Mark Foley

FL GOP Gubernatorial Nominee Charlie Crist: 'I Never Had Sex With That Man'

CactusPat — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 18:07:54 -0400

Look out America! Another Gay Republican is on the prowl. Gay Republicans are dropping from the sky! Do you know where your children are? Unbelievable! A rising young star in the FL GOP has been boasting about sexual trysts with FL GOP candidate and Jebthro Bush wannabe Charlie Crist. There have been many rumors over the yrs., including one that has Crist as Mark Foley's former roomate (1, 2, 3, 4)....

Crist Denies Trysts - GOP frontrunner: I have never had sex with a man By Bob Norman
A young rising star in the Republican Party has boasted to witnesses of his sexual relationship with Charlie Crist, the frontrunner in the Florida governor's race who has repeatedly denied that he is gay. The GOP staffer, 21-year-old Jason Wetherington, told friends at separate social functions in August that he had sex with Crist... (more), according to two credible and independent sources who heard Wetherington make the claim first-hand.

Wetherington, who recently worked as a field director for U.S. Senate candidate Katherine Harris and currently works for state representative Ellyn Bodganoff's reelection campaign, also named a man whom he said is Crist's long-term partner, a convicted thief named Bruce Carlton Jordan who also recently worked for Harris in her long-shot Senate bid.

Jordan made headlines recently when the Miami Herald learned that the felon was working as Harris's travel aide. The newspaper noted that Jordan, 42, was reported to be close friends with Charlie Crist, whom he convinced to attend an annual Florida Funeral Directors Association meeting in 2003.

Jordan was charged in 2003 with stealing thousands of dollars from two organizations for whom he worked, including the Tallahassee-based Florida Funeral Directors Association, where he served as executive director. He completed a 60-day jail sentence in February and will be on probation until the year 2011, according to state records.

When the Herald questioned Crist about Jordan this past August, the frontrunner in the governor's race told the newspaper that he doesn't remember the man. "I don't know who Bruce Jordan is," he said at the time. "It doesn't mean I haven't met him. I don't know who you are speaking about."

I asked Crist during a phone interview on Monday morning if he had ever had sex with Jordan.

"No," he said. "I don't recall the name."

That Crist doesn't remember Jordan seemed incredible to me. Not only did the attorney general make a special appearance at the funeral directors' conference, but former presidents of the association say Jordan was known to be pals with Crist. Attempts to reach Jordan weren't successful, but his father told me that Crist and his son are friends.

"He talks about [Crist], but I don't think he's seen Charlie in a while," said Albert Jordan, who lives in Inverness, where he and his wife raised their son.

When asked if his son and Crist had a sexual relationship, the father simply said, "Not as far as I know."

I recounted some of those facts with Crist.

"I'm not saying I haven't met him, I probably have," he said. "I just can't picture him, that's all."

I also asked him about Wetherington's claim to sources that he'd had sex with Crist. "That's ridiculous," he said. "Completely false."

Then I asked him if he'd ever in his life had sex with a man.

"Never," he said.

While there is no proof that what Wetherington has said is true, it's clear that he said it. I first learned about his claims after receiving an anonymous e-mail on October 6. The e-mail was linked to a 2003 story of mine reporting that now-disgraced congressman Mark Foley was gay.

"Why don't you do the same story for another hugely visible FL politician running for office? Call if you want a starting point."

Immediately I knew the e-mailer was referring to Crist. For years, it has been rumored that Crist, the favorite to move into the governor's mansion after the November 7 election, is gay.

I was interested in pursuing the lead mainly because I've come to believe that any closeted politician in the Republican Party — which openly woos homophobes into its ranks while opposing gay rights — is fair game for the media.

Crist, for his part, has been moderate on those issues and supports civil unions. "I'm a live and let live kind of guy," he told me.

But the Palm Beach Post reported on Friday that Crist can be heard in recently recorded phone calls targeting voters saying, "I support a constitutional amendment to protect traditional marriages, and I oppose adoption by gay couples."

I asked him about that, and he said he's always held those positions. I asked him if he thought it was fair for reporters to ask him about his own sexuality. "Of course it's fair," he said. "It's just happens to be wrong."

Many people aren't convinced that Crist is telling the truth. I am one of them, especially after reporting this column. The source behind the e-mail, who asked that I not reveal his name for fear of retribution, is a gay man, a registered Independent voter and former Republican who isn't involved in Democratic Party politics. He was motivated to tell his story, he says, by his outrage at the Foley scandal.

He recounted a dinner party of four people at a friend's posh waterfront home in Las Olas Isles. He didn't remember the exact date but it took place in early August. He was there with his friend, his friend's partner, and Wetherington.

His friend had struck up a sexual relationship with Wetherington after meeting him in an AOL chat room. Wetherington spoke at the party about working for Katherine Harris's campaign. To me, this was significant since Harris is a stalwart of the Religious Right and openly denounces homosexuality. Wetherington even took a call from Harris after they sat down for cocktails before dinner. "He was like Harris's gay valet," the source said.

As they sipped their drinks, Jason started talking about his relationship with Crist, which he said had been sexual in nature.

