House Speaker Dennis Hastert finally stopped talking to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity today, and started talking to everyone else. Unfortunately, the message wasn’t quite clear. On the one hand, Hastert says he’s stepping up and making himself liable for what’s happened. “I’m deeply sorry this has happened and the bottom line is we’re taking […]
I’ve heard a surprising number of rumors today about “the next shoe to drop,” which in some ways, makes all of today’s updates, from Dennis Hastert and others, preliminary. If Mark Foley wasn’t the only one, this mess could, believe it or not, get considerably worse. Consider: As the scandal over former congressman Mark Foley […]
We’ll know more about House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s comeback plan soon, but in the meantime, Roll Call is reporting that Hastert will acquiesce to requests to bring in an outside investigator to determine what happened in the Mark Foley sex scandal. That’s the good news. The bad news is who Hastert picked. Sources said Speaker […]
Way back on Monday, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) noted that it had obtained controversial Mark Foley emails in July, and, suspecting possible illegalities, forwarded the emails to the FBI. Like the House GOP leadership, there’s no evidence the FBI did much of anything to deal with the issue. The FBI, facing […]
Chris Bowers raised a good point late yesterday when he noted that there seemed to be a dearth of polls in the wake of the [tag]Mark Foley[/tag] sex scandal. With a scandal like this dominating the political discourse, shouldn’t there have been several [tag]poll[/tag]s released over the last week? The story about Foley’s emails broke […]
Today’s installment of campaign-related news items that wouldn’t generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to political observers: * In Tennessee, Rep. Harold Ford (D) is using the Mark Foley sex scandal to fend off criticisms from Republican opponent Bob Corker. The GOP is running an attack ad against Ford across […]
Let’s briefly recap. According to Bob Woodward’s new book, “State of Denial,” then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice had what appeared to be a pretty important meeting on July 10, 2001. Rice sat down with then-CIA Director George J. Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, and according to the CIA officials, Tenet and Black […]
Sometimes, you can’t make this stuff up. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Wednesday that Democratic [tag]sex[/tag] [tag]scandals[/tag] have been far worse than the suggestive Internet messages sent to teenage congressional pages by former Rep. Mark Foley. […] “What we don’t have to do is allow our friends on the left to lecture us on […]
We’ve seen and heard a few doozies over the last week as conservatives have mounted a counter-attack against the Mark Foley sex scandal — blaming the GOP for political correctness is my personal favorite — but the principal argument theory is that Dems are behind the whole sordid mess. The theory has always lacked a […]
Rumor has it that House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) will host a press conference in Chicago this morning. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if he, at a minimum, announces that he will not seek the speakership in January, because at this point, it’s hard to see how his authority can remain intact. The […]