Tag: Scandals

First, he admitted to listening to phone calls illegally. Now this:

President Bush has quietly claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans’ mail without a judge’s warrant, the New York Daily News has learned.

The president asserted his new authority when he signed a postal reform bill into law on Dec. 20. Bush then issued a “signing statement” that declared his right to open people’s mail under emergency conditions.

That claim is contrary to existing law and contradicted the bill he had just signed, say experts who have reviewed it.

Bush’s move came during the winter congressional recess and a year after his secret domestic electronic eavesdropping program was first revealed. It caught Capitol Hill by surprise.

“Despite the president’s statement that he may be able to circumvent a basic privacy protection, the new postal law continues to prohibit the government from snooping into people’s mail without a warrant,” said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the incoming House Government Reform Committee chairman, who co-sponsored the bill.

Experts said the new powers could be easily abused and used to vacuum up large amounts of mail.

The House Ethics Committee released its report on Friday at the eleventh hour of the last day of the 109th Congress. Aside from stern words directed at House members, especially former Rep. Foley, the report basically gave everyone a pass, saying it found that no rules had been broken.

Apparently, there is no specific rule that forbids House members from diddling the pages.

And yet hidden in plain sight in the report is a matter-of-fact description of a conspiracy of silence around Foley’s improper behavior. His colleagues and their staff members told investigators that they knew about Foley’s interaction with 16-year-old pages but did not turn him in because they were reluctant to out him as a gay man:

“Some may have been concerned that raising the issue too aggressively might have risked exposing Rep. Foley’s homosexuality…. There is some evidence that political considerations played a role in decisions that were made by persons in both parties.”

The report fails to connect the dots on this issue: The truly unethical behavior was how, in service to Foley’s secret sexuality, members of Congress tolerated his predation of teenaged boys.

Mark Foley is out of rehab and back in Florida where he attended the funeral of his father. His email contacts with teenaged boys are finally being scrutinized by law enforcement.

You wouldn’t necessarily know this from watching cable news, however. Mr. Foley’s re-entry has been relegated to “other news,” at the same time that MSNBC is giving us live shots of a brick wall — the back of the building in Italy where Tom and Katie are to be married today. (The lead story is President Bush’s visit to Asia, where we are all anxiously waiting to see if he will follow in his old man’s shoes and vomit at a state dinner.)

Why wasn’t an angry-looking media gaggle there trampling the lawn in Tucson, shouting questions at Mr. Foley as he skulked out of rehab in a baseball cap? Has Old Media given Mr. Foley a pass out of deference to the death of his father?

Does that sound like them?

What has happened here? Where are the cameras that staked out the comings and goings of former Rep. Gary Condit, Scooter Libby, the Enron gang, Elia Gonzalez, Monica Lewinsky and other scandal figures?

Granted, no one has been killed and no stained GAP clothing has popped up in the Foley scandal — but how did it become a non-story so quickly? Just a few weeks ago, Mr. Foley was a major player in the self-destruction of the Republican Congress and the poster boy of GOP sexual hypocrisy. His party leaders almost undoubtedly knew about his fetish for chicken and covered it up. Investigations are ongoing, and the careers of former Speaker Hastert and other former and current Republican bigwigs could hang in the balance.

Even Mr. Foley must be disappointed to be yesterday’s news so soon.

The media gaggles of yore may have been rude, aggressive and unpleasant but, ugly as they were, at least they were doing their jobs.

They’re doing it again: Our Liberal Media has its collective panties in a wad over the House Democratic leadership elections, in part because the American Spectator — the putative “intellectual review” that served as central command of the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy in the 1990s — uncovered 26-old-videotape of Rep. John Murtha not taking a bribe from an F.B.I. agent in disguise.

The cable newsers have also put themselves in a dither of the race for House majority leader between Murtha and the winner, Rep. Steny Hoyer. While they have been reading from GOP talking points critical of Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi’s support of Murtha in the race, they have had little to say about the corollary dust-up on the Republican side.

In the race for minority leader, two rightwingers, Rep. Joe Barton of Texas and Rep. Mike Spence, ran against the current majority leader, Rep. John Boehner. Barton later dropped out, but if he was the victim of strongarm tactics from Boehner, I guess we’ll never know.

Boehner won in a landslide but there has been nary a mention of his ethics violation. Unlike Murtha, Boehner was guilty and apologized — and it wasn’t 26 years ago either:

John Boehner actually handed out checks from the tobacco industry on the floor of the House to fellow Congressmen in 1995 when they were considering a bill to end a tobacco subsidy.

It would be interesting to know if C-Span has video of Boehener handing out these checks.

Alleged Terrorist Tracked after Buying $15 Money Order Made out to Katherine Harris

Chad Castagana was arrested over the weekend for sending threatening letters to prominent liberals, including Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-California), Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-New York) and television personalities David Letterman, Jon Stewart, Keith Olbermann, as well as Viacom Chairman Sumner Redstone.

The alleged terrorist is 39 and lives with his parents in the Los Angeles suburb of Woodland Hills. He was apparently a frequent contributor to the ultra-rightwing extremist website Free Republic, whose members are known as “Freepers.”

Castanaga was arrested by the Joint Federal Terrorism Task Force in part because he purchased a money order for $15 that he had made out to “Friends of Katherine Harris” at the same time he purchased stamps and envelopes with which he intended to send another round of fake anthrax mailings.

On MSNBC’s Countdown yesterday, host Keith Olbermann, in an interview with Radar Online’s John Cook, revealed that Castagana was a follower of rightwing militarist talking heads Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin and Laura Ingraham:

OLBERMANN: [The] Ann Coulter-Laura Ingraham-Michelle Malkin connection is—how is that best described? Is that hero worship? Or crushes of some kind, or do we know what that is?

COOK: Well, I mean, if he is idolizing them, that sounds like hero worship to me … They sort of present a kind of rhetorical world view where they have their troops out there, and I think he thought of himself as one of their troops and wanted to live up to their standards. And I mean, I don’t think we can always hold these people responsible for the actions of the least hinged of their followers, but I think it is clear that he was an acolyte of the Coulters and the Malkins, and I think that they clearly enjoy having acolytes, and they clearly sort of issue calls to action — not necessarily to send threatening powder-filled envelopes to you in so many words, but they certainly exhort their followers to let themselves be known.

If convicted, Castagana could face 15 years in prison.

On Oct. 1, Republican former Rep. Mark Foley checked into the Sierra Tucson Treatment Center in Arizona, purportedly to deal with the alcohol abuse that he cited as a contributing factor to his sexual pursuit of teenage boys.

Rehab at the center usually lasts 30 days (at a cost of $30,000) but on Nov. 1 we learned that Foley was going to stay at the center for at least another week — thereby conveniently keeping his name out of the press in the final days of campaigning for the midterm elections.

Well, the elections are over and the damage done by his scandalous behavior has taken its first toll. His party lost both houses of Congress, in no small measure due to the revelation of his salacious emails to young House pages.

The elections may be over but the Foley scandal is not. We are still waiting on findings from the House Ethics Committee. We need to know when the House leadership, including Speaker Hastert, Majority Leader John Boehner and others, knew about Foley’s inappropriate behavior toward the pages. We need to know whether there was a cover-up by GOP House leaders and, if so, who else may have been involved.

So many questions but let’s start at the top: Where is Mark Foley?