"Charlie Crist? Are you kidding?" the source remembers asking.

They asked Jason about the size of Crist's anatomy. Jason "wouldn't go there," said the source. "He said that he remains friendly with Crist and that he was expecting an appointment when Crist becomes governor."

The source said that after the dinner he struggled for a few weeks with what he'd heard. When the Foley scandal hit the news, he called ABC News, which had broken the congressional page story. He said the network had no interest in the story.

Then he contacted me. I learned that Wetherington, a dark-haired and good-looking former page in the state senate, had been Harris's southeast field director and had left the campaign after the primary to work for Bogdanoff.

Wetherington had also appeared in numerous Sun-Sentinel articles. From them, I learned he was an alum of Fort Lauderdale High School, where he was the student body's vice president and the student advisor to the Broward County School Board.

On August 11, 2002, the newspaper published a feature story about Wetherington under the headline: "Leader by example: The school board's student advisor is a take-charge guy with lofty ideals and goals."

In it, Wetherington was very open about his ambition, telling the newspaper, "I'll make it to Washington, whether in the Senate or the White House." His mother said she was certain she would someday be a "First Mom."

The article also mentioned his role as a leader at First Baptist Church in Fort Lauderdale. The huge 12,000-member church is one of the more anti-gay institutions in the county and has been aligned with the ultra-conservative Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church and its rabidly right-wing minister, D. James Kennedy.

Wetherington appeared to be living a seriously twisted double life. On the one hand, he was a young Christian Republican leader and on the other a cruiser of men in AOL chat rooms.

Two weeks ago, I dropped by Wetherington's apartment complex off Sunrise Boulevard near the Intracoastal. As it happened, he was in his car in the parking lot, about to drive away.

I asked him to roll down his window, introduced myself, and told him what I was doing there. Wetherington confirmed he was gay. I told him what I had learned about the dinner party, which he admitted attending. But he denied that he had ever had sex with Crist.

"The only way I would have said that was if I was really drunk," he told me, adding that he didn't "remember anything" about the party.

I told him that the source told me that they had asked him about Crist's anatomy. Wetherington became more adamant about this detail than anything else during the impromptu interview. He asserted several times that he had never spoken about Crist's anatomy.

I assured him that the source had told me the same thing.

He said that he had met Crist on at least three different occasions, including at his church and at Crist's Republican primary debate with Tom Gallagher in West Palm Beach, but the extent of his contact with the Attorney General was "shaking his hand."

Did he already have a job locked up with the administration if Crist wins the election?

"I sent him a resume," he said. "I want to work for him, but I never said that I had a job with the administration."

I told Wetherington that it must be tough navigating his two conflicting worlds.

"It has been a personal struggle," he told me. "But I have my mother and I have the church "

Wetherington went on to say that he had come out to the church and that his activity there had decreased significantly because of it. He said he needed to go but wanted me to call him so we could meet for a standard interview. He never returned my phone calls.

A week later, I received another e-mail from another source who created the Yahoo name of "EveryOne KnowsAboutCC" to contact me. I spoke with the new source and he told an extremely similar story about Wetherington, only he'd heard it at a different party that took place in Broward County this past August.

This source, unlike the first, has known Wetherington for years. Again, the source supplied his identity — which is known in some local political circles — but asked that I not reveal it publicly.

The source was credible and possessed knowledge that only a confidante of Wetherington's could possibly have. He said he contacted me because he had learned that I had interviewed Wetherington.

"I am very conflicted about talking yet at the same time with the whole Foley thing, you can imagine how I must feel," he said. " Jason is a very nice kid, but as a gay person, we struggle very hard and, to have somebody [Crist] who sucks up to a party that badmouths us and works against us, is very two-faced."

He said Wetherington told him and several other people at a party that he had sex with the politician in a hotel room in the Tampa-Sarasota area while he was working on the Harris campaign. He said Wetherington recounted that he spoke with Crist about a campaign matter and "one thing led to another and they had sex."

"No birthmarks, moles, or such," said the source. "He also said that it happened on more than one occasion."

The new source also told me, like the first, that the young aide boasted that he was in line for an appointment to Crist's administration after he won the governor's race.

And he said that Wetherington named Crist's long-term partner: Bruce Carlton Jordan. The source said he had no idea who Jordan was, but had jotted the name down so he would remember it.

Both the sources are obviously telling the truth about Wetherington. That means that Wetherington, one of the most promising young Republican staffers in Florida, either had a sexual relationship with Crist or was lying about it.

There's no proof, just the ring of truth. Crist, meanwhile, is clearly in denial mode as indicated by his hollow claim that he doesn't remember Jordan. He tries to write the issue off as pre-election politics.

"It's the silly season," he said.

Maybe, but I don't think this issue is going away anytime soon.

Also see Bob Norman's blog post on his reasoning for publishing this article. It's sound... and if you didn't catch it, FL Dem Nominee Jim Davis has caught up to Crist in the latest poll...

Jerry Weller Rats-Out Fellow Republican Pervert?

