"President Obama’s world view is rooted in American exceptionalism."

So astonishingly said Fareed Zakaria during the opening segment of his Fareed Zakaria GPS program to be aired on CNN Sunday (video follows with commentary):

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A few weeks ago I told you about Meg Lanker-Simons, a University of Wyoming student and "Think" "Progress" award-winning blogger who claimed to have been the target of "right-wing hate speech" because of an ugly, hateful Facebook post about her.
Then the cops said she wrote it.

Before we start, just to set the mood, click “play” to start the theme song of the IRS’s relationship with liberal organizations:

Conservative groups have reported waiting for the IRS to review or approve their non-profit status applications for many months and even years (as well as receiving ridiculous demands from the IRS).

Other groups didn’t have to wait nearly as long. I wonder why:

When the Barack H. Obama Foundation sought tax-exempt status to raise money for good works in Kenya, the Internal Revenue Service provided quick help.

The IRS approved charitable status for the foundation, which was run by President Obama’s brother and named after his father, in about a month’s time. The IRS also agreed to give the group this important financial status retroactively, back to 2009, when it had begun its fundraising.

Lois Lerner gave this application a fast green-light in June of 2011. The IRS was even nice enough to make the non-profit status retroactive so as to not make liars and lawbreakers out of the Foundation:

In 2009, the Barack H. Obama Foundation was accused by the National Legal and Policy Center of being a scofflaw. The group had been promoting itself as a charity and seeking donations that it said would be tax-deductible, but it lacked the required tax-exempt status.

With that, here’s the graphic of the day:

More: IRS Deliberately Chose Not to Fess Up to Scandal Before Election

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

In April last year, the Obama campaign identified by name eight Romney donors as "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." That week, Kimberley Strassel began her Wall Street Journal column thus:

Try this thought experiment: You decide to donate money to Mitt Romney. You want change in the Oval Office, so you engage in your democratic right to send a check.
Several days later, President Barack Obama, the most powerful man on the planet, singles you out by name. . . . The message from the man who controls the Justice Department (which can indict you), the SEC (which can fine you), and the IRS (which can audit you), is clear: You made a mistake donating that money.

Jay Leno on Friday continued his humorous attacks on the White House.

The NBC Tonight Show host finished a string of opening monologue jokes aimed at President Obama saying, “Let me tell you how bad it's gotten: Fox News has changed its slogan from ‘Fair and Balanced’ to ‘See, I Told You So!’" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

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The first of today’s Dueling Headlines comes to us by way of The Hill and is about the advice Michelle Obama gave to graduates at Bowie State University yesterday:

Dueling with that is this headline from the Daily Caller:

And while we’re at it we might as well throw a few more headlines from the past weeks and months into the mix to prove that when FLOTUS warns against jumping on the celebrity worship bandwagon, the First Couple leads by example:

Dueling Headlines archive here.

Update: A response via Twitter:

@thepowersthatbe you’re missing that the celebrities are worshiping The One, not the other way around.

— Paul Stagg (@Paul_Stagg) May 18, 2013

I think worship is mutual in many cases.

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Bill Maher on Friday once again exposed himself as a total hypocrite.

Minutes after telling his HBO Real Time panel "the Second Amendment is bulls--t," he admitted having two firearms in his house - "one upstairs and one down" - claiming, "As long as we live in the gun country, I ain’t giving up my gun" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

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You hear it again and again: While Americans were under attack, the commander-in-chief checked out, leaving subordinates to deal with the crisis while he got his beauty sleep in preparation for a fundraising campaign trip to Vegas.
That is not true . . . and the truth, as we've come to expect with Obama, is almost surely worse. There is good reason to believe that while Americans were still fighting for their lives in Benghazi, while no military efforts were being made to rescue them, and while those desperately trying to rescue them were being told to stand down, the president was busy shaping the "blame the video" narrative to which his administration clung in the aftermath.

Far more “anti-” opinions than I imagined there would be.

Not sure how many are hostility/impatience toward the disabled, how many are sincerely concerned about possible lawsuits, and how many use “health and safety” (like “hostile work environment”) to get out of doing stuff they just don’t feel like doing…

Why is it always someone else’s fault. You have a disabled son you have had him for 17 years and you still expect organisations to pamper to you. He is your son it is a shame but this restaurant has no obligation to do one off food items and they are not responsible it he chokes as someone has pointed out already There must have been soup, hummus, ect on the menu so why could he not have this. Or take your own food for him. Stop with the whining, take charge of the situation and deal with it yourself it will be a lot let hassle in the long run (…)

At first I thought “that is not very nice”, but when I read the comments I have to say I agreed with them. What if the child would have choked on a lump? We own a restaurant ourselves, and my partner just said “I would not want a potentially unclean utensil in my kitchen, just as I do not prepare food in my kitchen somebody has brought in off the street.” Restaurants are willing to do a lot if it is discussed properly beforehand, like Loran said they will even come up with ideas.

In a story appearing this morning at the Politico about the Department of Justice's broad and unannounced subpoenas of the April and May 2012 personal and business phone records of reporters and editors at the Associated Press involving 20 phone lines and involving over 100 reporters and editors, James Hohmann found several "veteran prosecutors" who aren't necessarily outraged by what most members of the press and several watchdog groups have declared a blatant overreach. Instead, Hohmann summarizes their "far more measured response" as: "It’s complicated."

