{"id":19396,"date":"2011-04-18T11:00:22","date_gmt":"2011-04-18T17:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=19396"},"modified":"2011-04-16T09:25:14","modified_gmt":"2011-04-16T15:25:14","slug":"a-pattern","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=19396","title":{"rendered":"A Pattern?"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s been a running gag among cultural conservatives for the past decade or so; if a drunk Chechen wearing a suicide vest swerves off the road and knocks over a lightpole, the headline will read “SUV DESTROYS CITY PROPERTY”.<\/p>\n

And apparently any reference, no matter how oblique, to the “Tea Party” when reporting news is enough to impugn the mass movement that dealt the Democrats their biggest setback in generations last fall.<\/p>\n

We ran into this briefly – and comically – last year, when the Minnesota Birkeydependent <\/em>ran a piece about a “threatening” message that an AFSCME office reported<\/a>. \u00a0On April 15, the day of the Tea Party rally. \u00a0From a guy claiming to be a leader in the local Tea Party. \u00a0About whom absolutely nobody in the Minnesota Tea Party had ever heard. \u00a0Having spoken at (as of last weekend) five of ’em, I claim some authority there.<\/p>\n

Anyway – <\/em>magically, on the eve of the Tea Party, voila<\/em>, another threatening message<\/a>…<\/p>\n

Officials with Minnesota’s largest public employee union say they have received several threatening phone calls and e-mails in response to their recent “tax the rich” ad campaign.<\/p>\n

One voice message left at AFSCME Council 5 headquarters in South St. Paul prompted the union to file a complaint with police.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…from – guess who?:<\/p>\n

<\/blockquote>\n

In the profanity-laced message, a man implied a connection to the tea party movement and a tea party event scheduled for Thursday evening outside of the State Capitol. He also said the union’s days were numbered.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The story doesn’t release the caller’s name. \u00a0 Or attempt to document in any way the “connection” to the “Tea Party”.<\/p>\n

And I’m going to guess he was no more “connected” to the Tea Party than any of the other millions of people who have had enough of Obama and the special interests that float him.<\/p>\n

But I suspect that this is going to be an annual tradition, as long as there is <\/em> a Tea Party; the Twin Cities media dutifully reporting that a big bad tea partier (probably, maybe) \u00a0has, er, threatened a union, and they’ve called the police.<\/p>\n

Any bets?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s been a running gag among cultural conservatives for the past decade or so; if a drunk Chechen wearing a suicide vest swerves off the road and knocks over a lightpole, the headline will read “SUV DESTROYS CITY PROPERTY”. And apparently any reference, no matter how oblique, to the “Tea Party” when reporting news is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[130],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tc-media-bias"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19396"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19396\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19399,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19396\/revisions\/19399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}