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When I first saw Shelby, I thought she was going to be asking for money. She had the look of a desperate person. I was right and I was wrong. She was desperate, but it wasn’t money she needed.

I was sitting alone with my laptop at a fast food restaurant in downtown Trussville Friday afternoon. There was almost nobody else in the place, so I didn’t notice when she came in. I was sitting in a quiet corner, but she approached me and asked if I could help her.

She had cuts and bruises on her face. (Or some kind of wounds.) She wore sloppy and dirty clothes. She wasn’t wearing makeup. She looked desperate.

Instead of asking for money, she told me that she had been in an auto accident on I-59 earlier. A friend of hers who works about two blocks from where we were had gone to the site of the wreck, but he had to return to work, so he dropped her off at Hardee’s. She had a phone that belonged to someone else and its battery was about dead. She said she had been calling to find friends who would come pick her up, but nobody would agree to come.

She said her mother lives about 10 miles away in a part of town called Center Point. It’s a declining part of the area and I almost never go there. She said her mother had her two children there, but her mother had no car to pick her up. She wanted me to get her at least close to the area. She said she thought she could talk friends into picking her up if they just had to drive a few blocks instead of 10 miles.

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Republicans love the free market. They hate socialism and big government. Conservative southern Republicans are some of the most vocal about cutting the size of government and cutting federal subsidies. It’s a pity they don’t really mean their rhetoric.

On Wednesday, the Obama administration proposed one of the few things it’s ever proposed that I thought was a great idea. Included in the 2014 budget is a plan to sell the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) so it will be a private utility instead of a government monopoly. That would shrink the size of government and cut out subsidies for millions of people in the South who are getting electricity at cheap rates.

Republicans should have been cheering this great news. TVA is the country’s largest electric utility. Selling it would be a perfect demonstration of what Republicans have been talking about for years. GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater proposed in 1964 that TVA be privatized (and he lost Tennessee as a result). So how did modern Republican stalwarts against big government react?

In Alabama, U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby and U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks both reacted negatively. Shelby didn’t outright dismiss the plan, but anyone who can read through political language knows what his statement means.

“I intend to carefully study any proposals to restructure TVA to ensure that it continues to deliver affordable electricity throughout the region without continuing to add to our nation’s rapidly growing debt,” Shelby told the Huntsville Times.

Brooks told the times that he’s willing to study the proposal, but, “Quite frankly, I am skeptical the president can make that case.”

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There’s nothing like a good old fashioned tragedy on the news to make a political point. Whether we admit it or not, most of us unconsciously feel this way. An anecdote is a cheap and easy way to score a point, but is it really good in the long run for public discourse? Maybe not.

You might have heard about the knife attack at a Houston college campus Tuesday that injured at least 15 people, sending 12 of them to hospitals. As soon as I saw the news, I thought about what gun-control advocates would be saying about the story if the assailant had used a gun. So I posted a sarcastic comment about it on Facebook.

“Police in Houston say 15 people were stabbed on a college campus there today,” I wrote. “This is proof that it’s time to get serious about banning assault knives — since they clearly have no purpose other than stabbing innocent people.”

A number of other people who agree with me on the issue of gun rights agreed and chimed in with their own comments. It felt good, because there was a story that illustrated very clearly what we believed. We felt that it made our point and that felt emotionally good.

I’ve been thinking about this tendency to use “anecdote as argument” a lot lately, and I’m not really happy with it, even though I do it as much as anybody else does.

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