Link:http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/10/10/791972/-GOP-Mackinac-Event-Underage-Drinking-Prompts-Investigations-and-Coverage

This story from WOOD TV from last year describes a Vanessa Oblinger of Saranac, MI being charged with placing a fake bomb outside of the band room of Saranac High School. Coincidence?

Link:http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/10/10/791972/-GOP-Mackinac-Event-Underage-Drinking-Prompts-Investigations-and-Coverage

This story from WOOD TV from last year describes a Vanessa Oblinger of Saranac, MI being charged with placing a fake bomb outside of the band room of Saranac High School. Coincidence?

Link:http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/10/10/791972/-GOP-Mackinac-Event-Underage-Drinking-Prompts-Investigations-and-Coverage

This story from WOOD TV from last year describes a Vanessa Oblinger of Saranac, MI being charged with placing a fake bomb outside of the band room of Saranac High School. Coincidence?

If this story is about:

when you pay a bunch of underage kids to come to the conference, allow them in to parties that you paid for and arranged with an open bar and then don't take the proper precautions to prevent them from being served. We do not know which, if any, of the campaigns actually did this. That's why we didn't accuse any of them of doing it and that's why we made clear that at least one campaign had denied and another had taken positive steps to prevent it.

Only one campaign paid a bunch of kids to come to the conference. It's well known – a google search would have turned it up. You could have interviewed me, for that matter (the Republican campaigns ignore you for reasons I'm sure you're well aware of – they involve a libel suit last year). Snyder. He denies having any party. That's probably true. The other campaigns had fairly tight staffs of (mostly) mid-aged folks. The Snyder people didn't come to other Governor's candidates parties – at least in significant numbers (the shirts, as you note, are what I base that on). Should the other 4 Gub candidates be responsible for Snyder's decision to bring a few hundred students on the island? Did the candidates that had open bars have the bars take normal precautions to comply with the law? Yes, or at least no evidence they didn't. And if the “open bars” were so “open” — why would the students have needed to go to their hotels rooms to get more alcohol — which we know they did? When I was young (and over 21), I always drank what was free before tapping into my own reserves.

But as I said two comments above, if this is what you want to criticize … paying a bunch of underage kids to come to the island … then the pox is on Snyder's campaign (its not a particularly huge one, since even he has apparently dispersed responsibility, but …). That we agree on, albeit its not as big a story as “Underaged drinking problems for GOP”. MM may not have “known” which campaigns did what because many chose not to respond to you, so MM effectively accused them all of doing it in the general way of writing the story. That's why I reacted to it the way I did.

Mr. Heywood's article goes far beyond the mere reporting you and I agree on would be reasonable. Just one example would be the second paragraph:

…had been served alcohol at official parties sponsored by several Republican candidates for governor …

I don't see where Oblinger claimed SEVERAL Republican candidates for governor served her alcohol, let alone claimed any gubernatorial candidate did. She refers to “open bars” in the generic in her tirade, but doesn't identify any bar. The more I read it, the more I think … this is a girl trying to brag to her peers about drinking more than she really did. Perhaps she deserves some investigation here, and if it rubs off on a candidate so be it, but I don't see that as likely and there is no evidence of any candidate being responsible at this point.

I also don't see where she's “named names” – unless you're talking about a few of her friends (which I don't see in this article or any other). She named no candidates, no bars or bartenders, no friends over 21 that got her the “drank”. You haven't shown us any of the photos, in your journalistic excellence, probably because they had little editorial value to the conclusions you'd like to draw. Don't introduce into evidence concepts from evidence you haven't introduced into the debate. I can't reasonably respond to it.

Finally, if you don't want to be viewed as a George Soros hack, stop writing stories that act as that. Stop attacking your readers for raising fair questions. And when you're losing the argument, stop attacking them with ad homimens, like we're both doing now.

If this story were running in reverse and it was a young Democrat, you'd be accusing those doing the story writers of being on a witch-hunt … that is, if it even saw the light of day in the media at all, which I suspect it wouldn't. Don't be surprised when a sting-with-video is done at the next Jefferson-Jack dinner, and I expect the writer to get the MM award for good journalism if it turns something up.

Incredibly silly, Chetly. Even worse than the time you tried to say that waterboarding isn't bad because there isn't a specific statute saying as such under U.S. law.

What ends am I trying to serve here? Very simple. I'm trying to point out the depths to which various campaigns sunk to win a stupid, meaningless straw poll. And, all the stuff pushed about the Snyder campaign forcing people to sign pledges to vote for him, and to show their ballots, came from a Republican … not me.

Yeah, Ed, I can think of a reason.

Teenagers try to impress other teenagers. They occasionally tell “tall tales” – even on, or perhaps now especially on, blogs and facebook. Young men are reknowned for this – but society has evolved and even young woman get into it as well. I think the LCC and local police know that too, and when they don't have specific facts, as they don't here, their investigation, as the MIRS quote of Island police chief points out, is unlikely to result in anything. Everyone here talks of Oblinger's writing as gospel truth … that's far from apparent.

You're beating up a straw man here, chetly. No one here claims that what she said is “gospel truth.” What I said, and what remains true, is that she made a credible report of underage drinking. Credible – not indisputable, not inviolable, but credible. One can always come up with a hypothetical reason why someone might be lying, but that is a far cry from providing a compelling for believing that they are lying. If Oblinger made it all up to impress someone, she went to great lengths to do it – taking pictures of her friends at Mackinac Island during the conference, in campaign shirts, and pictures of them playing drinking games and falling down drunk on the lawn. And she even named names. That's not the hallmark of a hoax, chetly. Could it hypothetically be? Sure. Guess how you find out? Through an investigation.

Cut the bull-turd argument that I think “news” should avoid Republicans. My point was that the “journalism” here in this article lacked evidence for its claims, as does Brewer. You get evidence one of the candidates or campaigns did something active or negligent to encourage underage drinking, and I'll slam them hard. Publicly and behind the scenes. It's not there. Perhaps MM should have covered it – its certainly news in the sense that Brewer had a press conference. But that's it – so far.

And that's all we've reported. Again, you're attacking a strawman, pretending that we went off on some wild-assed accusation. In fact, we did exactly what an ethical journalism site does, we contacted each and every campaign that had underage people there and threw parties. The only one that called us back was Snyder's campaign. But we also got our hands on evidence that the Cox campaign had taken steps to avoid underage drinking and we reported that. We also went out of our way to point out that the campaigns that paid their way there could not be held responsible for what went on at the hotels, that a good portion of the story is nothing greater than “kids will be kids.” But there is responsibility, I think, when you pay a bunch of underage kids to come to the conference, allow them in to parties that you paid for and arranged with an open bar and then don't take the proper precautions to prevent them from being served. We do not know which, if any, of the campaigns actually did this. That's why we didn't accuse any of them of doing it and that's why we made clear that at least one campaign had denied and another had taken positive steps to prevent it. If the other campaigns had returned our calls, we would have reported their positions as well.

The fact is that this is a perfectly reasonable article in both tone and substance. We didn't go off making wild accusations, we presented the evidence on both sides as it is known right now and we reported that an investigation has been called for. In response to that perfectly reasonable tone and substance, you went off like a partisan hack. Then you whine when you're responded to like a partisan hack. Don't want to be viewed that way? Stop acting that way.