Joe Lieberman, the man who very publicly fretted about the effect a presidential affair would have on the nation’s children, voted for torture last week and this week he’s MIA on teen sex cyberstalking in the halls of congress. I guess he’s been busy observing the High Holy Days.
They’re over now and it’s time somebody asked him the question. Does Holy Joe think the Republican leadership should be held responsible for covering up for a sexual predator? Or is he trying to keep his options open in case he wins and gets an offer he can’t refuse from the GOP?
For those of you who have demanding lives and can’t keep up with the many dirty emails, embarrassing videotape and lame excuses the latest GOP scandals revealed while you were picking up a quart of milk or checking you messages these days, your one stop blog is Down With Tyranny. It even features your essential daily requirement of Jon Stewart.
Also: Gilliard is having a fundraiser. If you’ve got a little extra scratch, it’s a good place to spend it. Steve is one of the most fearless bloggers around.
If your consultants don’t take this story and combine it with this one, then add numerous references to this unbelievably outrageous stunt and urge you to flay the Republicans over their dangerous incompetence, their sheer inability to perceive reality, their malicious lies, and their unparalleled moral hypocrisy…If instead, your consultants insist that in the next month you ignore all these genuine gifts so you can re-emphasize prescription drugs or concerns over the economy, fire them immediately, sue them for fraud, then grab them by their throats, stick ’em in an empty room and force them to listen to the complete recorded works of Andrew Lloyd Webber. Over and over. For a week. No. make it two weeks.
Things have been looking up for accused child molester Jeffrey Ray Nielsen, the 36-year-old Christian conservative activist and lawyer with close ties to Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher and Scott Baugh, head of the Orange County Republican Party. Police say Nielsen took a 14-year-old Westminster boy as his sex partner in 2003 and maintained a huge cache of man-boy pornography.
But prosecutors have allowed their case against Nielsen, once an intern in the district attorney’s office, to stall for 40 months.
Ironically, those delays have provoked new sex-crime allegations. Saying he fears a subversion of justice, a northern Virginia man claims that Nielsen repeatedly molested him when he was an adolescent.
“For two years, when I was 13 and 14 years old, Jeff sexually abused me while he worked in Washington for Rohrabacher as a legislative aide,” the 25-year-old married man told the Weekly in a recent interview. “There was never any penetration, but other than that? Everything. He wrapped it all up as normal, as love.”
Paul S. Meyer, Nielsen’s Costa Mesa-based defense attorney, did not respond to requests for comment.
The Virginia man, who asked to remain anonymous, said Nielsen worked in his church’s youth ministry and that his parents rented Nielsen a basement room in their home sometime in 1994 or 1995.
“Jeff took an immediate liking to me,” he said. “When he moved into our house, [the sex] started right away. I know this might sound weird, but at the time he was a mentor and he assured me the messing around was normal. I believed him. I was in the seventh grade at the time. It was brainwashing.”
He says Nielsen orchestrated a “boyfriend-girlfriend type” relationship that included occasional public kissing, hand holding and sex.
“Jeff called it ‘our thing,’ and one time we were near Tyson’s Corner [Virginia], he stopped at a gas station so we could have sex in the bathroom,” the man said. “A guy walked in and caught me with my pants down and Jeff on his knees. We made some excuse about an injured knee or something. The guy said, ‘Oh!’ and quickly left.”
There was also jealousy when the boy expressed an interest in girls, according to the victim.
“[Nielsen] was very controlling and emotional,” he said. “After sex, he’d sometimes say, ‘You know you are gay, right?’ But I wasn’t. I’ve been married now for three years and have a great relationship with my wife. I am very much heterosexual.”
The abuse stopped, according to the man, when Nielsen moved back to California to attend USC law school after receiving a personal recommendation from Congressman Rohrabacher.
The Orange County Weekly has been following this story from the beginning and the whole sordid story is here and here. If you choose to read the whole thing, keep a bucket handy.
I think the question now is just how many of these perverts the Republicans have been covering up for.
