Scandals

Talking to Michael about Spitzer and to other people, I am struck by how different the public persona I had met was from the public Spitzer persona that others knew.

I was only in several social situations with Spitzer and spoke to him only a couple of times. Yet during those public "private" appearances (they were at closed events) I was able to observe the man.

What did I take away? Even though the man knew how to commandeer a room and appeared to have a hyper-social personality, Eliot Spitzer struck me as a very private, very shy man.

Yes, it's shocking to hear since so many describe him as powerful, intense and overwhelming. Which I don't disagree with. It's just that if you got physically a bit too close to him (as it happened to me a couple of times) he would get very quiet and, what struck me about him was that he couldn't look at me straight into my eyes.

And as I was telling my husband, I've packed on some serious poundage, so it's not that I am looking babealicious these days. Yet I noticed that Spitzer was actually shyish in a nerdy way. At least to me, he wasn't that overwhelming as other people have described him.

Make of that what you wish.

It's 2004 all over again, 'yall! Political manwhore and principal funder of the infamous "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" is at it again. GOPers are the party of crazy-makers and T. Boone Pickens is the guy who paid for the 2004 crazy-making anti-John Kerry smear campaign that claims to have given Bush the 2004 elections.

Unhappy with not being in the news during this election cycle, the oilman seems to have been drunk at a dinner sponsored by the American Spectator magazine. In a room full of Washington movers and shakers he claimed to be willing to pay 1 Million Dollars to anybody who could prove his "Swifties" lied about John Kerry's record.

Kerry issued a statement accepting the challenge and vowing to give the money to Paralyzed Veterans of America. So what does the GOP douchebag say to that? In what a colleague described as "a game of GOP Calvinball", the guy completely changes the rules of the wager by demanding that Kerry "provide his Vietnam journal, his military records, and copies of movies and tapes made during his service".

First off, I was upset that my colleague used the Calvinball reference to describe anything to do with the crazy-making slimeballs working for the Republican party. Bill Waterson is one of my heroes and Calvin and Hobbes is a masterpiece for how he captured the anarchic innocence and creative exhuberance of childhood.

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Today, Markos Moulitsas, is the doctrinaire leftist publisher of the DailyKos “progressive” anti-war blog, railing against the moderation of candidates like Hillary Rodham Clinton and Harold Ford. But in the 1980’s, Mr. Moulitsas was an unabashed Reagan Democrat, even working as a campaign aid to George H.W. Bush in the 1992 Presidential election. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0601.wallace-wells.html http://francislholland.blogspot.com/2007/01/markos-was-republican-states...

Last year, in a piece Markos wrote for the Cato (libertarian) Institute, Markos acknowledged that the spent the 1980's as a Reagan Republican. http://www.cato-unbound.org/2006/10/02/markos-moulitsas/the-case-for-the...
http://francislholland.blogspot.com/2007/01/yes-progessive-markos-of-dai...

How did Markos achieve this stunning metamorphosis in just a few short years? Actually, nobody knows and Markos isn’t telling. He has told interviewers, improbably, that he last voted for the Republicans in 1992, because he suddenly realized that they didn’t support “states rights” as strongly as he would have liked. (See articles above.)

Image courtesy of Jossip

I was invited to attend the Reuters' Newmaker Event : Public figures, Private Lives.

The focus was actually on celebrities, paparazzi and the rise new media upstarts like Perez Hilton, Jossrip or the indy image agency Splash News. You all know who Perez and Jossip are. SplashNews, though, is the little company that could --they were the ones who snagged the rights to the "drunken stepfather" photographs of Mel Gibson; the ones taken minutes before his DWI arrest and anti-semitic ranting.

David has an excellent recap over at Jossip. He tells of how Bonnie Fuller polygraphs sources on some of their scoops. Crazy! Given that she is the biggest purveyor of gossip-as-cracktainment, this bit of news proves Bonnie Fuller is the Donna of the biggest gossip mafia in the world.

That's so hot!

This being Reuters though, the conversation when from gossip to politics thanks to Mark Foley. And of course, it was used as a moment to bitch-slap "the blogs".

Sigh.

A year ago I debated with Paul Holmes, the chief editor of Reuters global news division, about myths rurrounding blogs. A year has passed, much has happened since, and he's totally hit to blogging. But somehow these panels end up into blogsmears and now the shift is from "bloggers are rookies nobody should pay attention to" to "if Democrats/Lamont/candidate-of-your-choice looses, it will show how "the blogs" can't be trusted".

Disgraced Republican Congressman Bob Ney has now pleaded guilty to bribery charges in the Jack Abramoff influence-peddling scandal. He is the first Congressman to plead guilty in this case to date, though it has also brought indictments to the likes of the disgraced Republican, Tom DeLay. Remember, Bob Ney was an early target of my Target the Corrupt Republican Campaign. Tom DeLay was another early target! So far, I think I am doing well in picking them.

