Jim Cooper is whom my district (The Tennessee 5th) elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. He is, for better or worse, my Congressman.
This morning he held a coffee meeting at Fido with some bloggers to talk about various things. They discussed the TVA, the legalisation of industrial hemp, universal health care and a few other things.
Unless I’m mistaken, every blogger there was on the left-handed side of the spectrum.
That bothers me. Cooper is a representative of every single person in the 5th district. Would it have been a bad idea to invite one Republican? One Libertarian? Don’t get me wrong. I’m not hurt that I wasn’t invited. I haven’t been politically vocal for most of the last year, opting to pay attention to my own health and spiritual wellbeing instead. Had I been invited I probably could not have gone for the aforestated reason. But that doesn’t excuse not inviting at least ONE blogger from the other side of the spectrum. Most of us are very well-behaved and know how to act when taking a meeting. I have no doubt that any number of right-wing bloggers would have made a decent showing at this sit-down with the man who represents the entire 5th district of the state of Tennessee.
**UPDATED**
I am not a Tennessee Democrat. From being friendly with many Tennessee Democrats and reading their blogs I have gathered that there is some sort of ugly fight within the TNDP. It comes to my attention that Cooper, as part of this meeting, addressed that to some degree.
TENNESSEE DEMOCRATS, PAY ATTENTION.
I don’t care what you do with your time. I don’t care if you dance naked under the full moon and smoke hookahs and belch your ABCs.
But when you drag the person elected to the HoR to represent everyone into your shenanigans, that’s another story. Cooper works for me. He works for my neighbours. Now that he’s in the HoR he works for a whole lot of people who don’t care fiddlymiff about the internecine drama of the TNDP. So quit dragging him into your petty mess on everyone else’s time.
Thank you.
[...] COMPLAINTS ABOUT JIM COOPER’S one-sided treatment of bloggers. [...]
Perhaps you are under the misapprehension that Democrats believe anyone but them has a valid opinion. They hold their beliefs because they are True, and getting in the way of that just means you are obstructing the natural progress of mankind.
I write as one who was once one of them.
My reply to this, and to Glenn Reynolds: http://twitter.com/TnTicket/statuses/1488092602
Democrats also believe that everyone who is not a Democrat is dumber than a rock, because of course if we weren’t dumber than rocks, we would be Democrats.
Joe,
I complained about that one, too. I’m an equal opportunity loudmouth.
Hey, Joe Lance? Didn’t your momma teach you that trolling for traffic is a loser’s way of playing?
If anyone thinks that the bloggers in Nashville are represented by three liberals who want to talk about converting tobacco farmers in to hemp tillers, or universal healthcare after the Tenncare disaster then they are sorely mistaken.
I wouldn’t worry bout Cooper too much Kat, he would nod his head at three right wingers too if it meant votes.
This is only a Lesser Emir of Incumbistan using the Potemkin Media to demonstrate his willingness to meet with ‘real people’ who are part of said media. Anything to further the legitimacy of Incumbancy, he has no real connection to his district, only those compliant section willing to be paid off either through cash via earmarks or for ‘feeling good’ about knowing that he is furthering the accumulation of power for Incumbistanis. Representative democracy is not achieved at 1:500,000. Any such representative need not care about you or even their district beyond the minimum to get re-elected. The district is a means to an end. And a Potemkin Media puts up the front of ‘real’ interaction while offering no substance of it.
Well, let us not rewrite history too strongly here. There were liberals at Blogger Day on the Hill. Two of us, one was me. Did they intend to have liberal bloggers there? No, but they didn’t call it “Conservative Blogger Day on the Hill” and they were very gracious to us while we were there. If they’ve done it since then, they’ve done a very good job of rebranding it and making sure they only attract their target audience. But on Blogger Day on the Hill, there were liberals.
Second, anyone who imagines that you could put the five people who were there yesterday at a table and not have contention and who thinks that those five personalities would allow for some kind of easy-going love-fest of anyone who was at the table with us either doesn’t know the Nashville blogosphere or is just talking to hear themselves talk.
Third, yes, indeed, there should have been conservative bloggers there. Shoot, we talked healthcare and they didn’t make sure that Rachel from Women’s Health News was there–a medical librarian with the size audience she has? Clearly a stunning oversight.
I chalked it up to Cooper’s people not being very familiar with the local blogosphere. To me it seems obvious that at least someone like Bob Krumm or Coble here would have made a nice and thought-provoking addition to the table and still kept it a small enough group so that everyone could talk and be heard in an hour or so. But that a left-leaning person unfamiliar with the local blogosphere wanted to put his boss in front of a few sympathetic people for his first time meeting with local bloggers didn’t know the obvious conservative folks to invite isn’t that weird, I don’t think.
Until the last minute, I, at least, didn’t even know what other bloggers were going to be there, so it wasn’t really apparent until we got there, to me at least, that it was only going to be liberals. So there wasn’t a chance for anyone with any knowledge to say “Wow, your list is leaning in one direction quite a bit.”
But now that’ll be something I know to keep an eye on.
Legislators have private meetings with special interest groups all the time. I don’t see what the big deal is here unless it’s a Truth In Advertising issue. They get together all the time to coordinate strategy sessions and making sure everyone is singing from the same hymn.
