Hi all. I guess I'm the new guy here. Stephen has graciously given me posting privileges and I'm hoping he won't yank them away too soon. I'll follow with something more substantial later, but I just wanted to jump on the Foley roundup for a second with a link Stephen hadn't gotten to yet--Bay Buchanan's appearance on CNN today.
Buchanan: I know one thing: that e-mail they call an "overly friendly e-mail" that had predator stamped all over it. No one in this country can suggest otherwise. You're in a leadership position. You have a colleague you know is at least a potential predator and we have the pages coming through his office every day? They had an obligation, that same day, to investigate him further, to call in the FBI, if that was an appropriate action and also to call in those pages and make certain every one of them was interviewed to see if there is any problems here that goes deeper than what they already knew. They failed the parents of this country is what they did.
REPORTER: Congressman Reynolds put out a statement on Saturday saying that he told you in the spring. Do you think he's lying?
HASTERT: No, I'm not saying. I just don't recall him telling me that. If he would have told me that, he would have told me that in the context of maybe a half a dozen or a dozen other things. I don't remember that.
REPORTER: Other allegations of improper e-mails?
HASTERT: No, just other things that might have affected campaigns.
Video of both available at the links via Think Progress.
"Any true love story, if told with the urgency and animal intelligence of love, isn't for the fainthearted. On every page of this profound, distilled work of art, Stephen Elliott wrestles with the unknown and unspoken essences of love, and articulates that unknown so beautifully, with such clear-eyed fearlessness... Imagine a glass of pure water with one drop of blood hanging in its center, about to dissolve... Then drink it and be transformed." -Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
"There's an emotional courage to these stories, and a sense of urgency, that are thrilling to encounter. Elliott writes as if his life depended on each sentence. It is not overstating the case to say that he does for the BDSM community in this book what Denis Johnson did for lost druggies in Jesus' Son." - Steve Almond, The Believer Magazine
Best of the year: Salon.com, San Francisco Chronicle
"Happy Baby is surely the most intelligent and beautiful book ever written about juvenile detention centers, sadomasochism, and drugs." - Curtis Sittenfeld, The New York Times Book Review
"Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Richard Ben Cramer: the great, all-American genre of the political campaign in extenso (and in extremis) has had its Homers and Boswells. To that list we can now add Stephen Elliott. Hilarious, strange, electrifyingly written, and heart-pumpingly idealistic, Looking Forward to It wins every literary caucus and primary in a landslide." -Tom Bissell, author of Chasing the Sea
"A Life Without Consequences was harrowing, hard as nails, brutal, and soaring. Stephen Elliott has to be watched, because he knows things almost no one else could." - Dave Eggers, author of A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius and What Is The What