PeachyPolitics

Chambliss Sweeps to Victory in Georgia

2008-12-03T05:00:00.000-08:00

Stunning Rebuke for Obama: Ga. Re-elects Chambliss in Landslide

ATLANTA — Relieved Republicans celebrated a resounding win in Georgia's hard-fought U.S. Senate runoff, a victory that denied Democrats a filibuster-proof majority and cemented the state's reputation as a GOP bastion.

Sen. Saxby Chambliss trounced Democrat Jim Martin Tuesday night, winning his second term by a margin of more than 10 percentage points. The race dashed Democrats' hopes of a 60-seat majority immune to Senate filibusters, which would have given President-elect Barack Obama a stronger hand moving his agenda.

A Martin victory was a longshot in Georgia. A Democrat hasn't won an open statewide seat since 1998.

Martin hoped to capitalize on excitement surrounding Obama but was unable to get many of the president elect's voters back to the polls one month after the general election. Obama never came to the state to campaign for Martin, although he recorded automated phone calls and a radio ad for the former state lawmaker from Atlanta.

Chambliss revved up the state's vaunted GOP turnout operation and kept a parade of ex-GOP presidential candidates traipsing through the state to whip up enthusiasm. He brought in Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the former candidate for vice president, as his closer. She headlined four rallies for Chambliss across the state Monday that drew thousands of party faithful.

Minnesota - where a recount is under way - now remains the only unresolved Senate contest in the country. But the stakes there are significantly lower now that Georgia has put a 60-seat Democratic supermajority out of reach.

With 99 percent of the precincts reporting, Chambliss captured 57 percent of votes to Martin's 43 percent. It was a rare bright spot for Republicans in a year where they lost the White House, along with several House and Senate seats.

Martin called Chambliss to concede before 10 p.m., then emerged to tell supporters as his voice cracked: "For me and my family and campaign team and all of you this is a sad moment.

Chambliss portrayed himself as a firewall against Democrats in Washington getting a blank check.

"You have delivered a message that a balance in government in Washington is necessary and that's not only what the people of Georgia want, it's what the people of America want," Chambliss told 500 cheering supporters at a victory rally in Cobb County.

Martin, 63, made the economy the centerpiece of his bid, casting himself as a champion for the neglected middle class.

With most precincts reporting, turnout stood at about 35 percent. That's higher than the 20 percent predicted by a spokesman for Secretary of State Karen Handel, but it's far less than the 65 percent who voted in last month's general election.

The runoff between the former University of Georgia fraternity brothers was necessary after a three-way general election prevented any of the candidates from getting the necessary 50 percent.

Chambliss came to the Senate in 2002 after defeating Democratic Sen. Max Cleland in a campaign that infuriated Democrats. Chambliss ran a TV ad that questioned Cleland's commitment to national security and flashed a photo of Osama bin Laden. Cleland is a triple amputee wounded in the Vietnam War.

He was a loyal supporter of President Bush and, as a freshman, rose to become chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee. The former agriculture lawyer from Moultrie has been the ranking Republican on the panel since Democrats won control of the Senate.

Some 3.7 million people cast ballots in this year's general election, and both sides have since tried to keep voters' attention with a barrage of ads and visits by political heavy-hitters.

Former President Bill Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore both stumped for Martin.

GOP nominee John McCain, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee hit the stump for Chambliss.

Democrat Zell Miller Backs Chambliss in Ga.

2008-11-20T10:10:00.000-08:00

Democrat Zell Miller Backs Chambliss in Ga.

Former Democratic Senator and Georgia Governor Zell Miller has endorsed Republican incumbent Sen. Saxby Chambliss in the upcoming runoff election in Georgia against Democratic challenger Jim Martin.

The Republican National Senatorial Committee is running a Web-only ad featuring a speech that Miller delivered at a Chambliss rally on Thursday.

Neither Chambliss nor Martin garnered 50 percent of the vote on Election Day, necessitating a runoff on Dec. 2.

Mindful that Democrats could have 59 Senate seats by that time, one short of a filibuster-proof majority, Miller told the gathering that Saxby “could well be the last man standing [against] a far-left liberal agenda sailing through the U.S. Senate, an agenda that Jim Martin just can’t wait to help move on.”

Miller said when he was governor, “I proposed a $100 million tax cut for Georgia. Guess who [was] the very first state legislator [who] popped up and said, this is wrong, we’ve got too many unmet needs to do it? You guessed it. His name was Jim Martin.

“Unmet needs. I think the greatest unmet need is getting that money back to the taxpayers.

“I have served with both these men in this race. And there is no question in my mind or in my heart which one is the best prepared to serve our country and serve our state. And that is our senior Senator, Saxby Chambliss.”

Miller served as Georgia governor from 1991 to 1999, and delivered the keynote speech at the 1992 Democratic convention. But in the years since he has been drifting to the right.

He was appointed to the U.S. Senate from Georgia after the death of Paul Coverdell in July 2000, and retained his seat in a special election the following November.

In 2004, Miller delivered the keynote speech at the GOP convention, and he backed President George W. Bush over John Kerry in the general election.

Miller did not run for re-election and left the Senate in 2005.

In the RNSC ad, he alludes to President-elect Barack Obama’s likely economic policies and declares: “I don’t like this spread the wealth. To steal from Peter to pay Paul even if it gets Paul to vote for you, is wrong, wrong, wrong.”

Runoff Likely In Georgia Senate Race

2008-11-06T07:30:00.000-08:00

Runoff Likely In Georgia Senate Race

ATLANTA — The last seat of the new Senate will likely be determined by a runoff in Georgia, where Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss apparently came just short of winning enough votes to send him to a second term.

With 99 percent of precincts reporting Wednesday, Chambliss had 49.8 percent of the vote, shy of the 50 percent plus one required under state law to avoid a runoff. The mild-mannered Democrat Jim Martin, a former Georgia legislator and once-reluctant Senate candidate, won 46.8 percent of the vote. Libertarian Allen Buckley pulled 3.4 percent.

Some absentee votes were still being counted late Wednesday. However, if the current results hold, Chambliss would face Martin on Dec. 2.

"We're prepared for a runoff. We have already hit the ground," said Chambliss, who was expected to coast to re-election in reliably GOP Georgia before the nation's economy faltered, fueling a wave of anti-incumbent frustration. Some conservatives were angered that Chambliss backed the $700 billion bailout.

Martin said he had already been in touch with Barack Obama's campaign, but there were no immediate plans for the president-elect to visit Georgia. "The runoff race begins right now," Martin said.

It would be the first test of whether Obama can mobilize voters when he is not on the ballot. On Tuesday, Democrats added three seats to their Senate majority, but even if they swept the remaining still undecided races, they would fall short of the filibuster-proof, 60-vote majority.

Runoff results from top vote getters have been mixed in Georgia.

Of 215 local and statewide runoffs held between 1970 and 1986, the top vote getter in the general election won the runoff 69 percent of the time, according to the book "Politics in Georgia."

But more recently, incumbent Sen. Wyche Fowler led on Election Day before ultimately losing a runoff in 1992. A public service commissioner suffered the same fate in 2006.

Some claim Georgia's runoff law was intended to thin black voting strength and prevent African-American candidates who led in primaries from making it to the general election. Black front-runners in the primary won just 50 percent of runoffs when they faced white candidates between 1970 and 1986, according to "Politics in Georgia."

The State of Georgia's Lead in School Choice

2008-05-23T05:53:00.000-07:00

By Paul Weyrich

There has been a major development in the State of Georgia yet the so-called mainstream media has completely ignored it and even the alternative media hardly has covered it. This past week Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue signed into law the most expansive school-choice program in the nation.

Unlike similar programs in other States, this program has no demographic restriction. All students are eligible for private school scholarships. The State Legislature set the cost of the school choice budget at $50 million. If the demand is similar in other States that amount likely will rise considerably. All pupils K-12 are eligible.

The program is similar to that which was enacted by the State of Louisiana and continues a trend imposing no eligibility requirement for the scholarships. Originally only inner-city students in failing public schools were eligible for school-choice programs. But now Arizona, Vermont, Ohio, Maine, Illinois and Iowa all impose no eligibility restriction.

Robert Enlow, Executive Director of the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, in commenting on the developments in Louisiana and Georgia said, "The old idea of limiting school choice based on family income is coming to an end. States are increasingly adopting Milton Friedman's vision of school choice for all, not just for some. The argument that freedom is only good for some students just doesn't make it anymore".

Lydia Glaize, one of the parents who strongly supported school choice, said, "The Governor has made the most prolific change for the State of Georgia.... Children who will receive these scholarships will translate into fewer kids in juvenile detention, more who will graduate and more who will wind up in the labor force. That's a better standard of living for the entire Georgia community."

The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice reports that with the new Georgia law, there are now 23 school choice programs in 14 States plus the District of Columbia. Enlow said that 15 of the programs have no family income restriction for eligibility while nine have no demographic restriction at all. Six are restricted only in that they serve disabled and foster-care students alone.

The effort to pass this measure in the Legislature drew support from the Georgia Family Council, the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, the Southeastern Legal Foundation, the Archdiocese of Atlanta and Americans for Prosperity. In addition a number of national school-choice groups weighed in.

The Wall Street Journal called the Friedman Foundation "the nation's leading voucher advocate." Enlow said his group will be pushing for other States to enact school choice programs soon. In due course the group would like to see a national voucher program passed by Congress.

For many years the teachers unions used scare tactics to prevent school choice programs from enactment. They claimed that voucher programs would destroy the public school system. In fact, faced with competition, school choice has actually strengthened the public schools. Now that the public is able to see that union propaganda was a big lie citizens are more willing to consider vouchers. This is especially true now that it is widely acknowledged that the public school system is broken, graduating young people who hardly can read or write and who fail math and science.

At a time when conservatives are in a funk, believing that nothing good is happening in America, it is time to celebrate this milestone development in Georgia. This is a victory not just for Georgians but for all parents who are concerned with the state of public education in these United States.

Blather on, Al. Give ‘em hell, Zell

2008-04-25T01:22:00.000-07:00

Just as Gore represents the blame-America leftists who have pirated the Democratic Party, Miller represents those Democrats who have been set adrift by Gore’s party.

Zell-Al Real Reality Show

John L. Perry: Inquiring minds are asking: Is Al Gore off his meds? What’s Zell Miller doing addressing the Republican National Convention? Informed minds already know the answer.

There’s nothing bi-polar, topsy-turvy or uncharacteristic about what either of those Democrats is doing. Both are being what they actually are. This is a real reality show.

The former Democratic vice president from Tennessee and the retiring Democratic senator from Georgia accurately epitomize what’s become of the Democratic Party in the past decade.

The Democratic Party has become captive of the extreme left in America and thus the logical cote for the political cuckoos in quest of a congenial perch.

Little Albert, as Gore is regarded without tribute in his sort-of home state, it’s no surprise today to see him acting bug-swattin’ nuts on television. After his layer after layer of reinventions, the Al Gore you now see really is the real Al Gore.

Gore has always been most at home deep into the marshes of neo-Marxist, Trotsky-genre radicalism. When his carotid artery starts pumping and his visage turns from pasty blank to raspberry-purple, that’s our Al all right.

The party of Jefferson, Wilson, FDR, Truman, heck, even Carter and Clinton has in the past 10 to 12 years lurched drunkenly to the left. It’s now so hard aport that its new captain might as well be Admiral Gore, with Screechin’ Howard Dean his ideological first mate.

That ungainly, morose Massachusetts senator who will be the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee is little more than an expensively attired, stiff-collar, hereditary-commissioned, ornamental show-off striding the deck as if he actually knew where he was or where the ship is going. Kerry may surmise he’s captain, but watch the mutiny should he dare order a tack to starboard.

Just as the Democratic Party has caromed off to the left so far it is the perfect platform for the likes of Gore, so has it left Miller no comfortable planking to plant his feet other than amidships of the Republican Party.

No, it’s not Zell who has changed his compass heading. It’s the Democratic Party that’s gone missing.

When Gore disgorges, he stokes the adrenalin of homesick far-leftists who are not numerous enough to elect dogcatchers and have nowhere else to go unless it is to help Ralph Nader and his leftover wobblies give George W. Bush an even-wider margin of victory in November.

When Miller mounts the Republican convention podium and warns America about an “out-of-touch, ultraliberal from Taxachusetts” that his Democratic Party has come up with this year, he will be speaking to the hearts and minds of millions of other voters of independent mind who, along with him, have been betrayed.

So, blather on, Al. Give ‘em hell, Zell.

Voter ID law an ugly effort to subvert ballot

2008-01-15T06:18:00.000-08:00

If the U.S. Supreme Court upholds Indiana's harsh voter ID law, as it seems poised to do, hundreds of thousands of black Americans should march in protest. So should hundreds of thousands of Latino Americans. Native Americans, too. Political activists from across the ethnic spectrum should convene the biggest political demonstration since the historic March on Washington in 1963.

Where is Al Sharpton when a genuinely critical issue comes along? Where's Jesse Jackson?

The GOP-led campaign to pass stringent voter ID laws is a greater injustice than the prosecutions of the Jena Six, more significant than the incarceration of Michael Vick, more damaging than the insulting rants of Don Imus. This is a brazen effort to block the votes of thousands of people of color who might have the temerity to vote for Democrats. And it's un-American.

As happened in several states, including Georgia, the then-GOP-dominated Indiana Legislature pushed through a rigid law in 2005 requiring voters to produce a state-sponsored photo ID at the poll. While the Republican spin machine has worked mightily to portray this as an effort to curb voter fraud, it is no such thing. There has never — never — been a single documented case of "voter impersonation" at the ballot box, with a fake voter using an electric bill or phone bill to pretend to be a valid voter.

Earlier this month, radio journalist Warren Olney pressed Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita about the prosecution of voter impersonation cases in Indiana. "Oh, yeah. We suspect it happens all the time," Rokita said.

"Suspect?" Olney countered.

"Well, are you saying you want to define whether or not there's fraud based on whether or not it's prosecuted?" Rokita answered, adding, "It's a hard type of crime to catch. ... It's hard to catch one in the act."

OK, then. Got that? It's a little like the search for life on other planets. Extra-terrestrials are out there, even if none has actually been spotted.

(If Republicans were interested in actual voter fraud, they would have tightened the rules for absentee ballots, since that's where most voter fraud occurs. But because absentee voters tend to vote Republican, many GOP-dominated legislatures have made absentee balloting rules less stringent.)

But there is evidence aplenty of this: There are thousands of law-abiding registered voters across the land who have no government-sponsored ID — no passport, no driver's license — and who will be banned from the ballot box if the highest court upholds this highly partisan law.

It is difficult for middle-class citizens to believe, I know. If you live in the comfortable economic mainstream, where taking airplane trips and renting DVDs is a routine part of life, you can't imagine voters without a state-sponsored photo ID.

But they're out there. Just ask Mary-Jo Criswell, 71. Her ballot was thrown out when she showed up at her Indiana polling place expecting to use the same forms of ID, including a bank card with a photo, that she had used in the past. She has epilepsy, she says, so she has never had a driver's license.

Citizens like Criswell are Americans, too, and they have every right to vote, just like it says in the Bill of Rights. It is elitism, pure and simple, to suggest that requiring them to obtain a state-sponsored photo ID is a "minor inconvenience." But that's exactly what Justice Anthony Kennedy called it during oral arguments, noting that the law is expected to affect only a small percentage of voters.

That's true. The GOP is aiming at a small pool of voters — mostly poor, often elderly, usually black or brown — who lack driver's licenses. As it happens, they tend to support Democrats. With so many elections decided by a margin of a few hundred votes, Republicans figure they can stay in power by blocking just a few Democratic ballots.

But the Republicans could be in for a jolt. The electorate seems much more excited about Democratic candidates this year. The Democratic presidential candidates have topped the Republicans in fund-raising, and in early primary states, more Democratic ballots have been cast than Republican ones.

The way things are going, Republicans running for national office could lose by a lot of votes — not a few. So they'll need a new scam to win elections.

Gov. Sonny Perdue

2007-10-29T08:27:00.000-07:00

Governors, Secretary in Drought Talks

ATLANTA -- Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne met with Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue on Friday with the aim of keeping a tri-state fight over waning water supplies amid a severe drought from spilling into court.

Neither the governor nor Kempthorne would say much about the meeting until Kempthorne gets together in the afternoon with Alabama Gov. Bob Riley.

"Out of respect for the way these negotiations are going, we're not going to be very specific," Perdue said. "Things are in the works."

Kempthorne said his meeting with Perdue had "the right atmosphere and the right tone." He stressed that the states need to reach an agreement and keep the federal courts out of it.

Alabama, Georgia and Florida are mired in a decades-long water fight over federal reservoirs, and an exceptional drought -- the worst category, according to the National Drought Mitigation Center -- covering almost a third of the Southeast has intensified the jockeying. Government forecasters reported the drought could soon get worse.

Caught in the middle is the Army Corps of Engineers, which says it is complying with federal guidelines by sending millions of gallons of water from Georgia downstream to Florida and Alabama to supply power plants and protect federally threatened mussel species.

Georgia lawmakers announced plans Thursday for a network of state reservoirs. Perdue also has ordered state agencies and public utilities to reduce usage, and authorities have banned outdoor watering in most of the state.

Georgia also sued the Corps last week, demanding it send less water downstream. That brought objections from the governors of Alabama and Florida.

Riley and Florida Gov. Charlie Crist have warned that Georgia's consumption, especially by the burgeoning Atlanta area, with its population of 5 million, threatens their downstream states.

Valdosta State Expels Student for Collage

2007-10-25T06:58:00.000-07:00

Valdosta State Expels Student for Collage

Valdosta State University has expelled a student for peacefully protesting the school’s decision to construct two new parking decks on campus.

After the Georgia college’s President Ronald M. Zaccari labeled student T. Hayden Barnes a “clear and present danger” and mandated that he submit certifications of his mental health and on-going therapy as conditions of his readmission, Barnes contacted the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for help.

“A kind of madness seems to be gripping our colleges, one in which merely claiming a student poses a ‘threat’ — no matter how absurd or attenuated the allegation may be — is enough to punish even the most clearly protected speech,” FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said.

“This case represents the extreme of this troubling trend. Hayden Barnes did nothing wrong; the claim that his speech was threatening is specious, and the university’s decision to expel him is truly chilling.”

VSU’s student newspaper ran an article on March 22, outlining plans to spend $30 million of mandatory student fee money to build two new parking decks on campus.

Barnes posted flyers and e-mailed Zaccari, student and faculty governing bodies, and the Board of Regents detailing his environmental concerns about the parking structures and proposing environmentally friendly options.

On March 26, Barnes was informed by members of VSU’s Students Against Violating the Environment that Zaccari was upset by his flyers. In response, Barnes apologized to Zaccari and took the flyers down, according to a statement from FIRE, a nonprofit foundation that works in support of individual rights and academic freedom at U.S. colleges and universities.

On April 13, Barnes posted a collage of pictures on his Facebook.com page, including pictures of Zaccari, a parking facility, a bulldozer excavating trees, automobile exhaust, a gas mask, an asthma inhaler, and a public bus underneath the “not allowed” symbol.

Barnes also wrote a letter to the editor of the VSU student paper about the proposed parking plans and wrote to Zaccari to ask for an exemption from the mandatory student fee designated for funding the parking facility construction.

According to VSU, Barnes also “posted a link on his Web site page to an article discussing the massacre at Virginia Tech.”

On May 7, Barnes found a “notice of administrative withdrawal” from Zaccari underneath his dormitory door, informing him that “as a result of recent activities directed towards me by you, included [sic] but not limited to the attached threatening document [the Facebook collage], you are considered to present a clear and present danger to this campus.”

Barnes appealed Zaccari’s decision on May 21, forwarding a letter of support from a faculty member and a clean bill of mental health from a psychiatrist.

According to FIRE, “Zaccari amazingly claims that Barnes’ actions constituted ‘a specific threat to his [Zaccari’s] safety and a general threat to the safety of the campus.’”

After reviewing Barnes’ appeal, the Board of Regents referred the case to an Administrative Law Judge for further hearing. The Office of State Administrative Hearings now has jurisdiction over the appeal, and a hearing date has been set for November 26.

FIRE wrote a letter to the Chancellor of the University System of Georgia, Erroll B. Davis, Jr., explaining that Barnes has effectively been expelled for engaging in protected speech and has been denied due process rights.

“VSU has punished a vocal student for peacefully protesting a university parking garage,” Lukianoff said, urging readers to ask whether Barnes’ actions “really equaled a terror risk necessitating a student’s immediate expulsion. In its attempt to eliminate a student activist, VSU has eliminated basic fairness, free speech, and due process.”

Limbaugh Needs Defending

2007-10-03T08:11:00.000-07:00

Limbaugh Needs Defending

Written by Nathan Burchfiel and Monisha Bansal, CNSNews.com Staff Writers

Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) said Tuesday that he introduced a House resolution to support Rush Limbaugh because the conservative talk radio host "needs defending" from Democrats who have introduced resolutions and made statements condemning him for using the words "phony soldiers" on his radio show.

On his Sept. 26 show, Limbaugh used the term "phony soldiers" in setting up a story about Jesse Macbeth, a former soldier who was recently sentenced to five months in prison for obtaining veterans' benefits by falsifying his military records.

Macbeth claimed to have been an Army Ranger with a rank of corporal. He further claimed to have served in Iraq and Afghanistan and became a figure of the anti-war movement when he stated in Internet videos that he witnessed U.S. military atrocities in Iraq. In reality, Macbeth was in the Army only 44 days and never served overseas.

The liberal media group Media Matters for America (which has led a long campaign to have Limbaugh removed from taxpayer-supported Armed Services Radio) accused Limbaugh of referring to all anti-war soldiers as "phony soldiers."

Limbaugh clarified on his radio show that he was referring specifically to Macbeth and others like him.

But Democrats in the House and Senate have criticized Limbaugh and launched efforts to demand apologies and make official condemnations of his comment. On Monday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced he was sending a letter to Clear Channel Communications asking that the broadcasting giant force Limbaugh to apologize.

Also on Monday, Rep. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) introduced a House resolution to support the military and condemn Limbaugh's comments. Udall's resolution prompted Kingston to introduce his own resolution supporting Limbaugh. Cybercast News Service sat down with Kingston Tuesday to discuss the issue.

Thompson Leading GOP Field in Ga., S.C.

2007-09-13T06:28:00.000-07:00

Thompson Leading GOP Field in Ga., S.C.

Newly announced presidential candidate Fred Thompson leads his rivals for the Republican nomination in both Georgia and South Carolina, two new polls reveal.

In a poll of likely Georgia voters – Republicans, Democrats, and Independents – by Strategic Vision LLC, Thompson received 32 percent of the vote, followed by Rudy Giuliani with 17 percent. Potential candidate Newt Gingrich got 9 percent, John McCain tallied 8 percent, and Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee each received 6 percent.

“Thompson has significantly increased his lead among Republicans since our June poll,” said David E. Johnson, CEO of Strategic Vision.

“Even more evident is the magnitude of the McCain collapse in Georgia.”

A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll of likely primary voters in South Carolina showed Thompson ahead of Giuliani by a margin of 26 percent to 23 percent.

But Mitt Romney outpolled Thompson in two other key states. In Iowa, Romney received 28 percent of the vote, while Thompson and Giuliani each got 16 percent, and McCain received 7 percent.

In New Hampshire, Romney was tops with 28 percent of the vote, with Giuliani trailing at 23 percent. McCain was third with 12 percent, followed by Thompson with 11 percent.

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton led with 34 percent of the vote in Strategic Vision’s poll in Georgia, followed by Barack Obama (25 percent), John Edwards (13 percent), and Bill Richardson (8 percent).