U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Monday that the Afghan guerrilla war can never be won militarily and called for efforts to bring the Taliban and their supporters into the Afghan government.
The Tennessee Republican said he had learned from briefings that Taliban fighters were too numerous and had too much popular support to be defeated by military means.
“You need to bring them into a more transparent type of government,” Frist said during a brief visit to a U.S. and Romanian military base in the southern Taliban stronghold of Qalat. “And if that’s accomplished we’ll be successful.”
Frist said asking the Taliban to join the government was a decision to be made by Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Sen. Mel Martinez, a Republican from Florida accompanying Frist, said negotiating with the Taliban was not “out of the question” but that fighters who refused to join the political process would have to be defeated.
“A political solution is how it’s all going to be solved,” he said.
Frist may have ben speaking out of turn, but I think he was probably saying what he’s been hearing privately. And it explains why the admnistration has been acting so strangely about that truce between Pakistan and Mullah Omar in Waziristan a couple of weeks ago. The policy in Afghanistan is changing, only they aren’t telling anybody. And apparently that means allowing the Taliban back in power.
Aside from the absurdity of allowing that threat to fester again, this means that all that talk about freedom and democracy is, as we suspected, bullshit. They would be handing the women of Afghanistan back to the people who do this:
The president also voiced support for Hastert, calling him a “father, teacher, coach” and said the Illinois Republican “wants to ensure these children on Capitol Hill are protected.”
What he wants to do now and what he did are two different things.
Dennis Hastert’s office was warned that this was an issue. (According to this morning’s interview on CNN, he was warned about it in the context of “campaign issues” which is telling in and of itself.) As the Speaker of the House, the buck stops with him. He can try to rationalize his behavior all he wants, but the fact is that he was told that there was suspicion that a congressman was preying on the teen aged congressional pages and he failed to ensure that it was fully investigated and dealt with. (He allowed the guy to continue to co-sponsor the child abduction and abuse legislation that was signed into law just last July. Come on.)
The fact that he was a “father, teacher, coach” makes it even worse that he did nothing. He, of all people, should have been particularly sensitive about the welfare of these teen-aged boys in his charge. (It makes you wonder about him too. Did he cover for people when he was a teacher and a coach. Did he think that “overly friendly” correspondence between 52 year old men and 16 year old boys was appropriate back when he was a wrestling coach?)
Republican leaders simply refuse to take responsibility for what their subordinates do and their supporters never seem to require it. From Rummy and Abu Ghraib to Denny Hastert and his cyberstalking congressman, when people in their charge engage in deviant or criminal behavior they blame it on a few bad apples and just move on. The guy at the top protests his ignorance and says he can’t be held liable for what he didn’t know.
I’m starting to become quite serious when I say, “what do we tell the children?” The allegedly conservative leadership class in this country are selling the idea that leadership means never being held responsible for anything. Blame it on the plebes. This is a very dangerous idea for any society to adopt.
Update:
Denny goes on Rush and says:
SPEAKER HASTERT: There were two pieces of paper out there, one that we knew about and we acted on; one that happened in 2003 we didn’t know about, but somebody had it, and, you know, they’re trying — and they drop it the last day of the session, you know, before we adjourn on an election year. Now, we took care of Mr. Foley. We found out about it, asked him to resign. He did resign. He’s gone. We asked for an investigation. We’ve done that. We’re trying to build better protections for these page programs.
But, you know, this is a political issue in itself, too, and what we’ve tried to do as the Republican Party is make a better economy, protect this country against terrorism — and we’ve worked at it ever since 9/11, worked with the president on it — and there are some people that try to tear us down. We are the insulation to protect this country, and if they get to me it looks like they could affect our election as well.
In private conversations with Bush, Cheney said Rumsfeld’s departure, no matter how it might be spun, would be seen only as an expression of doubt and hesitation on the war. It would give the war critics great heart and momentum, he confided to an aide, and soon they would be after him and then the president. He virtually insisted that Rumsfeld stay.
