The Blue State

Foley Roundup: Tip line receives more than 400 calls

Last Thursday House Speaker Dennis Hastert announced that he would not resign despite admitting that as a leader he poorly handled the Foley situation.  During the press conference, he unveiled a toll free number that Congressional pages could call to give anonymous information to help the investigation.  In less than one week, hundreds have called the tip line, whether current or former pages:

The House ethics committee has asked all Housemembers to survey former pages to determine if any of them have moreinformation about Foley, and Hastert has set up a toll free telephonenumber for anonymous tips. CNN reported Tuesday that more than 400calls have been made to the hot line since it was announced lastThursday.

Tomorrow, the Republican-controlled House Ethics Committee will begin its hearings on the Foley scandal and the possible GOP cover-up.  The committee is chaired by Republican Doc Hastings (WA-04).  The ranking Democrat is on the Ethics Committee is Howard Berman (CA-28).  The hearing will be aired on C-Span television and C-Span.org on Thursday morning.  Mark Foley's former Chief of Staff Kirk Fordham will testify.

Here is a video of the press conference that the Ethics Committee held last week to announce their investigation.

To make things more dicey, yet another Congressional sex scandal is about to unfold -- this time involving prostitutes.  The Smoking Gun reports that recently jailed Republican Congressman Duke Cunningham may have been involved in a wider prostitution-for-votes deal:

Investigators are reportedly examining charges that a defensecontractor provided hookers to Cunningham as part of aninfluence-peddling scheme.

And so the Republican saga continues.  Stay tuned.

Let's not spoil it

A batch of new polls are out from USA Today, and they put Democrats in a great position as we get closer to the November 7th vote.  But before I get to them, it's important for the Democrats to make sure that they not let Bush use the crisis on the Korean Peninsula as a way to scare people into voting Republican (which we know from experience he will probably do).  We need to point out that the Administration has had six long years to try a number of approaches that would solve the nuclear standoff.  Instead, attention was diverted to Iraq, and Bush chose to ignore Colin Powell's advice of talking directly with the Pyongyang-based government.  There is no way that the President's North Korea policy has made us safer.

Now to the USA Today Poll:

Four weeks before congressional elections, anew USA TODAY/Gallup Poll shows Democrats hold a 23-point lead over GOPcandidates. That's double the lead Republicans had a month before theyseized control of Congress in 1994.

President Bush's approval rating was 37%, downfrom 44% in a Sept. 15-17 poll. The approval rating for Congress was24%, down 5 points from last month.

A 24% approval rating is hard to stomach, especially if you are Dennis Hastert.  If you are Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-NY), who also helped cover up the Foley messages, it gets even worse.  Even as the Chairman of the National Republican House campaign, Reynolds trails his Democratic opponent:

The increasing onslaught against Reynolds appears strongly connected toDavis’s improved position. A Zogby International poll reported Sundayindicated that Davis leads Reynolds 48 percent to 33 percent, with 57percent of respondents disapproving of how Reynolds handled the pagescandal and 58 percent saying it is time to elect someone new.

GOP once again fighting popular opinion

SurveyUSA conducted a poll that finds a clear majority of the country wants House Speaker Dennis Hastert to resign for his role in covering up the Marl Foley predator scandal:

SurveyUSA Poll (10/06-08/06: 1000 Adults Nationwide)

Based on what you know right now, do you think Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert should remain in his position as the Speaker of the House?  Do you think he should resign as Speaker of the House but remain a member of Congress?  Or do you think he should completely resign from Congress?

Remain Speaker - 26%
Resign Leadership - 20%
Resign From Congress - 45%
Not Sure - 9%

It's not the scandal, it's the cover-up that comes back to bite politicians.  Most Americans don't want Hastert to get away with it.

AZ-08: It's a small world after all

A retiring Republican reveals something about the Foley scandal that contradicts Hastert's public statements last week.  Fittingly, this Republican's vacated seat might turn out to decide whether the Democrats can take back majority in the House.  It's all connected.

Sorry for the cheap cliche.  It really is a small world though.  Republican Randy Graf -- Minute Men supporter and border-line xenophobic -- trails Democrat Gabrielle Giffords in the race for Arizona's 8th District U.S. House seat.  This race has national implications as it could decide the fate of which party controls majority status in the U.S. House of Representatives.

This House seat is open, and is being vacated by retiring Republican Congressman Jim Kolbe.  Now here is where the small world part comes in.  According to his spokesman, Rep. Jim Kolbe saw Mark Foley's messages in 2000.  This adds more names to the list of GOP lawmakers that saw the messages but chose to stay loyal to their party:

A spokeswoman for Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.) confirmed yesterday that aformer page showed the congressman Internet messages that had made theyouth feel uncomfortable with the direction Foley (R-Fla.) was takingtheir e-mail relationship. Last week, when the Foley matter erupted, aKolbe staff member suggested to the former page that he take the matterto the clerk of the House, Karen Haas, said Kolbe's press secretary,Korenna Cline.

