Explaining that, really, the only reason he posted the Coulter piece was simply because it was relevant to the topic at hand - no provocation was intended in the least,
Ticomaya wrote:Cycloptichorn wrote:Posting an article by Coulter, is provocation for insult.
You mean you cannot resist the urge to insult someone because they posted an article relevant to the subject matter of the thread, simply because you don't like the author of the article? [..]
I often post Coulter's articles on the Bush Supporters thread, but in this case it was specifically relevant to the Foley thread. That you cannot stomach Coulter is not my problem. Your options do include scrolling past the article. Instead, you exhibited a lack of self-control, and chose to insult me.
Immediately before, noting Snood's reaction to anothe of his posts,
Ticomaya wrote:Do you even realize how easy it is to yank your chain?
Seriously Tico, and you expect people to believe that with the Coulter piece, you were not simply "yanking their chain"?
Especially since, yes, yanking people's chain is the only reason one would post Coulter - she's the verbal conservative equivalent to liberal postings of pictures of Bush and monkeys.. there's no substance, just cleverly worded insult.
Explaining that, really, the only reason he posted the Coulter piece was simply because it was relevant to the topic at hand - no provocation was intended in the least, ...
Seriously Tico, and you expect people to believe that with the Coulter piece, you were not simply "yanking their chain"?
Especially since, yes, yanking people's chain is the only reason one would post Coulter - she's the verbal conservative equivalent to liberal postings of pictures of Bush and monkeys.. there's no substance, just cleverly worded insult.
Plus he gets to stop the thread from any discussion of the subject, and onto a prolonged attack on another member, who has responded just as he intended them to, from a position of feigned injured rectitude.
"feigned injured rectitude"?
So I came off as if I was feeling righteously indignant, but that was only a feigned reaction?
'splain more.....
Staffer Cites Earlier Role by Hastert's Office
Confrontation With Foley Detailed
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 7, 2006; A01
House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert's chief of staff confronted then-Rep. Mark Foley about his inappropriate social contact with male pages well before the speaker said aides in his office took any action, a current congressional staff member with personal knowledge of Foley and his behavior with pages said yesterday.
The staff member said Hastert's chief of staff, Scott Palmer, met with the Florida Republican at the Capitol to discuss complaints about Foley's behavior toward pages. The alleged meeting occurred long before Hastert says aides in his office dispatched Rep. John M. Shimkus (R-Ill.) and the clerk of the House in November 2005 to confront Foley about troubling e-mails he had sent to a Louisiana boy.
The staff member's account buttresses the position of Foley's onetime chief of staff, Kirk Fordham, who said earlier this week that he had appealed to Palmer in 2003 or earlier to intervene, after Fordham's own efforts to stop Foley's behavior had failed. Fordham said Foley and Palmer, one of the most powerful figures in the House of Representatives, met within days to discuss the allegations.
Palmer said this week that the meeting Fordham described "did not happen." Timothy J. Heaphy, Fordham's attorney, said yesterday that Fordham is prepared to testify under oath that he had arranged the meeting and that both Foley and Palmer told him the meeting had taken place. Fordham spent more than three hours with the FBI on Thursday, and Heaphy said that on Friday he contacted the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct to offer his client's cooperation.
"We are not preparing to cooperate. We are affirmatively seeking to," Heaphy said.
Hastert spokesman Ron Bonjean declined to directly comment on the second House staff member's assertion, saying that it is a matter for a House ethics committee investigation. "The Standards Committee has asked that no one discuss this matter because of its ongoing investigation," Bonjean said.
The emergence of a second congressional staffer describing such a meeting came on a day that Hastert (R-Ill.) was working to solidify his hold on the speakership. Prominent Republicans, including President Bush, have defended Hastert, saying he should not step down, but the criticism continues to flow.
