Randall Tobias, head of the Bush administration’s foreign aid programs, abruptly resigned Friday after his name surfaced in an investigation into a high-priced call-girl ring, said two people in a position to know the circumstances of his departure.
Tobias submitted his resignation a day after he was interviewed by ABC News for an upcoming program about an alleged prostitution service run by the so-called D.C. Madam.
ABC reported on its Web site late Friday that Tobias confirmed that he had called the Pamela Martin and Associates escort service to have women come to his condo and give him massages. More recently, Tobias told the network, he has been using a service with Central American women.
Tobias, 65, who is married, told ABC News there had been “no sex” during the women’s visits to his condo. His name was on a list of clients given to ABC by Deborah Jeane Palfrey, who owns the escort service and has been charged with running a prostitution ring in the nation’s capital.
Tobias held two titles: director of U.S. foreign assistance and administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development. His rank was equivalent to deputy secretary of state.
Rice named Tobias to head the two programs in January 2006, and on Wednesday was at the White House, where President Bush praised his efforts coordinating global AIDS relief. Tobias had been the White House’s coordinator for global AIDS relief before taking the USAID post.
Before joining the administration, Tobias was a director and chairman of Eli Lilly and Co., the Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical company.
Associated Press
Blogblah! Republicans will want to talk about Clinton and Barney Frank again. Y’know, I have this theory that the entire GOP platform is based on repressed sexuality. Think about it. Welfare Cadillac was/is about black women having sex. There’s the obvious abortion vs. abstinence debate and the equally obvious gay marriage stuff. How Freudian do you have to be to throw in the gun issue? This whole militaristic society led by a strongman stuff is just measuring dicks. The nation has been saturated with the phrase “family values” since 1998 and the Monica Lewinsky pimped up impeachment and that was just GOP repressed sexuality as far as I’m concerned. Then you start looking at the GOP leadership. Livingston, Speaker of the House, resigns in disgrace over an affair. Newt Gingrich was getting hum jobs DURING THE IMPEACHMENT SCANDALS from a woman with whom he was having an affair, he recently disclosed. Guiliani openly moves his mistress into Gracie Mansion. Mark Foley in Florida. The list is apparently endless. Somehow, Clinton trumps all this to the GOP. It’s almost like the hypocricy is what makes it OK for them. Yes, the Republicans say, our personal lives are like Ted Haggard’s, but at least we’re hypocritical about it and preach about how everyone else should lead a better life according to Leviticus. WTF? Somehow, the irony of a guy who is the leader of America’s AIDS international program, who insists on abstinence as the number one option and is queasy about handing out condoms and certainly won’t let anyone mention abortion is now getting happy ending massages from a prostitution ring. I wonder if the Central American indentured sex slaves he now uses for his massages are here legally. This guy is a deputy secretary of state! Can you say blackmail and spycraft boys and girls? It’s a national security issue for someone that high up at State to be caught with their pants down. Do we really believe there’s no health club in his neighborhood who can send over a licensed masseuse? Let me think about it. Uhm. NOPE!!! You know who else is caught up in this scandal so far? The guy who invented the military tactic now known as “shock and awe”. A Pentagon/think tank guru. Duh. Aren’t you just proud as punch with W’s ability to “pick ‘em”? Harriet Meiers and Al “Fredo” Gonzales for the Supreme Court. Those idiots Griffith in Arkansas and Palouse in Minnesota, the replacement U.S. Attorneys for two of the eight scandal firings, already failures. “Brownie” can never be forgiven or forgotten. Rumsfeld. The Regency Law School’s star student, Monica Goodling. Paul Bremer’s entire crew of inept ideologues that snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in Baghdad. Renzi in AZ and Doolittle in California following Bob Ney into the slammer with Duke Cunningham. DeLay and his Abrhamoff cronies can’t even be bribed successfully – how could they possibly be expected to be anything but failures at governance?
Until this story, my outrage of the day was at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. The Atlanta Journal reported today that 161 out of 225 scientific posts overseas have gone unfilled for a year because the scientists who’ve been selected by CDC for their merit have been held up by the White House who can’t find the scientists who dispute Global Warming or think that abortion causes breast cancer to pass their litmus tests of politics over all. The scandal at FDA over the Plan B pill. The Supreme Court being forced to order the EPA to follow the law. The new head of the Consumer Product Commission is a 14 year industry lobbyist who has consistently argued for deregulation and market forces for child hazard toys.
Anyone with competence is there by mistake, it seems, or has been forced to slink away like Colin Powell for having competence and no fucking moral courage to resist Dick Cheney, the father of all lies.
Every time I think I have outrage fatigue, this administration does something else to get my bowels in an uproar.
Torture! How can this be a part of official American policy? This is incredible on a global scale. It is surely as bad for our foreign policy objectives as the Iraq war itself.
This “Long War”, this GWOT, a unilaterally announced World War III against just whoever we pick for any old trumped up reason, the arrogance of the idea of American hegemony and American exceptionalism. It staggers the mind. That we have allowed these monsters to LEGALLY snoop into our phone calls, credit card use, email, library use is the greatest failure of any American generation including the “Greatest Generation’s” internment of the Japanese.
And speaking of libraries, nothing at all is sacred to these power mad proponents of an Imperial Presidency — they even attack freedom at the most fundamental level by restricting what can and cannot be read in a public library…this alone is outrageous.
The rise of the Euro and Pound against the dollar is no fluke because the war spending is pure inflationary spending and these crazy bastards are turning us into what Warren Buffet’s partner has called a “hasbeen” country. The curve is downhill from here, folks. He headed to China saying that nation has a future as well as a past.
These fundamentalist theocrats bear too strong a resemblence to the Iranian and Saudi theocracies for my own tastes. It’s an American fascist face on the Taliban.
I think we should sentence W to go to Walter Reed and tell every wounded American: “Mission Accomplished” and “Bring it on”. Hoo freakin’ rah!
Today, a line officer writing in the Armed Forces Journal charged the present general staff of the military with being second rate minds with third rate educations (almost none of them speak a second language, for example) and a general lack of ability in fundamental leadership skills. Quoting Clauswitz all the way up to the latest counterinsurgency papers, the brave soul quite simply said everybody should have been at least as honest as Shinseki, even if they got fired, and that the bastards didn’t have the balls to tell Congress and the nation the truth. Strong stuff. I inferred he believes we are STILL not being told the truth.
That fucks with my head. Pisses me off royally.
Grrrrr.
I am going to completely hate it if Reid and Pelosi give in to the President’s veto threats.
I have to go now. I have a BB pistol and a lifesize photo of a certain person and I’m going to get out some of my frustration by aiming my BB pistol and firing at this effigy of a certain prominent someone. Don’t get me wrong. I’d prefer to get out my frustrations by joining the prosecution team at the War Crimes trial at the Hague and seeing certain someones imprisoned, perhaps on Elba, for the remainder of their lives. It’s just not as satisfying a fantasy somehow.