Now Ney's pled guilty to bribery charges.

Reporters Marc Caputo and Lesley Clark of the Miami Herald called Harris on it yesterday:

Harris said Thursday that she can't return the money or give it to charity.

''The money came for my congressional race. It's been spent. It's gone. We'd have to research what we can do,'' Harris said.

Seventy years after President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that the Depression had left one-third of the American people "ill-housed, ill-clothed and ill-nourished," Americans are well-clothed and increasingly overnourished. But the scarcity of affordable housing is a deepening national crisis, and not just for inner-city families on welfare. The problem has climbed the income ladder and moved to the suburbs, where service workers cram their families into overcrowded apartments, college graduates have to crash with their parents, and firefighters, police officers and teachers can't afford to live in the communities they serve.

Grunwald's story is chilling. And he lays out an issue that seems tailor made for progressive political policies and candidates. Why? Because it effects everyone.

At Florida Workforce Housing Network, we're aiming at a slightly different mission from what most community bloggers are used to.

Florida Workforce Housing Network aims to promote a specific political, social and commercial outcome: the development and construction of "workforce" homes that average people in Florida can afford to live in.

I'd appreciate any criticism of the site, and I'll explain some of the strategy in the extended text.

Sounds like a joke, right? Well, this is Florida, and the rules really are different here.

Florida Workforce Housing Network has the story, it's from a marketWIRE-distributed press release, so it's reproduced here in full.

Hold your nose, shield your eyes and try to read the whole thing without laughing below:  

I don't mean Jeb Bush, with whom scurrilous, libelous rumor-mongers linked her back before "Sept. 11 changed everything," or even Charlie Crist, current God-appointed rethugubernatorial candidate, who admits he "dated" Harris back in the 1980's.

Orlando Sentinel Political Pulse blogger Mark Skoneki just posted Sentinel reporter Jim Stratton's original brief for today's print edition:

Fred Asbell, Harris' chief of staff, resigned yesterday - Thursday - effective today - Friday.

In an e-mail, Fred Asbell said he's leaving to pursue a business opportunity, but he did not say what type. He also said he would do some consulting work with Harris' campaign for U.S. Senate.

Like many political junkies, I get my news and opinion fixes from newspapers, television, and specialty newsletters. But I also rely increasingly on blogs, the Web pages that contain both interactive, hyperlinked reportage and commentary. Such information sources are no longer curiosities.

For example, Daily Kos (http://www.dailykos.com) started by Markos Moulitsas Zúniga...

(Out of space, more below...)

The Miami Herald has the story here.

The deal's pretty simple: buy a selected model (the cars no one wants because they get two miles to the gallon) plus OnStar, the electronic, vehicle-embedded Big Brother service, and GM will reimburse customers the difference between $1.99 per gallon and the cost of premium grade gas.

Yesterday SPT political reporter Adam C. Smith covered serial sleaze Katherine Harris, whose corruption denials are almost as prominent as her bosom these days.

Last month, as Harris' Senate filing deadline approached, she was busy denying improprieties with Mitchell Wade, the guy who (a) bribed California congressman Duke Cunningham; and (b) gave Harris $32,000 in illegal campaign contributions (c) during a $2,800 dinner-for-two at Citronelle, one of the priciest restaurants in D.C.

Harris made a clean breast of it all on Hannity and Colmes, claiming failure to pay for her half of that $2,800 bar tab was just an oversight she made good -- by donating $100 to a Jacksonville fundy church group.

Oops.

Adam Smith, SPT:

Now it turns out that wasn't her first fancy meal with corrupt contractor Mitchell Wade. Harris had dined with Wade previously at the same tony Washington restaurant and failed to pay her share as required by congressional rules, her campaign acknowledged Friday.

Ed Rollins, who resigned as Harris' chief Senate campaign political strategist last month, gave up the goodies to Orlando Sentinel reporter Jim Stratton in a page 1 story today.

A defense contractor seeking help from Rep. Katherine Harris for $10 million in federal money last year took her to one of Washington's most exclusive restaurants, where he paid for a meal that may have cost as much as $2,800 and offered to sponsor a campaign fundraiser for her.

I use Mac with OSX/Safari 1.0.3. I'm not able to reply to any comments, ("Reply" doesn't work). If I click the comment button at the top of the page (the one immediately below the diary), I can open the comment boxes, but the comment button at the bottom of the page doesn't work at all.

