GOP Slams Obama Nominee ... Over Old Flame?

Senate Republicans have already gone too far in opposing President Obama's appointees, argues Gail Collins in the New York Times—but blocking someone over a boyfriend she had 20 years ago? Yes, Senate Republicans want to stop Mari Carmen Aponte from becoming ambassador to El Salvador because of a guy she once dated. Collins explains: "A defecting Cuban intelligence agent claimed in 1993 that Fidel Castro’s spies were trying to recruit Aponte" through her then-boyfriend, Roberto Tamayo.

Only problem: A former US spy says Tamayo was actually an FBI informant. "This sounds like a complicated boyfriend," Collins writes. "However, who of us does not have a difficult significant other in the distant past?" Collins suggests a 10-year moratorium on all sketchy exes. She also expresses amazement over Republicans' increasingly die-hard desire to block Obama appointees, especially Richard Cordray, would-be head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—because conservatives oppose the very powers of the bureau, "which the Senate approved, with some Republican support, a year and a half ago." (More President Obama stories.)