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This story looks like it's about to get more interesting. I wonder if we're going to find out who paid the Dominican hooker to try to frame Sen. Bob Menendez. Report: Dominican Escort Now Says She Made Up Menendez Claims:

One of the women who appeared in a video last fall claiming Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) paid her for sex has now told a different story to the police in the Dominican Republic, The Washington Post reported on Monday.

According to affidavits obtained by the newspaper, the woman said she and a friend appeared in the video after being approached by a lawyer. That lawyer, meanwhile, said a second lawyer provided him with a script and paid him to find the women.

The Post report, which also cites two people “briefed on [the woman’s] claim,” does not identify the women or the lawyers by name, nor does it detail what court the affidavits were filed in, or what kind of proceeding they are related to. It is also not clear how the Post obtained the documents.

The videos referred to in the report are apparently the same ones that appeared, at least in part, on the conservative website The Daily Caller in November. The Daily Caller did not identify the women, and their faces were blurred.

The story was initially ignored by much of the press. But in late January and early February, the rumors resurfaced, in the form of an anonymously posted WordPress blog containing a shadowy tipster’s correspondence with a watchdog group, ABC News and an apparent FBI agent. The tipster said he had information that Menendez had slept with prostitutes while vacationing in the Dominican Republic, where he stayed at the home of Dr. Salomon Melgen, a Miami ophthalmologist and businessman who is both a friend and political donor of the senator’s. In late January, the FBI raided Melgen’s Miami offices, reportedly as part of parallel investigations into potential Medicare fraud and Melgen’s relationship with Menendez.

Wonkette has more here: Daily Caller’s Menendez Hooker: I Can’t Believe We Made Up The Whole Thing.

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On CNN's State of the Union, Candy Crowley tries to get NSCC Chairman John Cornyn to reply as to whether he agrees with some of the Republican's new batch of wingnut candidates and their views on privatizing Social Security and lowering the minimum wage, and rather than answer her, he calls what they've said "fear mongering" by Democrats and says he doesn't want to "relitigate them here." He also tries to pretend that their backtracking doesn't mean that's what those candidates really believe.

What's really pathetic is that those views that he's trying to paint as "extreme" here are what most Republicans actually do believe. They're just not allowed to say what they think out loud and these unpolished new comers that have swept in there under this "Tea Party" mantra apparently didn't get that memo before they opened their mouths. It's leaving them exposed to having to actually defend those positions. Rather than defend them, Republicans like Cornyn are pretending that what these candidates have said out loud is not what Republicans actually think.

The truth of the matter is, they hate any social safety nets. They hate that we have a minimum wage. They do want to dismantle Social Security and privatize it. They hate anything that helps working people in America and that does not help their big corporate donors who'd happily see us turned into a country with nothing but rich and poor and no middle class. And they've been doing their damnedest to take us there. And as Sen. Robert Menendez pointed out, it's not fear mongering to point out what someone has said they want to do.

Full transcript via CNN.

CROWLEY: So, getting back to the question I wanted to ask you, which is about Senator DeMint, it seems to me, if I were a betting person, that there may, when you return to Washington in January, be a kind of DeMint wing inside the Republican Party on the Senate side, sort of a party within a party.

So when you look at that, how is that going to work? Because you may get some candidates here who want to get rid or who want Social Security privatized. Some have said they want to lower the minimum wage, things like that. How is that going to work inside the party? Are those things you can sign on to?

CORNYN: Well, some of those are, of course, Democratic talking points, trying to scare people, and of course ,the candidates where those issues have been raises have explained themselves. And I'm not going to relitigate them here.

But let me just say that, I think, when it comes to restoring checks and balances, that's what we're going to see. And a lot of these candidates that Senator Menendez and Democrats have tried to scare people about are taking mainstream positions, and what they feel is that what's really extreme is what we see coming out of Washington, with almost double-digit unemployment, runaway spending and debt. And that's what they want us check...

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In July, Sen. Jim DeMint was quoted as saying that if Republicans were able to stop health care reform it would "break" President Barack Obama. "If we're able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him," said DeMint.

DeMint is now denying that his intention was to break the president.

"I did not want this to be the president's Waterloo," DeMint told ABC's Terry Moran Sunday.