A GRAND UNIFIED THEORY OF GOVERNMENT-CREATED TORNADOES AND THE IRS SCANDAL

Via Steve Benen, I see that Alex Jones suspects the Oklahoma tornado may have been created by the government:

On the May 21 edition of The Alex Jones Show, ... Jones said that "of course there's weather weapon stuff going on -- we had floods in Texas like fifteen years ago, killed thirty-something people in one night. Turned out it was the Air Force."

... Jones ... explained that "natural tornadoes" do exist and that he's not sure if a government "weather weapon" was involved in the Oklahoma disaster, Jones warned nonetheless that the government "can create and steer groups of tornadoes."

Jones didn't specifically mention HAARP, which surprises me, because it's been theorized in Jones World that HAARP created Hurricane Sandy. (The caller to whom Jones was responding did mention HAARP, however.)

What is HAARP? you ask. A 2011 Alaska Dispatch story explains:

A military-funded project called the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), located on remote tundra in Alaska, jumps off the horizon just past mile marker 11 on the Glenn Highway. The program's main facility sits behind a barbed wire fence that stretches as far as the eye can see. What grabs the imagination of most, though, are the couple hundred oversized antennas, described by legions of journalists and conspiracy theorists.

... the HAARP website notes that federal scientists are working to unlock the mysteries to other natural phenomena that have captivated humans for millennia. They're studying lightning, aurora borealis and the like. They've even learned how to induce both of those on a limited scale, according to a statement included on a Navy defense budget. HAARP also exists, the project's website notes, to learn more about shortwave radio communications and its application in global positioning systems, among other things....

Plenty of other theories have been explored about what exactly Uncle Sam is up to way out in the middle of nowhere, Alaska....

Among the HAARP conspiracy theories: weather modification.

There's a storied tradition of blaming devastating hurricanes on HAARP. That trend hit a fever pitch in 2005: first it was Katrina, then Rita, then Wilma....

"This is absolute hogwash," Stanford professor Umran Inan told Popular Science. "There's absolutely nothing we can do to disturb the earth's [weather] systems. Even though the power HAARP radiates is very large, it's miniscule compared with the power of a lightning flash -- and there are 50 to 100 lightning flashes every second. HAARP's intensity is very small."

But it's not just weather. There's also ... mind control:

Of all the conspiracies floating around about HAARP, this is perhaps the most entertaining, and scientifically farfetched.

The government is using the shortwave radio communication generated in Gakona, so the story goes, to control the minds of unsuspecting Americans.

What conspiracy theorists believe the Feds are trying to control is hazy. A good place to try and get a grip on this one is at the conspiracy website HAARP.net....

Yeah, just try reading that HAARP.net page:

... ELF waves from HAARP when targeted on areas can weather-engineer and create mood changes affecting millions. The intended wattage is 1,700 billion watts of power. A former govt. insider deduced they want to flip the world upside down. 64 elements in the ground modulate, with variation, the geomagnetic waves naturally coming from the ground.

The 'earth's natural brain rhythm' above is balanced with these. These are the same minerals as the red blood corpuscles. There is a relation between the blood and geomagnetic waves. An imbalance between Schumann and geomagnetic waves disrupts biorhythms. These natural geomagnetic waves are being replaced by artificially created very low frequency (VLF) ground waves coming from GWEN Towers....

Yeah ... right. Of course.

But maybe this can explain one aspect of the IRS scandal that remains a mystery. Simon Maloy of Media Matters had dubbed it the Legend of the Bureaucrat Whisperer. According to this theory, President Obama didn't have to tell any IRS agents to target his opponents. He merely had to say bad things about his opponents and the IRS agents then intuited that they should perform evil deeds aimed at those opponents. As a Wall Street Journal op-ed put it:

The IRS bureaucrats took the hint. No express order from senior administration officials would have been necessary. Like other federal enforcement agencies, the IRS has always been well-attuned to even subtle guidance from the White House, Congress and the political establishment.

"Well-attuned"! Maybe the IRS wasn't merely "well-attuned" -- maybe it was brainwashed by disruptions of natural cerebral rhythms emanating from HAARP on Obama's orders!

I think Jones's pal Rand Paul ought to hold Senate hearings to get to the bottom of this. Don't you?

WHY REPUBLICANS CAN POLITICIZE DISASTER RELIEF AND DEMOCRATS CAN'T

Republicans held up the Hurricane Sandy relief bill for weeks before it passed; Democrats are not going to do the same in response to the Oklahoma tornado. If anything, relief could be held up by Republicans, starting with the state's own Senator Tom Coburn, who wants spending cuts elsewhere to offset any aid. Meanwhile, Oklahoma's other senator, James Inhofe, says the two disasters are "totally different":

In the wake of the devastating tornado in an Oklahoma City suburb, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) rejected comparisons between federal aid for this disaster and the Hurricane Sandy relief package he voted against.

That was a "totally different" situation, Inhofe told MSNBC, arguing that the Sandy aid was filled with pork. There were "things in the Virgin Islands. They were fixing roads there and putting roofs on houses in Washington, D.C."

“Everyone was getting in and exploiting the tragedy that took place,” he said. "That won't happen in Oklahoma."

Republicans can always talk like this because Republicans win the loyalty of their base voters by declaring certain fellow Americans to be evil, sinful, lazy, gluttonous, and parasitical. If, after a while, it became politically awkward to make that claim about the blue-state victims of Sandy, many of whom could be seen on TV every night genuinely suffering, the backup plan was to complain about money in the Sandy bill that wasn't going to Sandy victims. (Never mind the fact that some appropriations were put in the bill in response to other disasters, and some money was added to benefit states with Republican senators.) The Sandy bill eventually passed, but the message was always one that's near and dear to Republican voters: Someone is being evil and must be punished.

That message doesn't appeal to most Democratic voters -- yes, Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, responded to the tornado by denouncing climate-change denialists on the Senate floor, but you're not going to hear a lot of responses like that from elected Democrats. Even many people who agree with Whitehouse thought it wasn't the time to say what he said -- that's how most Democratic voters think.

Gallup consistently finds that self-described conservatives greatly outnumber self-described liberals in America -- and yet Democrats have won the popular vote in four of the past five presidential elections, and votes for Congress suggest it's a 50/50 country. That means that Democrats are winning the votes of a lot more moderates than Republicans are.

