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lol. I meant could you please explain more about TN politics. This is in regard to your post about Ford/Corker.
Hey, I asked first. Still waiting for my PM back. :)
You seem to know more about TN politics. Please, explain.
More info on Corker. Not good to have this kind of news close to the election. Must be another conspiracy, like the Foley one.
==========================================
Corker saw to interests in 'blind' trust, records show
Shared tips, met with firms' employees while in office
By Marc Perrusquia
Contact
October 11, 2006
A blind trust set up to shield businessman Bob Corker from conflicts when he was Chattanooga's mayor may not have been all that blind, record show.
Corker met often with employees from his private companies while mayor from 2001 to 2005, and he shared business tips with others. Corker also got help organizing his 2001 mayoral campaign from City Hall, where a government secretary passed on voting lists and set up meetings for the millionaire commercial real estate developer.
These details appear among thousands of Chattanooga city e-mails documenting Corker's tenure as mayor. City officials reported this summer that Corker's e-mails had disappeared, yet many of his electronic notes survived in e-mail files of his executive assistant, Shirley Pond.
Asked about those e-mails, obtained by The Commercial Appeal, Corker said he's convinced his blind trust "worked very well.' Yet to avoid any appearance of conflict if elected to the Senate, Corker said he's since sold most of his business holdings, including office buildings that leased to federal agencies.
"All I have now is two pieces of property (and) my home. ... I've got a pickup truck and the personal vehicles that our family has,' Corker said. "I want for people to know: I've read about all these conflicts at the national level, and have bent over backwards.'
A spokesman for a public watchdog agency said some aspects of Corker's blind trust while mayor seem dubious.
"Blind trusts are often created so that there's a perception of no conflicts of interest,' said Alex Knott, political editor at The Center For Public Integrity, a nonprofit that promotes ethics in government and has studied blind trusts in Congress.
"But in actuality there's always the potential still there.'
Corker's business dealings have come under scrutiny during a tight, heated race with Democrat Harold Ford Jr. to replace retiring Sen. Bill Frist. Corker, with an estimated $35 million net worth, has drawn criticism for not releasing income tax schedules that detail sources of income, partnerships, and other business dealings.
Questions about Corker's business dealings heightened amid hearings on a lawsuit filed over a city road built through a nature preserve in 2003 when he was mayor. Days after Corker's administration signed off on the road, his private company sold adjacent land for $4.6 million for construction of a Wal-Mart Supercenter.
Corker's Senate campaign has said he acted responsibly while mayor, and was shielded from knowledge of his personal affairs by a blind trust.
Records from his mayoral secretary's e-mail files, however, show Corker met frequently with some officials of his private company, the Corker Group.
Among them was James M. Haley, an attorney and Corker Group officer who became the firm's CEO in August 2002. Haley exchanged e-mails with mayoral secretary Pond in 2002 and 2003, when the Wal-Mart issue began roiling, though none mention the controversy.
"He did a ton of work for the city,' Corker said, recalling that Haley handled legal work for a city redevelopment effort called Enterprise South. Indeed, some e-mails mention that initiative. Others refer to a crime strategy and a city telecommunications initiative. One invites Haley to a Corker birthday party.
Another frequent correspondent was Corker Group officer Lynda Childress, who handled Corker's personal finances. Paying bills and balancing credit card reports, she wrote in an unexplained August 2003 note: "Bob, You received a check in the mail today from (insurance firm) Unum Provident for $152,078.59. Would you like me to deposit this into your personal account or give it to the company?'
Corker said he saw no conflict maintaining contact with Haley or Childress.
Public Integrity's Knott took a different view. For one, there's no way to know what all was said in their meetings, he said.
"Being a representative of this company and meeting with government officials basically makes him a lobbyist,' Knott said of Haley. And if the Corker Group provided Childress as Corker's personal secretary, that's "going to make him somewhat indentured to the company. ... He may want to repay that generosity in the form of legislation or city action.'
