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The Department of the Interior acknowledged today that a large number of government officials have been caught in a corruption ring involving employees of big oil companies - Hess, Chevron and Shell Oil, to name a few. There were bribes. There were exchanges of illegal drugs. Government officials were given sexual favors by oil company employees.

This news is only the result of an internal investigation by the Bush Administration. Once independent inquiries begin, the full scope of this oil industry corruption may go quite a bit further.

The government officials so far identified are in positions of decision-making power over oil company leases for drilling on public lands and in public waters. It’s very interesting to me that so many members of Congress have hopped on board the bandwagon recently for additional oil drilling leases, and for expanded offshore drilling rights - smack where the newly discovered corruption is centered.

It would be foolish for Congress to pass legislation authorizing expanded drilling before the bribery and other crimes are fully investigated… Foolish, or simply corrupt.

(Sex, drugs and oil podcast)

We said it with John Edwards. We said it with Larry Craig. Ages ago, we said it with Bill Clinton. Now the time has come to say the same with Sarah Palin.

Personal sex is personal. Public policy is public. The two shouldn’t be mixed. Politicians should not be denied public office on the basis of their private sex lives.

Nonetheless, the National Enquirer says that it has evidence that Sarah Palin had an extramarital sexual affair recently. The publication says it’s going to release a big story about it all next week.

That’s titillating news, but hardly surprising. Todd Palin seems to almost always out of the home, on an oil rig or a fishing boat.

But really, it doesn’t matter. It might not even be true.

Sarah Palin is a bad vice presidential candidate because she is inexperienced, poorly educated, inconsistent, unethical, disrespectful of the Constitution, politically extremist and mentally unstable. We don’t need a Palin sex scandal to conclude that Sarah Palin should never be given a job in the White House.

If Sarah Palin is really getting some action on the side, that’s her business, and her husband’s business. It isn’t ours.

Mother Davis looks at her calendar and asks,

Did Bristol Palin and her boyfriend use contraceptives? We can’t know for sure. We do know, however, that Bristol Palin’s mother and her church oppose contraceptives, and claim that allowing teenagers access to contraceptives will encourage them to have sex. Growing up with these anti-contraceptive attitudes didn’t keep Bristol Palin from becoming pregnant while still in high school, though.

Whatever the personal problems Bristol Palin had with contraception is less important than the general problems that American teenagers have getting hold of contraceptives. Because of right wing religious Republican policies in place in communities across America, teenagers have an extremely difficult time getting a hold of contraceptives. Politicians from Sarah Palin’s evangelical wing of the Republican Party put regulations in effect that stop schools from providing contraceptives to sexually active teens, or even from giving teenagers with guidance about how to use contraceptives effectively, so as not to get pregnant or contract sexually transmitted diseases.

Because of these regulations, teenagers have sex without contraceptives, and they get pregnant. Sometimes, they get AIDS and die.

The Republican Party platform passed this week supports this neglect. The platform states, “We support abstinence education and oppose school-based clinics that provide referrals, counseling, and related services for abortion and contraception.”

It’s official now: Blocking access for sexually active teenagers to contraceptives is what the Republican Party stands for. If the Republicans are allowed to keep control of the White House, there are going to be a lot more teenage mothers like Bristol Palin.

Counting the months,
Mother Davis

Eliot Spitzer, Governor of New York, has been caught hiring the services of an international prostitution ring, “Emperors Club VIP”. Known as Client Number 9, Spitzer was apparently hiring prostitutes from the group as recently as this year.

Spitzer has all but openly admitted his association with the prostitution ring, saying, “I have disappointed and failed to live up to the standard I expected of myself. I must now dedicate some time to regain the trust of my family.”

I agree, Mr. Spitzer. Dedicate some time to your family. Go home, if they’ll take you there. Resign.

With other major sex scandals involving elected officials, such a Bill Clinton and Larry Craig, I’ve said that private sexual matters ought to remain private. I stand by those statements.

Spitzer’s misdeeds are different. His sexual misconduct is criminal, and not just in a private sense. Spitzer didn’t have a personal sexual affair. He had a professional sexual affair, and he became the client of an international organized crime ring in order to do so.

Consorting with organized crime figures is bad enough when it’s the consorting is non-sexual in nature. Having sex with employees of an organized crime ring, and paying them to do it, is beyond forgiveness for an elected official. It’s a crime, and it’s a very public crime.

In Spitzer’s case in particular, the mistake of becoming the client of an organized criminal gang compounds a series of other serious mistakes that already had a once-promising leader and made him a liability for the Democrats in his state.

You screwed it up, Mr. Spitzer. You’re the client of an international crime ring. You’ve bumbled your way through the your governorship. You’ve betrayed your own family. You’re a jerk. Go home, or to a motel, or whatever. Just resign first.

John McCain’s campaign has just announced that he is going to hold a press conference at 9:00 PM Eastern Time. This comes just about 12 hours after the Internet really started surging with rumors that McCain and corporate lobbyist Vicki Iseman had an extramarital sexual affair that may have involved some form of bribery or special favors.

