And in other news...

The Sun rose in the East this morning and will likely set in the West tonight...

If you're going to try to pawn something off as news, it needs to be, well, news. In otherwords, something we didn't already know:

The head of the House Democrats' campaign committee, Rep. Rahm Emanuel, had heard of former Rep. Mark Foley's inappropriate e-mails to a former male page a year before they became public, a campaign committee aide told CNN.

Foley, a Republican, resigned after the scandal broke. House Speaker Dennis Hastert and other Republicans have suggested repeatedly that some Democrats knew about the e-mails earlier than they have acknowledged, but waited till midterm elections approached to bring up the issue.

Emanuel's campaign committee aide said Friday that the Illinois Democrat was informed in 2005, but never saw the correspondence and did not have enough information to raise concerns. The aide said Emanuel took "no action" because his knowledge was "cursory" and little more than "rumor."

The aide's acknowledgement differs from the flat "no" Emanuel gave in October when asked -- during an interview on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" -- if he or anyone on his staff knew of the e-mails before the scandal broke.

Whether the effort was authored and executed at the level of the DCCC leadership or not is effectively a moot point. But please, let's not be coy--Dem political operatives and politicians knew of this behavior just as the Republican House leadership did. Only their responsibility was to find a way to use it to political advantage rather than acting in the interests of the young pages in the program.

How convenient. See, this is what always angered me most about the Foley situation. Lots of people knew...and no one deemed it worthy of exceptional action, inside or outside of Congress. So then exactly where was the "scandal"...?

And if saying that such a position is an abdication of the responsibility for oversight of the page program by Republican leadership, was not then also every other member who knew, every journalist who'd seen and read the emails also a worthy target of the anger and disdain that fell upon the heads of Denny Hastert and his fellow Republicans?

You'd think, but apparently not.