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An October surprise: a sudden, stunning event late in an election season that has the potential to greatly affect the election itself.

We’re only one day from October, but it’s close enough. The blogosphere is alight with news reports that House Republican leaders Dennis Hastert and John Boehner have been aware of Foley’s pedophilic behavior for months and did nothing about it. Boehner, who initially told the Post he had told Hastert about it, later waffled and said he couldn’t remember if he had. Please. It sure wasn’t news to the pages, who were warned about Foley by people involved with the page program. The chairman of the House page board even mounted a cursory investigation and reported that fact to Hastert’s office, although Democrats were conveniently not informed.

Blogs are outraged by the hypocrisy of it all. Says Total Information Awareness:

D.C.’s age of consent is 16, but even with that, it seems like Foley could be in some serious legal trouble in addition to the political scandal. And where is the Religious Right on this issue, when apparently Bill Clinton getting his knob slobbed by a woman clearly far beyond the age of consent was equivalent to Sodom and Gomorrah?

*crickets*

…

And as for the GOP, well…cronyism, corruption, torture, and now child pandering. Behold what your modern right-wing movement has brought you.

Americablog is pounding on the Republican leadership from every angle, and is particularly outraged at Hastert:

ABC reported this evening that GOP House Speaker Denny Hastert has asked for an investigation to make sure other pages weren’t sexually harassed or abused. But the House leadership was told almost a year ago about Mark Foleys’ hanky-panky online communications with underage pages and Hastert did nothing. Why didn’t Hastert do an investigation at the time to make sure the pages were all right? Why did Hastert leave Foley in charge of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children when he knew Foley had some possible personal issues involving the exploitation of children? Why did Hastert let Foley remain in the House leadership for a good year after he knew about these accusations? Cruising underage kids isn’t a disqualifier for being in the House leadership? Why did Denny Hastert let Foley remain anywhere near underage pages at all?

Would you let your kids near someone like Foley if you had been warned a year ago? Then why did Denny Hastert? The parent of every kid who was a page in the last year should be livid at the Republicans right now.

If the Catholic Church’s pedophilia scandal is any indicator, the GOP may be in for a very hard few weeks ahead.

There is just no end to the abuse to America’s pocketbook from this GOP Congress.

It has just approved one of the largest but most inane projects in human history: the construction of a 700-mile border fence along the Canada/US border, a fence as long as the distance from Washington to Jacksonville, FL. Preliminary estimates of the fence’s cost are $6 billion.

I don’t even know where to begin on what a stupid, idiotic election-season idea this is:

• Despite the length of the fence, it will still leave 1300 miles of border unfenced, or twice the distance from Washington to Jacksonville. It will be a short matter of time before anyone wanting to cross the border knows the locations of the fence pieces and acts accordingly.
• Wildlife do not have access to the same information about the fence’s location nor do they care about the US/Mexico border, so it threatens to seriously impede natural migration routes. Those routes are increasingly important on a planet suffering from global warming, which is forcing the northward migration of many species.
• The fence will be almost impossible to build, because it must go “over hill, over dale, through bush, through briar.” It is not flat land, and includes mountain peaks and desert valleys.
• The fence will be impossible to monitor along its entire length. Nothing will stop people from going to remote parts of the fence and simply blowing it up to allow passage.

You’d think the Republicans in Congress would have learned something from the Great Wall of China–pretty, but ultimately rather useless. But then again….that’s a decent description of this Congress too.

I had no sooner finished my previous entry on Foley and his nasty emails to a 16 year old male Congressional page, when ABCNews.com posted a chilling series of sexually charged instant message exchanges between the Congressman and another teenager.

The entire instant message exchange can be found here. The full transcript just gets worse and worse–he asks the teen about how he masturbates, comments on his ass and legs, tells the teen he is horny and has an erection, tells him he’d love to take the teen’s clothes off, asks the teen’s penis size, and so on. No wonder Foley resigned so quickly!

Not only is he a hypocrite for following the “family values” pablum of the Republican party, but he is doubly so for co-sponsoring legislation for tougher registration requirements for sex offenders and being a staunch opponent of kiddie porn when he is engaging in this totally disgusting behavior with a minor! In a sweet bit of irony, though, federal officials are saying Foley could be prosecuted under the same laws prohibiting Internet exploitation of children that Foley himself championed.