The fact that John McCain is coming out with a press conference this quickly lets us know one thing quite clearly: McCain believes that this story is a significant threat to his ability to win the Republican presidential nomination, no matter how many delegates he has earned.

When it comes to the sexual part of this story, however, I still don’t think that it’s relevant, unless John McCain got HIV or syphillis, which would make him physically unable to serve reliably as President. The only reaction of substance that I have to the idea of John McCain having a sexual affair is to say: Ewwww. Yuck.

The Internet is all atwitter tonight about rumors that senator and Republican presidential candidate John McCain had a sexual affair with a corporate lobbyist by the name of Vicki Iseman. Most mainstream news outlets aren’t saying that. They’re playing a game of winking and nodding, with phrases like “intimate relationship” or “inappropriate relationship”. Outlets like Raw Story are describing the story in a somewhat more raw form, asking the question “Could this be the unreported political sex scandal that had the blogosphere buzzing late last year?”

Note that that question isn’t really answered. No one has proof in their hot little hands, and no one wants to be sued, so the story is all about reporters talking to political aides talking to someone’s half-sister. Blah, blah, blah.

Does it matter? Does it matter if John McCain had a sexual affair? It won’t affect my vote, and that’s not just because there’s no way in hell I’d vote for John McCain in a million years. News of a sexual affair wouldn’t affect my vote even if I would vote for John McCain in a million years (or ten thousand years, which is how long John McCain suggests we might need to be in Iraq).

Who or what a presidential candidate has sex, so long as it’s legal and consensual, has no relevance on the election.

Now, if John McCain gave this Vicki Iseman special access to government information, or gave her clients government contracts, in return for money or sex, then that is very important. It’s illegal bribery.

As far as I can tell, though, there’s no evidence of that. In fact, as far as I can tell, there’s no evidence of anything.

But then again, I don’t think that’s the point. The point is that it’s a great opportunity for somebody to make John McCain look like a big sleaze in a sexual kind of way.

Like I said, I don’t think that the private sexual matters of presidential candidates are relevant. Only bubbleheads who don’t have enough neurons to hold onto a coherent political concept care about such things. The trouble is that there are a lot of that kind of bubblehead out there in America these days.

Which brings me to Mike Huckabee.

What, am I accusing Mike Huckabee of being a bubblehead without enough neurons to hold onto a coherent political concept? Well, yes, but that’s not the point. The point is that it’s Mike Huckabee, or his supporters, who are pushing this McCain sex scandal rumor out there, in a desperate attempt to take the Republican nomination away from John McCain, after even the Republicans have largely agreed that Huckabee is too much of a wacko to trust with the presidency.

Haven’t you wondered why Mike Huckabee decided to go on campaigning even after John McCain got what appeared to be a lead in the delegate count that could not possibly be overcome, unless some terribly embarrassing scandal about McCain came out?

Isn’t it awfully convenient that this McCain lobbyist sex scandal rumor is now coming out at a time when there’s a two-week break between primary elections - enough time for sex-obssessed Republican faux-prudes to talk about nothing else?

If John McCain has to pull a Gary Hart and withdraw from the race, it won’t be Ron Paul who gets his delegates, folks.

Oh, but I don’t know for sure that’s what’s going on, of course. There is another bubblehead possibility for the source of this vapid little scandal, and this is a bubblehead with teflon hair.

That’s right, it’s one of the former, or not-so-former, Republican presidential candidates, and his name rhymes with Bitt Domney. Okay, Mitt Romney. Remember how Romney gave that mealy-mouthed speech at which he declared that he would be “suspending” his presidential campaign? That was awfully curious language, wasn’t it? At the time, people interpreted it as a sign of Mitt Romney’s denial, a refusal to admit that he, the one mighty and strong, had failed. In retrospect, one could say that it also sounded as if Mitt Romney knew something might happen that would bring him back into the race.

Will we now be seeing a Huckabee vs. Romney race to the Republican nomination? Well, shucks, I don’t know.

What I can see is this: There’s a big red curtain and three big elephant-shaped things wrestling with each other behind it. It’s getting pretty rough and tumble back there from what I can see, though I can’t really tell who is butting up against who. Will one of them slip and rip the curtains down with their tusks so that we can see what’s really happening, or will it all get smoothed over as one of the elephant shapes whispers sweet nothings like “I promise you the VP spot,” or “ambassadorships for all your illegitimate children”?

Oh let’s do keep an eye on this one - not for the sex, but for the much more tawdry soap opera of the betrayal of Republicans against Republicans.

The Guardian says that the Idaho Statesman says that 8 men have come forward saying that they either had sex with him or that he asked them to have sex with him. Curiously, one of these 8 men is the male escort that anti-gay evangelist Ted Haggard had crystal meth and sexual relations with.

It’s curious and all, but when it comes to the job that Larry Craig is doing in the Senate, it’s irrelevant. How senators have sex doesn’t matter.

How they vote does matter. People ought to be focused on running Larry Craig out of office based on the fact that he has voted so consistently to deny the legal rights of American citizens and other people living in the USA. Those people include non-heterosexuals.

It’s a tragedy that most people will pay more attention to the sex that Larry Craig has in private than to the nasty work he does right in the public eye.