File under Gotta Start Somehwere …
Sen. Allen (R-VA) introduces bill to help black farmers.
In case you’re wondering whether the Florida GOP has any chance to replace resigned Rep. Foley (R) on the ballot and not give the seat to the Dems, the answer seems to be no.
Yet another shoe drops. This just out from Salon …
A former football teammate of Sen. George Allen decided Friday to go on the record with recollections of the Virginia Republican’s alleged racist behavior during college.
Edward J. Sabornie, a special education professor at North Carolina State University, had previously spoken to Salon about Allen’s behavior on the condition of anonymity, because he feared retribution from the Allen campaign. In a Salon story on Sunday, Sabornie was quoted as a “teammate” who remembered Allen using the word “nigger” to describe blacks. “It was so common with George when he was among his white friends. This is the terminology he used,” Sabornie said in that article.
Read the rest here.
From the House to the Big House? Rep. Foley (R-FL) may be prosecuted under child sex predator laws he helped pass.
Let me try to clear up some confusion. Earlier I did a post that said that Florida election law doesn’t give the Republican party much of an 
opportunity to save Rep. Mark Foley’s (R-FL) seat. (Foley resigned today in the wake of revelations that he had sexually explicit IM chats with a congressional page.)
A number of readers have written to say that the law Paul Kiel refers to in this post doesn’t bear that out or that other sites say differently.
Let me explain.
Florida law says that the state GOP cannot remove Foley’s name from the ballot. However, since he’s dropped out of the race, they can designate a replacement. And any votes “Foley” gets will go to that GOP replacement.
The problem for the GOP is that Florida’s 16th congressional district isn’t that strong a GOP district. Foley won in 2004 with 68% of the vote. But President Bush pulled only 54%. That tells me it’s a GOP district. But not by much. And there was already a serious Democratic challenger in the race.
So here’s how this plays out to me. No question, strong Republican partisans will vote for “Foley” because they know that vote goes to the candidate the local GOP has chosen to replace him. But outside of strong partisans, I really don’t think a lot of voters are going to check off the box next to the candidate who’s just resigned because he was exposed for having sex chats with underaged congressional pages. That just doesn’t play to me.
And once the replacement gets picked, candidate X and the local Republican party can start putting up flyers that say “Vote for guy who had cybersex with a minor because the vote will really go to candidate X who would never do such a thing.”
But that’s just a hard message to get a lot of traction with. And if you figure that President Bush could still get 54% in that district, which doesn’t seem likely, how many of the those 54% of Bush voters would you lose because they don’t know that “Foley” really isn’t Mark Foley, the disgraced congressman? I think more than four percentage points of them.
Given the Dems were already making a race of it, I think the Republicans’ prospects for holding that seat are not good at all. Not a cakewalk. But I’d say this race now leans toward the Dems.
Others don’t see it that way. But that’s my read.
Late Update: A credible but unconfirmed tip has it that the Florida GOP is going to “sue to get the replacement’s name on any ballots already not ‘printed'”. If successful, that could of course change the calculation. And remember of course that the Florida state judiciary is now well larded with Jeb Bush toadies. So don’t count out the possibility.
Big. Big Trouble.
We caught wind of this and tried our damneddest to confirm it this afternoon. But we weren’t able to. Rep. Alexander’s office wasn’t eager to return out calls.
But now the AP has the story. And here’s why there may be a lot more fall out from the Rep. Foley (R-FL) story.
The page in question worked for Rep. Rodeny Alexander (R-LA). And the page brought the matter of his contacts with Foley to the congressman’s attention via a staffer, who I’m told has since left Rep. Alexander’s employ.
Here’s the key passage from the AP article …
The page worked for Rep. Rodney Alexander, R-La., who said Friday that when he learned of the e-mail exchanges 10 to 11 months ago, he called the teen’s parents. Alexander told the Ruston Daily Leader, “We also notified the House leadership that there might be a potential problem,” a reference to the House’s Republican leaders.
I assume that passage doesn’t need much unpacking. But let’s do it anyway.
So Rep. Alexander knew about this 10 or 11 months ago. And he says he notified the House leadership. That means Hastert and (at the time) either Tom DeLay or Rep. Blunt (R-MO). We don’t know it was either of those three men yet. But that’s what Alexander means when he says he “notified the House leadership.” They’re the House leadership.
If I’m understanding this correctly, that means that the leaders of the House Republican caucus have known for almost a year that a member of their caucus was having cybersex with an underage congressional page. And apparently they did nothing about it.
I think this story is about to get a lot bigger.
The story changes. Did Rep. Alexander (R-LA) report Rep. Foley (R-FL) to the NRCC, the House Republican campaign committee?
An NRCC spokesman says the matter was brought before the House Page Board. But it’s not clear what they did about it.
Everybody’s running for cover.
Foley Update: Rep. Alexander (R-LA) tells paper he informed Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) of Foley/underage page contact.