Category: Florida

#FreeKate Lies Rejected by Daily Kos Staffer, and Other New Developments

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Generally speaking, people who care about facts are not liberals, so I was amazed when Donald Douglas pointed this out to me.

McCarter’s original story on Monday, May 20, began with a touching lament about Kaitlyn Hunt’s “young life” being “turned upside down and her future jeopardized simply because . . . she fell in love with a younger girl who has vindictive bigots for parents.”

Right: “She fell in love,” and fingered a 14-year-old in a toilet stall at school. Isn’t it so delightfully romantic?

If you’ve followed the story at all — and my Thursday article at The American Spectator has been widely cited — you know that this “vindictive bigots” angle is crucial to the narrative that the #FreeKate mob has been pushing. And if you saw Jana Eschbach’s WPEC-TV interview with Jim and Laurie Smith, parents of the 14-year-old girl, you know what an evil and dishonest smear that is.

Where did this smear come from? Directly from Kaitlyn’s mother, Kelley Hunt-Smith, who wrote May 17 on Facebook:

“[The younger girl’s parents] are bigoted, religious zeolites [sic] that see being gay as a sin and wrong, and they blame my daughter. . . .
“They are trying to send an innocent young girl to prison because they are full of hate and bigotry. These girls are teenagers in high school, who had ONE mutual consenting sexual experience.”

Lies, lies, lies.

Is it possible, I will dare to ask, that Kelley Hunt-Smith’s dishonesty is somehow related to her daughter’s problems? There seems to be some kind of dysfunctional family situation here. If Kaitlyn’s mom is a pathological liar, isn’t mental illness often hereditary?

The “Free Kate” Facebook community also seems to have been the source for other falsehoods, especially the lie that the sexual activities between Kaitlyn and the younger girl occurred when they were 17 and 15, rather than 18 and 14. Joan McCarter bought that false narrative hook, line and sinker:

[A]ccording to Hunt’s parents, Hunt was 17 when the relationship began, but the other girl’s parents waited until after she turned 18 to go to police.

Anyone can read the arrest affidavit in the case and see that Kaitlyn’s date of birth is Aug. 14, 1994, meaning she turned 18 before she began her senior year at high school year and before she met the younger girl, who was a 14-year-old freshman throughout the period when the two were sexually involved together. Kaitlyn was arrested Feb. 16, and the freshman girl didn’t turn 15 until April.

Joan McCarter of Daily Kos — who had originally posted a petition supporting Kaitlyn Hunt — removed that petition and corrected the story as soon as she learned the truth:

Thu May 23, 2013 at 10:29 AM PT: The public scrutiny of this case has brought to light problems with the initial reporting, and with the original story coming from the Hunt family. Previously, Hunt’s parents said that the younger girl was 15, and Hunt 17 when the relationship began. The release of the arrest warrant made clear, as subsequent news stories report, that the younger girl was 14 and Hunt was indeed 18 when the relationship began.
These corrections, and the initial dishonesty of Hunt’s parents, make this story much more problematic, and our original petition moot.

Wow! If only we could explain to McCarter that Keynesian economics doesn’t work and ObamaCare will bankrupt the county . . .

OK, maybe that would be too much worldview trauma, too soon. But you might be surprised how often a situation like this, where a liberal discovers she’s been misled by her fellow liberals, leads to the kind of second thoughts that slowly unravel a belief system. Remember, I was a lifelong Democrat and voted for Bill Clinton in ’92, only to learn too late what a shameless liar he was (and still is).

Anyway, now that the facts about Kaitlyn’s Jailbait Dildo Deviance are beginning to break through the wall of #FreeKate lies — and Kaitlyn has, probably unwisely, rejected the prosecution’s plea bargain offer — Momma Weirdo is having conniptions:

Liars hate the truth. Therefore tell the truth boldly, because there are few honors more rewarding than to be hated by liars.

UPDATE: Ann Althouse blogged about the story and some of the most interesting bits are her remarks in the comments:

Based on the video [i.e., the WPEC-TV interview with Jim and Laurie Smith, parents of the younger girl], it seems that kids at school are putting a lot of pressure on their daughter to reject her parents.
Now, the parents did report her girlfriend in to the police. They did this, they say, as a last resort after their daughter had already run away (without telling them). That was not a good strategy for getting their daughter back, as it’s alienated her further, so that she may feel that her entire social life depends on rejecting her parents.
So, do you think that was very savvy of the parents?
I don’t think so, but the question is what can they do once the other girl has shifted the rhetoric?
The younger girl’s parents made one drastic decision: to report behavior that is, under the law, a felony.
The accused girl got control of the narrative, with much support, making it about homophobia.
There’s really no way back for the younger girl’s parents. They can present their point of view and make it somewhat better, but they must regret going to the police.

