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Three big scandals. Two Marine umbrellas. And a non-salute en route to Memorial Day. Plus more visual evidence from 12 days of scandal town.
When Senator Mark Pryor voted against a gun background check compromise, he was taking a measured political risk. Even as an anti-gun group announces a plan to spend $350,000 on ads criticizing Pryor ahead of a near-certain second vote, a detailed new poll shows why it may have made political sense.
One of the big fears about Obamacare has been that insurers will charge exorbitant prices for plans sold on state exchanges, meaning the law would have the opposite effect of its goal to make health care more affordable. But that's not happening in California.
It's still not entirely clear what caused I-5 bridge over the Skagit River in Washington to collapse Thursday night. What is clear is that, if the state had needed to repair it, getting federal money to do so would be an uphill climb.
Last night on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart explained that the Department of Justice is going after people whose crimes seem minor — especially when you look at them in comparison to what Wall Street executives did to create the financial crisis. To which Stewart asked: "What, none of them bought pot?"
President Obama's speech on counterterrorism on Thursday won rave reviews among some who seemed to see it as a return of the liberal constitutional law professor who ran for president in 2008. But while the tone might have been refreshing, maybe we should wait to see Obama's follow-through?
Weiner's new official campaign website switched up its main logo to a budget version of the New York City skyline late Thursday afternoon, because the background art temporarily adorning AnthonyWeiner.com... was a budget version of the Pittsburgh skyline.
The Code Pink protester got herself inside the National Defense University in Washington on Thursday for Obama's big drone speech, even though she's been a famous heckler in Washington for a decade. So how does she do it? By using her old name — plus maybe a little help from middle-aged woman invisibility syndrome.
There ended up being two speakers Thursday at the National Defense University in DC. The first, as planned, was President Obama. The other, speaking for a surprisingly long time, was Madea Benjamin, a well-known heckler.
When justifying his use of drone strikes — in countries we're not at war with, in a war against "networks" with a not-yet-clear end, in a major speech on a limitless war — it helps for President Obama to use the rhetoric of George W. Bush as a foil. At least he's not as bad as that guy, right?
At some point, the government violated the Constitution while conducting electronic surveillance. How and when is masked by the secret court that authorizes such action — the sort of tool Obama offers as a way in which his drone program might be made more transparent. But the existing court shows just how opaque transparency can be.
President Obama just delivered his major policy speech outlining the future of America's military drone program, and the future of the entire war on terror. We have the full text and the key highlights.
Now that he's running for mayor and advancing his plan of pre-emptive damage control, has Weiner already takend the scandal out of the next scandal, when more naughty Twitter photos from his last days in Congress inevitably surface?
President Obama will say he sees a day when the War on Terror comes to an end in a much anticipated speech Thursday afternoon. But when-ish will the War on Terror really end? It's going to be a while — maybe long after Obama has left office.
Later this summer, the Senate may at last tackle a controversial issue: if it should approve executive branch nominations decisions based on a majority vote. If it happens, the body will be taking on the warped new interpretation of Senatorial courtesy.
Jon Stewart last night turned his attention to Reagan "fan fiction" author (and, you know, Wall Street Journal columnist) Peggy Noonan, who is angry at President Obama for his recent scandals, but gives her former boss a pass for a little thing like Iran-Contra.
An Army Sergeant employed at West Point Military Academy has been charged with secretly videotaping female cadets in the school's showers and locker rooms.
For two days John McCain and Ted Cruz have been fighting on the Senate floor over the rules for negotiating a budget, but, like so many fights, it's also about so much more. Cruz is being annoying about the budget, but worse, he just doesn't get the Senate.
The Chairman of the House Oversight Committee would like a do-over. Rep. Issa plans to demand the IRS's Lerner return to his committee to testify, arguing that she waived her ability to plead the Fifth once she offered an opening statement. According to a lawyer we spoke with, he's almost certainly wrong.
The U.S. government admitted for the first time Wednesday that it intentionally droned American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, and that it unintentionally droned three other Americans, including al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son. Attorney General Eric Holder admitted it in a letter to Congress, ahead of President Obama's long awaited speech on Thursday, which could finally lay bare the truth about the administration's targeting killing program.
Paul Ryan is writing a campaign book, and though it's not officially a campaign book, it seems to be exactly the kind of campaign book that exists merely to preview a presidential candidacy.
The New York Times' Bill Keller suggests we should "Bring Back Ken Starr" to get to the bottom of the IRS scandal, because "the scandal circus on Capitol Hill is a terrible distraction."
For the third time in a week, officials from the IRS appeared before Congress to apologize for/not offer many new details on how and why the agency improperly targeted conservative groups for scrutiny — though one witness indicated others may have received the same treatment.
Jon Stewart last night couldn't resist telling the story of Canada's Rob Ford, the mayor of Toronto who might have a crack habit based on video viewed by news organizations.
