Hasterts Office Told Earlier than Acknowledged.

Source "a current congressional staff member with personal knowledge of of Foley and his behavior with pages":

Assertion:

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert's chief of staff confronted then-Rep. Mark Foley about his inappropriate social contact with male pages well before the speaker said aides in his office took any action

The staff member's account buttresses the position of Foley's onetime chief of staff, Kirk Fordham, who said earlier this week that he had appealed to Palmer in 2003 or earlier to intervene, after Fordham's own efforts to stop Foley's behavior had failed. Fordham said Foley and Palmer, one of the most powerful figures in the House of Representatives, met within days to discuss the allegations.

Palmer said this week that the meeting Fordham described "did not happen." Timothy J. Heaphy, Fordham's attorney, said yesterday that Fordham is prepared to testify under oath that he had arranged the meeting and that both Foley and Palmer told him the meeting had taken place. Fordham spent more than three hours with the FBI on Thursday, and Heaphy said that on Friday he contacted the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct to offer his client's cooperation.

And guess what??

Hastert's investigation means that House members and staff don't have to talk about this anymore. Shove it under the carpet! Yep, down low like the dirt under the carpet. Yet, behind the scenes the Republicans are not only working to make this look like the result of a Gay Cabal among aides to Republican Congressionals, but to out them all.

The Gay Cabal Theory is already out at CBS

Everyone of those staffers is to be "outed" according to David Corn quoted at Howard Kurtz's Media Notes. Apparently the Republicans are just looking for some over-eager liberal blogger to do the job for them so they can blame Democrats and liberals for the smear job.

Wait, so gay Fordham tried to warn the speaker's office and got a powerful aide to warn Foley about his behavior, and now the 'straight' or closeted Republicans are blaming the out there gays for this?

At Media note you can also read about Michelle Malkin's disgust with fellow conservatives who outed one Republican aide who was the young man in San Diego (or with whom Foley talked about a dinner date -- platonic -- in "sd"). I dealt with that blogger in a post below.

And Kurtz quotes Andrew Sullivan saying that online sex is not sex. Who knew? Mr. S. also says that age 16 is a legal age for sexual consent in DC, but Mr. S. when Mr. F was IMing J.E. in S.D. Mr. E. was in California. In California the age of consent is 18. Mr. F. emailed Mr. E. "Do you see us fooling around?" (about when the guy got to dc for a page reunion). Gee, that sure sounds like setting up a sexual contact to me. And people do get put in jail for setting up sexual contacts over the internet with a young person residing in a state in which they are a sexual minor.

The former page of the above paragraph (Mr. E.) is the subject of another report by the Washington Post in which his lawyer affirms that the conversations with former Representative Foley were not a prank. People asked why the former page might have come forward with the saved IMs after the news broke of the other page that received what he felt were upsetting IMs from Foley?

Maybe Mr. E. felt like Mr. V. of Atlanta felt, that his was an isolated case and therefore, not a big deal. When they heard that other, more vulnerable type young men were being hurt by Foley's advances, they came out to make sure things like this don't happen again.

The same might be true of 3 more pages who received emails from Mark Foley after leaving the page program from whom ABC has received information.

When it's Good to Be Shrill

People should scream like banshees when their nation is heading down the path of fascism. So Olberman has got it right.

Half Daily Funnies

Oh those Republicans. Always have to outdo everyone else (Huffaker)

IM to Republicans (Anderson)

Taxpayer's letting their employees get away with... (Asay)

Foley's in a safe place?


Even Conservatives are Chipping In (Wright)

How many more have to die? Wilkinson

Poor George. He can't help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth (w/ apologies to Ann Richards) works for a lot of folks I guess. (Schorr)

State of Denial or Illusion? (Sack)

What coverup? Benson

Just in time for Halloween: IM From the GOP (Cole)

Can right wing media control overcome all this? (Matson)

Staying the Course (Luckovich)

What You're Going to Get With a Democratic Speaker

1. Corruption contained.
2. Counterterrosism boosted.
3. Minimum wage raise.
4. Interest rate cut on student loans.
5. Broaden stem cell research.
6. Contain the Federal Debt.

Anyone have a problem with that? I don't.

From Washington Post article "Pelosi Says She Would Drain GOP 'Swamp'":

I hope they get rid of all those slimy alligators roaming the halls of Congress too. Real alligators I like. The rotten kind infesting Congress need to go. Those would be the lobbyists that work with Republicans to sell the nation to big business and fat cats.

As in the first 100 hours the House meets after Democrats _ in her fondest wish _ win control in the Nov. 7 midterm elections and Pelosi takes the gavel as the first Madam Speaker in history.

