Latest Newsweek poll: For the first time since 2001, more Americans trust the Democrats than the GOP on moral values and the war on terror.
Late Update: The Newsweek story describing the poll results also contains this head-scratcher: "Americans are equally divided over whether or not Speaker Hastert should resign over mishandling the situation (43 percent say he should, but 36 percent say he shouldn’t)." Equally?
--David Kurtz
From the WSJ "Washington Wire":
State Department will award more than 20 grants of as much as $1.5 million for Iran-related democracy and human-rights work, most of it outside Iran. Since U.S. fears Iranian meddling, “don’t expect a lot of transparency” on who gets awards, a State official says.
Yes, but for those meddling Iranians we would have the otherwise high level of transparency from this Administration that we have come to know and love.
--David Kurtz
ABC has its own congressional staff source confirming what the Post reported in today's edition: that Hastert Chief of Staff Scott Palmer did meet with Mark Foley about his conduct with pages months before the "overfriendly" emails emerged last fall.
ABC reports that its source first became aware last fall of the earlier Foley-Palmer meeting, around the time Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL), head of the House Page Board, and then-House Clerk Jeff Trandahl confronted Foley about those emails.
--David Kurtz
President Bush reserves the right to re-appoint "Heckuva Job" Brownie as head of FEMA.
--David Kurtz
Reporting the news always safer than predicting it. From the AP, last Saturday:
This time there were no tortured explanations, no heels dug in, no long, slow drip of revelation or fight for redemption. Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., just up and quit after his e-mails expressing undue interest in a 16-year-old male page were exposed to the nation. Less than six weeks from a tough election for Republicans who control an already ethically tainted Congress, the more common stick-it-out approach to scandal was cast aside."Resigning leaves your attackers nowhere to go," said Eric Dezenhall, a crisis-management consultant. "If this had dragged on, it could have sucked Republicans into the vortex of scandal."
Hmmm, is that a giant sucking sound I hear?
--David Kurtz
Of all the leading players in the Mark Foley saga, Rep. Tom Reynolds is the only one in a close race for re-election. That means that while others can hunker down and try to ride out the storm, Reynolds can't avoid it. He has to keep talking, and the more he talks, the deeper the hole he digs. Greg Sargent has the details.
--David Kurtz
Bam! Just like that, Duke Cunningham is back in the news.
He writes a scathing letter to the reporter who took him down (and who won a Pulitzer for doing so).
His wife concedes her own wrongdoing, but avoids prosecution if she applies her share of the proceeds of the sale of their ill-gotten home toward the hefty tax bill associated with all those bribes.
And, to top it off, apparently House Intelligence Committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra has been in direct contact with the imprisoned former member of his committee, much to the alarm of Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), the committee's ranking member.
Some background: The Intel Committee is investigating what other misdeeds, if any, Duke may have committed while on the committee, focusing specifically on whether and to what extent he was able to use the committee, its staff, and its cloak of secrecy to dispense favors to his bribers, and perhaps others.
The report of the investigation has been held up by a dispute over whether to subpoena Cunningham to testify. Harman is demanding it; Hoeksta says, unconvincingly, that there's no point in that because Cunningham will merely take the 5th.
Given that background, Harman is livid that Hoekstra has had direct contact with Cunningham without her knowledge, reports the NYT. And in a letter to Hoekstra this week she demands that Hoekstra not visit Duke in prison! “I believe this would be highly inappropriate,” Harman writes.
Now there's a scene for you. The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee visiting his former colleague in federal prison. Then again, that's what retirement might look like for a lot of Republicans.
--David Kurtz
More on Susan Ralston's resignation. I don't want to paint her as an innocent bystander in all this. She was, as I understand it, The Brain's brain. You don't work as an assistant to Karl Rove and to Jack Abramoff without knowing your way around the block. She's a big girl.
That being said, you start to wonder if Republicans understand "The buck stops here" only in some literal sense. Accountability stops way down the chain of command, but the perks of office flow all the way to the top.
Karl Rove, at this point, looks untouched. But his assistant, well, we just can't stand for that kind of conduct, now can we? Here's a sampling of how the Bush White House ferrets out and punishes alleged ethical improprieties, according to the WP:
The White House counsel's office conducted a review of the report, but with Ralston's departure it closed its inquiry yesterday. "Nothing more will come from the report, no further fallout from the report," Perino said.A senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the counsel's office reached no conclusion about whether Ralston violated gift limits because her resignation made the point moot. But the official said there were "mitigating circumstances" in her case because she had a preexisting relationship with Abramoff, for whom she worked before joining the White House. The official said the White House made no criminal referral in her case. A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.
Given the number of Bush Administration appointees with "preexisting relationships" in business and industry (and on K Street) that's a mitigating circumstance wide enough to drive a Brink's truck through.
