Monday, March 16, 2009
Politics / Woods We Seek Guidance from Bill Hobbs
Posted by Jeff Woods on Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 3:05 PM
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Rebel elements within the state's political press corps have started referring to House Speaker Kent Williams as a Republican again. Gasp! That's in direct defiance of state GOP flack Bill Hobbs, who gave this order to all media around the time the party was disowning Williams:
"If Rep. Williams is stripped of his membership in the Republican Party in a process in accordance with the bylaws of the Tennessee Republican Party, the Party will insist that Speaker Williams no longer be referred to in media accounts or state government websites as a Republican."Of course, the media obeyed Hobbs without question at first. But now that House Republicans have decided to let Williams caucus with them, the Associated Press is referring to the speaker in its roll call reports thusly, "R-Elizabethton," with a footnote that reads, "Kent Williams is identified as a Republican in this list. He has had his Republican credentials stripped by the state party, but still caucuses with the House GOP." And in an even more brazen affront to Hobbs' authority, The Tennessee Journal's Ed Cromer has stopped listing Williams' party affiliation as "?" and started making him an "R" again. But Cromer says he's hedging "just as baseball commissioner Ford Frick did with Roger Maris' home run record" and adding an asterisk. So it's Williams (R*). Here at Pith in the Wind, we are flustered. We just don't know what to do. We could never disobey Bill Hobbs, but then what do we call Kent Williams? We emailed Hobbs for guidance and like a thunderbolt came his response: "Just be completely factual." Words to live by. Amazing how he cuts to the chase! It's that kind of steel-trap thinking that causes Pith to follow Hobbs so faithfully.
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