Mr. Beck homed in. "Are there Tiger Woods phone calls that are going to happen, or text messages?"
In the show's most newsworthy moment, Mr. Massa said frankly of his interactions with staff members: "I'm sure there are text messages because we bantered back and forth all the time."
Text messages!
Does climbing into a guy’s bunk and tickling his junk while he fends you off count as a “tickle-fight”?(HotAir, "New details emerge: How Massa tried to, er, 'snorkel' his Navy shipmates")
According to Peter Clarke, a Navy shipmate, Massa was notorious for making unwanted advances toward subordinates. He tells the story of his friend Stuart Borsch, with whom Massa shared a hotel room while on leave during the first Gulf War. “Stuart’s at the edge of the bed,” Clarke says Borsch told him at the time, “and [Massa] starts massaging him. Massa said, ‘You’ll have to get one of my special massages.’ He called them ‘Massa Massages.’” Ron Moss, a Navy shipmate and Borsch’s roommate, confirmed that Borsch told him this story at the time.Borsch, now a history professor at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts, didn’t addresss that specific incident, but did confirm to me in an email that he was groped by Massa: “In 1990, aboard the U.S.S. Jouett, I was awakened when a senior officer, Lt. Commander Massa, seemed to be groping me. (I was a lieutenant at the time.) I believe he may have been drinking. I shouted at him and he left. I mentioned the incident to several other officers. I did not officially report it.”Clarke says that Massa’s roommate, Tom Maxfield was also assaulted. “Tom lived on upper bunk,” Clarke say. “When you’re on ship, you’re almost exhausted 24-7. So a lot of times you sleep with your uniform on. Tom and Massa shared a stateroom together. Massa climbed up on the top of his bunk, which is hard to do–you never crawl up on somebody else’s bunk. He wakes up to Massa undoing his pants trying to snorkel him.” Ron Moss also confirmed hearing this story from Maxfield. Maxfield did [not] return calls and messages left for him–I’ll update if he does.Why waste a post on this when, thanks to yesterday’s fiasco, this guy’s credibility is already destroyed? Three reasons. One: The snorkeling euphemism deserves a link, damn it. Two: I linked that Bob Lonsberry piece reciting the allegations against Massa during his naval career several times and figured you guys might want to compare and contrast. Lonsberry’s account is strikingly similar to what the Atlantic heard — except that the Atlantic notably now has people willing to go on the record. And three: To no one’s surprise, because of Massa’s resignation, the less-than-worthless House ethics committee has ended its investigation into his alleged misconduct. Barring a sexual harassment lawsuit by one of his victims, the only justice this guy’s going to get is from reporters. The Atlantic is the beginning but probably not the end.
The recent awarding of a lucrative federal contract to a company owned by a financial contributor to the Obama presidential campaign -- without competitive bidding -- "violated" President Obama's many campaign pledges to crack down on the practice, a top State Department official told Fox News.
Assistant Secretary of State P.J. Crowley, familiar to many Americans from his erudite delivery of the State Department's daily press briefings, made the admission in a telephone interview Saturday night.
Reminded of Obama's many pledges during the 2008 campaign to crack down on the use of no-bid contracts, and of the memorandum the president signed last March instructing the Office of Management and Budget to curb the practice, Crowley said: "You make a valid point. If you want to say this violates the basis on which this administration came into office and campaigned, fair enough."
The contract in question, worth more than $24.6 million, was awarded on Jan. 4 by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to Checchi and Company Consulting, a Washington, D.C.-based firm owned by economist and Democratic Party donor Vincent Checchi. The deal called for Checchi's firm to train lawyers and judges in Afghanistan and thereby strengthen the "rule of law" in the war-torn country.....