WaPo: Rampant wrongdoing and politicization at DOJ should not prevent Democrats from trusting DOJ officials in all matters large and small.
I’m not sure this has gotten the attention it deserves. The leading Republican presidential candidate in most national polls is facing what amounts to an open revolt from his party’s religious conservative base (or perhaps more precisely from a wing of the party which makes up a significant portion of its base).
As we noted yesterday, Rudy Giuliani’s pro-choice leanings have some leading religious conservatives publicly declaring their intention to abandon a pro-choice GOP nominee for a third party pro-life candidate.
This afternoon Richard Viguerie, the conservative direct mail guru and longtime leading light of the movement, launched a petition drive to get GOP voters to declare to the national Republican leadership that “they will not support or vote for any Republican candidates who are pro-abortion.”
The noted Israeli activist, scholar and former government official finally weighs in on Mearsheimer’s and Walt’s The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy:
[W]hile I certainly take issue with the specific recent policy examples in the book (Iraq and Syria in particular), I would argue that the relationship between the US, Israel and the lobby that speaks in its name needs to change for everyoneâs sake, that this book contributes to a re-think and that the authors are not driven by prejudice.
Another Republican decides to step aside from the hurly-burly of politics as public restroom incidents hit the papers.
Joey DiFatta, St. Bernard Parish Councilman and until-today candidate for state senate, had a novel approach to getting ahead of the story. Hours before the revelations appeared in the Times-Picayune, he called local reporters to announce that he would withdraw from the senate contest because he had “been having chest pains for a few weeks and … might have had a minor heart attack in the past few days.”
One incident in 1996 involved watching “a man use the bathroom while peering throguh a hole in a bathroom stall.” The man subsequently detained the sizable DiFatta until police arrived. In 2000, an effort at a foreshadowing homage to the work of Sen. Craig was misinterpreted as an effort to engage in public bathroom sex …
Jefferson Parish deputies working an undercover detail in a men’s bathroom at Dillard’s at Lakeside Shopping Center in March 2000 stopped DiFatta after he indicated a desire to engage in sex with an undercover deputy in an adjoining bathroom stall, according to an interoffice memorandum written by Sgt. Keith Conley, one of the deputies involved in the investigation.
The report said DiFatta slid his foot into the deputy’s stall and tapped the deputy’s foot. In the report, Conley noted that such activity is common among men to indicate a willingness to participate in sex.
The deputy inside the stall, Detective Wayne Couvillion, responded by tapping his foot, and DiFatta reached under the partition and began to rub the deputy’s leg, the report states.
The detective asked DiFatta, “What do you want?” according to the report, and he replied, “I want to play with you.”
DiFatta also used a hand signal to indicate that he wanted to engage in sex and used language that indicated the same, according to the report. Conley, who is now the Kenner city attorney, confirmed the report’s authenticity Thursday.
Only days ago, DiFatta was hawking the DiFatta plan to “defend our conservative values from attacks by extreme liberal groups.”
He now joins Idaho’s Larry Craig and Florida’s Bob Allen in the GOP Stall of Fame.
Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA): “We have right now a real danger of people that are illegally in the country being rounded up, herded into the polls, we’ve seen that in California, voting illegally. That disenfranchises everybody in that community.”
Senate Republicans can’t force Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) to resign, they don’t have the votes to expel him, and an embarrassing ethics investigation may prove more embarrassing to the caucus than the senator.
What’s left? Apparently, a censure.
Sen. Larry Craig is likely to be censured by the Senate – but not expelled – for pleading guilty after soliciting sex from a male cop, a top Republican said yesterday.
Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), a presidential candidate and religious conservative, said his colleague from Idaho faces a rebuke by the Ethics Committee.
“Whether … he’ll be expelled or not for that crime, I think there’s a good chance of censureship [sic]. But expulsion seems to me probably unlikely,” Brownback told Bloomberg TV. […]
Republican Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana may also face censure because he admitted hiring prostitutes, Brownback said.
As far as I can tell, that last part, about censuring Vitter, is new. The GOP has struggled for weeks to explain why Craig’s conduct is, in Mitch McConnell’s word, “unforgivable,” while Vitter’s sex scandals are trivial and inconsequential. If the party is willing to censure both, that would be a pleasant surprise.
