"Goes down by the head"?

Face first into something. Or the nautical equivalent.

(Gee, I knew reading Kent and Forester would come in handy some day. Politics wasn't the place I expected it, though.)

That CNN report has such a horrible opening sentence that they ought to be assembling the staff in hollow square, for a ritual disemvowelment. It wasn't written, it was deposited by the meltwater from a small and angry glacier.

"Goes down by the head"

But this one was hetero, you said!

It *is* nice to see some variety in Republican sex scandals; the bathroom blowjobs were getting monotonous.

Have we ever seen this many politicians "retire" before?

I've tried Googling this but I must not be phrasing the search correctly...

"Goes down by the head"?

Yeah. Here's a picture. It's when a ship has struck a rock and the forward compartments flood first. The bow (AKA the head) goes down, followed by the stern. (See, for example, RMS Titanic.) As opposed, say, to down by the stern, turning turtle, hard aground, or on the rocks.

Oh, and the joke was intentional.

This is just so, pardon the expression, fucking funny.

Meanwhile, here in Georgia, John McCain is compared to a certain ancient religious figure: http://wonkette.com/391667/state-gop-chair-claims-mccain-is-kind-of-like-jesus

Hey, quit picking on Georgia! We came up with Bob "the GOP's answer to Ralph Nader" Barr!

Goes down with somebody in the head. With a wide stance. And a nanny goat. And a bucket of buttered okra . . . you don't want to know.

Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings was the first person I heard to speculate that Rep. Fossella is retiring to spend more time with his families...

Lila #10: How can I pick on the state I live in?

Took me down town and dressed me in black
Put me on a train and sent me back.
Didn't have no one to go my bail
So they threw me into the county jail.

-- Little Sadie

At least his mistress likes him well enough to pay his bail. Presumably his wife said "Let him rot."

Lori: Have we ever seen this many politicians "retire" before?

The recent record (going back to 1964) seems to be 65 members of Congress in 1992, although that doesn't include retirement during a term.

Congressional re-election rates and retirements

Alex Cohen @15:

Thanks -- so this isn't all that unusual, looking at the data.

Hey, now, Stefan @ 11! I happen to like buttered okra, and I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't give it such a negative association!

Impugn greased eggplants, or something.

It's looking like family values guys cheating on their wives is my state's favorite recreation.

Spitzer went down, the present gub admits to having played, this guy -- and oh, so many others that don't even make the news coz they're not actually politicos.

This sport used to be mainly for those who inhabited the lofty realms of the wealthy fashionable and / or entertainment figures.

Love, C.

Grace notes: he spent the day that ended with his arrest taking his wife's father and his (acknowledged) kids to White House receptions

It turns out his father and his uncle have been supporting his second family, who his wife didn't know about

The House Republican leadership not only knew, Hastert's staff got his friend removed from her job as House liaison because she blew Hastert off at official functions at a european meeting to hang with Vito

Both parties in the House want to have an investigation into a trip "fact-finding" he took to France, ostensibly by himself, on the taxpayer's dime.

and just in case anyone was feeling any sympathy, he won't attend family gatherings his sister is invited to, because his sister, who has one partner with whom she shares two children, is gay.

Constance @ 18:
I don't think cheating on one's spouse has been an rich-people-only sport for at least most of this century. Aren't the statistics along the lines of 50% of married people admit to it? (I assume some percentage of people won't admit it even in anonymous surveys.)

American politics is so intense. Nothing like these scandals ever happens in boring old Scandinavia. I wonder why?
[*sarcasm*]

The part I liked best about the crappy reporting was describing him as a "moderate", since he's made a huge point of working to see that non-heterosexuals are second-class citizens.

I'd hate to see what counts as a Conservative, must less, "radical" republican.

As for Bob Barr, he's running as the Libertarian; and is trash-talking McCain; gluing Bush to his ass.

