The Other McCain

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

Will Jeb Bush Connect With Tea Partiers At CPAC?

Posted on | February 5, 2013 | 30 Comments

by Smitty

Via email from the ACU:

ACU ANNOUNCES GOVERNOR JEB BUSH TO ADDRESS CPAC 2013

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The American Conservative Union (ACU) today announced former Florida Governor Jeb Bush will address CPAC 2013 – the 40th annual Conservative Political Action Conference. America’s largest gathering of conservative leaders and activists will be held Thursday, March 14 – Saturday, March 16, 2013.

“We are pleased to announce that my friend Governor Jeb Bush will be a featured speaker at CPAC 2013,” said ACU Chairman Al Cardenas. “We look forward to welcoming Governor Jeb Bush to the CPAC stage for the first time in March.”

Governor Jeb Bush was elected Florida’s 43rd Governor in 1998, and was re-elected in 2002. During his two terms, Governor Bush revolutionized the education system to achieve dramatic rising student achievement, provided substantial, broad based tax relief and economic incentives to strengthen and diversify Florida’s economy. He also initiated measures to strengthen families, help the state’s most vulnerable citizens, and protect Florida’s natural resources.

The 40th annual Conservative Political Action Conference, to be held March 14-16, 2013, at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center, will provide three days of blockbuster speeches, policy discussions and networking opportunities – all celebrating the shared principles of smaller government, a strong national defense and traditional American values. The ACU has hosted CPAC in the Nation’s Capital since 1973, and it now stands as the largest annual gathering of conservatives in the country. For additional information, visit our website at conservative.org/cpac2013, on Facebook at facebook.com/CPACNews, or on Twitter at @cpacnews and #CPAC2013. Media registration (including bloggers) opened on February 1, 2013.

The CPAC 2013 schedule and list of confirmed speakers will be announced in the coming weeks. Previously announced confirmed featured speakers include: former U.S. Representative Artur Davis, former Puerto Rican Governor Luis Fortuño, U.S. Senator Ron Johnson, U.S. Senator Mike Lee, U.S. Senator Rand Paul, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, U.S. Representative Paul Ryan, former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, U.S. Senator Pat Toomey, former U.S. Representative Allen West and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.

I don’t mean to pile on the two minutes of H8, but Jeb would need to put himself on the hook for a ridiculous amount of reform to excite me much. Dynasties are contrary to the Founder’s vision, and we’ve had executive Bush presence for something like 20 of the last 33 years.

Granted, they were only piloting the Resolute Desk for a dozen there, but the need for a post-crash reform plan is staring us in the face. So more equestrian, compassionate, Progressive, national greatness piffle is not sought, Mr. Bush.

100,000 Hookers vs. the Alleged Heterosexuality of Robert Menendez

Posted on | February 5, 2013 | 22 Comments

Svitlana Buchyk: Robert Menendez denies having sex with her, too.

A couple of days ago, I got an anonymous e-mail tip to the effect that the real scandal is that Robert Menendez likes sex with young boys. I ignored this tip, figuring that the tipster was a Democrat operative trying to trick me into discrediting myself by reporting a dubious rumour.

You have to watch out for that stuff when you’re covering a heavy story like HookerGate. Remember, during the Anthony Weiner scandal, there was someone — or perhaps several people — trying to obscure the guilty truth by creating fake “girls” who claimed to have been romantically involved with the accused congressman. That whole “Betty and Veronica” distraction was obviously a trick I call the Reverse Ratfuck: Defend the guilty politician by deceptions that undermine the credibility of the accuser.

Hey, just incidentally, did I mention that Neal Rauhauser sent a Twitter message to Anthony Weiner Monday? But I digress . . .

