Stormiegate: A Bit of Meta-Commentary

Here at Wonkette, we don’t permit reader comments (yet). Some things, like the Washington Post’s recent unpleasantness with comments, make us less enthusiastic about the idea.

But sometimes we’re reminded of what we’re missing out on. Over at the AlabamaElections blog, which has also been covering Stormiegate, readers have been commenting up a storm. Here are some highlights:

Anonymous: this is no surprise at all. have any of you ever had dealings with [Senator Sessions’s] staff? they are the most churlish, immature, pious, serf serving brats I have ever come across in government dealings.
Anonymous: I believe her First Amendment Rights were pressured, and she had to cave in to maintain her job. Personally, I would have quit working for Jeff. In fact, I wouldn’t work for him to begin with!

Additional vitriol and snark — all from anonymous commenters, of course — after the jump.

Anonymous: “[M]en in button-fly jeans.” That line will follow that poor girl the rest of her life. It may explain why at 34 she is still single as I don’t know any men who wear button-fly jeans. But then I too am a Taurus.
Anonymous: This is low. I don’t even know that it’s right to call MySpace profiles blogs. They are more like personal ads. So the scandal here is that an unmarried 34 year old woman had a singles ad? And that she had a PG-13 photo on it? This is pathetic. MySpace is a members only community, and the person looking at this would have had to search specifically for this person, once logged in. Comparing this to Jessica Cutler is ridiculous.
Anonymous: This was a cheap shot. The Advertiser ran the story Saturday on its front page with a photo. It claims to have received an e-mail from someone about the “blog” and thus found it. Unduly embarassing people has unfortunately become part of the “gotcha” mentality of politics today. Both sides do it. No wonder people are so cynical about government. Is this really news? Questionable. But front page news on a weekend? Give me a break. They owe her an apology. I hope the media, and the Senator, will close the book on this and move on.
Anonymous: i checked out the friendster site for stormie. the really intersting thing there is her friend “laura” who is listed as a state representative from mobile alabama who wants relationships with women and men… go figure?????

Ooooh… Blog or no blog, this Laura character sounds like she’s worth investigating!

Jeff Sessions and the Case of the Sexy Blog [AlabamaElections]
Profile of “Laura” [Friendster]

Earlier: BREAKING (Despite the Elastic): Stormie Janzen’s Thong!
Stormie Janzen: Tempest in a Teapot?
Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Back in the Blogosphere

READ MORE: blog, bloggers, blogging, blogosphere, blogs, capitol hill, friendster, jeff sessions, montgomery advertiser, sex, sex scandal, stormie janzen

Stormie Janzen: Tempest in a Teapot?

Okay, fine, we’ll admit it. We believe that the whole Stormie Janzen blog controversy is a bit overblown. Indeed, our view is reflected in the title we’ve given to this post. (And yes, we briefly considered the triple-pun headline “Stormie Janzen: Temptress in a Teapot,” before rejecting it as way too “busy.”)

But the recognition that this is all “much ado about nothing” — as Stormie herself, a one-time Shakespeare scholar, might say — won’t prevent us from serving up yet another post about Sen. Jeff Sessions’s steamy staffer. It’s what you’re clearly clamoring for, and we aim to please!

For those of you who missed yesterday’s coverage, Stormie Janzen is a gorgeous, 34-year-old scheduler for Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). Until recently, Stormie Jansen [sic; intentional misspelling to capture Google traffic] maintained a bawdy blog on MySpace, where she raved about the sexiness of men in button-fly jeans and treated visitors to a tantalizing glimpse of her thong, a la Monica.

Unfortunately for Ms. Janzen, as well as all thong-loving members of MySpace, the powers-that-be in Senator Sessions’s office eventually got wind of her literary exploits. And when they did, they forced poor Stormie to change into a pair of granny panties — and to take down her blog. (But the chastened Janzen is keeping her job, as reported by Roll Call.)

So you’ll probably never get to see that ridiculously delicious photo of Stormie in her partially unbuttoned jeans (unless someone emails us a screen cap). But you’re still dying to know: “Who is Stormie Jansen? And how is she related to the Halle Berry character from X-Men?”

On the jump page, the results of Wonkette’s detailed investigation into those questions.

This Montgomery Advertiser article about Stormie Janzen provides some basic facts about her:

• she’s 34 years old;
• she is, by her own description, “single, straight and a Scorpio”;
• she’s a 1994 graduate of the University of South Alabama in Mobile;
• she works as a scheduler for Senator Jeff Sessions; and
• for her Senate work, she was paid $64,139 between October 1, 2004, and September 30, 2005 (so, with that healthy if not enormous salary, she has no need to supplement her income, Jessica Cutler-style).

In our quest for additional information about Stormie Janzen, we started at ground zero: we Googled her. This yielded up a ton of references to her work for Senator Sessions, as well as mention of her work on University of South Alabama Alumni Association, but not much else. (For those of you seeking to ask Janzen out on a date, however, Google will helpfully provide you with her office email address and work phone number.)

We then turned to Friendster, which was also a disappointment. Janzen’s profile has no photo — just that stupid Friendster smiley face — and it doesn’t tell us much about Stormie. We learn that she enjoys travel, writing, and dance, and that’s pretty much it. There’s also a somewhat banal testimonial from Stormie’s one friend, Laura, who raves about Stormie as “one of the nicest people I have ever known,” “who makes me laugh when I need it most.” Um, thanks, Laura. Can we be BFFs forever?

Of course, we also tried to locate Stormie Janzen on MySpace. That proved even less fruitful: it appears that Stormie’s profile disappeared along with her blog.

Then we turned to Lexis/Nexis. (Yes, dear readers, Wonkette research is a full-service operation. Don’t forget — people used to pay over $300 an hour for this!) And that’s when we finally started to get the good stuff.

First, we encountered an article about personnel changes among the Sessions staff from The Hill, on July 5, 2000. It had this to say about Janzen:

Janzen began working for Sessions on his campaign for attorney general of Alabama in 1994. After Sessions’ election, she served as his special administrative assistant in Montgomery, Ala. In 1997, she moved to Mobile, Ala., to work in Sessions’ district office as a field representative. A native of Madison, Janzen received her B.A. in philosophy and English from the University of South Alabama in 1994, and attended the University of London (King’s College) in 1992, where she studied Shakespearean literature. Janzen succeeds Kate Hollis, who has returned home to Montgomery.

That study of Shakespeare may explain how Stormie got to keep her job. We can already imagine Stormie Janzen making her impassioned plea to Rick Dearborn, Senator Sessions’s chief of staff: “The quality of mercy is not strained…”

Second, we found a Roll Call article from July 10, 2000, which contains essentially the same substance as the piece from The Hill. But the headline for the Roll Call piece about Janzen’s arrival in Sen. Sessions’s office is priceless:

SESSIONS SUPPLEMENTS D.C. STAFF WITH FOURSOME

Write your own punchline. People, you cannot make this shit up!

Update: BREAKING (Despite the Elastic): Stormie Janzen’s Thong!

Thunder Over Stormie [Roll Call]
Sessions’ Aide Agrees To Shut Down Blog After Complaint [AP]

Earlier: Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Back in the Blogosphere

READ MORE: blog, bloggers, blogging, blogosphere, blogs, capitol hill, dome punks, foursomes, jeff sessions, jessica cutler, kate hollis, montgomery advertiser, rick dearborn, self-writing jokes, sex, sex scandal, stormie janzen, threesomes, top, washingtonienne