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Monday, September 06, 2010

GOP donors. Target Corp. Is this what you cut checks to Tom Emmer for? Putting his inexcusably profane and mean spirited son on the campaign payroll, in effect your hard earned cash funnelled to the little creep when instead his allowance should have been cut off?

Yet more about Tom Emmer, III. He was sucking money out of cash paid in by campaign donors, instead of the Emmer family paying him an allowance out of pocket, or in addition to one.

Or did the kid hold a real paying job besides having the campaign cut checks for him for whatever it was he did to "earn" the cash?

Screenshot from here [City Pages again, where the links are active, etc.]:



I see no conclusion other than that it was nasty and mean-spirited to have put such an item on Facebook, humiliating an apparently helpless young woman intentionally displayed in a compromising and mocking way, and thereby intentionally subjecting her to ridicule in the community.

It was defamatory, and an assault. She and/or her parents should sue the Emmer family.

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And I am outraged at MSM, Strib et al., deciding for us that this in a family using its members as campaign props is not newsworthy.

What does it say about that family? About child-rearing and upbringing skills and values? About hypocrisy? About cause to vote for or against a particular politician?

It seems there's been past campaigns aimed to lead us to think child-rearing skills were something Republicans routinely go about justifiably patting themselves on the back over.

Good job, Tom, Jr. Ya sure, ya betcha.

Chip off the old block? That's a consideration.

Decide whether that's worth a thought when you've a ballot in your hands.

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And whether it actually matters to you or not, you should be quite thankful that City Pages declined to spike the story (as if it had no news value as other outlets appear to have concluded, for us, as if we should be thankful for their senior editorial censor-scissors).

For more coverage, fleshing out some of the statements in the above paragraphs after the City Pages screenshot, see an excellent Firedog Lake post, here, and the links given, including this Cuckingstool blog item.

What's Minn Post coverage so far? Is it MSM vanilla? This link. That appears MSM for sure. However, this link shows Minn Post and City Pages are not your self-imposed censors of "news that's fit to print."

Hit the links.

Read comments readers left on the reporting sites. Get informed.

See if any of the damage control, kids will be kids stuff some commentators left passes your own smell test as a valid excuse for the sort of thing young Emmer did - in publishing such a photo of a comatose defenseless young woman who showed bad judgment in choosing associates with whom she would party and in whom she held trust.

And remember, in all this, the protection usually proper under the adage that a candidate's family is off limits to attack is forfeited once the candidate deliberately decides to use and focus upon family members as advertising props.

If you play a card, you deserve to have other cards turned face-up.

_________UPDATE__________
Minn Independent, here, recalls how the Hatch daughters were accorded attention, (when neither had been used as advertising props and where, instead, Mike Hatch at all times was duly protective of his family's right to privacy). I do not believe there was any coarse Hatch family Facebook dimension at all back then, as, apparently, some people bring children up with differing standards of good conduct or bad, acceptable or otherwise. Also, Hatch had the decency to not put his daughters onto a campaign payroll.

This screenshot, from Cuckingstool:


_____________FURTHER UPDATE_____________
Cuckingstool calls it an assault. I mentioned defamation. Invasion of privacy probably is more the offense; similar wrongly photographed and circulated conduct was at issue in Lake v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., 582 NW 2d 231 (Minn. 1998) (online here).