Careful to avoid the Reverse Ratfuck, then, I ignored the anonymous e-mail accusing Menendez of pederasty as probably being a trick, until I saw the pained earnestness with which the New Jersey Democrat denied having banged any hookers in the Dominican Republic:

DANA BASH: One last question. Can you just answer the allegation that has been out there that you…
SEN. MENENDEZ: The smears?
BASH: … that you were with prostitutes there?
MENENDEZ: The smears that right-wing blogs have been pushing since the election. And that is totally unsubstantiated. It’s amazing to me that anonymous, nameless, faceless individuals on a Web site can drive that type of story into the mainstream. But that’s what they’ve done successful.
Now, nobody can find them. No one ever met them. No one ever talked to them, but that’s where we’re at. So the bottom line is all of those smears are absolutely false and, you know, that’s the bottom line.

Let me translate that for you:

“How dare you acccuse me — a suspiciously divorced Democrat who hasn’t been plausibly linked to any woman in a post-divorce romance — of desiring contact with the hot moist nether regions of a young Latina in a country where prostitution is legal!”

That is to say, the denial seems a bit too adamant and comprehensive. Not only does Menendez deny having done the dirty deed with illegally young hookers, he denies doing any hookers at all, as if his only reason for visiting the Dominican Republic was to relax in the warm Caribbean sun with an iced rum cocktail or two.

Dana Bash somehow managed to keep from laughing out loud during that interview, but she must have been rolling her eyes at this denial. The country has a “reputation as a hub for sex tourism.” What McDonald’s is to cheeseburgers, the Dominican Republic is to hired poontang.

It would be very strange if anyone — especially a New Jersey Democrat — went to the Dominican Republic and didn’t bang a hooker.

The common-sense factor must be considered here. Let’s just take a look at the Daily Caller’s gallery of Svitlana Buchyk photos and apply the reliable Ace of Spades test: “Would you hit it?”

Are you kidding me? Elton John would hit that.

Anderson Cooper would hit that.

Liberace would hit that, and he’s been dead for 26 years. Read more

Janet Napolitano In 2016?

Posted on | February 5, 2013 | 26 Comments

by Smitty

Via Drudge:

So, what happens if Hillary Clinton doesn’t run in 2016?
It is hard to imagine the presidential field without a woman contender, and here’s one to keep your eye on: Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. Napolitano is quietly making it known that she is considering the race, and there is reason to take her seriously.

Yeah, I can see the GOP, Tea Partiers, and basically anybody else with a functioning brain being more than a little motivated to work against Big Sis if she’s on the ticket.

Now, if she brings on Bill Maher as VP, would the double negative somehow work?

Third Option–Term Limits

Posted on | February 5, 2013 | 40 Comments

by Smitty

The Instapundit in USAToday:

There are two possible ways to address this problem. One is to elect people that everyone trusts. The problem with that is that there aren’t any politicians that everyone trusts — and, alas, if there were, the odds are good that such trust would turn out to be misplaced.
The other option is to place less power within the political sphere. The less power the government has, the less incentive for corruption, and the less that can go wrong when the government misbehaves. The problem with this approach is that the political class likes a powerful government — it’s one of the reasons that the Washington, DC, area, where much of the political class lives, is beginning to resemble the Capital City in The Hunger Games, prospering while the rest of the country suffers.

Maybe it’s a variation on the second option, but I predict that the 22nd Amendment is expanded upon to cover Congress, and perhaps even the SCOTUS, in the next couple of decades. As Director Blue pointed out a couple of years ago, incumbency has bred a Ruling Class, and substantially corrupted the Founder’s idea of self-rule. This is disastrous on at least two fronts:

  1. There is no way, given a 300 million+ population, that the number fit to hold office is that small. We can’t be that hurting for talent.
  2. There is no excuse for our system of government to overgrow itself to the point that it takes a professional cadre with a lifetime of knowing where the bodies are buried in order to operate the thing. No. We keep it simple, and we swap out the people in charge at a reasonable frequency so that the playing field stays level.

The bad news is that the voters chose to run us hard aground last November. The good news is that the goal for what to do, restore our Constitution to a representative state, is a straightforward. The exact path we take to get there, whether through or around the GOP, remains to be seen.

Update: linked by Jackie Wellfonder.

Update II: linked by Bob Belvedere.