--David Kurtz
The resignation of Susan Ralston late yesterday may have overshadowed National Journal's report on the failure of Karl Rove to pay for a bash at Jack Abramoff's restaurant, Signatures, for 50 of Rove's staffers until this year, more than two years after the fact--and well after Abramoff entered his guilty plea on corruption charges. Paul Kiel has more details on the NJ piece.
--David Kurtz
TPM Reader BC suggests a "meme neutralizer":
Don't you think that Republicans attacking Pelosi and CREW and bloggers over Foley is just like attacking Iraq when you know the crime was done by bin Laden? There they go again, Republicans attacking the wrong people when everyone knows who did the crime.
Not bad.
--David Kurtz
Jeb Bush was in Pittsburgh last evening for a Rick Santorum fundraiser. Unfortunately for Jeb, on his way to the venue he ran into a bunch of protestors assembling for the event.
Things got ugly from there. Here's how the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette describes it:
Mr. Bush had been walking in the area near the T-station and the incident happened spontaneously when about 50 pickets "tailed him and stayed with him and went into the Wood Street station.". . .
Mr. Grove said a Port Authority canine unit was called in to help with crowd control. Two officers used their tasers to stun two protesters who "were asked to leave, but did not go," Mr. Grove said.
The tasers he said were empty of the cartridges that supply a more powerful charge.
"It was a very tense situation. They were very close to the governor and shouting on top of him."
As a precaution, the governor was ushered into a T-station supply closet and stayed there until the crowd left.
When I said Republicans were on the run, this isn't quite what I had in mind.
--David Kurtz
The CNN view of the world:
Foley resigned last week after Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a left-leaning watchdog group, posted some of the e-mails he exchanged with the former male page in 2005, who was then 16 and had worked for Rep. Rodney Alexander, a Louisiana Republican.
Fox may be a joke journalistically, but at least it is ideologically consistent. CNN is just a joke.
Late update: CNN has changed the offending paragraph to read as follows:
Foley resigned last week after ABC news showed him it had some of the e-mails he exchanged with the former male page in 2005, who was then 16 and had worked for Rep. Rodney Alexander, a Louisiana Republican.
--David Kurtz
I love the sound of Republicans whining. It's a pleasant change.
Democrats have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory too many times for me to get my hopes up much. In my own defense, I came by my perpetual pessimism about the Democrats honestly. McGovern supporters caucused in my family's living room when I was but a toddler. We lived in the Deep South; our coat closet would probably have been big enough to accommodate the "crowd." I have no memory of that event, but if that doesn't imprint you with a certain political fatalism, I don't know what would.
The week before the Foley scandal broke, I first realized that Republicans were whining, not about some supposed cultural catastrophe to rile up the base, but about Democratic political attacks. It was the first time I allowed myself to believe that the Dems could actually win this year. Republicans were on the run.
Then the Foley scandal exploded.
The lingering image of the Foley scandal for me won't be Foley cruising to Morton's in his BMW convertible with a young male page or diddling himself during a floor vote (wouldn't want that image to linger).
It will be Rep. Tom Reynolds, chairman of the NRCC, hiding behind children at a press conference in his district to avoid having to answer the hard questions about Foley. A reporter, concerned that the subject matter wasn't appropriate for kids, asked Reynolds if the children would leave the room. Reynolds--a small, scared man--refused.
Pundits fret that the Dems might "overplay their hand" and push too hard on Foley. Does anyone ever worry about the GOP overplaying its hand? Republicans, as the Foley case shows, will risk the entire pot on a bluff. They can be wrong on principle, wrong on the substance, and wrong on the politics, yet no one ever wrings their hands about the Republicans overplaying theirs.
That's not to say the Dems have been as aggressive as they should be. NPR had a report yesterday on New Mexico Attorney General Patricia Madrid's effort to unseat Rep. Heather Wilson (R-NM). The Madrid campaign hastened to explain that the ad it began running this week touting Madrid's record of fighting internet sex crimes was produced back in the summer and didn't have anything to do with the Foley scandal. Well, why the hell not?
Dems seem to be getting their sea legs though. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi refused to throw Speaker Hastert a life preserver when he wanted to appoint Louis Freeh to investigate the Foley matter. What a refreshing surprise.
So let Republicans complain all they want about the timing of the Foley disclosures, the Clintons' supposed involvement, the mysterious hidden forces trying to do the GOP in.
I love the sound of Republicans whining. It is the sound of Democratic victory.
--David Kurtz
Did I say earthquake?
Here's another sign of the tectonic shift.
The NRCC dropped $7.8 million yesterday into 30 House districts.
