According to the Washington Post, an official in the Dominican Republic is claiming he was paid by The Daily Caller to get three prostitutes on the record claiming they were with Senator Robert Menendez.

The local lawyer told Dominican investigators that a foreign man, who identified himself as “Carlos,” had offered him $5,000 to find and pay women in the Caribbean nation willing to make the claims about Menendez, according to Jose Antonio Polanco, district attorney for the La Romana region, where the investigation is being conducted.

The videotaped claims of two women, made with their faces obscured, were posted last fall on the Daily Caller. The site reported that “the two women said they met Menendez around Easter at Casa de Campo, an expensive 7,000-acre resort in the Dominican Republic. . . . They claimed Menendez agreed to pay them $500 for sex acts, but in the end they each received only $100.”

The Daily Caller issued a statement Friday saying that the information allegedly provided by the Dominican lawyer, Melanio Figueroa, was false.

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While Medicare has been the focal point on most of the criticisms coming out of the Democratic Party against Paul Ryan's un-brave and callous GOP budget, many writers on C&L and bloggers on the left have been making sure that Medicaid is not left behind or served up as a main course for some kind of "grand bargain." NEC Director Gene Sperling recently destroyed Paul Ryan over his proposed Medicaid block grant cuts to it also.

It's nice to see Sen, Menendez jump aboard the ship of sanity with us and hold the line on Medicaid.

Cuts to Medicaid are no more palatable than cuts to Medicare, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) told reporters Wednesday.

Medicaid advocates and some congressional Democrats are worried that Medicaid could become a more ripe target for funding cuts amid the political firestorm over proposed changes to Medicare.

But House Republicans’ proposal to convert federal Medicaid funding into block grants for the states “is not, in my mind, a plan that will find currency in our caucus,” Menendez said.

“While Medicare has been the focus … Medicaid, certainly in the context of block granting, is also not acceptable,” he said.

Millions of Americans depend on Medicaid and the fear seniors have over these draconian proposals that hit at the heart of their survival is real. Boehner is right about one thing. The time is now to keep the pressure on the Democratic Party and vote Conservatives out of office in the process.

On This Week with Christiane Amanpour, senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Robert Menedez (D-NJ) spar over this week's election and what it will mean for America. Of course, Amanpour brings up what's on the minds of all the Very Serious People - deficit reduction! She wants to know how you can "move the economy forward" without cutting the deficit -- even though we have several prominent Nobel Prize winning economists loudly proclaiming that it will deepen and lengthen the recession. Dear God, do these TV talking heads even bother to read?

Yes, worrying over the deficit is what's driving every unemployed person I know to the polls this week!

AMANPOUR: Do you think, looking at the polls, looking at what we've just seen, do you think this is as bad as 1994?

MENENDEZ: No, this is not 1994. No. 1, in 1994, the Republican brand, its image was much better than it is today. In every poll, Democrats as a brand fare much better. And, secondly, in 1994, it was a surge at the end. We've known that this midterm election is going to be challenging, and so our candidates for the U.S. Senate have been ready for this and have been creating the contrast in each election between their Republican opponent, who wants to bring us back to the economic policies that brought us into this mess in the first place, and their own policies that are working to get us out of it.

AMANPOUR: Senator Cornyn said they don't think they will get it this cycle. But you're saying that you're blaming the economy on President Obama's predecessor, but clearly the voters are not saying that. They are taking this economy very -- to heart and very badly.

MENENDEZ: Christiane, we understand that people are hurting in this country. But our goal is to have them understand and channel their anger on election day against the Republican Party that brought us to the verge of economic collapse in November of 2008, when financial institutions in this country were ready to collapse.

AMANPOUR: So why hasn't the message got out better, then, for instance on precisely this issue? A recent Bloomberg poll found that most Americans think that taxes have gone up since President Obama took office; that the economy has shrunk; that TARP, the corporate bailout, won't be mostly paid back. I mean, all of those are untrue. Why is the messaging so bad?