The 2,600 members of the Minnesota National Guard recently ended a 22-month tour of duty in Iraq, the longest deployment of any ground-combat unit in the Armed Forces. Many of its members returned home, looking forward to using education benefits under the GI bill.
For example, John Hobot, a platoon leader, said, “I would assume, and I would hope, that when I get back from a deployment of 22 months, my senior leadership in Washington, the leadership that extended us in the first place, would take care of us once we got home.”
It’s not working that way. The Guard troops have been told that in order to be eligible for the education benefits they expect, they had to serve 730 days in Iraq. They served 729.
Nearly half the members of one of the longest serving U.S. military units in Iraq are not eligible for a more generous military educational benefit, with some falling one day short of eligibility. […]
All 2,600 of the soldiers, who returned this year from Iraq, are eligible for money for school under the GI Bill. But nearly half discovered they weren’t eligible for a more generous package of benefits available to other soldiers.
Minnesota’s congressional delegation is apoplectic, and the Army has vowed to look into the matter, but the troops are understandably suspicious that they were deliberately brought home after 729 days so the Pentagon could deny them GI Bill benefits.
Keep an eye on this one.
Rep. Ron Paul’s (R-Texas) presidential campaign had a pretty good week. Paul announced that he raised $5 million in the third quarter, which not only stunned the political world, it put him on par with GOP heavyweights like John McCain in the race for campaign funding. It’s difficult to dismiss a guy as a “fringe” candidate on a “quixotic” quest when he’s able to demonstrate this kind of support.
But it’s incredibly easy to dismiss a guy as “nutty” when he writes bizarre, hand-written letters about a U.N.-takeover of the world.
Brendan Nyhan received a fundraising letter from Paul, in which the candidate insisted that American sovereignty is hanging by a thread.
I don’t need to tell you that our American way of life is under attack. We see it all around us — every day — and it is up to us to save it.
The world’s elites are busy forming a North American Union. If they are successful, as they were in forming the European Union, the good ‘ol USA will only be a memory. We can’t let that happen.
The UN also wants to confiscate our firearms and impose a global tax. The UN elites want to control the world’s oceans with the Law of the Sea Treaty. And they want to use our military to police the world.
Keep in mind, all of this was written long-hand. I know fundraising operations have grown sophisticated, and professionals can make it appear as if a letter is hand-written when it’s really just a clever font, but this (.pdf) certainly looks like it came from Ron Paul’s pen. What’s more, it is, as Kevin put it, “Unabomber-esque.”
Listening to the debates, Paul often comes across as the most sensible guy on the stage, especially when it comes to Iraq and the Patriot Act. And then we’re reminded, in print, that when it comes to a paranoid vision of the world, Paul really is out there on the political periphery.
It’s been weeks since a prominent conservative institution has been rocked by scandal, so I suppose we were due for a story like this one.
Twenty years ago, televangelist Oral Roberts said he was reading a spy novel when God appeared to him and told him to raise $8 million for Roberts’ university, or else he would be “called home.”
Now, his son, Oral Roberts University President Richard Roberts, says God is speaking again, telling him to deny lurid allegations in a lawsuit that threatens to engulf this 44-year-old Bible Belt college in scandal.
Richard Roberts is accused of illegal involvement in a local political campaign and lavish spending at donors’ expense, including numerous home remodeling projects, use of the university jet for his daughter’s senior trip to the Bahamas, and a red Mercedes convertible and a Lexus SUV for his wife, Lindsay.
She is accused of dropping tens of thousands of dollars on clothes, awarding nonacademic scholarships to friends of her children and sending scores of text messages on university-issued cell phones to people described in the lawsuit as “underage males.”
The university, which reported nearly $76 million in revenue as recently as 2005, is reeling, despite denials from the Roberts family, which insists the lawsuit filed by three former professors at the school is “about intimidation, blackmail and extortion.”
There’s no shortage of serious accusations, but clearly that “underage males” angle stands out. Apparently, Mrs. Roberts, a member of ORU’s board of regents, “frequently had cell-phone bills of more than $800 per month, with hundreds of text messages sent between 1 a.m. to 3 a.m. to ‘underage males who had been provided phones at university expense.'”
Lambert has more, including the observation, “[A]uthoritarian systems are extremely vulnerable to fraud, because authoritarian followers aren’t capable of providing checks and balances for their leaders.”