Political News : Mark Foley on sexually explicit computer messages to male teens...

Mark Adam Foley (born September 8, 1954) is an American politician who served as a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives from 1995 until 2006, representing the 16th District of Florida.
Once known as a crusader against child abuse and exploitation, Foley resigned from Congress on September 29, 2006 after allegations surfaced that he had sent suggestive emails and sexually explicit instant messages to teenaged males who had formerly served and were at that time serving as Congressional pages.As a result of the disclosures, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement opened investigations of the messages to find possible criminal charges.The House Ethics Committee has also opened an investigation into the response of the House Republican leadership and their staff to earlier warnings of Foley's conduct

Even today, two years after Mark Foley's very public fall from grace, the former congressman can't explain why he sent lurid, sexually explicit computer messages to male teens who had worked as Capitol Hill pages.
Sitting in his room at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York this week, the Florida Republican, wearing a yellow tie with blue elephants, finally broke his silence.

"I'm trying to find my way back," Foley said in an interview with The Associated Press, his first public comments on the scandal since resigning from Congress on Sept. 29, 2006.

Foley insists he did nothing illegal and never had sexual contact with teens, just inappropriate Internet conversations. Investigations by the FBI and Florida authorities ended without criminal charges.

And while he concedes his behavior was "extraordinarily stupid," he remains somewhat unwilling to accept full public scorn.
These were 17-year-olds, just months from being men, he insists.
"There was never anywhere in those conversations where someone said, 'Stop,' or 'I'm not enjoying this,' or 'This is inappropriate' ... but again, I'm the adult here, I'm the congressman," Foley said. "The fact is I allowed it to happen. That's where my responsibility lies."
Foley had built a national reputation as an advocate for tougher penalties against child sexual predators. As co-chairman of the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus, he helped craft a law to protect children on the Internet.
Still, he said, there was no hypocrisy.
"The work I was doing was involving young children ... You know, you hear the term 'pedophile.' That is prepubescent," Foley said, noting a "huge difference" from lurid chats with teens on the brink of adulthood.
"At the end of the day, they were instant messages that were extraordinarily inappropriate," he added, breathing a heavy sigh, his eyes wandering toward the ceiling.
So why talk now? Sympathy? Forgiveness?

Just to free himself from the media clamoring for his first interview.
"I believed I owed my constituents an apology," Foley said. "I embarrassed them and I embarrassed my family and I wanted to have a chance in a public setting to lend my voice to what happened, not through an attorney, not through a spokesperson, but from myself."
Today, he's a pariah in Congress and the Republican Party. The affable man who reveled in the spotlight finds himself branded a pedophile, at best, a creep. Three former staffers refused comment because of their disgust with his behavior. He makes his living investing in real estate and other business.
"In public life, you dream of the day they'll name a hospital after you, or a bridge or a post office," Foley said, twisting a gold band on his ring finger identical to one his high-society dermatologist boyfriend wears.
"If I had a post office named after me today, they'd probably return to sender," he said. "It's not a pleasant place to be. It's not what I envisioned ... working this hard all my life to end up in an ash heap because of a momentary lapse of judgment."
But Foley carried on the computer conversations for months, asking about masturbation, sex, and other details.
Shortly after his resignation, his attorney announced that Foley was gay and an alcoholic and had been molested by a priest as a teenage altar boy in Florida. Foley then checked himself into a treatment facility.
"I loved my early life, and then along comes a priest ... who forces me into a sexual relationship at the age of 12. And right shortly thereafter, I fail eighth grade, I start drugs, I start drinking, I start smoking," he said. "My entire life ... implodes."
He was elected to the U.S. House in 1994 as a popular hometown boy who kept busy in glitzy Palm Beach, Fla., attending lavish parties and fundraisers with the likes of Donald Trump, Jay Leno, and actress Bo Derek.
While his homosexuality was said to be the worst-kept secret on the Hill and around Palm Beach, he cloaked himself in a false public persona, appearing at events with beautiful women.
He drank a lot and spiraled into darkness.
"Those demons that were inside me, by not addressing them, caused me to spin out of control," he said.
He doesn't feel fully responsible for Democrats taking over the House in 2006, but owns up to his role and calls his behavior "profoundly regrettable."
"They had the Republicans on a number of ethical scandals and, you know, I served up for them the moral dilemma," he said.
A Republican won back Foley's congressional district last week after the Democrat who replaced him was caught in an adultery scandal. It's become known as "The Curse of the Mark Foley Seat."
"It's not what I had hoped would be my lasting legacy," he said, pausing to brush away tears.
So what does the man who once was such a popular figure in politics and high-society do now?
"I don't know. I don't know," he said. "I'm just going to take it a day at a time."

