House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Shultz (D-FL) and fellow New York Representative Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee all called on embattled Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) to resign today.  The move is a complete reversal of Pelosi’s position from just twenty four hours ago.

From the The Hill:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and two other leaders of the Democratic Party on Saturday called on Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) to resign, shattering any semblance of party support for the embattled congressman.“Congressman Weiner has the love of his family, the confidence of his constituents, and the recognition that he needs help. I urge Congressman Weiner to seek that help without the pressures of being a Member of Congress,” Pelosi said in a statement Saturday.

Her call was issued nearly simultaneously with pleas for Weiner to quit from Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Shultz (D-Fla.), the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

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WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) – U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner, who has been under fire after admitting to sending graphic photos to women online, acknowledged Friday that he had online contact with a 17-year-old girl in Delaware but said the communications were “neither explicit nor indecent.”

New Castle County police officers went to a high school junior’s home north of Wilmington Friday afternoon to speak with the girl about her contact with the New York Democrat, police have confirmed. The interview was first reported by FoxNews.com, which had a reporter at the home when police arrived.

Weiner spokeswoman Risa Heller said in a one-sentence statement Friday night, “According to Congressman Weiner, his communications with this person were neither explicit nor indecent.”

A police spokeswoman confirmed that officers had interviewed an area teenager about online contacts with the congressman.

“They were made aware of an alleged contact between Congressman Anthony Weiner and an area teen,” said Officer Tracey Duffy, a New Castle County police spokeswoman. “The teen has been interviewed and disclosed no information regarding any criminal activity.” (more…)

[White House exercise facility]

MICHELLE:  Well, come in, people.  Geithner, Carney–get your skinny butts over here and spot for me while I press 250.  Everybody else, pull up a mat and sit so we can start.

JOE BIDEN:  Huh?  Why’s the Boss over in the corner in his PJs staring out the window?

MICHELLE:  Off the record.  He’s stressed out.  I’m running things until his therapist clears him for duty. Anybody got a problem with that?

DAVID PLOUFFE:  No Ma’m, but, uh . . . .

MICHELLE:  What happened?  Yesterday, he had to layup on the first par 5 at Burning Tree and couldn’t choose between a 6-iron and 7-iron.  Told his playing partners he wanted to sleep on it.  At dinner, a steward asked what flavor parfait he preferred for dessert.  Midnight, he was still muttering, “I like the strawberry, but the peach appeals to me, too.”

BILL DALEY:  Deteriorating decision-making skills.  It’s worse than when I came on board.  Hell, CIA knew where bin Laden was hiding since mid-2009.   The President couldn’t pull the trigger.  I had to use his autopen to sign the order okaying the Seal operation on Osama’s compound.

MICHELLE:  Hmmph.  Didn’t have a problem deciding on those chili dogs and stepping on my nutrition message the other day. (more…)

Congressman Wiener is in a tough spot.  It is a spot of his own making, but it is tough.  He now has some serious thinking to do, beyond his Congressional seat.  He certainly should resign, and not just because Republicans have been run out for lesser offenses, but because he is compromised.  Even voters who would vote for a man as smug, arrogant and malicious as Mr. Wiener deserve good representation.  I do not think they can have it from him.   However, should he decide to remain in office and take his chances with voters in 2012, he needs to answer some more questions and then take a new stand without question.

As a lawmaker, I found myself pulled into issues I never expected.  One issue really stuck with me.  There was a young man raised in relative affluence, groomed to take over  his father’s dental practice.  He went away to the best schools, studied hard, made the grades, and picked up a habit.  Shortly after returning home, he went to meet a 13 year old girl for sex.  The girl turned out to be a cyberdetective.  The cop was hired in part due to a funding program I created.  The laws used to prosecute and sentence him were also enhanced through my legislation.  His arrest was not something that I celebrated.  I found it really sad.   It made a chilling point that I make anytime I speak at the University level or elsewhere;  The only thing possibly worse than your child becoming the victim of a predator is your child becoming the predator.   Mr. Weiner is an addict, bent on a destructive path from which he could not extricate himself.  I cannot celebrate this either.  This is sad.

