Daily Kos: DE-AL: Castle (R) stroke severity covered up by local media. If this story is true, it’s like one of those old movies.
Only I don’t think we are going to get Jimmy Stewart saving the day.
I find it hard to believe that a newspaper could be as corrupt as is being suggested. They are not, after all, Republicans in Congress.
Rep. John Shimkus, one of the leading figures who seems to have known about Predatorgate for some time but done little, has found a novel defense which I hope he will keep using: Insult the voters.
Yes, really:
He insisted the page program is safe. “They are as safe there as they are at home,” he said. “In fact, in a lot of homes–they’re safer in our program than they are in a lot of homes.”
I am certain that voters all across America will appreciate hearing this assessment of their parenting.
Some more items with varying relevance to Predatorgate.
Wishful thinking dept? Or just old-fashion lying? You be the judge: Fox News identifies Foley as…a Democrat. (Yes, really.) Update: And then they did it again in a completely different caption! Amazing.
The Trademark Blog says You Can’t Make Up This Kind Of Irony: “Congratulations to the Foley Hoag firm, which won the exclusive right to be known as Foley, today.” (Explanatory link.)
Human Shields: NRCC head Rep. Tom Reynolds — second most likely head to roll after Hastert — did a press conference. Surrounded by kids. Reporters asked if the kids could be cleared out so they could ask the R-rated questions. Reynolds said no — prompting some bloggers to accuse him of using the kids as “human shields” to avoid tough questions.
Foley enters rehab and the rumors start to swirl. People keep emailing me saying he checked into a Scientology rehab center. I have no idea if this is true and don’t care. (In keeping with the national trend, the Scientologists have put their picture of Foley accepting an award that used to be on this page down the memory hole.) More interesting is this AP story (ephemeral link, sorry):
When disgraced former Rep. Mark Foley announced he was entering rehab for treatment of alcoholism and “other behavioral problems,” some of those who have known him for years were shocked and suspicious.
Some friends and acquaintances said they rarely saw him drink.
A former colleague, Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., said on Fox News Channel: “I don’t buy this at all. I think this is a phony defense. The fact is, I think he’s responsible for what he did here and I think it’s a gimmick.”
Meltdown: So here’s the serious item: The GOP leadership can’t keep its various stories straight. If they are not guilty of something, then they certainly are doing the most amazing job of acting like co-conspirators who have been discovered. The Washington Post speculates that Predatorgate may move several house seats.
Those few of you who read the comments on this blog may have noted a small dust-up in the comments to Predatorgate Scandal Spreads. One of the GOP spin points asserted there by an assiduous commentator is the idea that the Democrats are (at least? more?) to blame for letting a known predator run loose because they knew all about the scandal and did nothing. This isn’t a reference to the Democratic member of the page committee being totally shut out of discussions then (and now!) but rather an unsourced and unsubstantiated allegation that some unnamed Democratic sympathizer must have known all the juicy details and sat on them until the time it might do the most good. Since in fact neither I nor almost anyone else knows the source of the info that finally brought Rep. Foley’s behavior into the open, this sort of calumny is hard to rebut, although to my ear it has an element of blaming the victim — since a victim had to the original source of the damning information.
Amazingly, however, we now have some information on the subject of who leaked what to whom when:
Papers Knew of Foley E-Mail but Did Not Publish Stories: Then, in June, the reports resurfaced on Capitol Hill, where a neighborhood resident struck up a conversation in a bar with someone who had provided the e-mail messages. He said he passed them on to several news outlets. The resident, who said he was not affiliated with either party and was motivated by concern for the teenager, would talk only on condition of anonymity.
No one acted on the information until last week, and even then, it was a Web site that first posted the exchange. It is not clear who maintains the Weblog, stopsexpredators.blogspot.com, which appears to be largely devoted to the Foley scandal.
ABC News had its first account several days later on its Web site.
Mr. Ross said he was surprised by how quickly the congressman’s office confirmed the authenticity of the e-mail messages, first when ABC reported them on Sept. 28, and again a day later when confronted with much more explicit exchanges.
Mr. Ross dismissed suggestions by some Republicans that the news was disseminated as part of a smear campaign against Mr. Foley.
“I hate to give up sources, but to the extent that I know the political parties of any of the people who helped us, it would be the same party,” Mr. Ross said, referring to Republicans.
So to the extent we know who pushed this into the media … it’s Republicans. I have no idea who is behind stopsexpredators.com, but I bet that none of the people accusing them of being Machiavellian Democrats sitting on the info for ages do either. (And since when did Democrats get so good at Machiavellian tactics anyway?)
Predatorgate is a serious matter, and Glenn Greenwald is all over it: This needs to be investigated. Things look really bad for Hastert — the Washington Times is going to call for his resignation. And things look bad for NRCC Chairman Tom Reynolds too.
I wish I lived in a country in which this or even this was the biggest scandal of the week. (Not to mention the Torture bill.) But there it is. And there’s some karmic appropriateness that those who lived by the sex scandal should also die by it.
It’s easy to find the membership list of the Senate Caucus on Missing, Exploited, and Runaway Children.
Oddly, today, I can’t find the membership list for the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus anywhere. Google has let me down.
The Senate Caucus web page has a link for The Congressional Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus at http://www.house.gov/lampson/CMECC.htm but that page is missing because Rep. Lampson lost his seat. (He’s now running in TX-22, DeLay’s old seat. Oh the irony.) Seems the Senate Caucus doesn’t update its links very often.
Archive.org hasn’t visited Lampson’s page since 2004, which is probably when it stopped existing. Back then it listed three leaders of the caucus:
Rep. Nick Lampson, (D-TX) CHAIRMAN & FOUNDER
Rep. Bud Cramer, (D-AL) CO-CHAIRMAN
Rep. Mark Foley, (R-FL) CO-CHAIRMAN
Thanks to archive.org I was able to find that in 2004 the House Caucus boasted 150 members — but even there I couldn’t get the list, just a “Data Retrieval Error”.
It would be good to have that list — a target-rich environment, even if an article from July, 2006 in US Fed News suggests the number of members may have dropped to 136.
Jotwell Blenderlaw