“Small-Business Group Forms an Alliance for Health Care Reform.” So reads the headline of the entry in the New York Times’s small-business blog You’re the Boss.

Small-business group? It can’t be the 100,000-member National Federation of Independent Businesses, which adamantly opposes the $1.5 trillion pending House health bill. Here’s what the NFIB says about Obamacare:

The “America’s Affordable Health Choices Act” (H.R. 3200), introduced in the U.S. House, is a costly and flawed bill. Despite its name, the legislation not only fails to lower healthcare costs for small business owners, it actually institutes an employer mandate with a punitive payroll tax on our nation’s job creators.

No, the “small-business group” that’s the subject of New York Times blogster Robb Mandelbaum’s gushing attention is the Main Street Alliance, an organization set up only last year to beat the drum for the the “public option,” the costly and unpopular government-run lynchpin of Obamacare. The alliance may be small (10,000 members) compared to the NFIB, but the Democrat-dominated Congress just loves the little group.Some five alliance members have testified at various House hearings on the Obamacare bill.

The “businesses” that belong to the alliance aren’t exactly your corner hardware store. A leading alliance member is Smash, a Des Moines, Iowa, shop that sells in-your-face T-shirts to hipsters. A typical Smash T-shirt reads: “I Went to the Iowa State Fair and All I Got Was Type-2 Diabetes.” Nice tribute to Iowa’s farmers! Smash’s proprietor, Mke Draper, was one of the five alliance members to appear before Congress.

And check the Facebook page of the alliance’s youthful national director, Sam Blair. One of the Seattle-based Blair’s “business” interests is the Whole Foods boycott.

The NFIB, by the way, supports health-care reform–but of a somewhat different variety than the Obamacare pumped by the alliance. The federation wants to see the removal of costly regulatory mechanisms, coverage mandates, and other barriers to competition that make employer-supplied health insurance a prohibitively expensive proposition for many small businesses.