The resolute defender of truth, Miss Pertinacious, has a look at Locke.

Gary Locke.

If you don't know by now, he is the Chosen One's newest choice to become Commerce Secretary, after his last nominee found himself in a spot of hot water over taxes not paid in a timely fashion, and #2 choice decided that he couldn't live with the Porkulus bill and other differences with the administration.

Michelle Malkin reports that the guy next up in the spotlight has a few problems of his own with funny money.

Remember Chinagate?

"..In response to my columns pressing Locke on his close ties to campaign finance crook John Huang, the governor’s office first stonewalled. His standard Democrat smokescreen? Play the race card and play the victim.

From June 1999:

When I asked what the governor had to say about Huang’s guilty plea, Locke’s spokesman, Keith Love, responded tersely: “He has no comment and no interest.”

This is a most peculiar stonewall of silence.

Though Huang and his wife gave token personal donations to Locke totaling a mere $1,000, Huang is no casual acquaintance of Locke or his out-of-state fund-raising staff. As reported here previously, Huang helped organize May 1996 galas involving Locke at the Mayflower Hotel and Sheraton Carlton in Washington, D.C.; three fund-raisers at restaurants in Los Angeles, and an extravaganza at the Universal City, Calif., Hilton in October 1996 that raised upwards of $30,000.

In the Washington Post, Boston Globe and Dallas Morning News, Locke steadfastly defended his Huang-linked funds. He persistently invoked the race card to deflect criticism and castigated the national media for aggressively investigating those who benefited from the fund-raising of the then-presumed-innocent-now-self-confessed-felon Huang.

At a gathering of Asian-American journalists, Locke recently lamented: “The fund-raising scandal will have repercussions for several years. It will make our efforts doubly hard to get Asian Americans appointed to top-level positions across the United States. If they have any connection to John Huang, those individuals will face greater scrutiny and their lives will be completely opened up and examined - perhaps more than usual.”