Posted by R. Neal

This guy is so embarrassing for East Tennessee that I was reluctant to mention him but now that he's made the national news wires I guess there's no avoiding it.

Betty Bean at the Halls Shopper (don't let the newspaper's name fool you -- with the local daily and the local "alt-weekly" beholden to the local GOP Good Ol' Boys and Real Estate Developer Prayer Meeting Club, the Halls Shopper is the only paper that actually, like, reports on local issues here) sums it up nicely:

So we gotta hand it to our buddy [Tennssee House Representative] Stacey Campfield [R-Knoxville], who has the darnedest knack for snagging free media of anybody this side of John Ford.

Heck, the guy is a one-man media circus.

If he’s not getting thrown out of the coliseum for trying to punch [Tennessee Governor] Phil Bredesen, he’s renting his spare bedroom to a registered sex offender or committing crimes against the English language on his own personal Web site. But until now, all the aforementioned antics have been good for is a geographically-limited local notoriety.

Boy, howdy, that has all changed.

Read the whole thing, especially the quote by "The Rep" (as he calls himself on his blog) on ethics, which seems to reflect the current attitudes of right-wing conservative politicians everywhere. Boy howdy, indeed.

UPDATE: Tennessee Guerilla Woman Egalia has a complete blog/media roundup.