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Stories tagged with “Erick Erickson”

Alyssa

CNN Contributor Erick Erickson: ‘I Kind Of Like The Idea That Women Aren’t Members Of The Masters’

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Apr 6, 2012 at 1:10 pm

CNN contributor and conservative blogger Erick Erickson said he liked the idea of excluding women from The Masters golf tournament, saying, “I don’t want to be hanging out at some women’s event!”

The Augusta National Golf Club, which hosts the tournament, has never admitted a woman as a member in its history, but its discriminatory policy sparked controversy this week after it decided not to extend membership to the new female CEO of IBM, which sponsors The Masters. Augusta has offered membership to previous IBM CEOs (all men).

Both President Obama and presumed GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney have spoken out against the policy, as has South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R), but Erickson sees the debate over the prohibition on women as a “partisan” issue. “Who freakin’ cares?” he said during a lengthy rant in support of the policy:

ERICKSON: Who cares? Who cares that she wasn’t invited into the club? She’s a woman — women aren’t allowed! …. It is striking to me just how political the president wants to make everything. The war on women coming home to The Masters. Who freakin’ cares? [...]

I don’t care that The Masters are a male-dominated event. I don’t care that women aren’t members of The Masters. Frankly, I kind of like the idea that women aren’t members of The Masters. Good Lord, I don’t want to be hanging out at some women’s event! Can’t men go anywhere and just be men? There are plenty of places where women can be women. … You know what Mr. President, why don’t you just leave the partisanship out of golf?!

Listen to the clip, via Media Matters:

Erickson decries the partisanship of the issue, but even though Romney took an identical position to Obama’s, Erickson dismissed Romney’s opposition to Augusta’s policy by saying, “At lease he was smart enough to know that we don’t want to wade into the war on women with Augusta.”

Update

On Twitter, Erickson responded, “The left whining about Augusta National makes me smile.”

Alyssa

Conservatives’ Cultural Agonies at CPAC

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Feb 15, 2012 at 2:53 pm

There’s something refreshingly honest in two takes by conservative commentators on the behavior of young and youngish people at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Erick Erickson laments the lines of young men queued up to buy condoms, and the trend he sees in men coming to the conference with the goal of having casual sex:

They risk dragging the whole affair down to some bawdy, rowdy distraction. They risk embarrassing themselves and the conservative movement. They risk the perception premised on their own actions that conservative men of a certain age think that good manners and decorum around women of the same age is unneeded or unwanted. This is not to say CPAC cannot and should not be fun. This is not to say that CPAC cannot and should not be a party. But it is to say that I hope the college groups bussing in students next year, the out of college set there to network, and CPAC itself encourage behavior we all too often don’t talk about anymore in our society — the behavior of gentlemen. Eat, drink, smoke, be merry, but be chivalrous too. There really is, regardless of your age, no need to play the cad at CPAC to score points with conservative ladies.

And Melissa Clouthier takes her sisters in the movement to task for how they dressed and presented themselves:

Women will be future leaders, too, and I was dismayed to see how many of them either looked frumpish or like two-bit whores. First, are these young people being taught anything by their parents? I was at another service-oriented gathering of young women where the girls were in tight bandeau-skirts (you know, the kind of tube-top skirts that hookers wear on street corners?). They were sitting with their mothers. What is going on here?…I cannot even tell you how many girls have told me that all they want is to get married and have babies. They do not seem to make the connection that a young man is not interested in getting married and making babies with a girl who is so easy as to have a one-night stand over a CPAC weekend (or any other weekend.)

If there’s one thing I agree with conservatives about, it’s this: conservatism’s survival as a modern family-values movement depends less on passing policies that restrict the sexual and reproductive rights of Americans and more on building an alternative cultural framework and narrative, and convincing people to actually base their lives on its tenets. This is an effort that tends to work well in closed communities. It’s much easier to, for example, choose not to have sex until you’re married if you’re surrounded by people who are making that same choice, and who are providing reinforcement that such a decision is not only moral, but will provide you with the most benefit. The idea that waiting to have sex will make sex better because you’ll have reserves of the hormone oxytocin are part of arguing that making a conservative lifestyle choice will actually yield better results.

