Snapshot of the close congressional races

Hotline sayeth that the first 10 are gone (Democratic, that is). A sampler:

	1	ARIZONA-08	Open Seat (R)	Last Ranking: 1
		There's not much left to say about this race. It's over; she knows it and he knows it. Tip Sheet

	2	TEXAS-22	Open Seat (R)	Last Ranking: 2
		The NRCC has now spent over $1 million on behalf of Sekula-Gibbs, indicating they believe this seat is winnable. Bush's late-October rally for her could also help. Tip Sheet

	3	INDIANA-08	John Hostettler (R)	Last Ranking: 3
		Hostettler doesn't have enough money for a viable campaign and there's evidence that the party may be giving up on him. Introducing Rep. Ellsworth? Tip Sheet

Whitehouse aid gets 18 months in jail

The Abramoff scandal is starting to bear its toxic food. This is what the judge had to say:

"There was a time when people came to Washington because they thought government could be helpful to people," said U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman. "People came to Washington asking not what government could do for them and their friends but what they could do for the public."

This could actually work

Where do I sign up?

LONDON -- A Sudanese billionaire is putting up millions in prize money to promote good governance in Africa -- and to encourage leaders on the world's poorest continent to step down once their democratic mandates have expired.

Judges of the Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership will rate 53 African countries each year on progress in the economy, health, education, and security.

Each leader awarded the prize will receive $5 million spread over 10 years after leaving office. If still alive when the initial prize is exhausted, prize-winners will receive another $200,000 annually until they die.

In an opinion piece published in The Guardian newspaper yesterday, Ibrahim said he was trying in part to address reluctance to relinquish power on a continent where military dictators and presidents for life have long held sway.

"A situation in which leaders face three choices -- relative poverty, term extension, or corruption -- is not conducive to good governance," Ibrahim wrote in The Guardian. "And the continent's problems will not be solved unless governance improves radically."

The statement announcing the prize yesterday included endorsements from former South African president Nelson Mandela, who served one term, and African Union chief Alpha Konare, who stepped down as Mali's president after completing the constitutionally allowed two terms.

The prize will be awarded based on criteria developed by Robert Rotberg, a professor at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. The first prize will be awarded next year.

Ibrahim sold Celtel International, an African cellphone network, for $3.3 billion in 2005.

Immigration scare-mongering not exactly working for republican candidate

Really? In a border state where half of last year's illegal crossings ocurred? Reuters reports:

TUCSON, Ariz., Oct 8 (Reuters) - Randy Graf became the Republican candidate for Congress by taking a tough stand on Mexican border security but he seems unable to win over voters with a month to go until the Nov. 7 election.

The former golf pro and state representative, who was part of a civilian volunteer force to halt illegal border crossings, is hoping a strong enforcement message that includes deploying troops along the border will draw the hard-line conservative vote in southern Arizona.

"They are mobilized already," Graf told Reuters in an interview. "We are talking seriously about stopping illegal immigration before we talk about any other issues."

Others doubt his pitch will work -- even in an area where almost half of the 1.2 million illegal immigrants caught crossing the U.S. border last year trekked north.

Canadian Asylum adjudicator taking bribes

Desperate people with their lives in the balance, facing a low-ranking civil servant to makes a little over minimum wage. Say you didn't see this coming

MONTREAL — The federal Immigration and Refugee Board has identified nearly two dozen suspect cases handled by a Quebec adjudicator who has admitted to being on the take, according to internal department documents.

Overall, the board's legal team in Montreal reviewed 565 files handled by Yves Bourbonnais, say documents obtained by The Canadian Press using access-to-information laws.

So can anyone become legal, and then enter USA at will? We need a northern fence as well.

NY Times/CBS Poll: 83% think Bush is lying

Wow. The rightwingnuts can't ignore this as just a NY Times commie propaganda

Mr. Bush clearly faces constraints as he seeks to address the public concerns about Iraq that have shrouded this midterm election: 83 percent of respondents thought that Mr. Bush was either hiding something or mostly lying when he discussed how the war in Iraq was going.

Nice. The lunatic in North Korea now has a nuke

North Korea claims successful nuke test
And our military is bogged down looking for WMD in Iraq, while the lunatics are slowly talking over the asylum elsewhere in the world.

The country's official Korean Central News Agency said the underground test was performed successfully "with indigenous wisdom and technology 100 percent," and that no radioactive material leaked from that test site.