“Edwards lost significant support while Clinton increased and solidified her support,” said Johnson. “For Obama, the good news is that he is now the clear second choice to Clinton and is the second choice of a majority of Edwards’ voters.”

Clinton also beat out her Democratic rivals in the Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg polls in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

In South Carolina, where African-Americans are expected to comprise about half of the Democratic primary voters, Obama garnered only about one-third of the black vote, while Clinton tallied 43 percent.

An architect of voter harassment needs no reward

2007-06-24T07:15:00.000-07:00

CYNTHIA TUCKER

Former metro Atlantan Hans von Spakovsky is among the GOP hacks who perverted the U.S. Department of Justice — trashing constitutional principles, rewarding partisanship over competence and converting the entire machinery into an arm of the Republican Party. His specialty was suppressing voting by Americans of color, who are more likely to support Democrats; he played a starring role in a nationwide effort to disenfranchise poor blacks, Latinos and Native Americans.

Now, von Spakovsky is seeking Senate approval for a six-year term on the Federal Election Commission, which enforces federal campaign finance laws. (President Bush gave von Spakovsky a recess appointment in January 2006, but he must have Senate confirmation for a full term.) The vote ought to be easy: No, no and no way.

chief of the Civil Rights Division's Voting Section — have stepped forward to oppose his nomination. According to The Washington Post, more than half the career lawyers in the Voting Section left in protest during his tenure.

Von Spakovsky's blatant disregard for the constitutionally guaranteed right to the franchise should disqualify him from even serving as a volunteer poll worker, much less a commissioner on the FEC. He is a leading light among the Republican activists who have whipped up the bogeyman of fraudulent voting, claiming that illegal ballots can only be stopped by stringent requirements, such as state-sponsored photo IDs, at the ballot box.

Actually, illegal voters are about as common as honest Bush appointees in the Justice Department.

A small federal agency called the Election Assistance Commission hired researchers who found "little polling place fraud." (The report's conclusions were downplayed and their release delayed by the GOP-dominated Election Assistance Commission; earlier, von Spakovsky tried to get one of the researchers fired.) The real agenda was to throw up enough obstacles at the ballot box to shave off a few thousand votes that would probably go to Democrats, enough for Republicans to win in close elections.

Appointed to the Justice Department after serving Bush valiantly in the Florida vote-count debacle, von Spakovsky more or less took over the Voting Section, which until then had worked to ensure that all citizens had access to the ballot box — especially citizens from ethnic groups whose history included the harshest forms of disenfranchisement. Von Spakovsky turned that mission on its head. Under his de facto leadership, the Voting Section became a mechanism for disenfranchising certain voting blocs.

After Republican Tom Heffelfinger, then Minnesota's U.S. attorney, tried to scrutinize a new state photo ID requirement that he believed would disenfranchise Native Americans — a reliable Democratic voting bloc in the state — von Spakovsky essentially blocked the investigation. (Though Heffelfinger resigned on his own, his name did surface at one point on a list of U.S. attorneys targeted for replacement.)

Von Spakovsky supported the mid-decade gerrymandering of legislative districts by the GOP-dominated Texas Legislature. And he informed Arizona officials that they did not have to provide provisional ballots to voters who showed up at the polls without proper ID, an interpretation clearly at odds with the plain words of the Help America Vote Act of 2002.

Further, it was von Spakovsky who was largely responsible for clearing the way for an overly restrictive photo ID law passed by the Georgia General Assembly in 2005 (and since blocked by the courts). He overruled career attorneys in the Voting Section, who believed the requirement would disproportionately disenfranchise black voters in the state. He should have recused himself from that case, since shortly before, he had anonymously published an article in a legal journal arguing for stringent photo ID requirements at the polls, claiming there was no evidence such laws would hurt minority voters.

Trying to drum up a little sympathy with dubious Democratic senators at his hearing last week, von Spakovsky reminded them that he was born to humble immigrants who had fled Nazi Germany and communist Russia. But the young Hans seems to have drawn the wrong lessons from his parents' experiences. He needs to be sent back to ninth-grade civics class, not rewarded with a position on the FEC.

What he didn't say. . .

2007-06-17T13:28:00.000-07:00

Congressman Mac Collins Web Page

I found the recent letter from Doug Silvia, "Beyond dirty campaigning," interesting for what it did not say about the 8th District Congressional race between Mac Collins and Rep. Jim Marshall. He speaks about Marshall's support for the war on terror and support for veterans - both commendable, but fully expected of anyone wishing to represent the values of Middle Georgians.

What he did not mention are some of the other issues that Marshall supported through his votes in Congress. Marshall apparently believes that English is not the language of this nation by his vote to print election ballots in Spanish. He believes we do not have an energy problem in this country by voting against drilling for oil in ANWR and opposing new oil refineries.

He believes that hard working Americans should not have the right to pass on to their children the fruits of a lifetime of work by voting against repeal of the Death Tax. And most offensive, he voted against funding the terrorist surveillance program that has proven to be one of the most effective tools in the arsenal against terrorism.

Sylvia, who says he is a Republican, should not lose sight of the fact that Marshall voted with Nancy Pelosi 79 percent of the time last year and will vote to make her Speaker of the House should he return to the Congress. That reality would place Pelosi, an ultra liberal San Francisco Democrat, third in line to the presidency.

Judy Goddard

Chairman,

Houston County Republican Party
Warner Robins

Change rules, not McKinney road

2006-12-20T08:15:00.000-08:00

ajc.com > Opinion

Steve Tate was a bully who bragged about cheating people and refused to pay taxes, according to North Georgia historian Charlene Terrell.

"Even though he died in 1958, there are some people up here who still fear his name," says Terrell, author of "Wolfscratch Wilderness," a chronicle of the old Blue Ridge Mountain settlement that's now Big Canoe.

And what did Tate get for his misdeeds? A highway named after him in Pickens and Dawson counties.

If the Legislature wants to start stripping names from roads because of the errant ways of the honoree, it has to go well beyond U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney. The state is crisscrossed with roads christened in commemoration of dubious characters.

More than 450 state roads and bridges carry the names of politicians, entertainers, athletes, politicians and private citizens, not all of whom are paragons of virtue. Yet state Rep. Len Walker (R-Loganville) wants to erase only McKinney's name, claiming she "has brought embarrassment to the state of Georgia."

If embarrassment is the criterion, Walker better buy his erasers by the crate. The Republican lawmaker can start rubbing the I-75 Chattahoochee River Bridge, named for former Gov. Lester Maddox, who became a national symbol of segregation for chasing away blacks trying to integrate his Pickrick restaurant.

Then there's James Brown Boulevard in Augusta, so dubbed for the Godfather of Soul despite his long record of domestic violence and drug arrests.

Certainly, McKinney has aggravated many Georgians with her antics. Voters in her DeKalb congressional district kicked her out of office in her party's July primary. Walker's grandstanding is an effort by Republicans to get one last drop of publicity from McKinney before she slips into well-deserved oblivion.

A better approach is to adopt a ban on naming roads, bridges and intersections after living people. All honorary designations ought to wait until the party is long dead and enough history has passed to expose all skeletons.

Terrell, for instance, says she would not be upset if the state took Steve Tate's name off the highway, given what her research has revealed. "But I am not going to lead a petition to do it," she says. "Changing road names causes confusion."

— Maureen Downey, for the editorial board (mdowney@ajc.com)

Pull Coffins From Ads

2006-11-02T09:06:00.000-08:00

NewsMax - A Republican congressional candidate on Wednesday condemned a TV ad by his own party that uses images of soldiers' flag-draped coffins to attack his opponent, but the committee that paid for the piece said it will continue to air.

"It is unacceptable for them to use American soldiers' coffins in any advertising," Max Burns told The Associated Press. "They need to remove those immediately."

The National Republican Congressional Committee ad, which attacks Rep. John Barrow on homeland security issues, shows numerous television screens displaying rows of coffins draped in American flags.

An announcer says, "Barrow is funded by an organization that used coffins of dead American soldiers in a fundraising ad."

It's a reference to a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee video posted on the Internet in July. The Democratic group, which denies it was produced to raise money, took down the video after several Republicans and Democrats - including Burns and Barrow - complained that it exploited the deaths of American service members in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Burns, a former GOP congressman who lost to Barrow in 2004, asked the NRCC to take down the ad or edit it to remove the caskets, but the committee refused.

"Our production of the ad is completely independent of former congressman Burns and we have no plans to take it down," said NRCC spokesman Jonathan Collegio.

Barrow called it "utter hypocrisy" that Republicans would attack him with images they considered off-limits months ago.

"They're not trying to insult the memories of fallen soldiers to raise money, they're doing it to get votes," Barrow said. "It's just as insensitive either way."

The ad began airing Tuesday in Barrow's eastern Georgia district. Both the NRCC and the DCCC have been spending heavily on attack ads in the final week of the Barrow-Burns race.

Jim Marshall voted against Terrorist Surveillance

2006-08-17T09:31:00.000-07:00

Congressman Mac Collins Web Site:

Jim Marshall voted against Terrorist Surveillance program that thwarted airline bombings

Jim Marshall’s Bad Votes Come Back to Haunt Him…again

(Warner Robins, GA) – On June 20th, Jim Marshall followed up his public declaration to fund and legitimize the Hamas terrorist organization with a vote to cut funding for a Terrorist Surveillance Program used by the National Security Agency (NSA).

This is the very program that successfully helped thwart this week’s terrorist plot to blow-up United States passenger planes flying from Great Britain. (RCV#295, 06/20/06)

Time Magazine is now reporting that “American official says U.S. intelligence provided London authorities with intercepts of the group's communications.”

The foiling of this terrorist plot was a direct result of information derived from the NSA program that Jim Marshall had voted to cut. Thankfully, the lives of hundreds of innocent people were spared because of Republican members of Congress who, unlike Jim Marshall, voted to retain funding for this critical NSA program.

Last night while speaking to the Young Farmers Association of Houston County, former Congressman Mac Collins addressed the subject of the terrorist surveillance program that Jim Marshall voted against funding.

Collins said, “Some people say that the terrorist surveillance program is an infringement on our privacy rights. It is an infringement on our rights not to monitor terrorists who are trying to bring down this country. Incredibly, Jim Marshall voted against funding the very program that this week saved our country from a massive, 9-11 scale tragedy.”

“You cannot support the War on Terror and vote to cut funding for terrorist surveillance programs that have saved the lives of many Americans. Jim Marshall’s repeated votes in support of Hamas and against funding the surveillance of terrorists is not in the best interest of our national security”, said Bill Hagan, a spokesman for Congressman Mac Collins (Ret. R-GA).

Mac Collins: Ending America’s addiction to Middle East oil

2006-05-04T10:05:00.000-07:00

Commentary by U.S. Rep. Mac Collins

The United States is addicted to oil. Congress, the federal government and big business have been aware of this problem but like most addicts they failed to correct their destructive behavior until they hit rock bottom.

It is essential to our nation’s security that this country becomes unshackled from its dependence on foreign oil. This is not a time for academic or elitist debate on environmental impact. This is the time in our history to put an end to fossil fuel reliance through energy independence.

There is a solution and it does not lie in trade relationships with Middle Eastern nations that, even at their best, view us as tolerated customers as opposed to valued allies. The solution to America’s energy woes can be found right here at home. The development of alternatives to foreign oil such as bio-fuel made from wood byproducts; ethanol made from corn; the reduction of unneeded government regulations on the building of domestic oil refineries; and the drilling for new sources of domestic oil in locations such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) all hold the key to our freedom from foreign oil.

No problem can be solved overnight and the United States has certainly waited too long to address this great failure. However, despite the failure of past energy policies, the Bush administration and my fellow Republicans are embracing a new policy that, if not hampered by the opposition party, will result in not only energy security for the United States but a level of national security that we do not have now. The development of underutilized, readily renewable domestic resources holds the key to our independence.

Last year, 157 Democratic members of the House of Representatives voted against our energy bill in a display of partisanship that did not help this problem one bit. I am thankful that my colleagues in the Republican Party were able to overcome the opposition’s unpatriotic objections to what will be the first stage in our nation’s energy future. The everyday use of ethanol and bio-fuels as a substitute for petroleum-based energy sources will take several years to accomplish, even under the best of circumstances. Therefore, in the short term, the United States needs to aggressively develop our enormous, and almost infinite, domestic energy resources.

The first stage of any successful energy program will be the development of the resources that already exist. Right away, for example our nation can eliminate the regulations that stand in the way of building new refineries. Furthermore, we will drill for oil at ANWR in Alaska. I do not believe that domestic oil production alone will safeguard our future energy needs. The time has come for the United States to look forward and develop renewable alternative energy sources that can be found on our family farms. Both wood based bio-fuels and ethanol will fill the gap between our ability to produce petroleum domestically and our dependence on Middle Eastern oil. Rather than continuing to enrich Middle Eastern oil sheiks, the time has come for those dollars to find their way into the pockets of our own citizens. This can be accomplished by directing both private and federal research dollars toward developing the resources that exist in our very own fields rather than recklessly continuing to funnel our hard-earned money to nations, and terror havens, that do not share America’s interests or values.

Mac Collins is a former Republican member of the United States House of Representatives. Congressman Collins served 12 years in Congress, and in the Republican leadership of the House as a member of the Republican Steering Committee and as Deputy Majority Whip. He was also a member of the Ways and Means Committee and the Intelligence Committee.

We're Stigmatized, But the Enemy Isn't

2006-05-03T04:11:00.000-07:00

Left Has Turned Their Guilt Into Our Problem

This does not mean that President Bush is insincere in his desire to bring democracy to Iraq, nor is it to say that democracy won't ultimately be socially transformative in Iraq. It's just that today the United States cannot go to war in the Third World simply to defeat a dangerous enemy. White guilt makes our Third World enemies into colored victims, people whose problems -- even the tyrannies they live under -- were created by the historical disruptions and injustices of the white West. We must 'understand' and pity our enemy even as we fight him, [such as yesterday's New York Times headline: "Saddam, Misunderstood."] And, though Islamic extremism is one of the most pernicious forms of evil opportunism that has ever existed, we have felt compelled to fight it with an almost managerial minimalism that shows us to be beyond the passions of war -- and thus well dissociated from the avariciousness of the white supremacist past."

It all adds up to the fact that we are afraid to win because we think it's wrong -- and again, not talking about all of us collectively, I think where he has nailed this here is identifying the mind-set on the left, not just in this country, but around the world. We're actually afraid to win, because there's no question, folks, how many times during this war have you sat frustrated? We're the United States of America. What do we need to put up with this insurgency and these IEDs and these car bombs? We could win this war inside of two weeks to a month, but we refuse to, and that's why this piece is so important, because we do fight these things in a minimalist fashion, and all the while even while this is happening we are told what a bunch of brutes and how unfair we are by the leftists in this country, the Drive-By Media.

We still get hammered for the way we're doing it. You can't appease people. It's like when you try to get along with the left, it never works. They take advantage of you. They think you're a sap or a sucker. They think you're exposing weakness. You can't make them your friends. They're not interested in that. Same thing here. We can't make the world like us, but this is I think from which these comments from John Kerry and all this, "We've lost our standard in the world. We've lost our reputation." Shelby Steele has nailed precisely why. These people are so self-loathing. They have such disrespect for their own country and its past.

Kerry in Vietnam, the whole Democratic Party in the civil rights movement which really was responsible for stopping integration early on in the period, with all the Democrat mayors and governors and sheriffs down there, and the senators who opposed the Civil Rights Act. "Anti-Americanism," continues Mr. Steele, "whether in Europe or on the American left, works by the mechanism of white guilt. It stigmatizes America with all the imperialistic and racist ugliness of the white Western past so that America becomes a kind of straw man, a construct of Western sin. (The Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons were the focus of such stigmatization campaigns.) Once the stigma is in place, one need only be anti-American in order to be 'good,' in order to have an automatic moral legitimacy and power in relation to America."

You come out and oppose your country as the Democrats have about Abu Ghraib, that gives them moral superiority. They've got the guts to understand our past sins and to say we are continuing to commit them and we need to stop, and it's the evil George Bush who needs to be reined in -- not Al-Qaeda, not bin Laden, not Saddam, and not Mahmoud.

"(People as seemingly disparate as President Jacques Chirac and the Rev. Al Sharpton are devoted pursuers of the moral high ground to be had in anti-Americanism.) This formula is the most dependable source of power for today's international left. Virtue and power by mere anti-Americanism. And it is all the more appealing since, unlike real virtues, it requires no sacrifice or effort -- only outrage at every slight echo of the imperialist past. Today words like 'power' and 'victory' are so stigmatized with Western sin that, in many quarters, it is politically incorrect even to utter them." In fact, if you're Madeleine Albright, you go out around the world and you lament the fact that we are the lone superpower in the world. It is guilt that inspires this and self-loathing and disgust for the country.

"For the West, 'might' can never be right. And victory, when won by the West against a Third World enemy, is always oppression," is always going to be called oppression. "But, in reality, military victory is also the victory of one idea and the defeat of another. Only American victory in Iraq defeats the idea of Islamic extremism. But in today's atmosphere of Western contrition, it is impolitic to say so," and dangerous to proceed. Now, this is profound. Let me read it again. "[M]ilitary victory is also the victory of one idea and the defeat of another. Only American victory in Iraq defeats the idea of Islamic extremism. But in today's atmosphere of Western contrition [and guilt], it is impolitic to say so," and even accomplish it.

"America and the broader West are now going through a rather tender era, a time when Western societies have very little defense against the moral accusations that come from their own left wings and from those vast stretches of nonwhite humanity that were once so disregarded. Europeans are utterly confounded by the swelling Muslim populations in their midst. America has run from its own mounting immigration problem for decades, and even today, after finally taking up the issue, our government seems entirely flummoxed. White guilt is a vacuum of moral authority visited on the present by the shames of the past. In the abstract it seems a slight thing, almost irrelevant, an unconvincing proposition.

"Yet a society as enormously powerful as America lacks the authority to ask its most brilliant, wealthy and superbly educated minority students to compete freely for college admission with poor whites who lack all these things. Just can't do it." We need the victims. The left needs its victims in order to continue to promote this guilt, show that we're still committing these sins.

"Whether the problem is race relations, education, immigration or war, white guilt imposes so much minimalism and restraint that our worst problems tend to linger and deepen. Our leaders work within a double bind. If they do what is truly necessary to solve a problem -- win a war, fix immigration -- they lose legitimacy. To maintain their legitimacy, they practice the minimalism that makes problems linger. What but minimalism is left when you are running from stigmatization as a 'unilateralist cowboy'? And where is the will to truly regulate the southern border when those who ask for this are slimed as bigots? This is how white guilt defines what is possible in America. You go at a problem until you meet stigmatization, then you retreat into minimalism."

He's exactly right, folks. It's a brilliant, brilliant piece. He has nailed it. This is again Shelby Steele: "White Guilt and the Western Past," at OpinionJournal.com today. "Possibly white guilt's worst effect is that it does not permit whites -- and nonwhites -- to appreciate something extraordinary: the fact that whites in America, and even elsewhere in the West, have achieved a truly remarkable moral transformation. One is forbidden to speak thus, but it is simply true. There are no serious advocates of white supremacy in America today, because whites see this idea as morally repugnant. If there is still the odd white bigot out there surviving past his time, there are millions of whites who only feel goodwill toward minorities.

"This is a fact that must be integrated into our public life -- absorbed as new history -- so that America can once again feel the moral authority to seriously tackle its most profound problems. Then, if we decide to go to war, it can be with enough ferocity to win." Amen, bro! This is just a grand-slam home run. He is essentially saying we're not committing sin. There may be the lone bigot out there who's outlived his time, but the vast majority of Americans have no desire to practice the sins of the past, to be discriminatory and so forth. We've moved beyond it, and yet nobody wants that to be stated because there are too many people who benefit from the idea that we're still like we were in the 1800s and all the way through the 1960s and '70s.

There's an entire industry in fact that has cropped up to maintain that mind-set within as many groups of people in this country as possible. So I would urge you to follow the link to this. We'll link to it at RushLimbaugh.com. You can find it now at OpinionJournal.com, because in this piece he has explained so much of the left's attitudes and the effect that they have had and continue to have on the country. People have asked me my entire sterling career, "Can you explain liberals to me? How can somebody be one?" and it's not possible to explain it in brief. There are many facets and characteristics, but I've always told people that at the foundation of it is guilt, guilt over so many things.

I just never had the intellectual power to express it as powerfully here as Shelby Steele has. You really need to read this, folks, and absorb it. It will explain why we're not doing anything about immigration, because we're afraid what people are going to say about us. We're afraid to succeed. We're afraid to do what we know is morally right because we're afraid of the stigmatization of our past being attached to present day activities. We're afraid to actually go out and fight a war and win it or deal with a problem like immigration and solve it because of the ramifications of what will be thought of us, what will be said of us by the left not only in this country, but around the world.

White Guilt and the Western Past

2006-05-02T11:12:00.000-07:00

Why is America so delicate with the enemy?

BY STEELE
Tuesday, May 2, 2006 12:01 a.m.

There is something rather odd in the way America has come to fight its wars since World War II.

For one thing, it is now unimaginable that we would use anything approaching the full measure of our military power (the nuclear option aside) in the wars we fight. And this seems only reasonable given the relative weakness of our Third World enemies in Vietnam and in the Middle East. But the fact is that we lost in Vietnam, and today, despite our vast power, we are only slogging along--if admirably--in Iraq against a hit-and-run insurgency that cannot stop us even as we seem unable to stop it. Yet no one--including, very likely, the insurgents themselves--believes that America lacks the raw power to defeat this insurgency if it wants to. So clearly it is America that determines the scale of this war. It is America, in fact, that fights so as to make a little room for an insurgency.

Certainly since Vietnam, America has increasingly practiced a policy of minimalism and restraint in war. And now this unacknowledged policy, which always makes a space for the enemy, has us in another long and rather passionless war against a weak enemy.

Why this new minimalism in war?

It began, I believe, in a late-20th-century event that transformed the world more profoundly than the collapse of communism: the world-wide collapse of white supremacy as a source of moral authority, political legitimacy and even sovereignty. This idea had organized the entire world, divided up its resources, imposed the nation-state system across the globe, and delivered the majority of the world's population into servitude and oppression. After World War II, revolutions across the globe, from India to Algeria and from Indonesia to the American civil rights revolution, defeated the authority inherent in white supremacy, if not the idea itself. And this defeat exacted a price: the West was left stigmatized by its sins. Today, the white West--like Germany after the Nazi defeat--lives in a kind of secular penitence in which the slightest echo of past sins brings down withering condemnation. There is now a cloud over white skin where there once was unquestioned authority.

I call this white guilt not because it is a guilt of conscience but because people stigmatized with moral crimes--here racism and imperialism--lack moral authority and so act guiltily whether they feel guilt or not.

They struggle, above all else, to dissociate themselves from the past sins they are stigmatized with. When they behave in ways that invoke the memory of those sins, they must labor to prove that they have not relapsed into their group's former sinfulness. So when America--the greatest embodiment of Western power--goes to war in Third World Iraq, it must also labor to dissociate that action from the great Western sin of imperialism. Thus, in Iraq we are in two wars, one against an insurgency and another against the past--two fronts, two victories to win, one military, the other a victory of dissociation.

The collapse of white supremacy--and the resulting white guilt--introduced a new mechanism of power into the world: stigmatization with the evil of the Western past. And this stigmatization is power because it affects the terms of legitimacy for Western nations and for their actions in the world. In Iraq, America is fighting as much for the legitimacy of its war effort as for victory in war. In fact, legitimacy may be the more important goal. If a military victory makes us look like an imperialist nation bent on occupying and raping the resources of a poor brown nation, then victory would mean less because it would have no legitimacy. Europe would scorn. Conversely, if America suffered a military loss in Iraq but in so doing dispelled the imperialist stigma, the loss would be seen as a necessary sacrifice made to restore our nation's legitimacy. Europe's halls of internationalism would suddenly open to us.

