THE TENSION: Counterbalance for Wed 4 Oct

If what the Passionate America blog claims to have discovered is accurate, the congressional page to whom Mark Foley sent explicit instant messages was 18 years old at the time: Meet Jordan Edmund One Mark Foley Instant Messenger. More from Drudge.

Clarice Feldman at the American Thinker smells something very peculiar in the way we have learned of Foleygate:

Democrats are attempting to make hay by alleging that the Republican leadership may have known about the inappropriate emails and covered them up for months. Their hope, no doubt, is to discourage turnout by disillusioned evangelical and other voters sensitive to moral issues. But the emerging background detail suggests that this is simply not the case, and that an attack strategy has been devised by parties anxious to damage the GOP and swing the coming election.

In July a blog appeared, designed it said to trace sex predators. Few posts were made in that month or the following month. All recounted years old stories. Then on September 18, the blog printed the fairly innocuous email exchange between Congressman Foley and an unnamed page. In this correspondence initiated by the former page, Foley asks the former page how he is after Katrina (the boy lived in Louisiana) and asked for a photo. Thus began the latest political kerfuffle which swirls through the final five weeks of the campaign. How likely is it that this site with virtually no readership, few posts and hardly any history or posts of interest suddenly receives this bombshell? I’d say slight. About as likely as Lucy Ramirez handing Burkett Bush’s TANG papers.
As soon as the ABC story ran, and organization called C.R.E.W., which said it had the original exchange which Hastert had heard of and the St Petersburg paper had seen, put them on their website .They said they’d earlier conveyed them to the FBI, were releasing them because of the ABC story, and asked for the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the Republican leadership. It is abundantly clear to me that C.R.E.W. and ABC communicated and may have coordinated the release of this story.
Who is C.R.E.W.? Check out what The Hill has to say. Note how many times the name Soros appears.

Elitists all think the same way; that's something you can bet on. So when Chris Cillizza writes in the Washington Post that Drudge thwarted John's Kerry's run for president in 2004, you can assume that some elite folks just can't accept the fact Kerry lost on his own.
While Kerry's foibles have been well-documented, Harris and Halperin propose that the man most responsible for the Massachusetts senator's defeat was not the candidate but rather Matt Drudge -- founder of the widely read Drudge Report.
Harris and Halperin call Drudge the "single most influential purveyor of information about American politics" and go on to add: "Drudge, with his droll Dickensian name, was not the only media or political agent whose actions led to John Kerry's defeat. But his role placed him at the center of the game -- a New Media World Order in which Drudge was the most potent player in the process and a personifications of the dynamic that did Kerry in."
You can click over to the Post and read the rest for yourself. Be sure to glance over the comments to see what the intolerant amongst us are saying. Sheesh, you'd think those folks would simply implode under the weight of blame and guilt.

The real news today has nothing to do with Mark Foley. Unless Social Security and Medicare are revamped, the massive burden from retiring baby boomers will place major strains on the nation's budget and the economy, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Wednesday, according to AP.

Imagine being able to check instantly whether or not statements made by politicians were correct. That is the sort of service Google Inc. boss Eric Schmidt believes the Internet will offer within five years, reports Reuters. Politicians have yet to appreciate the impact of the online world, which will also affect the outcome of elections, Schmidt said in an interview with the Financial Times published on Wednesday.