But here's the thing. It's not just the size of the expenditure. Of the 30 districts in question, 27 are currently held by the GOP.
They're playing defense. But as the GOP playbook says, the best defense is a strong offense, so 98% of the $7.8 million is going to attacking the Democratic opponents.
--David Kurtz
Earthquake. The Cook Political Report changes its ratings in 14 House races--downgrading GOP chances in every one. Election Central has the rundown.
--David Kurtz
Looks like Denny Hastert's Chief of Staff, Scott Palmer, is in a heap of trouble.
Remember that Kirk Fordham, one-time Chief of Staff to Mark Foley (R-FL), resigned Wednesday as Rep. Tom Reynolds' (R-NY) Chief of Staff and promptly announced that he had warned Hastert's staff about Foley's page problem as far back and 2003. Specifically, he said he repeatedly asked Hastert's Chief of Staff, Scott Palmer, to take action to deal with Foley.
Palmer promptly denied it.
Now, according to the Post, another congressional staffer has come forward to say that Fordham is telling the truth and Palmer is lying.
And the piece in the Post also touches on this topic we discussed back on October 1st. Jeff Trandahl, you'll remember, is the former House Clerk who, along with Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL), had the sit-down with Foley in late 2005 ...
Trandahl's departure came within days of his confrontation with Foley over e-mails that the congressman had sent a former page. House aides say the circumstances of Trandahl's exit were oddly quiet. The departure of a staff member of long standing, especially one as important as the House clerk, is usually marked with considerable fanfare, said Scott Lilly, a former Democratic staff director of the House Appropriations Committee. Debate is suspended in mid-afternoon to accommodate a stream of testimonials from lawmakers.Trandahl's departure was marked by a one-minute salute from Shimkus and a brief insert into the Congressional Record.
"My one-hour Special Order changed to a five-minute Special Order, now to a one-minute," Shimkus said. "I just want to say thank you for the work you have done."
Lilly said: "He seemed to suddenly disappear in a puff of smoke."
Pretty clear a lotta this story has yet to unfold.
But I guess that's what next week is for.
--Josh Marshall
One-time Social Security phase-out maven, Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-NY) sends out a flyer accusing his opponent of wanting to deep six Social Security. Anything to change the subject from Foley, I guess.
--Josh Marshall
When the House Republicans need a good liar to step up to the plate, no one better than Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA).
From CNN ...
Faced with fending off the backlash from the Mark Foley scandal, House Republicans took the offensive Friday, asking Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats to testify about whether they engaged in partisan trickery by releasing Foley's messages weeks before the midterm elections.Top GOP leaders -- including House Speaker Dennis Hastert, of Illinois, and Majority Leader John Boehner, of Ohio -- have accused the Democrats of knowing about Foley's correspondences with teen pages, and waiting to release them until it was politically advantageous.
As noted earlier, the reporters on the story know the claim is false and that Kingston et al. know it's false. But they don't share that with their readers and viewers.
Late Update: Sharp-eyed TPM Reader AA noticed this line down near the bottom of the article at CNN ...
Top GOP leaders, including Boehner and Majority Whip Roy Blunt, of Missouri, have rushed to Hastert's defense. Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, wrote a letter supporting Hastert, saying it was inappropriate to ask for the speaker's resignation when similar scandals in the 1980s prompted a "dramatically different standard."Barton was referring to Democratic Reps. Gerry Studds of Massachusetts and Dan Crane of Illinois, both of whom were censured after having sexual relationships with 17-year-old pages. Crane lost his re-election bid, while Studds survived the scandal.
Yep, Democrat Dan Crane. Clearly a Democrat under the rule that Republicans who diddle congressional pages are transmogrified into Democrats. Like political transubstantiation.
--Josh Marshall
I think this may have been overlooked. That letter Rep. Deborah Pryce (R-OH) sent to the House Clerk is bad news for former House Clerk Jeff Trandahl, the one who had the sit-down with Reps. Foley (R-FL) and Shimkus (R-IL).
--Josh Marshall
27%.
That's the number of Americans who think Denny Hastert should remain as Speaker, according to SurveyUSA.
63% think he resign.
43% think he should leave the House altogether.
Late Update: Number of Democratic strategists who think Denny Hastert should remain Speaker through November 7th. 100%. That's my poll, not SurveyUSA. My methodology was to think about it for about 3 seconds. But I believe the margin of error is extremely low.
--Josh Marshall
White House aide resigns over Abramoff ties. (ed.note: Check the calendar. Yep, Friday around 5.)
--Josh Marshall
Oh boy. It's getting positively bicameral on Denny Hastert. Tom Kean, Jr., who's running for senate from New Jersey, says Denny should pack it in.
