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.
Thieves in the German town of Bad Hersfeld spirited away some 5.5 tons of the chocolate-hazelnut spread over the weekend. But if you can trick one of the top schools in the United States into paying $2,500 per week for Nutella, perhaps everyone should get in the chocolate topping business.
The 29,503,030 people who follow Barack Obama's Twitter account might see his picture, see his name, see that little blue verified account badge and think they're following the President — but it's not him.
Reports of a possible compromise on the Senate's gun control package will certainly be welcomed at the White House. But it cements where the debate is happening. It's not Democrat vs. Republican. It's NRA vs. the middle.
This week on the Sunday talk shows, Lindsay Graham isn't afraid of big, bad Hillary Clinton running for President; Dan Malloy thinks the face of the NRA is more a circus act than anything; and everyone else gabs about North Korea.
Modern women face a stark choice: either give up their careers early to have loving families or die alone and be eaten by their pets. But we feel we must point out that this modern condition is not modern at all.
Ben Carson, the Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon and newly minted conservative celebrity who inspired a hundred op-eds, has apologized for comparing gay couples seeking legal recognition of their relationships to NAMBLA and those who practice bestiality.
Since senators' announcements of support for gay marriage have gotten dull, the hot new trend in politics is to try and predict which senator will be next to come out into the open on the issue. We looked at the data.
President Obama called California Attorney General Kamala Harris to say he was sorry for calling her the hottest attorney general in all the land, White House press secretary Jay Carney explained Friday afternoon, after a ton of criticism that Obama acted like an unenlightened bro.
One possible explanation is Biden's net worth, which is on the modest side compared to the president and other Cabinet members.
An arrest Friday in Colorado capped a week full of connections between law enforcement killings and white supremacist groups, including Breitbart's claim that "the mainstream media has gone to great lengths to label ad-infinitum the Aryan Brotherhood as a 'white supremacist' group." So what do real white supremacists really think of the Brotherhood? We went straight to the source.
When Democratic senators Heidi Heitkamp and Joe Donnelly said Friday they were backing same-sex marriage, it was clear their "evolution" would carry less political import than it would have during last year's reelection campaign. But there's no better example of the incentive some Democrats still have to oppose gay marriage than in Arkansas, where Mark Pryor is up for reelection.
The proposals will include cuts to Medicare and Social Security and tax increases... which doesn't change what the president was offering Republicans last fall — but it does mean pundits will declare Obama is offering a serious budget for serious times, DOA or not.
The tragedy at Newtown hasn't inspired Republicans to embrace gun control. And it's starting to look like the tragedy of Mitt Romney isn't enough to get its base on board with immigration reform either.
On The Daily Show last night, Stewart went after Jeff Zucker's newfangled approach at CNN, taking aim at hologram goats, vegetarians who eat bacon, and horrifying murder recreations.
America has officially become indifferent to Democratic senators declaring support for gay marriage. On Thursday afternoon, Bill Nelson of Florida indicated that he'd switched positions. Few seemed to care.
President Obama revealed his secret adherence to fascist beauty standards when he praised the female California attorney general for being, like, mad hot at a DNC fundraiser Thursday afternoon in Atherton, California.
Let no one ever intimate that we Americans can't be as flippant about threats to bomb things as Kim Jong-un. Senator Jim Inhofe and the Buffalo Bills' Stevie Johnson have gotten in on the act.
More than five months after two states voted to legalize marijuana — and as a host of other states consider the same — a majority of Americans now say pot should be legal to consume.
A Republican Party website is going to try to reach young people by stealing the jokey lists and memes from BuzzFeed. While it's funny to imagine "stuffy white men" (the RNC's words!) brainstorm OMG LOL listicles, this is not cosnervatives' first attempt to tap the power of social media to make their ideas go viral.
The conventional wisdom centers on who might be running. But the reality is that Hillary "Book Deal" Clinton, Rand "New Hampshire" Paul, and Marco "Kindler Gentler" Rubio are already running. Here's the latest look at the field.
Just when you thought New York politics couldn't get any more drenched into dirty money, Bronx Assemblyman Eric Stevenson was charged on Thursday morning with several counts of corruption and conspiracy.
States aren't waiting to act on guns. But while high-profile restrictions packages make headlines, most new state gun laws have instead focused on loosening controls. Activism, partisanship, and time are a powerful combination.
Stewart compared the process of getting genetically modified foods legislation passed to buying porno, then hiding it under a bigger purchase that might include, say, Mountain Dew and Funyuns. And then came the "flatulent grandpa."
President Obama's trip to Denver today to lift up Colorado as "a model of what's possible" on gun control in D.C. The interesting comparison, though, isn't why Congress won't stand up to the NRA — that answer is obvious — but what happened to the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, the state's gun lobby that is, if anything, more radical than the NRA.
In a measure of solidarity with those affected by the budget-slashing government sequestration, President Obama is giving up 5 percent of his salary for rest of the year, which is almost as admirable and sensible as a mansion-owner shutting off his marble fountains during a drought.