Having said that, let’s not kid ourselves. Cooper’s job in the 5th is the congressional responsibilities of a fairly rural area of Tennessee that voted heavily for McCain in this last election. Cooper is a liberal who tries to appear fiscally conservative and socially conservative enough to stay in power. I’m sure Cooper was really wanting to take a browbeating from commies on not being leftwing enough for their tastes so Spragens wanted to make sure the bloggers row was as rigged as an Obama “press conference”.
He’d be thrown out on his banjo if he voted like you people.
I would have loved to have been there just to show out the immigration Amnesty thug blogger present and to ask about, oh I dunno, the multi-trillion dollar bailouts that he flip-flopped on. I know it’s not a hemp factory or subsidized federal abortions but it’s kind of important.
When he originally voted against the Generational Theft Act, I sent him a letter congratulating him. When he flipped and voted for it after toting around the Federal Budget for 8 years and complaining about Bush’s spending (that Democrats agreed to and still wanted more), I sent him another one castigating that decision.
Did someone ask him about this? It’s only the most important issue of the day.
He might have said something about it, but I was munching on the corpses of dead babies throughout the meeting, and may have missed it over the noise.
How is the 5th District in the least bit rural? Cooper represents my district, which is urban and went for Obama. I think you mean back when he represented the 4th. That was very rural and voted heavily for McCain. He’s moved to town.
Anyway, I would have paid good money to see you there, Brian, but that’s just me.
Which one of us is the immigration amnesty thug blogger?
Oooo! I know! I know!
Do thug bloggers do posts about their brass knuckles, the best knives and guns to use, and how not to get blood on you when you kneecap people? Also, do they tell you how high the vig has to get before the threats start? Because, if so, I am sooooo there.
I think I, too, know which of the crowd was the aforestated ATB. And it’s not you, B.
Rats. Always the baby-killer, never the thug.
You can be the patriarchy-bashing, manhating shut-in. Who PMS if you prefer.
Except that I’m the shut-in.
Right. I’m just a recluse. And PMR seems like it should stand for “prime mortgage rate.” It misses the whole second half of the joke.
Still, I kind of have been snickering all morning about opening a hemp factory. I mean, now that I know that the problem is just that no one has ever publicly said that they want to grow hemp, let me publicly state, I would love to grow hemp and sell it.
Shoot, there’s got to be some cute DEA agents they could assign to me to come over and check on my hemp farm once a week or a month or whatever and make sure I was growing cannabis sativa sativa and not cannabis sativa indica.
And think of the money I could make growing ditch-weed in the field behind me!
Completely off the original topic: the book I read two days ago featured illegal marijuana growers as a prominant plot point. I realized how far I’d strayed from the mainstream when about a third of the way through the book made it clear the growers were villains.
I was all the time thinking of them as renegade heroes.
Kat, are you high? You mean a pot point, not a plot point.
Keeping in mind that I read it on Wikipedia, I have to ask you, is it not hilarious that, though you cannot legally grow hemp in the U.S. (even though its THC content is .3% or lower), we are the biggest hemp importers in the world?
Seriously, if I were a struggling small farmer, I’d be pissed that I can’t grow something that easily grows here for which there is an enormous market for no other reason than it’s in the same family as an illegal drug.
How can this be true? Plenty of farmers grew hemp in MO when I was a teenager. Has it all been stamped out in the ensuing decades?
Hey, congratulations on the success of your blog. I recently started my own wordpress blog so when you have time, I hope you take a look. Good luck in the future!
http://chicagoismynewblog.wordpress.com/
I want to look, but then I don’t. It won’t be as salaciously charming as The Forever Girl: Brandon’s Inferno. That’s for sure.
As far as hemp goes, I hate to admit how little I know about what is and isn’t legal. I just assumed it was all illegal.
Hmmmm. I’m seeing web sources stating that hemp farming “disappeared” in MO in 1958/1959. But then I’m also seeing that some of it continued until revision of federal drug guidelines in 1970. So I’m thinking that some of it was sundowned out, in practical terms, through the early 1970s, which would be what I remember. I also remember that one could not get high from it, no matter how one tried. They really ought to bring that stuff back; it used to be a huge cash crop.
Yeah, the amount you’d have to smoke to get high off something with a .3% THC content is like… I’m honestly not sure it can be done.
It would make for a great cash crop now, especially since you can use it to make all kinds of stuff and it grows back like a… yes folks… a weed.
Ha ha ha.
[...] Representing All The People?**UPDATED** Jim Cooper is whom my district (The Tennessee 5th) elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. He is, for better or [...] [...]
Actually, in 05, we had politicians come and speak to a mixture of people. Bill was in charge of getting the conservatives, and I was in charge of getting the liberals.
We alternated politicians from each side, and it worked very well. There was no elitism and “I won’t go if SHE is there” bully bullshit.
Then, the few bullies decided they didn’t want us around and this is what it is instead of what we had, which is what you and many others want.
I was in the hospital, so I couldn’t go to the meeting, not that I was invited, but that wasn’t due to Cooper.
If I want to meet with Cooper, I can. That’s not bragging. That’s years of dedication and work.
And totally off topic–this one and about another one, do you get your medications at Walgreens? If so, you aren’t necessarily being paranoid about the refill thing. Call me for details on that.
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