I was drawn to the issue of stopping sexual predators because Bill O’Reilly once challenged our state saying “Missouri is a state that does not care about kids”.  He was referencing the critical Megan’s Law and Jessica’s Law recommendations and the fact that Missouri scored so poorly in adopting them.  The words resonated for me because my brother, a probation officer for sexual predators often told me the frustrating stories of people our state turns loose.  So, having that wonderful honor of being a public servant, and  ability to do something about it.  I went to work.  Congressman Wiener should too.

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This New York Post article might finally move this story forward.  About that investigation… is this a good enough time for everyone?:

The furious mom of the Seattle college coed at the center of Weinergate yesterday demanded that the cocky congressman come clean about the lewd photo.

“I’m really upset. I feel like he’s a person of power and influence, who can make a statement and make all this go away,” Carol Mizuguchi said, blasting Rep. Anthony Weiner for his continued snarky sidestepping.

“As her mother, I’m really upset,” Mizuguchi told The Post. “I’m pissed off at that.”

Mizuguchi’s 21-year-old daughter, Gennette Cordova, got the surprise package — a close-up of an underwear-clad crotch — over the weekend in a tweet from Weiner’s account.

After days of dodging, Weiner yesterday admitted he “can’t say with certitude” that the photo isn’t of him.

But he continued to deny he sent the picture.

The pol’s refusal to clarify things has made a bad situation more difficult for her daughter, Mizuguchi said. (more…)

Rep. Anthony Weiner’s comments today and yesterday raise new questions, and emphasize the urgent need for a full, official, and independent investigation of the allegation that one or more of his account(s) were “hacked.”

A new theory suggests that it would have been possible for someone with Weiner’s private yfrog email address to send a picture to that address which would then appear on his Twitter feed as if Weiner himself had sent it.

That means someone other than Weiner, who had “hacked” or otherwise obtained his yfrog email address, could have “pranked” him.

Yet the same result would have occurred if Weiner had emailed an image to his own yfrog account, and only would have occurred once he had authorized yfrog to use his Twitter account. Weiner appears to have had no knowledge or understanding of the yfrog feature.

The yfrog feature, in other words, proves nothing–it only suggests that Weiner could have been both “hacked” and “pranked.” And again, he could simply have sent the link to the offending yfrog image himself, from his mobile device or another source. The conflicting theories cry out for investigation.

Weiner said today that he did not send the photograph, and that a reference to Seattle in one of his tweets was a “terrible coincidence.” We are prepared to take him at his word. Yet he repeated his initial claim that his account had been “hacked”–an allegation that calls for an official, not a private, investigation.

And even if we assume everything Weiner has said is true, he still has not given a clear or credible answer about whether the image is of him; he has not explained why other images were deleted from his yfrog account; and he insists on an internal investigation that will report to him alone.

Hacking into private accounts, impersonating a federal elected official, and deleting evidence that may be subject to federal investigation are each criminal offenses. Failure to report suspected cybercrime is also a breach of House of Representatives rules.

The American people deserve to know whether these violations, having been alleged or described, actually occurred.

Yes, this is Rep. Anthony Weiner calling a CNN producer a “Jackass.” And that’s just the beginning:

CNN’s Dana Bash reports on the latest developments involving a lewd photo sent out on Rep. Anthony Weiner’s Twitter account to a young college girl in the Seattle area. She says despite the congressman’s claim that his account hand been “hacked” neither the Capitol Police nor the FBI are currently investigating a hacking.

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The Daily News has a statement from Gennette Nicole regarding the controversy swirling around an explicit image Tweeted via Rep. Anthony Weiner’s Twitter account.  Mediaite has a fair assessment of where the story stands for now:

It may be too soon to say for sure, but this Memorial Day weekend may go down in the annals of Twitter history as one of the strangest ones imaginable. Rep. Anthony Weiner claimed that his Twitter account had been hacked after an inappropriate photo surfaced that was alleged to have been sent to a college student via the social media platform. There are a slew of legitimate questions, however, that remain. Once answered, they could do irreparable damage to some high profile personalities, particularly if there is more to the story, as there most certainly is.

As for Gennette Nicole’s statement, Big Government and associated Breitbart sites made the decision to redact or withhold Gennette’s name and personal information as it was determined unnecessary for an accurate reporting of the still developing story.

