Posts from — October 2006

I’ve seen a number of people complain that the word, pedophile, should not be used to describe Mark Foley because the victim was a teenager, and not a pre-pubescent child, the use of the term in the social sciences and psychology.

Update: thanks to the Pensacola Beach Blog we have located the correct term: Ephebophilia.

It might surprise people, but the penal [criminal] law generally breaks the population down to two groups, adult or child, and the age of differentiation is 18. The age of consent is almost always limited to the definition of a specific crime, statutory rape, and not a determining factor in other crimes where the 18 year-old standard is used.

From the stand point of this former member of law enforcement, when one party is legally defined as a child, if you divided the other party’s age by the child’s age and come up with a number greater than 3, you have a pedophile ephebophile. An age difference of more than 4 years is sick, and a ratio between 2 and 3 is perverted, but when you get to three: it’s pedophilia ephebophilia. Foley could be that kid’s grandfather!

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The average American worker has 50 5-day workweeks, 250 workdays a year. This latest session of Congress didn’t even make it into triple digits. It spite of this, the American people would have been better off if they had spent even less time in Washington.

As Steve notes, before the media switched to 24/7 coverage of political pedophilia, there were new laws being passed that were blatantly unconstitutional.

The Bill of Rights had already been abridged by USA PATRIOT Act 2.0, with its requirements that people provide records to the government in secret based solely on the discretion of the Justice Department and other outrages.

Before leaving the House found time to pass the Public Expression of Religion Act, which basically says that if a government decides to promote religion, anyone who sues to stop the practice cannot be awarded attorney’s fees when they win. So much for the prohibition against the government establishing a religion.

Finally there was the passage of the Military Commissions Act, which does its very best to emulate the government practices of Josef Stalin, with the minor difference that Stalin never pretended that what he was doing was legal, only that it was “necessary”.

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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.

As has become the custom in recent years we have the al Qaeda pre-election tape:

Calling President Bush “the murderer and spiller of Muslim blood,” al Qaeda’s top deputy released a videotape Friday accusing the U.S. president of being a “deceitful charlatan” who has lied to the American people.

Ayman al-Zawahiri also blasts the Bush administration for holding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, an alleged 9/11 conspirator, in a secret prison and alleging that Mohammed gave interrogators “valuable information which has helped the crusaders to kill and arrest a number of al Qaeda.”

“I ask this lying failure, who are the leaders of al Qaeda whose killing or capture was facilitated by the information extracted from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?” al-Zawahiri asks. “Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, may Allah free him, has hurt you thousands of times more than you have hurt him.”

I’m beginning to suspect that al Qaeda does this to help the Shrubbery with elections. They have been extremely consistent in issuing these tapes, and have to know that they generally benefit the Republicans.

No, I’m not suggesting there is a link between al Qaeda and Karl Rove. I’m merely commenting on this biennial custom.

CNN this morning:GOP leaders assail Foley amid Democratic criticism¹:

House Republican leaders mounted an effort to explain their own conduct after the resignation of Rep. Mark Foley, and they suggested there should be a criminal investigation of Foley’s contacts with congressional pages.

A strongly worded statement assailing Foley from the chamber’s top three Republicans came as they addressed questions about what they knew of the incidents and what action they took.

Calling Foley’s contacts “an obscene breach of trust,” the congressmen said in their statement that his “immediate resignation must now be followed by the full weight of the criminal justice system.”

“The improper communications between Congressman Mark Foley and former House congressional pages is unacceptable and abhorrent,” read the statement issued by Majority Leader John Boehner of Ohio, House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois and Majority Whip Roy Blunt of Missouri.

Foley, a Republican from Florida, resigned Friday after his alleged e-mail exchanges with a teenage male page were made public, and the House voted to launch an investigation. Foley apologized to his family and his constituents.

Note to CNN: it isn’t “alleged” when the bloody e-mails have been published all over the world.

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Florida License Plates

Beneficiary

A weekend feature of Why Now.