What happened, Professor Althouse, was that Kaitlyn Hunt’s parents lied. And why should lying — “shift[ing] the rhetoric” to gain “control of the narrative,” as you say — be rewarded? It seems important to me that liars should never prevail in a situation like this, or else the rule of law will be subverted by dishonesty.

Then again, that seemed important to me when Bill Clinton lied about having sex with Monica Lewinsky, too.

As to the decision of the younger girl’s parents to report Kaitlyn Hunt to the police, both the arrest affidavit and the WPEC-TV interview suggest that this was the only remedy they had left, if their purpose was to protect their daughter against Hunt’s selfish predation.

From studying this story, a picture of Kaitlyn Hunt emerges that is far from flattering: She is reckless and arrogant, and feels entitled to do whatever she wants, without any criticism, any opposition or any consequences — the Veruca Salt Syndrome, as it were. Had she been willing to take “no” for an answer, had she been amenable to reason, had she thought twice of the potential consequences of continuing to pursue this 14-year-old even after repeated warnings from the parents, it never would have come to this.

Kaitlyn Hunt at all times had agency over her fate, and by her selfish impetuosity she has done dreadful damage to everyone involved here. To criticize the “drastic” action of the younger girl’s parents, or to suggest they “must regret” having gone to the police is to overlook their duty as citizens: Kaitlyn Hunt is a menace to the safety of the community. How many others has she victimized, exploited or corrupted? All this yammering about what a popular and successful student she was — is it true? Is it relevant?

She seems to be a dishonest, selfish, impudent whelp, and however “popular” she may have been, her attempt to evade responsibility by playing the victim — and enlisting a mob to pressure the prosecutor on her behalf — looks an awful lot like pathological narcissism.

The more I examine the arguments made in support of Kaitlyn Hunt, the more I’m of the opinion that she should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, if only to provide an example to any other young fool who might be tempted to emulate her.

Think of it this way: #FreeKate = “Occupy 14-Year-Old Vagina!”

Damn her, and damn her lying supporters, too.

 


Because She’s Cute, That’s Why

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Some friends have asked why I’m being such a hard-ass about the Kaitlyn Hunt case. Certainly, my personal experience and opinions are relevant to the situation, and perhaps later I’ll discuss the case in terms of my perspective as an erstwhile teenage hoodlum.

No one familiar with Rule Five of “How to Get a Million Hits on Your Blog” could miss the professional interest in a case where it is entirely legitimate to use Jailbait Lesbian Scandal as a headline.

Ouch. Stop. You’re twisting my arm.

This case involves serious matters of law, politics, culture and morality. It also involves journalism bias, with liberals pushing the #FreeKate propaganda of gay victimhood, and it is that aspect of the Kaitlyn Hunt case that angers me most: Stop the damned lies.

So the story engages my interest on multiple levels, and I readily admit that my sarcastic tendencies and tabloid instincts — on the one hand — might appear to conflict with my social conservative stance against the “emerging awareness,” on the other hand. But this is merely an apparent conflict, and the only reason it is apparent is because I’m trying to pull back the curtain and show readers the inherent hypocrisy that practitioners of Serious Journalism would like to pretend doesn’t really exist: They know damned well that Sex Sells, and the more kinky and lurid, the better. And to have Kaitlyn Ashley Hunt — 18 years old, 5-foot-1, 110 pounds — as the “face” of a sex story as kinky and lurid as this one? Yeah, it’s gold, baby.

When the networks trot this story out on Good Morning America and The Today Show, they understand the Rule 5 factor, and the liberal activists understand it just as clearly. That media hypocrisy needs to be exposed by brutally irreverent sarcasm.

It’s important in doing so to make clear that I’m not a stuffy narrow-minded prude. Advocating on behalf of the right of parents to protect their children against moral corruption does not require me to talk like a Baptist deacon addressing a ladies’ Sunday School picnic. Reporters are legendarily rude and profane people, and I expect some of them will be reading this stuff, so readers will excuse me if I speak the native language of the tribe at times.