The notion that a verified Twitter account, in this instance, belonging to a member of Congress, can allegedly be hacked and continue to remain verified raises serious questions for Twitter. That an official account of a member of Congress can be hacked has even broader ramifications. Many taxpayers may not think it the laughing matter Rep. Anthony Weiner appeared to think it was, given his own reaction.

Also from Gennette’s statement:

The last 36 hours have been the most confusing, anxiety-ridden hours of my life. I’ve watched in sheer disbelief as my name, age, location, links to any social networking site I’ve ever used, my old phone numbers and pictures have been passed along from stranger to stranger.

When contacted, sources on Capitol Hill raised serious concerns given that such a hacked account could potentially provide access to confidential, if not classified, information, by facilitating access to government servers via an existing Virtual Private Network. The extent of any hack would have to be investigated before any determination in that regard could be made. (more…)

Jonathan Allen and Ben Smith at Politico:

Rep. Anthony Weiner says social networking identity hacking is to blame for the lewd material that a conservative news website reported was sent from his Twitter and yfrog handles to an unidentified woman from Seattle, Washington.

Weiner’s office did not respond to a request for comment on if he has contacted authorities.

The New York Democrat told POLITICO he thought it “obvious” that his account had been taken over, and he tweeted that his Facebook account had been hacked with the abbreviation “FB hacked.”

A photo of a man’s bulging gray boxer-brief underwear was posted to Weiner’s account with yfrog — an online image-sharing site — on Saturday night, according to biggovernment.com, which is run by Andrew Breitbart. The photograph is from the waist down, and shows no face.

“The weiner gags never get old, I guess, ” the veteran lawmaker emailed a POLITICO reporter in response on Saturday. …

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WASHINGTON (AP) – The House on Thursday voted to end federal funding to National Public Radio. Republican supporters said it made good fiscal sense, and Democratic opponents called it an ideological attack that would deprive local stations of access to programs such as “Car Talk” and “All Things Considered.”

The bill, passed 228-192 along mainly partisan lines, would bar federal funding of NPR and prohibit local public stations from using federal money to pay NPR dues and buy its programs. The prospects of support in the Democratic-controlled Senate are slim. Seven Republicans broke ranks to vote against the bill.

“It is time for American citizens to stop funding an organization that can stand on its own feet,” said Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., the sponsor. He said it was not a question of content—which many conservatives say has a liberal bias—but whether taxpayer dollars should go to nonessential services. “As a country we no longer have this luxury.”

Other Republicans also denied that the measure was a vendetta against NPR, although the organization left itself open to conservative attacks last week when an executive, talking to conservative activists posing as members of a fake Muslim group, was caught on camera deriding the tea party movement and saying the NPR would be better off without federal funding. Both the executive and the president of NPR resigned after the incident. (more…)

Anthony Weiner honed his political craft working for New York Senator Charles Schumer, and it shows in his recent attack on Glenn Beck and his sponsor Goldline.

Weiner and his comrades’ views are well reflected when he says in his Goldline Report:

…during troubling economic times it seems there is always someone ready to take advantage of the situation and profit from people’s fears.

In the past there is always the “product” that is either the next big thing (the dot com boom) or the investment that will never go down in price (the housing market), and in the past much of the media has failed in its duty to conduct due diligence, but never before have they worked so hand in hand to cheat consumers.  Commentators like Glenn Beck who are shilling for Goldline are either the worst financial advisors around or knowingly lying to their loyal viewers.

Goldline’s high pressure sales tactics and fear mongering about big government as well as their ability to hire sales staff and spokespeople who misrepresent their roles are case studies in why entities like the SEC and FTC are necessary.

Of course, it is the unscrupulous businessmen and their shills in the media who are preying on people’s fears to make a buck.  Guess what Mr. Weiner? It is because people like you are running our nation that is precisely why people are turning to gold, and precisely why places like Goldline can charge a premium.

You see, the reverse is true when it comes to your argument that because of the sales representatives at Goldline who “misrepresent their roles,” the SEC and FTC are necessary entities.  We need gold and thus gold salesmen because agencies like the SEC and FTC, along with you and your colleagues in Congress and over at the Fed help sanction and blow the very bubbles that you speak to and debase our currency, stealthily taxing us and leading us on a path to monetary and fiscal collapse.  It is because of your “consumer protections,” that consumers are made unsafe.  It is because of your regulations that we have distorted markets and the moral hazard that encourages imprudent risk-taking.

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