""In recent weeks, allegations have surfaced that have called into question my ability to represent the citizens of Virginia's Second Congressional District," Shrock said in a press release."

"Congressman Ed Schrock has made a habit of rendezvousing with gay men via the MegaMates/ MegaPhone Line, an interactive telephone service on which men place ads and respond to those ads to meet each other."

Audio link - be aware that this is an ad soliciting gay sex.

"In January 2001, Schrock was elected president of the Republican House freshman class and landed a seat on the House Armed Services Committee, a plum for any member of Congress from eastern Virginia."

NEW YORK - A former aide who claims New Jersey Gov. James E. McGreevey sexually harassed him said Monday he will not sue the governor.

The governor's resignation announcement was sufficient admission of his wrongdoing, Golan Cipel said in a statement written in Hebrew and released Monday by an Israeli public relations agency. Cipel is in seclusion with his family in Israel.

"As Republican former Governors, Senators and public officials,
we urge our party to renew its allegiance to the proven, common sense values which unite America.

Instead of partisan ideology - which increasingly has led moderates to leave the party - what's needed is a speedy return to the pragmatic, problem-solving mainstream."

"- put the health of millions first, and clear the way for embryonic stem cell research;

- appoint mainstream federal judges, and respect the Constitution;"

I believe the decision to go to war was the right decision, particularly after September the 11th.

When asked "Can we win?" the war on terror, Bush said, "I don't think you can win it."

As Christian conservatives rally around Mel Martinez, their favorite candidate in the U.S. Senate race, a key reason for their support is his strict stance on one of their hot-button issues: homosexuality.

The Martinez campaign has made the fight against what it calls ''the radical homosexual lobby'' central to its campaign. It's the subject of an attack ad -- removed Saturday under political pressure -- and a stinging mailer that criticizes rival Bill McCollum, a fellow conservative, for ''pandering to gays'' because he supported so-called hate crimes legislation in Congress.

Yet the Martinez campaign and the candidate's religious allies find themselves having to carefully parse their positions for one reason: Both Martinez and McCollum -- Republican politicians with impeccable conservative credentials -- have highly placed campaign staffers who are gay.

Mr. [Alan] Simpson recalled a tense confrontation on the campaign trail when one of Mr. Bush's Christian conservative backers advised Mr. Cheney to "pray for her" and "to urge her away from her aberration."

"Dick just starred at him," Mr. Simpson recalled. "If you said that to Dick or Lynne Cheney, you will get a look that would sizzle your underwear, I tell you."

"When people are open, which Mary is, they are not trying to make a statement,'' Ms. Matalin said. "There are other reasons to be politically active besides your sexual orientation. That is not her raison d'être."

Speaking of the gay equality movement... What about Mary? Mary Cheney, that is. She's the gay daughter of vice president Dick and his wife, Lynne.

Lynne Cheney and one of her two daughters are on the roster of top Republican wives and offspring listed as speakers at Monday's "W Stands for Women Forum." But notably absent from that list is Mary Cheney.

Meanwhile -- how retro -- all the married women are listed as "Mrs.": Mrs. Barbara Bush, Mrs. Liz Cheney Perry (the Cheney's other daughter); Mrs. Doro Bush Koch (President Bush the First's only daughter; sister of the current president). Also listed, the president's twin 22-year-old twin daughters, Barbara and Jenna, who everyone wants to meet, or at least eyeball this convention week.

... The attacks initially made me sorry I voted for him. For most of that day, as my wife and children stayed inside our house listening to the roar of fighter jets overhead, and black smoke from the Pentagon hovered above our neighborhood, Bush failed to return to Washington. My family sat unprotected a few miles from the scene of a terrorist attack; Bush hid in a bunker on some faraway military base.

It infuriated me, as did the subsequent excuses from White House spokesman. There was a risk in coming back, they said. There was a risk in coming back, they said. Of course there was. That's the point: Leaders must take risks, sometimes physical ones. Bush should have elbowed his Secret Service detail out of the way and returned in a display of fearlessness to his nation's capital. I found it distressingly revealing that he didn't.