A friend asked: Am I trying to “crucify” Kaitlyn Hunt? No, she’s quite voluntarily climbing up on that cross — refusing a plea deal that was very generous, all things considered — and I’m merely the minstrel bard telling the tale of her doom. Because she’s cute.

Oh, the pretty ones never see it coming, do they?

Everybody Loves a Pretty Girl, and they become accustomed early to smiling and charming their way out of trouble. Never mind who gets hurt, or how unfair it is that the pretty girl always manages to get away with breaking rules that other people have to obey.

Well, from what I’ve learned about this case — have you read the affidavit? — the sheriff and the prosecutor didn’t really want to put pretty green-eyed Kaitlyn Hunt in prison, but she and her indulgent mother got the idea that the rules shouldn’t apply to Kaitlyn.

Let’s see how this works out, eh? My guess is Kaitlyn’s wardrobe for the final scene will be handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit.

And she’ll look hot.

Don’t judge me, haters.





 

UPDATE: The courageous Teenage Dildo Queen:

If Hunt loses at trial, she faces up to 15-years behind bars.
“Our client is a courageous teenager who is choosing not to accept the current plea offer by the state of Florida.”
Defense attorney Julia Graves advised her client to go to trial, rather than accepting a plea deal by the state.

“All is proceeding as I have foreseen . . .”

 

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BREAKING: Kaitlyn Hunt Refuses Plea Offer, Will Face Trial on June 20

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Kaitlyn Hunt, the Florida 18-year-old who admitted a sexual affair with a 14-year-old girl, has rejected a plea-bargain offer from prosecutors in Indian River County and will face trial June 20 on charges of lewd and lascivious battery.

UPDATE: Hunt’s supporters had mounted an online campaign claiming that she was the victim of homophobic prejudice in an effort to pressure prosecutors to drop the felony charges against her.

While prosecutors had offered a plea bargain that would have kept Hunt out of prison on supervised release, Hunt and her supporters wanted the charges reduced to a misdemeanor. Hunt’s supporters say because her sexual involvement with a 14-year-old freshman girl — which began inside a toilet stall at Sebastian High School — was consensual, she should not be charged with a felony.

UPDATE II: Liberal organizations and major media have united behind the #FreeKate movement’s argument that Hunt is a victim, and have demonized the parents of the 14-year-old as “bigoted religious zealots.” However, in an interview with the local CBS affiliate yesterday, Jim and Laurie Smith, denied those accusations, saying they twice warned Hunt to stay away from their daughter. The Smiths say they only went to police after a Jan. 4 incident in which their daughter went missing overnight; a sheriff’s department arrest affidavit in the case says the 14-year-old ran away and spent that night at Hunt’s house, where the two teens “put their fingers inside of each other’s vaginas, put their mouths on each other’s vaginas, and both of them used a vibrator on each other to insert it in each other’s vaginas.”

UPDATE III: It is doubtful that Hunt’s attorneys will attempt what Da Tech identifies as The Roman Polanski Defense:

“Judges want to f— young girls. Juries want to f— young girls. Everyone wants to f— young girls!”

But the cross-examination should certainly be interesting, eh?

And what about the forensic evidence? Will prosecutors include the vibrator as Exhibit A? If readers want to send me to Florida next month to cover The Teenage Lesbian Trial of the Century, this would be a good time to hit the tip jar.





 

UPDATE IV: Darleen Click at Protein Wisdom:

Merely three years ago Whoopi Goldberg was rightfully chastised for defending Roman Polaski’s sexual relationship with a 13 year old girl by questioning whether or not it was rape-rape. . . .
On one hand, we have the the Obama Administration demanding universities criminalize even “offensive” speech as sexual harassment, making all college students nascent sexual harassers; but we have a whole new social movement dedicated to decriminalizing sexual behavior with 14 year olds . . .
Minors must be emancipated from their parents and adults must be dependent on The State.

Dan Collins at The Conservatory:

Meanwhile, on Twitter, with the hashtag #FreeKate, and elsewhere online, the far left has tried to make this a cause celebre, painting the issue as one of two young girls being in love, but tormented by the younger’s Christofascist Godbag parents. . . . [T]hey go so far as to lie about the age of the younger girl, stating that she was just 17 (you know what I mean), when these incidents occurred, because that helps them shape the narrative of victimization.