Events like CPAC are disconcerting because they suggest that the movement is doing poorly at selling conservative ideals of sexual ethics on a broad scale. Whether the conference has consciously tried to cultivate a party vibe or not, it’s clearly no longer an environment that reinforces values like chastity, conservative self-presentation through family, and dating as a pursuit of marriage. And of course that’s disconcerting to commentators like Erickson and Clouthier. It’s utterly unsustainable for conservatives to govern one way and live another if they truly want a society based on their stated and legislated values. But calling women sluts and exhorting men to be gentleman seems unlikely to bring the two back into alignment.

Health

Conservatives Cheer Komen Foundation’s Decision To Stop Funding Cancer Screenings At Planned Parenthood

By Amanda Peterson Beadle on Feb 1, 2012 at 1:45 pm

After Susan G. Komen for the Cure announced it would stop providing grants for Planned Parenthood to fund thousands of breast exams for women, many were shocked by the foundation’s decision to cave to right-wing pressure. Credo launched a petition asking people to “[t]ell the board of Susan G. Komen: Don’t throw Planned Parenthood under the bus! Don’t cave to anti-woman extremists and cut off funding for breast cancer screenings at the largest provider of health care for women.” Planned Parenthood released a statement saying they were deeply saddened and disappointed by the decision. “We’re kind of reeling,” said Patrick Hurd, CEO of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Virginia, which received a 2010 grant from Komen. Hurd said his wife, Betsi, is a veteran of several Komen fundraising races and is currently battling breast cancer.

Anti-choice activists have targeted Komen’s parternership with Planned Parenthood since 2005. And the assault on Planned Parenthood intensified after Karen Handel, a vocal anti-abortion activist, joined Komen as a senior vice president in April.

Now, conservatives are celebrating the win. “Pro-Lifers win big against Planned Parenthood,” read one headline on the New York Post’s website. “VICTORY!” proclaimed a conservative blog. Here are some examples of the right-wing cheering:

– Planned Parenthood Exposed! Kathryn Jean Lopez writes at the National Review that the “icon” of Planned Parenthood is crumbling as groups break ties with it and it is “exposed” after undercover work. “To take issue with Planned Parenthood is not to be unkind to women. It’s to seek something better,” Lopez writes. “Komen is not the National Right to Life Committee, the Susan B. Anthony List, Feminists for Life, or your pro-life organization of choice (pun intended). And Planned Parenthood’s ‘war on women’ rhetoric is only looking shriller and emptier this evening.”

– Thank Komen For Cutting Funds To Cancer Research! Now that the Komen foundation has stopped contributing to Planned Parenthood, RedState’s Erick Erickson calls for conservatives to support Komen since it listened to them. “If you are not willing to support an organization that takes a stand you want when they come under attack, you cannot be surprised when less organizations listen to you,” he writes. “So say thank you.”

– Komen Is Saving Lives By Underfunding Research! Charmaine Yoest, president of Americans United for Life President, cheered Komen’s decision to break ties with Planned Parenthood because Planned Parenthood performs abortions. “As a breast cancer survivor, I applaud the decision made by the Komen Foundation to discontinue their partnership with the billion-dollar, abortion mega-provider, Planned Parenthood,” she said. “The work of the Komen Foundation has life-saving potential and should not be intertwined with an industry dealing in death.”

– No More Abortions!Family Resource Council President Tony Perkins said Komen’s decision would stop funding “the nation’s largest abortion provider.” “For too long many people of good will gave money to this foundation to help stop the scourge of breast cancer, not realizing that their money was going to help subsidize the nation’s largest abortion provider,” Perkins said in a statement. “Planned Parenthood has claimed they provide mammogram services for women but recently admitted they do not. Susan G. Komen is right to be concerned about the investigations of Planned Parenthood. The abortion organization has been exposed for covering up statutory rape cases and has a history of Medicaid over-billing and other financial misconduct.”