Moderates presumably don't want disasters politicized. Conservatives, by contrast, seem to have no problem with the politicizing of disasters. So Democrats run risks if they try to score political points after a disaster. On the other side, Republicans have free rein -- they can politicize away.

SCANDAL MONOMANIA IS THE NEW DEFICIT MONOMANIA

Another poll -- this one from The Washington Post and ABC -- shows that Americans disapprove of the events being highlighted in the current Scandalpalooza, but they aren't turning against the president:

Majorities of Americans believe that the Internal Revenue Service deliberately harassed conservative groups by targeting them for special scrutiny and say that the Obama administration is trying to cover up important details about the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans last year.

But a new Washington Post-ABC News poll also finds that allegations of impropriety related to the controversies have yet to affect President Obama’s political standing.

The president's approval rating, at 51 percent positive and 44 percent negative, has remained steady in the face of fresh disclosures about the IRS, the Benghazi attack and the Justice Department's secret collection of telephone records of Associated Press journalists as part of a leak investigation....

Ezra Klein thinks this is because people don't blame the president:

The public is simply separating the scandals from Obama. They’re upset about the IRS, Benghazi, and DoJ stories. But most think the president has been truthful.

Except that, as noted above, a majority of Americans (55%-33%) think the Obama administration "is trying to cover up the facts" with regard to Benghazi, and a small plurality (45%-42%) feel the same way about the IRS story.

My guess? They see misdeeds, and many think these misdeeds extend to the White House, but (apart from conservatives) they don't care all that much. Most ordinary Americans don't identify with the tea party. And four people died in Benghazi, but a lot of Americans have died overseas in the past dozen years. And they certainly can't identify with high-level journalists. This is yet another way the public is saying, Hey, when the hell are you going to start caring about us?

Obsessing about scandals is the new obsessing about the debt and deficits -- it's what D.C. insiders do instead of focusing on the economy and jobs and ordinary people's economic uncertainty. Obama, at least, pays some attention to ordinary Americans' economic distress -- and that's why the public gives him a not-great but passing grade:

A bare majority of Americans [51%] say they believe that Obama is focused on issues that are important to them personally; just 33 percent think so of congressional Republicans.

Clear majorities of Americans think these scandals are bad? Well, clear majorities of Americans consistently tell pollsters that the federal debt and deficits are bad -- but when you ask them what their top priorities are for government, the economy and jobs outrank the debt and deficits by a considerable margin.

So this is the new public-be-damned monomania. The public still wants what it's wanted for years -- jobs and a better economy.

GUESS WHICH STATES ALL THOSE "TAKERS" ON DISABILITY COME FROM

You've heard the right-wing complaints:

* "Disability Claims Explode During Obama's First Term"
* "Disability Ranks Continue to Surge Under Obama"
* "Getting People on Disability Has Become Big Business at Taxpayers' Expense"
* "[Bill] O'Reilly Exposes Massive 'Disability Con'"

Never mind the fact that disability rolls are probably going up for simple demographic reasons -- the population is getting older, after all. We've been told that people on disability are the 47%, the "takers," the people who've been lulled into parasitism by Obama's evil socialist policies.

Well, guess which states have the highest percentages of people on disability. Here are the top 10, accoding to the site 247WallSt.com:

10. Michigan
9. Missouri
8. South Carolina
7. Tennessee
6. Maine
5. Mississippi
4. Kentucky
3. Alabama
2. Arkansas
1. West Virginia

A lot of red there, wouldn't you say? Only two of the ten states, Maine and Michigan, voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Oddly, the bluest, most sneered at pinko-socialist states, California and New York and Massachusetts, aren't on the list. What happened? How is our excess of evil socialism not the main diver of this disability explosion? Inquiring minds want to know.

HIGH-MINDEDNESS

Today:

Folks, I have no patience for turning this tornado into a talking point, for right or left. All that crap can wait.

— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahNRO) May 20, 2013

October 29, 2012, in response to Hurricane Sandy, while the storm was pummeling the New York metro area:

All I can think about is how all of this destruction will make NYC so much richer according to Paul Krugman.

— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahNRO) October 30, 2012

"I have no patience for turning this ... into a talking point" is clearly Goldberg's euphemism for "I'm fresh out of one-liners."

SOMETIMES THE DUMB RUBES ARE ONE-PERCENTERS

I don't know if this ABC story describes a real trend or is just well-placed industry hype, but the mere fact that somebody is apparently buying the merchandise under discussion tells me that some of the dumb rubes who watch Fox News and listen to talk radio are in the upper-tax-bracket dumb rubes:

Bomb Shelter Boom Sees Underground Pools, Basketball Courts

The latest real estate boom to sweep America comes with all the trappings of luxurious living: custom-built swimming pools, gyms, full-length basketball courts, and even airplane hangars.

The only catch is that this time, the features are all buried underground.

The boom in bomb shelter sales over the past 15 years has taken the spartan 1950s notion of a fallout shelter and given it a makeover, according the owners of three companies that make and sell shelters....

"You can have all your major amenities: TV, high power and high voltage (appliances)... horticulture rooms where you can grow vegetables and gardens, a full shower, all the amenities of your full home. We're not limiting what people can do," said Brad Roberson, marketing director for Rising S Company, which builds and installs custom shelters....

A bunker on the small side of 10 feet by 20 feet starts at about $54,000. They go up from there to $10 million, Roberson said....

In the past 15 years, companies that make and sell underground bunkers have sprouted up around the country, mainly in the West and South....

The West and South! Imagine my surprise.

Bomb shelter manufacturers said that their average customer is a middle-aged, affluent man....

This is a midlife guy thing? Knock me over with a feather. Next you'll be telling me the guys are almost all white and Republican.

[Sharon] Packer of Utah Shelter Systems said that of her customers, she has seen few traditional "survivalists," and many more ordinary, highly-educated professionals coming to her in case of a worst-case scenario.

"The vast majority are professionals," Packers said. "They are very well educated, a lot of doctors. The majority of them are physicians, and attorneys, a lot of engineers, all of whom understand the real threat."

Which is what?

"It won't matter how close you were to the blast radius. It's going to be the 'haves and have-nots', and if they need it they're going to take it, to come into your house and burn it down," [Brad Roberson] said....

I say this all the time about phony macho men (e.g., the gunners), and I'll say it again: this isn't fear, it's wish fulfillment. It's people with too much money paying to have a bunker built that tells them a pleasing story every day: You are a rich and important person, and people would like to tear you down, but that won't happen because YOU ARE A SURVIVOR, you big, brave man.

