“I don’t belong to any such group,” Stupak said. “I rent a room at a house in ‘C Street.’ I do not belong to any such group. I don’t know what you’re talking about, [The] Family and all this other stuff.”

The Messenger also spoke with Jeff Sharlet, a contributing editor to Harper’s magazine who lived with The Family at another house and wrote a tell-all book about the group. Sharlet said he doesn’t buy Stupak’s proclaimed ignorance of the organization’s activities.

“When I lived with The Family at Ivanwald, a house for younger men being groomed for leadership, I was told that Stupak was a regular visitor to the Cedars,” Sharlet said. The Cedars is yet another compound owned by The Family, one that hosts weekly prayer events led by former Reagan-era Attorney General Ed Meese.

Sharlet said that Stupak had much greater involvement with the group than he is admitting, noting that the congressman was “a Family-assigned mentor to one of my brothers at Ivanwald.” That Ivanwald resident, Sharlet said, “regularly left for what he and others described as mentoring sessions.”

Another reason to doubt Stupak’s denials, Sharlet said, is that members of the organization and those who live at the C Street house are sworn to secrecy about what goes on there, as fellow resident Zach Wamp admitted to the Knoxville News in the wake of the recent scandals. That makes such denials less credible, Sharlet said.

You can read the full story at The Michigan Messenger.

If the Gov does an interview and its exclusive, it will make air on the tv channel and our radio news service all across the country. And I’m not sure if you’ve seen the stuff I do on the channel as a reporter, but I work mostly for our primetime coverage – Oreilly, Hannity, Greta, Beck — so there likely would be primetime coverage as well for some soundbites of the gov dispelling this flap…

Jenkins has a … complicated relationship with journalistic ethics. Back in May, he repeatedly identified himself as a “blogger,” not a reporter for Fox News, in order to get an interview with Janeane Garofalo which then ran on Fox News.

An attorney for U.S. Sen. John Ensign says the senator’s parents gave his mistress and her family nearly $100,000.

In statement released Thursday, Paul Coggins says Ensign’s parents made the gifts “out of concern for the well being of longtime family friends during difficult time.”

Coggins says the gift was made in the form of a check totaling $96,000 in April 2008, after the Nevada Republican had told his parents of his affair.

“Dr. Coburn did everything he could to encourage Senator Ensign to end his affair and to persuade Senator Ensign to repair the damage he had caused to his own marriage and the Hamptons’ marriage,” Coburn spokesman John Hart said in a statement. “Had Senator Ensign followed Dr. Coburn’s advice, this episode would have ended, and been made public, long ago.”

Hart told The Post that the husband’s claim that Coburn urged Ensign to pay restitution “is false.”

Thus likely endeth the Coburn chapter of this saga. The larger story here revolves around the separate charge that Ensign paid his mistress $25,000 in severance money as she was quitting her job in his campaign office. That payment didn’t show up on any campaign forms filed with the Federal Election Commission — a campaign finance violation that also happens to be a felony.

The Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has filed an official complaint with the Senate Ethics Committee on that very point. Most such complaints are dismissed (lawmakers, after all, don’t really like policing themselves). This case, though, will be more difficult to dismiss as a triviality.

Stay tuned…

Given the fact there aren’t enough votes for impeachment, if censure is the only available option, then that will be the option. It’s the only one that has a chance of surviving.

Shortly thereafter, Sanford voted to impeach Clinton on four counts.

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford is admitting more encounters with his Argentine mistress than he previously has disclosed.

In a lengthy, emotional interview with The Associated Press, the governor described seven meetings with the woman, including their first in 2001. Sanford says there have been five over a 12-month period, including two multi-night stays with her in New York.

You get one chance to reveal everything, and Sanford missed it.

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