Security

Accused Domestic Terrorist Arrested In Georgia Ranted About Health Reform On Erickson’s RedState.com

By Lee Fang on Nov 3, 2011 at 5:30 pm

CNN's Erick Erickson, editor of RedState

Earlier this week, FBI agents arrested four men in Georgia for plotting a series of domestic terror attacks on government officials and other people across the country. The FBI press release states that the men were caught on tape planning to purchase pounds of ricin, a biologic agent, as well as silencers and explosives. While the men claim to be part of a militia group, online postings identified by ThinkProgress make clear that at least one of the men had railed against President Obama, health reform, and regurgitated right-wing conspiracies on the popular conservative blog, RedState.com.

In a document filed with the Northern District of Georgia, parts of the transcript of the alleged domestic terrorists were released. “There is no way for us, as militiamen, to save this country, to save Georgia, without doing something that’s highly, highly illegal: murder,” said one of the accused terrorists, Frederick Thomas. Thomas also planned to target the ATF and the IRS. “We’d have to blow the whole building like Timothy McVeigh,” said Thomas, according to the Associated Press. The AP also notes that court documents accused Samuel Crump, a co-conspirator, of suggesting ricin could be “dropped from an airplane or blown out of a car along an interstate highway to attack people in Washington, Newark, NJ, Jacksonville, FL, Atlanta and New Orleans.”

Today, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published a broader picture of the four men accused of the terror plan. Dustin Baker at the blog GAPolitico flags one important part of the AJC story: that accused terrorist Fred Thomas blogged on RedState.com, the website edited by CNN’s Erick Erickson. The Thomas blog post highlighted by Baker and AJC revealed that at one point, he did not “advocate a general rebellion against the U.S. Government for cause,” but seemed conflicted about the idea of violent revolution. Something apparently changed between that unpromoted post, published in July of 2008 and this year, when the alleged plot began taking shape.

A ThinkProgress examination of Thomas’s online writing in the following years shows that the alleged terrorist grew more and more upset, and expressed sympathy with the anti-Obama conspiracies posted on RedState. Last year, he posted a comment to a popular RedState post about the evils of health reform. Thomas claimed that the “ObummerCare Bill” not only “won’t be forgiven,” but will lead to “TYRANNY of the worst order” and “civil war.” (view a screenshot of the comment here)

The other blog Thomas mentions in his RedState comment is apparently the militia website run by Mike Vanderboegh, who gained infamy for calling for violence over the health reform bill and for writing an online series advocating a new civil war against President Obama. ThinkProgress has covered Vanderboegh, who recently signed up as a commentator for Fox News, here and here.

Thomas posted other comments on RedState, and indicated he was a regular reader. In one comment, Thomas asked how to gain promoted posts on the website, to which RedState editor Neil Stevens responded with a link and suggestion on the guidelines (view a screenshot here).

As GAPolitico notes, RedState editor Erick Erickson has a long history of fostering a blog filled with violent rhetoric and unhinged conspiracy theories. Earlier this year, Erickson suggested that “mass bloodshed” may be necessary if Roe v. Wade isn’t overturned, as Media Matters reported. During the health reform debate, when Thomas was an apparent fan of the site, Erickson promoted the debunked “death panels” smear, that health reform would give Obama the power to kill his political opponents and the elderly.

Erickson is not responsible for every comment left on his site, and he has no connection at all to the alleged terrorist plot in Georgia. His RedState website’s rhetoric of health reform “tyranny” and calls for violence, however, were embraced by at least one of the alleged conspirators.

