You have to be pretty ignorant of institutional cultures to imagine that what happened in Cartagena was an isolated incident. Was it just a coincidence that everyone assigned to that detail just happened to go along with it, that no one tried to get their colleagues to behave? No, they obviously all came from a much larger pool of individuals, from a culture in which such things were at least tolerated, if not reinforced and encouraged.
This source witnessed the majority of the men drink heavily (“wasted,” “heavily intoxicated”) at the strip club. He says most of the Secret Service “advance-team” members also paid extra for access to the VIP section of the club where they were provided a number of sexual favors in return for their cash. Although our source says he told the agents it was a “really bad idea” to take the strippers back to their hotel rooms, several agents bragged that they “did this all the time” and “not to worry about it.” Our source says at least two agents had escorts check into their rooms. It is unclear whether the escorts who returned to the hotels were some of the strippers from the same club.
These alleged incidents in El Salvador occurred a full year prior to recent revelations that secret service agents used prostitutes in Cartagena, Colombia, on a presidential trip this month.
This wasn’t an anomaly; it was standard operating procedure.
I’m not surprised. The conventional wisdom is that the president is going to have a huge war chest, but he’s having trouble raising funds, and I think it’s likely that the Republicans will outspend the Dems this cycle. As a commenter over there notes, business is sitting on trillions of cash, waiting for a president and Congress that won’t make non-stop war on it. There will be an economic boom next year if the election goes the right way.
Over at PJMedia this morning, I have some thoughts on why “liberals” are unable to understand conservatives, but not the reverse. I like the one comment over there that a simple explanation is that everyone remembers being a teenager, but that the leftists don’t know what it’s like to be grown up.
This is what happens when you have race mongers and baiters like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, the black caucus and the “liberals” in the media driving the national conversation. And I hold them responsible for this:
“During the course of the investigation, we learned that the crime was related to the victim’s race,” Reynolds said.
Conklin said Hayes told investigators that he was angry about the Martin shooting and decided to attack the victim because of his race. Reynolds would not comment if the crime had anything to do with the Martin shooting.
This has been as big a case of journalistic malpractice as the Duke lacrosse affair.
If you’re an SLS supporter, that is. Spaceref has a NASA document from November that concludes utilizing orbital assembly and fueling for exploration missions adds no significant mission risk. Opponents of this concept have been sowing FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) about this ever since it became viewed as a threat to first Ares, and now SLS. It was always a monumentally ignorant argument, that could be made only by someone unfamiliar with basic statistics and space ops (and sadly, it was once even made by the administrator himself), but now NASA has an internal document that shows what nonsense it is (and really, always was). Of course, in defense of Bolden, he knew what his audience wanted to hear.