Ed Martin

Adam Shriver of St. Louis Activist Hub flags a fascinating exchange between Ed Martin and a supporter at a March 3rd campaign event.  In it, Martin smiles from the podium as a supporter raves about WorldNetDaily.com editor Joseph Farah and Barack Obama's birth certificate.  Martin does nothing to distance himself from the radical comments; instead, he just praises the man's mention of local precinct captains.  Watch:

You don't have to know about Joseph Farah (but you should) to know what the man is talking about.  Martin most certainly understood -- but chose to remain mum.

Ed Martin held a Health Care Townhall last week. At the event, which you can see here, one tea party member had the following to say (starting at about the 55:40 mark of the video):

I wanna do a commercial for a friend of mine. Does anybody know who Joseph Farah is? He is what? He's an author, he's also an editor of World Net News. This gentleman spoke at the Tea Party convention in Nashville... It's about a 40 minute spiel: he talks about God, he talks about birth certificates, he talks about what the real motive is that this government has. It's to take us over. Period. One step at a time, and he's already got his foot in there...we knew all this before this man got elected, but we didn't want to believe it. There was more books out on what a rascal was running for the Presidency then I've read in my lifetime: and I've read em all...If you really want to know the facts, read some of the literature on this guy. He ain't been a nice guy for a long time, and he ain't gettin any better.

Mike Carey, president of the American Council for Affordable and Reliable Energy, was on KMOX's Hancock & Kelleyshow last week to talk about new billboards his organization is financing in the St. Louis area.  The American Council for Affordable and Reliable Energy is a Washington, D.C.-based group financed by coal companies created to protect companies' ability to pollute at their current unsustainable levels.

In the interview, Carey was unable to provide the name of a single funder or supporter unconnected to the coal industry, and struggled to explain why his organization was not running similar ads in any other areas of the country. And just in case you thought the ads weren't political in nature, Carey admitted on air that his organization has only tried to purchase ads in one other Congressional district in the country: Arkansas's Second.  But when Democratic Congressman Vic Snyder announced that his retirement in January, Carey and ACARE lost interest.

Carey was last seen in St. Louis at the November 2009 "Tea Party" as a keynote speaker, along with the recently-arrested James O’Keefe.  The St. Louis Tea Party wrote at the time that Carey created his organization last year "when he saw that misinformation and lies were beginning to shape the political landscape on coal and global warming." Before serving as president of the ACARE, Carey was president of the Ohio Coal Association.

At the end of a "Random notes from Lincoln Days" blog post by Missourinet's Brent Martin, there's a noteworthy bit of audio recorded last Tuesday with Scott Eckersley. 

Eckersley worked for then-Chief of Staff Ed Martin in Governor Matt Blunt's administration, and was fired after raising questions about whether the Blunt Administration complied with the Sunshine Law (read more about that here). Eckersley was in Jefferson City to talk about strengthening the state's open records laws.

Here's what he told Missourinet about Martin's campaign for Congress:

Ed Martin isn't a man that's fit to hold public office. I think that's been proven. I think if the Missouri Republican Party sees this guy as somebody they want to support, then they're making one more mistake. And I don't have much more to say about Ed than that.  And I think voters will see that.

Listen:

It's hard to be surprised by anything Ed Martin does these days. But a couple of the photos posted on Martin's official campaign website from yesterday's 'Tea Party Rally' are downright incredible. 

The signs below are probably not shocking by normal tea party standards -- but is this the 'new normal' for Republican candidates?  One might think this extreme rhetoric would be rejected by a "mainstream" GOP Congressional candidate. (For the purposes of this post, I'll assume that there is a difference between the "mainstream GOP" and the radical fringe.) But instead, these signs are held up and celebrated by Martin. 

Kit Bond says the jobs bill "will help restore funding to Missouri and states across the nation that would have lost critical transportation projects and thousands of jobs." 

UPDATE: Roy Blunt says he will vote against the jobs bill.

In a series of tweets this morning (here, here and here), Ed Martin is criticizing GOP Senators Kit Bond, Scott Brown, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins and George Voinovich for their support of a new bipartisan job creation package. 

The bill, which passed a procedural vote the Senate yesterday 62-30 , includes a number of job creation measures that earned it bipartisan support.

I can't help but wonder what prominent Republican Catholics -- folks like Cong. Blaine Luetkemeyer and Crazy Eddie Martin -- think of this left-wing garbage coming out of the Vatican.

