Republican Rep. John Shimkus demanded Friday that two of Congress’s leading Democrats apologize for what he said were accusations that he tried to cover up the Capitol Hill pages’ scandal involving former GOP Rep. Mark Foley.
In interviews with news media outlets in his south central Illinois congressional district, Shimkus lashed out at a fellow Illinoisan, Sen. Dick Durbin, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California.
“People, like Senator Durbin and Nancy Pelosi, who are using this for partisan gain, they ought to be ashamed of themselves,” Shimkus said on WJPF-AM radio in Herrin.
According to the House Ethics Committee report released today:
After Foley resigned, Shimkus told another Republican member of the Page Board _ Rep. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia _ why he never informed the Democratic member of the board, Rep. Dale Kildee of Michigan, about Foley.
Shimkus said, ‘Dale’s a nice guy, but he’s a Democrat, and I was afraid it would be blown out of proportion.”
If, like me, you’re still following the mob angle to the Jack Abramoff scandal, then you’ll enjoy the latest installment from the Palm Beach Post:
Konstantinos “Gus” Boulis was killed gangland-style nearly six years ago, but he may have been instrumental this week in helping a man get a reduction in his prison sentence in a high-profile slaying at a suburban Boca Raton deli.
Circuit Judge Stephen Rapp reduced the sentence of Ralph Liotta from 15 to 12 years this week after hearing testimony that the man Liotta killed, John “J.J.” Gurino, may have been Boulis’ hit man. That was further proof of how dangerous Gurino was, and why Liotta was justifiably afraid of him, Liotto’s attorney, Doug Duncan, argued.
. . .
Boulis, 51, was ambushed by a gunman in Fort Lauderdale in February 2001 as he sat in his BMW. In 2000 he sold SunCruz to Washington, D.C. attorney Adam Kidan and imprisoned lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Boulis then sued Kidan and his partners in a dispute over the sale.
Does anyone know if Jack has sold the movie rights to his story?
A subcontinent of mortification? From the BBC …
A survey of more than 1,000 men in India has concluded that condoms made according to international sizes are too large for a majority of Indian men.
The study found that more than half of the men measured had penises that were shorter than international standards for condoms.
It has led to a call for condoms of mixed sizes to be made more widely available in India.
The two-year study was carried out by the Indian Council of Medical Research.
Over 1,200 volunteers from the length and breadth of the country had their penises measured precisely, down to the last millimetre.
The scientists even checked their sample was representative of India as a whole in terms of class, religion and urban and rural dwellers.
The conclusion of all this scientific endeavour is that about 60% of Indian men have penises which are between three and five centimetres shorter than international standards used in condom manufacture.
There must be some globalization joke in here. But I’m afraid to find it. Maybe about out-sourcing?
Maybe if I ignore this for a while it’ll get better?
From USNews …
White House advisers say Bush won’t react in detail to the ISG report for several weeks, while he assesses it and awaits various internal government reports on the situation from his own advisers. Bush tells aides he doesn’t want to “outsource” his role as commander in chief. Some Bush allies say this is a way to buy some time as the president tries to decide how to deal with rising pressure to alter his strategy in Iraq and hopes the critical media focus on the Iraq war will soften.
What a pitiful coward this man is. Maybe if I just sort of shuffle the papers a bit and clear my throat everybody will get off my case. That’s his response.
Just above that passage there’s this …
“We have a classic case of circling the wagons,” says a former adviser to Bush the elder. “If President Bush changes his policy in Iraq in a fundamental way, it undermines the whole premise of his presidency. I just don’t believe he will ever do that.”
I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anything truer said on the whole sorry topic of this war. And it gets to the heart of the issue. He won’t ever change course. Not because there’s anyone who can’t see that the present course is a catastrophe, but because changing course would cut the legs from under the collective denial of the president and his supporters. As bad as things get they can still pretend they’re on the way to getting better. It’s a long hard slog to January 2009 when it becomes someone else’s fault. Once they pull the plug themselves, though, they admit it was all a disaster, that the whole presidency was, in Dick Gephardt’s half forgotten phrase, “a miserable failure.”
That is why we’re in Iraq today. Get your head around it.
President Bush hits new low in the Zogby poll: 30% approval.
Is there anything more self-serving than Don Rumsfeld saying his worst day as defense secretary was when he learned of the Abu Ghraib abuses? (And which day was that exactly?) Worse than the attacks on 9/11, which killed nearly 3,000 people, a day on which a jetliner crashed into the Pentagon while Rumsfeld was in his office there?
No secretary of defense would subordinate the worst attack on the U.S. homeland in modern times to what Rumsfeld himself has called isolated incidents of abuse by low-level soldiers. That is, unless that secretary of defense was legally or morally culpable for that abuse, or as I’m sure is the case here, he is convinced that Abu Ghraib will be the symbol of his legacy and of the great failure that the Iraq adventure has become.
In either case, it says all you need to know about Rumsfeld that he doesn’t consider 9/11 his worst day as secretary of defense.
Via Muckraker, here’s a snippet of a Congressional Quarterly interview with incoming House intelligence committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-TX):
Reyes stumbled when I asked him a simple question about al Qaeda at the end of a 40-minute interview in his office last week. Members of the Intelligence Committee, mind you, are paid $165,200 a year to know more than basic facts about our foes in the Middle East.
We warmed up with a long discussion about intelligence issues and Iraq. And then we veered into terrorismâs major players.
To me, itâs like asking about Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland: Whoâs on what side?
The dialogue went like this:
Al Qaeda is what, I asked, Sunni or Shia?
âAl Qaeda, they have both,â Reyes said. âYouâre talking about predominately?â
âSure,â I said, not knowing what else to say.
âPredominantly â probably Shiite,â he ventured.
He couldnât have been more wrong.
Al Qaeda is profoundly Sunni. If a Shiite showed up at an al Qaeda club house, theyâd slice off his head and use it for a soccer ball.
Ladies and gentlemen, your new intel committee chairman.
Newsweek: Bush at 32%; 68% think America is losing in Iraq; 53% say invading Iraq was a bad idea.
Sen. Conrad Burns (R-MT): “They call me racist. Donât even own a car.”
Is that supposed to be funny?