Can she actually believe this? Has this president broken the law, lied under oath, or authorized war crimes? Has he traded arms for hostages with Iran? Has he knowingly sent his cabinet out to tell lies about his sex life? Has he sat by idly as an American city was destroyed by a hurricane? Has he started a war with no planning for an occupation? Has he started a war based on a lie, and destroyed the US’ credibility and moral standing while he was at it, leaving nothing but a smoldering and now rekindled civil sectarian war?

So far as I can tell, this president has done nothing illegal, unethical or even wrong.

Charlie Pierce adds his wisdom:

For the benefit of wandering fetuses who may have joined our program in progress—and for the benefit of aging stenographers whose memories may be failing them—here is what has happened in the IRS “scandal” so far. There was bureaucratic dumbassery in the IRS office in Cincinnati to which there was something of an inadequate response by the home office in Washington. This dumbassery concerned the criteria involved in the certification process of 501 (c) 4 groups which, since the Citizens United decision was handed down, have become the biggest scam against democracy this side of whatever Michelle Rhee comes up with next. (It did not involve, you know, actual IRS audits of said groups. It was about…paperwork.) Subsequently, the IRS blew the whistle on itself. The president fired an interim commissioner. Somebody else resigned. The president got angry about it. And that’s it.

And to top off the week, there was a HUGE scandal about President Obama asking two Marines to hold umbrellas over him and the Prime Minister of Turkey.  What an outrage!  Why is he still president?

Because history shows that lots of other presidents, including St. Ronald, have been there and done that.  Oh, and so did the Sarah Palin, the dingbat who started the whole flap in the first place.

So there.

ETA: FC points to a little bit of background on Grand Inquisitor Darrell Issa, who has his own past to account for.

HT to ntodd.

That should inspire you to get out there and play in the dirt.

Group finds use of torture in Syria.

Rob Ford, the mayor of Toronto, says accusations that he smoked crack are “ridiculous.”

A huge asteroid will just miss hitting Earth this month.

Judge blocks Arkansas abortion law.

The Tigers beat the Rangers 2-1.

And then there’s the classic version.

HT to J.M.G.

SCOTT PELLEY: Also at his news conference today the president called for tighter security for U.S. diplomatic facilities to prevent an attack like the one in Benghazi, Libya, last year that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. Of course, Benghazi has become a political controversy. Republicans claim that the Administration watered down the facts in talking points that were given to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice for television appearances while Mr. Obama was running for reelection. Republicans on Capitol Hill claim that they had found proof of this in White House e-mails that they leaked to reporters last week. Well, it turns out some of the quotes in those e-mails were wrong. Major Garrett is at the White House for us tonight. Major?

MAJOR GARRETT: Scott, Republicans have claimed that the State Department under Hillary Clinton was trying to protect itself from criticism. The White House released the real e-mails late yesterday and here’s what we found when we compared them to the quotes that had been provided by Republicans. One e-mail was written by Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes. On Friday, Republicans leaked what they said was a quote from Rhodes. “We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don’t want to undermine the FBI investigation.” But it turns out, in the actual e-mail Rhodes did not mention the State Department. It read “We need to resolve this in a way that respects all the relevant equities, particularly the investigation.” Republicans also provided what they said was a quote from an e-mail written by State Department Spokesman Victoria Nuland. The Republican version notes Nuland discussing: “The penultimate point is a paragraph talking about all the previous warnings provided by the Agency (CIA) about al-Qaeda’s presence and activities of al-Qaeda.” The actual e-mail from Nuland says: the “…penultimate point could be abused by Members to beat the State Department for not paying attention to Agency warnings…” The C.I.A. agreed with the concerns raised by the State Department and revised the talking points to make them less specific than the C.I.A.’s original version, eliminating references to al-Qaeda and affiliates and earlier security warnings. There is no evidence, Scott, the White House orchestrated these changes.

And that’s the way it is, Major.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) on Thursday declared that efforts to repeal President Barack Obama’s health care reform law were “now revived” after the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) admitted that it had inappropriately targeted conservative groups to determine if they had abused their tax-exempt status.

And they tried for the 37th time to repeal Obamacare.

Meanwhile — just like I told you — the righties don’t think the 100 e-mail dump by the White House about the Benghazi! talking points is enough.

“Why not release all of the unclassified documents?” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. “The president has repeatedly said that when he gets new information, he’ll release it to the public. Why not release — instead of the hand-picked ones — why not release all the unclassified documents?”

A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said Wednesday Republicans hoped “this limited release of documents is a sign of more cooperation to come,” while the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee pressed the Pentagon for more details about military orders around the time of the attack and what military aircraft were in the region.

So obviously Mr. Chaffetz knows there is much more to come.  How does he know that?

And now they want to bring back the Special Prosecutor.  Get Kenneth Star as the front man and this gig could open at the Hard Rock in a couple of weeks.

A man shot himself in the leg Tuesday while bowling in Jupiter, Fla.

According to TV station WPBF, witnesses said the man was carrying a revolver in the pocket of his shorts. The gun was triggered when he hit his leg while throwing a bowling ball.

He was subsequently taken to the hospital with injuries that were not life threatening.

In his defense, maybe he once got mugged in an alley.

 The attorney general made statements that what I said was not true, when actually, uh, the reverse is what happened. [...] He’s casting aspirations [sic] on my asparagus.

Do you want Hollandaise with that?

It’s hard to tell now if the I.R.S. scandal is political thuggery or obliviousness. It would be one thing if the scandal is just a group of tax people targeting the most antitax groups in the country. That’s just normal, run-of-the-mill partisan antipathy.

It would be far worse if the senior workers of the I.R.S. have become so isolated by their technocratic task that they didn’t even recognize that using the search term “Tea Party” was going to be a moral and political problem. If that’s the case, then the members of the I.R.S. leadership are suffering from a tunnel vision that turns outside reality into abstractions. When government workers lose touch with the normal human context of their job, that’s when the real horror show commences.

Everyone is treating the I.R.S. issue as a bigger deal, but the Justice Department scandal is worse. This was a sweeping intrusion that makes it hard for the press to do its job. Who is going to call a journalist to report wrongdoing knowing that at some future date, the government might feel perfectly free to track the phone records and hunt you down?

I’m not going to be lectured on government overreach and unrestrained bureaucrats by someone who spent eight years cheering on the Bush administration, so don’t even try.

Men who are strong are more likely to take a right-wing stance, while weaker men support the welfare state, researchers claim

Their study discovered a link between a man’s upper-body strength and their political views.

Scientists from Aarhus University in Denmark collected data on bicep size, socio-economic status and support for economic redistribution from hundreds in America, Argentina and Denmark.

The figures revealed that men with higher upper-body strength were less likely to support left-wing policies on the redistribution of wealth.

But men with low upper-body strength were more likely to put their own self-interest aside and support a welfare state.

I spent twenty years working out three or four days a week.  Got pretty buff, if I do say so myself, and my political opinions and views of society didn’t change from the liberal point of view that I had going in.  But maybe I was just hanging out with the wrong set of gym bunnies.