How did the CIA become the hero in the Benghazi talking point controversy? And if the CIA is part of Team Obama, why hasn't it enjoyed as much scrutiny as everyone else involved? One reason is the political skills of David Petraeus, as behind-the-scenes emails continue to reveal.
In the least surprising move of this political season, former Congressman Anthony Weiner officially threw his hat into the ring to be the Mayor of New York.
Mitch McConnell said he wouldn't block the bipartisan immigration overhaul on Tuesday, and Patrik Leahy said he will hold off — "with a heavy heart" — on a controversial amendment to green cards to spouses of gay couples. But the path to passage is surprisingly clear, even amidst the Obama administration's scandals.
Lois Lerner will plead the Fifth on Wednesday before a congressional committee investigating the IRS's targeting of conservative groups. Lerner broke the news of the scandal — even to President Obama! — by planting a question at a tax lawyers' conference. In hindsight, that strategy for releasing the news does not look like it was a great idea.
Michele Bachmann was the muse for a new romance novel called Fires of Siberia, to be published June 1, about a fiery presidential candidate who tries to bone up on her foreign policy credentials only to get stuck in the wilderness with a sexy stranger.
Nearly four months ago Oklahoma Senators Tom Coburn and James Inhofe voted against H.R.152, the Disaster Relief Appropriations Act that eventually sent $50.5 billion in relief to victims of Hurricane Sandy. And in the flurry of last night's devastation in Moore, Okla. it was impossible not to forget that fact.
Anthony Weiner will announce he's running for New York City mayor sometime this week, but he won't get the Clintons' official support or endorsement, Politico's Maggie Haberman reports.
A majority Americans approve of the job President Obama's doing and think he's focused on issues that are important to them, even though a majority also thinks the IRS intentionally singled out conservative groups for harassment, according to a new Washington Post/ ABC News poll. Why is Obama doing so well in scandal season?
In the wake of what he is calling "Hurricane Scandy," Jon Stewart last night looked at Obama's defense strategy: sending out a random guy to Sunday morning talk shows.
During last week's first-of-many hearing into the IRS scandal, one subplot emerged: Conservatives presented anecdotes to argue that the IRS didn't just target Tea Party groups seeking tax exempt status but a broader swath of conservative individuals and organizations. But the anecdotal evidence does not stand up to the data on tax audits.
Billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch are quite entrepreneurial in their attempts to influence public policy in their favor.
So far the facts of the three scandals facing the Obama administration do not tie President Obama himself to the scandalous acts. Since Republicans can't yet indict President Obama, they're shifting to indicting all of liberalism.
Now that Hillary Clinton no longer has a nonpartisan badass day job, the universe is reverting back to its natural state in which Clinton is a controversial figure with a complicated past and more than a few enemies as well as the symbol of some people's anxieties about women in power.
The government will use any and all information at its disposal to find journalist sources, as shown in The Washington Post's report this morning on a Department of Justice investigation into Fox News chief correspondent James Rosen, who may face criminal charges for reporting government secrets.
Here's one place where the president didn't have a dramatic week: in his approval ratings.
The President's senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer did a tour of the sunday shows to try and calm everyone down about this whole IRS targeting Tea Party groups scandal.
The IRS' office of Exempt Organizations sounds like a terrible place to work. Four sweeping media assessments this weekend show a department that is overwhelmed, underfunded, and poorly managed.
There was a brief moment where some conservative were trying to make a scandal out of the President's moment in the rain on Thursday. But unfortunately that scandal died before it could really take off.
The IRS official who revealed the IRS had inappropriately targeted conservative groups on Friday did so on purpose -- by asking a tax lawyer to ask her about it at American Bar Association tax section’s annual meeting.
The IRS division responsible for flagging Tea Party groups has long been an agency afterthought, beset by mismanagement, financial constraints and an unwillingness to spell out just what it expects from social welfare nonprofits, former officials and experts say.
When, in 2006, the website The Smoking Gun released a secret CIA memo documenting prisoner organizing strategies at Guantanamo Bay, the FBI took notice. Now the site has posted details of the ensuing 44-month-long investigation, offering a timely glimpse into the black box of a Department of Justice leak prosecution.
As Scandal Week comes to a close, it's worth reviewing the policy proposals that have followed in the revelations' wake. There aren't many.
ABC News' Jonathan Karl's revelation of the White House's role in 12 revisions to the Benghazi talking points propelled the story, long percolating in conservative media, into a bona fide scandal. But then CNN's Jake Tapper's revelation of what the emails actually said revealed that to be a fake scandal. So who lied to Karl?
The scandal surrounding New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez has evolved from a sex scandal to a donor scandal to a weird mystery about who set him up, with the FBI talking to sugar baron brothers and an ex-CIA operative.
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