Sex Doesn't Pay

Jessica Cutler, whose Washingtonienne blog posted juicy details about Capitol Hill sexcapades and managed to get a Playboy spread, has had to declare bankruptcy.

Cutler, a former aide to then-Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, created the "Washingtonienne" blog in 2004 and began posting racy details about her sex life with six men, including a Senate colleague and "a few generous older gentlemen" who she said paid many of her living expenses.

When the blog was discovered, Cutler was fired. She moved to New York, wrote a novel based on the scandal, posed naked and started a new Web site that describes herself as "a published author who jumps out of cakes for money."

Under the occupation heading of her Web site, it reads: "I'm freelancing."

Cutler has spent much of her time fending off a lawsuit by ex-boyfriend and fellow DeWine staffer Robert Steinbuch, who claims Cutler's blog publicly humiliated him. He is seeking more than $20 million in damages.

In court documents filed in the case Thursday, however, Cutler says she can't even pay her American Express bill, legal fees and student loans. She submitted to the judge a copy of a Chapter 7 bankruptcy petition filed in New York dated Wednesday.

Guess she wasn't as good at business, or morals, as she was in getting around?

It's not a good idea to kiss and tell. It just isn't.

Discharged?

An Air Force drill sergeant and former Iowa National Guard member who posed nude for Playboy magazine has been removed from active duty, she said Wednesday. Whether that amounts to an honorable discharge, as Michelle Manhart also says, is unclear.

Manhart, who appeared in a six-page spread in Playboy's February issue, said she got word Friday that she was removed from "extended active duty" and was also told that she was demoted in rank from staff sergeant to senior airman.

"I'm disappointed in our system," Manhart told The Associated Press on Wednesday. "They went too far with it."

Manhart said that being removed from duty meant that she reverted to her Air National Guard status and that she submitted a "resignation" to the Guard, which she said is pending. Manhart was a member of the Iowa Air National Guard before going on extended active duty.

Manhart offered The AP a copy of a signed "request and authorization for separation" form that indicates her "character of service" was "honorable." It is not clear whether the form is an official discharge order.

Oscar Balladares, a spokesman for Lackland Air Force Base, confirmed that Manhart was removed from extended active duty on Friday, but he said Lackland did not discharge her.

"She was not discharged, but she was removed from active duty status and thus reverted to National Guard status," Balladares said. "It is not up to the Air Force — it is not our jurisdiction to discharge her."

So, until her papers come through from the Air Force regarding her active duty status, it would appear that her status with the National Guard isn't resolved one way or the other. It will be interesting to see how the National Guard handles the matter. Either way, Manhart is getting quite a bit of press these days. More photos here.

Prior coverage is here.

UPDATE:
Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Perri Nelson's Website, Faultline USA, The Random Yak, The HILL Chronicles, stikNstein... has no mercy, basil's blog, Pirate's Cove, The Amboy Times, Dumb Ox Daily News, High Desert Wanderer, Conservative Thoughts, Right Voices, and Pursuing Holiness, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Technorati: michelle manhart, playboy.

Air Force Sergeant In Trouble Over Playboy Pose

SAN ANTONIO Jan 12, 2007 (AP)— An Air Force staff sergeant who posed nude for Playboy magazine has been relieved of her duties while the military investigates, officials said Thursday.

In February's issue, hitting newsstands this week, Michelle Manhart is photographed in uniform yelling and holding weapons under the headline "Tough Love." The following pages show her partially clothed, wearing her dog tags while working out, as well as completely nude.

"This staff sergeant's alleged action does not meet the high standards we expect of our airmen, nor does it comply with the Air Force's core values of integrity, service before self, and excellence in all we do," Oscar Balladares, spokesman for Lackland Air Force Base, said in a statement.

Manhart told Playboy that she considers herself as standing up for her rights.

"Of what I did, nothing is wrong, so I didn't anticipate anything, of course," Manhart, 30, told The Associated Press. "I didn't do anything wrong, so I didn't think it would be a major issue."

Manhart, who is married with two children, joined the Air Force in 1994, spending time in Kuwait in 2002. She trains airmen at Lackland.

I guess the Air Force didn't read Lawhawk's posting (complete with Phoebe Cates picture) on how terrorists fear scantily clad women most of all.

On a serious note, there is nothing wrong with a women doing a spread in Playboy. Playboy is after all a legitimate magazine ... with great articles. However, we all know that when uniform personnel posse in Playboy, bad things happen, i.e., they get fired. Remember Carol Shaya, an NYPD officer who posed nude and was fired from the job. I know there were others also who got in trouble for posing in their uniform. Now, Sgt. Manhart should have known that and should have cleared this with her supervisors. Should she be relieved of her duties, I don't think so. Should she be reprimanded? Sure. Should we all go out and buy Playboy? Why not!

UPDATE:
Lawhawk here. Rob at Say Anything has more links to the photos (most of which appear to be nothing more than what you'd find in Victoria's Secret catalogues).

