The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Super Bowl XLVII: Ravens Win 34-31 as Satan Honors Contract With Ray Lewis

Posted on | February 3, 2013 | 43 Comments

The Baltimore Ravens defeated San Francisco 34-31 Sunday in Super Bowl XLVII, offering further proof that the contract under which Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis sold his soul to Satan remains in effect.

Baltimore got three touchdown passes by Joe Flacco, capitalized on key mistakes by the 49ers and leaned heavily on satanic assistance to stave off a strong second-half rally by San Francisco.

With the aid of Mephistopheles, Jacoby Jones ran back the opening kickoff of the second half for a Baltimore touchdown, and demonic powers enabled Justin Tucker to kick two fourth-quarter field goals for the Ravens.

“The Devil really came through for us,” Lewis told reporters in a postgame press conference. “I’ve got to admit, I was worried for a while, after Kaepernick scored that touchdown and cut the lead to 31-29. But my Infernal Lord and Master lived up to his end of the bargain, and now that I’ve got a Super Bowl ring, it’s not like I’ll be spending eternity in ceaseless torment for nothing.”

* * PREVIOUSLY * *

UPDATE 8:45 p.m. ET: Baltimore’s Jacoby Jones returned the second-half kickoff for a touchdown, making it Ravens 28, Niners 6.

UPDATE 8:30 p.m. ET: Halftime show review:

UPDATE 7:55 p.m. ET: My prediction of a 49ers victory is currently looking almost as a bad as a Ray Lewis murder victim.

San Francisco QB Colin Kaepernick has been stinking up the Superdome worse than a mob of hurricane refugees, and Ravens QB Joe Flacco has thrown for 187 yards and three TDs. Be sure to shop our Amazon links for all your Ray Lewis souvenir needs.

 

 

* * PREVIOUSLY (5:59 p.m. ET) * *

HEADLINE: Forty-Niners Win Super Bowl XLVII

Is that a prediction? No, it is a statement of fact: Baltimore is cursed, a stinking cesspool of a city with an abomination of a football team, the only NFL franchise so wretched that, by somehow making it to the Super Bowl, could possibly make me cheer for San Francisco.

Name any franchise in the league — even the despicable Redskins or the loathsome Saints — and I hate them less than I hate the Ravens.

At least Joe Montana once played for the ‘Niners. And I know you’ll say that Sodom by the Bay is a liberal hellhole crammed full of degenerate commies, but need I remind you that Nancy Pelosi is originally from Baltimore? Cosmic justice requires that the Ravens lose.

“Kickoff is scheduled for 6:29pm Eastern Time,” according to Fox News, but a White House spokesman immediately denounced this as “another right-wing lie.” Meanwhile, National Review has a round-up of Super Bowl predictions, including an admission by Steelers fan Rick Santorum that he’ll be cheering for the arch-rival Ravens.

Rick, you’re wrong. Let hate be your guide: If you hate the Ravens — as every patriotic American should — then you have to cheer for the Niners.

Speaking of difficult decisions, Dana Pico wonders whether we really want Sandra Fluke to forego contraception and thereby risk the possibility that she might reproduce. The answer: Yes.

Occasionally, motherhood cures liberal feminism. It may be that Sandra Fluke is too far gone down the slippery slope of progressive lunacy, but if there is any hope for her at all for her, it would probably involve an acquaintance with the responsibilities of parenthood. Alternatively — and more likely — she’ll end up as an embittered divorcee, focusing her rage (and the punitive force of child-support demands) on whatever unfortunate soul should draw the short straw and become her future ex-husband. So then she will no longer have the time to inflict her idiotic opinions on the nation at large, but will instead obsessively seek retribution against that one pitiful fool.

 


Category: Football

Just Hit Da Tech Guy’s Tip Jar

Posted on | February 3, 2013 | 4 Comments

Gratitude requires generosity and vice-versa. Having fallen drastically behind on my thank-you notes to tip-jar hitters, I am nevertheless grateful for the continued support, and when Pete Da Tech Guy rattled his tip jar, I immediately hit it. Given the circumstances of our friendship and his many acts of generosity toward me, Pete’s explanation of his circumstances is entirely unnecessary. All I needed was to know he was in need. January is usually one of those hard months in Bloglandia. People go overboard on Christmas and, when the New Year arrives, they look at their bank balances and say, “Uh-oh.” So it’s scarcely surprising if there is a need to rattle the tip-jar a bit extra as February arrives.

I can’t stop thinking about the $53 million that Sheldon Adelson pissed away on Republican “super PACs” in the 2012 election cycle. It makes me angry, but I can’t do anything about that.

Pete has done a rather elaborate calculus of how much he would require annually, but (a) I’ve never been one to worry that far in the future, and so (b) let’s just deal with the immediate need. Let’s hope everyone else feels the same: Go hit Pete’s tip jar, please.