Day One: Put new rules in place to "break the link between lobbyists and legislation."

Day Two: Enact all the recommendations made by the commission that investigated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Army, Marines write new field manual. Don't Have Enough Manpower to Implement New Plans

That lack of manpower sounds ominous.

I hope they look around Iraq and see that there are millions of unemployed men and women that need a better job than insurgency for Pete's sake.

The only other alternative is a draft.

Rebuilding is a big part of pacifying the nation, but security is needed before rebuilding can take place according to the big Bush campaign contributors who took billions for the job and failed.

But now the military seems to be saying they will use the troops (that they don't have enough of) to try to rebuild Iraq. I hope Halliburton isn't making money off this.

I guess that since the troops are stuck there anyway they might as well be building something. But I hope they keep in mind that they can hire some of the locals too.

In fact, the UN recommended that local enterprises be given the jobs of rebuilding. It is much cheaper and the people know the area, the supplies available and the necessary construction skills for that area. And the resultant products are utilities or hospitals of the kind that the locals are used to using, not hospitals with overpriced Italian marble floors, but in which the elevators kill people.

I still don't believe we will be in Iraq any longer than it takes to get the war on Iran started.

But if we can believe in fairy tales, this is the best one they've offered so far.

Houston Chronicle report on New Army and Marine Tactics.

GOP's Hold on Evangelicals Weakening

This is good. After the GOP killed so many in Iraq people should notice that they are not the pro-life party.

Next up they could be calling a draft and sending our kids off to Iran which is much stronger than Iraq was.

Right Wing Blogger Outs A Former Page Then Whines About the Blowback

It turns out that the former page is working for a Republican US House member who is running for Governor in Oklahoma. Not a skulduggerous Liberal, but a Republican.

Okay to stop you from taking up time googling that the US Representative Ishtook (R-OK).

This "miracle blogger" did the incredible job of looking up the the young man's AOL profile from a transcript that was apparently not redacted enough, and he needed help doing that.

I will not mention the name myself. This is between Republicans, but the unemployed blogger gave an interview to NewsOK.com which he described as the "Daily Oklahoman", and I would be willing to believe is a real newspaper in Southern City, especially the way they focused only on the blogger and got no balancing statements from anyone else. I must say that the blurb hinting that Senator Inofe may have been in danger in an airplane cause me to try to open up 2 new pages on their site at one time and I guess you just can't do that at newsok.com at least not in the same 10 minutes. So maybe that's an indication of the quality of publication they have there.

But back to the miracle blogger who can look up AOL profiles. The man went through his previous troubles with the law and the military and how his wife supports the family and they get foodstamps, whines about "threats" to his family. (Like I said, this is between Republicans, remember?) But he nevers seems to waste a moment worrying about the other guy, and if that guy is receiving threats. That is a sad commentary on our miracle blogger guy. I'm sure the young man is getting death threats.

The right wing is also trying to confuse the issue of which former page was underage when.

The young man in this incident is the young man who, in California, that received contact from Foley years ago ("I wish I had jumped you in SD" said one of Foley's missives) when he was under 18. He is not the young man in Louisiana that received the more innocuous IMs last year. One thing I do know is California and the age of sexual consent in CA is 18. It does not matter if the young man Foley was talking about a date in San Diego with continued to talk to him, because in California it is statuatorily considered harassment until the age of 18. As is well understood, teens may get together when both are underage, but older people (for Pete's sake Foley's 54!) had better keep their hands and their IMs off.

FBI Dealiings With Liberal Group Have Americans Questioning Gmen's Committment to Protecting All

The FBI claims that Emails sent to them by Citizens for Responsibility in Washington (CREW) offered them were heavily, but CREW members say the emails were the complete copies (which to me says unredacted).

The further controversy comes over whether or not the FBI contacted CREW for further information. The FBI claims it did. CREW claims it didn't.

In comments on the Internet, we find people wondering just who the FBI works for and some have gone beyond wondering.

Melanie Sloan's statement

The Left Coaster reminds us that the FBI made a different excuse last week for why they didn't investigate the emails to two former pages that CREW provided the FBI.

Further, the FBI made a different claim previously to explain why they never bothered to investigate Foley:

An FBI official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing, said the field office concluded that the e-mails "did not rise to the level of criminal activity." The bureau announced Sunday that it would begin a preliminary investigation into Foley's more explicit electronic exchanges with teenagers.

Media Matters for America is heavily unredacting the mainstream new media's bias on Foleygate. Click here for one article and later you can click on the newssite's title for their latest offerings

A Washington Post article has more on Sloan's responses to newer allegations of the FBI about 'redaction' and a supposed "Deep Throat" (Karl Rove ally behind a leaking public restroom most likely instead of Mark Felt in a parking garage.) allegation that the Bush administration political arm uses so often. Remember when the administration's leakers told Judith Miller all we needed to know about Iraq so we could invade?

