Say Anything Blog

Last night, I was watching television and one of our local stations ran a tease for their 10:00 news.  The grim-faced anchor announced, “President Bush is not worried about Tuesday.” I wasn’t sure if I had heard what I did correctly, so I waited until they ran the same tease again, and sure enough, that’s what he said.

If I were President Bush, I wouldn’t worry about Tuesday, either.  I mean, unless he can’t pick out a Halloween costume or something.  That had to be what the anchor was referring to.  If he had meant the mid-term elections, he would have missed that by a week.

Just the other day, I wrote that something seemed fishy about the whole Foley-IM issue.  Now, Drudge is reporting that the whole thing was a prank gone bad.

It seems the whole IM thing was designed by the page to goad Foley into talking dirty over the Internet:

According to one Oklahoma source who knows the former page very well, Edmund, a conservative Republican, goaded Foley to type embarrassing comments that were then shared with a small group of young Hill politicos. The prank went awry when the saved IM sessions got into the hands of political operatives favorable to Democrats.

As I originally said, the logging of the IMs was suspicious to me.  Apparently, I was right to question it.

Today at Townhall.com, Dr. Walter E. Williams has a wonderful piece on the minimum wage and its effect on discrimination:

What minimum wage laws do is lower the cost of, and hence subsidize, racial preference indulgence. After all, if an employer must pay the same wage no matter whom he hires, the cost of discriminating in favor of the people he prefers is cheaper. This is a general principle. If filet mignon sold for $9 a pound and chuck steak $4, the cost of discriminating in favor of filet mignon is $5 a pound, the price difference. But if a law mandating a minimum price for chuck steak were on the books, say, $7 a pound, it would lower the cost of discrimination against chuck steak.

Read the whole thing.

Now, I don’t have any special knowledge of any kind, but one thing has struck me strange about the tale of former Rep. Foley and the infamous IMs and e-mails.  Certain elements of the tale smell funny to me.

I can understand the e-mails still being around.  I am notoriously bad about not getting rid of old, deleted e-mails.  I could see this page having deleted them but not gotten rid of them completely.  The IMs are a different story and raise an interesting question.  Why would anyone be logging the IMs he received?

Logging IMs isn’t something that happens automatically.  The user would have to take action to cause that to happen.  Why would the page have done that?  I have to wonder if this wasn’t a set up from the beginning.  You get a kid to catch Foley’s eye.  Whe he starts getting IMs, you have the kid log them.  Then, when the time is right, you release the more lurid parts to the media.  We don’t have all the facts because we only know of the IMs that have been released.  There could be many others that contain the proof that this was a railroad job from the beginning.  Foley surely wouldn’t have kept the IMs.  We will likely never know tha truth.

None of this excuses Foley’s behavior.  Based on everything we know, he was a scumbag that went after boys.  He deserves everything that happens to him and more.  I just know that the logging of the IMs hints at something more sinister behind the entire thing.