The revelation pushes back by at least five years the date when amember of Congress has acknowledged learning of Foley's behavior withformer pages.

Jim Kolbe is the only openly gay Republican in Congress.  The fact that Rep. Kolbe is retiring probably had something to do with this information being released.  He has no reason to be loyal to the GOP leadership.  He will be gone in January anyway, and is deciding to leave with some dignity (the same situation as General John Batiste).  More importantly, Kolbe's revelation proves that Dennis Hastert lied when he said that GOP lawmakers learned for the first time about the Foley messages last fall -- when in fact it was more like six years ago.

Hastert will lie through his teeth if it means holding on to majority.  He knows that voters are fed up and want change.  All he can do is fight -- even if that means fighting dirty.  This will be an interesting final month.
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Other progressive sites blogging about this story: The Democratic Daily, Newsvine, True Blue Liberal, Major Conflict,  The Republic of T, The Next Hurrah, Down with Tyranny, Facets of Lisa, Apply Liberally.

Dobson: Foley scandal was a prank by House pages

This is one of those stories that makes you wonder why anyone listens to this guy.  James Dobson -- host of the conservative radio program Focus on the Family -- is at it again.  James Dobson is blaming the pages for the Mark Foley sex scandal becoming the big story that it is.  In other words, it was just a little prank by a bunch of teenagers:

DOBSON: We condemn the Foley affaircategorically, and we also believe that what Mr. Clinton did was one of themost embarrassing and wicked things ever done by a president in power. Let meremind you, sir, that it was not just James Dobson who found the Lewinskyaffair reprehensible. More than 140 newspapers called for Clinton's resignation. But the presidentdidn't do what Mr. Foley has done in leaving. He stayed in office, and he liedto the grand jury to obscure the facts. As itturns out, Mr. Foley has had illicit sex with no one that we know of, and thewhole thing turned out to be what some people are now saying was a -- sort of ajoke by the boy and some of the other pages.

...By midafternoonyesterday, a rumor emerged that in fact Mark Foley had been pranked by theHouse pages. It is the first plausible thing I've heard in seven days. Four weeksfrom the election, I have an idea: Let's fire the Members and replace them withthe pages. We could do worse. We are.

Just in case you are even thinking about taking Mr. Dobson seriously, here are some other statements that he has made in the past:

• (Weak Women)"My observation is that women are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership."
• (Comparing Supreme Court to KKK) "I heard a minister the other day talking about the great injustice andevil of the men in white robes, the Ku Klux Klan, that roamed thecountry in the South, and they did great wrong to civil rights and tomorality. And now we have black-robed men, and that's what you'retalking about."

(Video) Republican Elite: Evangelicals don't share our values

Do Republicans genuinely care about Evangelical voters at all, or do they just want use them for political gain?  Exciting voters with like-minded rhetoric can win you votes in the short-term.  But when voters discover the real truth, there is usually a backlash.  That is what has happened ever since the Mark Foley scandal errupted.  Evangelical voters are finally figuring out that the party that talks a whole lot about faith and values has failed the truth test.

On the syndicated weekend program the Chris Matthews Show, conservative panelist Tucker Carlson, who lives next to a number of elite Republican strategists, admits that Republicans leaders have contempt for the Evangelicals and their movement.

Click to watch video of Tucker Carlson

--- Partial Transcript ---

CARLSON: "The deep truth is that the elites in the Republican Party have pure contempt for the Evangelicals who put their party in power."

MATTHEWS: "How do you know that?"

CARLSON: "Because I know them, because I grew up with them, because I live with them -- they live on my street -- because I live in Washington.  And I know that everybody in our world has contempt for the Evangelicals.  And Evangelicals know that.  And they're beginning to learn that even their own leaders..don't share their values."

The Republicans are trying to play the same game that they played in 2002 and 2004.  Guess what?  This time around, Evangelicals aren't buying it.

Don't worry, we'll handle it

To help quell the firestorm over Mark Foley, the GOP wants us to believe that they will conduct a perfectly honest, full and far-reaching investigation on their own party's leadership.  The American people have already fallen for this trick.

It's only fitting that the Republican-led Ethics Committee has opened their own investigation into whether their party helped cover up Mark Foley's sexually explicit emails towards minors.  Gee, I wonder what they will come up with?  Even with the election just more than four weeks away, they've got to think that I'm stupid, that you arestupid and that the rest of the country is just as dumb.  Why would any of us consider such a partisan investigation legitimate at all?  It's like asking a teammate to snitch on another teammate.  It's not going to happen.