Hohmann utterly ignored a May 15 Washington Post story which chronicled claimed discussions between AP and government officials. Ultimately, it appears that the Obama administration's Department of Justice under Eric Holder may have only gone after AP out of spite because the wire service refused to accommodate administration requests to allow it time to crow about foiling a terrorist plot before the story gained meaningful visibility, and not because the release of the story, especially after what appears to have been an appropriate and negotiated delay, represented a genuine security risk. One obvious unanswered question is why DOJ waited, according to the AP's Mark Sherman in his original story, until "earlier this year" to obtain the phone records if it was so darned important to find out who the alleged leaker was.

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Most Americans say that the issues being raised by congressional hearings into the Benghazi terrorist attacks and the revelations that the IRS unfairly targeted conservative groups "involve serious matters that need to be investigated." According to a new poll from Gallup, 69 percent of those polled agreed that questions over the Obama administration's public response to the September 11, 2012, attack on the Ame

As for the so-called far right — about 10 people and a dog — this would be like removing the Canadian flag because a white supremacist in his mom’s basement puts it on his website.

The rainbow flag of the gay community is still to be flown by this particular council, of course, and Islamic festivals are to be properly commemorated, but the flag known by men who died fighting the Nazis and one that represents nation, tolerance, democracy and decency is to disappear.

To their credit, several Muslim leaders have described the action as absurd and extreme, which is a welcome departure as similar flags have been taken down from police stations and public buildings due to Islamic complaints.

The annual network list of cancelled prime-time shows cannot be pleasing to the progressives who measure shows based on their cultural and political usefulness. “TV Will Be a Lot Less Gay Next Year,” the commissars complained at Slate.com. They counted 11 cancelled shows that featured regular gay characters.

That bothersome thing called the market: why must it get in the way!

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Boomers: Don’t blame us for this one.

Landov

It may be hard to believe, or maybe it’s all too believable; but here in Washington the chattering classes are beginning to ask a question that, elsewhere in America, might seem premature: After Obama, what? 

Helen and Anthony Hecht at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, ca. 1997

Miriam Berkley

Of the generation of American poets born in the 1920s, three are preeminent: Richard Wilbur (b. 1921), Anthony Hecht (b. 1923), and James Merrill (b. 1926). This judgment will, of course, be contested by those who are most excited by the high nonsense of a John Ashbery, the manic improvisations of an Allen Ginsberg, or the solemn proclamations of an Adrienne Rich. But for those admiring of “formal” verse—of meter, rhyme, and stanza—the trio named above (one of whom, Wilbur, is still alive and writing) are master practitioners.

Many liberals have objected to the IRS's targeting of conservative groups, but others see nothing wrong with it, including one Kossack who asserted this week that the revenuers in Cincinnati were simply "doing their job."
 
As usual, each headline is preceded by the blogger's name or pseudonym.

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Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer had some harsh criticism for acting IRS commissioner Steven Miller’s testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee Friday.

Appearing on Fox News’s Special Report, Krauthammer said, “You've got to be a knave or a fool to say that and you have to be an idiot to believe it.”

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"We need to think very, very clearly about who the enemy is. The enemy is the United States of America and everyone who supports it." That's taught to University of Hawaii students by Professor Haunani-Kay Trask. Richard Falk, professor emeritus at Princeton University and the U.N. Human Rights Council's Palestine monitor, explained the Boston bombings by saying, "The American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world." Professor Falk has also stated that President George W. Bush ordered the destruction of the twin towers.

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Too soon? Never!

A congressman asked, “What do you need to make it so that this wouldn’t have happened?”

“So there are two things, sir,” said Miller. “And I appreciate the kind words for our people because we are incredibly hard working and honest group, frankly, and that seems to be forgotten in all of this. With respect to political activity, it would be a wonderful thing to get better rules, to get more clear rules. And in terms of our ability to get to this work it would be good to have a little budget that would allow us to get more than the number of people we have to do 70,000 applications and to do our job and looking at whether an organization is tax exempt or not.”

Because everybody knows that the best way to stop corruption is to just throw more money at it.

What would a larger budget have accomplished? From the sound of Miller’s answer it would have allowed them to harass political undesirables at a quicker, more efficient pace.

As for the “rules,” if those still aren’t clear, so much for the expensive Star Trek training video.

At the hearing, Republican Rep. Mike Kelly gave Miller such a grilling that it should have been sponsored by Kingsford Charcoal, Johnsonville Brats and Hibachi (h/t Twitchy):

My reaction.

After the hearing, rumor has it that Miller was spotted in the lobby raising money for the IRS by selling his Mike Brady signature collection perm rods:

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

The “journalists” at MSNBC continued to fawn over ObamaCare on Friday’s Morning Joe, even in the midst of startling criticism for the bill from David Gregory, liberal host of Meet the Press. The discussion over the president’s massive health care overhaul came after reports that the IRS official in charge of the agency’s unfair treatment of conservative groups during its targeting is now leading the IRS’s efforts to implement ObamaCare.

Gregory pointed out that the Medicare surtax that is funding “Obamacare across the board” is “a lot of money.” “You may not know how it helps you,” he noted, “but you know what it's taking away from you.” Of course, dutiful defenders of Obama like MSNBC Politics Nation host the Rev. Al Sharpton and Huffington Post’s Sam Stein were on hand to defend ObamaCare [see video below the page break].

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• Rush Limbaugh’s offer to the president
• Mark Levin’s call to abolish the IRA
• Laura Ingraham’s chat with Peter Hitchens

And MORE!

PLUS:

Mark Steyn and Hugh Hewitt talk about the scandals enveloping the White House

Mark Steyn is radio legend Milt Rosenberg’s very FIRST guest on his new podcast

More on Rosenberg’s podcasting endeavor — and why he left terrestrial radio (involuntarily)

Howard Stern buys a $52 million mansion in Florida