--Josh Marshall
Hmm. The FBI got copies of the "over friendly" emails that got Foleygate rolling way back in July. CREW, the good government group that turned over the emails, wants to know why they didn't initiate an investigation.
And this sort of thing makes it seem as if the FBI doesn't have a very good explanation.
--Paul Kiel
Who will call them on it?
Will you?
TPM Reader MW just sent us in this email ...
While you and the Hill report that Foley's IM's were given to ABC by a GOP aid, Newt G was reported on NPR last night saying that it is a Democrat election gambit and the assertion was not challenged in the report. Again last night on CNN they reported Hastert's comments that the Dems did it and on NBC's Today this morning, the same unchallenged reporting of GOP assertions were made. Eventually it will become the "truth" that the Dems did it unless the mainstream media do real reporting. This kind of stuff really irritates me.
On CNN and in the Washington Post yesterday, reporters duly noted that the Republicans who are parrotting this argument do so with no evidence and that there's no evidence to back it up.
But this is insufficient.
Every news organization that is aggressively reporting this story knows in basic outlines who the ultimate sources of these IMs were and how they made their way into the hands of the media. So they know not only that there is 'no evidence' for the GOP line but that it is actually false. Given that the Republicans who are spouting this line make no effort even to offer evidence, I think it is a fair conclusion that not only is the claim false but that these professional bamboozlers like Gingrich know it's false.
In other words, they're lying. And the news organizations publishing what they say know they're lying.
Saying there's 'no evidence' doesn't cut.
--Josh Marshall
My my my. Oh what a tangled web we weave when at first we practice to bamboozle.
Way, way back on June 29th, frustrated that chronic Social Security bamboozler Mike McGavick, Republican senate candidate in Washington, wouldn't give a straight answer on his position on whether or not to phase out Social Security and replace it with private accounts, we actually launched a special TPM Media contest to see who could get a straight answer out of the guy.
Then the next day, in response to our contest and general efforts to shed some light on the murky darkness of McGavick's bamboozlement, David Postman of the Seattle Times interviewed McGavick to find out what the deal was. McGavick gave a fairly poll-tested but still relatively straight forward response. McGavick, wrote Postman, "wants a phased-in system of individually controlled, privately managed retirement accounts that could provide a 
higher yield than the government-run system, but would come with a lower guaranteed payment."
McGavick also told Postman that on Social Security he wants "to get this out of the political world and into a thoughtful space."
Anyway, with the exception of a few moments of recidivist bamboozlement, that's where the matter stood for the past few months. McGavick didn't really want to discuss the issue. But when pressed he conceded he was for phasing out Social Security as it now exists and replacing it with a system of private accounts. McGavick never uttered a peep saying Postman got anything wrong. His campaign even excerpted Postman's piece on its campaign blog, as a pointer for understanding his position.. And that's where the matter stood.
That is, it stood there until this week when his opponent, Maria Cantwell, ran a radio ad criticizing the position he took in his interview with Postman.
Now suddenly McGavick says Postman got it all wrong. Now McGavick says he actually doesn't want the private account managed privately. He wants the government to manage the private accounts.
Says McGavick ...
I don't want it privately managed, either by Wall Street or that individual. What I want is a government-run program, with money going into an account. It would be managed by the government.
And now he says Cantwell has to take down her ad because it doesn't reflect his true position. At least after changing it for the tenth time. Can anyone take this dude even remotely seriously? And how am I supposed to run Social Security contests with any sense of predictability or finality when we've got serial bamboozlers like Mike McGavick out there constantly changing their positions?
I need Regis here to give McGavick one of those, "Is that your final answer?" lines.
(ed.note: In private McGavick is known for supporting hardline privatization of Social Security. He just fibs about his position in public.)
Late Update: Maybe give a holler to the Postman guy at the Seattle Times and thank him for braving the hot swamps of McGavick's bamboozlement.
--Josh Marshall
Mark Foley loved to talk about masturbating -- turns out, it's a common GOP trait.
--Paul Kiel
Denny Hastert told by Republican higher-ups to cut the half-brained conspiracy chatter.
--Paul Kiel
The grand Republican strategy for containing the damage from Foleygate: hunker down and hope. That and other news of the day in today's Daily Muck.
--Paul Kiel
Here at TPM we're putting out more and more material each day. And with the political news world more or less exploding or in meltdown (pick your metaphor), we've gotten an increasing number of readers asking if we can come up with some way to distill our best posts and the most important news of the day into a series of easy (and hopefully fun) digestible nuggets that we can send out to get each day started.
So starting next Tuesday we're going to be debuting the admittedly-none-too-creatively-named TPM Daily Digest.
