Shot in the Dark

It’s Rerun Season

 The Dems have officially run out of stuff to talk about.

So they’ve gone back to reruns of earlier tempests in teapots.

A “Jim Horan” fobbed a “story” off on “Talking Points Memo”  via  Twitter:

RT @tpmmedia: Flashback: Emmer Had Past DWIs — And Sponsored Bills To Soften DWI Laws http://tpm.ly/a244GP

Now, if you’ve been paying attention, all the smart people dealt with this “issue” quite some time ago.  The DWIs were in 1981 and 1991; Emmer sponsored legislation to make it possible for people who’d been convicted but kept their noses clean to get out of under some of the more onerous burdens of sentencing earlier.  I wrote the first time this issue emerged, when the issue came out before the GOP convention…:

…regarding a couple of DWI-related charges, that…Tom Emmer, got 19 and 29 years ago – questioning not only his character due to the arrests, but some legislation he backed that’d have had the effect of treating drunk drivers as innocent until proven guilty and making DUIs private information after ten years of good behavior – in other words, allowing people who’d made  a dumb mistake to function and get their lives back. Drunk driving is an emotional issue – made all the more so by groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the rest of the drunk driving lobby.  It’s understandable; anyone who’s lost a loved one to a drunk driver is justifiably motivated to seek change.   But the .08 blood alcohol level limit is a ludicrious waste of resources, and the resources spent on hammering on first-time, only-time offenders with low levels of intoxication are largely a complete waste.

Question:  Does saying the above mean I “support” or am “soft on” drunk drivers and drunk driving?

But it’s ludicrous to treat attempts to make the system fairer and more rational as “sympathy for drunk drivers”.  Almost as ludicrous as assuming two mistakes made a generation ago are defining traits about a late-fortysomething guys’ judgment.

 All the smart people dealt with this issue three months ago.

But DFL propaganda is never aimed at smart people.

Oh, yeah – who’s pushing the story?  Who is “Jim Horan?”

He’s working for Independence Party candidate stealth DFLer Tom Horner:

Screenshot from LinkedIn
Screenshot from LinkedIn

That sound you hear?  It’s the sound of Tom “Weasel” Horner’s campaign scraping the ground below the bottom of the barrel.

Posted

in

,

by

Mitch Berg

Tags:

Comments

12 responses to “It’s Rerun Season”

  1. Tweets that mention Shot in the Dark » Blog Archive » It’s Rerun Season — Topsy.com

    […] This post was mentioned on Twitter by mitchpberg, Luke Hellier. Luke Hellier said: RT @mitchpberg: Horner operative recycles Emmer DWI story: http://tinyurl.com/39pzj3l #stribpol #mndfl #narn2 […]

  2. Dog Gone Avatar
    Dog Gone

    I absolutely agree with you when you write
    “regarding a couple of DWI-related charges, that…Tom Emmer, got 19 and 29 years ago – questioning not only his character due to the arrests, but some legislation he backed that’d have had the effect of treating drunk drivers as innocent until proven guilty and making DUIs private information after ten years of good behavior – in other words, allowing people who’d made a dumb mistake to function and get their lives back.”

    Welll said, excellent point. It is to proceed from a mistake to success that I would think we would wish for everyone as the desideratum. We should applaud it, not use something like this for ‘gotcha’ politics. You had me with you, you had persuaded me on the correctness of your position. You had me in enthusiastic agreement this was old news, and stupidly brought up again.

    But then Mitch……why did you have to go and spoil it with this: “But DFL propaganda is never aimed at smart people.”

    Remember my point a while back about insulting and demonizing large groups of people who disagree with you? The whole Too-broad a brush and tar thing?

    That is great for rousing the Mitch-k’teers, my applause on your work with the pom-poms as cheerleader. But as persuasion, it is not preaching to anyone who isn’t already in your choir. And it really undercuts the value of your earlier very cogent and effective argument.

    Is right wing propaganda aimed at an intelligent audience? Hell no. NO propaganda is aimed at an audience that takes the initiative to educate themselves and to think for themselves rather than stupidly following slogans. And please, don’t try to tell me there isn’t just as much right wing propaganda.

    By all means, condemn the stupid and just plain wrong tactic of the Horner campaign. Great job. The rest – alienates more moderate people like the ones Emmer will need to persuade if he is to ever appeal to enough people beyond his rather narrow base to get elected.

