You heard the one about Senator Ensign's affair involving hush money, right? And you're surprised he's still got a job, right? Well, this Senator Ensign story may finally mean the end for him.

The NY Times has a long piece about it.

Early last year, Senator John Ensign contacted a small circle of political and corporate supporters back home in Nevada — a casino designer, an airline executive, the head of a utility and several political consultants — seeking work for a close friend and top Washington aide, Douglas Hampton.

He’s a competent guy, and he’s looking to come back to Nevada. Do you know of anything?” one patron recalled Mr. Ensign asking.

The job pitch left out one salient fact: the senator was having an affair with Mr. Hampton’s wife, Cynthia, a campaign aide. The tumult that the liaison was causing both families prompted Mr. Ensign, a two-term Republican, to try to contain the damage and find a landing spot for Mr. Hampton.In the coming months, the senator arranged for Mr. Hampton to join a political consulting firm and lined up several donors as his lobbying clients, according to interviews, e-mail messages and other records. Mr. Ensign and his staff then repeatedly intervened on the companies’ behalf with federal agencies, often after urging from Mr. Hampton.

While the affair made national news in June, the role that Mr. Ensign played in assisting Mr. Hampton and helping his clients has not been previously disclosed. Several experts say those activities may have violated an ethics law that bars senior aides from lobbying the Senate for a year after leaving their posts...read on

Update: Michael Duvall has resigned. h/t commenter vorhese.

I've said for years that most politicians are in bed with lobbyists, but in the case of California Republican Michael Duvall, he's actually getting his freak on with one. Duvall gets the Jesse Jackson treatment, getting caught with an open microphone, bragging about making love and spanking his much younger mistress:

"And we had made love Wednesday. A lot."

"So I am getting into spanking her...yeah, I like it."

"I like spanking her. She goes, I know you like spanking me."

This bit of gotcha journalism wouldn't interest me much, but for the fact that Duvall considers himself to be one of those family values Republicans -- who just happens to be having kinky sex outside of his marriage.

Of course...

According to WRAL News, sources expect former U.S. Sen. John Edwards to admit that he is the father of his former mistress' 18-month-old daughter.

Edwards confessed last August to an affair with Rielle Hunter, who worked for the Edwards presidential campaign in 2008. Edwards has denied father her daughter, saying the relationship with Hunter ended before the child was conceived.

I will reiterate again that it is my belief that the extramarital activities of any one is not of interest. However, I do think it's instructive to note the character of someone who would break so callously the promises made to those closest to him.

However, let me also say (and I do this as a former HUGE John Edwards supporter), WHEW!!!! I'm so glad his campaign blew up when it did. It's bad enough that he took his marriage vows so casually, but to be dumb enough to do so without taking precautions against this kind of eventuality does not speak well for Edwards' intelligence at all.

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Rachel reports on the lastest information on the John Ensign affair from the Las Vegas Sun: Emails between Ensign NRSC lieutenants, Hamptons show affair was known inside organization more than a year ago. Those emails can be read here and here.

Now, who is responsible for the Republican Party‘s fiasco in the Senate in the 2008 election? Who was in charge of the Republican Party‘s efforts to hold on to its seats in the Senate, efforts that failed so epically?

Hey, it was Sen. John Ensign of Nevada. He was in charge of the National Republican Senatorial Committee for 2007 and 2008. That‘s the campaign arm of the Republican Party responsible for the Senate.

While he was supposedly getting busy then overseeing the run-up to his party‘s 2008 shellacking in the Senate, you may recall he was also getting busy with one of his staffers, putting her son on the NRSC payroll, finding jobs for her husband, and asking his own parents to give financial gifts, lots of them, to his mistress‘s family. That‘s a lot to do while you‘re trying to get folks elected to the U.S. Senate. I wonder if he‘s a good multi-tasker.

Well, tonight there is new evidence that Sen. Ensign was not the only one at the National Republican Senatorial Committee who might have been distracted by his extramarital affair while preparing for that ill-fated election.

Continue reading »

And you thought Mark Sanford was the only one "in love." I'm waiting for John Ensign to give an interview with the AP, just like Sanford.

The husband of John Ensign's mistress spoke publicly for the first time today, claiming that the Nevada Senator continued to pursue his wife, Cynthia Hampton, even after powerful political colleagues tried to stop him.

Doug Hampton said that Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn and others urged Ensign "to end the affair and help the Hamptons pay off their home and move to Colorado. But Ensign was so infatuated that he continued, Hampton said, reports the Las Vegas Sun.

He also claimed that Ensign paid Hampton's wife more than $25,000 in severance, which could be a possible felony violation of campaign finance law.

Hampton added that Coburn confronted Ensign and urged him to provide millions of dollars in assistance to the Hamptons to pay off their mortgage, in addition to getting Ensign to write a remorseful letter to Cynthia Hampton.

In the letter, Ensign expresses his shame: "I was completely self-centered and only thinking of myself. I used you for my own pleasure not letting thoughts of you, Dough, Brandon or Brittany come into my mind."

But that attitude changed quickly, says Hampton, who claims that Ensign later repudiated the letter and told him "I'm in love with your wife."

Now Ensign's attorney admits that the senator paid out $96,000 in hush money to the Hamptons. Ow.

The plot thickens...

RIO DE JANEIRO — A television anchor who's the only journalist known to have spoken with South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford's Argentine lover since news of their affair broke last week said the couple received an e-mail threat from the person who hacked into her Hotmail account.

Eduardo Feinmann, who worked with Maria Belen Chapur when she was a translator for Argentina's C5N news channel, said in a telephone interview from Buenos Aires that a member of Chapur's family told him of the threat on Saturday.He said the family member told him that the e-mail from the unidentified person warned both Sanford and Chapur that "you don't know who you are messing with." He said he didn't know how either of them responded.

Sanford's wife has said she's known about the affair for many months, so if true, this would certainly explain a lot:

Chapur said in an e-mail to Feinmann, which the anchorman read on the air Sunday night, that her Hotmail account was hacked into around Nov. 24. She became aware of the intrusion shortly thereafter and by Dec. 8 had succeeded in having the account closed. Read on...