U.S. election : 6(McCain) of 8(Obama) key states

Democrat Barack Obama leads Republican John McCain in six of eight key battleground states one day before the U.S. election, including the big prizes of Florida and Ohio, according to a series of Reuters/Zogby polls released on Monday.
Obama holds a 7-point edge over McCain among likely U.S. voters in a separate Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby national tracking poll, up 1 percentage point from Sunday. The telephone poll has a margin of error of 2.9 percentage points.
Obama heads into Tuesday's voting in a comfortable position, with McCain struggling to overtake Obama's lead in every national opinion poll and to hold off his challenge in about a dozen states won by President George W. Bush in 2004.
The new state polls showed Obama with a 1-point lead in Missouri and 2-point lead in Florida, within the margin of error of 4.1 percentage points. But Obama also holds leads in Ohio, Virginia and Nevada -- all states won by Bush in 2004.
The five states where Obama is ahead have a combined 76 electoral votes. Along with states won by Democrat John Kerry in 2004, they would give Obama 328 electoral votes -- far more than the 270 needed to win the White House.
Obama also leads by 11 percentage points in Pennsylvania, which McCain has targeted as his best chance to steal a state won by Kerry in 2004.
McCain leads Obama by 5 points in Indiana and by 1 point in North Carolina -- both states won by Bush in 2004.
"Obama's lead is very steady. He could be looking at a big day on Tuesday," said pollster John Zogby. "These are all Republican states except Pennsylvania, and that does not look like it's going to turn for him."
In Florida, the biggest prize being fought over on Tuesday with 27 electoral votes, Obama leads McCain by 48 percent to 46 percent. The two were running dead even at 47 percent one week ago.
OBAMA LEADS IN OHIO
In Ohio, the state that decided the 2004 election with a narrow win for Bush, Obama has opened a 6-point edge. He also has a 6-point lead on McCain in Virginia and an 8-point advantage in fast-growing Nevada.
Obama leads McCain by a statistically insignificant 1 point, 47 percent to 46 percent, in Missouri. McCain has the same 1-point edge in traditionally Republican North Carolina.
McCain has a solid 5-point lead in Indiana, which has not supported a Democrat for president since 1964. Obama has worked to put Indiana in the Democratic column, and plans a visit there on Election Day to try to help turn out the vote.
In the national poll, Obama leads by 15 points among independents and by 13 points among women, two crucial voting blocs in Tuesday's election. He leads by 1 point among men and among all age groups except those between the ages of 55 and 69, who favor McCain by 1 point.
McCain leads among whites by 13 percentage points but is only attracting about 25 percent of Hispanics. In 2004, Bush won more than 40 percent of Hispanics.
Both independent Ralph Nader and Libertarian Bob Barr were at 1 percent in the survey, with about 2 percent of voters still undecided.
The rolling tracking poll, taken Thursday through Saturday, surveyed 1,205 likely voters in the presidential election. In a tracking poll, the most recent day's results are added, while the oldest day's results are dropped to monitor changing momentum.
The state surveys also were taken Thursday through Saturday with a sample in each state of between 600 and 605 likely voters. The margin of error in all eight states was 4.1 percentage points.

World News : Sarah Palin's Myth of America???

