Part 1:
Part 2:
I’ve also got pictures that I’ll upload later.
Category: 2009 election
Rob Wittman condemns Catherine Crabill, refuses to support or endorse her candidacy.
Rep. Rob Wittman has joined other top Republican leaders in the state who are shunning Catherine T. Crabill, a controversial candidate for the Northern Neck’s seat in the House of Delegates.
Wittman spokesman Steve Stampley said last week that the congressman from Montross will endorse neither Crabill nor incumbent Albert Pollard, D-Lancaster, in the race for the House seat Wittman once held.
Wittman also has no plans to appear with Crabill at campaign events or to donate money to her campaign, Stampley said.
I wonder what R. Allen Webb will have to say about this latest development. Maybe he’ll see the writing on the wall now.
Probably not, but I’ve always been an optimist. And I have no idea why in this particular case give previous actions by people in the 99th district.
Cross-posted at Virginia Virtucon.
Introducing the Catherine Crabill blacklist.
Because these people shouldn’t be allowed to vote, much less be involved in a serious political party. And these people should be made aware in absolute terms that their support for this embarrassment of a candidate will be remembered and there will be repercussions for it.
Feel free to add names in the comments section for anyone I forgot.
No one on this list should be allowed to hold an position in any Republican committee or ever be nominated or endorsed by a Republican committee. Members include:
R. Allen Webb. Chairman, 99th Legislative District Republican Committee; Chairman, 28th Senatorial District Republican Committee; Chairman, Grass-roots Steering Committee for Catherine Crabill’s campaign. UPDATE: Webb is also a member of the First Congressional District Republican Committee and the Republican State Central Committee as James Cupp pointed out in the comments section.
Bill Kling. Catherine Crabill’s campaign manager.
Larry Kile. Chairman, King George County Republican Committee. Huge supporter of Crabill’s campaign.
James Cupp provides a few more names:
Jeanne Kling. Wife of “Badwater Bill” Kling; Chairwoman, Northumberland County Republican Committee; Confirmed supporter of Crabill campaign, as evidenced by Letter to the Editor published in Northumberland Echo, Northern Neck News, and Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star.
Jim Spiess. Convicted felon (unlawful wounding); Convicted dog killer (by poisoning with strychnine); Apparent leader of 99th District TEA Party; Owner, River Pools and Spas, Tappahannock, Virginia (”Catch the wave!”); Virulent promoter of Crabill campaign.
Hopefully Allen Webb steers her campaign right into the Chesapeake Bay.
Or the Potomac, or the Rappahannock for that matter. According to a press release from Catherine Crabill’s campaign:
R. Allen Webb, of King George, chairman of the 99th Legislative District Republican Committee, has been named to head the grass-roots steering committee of Catherine Crabill’s GOP campaign for the district’s seat in the Virginia House of Delegates in the Nov. 3 general election.
Blah, blah, blah, read the whole thing at Fred2Blue.
NOTE: In no way should the title be construed as a threat of violence. I just wish this embarrassment would be over with.
My thoughts in re Catherine Crabill.
It looks like some of the state Republican bigwigs have finally realized how bad having someone like Catherine Crabill as a Republican nominee is according to The WaPo:
No, Bob McDonnell is not attending an upcoming fundraiser with Republican House of Delegates candidate Catherine Crabill. Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling won’t be there either. Attorney general candidate Ken Cuccinelli II also will not appear with Crabill.
In fact, the Republican Party of Virginia has formally decided it will be giving Crabill no support for her campaign against Del. Albert Pollard, and chairman Pat Mullins has sent word to Crabill that he would prefer that she step aside and not run for the seat.
The folks at the Democratic Party of Virginia rightly had this say in a single-sentence statement: “Why did it take 29 days?”
A better question, however, is why did it take them 124 days since her belief that the federal government was responsible for the Oklahoma City Bombing was publicized on this blog, to repudiate her as a Republican?
This is an unmitigated disaster for Republicans and it never should have gotten to this point. No one involved in this situation has displayed an inkling of leadership in dealing with the problems presented by having this nut running for office.