CactusPat — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 21:50:02 -0400

Hmmmm, is suspected pervert Jerry Weller ratting out a fellow Republican pervert to try and save his own ass?

Weller refers incident to House
WASHINGTON -- Rep. Jerry Weller, R-Morris, through his election attorney, moved Thursday to inform the House that a former male page or intern may have been the subject of inappropriate attention from another lawmaker, Weller's campaign manager said Thursday. Steven Shearer said the congressman was not prepared to reveal the identity of the youth, the timing, nor the identity of the lawmaker, but felt confident that a former page or intern was "inappropriately invited to a social function by another congressman."...

Weller and his staff learned of the alleged incident through conversations with reporters and others Thursday. Shearer said Weller directed his campaign attorney to inform the House Page Board and the House Ethics Committee of the incident. The committee is investigating inappropriate contacts by former Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., with former pages and the handling of the matter by House leaders and staff.

Foley, 52, resigned abruptly late last month when it was revealed he had carried on explicit text message conversations with underage male pages.Shearer said Weller's name came up before the page inquiry within the last week, but as far as the congressman knows, solely in the context that he was the sponsor of the page or intern in question.

He said neither the congressman nor his office ever knew of the invitation, what became of the incident, and have yet to confirm the identity of the former page or intern.

He said the congressman would provide whatever information might be asked of him by the Page Board or the committee, and stressed that neither had contacted Weller for any reason. "When it comes down to it, we are very, very confident that's the extent of anything associated with Congressman Weller," Shearer said.

Congressional pages are high school juniors who work, live and study on Capitol Hill for one or two semesters. Their duties include ferrying messages and running errands. Shearer could not confirm whether Foley or another lawmaker is the subject of Weller's notice to the House.

House leaders and staff have come under scrutiny for failing to act more forcefully when they first learned of non-explicit contact by Foley with a page after that person left Washington. The contact alarmed the page and his parents, and they relayed their concerns to the page's sponsor, Rep. Rodney Alexander, R-La., who in turn told House leaders.

His concerns came some months after Foley's chief of staff, Kirk Fordham, says he informed Rep. John Shimkus, R-Collinsville and chair of the three-member House Page Board, of his concerns over Foley's behavior. At that time, Shimkus and then-House Clerk Jeff Trandahl warned Foley to cease contact with pages, but did not inform the board nor the Ethics Committee.

The unconfirmed mention of Weller in the page inquiry had inspired intense speculation on Democratic-leaning Internet Web blogs about what role he might have played. Shearer accused the congressman's opponents of leaking his name in connection with the page inquiry, and said it came from "national Democrats what want to put another seat in play for free."

Weller's 11th Congressional District seat has been considered relatively safe by independent observers in recent weeks, though predictions of a disastrous Nov. 7 election for incumbent Republicans have many Democrats hoping that the party will post unexpected victories in seats like Weller's.

The race, however, has yet to attract big money from national party organizations on either side, indicating Weller is thought to hold the advantage over Democratic opponent John Pavich, a Beecher attorney and political newcomer.

Shearer did not accuse Pavich of any role in the speculation about Weller, and Pavich's campaign manager and brother, Matt Pavich, had no comment.

A spokesman for Shimkus declined specific comment, other than to say any such information would be considered confidential and referred to the House Ethics Committee or a legal authority.

A spokesman for Rep. Dale Kildee, D-Mich., the lone Democrat on the board, also declined comment.

EDWARD FELKER, sng@nationalpress.com, 202-277-2487
Posted Online: 2006-10-20

Desperate and Craven Repubs Now Claiming Dems Support Pedophiles

CactusPat — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 04:41:19 -0400

How low will they go? The desperation is really showing with this latest craven campaign tact by the criminally corrupt Repugnants. I can only surmise they've now reached the SAY ANYTHING phase...

Republicans say top Democrats support 'group of gay paedophiles'

Let the dirty campaigning begin. With less than three weeks to go before the US mid-term elections and an embattled Republican Party struggling to hold on to control of both the House and Senate, some of the country's more desperate candidates are resorting to desperate measures. Republicans aren't going after their Democratic challengers much on Iraq, or the war on terror, or nuclear proliferation. Instead, members of pResident Bush's party are accusing their adversaries of being apologists for gay sex between adults and children.

In Ohio, the Republican candidate for governor, Kenneth Blackwell, went on a tear against his Democratic challenger, Ted Strickland, in their concluding televised debate this week, accusing him of cosying up to an eccentric group called the North American Man Boy Love Association, or Nambla, and associating himself with a man convicted of exposing himself to young children.

The attack almost certainly had more to do with Mr Strickland's double-digit lead in the polls than with any real substance. The convicted man, for example, was one of hundreds of campaign workers, not a close confidant of Mr Strickland's. But the smear by association with Nambla - a convoluted charge based on a congressional vote on which Mr Strickland abstained - does not appear to have been an accident, since Republican candidates have been trying it out all over the country.

