MDE Exclusive: Jason Engbrecht's attendnace record - Missed 40% of special board meetings; missed 60% of votes in 2010 http://bit.ly/7xvbgq
– Tweet by MDE's @lukehellier
I've tackled this on Twitter, but because it's such an typical example of telling big lies with little facts, I thought I'd expand on it here.
Luke Hellier posts at Minnesota Democrats Exposed that DFL state senate candidate Jason Engbrecht has a terrible "attendnace" record in serving as a member of the Faribault School Board. This is a story worth pushing, because his GOP-endorsed opponent Mike Parry has a documented poor attendance record as a member of the Waseca City Council.
The trouble is, the story is one of those factual fabrications Michael Brodkorb specialized in at MDE. Now that he's the party deputy chair, he simply retweets similar handiwork by others.
In the new media twitterverse where these GOP hatchet men pant over their party's prospects, you get only 140 characters — about the length of the standard MDE headline — to tell your lie and leave a few characters so your cronies can retweet the lie.
Twitter is perfect for stunted, truth-challenged crap like this.
Let's note how it's done. Fortunately, the Board of Education makes its minutes available to fact checkers like me as well as oppo-slime specialists like Hellier (who does not link to his source, but shows two snapshots of Engbrecht's rarely empty chair).
"Missed 40% of special board meetings" — The Board held five special board meetings in 2009. Engbrecht missed two where the only agenda item was whether to expel a particular student. In each, the vote to expel was unanimous. Failing to add one more vote here hardly seems like a dereliction of duty, but "special" board meetings do sound special.
"Missed 60% of votes in 2010" — That may be true. But there's only been one special working session for the Board so far this year. It was a basic housekeeping meeting that included things like electing officers, committee assignments and naming the local paper as the official school publication source. Since the minutes haven't been posted yet, it's difficult to see which votes were missed at a meeting Engbrecht attended.
Fact: Engbrecht attended every single work session and business meeting held by the school board in 2009. If I were a taxpayer, that's what I'd care about.
And if I were a voter, I would never trust a single "fact" being pushed by these characters.
