{"id":4929,"date":"2009-06-15T05:33:46","date_gmt":"2009-06-15T10:33:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4929"},"modified":"2020-12-21T05:33:57","modified_gmt":"2020-12-21T11:33:57","slug":"i-obstreporous-peasant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4929","title":{"rendered":"I, Obstreporous Peasant"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I <a href=\"http:\/\/www.blogtalkradio.com\/Radio-Free-Nation\/2009\/06\/14\/The-Nation-Speaks-Highly-Rated-Ground-Breaking-Round-Table\">sat in <\/a>on &#8220;Radio Free Nation&#8221;, Marty Owings&#8217; Blogtalkradio show last Saturday night.<\/p>\n<p>Marty had booked Minnesota Fifth District representative Keith Ellison.\u00a0 Ellison appeared for about 45 minutes.\u00a0 For the first 25 minutes, the Representative talked about his economic platform:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;Reform&#8221; of regulations for financial services companies<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Strengthening Union Rights&#8221;, as he referred to it, via the Empoyee Free Choice Act<\/li>\n<li>Changing Capitalization requirements for bank assets.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So if you leave out the odd reference to Sean Hannity being a &#8220;bigot&#8221;, and conservatives &#8220;winking&#8221; at Von Brunn (the Holocaust memorial murderer), and his line that the US needs to stop &#8220;toeing the line for Israel&#8221; if we want peace in the Middle East?\u00a0 Fairly uneventful.<\/p>\n<p>Sorta.<\/p>\n<p>I got my chance to ask questions about 36 minutes into <a href=\"http:\/\/www.blogtalkradio.com\/Radio-Free-Nation\/2009\/06\/14\/The-Nation-Speaks-Highly-Rated-Ground-Breaking-Round-Table\">the netcast<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I asked my first question: since, in his response to a previous panelist about the solution to the Palestinian\/Israeli problem, Representative Ellison said that it was (closely paraphrasing) up to the people to push a solution (and the people wanted the solution!), I asked, given that the charter of the Hamas government that the people of Gaza elected to power in a landslide calls in as many words for the destruction of Israel as a nation and people, how we could expect &#8220;the people&#8221; of Gaza to really want &#8220;peace&#8221;?<\/p>\n<p>Well, I tried to ask.<\/p>\n<p>His immediate response?\u00a0 &#8220;How many Palestinians do you know?&#8221;, followed by a fairly peevish little tirade.<br \/>\nI&#8217;m not sure if he wanted me to respond &#8220;some of my best friends are Palestinians&#8221;, or if he was just acting like a lawyer and trying to buffalo my question or what.\u00a0 You can listen, if you&#8217;d like, to try to pick apart the tirade that follows.\u00a0 I don&#8217;t want to say Ellison is &#8220;typical&#8221; of Minneapolis DFLers in being unable to hold a civil conversation with a dissenter (after all, I had a great time interviewing RT Rybak).<\/p>\n<p>But I don&#8217;t think Ellison appreciates us peasants questioning our betters one little bit.<\/p>\n<p>But we&#8217;ll find out &#8211; maybe.\u00a0 If you recall, about a year ago &#8211; responding to Andy Birkey&#8217;s observation that Michele Bachmann only appeared on conservative media (which the last year has pretty well belied in any case), I sent invites to a slew of regional DFLers &#8211; Senator Klobuchar, Candidate Franken, Representative McCollum, Mayor Rybak&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;and Keith Ellison.<\/p>\n<p>Only Rybak responded (as noted above).\u00a0 Ellison&#8217;s press people didn&#8217;t even give us the courtesy of a &#8220;screw you, peasant&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>So I took the liberty of asking again.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ll see how that turns out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I sat in on &#8220;Radio Free Nation&#8221;, Marty Owings&#8217; Blogtalkradio show last Saturday night. Marty had booked Minnesota Fifth District representative Keith Ellison.\u00a0 Ellison appeared for about 45 minutes.\u00a0 For the first 25 minutes, the Representative talked about his economic platform: &#8220;Reform&#8221; of regulations for financial services companies &#8220;Strengthening Union Rights&#8221;, as he referred to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[208],"class_list":["post-4929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-democrats","tag-a-klo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4929","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=4929"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22389,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4929\/revisions\/22389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}