In California, a struggling Republican congressman called John Doolittle has argued that since his opponent, Charlie Brown, is a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, and since the ACLU has in the past defended Nambla's free-speech rights, he is tainted by association. "It is astounding," Mr Doolittle said in a recent press release, "that anyone could defend a group dedicated to aiding and abetting paedophiles." (Mr Docozyingolittle failed to mention that he once acted as a character witness for a friend convicted of sexually assaulting six of his patients.)

The Nambla charge has also been thrown at Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco congresswoman who would become the next Speaker of the House if the Democrats win a majority on 7 November and who has thus become a multi-purpose pincushion for the Republicans. The maverick right-winger and erstwhile presidential candidate Pat Buchanan told a television interviewer this week that Ms Pelosi had been on gay pride parades where Nambla members were also present and had thus been "marching with paedophiles".

The line of attack is remarkably brazen, given that the Republican Party is itself being rocked by a man-boy sex scandal. First, Florida congressman Mark Foley was forced to resign following the publication of predatory e-mails and instant messages he sent to teenage pages working on Capitol Hill. Then the Republican House leadership closed ranks over revelations that it had known about Mr Foley's habits for years and done nothing about them. Now a second Republican congressman, Jim Kolbe of Arizona, is under investigation for a camping trip he organised with a group of pages 10 years ago.

And these are only the latest setbacks to hit a Republican Party already mired in corruption scandals and public disillusion on an array of issues, from Iraq to the aftermath of last year's Hurricane Katrina.

The thinking, though, appears to be that if Democrats can be painted as paedophiles too, then the Foley scandal might lose some of its bite. As Mr Buchanan said of Ms Pelosi: "If she's been marching with paedophiles, is she credible standing up there saying, 'I'm shocked, shocked, that some Republican is after 17-year-old pages'?"

There is a tendency in all US election campaigns to talk about sexual morality rather than weighty matters of state. But this yearseems to mark a new low.

Nowhere has the tone gone lower than in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where a Republican candidate called Vernon Robinson has accused his opponent, incumbent congressman Brad Miller, of wanting to import homosexuals to the United States and spending tax-payer dollars on filthy scientific studies on sex.

"Instead of spending money on cancer research," a recent campaign advert ran, "Brad Miller spent your money to study the masturbation habits of old men ... Brad Miller even spent your tax dollars to pay teenage girls to watch pornographic movies with probes connected to their genitalia. Brad Miller pays for sex, but not for body armour for our troops."

All this opprobrium stemmed from a single vote by Mr Miller on appropriations for the National Institutes of Health. In a campaign mailer, the unabashedly homophobic Mr Robinson even sought to drop hints questioning his adversary's sexuality, referring to him pointedly as "childless". Mr Miller has since pointed out that the reason he is childless is that his wife had a hysterectomy 20 years ago.

So let's review - We now have three suspected Grand Old Pedophiles caught up in FoleyGate/PageGate...

and now it's Democrats who are coddlin' preverts? GMAFB!

hat tip to BattleDove2

Is Jerry Weller (R-IL) GOP Page Predator #3?

Bob Fertik — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 09:23:29 -0400

First Mark Foley (R-FL)... then Jim Kolbe (R-AZ)... and now Jerry Weller (R-IL)?

This week Dana Milbank of the Pentagon Post told Keith Olbermann the House Ethics Committee was investigating a third Republican Page Predator, this time a straight man who hit on a 16-year-old girl. Since then, everyone has been wondering: who?

Kos diarist TheMadEph fingers Weller:

Gonna have to trust me on this, but I have fantastic information that Weller R-IL (11th District) is the next one coming down in the page scandal. Can't reveal source.

Look at his web page and picture though... he sort of looks like a leerer.

I will post on this shortly with more news... but start asking questions and this one will start to resonate....

As for me, remember I had the jump on the media when Sandra Day OcOnnor resigned... look it up if you want.

Archpundit narrows the field to Illinois and predicts another surprise Democratic pickup but doesn't name names.

Stay tuned!

FoleyGate: What Did "The Rove Gang" Know?

Bob Fertik — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 22:16:17 -0400

TNR's Ryan Lizza reports that Karl Rove blackmailed Mark Foley early in 2006 to run for re-election, even though Foley wanted to quit Congress and cash in as a lobbyist.

"Mark's a friend of mine," says this source. "He told me, 'I'm thinking about getting out of it and becoming a lobbyist.'"

But when Foley's friend saw the Congressman again this spring, something had changed. To the source's surprise, Foley told him he would indeed be standing for re-election. What happened? Karl Rove intervened.

According to the source, Foley said he was being pressured by "the White House and Rove gang," who insisted that Foley run. If he didn't, Foley was told, it might impact his lobbying career.

"He said, 'The White House made it very clear I have to run,'" explains Foley's friend, adding that Foley told him that the White House promised that if Foley served for two more years it would "enhance his success" as a lobbyist. "I said, 'I thought you wanted out of this?' And he said, 'I do, but they're scared of losing the House and the thought of two years of Congressional hearings, so I have two more years of duty.'"

This raises a very important question - one Ryan Lizza unfortunately doesn't explore. Did the "Rove Gang" know about Mark Foley's "page problem"?

