More on Foleyville:
“Moving with unusual speed,” the House Ethics Committee has started interviews in its probe of the Mark Foley scandal. Longtime Foley aide and former chief of staff for Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-NY) Kirk Fordham will be testifying this week.
There are “compelling reasons beyond the Foley case to call for the speaker’s resignation from the post,” conclude American Progress’s Scott Lilly and the American Enterprise Institute’s Norman Ornstein, who examine Rep. Dennis Hastert’s (R-IL) “dodgy real estate deals.”
Any hopes by Republicans that the Mark Foley sex scandal might finally be starting to wane and attention had drifted towards weighty global matters (like, say, a North Korean nuclear test?), were dashed Monday morning, when the Washington Post reported that a male page had shown one Republican congressman, Rep. Jim Kolbe, some dirty “Internet messages” sent by Foley six years ago.
Guess it’s a good thing Kolbe, who has been openly gay for a decade, is retiring and Republicans had already given up hope of keeping his Arizona seat.
Meanwhile, the Foley fallout continues to dog House Republicans in races across the country. Case in point, the Sacramento Bee reports today that Rep. John Doolittle of California is getting beat up by his Democratic opponent, retired Air Force officer Charlie Brown, for taking a $1,000 contribution from Foley four years ago. Doolittle says he had no idea this was going on, an argument that’s been made by countless other House Republicans on the trail during the past two weeks who arguably had no knowledge of Foley’s inappropriate behavior.
Democrats aren’t letting the issue go, however, a point made by former Georgia Sen. Max Cleland, who was campaigning for Brown this weekend. As the Bee reports: “Later, at a Brown rally with veterans in Lincoln, former Sen. Max Cleland (D., Ga.), picked up the cudgel. “We all know what GOP means now,” Cleland said. “It means grope our pages…” –Amy Schatz
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2006/10/09/grand-old-party/
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