I can't rate anything and can't read users' UID #'s either.

The triangle thingie doesn't work at all, the only way I can read comments is by setting the "extended" feature in my user profile box (which I did).

When I click on "comment," the comment/header boxes open but I can't make my cursor work inside the boxes except by right-clicking on them (I have a prologis mouse).

But the "post" button doesn't work for me either, so there.

Am I just SOL or are these problems fixable?

Joe DuRocher is a longtime personal friend and personal hero of mine. Joe has always been one of those good-guy Americans whose opinion was invariably common-sense patriotic. Joe's ideas, and Joe's actions, always evidenced first principles that were firmly rooted in the ideas we learned as children about fairness and justice and equanimity, egalantarianism, the idea that we are all equal, and that our differentness is a beautueous thing.

Joe DuRocher's first principles are first principles I think every one of us would agree with. He'd have made a great king, but he'd have been the first to say "king" is stupid.

Below the jump, I'll tell an inside story about him, I hope it's interesting enough to warrant posting on the front page, because I think Joe DuRocher is a genuine American Hero, one whom we Democrats ought to embrace and cherish.

Those blasphemous Danish political cartoons might save the world.

I hate them -- they are offensive to me in a cellular, media-as-the-message sort of way -- but they may save the planet from self-destruction.

I have been studying religion and religions for more than 30 years. Freedom of speech always trumps piety, IMO, but piety deserves our respect for practical reasons: most people think it matters some, and some people think it matters enough to kill and die for.

I used to feel that way myself. When I was 12, I swore a sacred oath -- a sacrament -- to suffer for my faith "as a soldier," martyrdom included. A bishop struck me on the cheek to commemorate my oath in front of a church full of people -- families of my sixth-grade class.

I'd like to remember that I had more sense, but in 1962, I would have suicide-bombed for Catholicism had circumstances warranted. My heroes were all martyrs, I was named after one, I wanted to be a priest. I was a hungry little Palestinian kid with a rock, longing for God's notice and invincible as any 12-year old.

NYT/AP posted the story about 20 minutes ago, so is this is b..b..breaking?

What I want to know is, who are the Dirty 33? Anyone want to help me find them (I've been googling for an hour)?

And mightn't their names and photos rate our front page?

This is already well diaried by MissLaura with big rec's, but if you've missed it, a front group calling itself the "Bruin Alumni Assn." offers UCLA students up to $100 each to spy on professors and report comments deemed ideologically offensive. The group issued a "hit list" of 30 professors it deems ideologically suspect.

Here's how UCLA professors -- even the 30 hit-listed ones -- can rub the noses of the "Bruin Alumni Assn." in their own fascist feces and strike a blow for truth, justice and academic freedom:

1. I will (endeavor to) never post a diary about something I read on the Drudge Report.
   
2. I will (endeavor to) limit my use of first person singular to one per sentence, two in an emergency.
   
3. I will (endeavor to) leave the writing of meta diaries to members whose dKos experience is greater than three years or less than one.
   
4. The above resolution doesn't (endeavor to) include this diary.

A year ago eight million Americans claimed to have posted blogs and 14 million of us comments, images or links. Last year lurking on blogs grew by more than half -- to 27 percent of America's 120 million Internet users.

Among all political blogs, every available objective measure says dailykos.com is the biggest dog that ever was. Senators and congresspeople, CIA analysts, jihadists and creepy Karl Rove kids visit this site regularly and contribute, bet your last dollar on that. Why? Because some of the sharpest tools in America's shed work the garden here regularly -- by the thousands.

So what role might dailykos.com play in the Reconstruction of America?

Says Graham:

The day the Twin Towers fell, Bob Graham was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. In What I Knew Before the Invasion, he first quotes Bush -- ""[M]ore than 100 Democrats in the House and Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power," he said" -- and then buries him.

Among 18th-century fundamentalist Christians, it was eminently proper to rise up during Sabbath meeting to declaim and denounce policies and efforts destructive of community norms (or otherwise antibiblical).

Clearly, torture is such a policy, such an effort.

Not even torturers can prove the logical value of their own efforts: torture victims routinely claim whatever their torturers expect, as you would when someone starts to Torquemada  your genitals.

As any sadist knows, the effective value of torture is wholly in its anticipation. It's the threat, stupid.