The fact that these people might get through the immediate aftermath of the apocalypse is one reason I hope I'm flash-fried at Ground Zero if it ever happens. On the other hand, these are the last people I expect to survive an apocalypse long-term, because a lot of them have forgotten how to do anything without employing a lot of underpaid peons to do it for them. If anyone rebuilds civilization after an apocalypse, I think it's going to be those peons. (I'm not very resourceful myself, but I'm not deluding myself into thinking I am.)

In any case, the apocalypse is highly unlikely to be coming anytime soon -- sorry to burst anyone's bubble. Doomsday-prepper thinking, even on the part of one-percenters, is just a silly way to ignore the slow degradation of American society, which is what we really need to worry about. Of course, these are the guys who don't need to worry about it, because their American society is still intact, and still provides them with money to burn this way.

And on the subject of rich people's intelligence: well, if we didn't know rich people could be dumb Foxites and Beck-heads, all we had to do was read Donald Trump's Twitter feed, right?

I BET I'LL LIVE TO SEE THE DAY WHEN RIGHT-WINGERS ARE STICKING UP FOR "BIG POT"

Bill Keller has an op-ed in The New York Times today titled "How to Legalize Pot," in which he looks at the questions faced by Washington State and Colorado as they tries to create an aboveground marijuana market. Keller talks to Mark Kleiman, a policy expert who's offering Washington State legal advice on this. What strikes me about Keller's description is how non-laissez-faire the thinking is there:

One practical challenge facing the legalization pioneers is how to keep the marijuana market from being swallowed by a few big profiteers -- the pot equivalent of Big Tobacco, or even the actual tobacco industry -- a powerful oligopoly with every incentive to turn us into a nation of stoners. There is nothing inherently evil about the profit motive, but there is evidence that pot dealers, like purveyors of alcohol, get the bulk of their profit from those who use the product to excess. "When you get a for-profit producer or distributor industry going, their incentives are to increase sales," said Jonathan Caulkins of Carnegie Mellon, another member of the Washington consulting team. "And the vast majority of sales go to people who are daily or near-daily consumers."

What Kleiman and his colleagues (speaking for themselves, not Washington State) imagine as the likely best model is something resembling the wine industry -- a fragmented market, many producers, none dominant. This could be done by limiting the size of licensed purveyors.

I bring this up because, in the print edition of today's Times, the Keller op-ed sits right above an "advertorial" (PDF) from the Washington Legal Foundation, a wingnut-welfare group funded by right-wing foundations. The ad complains about the targeting of certain foods as unhealthy:

We are constantly barraged with preachy messages and bad news about our food and drink choices. Advocacy-tinged studies accuse salt, sugar, and other essential food ingredients of causing countless "preventable" deaths. Quotable chefs and talk-show doctors implore us to absolutely avoid this snack or that beverage.

Such condescending demonization is not only intended to shame us into "healthier" diets, it's also aimed at building support for government policies like sin taxes, advertising restrictions, and even bans or limits on food. To advance their regulatory agenda, activists have also sharpened their accusations that Big Food and Big Soda, and not overeating consumers, are directly responsible for a fatter America.

See why I'm linking the two? In Washington State, according to Keller, the regulators want to make sure weed isn't taken over by "Big Pot," which will target, and rely on, excessive users. But what do you think is going to happen as more and more Americans accept the notion of legalized weed? The right is going to get on the libertarian side of this, especially in purple and red states (or, for that matter, any state with GOP control), and "Big Pot" is precisely what we're going to get: lower-quality mass-produced weed marketed to heavy smokers, and a regulatory mechanism as limited as lobbyists can make it.

What they're trying to do in Washington State right now will be denounced as intolerable nanny-state-ism. It will be fought vigorously, until Big Pot dominates the market.

Oh, I suppose, after the small growers are driven out of business, we might have a comeback of high-priced, niche-market "artisanal" weed. But in the meantime it'll be Miller-and-Bud-level weed dominating the market for a few decades. Because: freedom.

HEAR NO EXTREMISM, SEE NO EXTREMISM

You may have seen this over the weekend:

The Virginia Republican Party picked conservative minister E.W. Jackson as their nominee for lieutenant governor Saturday night. Jackson will run along side Ken Cuccinelli and is the first black candidate the party has nominated for statewide office since 1988 according to the Associated Press....

Jackson ... maintained a now defunct blog on his site, where he argued in one post that President Obama saw the world “from a Muslim perspective."

Obama clearly has Muslim sensibilities. He sees the world and Israel from a Muslim perspective. His construct of "The Muslim World" is unique in modern diplomacy. It is said that only The Muslim Brotherhood and other radical elements of the religion use that concept. It is a call to unify Muslims around the world....

You may have also seen that Jackson has compared Planned Parenthood to the Ku Klux Klan:

In a video posted to YouTube last September, the minister and activist urged black Christians to reject the "ridiculous lies" of the "Democrat Party." ...

He continues, "The Democrat Party has created an unholy alliance between certain so-called civil rights leaders and Planned Parenthood, which has killed unborn black babies by the tens of millions. Planned Parenthood has been far more lethal to black lives than the KKK ever was. And the Democrat Party and the black civil rights allies are partners in this genocide."

And he's said this:

Democrats now have fully embraced an abortion policy that amounts to infanticide. They have also made the lesbian-homosexual-bisexual-transgender agenda their vision for America. How have they managed to hold on to black Christians in spite of an agenda worthy of the Antichrist?

Jackson will be #2 on a ticket that, of course, will be topped by Ken Cuccinelli, Virginia's anti-gay, climate-change-denying attorney general, who's working hard to make abortion effectively illegal in the state.

Now, here's the thing: This radicalization of the state Republican Party is taking place right in the D.C. press corps's backyard. It's happening despite the fact that Virginia is a purple state now, one that voted for Barack Obama twice (although Cuccinelli seems to think that Obama was elected president twice because lack of voter ID in some states helped him steal the election). And, as The New York Times notes today, the radicalization of the Virginia GOP is no accident -- it's the result of "Mr. Cuccinelli's consolidation of his party by activating its most conservative members."