#17: "I happen to like buttered okra"

I did not mean to slight the noble okra. It's just one of those vegetables that is funny. Carrots and cucumbers are too suggestive and obvious in this context; potatoes too peculiar.

As for spinach . . . that's just sick.

Go Bob, go! (loathe the man, think he's not a real Libertarian, but hey, if he helps McCain loose, I'm thrilled)

Tangentially related (because he's in a leadership position and it's 99.9999% probable that he's a Republican):

Dallas minister caught in sex sting.

Briefly: he went into an online chat room, struck up an acquaintance with someone who represented themselves as an underage female, had multiple conversations of a sexual nature, and arranged to meet "her" for sexual purposes. "She" turned out to be an undercover cop. The guy was carrying a webcam and sexual paraphernalia at the time of the arrest.

Lee #25: What's a Baptist minister doing with condoms?

He's leaving to spend more time with his families. And let's face it, he probably needs more time than most.

Stefan Jones @ 23...

"Oooooh... Popeye!"

Stefan 23: I did not mean to slight the noble okra. It's just one of those vegetables that is funny.

Anything with a 'k' in its name is automatically funny, as we here in Hoboken ("ohhhh, I'm DYING") know.

Lori @16:

Thanks -- so this isn't all that unusual, looking at the data.

It's still pretty unusual. The number of Republicans who aren't seeking reelection this time around matches or exceeds the total for both parties combined for many recent years.

re 3: It sounds like a word-for-word translation from the German.

The best thing about the Barr candidacy... he doesn't expect to win, and seems to think that tossing the race to Obama is just fine, if McCain loses.

The statistics I've seen quoted online for affairs seem to be all over the place, and a lot of the time appear to be convenience numbers for rhetorical purpose rather than well-sourced statistics.

The more reliable studies I've seen suggest that approximately 20% of married people admit to extramarital sex (that is, while being married to someone else), in settings where they are most secure about confidentiality. The rate for men is higher than that for women. There's an interesting-looking 1997 review of studies online at

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Extramarital+sex:+prevalence+and+correlates+in+a+national+survey-a019551967

Gallup polls do report that over half of Americans polled *know* someone who's had an extramarital affair, though; and another 1997 poll had 64% of respondents say they *thought* half of all married men had had affairs, a statistic that appears to be well above reality. See

http://www.gallup.com/poll/4591/Americans-Consider-Infidelity-Wrong-Acknowledge-its-Prevalence-Society.aspx

for discussion of those polls and other related "attitude" polls.

(Note: this isn't my field; I just did a bit of searching for what appeared to be well-sourced statistics from reliable-looking agencies without a known agenda. If anyone has better stats, please share them.)

#33 ::: John Mark Ockerbloom

Also the stats get skewed, as do those for divorce, since those who have divorced once, often have more than one divorce and remarriage, just as they also appear to commit infidelity more than once.

As far as I can tell, like you, concrete, hard data in these areas are hard to really come up with.

Of course politicians have always been a solid customer base for brothels and prostitutions. But it had gotten so out of hand over the last years in Albany even they tried to 'do' something to change this -- to some degree, sexual service was a part of the lobbyists' 'gifts' to the legislators, thus the attempt to rein in the lobbyists recently, and for 'reform.'

That same reform on which Spitzer ran and presumably won the governorship.

Love, C.

John @ #33:
Even 20% admitting (plus however many didn't admit it), takes it well out of Constance's

those who inhabited the lofty realms of the wealthy fashionable and / or entertainment figures.

I'm pretty sure the "lofty realms" don't make up 20% of the married population, and my personal experience includes plenty of non-lofty types with a track record of adultery of various kinds. Lousy ethics are not exclusively an upper-class phenomenon.

Susan 35: Lousy ethics are not exclusively an upper-class phenomenon.