You should read the whole thing. The automatic conflation of “gay = victim” is one of those emotional buttons that liberals love to push. And speaking of pushing buttons, hit the tip jar.

You’d hate yourself if I missed this one, wouldn’t you?





 

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No Wonder They Couldn’t Find Her

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For 11 years, police in Pennsylvania searched for a woman who had disappeared. It’s easy now to understand why they could find her. She had hitchhiked to Florida, and the photo on the “missing” posters didn’t look anything like her after 11 years of hard living:

People thought Brenda Heist had been murdered. Her ex-husband was viewed as a suspect. In 2008, a cold-case unit revived the investigation, but none of their leads led anywhere. And the least-likely explanation turned out to be true.
“When the investigation first began, after interviewing all of her family and friends, neighbors, co -workers, the one consistent thing they all said was that she would never leave on her own. She would never leave her children behind,”Detective Schofield told CNN. ”The fact that she left on her own was one of the theories, but it was at the bottom of the list.”

Read the whole thing at Viral Read.

 

Svitlana Buchyk: Mystery Woman in Menendez HookerGate Scandal

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Matthew Boyle of Breitbart.com just published a photo of a woman who reportedly “worked” for Dr. Salomon Melgen, the Palm Beach opthamologist at the center of the scandal surrounding embattled Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.). Melgen’s office was raided by the FBI last week, amid accusations that Menendez attended “wild sex parties” with prostitutes during trips to the Dominican Republic provided by Melgen.

The Russian-born woman, Svitlana Buchyk, figures prominently in the prostitution accusations against the scandal-plagued Menendez, who is in line to become chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. Kathleen McGrory and Melissa Sanchez of the Miami Herald reported:

Public records show that a woman named Svitlana Buchyk got into a minor crash while driving a Chevrolet Impala on Miracle Mile in Coral Gables in 2010. The car belonged to Melgen’s wife. Buchyk gave Melgen’s North Palm Beach address as her own.
Buchyk spoke briefly with a Miami Herald reporter by telephone Thursday, saying she had worked for Melgen in the past.
But Buchyk wouldn’t answer questions on the type of work she did, and was eager to defend Melgen — particularly when asked about stories of Melgen’s alleged sexual liaisons with prostitutes.
“He is an amazing person,” she said. “He was always with his family. There is nothing else I can say.”
Buchyk added that many women would have liked to have spent time with her former employer.
“He treated me well,” she said. “He had money. He was very generous.”

The photo published by Boyle shows Buchyk in front of what appears to be Melgen’s private jet during a May trip to Hawaii, not long after a tipster using the name “Peter Williams” contacted an ABC News reporter with allegations about Menendez’s trips to the Dominican Republic, a Caribbean island nation where prostitution is legal and as many as 100,000 prostitutes reportedly ply their trade. In his e-mails, “Williams” described Buchyk as “one of the most regular participants in the activities the Doctor [Melgen] arranges for the Senator [Menendez],” and said the woman “has traveled with them in the jet, sailed with them in the yacht, and has repeatedly visited the Doctor’s house.”

Melgen has a history of spending big money on his mistresses, Boyle reports, noting a 2002 federal court case involving Yuddehiris Dorrejo, a woman on whom Melgen spent $700,000, allegedly in exchange for “an intimate romantic relationship” that began in 1998.

Melgen, who has contributed generously to Menendez’s political campaigns, reportedly owes $11.1 million in unpaid federal income taxes.

UPDATE: Andrew O’Shea at Viral Read has a selection of photos of Svitlana Buchyk, including bikini/lingerie shots.

Amazing, the quality of womanhood available to guys who can afford to cheat the IRS out of $11.1 million.

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Dominican Prostitute in Menendez Scandal Says They Were ‘Very Mistreated’

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Here’s this morning’s Menendez headline stack at the Drudge Report:

I point this out because there were people in the comments of my post this morning (“HookerGate: Miami Herald Confirms Elements of Menendez Prostitute Story“) who were wondering if the mainstream media were going to ignore this story and let Menendez skate. And the answer to that question is, I don’t think they can, even if they wanted to.