Two years ago, he challenged grass-roots Virginians excited by his lawsuits as state attorney general against Mr. Obama's health care law and environmental regulation to run for seats on the party's central committee. They did. Mr. Cuccinelli's selection was all but assured when the new blood on the committee, including Tea Party and libertarian members, canceled a Republican primary in favor of a nominating convention, which favors ideological purists.

On Friday, the central committee also ruled that it would pick next year's Senate nominee by convention.

It's obvious to anyone who's looked at how government is run in any state with Republican control, or who's looked at any recent contested Republican primary, that there's nothing anomalous about this these days. But it's happening within plain sight of the D.C. press corps -- and yet that press corps still refuses to acknowledge the Republican Party's nationwide tilt to extremism.

Remember, these are the same D.C. journalists who reported on the campaigns of Howard Dean and Ned Lamont as if they were witnessing Mao's Long March. This? No big whoop. Even the Times story focuses more on attendees at the Virginia Republican convention making IRS jokes than on the party's tilt to the extreme right. Teabaggism is just an interesting experiment in one isolated laboratory of democracy -- apart from that, nothing to see here.

****

ALSO, TOO: "The 10 Most Anti-Gay Statements From The Republican Nominee For Lt. Governor Of Virginia." This, by the way, is from BuzzFeed, as is the first link above. The Klan link is from the Huffington Post; the Antichrist link is from Right Wing Watch. The New York Times has nothing on Jackson's extremism, nor does this Washington Post story.

****

OH, AND: Regarding the GOP nominee for Virginia attorney general, Think Progress tells us....

If a woman in Virginia has a miscarriage without a doctor present, they must report it within 24 hours to the police or risk going to jail for a full year. At least, that's what would have happened if a bill introduced by Virginia state Sen. Mark Obenshain (R) had become law....

ONLY WINGNUTS ARE STUPID ENOUGH TO BELIEVE THAT A GUY WHO CAN'T GET ANYTHING DONE IS ALL-POWERFUL

This new CNN poll shouldn't really surprise us:

President Barack Obama comes out of what was arguably the worst week of his presidency with his approval rating holding steady....

According to the survey, which was conducted Friday and Saturday, 53% of Americans say they approve of the job the president is doing, with 45% saying they disapprove. The president's approval rating was at 51% in CNN's last poll, which was conducted in early April....

More than seven in 10 in the CNN poll say that the targeting by the Internal Revenue Service of tea party and other conservative groups that were applying for tax exempt status was unacceptable....

But more than six in 10 say that the president's statements about the IRS scandal are completely or mostly true, with 35% not agreeing with Obama's characterizations. And 55% say that IRS acted on its own, with 37% saying that White House ordered the IRS to target tea party and other conservative groups.

Only 42% of the public is satisfied with how the Obama administration has handled the September attack in Benghazi, Libya, which left the U.S ambassador to that country and three other Americans dead. Fifty-three percent say they are dissatisfied. But those numbers are virtually unchanged from November.

... 59% now say that the U.S government could have prevented the attack in Benghazi, up 11 points from last November....

Let's start with the IRS. The message of the right is that Evil, All-Powerful Obama used his Nixonian superpowers to crush opposition. But this is a guy who can barely manage to deal out a love tap to his opposition -- yeah, he won reelection, but he lost on the sequester and he couldn't even get approval in the one house of Congress his party controls for a gun control proposal with 90% national support. You and I know his problems with Congress are the result of serious flaws in our system -- the filibuster in the Senate, gerrymandering of House districts, an opposition party determined to nullify yet another election, a press that never stops trying to blame both sides equally. But the general public just sees a president who's not particularly powerful -- and can't square that with the notion of an all-powerful partisan crushing his enemies.

Wingnuts, of course, have no problem holding these two completely contradictory notions in their head simultaneously. That's just their nature. Obama is horrible in every conceivable way, even in ways that cancel other out.

The one argument wingnuts are possibly getting across to the general public is the notion that the four dead in Benghazi could have been saved -- note the uptick in the number of people who believe that. But that jibes with the center's sense of Obama as a guy who often doesn't get done what he sets out to do. The public doesn't think he wanted the Benghazi attackers to succeed -- only idiot wingnuts would believe that of the guy who ordered bin Laden killed and who sends out all those drones. The public just thinks his administration failed there, and maybe tweaked the narrative at first to downplay the errors made. The non-wingnut population doesn't see a massive coverup because Obama doesn't seem like a powerful evildoer to them. He just seems like a guy with generally good intentions who frequently falls short.

MAYBE YOU SHOULD TAKE YOUR OWN ADVICE, MODO

Maureen Dowd today:

The president should try candid; wistful and petulant aren't getting him anywhere. The Republicans who are putting partisan gain above solving the country's problems deserve a smackdown.

Interesting advice from a person who has one of the most high-profile commenting gigs in America, and who's written thirty columns so far this year, but hasn't once published the same kind of "smackdown" of the Republicans that she's recommending to the president.

Dowd has written this year about Bush and Cheney, and Cheney again, and then the whole Bush family, and (of course) Hillary Clinton twice; she's written about Hollywood historical fiction and The Great Gatsby and the golden age of newsmagazines; she wrote a column about Annette Funicello, Lily Pulitzer, and Margaret Thatcher, in that order.

Oh, and this is the third column she's written urging Obama to be tougher on the Republicans -- here are the first two -- as well as one urging Obama to be nicer to the Republicans.

Smackdowns of Republicans putting partisan gain ahead of the national interest? I'll let you know if I find one in Dowd's archives.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, NO, OBAMA IS NOT THE FIRST PRESIDENT WHO HAD A SERVICEMEMBER HOLD AN UMBRELLA FOR HIM

The ridiculous Obama umbrella "scandal" has been pretty thoroughly debunked by The Atlantic, by The Atlantic again, by The Washington Post, and, most memorably, by Wonkette's Rebecca Schoenkopf, who enlists her ex-Marine brother to explain, with many appropriate obscenities, that a Marine must follow any order issued issued by his commander in chief ASAFP. In the first Atlantic post, please note the military uniform on the umbrella holder in the second picture of George H.W. Bush.

I'll just add a couple more examples for the record.

LBJ, as president, had an umbrella held for him by an Air Force General, James U. Cross, according to Cross's own memoir:





Cross, later promoted to brigadier general, was LBJ's Air Force One pilot; more about him here, and about his memoir here.

And there's this, from a 1932 story about President Herbert Hoover attending an Easter sunrise ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery:





So, yes, servicemembers hold umbrellas if presidents ask.

