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When right-wing activist Ralph Reed announced Wednesday he would not be a candidate in the 7th Congressional District race, he said he decided against running because he wanted to spend his time "continuing to serve as CEO of Century Strategies, LLC, and founding chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition."

Tuesday was supposed to be a day when Tea Party activists would show up in force at the state capitol to demonstrate their growing political clout for all those legislators foolish enough to think that Georgia might need a tax increase to keep state government from collapsing. The stage, thanks to the financial support of tobacco giant Altria, was set for anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist to swoop in as the featured speaker who would fire up the teabagger hordes.

We've posted about this before, but I continue to be amazed at how steeply Florida's Republican governor, Charlie Crist, has fallen off a cliff in the U.S. Senate race. The latest indicator comes from Public Policy Polling with a survey out of the Sunshine State that shows teabagger favorite Marco Rubio leading Crist by 60-28 percent.

Nathan Deal did Democrats a big favor by deciding to resign early from his seat in the U.S. House to concentrate on running for governor (Deal did himself an even bigger favor, because his early resignation will squelch an embarrassing move by the House Ethics Committee to resolve an ethics complaint related to Deal's lucrative business deal with the state involving an auto salvage firm he owns).

You've got to love the voters of Paulding County -- they appreciate a good joke better than any other group of people I know. Where else in Georgia would you see the voters put such a colorful bunch of horndogs, carousers and hypocrites into public office?

The U.S. Justice Department told Georgia election officials this week that their program for verifying the citizenship of voters has been rejected because it violates the Voting Rights Act. You would think that our state's officials would have gotten the message by now -- this is at least the third time in nine months that the DOJ has turned down this plan because it discriminates against non-white voters.

This past week marked the one-year anniversary of President Barack Obama's signing of the federal stimulus act. It's a fair question to ask how much good, if any, the stimulus act did in creating new jobs or saving existing jobs.

When you observe the national media's continuing obsession with Sarah Palin, you can only come to the conclusion that the learning-impaired, half-term governor of Alaska has made a lot of veteran journalists quite horny. How else to explain the gushing adoration expressed in so many political columns by so many pundits who really should know better. The lady from Alaska has obviously caused a lot of scribes to start sporting boners.

Georgia's senior senator Saxby Chambliss has always been a special member of the U.S. Senate -- special in the sense of those special education classes offered at most public schools.

The trend has been evident for quite some time, but the latest poll should remove any doubts: Charlie Crist is dead meat in the Republican primary for Florida's Senate seat.