Sarah Palin has arrived in our midst with the force of a rocket-propelled grenade. She has boosted John McCain's candidacy and overwhelmed the presidential process in a way that no vice-presidential pick has since Thomas Eagleton did the precise opposite — sinking his sponsor, George McGovern, in 1972. Obviously, something beyond politics is happening here. We don't really know Palin as a politician yet, whether she is wise or foolhardy, substantive or empty. Our fascination with her — and it is a nonpartisan phenomenon — is driven by something more primal. The Palin surge illuminates the mythic power of the Republican Party's message since the advent of Ronald Reagan.

To start with the obvious, she's attractive. Her husband ("And two decades and five children later, he's still my guy...") is a hunk. They have a gorgeous family, made more touching and credible by the challenges their children face. Her voice is more distinctive than her looks: that flat, northern twang that screams, I'm just like you! Actually, the real message is: I'm just like you want to be, a brilliantly spectacular...average American. The Palins win elections and snowmobile races in a state that represents the last, lingering hint of that most basic Huckleberry Finn fantasy — lighting out for the territories. She quoted Westbrook Pegler, the F.D.R.-era conservative columnist, in her acceptance speech: "We grow good people in our small towns..." And then added, "I grew up with those people. They're the ones who do some of the hardest work in America, who grow our food and run our factories and fight our wars. They love their country in good times and bad, and they're always proud of America."

Except that's not really true. We haven't been a nation of small towns for nearly a century. It is the suburbanites and city dwellers who do the fighting and hourly-wage work now, and the corporations who grow our food. But Palin's embrace of small-town values is where her hold on the national imagination begins. She embodies the most basic American myth — Jefferson's yeoman farmer, the fantasia of rural righteousness — updated in a crucial way: now Mom works too. Palin's story stands with one foot squarely in the nostalgia for small-town America and the other in the new middle-class reality. She brings home the bacon, raises the kids — with a significant assist from Mr. Mom — hunts moose and looks great in the process. I can't imagine a more powerful, or current, American Dream.

Nearly 50 years ago, in The Burden of Southern History, the historian C. Vann Woodward argued that the South was profoundly different from the rest of America because it was the only part of the country that had lost a war: "Southern history, unlike American...includes not only an overwhelming military defeat but long decades of defeat in the provinces of economic, social and political life." Woodward believed that this heritage led Southerners to be more obsessed with the past than other Americans were — at its worst, in popular works like Gone With the Wind, there was a gagging nostalgia for a courtly antebellum South that never really existed.

During the past 50 years, the rest of the country has caught up to the South in the nostalgia department. We lost a war in Vietnam; Iraq hasn't gone so well either. And there are two other developments that have cut into the sense of American perfection. The middle class has begun to lose altitude — there isn't the certainty anymore that our children will live better than we do. More important, the patina of cultural homogeneity that camouflaged 1950s suburbia has vanished. We have become more obviously multiracial. There are lifestyle choices that were nearly unimaginable in 1960 — the widespread use of the birth control pill, the legalization of abortion, the feminist and gay-rights revolutions, the breakdown of the two-parent family. With the advent of television, these changes became inescapable. They intruded upon the most traditional families in the smallest towns. The political impact was a conservative reaction of enormous vehemence.

Enter Reagan. His vision of the future was the past. He offered the temporal pleasures of tax cuts and an unambiguous anticommunism, but his real tug was on the heartstrings — it was "Morning in America." The Republican Party of Wall Street faded before the power of nostalgia for Main Street...at least a Main Street that existed before America began losing wars, became ostentatiously sexy and casually interracial. In his presidential debate with Jimmy Carter, Reagan talked about an America that existed "when I was young and when this country didn't even know it had a racial problem." The blinding whiteness and fervent religiosity of the party he created are an enduring testament to the power of the myth of an America that existed before we had all these problems. The power of Sarah Palin is that she is the latest, freshest iteration of that myth.