Because dissociation from the racist and imperialist stigma is so tied to legitimacy in this age of white guilt, America's act of going to war can have legitimacy only if it seems to be an act of social work--something that uplifts and transforms the poor brown nation (thus dissociating us from the white exploitations of old). So our war effort in Iraq is shrouded in a new language of social work in which democracy is cast as an instrument of social transformation bringing new institutions, new relations between men and women, new ideas of individual autonomy, new and more open forms of education, new ways of overcoming poverty--war as the Great Society.

This does not mean that President Bush is insincere in his desire to bring democracy to Iraq, nor is it to say that democracy won't ultimately be socially transformative in Iraq. It's just that today the United States cannot go to war in the Third World simply to defeat a dangerous enemy.

White guilt makes our Third World enemies into colored victims, people whose problems--even the tyrannies they live under--were created by the historical disruptions and injustices of the white West. We must "understand" and pity our enemy even as we fight him. And, though Islamic extremism is one of the most pernicious forms of evil opportunism that has ever existed, we have felt compelled to fight it with an almost managerial minimalism that shows us to be beyond the passions of war--and thus well dissociated from the avariciousness of the white supremacist past.

Anti-Americanism, whether in Europe or on the American left, works by the mechanism of white guilt. It stigmatizes America with all the imperialistic and racist ugliness of the white Western past so that America becomes a kind of straw man, a construct of Western sin. (The Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons were the focus of such stigmatization campaigns.) Once the stigma is in place, one need only be anti-American in order to be "good," in order to have an automatic moral legitimacy and power in relation to America. (People as seemingly disparate as President Jacques Chirac and the Rev. Al Sharpton are devoted pursuers of the moral high ground to be had in anti-Americanism.) This formula is the most dependable source of power for today's international left. Virtue and power by mere anti-Americanism. And it is all the more appealing since, unlike real virtues, it requires no sacrifice or effort--only outrage at every slight echo of the imperialist past.

Today words like "power" and "victory" are so stigmatized with Western sin that, in many quarters, it is politically incorrect even to utter them. For the West, "might" can never be right. And victory, when won by the West against a Third World enemy, is always oppression. But, in reality, military victory is also the victory of one idea and the defeat of another. Only American victory in Iraq defeats the idea of Islamic extremism. But in today's atmosphere of Western contrition, it is impolitic to say so.

America and the broader West are now going through a rather tender era, a time when Western societies have very little defense against the moral accusations that come from their own left wings and from those vast stretches of nonwhite humanity that were once so disregarded.

Europeans are utterly confounded by the swelling Muslim populations in their midst. America has run from its own mounting immigration problem for decades, and even today, after finally taking up the issue, our government seems entirely flummoxed. White guilt is a vacuum of moral authority visited on the present by the shames of the past. In the abstract it seems a slight thing, almost irrelevant, an unconvincing proposition. Yet a society as enormously powerful as America lacks the authority to ask its most brilliant, wealthy and superbly educated minority students to compete freely for college admission with poor whites who lack all these things. Just can't do it.

Whether the problem is race relations, education, immigration or war, white guilt imposes so much minimalism and restraint that our worst problems tend to linger and deepen. Our leaders work within a double bind. If they do what is truly necessary to solve a problem--win a war, fix immigration--they lose legitimacy.

To maintain their legitimacy, they practice the minimalism that makes problems linger. What but minimalism is left when you are running from stigmatization as a "unilateralist cowboy"? And where is the will to truly regulate the southern border when those who ask for this are slimed as bigots? This is how white guilt defines what is possible in America. You go at a problem until you meet stigmatization, then you retreat into minimalism.

Possibly white guilt's worst effect is that it does not permit whites--and nonwhites--to appreciate something extraordinary: the fact that whites in America, and even elsewhere in the West, have achieved a truly remarkable moral transformation. One is forbidden to speak thus, but it is simply true. There are no serious advocates of white supremacy in America today, because whites see this idea as morally repugnant. If there is still the odd white bigot out there surviving past his time, there are millions of whites who only feel goodwill toward minorities.

This is a fact that must be integrated into our public life--absorbed as new history--so that America can once again feel the moral authority to seriously tackle its most profound problems. Then, if we decide to go to war, it can be with enough ferocity to win.

Mr. Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, is author, most recently, of "White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era," published this week by HarperCollins.

Georgia’s Top Republicans Endorse Mac

2006-04-11T10:58:00.000-07:00

(Macon, GA) – During Macon’s Cherry Blossom Festival Georgia’s three most powerful statesmen came together to jointly endorse former Congressman Mac Collins in his race against Democrat Jim Marshall in Georgia’s new 8th Congressional District.

Governor Sonny Perdue, Senator Saxby Chambliss, and Senator Johnny Isakson were all on hand to throw their support behind Congressman Collins during a fundraiser held in the city of Macon.

The 21 counties that make up this new, powerful district are Baldwin, Ben Hill, Bibb, Bleckley, Butts, Colquitt, Dodge, Houston, Irwin, Jasper, Jones, Laurens, Monroe, Newton, Pulaski, Tift, Turner, Twiggs, Wilcox, Wilkinson, and Worth.

In addressing his supporters Mac Collins stated: “This will be a difficult battle, but we are going to win. The people in this room are the folks who will help me win this race. I have been elected to the Congress of the United States six times by grassroots supporters just like you. People who have provided for their families, participated in their community, contributed to their church, paid their taxes and played by the rules.

When I return, I return to the House with my twelve years of seniority as a member of the majority party. The difference between my opponent and me is how valuable this seniority will be to the people of Georgia and to our district.

I want to return to Washington because I have track record of being conservative and constituent orientated, and these are the values that we need to bring home. This hands-on approach is what the people of Georgia need most. Good, honest representation committed to the needs of small business, the worker, the farmer and family.

When you look at the Nation Journal’s rating, with ‘0’ being the most liberal to ‘100’ being most conservative, you’ll see that in 2003 I scored an 88 and in 2004 I scored a 97; Jim Marshall had a 43 in 2003, a 47 in 2004, and a 49 last year. This is not conservative; this is not representative of the people of this district.”

Senator Saxby Chambliss then endorsed Mac Collins before a crowd of well-wishers and supporters before saying, “This is a wonderful district, this is a district that George Bush won, that I won, that Johnny [Isakson] won, and Mac is working very hard to make sure he wins it. We need you all out there everyday to help Mac Collins. We need you out there making sure that all your friends get out and vote. A good turnout this fall is going to be critical to Mac winning this race.”

Following Senator Chambliss’ endorsement of Mac Collins, Senator Johnny Isakson endorsed Collins for the second time in a month and then said, “I am delighted to be here tonight. First of all to thank you for offering your support for Mac Collins, he is a great individual. I’ve watched him on Ways and Means, I’ve watched him on fiscal policy, I’ve watched him on national defense; he is a rock solid conservative, as good as you could ever have, and Georgia needs him. Just do everything you can do to send Mac back to Congress. He is a friend of mine, and he and Julie deserve to be back in Washington. Just do for him what you have done for Saxby and me, and we’ll have him there as our friend and our colleague.”

Governor Sonny Perdue then completed the round of high powered endorsements by calling on the people of Georgia to send Mac Collins back to Congress. The Governor stated: “The relationship between the state and our members of Congress is critical. We have a great relationship with our two Senators and our members of Congress. We need to add to them. We need members of Congress that we can have great relationships with. That is what this is really all about, it is about having someone up there that we can have trust and confidence in, where we can pick up the phone and say ‘Mac we need your help’. That’s why we’re here to help return Mac to his rightful place in the United States Congress.”

The Limbaugh Laws

2006-04-11T10:20:00.000-07:00

Everybody's making immigration proposals these days. Let me add mine to the mix. Call it The Limbaugh Laws:

First: If you immigrate to our country, you have to speak the native language. You have to be a professional or an investor; no unskilled workers allowed. Also, there will be no special bilingual programs in the schools with the Limbaugh Laws. No special ballots for elections. No government business will be conducted in your language. Foreigners will not have the right to vote — or hold political office.

If you’re in our country, you cannot be a burden to taxpayers. You are not entitled to welfare, food stamps, or other government goodies. You can come if you invest here: an amount equal to 40,000 times the daily minimum wage. If not, stay home. But if you want to buy land, it'll be restricted. No waterfront, for instance. As a foreigner, you must relinquish individual rights to the property.

And another thing. You don’t have the right to protest. You're allowed no demonstrations, no foreign flag waving, no political organizing, no bad-mouthing our President or his policies. You’re a foreigner: shut your mouth or get out! And if you come here illegally, you're going to jail.

You think the Limbaugh Laws are harsh? Well, every one of the laws I just mentioned are actual laws of Mexico today! That’s how the Mexican government handles immigrants to their country. Yet Mexicans come here illegally and protest in our streets!

How do you say “double standard” in Spanish? How about: “No mas!"

Rep. McKinney: No Apology for Clouting Cop

2006-04-02T06:08:00.000-07:00

CBlountBlogs - Rep. Cynthia McKinney, the Georgia congresswoman who had a physical altercation with a police officer, is speaking out about the episode after saying she regretted the incident.

But she has refused to apologize in a statement and a brief on-camera interview.

The six-term congresswoman apparently struck a Capitol Police officer when he tried to stop her from entering a House office building without going through a metal detector. Members of Congress wear identifying lapel pins and routinely are waved into buildings without undergoing security checks. The officer apparently did not recognize McKinney, she said in a statement.

Asked on-camera Thursday by WSB-TV of Atlanta whether she intended to apologize, McKinney refused to comment. A news conference scheduled for Friday morning was canceled. She issued a statement late Wednesday saying she regretted the confrontation.

"I know that Capitol Hill Police are securing our safety, and I appreciate the work that they do. I have demonstrated my support for them in the past and I continue to support them now," she said in the statement on her Web site.

Capitol Police were considering Thursday whether to ask the U.S. Attorney's office to file charges against McKinney, a Democrat who represents Atlanta suburbs that make up one of Georgia's two black-majority districts.

Democrats and Republicans, meanwhile, engaged in a rhetorical scuffle over the incident.

Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi on Thursday labeled it "a mistake, an unfortunate lack of recognition of a member of Congress." She added that the police officer was not at fault.

"I would not make a big deal of this," said Pelosi, D-Calif.

Ron Bonjean, spokesman for House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., responded: "How many officers would have to be punched before it becomes a big deal?"

The dustup is the latest in a series of tangles for the roughly 1,200-officer Capitol Police department.

The department faces a difficult task - protecting 535 members of Congress and the vast Capitol complex in an atmosphere thick with politics and privilege.

The safety of its members became a sensitive issue after a gunman in 1998 killed two officers outside the office of then-Republican Whip Tom DeLay of Texas.

More recently, police obeyed an order by an angry House Ways and Means Committee chairman, Rep. Bill Thomas, R-Calif., to remove Democrats from a hearing room. Thomas later tearfully apologized on the House floor.

This year, during President Bush's State of the Union address, police drew criticism for first kicking antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan out of the House gallery, and then for evicting the wife of Rep. Bill Young, R-Fla.

Actress Fonda Won't Be Honored by Ga. Legislature

2006-03-16T11:21:00.000-08:00

ATLANTA — The sponsor of an effort to honor Jane Fonda in the state Senate withdrew her resolution Thursday, after a rocky reception from some colleagues and a phone call from the actress' office.

Sen. Steen Miles, D-Decatur, said a representative for Fonda, who is out of the country, asked that she avoid the controversy the effort had stirred.

"This, ladies and gentlemen, should not be occupying our time," said Miles.

The resolution cites the Atlanta resident's work as founder of the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention, donations to Atlanta-area universities and charities and role as goodwill ambassador with the United Nations.

But the two-time Academy Award winner's political activities protesting the Vietnam War, including a trip to North Vietnam in 1972, have long made her a target of veterans of that war.

The measure, which Miles said is one of several she has pushed honoring Georgia women during Women's History Month, cruised through the Senate on Wednesday before some members realized it was part of a stack of mostly non-controversial resolutions approved because no one objected to them.

Sen. John Douglas, R-Social Circle, later asked that the vote be reconsidered.

"I can think of no living American who is less worthy of this honor," Douglas, chairman of the chamber's Veterans and Military Affairs committee, said Thursday. "She is as guilty of treason as Benedict Arnold and Tokyo Rose."

Miles said she is sympathetic to concerns of military members. She said her brother and ex-husband both served in Vietnam and her daughter currently serves in the Army reserve. But she said Fonda's good works for the past three decades outweigh any negatives associated with her Vietnam-era actions.

"I have a deep and abiding respect and love for our men and women warriors," she said. "We should not ignore the past, but we should not be inextricably bound to its mistakes."

The Senate voted 48-1 to reconsider the measure -- a necessary procedure before Miles could withdraw it. Sen. Michael Meyer von Bremen, D-Albany, cast the only vote against reconsideration.

Miles then withdrew the effort before senators considered the resolution itself.

Georgia's HOPE chest

2006-03-14T07:18:00.000-08:00

By Jeff Emanuel

With just two weeks left in the Spring 2006 legislative session, time is running out on a proposed constitutional amendment which would ensure that Georgia’s unique merit-based college scholarship program will remain funded beyond the foreseeable future.

The brainchild of then-Governor Zell Miller, Georgia’s “Helping Outstanding Pupils Educationally,” or HOPE, scholarship program rewards students who graduate from a Georgia high school with at least a 3.0 grade point average by providing them a tuition-free education at a Georgia state college, university, or technical college. Students must maintain a B average in college to keep the HOPE benefit, with grades being re-evaluated every 30 attempted academic hours to ensure eligibility. Since the program’s inception in 1993, more than 900,000 students have received benefits, which also include student fee coverage and a textbook allowance.

Miller proposed that this merit-based scholarship be funded by a new state lottery, whose profits were to be used solely for that purpose. Georgia’s location in America’s “Bible belt” ensured that such a morally appealing carrot was necessary to make the inception of a state lottery palatable to the general public. After much public debate, the voters accepted both programs, but a major reason for the lottery’s approval was the promise of its revenue being used only for higher education and pre-kindergarten programs.

The dedication of lottery funds to the HOPE scholarship lasted all the way until the program ran a surplus, at which time Democrats in the state assembly expanded lottery proceed-eligible projects to include technological upgrades in public schools and related training for teachers, as well as other, less-defined “hometown projects.”

This expansion may seem beneficial on the surface, but, as is true everywhere, Georgia lawmakers have fought to take ever-increasing amounts of these benefits home to their individual districts as vote-buying pork projects. $1.8 billion in lottery proceeds have now been spent on projects other than HOPE scholarships and pre-kindergarten classes, and lawmakers have been forced to begin talking about cutting the program’s budget. College enrollment has risen almost 10 percent in Georgia since HOPE’s inception; however, the combination of that increase in attendance, the fact that many already in college qualify for the program, and the increase in pork spending have created an incredible financial strain. In 2004, a panel studying the program’s future recommended that Governor Perdue cut book and fee payments to scholarship students, and more cuts are inevitable if the program’s funding situation remains unchanged.

In an effort to safeguard the HOPE scholarship for the future, and to guarantee that it remains funded to the fullest extent possible, Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue recently proposed what he called the “HOPE Chest” amendment. This measure would go a long way in securing this unique merit-based scholarship program by amending Georgia’s state constitution to “protect lottery funds so that they may be reserved only for the HOPE Scholarship Program and other tuition grants, scholarships, or loans to enable citizens of this state to attend colleges and universities within this state; for voluntary pre-kindergarten; and for educational shortfall reserves.”

SR 655, currently in the Georgia state Senate, would put the HOPE Chest amendment on the statewide ballot in November, allowing Georgia’s voters to decide for themselves whether or not they want to guarantee further their children’s affordable academic futures. However, this attempt to give citizens a say in the governing process has been met with fierce partisan resistance. The measure has twice been voted down in 35-20, party-line votes, falling just three votes short of the two-thirds majority needed in the 56-member body to amend the state constitution. One final vote on the measure may be held, but Democrats, who claimed they were "shut out of the process" and had a "better plan" which was "being rejected for political purposes," are not expected to change their minds.

The promise of HOPE has encouraged students to excel at both the secondary and the university level. However, the decision of Democrats to play the role of the opposition, even when it comes to safeguarding a vital educational benefit, and to attempt to kill this proposed amendment in favor of securing lottery funds for pet projects, will only plunge the program into greater crisis. Without some Democrats finding the courage necessary to cross the aisle and do what is right for the educational future of the Georgia’s children, the state’s model program for merit-based scholarship, which has served as the inspiration for many similar elsewhere, will almost certainly wither on the vine.

Bubba Boots Dubya Outta the Dubba-Wide, or: Dubai, Cruel World

2006-02-23T10:43:00.000-08:00

Bubba Boots Dubya Outta the Dubba-Wide, or: Dubai, Cruel World

Tim Cavanaugh: Left-wing Bush opponents have spent six years fuming about an exquisitely irksome trait in George W. Bush's character: He's not really a man of the people! He's actually really rich and stuff! Now, they're so eager to join the frenzy over the Dubai Ports World deal that they're not even savoring the moment they've been praying for: For the first time, Bush has been completely out-populisted. And by Democrats, for Christ's sake!

If there's one thing the DPW dustup proves, it's that Bill Clinton really was a better Man of the People than George W. Here's why:

There's a very short list of concepts the president needs to spell out:

• The DPW deal is just a contract for services—the Arabs are not going to own our ports.

• This doesn't involve port security, and if opponents think there's a security risk they haven't provided any evidence for that.

• It's in our best interest to be engaging "moderate" Arab business types like our friends in the UAE, where gay marriage is legal and every citizen is the CEO of a private company that does nothing but manufacture "I Love America" bumper stickers.

•Yes, it seems scary to be turning over port services to this foreign company, but actually this kind of transnational deal carries many benefits, among them blah blah blah...

• It's not true that foreigners will be doing all our port services. All the employees will still be Americans. In fact, I've had my brain trust run the numbers and calculated that this deal will actually create umpteen new jobs.

• The fact that DPW is state-owned isn't substantially different from, say, Continental buying some planes from the heavily subsidized Airbus.

• And so on.

It's a simple bunch of talking points, but it's become very difficult to get out there because we're in the heat of a full-scale populist panic, and against a populist panic only a golden tongue can argue logic. Bush has been caught totally flat-footed. He tried first to play the race card—a tactic that worked back in 2003, when skeptics made the absurd, bigoted, America-hating claim that Iraq's factions might be just as happy attacking each others' mosques as voting for a new future together. But the race card doesn't work because a) it's not 2003 anymore, b) a general opposition to Arabs is a badge most Americans would wear proudly by this point, and c) go hold hands with another oil sheik, Gaylord.

His next gambit was what they call in The Sunshine Boys the A-1 material: I'm the President, so it's my way or the highway. That argument's worth nothing because what, after all this time the first veto you're going to use is in favor of some screwy deal to give away our country to a bunch of Arabs?

So that leaves only rhetorical Plan C: Terrorist terrorist terrorist, war war war, I've made my decision and these questions aren't helpful. You can see why that one doesn't work.

Who could get out of this fix?

I'll tell you who: NAFTA-era Bill Clinton, that's who! Explaining stuff like this is what Bill Clinton lived for. Just think back to that Clintonian love of factoids, that congenial explanation of the benefits that you, the listener, will directly receive, that enthusiastic drive to get you to share the president's love of policy minutiae. Clinton was great at this stuff because, whatever else he was, he was a man of the people. He understood (as Bush does) the benefit of a barrier-free market that might leave, say, Dubai Ports World providing services to American harbors. And he knew that populist panics are stupid and almost always wrong. But unlike Bush, he realized that populist panics come from deep within people's hearts, and that you have to respect that. (It just sweetens the deal that this time the populist panic is being driven by another Clinton, that Around the Way Girl in the Yankees cap who always has her finger firmly up the ass on the pulse of the Average American.)

Will Bush weather this storm? All signs say yes: A PR machine that can turn Sunday's The Vice President had "one beer" and then shot a guy story into Wednesday's Why is the media picking on the Vice President and why hasn't the guy who was shot apologized already story can do pretty much anything. Allahu Akbar, DPW! Welcome to our ports!

Is it division or multiplication? Depends on your party

2006-01-26T09:53:00.000-08:00

When the Democrats whacked through county and municipal lines to create a politically weighted new redistricting map in 2001, Sonny Perdue, then in the state Senate, thundered in righteous indignation at how communities across the state were being divided. Fellow Republican Sen. Bart Ladd wept openly that the small towns he loved would have divided representation under the Gold Dome.

Now it's the Democrats' turn to cry.

The GOP-controlled Senate passed a redistricting measure, now before the House, which divides Athens-Clarke County into two Senate districts and deals a blow to Rep. Jane Kidd (D-Athens), who's running for the seat being vacated by Sen. Brian Kemp (R-Athens). The changes make the district a less Democrat-friendly place.

Kidd said last week she intends to fight the remap "to the very end." If the new district lines do pass, Kidd said she was leaning toward going ahead with her Senate race but hadn't reached a final decision.

This issue divides the Athens-Clarke County Commission, which opposes the map, and the Chamber of Commerce, which endorses it. In the debate, a lot of the arguments made a few years ago about communities of interest have been reversed.

The map Republicans want to change, she said, was drawn by a court after the last redistricting suit brought by Republicans and pronounced fair by Perdue. It has proven to be competitive for both parties.

Kidd noted she wasn't in the Legislature when the Democrats drew the 2001 map, which Republicans are already pointing to for political justification. "We're a little blue island in the middle of a red sea, and I want them off my island," Kidd said.

Athens isn't a little town, Sen. Ralph Hudgens (R-Comer), the sponsor of the remap bill, said at Saturday's Christian Coalition kickoff event. It could use more representation in the Senate, he argued, noting that the 13 counties larger than Clarke --- which include the real giants like Gwinnett and Fulton --- have an average of 3.4 senators per county.

"They're complaining because it's bad for Democrats, not because it's bad for Clarke County," Hudgens said.

Hudgens said theLegislature never gave formal approval to the court-drawn map, and the current bill would give it the chance to do so with the new changes.

These redistricting stories, it should be noted, are often fraught with unintended consequences. Ask Roy Barnes.

Higher education politics

Absolutely nothing will come of it --- at least during a year when hunkering down is the watchword --- but it was interesting to read what former U.S. Attorney General Griffin Bell had to say about education, particularly higher education, last week at a Georgia Public Policy Foundation lunch.

Bell recommended consolidating some state colleges with technical schools and imposing what he called "term limitation" under which HOPE scholarship recipients could not stay in college longer on a "relaxed pace" and other students would have to pay higher tuitions for this luxury.

Bell's most politically sensitive point was about the University System-governing Board of Regents, which he called "an organization of another era." The state should take a close look at how the University System is structured, said Bell, who called on the foundation to issue a white paper on the subject.

Reed trails Democrats

Last week we reported on a campaign poll for Democratic lieutenant governor candidate Jim Martin that showed him leading Republican Ralph Reed by more than Martin's Democratic rival, former Sen. Greg Hecht.

The poll raises a good question, brought up by the Hecht campaign. How did Martin do in a head-on-head with Hecht?

Jay Martin, campaign manager and son of the candidate of the same name, said pollster Alan Secrest was looking solely for who had the better chance against Reed and didn't ask voters to chose between the Democrats.

"It was a general election poll, and it wouldn't have made sense to poll on a Democratic primary question," the younger Martin said.

Zell Miller: Will America Survive?

2006-01-21T04:31:00.000-08:00

Zell Miller, former Democratic Senator from Georgia, said that the United States is in a crisis of morality that could destroy the country. Miller served in the Senate four years, serving out the term of Senator Paul Coverdell, who died in July of 2000.