No, but it sure helps!

who admitted to fathering a child out of wedlock with a woman who bailed him out of jail on a drunk driving charge

He really needs to learn how to just send a thank-you note.

re #15 Actually, 1992 wasn't an ordinary year either. There was a big change in what they could do with excess campaign funds following some financial scandals. Retire before 1992 and keep some big chunk of cash. 1992 was also the first election following the Clarence Thomas hearings (and the Anita Hill grilling and smearing). The election was billed as the Year of the Woman - eight female Senators of both parties. (followed immediately by the backlash of 1994...).

Fragano Ledgister @ 26: Filling them with hydrochloric acid and throwing them at Planned Parenthood clinics. That, or strangling cute little bunny rabbits.

Jim, #14, his wife didn't know. The mistress and daughter are down here and he was here, driving to see them. The mistress bailed him out. It was the next day that the press figured it out and he told his wife. (The local TV has been covering this thoroughly.)

Fragano @ #13: well, that never stopped me!

(and @ #26: he was planning to use them to make balloon animals for the amusement of the supposed 13-year-old)

C. Wingate @31, no, word-for-word from the German would be more like this:

A New York congressman, who admitted to with a woman an out of wedlock conceived child fathering, who him this month out of jail bailed, has Monday announced, that he will not for re-election run.

Trust me on this one. This is why taking post-editing of machine translation is always, always, always a mistake, no matter how reasonable it seems when the agency asks.

A New York congressman
who admitted to fathering a child out of wedlock
with a woman who bailed him out of jail
on a drunk driving charge
this month

I'm having flashbacks to 5th-grade sentence diagramming exercises...yikes.

"New York Congressman is bailed out on drunk driving charge by baby's mama" would be too direct, I guess. Or maybe it really means "New York congressman meets bail bondswoman, promptly impregnantes her."

Michael Roberts @#42: your version is clearer than CNN's.

Avram, #37: You just made me waste a perfectly good mouthful of apricot tea. :-)

#42 ::: Michael Roberts

A New York congressman, who admitted to with a woman an out of wedlock conceived child fathering, who him this month out of jail bailed, has Monday announced, that he will not for re-election run.

Yoda?! Yoda, is that really you?

Let's all sing a chorus of that great Blind Willie Johnson blues song, "You're gonna need somebody on your bond."

Funny vegetables:

Eggplant
Kale
Kohlrabi
Okra
Rutabaga

#2: Gee, I knew reading Kent and Forester would come in handy some day.

Kipling too..

"An' Mac'll take her in ballast -- an' she trims best by the head. . . .
Down by the head an' sinkin', her fires are drawn and cold,
And the water's splashin' hollow on the skin of the empty hold --"

3: It wasn't written, it was deposited by the meltwater from a small and angry glacier.

Wow, I hope I never get a review from Dave Bell. Unless it's a good review, of course.

Also, the way it's written sounds like the bailing-out happened before the impregnation - quick work that man.

37: (splutter)

A New York congressman who admitted to fathering a child out of wedlock with a woman who bailed him out of jail on a drunk driving charge this month

This is just to say
I have fathered a child
that was out of wedlock
with the woman who bailed me out of jail
Forgive me...

John A. Arkansawyer #39: Ugh!

Lila #41: *snort*

52, 53: his mind battered almost beyond endurance by having to mark 8,329,403 horribly written term papers, Fragano is trying to ease the strain on the Ledgister neocortex by experimenting with Non-Verbal Blogging, in which his chuckles, snorts etc are transcribed by a devoted amanuensis.

If this does not work, the next step will be Non-Conscious Blogging, in which he will listen to the thread being read out loud by a nurse while he lies in a restful drug-induced coma in some secluded retreat (Antigua's nice, they tell me) and his EEG trace will be posted as a .gif file.

Actually, what's been driving me bats, ajay, has been the repeated importuning of one young man, and his father, about a slight matter of plagiarism.

55: oh, lord, another one? Bad luck. Hope it resolves itself reasonably soon...

ajay #56: I think it has, the semester and academic year are over and graduation is past. I had genuine crises to deal with (a grade that vanished from the computer system, a committee member who'd been ill) without having to worry about a young man whining 'I turned in the wrong essay'. Right, and I am the Queen of the May.

