More Mark Foley. One former page talked to the LA Times about his ‘sexual encounter’ with Mark Foley. He admits that he was 21 years old when they had sex. “Yet the former page’s exchanges with Foley offer a glimpse of possible predatory behavior by the congressman as he assessed male teenagers assigned as House errand-runners.”

The Washington Post reports: Thousands of low-income children have been unable to enroll in Virginia’s Medicaid program since July 1 because of new, tougher federal rules requiring proof of citizenship and identity, state officials said. Officials for the state program for the poor and disabled said as many as 10,000 eligible children are living without health care largely because their families have been unable to present original birth certificates and other needed documentation to state...

Karen Tumulty wrote an in-your-face-article for Time: Every revolution begins with the power of an idea and ends when clinging to power is the only idea left. The epitaph for the movement that started when Newt Gingrich and his forces rose from the back bench of the House chamber in 1994 may well have been written last week in the same medium that incubated it: talk radio. On conservative commentator Laura Ingraham’s show, the longest-serving Republican House Speaker in history explained why...

I admit: sometimes it takes me a long while to pick something up. At times… I’m quite slow. Anyway, it has now occured to me that we have a lot of commenters here at The Moderate Voice who show a, as far as I can tell, above-average interest in science. Scientific methods, how science is being used in politics these days, what they think the role of science should be in the future (regarding politics), etc. So, what role do you all believe science should play in politics? If everything...

TMV NOTE: This post ran yesterday and generated a lot of comments. Due to its subject matter, we’re running it again on today’s blog and it is presented here out of chronological order. Newer posts are underneath it, so please keep scrolling after you read it. For a while now I, being Dutch, have been amazed by the emptiness of American politics. To me, it seems as if most debates are not about what one favors but about what one does not favor. Be it either individuals or parties. An...

The New York Times reports that US Secretary of Defense has decided to make life more easy for the US Army: Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is allowing the Army to approach White House budget officials by itself to argue for substantial increases in resources, a significant divergence from initial plans by Mr. Rumsfeld and his inner circle to cut the Army to pay for new technology and a new way of war. According to the Times some senior officials of the Army are not ‘just’ advocating...

Baseball legend Buck O’Neil died earlier today. He was 94 years old. Buck O’Neil, a star first baseman and manager in the Negro leagues and a pioneering scout and coach in the major leagues who devoted the final decade of his life to chronicling the lost world of black baseball, died last night in Kansas City, Mo. He was 94. Bob Kendrick, marketing director for the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, reported the death last night, according to The Associated Press. O’Neil entered...

The New York Times reports that Google is “in discussions to acquire YouTube for $1.6 billion, people involved in the talks said yesterday.” YouTube has definately become one of the biggest success stories on the Internet the last year, even the last couple of years: YouTube is “has yet to celebrate its first anniversary or its first profit” but already Google is trying to buy the video-sharing website for 1.6 billion dollars. Other companies that have “expressed interest”...

Due to all the mess with Mark Foley and, more importantly, the existence of some kind of list of ‘gay conservatives (/ Republicans)’ made by ‘liberal gays’, the Anchoress outs herself, as does Roger L. Simon. Therefore, I will join the ‘being honest squad’ myself. I admit: I love Asian women. I do not know why. But I do. I am afraid this makes me a lesbian trapped in a male body. Most likely even a lesbian, trapped in a male body who hates his, er, her own race. Terrible,...

NJ Republican candidate for US Senate, Tom Kean, called on Haster to step down immediately. By doing so, Kean is the first major Republican candidate who publicly attacks Speaker of the House Dennis Haster and, thus, breaks with what seems to be the party-line. To me, it seems that the most important Republicans make a huge mistake by publicly supporting Dennis Hastert. Whether all reports about his supposed knowledge are 100% accurate or not is irrelevant. Hastert is US House Speaker, we can be...

and the Palestinian people for that matter.

The Sunday Times reports that David Cameron – the newly elected leader of the Tories (well… ‘new’ – last year) – has to provide some clarity. People, by now, know what the Tories, under his leadership, are against but both politicians and voters, are now urging Cameron to make clear what it is he favors (and don’t even get me started about Pelosi’s empty “100 hours plan“. Never saw such a ridiculous thing in my life. As I commented: “Does...

The Washington Post reports: The U.S. economy created far fewer jobs in September than anticipated, but revised job figures for previous months showed a surprisingly substantial uptick over what was previously reported. The national economy created 51,000 jobs in September — analysts had been predicting 120,000 — and the unemployment rate dipped slightly from 4.7 percent to 4.6 percent, according to figures released today by the Labor Department. The new figures, which painted a mixed...