MENENDEZ: It's true that all of those are untrue, and I think the challenge is, when you're hurting economically -- and we have gone from negative job growth to positive job growth, from negative GDP growth to positive GDP growth -- but if you're still unemployed, none of that news makes that much difference to you. And that's the challenge in this election.

Our hope and our message and the contrast is you want to give the power back to the people who got us in this mess or do you want to continue to move progress forward?

AMANPOUR: Let me ask you, Senator, because so many of the people we talked to say that they really want to see cooperation, bipartisanship, less of the poison, and solutions. And yet your leader, the Republican leader of the Senate, has said that if you win in November, "the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." The Republican leader in the House, John Boehner, said this is not the time for compromise.

That doesn't sound like putting partisanship aside and working for the people. Is that the sum total of the policy?

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During his recent visit to the White House, British Prime Minister David Cameron adamantly denied any link between BP and the release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the convicted Lockerbie bomber, rejecting any possibility of a new investigation into the matter, maintaining that there is ‘no need for further investigations’.

Four US Democratic senators led by New Jerseys’ Frank Lautenberg, have sent a letter to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations to ‘hold a hearing and thoroughly investigate the role that oil contracts played in the decision to release Mr Megrahi.’ He further, along with senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Charles Schumer and Robert Menendez, wrote to UK Ambassador Sir Nigel Sheinwald last week urging a full investigation into the release of Mr Megrahi who is ‘still alive and reportedly living in luxury.’

‘Was this corporation willing to trade justice in the murder of 270 innocent people for oil profits?’ Senator Schumer added that the answer to that would ‘help us understand if BP might use blood money to pay claims for damage in the Gulf of Mexico.’

‘The evidence here may be circumstantial but if I were a prosecutor, I'd love to take this case to a jury,’ said New York Senator Charles Schumer. But without the cooperation of the UK government, such an investigation will remain unfeasible.

So, what exactly IS the circumstantial evidence? Where there’s smoke…

Cameron not only condemned the release of al-Megrahi, he attempted to shift the blame onto the Scottish, conveniently overlooking Gordon Brown’s approval of the agreement in 2007. ‘It was a government decision’, where the Scottish Justice Secretary, Kenny MacAskill had the right only to veto the application. UK Foreign Secretary William Hague wrote to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to insist there was ‘no evidence’ to support claims the release of al-Megrahi was linked to any BP oil deal. In his letter – copied to foreign relations committee chair Senator John Kerry – he said;’There is no evidence that corroborates in any way the allegations of BP involvement in the Scottish Executive's decision to release Megrahi on compassionate grounds in 2009 nor any suggestion that the Scottish Executive decided to release Megrahi in order to facilitate oil deals for BP.’

Leaked ministerial letters, however, clearly show that it was the British government which decided it was ‘in the overwhelming interests of the United Kingdom’ to release al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, after discussions between Libya and BP over a multi-million-pound oil exploration deal had bogged down. Two letters by Jack Straw, the justice secretary, to Kenny MacAskill, his counterpart in Scotland, clearly shows that the key decision to include Megrahi in a deal with Libya to allow prisoners to return home was, in fact, made by the UK government in London for British national interests. While Straw originally intended to exclude Megrahi from a prisoner transfer agreement with Colonel Muammar Gadaffi, under which British and Libyan prisoners could serve out their sentences in their home country, Straw later changed his mind after Libya insisted the Lockerbie bomber would be included and dragged their feet over the deal with BP as leverage for six months until Whitehall caved.

On December 19, 2007, Straw wrote to the Scottish Justice Secretary, informing him that the UK government was capitulating, citing national interest in its decision to include Megrahi in the prisoner transfer agreement. In a letter leaked by a Whitehall source, Straw wrote: ‘I had previously accepted the importance of the al-Megrahi issue to Scotland and said I would try to get an exclusion for him on the face of the agreement. I have not been able to secure an explicit exclusion. The wider negotiations with the Libyans are reaching a critical stage and, in view of the overwhelming interests for the United Kingdom, I have agreed that in this instance the [prisoner transfer agreement] should be in the standard form and not mention any individual.’

