Rightroots: Glad To Know Jack

We just received a message from Jack Kingston regarding the challenge he issued on our Tueday launch. Rep. Kingston offered to donate $14,000 to the eighteen Rightroots candidates if we could raise $26,000 by midnight Friday. We’ve surpassed that with more than 36 hours to go!
Rep. Kingston says:

Way to go! I’m proud to be a member of this team. And I’ll start cutting the checks!
Now let’s keep it going. George Soros hopes we’ll stop. Let’s be sure to disappoint him.
-Jack

Let’s all keep cutting the checks — and keep pushing hard for these critical races!
UPDATE: I had the total wrong, as Jhn’1 in the comments notes — Rep. Kingston donated a total of $14,000 to the candidates, not $100 each. Just when you think you know Jack …

Now Murtha Wants To Surrender For Other Nations

Rep. John Murtha has demanded an immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq for months. Now he’s demanding another stand-down, but this time he’s telling Israel to declare defeat and go home:

Pennsylvania’s Rep. John Murtha said yesterday that he favored an immediate cease-fire in the fighting in Lebanon. …
Mr. Murtha, speaking yesterday at a Post-Gazette editorial board meeting, was asked if he favored a cease-fire in the campaign north of Israel’s border.
“I think so,” he said. “I think it would be very difficult to justify continuing on.”
Referring to the Bush administration’s position, he said: “You know, they say, ‘Well, we want a long-term cease-fire.’ It seems to me you start with a cease-fire, and then you try to work out the details long term. If you don’t, and you continue to have heavy-handed military action — and I support heavy-handed military action because it saves your own troops — but it creates enemies, and that’s the problem we have.”
Mr. Murtha said the fighting risked hardening against Israel the “hearts and minds” of Lebanese civilians within the general population, beyond Israel’s entrenched enemies in the Shiite militia.

John Murtha has made himself into the paragon of Democratic tenacity in wartime, only now he wants Israel to follow his example — after Hezbollah attacked them. He trots out the same old “hearts and minds” line that we have heard since Viet Nam, only he fails to realize that for Israel, surrender will not endear it to their neighbors. Israel withdrew from Lebanon six years ago, and Hezbollah has lobbed missiles and conducted border raids ever since. Surrender has not worked for the Israelis; Islamists hate them just the same, and only get emboldened by their efforts to act peacefully.
For this reason, as well as for his impulse to declare fellow Marines guilty of murder without benefit of trial, Murtha will have a tougher time convincing his constituents to return him to Congress. Many of them supported the veteran Marine because of his service record, and understandably so. However, Murtha has dissipated that asset with this kind of incessant defeatism and knee-jerk capitulationism. Considering that Bush probably won this district in 2004 (gerrymanderings makes it difficult to say definitively), the Republicans certainly have a shot at a win here in PA-12.
Some have challenged the wisdom of including Diana Irey in our Rightroots campaign, which has raised over $25,000 to date for the eighteen races we selected. Irey leads all fundraisers at Rightroots, with over $5,000 in contributions. Given Murtha’s wide lead in fundraising and his electoral record, that skepticism is understandable. (The Florida Masochist elected us his Knuckleheads of the Day for being, well, masochists.) I don’t share his defeatism. Murtha ran unopposed in 2004, but a lot has happened since then, and none of it reflects well on Murtha. Despite his financial advantage, which we hope to dent just a bit, he’s going to be vulnerable to a serious challenge in the fall.
We don’t win by ducking a fight. We learned that despite John Murtha and his defeatism, and we want to work as hard as we can to replace him with someone who supports a forward strategy for the war on terror — someone who understands that terrorists do not abide by cease fires and the rules of war. Diana Irey deserves our support in showing the courage to challenge John Murtha for his Congressional seat, and I’m pleased to have her as part of our Rightroots initiative.

Rightroots: Irey Needs Support

Diana Irey has her work cut out for her if she wants to unseat longtime incumbent John Murtha in PA-12. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that she trails far behind Murtha in fundraising, although she still qualifies as the best-financed challenger in the state:

While Republican challenger Diana Irey accelerated her fund-raising pace in the second quarter of the year, she still trailed far behind U.S. Rep. John P. Murtha, D-Johnstown, the veteran incumbent in the 12th Congressional District.
Entering the final four months of the campaign, Mr. Murtha’s campaign committee had a cash advantage of more than 10-to-1 over the Washington County commissioner. The Democrat entered July with $1,804,695, while Ms. Irey had $159,138, according to a digest of Federal Election Commission filings compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. Murtha funds include money leftover from his last campaign.
Mr. Murtha had raised a total of $2,452,426 during that election cycle and spent $1,481,352 by June 30. Ms. Irey, who has tried to build a national fund-raising effort based on opposition to the Democrat’s anti-war rhetoric, had raised a total of $305,541 and spent $146,403.

Irey’s race is one of the eighteen focus campaigns supported by the Rightroots initiative. In fact, so far she’s proven one of the most popular of the candidates, with over $1200 in donations in the first 24 hours. As is obvious from this P-G report, she will need much more support to erode Murtha’s fundraising edge. She has a tough fight, but with enough support she could win this seat and help the GOP retain control of Congress.
One of our other candidates has noticed the Rightroots support already. Ray Meier, running in NY-24, has a press release on his site:

State Senator Ray Meier is breaking new ground in his campaign for New York’s 24th Congressional seat as he receives a boost today from Rightroots, a new fundraising effort organized by bloggers from across the country.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist endorses the Rightroots on his own Volpac blog today as well. Volpac becomes the eighth official endorser of Rightroots, and has been added to our site at ABCPac.
UPDATE: I think we can take Michelle Malkin’s challenge and agree that we won’t be photoshopping people into racist blackface images, like the netroots of the Left.