He made his remarks on the Right Hour, an Internet radio program hosted by Paul M. Weyrich, CEO and Chairman of the Free Congress Foundation, where he discussed his new book, "A Deficit of Decency” and other national issues.

"Recent generations have been more interested in giving their children the material things that they did not have when they were growing up. But they have failed to give them the spiritual things that they had when they were growing up; the valuable things like family, and Faith, and love of country, and duty. Duty to family, duty to country. These are the things that seem to be missing so much right now,” said Miller.

Senator Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who recently compared the American military to fascists on the floor of the Senate, did not escape Miller’s sharp eye. "As far as what Senator Durbin did, that’s a national disgrace. He should have apologized, and the U.S. Senate, in my opinion, ought not to let him get away with just an apology. He deserves some kind of reprimand or censure. What he did is to put our men and women in uniform further into harm’s way than they already are."

Miller also continued to be critical of his own Democratic party and its current chairman Howard Dean.

"Probably the Republicans ought to be cheering him on, because he’s doing more harm than good for the Democrats. Here is a man who should be trying to broaden the base of his party, a party that has been shrinking now for many, many years. Instead, he is narrowing the base even more. How can you broaden the base of a party when you are talking about independents and Republicans having no sense, being evil, not working a day in their life? It is ridiculous.”

In his book, Miller cites examples of the country’s ruinous moral decline taken from the entertainment industry, professional athletics, tolerance of a corrupt United Nations, a flaunting of immigration laws, and a dysfunctional tax code.

Miller’s father died when Zell was two weeks old, and he was raised by his mother. He believes that his religious upbringing in the Appalachian mountains of north Georgia, a "very patriotic part of the country,” was, in part, responsible for the development of his character. But his experience in the United States Marine Corps was the key building block. Miller’s first book, "Corps Values,” is still available today.

The former Senator expressed strong support for the nomination of John Bolton to be Ambassador to the United Nations. "I want a man up there who will aggressively defend the interests of the United States, not tiptoe through the tulips. I want a John Wayne kind of character, not a Woody Allen,” he said.

Miller noted too that the country’s immigration problem was a bipartisan "dereliction of duty” that is unrivaled in the history of the country.

Miller, 73, has been married for 51 years, and lives in Young Harris, Ga. His previous book, "A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat,” was on the New York Times best seller list in 2004.

Chamblis: Energy Bill is Good for Georgians

2005-07-30T07:44:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON—U.S. Senator Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., today praised passage of a comprehensive, common-sense Energy package for the United States. The legislation will help reduce America’s dependency on foreign sources for oil, stabilize rising fuel costs and provide security for future generations.

“Our nation has the most abundant supply of natural resources in the world, yet today we are dependent on a handful of foreign countries for almost 60 percent of our petroleum products and that’s simply not in our economic or national security best interests,” said Chambliss. “This bill puts a long-term energy policy in place and will help stabilize gas prices at the pump and natural gas prices for heating homes, and ensure that we have a reliable energy supply.”

To help reduce our dependency on foreign energy sources, the bill helps to increase production, increase conservation, diversify fuel supply and employ new technologies.

Specifically, the bill:

Addresses our dependency on foreign oil and rising gasoline prices by promoting a greater refining capacity to bring more oil to market; and encouraging additional domestic production of oil with incentives such as a streamlined permit process.

Seeks to determine U.S. energy resources by calling for a Department of Interior inventory of oil and gas resources on the Outer Continental Shelf. Doing so will enable the federal government to better assess the extent of these resources and includes coastal impact assistance of $1 billion over four years for energy-producing states to assist in coastal enhancement and conservation programs.

Enhances production of clean natural gas to help ease soaring prices for environmentally friendly fuel.

Authorizes the Department of Energy to accelerate programs for electricity production and supply through additional nuclear and hydropower production.

Establishes new efficiency standards for federal facilities, and efficiency standards and product labeling for battery chargers, commercial refrigerators, freezers, unit heaters and other household appliances that would improve conservation.

Mac Collins Posts Strong 30 Days of Fundraising

2005-07-16T06:19:00.000-07:00

Takes Step Closer To Making Campaign Announcement

Jackson - According to quarterly reports filed with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) today, Mac Collins, who is exploring a campaign for Congress in Georgia's newly drawn 8th District, received over $130,000 in campaign contributions during the month of June.

Collins previously filed a federally required campaign Statement of Organization with the FEC on June 10, 2005.

During the reporting period Collins received contributions from many Republican leaders including: U.S. Speaker of the House J. Dennis Hastert, Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Republican Whip Roy Blunt, Republican Chief Deputy Whip Eric Cantor, and National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Reynolds, as well as, the entire Georgia Congressional House delegation.

"We are receiving a lot of encouragement from the people who know us best: our family, friends, former constituents and colleagues in Congress, to again run for Congress," said Collins. "It's overwhelming to have such strong support from the people who know me best and appreciate my common-sense approach to leadership.

"It's still early, we are more than a year away from next year's election, but Julie and I are getting closer to making an announcement on a potential run for Congress."

Mac Collins, a Butts County native, has been married to the former Julie Watkins of Jackson, Georgia for 41 years and has been a small business owner for 43 years in Georgia. Together they have four children and eleven grandchildren.

Collins previously served on the Butts County Commission, 1977-80 (chairman); in the Georgia Senate, 1989-93, U.S. House of Representatives, 1992-2004; and was a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in 2004.

Documentation: Collins collected $130,200 in contributions during the month of June. (Source: www.fec.gov)

Georgia Lawmakers Comment on Georgia Military Bases

2005-05-17T04:31:00.000-07:00

Today at the Georgia State House, Senators Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson, and Governor Perdue, commented on the Department of Defense recommendation to close Naval Air Station Atlanta, Ft. McPherson, Ft. Gillem, and the Athens Naval Supply School.

Chambliss said the recommendations will be met with strong opposition from Georgia’s congressional delegation, the Governor and Georgia communities because the bases contribute to the national security of the United States.

To listen to the news conference, (click here)

To read more, (click here)

Sen. Zell Miller hospitalized

2005-04-29T04:00:00.000-07:00

Zell Miller falls ill during speech in Gainesville

Former Sen. Zell Miller fell ill while giving a speech in Gainesville Thursday night and was taken to a hospital emergency room. His wife said he had flu-like symptoms.

Miller, 73, excused himself from the stage at a banquet for the Gainesville Care Center at the Georgia Mountains Center and was transported to Northeast Georgia Medical Center.

He was admitted to the emergency room and was in stable condition, according to nursing supervisor Tammy Harbison. She said she did not know what made Miller ill.

Miller's wife, Shirley, was at the hospital and released a statement about an hour later saying he was feeling better.

"He has had flu-like symptoms for a couple of days, and he would not stay in bed," she said. "He feels like going home. He's just waiting for the doctor's approval."

Miller, a Democrat who riled fellow party members last year by his avid support for President Bush's re-election, left the Senate in January. He was replaced by former U.S. Rep. Johnny Isakson, a Republican.

Miller, a one-time college history professor, was Georgia's governor from 1991 to 1999. He was tapped in 2000 to fill the unexpired term of the late Sen. Paul Coverdell and elected the same year to the balance of the term. He did not seek re-election.

The Democrat, who gave a fiery keynote speech during last year's national Republican convention, is popular on the conservative speeking tour. In March, he told Liberty University students Wednesday it was his change in religion, not politics, that had impacted his life the most.

Voting Bill Leads to Walkout in Ga. Senate

2005-03-12T05:28:00.000-08:00

ATLANTA (AP)

The state Senate's Democratic caucus, led by the chamber's black members, walked out of the Legislature Friday after an emotional vote on voting rights.

Immediately after a 7 p.m. vote that would eliminate 12 of the 17 forms of identification that may be used at Georgia polls, a majority of Senate Democrats, including all black members, left the chamber.

"This is wrong!" Sen. Vincent Fort, D-Atlanta, shouted before the exit. "We will not go back."

All but one other member of the Democratic caucus left shortly afterward. Most Democrats returned to the chamber about 25 minutes later.

"We wanted to at least show them we support them," said Sen. Michael Meyer Von Bremen, D-Albany.

Republican sponsors of the bill said it was an effort to cut down on voter fraud.

"My intention was to make sure in Georgia that next election, or down the road, we don't end up with all the lawsuits or all the voter irregularities we've heard about," said Sen. Cecil Staton, R-Macon, the bill's sponsor.

The bill, which passed 32-22 along party lines, would require a photo ID to vote.

It would remove other forms of ID, including a Social Security card, birth certificate or student identification, from the list.

Democratic critics compared the effort to the poll taxes, literacy tests and other laws aimed at suppressing black votes during segregation. They said poor and minority voters are more likely to be without photo ID than other voters.

"What's happening today is just an updated form of Jim Crow," said Fort, referring to segregation-era laws that suppressed black voting. "You may be more polite about it ... but we know who's going to be disenfranchised."

In an emotional speech, Sen. Kasim Reed, D-Atlanta, shouted that senators were "stabbing race relations in the heart" by pushing the plan.

Staton said the bill allows anyone, even non-drivers, to apply for a state ID card from Georgia's motor vehicles department. He said people who can't afford one may request one for free.

Friday was the 30th day of the Legislature's 40-day session. By unofficial agreement, it is the last day a bill must pass at least one chamber to be considered by the other.

The House was expected to consider a similar bill Friday night. Several black Democrats in that chamber had left, but no organized walkout had occured by shortly before 8 p.m.

If Congress had 435 Tillie Kidd Fowlers

2005-03-08T04:07:00.000-08:00

Matt Towery - Townhall

If politics is a question of balance, then Tillie Fowler was the answer.

The mourning for the just-deceased former congresswoman from Florida has reached deep into the halls of the U.S. Capitol and far across America. The 62-year-old Fowler was a political superhero; an antidote to the epidemic cynicism that surrounds the political process.

Sen. Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina was particularly devastated by the loss. Fowler once served with Dole at the U.S. Office of Consumer Affairs. Their days together made them close, and no wonder. Fowler's grace, strength, humor and integrity could only have reminded Dole of her own husband, former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas. Like him, Fowler believed in the aptness of the political process as an extension of the worthiness of people.

Both Bob Dole and Fowler could laugh at themselves. I recall during the presidential campaign of 1996 that Dole appeared at a Republican National Convention private meeting and right away declared with a grin, "We're really going to get our butts kicked, aren't we?" He was referring to the upcoming election with Bill Clinton. And yet during the campaign, Dole displayed a fiery zeal in fighting for his beliefs.

Fowler displayed that same admirable sense of proportion. Like Bob Dole, she could rise up in righteous anger when she believed that government could -- and should -- help right a wrong.

I knew Tillie Fowler, but that is no claim to glory. If you were involved in the early days of the Republican Party's ascendance in the Sun Belt during the early 1990s, you were bound to know her.

She came from a prominent political family in Georgia. Her father, Culver Kidd, was a Georgia state senator. Her brother Rusty also made a name for himself. Neither outdistanced the lady of the family.

She won a congressional seat in north Florida in 1992, heading to Washington one term prior to the proclaimed "Republican Revolution." That's significant because the GOP's "Contract With America" appeared in 1994. And the only critical part of that contract that never became law was mandatory term limits for those in the House or Representatives and the Senate.

Never mind. Tillie Fowler imposed term limits on herself. She went into office having proclaimed that "Eight is Enough" -- that she would voluntarily leave Congress after serving four terms.

When the election of 2000 rolled around, Fowler was nothing less than the most powerful woman in Congress. Her political career was posed to ignite the afterburners and soar into the stratosphere of national media renown.

No matter. She refused to turn back on her pledge. She walked away from the power and the glory.

Isn't that always the way? The one person we wish would renege on a promise in order to benefit society as a whole is the same person who won't back away from a political pledge. As lengthy as the roll of Fowler's impressive accomplishments runs, nothing illustrates her political worthiness like this walking away from the limelight. And that's what makes this more than just another eulogy for a colleague now gone. Her example is important to all Americans. We can see by it that politicians can be what politicians should be. And that integrity is as integrity does.

Widespread support for forced term limits seems to be faltering. A single but significant example happened in Texas, where Republicans removed support for term limits from their state party platform.

The reasons for the distaste for mandatory term limits aren't always cynical or selfish. For example, calls for voluntary term limits have won more responses from Republicans than from Democrats, according to the National Center for Policy Analysis. Many Republicans fear that if they step down, they are doing little more than unilaterally handing over power to the Democrats.

The best one can say is that each case is different. If we could truly trust our elected officials to make the wise choice when the time comes, then laws regulating term limits would be completely unnecessary.

In short, if Congress had 435 Tillie Fowlers and the Senate 100 of her kind, we could all rest easy -- as a deserving Tillie Fowler rests today.

Tillie Kidd Fowler: A Tribute

2005-03-06T03:40:00.000-08:00

The former Congresswoman was always steadfast and loyal. Her death reminds us how rare that is in today’s poisoned and partisan political arena.

Newsweek -By Eleanor Clift-For Complete Article (Click Here)

There is a picture of Tillie Fowler at age six standing on the desk of the legendary Georgia governor Herman Talmadge as her father, another Georgia legend known as “Silver Fox,” proudly looks on.

Fowler was born into politics. Her father, Culver Kidd (Of Milledgeville Ga.), a lifelong Democrat, served 40 years in the state legislature before he was defeated at age 78. He lived to see his prized daughter elected to Congress in 1992, but he never reconciled to the fact that she became a Republican.

Maybe it was her family heritage, but Fowler was a Republican who hearkened back to an earlier time, when our politics were not so partisan and poisonous. She was expansive and inclusive, fiercely loyal to friends on both sides of the aisle, and a committed feminist.

She wasn’t known around the country, but in Washington, especially among the community of women active in pressing women’s issues, she was a popular and familiar figure who could be counted on when it mattered.

Fowler was one of only a few Republican women active in the Congressional women’s caucus, and she tried (unsuccessfully) to get her party to moderate its position on abortion. “Enough is enough,” she counseled when the GOP scheduled more than a hundred votes to restrict reproductive rights in the Congress led by Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Her story was emblematic of women a generation ago entering the political arena. She agonized about the impact on her family, consulting her pediatrician and her preacher before running for the city council in Jacksonville, Fla., where her husband is a tax attorney.

When a Congressional seat looked promising after the 1990 redistricting, Fowler spent six months studying the pros and cons of the job. She flew to Washington to consult with other women lawmakers about how to balance a Congressional career with her responsibilities as a wife and mother.

The older of her two daughters was in college by then and got exasperated with her mother’s diligent decision-making. Running for Congress was a no-brainer, she said. “Mom, you should have done it before.”

Fowler’s signature issue was term limits. She campaigned on the pledge, “Eight is enough,” meaning she would step down after four terms. When her time was up in 2000, she must have felt like Cinderella at the ball with the clock about to strike midnight just when she was coming into her own as a legislator.

She was then the only Republican woman serving on the House Armed Services committee, and when the Army was charged with sexual harassment, she was given a lead role in the investigation.

Her expertise on defense matters was not limited to gender issues, and she earned respect as an authority on a range of military issues. Suspecting that she may be having second thoughts about keeping her pledge to leave office after eight years, an advocacy group for term limits taunted her with ads calling her “Slick Tillie.”

But Fowler kept her commitment, announcing early in 2000 that she would retire. Her steadfastness is one of the qualities for which she will be remembered. She took principled stands and stuck to them, a rarity in today’s politics. She took no money from the tobacco industry; her mother was dying of lung cancer. She also refused contributions from the National Rifle Association, another major backer of GOP officeholders.

Prim and proper with dark, coiffed hair and oversized glasses, Fowler looked like the Junior League President she once was. Nothing about her said radical or feminist or women’s libber, yet she was an unabashed cheerleader for getting more women into politics, and for championing issues the sisterhood cares about.

As the politics around her grew more partisan and poisonous, she held her ground. She had become friendly with a number of Democrats through her active participation on the Congressional women’s caucus, and she wouldn’t campaign against incumbents she had a working relationship with. “I can’t sit next to them one day and campaign against them the next. If I’m your friend, then I’m your friend.”

Chambliss weekly e-newsletter

2005-02-06T05:14:00.000-08:00

For the week ending February 4, 2005

Chambliss, Isakson help deliver grant funds for Franklin County
This week, Georgia Senators Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson announced that the Franklin County Board of Commissions will receive a $300,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Appalachian Regional Commission Grant to make water system improvements.

Chambliss says State of the Union one of Bush's best speeches ever
Senator Chambliss called President Bush's State of the Union one of President Bush's best speeches ever. Chambliss praised the President for his resolve to win the war on terror and commitment to strengthening many of America's domestic programs. Chambliss said the President efforts to save Social Security for today's seniors and tomorrow's retirees and strengthening it for our children and grandchildren was critically important.

Chambliss praises Alberto Gonzales during Senate Floor speech
This week, Senator Chambliss spoke in support of Judge Alberto Gonzales' nomination to be the next Attorney General for the United States. Chambliss praised Gonzales' qualifications and applauded his! pursuit of the American dream The Senate voted to confirm Gonzales - 60-36.

Chambliss visits with Atlanta student on Capitol Hill
This week, Georgia Senators Chambliss and Isakson meet with Matt Westmoreland a Henry Grady High School Junior in Atlanta. Matt participated in a Junior Achievement Shadow Program to learn more about Congress and the role of government. Chambliss praised Matt for his dedication to his studies and for doing all he can about a career he hopes to pursue.

Jimmy Carter's 2004 Misadventures

2004-12-30T03:05:00.000-08:00

Being Jimmy Carter in 2004 meant turning 80 and looking back on a substantial and proud record of public service to our great nation. But being Jimmy Carter in 2004 also meant putting international expediency and political partisanship far before everything else.

Charlie Norwood: Fellow Georgian and former President Jimmy Carter has had a busy past few months. And I'm not even referring to his 80th birthday celebrated this past October.

His hectic run really started back in August, when the former president's international good- government group, the Carter Center, served as an election monitor in the recall referendum of Fidel Castro's good buddy and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Of course, this is the same Hugo Chavez who has weakeneddemocracyin Venezuela to an almost non-functioning level, who verbally trashes President Bush and our nation at every opportunity, and who despicably and routinely allows his military henchmen to fire on and coldly kill Venezuelan demonstrators who oppose his dictatorial-leaning ways.

So, when the recall referendum concluded, not many folks were stunned that Mr. Chavez claimed victory — despite an exit poll by a well-respected American polling firm forecasting his overwhelming recall. It proved to be wildly out of step with the "official" results (off by 30-plus percentage points). But what was unforeseen and shocking was Mr. Carter's reaction to all of this.

Mr. Carter turned a blind eye to what had just transpired and endorsed the highly suspect returns. While Mr. Chavez gleefully called the tumultuous election a "democratic fiesta," Mr. Carter chimed in by proclaiming it a "heroic performance" and saying that it was now "the responsibility of all Venezuelans to accept the results and work together for the future."

Hmmm ... I just wonder how that whole "working together" thing works when you're getting shot in the park or in line to vote? Who knows?

Regardless, Mr. Carter's recent misadventures continued the next month when he launched an attack on a personal friend and political ally, Georgia's senior Sen. Zell Miller.

It seemed Mr. Carter took great issue with Mr. Miller's decision to endorse President Bush and deliver the keynote address at this year's Republican National Convention. In one line Mr. Carter said, "By your historically unprecedented disloyalty, you have betrayed our (loyal Democrats') trust."

Wow. That's pretty strong language coming from someone who had just given the wink and nod to Fidel Castro's Venezuelan protege. Apparently, watering down a strategic nation's democracy is A-OK in Mr. Carter's book, but breaking ranks with "loyal Democrats" is an unforgivable offense.

I guess watching Mr. Miller forsake his party by standing up for lower taxes, moral values, a strong national defense and a commander in chief who will fight for the same was more than Mr. Carter could stomach.

One thing is for sure, Mr. Carter's scorecard reads: Hugo Chavez thumbs up; Zell Miller thumbs down.

Fresh off of pummeling Mr. Miller in print, Mr. Carter turned his attention and angst toward the state of Florida and the then-upcoming national election. Among other things, Mr. Carter wrote, "The disturbing fact is that a repetition of the problems of 2000 now seems likely,... With reforms unlikely at this late stage of the election, perhaps the only recourse will be to focus maximum public scrutiny on the suspicious process in Florida."

Thankfully, Mr. Carter's indictment of the 2004 electoral process in Florida proved to be unfounded, his dire prediction off base and the "scrutiny of the suspicious process in Florida" utterly unnecessary to say the least.

Here's wishing Mr. Carter a great 2005 — and a new year filled with much more straight-shooting and much less divisive posturing to boot.

Fox News Channel Hires Democrat Sen. Zell Miller

2004-12-16T03:26:00.000-08:00

Fox News Channel has a feisty new employee: retiring Sen. Zell Miller, D-Ga.

"We will plug him in wherever we can use him," Kevin Magee, vice president of programming, told the Washington Post.

"I am excited to be joining Fox News Channel," stated Miller, 72, author of "A National Party No More" and rip-roaring keynote speaker at the GOP presidential convention.

The Post noted today: "Zell Miller's Really Big Night at the Republican convention was a watershed moment for Fox News Channel as well.

"FNC surprised many by beating ABC, CBS and NBC in head-to-head ratings competition on both nights of the televised GOP get-together. And the margin was widest on the night of Miller's keynote, followed by Vice President Cheney's speech.

"FNC was watched by an average of 5.9 million viewers between 10 and 11 that Wednesday, easily outstripping NBC's 4.5 million, ABC's 3.3 million and CBS's 2.6 million."

Note to Rupert Murdoch: Please launch a 6:30 p.m. ET news program on Fox's broadcast network to crush the former "Big Three" networks.

It's The Soldier

2004-11-20T08:33:00.000-08:00

"It's The soldier, not the court, that has given us freedom

of speech. It is the soldier, not the agitator, who has

given us the freedom to protest. It is the soldier who

salutes the flag, serves beneath the flag, whose coffin is

draped by the flag, who gives that protester the freedom

he abuses to burn that flag." - Senator Zell Miller

Johnny Grant Takes State Senate Seat

2004-11-06T08:52:00.000-08:00

Georgia State Senate District 25
85 of 85 precincts - 100 percent

Johnny Grant Rep 29,314 - 52 percent

Faye Smith (i) Dem 26,938 - 48 percent

Johnny Grant: I can tell you from past experience that it feels a whole lot better to be the winner.

Carol and I thank each of you for the support you gave the Grant for Senate campaign. You were awesome and I could not have won without your help.

Your efforts are greatly appreciated whether you helped out by making a financial contribution, calling your friends, forwarding emails, walking your neighborhood, or praying for me.

It has been a pleasure to get to know the people of this area. I am honored to be the Senator-elect from Georgia's 25th District and I look forward to the opportunity to serve you for the next two years. Let me know if there are concerns or issues that I can help you with.

Again I extend my thanks for your vote and support.

Johnny

The Union-Recorder - Amy H. Mullis:

Grant said he intends to be attentive to the needs...

"I think that I'm actually in a better position to be able to help in Baldwin County than Senator Smith was," he said. "With the state Senate being under Republican leadership at this point, the state House being under Republican leadership, and the governor being a Republican, it puts me in a position where I can be much more effective serving this area than my opponent."

Grant said regardless of who individual voters supported, he wants to serve all constituents in District 25.

"I want the people that supported Senator Smith to know that they can call on me," he said. "I will be responsive, and I will work to serve them as well as the people that supported me. I will be the senator for the entire 25th district - not just the Republican portion, not just the portion who voted for me."

Help Secure A Win For Calder Clay

2004-10-29T08:25:00.000-07:00

Rufus Montgomery: Your vote counts!

VICTORY IS NEAR!