Pope Benedict XVI denounced the failure of world leaders to agree to a new climate change treaty in Copenhagen last month, saying Monday that world peace depends on safeguarding God's creation...

Benedict has been dubbed the "green pope" for his increasingly vocal concern about protecting the environment, an issue he has reflected on in encyclicals, during foreign trips and most recently in his annual peace message. Under Benedict's watch, the Vatican has installed photovoltaic cells on its main auditorium to convert sunlight into electricity and has joined a reforestation project aimed at offsetting its CO2 emissions.

A new document obtained via Sunshine request from the Attorney General's office show that Ed Martin did not disclose his list of 85,000 petition signers and their personal data as an asset when he dissolved the "SaveAB.com for America" corporation in December 2008.

Last month, Martin used that list to send an email to about 40,000 people on behalf of his Congressional campaign.  He also relaunched the SaveAB.com website to support his federal campaign. 

According to an election law expert quoted in the AP, Martin's move would have been clearly out of bounds if the corporation still techinically existed -- but since the corporation was technically dissolved, the legality of it all is a tad confusing. 

Over at the conservative RiteOn blog, conservative activist and website founder Chuck MacNab writes about a meeting at the offices of Sen. Jim Lembke he says he attended on Saturday.  According to MacNab, Lembke was joined by Sen. Jane Cunningham and representatives of numerous other conservative organizations and campaigns to focus on three goals for the 2010 elections.

A dedicated group of experienced conservative leaders met for about 4 hours in State Senator Jim Lembke's office in St. Louis Saturday morning, January 9. RiteOn observed a common view and single mindedness among these area leaders that, if allowed to mature, could spell big trouble for RINOS and liberals and impact the status of many who currently believe they control the Republican Party.

Three objectives emerged from the meeting:

- To replace non-conservative candidates and office holders with conservatives in the August Primary elections.

- To make certain a conservative candidate wins in the General election in November.

- To support conservative sponsored ballot issues and to defeat those issues the group opposes.

In shocking display of normal, boring campaign activity, Ed Martin has created a petition on his campaign website calling for another town hall meeting for people to scream at Russ Carnahan.  Though I can't imagine such a meeting would be productive in any way, it's nice to see Martin using his actual campaign resources to build his email list. 

Last month, you'll recall, Martin used the data and website for the SaveAB.com campaign -- data he promised would never be used for anything but that campaign, and assets that probably shouldn't have been used in any event for campaign purposes.  

Lt. Governor Peter Kinder wrote state auditor candidate Thomas Schweich a $100,000 check on New Year's Eve -- a sizable donation, especially from a candidate who still showed more than $400,000 in his own campaign debts in his last campaign finance report.

As the Post-Dispatch's Tony Messenger notes in his post about the donation, Kinder's strong support for Schweich (a thank you for not pursuing the US Senate?) puts him at odds with most all of the House Republicans, who have backed House Budget Chair Allen Icet in the GOP primary for auditor.

Some hateful stuff from Ed Martin today, who apparently wants you to know that your life is in danger because Barack Obama is president:

Martin's tweet links an article in the American Thinker, which begins: "Barack Obama could get you killed. That's the reluctant conclusion more and more Americans are contemplating in the wake of the bizarre handling of the Northwest 253 attempted bombing."

The Post-Dispatch reflects today on the dismissal of professional misconduct complaints filed against Scott Eckersley by former Governor Matt Blunt's chief counsel, and on Ed Martin's role in the saga. The final two paragraphs of today's editorial:

All of this cost state taxpayers some $1.3 million in legal fees to settle. It could be seen as money down the drain and water over the dam were it not for two facts. One, it’s nice to see an idealistic young man get his reputation back. And two, Ed Martin is now running for the Republican nomination for the congressional seat now held by Democrat Russ Carnahan of St. Louis.

Here’s a guy who ruthlessly trashed a young conservative for an excess of integrity. Is this really the kind of man Republicans want in Congress?

Ed Martin loves media attention, but this probably isn't what he had in mind. 

I don't really understand why these people are being so mean to Glenn Beck.  As the extremely wise Blaine Luetkemeyer said a few months ago, everything you hear from Beck "must be true because nobody's refuting it."

And remember: If you like Glenn Beck, you'll love Ed Martin!