 

Category: Da Tech Guy

The 2016 White House Game, Briefly

Posted on | February 3, 2013 | 39 Comments

It is a mistake for Republicans to look past the 2014 mid-terms, yet much of the current discussion among conservatives is distorted by the attempt to identify a consensus presidential pick for 2016. Because everybody’s playing that game, I’ll indulge speculation briefly.

Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio and Bobby Jindal are the three names currently getting the most discussion. Of these three, Ryan is my favorite for very practical reasons: He’s a young, smart Catholic from the Midwest with an Irish surname and a full head of dark hair.

How many times must it be explained to Republicans that Catholics are the pivotal “swing” vote in national elections? All this post-N0vember “demographic” hand-wringing about Hispanics, women and younger voters is ultimately a distraction. If Republicans nominate a candidate who can win over Catholic voters in states like Wisconsin and Ohio, they’re in the game. Otherwise, they’re not.

Ryan is young and smart, ostensibly so. If Republicans nominate Ryan, an honest-to-goodness policy wonk, they automatically delete the “dumb Republican” stereotype from the 2016 narrative.

Of course, Jindal is likewise brainy, and Rubio is certainly no dummy, but Ryan has already been road-tested in a national campaign, held his own and — hey, did I mention this? — he’s a Midwesterner with an Irish surname and a full head of dark hair. It is a proven fact (I could look it up) that in elections where all other factors are equal, an Irish surname is a distinct advantage.

Ronald Reagan was from the Midwest, had a full head of dark hair and an Irish surname. I rest my case.

Would any conservative object to a ticket of Ryan-Rubio or Ryan-Jindal? I think not, although one could see any number of reasons why that kind of Dream Ticket is unlikely to happen: Neither Rubio nor Jindal brings any military or foreign-policy background to the equation. What would be ideal, to complement Ryan as the 2016 GOP vice-presidential candidate is a military veteran from Florida or Ohio.

Fans of Allen West and Josh Mandel are probably smiling at that suggestion, but we’re getting way ahead of the speculation game. While Ryan’s status as prime contender for 2016 is, I think, beyond dispute, there are two obvious caveats:

  1. Ryan is a member of the House of Representatives, which is historically a poor base of operations from which to stage a presidential campaign. If he is really serious about seeking the White House in 2016, Ryan will have to consider whether he should announce, sometime late this year or early next year, that he will not seek re-election to the House in 2014.
  2. Ryan must either “clear the field,” persuading potential heavyweight rivals not to run in 2016, or be prepared to go all-in on Iowa.

The two caveats are related. If Ryan were to announce his retirement from the House — saying good-bye to the Budget Committee chairmanship he’s worked so long to obtain — that would be the kind of “clear the field” gesture that would scare off a lot of people who might otherwise seek the 2016 nomination. And if I were advising Ryan, I’d tell him this: “You need to have a long talk with Rick Santorum, soon.”

Santorum is quite nearly obligated to run again in 2016. Obviously, he’s not going to say so explicitly in early 2013, but after emerging from sixth place to become the top rival to the Establishment choice Romney in 2012, Santorum has every incentive to try again in 2016.

Most importantly, Santorum has a committed infrastructure of diehard supporters in Iowa. Anyone who thinks they’re going to beat Santorum in the 2016 Iowa caucuses is apt to get an unpleasant surprise. However . . .

If Santorum could be persuaded to support Ryan in 2016, it would be the political equivalent of John baptizing Jesus in the Jordan River. With Santorum’s support, Ryan would then become such a prohibitive favorite to win Iowa that other potential GOP rivals would begin their primary campaigns by scratching the Hawkeye State off their “roadmap” to the nomination. And if you begin the campaign by conceding Iowa, you’re likely to be following a roadmap to nowhere.

Maybe someone of Rubio’s stature could win New Hampshire, or Jindal could parlay his Southern connections to make a fight for South Carolina, but beating a Santorum-endorsed Ryan for the nomination would be a long-odds proposition, any way you look at it.

OK, now suppose this elaborate hypothetical scenario developed — Ryan leaves the House, secures Santorum’s blessing, and makes the “all-in” move for 2016 — who would then be Ryan’s chief rival for the GOP nomination? Rand Paul.

C’mon, this is obvious, right? The torch has been passed, and an army of fanatical Ron Paul supporters is prepared to mobilize for the son of their libertarian hero. Rand is a bit more mainstream than his father, and thus wouldn’t get the whole kook cavalcade behind him, but he’d get enough of them to be a significant player throughout the early primary campaign. In fact — and I’m going waaayy out on the hypothetical limb here — Rand might do well enough to force himself onto the ticket as the running mate: Ryan-Paul.