Justice

Right-Wing Media Says It’s ‘Time To Execute’ Troy Davis

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Sep 21, 2011 at 5:30 pm

As demonstrations break out around the world to protest the execution of Troy Davis tonight in Georgia, some conservatives have been less than concerned with the doubt surrounding his conviction. CNN contributor and Red State editor Erick Erickson wrote that Davis is noting more than a “cop killer who, 20 years later, defense attorneys and liberals are turning into a victim.” “The state maintained a finding of guilt. Time to execute him,” Erickson added on Twitter.

Davis was convicted of killing an off-duty police officer who was working as a security guard, but seven of the nine witnesses have since recanted and many experts say there is “too much doubt” to proceed with an execution.

But Fox News didn’t seem too concerned. Throughout the day, the network has overwhelmingly presented the prosecutions’ view, giving little airtime to the other side. Fox and Friends host Gretchen Carlson said Davis “murdered a police officer 22 years ago” and will soon “pay the ultimate price,” while host Bill Hemmer called Davis a “cop killer.” The network then interviewed the daughter of the victim, who is convinced of Davis’ guilt.

The first time Fox interviewed anybody with an alternative view, it was a “short segment” debate in which host Megyn Kelly repeatedly interrupted Amnesty International’s Laura Moye, and echoed former prosecutor Jeffrey Steinberger’s argument to such a degree that he said, “that’s exactly what I said!” Watch it:

As contrast, CNN and MSNBC have both run multiple full segments on the issue, devoting entire interviews to opponents of the execution.

Update

Conservative commentator Ann Coulter chimes in:

For decades, liberals tried persuading Americans to abolish the death penalty, using their usual argument: hysterical sobbing.

Only when the media began lying about innocent people being executed did support for the death penalty begin to waver, falling from 80 percent to about 60 percent in a little more than a decade. (Silver lining: That’s still more Americans than believe in man-made global warming.) [...]

Davis is the media’s current baby seal of death row.

Politics

Erickson Slams Bachmann’s Continued Defense Of India Trip Lie As ‘Absurd’, Says She Should Admit She’s Wrong

By Tanya Somanader on Nov 23, 2010 at 11:55 am

Tea Party doyenne Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) has made a career out of fringe thinking, and appearing on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 the day after this month’s election, she insisted that President Obama was spending $200 million a day at taxpayers’ expense on his trip to India — a whopping falsehood that was “repeated by nearly ever conservative pundit in the land: Hannity, Limbaugh, Beck, Drudge. Always with a healthy dose of indignation.”

However, organizations concerned with facts — such as ABC, the Wall Street Journal, Politifact, Factcheck.org, the Secret Service, and the Pentagon — summarily debunked Bachmann’s accusation as false and outlandish (for comparison, the war in Afghanistan costs about $190 million a day).

But now, her blatant untruth telling is chaffing even some of her conservative champions. In a follow up segment on Cooper’s show last night, conservative Red State blogger and CNN contributor Erick Erickson called Bachmann’s $200 million claim “absurd” and an affront to “commonsense.” Erickson added, “she probably should have come out and said she’s wrong”:

GUPTA: Eric, is this crazy, or is this calculated? I mean, it’s got a lot of people talking. And maybe she’s not quite ready for prime time, some of her colleagues are saying. What do you make of this?

ERICKSON: I think this goes beyond trying to keep politicians honest to going into the absurd. You know, I — I saw that report on November 2nd, during election night, while I was on studio in — at CNN. It was on The Drudge Report. She clicked through it. It was a media report out of India. It seemed like, when she was talking to Anderson about it on the 3rd, it seemed very clear she was basing her opinion based on that story, which was wrong, but was quoted all over the place. [...]

GUPTA: I — Erick, I — I get that. I understand that. But, look, I mean, is there a greater level of accountability that someone like her needs to have? $200 million a day, Erick, is what that unnamed official in the overseas wire article said….I mean, it — it doesn’t pass the commonsense test.

ERICKSON: You or I, Sanjay, wouldn’t have said it, but she did. You know, it — it doesn’t for you or for me, and I don’t think she should have said it. I think she probably should have come out and said she was wrong. But that was November 3rd, and — and she has moved on, and the rest of us haven’t.

