Inside Blogotics

Red State vs. NRSC

Conservative bloggers and political activists have been up in arms since the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) endorsed Florida Gov. Charlie Crist on May 12 for that state’s open Senate seat.

The primary is 15 months away, and at least a prominent conservative Republican lawmaker - former state House Speaker Marco Rubio - already had said he was running.

Red State.com leader Erick Erickson founded a Facebook group whose members vow to give “not one penny” to the NRSC.

“If the NRSC thinks this is smart, we must not waste our time or energy with them. Join me in pledging no money, no help, no aid, and no support for the NRSC’s efforts in the 2010 election cycle,” Mr. Erickson said at Red State.

Several conservative co-bloggers built a new site around the idea, called Not One Red Cent, which, among other things, chronicles the opposition and the party establishment’s response.

The rebellion helped force Florida Republican Party Chairman Jim Green to declare the party officially neutral after, as Mr. Erickson noted, having tried “to use party rules to get Rubio knocked off the ballot” and having “made clear at [a Republican National Committee] meeting that the Republican Party of Florida would be supporting only Crist in the Senate race.”

NRO vs. Biden

National Review’s Jim Geraghty went toe-to-toe with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. last week, accusing him of again exaggerating (a Biden foot-in-mouth moment… pshaw), this time in a speech before the Bosnian Parliament in Sarajevo.

The New York Times had reported that “Mr. Biden recalled his trip to the country in 1993, and how, flying in at the time, his plane was fired upon, and bombed-out homes with snipers inside could be seen.” Mr. Geraghty noted disbelievingly at his Campaign Spot blog that “a preliminary archive search suggests that this is the first time Biden has ever mentioned his plane being fired upon” during the trip.

The vice president’s office responded with a Senate report that noted that Mr. Biden’s first effort to land in the Bosnian capital was turned back “due to fighting at the Sarajevo airport,” a rebuttal Mr. Geraghty characterized in his second post’s title as “We Know Joe Biden Was in Sarajevo, and People Were Shooting.”

“To Biden’s credit, it does appear his delegation was passing through some dangerous territory on that trip. However, it doesn’t quite line up with his statement that his plane was fired upon. … If the plane had been fired upon, wouldn’t it have been mentioned in the report? Doesn’t that seem to be a big detail to get left out?” Mr. Geraghty asked before posting an image of the 1993 Senate report, which does not mention any firing on the plane.

Pope vs. supermodel

In an interview with a French women’s magazine, French first lady Carla Bruni Sarkozy criticized the Catholic Church’s teaching on contraception as leaving her “profoundly secular” and damaging countries in Africa.

“I was born Catholic, I was baptized, but in my life I feel profoundly secular. I find that the controversy coming from the Pope’s message - albeit distorted by the media - is very damaging,” Mrs. Sarkozy told Femme Actuelle before going to the subject that every church critic eventually gets back to - sex.

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