MONDAY, OCTOBER 2 The week kicks off with that continuously accelerating avalanche of revelations, allegations, confessions, excuses, and ass-covering tactical scramblings history will remember as the Foley Scandal. Instigated by the events of last Friday—when ABC News disclosed the sexually explicit instant messages sent by Florida Congressman Mark Foley to his teenage congressional pages, and Foley immediately resigned—the scandal spent the weekend brewing into the tornado of spin unleashed today upon the media, an onslaught that grew more grotesque by the minute, all week long. In a cartoonish twist, the most credible measure of the scandal's potential for Republican ruin was supplied by the increasingly desperate and ludicrously duplicitous bullshit those implicated by the scandal allowed to pass through their lips. Greatest hits: White House Press Secretary Tony Snow's dismissal of the instigating evidence as a few "naughty e-mails" (insulting any and all of Foley's victims, and willfully ignoring both allegations of a cover-up and the wealth of evidence tracking the GOP's knowledge of Foley's "naughtiness" back at least two years); embattled House Speaker/primary cog in the alleged cover-up Dennis Hastert issuing bald-faced lies ("When we found out [about Foley's tendency to hit on his underage pages], we dealt with it immediately") and attempting to pin the whole scandal on "Democratic operatives aligned with Bill Clinton" (did you know Bill Clinton murdered Jesus, threw Baby Jessica down that well, and invented lupus?); and, glory of glories, Fox News's numerous on-air references to Republican leader Foley as a Democrat. After such inspired bloviating, it was almost a letdown when Pat Robertson eventually got around to blaming the gays: "This man's gay," said Robertson of Foley. "He does what gay people do and so don't worry about it." As The Stranger's lovingly cruel lord and master Dan Savage argued so eloquently on the Slog, this is not what gay people do; this is what closet cases do. But such points are too intricate for those who stand to suffer from the Foley scandal, who have devoted themselves to the crudest type of damage-control grandstanding. For now, Last Days can only watch in awe and horror, and look forward to the day when Foley, former chairman of the Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus, may be punished with a number of the fierce internet-predator laws he helped create.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 3 Nothing happened today, unless you count numerous new twists in the events of yesterday.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 4 The week continues with an exceedingly brown story from the streets of Seattle, as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported the surprising failure of the city's high-tech automated toilets. Installed two years ago and maintained at a cost of $700,000 a year, the self-cleaning robot johns were hyped as the cure for Seattle's burgeoning street-feces epidemic. The new problem, according to downtown and Capitol Hill business owners: the endlessly rotating cavalcade of drug dealers, crack heads, and prostitutes perpetually hogging all five of the city's pay toilets, forcing those wanting to use the john for less criminal means to do their business in the street. According to Peggy Dreisinger, field operations director for the Metropolitan Improvement District (MID), in the two years prior to the installation of the automatic toilets, the organization logged 2,400 reports about misplaced human waste; in the two years since the toilets' installation, there have been 7,418 reports. As for solutions to the new problem caused by the last attempt at a solution: The MID is urging the city to ditch the high-tech toilets, even if it means spending $820,000 to remove the devices and break the maintenance contract, while Seattle Public Utilities is working on improvements, including the installation of a video camera outside one of the toilets, and the passage of a rule barring more than one person from entering an auto-john, unless the second person is underage, differently-abled, or both. (Once again, Seattle's crippled underage hookers get a leg up.)

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 5 "Holy fucking shit," writes Hot Tipper Levi. "I really don't know what else to say after what I just witnessed on the #28 bus, which I will now try to recount as accurately as possible. The subject: a white male in his 30s, pudgy, with blond hair and a touristy fisherman-type hat. On his lap was a large, bulky backpack. When I first noticed him, he was putting on a pair of white cotton gloves. Once gloved, he reached into the backpack and extracted a stethoscope, which he used to listen to his right kneecap and right ankle. Having now commanded the peripheral attention of all nearby riders, Mr. Backpack produced a pair of needle-nose pliers, which he inserted into his right nostril and yanked, maintaining a completely straight face. He then produced a Bank of America deposit envelope, into which he placed his yanked nose hairs. By this point, I was staring openly. With the bus bumping along, the man plunged the pliers repeatedly into both nostrils—at least eight times—each time carefully scraping the removed hairs into the envelope. When he was done, he folded up the envelope and placed it, along with the pliers, into the backpack. I will admit that this was the climax, but it was not the end. The man then produced a cell phone, which he used to call an unknown third party, to whom he confessed he'd forgotten what he was supposed to do for the rest of the day, then hung up. He then produced another phone, which he held at arm's length and used to snap a picture of himself. He then returned to the first phone and called information, asking for the number of the Sunset Bowl in Ballard. Then he shuffled through his wallet, laughed hysterically at something inside, and got off the bus somewhere in Fremont. I don't know what to say. I am a changed man."

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 6 In a fitting follow-up to yesterday's "World Can't Wait" marches, today brought another bracing challenge to the Bush regime, this one from MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann, who came through with an astonishing on-air op-ed about our president's unprecedented mendacity. "The president of the United States—unbowed, undeterred, and unconnected to reality—has continued his extraordinary trek through our country rooting out the enemies of freedom: the Democrats. Yesterday at a fundraiser for an Arizona congressman, Mr. Bush claimed, '177 of the opposition party said, "You know, we don't think we ought to be listening to the conversations of terrorists."' The hell they did. One hundred seventy-seven Democrats opposed the president's seizure of another part of the Constitution. Not even the White House press office could actually name a single Democrat who had ever said the government shouldn't be listening to the conversations of terrorists. President Bush hears what he wants. Tuesday, at another fundraiser in California, he had said, 'Democrats take a law enforcement approach to terrorism. That means America will wait until we're attacked again before we respond.' Mr. Bush fabricated that, too... Mr. President, these new lies go to the heart of what it is that you truly wish to preserve. It is not our freedom, nor our country—your actions against the Constitution give irrefutable proof of that. You want to preserve a political party's power. And obviously you'll sell this country out to do it. Please, sir, do not throw this country's principles away because your lies have made it such that you can no longer differentiate between the terrorists and the critics."

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 7 Today brought a short, fierce explosion of violence at Westlake Center, as a troubled 25-year-old man brutally attacked a 52-year-old male stranger, punching him to the pavement and then kicking him repeatedly. Unfortunately for the younger man, his apparently randomly selected victim happened to be packing, and the older man eventually shot his attacker in the abdomen. The younger man died, the shooter produced a concealed weapons permit, police are investigating.

SUNDAY OCTOBER 8 Nothing happened today, unless you count North Korea's terrifying nuclear tests.

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