Haley and Childress did not immediately respond to messages left Tuesday at their Chattanooga offices.
E-mails also show:
Former Corker executive Michael Compton, who became the mayor's chief of staff, passed on details about Corker's privately held stock, and wrote in a November 2001 e-mail that he had to attend "the Corker Group leasing meeting.'
Mayoral assistant Shirley Pond, who also served under previous mayor Jon Kinsey, used her city e-mail to pass Bush voter lists to Corker as he prepared to run for mayor in 2000 and to set up meetings with "the right people.'
Copyright 2006, commercialappeal.com - Memphis, TN. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.commercialappeal.com/mca/politics/article/0,1426,MCA_1496_5057186,00.html
Susie, you should be a ballot proofreader....
Typo will cost Michigan county $40K
Ottawa County will pay about $40,000 to correct an embarrassing typo on its Nov. 7 election ballot: The "L" was left out of "public."
A total of 170,000 ballots will have to be reprinted.
The mistake appeared in the text of a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would ban some types of affirmative action.
The word "public" was misspelled one of the six times it appears, county Clerk Daniel C. Krueger said Tuesday. Five or six people in his office had proofread the ballot, but it was an election clerk who found the mistake early last week.
"It's just one of those words," Krueger said. "Even after we told people it was in there, they still read over it."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061010/ap_on_el_st_lo/ballot_typo;
_ylt=AlwaN2VYDG1voFZMuJYOe.ntiBIF;_yl...
...I still see a dark cloud hanging over QCOM on this and I will bale if I get my double bucker...
Shirley you saw this coming...
Damn, my ignorance stalks me.
Edit: palindrome grub
Let's see. You made that bigoted post on 3 boards, and got one positive response from another apparent bigot. Most have moved on. Old habits die hard, eh? JMO, of course.
I guess those days are gone ...
They are, but some people haven't figured it out yet.
It's more than "in your face U.S."--also China, South Korea, Japan. Not good.
Breaking News: Unconfirmed report from BBC that North Korea exploded nuclear device. Stock futures dropping just now.
Stephanie, this board is for us (iHubbers) to be able to laugh at ourselves. That's why posters aren't identified. However, often enough, the guilty do admit the error of their ways.
I hope that answers your question. If not, too bad. And don't even think about using the iHub search engine.
It is you who should be ashamed of himself for thinking you can stifle opinion in favour of your own personal gain, especially when you are entrusted to do just the opposite: foment fair discussion.
From the iHub Moderator's Handbook: "Active posting on your board is the Moderator's responsibility. If posting drops it is your duty to foment fair discussion."
Is it not more of a crime to help someone be dependent then to ignore depenence?
I'm for ignoring the penance.
...I can't fathom another few years of having to pay the pauper for the welfare society...
Freudian slip?
...that men need to look far beyond themselves and reach for the pubic good...
How's that an oops? Isn't that what guys do?
(Nice catch Susie.)
Oh, planting, not "sowing". Sorry. <g>
Let them say no - to drugs and sex (before marriage)...
Everybody should abstain from drugs before marriage -- that's
when you really need them.
Being in government should be like planting seeds for the future...
This wasn't about Foley, was it?
Now his attorney claims..."we were unfamiliar with that provision in the Senate Ethics manual".
An attorney claiming 'ignorance of the law' IS an excuse?? Now THAT is funny.
I need to find the "Don't drink and post" one.
See new iBox.
Re Foleygate -- good article on handling political scandals...
================
There is a way to get out of the mess
Tell the truth, and don't wait, strategists say
By Julie Hirschfeld Davis
Sun Reporter
October 8, 2006
WASHINGTON -- Republican congressional leaders and President Bush, trying to keep a sex-chat scandal from becoming a lethal election year battering, have turned to a well-worn playbook of damage-control techniques that strategists say could determine whether their party can keep its hold on Congress.