Since the scandal broke, we have learned that "everyone knew" Foley was a closeted gay. Obviously that included the "Rove Gang."

We have also learned that reports about Foley's "page problem" began circulating in senior Republican ranks at least as far back as 2000, when Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) reported a complaint he received to Foley's office. In 2001, pages were warned to "watch out for Congressman Mark Foley" by a Republican staffer. In 2003, Kirk Fordham reported sexual IM exchanges to Denny Hastert's Chief of Staff. In 2005, Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-LA) reported another complaint to Hastert's office, which resulted in urgent meetings among Hastert's top staffers, as well as Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL), Chairman of the House Page Board, and the Clerk of the House.

The odds that none of these reports reached the "Rove Gang" are between slim and none.

The odds that Foley's "page problem" was not discussed when the "Rove Gang" were pressuring Foley to run one more time are also between slim and none.

A week ago, the House Ethics Committee promised to interview everyone who had any knowledge of Foley's page problem and issued 44 subpoenas.

At the same time, House Republicans led by Patrick McHenry (R-NC) and Jack Kingston (R-GA) demanded the questioning of Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Rahm Emanuel.

Pelosi and Emanuel were not privy to GOP scandal secrets - but the "Rove Gang" is the central hub for all such secrets.

Will the House Ethics Committee subpoena Karl Rove and the rest of the "Rove Gang"???

Call the Page Tip Line at 866-348-0481 and email the four Members of the investigation committee:

Doc Hastings (R-WA): http://hastings.house.gov/ContactForm.aspx
Howard Berman (D-CA): http://www.house.gov/berman/contact/
Judy Biggert (R-IL): http://judybiggert.house.gov/FormCheck.asp
Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-OH): http://www.house.gov/tubbsjones/contact2.htm

Also email TNR's Ryan Lizza rlizza@tnr.com and ABC's Brian Ross brian.ross@abc.com

Post any replies below.

Update 1: John Aravosis reports:

Bush suddenly started avoiding Foley in Sept. 2004, after months of using Foley to help Bush's re-election campaign. What did Bush find out?

Why did the White House suddenly decide two years ago that Foley was too hot to handle? And even more interesting, why did Foley reach out to Jeb Bush about something he needed his advice on right about the time Foley's creepy emails became known amonst Republicans on the Hill in late 2005? Did Foley and Jeb Bush talk about the sdandal a year ago? Did the White House know something two years ago?

Post FoleyGate Polls Have Repubs Grasping 'Mushroom Clouds'

CactusPat — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 17:15:33 -0400

If you hadn't noticed, the post FoleyGate polls are so bad for Republicans they're grasping for 'Mushroom Clouds'. Here's a round-up of the good poll news for Democrats from the past week. Ride the "Democratic Wave"...

BREAKING--New House polls will show looming Democratic landslide The new Majority Watch will be released in a few minutes. Based on 63 polls of 48 districts of 1,000 likely voters each, they will show Dems currently ahead in the House by 19 seats, 224-205... It is also a significant increase from the 219-214 seat lead for Democrats from late Aug. and early Sept. This 19-seat doesn't even include seven competitive, Repub-held districts that are currently being polled, and six districts that are currently tied. In fact, perhaps most stunningly, the districts with "safe" leads outside the margins of error break 217-198 in favor of Dems...
Internal Poll Suggests Hastert Could Devastate GOP House Republican candidates will suffer massive losses if House Speaker Dennis Hastert remains speaker until Election Day, according to internal polling data from a prominent GOP pollster... "The data suggests Americans have bailed on the speaker,... And the difference could be between a 20-seat loss and 50-seat loss...."
Poll: GOP Put Politics Over Safety Most Respondents Think GOP Leaders Knew About Foley's Explicit E-Mails. (CBS) An overwhelming majority of Americans think House Republican leaders put their own political interests ahead of the safety of congressional pages in their handling of the Mark Foley scandal...

Democrats have big lead after sex scandal": polls (Reuters) Dem candidates have a big edge on Repubs one month before elections to decide control of Congress... A USA Today/Gallup poll gave Democrats a 23-point edge on Republicans in the battle for Congress, while a CNN poll gave Democrats a 21-point lead. A ABC News/Washington Post poll found Democrats held a 54-41 percent lead in the congressional horse race, which ABC said was the biggest Democratic lead this close to election day in more than 20 years...

GOP Officials Brace for Loss Of Seven to 30 House Seats Republican campaign officials said yesterday that they expect to lose at least seven House seats and as many as 30 in the Nov. 7 midterm elections, as a result of sustained violence in Iraq and the page scandal involving former GOP representative Mark Foley. Democrats need to pick up 15 seats in the election to take back control of the House after more than a decade of GOP leadership. Two weeks of virtually nonstop controversy over President Bush's war policy and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert's handling of the page scandal have forced party leaders to recalculate their vulnerability and placed a growing number of Republican incumbents and open seats at much greater risk...

An analysis by Glen Greenwald - Increasing desperation There is a palpable desperation among Republicans as a result of the Foley scandal and related election troubles, which is giving rise to a significant increase in their willingness to peddle blatantly dishonest and irrational claims in order to save themselves...