Consider this latest report from David Martosko and Charles C. Johnson at the Daily Caller:

A Dominican prostitute’s firsthand account of sex parties allegedly attended by New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez refers specifically to another participant: Vinicio “Vinicito” Castillo Seman, the scion of a prominent Dominican political family who serves as a lawyer for his cousin, Dr. Salomon Melgen, in the Caribbean nation. . . .
At least one of the women allegedly involved has said she was younger than 18 when she first had sex with Sen. Menendez.
In her account, sent via email on April 21, 2012 to the liberal advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the prostitute identified “Vinicito” by name as a participant, along with Melgen and Menendez. . . .
“It was during some yacht outings that I realized I needed to get out of there,” the young prostitute wrote in one email included in that collection, “because these people are so important and they do whatever they want with whomever they want.”
“Vinicito was there, who goes to many of the doctor’s functions and invents things [to do] with the young girls, and then forces them to do the same things with the doctor’s friend. And he really liked it and wanted to take them to another place, but I don’t know where. They threatened those girls and told them to not talk, and that they couldn’t leave.” . . .
In an April 28 email to CREW about the sex parties, the same woman said that “we women are very mistreated,” especially “the younger ones between 16 and 18 years old.”

Go read the whole thing. Menendez denies banging hookers, underage or otherwise, during his Caribbean holidays, but Menendez also originally denied accepting free flights to the Dominican aboard his shady Palm Beach campaign contributor’s private jet — until the FBI started snooping around, and Menendez figured out the jig was up.

What you’re beginning to see now is the drip-drip-drip effect: Once the scandal got serious enough that the New York Times was forced to report on it, that served as a signal to other news organizations that this is a legitimate story, rather than (as many mainstream reporters had apparently wanted to believe) just some flimsy thing ginned up by Menendez’s right-wing enemies.

Guess what? There’s much, much more to come.

Remember that, on Oct. 31, I was able to name Menendez as the focus of the scandal even before the Daily Caller published its first article about the scandal. And what I’m hearing through the grapevine now is that there is so much related stuff — various interesting details about Senator Menendez’s divorce, for example — that the sources are doling out to other news organizations bits and pieces that Daily Caller and Breitbart.com don’t have time to report. There is an entire dossier on Menendez, in other words, and now that there’s blood in the water and lots of journalistic sharks circling the scandal-plagued senator, the contents of that file will be unloaded.

Marc Caputo of the Miami Herald describes the “mystery novel” aspects of the Menendez story and the shadowy tipster who broke it:

The investigation into his ties with Menendez began in August, after the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sent an agent the complaint that “Peter Williams” first sent to CREW months before.
CREW, ABC News the FBI had trouble getting Williams to be forthcoming. He refused to meet with them or speak on the phone.
CREW’s executive director, Melanie Sloan, said Williams was also suspicious because the self-described American citizen and father of two daughters claimed to know about the illicit activity since 2008. But he only complained in an election year when control of the Senate was up for grabs.
At one point, on Sept. 12, FBI agent Regino Chavez emailed Williams and said “we have been able to confirm” most of the information he provided. But it’s not clear what that information was.
On Nov. 1, Chavez seemed annoyed that Williams had provided him no access to the alleged prostitutes yet two others gave an interview with the conservative Daily Caller website just before the election that Menendez won. Those prostitutes were not underage and neither claimed Menendez consorted with minors.
Williams suggested that he was not aware of those two prostitutes. They can’t be found any longer. Their former lawyer, Melanio Figueroa, has stopped returning press calls.
The email trail with the agent, sent anonymously to reporters late last month before Menendez was set to chair the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, ends in late December.

Hmmm. So the FBI agent Chavez was “able to confirm” the mysterious tipster’s information in September, and yet it was not until January that the FBI raided the Palm Beach offices of Menendez’s big donor Dr. Melgen. Could it be that powerful political figures at the Justice Department were less than eager to pursue this investigation?

Just askin’ questions. As Professor Jacobson says, I’m “all over the story like a U.S. Senator on a Dominican prostitute.” Expect more, soon.

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Billion With a ‘B’: Did Menendez Provide Special Favors to HookerGate Donor?

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A sex scandal is quite often more than just a sex scandal, and the emerging story of the connection between embattled Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and his shady Palm Beach patron, Dr. Salomon Melgen, appears to be developing as a complex scandal:

Sen. Bob Menendez used his influence to advocate for a Dominican Republic business deal that helped a longtime friend and donor whose South Florida office was raided by federal agents this week.
Menendez questioned Obama administration officials at a July hearing about what it was doing to help U.S. businesses that he felt were being unfairly treated by the government of the Dominican Republic and other Latin American countries.
One company Menendez was apparently referring to: ICSSI, acquired the year before by Dr. Salomon Melgen, a Palm Beach County eye doctor and friend. The firm was seeking to enforce a contract it had won to X-ray Dominican Republic port cargo, that could be worth $500 million to $1 billion over two decades.