But as Carlson says, the incident was revealing. Just as Kerry's heroism half a world away is revealing. There's a reason the Swift Boat Liars are going after the story so hard. Kerry turned his boat into the danger he faced.

...the FBI is looking with renewed interest at an unauthorized back-channel between Iranian dissidents and advisers in Feith's office, which more-senior
administration officials first tried in vain to shut down and then later attempted to cover up.

The administration's reluctance to disclose these details seems clear: the DoD-Ghorbanifar meetings suggest the possibility that a rogue faction at the Pentagon was trying to work outside normal US foreign policy channels to advance a "regime change" agenda not approved by the president's foreign policy principals or even the president himself.

The Agency believes Ghorbanifar is a serial "fabricator" and forbids its officers from having anything to do with him. Moreover, why were mid-level Pentagon officials organizing meetings with a foreign intelligence agency behind the back of the CIA -- a clear breach of US government protocol?

Newsday broke the original story about the secret Ghorbanifar channel. Faced with the disclosure, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld acknowledged the December, 2001 meeting but dismissed it as routine and unimportant. Later that day, another senior Defense official acknowledged the second meeting, in Paris, June, 2003, but insisted that it was the result of a "chance encounter" between Ghorbanifar and a Pentagon official.

Lining Up With Hitler or Against Him

This escalating situation reminds me of a statement of a World War II journalist by the name of Dorothy Thompson who wrote for the Saturday Evening Post in Europe during the pre-World War II years when Hitler was building up his armies and starting to take ground. In an address she delivered in Toronto in 1941 she said this: ?Before this epic is over, every living human being will have chosen. Every living human being will have lined up with Hitler or against him. Every living human being either will have opposed this onslaught or supported it, for if he tries to make no choice that in itself will be a choice. If he takes no side, he is on Hitler?s side. If he does not act, that is an act­for Hitler.?

May I take the liberty of reading this statement again and changing just a few words, applying it to what I fear we face today? ?Before this era is over, every living human being will have chosen. Every living human being will have lined up in support of the family or against it. Every living human being will have either opposed the onslaught against the family or supported it, for if he tries to make no choice that in itself will be a choice. If we do not act in behalf of the family, that is itself an act of opposition to the family.?

At first it may seem a bit extreme to imply a comparison between the atrocities of Hitler and what is happening in terms of contemporary threats against the family­ but maybe not....

Falwell, the founder of the Moral Majority and a veteran in conservative evangelical politics, will be at the convention.

"I'm in New York right now," he said in a phone interview with The Chronicle on Thursday afternoon. "I have V.I.P. credentials, and I will be there.'' ....

Falwell said God was especially upset with pagans, abortionists, feminists, homosexuals, the American Civil Liberties Union and the People for the American Way, a liberal watchdog group.

In his interview Thursday, Falwell said he still stands by that statement, but wishes he had added "the sleeping church" to the list of responsible parties....

[Falwell] insists that he remains close to President Bush.

"We've talked many times,'' Falwell said. "I've had many photo ops with the president.''

"Listen,'' he added, "I've been doing this for 50 years, and I don't know of any president who is more beloved by conservative evangelicals than President Bush.''

The problem is growing, said J. William Leonard, director of the Archives' Information Security Oversight Office, which monitors federal practices. Officials classified documents 8 percent more often in 2003 than in 2002.

''This administration believes the less known the better," said Shays, noting that he was speaking of a GOP administration. ''I believe the more known the better."

But in 2003, President Bush ordered officials to use the more restrictive level.

Steven Aftergood, director of a Federation of American Scientists project on secrecy, said some classification clearly aimed to conceal illegality or avoid embarrassment, even though that is forbidden.

Aftergood cited the ''secret" stamp on Army Major General Antonio Taguba's report of ''numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" inflicted on Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib prison.

As Bush heads to the Republican National Convention in New York this week, the man who stood astride the political world at that news conference in 2002 is a distinctly more life-size figure. With the election just 65 days away, there is a puzzle: How did a leader who was so formidable become so vulnerable?