More smoke…

Sir Richard Dalton, a former British ambassador to Libya and a board member of the Libyan British Business Council, has also openly acknowledged the link between BP and Libyan interests: ‘Nobody doubted Libya wanted BP and BP was confident its commitment would go through. But the timing of the final authority to spend real money was dependent on politics.”

Six weeks after the UK giving in to Libyan demands and the release of al-Megrahi, all those pesky difficulties over BP’s oil contract magically disappeared. But there’s no link here, no sirree, all circumstantial, can’t prove a thing.

Except even the Libyans openly admit the release of al-Megrahi was directly linked to the BP oil deal. Saad Djebbar, an international lawyer who advises the Libyan government and who visited Megrahi in jail in Scotland, said: ‘No one was in any doubt that if al-Megrahi died in a Scottish prison it would have serious repercussions for many years which would be to the disadvantage of British industry.’ Saif Gadaffi, the son of the Libyan ruler who spearheaded the negotiations for the release of al-Megrahi and personally escorted al-Megrahi from Scotland to Tripoli, further backed this up. ‘At all times we talked about the [prisoner transfer agreement]. It was obvious we were talking about al-Megrahi. We all knew that was what we were talking about.’ Saif later told Megrahi, who was welcomed back to Libya as a hero, 'You were on the table in all commercial, oil and gas agreements that we supervised in that period. You were on the table in all British interests when it came to Libya, and I personally supervised this matter.’

Saif Gadaffi, just coincidentally, has moved to Britain, buying a £10m home in Hampstead, north London and moving his financial and media empire to London. It probably helped grease the wheels ever so slightly that his company, Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation, donated £1.5m to a new global governance unit to his former alma mater, the London School of Economics. Just coincidence. All circumstantial.

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Well, it's a blow to the progressive movement but not the end of the world. (Especially since Halter wasn't really all that progressive.)

I do wonder if progressives might be better served by pouring all that money into lobbying on causes rather than pushing candidates who so often end up being absorbed by the Beltway Borg, anyway. Because I don't think we have enough time left to build a new Congress - but that's just me:

WASHINGTON — On a primary election night when the heralded anti-incumbency sentiment was expected to again demonstrate its strength, Senator Blanche Lincoln proved there were clear limits to its power.

Virtually written off as a likely victim of voter outrage at veteran politicians, Mrs. Lincoln, a two-term Arkansas Democrat, showed that an experienced office-holder with money, message and determination still had a chance to prevail even in a toxic environment.

“Blanche has proven once again she is a true independent voice for the people of Arkansas, but she is also a fighter for what she believes in and will never stop standing up for her convictions or for her state,” said Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

But while Mrs. Lincoln survived to fight on in the general election, incumbents in both parties could not take much solace from the outcome in Arkansas. In South Carolina, Representative Bob Inglis, a veteran Republican, was forced into a runoff election after finishing a distant second in the battle to hold on to his seat. And Gov. Jim Gibbons, Republican of Nevada, lost his primary.

One by one, voices are calling out baseball to do the right thing and denounce Arizona's hateful law.

Sen. Robert Menendez is urging the Major League Baseball Players Association to boycott next year's All Star Game in Phoenix over the recently passed Arizona law to crack down on illegal immigrants.

The New Jersey Democrat says in a letter that 27 percent of Major League players are Latinos and they shouldn't be subjected to a law Menendez says codifies racial profiling.

Rep. Jose Serrano, a New York Democrat, has similarly asked the players to boycott the 2011 event, noting that in 1993 the National Football League rescinded its offer to host the Super Bowl in Arizona because it didn't then recognize Martin Luther King day.

I've helped put together a huge coalition against MLB and Bud Selig over their silence on SB1070. Tuesday will be an interesting day. Stay tuned.

I was taking a look at Gov. Chris Christie's budget today and then I saw this. Will New Jersey follow in California's footsteps and start governing by mood ring?

A state appeals court today ruled New Jersey’s secretary of state must accept a petition a citizens group filed to recall U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez, but left open the question of whether the removal effort itself is constitutional.