With your help, George W. Bush will be re-elected... Johnny Isakson will go to the U.S. Senate...

And Calder Clay will be elected to the U.S. House!

Republicans in our community must come together at the end of this race and push each other across the finish line to victory. Our local candidates will be successful as well if we get the Republican vote out.

Your efforts will mean the difference between winning and losing.

Volunteers are welcome for the final weekend push to walk door to door and make phone calls in all 31 counties of the 3rd Congressional District for our next congressman, Calder Clay.

It can mean the difference between winning and losing on November 2.

Consider this email an action alert. Consider this email that extra help that we need right now. Consider this email a wake up call that if we don't get our vote out, the idea of a President John Kerry could become a reality? There truly is so much more work that needs to be completed. We look forward to seeing you.

Join us through Election Day as we make calls to our friends and neighbors. We'll keep walking door-to-door and waving signs until the polls close on Tuesday. Call us at (478) 923-2429 for details about where you can help!

View Latest Ad:

Calder on the Issues
New! Posted 10/28/2004
Windows Media - View

Related Hot Topic:GOP Leaders Blitz Through Midstate

Perdue, Isakson, Clay among politicians, candidates participating in bus tour

The Macon Telegraph - Don Schanche Jr.

Republican leaders blitzed through Middle Georgia on Wednesday on a 36-city bus tour to tout their candidates in Tuesday's election and stir up supporters to go to the polls.

Gov. Sonny Perdue, U.S. Rep. Johnny Isakson and congressional candidates Calder Clay and Lynn Westmoreland were on hand for the Milledgeville-Macon leg.

They gave a pep talk to about 150 supporters outside the old courthouse in Milledgeville and later mingled with party officials and volunteers outside Fincher's Barbecue on Houston Avenue in Macon.

Perdue said he believes his party has a good chance next week to take control of the state House, as it now controls the Senate.

"I feel we'll be very competitive," he said. "I feel there's a good chance there could be an absolute (Republican) majority on election night in the House of Representatives for the first time."

Isakson, meanwhile, said he expects the GOP will display the kind of well-organized get-out-the-vote effort that helped elect Perdue in 2002.

"We got a good practice run in July (for the primary election)" he said. "That has done nothing but expand since the primary was over with."

Clay: Marshall Missed Key Votes

2004-10-18T06:22:00.000-07:00

ATLANTA - U.S. Rep. Jim Marshall, D-Ga., and Republican Calder Clay compressed an entire campaign's worth of sniping into a debate that lasted little less than a half-hour Sunday night.

Macon Telegraph, Andy Peters
Marshall, Clay debate as heated as campaigns

During the debate broadcast on Georgia Public Television, Clay repeated the accusation that Marshall, the first-term incumbent congressman from the 3rd District, missed key votes in Congress and doesn't reflect the values of a majority of Middle Georgians.

The former Bibb County commissioner also asked Marshall who he was supporting for president - George Bush or John Kerry - but Marshall declined to answer.

Much of the debate centered on Clay's accusation that Marshall missed a key vote related to legislation to reduce frivolous lawsuits.

Clay said Marshall skipped the vote because of the campaign donations he's received from the legal profession. He previously had said Marshall was AWOL - the military term for absent without leave - because he missed that vote.

"I'm a dues-paying member of the Air Force Association," Clay said. "I find it difficult to understand why you would choose to miss that vote. I know you're supported by trial lawyers."

The two candidates also disagreed on whether Marshall had fulfilled a campaign pledge to help rural hospitals.

Marshall said he had made good on that promise, because he'd persuaded federal officials to give rural hospitals better access to the Indigent Care Trust Fund.

But Clay said Marshall's vote against a bill to limit frivolous lawsuits makes it much more difficult for rural hospitals to stay open because of the higher medical costs associated with medical-malpractice lawsuits.

"We will work to protect the sanctity of marriage," Clay said. "I believe life begins at conception. I will protect our Second Amendment rights."

Sunday's debate may be the only televised debate between Marshall and Clay accessible to the entire 3rd District.

Calder For Congress - Press Release

Marshall Not Able To Account For Whereabouts During Missed Votes

Says He Will Disclose Why He Skipped the Votes and Where He Was.

MACON, GA - Republican candidate for Congress Calder Clay debated with Democrat Jim Marshall tonight at an event sponsored by Georgia Public Broadcasting.

When asked why he missed two critical votes in the Armed Services Committee this year, Jim Marshall said he did not know and that he would follow up to let people know where he was and why he failed to vote on those two important measures.

Clay asked Marshall the following question:

Unfortunately, some members of Congress have chosen to inject politics directly into the war on terror - using the situations at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay to try and score political points against the President.

On two occasions, June 14 and July 15 of this year, important resolutions were brought before the House Armed Services Committee to do just that.

Mr. Marshall, you said "I make sure that I get up to speed on all legislation pending before my committees." However, you chose to skip those two very partisan votes on the War on Terror. Why did you skip them and where were you?

NOTE: There have been fewer than 20 votes in the Armed Services Committee during all of 2004.

Giuliani Stumps For Isakson, Clay In Macon

2004-10-06T14:31:00.000-07:00

Macon, Ga (Macon Telegraph) Maggie Large:

On a Tuesday visit to campaign for U.S. Senate candidate Johnny Isakson, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani took aim at prominent Democrats like Sens. John Kerry and Giuliani nemesis Hillary Clinton.

Absent was any mention by name of Isakson's Democratic opponent, Rep. Denise Majette. Instead, most of Giuliani's talk focused on the presidential race, with brief mentions of the importance of electing fellow Republicans Isakson and Calder Clay, candidate for the 3rd Congressional District seat.

(See Photo - Giuliani, Calder and Isakson)

Giuliani characterized himself as a moderate Republican and said The New York Times considered him one of the most conservative mayors the city has ever had.

"I am not in lockstep with anybody. Nobody is in lockstep with me," Giuliani said.

When introducing Giuliani at a Mercer University luncheon, Isakson acknowledged that the presidential election is the most important race this year.

Giuliani stuck to two major themes during his talk: the war on terrorism and tax reform, calling them the most important issues in the upcoming election.

He scolded European leaders for allowing terrorism to flourish and defended the president's new doctrine of pre-emptive strikes.

"If President Bush is re-elected, we will continue the war on terrorism," Giuliani said. "We're not going to back off because of some really bad days. War is terrible and is filled with bad days. Young men die who really shouldn't die."

Giuliani praised Bush's steadfastness and his prosecution of the war in Iraq but stopped short of directly linking Saddam Hussein's regime with the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that killed 3,000. Giuliani received widespread praise for his leadership following the terrorist attacks on New York.

"Saddam Hussein was one of the pillars of world terrorism," Giuliani said. "He used weapons of mass destruction against his own people, invaded another country and defied U.N. weapons inspectors for 10 years."

To chuckles from the Republican crowd, he mocked Kerry for asking in last week's presidential debate for a "global test" to go to war.

"Maybe the global test is to go to (President Jacques) Chirac in France and ask him for permission," Giuliani said.

Calder Clay's New Media Campaign For Georgia's Third District

2004-09-22T10:22:00.000-07:00

Calder Clay is the Republican candidate running against Democrat Rep. Jim Marshall for Georgia’s Third Congressional District seat.

Vice President Cheney said: "I was proud to campaign with Calder two years ago. He ran a tough, smart race and came very close to victory. He's going to run even harder this year, and the outcome is going to be different."

Calder Clay said: The biggest difference, "My opponent voted 73 percent of the time with Nancy Pelosi ... That's a failing grade in Middle Georgia, and we'll be pointing that out."

Pelosi, a California representative and House Minority Leader, is "the most liberal member of Congress."

(See Photo Of President Bush and Calder Clay)

MACON, GA – On Monday, Georgia Republican Congressional Candidate Calder Clay began his media campaign. Clay began running two ads to inform voters about Jim Marshall’s documented record in Washington.

Ads Document Jim Marshall’s Habit of Saying One Thing and Doing Another

Watch 1st New Ad: "Double Life"
Windows Media - High Low
Quicktime - High

In “Double Life,” the ad documents the conflict between Marshall’s rhetoric in Georgia versus his record in Washington, DC:

Disclaimer – I ’m Calder Clay and I approve this message.

VO: Jim Marshall leads a double life.

In Georgia, he runs ads claiming to support our veterans.

But in Washington, he voted against funding to help disabled vets.
(Roll Call Vote No. 452, 7/25/2003)

He says he supports marriage between a man and a woman.

But for more than 475 days he refused to sign legislation to ban gay marriage.
(H.J. RES. 56 – Introduced on 5/21/2003)

Now Jim Marshall talks about saving jobs.

But in Washington, he voted to keep the Death Tax that destroys family farms and small business.
(Roll Call Vote No. 288, 6/18/2003)

Jim Marshall – not the man he pretends to be.

Watch 2nd New Ad:"Time's Up"
Windows Media - High Low
Quicktime - High

In “Times Up,” the ad documents Marshall’s letter to 3rd District voters saying that he did not have time to focus his limited attention to the issue of tax reform. The ad documents that Marshall did find the time to take a leadership position on legislation for a commemorative coin, Living Well Week, and promoting square dancing.

Graphic Marshall:

“There are only so many hours in the day … I have made a conscious decision to focus my time and attention upon a very limited number of issues.” Macon Telegraph, August 19, 2004

Mahlon Marr and others have contacted me with a request that I support the "Fair Tax" proposal that, with elections just around the corner, has recently been mentioned by Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert. Like so many other issues that come across my desk in Washington, I am unable to take a leadership role on this one.

There are only so many hours in the day, even for members of Congress. I make sure that I get up to speed on every matter brought to the House floor for a vote, and all legislation pending before my committees.

Beyond that I have made a conscious decision to focus my time and attention upon a very limited number of issues. I am one who believes that those who seek to master all issues will master none.

Rep. Jim Marshall
3rd Congressional District
8/19/2004

VO: Jim Marshall said he didn’t have time to consider tax reform and could only focus his attention on a very limited number of issues. So what issues has Jim Marshall championed?

He was a co-sponsor to create a commemorative coin for Jamestown.
(H.R. 1914)

He co-sponsored legislation to create “Living Well Week.”
(H.CON. RES 416)

He also found time to sponsor legislation to make square dancing the national folk dance.
(H.R. 645)

But no time for tax reform?

CALDER ON CAMERA: I’m Calder Clay and as your Congressman I’ll always have time for the issues that are important to you and that’s why I approve this message.

Calder Clay for U.S. Congress Website (Click Here)

Carville: GOP Probably Drugged Zell Miller

2004-09-08T23:22:00.000-07:00

NewsMax:

Frothing-at-the-mouth Democrat attack dog James Carville is accusing Republican Party officials of drugging Sen. Zell Miller for media appearances after his speech to the GOP convention last week.

"They probably shot him up with something," the wild-eyed Ragin' Cajun insisted Wednesday during an interview with radio host Don Imus.

Carville leveled the bizarre charge after claiming that Republicans had written Miller's speech, even though it contained lines Miller had used before and echoed much of the criticism of Democrats outlined in Miller's recent book, "A National Party No More."

But Carville insisted the renegade Democrat's speech was strictly a put-up job.

"They got that poor man in the twilight of his career and just used him," the former Clinton adviser insisted. "They said, 'Look, go up there and say this,' and they handed him a bunch of documents."

Carville claimed Miller didn't know "what he was talking about" in post-speech interviews, saying that's why he grew angry when challenged by MSNBC host Chris Matthews.

When Imus noted that the Georgia Democrat sounded "fine" when he interviewed him the next morning," Carville shot back: "They probably shot him up with something, you know. He just likes screaming at people."

Marshall Votes 73 Percent With Pelosi and Kennedy

2004-09-06T04:54:00.000-07:00

Calder Clay: He was 73 percent voting with Nancy Pelosi and Ted Kennedy and the liberal Democratic agenda. That is not conservative. That is not moderate. It's liberal, and it's a failing grade.

An analysis of Marshall's roll-call votes on the nonpartisan Project Vote Smart Web site shows he followed the Democratic party line 73 percent of the time and supported President Bush 53 percent.

Don Schanche Jr.,Macon Telegraph:
3rd District Race Expected To Be Rough

Middle Georgia is likely to take a mud-bath during the next 10 weeks, as U.S. Rep. Jim Marshall, D-Ga., and challenger Calder Clay slug it out in a re-match.

Two years ago, Marshall beat Clay by a mere 1 percent - or as Clay puts it, "by four votes per precinct."

Clay, the Republican nominee, says he will fight for every vote he can find. And although he has some proposals of his own, his chief target is Marshall's record.

"Jim Marshall has failed to represent Middle Georgia," Clay said.

Marshall, meanwhile, asserts that his is the record of a focused leader who has worked with both parties to bring real benefits to the people of his district.

The 3rd Congressional District, which occupies most of central Georgia, is generally considered one of the few in the nation not already locked up by one party or the other.

Political scientist Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, lists it among his "dirty thirty" competitive House races, "guaranteed to see the lion's share of money and mudslinging."

Last week brought an early salvo in the form of a news release from Clay, ridiculing Marshall for not taking a position on Georgia Republican Rep. John Linder's "fair tax" plan - a proposal to replace the income tax with a 23 percent national sales tax.

In a letter to the editor of The Telegraph, Marshall said he was "unable to take a leadership role on this one," because he has decided to "focus my time and attention upon a very limited number of issues."

Clay noted that Marshall found time to co-sponsor resolutions on inflammatory bowel disease; creating a Jamestown, Va., commemorative coin; and making square dancing the national folk dance.

"First Jim Marshall complains that he does not have time to get involved in every issue and then he turns around and places square dancing in a position of priority above tax reform," Clay said in the release. "That makes no sense at all and is an insult to every taxpayer in the 3rd District."

Marshall said it takes little time to sign on as a co-sponsor when colleagues or constituents bring resolutions such as these, and that doing so often helps build relationships.

Marshall has had nearly two years to make an impact through policy and constituent services. The power of incumbency is often seen as a handicap for a political challenger. But Clay says the political dynamics are in his favor.

"Georgia is transitioning to a Republican state, and people see it and feel it," Clay said. "For the first time ever, there were more Republicans voting in the primary than on the Democrat side."

Clay said he supports Linder's tax plan, would end the inheritance tax and favors tort reform to limit "frivolous lawsuits."

He calls for a strong national defense; would allow workers to invest a portion of their Social Security payments in personal savings accounts; and says "Congress must allow our military retirees to receive their full pensions along with their disability pay."

"Yes, I'm a Democrat, have been and will be. And yes, I do wind up voting more often with the Democrats than I do with the Republicans," Marshall said. "But I'm one of a handful of the most likely Democrats in Congress to vote with the Republicans."

Rufus Montgomery, Clay's campaign manager, said that doesn't hold water.

"Half the time he's voting against the president. That's not strong support when it's half the time," Montgomery said. "Our contention is he's a liberal, and the record bears it out. ... He is definitely not in line with Middle Georgia values and conservative voters."

Marshall has consistently supported the Bush administration's war on terror, and recently reaffirmed his conviction that the U.S. must stand firm in Iraq. He has angered some fellow Democrats by his stand.

Clay said, "Supporting the war on terror does not a voting record make."

Calder Clay Supports Federal Marriage Amendment

2004-08-31T15:33:00.000-07:00

Calder Clay:

Ultimately same-sex couples that succeed in gaining recognition in states like Massachusetts will bring suits in other states arguing that the U.S. Constitution requires their new state to recognize their status.

We must take action before this question is left up to the Supreme Court.

Clay, Marshall spar over marriage amendment

Don Schanche Jr.,Macon Telegraph:

Calder Clay and U.S. Rep. Jim Marshall, D-Ga., both say they oppose same-sex marriage. The question Monday was who opposes it the most.

At a morning news conference, Clay, a Republican, challenged Marshall to co-sponsor the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would define marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

"For over a year now Jim Marshall has not signed on to this critical piece of legislation," Clay told a crowd outside the Bibb County Courthouse. "His inaction on the Federal Marriage Amendment indicates one of two things: Either this issue does not warrant his attention or he is philosophically opposed to the concept of a constitutional amendment protecting marriage."

Marshall responded that he does support the amendment. Marshall put his comments into a letter to Clay, calling it the 2,034th letter in favor of the marriage amendment that he has written.

Marshall recently voted for a bill to prevent federal courts from hearing challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act, which put a heterosexual definition of marriage into the nation's laws.

In the letter, Marshall enclosed a wallet-size card outlining his support for the amendment, so that Clay could more "accurately and fully" describe Marshall's position next time he discusses it.

Rufus Mongtomery, Clay's campaign manager, called Marshall's answer a "typical, look-down-your-nose" response. But he said Clay gets credit for prompting Marshall to talk about his position.

At the news conference, Clay displayed an easel with a poster-size petition in support of the constitutional amendment. He and his wife, Kathy, stepped up to sign it, followed by a band of supporters. Clay called it the beginning of a grass-roots effort.

Fools Brought Another Knife To A Gunfight

2004-08-26T01:44:00.000-07:00

Cleland Publicity Stunt Flops

NewsMax: Trying again to divert attention from his repeated refusal to leash his multimillion-dollar 527 attack dogs, Sen. John Kerry sent chum Max Cleland to Crawford, Texas, to hand President Bush a letter attacking Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. But the Georgia Democrat never made it past the Secret Service.

Cleland, who became a triple amputee in Vietnam when he picked up a live American grenade (and not in combat, as some media have reported), had a message from nine Senate Democrats who wrote that Bush had "a special duty" to condemn attacks on Kerry's military record.

Cleland, a former one-term senator from Georgia, claimed: "The question is where is George Bush's honor. The question is where is his shame to attack a fellow veteran who has distinguished himself in combat. Regardless of the political combat involved, it's disgraceful."

What's "disgraceful" is that the Democrats keep trying to pretend the president hasn't already denounced such attacks.

Too bad the president didn't give Cleland a message asking Kerry once more to stop his attacks.

Fools Brought Another Knife To A Gunfight!

Zell Miller: See Y'all in New York

2004-08-23T08:45:00.000-07:00

Twelve years ago, I delivered one of the keynote addresses on the first night at the Democratic National Convention in New York. It was a stinging rebuke of the administration of George H.W. Bush and a ringing endorsement of Bill Clinton. This summer I'll again be speaking in New York, but it will be to the Republican Convention that renominates George W. Bush.

Many have asked how I could have come so far in just over a decade. Frankly, I don't think I've changed much at all. At 72, I don't feel much need to change my opinions. Instead, the reason I'm not attending the Democratic Convention in Boston is that I barely recognize my party anymore. Most of its leaders -- including our nominee, John Kerry -- don't hold the same beliefs that have motivated my career in public service.

In 1992, I spoke of the opportunity and hope that allowed me, the son of a single mother growing up in the North Georgia mountains, to become my state's governor. And I attributed much of my success to the great Democratic presidents of years gone by -- FDR (a hallowed man in my home), Truman and JFK. The link these men shared was a commitment to helping Americans born into any condition rise to achieve whatever goal they set for themselves.

I spoke of Americans who were "tired of paying more in taxes and getting less in services." I excoriated Republicans who "dealt in cynicism and skepticism." I accused them of "master[ing] the art of division and diversion." And I praised Bill Clinton as a moderate Democrat "who has the courage to tell some of those liberals who think welfare should continue forever, and some of those conservatives who think there should be no welfare at all, that they're both wrong."

Bill Clinton did deliver on welfare reform, after a lot of prodding from the Republicans who took hold of Congress in 1995. But much of the rest of the promise I saw in his candidacy withered during his two terms in office.

Today, it's the Democratic Party that has mastered the art of division and diversion. To run for president as a Democrat these days you have to go from interest group to interest group, cap in hand, asking for the support of liberal kingmakers. Mr. Kerry's no different. After Hollywood elites profaned the president, he didn't have the courage to put them in their place. Instead, he validated their remarks, claiming that they represent "the heart and soul of America."

No longer the Party of Hope, today's Democratic Party has become Mr. Kerry's many mansions of cynicism and skepticism. As our economy continues to get better and businesses add jobs, Mr. Kerry's going around America trying to convince people that the roof is about to cave in. He talks about "the misery index" and the Depression. What does he know about either?

And when it comes to taxes and services, you'd be pressed to find anyone more opposed to the interests of middle-class Americans than John Kerry. Except maybe John Edwards. Both voted against tax relief for married couples, tax relief for families with children, and tax relief for small businesses. Now Mr. Kerry wants to raise taxes on hundreds of thousands of small-business owners and millions of individuals. He claims to be for working people, but I don't understand how small businesses can create jobs if they've got to send more money to Washington instead of keeping it to hire workers.

Worst of all, Sens. Kerry and Edwards have not kept faith with the men and women who are fighting the war on terror -- most of whom come from small towns and middle-class families all over America. While Mr. Bush has stood by our troops every step of the way, Messrs. Kerry and Edwards voted to send our troops to war and then voted against the money to give them supplies and equipment -- not to mention better benefits for their families. And recently Mr. Kerry even said he's proud of that vote. Proud to abandon our troops when they're out in the field? I can hear Harry Truman cussing from his grave.

I still believe in hope and opportunity and, when it comes right down to it, Mr. Bush is the man who represents hope and opportunity. Hope for a safer world. And opportunity for Americans to work hard, keep more of the money they earn, and send their kids to good schools. All the speeches we hear this week won't be able to hide the truth of what today's Democratic Party has become: an enclave of elites paying lip service to middle-class values. Americans looking for a president who understands their struggles and their dreams should tune in next month, when we celebrate the leadership of George W. Bush.

Zell Miller, Why I Skipped The Boston Convention

2004-08-02T03:32:00.000-07:00

Zell Miller: The reason I didn't attend the Democratic Convention in Boston is that I barely recognize my party anymore. Most of its leaders--including our nominee, John Kerry--don't hold the same beliefs that have motivated my career in public service.

Twelve years ago, I delivered one of the keynote addresses on the first night at the Democratic National Convention in New York. This summer I'll again be speaking in New York, but it will be to the Republican Convention that renominates George W. Bush.

Many have asked how I could have come so far in just over a decade. Frankly, I don't think I've changed much at all. At 72, I don't feel much need to change my opinions.

I spoke of Americans who were "tired of paying more in taxes and getting less in services." I excoriated Republicans who "dealt in cynicism and skepticism."

Today, it's the Democratic Party that has mastered the art of division and diversion. To run for president as a Democrat these days you have to go from interest group to interest group, cap in hand, asking for the support of liberal kingmakers. Mr. Kerry is no different.

After Hollywood elites profaned the president, he didn't have the courage to put them in their place. Instead, he validated their remarks, claiming that they represent "the heart and soul of America."

No longer the party of hope, today's Democratic Party has become Mr. Kerry's many mansions of cynicism and skepticism. As our economy continues to get better and businesses add jobs, Mr. Kerry's going around America trying to convince people that the roof is about to cave in. He talks about "the misery index" and the Depression. What does he know about either?

And when it comes to taxes and services, you'd be pressed to find anyone more opposed to the interests of middle-class Americans than John Kerry. Both voted against tax relief for married couples, tax relief for families with children, and tax relief for small businesses.

Worst of all, Sens. Kerry and Edwards have not kept faith with the men and women who are fighting the war on terror--most of whom come from small towns and middle-class families all over America.

Kerry and Edwards voted to send our troops to war and then voted against the money to give them supplies and equipment--not to mention better benefits for their families. And recently Mr. Kerry even said he's proud of that vote. Proud to abandon our troops when they're out in the field? I can hear Harry Truman cussing from his grave.

I still believe in hope and opportunity and, when it comes right down to it, Mr. Bush is the man who represents hope and opportunity. Hope for a safer world. And opportunity for Americans to work hard, keep more of the money they earn, and send their kids to good schools.

