Christopher Shays Quote Of The Day!

"I know the speaker didn't go over a bridge and leave a young person in the water. Dennis Hastert didn't kill anybody."

- Rep.-CT Shays comparing House Speaker Dennis Hastert's role dealing with the congressional page scandal to Ted Kennedy's role in a fatal 1969 car accident on Martha's Vineyard.

Oh Yeah: Harry Reid Stole Money; May Have Mob Ties

Geez, right after the national media tells you that corrupt politicians only exist in the GOP you find this out.

From WaPo:

WASHINGTON -- Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid is awaiting word from the Senate ethics committee on whether he failed to properly account for a business deal that allowed him to collect a $1.1 million windfall on land he hadn't personally owned for three years.

Reid sought the opinion after The Associated Press reported Wednesday that the senator didn't disclose to Congress that he first sold the land to a friend's company back in 2001 and took an ownership stake in the company. He didn't collect the seven-figure payout until the company sold the land again in 2004 to others.

Reid reported the 2004 transaction as a personal sale, never disclosing his earlier sale or the stake in the company.

The Nevada Democrat's deal was engineered by Jay Brown, a longtime friend and former casino lawyer whose name surfaced in a major political bribery trial this summer and in other prior organized crime investigations. Brown has never been charged with wrongdoing, except for a 1981 federal securities complaint that was settled out of court.

Ethics experts told AP that Reid's inaccurate accounting of the deal to Congress appeared to violate Senate ethics rules and raised other issues concerning taxes and potential gifts.

Of course, failure to report a $1.1 million-dollar windfall and possible ties with a mob guy can't be nearly as important as a sex scandal involving young pages, but we still shouldn't throw stones.

Others blogging on Reid: Flopping Aces, California Conservative, Badger Blogger

Liberal Exploitation Of Mark Foley Will Hurt Democrats

OK, so the hypocritical Democrats (i.e. liberals) want to use the Mark Foley "scandal" to bumrush their way into winning both the House and the Senate come November? Well, guess what: it ain't gonna' happen because the American voter isn't that stupid and as the 2004 election proved, most people don't base their votes on what the Michael Moore/MoveOn/Howard Dean/Kos-run Left thinks. Really, they don't.

Yet, liberals and the Leftist media are having a field day with the Foley scandal, apparently too dumb to notice that most people just don't care (indeed, a CBS/NYTimes poll found that 72 percent of voters said that the Foley scandal will make "no difference" in how they vote). But when you're too caught up in your hatred for Bush and anything associated with the GOP, who cares what the rest of the world thinks. Of course too, the hypocritical moonbats have conveniently forgotten about the sex scandals involving Gerry Studds, who was exonerated for doing the same thing Foley did back in the day, (Studds claimed it was "consensual", as most homosexual pedophiles like to say) and Mel Reynolds who was later pardoned by Bill Clinton as well as Barney Frank whose "punishment" was being re-elected 5 times after it was found that he ran a prostitution ring out of his house.

Disagree all you want with the GOP and its policies, but at least you know where the Republicans stand. Therefore, the idea that a party would need to exploit a sex scandal for its political gain while undermining the intelligence of the American voter shows you why we're losing and they're winning.

In a time which sees North Korea "testing" nuclear weapons, Pakistan cutting a deal with Al Qaeda, troops still fighting and dying in Iraq, ever-changing gas prices, school violence back in the spotlight, rising taxes and jihadists always making news, the idiot liberals and their brethren in the media want you to concentrate on Foley: a huge mistake for Democrats and a bonafide win for the GOP.

Oh Yeah: 810,000 More Jobs

Of course, because there's no such thing as liberal bias in the media, you're probably gettting your fill of gas prices being down, the economy doing well and the unemployment rate getting lower and lower as much as you're having Mark Foley being shoved down your throat.

From the New York Sun:

Columbus Day tends to generate nostalgia for frontier, and the time when the possibilities seemed open for all on the American landmass. Some news that came out last Friday however underscores the fact that America remains a frontier, at least as far as opportunity is concerned. That news was contained in the monthly employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The September jobs report at first seemed disappointing. Only 51,000 payroll jobs were created, compared to predictions of 120,000. Still, unemployment was down to 4.6% — a drop. And two surprises were in the report. The document also announced that an extra 62,000 jobs were created in the prior two months, bringing the total number of new payroll jobs to 113,000.

More important, tucked away on a back page, was the preliminary announcement that our economy had created 810,000 more payroll jobs over the period April 2005 to March 2006 than had been thought. This seemingly minor news contradicts the jobless recovery stories, shows why wages and compensation haven't been growing faster, and explains the some of the difference between the household and payroll employment surveys.

"How The Democrats Would Rule The Hill"

Interesting article in today's NYTimes:

IN the final weeks of this bruising campaign, the debate, in many ways, comes down to this: What would happen if the Democrats win?

Republicans
warn, ever more urgently, that a Democratic takeover of Congress would mean wrenching ideological change: higher taxes; big new spending; maybe even impeachment. Democrats insist they have no intention of an abrupt lurch to the left, offering instead a relatively modest agenda and the less-than-revolutionary rallying cry of “more oversight!”

In fact, a Democratic majority in the House or the Senate — or both — would immediately change Washington in fundamental ways after four years of one-party Republican rule. That majority seemed less theoretical last week as Republican woes, most recently the scandal over Mark Foley and Congressional pages, added up. Even so, it would operate under some formidable constraints, political and institutional.

A Democratic Congress would have sweeping new powers to set the agenda and focus the political debate — through the hearings it calls, the witnesses it summons and the kind of legislation it brings to the floor. “More oversight” could be more revolutionary than it sounds, with the rise of lawmakers like Representative Henry A. Waxman, the hard-charging California Democrat who would take over the House Government Reform Committee; in an interview, he promised a review into “waste, fraud and abuse of taxpayers’ money” related to Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and homeland security.

A Democratic majority in the Senate could also stymie, or at least slow, the conservative reconstruction of the Supreme Court, assuming another vacancy occurs in the next two years, and force President Bush to seek more bipartisanship on all judicial nominees.

This is nothing but fantasizing on the part of the NYTimes. First of all, even if the Democrats were somehow able to win both the House and Senate it would only be with a slight majority, which would make any sort of vote for impeachment look mighty weak and mighty liberal. Secondly, I just dont believe that the Foley scandal will have that much of an impact on voters because we're not talking about a Presidential election here and it's the Left that's trying to push Foley down the throats of voters more concerned about what's going on with more important matters such as Iraq, illegal immigration and gas prices than a pervert from Florida who's already resigned. Lastly, the idea that a Democratic majority would cut down on spending is just ludicrous when you consider that the only cuts in spending during the Clinton administration was on farm subsidies, defense and welfare.

Once again, the Times just doesn't get it.