IF THIS IS YOUR BABY IN AN INCUBATOR, MAYBE YOU OUGHT TO RETHINK YOUR P.R. STRATEGY

I think the IRS story has the potential to be very damaging to the Obama presidency -- but not if this is the right's idea of a victim with a tear-jerking story:

... Mr. Obama now professes shock and outrage that bureaucrats at the IRS did exactly what the president of the United States said was the right and honorable thing to do. "He put a target on our backs, and he's now going to blame the people who are shooting at us?" asks Idaho businessman and longtime Republican donor Frank VanderSloot.

Mr. VanderSloot is the Obama target who in 2011 made a sizable donation to a group supporting Mitt Romney. In April 2012, an Obama campaign website named and slurred eight Romney donors. It tarred Mr. VanderSloot as a "wealthy individual" with a "less-than-reputable record." Other donors were described as having been "on the wrong side of the law."

This was the Obama version of the phone call -- put out to every government investigator (and liberal activist) in the land....

First of all, what's being alleged here (by Kimberly Strassel of The Wall Street Journal) is that Obama merely has to say a harsh word about someone and he's automatically responsible for anything bad that subsequently happens to that person -- people listening to his words have no independent agency. Fine. Then let's hold everyone to the same standard. By that standard, Sarah Palin should literally be indicted for murder and attempted murder, and be standing in the dock right next to Jared Loughner.

But seriously, righties -- you want us to shed tears for Frank VanderSloot? Yes, he was one of several high rollers mentioned on an Obama campaign Web page under this paragraph:

A closer look at Romney's donors reveals a group of wealthy individuals with less-than-reputable records. Quite a few have been on the wrong side of the law, others have made profits at the expense of so many Americans, and still others are donating to help ensure Romney puts beneficial policies in place for them. Here’s a look at just a few of the people Romney has relied on....

And why might that be? Could it be because of the history of his company Melaleuca?

Melaleuca's get-rich pitches have in the past caused Michigan regulators to take action, resulting in the company's entering into a voluntary agreement to "not engage in the marketing and promotion of an illegal pyramid"'; it entered into a separate voluntary agreement with the Idaho attorney general's office, which found that "certain independent marketing executives of Melaleuca" had violated Idaho law; and the Food and Drug Administration previously accused Melaleuca of deceiving consumers about some of its supplements.

That's from Glenn Greenwald, who has much more about VanderSloot's "chronic bullying threats to bring patently frivolous lawsuits against his political critics -- magazines, journalists, and bloggers." Hell, even a somewhat admiring journalist, Phyllis Berman of Forbes, refers to Melaleuca as "a pyramid selling organization, built along the lines of Herbalife and Amway."

He's your poster child, righties? He's your aggrieved innocent? Well, good luck with that.

Oh, and did I mention that VanderSloot says that, yes, he was audited, but the audits actually saved him money? Yeah, tht's going to make him a really sympathetic figure to Joe and Jane America.

*****

ALSO, TOO:

GOP donor Charlie Moncrief telling ABC he was audited because he raised for Romney. Not his first time at the rodeo: nytimes.com/1998/08/02/bus…

— Nick Confessore (@nickconfessore) May 15, 2013

IF THEY WERE TRYING TO INFLUENCE THE ELECTION, THAT WAS A DUMB WAY TO DO IT

Micah Cohen of The New York Times reports:

Public data from the Internal Revenue Service ... shows that dozens of Tea Party groups were approved for tax exempt status beginning in May 2012. That was the same month that Representative Dave Camp of Michigan wrote to the I.R.S. asking for information about all "social welfare" groups that had applied for tax-exempt status in 2010 and 2011, to determine whether the I.R.S. was targeting conservative groups.

The flurry of approvals that came in the next few months was a sharp break from the previous two years, during which the agency approved just a handful of 501(c)(4) applications from Tea Party groups....

Here's a chart showing the approvals by month:





If you were a nakedly partisan IRS employee, is this how you'd have helped President Obama win reelection? It's not what I would have done. Remember late 2011: Herman "Uzbeki-beki-stan-stan" Cain led the Republican presidential field for quite a while. Then Newt Gingrich, temporarily an honorary teabagger, led the field. Then, in 2012, Rick Santorum made his move.

If you'd wanted to help the president, I think you'd have wanted to unleash the teabaggers in 2011. I think you'd have wanted them free to make mischief for Mitt Romney -- who, for all his flaws as a campaigner, could have pulled out a win against Obama with a better-executed campaign, unlike, well, every candidate enthusiastically embraced by tea types (see also: Trump, Bachmann). And I think you would have wanted teabaggers more deeply involved in GOP House and Senate primaries. More Christine O'Donnells and Sharron Angles!

So if you IRS folks were monkeying with elections, you were screwing it up.

AMERICA IS A MORAL CESSPOOL, AND IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT

Politico reports:

A majority of Americans are following both the controversy over the attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi and the brewing IRS scandal - but at levels below historic averages, according to a new poll.

Fifty-four percent said they are closely following the story of how the IRS unfairly targeted conservative groups, according to the Gallup survey on Thursday, and 53 percent are closely following Benghazi. For both stories, 22 percent were following "not too closely" and 24 weren’t following at all.

"The level of attention being paid to each is below the average 60 percent of Americans who have closely followed more than 200 news stories Gallup has measured over the past several decades," Gallup editor-in-chief Frank Newport wrote in an analysis of the poll....

Sorry, GOP (and Washington insiders).

Now, if the public's reaction continues to fall short of all-consuming, pitchfork-wielding, head-on-pike-demanding outrage, I can tell you what will happen next. Recall that the famous 1998 Sally Quinn article about D.C. insider reactions to Monicagate was written out of a sense of disgust that the morally fallen general public didn't grasp the true import of what had transpired. Quinn wrote:

With some exceptions, the Washington Establishment is outraged by the president's behavior in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The polls show that a majority of Americans do not share that outrage. Around the nation, people are disgusted but want to move on; in Washington, despite Clinton's gains with the budget and the Mideast peace talks, people want some formal acknowledgment that the president's behavior has been unacceptable. They want this, they say, not just for the sake of the community, but for the sake of the country and the presidency as well.

Bad public! Wag your fingers self-righteously or you won't get any pudding!

So if the public remains indifferent to the Obama scandals, it'll be the fallen nature of America that's at fault. I assume Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei will take the baton from Sally Quinn and be the ones to lecture Americans on their moral failings.