  3. Kermit Avatar
    Kermit

    I’m sorry, but I have to break the news to you, Doggie. The DFL doesn’t just encourage stupid people, they are dependent on them. What you call “right wing propaganda” is actually the alternate point of view, almost never presented by the Democrat liberal media (pardon the redundancy).

    And the “Mitch-k’teers” was a nice touch. Given some practice you may achieve Angryclown status as totally irrelevent.

  4. Dog Gone Avatar
    Dog Gone

    Kerm, I enjoy AC. i think Angry Clown is wonderful. To be compared to AC is a compliment. Actually, to be compared to either AB or AC is a compliment; we minority of dissenters seem to be identified by initials from the beginning half of the alphabet a lot.

    News flash for you Kerm. BOTH parties engage in propaganda. If you can’t discern that, then you might want to revisit that whole problem with who is stupid.

    An excellent example of propaganda would be the whole issue of voting fraud – not voter registration fraud -voting fraud. In the most recent kerfuffel over the claims by the Minnesota Majority and prominent Republican elected officials who I believe actually are savvy enough to know better, and deceitful and manipulative enough to make the claims anyway would be this little nugget of fact

    “County attorneys have said Minnesota Majority’s work is flawed. Phil Carruthers, director of the prosecutions division in the Ramsey County attorney’s office, said the group’s statistics were overwhelmingly “not accurate.”

    Note, it did NOT state ONLY DEMOCRATIC county attorneys are saying that Minnesota Majority’s work is flawed. That should tell you something.

    Minnesota Majority’s work is flawed according to pretty much anyone other than a few Republicans willing to exploit those unsubstantiated claims, and Minnesota Majority. Every other source that has investigated voter fraud has shown that it is extremely rare, and that in the very very few cases where a felon does improperly vote, 1, it is not necessarily or always for a democratic candidate; 2. it is not part of a conspiracy, but rather nearly always arises out of some plausible confusion over voting status. Nor are the few proven cases of voter fraud necessarily by felons either; there are others who have done it too. Care to look at those proven cases to see how many are democrats? You won’t like the results.

    What seems to be left out here far too often is that MM is claiming there might be some illegal votes by felons, not that they have proof that there actually was. They have some lists of data about which there appears to be a serious problem for accuracy.

    There are a lot of republicans who get their knickers in a twist over these claims — it has happened here on SitD as well. Without proof or even reasonable plausible substantiation of those accusations.

    When investigations have consistently failed to support these claims, EVER? geeze, Kerm don’t you think the smart thing to do would be to stop and say hey! wait a minute! this might be propaganda. Or are you so damn hot to believe it that you will suspend your critical thinking and label that ‘an alternate point of view’?

  5. Kermit Avatar
    Kermit

    Sorry, Doggie. I just watched Al Franken and an army of lawyers steal a Senate seat.
    Didja notice that the NYT and several other “news” agencies went down to Florida to verify the 2000 presidential election? They did. Bush won. Didja notice the same watchdogs aren’t very interested in Carpetbagger Al’s 300 vote win?

    Shocking, isn’t it.

  6. nerdbert Avatar
    nerdbert

    Does this mean that Dayton’s mental health issues will now come into media play? They are far more recent.

  7. Dog Gone Avatar
    Dog Gone

    nerdbert – fair game, and should come into discussion.

    But if there is not a continuing problem, like Emmer not having a continuing DUI problem, that should also be given the same respect.

    Kerm, the courts decided in Bush’s favor. Time did not permit a thorough examination like the one that the Senate race here had, and that means that there are unanswered questions about that election. I don’t blame Bush for that lack of time or answers.

    People died establishing this country so that among other things, we can vote. It is a terrible thing if someone has voted illegally, and they should go to jail. Show me who that is, however who has done so. Proof, not just implausible accusations.

    Possibly worse, given the number of people who have died defending that right to vote over the two plus centuries this country has existed is the number of legal voters who have been disenfranchised illegally. There is a pattern of efforts to remove legitimate voters from voting rolls by Republicans that have been challenged in courts. It seems obvious that those efforts are intentional, given they have occurred overwhelmingly in states that were key states or swing states.

    Those aren’t cases where a few people voting in good faith, not part of a conspiracy, were wrong. Those are cases where someone deliberately set out to prevent people who were likely to vote against their party’s candidates from exercising the right that people died to protect. Tens of thousands of people who are legal voters – LEGAL voters – being denied or at least attempts to deny them, the exercise of their right to vote so as to alter the outcome of an election. That offends me. It offends me no matter who those people would have voted for — and some of them, just not a majority, would have voted for Republicans. I don’t hear your outrage over any of that. Why not Kermit? These are cases where it has been established in court that people were being denied their right to vote. It is not speculation, it has been proven to the satisfaction of courts, sometimes not just one court, but multiple courts through a series of appeals.

