{"id":30839,"date":"2012-10-02T11:45:18","date_gmt":"2012-10-02T16:45:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=30839"},"modified":"2012-10-02T12:54:01","modified_gmt":"2012-10-02T17:54:01","slug":"bluestem-prairie-all-the-news-thats-fit-to-yank-from-between-the-lines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=30839","title":{"rendered":"Bluestem Prairie: All The News That’s Fit To Yank From Between The Lines"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve said it in the past, and I’ll say it again – Sally Jo Sorenson of the outstate-MN blog\u00a0Bluestem Prairie\u00a0is one of the Minnesota leftybloggers that doesn’t deserve to be under police surveillance.<\/p>\n

But every once in a while, Sorenson – usually a capable reporter and observer – lets her inner snarkmeister romp and play a bit too much.<\/p>\n

Sorenson jumped on a bit in my piece<\/a> yesterday on the rhubarb between Rep. Mary Franson and some of her critics. Sorenson wrote:<\/p>\n

We’ll get to what Franson actually said about feeding people on food stamps in a bit. But this passage is puzzling:<\/p>\n

“the freshman conservative from Alexandria is most famous for the teapot-tempest that blew up last year about her video noting \u2013 from the perspective of someone who\u2019d been there \u2013 that welfare treats people \u201clike animals\u201d.”<\/p>\n

A reasonable reader would conclude upon reading “from the perspective of someone who\u2019d been there” that Berg means that Mary Franson had at one time been on “welfare.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But only if the “reasonable person” was hovering over the story looking for stray bits of chaff to yank out of context. \u00a0And yank. \u00a0And yank.<\/p>\n

My line “from one who’s been there” was not\u00a0<\/em>implying that Franson had been on welfare. \u00a0It was a sloppy reference to a bit of Franson’s own bio that has popped up in many of her own statements on the issue. \u00a0.<\/p>\n

And here’s where Sorenson’s thoroughness as a reporter saves the day for me – and sort of makes me wonder why she reached the conclusion she did; she obligingly includes one of Franson’s<\/a>\u00a0tellings of her own story, which helped form her views on welfare and dependency. \u00a0Sally Jo even provided the money quote:<\/p>\n

It would have been very easy for me to get on to the system, enroll in all the various social programs, but I decided I wanted a better future for myself and for my future children, so I made up my mind that no matter what, I was going to succeed.<\/p>\n

And that’s what happened, I succeeded. Obstacles came in my way and I pursued and I persevered. My successes didn’t come easy though but they were well worth it. I pray everyone in this state and in this country to have the same desire to succeed and be self-reliant.<\/p>\n

There is pride in never letting yourself fall into the trap of dependence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It was to this bit of Franson’s autobiography – which Rep. Franson has told a time or two over the past few years – that I was referring.<\/p>\n

A “reasonable person” – the same one Sorenson conjured up when jumping to her conclusion – might think that, in fact, was what I was aiming for. \u00a0That would, in fact, be the truth.<\/p>\n

I regret any confusion – although to be fair, I think the sloppiness of my statement was more than matched by the amount of gratuitous, unfounded assumption that Sorenson jammed into my mouth.<\/p>\n

I also regret that Sally Jo Sorenson apparently felt the need to make such a very, very tenuous reach to try to dig up a rhetorical “gotcha”. \u00a0If I wrote a sloppy rhetorical check, Sorenson grabbed it out of the mail and tried to write a zero at the end of the amount.<\/p>\n

While I left an editorial loose end, it was an unsupportable cheap shot. \u00a0We usually expect better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve said it in the past, and I’ll say it again – Sally Jo Sorenson of the outstate-MN blog\u00a0Bluestem Prairie\u00a0is one of the Minnesota leftybloggers that doesn’t deserve to be under police surveillance. But every once in a while, Sorenson – usually a capable reporter and observer – lets her inner snarkmeister romp and play […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30839","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=30839"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30839\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30854,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30839\/revisions\/30854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}