The Republican Party's subliminal message seems stronger than ever this year because of the nature of the Democratic nominee for President. Barack Obama could not exist in the small-town America that Reagan fantasized. He's the product of what used to be called miscegenation, a scenario that may still be more terrifying than a teen daughter's pregnancy in many American households. Furthermore, he has thrived in the culture and economy that displaced Main Street America — an economy where people no longer work in factories or make things with their hands, but where lawyers and traders prosper unduly. (Of course, this is the economy the Republican Party has promoted — but facts are powerless in the face of a potent mythology.) Obama is the precise opposite of Mountain Man Todd Palin: an entirely urban creature. He lives within the hilarious conundrum of being both too "cosmopolitan" and intellectual for Republican tastes — at least as Rudy Giuliani described it — while also being the sort of fellow suspected of getting ahead by affirmative action.

The Democrats have no myth to counter this powerful Republican fantasy. They had to spend their convention on the biographical defensive: Barack Obama really is "one of us," speaker after speaker insisted. Really. Democrats do have the facts in their favor. Polls show that Americans agree with them on the issues. The Bush Administration has been a disaster on many fronts. The McCain campaign has provided only the sketchiest policy proposals; it has spent most of its time trying to divert the national conversation away from matters of substance. But Americans like stories more than issues. Policy proposals are useful in the theater of presidential politics only inasmuch as they illuminate character: far more people are aware of the fact that Palin put the state jet on eBay than know that she imposed a windfall-profits tax on oil companies as governor and was a porkaholic as mayor of Wasilla.

So Obama faces an uphill struggle between now and Nov. 4. He has no personal anecdotes to match Palin's mooseburgers. His story of a boy whose father came from Kenya and mother from Kansas takes place in an America not yet mythologized, a country that is struggling to be born — a multiracial country whose greatest cultural and economic strength is its diversity. It is the country where our children already live and that our parents will never really know, a country with a much greater potential for justice and creativity — and perhaps even prosperity — than the sepia-tinted version of Main Street America. But that vision is not sellable right now to a critical mass of Americans. They live in a place, not unlike C. Vann Woodward's South, where myths are more potent than the hope of getting past the dour realities they face each day.

World News : Sarah Palin's Myth of America???

World News : Mark Foley cought on Republican SXX Scandal ??

The Mark Foley scandal, which broke in late September 2006, centers on soliciting e-mails and sexually explicit instant messages sent by Mark Foley, a Republican Congressman from Florida, to teenaged boys who had formerly served as congressional pages.The scandal has grown to encompass the response of Republican congressional leaders to previous complaints about Foley's contacts with the pages and inconsistencies in the leaders' public statements.There are also allegations that a second Republican Congressman, Jim Kolbe, had improper conduct with at least two youths, a 16-year old page and a recently graduated page.

The scandal led to Foley's resignation from Congress on September 29, 2006. It is believed to have contributed to the Republican Party's loss of control over Congress in the November 7, 2006 election, as well as the end of House Speaker Dennis Hastert's leadership of the House Republicans. Kirk Fordham, chief of staff to Rep. Tom Reynolds and former chief of staff for Foley, also resigned as a result of the scandal.

The questionable conversations, which took place between 1995 and 2005, are under investigation by the FBI and Florida officials for possible criminal violations. The House Ethics Committee is investigating the response of the House Republican leadership and their staff to earlier warnings of Foley's conduct.In early October 2006, two news organizations quoted anonymous former pages saying they had sexual liaisons with Foley after turning 18 and 21.

Foley was chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, which introduced legislation targeting sexual predators and created stricter guidelines for tracking them.

Mark Foley, Republican Representative, Florida Sixteenth Congressional District. Resigned after trying to solicit sex from male congressional pages via an instant messenger program.

The conversations included his asking a sixteen-year-old “stud” whether his penis was erect and requesting that he take out and measure his penis. The cover-up involved Republican House Majority Leader John Boehner (how appropriate), Ohio Eighth Congressional District and Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert, Illinois Fourteenth District.

World News : Mark Foley cought on Republican SXX Scandal ??