Moby Reid

The AP's John Solomon has been trying for about 10 months to slay the savage Minority Leader with a series of half-true and distorted articles attempting to show some kind of impropriety or other. When they're linked to by the right they almost always ignore the fact that THE SAME REPORTER is writing all of these stories, which inevitably get shot down. This latest one is no different:

Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) "collected a $1.1 million windfall on a Las Vegas land sale even though he hadn't personally owned the property for three years," the AP reports.

Except that's wrong. Reid made a $700,000 profit on the sale, not $1.1 million. Also, the story, by the AP’s John Solomon, makes it sound as if Reid got money for land he didn't own. But that's not the case [...]

...as Solomon obliquely acknowledges, Reid, who had bought the land along with a friend in 1998, transferred his ownership in the land to a limited liability company in 2001. The company, which was composed solely of this land owned by Reid and his friend, in turn sold the land in 2004. That's when Reid collected his $1.1 million share of the sale. Since Reid had originally put down $400,000 on the sale, his profit was $700,000, not the full $1.1 million, as Solomon states in his lead.

Solomon persists in straightforwardly describing the 2001 land transfer as a sale, even though no money changed hands; Reid's share of the land after the transfer was the same as before. In his financial disclosure forms, Reid did not disclose his transfer of the land to the LLC, although he did continue to disclose his ownership of the land through 2004, when it was sold.

There's something to be said for the "appearance of impropriety," but according to John Solomon Harry Reid must spend his entire day handing out $10 bills to the homeless or else he's a CROOK... CROOK I TELL YOU!

I picture Solomon driving around Reid's house in Washington continuously, searching through his garbage, leaving messages on his answering machine with phrases like "I won't be IGNORED, Harry!"

What's important to note is that this is a mainstream reporter, part of the largest consortium of news reporting in the country, who place articles in hundreds of papers daily, who appears to have a hard-on for trumping up Harry Reid's purported ethical lapses. It's borderline creepy. Is he given any other assignments other than being "Senior Harry Reid Land Deal and Boxing Ticket Analyst"?

The fact is that the media, in its attempt to be "fair and balanced," will always try to tip the scales to ensure that Democrats and Republicans are ensnared in whatever web of corruption is at the forefront, even if they have to stretch the truth to do it.