In small ways, the answer is an accumulation of miscalculations and missed opportunities that have marred the president's political operation this year... In a large way, however, Bush's predicament is less a reversal of his 2002 success than a natural progression of it -- the consequence of two confrontations he sought that autumn.

...his decision to confront Democrats directly and immerse himself in partisan electioneering ensured that he would face reelection with little of the rally-behind-the-leader sentiment that flowed to him after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

• The enactment of a prescription drug benefit under Medicare in December
• The missed opportunity of the State of the Union address in January.

Questions have also repeatedly been raised about work done by members of Mr. Feith's staff that skirted the normal bureaucracy. For example, Mr. Franklin participated in secret meetings with Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian who had acted as an arms deal middleman in the Iran-contra affair during the Reagan administration.

The secret meetings were first held in Rome in December 2001 and were brokered by Mr. Ledeen. He said he arranged the meetings to put the Bush administration in closer contact with Iranian dissidents who could provide information in the war on terrorism.

Current and former defense officials said on Saturday that Mr. Franklin worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency until about three years ago, when he moved to the Pentagon's policy office, headed by Mr. Feith, to work on Iran and other Middle East issues.

George W. Bush may be a conservative, but he has liberal sex appeal with the ladies.

Case in point: He's the presidential candidate that women most want to bed, according to a survey by an online sex toy company.

Forty-five percent of the 1000 proud sex toy fans who answered the MyPleasure.com poll chose Bush, compared to 33 percent who prefer John Kerry as their fantasy bedroom buddy.

As for vice-presidential candidates, John Edwards gets the motor revving for 18 percent of the women polled, while Dick Cheney brings up the rear with only 3.5 percent.

You may find it unusual that sex toy users pick a conservative as their ultimate presidential sex partner, and you're not alone.

MyPleasure.com founder/sexologist Sandor Gardos admits surprise at the survey results, adding: "We assumed the sex toy buying audience might lean to the left politically. Clearly, we were wrong. It just goes to show you, whether you are Republican or Democrat, everyone loves sex."

Kerry's April 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "They had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads ... randomly shot at civilians ... cut off limbs, blown up bodies ... razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan ... crimes committed on a day-to-day basis ... ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam."

Take a close look at what Kerry said to the Senate committee. He was summarizing testimony given publicly at the so-called Winter Soldier Investigation of Jan. 31-Feb. 2, 1971, presented by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, in Detroit. One hundred five Vietnam veterans testified there. Seventy-one of them said they were eyewitnesses to war crimes of the sort Kerry later mentioned. Thirteen said that they themselves had committed war crimes.

These veterans testified to rape; to torture and the killing of prisoners; to the torching of Vietnamese homes and whole villages. In sickening detail they filled in the blanks -- as the Pentagon was itself unwilling to do -- to put to work this sentence from a U.S. Army field manual: "Every violation of the law of war is a war crime."

The cutting off of heads -- on Operation Stone -- there was a Lt. Colonel there and two people had their heads cut off and put on stakes and stuck in the middle of the field.

Before we went out on the operation we were told not to waste our heat tablets on food but to save them for the villages because we were going to destroy all the villages and we didn't give the people any time to get out of the villages. We just went in and burned them and if people were in the villages yelling and screaming, we didn't help them. We just burned the houses as we went.

People cut off ears and when they'd come back in off of an operation you'd make deals before you'd go out and like for every ear you cut off someone would buy you two beers, so people cut off ears. The torturing of prisoners was done with beatings and I saw one case where there were two prisoners. One prisoner was staked out on the ground and he was cut open while he was alive and part of his insides were cut out and they told the other prisoner if he didn't tell them what they wanted to know they would kill him. And I don't know what he said because he spoke in Vietnamese but then they killed him after that anyway."

I looked out across the field and I spotted a Vietnamese woman peasant running away from the ship. I fired a burst of about six or seven rounds into her back before we fired, before we hit the ground. When I was being questioned as to what happened about two weeks later by a captain in my company, I told him what we did and what I did. We both had a good laugh about it. That was pretty much company policy. Also in Hue, during the Tet offensive in '68, I observed American fighters and bombers (Phantoms) dropping bombs and napalm into very crowded streets full of civilians. I don't know how many people were wiped out in that place.

