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A Tea Party favorite for the U.S. Senate in Ohio has just been indicted by a grand jury for unlawful conduct with a minor:

A New Lebanon man, running for a U.S. Senate seat in Ohio, has been indicted by a Montgomery County grand jury on sex charges.

Eric Deaton was indicted on one count of unlawful sexual conduct with a minor. He is accused of having an inappropriate relationship with a 15-year-old girl between March 2006 and March 2007.

Perry Township police said Deaton met the victim at a church where Deaton served as an elder.

Deaton, who is due in court September 14, faces up to 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine if convicted.  This isn’t stopping Deaton though. He’s staying in the race and insisting that this is some big political setup:

“I think this is politically motivated,” said Deaton, blaming the indictment on his decision to run for political office.

“The powers that be don’t like that,” said Deaton, who said he intends to stay in the race.

Deaton has been pretty much an unknown in Ohio politics, well that is until now. He has only received a handful of endorsements, but one of those endorsements really sticks out:

Vote Family Values

Perhaps it’s just a day of major irony, but looking at the front page for Vote Family Values, I couldn’t help but notice one of their top news stories:

“Christian Teens and Hands-On Politics”? It sure sounds like Deaton took that way to literally.

politibits: In a whirlwind of position changes and drama queen spotlight chasing, McCain rushed to the rescue and everything went 'kablooey.' All of a sudden, the congressional republicans, whose ideas from 1994 thru 2006 got us here, decided they didn't like the deal. So the Maverick flip flopped and went to Oxford to change minds.

Adult Christianity: In another Christianist email smear, a former employee of CBN and CampusCrusade for Christ, has posted an essay suggesting that God chose Sarah Palin to defeat Barack Obama.

William K. Wolfrum Chronicles: John McCain hires Palin's Kenyan pastor to "remove witchcraft from the economy."

Bread With Circus: Prior to her visit to the UN, the only foreign leader Caribou Barbie had met was former drug dealer, now Premier of the Yukon Territory, Dennis Fentie.

Corrente: The crisis explained

Vagabond Scholar: Right-Wing Cartoon Watch

The Robotic Chair (1984 - 2006) is a generic-looking wooden chair with the capacity to fall apart and put itself back together. With shuddering force the chair collapses to the floor then with persistence and determination proceeds to seek out its parts and upright itself. Found at the online art gallery VVork.

Open thread below...

STLtoday:

JEFFERSON CITY -- Missouri state Rep. Scott Muschany, R-Frontenac, was indicted today in connection with a reported sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl on May 17, the day after this year’s Legislative session ended.

The alleged victim is the daughter of a state employee. The girl’s mother and Muschany -– who is married and has two children -- were romantically involved, the woman said.

A Cole County grand jury returned an indictment today charging Muschany with the Class C felony of "deviate sexual assault." The indictment identifies the victim only by initials. It says that on May 17, Muschany "had deviate sexual intercourse" with the girl, "knowing that he did so without" her consent.

The document also alleges that the mother "did admit that the incident did take place, including her witnessing same." Read on...

After so many Republican sex crimes and scandals, you just have to scratch your head and wonder how one party could attract so many deviant hypocrites. Ready for the money shot? Muschany co-sponsored a bill in 2006 that toughened sex offender laws.

To follow up on my Rick Warren post---here's a quick story. I actually did meet a member of his church once.

When I was flying to DC in 2006 for the CNN blogger bash, I was sitting next to a guy who kinda looked like Kinky Friedman. As we waited for the flight to take off from LAX---he already was on his second cocktail. After we took off, he asked me what I did for a living and I said I was a liberal political blogger. He smiled and proclaimed that he was a Christian Conservative and then we both started laughing.

After a while he told me about this great church he was a member of and the leader was this really cool guy named Rick Warren. He loved it so much. I told him that I heard of it and I asked him if Rick would frown on his drinking so much and he said "no way.""Grapes, my man, grapes."

I can't remember a time when he didn't have a drink in his hand during the entire five hour flight and by the end he was so drunk that as we were getting ready to land he stood up in the aisle and told all the passengers what a cool bleeding heart liberal I was. "You gotta come to the church with me, " he said as we were leaving. I said, "Sure, just give me your card.

God, I love being a San Franciscan... I can't think of a more appropriate dedication for this administration.

Some presidents get carved into Mt Rushmore; others have airports, motorways, and even entire cities named in their honour. But when George Bush leaves office, his most visible memorial may be a mouldering patch of human effluent.