At first glance, that’s stark lunacy. And on second glance, it’s still pretty crazy. But look at it a third time, and the chance to bring at least some of the Paulistas inside the GOP tent makes a certain kind of counter-intuitive sense. While I don’t think it’s what you’d call a “likely scenario,” neither is it something we ought to rule out.

Ever since Pat Buchanan blew a hole in Bush 41’s ship during the 1992 primary campaign, the Republican Party has been dogged by the dissatisfaction of its anti-establishment faction, and the presidency of Bush 43 did nothing to resolve that problem. During the 2009-2010 Tea Party uprising, the anti-establishment faction — including Ron Paul’s supporters — found a reason to get involved GOP politics, and the result was a massive mid-term Republican landslide. A strong 2016 primary campaign by Rand Paul, followed by Rand’s inclusion as the GOP vice-presidential candidate, might finally heal a damaging would in the Republican coalition.

The terms of such a deal might prove difficult to broker, and it may be that the Paulistas are ultimately an indigestible lump, but I still say that a 2016 ticket of Paul Ryan and Rand Paul could be one of those crazy ideas that works better than more ostensibly sane ideas.

Republicans have become too predictable. They can’t win if they keep doing things the way they’ve been doing them lately, because Democrats have figured out how to beat the standard-playbook type of Republican presidential campaign. So while this Ryan-Paul idea is probably crazy enough to make GOP consultants run screaming from the room, that might just be the best argument in its favor.

Anyway, as I say, this is at the far end of a long chain of hypotheticals, none of which are certain and most of which are long-shot ideas.

Speaking of 2016 long-shots, however: Martin O’Malley.

This is a tip I got from Dave Weigel during last weekend’s National.Review Summit. Everybody’s talking about Hillary 2016, Cuomo 2016 or even Biden 2016, but Weigel (who obviously has better Democrat sources than I do) says that the governor of Maryland has been quietly assembling a campaign apparatus and is all but certain to be contender for the 2016 Democrat presidential nomination.

Right now, of course, O’Malley’s national name-ID is somewhere in the range between neglible and non-existent, but the same was true of Bill Clinton in 1989 and Barack Obama in 2005. So if you’re a Republican operative looking forward to 2016, write down Martin O’Malley’s name as a potential Democrat nominee you’ll have to deal with. And by “deal with,” of course, I mean, Swiftboat the hell out of him.

Hack his Twitter account, frame him Weiner-style and . . .

No, just kidding. That was a joke to play on the Left’s paranoia.

But enough of this hypothetical speculation about 2016. Put it out of your minds now, and concentrate on the 2014 mid-terms, especially the need to win back a couple dozen House seats and try to get some good conservative Senate candidates who can win.

Category: Election

FMJRA 2.0: Free Bird

Posted on | February 3, 2013 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Apparently, John McCain Doesn’t Think He’s Done Enough Yet to Destroy the GOP

CNN’s ‘Poorly Rated’ @Soledad_OBrien Will Lose Her Show Nobody Watched

If You Don’t Think ‘Jailbait Hookers’ Is Headline News, You Don’t Know News

#NRISummit: Scarborough 2016?

The Chicago Way

Daniel Hannan Is One Of The Reasons We Don’t Lose Hope

Sarah Palin Interview At Breitbart.Com

Hawkins: 15 Lies Of Liberalism

FMJRA 2.0: Halcyon

Neo-Confederate Judges? Who Knew?

Rule 5 Sunday: Neuronengesang

LIVE AT FIVE: 01.28.13

If We Had Wanted an Obama-Hugging Sellout, Charlie Crist Would Be a Senator

BREAKING: Lightworker Astride Unicorn Transcends Space-Time Continuum

Fear & Loathing Among the Conservative Intellectuals: A Stubborn Sense of Panic

‘Arab Spring’ Update: Foreign News the Media Doesn’t Want to Ask Obama About

LIVE AT FIVE: 01.29.13

Steubenville Update: Nodianos Video Will Not Be Used as Evidence at Rape Trial

Republican Auto-Demoralization

Mayor Bloomberg: Ass Man

For A Nobel Peace Prize Winner, That President Sure Sows Some Strife

LIVE AT FIVE: 01.30.13

HookerGate: Is FBI Raid Connected to Menendez’s Dominican Jailbait Scandal?

Obamanomics Fails — Unexpectedly!

Anonymous Spokesman Barrett Brown Is Sane Enough to Stand Trial, Judge Rules

Israeli Jets Hit Convoy in Syria; Also, People Are Mean to Matt Lewis on Twitter

LIVE AT FIVE: 01.31.13

What A Lucid Politician Sounds Like

Zero Hedge Lays It Down, Mead Sort Of Picks It Up

Chuck Hagel’s Very Bad Day

Three Axis Of Fedora Amigos

FORMER NYC MAYOR ED KOCH DIES

Mayor Ass-Man: ‘How Dare You Accuse Me of Sexism, You Lying Media Bitches?’

