I recognize that in the grand scheme of things, the Mark Foley scandal will not amount to much more than a Hill of Beans. Other events of the day hold more importance and will be duly noted in the History books ahead of this — North Korea just created a nuclear explosion, for example — and domestically, Bush has rendered the Congress irrelevant through creativ, wholly brazen, and liberally use of the Signing Statement — a new substitute for the Veto Pen wherein the President refuses to follow through with a law.

But this is one of those stories where news develops quickly minute by minute, and thus it is conducive to our current media model of 24 Hour McNews Cable networks and the Tubular world of the Internets. News such as:

Former President George Herbert Walker Bush has come out strongly in support of beleagured House Speaker Dennis Hastert.

Sure, sure. Bush Senior supports Hastert. But what I want I want to know is: does Gerald Ford still support Dennis Hastert? Because if Gerald Ford doesn’t stand by Hastert, we know that the game is up for him.

In a letter to Pelosi, which also was sent to Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean, Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Georgia, asked them to disclose whether Democrats played a role in publicizing Foley’s correspondences.

In a speech Thursday in Batavia, Illinois, Hastert said he had “done nothing wrong” and refused to step down. He also suggested the timing of the release of the messages was a Democratic ploy to get the upper hand in November elections.

Fair enough. But what I want to know is: Did the Reform Party know anything about Foley, and did they cover it up? Eh? Eh? Get me the head of the Reform Party — whoever that may be these days — and demand answers!

I’ve noticed on more than one occasion someone trying to make a reference to Mark Foley instead mis-naming Mark to Tom — thus referencing Tom Foley, former Speaker of the House and Congressman of Washington State’s 5th Congressional District — the Spokane area and areas around the Spokane area. Notably defeated in 1994 — the year of the “Republican Revolution”, only the second Speaker of the House to be defeated in an election.

He is not Mark Foley. But I’m curious to see a graph that shows this “Tom Foley Effect”. Here it is, courtesy blogpulse:

Just for reference, Mark Foley in the same time – period:

For the life of me, I don’t know why the two graphs don’t directly correlate. Why does Tom Foley spike upward at the end there these past two days, while Mark Foley doesn’t? I suppose I could read the blogosphere and see what people are saying about Tom Foley, and see if somehow he’s being referenced sans mistaking him for Mark Foley. Otherwise, explanations are welcome.

The conspiracy theorists have shifted what website they scrawl in chalk around the city for some reason. I don’t know what is wrong with the old 9/11 site they chalked, but suddenly everyone’s supposed to go to 911weknow.com … Kind of like when a business moves to a new location.

Hotline’s listing of vulnerable House Races is quite a trip. We’ve got two tiers here — #1 through #30 and then #31 through #50.

#1 through #29 are Endangered Republican seats. #30 is an endangered Democratic seat. I suspect a bit of artful play here. You slide this Endengered Democrat either up or down to this 30th position to prove a point. The point, of coure, being that this is just not the Republican’s year. But, smarmy as all smarm comes out, there’s a Democrat for you — right there at the bottom. Whether he’d really belong at #28 or #33 if viewed in a somehow more calibrated-scientific sense — thus destroying this bemusing art display, I have no way of knowing.

The bottom tier remain rather placid, sans the suddenly Page-Scandal implicated Tom Reynolds who, obviously, popped up on the list out of the blue. This is a standard tic you’ll see in sports writer’s lists of the Top 25 College football teams — which, after going through the 10 teams that he has a strong opinion of in the top 10 and have unbeaten or once beaten records, he shrugs “Meh. I dunno.”

An embattled Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds on Monday denied covering up the actions of a now-disgraced Florida congressman who resigned last week after it was revealed that he sent inappropriate computer messages to teenage boys who worked in the House. […]

Reynolds told reporters that as soon as he learned Friday of the more serious instant messages that Foley sent to another former page in 2003, he “immediately began to work for his resignation.” He called the instant messages “despicable and disgusting” and called for Foley’s criminal prosecution at both the federal and state levels.

From the Transcript:

Reporter: Congressman, do you mind asking the children to leave the room so we can have a frank discussion of this, because it’s an adult topic. It just doesn’t seem appropriate to me.
Reynolds: I’ll take your questions, but I’m not going to ask any of my supporters to leave. […]

Reporter: Who are the children, Congressman? Who are these children?

Reynolds: Pardon me?

Reporter: Who are these children?

Reynolds: Well, a number of them are from the community. There are several of the “thirtysomething” set that are here and uh I’ve known them and I’ve known their children as they were born.

Reporter: Do you think it’s appropriate for them to be listening to the subject matter though?

Reynolds: Sir, I’ll be happy to answer your questions, I’m still, uh…

……………………

Well, the kids need to learn about the Birds and the Bees sooner or later. Just go full bore and ask for definitions and degrees of “explicit”. The early ones are supposedly vague enough that the kids might think something else — what I don’t know — anyways, right?

There is an elementary school located in Stockton, California with the name (drum roll, please) George W Bush Elementary School.

George W Bush paid a visit to it the other day. If you look up “George W Bush Elementary School” in google news search, you’ll see that numerous headlines of statements he made at his namesake elementary school — school violence this, Mark Foley that, Democrats’ “softer side”, etc.

http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061004/NEWS01/610040320/1001

I kind of feel sorry for the kids quoted here. They met the president, sure, but what a crappy president to meet!

Apparently, Monsieur Doc Hastings has opted out of the Endorsement Process for the Yakima Herald. I understand this from a political vantage point. His opponent is underfunded and has no real means of making headway. And the way to avoid the political headache of being a Republican toady with head of the Ethics Committee is through the maxim “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”

I’ve read the endorsements the Yakima Herald gave for all of Doc Hastings’s race. As long as the Democratic opponent met a certain level of credibility — which the 1998 candidate did not, or was not perceived as too “liberal” — as the 2002 candidate was — the Democrat received the endorsement. Tellingly the endorsements were always mixed — the 2004 endorsement was practically a coin flip — but most tellingly Hastings’ drawback in the eyes of the Yakima Herald has always been a high level of deference and lack of independence to the Republican Leadership. That problem has been multiplied to the nth degree.

