There have been times when I thought my former Congresscritter, Joe Scarborough, was overcoming his KoolAid habit, but he manages to fall off the wagon.

He has guts enough to identify Mark Foley as a friend he met as part of the “class of 1994” in the big win for Newt, and that he knew that Foley was gay, but didn’t out him or cut him off.

He also admits he was one of the people who talked Foley out of running for Senator in 2004 because of the gay issue. Bob Graham retired and Florida had an open Senate seat that year. Karl Rove felt a Republican primary involving several sitting Congresscritters would be risky, especially if Cruella de Harris was involved in a statewide race, when the Shrubbery was running for re-election, and it would open up a number of safe House seats. So a combination of threats and promises was used to bring Mel Martinez back to the state from Washington without Republican challenge.

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Lisa at All Hat and No Cattle has the picture at the bottom of today’s edition.

It’s Ramadan, a month of fasting, and this evil person creates a mosque from more than 550 pounds of chocolate! People will be looking at it for weeks! That is totally inhumane!

I think Echidne should be sent to investigate.

Blogger has major problems with a crew of spammers. Blogger tech support is involved in Whack-a-mole with them, stamping out one nest only to have another pop up.

Things are slow and there may be outages, so save your posts locally before trying to publish.

I have seen a host of otherwise intelligent people, including some who have passed the bar, making a very basic error in the Foley case. They have talked about the age of the pages as being the determining factor as to whether the law was broken, and that is not true. The age of the pages determines what law was broken, because if the individual Foley had been sending those messages to had been 26 instead of 16, with all other factors being the same, it was still illegal.

Glenn Greenwald mentioned the age of consent in the District of Columbia is 16, and then opines that if Foley had had sex with the page it would have been legal, while sending the e-mails was illegal. If the page had given his consent to either the sex or the e-mails, it would have been legal and this wouldn’t be spread all over the media. The page didn’t consent. That is the heart of the issue, the lack of consent.

In the 1983 Page scandal, both pages consented and the Congressmen were reprimanded, but there were no criminal cases because of the consensual nature of the acts.

In this case the age of the victim determines the specific law broken, as occurs in other criminal acts, not whether the law was broken. The age of consent means exactly, and only that, the age at which meaningful consent can be given. The law generally says that no one under the age of 16 can give meaningful consent.

You have sex with a 16-year-old you are not going to be charged with statutory rape, but if they didn’t consent you are still going to be charged with rape.