ALLEGED PARTISAN OBAMACARE ENFORCER: HIRED UNDER REAGAN, PRAISED BY BUSH

Right-wingers are crowing about this:

The Internal Revenue Service official in charge of the tax-exempt organizations at the time when the unit targeted tea party groups now runs the IRS office responsible for the health care legislation.

Sarah Hall Ingram served as commissioner of the office responsible for tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012. But Ingram has since left that part of the IRS and is now the director of the IRS' Affordable Care Act office, the IRS confirmed to ABC News today.

So what do we know about Sarah Hall Ingram? Well, we learned this in 2009:

Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Douglas Shulman has selected Sarah Hall Ingram as commissioner of the Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division....

Ingram, who has served as Chief of Appeals for the past three years, previously served as TE/GE Deputy Commissioner from 2004-2006. Prior to that, she served as Division Counsel/Associate Chief Counsel for TE/GE, where she was responsible for providing legal services to TE/GE, as well as other parts of the IRS. Ingram began her career with the IRS in the former Tax Litigation Division in 1982.

Oh. So prior to that 2009 promotion, she got her previous promotion in 2004 -- under President George W. Bush. And she was hired when Ronald Reagan was president.

The only remotely scandalous story about her that I can find in the news archives is this story about large IRS bonuses, from 2004:

Last year, 25 senior executives in the [IRS chief] counsel's office received bonuses totaling $510,660, an average of $20,426. One lawyer, Sarah Hall Ingram, received a $46,900 award, after being singled out for distinguished service by President Bush.

Let me repeat that last sentence again:

One lawyer, Sarah Hall Ingram, received a $46,900 award, after being singled out for distinguished service by President Bush.

And in the Obama years, I see that Ingram showed her political bias by targeting a beloved right-wing institution: Harvard.

Harvard University President Drew Faust received $822,011 in salary and benefits in 2008, including travel expenses and the use of a home....

Harvard said in January that it's among about 40 institutions undergoing an audit as part of an IRS program to examine school finances. The federal agency is looking at how schools report income unrelated to their tax-exempt missions of teaching and research, and how officials are paid, said Sarah Hall Ingram, the IRS commissioner of tax-exempt and government entities....

So, yeah, a lot of liberal bias there. Impeach!

CATHOLIC LEAGUE'S DONOHUE: OBAMA IS SO EVIL HE CONTROLLED THE IRS EVEN BEFORE BECOMING PRESIDENT

Tomorrow, Bill Donohue of the Catholic League will be on a FoxNews.com Web-only show to talk about President Obama and the IRS -- or, rather, President-Elect Obama and the IRS:

Fri 5/17 Bill will be on FOXNews.com "Spirited Debate"@ 1:10 pm ET Re '08 Catholic League IRS controversy live.foxnews.com

— Catholic League (@CatholicLeague) May 16, 2013

Yes, it's true, folks -- that says "Re '08 Catholic League IRS controversy." Barack Obama is so evil he controlled the IRS even before he was sworn in as president!

But Obama had help from a certain international Jew billionaire, as Donohue explained today in a Newsmax article:

... I have never made this public before, but given the heightened interest in the way the IRS has conducted itself, the time has come to disclose what happened.

Just weeks after Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, I was notified by the IRS that the Catholic League was under investigation for violating the IRS Code on political activities as it relates to 501(c)(3) organizations. What the IRS did not know was that I had proof who contacted them to launch the investigation: Catholics United, a George Soros-funded Catholic organization.

The IRS was contacted on June 5, 2008, to launch a probe of the Catholic League, and the letter sent to me was dated Nov. 24, 2008. The June 5 letter was sent to the IRS by lawyers from Catholics United; it was mailed to Director Marsha Ramirez, director of Exempt Organizations Examinations, and to Lois G. Lerner, director of EO Division.

The "evidence" against me was nothing more than news releases and articles I had written during the presidential campaign on various issues....

Yes, and that was pure harassment, because everything Donohue and the League did before the election was perfectly innocent and apolitical! Like this ad, which ran in the weekend edition of The Washington Times shortly before the election (click to enlarge):





Oh, and here's a representative sample of articles from the September and October 2008 issues of the Catholic League's magazine, Catalyst:

* "Obama's Public Policy Blunders"
* "Bob Casey Mislabeled as Pro-Life"
* "Pelosi Gets an 'F' in Religion"
* "Biden Digs Himself a Hole"
* "Casey Blows It on Abortion"
* "Democrats Sponsor Catholic Bashing"

Gosh, I don't know where anyone would get the idea that Donohue was motivated by electoral politics in 2008.

And what sort of heavy-handed oppression resulted from this Jew/Kenyan/socialist/atheist thuggery by a guy who wasn't president yet and his zillionaire puppetmaster?

In the end, the IRS concluded that although the Catholic League had "intervened in a political campaign," it was "unintentional, isolated, non-egregious and non-recurring"; our tax-exempt status remained intact.

Oh.

Well, then impeach Obama now! We should have impeached him before he was even sworn in!

LET'S RESTRICT GOVERNMENT ACCESS TO GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS! (BECAUSE: GUNS)

This is actually happening:

Less than six months after the state Revenue Department began scanning driving applicants' personal documents into a state computer system, Missouri lawmakers sent the governor legislation Wednesday that would force the department to stop....

Republican lawmakers began pushing for the measure after learning about the new license procedures early in the legislative session. The push accelerated in March after a Stoddard County man filed a lawsuit challenging the state's new licensing procedures. They said that scanning documents, such as birth certificates and concealed weapons permits, were an invasion of privacy....

The bill passed the Senate 25-8 on Wednesday and the House earlier this week. It would prevent any future document scanning and would require the department to securely destroy any documents collected since September 2012....

All this scanning started in order to combat fraud involving undocumented residents. That's an effort you'd think right-wingers would support. But no:

The department began scanning documents shortly after a clerk in a St. Joseph license office pleaded guilty Dec. 11 in a scheme to accept false identification documents that federal prosecutor say resulted in Missouri licenses being issued to more than 3,500 people living illegally in the U.S.

Right-wingers were outraged -- and notice that what upset them was the government being allowed to retain copies of government documents.

Of course, the concern is all about one particular category of government document, as The Kansas City Star's Barbara Shelly explains in this blistering column:

It's a tough job, but today we will attempt to select the low-light of the great document-scanning "scandal" that the Missouri legislature has used as an excuse to avoid doing much real work this session.