It is as written ever so eloquently here: Now, I have no reason to think Hastings knew about Foley, mainly because Hastings is a lump of coal. It’s easy to believe that the real powers in the GOP don’t tell him anything. […] Even if Hastings knew nothing about Foley’s actions, it does not excuse Hastings from moral culpability. Hastings has been a lump of coal on purpose; the sole intent of his chairmanship was to render the ethics committee powerless. And this is what you get–a Congress that is accountable to nobody.

The disturbances of being a functionary lackey for this particular party has been exposed as an exercise in Evil (whatever you can say about being the man who literally had the task of holding the gavel for the 15 minute Medicare Vote for that 3 hour middle of the night session — the other great exercise in being a functionary lackey).

I note that the ABC Reporter who brought us this Mark Foley scandal notes, while keeping the confidentiality, that his sources were Republicans. I wander my mind over to the last issue of the Washington Monthly, and to various murmurs of carefully couched words spoken by various Republicans over the year. The sense is that this Republican Party is untenuable, has lost its way, and the best thing for “our Conservative Goals” is to lose and spend a little bit of time in the Wilderness. I’m intimating a conspiracy theory here that makes more sense than two other conspiracy theories I’ve heard. (1) The Mark Foley story was released to take the public’s mind off of Iraq (we’ve just disbanded their police unit for the crime of merging into a Death Squad, in case you missed that story), and more specifically the Bob Woodward Book. (2) More sensical, ABC released the Mark Foley story in a competition with CBS News and 60 Minutes — our media sources shift from CBS to ABC for the most sensational story. ‘Tis business, that.

I never understand the Oregonian’s website. Granted, it is in the newspaper’s perogative to not include all material found in its print edition, and further my problem may be that the editorial I’m trying to find may be syndicated and thus not owned by the Oregonian. It still seems a littls scatter-shot. I remember the first paragraph referring to Phil Knight and Nike, state references to various Oregon based corporations, so I do not know.

The editorial in question, from yesterday’s Oregonian, wanted to end the Congressional Page Program. The argument had me in stictches was something to the effect of — why expose these 16 year olds to the harsh reality of how Congress really works, far from the Civics textbook look at “How a Bill Becomes a Law”, and destroy their innocence?

It would be more effective if I could quote it there, but I’ll just have to suffice on this paraphrase from memory. This is a joke. For one thing, these 16 year olds are two years from being of voting age, and giving the fact that they chose to be on Congressional staff are actually going to vote. Better not to have a polly-anna view of the electoral process.(*)

I was more jaded and cynical at electoral politics at the age of sixteen than I am now. I don’t know about others, though I suppose they take their cues from late night monolouges and morning dj inanities. I vary in my mind as to who I was as an adolescent — maybe incredibly normal; maybe just a bit weird. Nonetheless, I always wanted to have the question asked in a high school assignment “How Does A Bill Become a Law” because I wanted to provide an obnoxiously cynical and jaded answer. (One which, incidentally, would if answered honestly today would be far worse today than a decade ago.)

So I don’t know what that editorial writer was talking about. Maybe there’s a reason the Youth don’t take seriously politics — and maybe this “Sheltering” is a pointless exercise. Or maybe this writer was just a buffoon.

A close House ally of Speaker Dennis Hastert called Wednesday for temporary suspension of the congressional page program amid the uproar over former Rep. Mark Foley’s Internet exchanges with former teenage pages and Hastert’s handling of the problem.

“Some members betray their trust by taking advantage of them. We should not subject young men and women to this kind of activity, this kind of vulnerability,” LaHood said in a CNN interview. He said the program should be shut down until problems can be resolved.

While I’m far from an expert and am not privvy to any details of the program, I don’t really see what is “antiquated” about the congressional page system. Sans a sick 50-something year old Congressman sexually preying on teenage pages, it looks good to me. Our fellow Dennis Hastert accolade gives himself away with the “it’s not the speaker who should go” and the “has resulted in scandals in the past”. He is protecting Dennis Hastert’s hide and trying to shift the focus.

I’m weary. As a rule, it is not a good thing to isolate adolescents completely away from the adult world and innoculate themselves into the whole of Youth Culture. (As Matt Drudge put it in his completely disgusting monolouge on Mark Foley: And I’ve seen what they’re doing on YouTube, and I’ve seen what they’re doing all over the Internet. Oh yeah. And you just have to tune into any part of their pop culture. — which I would hedge in various degrees but to some degree agree, but go with mainly because our Hastert accolade would undoubtedly agree with) Bridges to Adult Responsibilty and “the real world” (such that Washington, DC is the real world) are good things, and quite frankly rather non-existent in our culture. There’s a certain lameness to high school, and I found and find it impossible to take seriously the Measures dropped on teenage students as character and leadership building: school athletics and ASB Elected officials (the latter seeming to have had no other duty than to plan Pep Assemblies).

Thus this is taking away something valuable and, um, real because of Mark Foley and his political protectors. Just watch your goddamned Congressmen, and within the guidelines of proceeding with the page program, know that if you’re warning the kids in 1995 to avoid this Congressman because of his “creepiness” that you should probably keep closer tabs on him and edge him outward.

(Some clarification of adolescent — adult relations came when I read John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education The oft-cited reference that obviously popularly came from Gatto is of a 16-year old Ship’s Captain circa the 18th century, nobody doing a double-take — just a natural enough occurence.)