Every weekday, a little before 9 AM on the East Coast, we'll send out a short email with a few key nuggets of news and quotes, what we think are some of our best posts from the last 24 hours that you might have missed and articles from the morning's papers you'll want to read. Think of it as a quick curtain-raiser for the news of the day and a heads up on what to expect. A primer for the day's news along with links to some news you might have missed -- all packaged together in the TPM style.
For the first four weeks, we'll obviously be heavily focused on the November election. So we'll start with a half dozen of what we think are the most important polls released in the past 24 hours, along with key dispatches on races around the country.
We'll try to make it fun. If you're interested, just sign up at the little email sign-up form at the top of the TPM post column on the right where it says 'TPM Daily Digest'.
(pub.note: We respect your privacy. So your email address will never be sold, rented, given away, shared or anything else. It will only be used to send you our daily update.)
--Josh Marshall
I'm shocked, shocked, I tell you. That Drudge bamboozlement about the Foleygate cybersex IMs being a 'prank'. The kid's lawyer says Drudge's piece was "a piece of fiction."
--Josh Marshall
Let's not mince words: President Bush is a profound threat to the US constitution.
From the AP ...
President Bush, again defying Congress, says he has the power to edit the Homeland Security Department’s reports about whether it obeys privacy rules while handling background checks, ID cards and watchlists.In the law Bush signed Wednesday, Congress stated no one but the privacy officer could alter, delay or prohibit the mandatory annual report on Homeland Security department activities that affect privacy, including complaints.
But Bush, in a signing statement attached to the agency’s 2007 spending bill, said he will interpret that section “in a manner consistent with the President’s constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch.”
His contempt for the rule of law needs to be ended.
--Josh Marshall
This is a treat.
Foleygate may be an added burden for the GOP to take into next month's election. But November 7th is really about the style of 
government the Bush administration has brought to this country and the war in Iraq -- two things that are very much intertwined.
Today, the American adventure in Iraq has settled down to a regular schedule of disaster and bloodletting, with routine deaths of American soldiers, escalating sectarian attacks killing Iraqis on a far larger scale and an atmosphere of paralysis at home over what to do about what Tom Ricks aptly calls a fiasco.
But there was an earlier period when the body counts were far smaller but the groundwork was being laid for the coming carnage and collapse: during the period of the Coalition Provisional Authority under Jerry Bremer.
Rajiv Chandrasekaran was the Baghdad Bureau Chief for the Washington Post during 2003 and 2004. So he was there and probably saw as much of what happened as any American journalist. His book Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone came out last month. And Monday through Wednesday of next week he's going to join TPMCafe's Table for One to talk about his book, describe what he saw in Iraq and answer your questions.
Join us.
--Josh Marshall
Just for future reference let's nip one pre-meme in the bud.
There are already a number of Republicans arguing that the election tide was beginning to turn their way before Hurricane Foley came ashore last Friday.
Not so.
At some point I'll write in greater detail about this. But I believe statistics, as well as observation, will show the claim is simply false.
Republicans and the president did get a modest but real boost in late August and the first couple weeks of September. By the middle of September it was reasonable to ask, as I think Charlie Cook did, whether the small GOP uptick was just a blip or the beginning of trend that would grow toward the November election.
From that point on though things began to change. It was observable in the polls. And it was most due, I believe, to the issue of Iraq moving back to center stage of news, with stories like the hidden NIE, the first hints of the Woodward and other stories. Also playing a role was the GOP infighting over the torture bill and the Ney indictment.
Even as bleak as things look at the moment for the GOP we don't know what will happen on November 7th. And it's important for everyone to realize that is not just rhetoric. It's the uncomfortable truth. We don't. But whatever happens on November 7th, the GOP wasn't on the upswing before Foley. They were back on the skids.
--Josh Marshall
Okay, we've got an answer for Rep. Dave Reichert (R) of Washington's 8th district. He says he doesn't want to take a stand on Hastert until after an investigation has been completed.
Reichert is a freshman and he's in a really competitive race. So as of now we're still looking for any rep. who's in any sort of real race who's willing to say that they're going to vote for Hastert as Speaker or Minority Leader.
Here's a picture of Reichert and Foley maxing and relaxing with Honeywell CEO Dave Cote back in happier days when everyone was still on speaking terms.
--Josh Marshall
Okay, we've found a member of the House who's going on the record saying he'll vote for Denny Hastert for Speaker next year if the Republicans retain the majority. Rep. Ray Lahood, of Illinois' nearby 18th district. Apparently he announced his support tonight on Hardball.
Now, anyone outside of Illinois?
--Josh Marshall
We've got a small staff at TPM, four full-time employees including me. So perhaps you can help us with something. Over at Election Central, I've tasked Greg Sargent with finding me that elusive quarry -- the Republican member of Congress who will say on the record that he's going to vote for Denny Hastert for Speaker next January if the Republicans maintain their majority. We were working on this and, surprisingly, we just couldn't get anybody to get back to us.