News Flash: Crazy People Are Dangerous

Typical Democrat Voters™

Top linkers this week:

  1. Rick’s Rants (24 the hard way)
  2. Lonely Conservative (8)
  3. The Camp of the Saints (6)
  4. Hogewash (5)

…and as usual, a ouple of folks who missed it by that much. Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline to submit links for next week’s FMJRA will be Friday, February 8.


Category: FMJRA Award

Elite Pundit, Belatedly Catching Up With Me, Recognizes the ‘Fox Trap’

Posted on | February 3, 2013 | 20 Comments

How long have I been talking about the “Fox Trap”? Forever, it seems, but for example, here’s a description from February 2009:

Media-wise, the GOP made the mistake of putting all its eggs in one basket. I enjoy Fox News, but it has created a syndrome where Republicans watch Fox all the time and delude themselves into thinking, “Hey, our message is getting out! We’re winning!” Fact: The evening news broadcasts of ABC, NBC and CBS reach a combined audience of about 22 million; the top rated Fox News show, “The O’Reilly Factor,” reaches 4 million viewers. So if the three broadcast networks are viciously biased against Republicans — and they are — then that anti-GOP message is reaching more than 5 times as many TV viewers as Fox.

Fox News becomes an excuse for liberal journalists to engage in partisan cheerleading, as I explained in April 2012 at The American Spectator:

The very existence of a conservative-friendly TV news alternative, however, relieves liberals at other networks of any twinge of conscience about bias in their programming. They may well reckon, “If conservatives don’t like it, let ‘em go watch Fox.” And given how liberals have demonized Fox — portraying it as an all-powerful evil force in media — some reporters may even feel the need to slant their coverage more stridently leftward, so as to counteract the exaggerated right-wing news menace.
Many conservatives, however, do not fully grasp how this phenomenon (which I’ve come to think of as “The Fox Trap”) may actually result in mainstream media coverage that shows a shameless disregard for political fairness. Even if the audience for the major network news broadcasts slowly shrinks, that audience — like the readership of liberal “mainstream” newspapers — is still much larger than the audience reached by conservative alternative media. Yet too many conservatives have been lulled into complacency. Self-selecting their media choices (Fox News, talk-radio, conservative websites, etc.) many conservatives may believe that their viewpoint is adequately represented in the overall media ecology, when in fact the larger news industry is as liberal as it ever was, if not more so.

Having repeatedly discussed this subject over the years, I should probably be pleased that Peter Wehner at Commentary finally got a clue:

To say that the elite media has a liberal bias is similar to declaring that the sun rises in the east. But it’s never been this transparent, the infatuation never this deep, the advocacy this passionate. . . .
What explains this?
A combination of factors, I think. One is the rise of Fox News. For decades progressives had a monopoly on news, which meant they were content to slant the news but not routinely cross the line into advocacy. But now that Fox News has offered not only a different perspective, but a popular one, journalists may feel they must, in order to compensate for their loss of influence, increase their liberal advocacy.

Not even a fucking hat-tip, you useless neurasthenic dweeb?

Like I said, I probably should be pleased, but instead I’m angry, and maybe later I’ll write a rant about why I’m angrty.

Category: Fox News, Intellectuals, Media Bias

How to Make Babies

Posted on | February 3, 2013 | 27 Comments

Do I really need to explain this, people? Apparently so, because Jonathan V. Last has written an entire column at the Wall Street Journal about the fact that people aren’t having babies and — as if that were not enough — has also written a book on the subject, What To Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster.

This is depressing. Why? Because no one’s paying me to write a book about how to fix the problem, despite the fact that I’ve got six children. Whatever the “demographic” problem is, I’m an expert on the solution. Not quite as much an expert as Jim Bob Duggar, I guess . . .

Penis + Vagina = Babies.

It’s not really complicated. What solution does Jonathan V. Last prescribe? I don’t know. Why should I read a book about a problem that I’ve already solved, insofar as it involves my own personal share of the reproductive burden? As far as childless people are concerned, they don’t need to be reading books, they need to be making babies.

There’s your solution in a nutshell: Stop reading books about demographics, and start making babies instead. Which is probably why nobody’s offering to pay me to write a whole book about it, because I’ve just solved the demographic crisis in a little over 200 words.

 

Category: Culture, Family, Sex

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

Posted on | February 2, 2013 | 20 Comments

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!

PREVIOUSLY:

 


Category: Corruption, Democrats, Dominican Republic, Florida, New Jersey

I Guess We’re Not Supposed To ‘Shop The #OccupyResoluteDesk Skeet Photo

Posted on | February 2, 2013 | 38 Comments

by Smitty

Which is fine, because Soopermexican flogged it hard:

Update: Moe Lane opines, and Cynthia Yockey asks

Update II: Oh no:
Category: Barack Obama
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