All it should have taken was one person, just one, coming out before the committee met and nominated her, to stop this whole situation from becoming a problem. And it didn’t have to be — and shouldn’t have to have been — Bob McDonnell’s, Bill Bolling’s, or Ken Cuccinelli’s campaign.
Pat Mullins, then-interim Chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia, or Speaker Bill Howell, or Republican House Majority Leader Morgan Griffith, or even State Senator for the Northern Neck, Richard Stuart or Congressman Rob Wittman could have done it.
But none of them set up to the plate and did it. And now, we’re left with this nut as a nominee. Instead of finding a candidate that could given a Pollard a run for his money and possibly have beaten him, we have a nut that will receive 10% of the vote (at most) in one of the most Republican-friendly districts in the state.
And she’s not going to step down, she made that clear as the convention.
And it gets worst: The 99th Legislative Direct Republican Committee’s Chairman, Allen Webb, has sent out an e-mail saying that he will continue to support Crabill’s candidacy and if the committee doesn’t like that, they can remove him. Here’s hoping they do.
There should have been someone else out there telling the Republicans that this nominee was going to be a disaster. Someone besides me and a couple of other bloggers.
H/t: Fred2Blue.
Perfect example of why you shouldn’t believe everything you see on the Internet.
That moron Ben Tribbett at “Not Larry Sabato” (NLS) posted a picture today that purported to show a Confederate flag being displayed in a Bob McDonnell booth at a gun show.
The problem? The Confederate flag belonged to a Confederate memorabilia dealer that was positioned beside McDonnell’s booth. The Washington Post did the fact-checking that Tribbett is too lazy to do:
Hugh Crittenden, the founder and manager of the Virginia Outdoor Sportsman Show, is backing up McDonnell.
Crittenden said he invited both campaigns to staff a booth at the show, which draws 20,000 people each year. McDonnell’s campaign decided to show, but came late, so Crittenden assigned them the only booth left open: Number 43.
It happened to be next another vendor who also signed up late, Down Home T-Shirts, which got Number 44. According to material submitted to the show, Down Home T-Shirts sells “Confederate T-shirts and more.”
He said even if McDonnell’s staffers had asked for a move, the show was so crowded that they could not have been accommodated.
And it wasn’t just Tribbett that was promoting this trash, the folks at Fred2Blue posted a link to NLS without bothering to do any fact-checking either.
And no one involved has bothered to issue a correction to their original posts, including Tribbett. In fact, he has following the say (Id.):
“If a confederate flag was placed at the exact median point between the McDonnell booth and a confederate booth and the McDonnell campaign was not smart enough to demand that it be taken down or that their booth be moved, that’s almost as bad as if the flag were at their booth,” he said. “Either way, it shows a real insensitivity to what the flag means.”
And D.J. McGuire took care of that point:
AAAACK! THE DREADED MEDIAN POINT! WE’RE DOOMED!!!
Now, I have no idea what mathematical genius allowed Tribbett to determine the “exact median point” from the picture, but allow me to use this to establish Blogospheric Rule # Um, we’re supposed to be counting? – When you are forced to resort to a syntactical precision best suited for a college-level dissertation, you lose the argument.
And it wasn’t just the blogosphere promoting this story either. Creigh Deed’s own campaign manager tweeted about the picture encouraging people to visit NLS.
But, of course, this is just more and more of campaigns intermingling themselves with blogs. You would be surprised at some of the e-mails I have gotten and conversations I have had with different politicians wanting such and such promoted. In one case, a well-known local politician wanted me to accuse another blogger of committing a crime because of a picture that he was using. Yes, seriously. And for some reason, he thought that just mentioning an extremely vague criminal statute to me and the blogger’s name would just cause me to pounce. Sorry, guess I’m not as stupid as Ben Tribbett.
In fact, if a campaign mentions anything about something I was going to write a post on, more than likely that post has just gotten deleted. Why am I just going to repeat something that someone else is already saying? If I wanted to do that I would be a spokesman or *shudder* a reporter.
