Georgia on Your Mind

Raise a glass and toast the end of Ralph Reed, the not-as-funny-as-Dave-Foley Christian Coalition fieldmarshall whose foray into elective politics hit the reef last night. Reed lost the nomination for lieutenant governor to unknown State Senator Casey Cagle, the only candidate who dared to make a race against Reed—the rest of the field had jumped out when Reed entered. Yesterday, Reed's vaunted evangelical turnout machine fell apart and Cagle won by 12 points. This will make your day:

Conservative radio-TV talk show host Sean Hannity and future presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani traveled to Georgia to help Reed build his war chest. Giuliani said it was "very important" that Reed get elected.

Tim Cavanaugh's brutal 2005 takedown of Rudy is here.

Elsewhere in Georgia, cop-blocking Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney was surprisingly forced into a runoff (to win a primary race in Georgia you need to score over 50 percent) against a political nobody, former Cobb County commissioner Hank Johnson. McKinney's camp is telling bloggers that the election was flipped by rigged Diebold machines. Because, obviously, if you're the masters of a Republican election-stealing matrix, you want to keep the Dems' walking bad-headline generator out of Congress.