Posted on 05/08/2005 9:45:20 AM PDT by lilylangtree
Spokane Mayor Jim West confided to a city councilwoman Thursday that he masturbated in his City Hall office during an online chat on a gay Web site.
"He wanted to kind of bare his soul...He wanted to give me a heads-up," City Councilwoman Cherie Rodgers said Saturday in describing a conversation she had with West.
West's admission led Rodgers on Saturday to renew her call for West to resign as mayor, an independent elected position he has held since January 2004. A recall election would require 12,567 signatures of registered voters.
http://www.spokesmanreview.com/jimwest/story.asp?ID=050805_west_main
(Excerpt) Read more at spokesmanreview.com ...
Damn. This sickening story just gets worse. He needs to switch parties if he expects to remain in politics.
Agree with you 110%. As a conservative pubby woman, I'm ashamed to admit that he and I belong to the same party. Yuck!
Does the city health plan cover eyeglasses?
Slick Willie liked to masturbate into the Oval Office sink.
People like this guy like to use the word "queer" they think it's cute or avant garde or something to "shock" straight people with that word. Nevertheless, nothing fits this bird better than "QUEER" 'cause he sure is. The fact that he's a pubbie makes it worse. He should be kicked out of our party and sent over to his real party, the one with the jackass mascot.
That would be a good start. Did you catch Geraldo Rivera's program on Fox yesterday? He brought the West scandal up with Ann Coulter, asking her if West should resign. She didn't hesitate a minute in saying yes, and that he should be prosecuted if the story is true.
Then, Rivera did a whole segment on the scandal. He had Mark Fuhrman on a live satt feed from Spokane. Fuhrman says the phone lines for his radio program have been lit up for 2 days with shocked locals demanding West's resignation. That seems like a no-brainer.
But, Fuhrman takes it one step farther, a step with which I strongly agree. He asks what the hell was going on in the Spokane Sheriff's office during the time period that West is accused of molesting boys while employed as a Sheriff's Deputy. At the same time, his partner in the Sheriff's office was accused of the same acts, committed suicide, and had his records sealed. There's another story of Sheriff's deputies going to the county jail and beating one of the accusers to silence him.
I hope Fuhrman doesn't let this drop. Something rotten and evil was going on in the Spokane Sheriff's Department. Those responsible or complicit need to pay and the citizens need to be assured that the Sheriff's Office is being held to the highest possible standard.
I think this is as much a story as is the West scandal...may he rot.
No, I didn't see it. However, I'm passing your information along to other non-freeper pubbies. Thanks for the heads up. Resign West resign!
This story raises so many issues it's hard to track all of them. There are lots of losers here as a result of this story.
1. If JW assaulted young boys, or uses the mayoral office for the purposes of generating sexual liasons, he must resign and should be prosecuted if he broke the law. JW loses.
2. The Spokesman Review should be investigated and censured for entrapment for the purposes of creating news instead of reporting on events. The Review loses.
3. The local Dems accuse the Repubs of being hypocritical because JW is gay??? The only hypocrisy here is that the Dems on one hand support gays, but then attack gays for being gay when they see a possibility to score political points. Repubs lose because of guilt by association, and the hypocritical Dems lose because they're eating their own.
In other recent Spokane news, the previous mayor's (John Powers) adult children were in court to plead quilty last week for seriously beating one of the family friends. Even the previous mayor loses.
Must be something in the water at City Hall.
The latest news is that West is stepping down from office for 2 weeks in order to think things through and prepare for the legal battle that is sure to follow. My advice to him is to not return to office. Also, a group of Spokane citizens have already filed a petition asking that Jim West resign. On another note, Mark Furman is just the man to make sure that the Spokane Sheriff's office gets investigated. This is all so sick.
The latest news is that West is stepping down from office for 2 weeks in order to think things through and prepare for the legal battle that is sure to follow. My advice to him is to not return to office. Also, a group of Spokane citizens has already filed a petition asking that Jim West resign. On another note, Mark Furman is just the man to make sure that the Spokane Sheriff's office gets investigated. This is all so sick.
I applaud the Spokesman Review newspaper. They were given information that accused a public official - the mayor - of molesting boys. Then they received information that he was frequenting gay internet sites. Put two and two together, and the Spokesman Review had a duty to go undercover and find out what the hell was going on in the mayor's office. And guess what - they did!
Some say that's the job of the police, but the police won't launch an investigation into the alleged molestations because of the statute of limitations.
The Spokesman Review did absolutely the right thing in this case, just as TV journalists do the right thing when they pose as 12-year-old girls in chat rooms and set up hidden-camera meetings with perverts who abuse the internet so they can then abuse this nation's young people.
This wasn't a random sting by the Spokesman, it was a targeted sting involving a city's mayor who was being accused by two people of outrageous and sickening crimes against children.
I was disappointed to see Joe Scarborough and one of his msnbc guests last night criticizing the Spokesman. The newspaper DID NOT create news. It went undercover to report news. Good job, Spokesman Review!
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