So we've started a list in this post over at Election Central of different campaigns and congressional offices we've called. As you can see, the only member we've been able to get a comment out of was Rob Simmons (R-CT). And his comment was 'no comment'. So you can see it's pretty slim pickings. All the rest have refused to return calls. Gerlach in Pennsylvania. Sweeney in New York. The Count in Indiana. Nancy Johnson in Connecticut. No dice. None of them are returning calls.
So if you'd like to lend us a hand, you can call them and see if you can get an answer. We'll be adding to the list tomorrow.
--Josh Marshall
Lieberman: Let's stand by Hastert in his hour of need.
Late Update: There's even video.
--Josh Marshall
Rep. Darrell Issa's (R-CA) two ideas for cutting runaway government spending: a) Cut farm subsidies and b) DHS funding for security measures at buildings which house Jewish organizations.
--Josh Marshall
Stung by the Foley scandal, Rep. Tom Reynold's (R-NY) already-faltering campaign is slipping into a hole. How deep a hole? He's calling on Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) to help pull him out.
--Justin Rood
One of the many funny things about Denny Hastert's silly lies about Democrats being responsible for his scandal is this: is this really their position? If the Democrats would have just focused on the real issues instead of blowing the whistle on our caucus pedophilia, we could have gone back to the real business of passing laws and molesting teenagers! Let's focus on the people's business! Oh, and also our funny business. If it weren't for George Soros I could be cranking out a few good IMs right now!
--Josh Marshall
Bye Denny?
No, please stay!
From Fox (of all places ...)
House Republican candidates will suffer massive losses if House Speaker Dennis Hastert remains speaker until Election Day, according to internal polling data from a prominent GOP pollster, FOX News has learned."The data suggests Americans have bailed on the speaker," a Republican source briefed on the polling data told FOX News. "And the difference could be between a 20-seat loss and 50-seat loss."
I think that's about right. No matter what bamboozlement they try to feed to Drudge.
--Josh Marshall
We're pretty much all Foley all the time at the moment. But if you're still interested in the non-page-sex side of the political process, Tom Schaller is discussing his new book on whether or not the Dems really need to win in the South.
--Josh Marshall
Get the rundown on Hastert's press conference here. Apparently Pelosi put the kibosh on tapping Louis Freeh.
--Paul Kiel
We just watched Denny Hastert make his latest statement that he thinks will end the bonfire but won't. And whatever Denny Hastert may have done or not done on the page front, you at least have to say on his behalf that he's certainly one of the most dishonest and irresponsible Speakers in the history of the House. Asked if he had any evidence to back up his claims that ABC, Democrats and George Soros are behind this scandal, his answer was basically, 'Oh, all I know is what I hear.' In other words, I don't have any evidence at all. But I did see something like it on Newsmax. So I figured I'd go with it.
Reminds me of his sliminess back in 2004.
--Josh Marshall
It's a Foleygate investigation bonanza!
House Ethics committee announces that it's launched an investigation.
And this is apparently separate from the one that will be headed up by Louis Freeh, which Hastert will announce shortly.
--Paul Kiel
Still waiting for that press conference. But apparently Hastert is planning to announce that former FBI Director Louis Freeh will be leading an investigation of the House page program. No resignation.
--Paul Kiel
We'll find out in about an hour whether the House Ethics Committee will appoint a special counsel -- like they did the last time something like this happened.
Meanwhile, Denny Hastert is still saying that he won't resign.
--Paul Kiel
In a telephone interview last night, Hastert says he's not resigning -- and somehow the names George Soros, Bill Clinton, and Dick Morris come up in his explanation why. That and other news of the day in today's Daily Foley, er, Muck.
--Paul Kiel
A run-down on what tomorrow likely has in store in Foleygate. Including speculation about a possible resignation announcement tomorrow morning.
--Josh Marshall
Kirk Fordham, longtime Chief of Staff to Mark Foley (R-FL) and more recently to Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-NY), moved to the center stage of Foleygate today. So I wanted to chart out a few things we know about his accusations and him.
Here are some key passages in tomorrow's story from the Post ...
A longtime chief of staff to disgraced former representative Mark Foley (R-Fla.) approached House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert's office three years ago, repeatedly imploring senior Republicans to help stop Foley's advances toward teenage male pages, the staff member said yesterday...
Fordham says his warnings to Hastert's office dealt with a different matter: reports of Foley's troubling interest in male pages working in the Capitol Hill complex. He says he implored the highest ranks of the GOP leadership to intervene to thwart behavior that he had been unable to stop after multiple confrontations with his boss. Sources close to the matter say a meeting took place between a senior Hastert aide and Foley before Fordham's January 2004 departure, probably in 2003, in a small conference room on the third floor of the Capitol.
