Can Jay Bullock read?

I'm not going to be as nice as Owen Robinson was about this. Jay Bullock of Folkbum is once again misrepresenting another blogger's position on an issue. And the blog where Bullock posted his comment, John Michlig's Sprawled Out, has not posted Owen Robinson's response (although he posted mine). I can't find an e-mail address on Michling's site to ask him why Robinson's response was not allowed. (Update! 3/17/08 Michlig has let me know that Owen's response was sucked up by the spam filter.)

Sprawled Out is complaining (two years too late) about the $4 million subsidy from Washington County for the Cabela's store that was built up there.

Bullock wrote in response:

I keep waiting for Washington County's most prolific blogger (*cough*Owen*cough*) to voice an opinion.

Do they have crickets in the wildlife displays?

The next two comments were pretty revealing, too.

Yeah, you don't usually hear the mouthpieces of big business blab about something like this!

Which actually, to use a 21-year-old phrase, sucks. We could definitely use an overheated Mark Belling screaming over the incident or someone calling Cabela's "fish breath" or something similar.

Posted by: Greg Kowalski | March 10, 2008 at 11:33 AM

You're correct Greg. This type of thing should be as offensive as excesive government spending or political cronyism but it never seems to get the same coverage from people like Belling because it goes against everything that was deemed to be a good idea on paper. Unfortunately, the GOP has been hijacked by politicians that are no better than tax-and-spend liberals they loath. The taxing and spending just comes from a different place.

Furthermore, where is the public outrage in Washington County and, more specifically, Richfield over this disaster? Judging by the tone of this article (where it appears that even the journalist writing the article is clueless to the problem he accidently uncovered) this issue just doesn't seem like a big deal up there. Pretty sad.

Posted by: Josh Strupp | March 10, 2008 at 12:46 PM

Now I'm going to guess that Kowalski and Strupp are just intellectually lazy and didn't feel like checking into the huge firestorm (by Washington County standards) that occurred when the board passed the subsidy and then later tried to back out in the face of public pressure. And given Mark Belling's past opposition to some subsidies they might want to actually check before making a blanket statement. But that's not as much fun, is it?

As for Bullock, self-declared nemesis of Owen Robinson, there is no excuse. He has misrepresented other bloggers' blog posts before, and I doubt he is unaware of Robinson's extensive number of postings on the Cabela's subject, especially since Robinson did everything but dive under the bulldozer to stop it. I realize that Bullock has fallen into a bad crowd at his blog, and that personal matters may be distracting him, but if I were to suddenly write that Bullock was a huge fan of Catholic school choice vouchers I'm sure he would tolerate no excuses even as he demanded a correction.