Protect the royals at all costs.
Update II: Ray LaHood (R-buckpasser) on CNN just said that it was the Speaker’s staff who let everyone down. The man himself is blameless.
Via Kevin Drum, I see that the CBS News “free speech” segment has some funny ideas about what is permissable and what isn’t. Bill Maher isn’t allowed to talk about religion but some rightwing fundamentalist is allowed to freely share views like this:
This country is in a moral free-fall. For over two generations, the public school system has taught in a moral vacuum, expelling God from the school and from the government, replacing him with evolution, where the strong kill the weak, without moral consequences and life has no inherent value.
We teach there are no absolutes, no right or wrong. And I assure you the murder of innocent children is always wrong, including by abortion. Abortion has diminished the value of children.
That’s your liberal media at work.
Don’t get me wrong — I think the guy has the same right to free speech as everyone else. But CBS was nervous about Bill Maher’s commentary which was critical of religion. The fact that they let this man speak, obviously without restriction, while balking at Maher means that CBS’s little exercize in free speech is not just a milquetoast middle of the road program, it is affirmatively asserting that far right views are acceptable while Maher’s are not. This man says that abortion and teaching evolution are causing school shootings. That’s not mainstream.
If I didn’t know better I’d say that Rathergate successfully intimidated the network of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite into being a rightwing lapdog. How sad.
We’ll return to our regularly scheduled sexual cyberstalking programming in a few moments, but may I just take a moment to ask just what in the hell is going on with this?
A review of White House records has determined that George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, did brief Condoleezza Rice and other top officials on July 10, 2001, about the looming threat from Al Qaeda, a State Department spokesman said Monday.
The account by the spokesman, Sean McCormack, came hours after Ms. Rice, the secretary of state, told reporters aboard her airplane that she did not recall the specific meeting on July 10, noting that she had met repeatedly with Mr. Tenet that summer about terrorist threats. Ms. Rice, the national security adviser at the time, said it was “incomprehensible” to suggest she had ignored dire terrorist threats two months before the Sept. 11 attacks.
Mr. McCormack also said records showed that the Sept. 11 commission had been informed about the meeting, a fact that former intelligence officials and members of the commission confirmed on Monday.
When details of the meeting emerged last week in a new book by Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, Bush administration officials questioned Mr. Woodward’s reporting.
Now, after several days, both current and former Bush administration officials have confirmed parts of Mr. Woodward’s account.
Officials now agree that on July 10, 2001, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism deputy, J. Cofer Black, were so alarmed about intelligence pointing to an impending attack by Al Qaeda that they demanded an emergency meeting at the White House with Ms. Rice and her National Security Council staff.
According to two former intelligence officials, Mr. Tenet told those assembled at the White House about the growing body of intelligence the C.I.A. had collected suggesting an attack was in the works. But both current and former officials, including allies of Mr. Tenet, took issue with Mr. Woodward’s account that he and his aides had left the meeting feeling that Ms. Rice had ignored them.
Earlier this week, some members of the Sept. 11 commission said they could not recall being told about a meeting like the one described by Mr. Woodward.
On Monday, officials said Mr. Tenet had told members of the commission about the July 10 meeting when they interviewed him in early 2004, but committee members said he never indicated he had left the White House with the impression that he had been ignored.
“Tenet never told us that he was brushed off,” said Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic member of the commission. “We certainly would have followed that up.”
Mr. McCormack said the records showed that far from ignoring Mr. Tenet’s warnings, Ms. Rice acted on the intelligence and requested that Mr. Tenet make the same presentation to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft, then the attorney general.
But Mr. Ashcroft said by telephone on Monday evening that he never received a briefing that summer from Mr. Tenet.
“Frankly, I’m disappointed that I didn’t get that kind of briefing,” he said. “I’m surprised he didn’t think it was important enough to come by and tell me.”
Government investigations have shown that Mr. Ashcroft was briefed by other C.I.A. officials in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks.