The suggestion seems to be that this 
happened late in 2003, before his departure from Foley's employ in January 2004.
But let's go back further.
Fordham started working for Foley in 1994. He was his top aide through early 2003. And during his abortive campaign for the senate he was noted in the press as Foley's 'top advisor', though it's not clear to me whether he officially left the Hill to work on the campaign proper.
Foley's campaign was derailed by widely circulated rumors that he was gay -- rumors Foley denounced but also wouldn't deny. He eventually dropped out of the race in September 2003.
Here's a brief description of the end of the campaign in a piece in the Palm Beach Post from September 5th, 2003 ...
Foley made the final decision during a torturous weekend just days after ending a successful 30-day, 30-county campaign trip around Florida. On Tuesday night, he talked over the decision with his top adviser, Kirk Fordham. By Wednesday, the decision was hardening. On Thursday, he began telling his staff.
What is important to note is that the last four or five months prior to Foley's withdrawal from the race saw a rising crescendo of rumors and innuendos about his homosexuality -- rumors his opponents in the race for the GOP senate nomination played at least some role in circulating. A senior aide to Florida Republican Clay Shaw (R) was forced to admit that she had played a role in doing so.
Now, here's the thing. If you read back through the press clippings you see that Fordham, who himself happens to be gay, played the lead role in trying to beat back the rumors and keep them from sinking his boss's campaign.
With Foley making high-profile campaign swings through the state and political opponents trying to feed rumors about his sexuality, it is very hard to imagine that his seemingly intense attraction to young men didn't come up. And Fordham would have known because it was his job to keep those stories out of the press.
When we were first discussing Fordham today at TPM, it seemed hard to figure he would have been trying to get Hastert's office to crackdown on Foley's behavior while simultaneously acting as the lead force trying to propel Foley into the senate.
But the available evidence suggests a different scenario. Go back to 2003. Fordham's spent much of the spring and the summer trying to keep his boss's personal life from destroying his career. According to what Fordham is telling people now, he had confronted Foley several times about his behavior with underage boys -- a pretty standard story for political operatives with boss's who can't or won't control their self-destructive habits.
From what I can glean from the history, it doesn't seem like Fordham would have been trying to sabotage his boss while supposedly trying to keep him in the senate race. He appears to have left on good terms in early 2004, remained close to Foley and his sister and, perhaps most telling, he intervened for Foley on Friday in a last ditch effort to spare his old boss the humiliation of 
the release of those infamous IM transcripts. (Fordham offered to give ABC's Brian Ross an exclusive on Foley's resignation in exchange for not printing the transcripts. Ross said, no deal.)
Perhaps Fordham spent those months trying to keep the rumors of Foley's sexuality out of the press. But during that time he either learns of or has to focus more closely on Foley's issues with underage men. He tries but is unable to get him to cool it. And then after the campaign is over, perhaps in an effort to save Foley from himself, he goes to the leadership to try to get them to intervene to protect Foley from himself. Perhaps he'd just decided he couldn't let it go on any more.
I always try to be as clear as I can on this site in distinguishing between what is reporting and what is speculation informed by reporting. I hope I've done so here.
Certainly, there are other possibilities. When he spoke to the Times, Fordham only said that the meetings with Hastert's office were between 2001 and 2003. And he said he was prompted to do so after the House Clerk, Jeff Trandahl, approached him with accounts from pages who had come forward with complaints about Foley's behavior.
(Remember, Trandahl was the House Clerk who, with Rep. Shimkus, interviewed Foley about the suspicious emails in 2005. To the best of my knowledge, Trandahl has been entirely mum through this whole saga.)
I think it's hard to believe that it is a coincidence though that Foley's effective outing, the end of Fordham's tenure with Foley and the alleged warnings to Hastert's office all appear to have happened over a period of roughly six months. Something was happening.
--Josh Marshall
Percentage of voters in Rep. Tom Reynolds' (R-NY) district who disapprove of his behavior in Foleygate? According to SurveyUSA, 66%.
--Josh Marshall
More and more and more. From Copley News Service ...
Long before Mark Beck-Heyman ever came to this town in 1995 to work as a congressional page, Congress had revamped the program in hopes of preventing the sort of sex scandals that had disgraced two congressmen more than a decade earlier.Regardless, the former resident of San Diego's North Park neighborhood learned almost from day one that there was one person to be careful of: Rep. Mark Foley.
“When I got there, I was warned about Foley from former pages and cloakroom Republican staffers,” said Beck-Heyman, who attended a Catholic high school at the time and was nominated for the page program by Republican Rep. Brian Bilbray, who then lived in Imperial Beach. “The warning was to watch out for him.”