Follow the money — if Melgen had a billion-dollar contract at stake, his “friendship” with Senator Menendez was obviously more than a mere social acquaintance, which doesn’t necessarily mean that it was illegal for Menendez to pressure the administration to help Melgen enforce his Dominican port security contract. But how and why does a Florida opthamologist become an international port-security mogul? The New York Times rather unsubtly raised that point Friday:

Two years ago, Dr. Melgen, despite an apparent lack of experience in border security issues, bought an ownership interest in a company that had a long-dormant contract with the Dominican Republic to provide port security. . . .
The friendship between the two men goes back to the 1990s, when Mr. Menendez, who entered the House of Representatives in 1993, began regularly visiting the Dominican Republic. They spent holidays together, often in the Dominican Republic, where Dr. Melgen has a home in Casa de Campo, a gated oceanfront resort where houses cost as much as $20 million and which has been home to some of the country’s richest residents, like Oscar de la Renta. . . .
Also in 2010, Dr. Melgen moved to buy the ownership interest in ICSSI, a company based in the Caribbean that had been awarded a contract to provide extensive screening of cargo from ports in the Dominican Republic. The Dominican government was refusing to honor that contract, after Miguel Cocco, then the Dominican customs director, had long said the deal was an exorbitant giveaway to the company.

Question: Would just any random investor be interested in a deal like this, or would ICSSI’s “long-dormant contract” be valuable only to someone with enough political “juice” to apply leverage against these Dominican officials?

Did Melgen’s carefully nutured relationship with Menendez therefore give him a special opportunity? The questions multiply and it’s often difficult in such situations to prove that this quid over here is connected to that quo over there by a pro, if you see what I’m saying.

Back during the Lewinsky scandal, remember, the president’s lawyer buddy Vernon Jordan made an extraordinary effort to help Monica get a job with New York-based Revlon (a firm headed by a Clinton donor) and then arranged for Monica to sign an affidavit stating that she couldn’t testify in the Paula Jones lawsuit because, well, she was moving from D.C. to New York for her new job at Revlon.

The blindingly obvious truth is that this was obstruction of justice and suborning of perjury as part of a corrupt effort to deprive Paula Jones of relevant testimony in her civil-rights lawsuit against Clinton, but actually proving the “pro” part of the quid pro quo — helping Monica get this job from a campaign contributor in exchange for having her sign this false affidavit denying a sexual relationship with her presidential boyfriend — was impossible, so long as everybody involved was willing to lie about it, as they most certainly were.

Or think about Watergate: If it hadn’t been for the White House tapes, Nixon might have gotten away with that cover-up, letting some minor figures take the fall for the “Plumbers” operation and using plausible deniability to conceal any direct presidential knowledge.

All of which is to say that turning HookerGate into enough of a scandal to take out a Democrat in heavily-Democratic New Jersey could be rather more difficult than it might seem. However, it doesn’t seem that Obama is willing to invest any political capital to protect Senator Menendez, as Neil Munro reports at the Daily Caller:

White House spokesman Jay Carney refused to defend Sen. Bob Menendez when he was quizzed by a reporter Thursday.
Does “the president have full faith and confidence in the senator?” asked a reporter during the midday White House press conference.
“I’ve seen those reports. I don’t have anything for you on that,” Carney said.
“He plays a significant role in immigration,” the reporter followed up.
“I don’t have anything for you on those reports,” Carney repeated.

Munro reminds us of yet another Menendez scandal:

In December, immigration agents arrested an intern who worked for Menendez’s staff. The Peruvian intern was an illegal immigrant and a convicted child molester, who worked in Menendez’s New Jersey office.
The Associated Press subsequently reported that federal immigration officials delayed any arrest of the man until after Menendez won re-election Nov. 6.
When asked [Thursday] if White House officials knew of agency’s decision to delay the arrest, Carney declined to answer. “I’ve not seen those reports. I don’t have anything for you on that,” he said.

Remember that the HookerGate story first broke on Halloween, six days before Election Day, but it seemed impossible at that time to get anyone to take the story seriously. I remember being frustrated with some of my Republican friends whose response was, “What difference does it make in New Jersey? Menendez is going to win no matter what. We need to concentrate on the presidential campaign.”