New Jersey's Thomas H. Kean Jr., whose candidacy offers the GOP its most promising hope to take a Senate seat from a Democrat in November, called for Hastert's resignation yesterday, as did the editorial page of the Los Angeles Times. Democratic House candidate Patty Wetterling of Minnesota, a child-safety advocate and the first to air a television commercial about the Foley scandal, will deliver the national Democratic response to Bush's weekly radio address today.
Hastert maintains that he knew nothing of Foley's actions until last week, when the story first broke and Foley resigned. His stance contradicts that of House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Thomas M. Reynolds (R-N.Y.), both of whom said they had informed Hastert this spring.
Palmer has resolutely said he had no earlier meeting with Foley, and other leadership aides have questioned the truthfulness of Fordham. Fordham quit his job as Reynolds's chief of staff last week after acknowledging that he had tried to persuade ABC News not to publish the salacious instant-message exchanges between Foley and two former pages.
Hastert's office contends that the first confrontation with Foley occurred in November 2005, when Shimkus, the head of the House Page Board, and then-House Clerk Jeff Trandahl took Foley aside to discuss what they termed "over-friendly" e-mails that Foley had sent to a Louisiana boy. Fordham's account not only pushed the matter back at least two years but also indicated that alarms over Foley's behavior had gone well beyond bland e-mails.
Sources close to Fordham say Trandahl repeatedly urged the longtime aide and close family friend to confront Foley about his inappropriate advances on pages. Each time, Foley pledged to no longer socialize with the teenagers, but, weeks later, Trandahl would again alert Fordham about more contacts. Out of frustration, the sources said, Fordham contacted Palmer, hoping that an intervention from such a powerful figure in the House would persuade Foley to stop.
Now, a second House aide familiar with Foley and his actions told The Washington Post yesterday that "Scott Palmer had spoken to Foley prior to November 2005." The aide spoke on the condition of anonymity because the matter is now the subject of a criminal investigation and the House ethics committee inquiry.
Two law enforcement officials said yesterday that the FBI had not yet determined whether a crime had occurred in the Foley case. Justice Department and FBI officials have cautioned that cases involving the enticement of minors are notoriously difficult to prosecute.
On Wednesday night, Palmer was described as highly emotional while aides sifted through e-mails and files to determine whether he had ever spoken to Fordham. Several people who spoke with Palmer said the chief of staff was emphatic in denying that he knew anything about Foley's questionable contacts with young male pages.
Palmer, who shares a townhouse with Hastert when they are in town, is more powerful than all but a few House members. Members know that he speaks for Hastert.
The divergent accounts have highlighted the holes in the public's understanding of Foley's undoing. And they are sure to ratchet up the pressure on Trandahl to come forward with his knowledge of events. As House clerk between January 1999 and November 2005, Trandahl had direct control over the page program.
Pages apparently saw Trandahl as a strict disciplinarian. In one instant-message exchange obtained by The Post, a former page, on his way to his first annual reunion in Washington, told Foley in January 2003 that "everyone is going to be pretty wasted a lot of the time in dc."
He then added, "well we dont have the [expletive] clerk to fire us anymore. . . . we didnt like trandahl that much . . . he isnt a nice guy . . . and he gets really scarey when he is mad."
Trandahl's departure came within days of his confrontation with Foley over e-mails that the congressman had sent a former page. House aides say the circumstances of Trandahl's exit were oddly quiet. The departure of a staff member of long standing, especially one as important as the House clerk, is usually marked with considerable fanfare, said Scott Lilly, a former Democratic staff director of the House Appropriations Committee. Debate is suspended in mid-afternoon to accommodate a stream of testimonials from lawmakers.
Trandahl's departure was marked by a one-minute salute from Shimkus and a brief insert into the Congressional Record.
"My one-hour Special Order changed to a five-minute Special Order, now to a one-minute," Shimkus said. "I just want to say thank you for the work you have done."
Lilly said: "He seemed to suddenly disappear in a puff of smoke."
Trandahl, now the executive director of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, has not returned repeated phone calls and e-mails.