Was it the "hearing" in North Kansas City, when a citizen worried that the sharing of the names of Missouri concealed gun permit holders with a federal agency would land her on a United Nations watch list? Cue the black helicopters....

This winding saga began when a citizen in Stoddard County went to renew his driver's license and a clerk insisted on scanning his conceal carry permit.

Paranoia reared its head. Lawmakers dropped mundane matters like health care, finances and economic development bills and hauled state officials into hearings.

It turned out that the Department of Revenue, as part of a cost-saving move, has begun digitally scanning documents needed for a driver's license, such as Social Security cards, birth certificates and concealed carry permits, and having the licenses processed by a private company. It was further discovered that the Missouri Highway Patrol had attempted to share the state's concealed carry permit list with a federal fraud investigator.

The names of concealed carry owners are a closed record in Missouri. But state law makes an exception for state or federal law enforcement investigations. So the sharing was legal, although technical glitches ultimately stopped the investigator from accessing the list.

Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat, tried to tamp down the fires by halting the scanning of concealed carry permits. But the opportunity to rile up gun owners is too rich for Republicans to pass up....

Now it could be argued that it's inappropriate for the government to share this information with a private firm handling driver's license applications. But, um, which wing of American politics insists that all government functions can be handled more efficiently by private contractors? Hint: It ain't liberals.

No -- the real problem is that the list was shared with the evil feds. Who were investigating crime, but hey, that's not a sufficient reason for the sharing.

So now (assuming the governor signs the bill) there'll be no scanning of such documents anymore. But I bet the gunners' demands won't stop there.

Eventually, I imagine that concealed-carry permits and other gun documents will be like Snapchat photos -- it will be possible for another human being to view them, but they'll disappear after a few seconds. (Though there'll probably be a non-Snapchat provision in the law saying that if the viewer attempts to make a copy of the permit, the permit holder can respond with lethal force -- even if the viewer is a cop. Stand your ground and all that.)

Ultimately, I imagine that no human being will be allowed to file, review, or even touch any document relating to a gun permit, which will mean that all gun permits will be on the honor system -- technically, you'll still need supporting documents, but since no one will be allowed to see them, if you say you have them the government will just have to take your word for it.

One day, the sacralization of everything to do with guns will probably lead to gunner protests resembling the worldwide protests against mishandling of the Koran. You won't be able to mock a gun, or even a picture of one. You won't be able to put an image of a gun on the floor. Riots will ensue if you do.

DELAY-GATE!

Yesterday, President Obama took steps to deal with the scandals he's facing -- he released Benghazi e-mails and the acting commissioner of the IRS got a pink slip -- and even Politico is giving him good marks. However, a few of the folks Politico quotes wonder what the hell took so long, because, after all, it's been days:

Ideally, Obama would have acted earlier, [Democratic strategist Phil] Singer said.

"You don't want to sit back and let events control you. You want to take control of events," he said....

[Robert] Gibbs, the former Obama press secretary, said earlier this week to say that Obama should have spoken out on the IRS issue last Friday or over the weekend, and that the president should've been more forceful when he finally did speak on Monday....

Yes, he had to act nownownow, not work out his response over the course of, um, five days, because his approval rating had dropped 30 points and people trapped under the scandal rubble were about to bleed to death in a matter of hours and a meteor was about to destroy earth that could be steered off course only if Obama acted immediately. No, wait -- none of that was happening.

Look, this guy likes to take a little time when preparing a response. And it always makes Beltway insiders freak out -- or at least it does at the time, though afterward it's hard for anyone, including those same insiders, to recall what the fuss was about. Remember Obama's horrible, unconscionable, unthinkable delay in deciding whether to send more troops to Afghanistan? REmember all the fussing and fretting about that? No? You don't remember? Well, neither does anyone else now.

In the case of the current scandals, Obama has finally started to act, and the critics are finally calming down, according to Politico ... right?

Moving ahead, Democrats agree that Obama needs to try to change the subject....

And the White House has "got to do it soon and quickly, because we've got to get back to immigration, the debt, energy," [frormer Pennsylvania governor Ed] Rendell said. "He's got a limited window to take action on the real challenges of the country...."

Sigh.

CAN'T STOP, WON'T STOP

If you're a sane person, you might think this takes what wing there is out of the sails of the #BENGHAZI!!! "scandal":

The White House released more than 100 pages of e-mails on Wednesday in a bid to quell critics who say President Barack Obama and his aides played politics with national security following the deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.

The exchanges detailing discussions between top Obama administration officials from multiple agencies suggest the CIA took the lead in developing talking points to describe the attack last September 11 that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans....

So the talking points weren't massaged to protect Hillary Clinton's reputation. And, as jonathan Bernstein notes, it's absurd to argue that any spin the White House was doing could have had any impact on the 2012 election:

You want to know what would have been a coverup? If the administration had maintained that Ambassador Chris Stevens slipped and hit his head on the sink on the way to a celebration of Libya's love for the United States (and if it then paid off those on the scene to go along with the story). In other words, trying to pretend that no policy fiasco had happened. Or if it later emerges that Osama bin Laden, alive after all, was personally leading the attack. That really would have contradicted an important campaign story line.

That it was an act of terror, instead of terrorism? That it was extremists, instead of terrorists? That it was planned or spontaneous, a reaction to an immediate event or something coordinated in advance? There’s not a single voter who would have cared at all. Not one.

So will Republicans just drop this now?

Nahhhh....

BTW there are at least 25,000 docs they have but won't give us @jaketapper @cnnsitroom #benghazi

— Jason Chaffetz (@jasoninthehouse) May 15, 2013

"Release all the Benghazi Emails." For a WH that claims to want the whole story told, where's the transparency? weeklystandard.com/blogs/release-…

— Stephen Hayes (@stephenfhayes) May 14, 2013

Obama released #Benghazi emails to distract from #IRS # AP scandals. @ericbolling @greggutfeldMommy Jarrett strikes again Told Yah!

