Archive for the ‘Erick Erickson’ Category

Former U.S. House speaker Newt Gingrich is taking real heat over his endorsement of a moderate Republican, Dede Sozzafava, in a special congressional election in upstate New York.

David Keating, executive director of Club for Growth, has taken to a third-party conservative, Doug Hoffman, and rakes Gingrich on the anti-tax group’s web site:

“Gingrich does this all the time,” said Keating. “He does whatever the party committee asks him to. He likes to cultivate this image of being an innovator and a thinker and so on, and then he endorses the most tired, worn-out, special interest-genuflecting candidate you can possibly find.”

Erick Erickson’s RedState is calling for Sozzafava to withdraw.

But this afternoon, on his own web site, the former Georgia congressman pushed back:

The choice in New York is a practical one: We can split the conservative vote and guarantee the election of a Democrat in a Republican seat in a substantial loss of opportunity. Or we can find a way to elect …

Continue reading Newt Gingrich pushes back on N.Y. endorsement »

Because life is unfair and cruel and at its heart a veil of tears, you are not allowed to read press releases with headlines like this every day:

“Georgia Congressman Jim Marshall publicly attacks ghost hunting and those who participate.”

An explanation will come, but later. This morning, the Macon Telegraph reports this:

Paul Rish, until a few days ago chairman of the Bibb County Republican Party, will challenge U.S. Rep. Jim Marshall in the 8th Congressional District, he said Monday. Rish, who will be 30 next week, is making his first bid for political office.

He is president and CEO of his own voice and data network business, Rish Telecommunications, and was head of the local GOP until resigning Sept. 30 to make this congressional run. The Republican Party has tried to take down Marshall, a Democrat, for several years now, making Middle Georgia’s 8th District a national priority.

Rish has been an active participant in the Tea Party movement. PeachPundit has more background …

Continue reading Your morning jolt: Jim Marshall loses the ghost-hunter vote in Macon »

Erick Erickson over at Macon-based Redstate.com says he’s obtained a leaked contact list kept by Bertha Lewis, CEO of ACORN.

Writes Erickson, in a summary:

–Bertha Lewis has the office, cell phone, home number, and private personal email address of Patrick Gaspard.

–Patrick Gaspard holds Karl Rove’s position in the White House and was Obama’s Political Director during the campaign.

–In addition to Patrick, Bertha has Patrick’s brother Michael in her rolodex. She lists Michael as working at the Advance Group.

–The Advance Group is ACORN’s lobbying organization.

–In other words, besides having Obama’s political director’s contact info, the political director’s brother works for ACORN via its lobbying shop.

While most have been focused on Jimmy Carter’s comments on the role of race in criticism of Barack Obama, the former president has pressed on to other issues:

This from AFP, via the Jamaica Observer:

BOGOTA — The United States knew about an abortive coup against Venezuelan …

Continue reading Your morning jolt: ACORN’s Rolodex and Tom DeLay’s moves »

Gov. Sonny Perdue was among three GOP governors who this afternoon defended protesters showing up at town hall meetings on health care hosted by members of Congress.

According to Politico.com, Perdue joined a conference call with Govs. Haley Barbour of Mississippi and Linda Lingle of Hawaii, sponsored by the Republican Governors Association.

Said the governor of Georgia:

Perdue suggested that media coverage of some of the town halls has been overblown, saying what he has seen at the town halls is “democracy in action.”

“For some Democratic legislators to call it anti-democratic is just ludicrous,” said Perdue, seeming to allude to a column by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) published Monday in USA Today that called the protesters “un-American.”

“These are citizens who are very concerned,” said Perdue. “They just want answers to their questions.”

“To be excoriated for asking those questions is just beyond me,” he added.

On the …

Continue reading Sonny Perdue goes to bat for health care protesters »

With the economy still coughing, with one war bubbling and another merely seeting, with an administration’s major health care initiative stalled, it can be easy to forget the immediate and essential change that comes when an African-American is president of the United States.

This from the Washington Post:

Obama was asked at the end of his [Wednesday night] news conference about the arrest last week of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. outside his home. The incident has sparked a national discussion about race relations.

Obama noted that “Skip Gates is a friend, so I may be a little biased here,” and he referred to the professor’s account of arriving home to find a jammed door, forcing it open and then being confronted by a white police officer looking for proof that Gates lived in the home. According to Gates’s account, he showed the officer his ID and became angry when the officer would not identify himself.

We’ll let the New York Times pick it up:

Mr. Obama, asked …

Continue reading Your morning jolt: Obama says ‘Cambridge police acted stupidly’ in arrest of Harvard scholar »

If you are of a certain age and of a certain regionally based faith, the debilitating debate within Republican ranks, one that pits purity against inclusion, might seem more than familiar.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Southern Baptist Convention, then and now the largest Protestant denomination in America, was enveloped in a bitter power struggle between modernists and traditionalists. Biblical inerrancy was the primary litmus test, but there were many others.

Because both sides in the fight claimed the mantle of conservatism, they were dubbed “fundamentalists” and “moderates.” Biblical literalists eventually won, in part because Southern Baptist government is based on convention elections, not unlike the nation’s two political parties. And elections are won by the motivated, the outraged — the activists.

The parallels with the current Republican party, with which the SBC has been closely aligned since Ronald Reagan and the early 1980s, are obvious, even uncanny. …

Continue reading Republicans, Limbaugh, Gingrich — and that old-time religion »

Keeping track of language is essential to political observation. So many times, people actually mean what they say.

Over the last few days, the extreme use of words among Republicans had made it abundantly clear that the party, without a large dose of Xanax, is headed toward a frightful 2010 that will pit its right primary flank against its centrist, general-election appeal.

The most obvious national example: Dick Cheney on Sunday’s “Face the Nation,” who said he preferred Rush Limbaugh as the symbol of the Republican party over Colin Powell.

But local cases indicate the virus has reached near-pandemic proportions.

As Cheney questioned Powell’s Republican credentials, John Oxendine was sending out a blistering, intemperate response to an AJC story questioning the source of $120,000 in donations to his campaign for governor.

Much of the long, long message was directed at this newspaper. Not a problem.

But the paragraphs below singled out Secretary of State Karen Handel, only …

Continue reading Your morning jolt: The Republican words that matter »

A few things worth noting this morning:

— The problem with creating a national political blog, where conservatives are free to rage and foment, is that people actually read what you write.

Travis Fain, who writes Lucid Idiocy for the Macon Telegraph, has posted about those Twitter messages sent out by Erick Erickson of RedState.com shortly after U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter announced his retirement.

Souter, an appointee of the first President Bush, disappointed many on the right. Erickson, who also serves on the Macon city council, gave vent by publicly accusing Souter of having sex with both goats and children. Employing rather crude language.

Not the sort of thing that gets you a regular analyst’s spot with Fox News.

In his own post at PeachPundit, Erickson agrees that he was “intemperate.” “I shouldn’t have (written it),” he told Fain. “I was just creatively expressing my disdain for a guy that hates America. … I was expressing my opinion of the man. I don’t …

Continue reading Your morning jolt: On a blogger’s ‘intemperate’ remarks about David Souter »