Watch the segment (Erickson begins at 4:30):

While Erickson is correct in pointing out Bachmann’s absurdity, he is wrong in defending her by saying she has “moved on” from her claim. Two weeks after her “fact” withered under scrutiny, she is still refusing to back away from it, defending the claim in a BBC interview last week. What’s more, Bachmann took the opportunity to stand by another ridiculous charge she made in 2008 that President Obama is “very anti-American.” This McCarthyism, however, somehow strikes Erickson as “one billion percent on the money,” as he wrote on Red State today.

If a past filled with fantastical accusations is any indication, there’s no telling where she’ll stop now. After all, she has a rare Politifact “all-false/pants on fire” record to maintain. As Gupta, who was filling in for Cooper, put it last night, “many politicians say things for effect. And then they try to unsay them when someone puts them on the spot. But some do it more than others. And Ms. Bachmann, well, she seems to have a history.”

Security

CNN Contributor Erick Erickson Suggests Petraeus Is Folding ‘Like A Cheap Suit’ To Violent Islamists

By Zaid Jilani on Sep 8, 2010 at 1:40 pm

erickson As ThinkProgress previously reported, earlier this week General David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, warned that the planned burning of the Quran by the extremist Dove World Outreach Center “could put the lives of American troops in danger and damage the war effort.”

Now, Erick Erickson, editor-in-chief of Redstate.com and CNN contributor, has responded to Petraeus’s warning to be respectful of Muslim sensitivities by excoriating the general. He writes that he thinks it is “bad form for the military to start applying pressure to influence the political activities…of American civilians” and notes that Petraeus “made no similar pronouncement about the activities of antiwar demonstrators who, at least arguably, caused American deaths.” He even goes as far as to say that Petraeus’s actions “teach the same lesson to both us and the Islamists that the Mohammed cartoon did” — that Western governments and elites will “fold like a cheap suit” to violent Islamists:

I think it is bad form for the military to start applying pressure to influence the political activities (and this is clearly a form of political speech) of American civilians. Petraeus is essentially attributing direct responsibility for American deaths to the activities of American citizens (and I hasten to point out that he made no similar public pronouncement about the activities of antiwar demonstrators who, at least arguably, caused American deaths by giving the jihadis reason to believe they could drive us out of Iraq given enough casualties). [...]

More specifically, Petraeus’s actions teach the same lesson to both us and the Islamists that the Mohammed cartoon did: Islamists learned if they are sufficiently violent Western governments and elites will fold like a cheap suit.

Erickson also writes that Petraeus’ actions taught us that “Islam, as practiced by large swaths of the [M]uslim world, is a violent religion that apparently can’t operate in tandem with a civil society.” He ends his screed by saying he does disagree with Dove pastor Terry Jones’s actions, but implies that Arabs are inherently violent, writing, “I would encourage this pastor to stand down — but I’m not going to wring my heads over it. If not this, there’ll just be something else causing riots in the ‘Arab Street.’ This is just today’s excuse.”

Update

Two dozen Christian, Jewish, and Muslim religious leaders from across the country gathered in Washington yesterday to condemn the proposed Quran burning, saying in a joint statement that the plan is “a particularly egregious offense that demands the strongest possible condemnation by all who value civility in public life and seek to honor the sacred memory of those who lost their lives on September 11.” At a press conference, Rev. Richard Cizik, the president of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, said that while Rev. Jones and his followers are “conservative Christians” like himself, their hateful acts and speech against Muslims “bring dishonor to the name of Jesus Christ”:


Update

,In 2007, Erickson complained that the left was demeaning Petraeus, writing, “[The left is] calling into question General Petraeus’s bronze star and whether he really has earned all the medals he wears.

That’s right, according to the left, General Petraeus is a liar and a fraud. According to one DKos (surprised?) poster, General Petraeus did not deserve the medal and so if it was really given to him, it had to be a GOP job to boost his credibility.”


