Republican Congressman Chris Shays (CT) is scrambling, trying to backtrack from his comments at a debate this week in which he said the Abu Ghraib scandal didn't involve torture.

"Now I've seen what happened in Abu Ghraib, and Abu Ghraib was not torture," Shays said at a debate Wednesday. "It was outrageous, outrageous involvement of National Guard troops from (Maryland) who were involved in a sex ring and they took pictures of soldiers who were naked," added Shays. "And they did other things that were just outrageous. But it wasn't torture."

Today he told the Associated Press he didn't mean sexual abuse was not torture. Yet, he still maintains what happened at Abu Graib was the result of a sex ring of a National Guard unit run amok. He says the scandal was more about pornography than torture.

That dog won't hunt. Staging a mock execution as Ivan Frederick did is not sex abuse. It's torture, plain and simple. Frederick also admitted to stomping on prisoners' hands and feet and punching them in the chest.

Uh-oh. The Feds are investigating Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) for allegations of inappropiate conduct with pages on a camping trip he took ten years ago.

A spokesman for the Justice Department in Washington said that the U.S. attorney in Arizona has started a "preliminary assessment" of the trip, after an unidentified source made allegations about the congressman's behavior on the expedition. "The U.S. attorney is looking into allegations about the congressman taking a trip with the two pages," the spokesman said.

Count me underwhelmed on this one. I'm not buying it.

From Big Tent Democrat

Charlie Cook's upcoming column says:

If you want to know how much pain the midterm elections are likely to inflict on the Republican Party, keep your eyes on the national spotlight. If, for the next three weeks, attention remains focused on the war in Iraq and on congressional scandals, the Republicans could lose 20 to 30 seats--or perhaps even more.

. . . In short, we need to be aware of how bad this election could be for Republicans, while also keeping in mind that politics is a volatile business. The spotlight could shift another time or two before November 7. Anyone who focuses only on the Republicans' vulnerability or only on the impossibility of knowing what will hold the public's attention in the coming weeks is missing half of the story.

Charlie is darn smart. I listen to him.

TChris is off in wine country this weekend (lucky him) and I'm working at my day job and testing the new scoop site in my spare moments. It's also a spectacular fall day and I want to get outside.

So, for those of you with something to say, here's the place.

Some things I would blog about if I had the time today:

• Lenny Bruce would have turned 81 today if still alive.

• Pot guru Ed Rosenthal indicted by the feds again -- after an appeals court threw out his first conviction.

• A British coronor has ruled U.S. forces in Iraq killed British reporter Terry Lloyd in the beginning days of the war.

Bump and Update: Ney appeared in court and entered his guilty pleas but is not resigning immediately. TPM Muckraker has Ney's full statement. He will be resigning in the next few weeks.

******
Original Post 12:35 am

Ohio Republican Congressman Bob Ney is set to plead guilty Friday in federal court to two five year felonies. Prosecutors will ask for a 27 month sentence. There's speculation he will resign from Congress at the hearing, to show remorse and acceptance of responsibility to the Judge.

Ney will be the first Congressman in the Jack Abramoff investigation to plead guilty.

Ney signed papers a month ago admitting to charges of conspiracy and making false statements, acknowledging that he had deprived the public of his honest services.

The Ohio congressman says he took tens of thousands of dollars worth of trips, sports tickets, campaign contributions, meals and casino chips in exchange for legislation and public statements supporting Abramoff's clients and a foreign businessman.

Ney recently went into alcohol treatment, which he blamed for his actions. As for others connected to the White House taken down in the Abramoff scandal, there's Karl Rove aide Susan Ralston and White House aide David Safavian:

The Wall St. Journal (free link) reports that the latest Harris Interactive Poll shows that President Bush's approval rating dropped four points this month, from 38% to 34%.

Sixty-four percent of U.S. adults now have a negative view of Mr. Bush's job performance, compared with 61% who ranked him "only fair" or "poor" in a similar poll last month. The drop follows a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll that showed the president's job approval rating fell to 39% from 42% earlier in October.

With less than a month to go before the midterm congressional elections, 47% of registered voters said they would vote for a Democratic candidate, compared with 35% who said they would pick a Republican candidate. When asked about recent Capitol Hill scandals involving charges of corruption and sexual improprieties, 64% said they believed those activities were the just the "tip of the iceberg," compared with 25% who believed they were "isolated incidents."

