Rarely do you see such an epic takedown from the left in a dead trees major newspaper. Sure, sometimes you see something on the paper’s blog, and you get the dissembling manifestos from the right. But, the combination of a progressive perspective and actual readers? Well, that’s a rare one.

But, in today’s column entitled “Carly Fiorina’s Senate campaign an uninspiring product launch” in the LA Times, Michael Hiltzik does just that. Let’s start with the broad stuff.

So here’s the tally thus far on Fiorina the candidate: Business celebrity with an equivocal record, cancer survivor with a secure employer-sponsored health plan, “problem-solving” candidate spouting ancient Republican nostrums. I can hardly contain my excitement.

At one point, I thought Hiltzik was even eavesdropping on my gchats during her launch event.  During a segment where she called for bills to be on the internet, specifically pointing to the health care bill, I said to my friend who was also watching, “well, maybe she can’t steer her HP windows computer over to thomas.loc.gov.” Because, you know, if she had, she would find on the home page of that site, a list of the major health care bills pending right now. I took a peek at the main house bill right here. It even has these things called hyperlinks to let you move around the bill easily.

Hiltzik has a similar takedown of her whole transparency argument. He then moves on to health care, where her “big idea” is pretty much the health insurance lobby’s wet dream:

More disturbing is her advocacy of allowing insurers to sell policies across state lines. This is a “reform” the insurance industry has been after for years, because it would allow them to evade the more stringent regulations of some states by selling all their policies out of states with hands-off regulators.

For a clue to how this works, notice how credit card companies issue their cards from banks in places like South Dakota and Nevada, which have no usury limits, rather than, say, California, where the cap is 10%. But even Californians can’t sign up for a card issued in California, so we’re stuck with the South Dakota sky’s-the-limit variety.

If this is what Carly Fiorina is going to bring, perhaps she will be able to get some big checks from Blue Cross. However, she won’t be able to get the votes from Californians that one assumes are her ultimate goal.