Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty (R) is in the mix for John McCain’s running-mate.

Which makes this story in MinnPost from Chatfield, MN, all the stranger:

The world-class sheet music library here is a chunky, one-story concrete-block building fairly well hidden on the southern edge of town. Its nearest neighbor: the municipal sewage plant.

Officially, it’s called the Chatfield Brass Band Free Music Lending Library, and it’s filled with ancient green and gray metal filing cabinets that hold reams of sheet music from the days when John Philip Sousa and his band entertained the nation with marches and town bands played concerts on summer evenings in parks throughout the country.

Piled high atop the museum’s file cabinets are hundreds of cardboard boxes filled with tens of thousands more pages of sheet music. That’s the new stuff, not yet filed or listed in the library’s online catalog.

Clearly, the Chatfield music library doesn’t aspire to grandiosity, but since the early 1970s, it’s quietly filled a niche, providing out-of-print music for bands that want to play some of that old-time, foot-tapping, hum-along music that’s made with trombones and tubas, with piccolos and saxophones.

But suddenly, thanks to a much publicized veto last month by Gov. Tim Pawlenty, the Chatfield music library has become the poster child for runaway legislative spending. His line-item vetoes of many items in the state bonding bill included one that eliminated $400,000 for the library.

And the folks here don’t understand why.

The governor, on his radio show after the veto, said: “Now, (a sheet music lending library) might be a nice idea, but is that a priority relative to zeroing out the Veterans Home? We’re going to have a sheet music museum, Rep. Tschumper? Is that the priorities for the state of Minnesota?”

Wait, you’re telling me that this stuff doesn’t need sheet music?  Have you ever tried it without sheet music?  Tim Pawlenty: wrong on polka, wrong on America.