Rumsfeld Blames the International Community for Failure over North Korea

What a blooming hypocrite!

Your honor I would like to place into evidence an analysis by one Fred Kaplan about the Bush administration complete failure in the North Korea nuclear crisis that they have managed to stretch out for four years and make worse with every passing season.

.

..the North Koreans had another route to nuclear weapons--a stash of radioactive fuel rods, taken a decade earlier from its nuclear power plant in Yongbyon. These rods could be processed into plutonium--and, from that, into A-bombs--not in years but in months. Thanks to an agreement brokered by the Clinton administration, the rods were locked in a storage facility under the monitoring of international weapons-inspectors. Common sense dictated that--whatever it did about the centrifuges--the Bush administration should do everything possible to keep the fuel rods locked up.

Unfortunately, common sense was in short supply. After a few shrill diplomatic exchanges over the uranium, Pyongyang upped the ante. The North Koreans expelled the international inspectors, broke the locks on the fuel rods, loaded them onto a truck, and drove them to a nearby reprocessing facility, to be converted into bomb-grade plutonium. The White House stood by and did nothing. Why did George W. Bush--his foreign policy avowedly devoted to stopping "rogue regimes" from acquiring weapons of mass destruction--allow one of the world's most dangerous regimes to acquire the makings of the deadliest WMDs? Given the current mayhem and bloodshed in Iraq, it's hard to imagine a decision more ill-conceived than invading that country unilaterally without a plan for the "post-war" era. But the Bush administration's inept diplomacy toward North Korea might well have graver consequences. President Bush made the case for war in Iraq on the premise that Saddam Hussein might soon have nuclear weapons--which turned out not to be true. Kim Jong-il may have nuclear weapons now; he certainly has enough plutonium to build some, and the reactors to breed more.

Yet Bush has neither threatened war nor pursued diplomacy...

Read rest at source (Link above).

A Washington Post article says:

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Thursday if North Korea successfully tests a nuclear weapon, it will show weakness on the part of the international community.

"And that failure ... is something that the international community would have to register and ask itself how comfortable are we being that ineffective in this situation," Rumsfeld told reporters at the Pentagon during a visit by Croatian Defense Minister Berislav Roncevic.

His comments came as U.S. officials warned North Korea anew not to test a nuclear weapon.

"It isn't in their interest and it isn't in anyone's interest," Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, the top U.S. negotiator on the communist country's nuclear program, told AP Television. "We will not accept a nuclear state."

But they don't say what they will do about an actual test.

Republicans claim that Inquiry Will Focus on What Went Wrong

Again we want to say this is the foxes talking about how they will somehow someday get around to investigating how they failed to protect the hen house last time.

Just like the investigation about whether the pre-war intelligence was coerced by the Bush administration which hasn't been completed at least 1.5 years after it was started.

But they don't care. Anything to get Americans to think that they are really going to actually investigate themselves.

Meanwhile if you check google you will see that the fat cat, big business and American Taxpayer financed massive right wing blogger corps started with the lie that the IMs were faked, but couldn't begin to prove that one. Sorry Karl... er I mean um Mr. Buckbeak. This time that dog don't hunt. So now they are going with the BS that the IM were coerced from Foley by prank playing pages.

(I guess they mean all of these IMs Foley sent all over the nation to explore sexual themes with former pages who were still underage too were coerced as well.)

Though it sounds like once again the right wing is trying a case in the court of public opinion as they are doing about the Valerie Plame exposure, in this case they only have to fool their base who aren't allowed to get real news from outside their little bubbles anyway and a few others and only until election day and after that your kids are theirs to do with what they will. I'm more worried about Iran that the House page scandal because I would never let my child page for a Republican under any circustances. But that draft for Iran will reach out and touch ever family. (And of course as we see how Bush's unpunished invasion of Iraq has increased the violence level in our nation , if Foleygate goes unpunished then it will be a free for all in adults sexually harassing our children and other adults getting away with not stopping the predation.)

Washington Post's "Inquiry To Look At House, Not Foley" is a pretty well reported and well balanced article. It mentions the attempt to get Freeh to investigate as if he were some kind of competent and balanced "Diogenese". Pelosi sure showed what she's made of in this case.

And apparently, the ethics panel is stuffed with Haster loyalists. Can the Speaker get any more slimy? Check out the rest of the article at the link above and see what I'm talking about.

