Foley follies: Friday all-purpose thread; Update: Side-by-side PDF e-mail comparison added!

posted at 12:45 am on October 6, 2006 by Allahpundit
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On behalf of myself and the Hot Air readership, I open this thread by calling upon Speaker Hastert to resign immediately and spare us from having to devote yet another day of coverage to this clammy, tedious crap.

Do the right thing, Denny.

Alas, it sounds like he’s dug in. Dan Riehl thinks it’s the right move, but if this is our silver lining, we’re in more trouble than I thought:

If the Majority Watch polls are predictive, the Democrats are on track to win a majority with a margin of between 2 and 4 seats. But what a flimsy majority it would be, one in which at least half their margin of victory comes from seats that can be expected to easily fall back into Republican hands in the next cycle.

Plenty of updates ahead, no doubt. Exit question quotation: “One law enforcement official — speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation — also told The Washington Post the FBI believed that CREW may have received the e-mails as early as April and that the group refused to tell the FBI how they were obtained.”

Update: Weaponized!

Update: I’m not really calling on Hastert to resign. (I think.) I’m calling on anyone capable of granting us a reprieve from this tiresome story to do what’s necessary to make that happen. Just a few days of material that isn’t torn from the pages of NAMBLA Weekly. Is that too much to ask?

Perhaps it is.

Update: Gallup surveys the scene in six close Senate races. At the moment, it’s a bloodbath.

Update: Nancy promises to “drain the swamp” in her first 100 hours as Speaker:

Day One: Put new rules in place to “break the link between lobbyists and legislation.”

Day Two: Enact all the recommendations made by the commission that investigated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Time remaining until 100 hours: Raise the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour, maybe in one step. Cut the interest rate on student loans in half. Allow the government to negotiate directly with the pharmaceutical companies for lower drug prices for Medicare patients.

Broaden the types of stem cell research allowed with federal funds — “I hope with a veto-proof majority,” she added in an Associated Press interview Thursday.

All the days after that: “Pay as you go,” meaning no increasing the deficit, whether the issue is middle class tax relief, health care or some other priority.

Update: Remember how David Corn suggested that the list of closeted gay Republicans was being circulated by, um, Republicans? Well, he’s not suggesting that anymore. Surprise.

He also claims that the list has been sent to socially conservative groups for the express purpose of instigating a “GOP civil war.”

Update: A.J. Strata wonders why the PDFs of Foley’s e-mails that were posted by CREW have a printout date at the bottom from October of last year. The fax date at the top suggests CREW received them in May 2006 (two months before they tipped the FBI, please note). For whom were those e-mails originally printed seven months earlier?

Update: Tom Reynolds was cruising towards re-election a few weeks ago. And now?

Update: Kurtz is disgusted with Corn and his list: “Excuse me while I grab some Maalox. Will there also be a list of heterosexuals who violate their family-values rhetoric by fooling around on the side? How far can this craziness go?”

Update: Charles joins my call for a reprieve from Foleygate but resigns himself to suffering. Elsewhere, James Dobson condemns Mark Foley — and the media, for trying suppress the conservative vote. Too late, says CREW: they want a list from the Secret Service of every last prominent Christian to have visited the White House. Meanwhile, Al Kamen of WaPo spots a schism between “hard-line anti-pedophiles” and “moderate anti-pedophiles” like George Bush and Dick Cheney.

Update: Tangential but related — WaPo editor Len Downie says all his reporters want to be bloggers now in part because of the, er, “unlimited newshole.”

Update: ALF says he knows plenty of people in Christian conservative movement, and if the left thinks they’re going to throw outed gay conservatives under the bus, they’re kidding themselves.

Of course, then the left will claim that that was their intention all along — forcing the Christian right to openly embrace the gays in their midst. David Corn, you see, is all about the healing.

Update: NJ GOP Senate candidate Tom Kean Jr. calls on Hastert to resign. Just like he did with Rumsfeld last month.

Update: On the offensive: GOP House members have asked the Ethics Committee to subpoena Pelosi and Rahm Emanuel, too.

Update: The attorney for the page whose identity was revealed by the “conservative outing mob” calls Drudge’s report of two days ago “a piece of fiction.” Quote: “There is not any aspect of this matter that is a practical joke nor should anyone treat it that way.”

Update: It’s 5 p.m. on the east coast. Looks like Hastert held on, for this week at least. The big board reads: 103!

Update: ABC has posted the PDF of an e-mail sent by the original page in all this — the one Foley asked for a picture — to Danielle Savoy, a member of Rodney Alexander’s staff, in August 2005. (The page had worked for Alexander.) Savoy failed to act at the time. Note the printout date at the bottom, though: October 17, 2005. The same date as the printouts of other e-mail exchanges that were posted by CREW. Clearly ABC and CREW are getting these from the source. Who was it? And why did they print all this stuff out last October?

Update: Drudge has a teaser up saying that the lawyer for the outed page isn’t absolutely sure that it wasn’t a prank. He’s “not ruling it in or out.” The lawyer’s supposed to be on CNN sometime soon. I’ll have video, probably.

Update: A.J. Strata’s been doing some document comparison. His post is important but it’s not easy to follow him without seeing the two copies side by side so I made this up in Photoshop for easy reference. Click for full size.

Looking at the first email heading (supposedly from the LA Page to the House Staffer) the redactions are not identical. The “from” line in the ABC News email is clearly there and being redacted by ABC News. But the fact both CREW and ABC News have the same redactions for the rest of the header means those redactions are much earlier and from the common source (either that or ABC News shared its version with CREW, which then added more redactions).

This is interesting because the next email heading we see is the one from Foley to the page. ABC News is trying to blot out the AOL domain name, but both versions use different redactions for the Page’s ‘from’ field. This means both CREW and ABC News knew who the potential victim was! And did they pass that onto to the FBI? Did CREW give the copies to the FBI they have on their site with the Page’s details blacked out? We shall see.

Remember this post? The discrepancies in the e-mails there were between e-mails posted by CREW and StopSexPredators.com. The fact that ABC’s version matches CREW’s exactly would mean that SSP’s are the anomalous ones, no? Which would in turn, as Strata says, mean that SSP’s are fakes.

Blowback

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