WTF? Why did the White House and Rice say last week that the meeting never took place? What’s up with the 9/11 Commission? Did they cover up for Condi or did they fail to note meetings that Condi took seriously? (I doubt that last since the commission’s main author is Condi’s good buddy, Phil Zelikow.)
This is important because, as we know, the Republicans are working overtime to write the history to say the Clinton administration let the situation develop and fester without any real action while the Bush administration did everything it could within the short time it was in office. That is demonstrably false.
I honestly don’t care if Tenet and Black “felt” they were brushed off or not. It’s clear that the intelligence communities were warning the administration in dire terms all summer long that a terrorist attack was looming and yet Junior went off to Crawford and cleared brush for the entire month of August.
The overarching reason for all this was that when the Bush admnistration took office they were determined to do everything differently than Clinton, Bush Sr even Reagan. The egomaniacs in charge (and the empty brand name in a suit out front) operated on a childish level that said nothing their predecesors did was correct, none of their priorities were right and they were determined to prove it.
It is documented that these people did not take terrorism seriously before they took office, nor did they take terrorism seriously after they took office. You canlook it up. They are temperamentally incapable of changing their minds in the face of new evidence short of a massive terrorist attack on New York and Washington DC … and even then they saw terrorism mainly as a political opportunity to advance their previous agenda of deposing Saddam Hussein.
These facts are indisputable. The problem is that these details of whether Condi knew on July 10th and whether Tenet felt he was being listened to are the details with which they hope to bury those facts.
Julia has more on this and points out that Ashcroft slashed funding for terrorism after he had these briefings. Maha notes that nobody has yet adequately explained why Ashcroft stopped flying on commercial airplanes during the period except to say he was worried for his personal safety.
Don’t blame Clinton. This is all Al Gore’s fault. Had he not invented the Internets, there would have been no Mark Foley scandal.
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Poor Chris Hitchens. There isn’t enough bourbon in the world to erase the horror and humiliation he must be enduring now that he knows that Henry Kissinger – Henry Kissinger – was a major Bush adviser for the Iraq fiasco. Oh, the humanity!
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What a relief. At first, I thought Mark Foley might be a pedophile preying on young boys. Fortunately, I’ve learned that he’s an admitted substance abuser who might be a pedophile preying on young boys. Whew! That makes it more tolerable.
Americans John C. Mather and George F. Smoot won the 2006 Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for work that helped cement the big-bang theory of the universe and deepen understanding of the origin of galaxies and stars.
Mather, 60, works at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and Smoot, 61, works at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.
The scientists discovered the nature of ”blackbody radiation,” cosmic background radiation believed to stem from the ”big bang,” when the universe was born.
”They have not proven the big-bang theory but they give it very strong support,” said Per Carlson, chairman of the Nobel committee for physics.
”It is one of the greatest discoveries of the century. I would call it the greatest. It increases our knowledge of our place in the universe.”
Their work was based on measurements done with the help of NASA’s COBE satellite launched in 1989. They were able to observe the universe in its early stages about 380,000 years after it was born. Ripples in the light they detected also helped demonstrate how galaxies came together over time.
”The COBE results provided increased support for the big-bang scenario for the origin of the Universe, as this is the only scenario that predicts the kind of cosmic microwave background radiation measured by COBE,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm said in its citation.
The big-bang theory states that the universe was born billions of years ago from a rapidly expanding dense and incredibly hot state.
Disgraceful. And do we hear from the other side, that the Bible tells us unequivocally the universe is 6,000 years old? We do not. Not so much as one iota of balance.
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Finally, while the multiple farces Republicans have made of governance play themselves out in all their tawdry stupidity, nine U.S. soldiers were killed in recent attacks around Baghdad bringing the total US military casualties in Iraq close to 2800. Remind me again: what are they there for?
I simply can’t forget, no matter how gleeful the schadenfreude watching rightwingers squirm through a scandal involving the cover-up of drunken homosexual pedophilia, that these incompetent, sick clowns are getting people killed. Lots of people killed.