In November, alongside casting their ballot for the next president, the people of San Francisco will also vote on a measure to rename one of the city's largest sewage works the George W Bush Sewage Plant, to provide a "fitting monument" to the outgoing commander-in-chief's achievements.

Activists from the Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco, a mischievously-named group behind the move, will ask supporters to participate in a "synchroni(z)ed flush".

It may sound like a student prank, but the proposal is almost certain to be passed. Democrats usually secure between 70 and 80 per cent of the vote in San Francisco - and in 2006 passed a proposition to impeach Mr Bush and his Vice-President Dick Cheney by a majority of almost two to one.

"In 50 years from now, we want people to see George Bush's name on that plant, and ask each other what went wrong," said Brian McConnell, the Memorial Commission's organi(z)er. "We want them to be reminded of the Iraq war, and his other dramatic mistakes, and this is the perfect way to do it."

The Shock Doctrine move by Conservative goons is on the move.  They re using the fear of rising gas prices to push the ridiculous notion that all will be saved if we drill in ANWR. If it didn't pass with the White House controlled by a conservative and Congress controlled by conservatives, how will it ever pass? I think the real reason they didn't get it pushed through before the 2006 election is because drilling for oil is very expensive and Cheney's blood brothers in the oil field really didn't want to spend the cash. Why bother with record profits lining their pockets...

Huffington Post:

Ken Silverstein of Harper's has discovered that Washington Post columnist David Broder has been spending time recently on the business lecture circuit. Among the groups to which he's spoken in the past few years are the National Association of Manufacturers, the Northern Virginia Association of Realtors, the American Council for Capital Formation, and an organization of health insurance companies.

As Silverstein points out, this is especially notable because Broder's spent years criticizing journalists who do this as being "greedy" and appearing to be "part of the establishment and therefore part of the problem." Silverstein has yet to receive a response from Broder about how much he's been paid for these speeches, although he did find that Broder seems to have received $12,000 for a 2006 talk.

And this behavior is nothing new from Broder. For decades his shtick has been to posture as an independent-minded guardian of the DC press corps' conscience, while engaging in exactly the kind of intellectually corrupt Washington insider-dom he publicly deplores. In fact, he's so shameless it almost makes you feel bad for everyone there with him in the DC muck. They may be all be whores, but Broder -- whenever he's on break from servicing the clientele -- makes the rest of the hookers listen to pious sermons about the evils of prostitution.*

What's unclear is whether Broder is deeply devious, or suffers from the kind of anti-self awareness usually associated only with severe brain damage. Perhaps it's the latter, and he believes those nice gentlemen are leaving the envelopes of cash on the dresser because he and they share a deep emotional connection.

Whatever the case, here's a little-known but especially hilarious example of Broder at his most Broder-iffic. Read on...

I have to give Howard Kurtz some credit because he hasn't backed away from the Military Generals scandal. He plays audio from one of the military analysts who was part of the propaganda scandal with the Pentagon and who lovingly praises Rumsfeld. It looks like O'Reilly was used in the same way that Dick Cheney used Russert in spreading their talking points to the American people. What say you, O'Reilly?

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Kurtz: The networks continue to ignore that New York Times story about TV's military analysts getting briefings and talking points from the Pentagon as they defended the Iraq war effort.

We reported twice on this program a huge batch of documents and e-mails show how cozy that relationship was. But now comes an audiotape of it, 2006 meeting between more than a dozen analysts and Don Rumsfeld, in which some of the retired military officers are giving the secretary advice on selling the war.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We would love for you to take the offensive and just go out there and just crush these people. You are the leader. You're our guy. You go on O'Reilly, and you've got him eating out of your hand because you're smart.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KURTZ: Eating out of your hand. And these men were presenting themselves to television viewers as objective military analysts.

C&Ler "Z" sent this link to a letter to the editor of the Colorado Springs Gazette:

SUPPORT THE TROOPS
Many soldiers missing out on Bush's stimulus checks

In August 2006 the 10th Mountain Division, 2nd BCT, 1-89 Cavalry was sent to Iraq for 12 months. In April 2007, the troops were told the Army was adding three additional months to their time in country.

In November 2007 the troopers of 1-89 arrived back in New York from their tour. They are now being told by the IRS, via the IRS Web site, that they haven't earned enough money to qualify for the economic stimulus check.

There's an incentive for re-upping for three, four and five more tours. But hey, the good news is that the Pentagon has decided to change the way they handle the cremation of fallen soldiers after it came out that the crematorium the Pentagon has contracted with handles both human and pet remains. See, they're trying to be sensitive to the needs of those they've put in harm's way.