During Dennis Hastert's press conference yesterday, he announced a tip line that former pages can call to report any leads in the Mark Foley investigation.  Other than making Republicans look like they care, the tip line will help prevent these pages from going to the press first.  ABC has been on a roll with their coverage on the Foley scandal, and now other networks are frantically trying to keep pace during political sweeps month.  The idea behind this tip line is that the media will not get the information needed to report these stories, and the confidential identities of the pages will instead be put into the hands of people who don't want certain political allies to implicated.  A creative strategy, huh?

But like I wrote, we have been duped like this before.  The GOP-led House Ethics Committee failed to investigate Tom DeLay, and they failed to investigate the ties that jailed lobbyist Jack Abramoff had with a whole host of Congressmen from both parties.  The Ethics Committee has acted anything but ethical ever since the GOP took Congress in 1994.  Why all of a sudden should we take them seriously?

NRCC Chairman might get ousted

Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-NY), the man heading the GOP election campaign in the House, might soon be ousted as a result of what has transpired in the Mark Foley scandal.  No, he won't be resigning anytime soon -- even though many think he should for helping Hastert keep the scandal under partisan wraps.  Instead, he might lose his reelection battle:

SurveyUSA Poll of NY-26

(D) Jack Davis - 50%
(R) Tom Reynolds - 45%

Well, if we can't get this guy kicked out for helping organize the GOP cover-up, then Jack Davis could possibly do it for us.  Remember, Reynolds is in charge of the GOP money machine for House Republicans this campaign season.  So the hope is that Reynolds will become selfish and divert a whole bunch of GOP resources towards his own race, thereby depleting the war chest of money slated for other battleground races.

Please get involved in this race in any way that you can.  Donate, Volunteer, Register Friends to Vote!  Fittingly, this might be the race that helps Democrats win back majority in the House of Representatives.  It's crunch time.  There are only four and a half weeks to go.

John Walsh furious at conservatives

John Walsh of the show America's Most Wanted is angry that conservative talk-show hosts are furthering the notion that gay = pedophile:

I think in the 21st century, people have a right to keep their sexuality, you know, to themselves. But, you know, making overt advances to 16-year-old boys from a 52-year-old man is nothing about gay. It’s about pedophilia.

Meanwhile, some unknown right-wing bloggers have publicized one of the page victim's names on the internet.  Great one you guys: you go after the victim instead of the pedophile suspect.  Now that shows class.

Fine Hastert, be that way

On this blog, I always try my best to write as a political science student first, activist second.  This entry is no different.

With regard to the Mark Foley scandal that has erupted into a referendum on House Speaker Dennis Hastert's secretive, ultra-partisan leadership style, just about everyone on both sides of the political spectrum is calling for his resignation.  I think he should resign because his actions of keeping the Foley emails under partisan wraps, as opposed to taking genuine action as a House leader, sets a bad precedent for politicians that are in positions of trust.

But the fact of the matter is that Speaker Hastert is resisting calls to resign.  To that, I say great!  The longer he refuses to take responsibility for his actions, the more that the media will cover it, and the greater likelihood that swing voters will show up to the polls on November 7th with an anti-Republican feeling in their stomach.

Let's face it: strategically, the Republicans need a new face.  President Bush's approval rating is at 40% or less.  I said earlier this year that if I were a GOP strategist, I would encourage Bush to get rid of Cheney and bring in a new face like John McCain (Sen-AZ) or Lindsey Graham (Sen-SC).  Replacing Tom DeLay was a step in the right direction -- although as of late, new House Majority leader John Boehner has been in hot water over comments on Hardball that Saddam had a supportive role in 9/11.  Boehner also changed his story about the Foley emails -- saying last Friday that Hastert told him about them, only to say the opposite a few days later.  But getting back to the point: other than Boehner, the GOP has had an old look for too long.  They are reluctant to change.  Voters have every reason to perceive them as arrogant and power-hungry.  Hastert's last minute lunge to maintain power only adds legitimacy to that point.

So, once again, if the Republicans were smart they would completely reorganize their leadership.  This would shift media attention away from the Foley scandal and more towards their fresh new look.  Maybe it might be too late for that.  But the longer that Hastert holds onto his position, the better it will be for the Democrats.  And if Hastert is still House Speaker on November 7th, that would be a dream come true for any Democratic House challenger.

Ultimately though, Hastert will probably use this weekend as one last attempt to win back House conservatives.  As they will likely tell him, he is hurting the party by staying.  That is why Hastert will probably not remain House Speaker through all of next week.  However, Democratic strategists are hoping he stays put.