"The test is 100 percent safe," said the KCNA.

"It marks a historic event as it greatly encouraged and pleased the (Korean People's Army) and people that have wished to have powerful self-reliant defense capability," KCNA said. "It will contribute to defending the peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and in the area around it."

Of course it pleased the Korean army--now they can starve some more people while basking in the radiation from the warhead. And remember--these crazy mo-fos have some effective short-range missiles.

Courtesy of GOP, voters finally get 'it'

Boston Globe op-ed piece. I have nothing to add to this.

IF I HAD my druthers, this election would have turned on the war in Iraq. I hoped that when the voters finally got it, ``it" would have been the disaster that's turned this war zone into a recruiting ground for terrorists.

Instead, we have the self-described party of family values caught enabling or at least ignoring a sick puppy of a congressman, Mark Foley, who was sex-talking electronically to teenage pages. Instead, we have Speaker J. Dennis Hastert dismissing such an exchange as merely ``over-friendly" and White House press secretary Tony Snow describing the messages as ``naughty." We even have right-wing webmaster Matt Drudge blaming the teens themselves as ``16- and 17-year-old beasts."

And my favorite section:

I remember when Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania blamed the Catholic priest pedophilia scandal on the blueness of Boston, ``a seat of academic, political, and cultural liberalism in America." You can no more label homosexuals as predators than you can label milkmen as murderers of Amish school girls. But you can try.

Republicans have been successful in getting a hold on the language and politics of values. There isn't a parent is this country who doesn't wince at and worry about the sexualization of children all over the culture from the clothing racks to the Internet. But the right has grabbed onto the free-floating anxiety and attached it to everything on their agenda from abstinence-only education to the dismissal of a Texas teacher for taking her students to a museum that had nude statues.

Now we are beginning to get ``it." The self-proclaimed party of moral values can't keep its own House in order. The Republicans in charge of too much for too long have one value they now hold above all others: staying in power. Got it? Well, that's a start.

4000 Iraqi policemen dead in 2 years; 8000 more wonded

When its 300 billion in taxpayer money being wasted and 2600 Americans being killed, why should we care about 4000 Iraqi policemen being killed in 2 years? I mean, after all, Haliburton continues to make money!

WASHINGTON --About 4,000 Iraqi police have been killed and more than 8,000 injured since September 2004, the U.S. commander in charge of the police training said Friday.

I reserve the right to hire incompetent idiots

W just stated that contrary to the law, he can hire anyone he wishes for the FEMA director position.

To shield FEMA from cronyism, Congress established new job qualifications for the agency's director in last week's homeland security bill. The law says the president must nominate a candidate who has ``a demonstrated ability in and knowledge of emergency management" and ``not less than five years of executive leadership."

Bush signed the homeland-security bill on Wednesday morning. Then, hours later, he issued a signing statement saying he could ignore the new restrictions. Bush maintains that under his interpretation of the Constitution, the FEMA provision interfered with his power to make personnel decisions.

Information teleported from light to matter

Remember the teleporter in Star Trek? Nothing that cool, but amazing nonetheless.

Until now, scientists have teleported similar objects, such as light or single atoms, over short distances from one spot to another in a split second.

But Professor Eugene Polzik and his team at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark have made a breakthrough by using both light and matter.

"It is one step further because, for the first time, it involves teleportation between light and matter, two different objects. One is the carrier of information and the other one is the storage medium," Polzik explained in an interview on Wednesday.

So we are now buying journalists. Nice.

I come from a 3rd world country, or in politically correct lingo, from a LDC. But this happens in the good old US of A as well. And its not just some small-time a-hole making a lot of money; this is a major newspaper.

The publisher of the Miami Herald resigned today, citing revelations that journalists in the group had been paid by the US government to help undermine Fidel Castro's Cuban regime.

More bombings in Baghdad

Sadly, new all-time high record

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Bomb attacks in Baghdad have hit an all-time high, the U.S. military said on Wednesday, as one of the capital's frontline police units was pulled off the streets on suspicion of involvement with sectarian death squads.

Thousands of police face criminal vetting and lie detectors as part of a "retraining" process designed to weed out militia killers who have used the cover of their uniforms to kidnap, torture and commit mass murder, U.S. officials have said.

Foley first reported to Hastert 3 years ago?