Congressional aides point to another factor that links Trandahl to the Foley matter. A member of the board of the national gay rights group Human Rights Campaign, Trandahl is openly homosexual and personally close to the now-disgraced former lawmaker, who announced through his lawyer this week that he is gay.
Staff writers Jim VandeHei, Charles Babington, Dan Eggen and Allan Lengel contributed to this report.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
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Fordham's account not only pushed the matter back at least two years but also indicated that alarms over Foley's behavior had gone well beyond bland e-mails.
"feigned injured rectitude"?
So I came off as if I was feeling righteously indignant, but that was only a feigned reaction?
'splain more.....
snood wrote:"feigned injured rectitude"?
So I came off as if I was feeling righteously indignant, but that was only a feigned reaction?
'splain more.....
I believe she is trying to insinuate that it was I that was attacking another member from a position of "feigned injured rectitude." But I could be wrong ...
So, sure I enjoy yanking your chains ... don't be ridiculous. I never claimed otherwise.
Andy Borowitz
Bush on Foley: We Must Crack Down on Illegal Immigration
Posted on Oct 6, 2006
By Andy Borowitz
In an attempt to change the terms of the debate over the Mark Foley scandal, President George W. Bush said today that the Foley matter "only reaffirms my belief that we must crack down on illegal immigration."
Mr. Bush's decision to link the Foley scandal with the issue of illegal immigration struck some in Washington as unorthodox, but the president remained resolute that America's immigration crisis, and not the behavior of Mr. Foley, was the true root cause of the scandal.
"The question we need to be asking ourselves is not if Mark Foley behaved improperly," Mr. Bush said. "The question we need to ask is, were these congressional pages in our country legally?"
Mr. Bush said he would ask Congress to appropriate $84 million to investigate the legal status of all congressional pages at once: "What we may be seeing is an orchestrated attempt by 16-year-old boys with hot bodies to swarm into our country and tempt our lawmakers."
Minutes after the president's remarks, which Mr. Bush made at a Boys Club of America luncheon in Washington, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert praised the president for "pointing the finger at the true culprits in this case."
"It's not hard for a bunch of scheming young men with hot bodies to corrupt an older man through no fault of his own," Mr. Hastert says. "As a former high school wrestling coach, I speak from experience."
Elsewhere, Brad Pitt said that he and Angelina Jolie would adopt three babies next year, "but definitely not Tori Spelling's."
Award-winning humorist, television personality and film actor Andy Borowitz is author of the newly published book "The Republican Playbook." To find out more about Andy Borowitz and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
Ex-Page Tells of Foley Liaison
The young man says the then-congressman eyed males in the program. He says he was 21 when he and the Florida Republican had sex.
By Walter F. Roche Jr., Times Staff Writer
October 8, 2006
A former House page says he had sex with then-Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) after receiving explicit e-mails in which the congressman described assessing the sexual orientation and physical attributes of underage pages but waiting until later to make direct advances.
The former page, who agreed to discuss his relationship with Foley with the Los Angeles Times on the condition that he not be identified, said his electronic correspondence with Foley began after he finished the respected Capitol Hill page program for high school juniors. His sexual encounter was in the fall of 2000, he said. At the time, he was 21 and a graduate of a rural Northeastern college.
Foley questions surface in review
(By Charles Babington, Washington Post, October 8, 2006)
WASHINGTON - Despite countless hours of TV coverage and reams of newspaper reporting on the House's handling of the Mark Foley page scandal, numerous fundamental questions remain unanswered as the FBI and the House ethics committee begin their first full week of inquiries.
Gaps and inconsistencies in the public accounts include such basic matters as when House Speaker Dennis Hastert and his top aides first learned of concerns about Foley's relations with male pages, and what they did about it. Also unclear is which GOP officials decided that only two members of the six-person House Page Board should confront the now-disgraced Florida lawmaker.
And accounts differ on whether the two board members knew the exact contents of e-mails sent last year by Foley to a teen-age boy in Louisiana. Those messages alarmed the boy and his parents, and set into motion the events that eventually would uncover far more sexually graphic messages to other former pages, triggering Foley's abrupt resignation a week ago.