Two years later Tyson Vivyan came to town ...
Tyson Vivyan was a congressional page from 1996 to 1997. Now 26, he tells NBC News that he knew Fla. Rep. Mark Foley somewhat during his brief Washington stay, but not well. It wasn't until after he finished the congressional program and returned home to Tennessee, he says, that Foley began reaching out to him. Vivyan says that he began receiving instant messages in 1997 from someone with the moniker "maf54," and that the messages were almost immediately sexual in nature.
I guess Denny Hastert was just the last to know.
--Josh Marshall
A blogger sorts through the Congressional Record for quotes about Rep. Foley's interest in the pages.
--Josh Marshall
Hastert Chief of Staff Scott Palmer tells TPM Election Central that Fordham's lying.
--Josh Marshall
Darker, darker and darker still. From Gannett ...
A senior House Republican has asked the House clerk to look into allegations that then-Rep. Mark Foley was turned away from the congressional page dorm on Capitol Hill after arriving there intoxicated one night.
Rep. Deborah Pryce (R-OH), chairman of the House GOP Conference, another rep who's election hangs in the balance.
--Josh Marshall
This is just a heads-up or perhaps an editorial note about what might be coming down the pike.
There have been a number of signals through the course of the day that the last gambit of the GOP House leadership will be to blame the Foley debacle on a cabal of gay staffers who hid and/or enabled Rep. Foley's behavior for years. The idea being that they are to blame rather than the leadership.
That may sound like a plot turn out of a bad novel. But with the times we're living in I guess we shouldn't be surprised.
Fordham, the staffer who just turned on Hastert, is openly gay, as is at least one other central player in the drama. Fordham's word now threatens to take down the whole House leadership. So they're going to throw everything at him.
As an editor, this sort of stuff is always complicated to deal with. You don't want to preview the hideous slur or give it publicity when you're trying to warn readers of what the wounded animal is capable of as it fights for its life. But I think the better part of wisdom in this case is to put the effort before people rather than let it bubble out only in the campaign of whispers and acidy newspaper columns. David Corn has some of the best details.
--Josh Marshall
Fordham's full statement to the AP ...
I've learned within the last few hours that unnamed sources have purported that I intervened on behalf of [Florida] Congressman [Mark] Foley to prevent a page board investigation. This is categorically false. At no point ever did I ask anyone to block any inquiries into Foley's actions or behavior. These sources know this allegation is false.Having stepped down as Mr. Reynolds' chief of staff, I have no reason to state anything other than the facts. I have no congressman and no office to protect. I intend to fully cooperate with any and every investigation of Mr. Foley's conduct. At the same time, I will fully disclose to the FBI and the House Ethics Committee any and all meetings and phone calls I had with senior staffers in the House leadership about any of Foley's inappropriate activities.
The fact is, even prior to the existence of the Foley e-mail exchanges, I had more than one conversation with senior staff at the highest level of the House of Representatives asking them to intervene when I was informed of Mr. Foley's inappropriate behavior. One of these staffers is still employed by a senior House Republican leader. Rather than trying to shift the blame on me, those who are employed by these House leaders should acknowledge what they know about their action or inaction in response to the information they knew about Mr. Foley prior to 2005.
I guess he's decided he won't take the fall for this.
--Josh Marshall
Dewey Beats Truman Watch ...
Headline from this afternoon's US News: "GOP Senses Cooling of Outrage at Hastert"
Dip your hands back in the water, guys.
--Josh Marshall
Well, some stories develop pretty quickly, don't they?
So let's take stock of where we are. For the last four or five days Speaker Hastert and the entire House GOP leadership have been staking their positions on this story: They were notified of some inappropriate but ambiguous emails in late 2005. They addressed the matter with Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL). They had no idea that the underlying truth was as scandalous as what was revealed last Friday. Whether Hastert himself knew about that individual incident or his staff is sort of sub-codicil of the basic line.
Now, one of key figures in the scandal, Kirk Fordham, who was Foley's longtime Chief of Staff and until today Rep. Tom Reynolds' chief of staff, has been fired. And he's come out and said, no, the whole leadership story is a lie. Fordham says he repeatedly told Hastert's then-Chief of Staff Scott Palmer as far back as 2003 that there was a problem with Foley and the pages. And nothing was ever done.
So, two years before the date everyone's been focusing on back in 2005. We're not at parsing little details.
They staked everything on a story. And the story was apparently pure fiction.
Unless Hastert and Co. can thoroughly discredit Fordham in the next few hours (and oh are they going to try) I'd figure Hastert is gone by this time tomorrow if not sooner. And just as a capital ship generates a giant whirlpool as it founders and disappears into the sea, I'm sure he'll be taking several with him.
--Josh Marshall