CNN says:

• NEW: Aide said he warned speaker's office about Foley 3 years ago
• Former Foley aide resigns after trying to negotiating with news media
• Key conservatives back Hastert, as does White House
• Republican whip questions how Hastert handled Foley matter

And Denny-boy claims he did all he could do. Calling Cardinal Law--calling Cardinal Law...

Boehner: "Foley Was Hastert's `Responsibility'"

The first rule of engagement is, cover your own ass, and this is happening faster and faster.

``I believe I had talked to the speaker and he told me it had been taken care of,'' Boehner, an Ohio Republican, told Cincinnati 700 WLW Radio this morning. ``It's in his corner, it's his responsibility.''

Blame it on Santorum

Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) once claimed that catholic-priests molested children because of the lefty leanings of Boston academics (and by extension, all liberals in Massachusetts). No, I am not making this up.

Hmm.. now we find that the head perv was chairman of the missing and exploited children caucus. So, I think its only fair that the Boston Globe asks:

Priests rape young boys, the church hierarchy hushes it up for years, and academics and other assorted Democrats in Boston are to blame. That fact should be obvious to anyone with half a brain, which I think Santorum may have.

So, of course, I find it surprising -- no, make that shocking -- that the center of the storm has shifted from Boston to, of all places, Capitol Hill, and not just any part of Capitol Hill but specifically the offices of the Republican congressional leadership.

And thanks for believing in me, and electing me

The rats are abandoning ship

See no evil, hear no evil, and if you took money from evil, give it back

Among Republicans disposing of Foley money were Virginia Sen. George Allen, who plans to give the $2,000 his campaign received to a charitable cause, and Rep. Heather Wilson of New Mexico, who plans to give away $8,000 she received between 1998 and 2002. Rep. Clay Shaw, R-Fla., already donated $2,000 to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and Rep. Nancy Johnson, R-Conn., returned $1,000 she had received from Foley's political action committee.

Rep. Deborah Pryce, R-Ohio, a member of the Republican leadership, returned $5,000 to Foley's leadership PAC on Friday. Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., returned a $1,000 contribution as well. Reps. Jim Gerlach, R-Pa., and Geoff Davis, R-Ky., donated the $1,000 they each received from Foley's PAC to victims' advocacy organizations in their respective districts.

Perhaps Foley can use this for his legal defense fund. Opps, he can't!

FoleyGate

Perhaphs this will not be as big as WaterGate, but the impact still will be like a Richter 8. And just as luck would have it, some of these guys are up for re-election. From the SF Chronicle:

Speaker Dennis Hastert, Majority Leader John Boehner and House GOP re-election chair Tom Reynolds had apparently known about Foley's e-mails for months, perhaps since late last year. The question is which e-mails.

If anyone in Washington knew the contents of the more graphic e-mail exchanges and did not contact authorities -- their careers are over. That would include Hastert or any other member of Congress. No amount of spin will explain how an adult could place the interests of a friend, a political ally, or their party's majority over the safety of an underage page.

Gingrich: Mark Foley is Gay

On Fox News Sunday, Gingrich sayeth (talking about GOP leaders' inaction about Foley):

Well, you could have second thoughts about it, but I think had they overly aggressively reacted to the initial round, they would have also been accused of gay bashing.

Not that there is anything wrong with the orientation of consenting ADULTS, but when a 55-year old man sends dirty emails to teenagers, that is just creepy.

Pakistan, our ally in the war against terror, responsible for Indian train bombing?

The same school of thought was responsible for 3,000,000 people being killed in 1971 in Bangladesh. Why would they change now?

MUMBAI, India -- An Indian investigator yesterday accused Pakistan's spy agency of orchestrating the July train bombings that killed at least 207 people in Mumbai -- an accusation that could threaten the shaky peace process between the two nuclear-armed neighbors.

Why does the Department of State hate America?

State and Defense sparred with the creep Veep over detainee memo, the NY Times reports:

In a nine-page memorandum, the two officials, Gordon R. England, the acting deputy secretary of defense, and Philip D. Zelikow, the counselor of the State Department, urged the administration to seek Congressional approval for its detention policies.
...
On one side of the fight were officials, often led by Vice President Dick Cheney, who said the terrorism threat required that the president have wide power to decide who could be held and how they should be treated. On the other side were officials, primarily in the State Department and the Pentagon, who portrayed their disagreement as pragmatic. They said the administration had claimed more authority than it needed, drawing widespread criticism and challenges in the courts.