If you want to fight corruption, please consider donating to defeating corrupt Republicans in this year's election (including Bob Ney's OH-18 and Tom DeLay's TX-22 seats), and please consider donating to electing Democratic Attornies General who will pursue, rather than block, investigations into Republican corruption (Secretaries of State races also included).

What started as a longish email reply about the scandal that has led to the resignation of US Rep (Fl-R) Mark Foley is turning out into a full fledged post. The conversations I have been having with other people is about how this story is being framed.

I've been hearing the word "pedophile" and now the moniker "predatorgate" thrown around with much gusto by Democrats. The problem is, it has been also intertwined with the words "homosexual".

See, Mark Foley was a self-hating semi-closeted gay man who happens to have also had a fondness for stalking young pages all around Capitol Hill. The worse part? Dennis Hastert, Tom Delay and other republicans knew about it. For years. About five years to be exact. They did nothing about.

Yet because "pedophile" and "predator" are in collusion with "gay", this whole framing makes me nervous.

Queer activists, like my friend Michael Rogers of BlogActive, work hard to report on the enemies within their communities. That a man like Mark Foley could spend 19 years in a committed relationship with another man yet push forward the Defense of Marriage Act is just incredible. Without Michael's investigative reports we wouldn't have the background information necessary for making informed assessments on creeps like Foley.

As many states face a decision of what technology to choose to replace the old voting machines, more security issues are cropping up around the touch-screen (DRE) machines.

I already have reported on how the DRE machines are easily hackable, use prorietary software that prevents open public oversight of elections, have no official paper trail preventing any kind of independent recount and, on top of it all, are far more expensive to buy, maintain and replace than the alternative, "scantron" (PBOS) system. A summary of a Princeton study on security issues surrounding DRE machines can be found here.

But the DRE machines are also easy for almost anyone to open. Turns out the locks they use can be opened by a standard key that will open hotel minibars and many kinds of office furniture. From the "Freedom to Tinker" technology blog:

“Hotel Minibar” Keys Open Diebold Voting Machines

Monday September 18, 2006 by Ed Felten

Like other computer scientists who have studied Diebold voting machines, we were surprised at the apparent carelessness of Diebold’s security design. It can be hard to convey this to nonexperts, because the examples are technical. To security practitioners, the use of a fixed, unchangeable encryption key and the blind acceptance of every software update offered on removable storage are rookie mistakes; but nonexperts have trouble appreciating this. Here is an example that anybody, expert or not, can appreciate:

Israel just went through a highly contentious war, and many of its citizens are questioning the way the war was conducted. Here in America, those dissidents would merely be intimidated, denegrated and ignored. In Israel, those dissidents have forced an actual investigation of the government.
From Guysen Israel News:

Ehud Olmert finally succumbed to public pressure. The former judge Eliyahu Vinograd will head the commission of inquiry into the handling of the war in Lebanon. He will have the power to summon witnesses and grant them immunity...

Former Judge Eliyahu Vinograd will head the commission of inquiry into the handling of the war. His appointment was approved by the Attorney General Meni Mazus this afternoon and will be submitted for government approval on Sunday. (Guysen.Israël.News)
Ehud Olmert finally succumbed to public pressure and dismissed former Mossad head, Nahum Admoni who had been appointed to the position. However he will remain on the commission.

Now why can't we get a REAL investigation of the way Bush and Co. have conducted the Iraq Fiasco?

Not long ago I was chided for targeting Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio. I considered him a target while the person who chided me said he was unassailable, too hard to defeat.

Well, once again events prove that no politician is safe if they are corrupt. Bob Ney is going down. And if we play our cards right, we can win big in Ohio this year because of Republican corruption.

I keep saying that even in districts where Republicans seem safe, the corruption issue can be huge. No one seemed safer in their corrupt complacency than Tom DeLay (TX), Randy Cunningham (CA) and Bob Ney (OH). DeLay is dropping out in disgrace, Cunningham is in jail and now I am happy to report that Bob Ney is following in DeLay's footsteps. Bob Ney, who I have included in some of my Ohio diaries, will drop out in disgrace in November. From BBC News:

A leading US Republican lawmaker facing corruption allegations has said he will not run for re-election in November.

Ohio congressman Bob Ney said he would stand down from the seat he has held for 12 years because of his family.

NY State Republicans may not quite be as corrupt as their counterparts in Ohio, Missouri and Kentucky (the three most corrupt Republican State Parties in the nation), but, my own NY State is not immune to the largely Republican Culture of Corruption. Some time back I brought up the hypocrisy and corruption of Republican Congressman John Sweeny (NY-20) who did his best to distance himself from the Republican mega-scandal involving lobbyist Jack Abramhoff but is himself just as much a part of the Republican-Lobbyist Culture of Corruption as any Republican. I also have blogged extensively about some corrupt ties between a particular developer (Bruce Ratner) and New York politicians (Republicans Michael Bloomberg and George Pataki (Ratner's law school chum)...as well as Democrat Marty Markowitz). Today I want to review Sweeny's corruption and introduce a new target of my campaign against corruption in NY State: Congressman Vito Fossella (NY-13).