Rep. Mark Foley (R-Florida) resigned from his seat today following allegations of misconduct and inappropriate communication with a minor male intern that worked in his office in Washington. This story is getting wide “exposure” all over the Internet, with Americablog.com having screen shots of some explicit emails sent to the young intern.

Foley denies that his resignation has anything to do with the allegations.  But considering this quote from ABC News:

A spokesman for Foley, the chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, said the congressman submitted his resignation in a letter late this afternoon to Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert.

So, the theocon’s sent a representative to Congress, gave him an important comittee chair position, and he used his power to talk dirty to a young intern?

Well, apparently, there is more. Check out this quote from the Stop Sex Predators blog from at least one different intern (I say this because the intern in the ABC piece is a minor and the author of this letter makes reference to college):

THIRD EMAIL
From: repub intern
Mailed-By: hotmail.com
To: stopsexpredators@gmail.com
Date: Sep 18, 2006 2:07 PM
Subject: CONGRESSIONAL CORRUPTION!!!
Reply Reply to all Forward Print Add sender to Contacts list Delete
this message Report phishing Show original Message text garbled?

My dad who gives a lot of money to republicans got me an internship capitolhill. I thought that I was hot shit, having such a good internship after myfreshman year of college.After a few weeks, I was finally learning my way around DC and I wasenjoying my job.One night, I decided to go out with my new fake ID to my first gay bar.I went to this bar named Coblot.There was old guy who would not leave me alone. He kept following me around.I tried to get him to leave me alone by going to the bathroom.Instead he followed me in and tried to grope me.A few days later my boss had me run something over to another congressmansoffice. It turned out that the guy who groped me was Representative MarkFoley.

So the very people who want to deny LGBT rights on issues such as partner benefits and marriage are trolling DC gay bars. Oh! What a tangled web indeed!

The Bush administration is in a real pickle this week over the leaking of classified intelligence documents that were critical of the President’s war in Iraq. (If Vietnam was Johnson’s war, why shouldn’t Iraq be Bush’s war?) Al Kamen, at WashingtonPost.com did an excellent piece this morning where he examines the administration’s use of shock that someone would leak such a document, considering this administration’s spotty history of cracking down on leaks.

Sadly, this is not the first time such damaging leaks of sensitive information — information jihadi recruiters couldn’t possibly have known — have occurred shortly before an election. Four years ago this month, back in September 2002, a leak of secret intelligence on Saddam Hussein ‘s efforts to get “specially designed” aluminum tubes to make nuclear weapons showed up in the New York Times.

As recounted in the new book “Hubris,” by Michael Isikoff and David Corn , a White House official worried in the Times article that the tubes might mean that “the first sign of a ‘smoking gun’ might be a mushroom cloud.” The brilliant line (later used by Rice) was conceived by White House chief speechwriter Michael Gerson , according to the book, and had been discussed in a White House meeting a few days earlier.

Vice President Cheney , on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” cited it to moderator Tim Russert as backing for the claim that Hussein was trying for atomic weapons. “There’s a story in the New York Times this morning,” Cheney noted when asked about Saddam’s push for nukes.
Unclear why no one went after the leaker…

Rick Perry (Governor Good Hair) is back to his old tactics now by promising to do what he said he would do four years ago. The problem now is finding a way to pay for his empty and shallow promises.

Perry now says that he will be fiscally conservative in his next term and that his priorities are (and have been, according to his account) education, health care and transportation.

Let’s take a look at these priorities and Perry’s stance on them:

1. Education was only a priority to Perry after Tom DeLay stuck his big head into state redistricting to keep Republicans in power for years to come. By having an unbelievable margin of control in both state houses, Perry was able to ram-rod his form of education finance reform through. The problem is, his education reform brought property tax cuts that the state cannot afford.

From the Houston Chronicle today we have:

And the GOP chairman of the budget-writing House Appropriations Committee noted lawmakers next year will need to come up with billions of dollars to pay for a cut in local school property tax rates approved this year.

His own stinking party is sweating his plan. How crazy is this? The school finance system needed to be fixed, that is for sure. But the plan put forth by Perry is fiscally irresponsible.

2. Health Care is not a priority for Rick Perry. It never has been and never will be. He is too closely aligned with the lobbyists representing HMO’s and pharmaceutical companies. According to the Dallas Morning News, Texas has the highest uninsured rate of any state at 25%. He has tinkered with Medicaid enhancements over the years, but has really done nothing to correct the uninsured problem.

There have been attempts by Perry and Washington Republicans to tie the debate for health care woes in Texas to illegal immigration, but the DMN article indicates otherwise:

Uninsured Americans don’t get the preventive medical care they need. Once they’re really sick, they enter the health care system through the most expensive pathway – hospital emergency rooms – where their treatment tends to be passed on to insured patients and taxpayers.