Armed with subpoena power, investigators for the FBI and the ethics committee will pursue scores of questions, almost surely including:
Who decided to keep word of the Louisiana e-mails closely held, so that only a handful of House Republicans - and no Democrats - knew of them?
Various accounts agree that only two people - Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill., chairman of the Page Board, and then-House Clerk Jeff Trandahl, also a board member - confronted Foley last November about the messages. But none has definitively said who decided that only those two should handle the task.
A Sept. 30 "Internal Review" released by Hastert's office says that aides to Rep. Rodney Alexander, R-La., alerted Hastert's aides to the e-mails. Among those dealing with the matter were Hastert's deputy chief of staff, Mike Stokke, and his in-house counsel, Ted Van Der Meid.
Stokke contacted Trandahl, who then contacted Shimkus. The review says Trandahl and Shimkus "immediately met" with Foley. But it does not say who chose the meeting's participants, and why other Page Board members - including Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., Rep. Dale Kildee, D-Mich.. and Sergeant-at-Arms Wilson "Bill" Livingood - were never alerted.
Some lawmakers say Capito, Kildee and Livingood might have urged queries to current and former pages, which could have turned up accounts of Foley's unusual friendliness to the pages and sexually explicit messages to some of them. Such accounts were quietly traded among pages, former pages and some House staffers, according to recent news reports.
Did Trandahl and Shimkus know exactly what the e-mails to the Louisiana boy said?
Hastert's Internal Review indicates the two men did not know the e-mails' precise language when they sat down with Foley, because Alexander's staff refused to divulge them at the boy's parents' request. That may have put the two men at a disadvantage when confronting Foley, who assured them the messages and his intentions were innocent.
Shimkus has said Alexander's staff did provide him with the text of the e-mails before he confronted Foley. In them, Foley asked the boy, then 16, for a photo of himself, and what he wanted for his birthday. The boy told an acquaintance he found the request "sick, sick, sick."
How did House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, handle word of the Louisiana e-mails?
Hours after Foley resigned on Sept. 29, Boehner told the Washington Post that he had heard last spring of some contact between Foley and a 16-year-old boy. He said he mentioned it to Hastert, who assured him "we're taking care of it." Soon after the Post asked the speaker's staff for comment on the remarks, Boehner called the paper and said he could not recall whether he had spoken to Hastert about the matter.
On Oct. 3, Boehner told a Cincinnati radio station: "I believe I had talked to the speaker and he told me it had been taken care of. My position is, it's in his corner, it's his responsibility."
Did Hastert know about the e-mails to the Louisiana boy?
Reinforcing Boehner's initial comments, Rep. Tom Reynolds, R-N.Y. - chairman of the GOP's House campaign committee - says he learned of the e-mails from Alexander this year and told Hastert about them. "I took logical, common-sense steps of notifying my supervisor," Reynolds told the National Public Radio program "On Point" on Oct. 5. "My supervisor was the Speaker of the House."
Hastert says he does not recall such conversations with Reynolds or Boehner, but he does not dispute that they might have occurred. He says Stokke and Van Der Meid did not tell him about the e-mails, and there was no reason for them to do so. Hastert says he does not recall hearing of concerns about Foley's dealings with teens until the day Foley resigned.
Was Hastert's staff alerted to earlier concerns about Foley's behavior toward teen-age pages?
Kirk Fordham, who served as chief of staff to Foley and later to Reynolds, says that in 2003 he repeatedly asked Hastert's staff to help put a stop to the Floridian's inappropriate attention to male pages on Capitol Hill. Fordham says he appealed especially to Hastert chief of staff Scott Palmer, and that Palmer discussed the matter with Foley in a meeting in the Capitol.
A congressional staff member with personal knowledge of Foley and his actions has told the Post that Fordham's account is accurate. But Palmer has said through a spokesman that Fordham's account is untrue.
Foley should be charged ni Florida.
