Lest you forget, there’s still an Idaho legislative session going on. Brandi Swindell, pro-life activist and former Boise city council candidate, has not forgotten, nor has she forgotten that the current favorite congressional candidate of the pro-life community, Bill Sali, still has a piece of pro-life legislation floating around the House. So she held a press conference, attended by reporters on the steps of the statehouse to announce that she was going to schedule a meeting to, uh, presuambly, get that bill moving. Of course reporters showed up, an announcement of intent to schedule a meeting being such important news.

All of which did in fact lead to a meeting, of Swindell with House Speaker Bruce Newcomb, to which the speaker didn’t admit reporters but after which he probably wished he had. The usually amiable speaker reported to the Lewiston Morning Tribune: “She called me a bitch. I didn’t know the speaker of the House could be a bitch.”

Swindell’s version of events at the meeting is at odds with Newcomb’s. (The story is in the March 17 Tribune; no free link available.) The speaker is undoubtedly right, though, that Swindell was after not a meeting or a negotiation or an effort at compromise, but rather a confrontation and a media event. The intended beneficiary, presumably (whether Swindell acknowledges it or not) would be Sali – the narrative being that his efforts to champion pro-life legislation are being squashed again by those squishies in the legislative leadership. (Never mind that similar legislation has been repeatedly thrown out by courts, and that Sali hasn’t yet come up with a version of it that even he’s willing to stand by.)

That’s how politics is played these days – as the news media, which will tomorrow be blasted once again by conservatives as “liberal,” gets used like their child’s plaything once again. Or, in the language of pro-life meetings these days, like their bitch.