“Flat Daddy”? My god, this belongs in The Onion, not The New York Times. On one level, I suppose I can see that it keeps an image in childrens’ minds… but on another level, it seems incredibly cruel. And if nothing else, it points out how badly troops are being kept fighting in a war beyond the tours of duty they signed up for. “Backdoor draft,” “stop-loss,” declining recruitment, and now “flat daddies,” for a war we never even should have entered. It’s sick.

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Meanwhile, Republican Jeanine Pirro, formerly the GOP’s best-and-brightest challenger to Hillary Clinton in the New York Senate race, is having… um, issues. After an inauspicious start, Pirro’s campaign floundered, and then she gave up against Hillary, and started to run for New York Attorney General. You know, the top “law enforcement” official in the state. Except now, she’s caught up in a little scandal: she believed her husband was cheating on her, so she attempted to abuse a little power, and get someone to illegally spy on him.

Unfortunately for Pirro, she chose Bernard Kerik, a Bush biggie who served as Interior Minister in Iraq and was nominated to head up U.S. Homeland Security, but was found to have been involved in various crimes, and eventually plead guilty to two misdemeanor charges. And his phone conversations were being recorded. Pirro is quoted as saying on the tapes, “What am I supposed to do, Bernie? Watch him f–k her every night? What am I supposed to do?… I can go on the boat, I’ll put the f—–g thing on myself.”

Now Pirro is playing the victim, claiming that the real criminal is the one who released the tapes, and is calling on Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to look into the matter. You can’t make this stuff up.

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But that’s not the big news. Straight out of Family-Values Republican-Land: A Republican congressman resigned after it was revealed that he’s a pedophile sexual predator–or at least sounds like one, having sent text messages to teenage male pages in the House. While he initially denied impropriety (the first revealed message could conceivably been simply a request for a page’s photo so the congressman could remember him better), claiming he was simply “overly friendly,” subsequent reports from other pages reveal messages including ones where he asks what they’re wearing, and then suggests disrobing them. There’s other sordid stuff, too.

Even worse, it seems that Republicans knew about this since about a year ago, when the initial page’s complaint was made. The congressman he worked for, Republican Rodney Alexander, says he told majority leader John Boehner, another Republican, as well as Thomas Reynolds, Republican chairman of the House Republican campaign organization. Then the House Page Board’s Republican member investigated Foley’s conduct with pages and the text message thing. A report was sent to Speaker Hastert’s office, but Hastert now claims he wasn’t informed. The Democratic member of the board was allegedly not informed of the matter.

So it’s looking more and more like a lot of Republican higher-ups knew about this, and covered it up. Hastert is promising an “investigation,” which will have to be closely monitored or it will simply be another cover-up. As it is, this quick “investigation” is likely the GOP’s best only way to set the issue aside before elections. Hopefully, the issue will be sufficiently juicy enough for the media to take it up.

Needless to say, it looks like the Democrats will pick up at least one seat over this….

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I sometimes wonder how some bloggers get their blogs listed in Google News. Take this site, titled “Stop the ACLU,” a far-right-wing smear site. It’s not just that they’re so political, it’s that they apparently revise their web site without public notice. I found this listing on Google News:

If you can’t read that, the headline is, “Mark Foley’s ‘Crime?’ Being a Gay Republican,” and the story snippet reads, “So right now, we know as fact that Mark Foley is not a pedophile, he has not broken any sexual consent laws nor has he violated any marriage vows….” The story was listed as new, and the URL tags it as 9/29/06. Interested in how they knew all this “as fact,” I went to their web site–and found that they had trashed the story, and replaced it with another one that didn’t directly address the bogus gay=pedophile issue, with no editor’s note about why the change was made. I’d love to see the entire original story, but can’t find a cached version of it anywhere.

If a site like that can get listed in Google News, then heck, maybe I should try to get listed. It would sure be a boon to visitor numbers…