Jim's picture link in #7 is blocked here at work, so I went googling on the term, looking for other pictures. This page is the #1 google result for the string. I did *not* expect that. I think I don't understand how Google works at all.

Fragano @ 55

Maybe they'll shut up if you point out that they really should be paying royalty fees.

R. M. Koske @ #58:

The way Google ranks search results depends not only on the page's usefulness to your specific search, but on a measure of how useful the page is generally.

Making Light has earned itself a very large "generally useful" score, which it shares with its individual pages, and which can be sufficient in some cases to outrank other pages that might be more specifically useful.

Avram @ #37:
My keyboard thanks you for the lovely shower.

Mary Dell @ 43

I thought it would have been easier to read if they'd learned the proper use of commas. Putting one before 'who' and another after 'month' would have improved the structure.

Fragano: Have you asked him what class the plagiarism was for, and why he thought it was going to be acceptable there?

I know this is, of course, a pointless exercise, the sort willing to blatantly plagiarise isn't going to comprehend the problem, nor appreciate that there isn't any good way to explain it away.

Fragano @55: Oh, Lord, his father got in on the act? That always makes a bad situation go positively rotten.

My sincerest sympathy.

If Senator Kennedy decides to resign his position for medical reasons, how will that effect the balance of power in the US Senate? Are there any Republican senators who are currently teetering on the brink of scandal to compensate?

Earl @#65--Massacusetts has a Democratic governor, and he'd probably appoint a Democrat to fill the seat until a special election could be held. So no change.

Bruce Cohen (Speaker to Managers) #59: Or burst into tears. That happened a few years back when I inquired of one young lady how long she'd been teaching at the University of New South Wales (she'd gone and copied for her essay on Mussolini a piece on the web asserting that Benny was really a lefty at heart, a statement unlikely to come from a student who was struggling to maintain a C).

I hereby promise, that should this year's balcony garden go well, the okra so produced will not be made available for the sexual shenanigans of GOP Congresscritters.

Because that would be a waste of okra.

Terry Karney #63: It was, quite clearly, intended for my class. He was trying to lie himself out of trouble, and merely assumed that I'd never heard that particular lie before.

Fragano (69):
So he flunks your class, and does quite poorly in his Creative Lying seminar?

Mary Frances #64: I know. That's why I've been giving them the cold shoulder and referring them up the ladder.

John Houghton #70: That's about the size of it. He has a brilliant career ahead of him in the Republican Party.

Being as el Vaquero is a Southern gent, okra is a staple in our house, such a useful African staple as it is also. Lots of songs in African and AfroLatin cultures -- as well as in the South -- reference okra.

Rutabagas -- I don't understand rutabagas, though I believe one of my grandmothers did.

Love, C.

Fragano: I was sure that was the case (let me guess, the essay was topical to the assignment). I've seen some really bad lying when teaching. They do get better as they progress through the course; something about teaching them to spot lies seems to improve the ability to tell them.

But it's what we teach, so they usually fail to pull it off.

Constance Ash, #73:

Rutabagas are excellent peeled, chopped into chunks of approximately 1/2 inch square, and simmered in beef stew together with parsnips and turnips. Also good in Cornish pasties and shepherd's pie.

Mom called them Swedes. I don't know why, but it does provide a snappy comeback to smartass questions about the latter dish:

"Is the shepherds pie made with real shepherds?"
"No, Swedes."

Nick #75: Was your mother from the United Kingdom or Ireland?

#75 ::: Nick

Thank you! I'll try that.

The grandmother who understood rutabagas and grew them too, was a Swede.

Love, C.

#75 -- Thanks, Nick, now I have "A Little Priest" running through my head: "and we have some shepherd's pie peppered with actual shepherd on top..."

Fragano:

UK (England).

anatidaeling, #48:

The funniest vegetable name has got to be Mangelwurzel.

