(Roughly) Daily

From The Daily Beast:

What better way to end March than with Michael Steele answering questions about an RNC member’s expenses-paid $2,000 night at a Los Angeles bondage club. Earlier in the month, Kevin Garn, Republican majority leader of the Utah state senate, admitted that he once skinny dipped with a 15-year-old girl and paid her $150,000 to keep quiet, and California State Senator and Republican family-values defender Roy Ashburn was arrested for driving drunk in a state-owned vehicle after leaving a gay nightclub with a new companion.

The Democrats can hardly crow, however. March was the month that “Tickle Me Eric” Massa burst onto the public stage—and out of the House of Representatives…

Which party has more problems with sex scandals?

After studying 58 scandals over the past 20 years all involving politicians or major candidates for city mayor and above—many involved crimes, others just allegations, but all wound up as tabloid fodder—some conclusions can be reached.

• The number sex scandals has increased dramatically over the past few decades, thanks to technology, new press standards and a post-Clinton belief that everything is fair game.

• Republicans have more scandals (32 to 26), but Democrats have bigger ones, based on our methodology (13 out of the top 20).

• Democrats tend to have more problems with harassment, staffers and underage girls; Republicans tend to have more problems with prostitutes, hypocrisy and underage boys.

The rest of the story, replete with Cook Report-like analysis and “grading” by category (e.g., “sexual assault,” “out of wedlock child”)– and of course, photos– is here.

And for readers itching to do something about the absolute corruption that results from absolute power, a place to start:  Change Congress.

As we disinfect our spectacles, we might recall that it was on this date in 1722 (Easter Sunday that year) that Jacob Roggeveen, an explorer in the service of the Dutch West Indies Company discovered Rapa Nui– or as he called it, “Paasch-Eyland” (Dutch; in English: Easter Island).  Roggeveen had been in search of Terra Australis; instead he found the 2-3,000 inhabitants of the island…  and probably saw at least some of the famous moai– the stone statues deifying ancestors for which Rapa Nui is renown– though at that time many would have been toppled or buried.

a 15-moai ahu (stone platform) excavated and restored in the 1990s