Undocumented workers, particularly from Mexico, are often seen as the major reason that uninsured patients cost everyone else so much money. Last month, Parkland Memorial Hospital estimated uninsured illegal immigrants are costing $22.4 million a year.

But in fact, working Texans, not immigrants, are the vast majority of the state’s uninsured.

“Seventy percent are U.S.-born, 6 percent are nationalized, and the rest are immigrants – a large percentage of whom are documented,” Dr. Malinow said. “So to say the problem of the uninsured in Texas is a problem of the undocumented or even of all immigrants is really not true.”

The article concludes by pointing out that uninsured medical treatment cost [Dallas County Hospital] Parkland $410 million in 2005, with illegal immigrants representing only $22.4 million of that number (5.5%). That is a clear demonstration that Perry has done very little about health care, and gives us little hope that he is serious about it now.

But Perry’s real priority, transportation, is likely his worst political strategy.

3. Transportation in the mind of Rick Perry means creating lucrative deals with big construction companies to build a network of massive toll roads that criss-cross Texas. Toll roads are a poor decision on the part of the governor because it creates an additional tax on taxpayers, and is more harmful to those citizens who can’t afford another form of taxation. As we just witnessed, 25% of our citizens work in such low-paying jobs that they cannot get health insurance. How does Perry expect people to afford the expansion of toll roads? It would be one thing if new roads were constructed to ease congestion and made into toll roads, but the Perry plan takes existing highways and converts them back into toll roads as a way to pay for additional construction on a different road entirely. So, if you are in South Dallas Perry wants to convert certain roads into toll roads and use those funds for highway projects in North Dallas. That is just not fair and it’s not ethical.

At the peak of this toll road plan is Perry’s beloved TransTexas Corridor system. The Houston Chronicle recently detailed the plans of the road after a court ruled that the state must release all records of negotiations with private contractors to build the system:

Perry announced the corridor plan in 2002, calling for a $175 billion, 4,000-mile limited-access transportation network built mostly with private dollars for profit but owned by the state.

 

TTC-35 generally would run east of Interstate 35 from Oklahoma to Mexico and would include an $8.8 billion toll road from Oklahoma to San Antonio.

The proposal has received continual criticism, despite efforts by TxDOT to reassure the public.

Farmers and ranchers have expressed concern that their property would be divided or taken by eminent domain.

Local officials feared that the corridor would draw business away from existing routes.

Others were concerned that negotiating a 50-year contract for a project of such size was being done behind the scenes.

Despite its bulk — 1,600 pages — and the numerous maps included, the master plan does not include the actual route of TTC-35.

 

TxDOT says that will depend on the same federally required environmental process, including public hearings, as any other road project.

If all the hurdles are jumped, TxDOT says, construction could begin in 2011.

Because the master plan supersedes earlier “conceptual” development and financial plans that TxDOT declined to reveal in March 2005, these were released Thursday as well.

The Houston Chronicle and others had filed open-records requests to see the documents, and Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott agreed they should be released.

TxDOT and Cintra-Zachry then sued Abbott, asking an Austin court to exempt the plans from disclosure on grounds that they would reveal proprietary information, give competitors unfair advantage and have a “chilling effect” on future proposers’ willingness to reveal their ideas.

The lawsuit was dismissed Thursday by agreement.

The campaign manager for gubernatorial candidate and state Comptroller Carol Keeton Strayhorn had urged that the plans be made public.

Strayhorn said Gov. Rick Perry had “fought to keep Texans in the dark and his contract with a foreign-owned company to build toll roads across Texas a secret.”

Perry’s plan for transportation has all of the same characteristics of Dick Cheney’s energy plan of 2001 that to this day remains top secret.

For all this governor claims that he wants to accomplish, there is little reason believe that he will do any of it in an ethcical way, and even less evidence that he will do anything that is in the best interest of the vast majority of Texans.

According to an article in the International Herald Times, British military leaders were recently overruled by political leaders whne they asked to draw down the number of troops in Iraq in order to lend support to efforts in Afghanistan.

British military commanders were overruled by politicians in a request to withdraw troops from Iraq to strengthen force numbers in Afghanistan, the British Broadcasting Corp. reported Wednesday.

It reported that a document compiled by a senior military officer also suggested military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan were heading toward an “as yet unspecified and uncertain result.”

The BBC’s Newsnight television program said it had been passed a copy of the document, which it said was collated as part of a private British review of efforts across the world to combat terrorism.

It painted a bleak picture of military and counterterrorism work, similar to a U.S. intelligence assessment ó parts of which were declassified Tuesday ó which warned of a growing terrorist threat and concluded Iraq has become a “cause celebre” for jihadists.

