GOP candidate booted from editorial meeting after calling out 'blah blah' dis

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Candidate calls out paper for rude behavior

Reporter kicked Mark Callahan out of meeting

A Republican Senate candidate was kicked out of a local Oregon newspaper's editorial board meeting after daring to challenge a reporter who dissed a fellow candidate by writing "blah blah blah" in his notes instead of her actual quotes.

The entire argument was captured on video and posted online by the newspaper, Willamette Week.

The Republican candidate, Mark Callahan, told Fox News that the newspaper was on a "power trip."

"It's a fairly liberal paper. And they were basically trying to manhandle us Republicans," Callahan said Sunday. "They were very condescending, very controlling."

The video shows an editorial board meeting where the newspaper was interviewing Republican candidates for Senate. One of those candidates, Jo Rae Perkins, was responding to a question over the phone when Callahan noticed something was amiss.

"You want to talk about disrespect, I see what you're writing down there," he said, pointing at a reporter at the table. "You just wrote down 'blah blah blah blah blah' for everything that Jo Rae said. Jo Rae is a respectable woman. Why are you not respecting her by writing 'blah blah blah blah blah' on your notepad?"

The moderator tried to get Callahan to "move on" and answer a question about whether climate change is a "myth or a reality."

Callahan said "myth."

Then, the same reporter, later identified by the newspaper as Nigel Jaquiss, asked him a follow-up: "Where are you on the Easter Bunny?"

"What's that?" Callahan said, and the reporter repeated the question.

The interview really went downhill from there.

"Are these really the questions that I was called here to answer?" Callahan said. "How about you ask a very serious and respectful question instead of asking a little childish question?"

The two sides continued to argue, and the moderator warned him he'd be asked to leave if they didn't move on, noting he had "two strikes."

"Who do you think you are?" Callahan asked.

"Okay, you may leave now," the moderator said. "Go ahead. You're done here."

Callahan then accused them of being "disrespectful, thin-skinned liberals."

Someone else in the room said: "There's the door." Walking out, Callahan told them he had "better things to do with my time."

The newspaper issued its own take on what happened after the video started to get attention online.

The newspaper wrote: "Our goal is not to provide equal time to all candidates, but to explore questions that we think matter most to our readers. Not everyone likes to follow the rules, and on rare occasions we have asked candidates to leave the endorsement interviews. That's what happened when Callahan came to our offices."

As for what touched off the argument, the newspaper said Jaquiss was writing "blah blah blah" when Perkins, "who was supposed to be talking about health care, was instead talking about eliminating the U.S. Forest Service."