Foleygate Reloaded

Orin Kerr takes you through some of the legal issues that will shape the investigation of Rep. Mark Foley.

Some of my posters think that the whole notion that those who had access to the IMs but chose to sit on them since 2003 to wait for the opportune moment to use them in 2006 is nothing but pure unadulterated bunk have raised a good point. If you were going to use them to maximum effect, would they not have been used in 2004, during the Presidential elections, and not in the 2006 midterm elections.

That's a question that AJ Strata, Macranger, and Mark Levin, among others have not addressed. It's a good question. Why wait til 2006 to use them, if they were supposedly sent as early as 2003.

Yet, there are real good reasons to question the timing and the timeline, if only to determine the full timeline of events in the course of the investigation to determine if other individuals are culpable for criminal acts - acts of commission or omission.

The media continues to swirl around Hastert and the pressure on him to resign. I think CNN has it right that even if he doesn't resign that he's most likely not going to be voted back as the leader of the GOP caucus after the midterm elections.

Juneau Blog wonders whether anyone else had access to the computers and the IM account by Foley. That's a good question, and one that investigators will certainly need to look at.

Kerry Howley sums things up thusly:

For his part, Foley has been a one-man war on nuance: A vocal fan of broad databases, the first to yell sicko and cry pervert. In his own words, Foley is "never too tired" to jerk off. Nor was he too tired to use his position as chairman of the former chairman of the House Caucus on Missing Children to stretch the definitions of sex crime beyond all meaning—everything from running a nudist camps to child modeling was deemed perverse, hardly distinguishable from straight-up abuse. At a news conference in 2002, he explained that it was a mistake to distinguish between the internet and physical contact, saying " It doesn't make a difference if the child engaged in sex is real or virtual. In other words, an old simple saying: If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, it is a duck."

No one seems to be making that mistake; thanks to a culture Foley helped create, he has been portrayed as an alcoholic pedophile/adulterer/cybermonster hybrid as guilty as any predator beyond cyberspace. If the laws he helped to write are hopelessly clumsy, the circumstances of his political end couldn't be more perfect.

As I noted yesterday, the whole idea that Foley could pawn off his current mess on the fact that he was supposedly molested as a teenager by a member of the clergy is just so much BS. I wasn't alone in that evaluation. Don Surber agrees and expounds on the subject further.

Sister Toldjah tries reading the tea leaves and wonders what would happen if President Bush pardoned Foley at some point before leaving office in a manner similar to that which President Clinton pardoned Mel Reynolds. Frankly, I can't see that happening, and his case doesn't even begin to rise to the level of one where the President can or should review the case for clemency. We're nowhere near that point, so this is just so much idle chatter.

Others blogging: Blue Crab Boulevard, Jay Tea at Wizbang, and Hot Air.

UPDATE:
MSNBC has an article about the difficulties of pursuing a legal case against Foley, considering that thus far there are no reports that Foley ever met up with any of the pages for a sexual encounter:

Graphic talk alone is rarely enough, said Joseph Dooley, a former agent who helped set up New England’s first FBI unit targeting Internet predators. Many adults engage in explicit chats with undercover agents but never show up for the scheduled meetings, he said.

“We never charged anyone unless they actually traveled to have sex,” Dooley said.

Investigators could consider federal obscenity laws, experts said, but the law prohibiting disseminating obscene material to children applies only to those under 16.

Benjamin Vernia, a former federal prosecutor specializing in such cases, compared Foley’s online conversations with pages to “grooming,” a law enforcement term for the way sexual predators bring along their underage victims. Grooming is a red flag for authorities, Vernia said, but it’s rarely enough to bring charges.

This can help explain why the earlier FBI investigation led nowhere. Foley's actions to that point - in the form of the emails - was apparently insufficient to bring charges.

UPDATE:
Glass houses and all that. Gateway Pundit rounds up the postings that suggest that Democrats actually knew about the IMs before Hastert did, and yet did nothing to inform the authorities of their existence. Via Clarice at American Thinker:

Dick Morris just said on FOX that a respected reporter told him that she has proof that a senior democrat member of congress knew about the IMs months ago–unlike Hastert.

If this is accurate (big if here), then there are Democrats on the Hill who have to be held accountable as well.

If we're going to throw Hastert et al. under the bus, there's plenty of room for Democrats who similarly violated their moral and ethical obligations to do the right thing by the Congressional pages.

UPDATE:
Confederate Yankee has the transcript of the Hannity and Colmes exchange with Dick Morris. Very curious how this will play out.

UPDATE:
Another resignation (via Michelle Malkin):

ABC News Has Learned FORMER FOLEY CHIEF OF STAFF KIRK FORDHAM RESIGNS AMID QUESTIONS OVER WHETHER HE SUPPRESSED INFORMATION ABOUT FOLEY EMAILS
By Jake Tapper

Kirk Fordham, the chief of staff to Rep. Tom Reynolds, R-NY, has submitted his resignation to his boss. Questions have been raised about Fordham's role in how the House GOP leadership handled initial reports of the scandal involving former Rep Tom Foley, R-Fl, and inappropriate internet messages to underage pages.

