As the Benghazi prosecution appears to fizzle, rightbloggers have sought to replace it with a pair of new scandalettes involving the IRS and the Associated Press.

We think this shows a disappointing lack of imagination. In the far-flung meth labs of the right, fresher outrages are cooking that Americans can better understand: Outrages that involve the humiliation of American servicemen by a racial minority, and the President's admission of what rightbloggers have been saying all along: That he's a Socialist. Hunt where the ducks are, fellas!

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House Republicans finally got their hearings on Benghazi, and we have learned that the Obama Administration, the CIA, and the FBI massaged their talking points before announcing the attack last September, and that at least a couple of people thought the U.S. military could have gotten to Benghazi quicker than they did.

At least, that's what we heard. Our friends the rightbloggers seem to have heard that Obama and Hillary Clinton murdered Ambassador Stevens in cold blood, for no better reason than that they hate America (or love Islam!), and that the President must be impeached for it at the very least.

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Well, we guess the voters were right to re-elect Charles Hynes back in 2005, when he was pushed fairly hard in the democratic primary by challenger, state Sen. John Sampson. (Hynes won by about four percentage points.)

Sampson, a 15-year veteran of the Legislature and chair of the senate ethics committee, was arrested today on two counts of embezzlement for, in part, using money embezzled from accounts of sales of foreclosed houses--over which he was supposed to be the protector--to finance that campaign against Hynes. He was also charged with tampering with evidence and witnesses.

Say what one wants about Hynes--and we have--but then imagine if Sampson had actually defeated the long-serving DA. Brooklynites would have an accused embezzler and evidence and witness tamperer in the most powerful law enforcement position in the borough. Yikes!

"Senator Sampson allegedly stole that money to fund his own ambition to become Brooklyn's top state prosecutor, then engaged in an elaborate obstruction scheme to hide his illegal conduct, going so far as to counsel lies and the hiding of evidence," U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch said.

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Last week NBA player Jason Collins came out as gay -- spectacularly, in the pages of Sports Illustrated. He did so not because he had been arrested in a men's room or outed by a news site, but because, as he told SI, he wanted to "start the conversation" that would make it easier for young gay athletes to pursue careers without hiding their essential natures.

Rightbloggers were happy to join the conversation -- to tell us what a lousy player and human being Collins is, and to complain that no one was willing to listen to their contribution.

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Reverend Calvin Butts, the politically influential Harlem pastor, is in damage-control mode following the Voice's article last week about the Abyssinian Development Corp., addressing the contents of the piece in a closed-door meeting with church elders, known as deacons, and in Sunday's sermon.

See also: The (Very) Earthly Pursuits of Rev. Calvin O. Butts III

The article raised questions about the financial situation at ADC, which was founded by Butts, the longtime leader of Abyssinian Church, in 1989, and about a series of high-end vacations billed to the organization by senior staff. The article also disclosed the contents of a lawsuit alleging that ADC swindled an elderly man out of a parcel of land worth close to $1 million. The article caused a buzz both in Harlem and elsewhere.

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Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul spoke at historically black Howard University last week, and it was a major event. No, he didn't seem to win any black votes for the GOP--even his fans admit as much. But white people of the rightblogger variety were all over it, and that's what counts.

Some of the brethren held out some hope that the speech, and the many acts of outreach with which Paul will doubtless follow up (how much does a half-hour on ASPiRE cost?), might shave some points off the Democrats' mammoth share of the non-Caucasian vote. But most were excited that Paul was saying things they liked in an exotic location.

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Maybe it's because everyone's sick of fighting over gay marriage. Maybe it's because our rightblogger friends' tactic of Adam-and-Steving the issue hasn't helped their increasingly hopeless cause, even within the Republican Party. In any case, some of the brethren are working a new angle.

Well, not totally new. There has long been a body of conservative thought about how it's actually straight marriage that needs fixing, and in these dark days for the anti-gay cause, that kind of thinking is catching on with rightbloggers. The basic premise: Straights better marry fast and early, because something something values.

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Last week the Supreme Court heard a couple of gay marriage cases, and with so many politicians and even some conservatives running to grab the rainbow flag, it seemed as if a corner on the contentious issue had been turned. How went the rightbloggers? Most continued to--paraphrasing Buckley--stand athwart history, crying "Please be gentle!" But others tried to accommodate their new gay-married overlords in ways that preserved for themselves some sliver of Right Pride.More »

When then-NYPD Capt. Michael Marino arrived as a commander in the tough section of Brooklyn known as East New York, he was appalled at what the 400 officers in the command considered to be work.

"They were doing five [summonses] a month, which was just not enough to address the problem," he testified, about the onset of his tenure in the 75th Precinct back in 2002. "It was almost malfeasance. ... The level of activity they were performing was so low that it was a detriment to the community, in one of the most crime-ridden precincts in the city."

Now a deputy chief, one of the top-ranking commanders in the department, Marino testified Friday in the landmark legal challenge to the city's stop-and-frisk campaign. An interesting character in the NYPD landscape, the Flatbush native rose from street cop to the second-in-command in Brooklyn North via a bullish persona, a matching physique, and a devotion to the tenets of the NYPD's numbers-driven CompStat strategy.

He is also the man who ordered police to forcibly commit Police Officer Adrian Schoolcraft to a psych ward back in October 2009, three weeks after Schoolcraft reported misconduct in Bed-Stuy's 81st Precinct to police investigators.

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Last week was the anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War. For friends and family members of the thousands of Americans and allies killed or wounded in that struggle, or of the tens of thousands of Iraqis killed, wounded or displaced, it probably wasn't a happy one.

We don't know whether these people expected or required an apology from the war's advocates in the media. But they got them nonetheless from several careerists eager to demonstrate that they had changed.

Most rightbloggers were disinclined to apologize, but weren't able to rouse much enthusiasm for the anniversary either, for which they blamed liberals.

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