All the speeches we heard Last week weren't able to hide the truth of what today's Democratic Party has become: an enclave of elites paying lip service to middle-class values.

Chambliss-Cleland Joust On Message

2004-07-28T13:20:00.000-07:00

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

AJC staff: Sen. Saxby Chambliss ventured Wednesday into the heart of what is — for this week, anyway — Max Cleland Country.

The Republican senator from Georgia was part of a Republican “truth squad” that held a press conference across the street from the FleetCenter, where the Democrats are holding their convention, to counter their political message and screen a video detailing Sen. John Kerry’s alleged “flip-flops” on the Iraq issue, with the theme from the TV show “Flipper” in the soundtrack.

At the Democratic veterans’ caucus Monday, Chambliss came under heavy fire from Democratic strategist James Carville for the way he conducted the 2002 race in which he unseated Cleland.

But Chambliss said that’s not the reason he’s in Boston.

“I’m not running for the Senate and my former opponent is not running for president,” Chambliss said “We’re talking about Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry and I’m very proud of our president’s support of veterans.”

Chambliss said, as he has in the past, that he never questioned Cleland’s patriotism, just his voting record.

“And we’re going to talk about Sen. Kerry’s voting record, as we’ve done today,” said Chambliss.

Cleland was asked about Chambliss’ visit a few minutes later, as he fielded interviews between bites of a late-morning breakfast. He stuck determinedly to the campaign message.

Cleland said. “We’re not about the past, we’re not about negative campaigning, we’re not about character assassination. We’re not about the politics of fear, we’re all about the politics of hope.”

Newt-The NAACP Extreme Rhetoric

2004-07-24T06:57:00.000-07:00

Newt: You would expect the president to turn down an invitation from a group whose leaders are quoted saying that a Republican's idea of equal rights is "the American flag and the Confederate swastika flying side by side, " or that Bush intended to take America "back to the days of Jim Crow segregation and dominance."

Bush and the NAACP: Extreme Rhetoric Explains Decision

Try to imagine the outrage the liberal left would feel if President Bush turned down an invitation to speak at a MoveOn.org event. Not shocked? Of course not; it is reasonable to expect the president to reject an invitation from MoveOn.org, whose Web site featured a contest entry that famously compared him to Hitler.

This election-year hyperbole did not come from MoveOn.org, but instead from the two leaders of the supposedly nonpartisan NAACP, Julian Bond and Kweisi Mfume.

Chairman Bond recently said that Republicans "draw their most rabid supporters from the Taliban wing of American politics" and want to "write bigotry back into the Constitution." He has also compared conservatives to the KKK and the Bush administration to the Confederacy.

The NAACP's campaign against the president isn't new... In September 2000, the NAACP National Voter Fund ran a vicious ad depicting the horrific death of James Byrd by racist killers. The message of the ad was clear -- elect George W. Bush and, if you are an African American, this is your future.

A Los Angeles Times editorial last week called the president's decision to "boycott" the NAACP "inexplicable." If the NAACP really values Bush's attention so much, it is the barbed remarks of Bond and Mfume that are "inexplicable."

Mfume provided a choice example of destructive political dialogue last week when he urged Bush to reconsider his decision and in the same breath suggested that if Bush only agrees "to meet with those who agree with him, we are getting closer to the previous regime in Baghdad than we are to a democracy."

Bond and Mfume have made it clear that they are not interested in the NAACP representing African Americans, but instead, want to have the organization represent the left by acting as a shill for the Democratic Party.

A recent Newsweek poll showed that 66 percent of African Americans favor school vouchers, yet the NAACP has come out firmly against school choice. A recent Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life poll found that 64 percent of blacks oppose same-sex marriage. Bond has even positioned the NAACP against personal Social Security accounts -- an initiative that Zogby polls show is supported by upwards of 60 percent of African Americans.

Mfume called conservative civil-rights groups "ventriloquist dummies" for the "ultraconservative right-wing attacker." In other words, any NAACP member whom Bush might have won over at the conference would have been immediately ostracized.

The choice for the members of the NAACP is: Will they allow their leaders to continue on a destructive path and its descent into irrelevance, or replace them and save the historic civil-rights organization that once had a proud tradition of representing African Americans who are interested in a better life for their families and their communities?

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Cleland Goes Ballistic On Bush

2004-07-22T08:57:00.000-07:00

In a conference call with reporters, Cleland said the president went to war in Iraq “because he concluded that his daddy was a failed president” for not having removed Saddam Hussein from power after the first Gulf War. Therefore, Cleland explained, the younger Bush decided to “be Mr. Macho Man” by removing Saddam himself.

Byron York: Cleland Attacks Bush

Former Democratic Sen. Max Cleland, a close friend and supporter of presidential candidate John Kerry, today launched into a blistering attack against President Bush.

Cleland said the president “flat-out lied” when he asked Congress to authorize war in Iraq.

“He told us four things,” Cleland said, listing Bush’s claims of Iraq weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons programs, attempts to acquire yellowcake uranium in Africa, and ties to al Qaeda. “All of that was a pack of lies,” Cleland said.

“The president is living in a world of denial,” Cleland said. “So is the Vice President, and so is the Secretary of State.”

Cleland also said the president’s famous “16 word” contention that Iraq sought uranium in Africa “is a lie.”

When asked if he believes former ambassador Joseph Wilson, whose story was substantially undermined in the new Senate report on pre-war intelligence, Cleland said, “I do believe that Joe Wilson is telling the truth. I believe he has tremendous credibility, and I’ve met with him personally for hours.”

Isakson Spells “Doom”

2004-07-20T02:59:00.000-07:00

Government Is Not God PAC (GING-PAC) Endorses Collins, Says: Isakson Spells “Doom”

GING-PAC, Government Is Not God Website (Click Here) released the following statement:

Virtually the only old fashioned "blue dog" conservative Democrat in the Senate, Zell Miller, is retiring. Georgia has trended Republican for some time, and two years ago social conservative Saxby Chambliss defeated a Democrat incumbent in the Senate race.

With Zell Miller’s seat now open, at first glance it would appear easy for a Republican to win. Unfortunately, Republican Congressman Johnny Isakson, who has consistently voted pro-abortion, entered the race early and as a result took the lead.

There are two social conservatives running in the primary. One is Herman Cain, a businessman who was the CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, and the other is an experienced legislator, Congressman Michael "Mac" Collins.

GING-PAC normally does not become involved in expensive primary races; however, a victory in the primary by Isakson would spell doom in November.

The pro-life movement is the heart of the Republican Party in Georgia. Should Isakson win the primary, social-conservatives will not work for or vote for him in the fall.

Not only would a Democrat win the seat, but lower voter turnout could endanger the vote count for George W. Bush in the state.

Calder Clay Supports Judge Tom Rawlings

2004-07-19T09:01:00.000-07:00

Macon, Ga (PP)

Calder encourages everyone to get out and vote in the Primary this coming Tuesday July 20th.

Calder: When you do vote, consider our friend Judge Thomas C. Rawlings. Currently Judge of the Juvenile Courts of the Middle Circuit in Georgia, Rawlings is running for the non-partisan State Court of Appeals.

He has the dedication, experience and integrity necessary for this difficult role. Since the Court of Appeals is a state-wide office, everyone can show their support for this hard-working man.

He has campaigned diligently all over Georgia, and he would make a fine addition to the Court of Appeals.

Remember to vote this Tuesday July 20th!

Rawlings Website (Click Here)

Thomas C Rawlings - Good Decisions For Georgia's Future.

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Mac Collins Polls Has Double

2004-07-19T03:25:00.000-07:00

Milledgeville, Ga (PP)

With only hours left before the Republicans vote for U.S. Senate, Mac Collins is gaining fast in the Polls.

A Zogby International poll conducted last week for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution showed Collins at 8 percent, Cain had 16 percent. About 30 percent were undecided.

Matt Towery-Pierre Howard released a Republican Senate poll that has U.S. Rep. Mac Collins with 16 percent, Herman Cain with 20 percent and 18 percent undecided.

Clearly, Mac Collins has the momentum in this U.S. Senate Race. The Undecided has gone from 30 Percent to 18 Percent. Most has gone to Mac Collins, only 4 percent has gone to Herman Cain.

"I feel confident I'm going to be in a runoff with Johnny Isakson," Collins said as he shook hands at Suwanee's Family Day. "We're still in this race."

Story still developing ....

So come back to PeachyPolitics and look for Updates.

Update # 1:

Mac Collins: I have a very strong base, a grass-roots conservative base, and they are the ones who turn out to vote - especially when the chips are down.

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Johnny Isakson's Mailer Attacks Cain

2004-07-18T13:10:00.000-07:00

The Isakson campaigners justified the mailer by pointing out they had endured Cain's attacks on TV since early June -- and that several of Cain's charges were exaggerated or misleading. Tit for tat.

Jim Galloway and Tom Baxter AJC:
Herman Cain and the weekend of the long knives

Johnny Isakson put out a mailer that flirts with the truth:

• Herman Cain "donated money to pro-choice Democrat Senator Kerrey," the flyer says.

Isakson has raised $5.5 million, but couldn't afford to insert "Bob" in the line above. As in U.S. Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, not U.S. Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts. Cain wrote the $250 check in 1993, when he lived in Omaha.

A spokesman for the Isakson campaign, which has decried negative advertising, saw no harm in voters thinking that Cain gave cash to the current Democratic presidential nominee. "Bob Kerrey and John Kerry are cut from the same liberal Democratic senate cloth," Heath Garrett said.

• Cain "stood with Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy to extend [the] Iraq handover deadline," the flyer says.

At a May forum in Gwinnett County, Cain said he wouldn't oppose extension of the deadline. "Do it at the right time for the right reason, even if we have to move it," Cain said.

• Cain "ran for president against George W. Bush," the flyer says.

Bush announced the formation of an exploratory committee for president on March 2, 1999. Cain filed his papers 17 days later, and quickly dropped out.

• Cain "endorsed Bush's opponent," the flyer says.

Well, yes. But Isakson omits the word "Republican." Cain was behind Steve Forbes in the presidential primary.

"We have sought a positive discussion, but we have also repeatedly put our opponents on notice that we will defend ourselves if attacked," said Brad Alexander, another Isakson spokesman.

Collins Determined To Win The Election

2004-07-15T05:42:00.000-07:00

Savannah Morning News, Brandon Larrabee:

Staking the campaign on his experience and conservative voting record, Collins appears determined to win the election - one vote at a time, if necessary.

And there are signs, at least in Dallas, that such perseverance can help.

Stanley Ingram, seated at another table at Martin's, hadn't had a politician personally ask him for a vote in 20 years.

"I'll vote for (Collins) just for that," Ingram said.

Mac Collins: Please consider a few things before you cast your ballot:

I am the only bedrock conservative in this race. I am the only one who has a 100 percent voting record as well as endorsements from the National Right To Life and the Georgia Right To Life. If my opponent is so pro-life, then why have these organizations censured him?

I am the only candidate with an A rating from the National Rifle Association and the Gun Owners of America. If my opponent is so pro-gun, why do these groups only give him a "B-" ?

I am the only candidate to author and pass legislation that cut your taxes and created jobs. If my opponent is so pro-jobs, why has he voted repeatedly for trade policies that hurt Georgia workers?

I am the only conservative candidate with the experience and the voting record to prove that I will represent your values in the United States Senate.

And of course, whether you vote early or on July 20th, I would appreciate your vote!

Check out Mac's 2 television ads:

Mac Collins: "Actions" (Click Here)

Mac Collins: "Same Ol, Same Ol" (Click Here)

For Mac Collins's Website: "iBackMac" (Click Here)

Meet Tom Rawlings - Georgia Court of Appeals

2004-07-12T12:53:00.000-07:00

Milledgeville, Ga (PP)

Johnny Grant: I know Tom and his family, and support his candidacy for Court of Appeals.

Rawlings - Good Decisions For Georgia's Future.

Kay Rawlings: Election time is here! Remember that you can begin "early voting" at your local voter registrar's office beginning tomorrow, July 12.

Please encourage your friends and family to vote between now and the regular primary date, July 20. And please help us by contacting your friends and family Statewide and ask them to vote for Thomas C Rawlings in the nonpartisan Court of Appeals race.

Tom is the ONLY candidate in this race who:

....Already has experience as a full-time Judge....

He serves full-time in juvenile court and has done work in other courts across the state, including presiding over jury trials and hearings in Superior Court.

Prior judicial experience is essential to an appellate court judgeship... it's not an entry-level position!

....Has actual work experience at the Court of Appeals....

Tom served as an attorney-advisor to the Judges of the Court of Appeals and helped decide over 200 appellate cases. His experience gives him a working knowledge of the Court, its policies, and its people.

He already knows how to do the job and do it well!

....Has extensive business experience....

Tom helped run a manufacturing company in Columbus and understands the needs and concerns of the business community.

He has received support from many business and medical associations who respect him not only for his legal ability but also for his understanding of the way the Court of Appeals can impact this state's business climate.

Additionally, Tom is from Rural Georgia and will bring a voice for rural Georgia values to the Court.

Thomas C Rawlings - Good Decisions For Georgia's Future.

For Tom Rawlings Website: Rawlings-Court Of Appeals (Click Here)

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Watch New TV Ad - Mac Collins "Actions"

2004-07-10T04:14:00.000-07:00

Congressman Mac Collins:

There are only 11 more days and counting until the July 20th Republican Primary!.

Attached is a new television ad I will begin airing drawing a firm line contrasting my 20 years of proven conservative public service with the moderate record of Isakson and the lack of experience of Cain.

The following is an excerpt from the ad:

"I am Mac Collins. I approved this message so you'll know there's a real difference between Mr. Isakson, the moderate; Mr. Cain's inexperience; and Mac Collins, the proven conservative."

It is important to send the right message at the right time.

The message is that I am the best man for the job. Voters in Georgia shouldn't have to hope that Mr. Isakson will occasionally vote in a way that reflects their values or that Mr. Cain will keep his promises.

Six years is a long time to gamble on someone who has never cast a vote on a piece of legislation. I am the only candidate in this race who can run on his record and not from it.

I have 12 years of votes, on record, in the House of Representatives that voters can look at. Voters can know I will represent their values, because "actions speak louder than words".

Watch New TV Ad - Mac Collins " Actions"

Dial Up: Windows Media (9.0) (Click Here)

Broadband: Windows Media (9.0) (Click Here)

For Mac Collins's Website: "iBackMac" (Click Here)

Mac Collins-The Only Proven Bedrock Conservative In This Race

2004-07-09T01:41:00.000-07:00

Collins Announces Running Mate - Common Sense

ATLANTA - Congressman Mac Collins, Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Georgia, announced today that he has selected his running mate for the Senate seat being vacated by the retirement of Zell Miller.

Mac Collins: Common Sense and I have been serving the people of Georgia for more than 20 years. In my 12 years in the House of Representatives, I have always tried to bring common sense values to any issue.

It is only right that Common Sense and I continue to represent Georgia in the U.S. Senate.

I have enough faith in the people of Georgia to use common sense when selecting their Senator on July 20.

Six years is a long time to gamble on a moderate (Isakson), who often voted with Cynthia McKinney, or someone (Cain) who will say whatever he needs to get elected, but who has no voting record and is an unknown quantity.

I am the only proven bedrock conservative in this race, and Common Sense has served us all well for a longtime. I am convinced he will be a strong and valuable running mate in this election.

Following a debate in Savannah, Collins talked about Cain:

It is a great thing that we don't legislate in sound bites. Mr. Cain has some great sound bites and one-liners, but he lacks any real legislative experience and that shows in these debates.

He talks a lot about band-aids, and bold leadership, but band-aids are for cuts, not legislation. For all of his bluster, he really lacks much in the way of substance on these issues.

Collins is traveling the state of Georgia with a conservative, issues-oriented campaign based on limited government, lower taxes, tort reform and local control of issues.

For Mac Collins's Website: "iBackMac" (Click Here)

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Cheney Proud To Stand With Calder Clay

2004-07-02T07:16:00.000-07:00

Calder Clay is the Republican candidate running against Democrat Rep. Jim Marshall for Georgia’s Third Congressional District seat.

Macon Telegraph
Cheney stumps for Clay in Macon

Don Schanche Jr.: Vice President Cheney issued a glowing endorsement of Republican congressional candidate Calder Clay III and gave a pep talk to the party faithful Thursday during a brief campaign stop in Macon.

"The president and I are proud to stand with him today, and look forward to working with him for a good many years to come," Cheney told a crowd that paid at least $500 apiece for a chance to see the nation's second-in-command up close at the Wilson Convention Center.

Clay estimated that he came close to his fund-raising goal of $150,000. More than 120 supporters were on hand.

Clay, 46, faces a rematch with Democrat Jim Marshall, 56, who managed a narrow victory for the congressional seat two years ago. Neither man has opposition in the July 20 primary. Voters will make their choice Nov. 2.

Cheney also visited Middle Georgia to campaign for Clay during the 2002 race.

"I was proud to campaign with Calder two years ago," Cheney said. "He ran a tough, smart race and came very close to victory. He's going to run even harder this year, and the outcome is going to be different."

Frequently interrupted by applause, Cheney said Clay is needed in Congress to support the Bush administration's policies abroad and at home.

Cheney recounted a list of recent achievements in the war on terrorism, including the formal transfer of sovereignty to the new Iraqi government and the beginnings of an Iraqi prosecution against former dictator Saddam Hussein.

The longest burst of applause followed Cheney's assertion, "The United States will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our country."

In an interview after Cheney's speech, Clay listed several points on which he differs with his opponent.

The biggest difference, he said: "My opponent voted 73 percent of the time with Nancy Pelosi ... That's a failing grade in Middle Georgia, and we'll be pointing that out."

Pelosi, a California representative and House Minority Leader, is "the most liberal member of Congress," Clay said.

Calder Clay for U.S. Congress Website (Click Here)

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Zell Miller, Kerry Is Another Joe Btfsplk

2004-06-30T03:37:00.000-07:00

Paul Weyrich:

Senator Zell Miller, (D-GA) asked the audience if they remembered the comic strip “Li’l Abner”? Less than half did. He went on to explain that there was a character, Joe Btfsplk, who always had a rain cloud above his head.

No matter how sunny the rest of the strip was, Joe never escaped the rain cloud. That character in today’s politics, said Sen. Miller, is John Kerry.

Miller went on to recite all of the good economic news in today’s economy and then added, “Kerry’s talking about the Great Depression.”

It is true that politicians who take a glum view of the world don’t do as well as those who are positive and upbeat.

Bush, despite having weathered a recession, the effects of 9/11 and so on, is running mostly an upbeat positive campaign.

No President in recent times has had anything like the day-after-day negative coverage that Bush has experienced. It is unprecedented.

We hear now that even the Gallup poll says that a majority of Americans believe going into Iraq was a mistake. One can only speculate what the situation would be like if the media had not overblown every negative story possible.

Kerry says ... we have the worst economy since the Great Depression. In the Depression, as my father preached to me often, more than two in 10 Americans were unemployed. That is as opposed to 5.6 percent unemployment now.

The economy is growing at the fastest rate since 1984. The economy is creating jobs at a great rate but Kerry says they are minimum wage jobs.

Bush says half of the new jobs are above average in wages and benefits.

The leftist activists could care less about Senator Kerry. In fact, many just plain don’t like him. But they want Bush out so badly they will work feverishly to defeat him.

Zell Miller: "I don’t have any polls, but I think Bush will eventually prevail for two reasons.

First, when voters think about whom they really want to lead the country on the War on Terror, they will pick Bush. Bush is an outstanding leader and I’ve never seen Kerry offer leadership on anything in his twenty years in the Senate.

Second, Bush is a genuinely nice person. He is the sort of person you would like to have as your neighbor. He is friendly. He makes you feel comfortable.

Kerry is not a very nice person. He almost never smiles. He is arrogant. You wouldn’t want to live next door to him. Bush will win because he can relate to the average American voter and Kerry cannot.”

If Miller turns out to be correct, we will have to change the old adage “nice guys finish last.”

If Bush wins in part because he is a pleasant person, parents will be teaching their kids “Nice guys get elected President.”

Mac Collins "Trailing, With Bases Loaded"

2004-06-25T03:50:00.000-07:00

Congressman Mac Collins:

I have a very strong base, a grass-roots conservative base, and they are the ones who turn out to vote - especially when the chips are down.

Jim Tharpe, AJC: With 30 days until the July 20 primary, a recent poll indicated that more than 40 percent of Republican voters are still undecided in the Senate race.

So Collins spent part of last week on the hunt for the conservatives he hopes will propel him into an Aug. 10 runoff with Isakson.

At 6:30 a.m. Monday in Fayetteville, Collins was sipping coffee with the regulars at Melears Barbecue, a place where everybody really does know your name and the walls are decorated with patriotic banners, campaign posters and the shelves are laden with ceramic pigs.

Wearing a white dress shirt, red tie, slacks and size 15 cowboy boots - he boasts he has the biggest feet in Congress - Collins sat with a dozen members of the local "coffee club."

Retired four-star Army Gen. William Livsey, 73, traded friendly insults with his fellow coffee drinkers and feigned a lukewarm endorsement.

Livsey is actually part of a coalition of military personnel pledging support for Collins that includes former Army Secretary Howard "Bo" Callaway and ex-Army Chief Warrant Officer Ron Young, a former prisoner of war in Iraq.

"I'm voting for Mac, even though he's never done anything for me," Livsey said.

Collins laughed and shot back, "You come cheap, General."

At Melears and at another coffee group an hour later in Griffin, Collins moved with ease, shaking hands, slapping backs and trading barbs.

Collins hopes his grass-roots approach will solidify his base in rural Georgia while he works to cut into Isakson's turf, the Republican-rich suburbs north of Atlanta. Collins needs both to win. But Collins seems unconcerned. He has, he said, faced tougher odds.

Isakson, who has run two unsuccessful statewide races, is better known and better funded. Collins has raised $1.7 million - including a $250,000 loan to himself - while Isakson has raised $5.5 million.

So, Mac Collins Is "Trailing, With Bases Loaded," - grass-roots conservative base, Veterans base, and the anti-abortion conservatives on 3rd base.

For Mac Collins's Website: "iBackMac" (Click Here)

Vote NO for SO SO Isakson!

2004-06-22T05:52:00.000-07:00

Nancy Stith, Georgia Right to Life:

Isakson says he is 23 out of 24 on the issues with National Right to Life.

Johnny Isakson is Purposely Deceiving you!! Johnny Isakson is hoping no one will check.

As of the time of this writing, Isakson has refused to mail in his survey to National Right to Life so that these facts can be verified.

We've been told, that in fact he filled out the survey and then placed it on file in HIS CAMPAIGN HEADQUARTERS. He did this SO THAT HE COULD TRUTHFULLY SAY HE FILLED OUT NRTL'S SURVEY! He has said that interested parties could come by and see it.

Ask him to fax it to you.

If he is SO pro-life, then why didn't Johnny Isakson return Georgia Right to Life's survey ... all the other candidates for US Senate did (Collins and Cain)... that is with the exception of the other pro-abortion candidates on the Democratic side?

If Johnny Isakson is SO pro-life, then why did he vote to repeal the current ban on abortions being performed at military hospitals just three weeks ago?

If Johnny Isakson is SO pro-life, then why does he claim that all "life Is special gift from God that should be respected and protected" and yet advocates (just three weeks ago in the Davis amendment) that a women should be free to "choose" to have her unborn child ripped from her womb?

If Johnny Isakson is SO, SO pro-life, then why does his voting record show him voting with the Pro-abort Democrats, more than any other Republican From Georgia?

If Johnny Isakson is SO, SO, SO pro-life, then why did he take more money from Republican pro-abortion groups than any other candidate in the Nation???

Please pass this on to as many Prolife voters as you can between now and July 20th. We must get the word out that Johnny Isakson is deceiving the pro-life community by his tricky politics.