UPDATE:
Has the source of the instant messages been discovered? That appears to be the case as John of Stop the ACLU points to Passionate America's research into the matter with Ms. Underestimated. Jay at Stop the ACLU also points to what appears to be a Democrat effort to out gay Republicans, as if that is anyone's business. Who is compiling such a list and to what end? Is this what we want our politicians and their political consultants and pundits and hangers-on doing with their time?

Fordham now says that Hastert's office was warned two years ago about Foley's emails. Yet, there's word that Hastert himself was never made aware of anything more than the initial email requesting photos of a page. Shouldn't Hastert have known that his office was informed of the matter, or did his staffers not think this important enough?

Heh. Yes, the media's reporting of this whole mess is beginning to resemble entries in Playboy Letters. And it is interesting how there was reluctance to mention sexual acts or encounters in earlier sex scandals, but all caution has been thrown to the wind in this scandal.

Others blogging: Blue Crab Boulevard (yes, it does look like this scandal is jumping the shark - but to ever higher ratings), Hot Air, AJ Strata, The Real Ugly American (who takes time to bash Glenn Greenwald's latest posting on the matter).

UPDATE:
Are you kidding me? This whole mess has gotten more bizarre at every turn. It now appears that the page at the heart of the matter was of the age of consent. Any instant messages between the two, even if cybersex, would be between consenting adults. No matter how scummy Foley was, ABC News now has a mess on their hands because they knew or had reason to know that the age of at least one of the individuals in the IMs was over 18 years of age.

UPDATE:
Drudge is reporting that ABC News says that the individual in question, Jordan Edmund, was engaging in IMs with Foley both before and after he turned 18. And is there a bogus blog that has been pushing the whole Foley story? More here.

None of this takes away from the fact that Foley engaged in reprehensible conduct.

The investigations continue. People are questioning the alcoholism claim. Well, no kidding. It was pretty suspicious that he'd run to rehab as this whole scandal was breaking. Convenient excuse to get out of the limelight.

UPDATE:
The age of consent in Washington, D.C. is 16.

Others blogging: Dan Riehl, Decision 08, and Euphoric Reality.

Prior coverage: Foleygate, The Foley Scandal Grows, Has Foley Scandal Gotten Worse?, Rep. Mark Foley Resigns Over Sexually Explicit Emails

Technorati: mark foley, email, im, instant message, congress, foleygate.

15 Years?

Time flies when you're having fun. It's been 15 years since the Internet hit it bigtime. In that time, I've had the opportunity to become a billionaire several times over, get hundreds of requests to partake in deals from Nigeria that will add to your net worth, get pornography for free without ever having to go buy a Playboy ever again, never have to worry about my manhood because of the wonders of modern medicine, and never have to engage in the dating scene without first consulting an online dating service.

It all started with a graphic interface for the networks that we used back in college. They called it Mosaic. And it was glorious. I was doing research on Middle East politics and it made it so much easier to obtain source information than going through Gopher. You remember Gopher don't you? And I don't mean Ted Grandy from the Love Boat either.

I mean the original way to sort through the various networks connected to each other on college campuses. And that doesn't even scratch the surface of the original dating services - the relays. If you know what I'm talking about, you know what I mean. Too many people I know used the relays as one huge chat room/dating service - and it worked.

So, from those origins, we now have e-harmony.com, jdate.com, match.com, and hundreds of other services that did the same things as the relays, but you now have to plunk down your credit card to use them.

And CNN has it all wrong. The most significant step in the development in the Internet is the fact that people realized that the could do more than talk to each other - they could use it for commerce. So, I'd say that the development of Ebay and Amazon.com was the key development. Of course, that coincides with the moment in time when the Internet went from being cutting edge to being passe, but that's besides the point.

There was money to be made. Stock options to get. Venture capitalists to fleece. And Nigerians looking for easy money. Oh, those Nigerians. They took grifting and scamming to new levels. I have personally been contacted by the sons and relatives of dictators from various African nations too many times to count. Hundreds of emails. Billions in money transfers just waiting for my personal contact information to seal the deal and transfer my cut on each deal. Which, in a way, was like the stock options offered by thousands of Internet startup companies - the dot coms.

And in a flash, the stock options were torched in the market correction that saw so many dot coms go belly up. Heck, the sock puppet from Pets.com ended up working for a credit counselling service or other such nonsense. He was had for pennies on the dollar - and began making money for someone else. Go figure.

Now, we don't think twice about email, videoconferencing, VoIP, blackberries, or any other accoutrements of what the Internet has wrought. In fact, you wouldn't be here reading this if the Internet wasn't around. I'd probably be watching TV or a movie right now. And wondering who the heck the guy on the screen is and not knowing the joys of IMDB.com to search for movie trivia. Which reminds me.

Football's on [crummy game such as it is - is still better than anything else on tonite].

I guess I better go check my fantasy football stats online.

Hey, never said I'd give up my usage that easily.