And while the Deed’s campaign will of course deny being involved in this astroturfing campaign, someone should ask Tribbett how a picture from a Mechanicsville gun show ends up being sent to a blogger in Fairfax County. (For those unfamiliar with the term “astroturfing”, it is defined as “[t]he disguising of an orchestrated campaign as a spontaneous upwelling of public opinion”.) Perhaps it kinda like how a video of a deranged nut, Catherine Crabill, speaking at a tea party in Heathsville ended up on the same blog?:
Leigh Anne Collier, executive director of the Democratic Party of Virginia, said a tracker hired by the party had recorded the remarks, which were edited only because she [Catherine Crabill] had been speaking for a long time.
Tribbett couldn’t tell us what county Heathsville is in, much less find it on the map, but he ends up with video from a DPV tracker, as well as a picture from a Mechanicsville gun show, and we’re supposed to believe that this junk is anything but astroturfing?
For more coverage see:
Crabill Watch: Catherine Crabill gets the coveted endorsement from the conspiracy theory clearing house Prison Planet.com.
Not a real surprise, right?
But a couple of words do not probably describe the type of folks that are behind Prison Planet.com. It isn’t just Oklahoma City Bombing Truthers (OKC Truthers) and United Nations one-government nuts like Crabill, it’s 9/11 Truther (people that believe that the Bush, or the Jews, or combination there of were responsible for the 9/11 attacks), anti-vaccine loons, anti-fluoride morons (they must worry about people trying to “sap and impurify” their “precious bodily fluids”), and, of course, those newest nuts known as Birthers (people that believe that Barack Obama is not a “natural born citizen” and therefore ineligible to be President). Of course, Crabill has previously shown her support for the Birthers between links on her campaign site to WorldNetDaily and comments made elsewhere.
To get a good idea on how insane the folks at Prison Planet.com are, consider this quote from the very article calling Crabill a “[p]atriot”:
GE manufactures jet and attack helicopter engines used in Iraq and Afghanistan to kill thousands. Not only is GE complicit in mass murder, it also pled guilty in federal court to civil and criminal charges of defrauding the Pentagon and agreed to pay $69 million to the U.S. government in fines — one of the largest defense contracting fines ever. Part of this fraudulent scheme was used to fund Israeli military programs not authorized by the United States – in other words, [Jim] Newell’s [the author of an article lambasting Crabill] boss helped Israel torture and kill Palestinians.
I’m loathed to even post stuff like that anywhere on my blog but I feel it’s important to document the type of insane people out there that have decided to support Crabill’s candidacy. I did make the prediction that Crabill would make the Republican Party and anyone running as a Republican look like a complete moron and it’s nice to see I was correct in that hypothesis even though I don’t like the net result.
And, no, I won’t be linking to that site. You can get your own link if you want to read that drivel! And the only reason that I even know about the endorsement post is because of a handy “Catherine Crabill” Google Blog alert. Heck, it was Google News search that found me the first article detailing Crabill’s OKC Trutherism, so they’re a a pretty good resource FYI.
Tim Kaine to call for special session of the General Assembly in light of the SCOTUS decision in Melendez-Diaz v. Massacheusetts.
Check it out at Bloggers for Ken Cuccinelli: Tim Kaine Agrees With Ken Cuccinelli, Decides to Call Special Session.
Crabill Watch: “We have the chance to fight this battle at the ballot box before we have to resort to the bullet box.”
Actually the statement before the quote I have in the title is probably the worst:
H/t: Fred2Blue, Not Larry Sabato.
And the bad thing is these Republicans in the 99th district can’t backpedal now and say they didn’t know what they were getting. They knew full well the kind of comments she had made previously as well as her membership in a militia group. Oh, well…
UPDATE: Ouch, now Crabill’s on the HuffPo.
UPDATE #2: The Washington Independent takes note too.
UPDATE #3: Daily Kos and The Washington Post‘s Virginia Politics blog also weigh in.
UPDATE #4: It’s on Breitbart now too.
Speaking of Catherine Crabill, did she forget to file her campaign finance report this month?
It’s neither listed on the State Board of Elections’ website nor on the Virginia Public Access Project (VPAP).
Of course, her report from the previous filing period was noticeably missing certain expenditures that should have been included in the report but I haven’t had a chance to write a post about that yet.
UPDATE, 07/16/2009, 1:10 p.m.: The report is finally up now.