We have known this man for 16 years and it is our opinion that he is portraying himself as something He is not!!!

If he will deceive you on this very important issue then what do you think he will do on your other issues?

Make no mistake Johnny Isakson is just as pro-abortion as he was when he was defeated by your vote twice before!

Vote NO for SO SO Isakson!

For the Sanctity of Life.

Miller, Chambliss Praise Senate

2004-06-17T03:09:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, June 16, 2004

Miller, Chambliss Praise Senate Confirmation of
William S. Duffey to Fill Northern District Judgeship

WASHINGTON – U.S. Senators Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) and Zell Miller (D-GA) proudly announce today’s U.S. Senate confirmation of Atlanta native William “Bill” S. Duffey of Atlanta to serve on the U. S. District Court in the Northern District of Georgia. The position became available once the Honorable J. Owen Forrester took senior status earlier this year.

Duffey currently serves as the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia and is a former partner at the Atlanta-based law firm of King & Spalding.

“Bill Duffey will serve the people in the Northern District with honesty and integrity,” said Chambliss. “I am proud to have played a role in seeing that this important position was filled by an outstanding Georgian,” said Chambliss.

“The Senate has confirmed an exceptionally qualified individual. Bill Duffey has served Georgia and this country so ably as U.S. Attorney and I know he will continue to serve us well on the U.S. District Court,” said Miller.

Earlier this year, Chambliss and Miller created a judicial screening panel to make recommendations on nominees to be forwarded to the White House in consideration for filling the vacancy. President Bush delivered Duffey’s nomination to the Senate on November 5, 2003.

Chambliss, who serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said it was an honor to help President Bush obtain confirmation for one of the president’s judicial nominees.

“This confirmation is great news and I hope my colleagues will continue confirming qualified judges as the Senate works through this legislative session,” said Chambliss.

Ralph Reed: It's Time To Party For The President

2004-06-15T02:57:00.000-07:00

Ken Mehlman: In April, you helped make national Party for the President Day a huge success, with over 5,000 parties in all 50 states with tens of thousands of the President's supporters who tuned in to hear Vice President Cheney.

Ralph Reed: It's Time To Party For The President, again.

The second national Party for the President Day will be Thursday, July 15.

Turn in your host and participant names to Amanda McPhail or Sarah Few in my office after you sign up online at http://www.GeorgeWBush.com/Party/ in order to get credit and have these numbers count toward your County Block Party Goal. You may call them in my office at 770-232-2929.

Georgia was one of the strongest states in the nation at the last Party for the President day in April, and we want to have a strong showing again on July 15. So sign up today. You should have your information in the database within 24 hours of signing up.

Thanks for all that you do for our great President.

All my best, Ralph Reed

Bush-Cheney '04 -Party for the President

Ken Mehlman: Again, parties with 5 or more guests who RSVP at GeorgeWBush.com, will include a conference call with a very special guest and each party will receive an updated packet of campaign material, including a new Presidential video, exclusive to Party for the President hosts.

We have an exciting new addition to this round of parties: we'll provide you with postcards that your party attendees can fill out and mail to likely supporters in your area!

We have a hard fight in the days ahead and the President needs your help. These fun, informal events will help grow the President's strong base of support in local communities and enlist thousands to join our campaign.

Congressman Mac Collins Cherishes Last Look

2004-06-13T02:03:00.000-07:00

Mac Collins: On Wednesday evening, I attended the Lying in State Ceremony for President Reagan in the Rotunda of the United States Capitol. Congress reserves this special honor for only a select few...It was a fitting tribute to our President and his family.

On Friday, my wife Julie and I attended the memorial service for President Reagan at the National Cathedral. We were honored to attend this service and give our respects to Mrs. Reagan and the other members of the Reagan family.

President Reagan embodied some of America's greatest qualities: integrity, civility and hope. His leadership paved the way for a better America and a safer world.

President Reagan believed in less government, lower taxes and a strong defense. For those who thought the government was the solution for America's problems, his reply was, "government is not the solution. Government is the problem."

Ronald Reagan was a president who, in a time of politicians, proved himself a statesman. He was a leader who, when others demanded compromise, preached conviction; a gentleman who, in time of average men, stood taller than anyone else.

He ranks as one of the finest men ever to hold the office. He was successful as a broadcaster, actor, union leader, Governor and President. But, above all else, he was a successful American whose legacy lives on across this land.

May God bless this great man, his family and this land that he so dearly loved.

Atlanta Journal Constitution
RONALD REAGAN: 1911-2004: SOUND BITES BACK HOME

Congressman cherishes last look

When U.S. Rep. Mac Collins received one of just 2,100 invitations to the most exclusive event of the commemorative week, he had a question: Could his wife, Julie, accompany him to Ronald Reagan's funeral Friday at the National Cathedral?

Word came that spouses were welcome, and she flew up Thursday to join him.

In a ceremony whose every detail was dictated by Reagan and his family, from the speakers to the songs, Collins said he'll most remember the moment the casket was rolled down the cathedral aisle one last time.

"That would be the last time you would view him," he said. "That was the most passionate time of the service."

--- Staff writers Gayle White, Andrea Jones and Matthew C. Quinn in Atlanta and Bob Kemper in Washington

Read more on this subject in Related Hot Topics:

Collins Praises President Reagan’s Legacy of Freedom and Conservative Principles

Congressman Mac Collins Mourns Death of Former President Reagan

Congressman Mac Collins - "Taxpayer Hero"

U.S. Senator Zell Miller, D-GA - Abu Ghraib Prison

2004-06-11T02:56:00.000-07:00

Floor Statement on the Situation at Abu Ghraib prison
Remarks as Delivered on the Senate Floor- May 13, 2004

Mr. President, here we go again, here we go again.

Rushing to give aid and comfort to the enemy.

Pushing and pulling and shoving and leaping over one another to assign blame and point the finger at America the Terrible.

Lining up in long lines at the microphones to offer apologies to those poor, pitiful Iraqi prisoners.

Of course, I do not condone all the things that went on in that prison, but I for one, Mr. President, refuse to join in this national Act of Contrition over it.

Those who are wringing their hands and shouting so loudly for “heads to roll” over this seem to have conveniently overlooked the fact that someone’s head HAS rolled - that of another innocent American brutally murdered by terrorists.

Why is it? Why is it that there’s more indignation over a photo of a prisoner with underwear on his head than over the video of a young American with no head at all?

Why is it that some in this country still don’t get that we are at war? A war against terrorists who are plotting to kill us every day. Terrorists who will murder Americans at any time any place any chance they get.

And yet here we are, America on its knees, in front of our enemy, begging for their forgiveness over the mistreatment of prisoners.

Showing the enemy and the world once again how easily America can get sidetracked and how easily America can turn against it self.

I worry that the HWA - the Hand-Wringers of America - will add to their membership and continue to bash our country ad nauseam. And in doing so, hand over more innocent Americans to the enemy on a silver platter.

So I stand with Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma, who stated that he’s “more outraged by the outrage” than by the treatment of those prisoners.

More outraged by the outrage. It’s a good way of putting it. That’s exactly how this Senator from Georgia feels.

Thank you Mr. President. I yield the floor.

Calder Clay Comments on the Passing of "The Father of the Modern Republicans"

2004-06-10T03:25:00.000-07:00

WARNER ROBINS,GA-Calder Clay, Republican candidate for Georgia's 3rd Congressional District, joins the nation in mourning the loss of the nation's 40th President, Ronald Reagan, who passed away on Saturday.

Reagan's great love for the United States and his eternal optimism for its future earned him the respect and love of the nation. "It was a sad hour for America" states Clay, "I have utmost admiration for President Reagan's unwavering faith in conservative American values and the character of our people."

Calder Clay also pays tribute to the huge impact that President Reagan had on the political world. "Reagan gave rise to a new generation of conservatives, challenging democrats to redefine themselves while reshaping the Republican party."

"President Reagan made it popular to wave the American flag again by restoring the faith American people had in our country. He renewed our nation's confidence by ridding the world of the communist threat while leading the United States to a Cold War victory."

"I have great respect for Reagan's ability to reform the Republican party, our nation and the world while maintaining constant optimism and patriotism along with a friendly and modest demeanor," states Clay.

Calder Clay for U.S. Congress Website (Click Here)

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

Calder Clay sees the big picture

Calder Clay Spotlighted by National Republican Congressional Committee

Jim Marshall No Friend to Taxpayer

Isakson as "a threat to the unborn"

2004-06-09T02:54:00.000-07:00

Abortion foes target Isakson

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution - Jim Tharpe:

An anti-abortion group that wields clout with the Republican Party's most conservative wing took a shot at Republican U.S. Senate candidate Johnny Isakson on Monday.

The political arm of Georgia Right to Life endorsed both U.S. Rep. Mac Collins and ...Herman Cain in the race for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate.

The endorsements are a slap at Isakson.

"It's very clear we are promoting these two candidates in order to eliminate pro-abortion Johnny Isakson," said Dan Becker, director of Georgia Right to Life's political action committee.

The anti-abortion group will send its endorsements to 50,000 Georgians in a newsletter.

Becker said his organization, which he said has identified 225,000 anti-abortion households in Georgia, was displeased with Isakson's recent vote to permit self-funded abortions on overseas military bases.

He said Isakson cast that vote while emphasizing his anti-abortion votes in campaign appearances.

"We are very definitely going after Johnny Isakson for the duplicity of these statements," Becker declared. "We find a large inconsistency between what he is saying to our constituency and our donors and what he is doing."

Campaign manager Chris Carr said Isakson's position on abortion is in accord with National Right to Life on 23 of 24 critical issues and that Isakson has a 92 percent rating with the Christian Coalition.

Collins, in accepting the endorsement, pledged to "continue my 100 percent pro-life record" if he is elected to the Senate, while Cain characterized Isakson as "a threat to the unborn."

Becker said exit polls show that about 6 percent of Georgians cast ballots based solely on a candidate's stand on abortion.

"They're single-issue voters, and this is a significant number," Becker said. "It's more than the margin of victory in most elections."

For Mac Collins's Website: "iBackMac" (Click Here)

Read more on this subject in Related Hot Topics:

Mac Collins Fighting for Ban on Partial-Birth Abortion, Where's Johnny?

With two months to go, Isakson and abortion foes reach a fork in the road

Isakson’s stance on abortion not firm

Collins Endorsed by Republican National Coalition for Life PAC

Congressman Mac Collins Mourns Death of Former President Reagan

2004-06-08T02:45:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON, D.C.- Georgia Republican Congressman Mac Collins was deeply grieved Saturday upon hearing about the death of former President Ronald Reagan.

The Congressman issued this statement:

Julie and I deeply mourn the loss of former President Ronald Reagan.

Ronald Reagan was a great president and make America stand tall again in the world. He definitely made America as he promised to do a "Shining City on the Hill." He made Americans proud to be Americans.

Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency when America was undergoing an Iranian hostage crisis, the inflation rate was very high, unemployment was very high, and Americans were waiting in lines to get gasoline for their vehicles.

Ronald Reagan proposed an economic and defense program and despite all the criticism, he stuck with it. He created the longtime peacetime job expansion in history during his presidency which has not yet been surpassed.

He stopped the communists in Grenada, he took action against terrorists in the Middle East.

He revived the Republican Party after the debacle of Watergate. Because of Ronald Reagan, Republicans gained the majority in the Senate. He paved the way for the later GOP gains in Congress--especially in the House where the GOP achieved majority in 1994 after close to 40 years in the minority.

Ronald Reagan said "nyet" to Russia. He put communism just like he promised to do into the "ash heap of history."

Ronald Reagan- a great man, a great president, and one who will live on in history as one of the greatest America ever had.

For Mac Collins's Website: "iBackMac" (Click Here)

The Weekly
Congressman Mac Collins Mourns Death of Former President Reagan

The Weekly
Collins Says More Government Bureaucracy Will Not Improve Intelligence Gathering

Arab Outrage

2004-06-06T04:27:00.000-07:00

(Sent to us by Harold and Alice Wood)

I will be the first to admit, what the MP's in the prison did is not in accordance with the Geneva Convention. However, when was the last time that we fought a war with an enemy that did observe the rules of war.

Remember the Baatan Death March, remember the ovens in Poland, Austria and Hungry? Remember the beating our prisoners endured at the hands of the Viet Cong?

To h*ll with Arab outrage!

Arabs are "outraged" over the humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of a few American servicemen.

Where were these "outraged" Arabs when necrophiliacs in Fallujah mutilated four American soldiers by stepping on their burnt skulls and hung their burnt bodies from a bridge?

Where were these "outraged" Arabs when "Palestinians" mutilated and dragged the bodies of two IDF soldiers in Ramallah?

Where were these "outraged" Arabs when 19 Muslims blew up the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11/01?

Where were these "outraged" Arabs when Muslims continue to slaughter Sudanese Christians?

Where were these "outraged" Arabs when Muslims blew up Pan Am Flight 103?

Where were these "outraged" Arabs when Muslims bombed the marine barracks in Lebanon killing 241 Americans in 1983?

Where were these "outraged" Arabs when Muslims bombed the USS COLE?

Where were these "outraged" Arabs when Muslims bombed the American embassies in Africa killing 231 people?

Where were these "outraged" Arabs when Abu Mazen engineered the "Black September" Terror Attack during the Munich Olympics, which killed 11 Israeli athletes and a U.S. citizen?

Where were these "outraged" Arabs when ABu Abbas threw the wheel-chair bound Leon Klinghoffer overboard on the Achille Lauro?

Where were these "outraged" Arabs when "Palestinian" rioters torched the Jewish-only Joseph's Tomb ?

Where were these "outraged" Arabs when the Taliban blew up the Buddhist statues in Afghanistan?

Where were these "outraged" Arabs when simultaneous blasts rocked two of downtown Istanbul's synagogues killing at least 15 people and wounding at least 140?

Where were these "outraged" Arabs when "Palestinians" handed out candies celebrating the deaths of 3000 Americans on 9-11-01?

Where were these "outraged" Arabs when Jemaah Islamiyah suicide bombers killed 12 people and injured 150 at the J.W. Marriott in Jakarta, Indonesia?

Where were these "outraged" Arabs when bomb attacks in Morocco killed at least 28 people and injure more than 100?

Where were these "outraged" Arabs when suicide bombers killed 12 people at an Israeli-owned beach hotel in Kenya and two missiles narrowly miss an airliner carrying Israelis?

Where were these "outraged" Arabs when nearly 200 people, including seven Americans, were killed in bombings in a nightclub district of the Indonesian island of Bali?

Where were these "outraged" Arabs when 300,000 Iraqi's bodies were found in mass graves?

Where was their indignation, folks? You know where? NOWHERE.

It was nowhere because Arab outrage when someone non-Arab is a victim, does not exist, it does not rate.

Why? Because the Arab culture knows nothing but how to be proud and arrogant. The culture is a cohesive political glob of people united simply by political identity and not at all by morality.

It's time for the rest of us, who do know the difference between right and wrong, to tell the world that these "outraged" idiots are too pathetic to warrant any sympathy from the rest of us.

We're waiting for these "outraged" Arabs to get up the manhood to be disgusted By Their Own people for the disgusting crimes they have committed against others.

Then we'll shed a tear!

Please forward this so we may have as many "Outraged Americans" as possible!

Where Have The "Outraged Democrats" been with all of the Above going on, that are now outraged with our military and wanting their heads?

Thanks to Harold and Alice Wood Of Powder Springs, Ga.

Mac Collins Fighting for Ban on Partial-Birth Abortion, Where's Johnny?

2004-06-03T04:24:00.000-07:00
Mac Collins Calls Judges Ruling on Abortion "Barbaric"

Congressman Mac Collins: A San Francisco judges' ruling that the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act is unconstitutional is yet another example of how liberals and moderates are assaulting our moral values.

The procedure of partial-birth abortion is barbaric and so is this ruling. It is wrong to perform this procedure. It is wrong to deny life to an innocent baby and cause it pain.

Today's ruling is another example of how activist judges are taking the law into their own hands."

Keeping with his consistent 100% pro-life record, Mac Collins is an original co-sponsor of the Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act.

IBackMac: Isakson voted 14 times in favor of pro-abortion legislation (Click Here)

The ACLJ (American Center for Law and Justice) filed an amicus brief with the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York representing 25 members of Congress who co-sponsored the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act.

The ACLJ represents itself and 25 members of Congress. They include: Robert B. Aderholt (R-AL), Todd Akin (R-MO), Bob Beauprez (R-CO), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Roy Blunt (R-MO), Michael C. Burgess (R-TX), Michael "Mac" Collins (R-GA), Jo Ann S. Davis (R-VA), Jim DeMint (R-SC), Jo Ann H. Emerson (R-MO), Tom Feeney (R-FL), Jeff Flake (R-AZ), Trent Franks (R-AZ), Scott Garrett (R-NJ), Phil Gingrey (R-GA), Melissa A. Hart (R-PA), Ernest J. Istook, Jr. (R-OK), Walter Jones, Jr. (R-NC), Ric Keller (R-FL), Marilyn Musgrave (R-CO), Charles "Chip" Pickering, Jr. (R-MS), Joseph R. Pitts (R-PA), Jim R. Ryun (R-KS), Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN), John Sullivan (R-OK).

Now here’s the question of the day!

WHERE'S JOHNNY?

Georgia Democrats have Johnny Isakson

Isakson is not a "moderate." He voted on opposite sides of most issues from Mac Collins and Saxby Chambliss.

Johnny Isakson voted on the same sides as Nancy Polosi and Dick Gephardt.

Johnny can’t erase his record on abortion. Isakson ran for governor in 1990 on a pro-choice platform, stating his support for legalized abortion. He first ran for Senate earlier as a pro-choice candidate, and in this race has been endorsed by the pro-choice Republican Main Street Partnership.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

Georgia Senate Candidate Gets Pro-Life Endorsement, Isakson Criticized

With two months to go, Isakson and abortion foes reach a fork in the road

Isakson’s stance on abortion not firm

Collins Endorsed by Republican National Coalition for Life PAC

Republicans vs Democrats

2004-06-02T13:09:00.000-07:00
Sent to Us By Eric and Charis Barker)

A woman in a hot air balloon realized she was lost. She lowered her altitude and spotted a man in a boat below.

She shouted to him, "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."

The man consulted his portable GPS and replied, "You're in a hot air balloon approximately 30 feet above a ground elevation of 2346 feet above sea level. You are 31 degrees, 14.97 minutes north latitude and 100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude."

She rolled her eyes and said, ""You must be a Republican."

"I am," replied the man. "How did you know?"

"Well," answered the balloonist, "everything you told me sounds technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and I'm still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help."

The man smiled and responded, "You must be a Democrat."

"I am," replied the balloonist. "How did you know?"

"Well," said the man, "you don't know where you are or where you're going. You have risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air.

You made a promise that you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. Now, you're in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but somehow, it's now my fault."

Thanks to Eric and Charis Barker Of Milledgeville Ga

Congressman Mac Collins - "Taxpayer Hero"

2004-06-02T03:09:00.000-07:00
WASHINGTON, D.C.- Georgia Republican Congressman Mac Collins, a member of the House Ways and Means Committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence was named a "taxpayer hero" Tuesday by the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste (CCAGW).

CCAGW in its "2003 Congressional Ratings" said Collins scored 87 percent on 38 "key votes" in the House.

The votes ranged on legislation designed to "prevent pork barrel projects, to reducing discretionary spending by a mere 1 percent, to the Medicare Prescription Drug Program."

Collins said he was "pleased" at being named a "taxpayer hero" by the group. He said he was "sorry" that the group disagrees with him on his Medicare vote but stated, "I voted for the bill because Medicare needs to be overhauled."

Collins also said he voted in favor of the highway reauthorization bill because transportation infrastructure is critical to national economic growth and the economy of Georgia. "In addition, the transportation bill would create thousands of jobs in the state of Georgia."

For the first time since 1994, there were no CCAGW Taxpayer Superheroes (with scores of 100 percent) either in the House or the Senate.

The House had only 68 Taxpayer Heroes with scores of 80 percent or above. In the Senate, there were only 11 Taxpayer Heroes.

Pete Pichaske: CAGW takes after liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans. The group is an equal opportunity nag.

For Mac Collins's Website: "iBackMac" (Click Here)

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

Collins Endorsed by National Right to Life PAC

Georgia Right to Life PAC Censures Johnny Isakson for "Pro-Choice" Vote

Is Johnny Isakson Giving Up?

Calder Clay sees the big picture

2004-06-01T07:24:00.000-07:00
Calder Clay Garners U.S. Chamber's Endorsement

"Calder Clay sees the big picture - he understands that America's businesses are the spark plug for economic prosperity and job growth," said Bill Miller, Chamber vice president and political director.

"He's earned the U.S. Chamber's endorsement because we believe he will support business, both large and small, on issues such as taxes, health care and legal and regulatory reform."

The U.S. Chamber has become a major player in national elections, endorsing candidates who have demonstrated support for business priorities and will work to advance a pro-growth agenda in Congress.

During the 2002 election cycle, the Chamber committed maximum resources to the tightest and most closely contested congressional races and the results speak for themselves: Chamber-backed candidates won 22 of 27 key House races and 8 out of 10 Senate contests.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is the world's largest business federation, representing more than three million businesses of every size, sector and region.

Clay has been active in several Republican elections, worked on Sen. Saxby Chambliss' finance team and served as a district chair for the Bush-Cheney campaign 2000.

He has pledged support to legal and tax reform if elected to Congress and has already earned the endorsements of state Governor Sonny Perdue and all eight GOP members of the Georgia delegation to the House of Representatives.

Governor Sonny Perdue: I am convinced that Calder is the best candidate in this race. His views are directly aligned with the ideals held by the conservative residents of the 3rd district. You deserve representation in Washington that reflects your morals and beliefs, and Calder Clay is the man for the job.

We Support Calder Clay. Georgia's Third District in the United States Congress needs Calder Clay.

Calder Clay for U.S. Congress Website (Click Here)

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

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Jim Marshall No Friend to Taxpayer

Is Johnny Isakson Giving Up?

2004-05-28T06:58:00.000-07:00
Savannah Morning News, Larry Peterson: U.S. Rep. Johnny Isakson, also seeking the GOP nomination to the seat Democrat Zell Miller is giving up, has skipped most of the candidates' debates held so far.

Contrasting styles in Republican Senate race

Mainstays of the debate circuit, the Republican U.S. Senate candidates are staunch conservatives.

Mac Collins and Herman Cain have become the Republican Odd Couple of the U.S. Senate race.

Debate after debate, Collins, a middle Georgia congressman, and Cain, a McDonough businessman, have been the fixtures, usually without Isakson.

So it was Monday, when 200 people showed up to hear them at Skidaway Island Methodist Church.

Both are about as conservative as they can get.

They spoke out for free enterprise, against abortion, for President Bush's policies in Iraq, against federal involvement in education, for tax reform and against the "liberal media."

But there the similarity ends.

Cain wants to go to Washington to shake things up.

Collins says he's been shaping them up. And he wants to do it some more.

Collins said he's proud of the Republican revolution that began with the GOP takeover of the House in 1994 and led to tax cuts and welfare reform.

While Cain confidently speaks of the need for "bold leadership," Collins talks more humbly of serving constituents and "respecting their requests."

Their contrasting styles and leadership approaches could be worth watching.

"The proof is in the pudding," he (Collins) says. "There's a lot to government that you learn from experience. It's different from running a business.

You can't... replace experience with good sound bites. ... It's no time ... to send someone without the experience."

Collins, a high school graduate and long-time small businessman who likes to quip that he attended "UHK" or the "University of Hard Knocks," had a zinger of his own.