Ah, yes, isn’t it lovely to see hypocrisy in action. The party of “family values” has produced yet another winner: Republican Rep. Mark Foley, co-chairman of the Missing and Exploited Children Caucus, has suddenly resigned his Congressional seat in a developing scandal over numerous emails he sent to a 16-year-old male page. You can see the emails here.

While the emails do not prove sexual contact with the page, they are downright lecherous. They ask for the page’s photograph, ask his age, and ask what he wants for his birthday. In another email, he comments about another boy:

“I just emailed Will…He’s such a nice guy…acts much older than his age…and hes in really great shape…i am just finished riding my bike on a 25 mile journey now heading to the gym…whats school like for you this year?”

That’s nasty, to be so brazenly making observations about the “great shape” this other boy is in.

One can’t help but wonder what else might be waiting to be discovered given Foley’s sudden decision to leave Congress.

His name will remain on the ballot, and votes for him will go to his replacement..but this does give the Democrats the opportunity for another pick-up seat.

A new MSNBC/McClatchy poll shows Republican George Allen and Democrat Jim Webb in a dead heat for Allen’s Senate seat. Allen’s standing has crumbled in the wake of the “macaca” and other racial scandals.

I can’t remember another time in recent memory when a political “rising star” fell so quickly.

Today was really a sad day for this country, with the Senate’s passing of the Military Commissions Act of 2006. From the time that Bush signs this bill into law, consider what can happen in this country with this theoretical example:

A scholar from the Middle East comes to the United States on an academic visa, and is granted a green card. He becomes one of 12 million legal immigants to the United States. He contributes to the prosperity, wealth, and knowledge base of this country for years, and comes to love America.

One day he meets up with a relative of his who is visiting from the Middle East. The relative informs him of a charity that provides assistance to children orphaned in the Middle East as a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The scholar decides to contribute money to the charity, as he believes it represents a noble cause.

Unbeknownst to him, the charity funds multiple causes, including one that the US government has arbitrarily deemed could be in furtherance of terrorism. Furthermore, the visiting relative is the cousin five times removed from one of the September 11th hijackers, raising more suspicions in the government.

The decision is made to place him under surveillance, without use of a warrant. He has done nothing wrong, but because a court is not allowed to judge the propriety of the warrant the sureveillance continues unimpeded. His phone records are searched, his house put under surveillance.

He meets with his relative again. They’re only swapping recipes, but the government becomes convinced that they are hatching a terrorist plot–especially because the scholar recently had some money wired to him from overseas as an inheritance left over after his grandfather died. But no, the government believes the money will fund an attack.

He is arrested and detained as an unlawful combatant. Now it gets really bad:

• He will be tried by a military tribunal rather than by a jury of his peers, and can be convicted merely by majority vote.
• He may only use a tribunal-appointed military lawyer.
• During his tribunal, the government can enter into evidence a confession made halfway around the world that the scholar hates America and wants to see it destroyed–something that is untrue, but because hearsay is now admissible the scholar has no way to refute it. Who knows if the confessor even exists, anyway?
• His relative is likely also being held as an unlawful combatant, and would be unavailable to provide an alibi.
• He has no right to challenge the legality of his detention via writ of habeas corpus to a federal court, a right well-enshrined in the Constitution. He can therefore be left to rot in jail indefinitely, because he also has no right to a speedy trial.
• He is subject to “harsh interrogation techniques” that meet the President’s interpretation of not violating the Geneva Conventions. Of course, nobody really knows what goes on in those prisons…a bit of “waterboarding” probably won’t hurt, right? Who’s going to know about it? He isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Even if the rest of the world does find out that torture took place the perpetrators are immune to prosecution, meaning there is almost no restraint on their behavior.

Can we really fathom this kind of thing happening in our supposedly advanced society? Some Republicans today couldn’t.

Republican Sen. Gordon Smith of Oregon said,

“The permanent detention of foreigners damages our moral integrity,” he said. “The power to detain people without showing cause is a tool of despotism. Stripping courts of hearing habeas claims is a frontal attack on our judicial system.”

He was followed by Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who said,

“[The bill] would take our civilized society back some 900 years [to a time before the Magna Carta was adopted. This is] unthinkable. What this entire controversy boils down to is whether Congress is going to legislate to deny a constitutional right which is explicit in the document of the Constitution itself and which has been applied to aliens by the Supreme Court of the United States.”