Ruy Teixeira gives his take - State of the Race: The Macro and the Micro Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to looking at the outlook for this year’s Congressional elections. One is the “macro” approach, where one looks at a variety of national indicators to gauge the mood of the electorate and how that’s likely to affect the incumbent and challenging parties. The other approach is the “micro” approach, which assesses how each individual House and Senate race is likely to turn out, and aggregates up from that level to assess the likely gains and losses of the two parties. The two methods can tell different stories and, indeed, this spring that’s just what they did. The macro story suggested that the GOP was in terrible shape and likely to get swamped by the Democrats in November. Indeed, by these macro-indicators, as Charlie Cook pointed out at the time, the GOP was at least as badly off as the Democrats were at that point in the 1994 election cycle. The micro story was different, however. Looking at individual races, it was hard to see where the Democrats could pick up enough seats to take back the House, while the Senate looked almost impossible. But that was then. This is now and now the macro and micro data are aligning and pointing in the same direction: big trouble for the Republicans and a good chance that they could lose not only the House—which looks better than 50-50 at this point—but also the Senate...

Support shifting to Democrats, poll shows Democrats have regained a commanding position going into the final weeks of the midterm-election campaigns, with support eroding for Republicans on Iraq, ethics and presidential leadership, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll. Apparent Republican gains in September have been reversed in the face of mounting U.S. casualties and gloomy forecasts from Iraq and the scandal involving Mark Foley (R-Fla.), who was forced to resign his congressional post over sexually graphic online conversations with former House pages. Approval of Congress has plunged to its lowest level in more than a decade (32 percent), and Americans, by a margin of 54 percent to 35 percent, say they trust Democrats more than Republicans to deal with the biggest problems the nation is confronting. Fifty-five percent of those surveyed said congressional Democrats deserve to be reelected next month, but just 39 percent said Republicans deserve to return to office...

Poll: Majority think Hastert should resign A majority of Americans believe the scandal over former Rep. Mark Foley's contacts with teenage congressional pages should cost House Speaker Dennis Hastert his leadership post, according to a CNN poll released Monday. The poll, conducted Friday through Sunday by Opinion Research Corporation, found that 52 percent of the 1,028 adults interviewed think Hastert should step aside. Only 31 percent said they think he should keep his post, and 17 percent had no opinion.

NEWSWEEK Poll: GOP in Meltdown A Political Limbo - How low can the Republicans go? Come hell or high water-ran the conventional wisdom-Republicans could rely on two issues to win elections: the war on terror and values. Then came Mark Foley. The drip-drip-drip of scandal surrounding the former Congressman from Florida, which became a deluge this week, now threatens to sink Republican hopes of keeping control of Congress... And that was the good news for the GOP. More worrisome still, the Foley fiasco is jeopardizing the party’s monopoly on faith and power. For the first time since 2001, the NEWSWEEK poll shows that more Americans trust the Democrats than the GOP on moral values and the war on terror. Fully 53 percent of Americans want the Democrats to win control of Congress next month, including 10 percent of Republicans, compared to just 35 percent who want the GOP to retain power. If the election were held today, 51 percent of likely voters would vote for the Democrat in their district versus 39 percent who would vote for the Republican. And while the race is closer among male voters (46 percent for the Democrats vs. 42 percent for the Republicans), the Democrats lead among women voters 56 to 34 percent....

TIME Poll: The Foley Sex Scandal Has Hurt G.O.P. Election Prospects Two-thirds of Americans aware of the lurid e-mails set to congressional pages by a G.O.P congressman believe Republican leaders tried to cover up the scandal — and one quarter of them say the affair makes them less likely to vote for Republican candidates in their districts come November... The poll suggests the Foley affair may have dented Republican hopes of retaining control of Congress in November. Among the registered voters who were polled, 54% said they would be more likely to vote for the Democratic candidate for Congress, compared with 39% who favored the Republican. That margin may be fueled by the rolling scandal over sexually explicit e-mails sent to teenage pages by Republican Representative Mark Foley. Almost 80% of respondents were aware of the scandal, and only 16% approve of the Republicans' handling of it...

Voters Say Scandals Will Affect Votes (AP) - In yet another hurdle for Republicans, the scandals that have dogged Congress for the past year are prominent in the minds of many voters who say corruption will significantly influence their vote in November. With midterm elections less than five weeks away, the latest Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that about half of likely voters say disclosures of corruption and scandal in Congress will be very or extremely important when they enter the voting booth. About two out of three of those voters said they would cast their ballots for Democrats in House races, further complicating the political landscape for Republicans already struggling against negative public perceptions...

Kinda breath-taking, eh? Dems polling ahead of Repubs in every catagory, including fightin' terra and moral values! Bonus statistic - Smirk's approval rating has fallen to a new all-time low for the Newsweek poll: 33 percent...

GOP Scandal Watch: 10/11/06

Bob Fertik — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 10:50:41 -0400

Just 28 days to Election Day - how many GOP scandals can we count today?

Wayne Madsen compiled a beautiful state-by-state GOP Scandal Scorecard - send it to your friends!

Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) will plead guilty on Friday the 13th for his Abramoff bribes and go directly to jail - but he will pass Go! and he will collect ~~$200~~ $165,200! And to make matters worse, he will still collect his full Congressional pension for the rest of his life!! (CREW)

Rep. Richard Pombo (R-CA) insists he never was lobbied by Abramoff. But new documents from the Northern Mariana Islands show Abramoff lobbied Pombo personally.(CREW)

Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) visited Pages outside their dorm in 2000 and 2002-3, forcing the Page supervisor to intervene. (ABC)

Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) said today he did not read the sexual emails from Mark Foley to a page and did not confront Foley personally. But two days ago, Kolbe's spokesperson said he did read those emails and did confront Foley personally. (John Aravosis)

Sen. Mike Dewine (R-OH) is under investigation by the Army for illegally using a uniformed soldier in his campaign ad. (Greg Sargent)

Rep. Charles Taylor (R-NC) has used earmarks to directly benefit his own companies. (CREW/Wall Street Journal)

Tell Denny Hastert to Resign

Bob Fertik — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 11:05:22 -0400

House Speaker Denny Hastert insists he knew nothing about Mark Foley's predatory behavior until the scandal broke on 9/29/06.

But two-thirds of Americans believe Hastert is covering up the truth.

And now we know Hastert's Chief of Staff, Scott Palmer, confronted Foley about his abuses several years ago, according to a front page story in the Washington Post.

Palmer and Hastert are extraordinarily close; they are roommates in Washington DC. It's impossible to believe Hastert was unaware of Palmer's confrontation with Foley.

That means Hastert is lying about what he knew and when he knew it - and is indeed leading a coverup.

Denny Hastert must resign as Speaker of the House immediately. Tell your Representative:
http://www.democrats.com/peoplesemailnetwork/87

Powerful Gay Republicans Cower in the Closet

Bob Fertik — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 11:58:49 -0400

Homophobia has been a central part of Republican electoral strategy for years - most notably in 2004, when Republicans put anti-gay-marriage amendments on state ballots around the country to increase turnout by religious right voters.

But now that Mark Foley has exposed closeted gays as a major problem for the Republican Party, those closeted gays are covering their closets with layers of plywood.

Less than 24 hours after Rep. Mark Foley resigned in disgrace, some 50 gay Republicans gathered at a friend's house in Virginia. They were in a brittle mood. Foley -- one of their own, in terms of sexual orientation and party ID -- had, by his misconduct, exposed them to personal and even professional recrimination. And they feared a backlash. A close friend of Foley's summed up the situation this way: "It is a disgrace. It's a disgrace for the party, and it's a disgrace and a disaster for all of us."

The quote is anonymous. In fact, reporter Marc Ambinder couldn't get one of the 50 closeted gay Republicans to speak on the record.

How can a gay person work for a party that loathes them and wishes them and everyone like them exterminated?

When 50 powerful gay Republicans get together, why do they cower - rather than stand up for themselves and demand understanding and acceptance as human beings from the party they work for every single day?

Talk about a disgrace - these cowards are a disgrace to themselves and to every gay person who struggled to come out of the closet to affirm their humanity.

And Marc Ambinder is a disgrace for adding another layer of plywood to their closet by pretending that GOP chair Ken Mehlman isn't gay.

Earlier this year, Democratic strategists delighted in gossiping about Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman's sexual orientation. Mehlman told the New York Daily News last May that he's not gay, and he joked that rumors to the contrary had hurt his social life for a while.

Hahaha. Hey Marc - everyone knows Mehlman is gay.

Update 1: John Aravosis asks a key question: Do conservative Christians have a predilection towards pedophilia?

Did anyone else notice how many days it took the religious right to condemn Foley's actions and the actions of the Republican leadership in covering-up Foley's crimes? Foley's sickness was announced publicly on Thursday. The religious right didn't respond until the following Monday. What - they were too busy preparing for Columbus Day? Apparently man-on-boy sex isn't a big deal to conservative Christians so long as the man and boy (and their enablers) are all Republicans.

And when the conservative Christian groups finally did speak out, they were more preoccupied with promoting their anti-gay agenda than they were the health of the children and the sins of their predators and enablers.

America must ask itself why so many conservative Christians are involved in this scandal? And why so many conservative Christian groups were so slow to condemn the sexual abuse of our children?

These are uncomfortable questions, but we live in uncomfortable times. For the sake of our children we must find out why conservative Christian leaders seem to have a predilection towards pedophilia. Perhaps we've tolerated conservative Christians in our congress, in our schools, and in our pulpits for far too long.

Update 2: Sara Robinson says conservative Christians do have a predilection towards pedophilia:

when conservatives say that gays are pedophiles, they may also be accurately reporting what they see on their own side. As I've discussed here before, a core reason people become conservative because they're afraid of losing control. (Words like "repressed" and "tightly wound" may apply here.) Psychologists who work with pedophiles -- both hetero and homo -- say that virtually all of them suffered some major innocence-shattering life trauma when they were at a similar age as their victims. Their psychosexual development stopped right there, and never went any further. Thus, in a real sense, pedophiles are sexually still children themselves, and thus simply seeking out their developmental peers.

