{"id":3507,"date":"2008-10-21T05:27:07","date_gmt":"2008-10-21T10:27:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=3507"},"modified":"2008-10-21T05:27:07","modified_gmt":"2008-10-21T10:27:07","slug":"gravitas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=3507","title":{"rendered":"Gravitas"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I went to a town hall meeting featuring Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN6), DFL-<em>and<\/em>-Independence Party endorsed challenger Elwin &#8220;E-Tink&#8221; Tinklenberg, and unendorsed\u00a0<strike>Ventura<\/strike> &#8220;Independence&#8221;\u00a0Party\u00a0challenger Bob Anderson.<\/p>\n<p>The shorter version:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Tinklenburg<\/strong>:\u00a0 Platitudes.\u00a0 Lots and lots of them.\u00a0 Look, I&#8217;ll cop to it; I&#8217;m singularly unimpressed by E-Tink.\u00a0 His performance during the 35W Bridge Collapse was uniquely loathsome, and I won&#8217;t be forgiving that for quite some time.\u00a0 That said, even by the low standards I expected, his performance was unimpressive; loads of platitudes, no real answers.\u00a0 That he&#8217;s even a contender is a sign of how dire things are for Republicans these days.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li><strong>Anderson<\/strong>:\u00a0 Seemed like a good guy, albeit not a politician.\u00a0 Confessed to being a fiscal conservative, which introduces an interesting question; given that the <strike>Ventura<\/strike> &#8220;Independence&#8221; Party endorsed E-Tink for CD6 over him, and Dean &#8220;Like Ed Schultz, Only Here&#8221; Barkley over the <strike>Lars Ulrich<\/strike> <strike>Skeet Uldrich<\/strike> Jack Uldrich for Senate, where indeed <em>is<\/em> the notion that there is a place for disaffected Republicans in the IP?<\/li>\n<li><strong>Bachmann<\/strong>:\u00a0 I won&#8217;t kid you; I went in rooting for Michele.\u00a0 She&#8217;s conservative, she&#8217;s sharp, and she&#8217;s got the one thing that the left hates most from conservative women; she&#8217;s uppity.\u00a0 And instead of hiding behind platitudes, she grabbed\u00a0a dry-erase marker and spent five minutes at a whiteboard explaining the numbers behind her opposition to the bailout bill &#8211; the <em>trillions <\/em>of dollars for which we the taxpayers are now on the hook.\u00a0 It was a pretty polarized crowd &#8211; about half of them were obviously fans, and the other half were not (and some of them were pretty rude about it, nattering and chattering away in the audience as the Representative explained her position, although Rep. Bachmann did a great job of fielding their questions).\u00a0<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It wasn&#8217;t a debate &#8211; call it a &#8220;forum&#8221; &#8211; and I&#8217;ll cop to my biases in advance.\u00a0 But how anyone who isn&#8217;t voting on pure ideology could choose E-Tink over Bachmann is&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;well, finding an analogy is irrelevant, since that&#8217;s about the only reason in play at the moment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I went to a town hall meeting featuring Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN6), DFL-and-Independence Party endorsed challenger Elwin &#8220;E-Tink&#8221; Tinklenberg, and unendorsed\u00a0Ventura &#8220;Independence&#8221;\u00a0Party\u00a0challenger Bob Anderson. The shorter version: Tinklenburg:\u00a0 Platitudes.\u00a0 Lots and lots of them.\u00a0 Look, I&#8217;ll cop to it; I&#8217;m singularly unimpressed by E-Tink.\u00a0 His performance during the 35W Bridge Collapse was uniquely loathsome, and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-08","category-minnesota-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3507","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=3507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3507\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}