British troops are being “held hostage in Iraq following the failure of the deal being attempted by the COS (Chief of Staff) to extricate UK Armed Forces from Iraq on the basis of doing Afghanistan,” the BBC quoted the document as saying.

Also, the BBC is reporting that British intelligence reports are tip-toeing around reports that the Pakistan security forces are secretly aligned with al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups in the region.

Many more years ago than I really want to admit, I learned a valuable lesson about people and their value systems. Fear, you see, is the underlying emotion that controls everything a person is or does in life. It is fear that keeps a person loyal to their God. Break God’s rules and you will have to face God’s consequences. Fear is a wonderful tool used throughout the Bible to prove how powerful the Almighty is.

Fear is the one thing that keeps us from doing all the things we want to do, but are afraid of the consequences. About a decade ago a common bumper sticker was “No Fear”, indicating that the person in the car simply had no bounds. For a parent the mere presence of such a symbol would create it’s own state of fear and anguish. Think of how convenient is fear during child development. Promises of getting your mouth washed out with soap, or making funny faces and never looking normal again, or…well, there is the going blind thing. Fear is quite useful in all of these cases.

The “fear” entry on Wikipedia constructs a nice definition of fear within the context of terror:

“Terror” refers to a pronounced state of fear, which usually occurs after the state of horror, when someone becomes overwhelmed with a sense of immediate danger. Also, it can be caused by seeing the (sometimes extreme) phobia. Thus, terror overwhelms the person to the point of making irrational choices and non-typical behavior.

Our government is another great abuser of fear. We are afraid that what we have today is the best we can do, and that without it we are all doomed to die. (Newsflash: We are all going to die someday and there is nothing any of us can do about it.) The Republicants knows this all too well, and are governed by the principles that they are able to control elections and the emotions of voters by constantly speaking to their fears and governing by default and “irrational choices”.

Great discussion over at Daily Kos on how Bush is perceived to be more responsible than Bill Clinton for not capturing bin Laden and heading off 9/11.

Of course, partisanship plays a role in the answers. 71 percent of Republicans are too stupid too realize that Bill Clinton hasn’t been in office the last six years and blame him rather than the guy currently in office. You know — the one that talks a big game but hasn’t delivered squat.

Three things come to mind. First, Republicans generally point fingers and assign blame when things go wrong and Bill Clinton continues to be that scape-goat for their inability to govern. Remember, it was the Republicants who raised hell over Monica Lewinsky because it “dirtied” the Presidency, all the while you never heard a peep from one Republican about national security or concerns over al Qaeda. Second, George W. Bush has never delivered a single promise he has made while in the White House or while in the Governor’s mansion in Texas. I never understood what the big deal was with him running for President. Seriously, I cannot recall a single measure he put before the legislature During his time as Governor.  And finally, there is plenty of blame to pass around on this issue with every administration, Democrat and Republican since Truman and the creation of the Israeli state. As a nation we have done a poor job of trying to deal with the issues in an honest and unbiased manner.

I think it is important to highlight the real advantages to being an American that many of us take for granted. Of these advantages, the right to publicly speak out about a particular subject is the most important. Whether it is a citizen standing in front of the Congressional Representative, or writing a letter to the editor of the local or national newspaper, or whether it is writing in the weblog fashion, it is a fantastic right that Americans have.

Compare this to the degree of freedoms that others throughout the world have. Muslims for example have no such rights, or at the least very limited rights, in this respect. Bashir Goth has written an excellent piece on The Washington Post blog community that deals with this very topic.

You are not allowed to be a person with vices and virtues, you cannot follow your own reasoning, and you cannot be unpopular or defend an unpopular idea. You cannot go out of the circle. To express yourself freely means to risk death. And death indeed if you change your faith. Invention itself is considered as an act of blasphemy.

Thank God the United States is free of this kind of treatment. But pray to God that our own extremisim is not leading us down this path. Goth continues:

On a personal level, I remember writing a poem in early 1980s, which was considered critical of Somalia’s dictatorial regime of Siyad Barre. Later when I wanted to visit my ailing father I had to travel by land from Djibouti, taking a longer route, rather than risking an arrest at the airport of Hargeisa.

In another unfortunate instance, a lyric I wrote on raising awareness about HIV/AIDS and encouraging safe sex has to remain under wraps because musicians were all afraid to set them to music. They considered its message un-Islamic.

Goth’s words should also serve as a reminder to us that creating a democracy in the Muslim world may not be that simple, and what’s more important, it may not be desired. Democracy is a sociopolitical system, whereas Islam is a socioreligious system. The two do not always belong together.