The three-judge panel stayed its ruling to give Menendez (D-N.J.) the opportunity to appeal to the state Supreme Court.. The senator has 45 days to file an appeal but did not say today whether he would. He called the recall effort a "political stunt" that won’t distract him from doing his job.

"This an organization trying to undemocratically and unconstitutionally overturn an election in which more than 2 million New Jerseyans voted," said Menendez, whose term expires in 2012. "My focus continues to be on job creation legislation and delivering a successful extension of my local property tax relief bill."

The court found existing New Jersey law and the state’s constitution both allow U.S. senators to be recalled. For that reason, the appeals court said, the removal effort can proceed. But noting the absence of case law and precedent, it left the ultimate question of the constitutionality of the state’s recall law and amendment to a higher court.

"There are a host of genuine arguments and counterarguments that can be articulated and debated about whether or not the Federal Constitution would permit a United States Senator to be recalled by the voters under state law," the appellate judges said.

"I’m pleased," said Dan Silberstein, attorney for the Committee to Recall Senator Menendez, which is backed by the New Jersey chapter of the conservative Tea Party movement. "I think the appellate court made the right decision on where the case is procedurally."

Menendez’s attorney disagreed.

"The U.S. Constitution is clear that a senator’s term is six years and is not subject to recall," said Marc E. Elias. "The state attorney general correctly argued before the court that a recall is unconstitutional and a clear disservice to voters who take part in a petition process that is invalid. We are pleased the court stayed this opinion until the appeals process is completed."

Fred Hiatt, always watching those tricksy Democrats for an opportunity to poke them in the eye, complains in his paper that it's really been the Democrats who have been politicizing national security, not the Republicans. In particular, he points to the sudden silence regarding the mandate for 100 percent cargo screening that Congress laid on the Department of Homeland Security in 2007.

Port security hasn't been in the news lately, so you could be forgiven for not seeing a connection between Brennan's incendiary charge and shipping containers. But not so long ago, Democratic politicians were absolutely convinced, or so they claimed, that President George W. Bush was putting the nation in grave danger by failing to inspect every container that arrived on our shores in a cargo ship.

Sen. John F. Kerry lambasted Bush during the 2004 campaign for screening only 5 percent of incoming cargo. After Bush's reelection, Sen. Robert Menendez helped shepherd through Congress a bill mandating 100 percent inspection by 2012 and said that anything less "is irresponsible and downright negligent." Then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Bennie Thompson -- now chair of the Homeland Security Committee -- piled on.

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Fast-forward to the Obama administration; screening policy hasn't changed. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano signaled more than a year ago, and confirmed in December, that the 2012 deadline mandated by law will not be met. The technology doesn't exist, she explained, and neither does the money. In fact, the administration's 2011 budget reduces funding for cargo inspection overseas and for pilot programs aimed at reaching the 100 percent goal.

The reaction from Democrats? Near silence. Rep. Thompson, at the end of a statement praising Obama's homeland security budget, allowed that he was "disappointed" on the matter of container screening. Menendez wrote to Napolitano last March expressing "concern," and a spokesman told me he is writing another letter. A Nadler spokesman said that "since we haven't had an official pronouncement from the administration" that the deadline won't be met, "we haven't made an official response."

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So was the nation not in imminent danger when Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff was pursuing a policy identical to Napolitano's, and getting beat up for it? Were Democrats, in Brennan's shocked words, "misrepresenting the facts to score political points?"

They were, of course. But there's a more serious point than noting that both sides do it. Democrats were playing politics with national security -- but they also were raising legitimate questions about al-Qaeda's ability to smuggle in a nuclear device. As Obama reduces the screening budget, the real danger may be the lack of serious oversight from Democrats who once raised alarms.

Now you may need a moment to just get past Fred Hiatt's tactic of misdirecting the Brennan issue on the Repubs' flagrant politicization of whether the FBI should turn the Underwear Bomber over to the military for "enhanced interrogation" or on the general issue of Republican hypocrisy on, oh, so many things - national security and otherwise. But this issue of cargo scanning is particularly interesting, in that while the original House resolution was sponsored by a Democrat and cosponsored by 205 others, it did in fact pass the House with 68 Republican votes. Interesting how 128 House Republicans were able to vote against a bill titled "Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act."