The strategies for coping with the Mark Foley affair are familiar to any politician or corporate chieftain faced with scandal: Say you're sorry. Pledge to do better. Blame your opponents. Distance yourself from the transgression. Change the subject.
But some insiders believe that Republicans may ultimately have to resort to the most drastic maneuver: offering up one or more sacrificial lambs, including House Speaker Dennis Hastert. Even then, analysts said, the moves may not avert disaster on Election Day.
"In a crisis of this magnitude, you have got to put the brakes on it immediately. There was only one way to deal with this, which was to immediately come out with all the facts at hand, apologize for having missed the signs initially, and discuss exactly what you've done to rectify the situation," said Mark Corallo, a Republican communications specialist. "Outside of that, you let it spin out of control and you become the one reacting to each new revelation."
Corallo and other strategists spoke before the latest such development, reported in today's Los Angeles Times, that a former page said that Foley had sex with him and ogled underage pages. The report complicated an already difficult damage-control challenge.
Public opinion surveys suggest that people are paying attention to the Foley matter, with 47 percent of respondents to an Associated Press/Ipsos Public Affairs poll saying that recent disclosures of scandal and corruption would be "very" or "extremely" important to their votes on Nov. 7. Fewer than one-fifth of voters said they would not play any role.
Republicans, including Bush, have rallied behind Hastert. The hope is that by displaying unity and calling for an investigation they can improve their party's standing and interrupt a steady stream of bad news.
They are also going on the offensive in an attempt to stoke enthusiasm among their disillusioned conservative base, by accusing Democrats and the news media of having known about Foley's misdeeds and waiting until the most damaging time on the electoral calendar to expose them.
Hastert charged ABC News, which broke the Foley story, and Democratic operatives funded by George Soros with "feeding this monster."
Republicans "believe that Denny is in a position right now to fix this and to take responsibility, and that's the most important thing, [not] just basically giving into what is an immediate goal of some people, which is to raise a scalp," said one Republican leadership aide who would discuss the strategy only on condition of anonymity.
Hastert defended himself at a news conference Thursday in his Batavia, Ill., district in which he apologized -- a move that some Republican strategists said was long overdue -- but also said he did not see himself as a liability to his party.
"I'm deeply sorry that this has happened," Hastert said, quoting President Harry S. Truman's famous "buck-stops-here" line and pledging to investigate. He later added, "I haven't done anything wrong, obviously."
The details of the scandal are murky, but even some Republican strategists suggest privately that Hastert either knew of or should have discovered Foley's improper interest in young pages after the parents of one page showed lawmakers a chummy e-mail from Foley last summer and asked that the congressman stop contacting their son.
"Could we have done it better?" Hastert said Thursday. "In retrospect, probably yes."
"It's starting to be too-little, too-late, but at least they're doing something. Up to now, they have broken every rule in every rulebook of a crisis manager," said Democratic lawyer Lanny J. Davis, who ministered to President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky imbroglio and wrote a scandal-management book, Truth to Tell: Tell It Early, Tell It All, Tell It Yourself .
Hastert "started out by denying, and then he went to blaming," added Davis, calling his actions "the same mistakes" that most politicians facing scandals make. "Unfortunately, they don't learn from past history that the only way to get past a crisis is to go transparent."
Republican leaders appear to have ripped pages from Clinton's scandal-control playbook, said Leon E. Panetta, a chief of staff in Clinton's White House, calling the current strategy "the hang-tough option" -- taking some responsibility while working feverishly to change the subject.
"You're basically kind of rolling the dice and hoping that you can whistle past the graveyard," Panetta said. "That was basically [Clinton's] approach to most issues like this: to hang tough, to divert attention, to compartmentalize."
Republicans are also relying heavily on another tactic that proved useful to Clinton: attack your attackers to generate support. Democratic Sen. Hilary Rodham Clinton of New York, then the first lady, made the strategy famous when she declared bitterly that her husband was the victim of a "vast right-wing conspiracy."
