Kay's camp distances themselves from the search engine vendors...

Kay's campaign has broken ties with the group they are saying caused the entire "Rick Perry gay" flap. Good move by them, but I think they could have earned some credibility by not saying (link) Excerpts follow...

exas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, never one to avoid the spotlight, is smack in the middle of it at the moment — but not for any good reasons. It’s never a good week when your campaign site ends up getting banned by Google.

Locked in the middle of the most fractious Republican primary in the land with sitting Texas Governor Rick Perry, Hutchison — a 66-year-old pro-choice moderate with a penchant for attention-getting suits — has been answering questions for months about whether she was planning to resign from the Senate, both to demonstrate her commitment to the state and to doing what it will take to beat the suddenly formidable Perry, whose political prospects have apparently been rejuvenated by a recent populist streak. No governor has arguably benefited more from the upsurge in anti-bailout sentiment than Perry, whose anti-insider tack seems to be working surprisingly well against Hutchison, hampered by the fact that she’s been in Washington since 1993, and hasn’t had to navigate a difficult election in more than fifteen years. Nothing about this contest has gone as expected, and this week was no different.

[SNIP]

Let’s take the Hutchison campaign’s statements at face value: they’ve said that the list of keywords embedded in their site was generated “by a computer,” or were inserted unknowingly by their web consultants. So while they may not have been playing clumsy search engine games, they’re at best technologically out of touch. And paired with the candidate’s actions this week, her supporters have to be asking if the Hutchison is, too.

Kay is getting reamed over this, and Kay's team must be wondering how in the hell their operation keeps screwing up. They should have done a lot better this week with their new team in place... and with Rick in California early in the week, but Kay's confusing comments about resignation and later this website ruined their week.