AOL Instant Messages Easy, Legal to Copy

Apparently right wingers are all in an uproar about someone copying IMs and showing what their man Foley was up to offering help and access in exchange for e-sex.

But AOL allows saving of IM conversations and it is perfectly legal.

Many people who take advantage of these free software services believe their conversations can't be tracked, but that's a misconception, said Michael Hall, managing editor of the Web site Instant Messaging Planet.

"Even the most basic instant-messaging software will keep some sort of archive," he said. "In the Foley case, I noticed there was a lot of carrying on in the right-wing blogosphere about the fact that these messages were recorded, [but] it's not odd. . . . Over the Net, you're never given any guarantees of real privacy."

Instant messages can be saved in a variety of ways. Most popular IM programs have built-in archiving features that can be turned on by anyone who uses them.
...Hall said he inspected screen shots of Foley's messages online and they appeared to have been captured using the standard archiving feature built into AOL's AIM software.

Sorry freepers, no army typewriters involved this time.

Confront Cheney. Get Arrested! Like Some Freaking Police State!

According to this report, a man walking his young son walked over to Cheney who was glad-handing and said, "I think your policies in Iraq are reprehensible." He walked on. Ten minutes later, he was handcuffed and arrested under orders from the Secret Service.

Just like in a Banana Republic!

I want to bite nails it hurts so much to cut down this excerpt, so please read the rest of this at Steve Clemons' "The Washington Note". Though very middle of the road (to my mind), Clemons is too honest for mainstream and proudly calls himself a "blogger" though he does stand head and shoulders above most of the rest of us.

Ethics Committee to Investigate Page Predation

The Republican Controlled Ethics committee will be investigating the Republican Page-Gate Scandal. Why is that not a surprise?

Hastert's Plan to have Republican Puppy Louis Freeh investigate Pagegate

Remember when the Republicans and Louis Freeh worked together to target a sitting president for removal for having a consensual and legal affair with a 26 year old woman who showed him her thong the first time they met?
Remember when that was supposed to be a scandal?

But now a Representative preying on 16-17 year olds is not supposed to be worthy of anyone's attention.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

Hastert thought he could get a deal with Democrats to have the former FBI director investigate the current scandal.

They knew they could pull it over the eyes of mainstream news which once called Henry Hyde a fair and balanced fellow, but they couldn't pull it over the eyes of the Democrats.

So Hastert just spewed his hate and bitter recriminations in his press conference.

Former Page From Oklahoma Says They Had No Hint

He also says over the top stuff like pages are "more mature than other teens".

Representatives themselves pick the pages, but of course they have hidden insight into how is "more mature" than other teens.

Sure, especially the GOP Congress members who are "annointed by God", unlike the Democrats who claim they are Christians but are really in league with Osama bin Laden according to the ever-wise right wing bloggers and pundits.

In other words this guy seems to have been hand picked to cover for the Republicans.

Indeed other former pages have said that most pages knew about Foley so our OK guy is quite out of the loop or covering up.

Why is that not a surprise?

Link to post under green or salmon print above.

He lets on that pages had plenty of places to complain to if they had problems with Representatives.

School counselors (who probably owe their jobs to the Republicans in Congress), supervisors (um I think they tried that but the supervisor was a Republican), and their clergy.

Yeah, go tell it to your priest, kiddo! They'll wanna hear if you've had some experience already with that kind of stuff.

RE: "Lawmaker's Intentions Appear Clear In Exchanges"

In a report that gets too disturbing to repeat here, the Washington Post shows that the emails to some pages clearly crossed the line. (Link to WP ariticle same name as referred in post title is second link below -- the green or salmon paragraph.)

It also shows that Foley offered access and help in advancing careers in exchange for the sexual communication and possibly physical contact.
BTW, ABC reports that Rep Deborah Pryce has called for an investigation of rumors that Foley tried to enter the page domitory one night.

Republicans keep hinting they could take some others down in the House with this, but, well if there were any Democrats or the Independent doing these kinds of things to House pages, you know their names would already be national news.

And it gets worse: According to the ABC report linked above, apparently, complaints about Foley's behavior were funneled to Foley's staff.

Move to Beta

If you have come from the non beta version or even if you haven't, "Welcome".

We have too much of a reputation to drop it now, but beta is a new challenge.

Please excuse the colors. Changing a template takes time, which I'm not sure I'll have before November or maybe even January.

I have changed the original "minima blue" colors but it takes time to get the best balance. I suppose tonight I will just grab the colors from their various spots on the original templat and put them in manually to this template.

My original Pendragn blog is at: Pendragn News, Analysis, and Insight


BTW, Lookee silly wabbits. No flag button! Better call Mistah Wove and ask him what to do now.