When asked how he'd like to serve in the Senate if Democratic candidate John Kerry is elected president, Collins grimaced, then quipped, "This is a house of worship."

After the laughter faded, he added. "We all have to pray that it doesn't happen."

For Mac Collins's Website: "iBackMac" (Click Here)

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

Collins Endorsed by National Right to Life PAC

Georgia Right to Life PAC Censures Johnny Isakson for "Pro-Choice" Vote

Isakson Spells “Doom”; Cain Has “No Traction”

Another Conservative Endorsement for Mac Collins

Calder Clay Receives National Senior Association's Award

2004-05-27T01:25:00.000-07:00
The Guardian award is presented to Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate who vote "senior friendly."

The honorary award is also given to candidates who score 60 or above on a 100 point scale. This test indicates how the candidates would have voted had he or she been an actual member of Congress.

Martin said he was pleased to honor Clay who has pledged to:

1. Protect Social Security and Medicare.

2. Support prescription drug benefits for seniors.

3. Favor repeal of the tax on Social Security benefits.

4. Support long term care tax incentives.

Martin also noted that Clay "will work hard to abolish the estate or so-called 'death tax, a 55 % confiscatory tax levided on your assets before they pass on to your beneficiaries."

Previous recipients of the Guardian of Seniors' Rights Award from the Peach State include Senator Zell Miller and Senator Saxby Chambliss as well as Republican Reps. Mac Collins, John Linder, and Jack Kingston.

Calder Clay for U.S. Congress Website (Click Here)

Mac Collins Gets Pro-Life Endorsement, Isakson Criticized

2004-05-23T04:28:00.000-07:00
Georgia Right to Life PAC Director Dan Becker: We commend Congressman Mac Collins, Max Burns, Nathan Deal, Phil Gingrey, and John Linder...who upheld the current government policy restricting the use of taxpayer funded facilities to allow abortions.

Georgia Senate Candidate (Mac Collins) Gets Pro-Life Endorsement, Isakson Criticized

Steven Ertelt-LifeNews.com Editor: Georgia Congressman Mac Collins has garnered the endorsement of the National Right to Life Committee, in a move his campaign says shows he is the most pro-life candidate running for the Republican Senate nomination.

Isakson's frequent votes backing abortion has earned him support from the pro-abortion group Republicans for Choice.

Isakson, who has been saying he is pro-life in campaign speeches, was wrong to have voted for a Congressional measure this week that would have allowed abortions at hospitals on taxpayer-funded U.S. military bases.

In addition to the military abortion vote, Isakson voted against President Bush's Mexico City policy and for the use of taxpayer funding to research abortion drugs such as RU-486.

IBackMac: Isakson voted 14 times in favor of pro-abortion legislation (Click Here)

The Concerned Women of America's PAC has also endorsed Collins.

“I am honored to earn the endorsement of the National Right to Life PAC,” commented Collins. “The pro-life issue is very serious and provides another example of how liberals and moderates are assaulting our moral values.

Mark Crutcher-WorldNetDaily: The problem is the belief that the unborn child is a living human being is a biological fact. That means they have as much right to live their life as anyone else.

There is no basis for being opposed to abortion other than the belief that it takes the life of an innocent and helpless baby.

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CCCs: Counterfeit Christians In Congress

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Georgia Right to Life PAC Censures Johnny Isakson for "Pro-Choice" Vote

Calder Clay Spotlighted by National Republican Congressional Committee

2004-05-20T03:58:00.000-07:00
Calder Clay is the Republican candidate running against Democrat Rep. Jim Marshall for Georgia’s Third Congressional District seat.

National Republican Congressional Committee Website (Click Here)

The National Republican Congressional Committee spotlighted Calder Clay for Congress on its website this week. The national committee lists the Clay campaign as a prime-pick up opportunity for the GOP this year.

Citing the support Clay has received from Governor Perdue, Senator Chambliss, and Georgia's eight Republican Congressmen, the NRCC focused on Clay's strong conservative message and his desire to bring common sense represntation to middle Georgia.

"I am excited to be the spotlight candidate for the NRCC this week." stated Clay. "The leaders of the Republican Party in Congress have seen how strong my campaign is and how we are gaining momentum throughout the 3rd district.

Speaker of the House, J. Dennis Hastert Campaigns in Macon for Calder Clay

Calder Clay: I am honored that the GOP leadership believes in my efforts, and I look forward to be a Congressman who has access to Speaker Hastert and the leadership in the House of Representatives."

Calder Clay for U.S. Congress Website (Click Here)

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

Jim Marshall No Friend to Taxpayer

Speaker of the House, J. Dennis Hastert Campaigns in Macon for Calder Clay

Congressman Charlie Norwood Endorses Calder Clay for U.S. Congress

Calder Clay Qualifies for 3rd Congressional District Seat

Isakson Spells “Doom”; Cain Has “No Traction”

2004-05-18T06:17:00.000-07:00
Government Is Not God PAC (GING-PAC) Endorses Collins, Says: Isakson Spells “Doom”; Cain Has “No Traction”

Another Conservative Endorsement for Mac Collins

ATLANTA— Today, Rep. Mac Collins, Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, received the endorsement of the Government Is Not God PAC (GING-PAC).

This marks the seventh endorsement Collins has earned from conservative groups.

GING-PAC, Government Is Not God Website (Click Here) released the following statement:

Virtually the only old fashioned "blue dog" conservative Democrat in the Senate, Zell Miller, is retiring. Georgia has trended Republican for some time, and two years ago social conservative Saxby Chambliss defeated a Democrat incumbent in the Senate race.

With Zell Miller’s seat now open, at first glance it would appear easy for a Republican to win. Unfortunately, Republican Congressman Johnny Isakson, who has consistently voted pro-abortion, entered the race early and as a result took the lead.

There are two social conservatives running in the primary. One is Herman Cain, a businessman who was the CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, and the other is an experienced legislator, Congressman Michael "Mac" Collins.

GING-PAC normally does not become involved in expensive primary races; however, a victory in the primary by Isakson would spell doom in November.

The pro-life movement is the heart of the Republican Party in Georgia. Should Isakson win the primary, social-conservatives will not work for or vote for him in the fall.

Not only would a Democrat win the seat, but lower voter turnout could endanger the vote count for George W. Bush in that state.

Herman Cain would be a viable candidate if he had some prior experience in elected office, which he does not.

Unfortunately, his campaign has no traction in Georgia other than to take votes from the viable social conservative in the race, Congressman Mac Collins.

A runoff is probable. GING-PAC believes it is imperative that Congressman Collins wins the Republican primary and for that reason he has our endorsement and our financial support.

Collins has also earned the support of numerous conservative leaders from across the state including many long-time sheriffs, state legislators and local business leaders.

For Mac Collins's Website: "iBackMac" (Click Here)

Dick Cheney Brought Political Muscle To Georgia

2004-05-18T04:43:00.000-07:00
POOLER — Vice President Dick Cheney brought political muscle and a flurry of fat checks to the re-election campaign of 12th District U.S. Rep. Max Burns at a fund-raising luncheon Monday.

Cheney stumps for Georgia congressman

By SONJI JACOBS -The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The vice president also used the opportunity to campaign for the Bush-Cheney 2004 ticket and took a few shots at the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.

While most political watchers consider Georgia to be solidly Republican in the presidential race, both national parties are watching the 12th District election closely. Four Democrats are campaigning to challenge Burns in the general election.

"We knew going in this was a district created for the Democrats," Burns said. "We knew it was going to be a hard re-election. But we're going to be ready. I wouldn't want to run against me."

Cheney declared to a standing ovation..."The United States will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our nation."

Bush Buckhead Visit Is Brief But Lucrative

2004-05-18T04:20:00.000-07:00
Three-hour stopover nets $3.2 million from some of biggest names in business.

Bush goes to Buckhead

By TOM BAXTER, MICHAEL PEARSON-The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

President George W. Bush breezed in and out of Atlanta on Monday in a four-hour, drive-time visit that netted $3.2 million from some of Georgia's biggest names in business.

To attend a dinner in Nardelli's private gym ran $15,000. To sit at the same table with the president cost $25,000 per person, the limit for donations to a Republican National Committee fund — or $50,000 per couple, according to those attending.

For the price of a small economy sedan, some 300 attendees were treated to steak, potatoes, and — according to one donor — "a medley of greens."

State GOP chairman Alec Poitevint called the event in Atlanta "perhaps the largest private fund-raiser in the history of the state of Georgia."

"Bush is here! Bush is here!" screamed 9-year-old Rachel Filsoof as she ran down the street in front of her house wearing a hat in the shape and colors of an American flag.

"Republicans are just so strong and so right," Rachel shouted before she, her brother, and their mother, Teresa, headed up the street for a closer look.

Over 100 Veterans Announce Support For Mac Collins

2004-05-17T09:22:00.000-07:00
Today, Rep. Mac Collins, Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, announced 107 Veterans have joined the coalition dubbed "100+ Veterans for Mac."

Members include, Honorary Chairmen: Former Congressman and Secretary of the Army, Howard "Bo" Callaway and Ron Young, former Iraqi War POW, Chairman: General William Livsey (Ret.) and Vice-Chairman: CSM Eddie Roberts (Ret.).

"We are supporting Mac because we believe he is the best man for the job," the group said in a letter sent to Veterans across the State. "A seat in the U.S. Senate is a position of high honor and responsibility and we need individuals of strong character and integrity."

"Mac Collins fits that description. With the challenges facing our nation, we need Mac Collins in the U.S. Senate now, more than ever."

"I am humbled by the support of these fine men and women," said Collins.

This is just another example of the extensive grassroots support Mac Collins has.

As a member of the House Intelligence Committee, Collins led delegations to Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003. In 2004, Collins traveled to Vietnam to research and find additional information on missing POWs.

Bush Visits Buckhead Today

2004-05-17T08:53:00.000-07:00
Bush mines rich vein in Buckhead

Presidential visit to Home Depot CEO Robert Nardelli's home expected to raise $2 million-plus for Bush campaign.

AJC-BEN SMITH & TOM BAXTER: The Buckhead ZIP code that has given more campaign money to President Bush than any other in Georgia will host the commander-in-chief for a fund-raiser today.

Nardelli's ZIP code, 30327, has donated a larger share of the $5.5 million given by Georgians to Bush than any other address in the state.

Robert Nardelli, chief executive officer of Home Depot, will host the president and his supporters at his mansion just north of Mount Paran Road.

If it goes well for the president, he will leave Atlanta with at least $2.25 million in new donations for his campaign war chest, which surpassed the $200 million mark in April. That's if the 300 people who are expected for the $15,000-a-couple dinner actually attend.

The sum, cited by state Republican officials, doesn't include a $4,000-a-couple reception and the additional $50,000 supporters must cough up to his campaign or his party to sit at the president's table.

"Bob Nardelli is a very strong and respected businessman, and he and Mike Eskew, [CEO] of UPS, have been very much involved in putting this thing together," said U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.).

"It's a shot in the arm when you have the president of the United States come down. It bodes well for all of our candidates around the state."

Earlier in the day, Vice President Dick Cheney is scheduled to appear at a fund-raising event outside Savannah on behalf of U.S. Rep. Max Burns (R-Ga.).

Also among the invited is an A-list of Atlanta business leaders including Georgia-Pacific Co. Chief Executive A.D. "Pete" Correll, Coca-Cola Co. board member Don Keough, Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, SunTrust CEO Phil Humann and Reynolds Plantation co-developer Jamie Reynolds.

Not all Democrats get a bashing at Georgia GOP convention

2004-05-17T05:07:00.000-07:00
By DICK PETTYS, AP Political Writer

Georgia Republicans opened their annual convention Friday with an unusual tribute to a Democrat.

U.S. Sen. Zell Miller.. drew a standing ovation from delegates before the convention was even an hour old when Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie paid him tribute.

Gillespie told reporters he has "a great deal of respect" for Miller and declared the party "would not be competitive for that Senate seat had Senator Miller decided to seek re-election."

The race for Miller's seat will top the Georgia ballot this fall and a three-way battle for the Republican nomination was in full view as delegates checked in.

A small group called NPAC - Network of Politically Active Christians - distributed bumper stickers and T-shirts calling the presumed front-runner, U.S. Rep. Johnny Isakson, a "certified moderate."

"If Johnny would say that he's a moderate, I wouldn't be standing out here. But he's portraying himself as a conservative," said Tim Echols, a religious broadcaster from Athens who supports Isakson's rival, U.S. Rep. Mac Collins, in the Senate race.

Collins leveled the same charge when he qualified for the election, and continued in a similar vein Friday while greeting delegates at the convention.

With a war on terrorism underway and "an assault on our moral values from the courts, people just don't feel like it's time to send a moderate to Washington to be a part of the most powerful legislative body in the world," he said.

Gillespie...brought the audience to its feet with applause when he slammed Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy for likening the U.S. treatment of prisoners in Iraq to that of the former regime.

Most American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan "serve honorably every single day," he said. "They are brave. They deserve our respect and appreciation, not slander from the floor of the Senate."

Dick Pettys has covered Georgia government and politics since 1970.

A Rising Political Star in Middle Georgia

2004-05-15T07:11:00.001-07:00
Johnny Grant III of Milledgeville Georgia is running for the 25th District Senate Seat. He is our Political Rising Star.

He is the Baldwin County Republican Party Chairman, 3rd Congressional District Republican Party Vice Chairman, a Georgia Republican Party State Committee member, and a newly elected delegate to the 2004 National Republican Party Convention.

He was chosen, as part of a group of eight Republican candidates, to greet President Bush at the Greene County Airport.

JOHNNY: "I welcomed him to the 25th Senate District and told him I was running for this Senate Seat. He thanked me for running and wished me "Good Luck." It was tremendously exciting to meet the most powerful man in the world!"

Tom Baxter with the AJC: Bush thanks supporters on Georgia visit

Johnny Grant III has a great news story to tell.

Johnny remembers..."Baldwin County Republican Party could meet in the front seat of a pickup truck."

He remembers..."Running for a county commission seat in the 80's as a Democrat. We all decided that, given the makeup of the district, I had no choice but to run as a Democrat, if I wanted to have a shot"

The Georgia Political landscape has changed. For the first time in 130 years we have a Republican Governor, and a Republican Senate.

Now Johnny is looking forward...Of having more Southern Democrats join the Republican Party.

We are all looking forward...Of having a Republican House.

We are all proud of Johnny Grant and will support him 100%

From CBlountBlogs 4/3/2004

President Bush- I'm Johnny Grant and I'm Running for the Senate

Johnny Grant of Milledgeville Georgia is running for the 25th District Senate Seat.

A group of about eight Republican candidates for the General Assembly were chosen to be the greet team at the Greene County Airport.

JOHNNY: "I welcomed him to the 25th Senate District and told him I was running for this Senate Seat. He thanked me for running and wished me "Good Luck." It was tremendously exciting to meet the most powerful man in the world!"

Tom Baxter with the AJC: Bush thanks supporters on Georgia visit

"Rep. Glen Richardson, the House minority leader, and Rep. Rich Golick, Gov. Sonny Perdue's floor leader, were on hand to greet Bush at the airport."

"They brought with them several Republican legislative hopefuls, including State Sen. candidates Rusty Griffin of Valdosta, Johnny Grant of Milledgeville and Greg Goggans of Douglas. State house candidates Louise Shackelford of Dublin, Melvin Everson of Snellville, Jim Cole of Forsyth and David Knight of Griffin also were on the tarmac to shake the president's hand and have their pictures taken"

We are all proud of Johnny Grant and will support him 100%.

Isakson is a poor Senate choice

2004-05-15T06:59:00.000-07:00
Isakson is a poor Senate choice

"Johnny Isakson, who is running for the U.S. Senate, has a problem saying one thing to the people of Georgia and then voting differently in Washington D.C."

"In other words, Republican U.S. Rep. Isakson has one eye on the presidency, and he votes accordingly."

"Mr. Isakson is a Ted Kennedy liberal who voted consistently with the likes of Democratic U.S. Reps. Dick Gephardt and Nancy Pelosi on many key issues."

"Mr. Isakson voted three times to use taxpayers' money to sue gun manufacturers."

"He tells Georgians that we need to be tough on criminals, but at the same time he voted for President Clinton's gun-control bill of 1999, with ultra-liberals Ted Kennedy, Barney Frank, Dick Gephardt and Nancy Pelosi."

"Mr. Isakson, true to form, also is two-faced on abortion. Pro-abortion or pro-life, he swings both ways to fit the occasion."

"For the first time in my lifetime I will not vote for the Republican candidate for the Senate, if that candidate is Johnny Isakson. We cannot trust him to be tough on terror when he is soft on crime."

"There are two other fine Republican candidates for the July primary. I will vote for Mac Collins."

Milton Gresham, Evans, Ga.

MDJOnline.com
East Cobb congressman (Johnny Isakson) criticized for missing hometown debate

"While three of Georgia's four Republican candidates for U.S. Senate debated in Marietta, one of the most high-profile candidates of the race was noticeably absent."

"My first question is, 'Where's Johnny?'" Cain said, in a tone similar to the opening line from The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. "I believe the people deserve to hear from all of us. That's my first question, and there is nobody here to answer it."

Rep Mac Collins: "I wish my opponent could be here to speak on his record."

Look at CBlountBlog Wed Apr 07, 07:42:39 AM (Click Here)

Mac Collins: Voting record speaks for itself

By David Burch-Marietta Daily Journal Staff Writer

"In his campaign for the U.S. Senate, U.S. Rep. Michael "Mac" Collins says his record in Washington speaks for itself."

"During the course of the campaign, Isakson has been painted largely as a moderate Republican while Collins and Cain have been deemed the more conservative candidates headed into the primaries."

Collins said, "I had always voted Republican on the national ticket, but in Butts County, we didn't have enough Republicans to have a good meal together,"

"He was one of a number of members of Congress in Iraq when the president arrived to visit troops last Thanksgiving."

Look at Monday, April 05, 2004, CBlountBlog

Georgia Democrats have Johnny Isakson

Jeff Dickerson said: "Lots of folks say Democrats have no candidate in the Senate race. Wrong. They've got Johnny Isakson."

"Of course, Georgia voters don't know Denise Majette from Adam -- well, from Eve -- and they have no intention of giving her the nod over the likes of Johnny Isakson.... Doggonit, Denise! What were you thinking?"

Johnny Isakson is the Liberal Republican, running against Mac Collins for the U.S. Senate.

Isakson is not a "moderate"." He voted on opposite sides of most issues from Mac Collins and Saxby Chambliss.

Johnny Isakson voted on the same sides as Nancy Polosi and Dick Gephardt.

In a 1996 Senate race Guy Millner, said: "Isakson isn't conservative enough for Georgia."

Now, even Georgia Democrats think of Isakson as a Liberal Democrat.

Mac Collins's conservative philosophy won him a seat on the Ways and Means Committee, serving on the subcommittees for Social Security and Select Revenue Measures.

Mac is on the House permanent Select Committee on Intelligence; and serves as Deputy Majority Whip and Regional Representative to the GOP Steering Committee in the Republican leadership. Mac is serving his sixth term in the United States Congress. (Click Here) For his new website- ibackmac.com.

Johnny Isakson's voting record will also speak for itself.

Johnny, you are not a "moderate", when you vote on the same sides as Nancy Polosi and opposite sides of most issues from President Bush and Saxby Chambliss.

Mac Collins: Voting record speaks for itself

2004-05-15T06:51:00.000-07:00
By David Burch-Marietta Daily Journal Staff Writer

"In his campaign for the U.S. Senate, U.S. Rep. Michael "Mac" Collins says his record in Washington speaks for itself."

"During the course of the campaign, Isakson has been painted largely as a moderate Republican while Collins and Cain have been deemed the more conservative candidates headed into the primaries."

"He (Isakson) and I have a voting record, and whoever wants to, can look at that record and make a decision who they want to support," Collins said Monday.

"Collins' positions include opposition to abortion except when the life of the mother is threatened; support for an overhaul to the federal tax system, including the establishment of a national sales tax and elimination of the death tax and support for tougher enforcement of existing trade agreements by the U.S. Customs Service and the U.S. Trade Representative's Office."

"He also introduced the American Competition Enhancement Act, aimed at lessening "government regulations that hurt businesses and cause them to either downsize their workforce or relocate overseas."

"Collins - who now touts himself as a conservative Republican and strong supporter of President Bush - began his political career as a Democrat, not uncommon during the days of one-party rule in Southern states like Georgia."

Collins said, "I had always voted Republican on the national ticket, but in Butts County, we didn't have enough Republicans to have a good meal together,"

"He was one of a number of members of Congress in Iraq when the president arrived to visit troops last Thanksgiving."

Look at Monday, April 05, 2004, CBlountBlog

Georgia Democrats have Johnny Isakson

Jeff Dickerson said:"Lots of folks say Democrats have no candidate in the Senate race. Wrong. They've got Johnny Isakson."

"Of course, Georgia voters don't know Denise Majette from Adam -- well, from Eve -- and they have no intention of giving her the nod over the likes of Johnny Isakson.... Doggonit, Denise! What were you thinking?"

Johnny Isakson is the Liberal Republican, running against Mac Collins for the U.S. Senate.

Isakson is not a "moderate"." He voted on opposite sides of most issues from Mac Collins and Saxby Chambliss.

Johnny Isakson voted on the same sides as Nancy Polosi and Dick Gephardt.

In a 1996 Senate race Guy Millner, said: "Isakson isn't conservative enough for Georgia."

Now, even Georgia Democrats think of Isakson as a Liberal Democrat.

Mac Collins's conservative philosophy won him a seat on the Ways and Means Committee, serving on the subcommittees for Social Security and Select Revenue Measures.

Mac is on the House permanent Select Committee on Intelligence; and serves as Deputy Majority Whip and Regional Representative to the GOP Steering Committee in the Republican leadership. Mac is serving his sixth term in the United States Congress. (Click Here) For his new website- ibackmac.com.

Johnny Isakson's voting record will also speak for itself.

Johnny, you are not a "moderate", when you vote on the same sides as Nancy Polosi and opposite sides of most issues from President Bush and Saxby Chambliss.

Georgia Democrats have Johnny Isakson

2004-05-15T06:48:00.000-07:00
In the Atlanta Business Chronicle, April 2, 2004, Denise, what were you thinking? Jeff Dickerson said:

"Lots of folks say Democrats have no candidate in the Senate race. Wrong. They've got Johnny Isakson."

About the Democrat Denise Majette run for the U.S. Senate.

"I have seen many strange things in politics, but this ranks among the strangest."

"It is inexplicable why Denise Majette, against the sage advice of so many people, decided she would abandon those who had supported her in an outrageous run for the U.S. Senate."

"Of course, Georgia voters don't know Denise Majette from Adam -- well, from Eve -- and they have no intention of giving her the nod over the likes of Johnny Isakson.... Doggonit, Denise! What were you thinking?"

Johnny Isakson is the Liberal Republican, running against Mac Collins for the U.S. Senate.

Isakson is not a "moderate." He voted on opposite sides of most issues from Mac Collins and Saxby Chambliss.

Johnny Isakson voted on the same sides as Nancy Polosi and Dick Gephardt.

In a 1996 Senate race Guy Millner, said: "Isakson isn't conservative enough for Georgia."

Now, even Georgia Democrats think of Isakson as a Liberal Democrat.

Mac Collins's conservative philosophy won him a seat on the Ways and Means Committee, serving on the subcommittees for Social Security and Select Revenue Measures.

Mac is on the House permanent Select Committee on Intelligence; and serves as Deputy Majority Whip and Regional Representative to the GOP Steering Committee in the Republican leadership. Mac is serving his sixth term in the United States Congress. (Click Here) For his new website- ibackmac.com

Peachy Politics Of Georgia

2004-05-14T07:08:00.000-07:00
The best place to fine the "Good Ole' Georgia Boy" Politics