Update

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Media

CNN Contributor Erickson Compares Building of Mosque To ‘Human Sacrifice’

By Matt Duss on Aug 14, 2010 at 12:45 pm

ericksonReacting angrily to President Obama’s statement yesterday in support of the Cordoba House community center in lower Manhattan on the basis of religious freedom, blogger and CNN contributor Erick Erickson compared supporting the rights of Muslims to establish mosques in America to supporting “human sacrifice” by the Church of Satan. Erickson went on to suggest that the president’s interpretation of American religious freedom could also extend to support for “jihad”.

Picture 2Picture 1

As the Guardian’s Michael Tomasky notes, the president’s support for the Cordoba House “is going to be demagogued to death in the next few days. The important part is going forward. Hang tough. Stand by the position. Don’t trim sails or add asterisks after Mitch McConnell or Dick Cheney or whomever says whatever hideous thing they’re going to say.”

By supporting the rights of an unpopular religious minority, President Obama is firmly within the bounds of America’s best traditions and values. The same can’t be said of those cultivating fear of Muslims for political gain.

Politics

RedState’s Erickson to GOP: ‘Stop lying’ and admit that you’re the ‘Party of No.’

By Scott Keyes on Jul 24, 2010 at 1:10 pm

erickericksonSince President Obama first took office, Republicans have stood lock-step in opposition to his legislative agenda. In March 2010, Republican senators waged a record number of filibusters for a two-year term – after just 14 months. Given the GOP’s dearth of ideas, it’s understandable that Rep. Peter King (R-NY) told radio host Bill Bennett that Republicans shouldn’t “lay out a complete agenda,” because it could become “a campaign issue.”

Despite their blanket rejection of virtually everything President Obama has proposed, many prominent conservative leaders have urged the GOP to develop a substantive agenda instead of simply accepting their “Party of No” label.

Yesterday, ThinkProgress caught up with RedState founder Erick Erickson and asked his thoughts on the “Party of No” moniker. Erickson took the GOP to task for clouding the issue. He advised them to “stop lying” about being the “Party of No” because “everyone knows you are”:

TP: They are saying, if you accuse them of being the party of no or not having ideas, they will say “oh no!”

Erickson: That’s such crap. Say you’re the “Party of No.” Of course you are. Everyone knows you are. Stop lying.

Watch it:

Politics

Erickson: I’ll ‘pull out my wife’s shotgun’ if someone comes to my door for the American Community Survey.

By Matt Corley on Apr 2, 2010 at 9:50 am

Yesterday, ThinkProgress noted that Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC) took to the conservative blog RedState to call out “blatant misinformation coming from otherwise well-meaning conservatives” about this year’s Census. “There have been calls to only partially fill out Census forms – even though that would be a direct violation of federal law,” wrote McHenry. RedState editor Erick Erickson, who recently became a CNN contributor, has joined McHenry in urging conservatives to fill out the Census because “it’s a Constitutional obligation.” But on his radio show yesterday, Erickson railed against the American Community Survey (ACS), a more-detailed supplemental survey conducted by the Census Bureau, saying that he would “pull out” his “wife’s shotgun” if someone tried to get him to fill it out:

ERICKSON: This is crazy. What gives the Commerce Department the right to ask me how often I flush my toilet? Or about going to work? I’m not filling out this form. I dare them to try and come throw me in jail. I dare them to. Pull out my wife’s shotgun and see how that little ACS twerp likes being scared at the door. They’re not going on my property. They can’t do that. They don’t have the legal right, and yet they’re trying.

Listen here:

According to the Census Bureau, response to the ACS “is required by law (Title 13 , United States Code, Sections 141, 193, and 221). The same law protects the confidentiality of the information.” Erickson basically repeated his comments on RedState this morning, complaining that “naturally the left is out today saying I was on the air advocating killing census workers.”

Update

On The Daily Show last night, Jon Stewart mocked CNN’s hiring of Erickson, running through some of his most offensive comments.

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