Fragano, are you climbing a stairway to heaven?

Eggplant, okra, kale, kohlrabi, please don't insult them, I like those edibles (though there are others who don't consider more or more of them edible). Rutabagas, however.... they're Swedish turnips, and I never met a turnip root I can recall having viewed as something worth going out of my way to ingest. Turnip grees, okay, turnip root, someone else please take my share.

Besides, there was an old Yiddish simile, translated as "May you grow like a turnip with your head in the ground and your feet in the air" that seems to be a polite description of the Republicraps and they manifold hypocrises and misdeeds and malfeasances.

Meanwhile, I wonder if Teddy is going to push for medical marijuana, he's got a perfect opportunity for promoting in on Capitol Hill now, the AMA finally got some backbone and advocates it, and since he's almost certainly going to be undergoing cancer treatments which are notorious for causing loss of appetite and nausea when the patient is trying to eat and the is food getting into the patient down the esophagus....

(This might sound flippant, cruel, and insensitive on my part, but actually I'm rather serious about it. Even the rarely-have-anything-nice-to-say-about-anyone-to-the-left-of-Torquemada radio pundit types locally, have been singing paeans to Edward Kennedy the past few days speaking of his decades in Congress despite the loss of all his older brothers in service to the US Government and a back broken in a plane a plane, his cross-party efforts to craft bills on healthcare and other efforts to promote the general health and well-being of US citizens, his stature as the second-longest serving senator.... It seems rather weird to me in a number of ways.)

The cure for that earworm is the current credit report TV commercial (the one where the lyrics feature the line "my legs are sticking to the vinyl and my posse's getting laughed at").

Then you can cure that earworm by reading Mark Twain's "A Literary Nightmare".

Then you can cure that earworm by reading Fritz Leiber's "Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-TAH-Tee".

Ummm, after that, you're on your own. Your best bet is to infect someone else with the earworm to reduce your misery through he gift of sharing.

Paula Lieberman #80: I doubt it. At the banquet my department threw for graduating seniors, the graduands voted me the 'hardest teacher' and gave me a certificate to prove it.

Nick #79: I thought that would be the case. I spent my childhood in England calling them swedes.

Earl Cooley III #65: "Are there any Republican senators who are currently teetering on the brink of scandal to compensate?"

So far as I know, 83-year-old Senator Stevens (R-AK), whose karma can't be in much better shape than Kennedy's, is still waiting for the other shoe to drop since the FBI raided his house last year.

#67: she'd gone and copied for her essay on Mussolini a piece on the web asserting that Benny was really a lefty at heart, a statement unlikely to come from a student who was struggling to maintain a C

Now I'm wondering about Jonah Goldberg's grade point average.

Nick @ #75:

In an English animated series I liked as a lad, 'Alias the Jester', every episode ends with the jester getting fired, often for telling a really awful joke.

There is, for instance, the episode in which the castle is raided by a flying longboat full of Vikings, which ends up crashing into the village pond. At which point the jester remarks that the pond now resembles a vegetable stew, in that it is full of Swedes...

Nick @ 79: Mangelwurzel?

Oh, man -- I am totally having a flashback to Jitterbug Perfume.

Fragano, #82, I used to teach classes of proto-volunteers for OMNI on AOL. One class gave me a cat'o'nine tails at graduation. (Since we interacted mostly online, one of the class members presented it to me at a Balticon.)

Fragano @ 82... What? They didn't get Lulu to sing To Sir, With Love? The ingratitude.

Marilee @ 88... classes of proto-volunteers

"With my army of vat-grown proto-volunteers, I will be unstoppable! Bwahahahah!!!"

"With my army of vat-grown proto-volunteers, I will be unstoppable! Bwahahahah!!!"

Debbie @ 91... Actually, he was quite stoppable, considering that it never became a series. I've never seen the original, but, as this was a 1978 TV thing, I can painfully well imagine why.

