Friday, February 09, 2007

Party Pooper?

Mike Ridgway, a Republican activist for several years, can't seem to keep himself out of trouble with the party hierarchy.

His latest problem?

The executive committee of the Salt Lake County Republican Party Thursday night passed a resolution barring Ridgway from holding or seeking any leadership position in the party.

Ridgway ran for the U.S. Senate against Orrin Hatch at last year's Republican state convention. Even that was a little dicey. At the time there was a court-sanctioned restraining order for Ridgway to stay away from Mark Towner, another party activist, because of alleged harassment

Towner was at the Republican convention so there was a question whether candidate Ridgway could even appear and speak on his own behalf. He eventually did with no incident.

The order requiring Ridgway to stay away from Towner has been appealed to the Utah Supreme Court.

Cheers,

Paul Rolly

2 Comments:

At 6:37 AM, Mark E. Towner said...: Paul, I want to expand on your comments just a little. The cival stalking order was requested to protect my wife Carrie, and my girls. Yes I was the person who filed the paperwork, but doing so to protect my faily. Second the appeal to the Supreme Court does not stay the order, in fact what the appeal is really about is should Mr. Ridgway be allowed to post harassing email or blog posts against us personally. Political free speech was allowed by the Judge, but only in response to political or policy issues Carrie or I have taken publically. The actions of the Salt Lake County Executive Commitee (of which my wife is a member) is the result of nealy a decade of actions by Mr. Ridgway.

Thank-you for allowing me to clairify the record.

Respectfully,

Mark E. Towner
At 2:54 PM, Mike Ridgway said...: Paul,

I want to compliment you on a completely factual and non-insulting report of what happened at the meeting.

Now if only you could bring yourself up to that level of journalism where you actually make a contact with the person about whom you are writing to request their input into your story.

The day you do that, you'll get another compliment from me. I'm not holding my breath, however.

Mike Ridgway

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Paul Rolly grew up in Salt Lake City, graduating from Skyline High School and earning a B.S. in political science at the University of Utah. He began working at The Salt Lake Tribune in 1973 as a copy boy. He worked his way up the ladder, covering police, local government, community affairs and business. He left The Tribune in 1982 to work for United Press International where he was the Utah political reporter and later Salt Lake City bureau chief. He returned to the Tribune in 1985, covering the Utah Legislature and later, taking over as business editor. He began the Rolly&Wells column in 2001 with JoAnn Wells and continues the column alone since her retirement. He also writes a political column that runs in The Tribune's Sunday opinion section. He is married to Dawn House, a reporter at The Tribune.

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