The DFL/Media/Anti-Gun Hot Tub Party

When you’re a conservative, distrust of the media – like most large institutions – is part and parcel of the job.

You probably accept that, for whatever reason – from systemic bias to cultural confirmation bias to being paid off by George Soros – that the media has a comprehensive bias toward the left.

And you notice it on some issues more than others.   For example, you notice that anti-gun groups – for example, “Protect Minnesota”, led by Representative Heather Martens (DFL – 66A), a woman who has never, not once, uttered a substantively accurate or true original statement about guns or the Second Amendment – gets breathless, slavish coverage from the Twin Cities media, whose mania for “balance” obscures, in their coverage, the fact that the pro-Second-Amendment movement includes thousands of actual activists, while Martens’ group and the other antis muster…

…well, Martens and about a dozen of her pals.

And it doesn’t take a political rocket scientist (?) to notice that while their groups have virtually no electoral clout, Martens is apparently a big enough cheese among DFLers on Capitol Hill that she gets treated like, well, a Representative herself.

So after the hearings broke up last night, I watched who went where for a bit.

After he got done with the media, Rep. Paymar lit his afterburners and ran for the bleachers to meet Representative Martens and Jane Kay from Action Moms:

Kay, Martens and Paymar, talking about how much clout they have when those Million Moms finally show up. Someday. Honest.

DFL stenographer and former Strib columnist Doug Grow – now with DFL PR shop MinnPost – painted Jane Kay’s toenails:

Grow, Kay

Hey, maybe his story about last night won’t be pre-written!

And at the end of the night, you had pretty much every anti-gun activist in town gathered with the DFL PR coalition:

Grow, Kay, Nick “I’m Not The DFL’s Monkey” Coleman (from “The Uptake”), a staff guy and Martens talking, presumably, about what a bunch of wingnuts their opposition are.

Us gunnies? We had the fun down front:

Second Amendment attorney David Gross mixing it up with an anti who claimed we should “learn our history”, that firearms confiscation had nothing to do with the Holocaust. The anti, by the way, reportedly had walked up to the child of one of the GOCRA members in attendance and said “You’ll grow up to be a better person than your father” at a hearing last week. These people ooze class, don’t they?

Same as it ever was.  Back next week.

17 thoughts on “The DFL/Media/Anti-Gun Hot Tub Party

  1. Wait. Are you telling me that Colemonkey is now a decrepit step&fetchet for some 30 year old, latte swilling Uptown sophisticate? Really?

    The mind reels off into so many different directions.

    – Does he gaze enviously at the parking spot reserved for the boss’ Mini Cooper?

    – Have people gotten used to finding him at 3:00 pm, face down on the desk, snoring and drooling?

    – Does he corner the volunteer citizen journalists and regale them with explainations of why they are not really journalists?

    – Will he be adding that lofty postition to his curriculum vitae?

    And most importantly, does Jay Rosen know about this?
    Bwaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahahahaaaaaaaa!

  2. Did you really have to use “hot tub party” right before the first photograph?

    Wouldn’t it be logical to assume that by resorting to such convoluted ways to annoy and evade the opposition, the hamster would realize that he’s just validating their power?

  3. If this is a DFL hot tub party I have to ask if the men are allowed to bring their testicles?

  4. I wonder if Coleman ever reflects on the fact that he is far more comfortable than the people he afflicts?
    Nah.

  5. If this is a DFL hot tub party I have to ask if the men are allowed to bring their testicles?

    The answer is “most definitely.” The DFL harpies prefer them par-boiled.

  6. I admit my bias, so the reader can judge for themselves.

    The media systematically poo-poohs the notion that they have bias.

    No pot, no kettle.

  7. Few people make a distinction between news reporting — which attempts to play it straight — and opinion-mongering, which is designed to provoke and persuade.

  8. Measuring media bias is a really difficult endeavor because unlike what economists usually study, which are numbers and quantities, media bias is all expressed in words.

    So if you care to, look at some of the recent empirical work on media bias, in which research scholars use words as data to better understand whether a) media bias exists; b) if so, to what degree, and in what directions; and c) what purpose/s it serves.

    University of Chicago economists Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro have done some interesting research on media bias. In a 2010 study, they used text as data to look at common Democratic and Republic phrases in Congress to help determine which way newspapers lean — and, most important, why.

    http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/jesse.shapiro/research/biasmeas.pdf

    (Yes, I realize anything Chicago rules out legitimacy over here)

  9. Am I the only one who noticed that Coleman looks just like Uncle Junior from the Soprano’s? Must be the silly hat.

    I never could take anyone who wears a hat indoors seriously. Hair plugs?

  10. Emery has obviously never played “name that party” in news articles. Several local politicians were recently convicted of corruption, and malfeasance of the public purse in a California town. 5 out of 6 charged. The AP article never once mentioned party affiliation. Some research showed it however. And that is repeated time and time again, but Emery never sees it.

  11. Emery links us to a paper that measures “slant” by indexing the frequency of arbitrary and short phrases categorized by researchers as Republican or Democrat. An interesting activity, but not necessarily a good measure of “slant” at all.

  12. Making monkeys of Gentzkow and Shapiro are leftist echo chambers like the MinnPost which not only eject a steady stream of strictly leftist papspew, but censor out dissenting views.

    Fact is, in my wide experience, “banning”, “Booting” and censoring is almost strictly relegated to lefty media, be it blogs or failing newspaper sites ala the Strib.

    Maybe these fellows should try their hand at global warming…word on the street is psuedo-science is taking a real trashing lately.

  13. @ Loren

    Your comment reminds me of what Justice Potter Stewart said during his struggle to define pornography: “I know it when I see it”.

  14. Pingback: Paymar: Bitchy | Shot in the Dark

  15. Pingback: ProtectMN: An Unreliable Source | Shot in the Dark

Leave a Reply

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