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Hastert to resign!

Well, at least according to K.A. Paul, the loopy evangelist who met with Hastert yesterday.

The National Republican Congressional Committee sends out a mailer attacking Dem Tammy Duckworth on Social Security that looks oddly similar to an official Federal mailing.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

The AP’s John Solomon take another shot at nailing Harry Reid.

Jonathan Weisman has a good piece in the Post tomorrow about the progress of the Hous Ethics Committee investigation into Foleygate. The first sentence outlines the basic story: “With House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert denying personal knowledge of former representative Mark Foley’s activities, investigators for the House ethics committee are bearing down on three senior members of Hastert’s staff to determine when they learned of Foley’s actions and whether they passed on their knowledge to the speaker.”

With that in mind, it occurred to me that you can’t really cover or follow a scandal unless you know who the key players are.

Denny Hastert, of course, you know.

This is Scott Palmer, Hastert’s Chief of Staff. He has been the focus of many recent Foleygate articles, but you may never have seen him. I’m impressed here by his John Grisham film ‘heavy’ look.

Palmer is sticking with the story that he didn’t hear anything about Foley and pages until late 2005. But if Kirk Fordham, Chief of Staff to Foley and later Rep. Tom Reynolds, is telling the truth, Palmer was told repeatedly and went saw far as to meet with Foley to get him to cut it out.

According to Weisman’s piece, a good candidate for the Hastert staffer most likely to get thrown under the bus is this guy, Ted Van Der Meid, counsel to Speaker Hastert. He even looks a bit worried, doesn’t he?

Finally, in the trio of key Hastert staffers under scrutiny is Michael Stokke. He’s Deputy Chief of Staff to Hastert. But he’s really more of a political fixer.

Those are the three key Hastert staffers under the microscope.

Also of possible interest are the two page supervisors.

Peggy Sampson is the page supervisor for the Republicans.

Here she’s going to speak with the Ethics Committee earlier this week.

And here is her Democratic counterpart, page supervisors Wren Ivester.

Tomorrow, if you don’t remember, Kirk Fordham, who is shaping up to be the key player in the drama, is going to speak to the Ethics Committee.

The House ethics committee investigation isn’t wasting any time in their probe of the Foley scandal. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.

We’ve known for a while that the House leadership leaned on Mark Foley to run for one more term in Congress before cashing in and becoming a lobbyist — even if that meant keeping the House pages on their toes for two more years avoiding the F-man’s constant advances. But apparently they weren’t the only one. It now seems that Karl Rove also got into the act and threatened Foley’s future lobbying career if he didn’t stick it out in Congress for two more years.

Mark Warner (D-VA) begging off a 2008 presidential run?

Update: Yup. Here’s Warner’s statement.

House Republicans pull the plug on efforts to knock of four Democratic incumbents.

House Republicans are scaling back television advertising reserved for four Democratic-held seats in Ohio, South Carolina and West Virginia, officials said Wednesday, fresh evidence of the party’s struggles as it tries to retain its majority.

At the same time, GOP strategists signaled they intend to spend nearly $1 million in an attempt to hold the seat recently vacated by Rep. Mark Foley. The Florida Republican quit Congress last month after being confronted with sexually explicit computer messages he sent to teenage male pages.

These late in the campaign redirections of money happen every cycle. And both parties will be shifting money from less to more promising opportunities. But this is another sign that Republicans can see it’s all defense this cycle.

Is making detainees drop acid one of the US government’s new ‘alternative interrogation techniques’?

Update: It seems the government has been very slow to release Jose Padilla’s medical records.