"At the same time that they're hanging tough, they're also saying that the real culprit is the partisan attacks by the Democrats," Panetta said. "It's an obvious effort to repair the damage to the Republican base."
Bush's message on terrorism, the economy and education has been drowned out by the Foley affair. He launched his own strategy, distancing himself from the scandal while working to limit its reverberations.
The president denounced Foley's actions and said he backed Hastert's calls for a probe, then dispatched his aides to tell reporters that the burden was on the House -- not the White House -- to figure out how to proceed. After Hastert's apology, Bush phoned the speaker to thank him for "making a clear public statement, taking responsibility, and telling the American people that the House Republican leadership is accountable to the voters," said Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman.
Bush's actions stood in stark contrast to his damage-control efforts during a 2002 scandal, when he kept quiet for a week about Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott's racially tinged remarks, then rebuked Lott publicly while privately working to oust him from the Senate leader's post.
White House press secretary Tony Snow, who initially called the inappropriate notes and lurid instant messages from Foley to an teenage page "naughty e-mails," later conceded that his remarks had been "glib." But Snow worked to insulate Republicans from the crisis, saying, "I don't think you should hold every member of Congress responsible for what happened in the case of Mark Foley," and then tried to change the subject.
"Come Election Day, the question is whether people are going to be voting on the basis of disgusting [instant messages] between a grown man and a young man, or something that's probably more important to everybody, which is safety, security and prosperity," Snow said.
Some in the party have been frustrated by the handling of the situation, especially candidates in tough re-election fights.
"One of the things I learned in politics a long time ago is, if you did something or said something stupid, you step up and just admit to it," Sen. Rick Santorum, a Pennsylvania Republican who is trailing in recent polls, told talk-show host Don Imus on MSNBC. "This idea that you can hide this stuff and that people aren't going to come clean eventually has proven time and time again not to be the case. So let's just stop the water torture and just come clean."
Strategists for both parties said that despite the historical evidence that an early, full-throated "mea culpa" is the best course, politicians seldom act on it.
"I'm always a little amazed that the lessons in [Washington, D.C.] never get learned. Every time these things occur, it's like they have to re-create the wheel," Panetta said. "The instinct for survival is so much stronger than the instinct to come clean."
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/bal-te.damage08oct08,0,7480551.story?coll=bal-nationwor...
The "profit" is political advantage, something that can be done with a not-for-profit government owned oil company.
The better question might be why we cannot help our own poor and needy to make this a political non-issue.
...I'm not bulling anyone.
"Got a wye?" he wily, wryly asked.
(Well, you said you were looking to waste a few minutes on a Saturday afternoon. <g>)
Butt, that's the humer in this bored.
I do apologize vehomently.
OT:
Two boll weevils grew up in South Carolina. One went to
Hollywood and became a famous actor. The other stayed behind in the
cotton fields and never amounted to much. The second one, naturally,
became known as the lesser of two weevils.
Correct. Ask Paulie for it.
...who cares?
Sorry. I thought you were concerned about politicians abusing their position of power and trust, especially when it comes to minors entrusted to their care, that you had something in mind when making your post, and that you might have expected a response to it. Why else make it?
As to: The Democrates can't win on the issues so they are pushing this and it's going to blow up in there faces!
Refresh my memory, but could one have not said the same thing about a President having an affair with a consenting adult?
Hey, Clinton shouldn't have had a BJ, and Foley shouldn't be soliciting minors, especially those he and his superiors are entrusted with. There's never a good time for the shit to hit the fan, and BOTH parties will exploit this to the extent they can. In fact, BOTH are, in their own ways. Don't be blindsided by that fact.
My point is your "factual" unattributed statement:
It was a prank on the part of the page. The page baited Foley and he fell for it.
Now it's not one page, it's a number of them, and they are just starting to come out of the woodwork.
Sure, Foley is sleaze, but so's whoever put out that prank story, unless it turns out to be true, of course.