LIVE AT FIVE: 02.05.13

Posted on | February 5, 2013 | 4 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


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Svitlana Buchyk: Mystery Woman in Menendez HookerGate Scandal

Posted on | February 4, 2013 | 18 Comments

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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HookerGate: What Did @AliciaMenendez Know, and When Did She Know It?

Posted on | February 4, 2013 | 15 Comments

“Alicia Menendez is a Senior Advisor to NDN and its sister organization, the New Policy Institute. . . . Ms. Menendez comes to NDN/NPI as a well-established television commentator and experienced organizer in important emerging communities. You can find her talking about national politics just about every week on the cable news networks, Fox and MSNBC. . . . She also spent time as a television segment producer and on-air contributor for RNN TV in New York, and was a primary surrogate on her father’s successful 2006 bid for the US Senate in New Jersey.”
— Simon Rosenberg, “Alicia Menendez Joins the NDN Team,” New Democrat Network, Jan. 13, 2010

“In NDN’s calculus, the long-term success of the Democratic Party will depend heavily on the party’s ability to ‘master the new media and technology tools that are changing the way we all communicate and advocate.'”
— Discover the Networks

Parlaying powerful family connections into a lucrative career in politics and media is not an unusual story in Washington, and it appears that the daughter of embattled Senator Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) has traveled that familiar path, as Adam Hose reports at Viral Read:

Alicia Menendez . . . graduated from Harvard College in 2005, with an honors degree in Studies in Women, Gender and Sexuality. . . . She is founder of dailygrito.com, has appeared on MSNBC Live, CNN International, BBC World and Fox News and is a regular contributor to the Huffington Post.
Ms. Menendez is a self-proclaimed feminist and has addressed women’s issues in politics in many different ways. In a March 2008 piece she wrote . . . focused on then-NY Governor Eliot Spitzer, after it was discovered he had been paying for the services of prostitutes. She seemingly excused his actions for biological, boys-will-be-boys reasons . . . Then during the 2012 presidential election (as well as her father’s own re-election campaign), in a piece for NBCLatino.com, she addressed “The GOP’s Lady Problems,” claiming that because Republicans desire to discuss women’s issues in terms of the economy, deficit and jobs, instead of contraception, abortion rights and equal pay, they were out of touch with women in general.

Read the whole thing. Alicia Menendez leveraged her father’s political connections into a career that includes being a HuffPo “star,” even while her father was leveraging his own connection to a Palm Beach campaign contributor into free flights to the Dominican Republic for (alleged) sex parties with young prostitutes.

Isn’t it therefore incumbent on Alicia Menendez to explain what she knew about her father’s involvement with Dr. Salomon Melgen, who is now the target of an FBI investigation? Certainly, other journalists are now demanding answers to these disturbing questions:

In an editorial Sunday, the Newark Star-Ledger said the scandal surrounding the senator raised “serious  doubts about his fitness to serve as chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee.” . . .
Menendez is facing a Senate ethics probe and an FBI investigation into a donor,  who is suspected of providing him with free trips on his private jet and  underage prostitutes during visits to the Dominican Republic, according to  reports from the media website The Daily Caller and a complaint filed with the  Justice Department by a watchdog group.

Does the Huffington Post employ Alice Menendez as a journalist, or is her “job” just a partisan patronage sinecure for the overprivileged daughter of a powerful (and possibly corrupt) Democrat? What are they really paying her for? Is it possible that Alicia Menendez is using her influential connections to help pressure her fellow “progressives” in the media to ignore her father’s sleazy scandal?

Oh, what a coincidence: Senator Menendez’s office has gotten one of the women to deny knowing the Senator!

So if Yaneisi Fernandez says she’s never met Menendez or worked as a prostitute, then obviously he must be innocent, right? I mean, when in doubt, you’ve got to take the word of alleged Dominican prostitutes. Because they’re as honest as New Jersey Democrats.

Alicia Menendez is on Twitter. Maybe you can ask her some questions.

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

Posted on | February 4, 2013 | 27 Comments

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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