— Snipr (@SniprFire1) May 15, 2013

What is so bad about #Benghazi that Obama let the #IRS and #AP stories surface to distract us from it? #tcot #OpSLAM #ocra #p2 #uniteblue

— Greg Howard (@GregWHoward) May 15, 2013

Lt Gen Mclnerney on #Benghazi Scandal: ‘There Is Only One Person Who Can Say-Stand Down – And That’s The President’thegatewaypundit.com/2013/05/lt-gen…

—SpreadButter (@SpreadButter) May 15, 2013

Yes it's ultimately about the stand down orders.. it's unconscionable. No lying can be as bad as leaving our men to die. #Benghazi #TheFive

— Kathryn S. (@kayms99) May 15, 2013

If Barry's daughter was at the #Benghazi consulate, think there would've been a stand down? #BenghaziGate #p2 #tcot #p2moron> @herbdoom

— BarrysLies (@BarrysLies) May 15, 2013

The first two tweets above are from a right-wing congressman and a right-wing reporter. The others are from random wingnut citizens. Yeah, random citizens post all kinds of nonsense online. But the GOP is still all about stirring up the base and then pleasing the base by focusing attention on whatever ridiculous thing has been ginned up to stir up the base.

So more attention will just shift to whatever hasn't been released, and -- especially -- to the absurd notion that the president could have saved four lives and refused to do so. I don't think Republicans can restrain themselves -- they're going to keep at this.

THE OBLIVIOUS AWFULNESS OF MAUREEN DOWD

The second half of today's Maureen Dowd column concerns Christine Quinn, New York's city council speaker and likely next mayor. In an interview published in yesterday's New York Times, Quinn discussed her past struggles with bulimia and alcoholism -- which brought out the Mean Girl in Dowd:

Quinn ... wanted to sprinkle some humanity on an image that took [a hit] ... when she was skewered in an article in The Times in March about her screaming fits and volatile bursts of wrath and retaliation. [Quinn] has a bloody penchant for threatening to cut off the privates of those who get on her bad side....

"I hope that what I share in this book is helpful, particularly to young women and girls who feel stuck," Quinn said.

And she certainly hopes the book is helpful to one 46-year-old woman who feels stuck, castigated as an arrogant bully....

I bring this up because -- in the two paragraphs immediately following -- Dowd writes this:

With Chris Christie, his admission that he had lap-band surgery under an assumed name to curb his obesity is a second-tier story. The first-tier story is that he's a Jersey guy who takes no guff.

Christine Quinn needs a first-tier story.

Notice what Dowd doesn't consider as a possible "first-tier story" for Christine Quinn? The fact that she's a New York gal who takes no guff. Chris Christie regularly yells at people and threatens them -- and that means he's a charming tough guy. Christine Quinn yells at people and threatens them -- and that makes her an evil, unlikable bitch.

Jesus, Mo, at least pretend that you hold men and women to a single standard.

****

And while we're on the subject of Dowd, let's turn to the Dowd reference in that damn Politico story about how all the Kewl Kidz hate Obama now:

The dam of solid Democratic solidarity has collapsed, starting with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd’s weekend scolding of the White House over Benghazi....

Maureen Dowd as part of a "dam of solid Democratic solidity" in support of Obama? Seriously?

Do you know when Dowd first sneeringly referred to Obama as "Obambi"? In 2006. Shortly afterward -- nearly a year before the '08 Iowa caucuses -- Dowd was showing her Obama solidarity thus:





Yeah, she's always had Obama's back, hasn't she?

ACTUALLY, AMERICANS HAVE A SLIGHTLY MORE FAVORABLE OPINION OF THE IRS THAN OF THE TEA PARTY

I absolutely don't want to dismiss the IRS scandal -- it's utterly wrong that IRS staffers seem to have targeted would-be tax-exempt groups by ideology (although I question USA Today's premise that the average American, or even the average government bureaucrat outside D.C., viscerally associates the words "progress" and "progressive" with politics as readily as the highly publicized "tea party" and "9-12" are associated with the right, and should have targeted lefty groups accordingly). I think what these IRS employees did, if not malicious, was ignorant. Nothing like this should ever happen. Scrutiny should be evenhanded.

On the other hand, I question the premise that every American automatically sides with the targeted groups and comes to this story automatically despising the government agency whose employees did the targeting. Josh Marshall says of the scandal, "It’s about taxes, something everyone has an experience with and understands." Libby Spencer says, "Everybody loves a scandal and hates the IRS." Rachel Maddow says:

There is a reasonable fear by all of us, by any of us, that the kind of power the IRS has could be misused, that the IRS, as an agency of the federal government, could be used by the federal government to retaliate against political enemies or to try and shape political outcomes in some way. It's been done before, we're all reasonably worried it will happen again.

But "all of us" aren't political. Most Americans hate politics. Most Americans don't form (or join) political organizations.

Also, the victims here are not well liked -- and the villains are hated much less than you'd think.

Polling Report's survey results on the IRS aren't particularly recent, but the agency polls better than you'd expect. Here's how people rated the job being done by the IRS in a 2009 Gallup poll:

Excellent 5%; Good 35%; Only fair 36%; Poor 20: Unsure 5%

Not a resounding endorsement -- but did you think even 40% of respondents would say "Excellent" or "Good"? Did you think anyone would?

In a 2007 AP poll, 14% gave the IRS a "Very Favorable" rating and 42% a "Somewhat Favorable" rating. In a 2003 Fox News poll, 12% had "a great deal" of confidence in the IRS and 50% had "some" confidence. (By contrast, the numbers for "the news media" were 9% and 43%, and for "major business corporations" they were 6% and 43%.)

By contrast (again according to Polling Report), a 2013 CNN survey says that only 28% of Americans have a favorable opinion of the tea party, while 48% have an unfavorable opinion. There were similar numbers in a September 2012 ABC/Washington Post poll: 32% favorable, 46% unfavorable. And only 23% of Americans consider themselves tea party supporters, according to an April 2013 AP/GfK poll, while 62% aren't supporters. CBS, March 2013: 22% support, 65% not supporters.

I'm not saying this to argue that it doesn't matter what these IRS employees did, because who cares about the misuse of government power against a bunch of teabaggers. I'm saying that we shouldn't assume the general public looks as the teabaggers and says, "Hey, that could be me."

Those of us who are either political pros or mavens sometimes forget how apolitical most Americans are. And political pros based in D.C. or other big cities automatically assume that heartlanders see the teabaggers as just like them -- when the polls suggest otherwise.

So if there are few new revelations, and if wrongdoers are punished, the impact of this could be limited. Yes, those are big ifs. But this is not likely to be seen as IRS Versus the Real America just yet.