Hillary, Johnny Mac and Mo

"Anthony Mercieca described a series of encounters that he said Foley might perceive as sexually inappropriate. Among them: massaging Foley while the boy was naked, skinny-dipping together at a secluded lake in Lake Worth and being naked in the same room on overnight trips."

The New York Times investigates and finds...dissension in the GOP!

"Tax-cutters are calling evangelicals bullies. Christian conservatives say Republicans in Congress have let them down. Hawks fault President Bush for bungling the war in Iraq. And many conservatives blame Representative Mark Foley's sexual messages to teenage pages.

"With polls showing Republican control of Congress in jeopardy, conservative leaders are pointing fingers at one other in an increasingly testy circle of blame for potential Republican losses this fall...

"Whether the election will bear out their pessimism remains to be seen, and the factors that contribute to an electoral defeat are often complex and even contradictory. But the post-mortem recriminations can influence politics and policy for years after the fact. After 1992, lawmakers shunned tax increases. After 1994, they avoided gun control and health care reform. And 2004 led some Democrats to start quoting Scripture and rethinking abortion rights, while others opened an intraparty debate about the national security that is not yet resolved."

Here are some quick political hits.

Boston Globe : "Governor Mitt Romney vigorously defended a plan yesterday by his political advisers to develop a network of Mormon supporters for his potential presidential bid, while a former Internal Revenue Service commissioner said discussions among Romney operatives and Mormon Church leaders about the initiative could violate the church's tax-exempt status."

Wall Street Journal : "The Democratic Party's three major campaign committees raised more money last month than their Republican counterparts, slicing deep into a financial edge Republicans hoped would provide an advantage in the final weeks of the bruising campaign for the midterm elections."

LAT : "Orange County Republican leaders urged their own congressional candidate to withdraw from the race Thursday after he acknowledged that his campaign was involved in sending out a letter intended to scare off Latino voters."

Here's what the Spanish-language letter from Tan Nguyen's campaign said: ""You are advised that if your residence in this country is illegal or you are an immigrant, voting in a federal election is a crime that could result in jail time . . . "

For liberals, Rove is the Great White Whale, and they hope that on Election Day he'll wind up beached:

"Is Karl Rove the great mastermind of American politics?" asks Slate Editor Jake Weisberg . "Everyone seems to think so. George W. Bush's nicknames for him include 'The Architect' and 'Boy Genius.' Other Republicans see Rove as a shaman who can conjure victory out of the air--and Democrats agree. (They would rather think they've been losing to a nefarious wizard than to a lazy moron.) The political press, always more comfortable with personality than ideology, cottons readily to the myth that the country is run by an elusive puppeteer.