Republicans can’t walk and chew gum at the same time? Couldn’t the spectacle of a Democrat senator whore-hopping in the Caribbean have value as a pushback against the ridiculous “war on women” narrative of the campaign? But when you raised that point, Republicans would then tell you, “Well, the liberal media will ignore it anyway” — defeatism, a de facto confession that the entire elaborate messaging apparatus of the Right is utterly useless in overcoming media bias.

No point in hindsight recriminations now, although it’s amusing to see David Graham at The Atlantic attempt to rationalize why the story was indeed ignored by the major media in November:

The story didn’t go anywhere, partly because it was so close to the election and Menendez was already a prohibitive favorite for reelection — he ended up beating his GOP challenger by nearly 20 percentage points — and partly because the Daily Caller has a reputation for wildly overpromising on scoops and then underdelivering on facts. (Remember the video that was going to end Obama’s campaign?) The article suggested there might be dirt, but nothing there that passed a smell test for serious news organizations.

Oh, dear God, where to begin? It took the National Enquirer to break the John Edwards scandal because the “mainstream” press was willing to ignore it, and even the Lewinsky scandal was originally spiked by Newsweek. We therefore have good precedent to expect that, when there is a really juicy scandal involving a Democrat, the story isn’t going to be broken by the mainstream outfits.

Ergo, one cannot dismiss such stories out of hand simply because they originate outside the journalistic mainstream. The fact that there is now an FBI investigation into — and a New York Times article about — the Menendez scandal requires that David Graham make some kind of excuse for having previously ignored a legitimate story, and all those digs at the Daily Caller are just that: Excuses.

You got scooped. You got beat. And the kid that beat you, Matthew Boyle, is still beating you on this story:

Dominican Flights Cost Menendez
Up to 18 Percent of Net Worth
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Menendez’s net worth is between $317,005 and $680,000. . . .
Since the reimbursement he made to his donor Dr. Salomon Melgen’s company totaled $58,500, Menendez spent a massive portion of his financial livelihood on the reimbursement for those two flights. . . .

Menendez Prostitution Scandal: Donor Melgen’s Political
Contributions Exploded After IRS Filed Tax Lien
Ophthalmologist and Democratic political donor Dr. Salomon Melgen may have tried to buy cover from the IRS for the $11.1 million he owes in back taxes from 2006 to present . . .
The donations continued to grow in size and quantity before Melgen began facing tax problems with the IRS in July 2002. The Free Beacon reports that the IRS filed a federal tax lien against Melgen for about $1.3 million then for unpaid taxes dating back to 1999 . . .

Matthew Boyle is still kicking ass and taking names, and The Hill’s Jordy Yager reports there’s blood in the water around Mendendez:

A cloud of scandalous allegations is rapidly growing over Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), putting Democratic leaders in a difficult position as the integrity of their immigration point man in the Senate falls under question at a critical time.
The bad news keeps coming: a Senate Ethics probe, allegations involving underage prostitutes, an FBI investigation of a key campaign donor, undisclosed flights on the donor’s private plane, and now, reports linking Menendez to an existing multi-million dollar contract he urged officials to enforce for the disgraced donor.

Depending on how strongly reporters follow up on the hooker angle, we may be just weeks away from Menendez’s resignation.

And what’s that you say, Jim Treacher? “Why is Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) following a very young-looking Dominican girl on Twitter?”

UPDATE (Smitty): Welcome, Instapundit readers!

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Debbie Wasserman-Schultz Has A Point: Having Aborted Common Sense, Babies Should Be Easy For Charlie Crist

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by Smitty

Will the altars of Moloch be smiling in the Sunshine State?

Wasserman Schultz added that Crist was “going to have to prove himself with some of our Democratic leaders before that’s a sure thing.”
The only thing “sure” about Charlie is that he’s looking out for #1.
When DeFede asked the congresswoman about Crist’s past and his current position on abortion, Wasserman Schultz said that “we are the big tent party. We elect on the issue of a woman’s right to choose.” She added that Crist was going to have “a lot of ground work to do” to convince Democrat leaders and constituents that he would best represent their next Governor.

This is all in the context of Charlie Crist mounting a challenge to Rick Scott for Florida Governor in 2014. Ol’ Rudderless Charlie seems quite flexible in terms of what courses he steers.

via The Shark Tank