The Senate agreed to the conference report by a vote of 85-8. The eight Republican Senators who decided that the US government should not implement the 9/11 commission's recommendations included those true patriots Jon Kyl, Liz Dole, Tom Coburn, Jim Inhofe, Jim DeMint, Lindsey Graham, John Barrasso, and Michale Enzi. You know, the usual wack-jobs. To be clear, this public law wasn't just about cargo screening, but also a number of other homeland security initiatives (including the stand-up of a National Biosurveillance Integration Center, WMD proliferation prevention, and enhancing interagency coordination on defenses against rad/nuke weapons).

That said, the idea that the US government should physically scan every cargo container entering the United States was and continues to be an extremely bad one. It was an issue that was not carefully considered, that was generated in the heat of discussions about "nuclear terrorism," without regard to the cost and impact of its implementation. It was always a bad idea, and Big Business knew it was a bad idea. It would delay shipments and increase costs, and those are Bad Things, even when homeland security is the issue. Republicans understood this, and while many supported the passage of this bill, they took no action to actually push the Bush administration into doing anything about its delay on implementing the cargo screening actions.

So now the Dems are in charge, it's their people in DHS who have to explain that they can't meet the public law's requirements, given the state of technology, the potential cost of implementing such a strategy, and the potential impact on the flow of economic goods. And the Dems are quiet in Congress. Shocked? I'm not. Maybe it's sinking in that this was not a well-thought out plan, that its basis for being (interdicting nuclear weapons or radiological material) was perhaps more emotional than logical. Instead of pointing out the obvious, that this was a bipartisan screw-up and perhaps we need a better, less emotional approach to homeland security, Fred would rather politicize the example to poke the Dems in the eye on national security. Because the Repubs have been such good stewards of national security and aren't at all hypocrites. What an asshat.

Hey Fred, why don't you hire more previous Bush administration officials to write for the Post? Your op-ed page isn't conservative enough with regular entries from George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Kathleen Parker, Bob Kagan and William Kristol. And then there's that f***in' retard Michael Gerson.

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Of course, Geithner is pushing the Very Serious Idea of reforming Social Security and Medicare. Doesn't everyone?

Considering that the Greenspan commission didn't actually work - at least, not the way that Geithner says it did - it kind of leads me to wonder what he actually means.

From This Week:

TAPPER: Do you think the fact that you guys are pushing the bipartisan commission is indicative of the fact that our political system is not capable of taking on the serious challenges our nation faces?

You and I know that the money, as Willie Sutton says, said, that -- why do you rob banks? Because that's where the money is. The money is in entitlement programs: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, things that you do not touch in this budget.

The fact that you need a bipartisan commission to recommend cuts or tax increases, doesn't that indicate that our political system is incapable of making these tough decisions?

GEITHNER: Jake, I am very confident in our ability as a country to bring people together and make sure we are solving these challenges and these problems. We've done it in the past, it is completely within our capacity to do as a country.

But of course, it requires you bringing people together across the aisle to step back from politics, to try to bring practical solutions to things that are very important to our future as a country. And the president is committed to do that.

We're going to give the Republican Party the chance to share in the responsibility and the burden and the privilege of trying to fix the things that were broken in this country.

TAPPER: Republicans are afraid this is just a back door for tax increases. Are you willing to say that tax increases are off the table for this commission? Let's sit down and talk about the long-term structural problems with entitlement spending?

GEITHNER: The president's view, and this is a view shared by many Republicans, and it builds on what we've seen with effective commissions in the past, like the Greenspan commission that President Reagan established to help restore the financial footing of Social Security, is that for this to work, you've got to bring people together to step back from politics, day-to-day politics, and to bring fresh ideas to solve these kind of problems.

That's the only way to do it, we think. And we're committed to doing that. We've got to do it on a bipartisan basis, and we're deeply serious about doing this.