Beleagured Jeanine Pirro, running for New York Attorney General, is catching more flak. This time it is for over-emphasizing her tough stance as a prosecutor in sex offender and pedophile cases. The New York Times reports:

In press releases she issued over six years, Jeanine F. Pirro, the Westchester County district attorney, trumpeted the arrests made in Internet sex stings that her office ran. By the time she left office at the end of 2005, that undercover pedophile operation had snared 111 men, including a Roman Catholic priest, a private-school headmaster, a New York City detective and a former Brooklyn prosecutor.

In her campaign, Pirro has repeatedly referred to her 100% conviction rate in these cases and stressed that the offenders were convicted of felonies that carried up to four years in jail.

One of my favorite movies of the 80's's, Reds, starring Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson, which was nominated for 12 Academy Awards, is set for release October 17th on DVD. It is a 25th anniversary edition, and you can get it here.

It's hard to believe it's been 25 years since this movie was released. I've probably seen it 5 times (I have a VCR copy.)

It tells the fact-based story of two activist journalists, John Reed and Louise Bryant, who fall in love around 1915 to 1920, with WWI and the outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution as a backdrop. Jack Nicholson plays playwright Eugene O'Neil who also is enamored with Diane Keaton. It's visually stunning and emotion-packed.

As a personal aside, shortly after the movie was released, I was at the Hotel Jerome bar in Aspen one afternoon with my then-spouse. Jack Nicholson and another man were seated at the next table. I walked up to Nicholson and told him that his 22 minutes on celluloid in Reds were my favorite of the film. He pulled out a chair and invited me to sit down.

The Wall St. Journal (free link) today analyzes how the war on terror affects voters.

The latest research shows that because such violent political acts are brutal reminders of death, they make conservatives, but not liberals, more hostile toward those perceived as different, and more supportive of extreme military policies, according to a study in April in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Although some voters would feel betrayed by incumbents who failed to protect them, researchers say, these days that trend would more likely be swamped by a surge toward candidates perceived as hawks on national security.

This says to me there will be another October surprise that results in elevating the terror threat. As I've said many times before, the goal of this Administration is to use the war on terror to strike fear in the heart of every American. Fear that will translate into votes. This time around, with all their current problems, they need a doozie. Don't put it past them.

Mother Jones has a feature article warning internet users about the amount of information Google collects about them.

Internet privacy? Google already knows more about you than the National Security Agency ever will. And don't assume for a minute it can keep a secret. YouTube fans--and everybody else--beware.

....the question is not whether Google will always do the right thing--it hasn't, and it won't. It's whether Google, with its insatiable thirst for your personal data, has become the greatest threat to privacy ever known, a vast informational honey pot that attracts hackers, crackers, online thieves, and--perhaps most worrisome of all--a government intent on finding convenient ways to spy on its own citizenry.

Via Southern District of Florida Blog: Taj Mohammad was a goat shepherd in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan. His tribe, the Gudjers, are nomads. He got in a fight with his cousin and hit him with a stick. His cousin's family, in retaliation, claimed he was a member of the Taliban. Unbeknownst to Taj, his cousin had been working laying pipe for the American military. They came to question Taj, arrested him and took him to the prison at Bagram AFB, and then shipped him to Guantanamo where he was held for four years.

The Defenders began representing Taj about a year ago and, after security clearances were approved, Paul Rashkind began to uncover evidence and develop a strategy to obtain his release. Just 14 days ago, Rashkind and Cone filed a set of classified challenges to Taj's continued detention, explaining why he should be released now. Last night, on the eve of the military hearing, Taj was on a plane back to Afghanistan. He was released to his family earlier today. Rashkind commented, "America was not a safer place while he was detained, but we can certainly feel better about ourselves now that he is home."

Kudos to defenders Paul Rashkind and Tim Cone for their victory.

Ok, it's taken 5 weeks to build a Scoop site for TalkLeft. In case you missed my previous post, here's why in a nutshell: TalkLeft has become too big and cumbersome for Movable Type to process, and the continual rebuilding that goes on in the background has made the site way too slow. I chose Scoop over Wordpress and other systems because I wanted the site to have growing room and to allow more people to post (not just comment). I want the site to load quickly and commenting should be a breeze.

I'm also moving TalkLeft to a new hosting company which specializes in Scoop sites and it will be on it's own dedicated server. If you want to see some other Scoop sites, see Daily Kos or click on those at that link.

The site will look almost exactly like it does now. That's why it took 5 weeks and a few thousand dollars or more (I haven't gotten the final bill yet) to build. It's a modified Scoop site. My hosting costs are going to increase by more than $200 a month. I'm looking at the cost as a long-term investment in the site.

I hope you all like it and find it easier to use.