FROM NOW ON LISTEN TO ME WHEN I TELL YOU THEY'RE A BUNCH OF NO-GOODNIKS. TWO MORE HEADED FOR THE CLINK: WELDON AND KOLBE

Look, I hate to say I told you so, just because I was sounding the alarm on Mark Foley last year. And if you were a DWT reader from the beginning, there's a good chance you heard about Duke Cunningham, Jack Abramoff and Bob Ney heading for prison cells right here. But I'll let those pass too. There are two "new" ones, though, that I want to call your attention to.

The Feds are loathe to open investigations against sitting congressmen in the middle of election campaigns. It almost never happens. Unindicted crooks like Katherine Harris, Jerry Lewis, Virgil Goode, Jr., Tom Feeney, etc. are all breathing a collective sign of relief now that their cases all seem to be on hold. Curt Weldon and Jim Kolbe aren't. Of course Kolbe is retiring from Congress and turning his Tucson-centered 8th congressional district over to a Democrat, Gabby Gifford (despite an endorsement of KKK-Republican extremist Randy Graf by fake-moderate John McCain this week) so there's no reason the Feds shouldn't just haul his ass off to prison. I'll get back to Weldon, speaking of asses, in a moment.

I've been mentioning for a couple years that Kolbe isn't only gay, but that he's enamored of teenage boys. So major alarms went off last week when his office announced his "heroic" involvement in the Foley page scandal. It was clear to me immediately that having someone with Kolbe's reputation for forcing his attentions on young men as involved with dozens of teenage male pages was a bad thing. On October 8th I wrote that his story smelled fishy and that another shoe would drop. The other shoe dropped today-- like a ton of bricks. " Federal prosecutors in Arizona have opened a preliminary investigation of a camping trip Congressman Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., took 10 years ago that included two teenage congressional pages, a Justice Department spokesman told NBC News."

In a scenario right off a page from the scandalous cheap-porn playbook of Washington State's right wing fuehrer, Jim West, Kolbe packed up some underage male pages and took them camping-- at a time when he was still a closet case, lurking around in the shadows looking for young boys to prey on.

According to MSNBC "one participant, who requested anonymity, said he was uncomfortable with the attention Kolbe paid to one of the former pages. He was 'creeped out by it,' he said, adding that there was a lot of 'fawning, petting and touching' on the teenager's arms, shoulders and back by Kolbe." Expect right wingers to deny, deny, deny, then blame Clinton, Harry Reid, the pages, and eventually, all gay people.

Meanwhile, over on the other side of the Republican cesspool, don't say I didn't warn you about a more commonplace form of Republican corruption from La Familia Weldon. That's coming home to roost today too. Now look at this headline. They never, never do that to a sitting congressman in the middle of an election, never. You probably think I just want to turn every right winger into a grease spot in the middle of the low road they've chosen to travel-- and you wouldn't be far from wrong. But when I first wrote up the contest between Weldon and Joe Sestak I went easy on Weldon... well, relatively easy. It wasn't until Weldon attacked Sestak's family over the life-and-death medical treatment they were giving their 5 year old daughter that I really let Weldon and his corrupt lobbyist daughter have it.

"The Justice Department is investigating whether Republican Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania traded his political influence for lucrative lobbying and consulting contracts for his daughter, according to sources with direct knowledge of the inquiry. The FBI, which opened an investigation in recent months, has formally referred the matter to the department's Public Integrity Section for additional scrutiny. At issue are Weldon's efforts between 2002 and 2004 to aid two Russian companies and two Serbian brothers with ties to strongman Slobodan Milosevic, a federal law enforcement official said."

The Russians and the Serbians used Weldon's 28 year old daughter as a conduit-- i.e.- a bagwoman-- to funnel around a million dollars to Weldon personally. Even in the stench of DeLay's swamp of corruption in Washington, that is clearly illegal.

So bad day for the Repugs today: Ney pled guilty and refused to resign from Congress, looks like Foley had company in the page molestation racket, Weldon's gonna get harpooned for taking bribes from the Russian Mafia and from neo-fascist Serbs... Did I neglect to mention Chris Shays seems to have suffered a mental breakdown during a debate? Maybe he's got too much Foley and Kolbe and Hastert on the mind but Shays denied there was any torture at Abu Ghraib and insisted it was a National Guard "sex ring." have all these Republicans just completely lost their minds?

"Amnesty International officials and Shays' challengers in the 4th District said it was absurd for the Republican incumbent to call the acts at the Iraqi prison anything but torture. 'This is outrageous for a sitting congressman who was shown pictures (of Abu Ghraib) that were not even available to the public because they were supposed to be more provocative,' said Joshua Rubenstein, Northeast regional director for Amnesty International. 'The photographs did not only depict humiliating and degrading treatment of prisoners. They showed prisoners who were killed.'" Maybe that kind of stuff is sexy to Chris Shays... I mean, he is a Republican and no matter what he says, he voted to make Tom DeLay Majority Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives.


UPDATE: SESTAK SWAMPING WELDON

In between the time we had Admiral Sestak over at Firedoglake for a special q&a session and the release of the info about the FBI investigating Weldon for bribery, a new poll came out. The admiral is leading the crook 52-44%.