Legal analysts are weighing in too, and not in a positive way. Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh, responding to Congress’s attempt to limit federal court review of the legislation’s constitutionality:

“[T]he image of Congress rushing to strip jurisdiction from the courts in response to a politically created emergency is really quite shocking, and it’s not clear that most of the members [of Congress] understand what they’ve done.”

Do you know someone with a green card? Indefinite detention and “harsh interrogation” (still just a euphemism for sanctioned torture) could now happen to them. And if it can happen to them, it won’t be long before it can happen to you.

Now only the Supreme Court stands in the way of our complete descent into despotism…and I’m not terribly confident given the recent appointments to that bench.

The stories just don’t stop coming. MSNBC has an exclusive report on a woman, Pat Waring, who overheard Allen loudly and repeatedly using the “n” word in the late 70’s as he prepared for a rugby match. This happened just before his first run for Virginia House of Delegates.

I agree with the woman in the article. He could have come clean about his past, admitted his repeated use of the word in the recklessness of his youth, apologized, and moved on. But no, he preferred to flatly deny it, which makes him a sitting duck for anyone who knows anything to the contrary. I bet we’ll get stories like this all the way to the election.

Allen is a disgrace to Virginia and to people of color. I can’t fathom how someone like him is still in office….though his presidential aspirations are probably toast, and that’s a good thing.

(The Allen campaign is fomenting allegations that his challenger Jim Webb also used the “n” word at one point. We’ll see what comes of that story, and if true is equally reprehensible, though I still consider Allen by far the worse evil for his consistent pattern of racism, from displaying nooses and confederate flags to the “macaca” incident to stuffing a decapitated deer’s head in a black family’s mailbox.)

Despite the threat of sectarian bloodshed, strong majorities of Iraqis polled say that the US should pick up and get out immediately.

Recently completed polls show that between 65% and 71% of Iraqis favor immediate withdrawal. Although they fear sectarian violence, that fear is outweighed by anger of and hatred towards American soldiers–who Iraqis say have done little to nothing to prevent violence, establish authority, and rebuild essential infrastructure.

Can you really blame them? Nobody wants to live in a country occupied by a foreign power, especially one so utterly unable to secure the peace.

If the Iraqis don’t want us there, if the Iraq occupation is a “cause celebre” for jihadists that is greatly worsening terrorism rather than lessening it, then why do we remain?

When “staying the course” means running the ship into an iceberg and causing it to sink, it is time to drastically change course.

Republican George Allen’s re-election campaign for Senate is crumbling, along with his ambitions for president. First there was “macaca.” Then came his defensive response to a question about his Jewish heritage, and his subsequent ludicrous claim that he wasn’t aware of it until now. Now witnesses are emerging to say that Allen repeatedly used racial epithets against African Americans in his younger years, and even shoved the head of a deer into the mailbox of the nearest black person during a hunt.

We’re seeing the real George Allen emerge now, especially in the way defensive, condescending way he is dealing about the questions regarding his past. This is a guy who has been photographed proudly with white supremacists, who has hung a noose in his office, who has spoken lovingly of the Confederate flag.

George Allen is and has always been a racist, and he can’t escape evidence of his true feelings anymore. Oh, he can try to hide by sponsoring useless and ultimately fruitless legislation to apologize for lack of harsher federal response to lynchings, and by providing lukewarm support for a formal apology for slavery. These are nothing but cheap ploys to deflect questions about his true racist past and feelings.

Hopefully Virginia will come to its senses and boot this bozo out office come November.

Is it really a surprise to anyone? A new National Intelligence Estimate by US intelligence officials bluntly concludes that the Iraq war is greatly increasing the potential for terrorist acts worldwide rather than decreasing them.

Why? Because Iraq is serving as a focal point for radical Islamists. It is evidence to them of the West’s attempt to conquer Islam and kill Muslims. It serves as a breeding ground for their hatred, and a testing ground to prove their mettle. Radical web sites use Iraq to paint a narrative that highlights insurgent victories and constantly drums in a strongly Anti-American message, increasing morale and spurring radicals to plan a variety of new attacks of widening scope worldwide. Radicals are being inspired to create new cells who communicate only among themselves with no connection to any central group, making them much harder to detect.

Way to go, Dubya! Can you stop lying now by telling people they’re safer when they’re not?