Serge -- you don't want to know. It was on SciFi here last night. The kindest thing I can call it is "naive". (But then, the original version of Battlestar Galactica is also from 1978.)

What's this comment thread about?

Oh, yeah, dumb politicians getting caught.

It's getting boring.

And you guys can't even do it well. I mean, look at the 1920s. The French manage to lose 1.4 million men out of 40 million total, and we all know what that led to; adultery, mistresses, Clochemerle, Josephine Baker, even wet celery and flying helmets.

All America got out of the 20s was prohibition and organised crime. And the Hays Code.

See what I mean. Big time boring.

Debbie @ 93... the original version of Battlestar Galactica is also from 1978

...and was soon followed by an even worse atrocity also from Glen Larson, Buck Rogers. (It'd have been improved if it had been produced by Gary Larson even though that'd have meant having John Candy as Buck Rogers.)

See, kids? Not only did we old folks have to worry about the Cold War and nuclear Armageddon, we also had to live in fear of Glen Larson.

The kindest thing I can call it is "naive".

From the referenced blurb: "In this failed pilot for a series, a biochemist reproduces."

I mean, how likely is that?

(Sez the once-and-future chemist.)

I have very vague memories of having seen that movie, once upon a time. Something about the "original" having telepathic contact with each of the clones, who couldn't communicate directly with each other?

Joel, you're thinking of the right one. None of it was likely, and a lot of it hurt to watch. The first clone out of the tank decided they'd need names, and decided on consecutive numbers. They called the original "Papa." I'm not at all surprised it didn't make it past the pilot.

Serge, I think I'd watch Gary Larson's version of anything. Especially stuff like Glen Larson's productions.

The last straggling remnants of humanity, in a desperate fight for survival with the evil Cowlons... yeah, that'd be worth seeing. "By your cowmand!" And Buck Rogers would have been a lot better with Gary instead of Glen running the show.

Marilee #88: Unfortunately, I'd be in violation of university rules if I had one on campus.

Serge #89: They're much too young....

#60, Paul A. -

Ah! That makes perfect sense then. Thanks.

Dave Bell #94: I wouldn't call the Hays Code boring. Well, OK, its intentions were boring, but for one thing, it's a hilarious read, and for another thing, without it film noir would've been a lot less interesting.

Fragano #57: That excuse makes me think of the old joke (in MAD magazine, I think) about a "minor bookkeeping error"--the bookkeeper gave the IRS the wrong set of books.

"Yeah, see, I was writing a plagarized essay for a different class, but I meant to turn it in to Dr Smith, who doesn't know how to use Google. It was an innocent mistake."

Julia #19: Well, of course he won't associate with his lesbian sister and her partner. If we start recognizing gay couples, imagine the negative impact it will have on respect for marriage!

75, 78:
Bloodnok: Admit it, you're a German spy.
Krupp: I'm not a spy, I'm a shepherd.
Bloodnok: Aha! A shepherd-spy! Ahhh, you can't fool us, you naughty German. We British are never caught napping.
Krupp: No, you're always caught vide avake!
Bloodnok: What? That's a damned insult! (aside to audience:) But he's perfectly correct, you know. Are you married?
Krupp: Ja, two years.
Bloodnok: Any children?
Krupp: Nein.
Bloodnok: Nine in two years? You're a blackguard, sir! You, you...

No points for STR - even if I had stripped the characters' names, still no points...

What's this comment thread about?

Oh, yeah, dumb politicians getting caught.

It's getting boring.

My favourite of recent years was the UK case of John Hemming. Not least because he subsequently considered running as leader of the Liberal Democrats. Not boring in the slightest.

The fact that the mistress in queston was an old friend of mine has very little to do with it.

The merry brown hares came a-leaping
Over the crest of the hill
Where the clover and corn lay a-sleeping
Under the moonlight so still
Leaping so late and so early
‘Till under their bite and their tread
The swedes and the wheat and the barley
Lay cankered and trampled and dead.

-- The Bad Squire

Buda?