Usually Bluestem reserves its satiric spleen over lazy reporting for the rocking chair media. Indeed, I weighed the merit of chastizing MinnPost for its recent discovery of rural electrification in the miasmatic jungles of Redwood County--along with stumbling over interactive teevee classrooms at a MNSCU campus--but will wait until the grant-plump staff marvels over the fact of plumbing in Rock County.
No, today's laurels are conferred on a certain rightie blogger who writes about the redistricting plan:
- It cuts Tim Walz’ mushy-left stronghold Mankato out of the 1st CD, putting it into John Kline’s solidly-conservative 2nd District. This means the 1st CD’s fundamentally conservative, rural nature can be maintained. It’ll be interesting to see how the DFL rationalizes pushing back against this, while fighting to keep the 5th and 6th districts uncorruptedly institutional-blue.
- Other than adding Mankato, the 2nd CD stays pretty solid.
Well, no.
Mankato is in Blue Earth County, and Blue Earth County remains in the First. And while much of the district is rural in terms of acreage, the turf includes Rochester. The blogger should try visiting the Med City. It's now the third largest city in Minnesota and at over 100,000, contains a significant percentage of the district.
This isn't the first time the blogger has gotten confused about Southern Minnesota. One of Bluestem's friends at I Don't Hate America noted back in January 2008 in A (lazy) conservative blogger’s inability to read maps:
Maybe I’m just being a nit here, but it really bugs me when bloggers on either side of the ideological spectrum purport to be experts/pundits on political issues and can’t even get simple facts straight when presenting an analysis.
Case in point: Shot in the Dark’s Mitch Berg on the Senate District 25 special election, won by DFLer Kevin Dahle. On Tuesday, not only did Mitch give the incorrect date for the election (claimed it was Wednesday when it was really Thursday), but claimed the district was “in the heart of Tim Walz’s district.”
Berg, who also plays radio talk show host every Saturday on 1280 AM “the Patriot,” explained the error with the date by stating he had meant to upload the post the following day (plausible, we’re all human, mistakes happen). He explained his error in identifying which Congressional District the SD was in by saying “SD25 is in CD2? Who knew?”
The latter is simply lazy “reporting.”
Who knew? Well, I would like to say everyone blogging about the subject, but I guess I was wrong.
As if publicly being wrong once on this very easy geographic fact was enough, today on Berg’s radio show he claimed SD 25 was in “the greater…uh…somethin’…the West Metro!”
West? Maybe south-southwest at an angle of 10 degrees…maybe. Metro? That’s funny.
This time, though, posts the redrawn map for his readers' pleasure. Is it safe to say that he simply doesn't know where Mankato is located? Nor how big Rochester is?
Or does he think redistricting involves relocating populations, rather than mere re-drawing of lines?
Another example of Bachmannian geography?
Image: SITD's map of new districts.
So that poor fellow still can't find his ass with a map? Heck, and I even made a point of handing him his ass a couple of weeks ago, the poor dear. Here, just in case he fails to find it on his own: http://www.shadowridgedonkeys.com/images/index.10.jpg
Posted by: Phoenix Woman | May 11, 2011 at 10:45 PM