Was your source Drudge?
And beyond the sleaze, I take it you are for making ALL responsible parties accountable for their action or inaction? BTW, it is FAR from over -- actually hasn't even started yet.
You're an erudite poster and I figured you'd remember it. Might come in handy for a limerick. For myself, I can hardly spell pede-a-fill-i-a.
rollingrock, this is turning out to be one helluva prank......
More pages recount 'sexual approaches' by Foley over Internet
Email this story | Print By AMIE PARNES
parnesa@shns.com
October 6, 2006
WASHINGTON — The list of accusers keeps growing longer.
Four more former congressional pages brought forward their own lurid accounts of their dealings with former Rep. Mark Foley on Thursday, less than a week after the congressman resigned from office.
Three pages — who served in the classes of 1998, 2000 and 2002 — recounted Foley's "sexual approaches" over the Internet, ABC News reported Thursday evening.
"I was seventeen years old and just returned to (my home state) when Foley began to e-mail me, asking if I had ever seen my page roommates naked ..." said one 2002 page, who did not want to be identified.
The former page said Foley had invited him to stay at his home near Capitol Hill if he would have sex with the congressman.
The page said he had been interviewed by the FBI.
Another former page revealed that Foley had visited the page dorms and asked pages if he could give them rides to events in his BMW.
But the solicitation reportedly didn't stop there. The page, part of the 2000 class, said Foley kept in touch with him with a steady stream of e-mails and arranged a sexual liaison after the page turned 18.
"His e-mails developed into sexually explicit conversations ..." the page said.
A third page, who was part of the 1998 class, said he began receiving instant messages from Foley when he was still a senior in high school.
"Foley would say he was sitting in his boxers and ask what I was wearing," the page said. "It became more weird, and I stopped responding."
In Atlanta, former page Tyson Vivyan, 26, said Foley sent him sexually suggestive messages a month or two after he left the page program in 1997.
"It was almost surreal," Vivyan said. "Not only was I conversing with a congressman in a personal manner, I was conversing in a sexual manner."
Many former pages say they knew about Foley's engaging, overly friendly personality.
"It was kind of known that he flirted with some of the male pages," said Jason Davis, who served as a page in 2000. "We joked about it but it was always on a low key."
Davis, 22, a recent West Point graduate, said Foley was an "extremely nice man," who was never light on flattery, often complimenting pages on their appearances.
The former page said he used to joke with one of his fellow classmates in particular.
"We used to tell him that Mark Foley was hitting on him," he said.
Brian Dugan of Scripps Howard Foundation Wire and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
http://www1.tcpalm.com/tcp/local_news/article/0,2545,TCP_16736_5045831,00.html
IBD and a dart would work well for you.
...one of the mods is an idiot from another board, but as a mod, he shouldn't carry it to this board.
This is true. Idiocy should not be carried from board to board. But isn't that the way of iHub?
You talking about the Foley thing? <g>
what a maroon!
Self-reporting is one thing, but calling yourself a
name on this board is a real OOPS. You a Gemini?
Matt Im ready to get out of Jail. Phycologically this is indimadating...
Yup, that's jailhouse dating.
Word of the Day (from Oxford English Dictionary)
EPHEBOPHILE
An adult (esp. a homosexual) who is sexually attracted to adolescents. Cf. EPHEBOPHILIA n.
1964 J. Z. EGLINTON Greek Love Gloss. 481 Ephebophile, noting sexual preference for adolescents. 1977 D. J. WEST Homosexuality Re-examined viii. 211 The great majority [sc. of male homosexuals] prefer physically mature adults, a minority of ephebophiles prefer post-pubertal adolescents aged about twelve to sixteen, while still a smaller minority of paedophiles prefer sexually immature children under the age of eleven. 2002
Liquids with sugar, like coffee and soda, are the worst, especially when somebody else spills it the day before and doesn't tell you. <g>