Glavine: The Mets’ ace this post season? As the Mets started confronting life without Pedro Martínez and Orlando Hernández, a 290-game winner lurked in the background. Tom Glavine is not the type to remind people of his pedigree or his impeccable résumé. But he understands the burden placed upon him. He, not Martínez, is now expected to be the big-game pitcher. Glavine pitched like an ace last night, throwing six scoreless innings, as the Mets defeated the Los Angeles Dodgers,...

There are a couple of women leading the debate about Islam, integration, a possible clash between civilizations, the treatment of women in Muslim countries, &c. One of those women leading the debate is Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I will publish a review of her book “Mijn Vrijheid” (My Freedom) this weekend. Another one is Dr. Wafa Sultan, a Syrian-American psychologist. She now told Danish TV channel DR2 in an interview that Islam needs a transformation and that “in its modern state...

ABC News reports: Congressional Republicans, already struggling against negative public perceptions of Congress, now face voters who say new scandals will significantly influence their vote in November. With midterm elections less than five weeks away, the latest Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that about half of likely voters say recent disclosures of corruption and scandal in Congress will be very or extremely important when they cast their vote next month. The poll of 1,501 adults, including...

I am appalled by the idiotic, intolerant, indecent, extreme and even violent behavior of students at Columbia University. When the founder of the Minutemen was holding his speech, left wing ‘students’ moved in and attacked him. Continue reading.

The AP reports: City of London financiers have found a perfect way to splurge their annual bonuses — cosmetic surgery to keep them looking youthful in a fiercely competitive job market. Business is booming in nose jobs, wrinkle fillers, liposuction and botox relaxants to repair the ravages of time. Operations carried out by the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons rose by a third to over 22,000 last year. The number of men having surgery has risen steadily and now account for...

It seems that Javier Solana’s patience with Iran is – finally – wearing thin. According to Solana just about no progress has been made recently due to Iran’s unwillingness to suspend its uranium enrichment program. Solana said that it was time for Iran to take responsibility -> a ‘dialogue’ can only last so long: “Today, Iran has made no commitment to suspend,” Solana said. “This dialogue I am maintaining cannot last forever and it is up to...

The New York Times reports that Roger D. Kornberg (from the Stanford University School of Medicine) ‘won’ the Nobel Prize for chemistry earlier today. Kornberg is the fifth American who receives a Nobel Prize this year. That’s five out of five. Curiously enough, his father won the Nobel Prize as well half a century ago. He received the Nobel Prize for his studies of how cells take information from genes to produce proteins. The work is important for medicine, because disturbances...

I just noticed this post over at The Brad Blog. It seems that Fox News – suddenly – got a little confused about what party Foley belongs to: Hot Air believes it’s an honest mistake / typo. Ezra Klein: Fox is not conservative, its Partisan channel without any intellectual honesty “which is how you get the hackish distortion of reality pictured above.” The All Spin Zone: “Three times is no damn accident. Three times. Is there no legal recourse for the Democratic...

The Christian Science Monitor reports about the relatively successful grass roots movement in America calling on the US government and the UN to do something against the genocide taking place in Darfur, Sudan. Students are organizing themselves and are trying to make the UN do something against the violence in before mentioned region which has already cost 200 000 people their lives and forced 2.5 million people to abandon their homes and (move towards relative safety). Some of the impact this movement...

I found the following article to be so strange that I thought others might be greatly surprised by it as well: Lions are at the top of the animal food chain, but they have never hunted elephants – until now. Our correspondent watches a BBC crew record the most shocking nautre film you will ever see… “It’s just unbelievable,â€? mutters Jonny Keeling, a BBC wildlife producer clinging to the top of the Jeep next to me. “They’re trying to kill again.â€? This...

The New York Yankees are on their way to the World Series. Sadly I could not watch, for you guys, yesterday’s game: it started at 2AM Dutch time this morning which is a little bit too late (or too early) for my taste. Anyway, the Yankees… won. The Detroit Tigers have a great team, but the Yankees have Jeter: The skies over Yankee Stadium were still rumbling with the roar of the pregame military flyover. Derek Jeter had seen it before. While his teammates stood along the baseline, Jeter...

Pieter Dorsman published a very interesting post about the Dutch elections over at Politics Central (Pajamas Media). Pieter carefully describes the tense situation in the Netherlands regarding immigration and integration. Let alone assimilation: which is virtually non-existent. In the Netherlands, there seems to be this strange misconception that those calling for assimilation automatically are racists. Which is, of course, factually inaccurate: a racist is one who believes that people with a different...