"...kids 4 years old, ranging up to 16 years old, came around the fence to sell GIs cigarettes, or candy, or beg for food, they were CSed. And what I mean is they were gassed. This didn't happen just once, it happened constantly,

We encountered a large amount of civilian population. The civilian population was brought out to one end of the village, and the women, who were guarded by a squad and a squad leader at that time, were separated. I might say the young women were separated from their children and the older women and the older men, the elderly men. They were told at gunpoint that if they did not submit to the sexual desires of any GI who was there guarding them, they would be shot for running away.

Two men were leading a young girl, approximately 19 years old, very pretty, out of a hootch. She had no clothes on so I assumed she had been raped, which was pretty SOP, and she was thrown onto the pile of the 19 women and children, and five men, around the circle, opened up on full automatic with their M-16s.

Regarding throwing people out of helicopters, I only saw one incident to this ... There were five Vietnamese people. I do not know if they were civilians, Viet Cong or Viet Cong suspects. Three of them were wounded, had bandages on their bodies and their legs and their arms looked in bad shape. The other two were older men, somewhere around 50 years old. The lieutenant from the armored personnel carrier and the captain from the chopper helped place these people in the helicopter. He got in the helicopter and took off. He got a couple of hundred feet up and three bodies came out.

The Toledo Blade won a Pulitzer Prize for its October 2003 series about killings committed by an elite U.S. Army "Tiger Force" unit in the course of a seven-month period in 1967. "Elderly farmers were shot as they toiled in the fields. Prisoners were tortured and executed -- their ears and scalps severed for souvenirs. One soldier kicked out the teeth of executed civilians for their gold fillings," the Blade reported. "Investigators concluded that 18 soldiers committed war crimes ranging from murder and assault to dereliction of duty. But no one was charged."

Eleanor Clift: The [GOP Convention prime time] stage will be full of moderates who could never win a Republican primary, who do not represent the basic values expressed in the Republican platform.

John McLaughlin: You're correct.

Clift: It's a total fraud.

McLaughlin: Well it's also an abolitionist document. Ban gay marriage, ban civil unions benefits, ban abortion. It's a series of bans. It's not compassionate conservatism.

ANNOUNCER: "Mr. Kerry's biggest supporter, Sen. Max Cleland, claims to have lost two legs and an arm in Vietnam. But he still has one arm! How did that happen? One word: Cowardice. When duty called, he was unwilling to give his last limb. Is that the type of selfishness you want hanging out in the White House? We think not. Vote for the man who would be willing to give America his right frontal lobe. Vote Bush." - MichaelMoore.com

Real Men Marry Women:
Support a Constitutional Amendment to Protect Marriage

Save the Constitution!
Impeach an Activist Judge

Cures for Diseases - Know the Score
Embryonic Stem Cell 0
Adult Stem Cell 45

#1 Reason to Ban Human Cloning:
Hillary Clinton

"Queers are the Antichrist. Lucky Numbers 2, 7, 12, 15, 19, 22."

"Reason #2 to Ban Human Cloning: No One Wants an Army of Ann Coulters."

"I got a young man named George W. Bush into the National Guard when I was lieutenant governor of Texas, and I'm not necessarily proud of that, but I did it." - AP

Barnes, who was House speaker when Bush entered the Guard, later became lieutenant governor.

He said he became ashamed after walking through the Vietnam Memorial and looking at the names of people who died.

The FBI is investigating a mid-level Pentagon official who specializes in Iranian affairs for allegedly passing classified information to Israel, and arrests in the case could come as early as next week, officials at the Pentagon and other government agencies said last night.

The name of the person under investigation was not officially released, but two sources identified him as Larry Franklin. He was described as a desk officer in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia Bureau, one of six regional policy sections. Franklin worked at the Defense Intelligence Agency before moving to the Pentagon's policy branch three years ago and is nearing retirement, the officials said. Franklin could not be located for comment last night.