The first (and maybe only) thing most people know about Elizabeth Colbert Busch is that she's Stephen Colbert's sister, but if she's going to pull off beating Mark Sanford, the former South Carolina governor most famous for flying to Argentina to cheat on his wife, for a Congressional seat this fall, people are going to have to learn more about her.
While the Republican National Committee thinks it needs to support immigration reform to start winning presidential elections, Republicans in Congress have reason to think they need to oppose to keep winning elections.
At the outset of his show last night Jon Stewart decided to poke fun at North Korea — you know, until North Korea actually started to scare him.
Erosion takes time. With news that the Senate vote on new gun legislation will move out another week, opponents gain seven more days to wear down support for its elements — even for popular elements like new trafficking regulations.
Less than two hours after the polls closed Tuesday night, the call came in: "Disgraced former governor" Mark Sanford had secured a primary victory and set up a May 7 special election against Stephen Colbert's sister. Boy, has this man come a long way since that time he went "hiking on the Appalachian Trail."
Conservative columnists are newly outraged by Social Security data showing a rise in disability applications. But this isn't Obama's fault. In fact, it's kind of theirs.
That faint sound you hear is Senate reporters from the AP, The New York Times, and beyond smacking their delete keys, rethinking their agenda setting aloud, and figuring out how we talk now, amidst a serious legislative discussion
One of conservatives' favorite examples of wasteful government spending in recent weeks has been a study of duck penises. This is dumb, and Newt Gingrich knows it: They should promote the very type of technological innovation made possible by the weird science research the party is currently dismissing as silly and wasteful.
Wayne LaPierre was MIA at the NRA's even Tuesday, replaced by moderate-sounding Asa Hutchinson, just the latest move by the gun lobby to repair its image now that its legislative victories have been all but secured.
The Democratic Senator from Delaware and the Republican from Illinois today joined 48 of their colleagues in support of gay marriage. Here's a breakdown of how they made their voices heard, and the reactions thereafter.
The National Rifle Association, the ongoing lobbying interests of which primarily exist for the promotion of buying more guns under the auspices of "safety," has apparently concluded that the way to keep schools safe is to bring more guns on campus, with its $1 million task force suggesting Tuesday that the government change laws surrounding gun-free zones and make the NRA's estimated $6.6 billion pipe dream a reality.
Graham is taking friendly fire from The Daily Caller, which criticizes the senator's efforts to facilitate a country club's hiring of Jamaican workers on temporary permits. At its heart, the critique isn't about politics — or even necessarily the Senate's pending immigration deal. It's about jobs.
How can the National Rifle Association oppose something as checking whether someone is legally barred from buying a gun before they purchase one, i.e. universal background checks? Because the NRA is not reasonable anymore.
Despite a money gap, given the unpredictability of turnout for a special election — especially a runoff that comes just two days after Easter Sunday — and the fervency of support Curtis Bostic enjoys in the evangelical and home school communities, the former county council member could pull off another surprise victory.
The spectrum of political responses to gun violence is neatly defined by two policy measures that advanced over the last 24 hours: new gun registration, permits and paperwork in Connecticut and in a Georgia small town mandatory ownership. That these are the poles, though, suggests that opponents of new gun laws have already largely won.
In order to get on the ballot as a Republican, doomed Democratic State Senator Malcolm Smith needed approval from GOP county chairs. He did not have that, and this morning he was arrested along with several others for allegedly bribing to pay off those chairs and trying to rig New York City's mayoral election.
The 2012 Republican National Convention will go down in the history for Clint Eastwood's dialogue with an empty chair — and, according to a lawsuit filed by the American Action Network against one of its vendors, for all the female pop stars it tried and failed to get to play the party's quadrennial party for itself. Here's the full list (for the RNC and Lolla).
It would have been hard to predict that one of the events that most clearly articulated the line between the Tea Party and other conservatives on economic issues would be the failure of two banks on a Mediterranean island.
A heated op-ed from a Judd advisor on Monday suggests a report by Howard Fineman — on Judd's apparent comparison between challenging Sen. Mitch McConnell and enduring sexual assault at a private dinner — is fabricated. Here's what Fineman has to say about a kind of would-be Todd Akin-style moment that never was, and what it says about the state of 2014.
Sue Everhart, chairwoman of the Georgia Republican Party, has drawn a line deep in the sand. Gay marriage, she told the Marietta Daily Journal, is simply a tool for defrauding the government of public benefits. And obviously any situation in which fraud could occur should be banned.
Congress' found its new willingness to tackle immigration reform in mere hours late one Tuesday evening last November, but actually acting has has taken five months and counting.
The Obama administration is sending Caroline Kennedy, the only living child of former President John F. Kennedy to Tokyo as Japan's new U.S. ambassador.
The Senate's Gang of Eight were out in full force on the Sunday shows to tell us how far they are from presenting the bipartisan immigration bill; Sen. Jeff Flake thinks a same-sex marriage supporting GOP candidate is "inevitable': Cardinal Dolan wants to better the church's relationship with gays.
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