It follows that somebody who sustained a severe trauma like that in adolescence -- especially if the trauma was all bound up with the dawning awareness that they were attracted to other men -- might become a) conservative and b) a potential pedophile. The whole desperate quest for control began with the need to control their own unresolved desires, and radiated out from there to form the foundation of their entire worldview.

The upshot here is that, if you're a Republican, it seems quite possible that an unusual number of the gays you know really are pretty sick and twisted characters who prey on boys. Evidently, there's a nonstop parade of these guys in God's Own Party: in fact, what we're seeing this week is that they're so pervasive that Sidney Blumenthal recently called the GOP the "largest walk-in closet in Washington."

Which means that we may need to realize that when our conservative friends start going on about those gay child sex perverts, they're just calling it exactly as they see it.

Technically, Foley's Not a Pedophile - a Lesson in Modern Sexual Perversion

CactusPat — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 04:28:42 -0400

In an op-ed published in the LA Times, Jonah Goldberg attacks Democrats for hypocrisy for moral outrage over recently "retired" Republican Mark Foley's predatory sexual cyber-stalking and possible statutory rape of Congressional Pages. Using a recently coined term, Ephebophile, to flaunt his supposed intellectual superiority to describe Foley's predilections instead of the "casually" used term pedophile. In light of this semantic hair splitting I think a vocabulary lesson is in order. So class, it's time to sharpen your pencils.

While not technically a pedophile, Foley's Pederasty is not what one could say is acceptable behaviour in most modern societies, let alone George Bush's Amerika... more

Goldberg's use of the unfamiliar word ephebophile led to a dictionary search. Curiously, the term doesn't yet exist in Webster's or Dictionary.com, so a Google search was in order.

That produced some interesting results. Here are the "family friendly" ones...

ephebophile : Gay & Black Glossary

ephebophile: Information From Answers.com

Ephebophilia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Urban Dictionary: ephebophile

Turns out ephebophile's only recently been coined in the late 20th century.

Ephebophilia has been defined as a sexual preference in which an adult is primarily or exclusively sexually attracted to post-pubescent adolescents. It comes from the Greek: (ephebos) variously defined as "one arrived at puberty"... and (-philia) "love".[1] Despite this classical etymology it is a term of recent coinage, created by psychologist John Money in the late twentieth century.

Ephebophilia, as most strictly defined, refers only to an attraction, not to actual love relations or sexual activity (although these can be involved). It is used in contrast with pedophilia, which is an attraction to pre-pubescent or pubescent individuals. In more casual usage, however, pedophilia is often used more broadly to describe an attraction to any person younger than the legal age of consent. For example, the term "pedophile priests" is frequently used instead of "ephebophile priests" or "pederastic priests", in the context of the Roman Catholic sex abuse cases, although much of the sexual behavior involved was with adolescent (i.e. post-pubescent) teens.

The nature of ephebophilia is unresolved, and a variety of perspectives are held. Some regard ephebophilia as merely a milder form of pedophilia, in which the object of attraction is closer to what is "normal" than with a true pedophile.

The term pederasty or paederasty embraces a wide range of erotic practices between adult males and adolescent boys. Pederastic relations can have widely dissimilar manifestations – they can be spiritual or materialistic, lawful or transgressive, loving or commercial, compassionate or abusive – and have been documented from ancient history to modern times. Rendered as 'age-structured homosexuality', it is, along with gender-structured relations and egalitarian relations, regarded as one of the three main subdivisions of homosexuality proposed by anthropologists.

Getting back to Goldberg's screed against Democrats' moral outrage, I think the winger doth complain too much. It's part of the now concerted Republican smear and distract campaign to divert attention away from Foley's crimes, the self-serving cover-up of Foley's predilections by the House leadership since 1997, and now commenced smear of gays since Foley's much belated coming out.

And it seems to me ol' Jonah's splittin' hairs on semantics on this one. The wing-nut version of the definition of "IS". While not "technically" a pedophile, Foley's pederasty is commonly thought of as pedophilia among folks of all political stripes. Even if the Congressional Page boys were post-pubescent they are still children and in many jurisdictions, including DC in this case, protected from sexual predators even if they've reached the "legal" age of sexual consent. Fellow Democrats.com member Bill puts it succinctly...

Whether or not Foley fits the "medical or technical" definition of a pedophile is not the issue. The "correct" terminology is that: by most legal definitions Foley is a sexual predator, and most likely is a child molester as well. His sexual orientation is not at issue, except to the religious right.

He used his position of power to intimidate, and prey on, adolescents who have not reached the age of majority, even if they have reached the legal age of consent. The D.C. law provides that 16 is the minimum age that a minor child can make a consensual decision to engage in any kind of sex with another person who is not more than four years older than the minor. That law applies until the minor child reaches the age of majority, which for D.C. is 18.

The "is he, or is he not, a pedophile" right-wing argument is nothing more than a distraction, and an attempt to gloss over the real crimes that this sexual pervert has committed.