    So, unless you are willing to be outraged over THAT affecting elections Kermit, I don’t really care about your outrage over scrutiny of the Florida elections. Or your inability to accept a legal decision here in MN where no adequate proof was shown by Coleman in court, just speculation. Because if you don’t care that both legal democratic voting AND legal republican voting voters are being denied the chance to vote, all you are really doing is looking for a shabby pretext to justify your unhappiness with Franken winning the senate seat. You don’t really give a damn apparently about the Constitution and the Right to vote.

    I’m a little disappointed though; I thought better of you than that. Prove me wrong Kermit. Prove you are better than that. Go take a look at voters who were wrongly disenfranchised, possibly REALLY changing the outcome of elections.

    You might want to start with Uggen’s study of that Florida 2000 election and voter disenfranchisement. He gave it better scrutiny than the press ever did, in detail. Voter disenfranchisement is one of his specialty subjects; his expertise in it is exceptional. I imagine, although I don’t know, that it is part of what led to his going from associate professor when he wrote the study being touted by the right back in 2002, to the chair of the sociology department at the U of MN now. His credentials are pretty impressive. (Terry will like this – he’s published LOTS.)

    But there are plenty of other sources beside Uggen’s. Let me know if you would like the links to the court case documents for starters; they are online.

  8. Kermit Avatar
    Kermit

    Time did not permit a thorough examination like the one that the Senate race here had
    What? Are you nuts? It went on for MONTHS! The SCOTUS finally stepped in to prevent the Florida Supreme Court from abrogating Florida law which put the final result in the hands of it’s LEGISLATURE.
    Then multiple news agencies went into overdrive to try and invalidate the result, but they couldn’t.

    There was precious little juducial oversight in the Coleman/Franken fiasco because Mark Ritchie is a partisan hack bought and paid for by George Soros. Franken had four lawyers to every one of Coleman’s, and the recount rules were DELIBERATELY not applied with uniformity accross the entire state.

    So spare me your disappointment, Doggie. Your on the side of frauds, cheats, assholes and America haters. Lucky you.

  9. K-Rod Avatar
    K-Rod

    Wow. Way to stay on topic, deegee.

    I agree that after 10 years a DUI should be off your record.

    Should Gov. Emmer be allowed entry into Canada?

    ….

    “he recount rules were DELIBERATELY not applied with uniformity accross the entire state.”

    BINGO! Spot on, Kerm.

    Deegee, I am appalled that you support the fact that a possible felon in the metro vote counted but for the same reason an elderly woman in greater MN had her vote thrown out.
    Franken won because of non-uniform standards from one county to another.
    It can’t be undone but our broken re-count process can be fixed.
    The DFL won’t properly fix it because they know how to game the system.

  10. justplainangry Avatar
    justplainangry

    Kerm, you better have a beer, no, make it two. You have to replace the braincells you just waisted reading DogPrescottPile’s waste of bandwidth.

  11. Loren Avatar
    Loren

    Yes, the uniformity of standards in the recount :

    http://johnrlott.tripod.com/other/FrankensXs.html

    http://johnrlott.tripod.com/other/ColemansXs.html

    Got to love the way DG has goal posts for others, but for herself, they move:

    Welll said, excellent point. It is to proceed from a mistake to success that I would think we would wish for everyone as the desideratum. We should applaud it, not use something like this for ‘gotcha’ politics. You had me with you, you had persuaded me on the correctness of your position. You had me in enthusiastic agreement this was old news, and stupidly brought up again.

    But then Mitch……why did you have to go and spoil it with this: “But DFL propaganda is never aimed at smart people.”

    Followed by :”That is great for rousing the Mitch-k’teers”

    Pot, Kettle, Black.

  12. Mitch Berg Avatar
    Mitch Berg

    But then Mitch……why did you have to go and spoil it with this: “But DFL propaganda is never aimed at smart people.”

    Partly for the same reason you and Penigma have felt the need to “spoil” what might possibly have been tenable points with utterly unsupportable overreaches (“Avalanche of violence”, “conservatism is racist”) – because it’s the nature of this sort of polemicism. And it can be fun.

    And partly because the stuff the Dems, especially Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota, are putting out this year IS genuinely stupid, and utterly transparent so to anyone who isn’t blinded by unthinking partisanship, diminished capacity, or both.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.