The Commentariat -- May 21, 2013

Christina Wilkie of the Huffington Post: "... it appeared increasingly likely that residents who lost homes and businesses [in the Oklahoma tornado] would turn to the federal government for emergency disaster aid. That could put the state's two Republican senators in an awkward position. Sens. Jim Inhofe and Tom Coburn, both Republicans, are fiscal hawks who have repeatedly voted against funding disaster aid for other parts of the country. They also have opposed increased funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which administers federal disaster relief.... Oklahoma currently ranks third in the nation ... in terms of total federal disaster and fire declarations, which kickstart the federal emergency relief funding process.... And despite their voting record on disaster aid for other states, both Coburn and Inhofe appear to sing a different tune when it comes to such funding for Oklahoma." Thanks to Jeanne B. for the link. ...

... Emily Pierce in Roll Call: "The tornado damage near Oklahoma City is still being assessed and the death toll is expected to rise, but already Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., says he will insist that any federal disaster aid be paid for with cuts elsewhere." ...

... Steve Benen: "I've seen many note overnight that Coburn is at least consistent -- there are plenty of politicians who've balked at disaster-relief funds when there's a devastating storm, only to change their minds when their constituents are among the casualties.... But while consistently is welcome, it doesn't change the questions about unnecessary callousness." ...

... ** David Sirota in Salon: "... there's an increasing chance that we will not be [prepared for weather events] thanks to the manufactured crisis known as sequestration. As the Federal Times recently reported, sequestration includes an 8.2 percent cut to the National Weather Service. According to the organization representing weather service employees, that means there is 'no way for the agency to maintain around-the-clock operations at its 122 forecasting offices' and also means 'people are going to be overworked, they're going to be tired, they're going to miss warnings.' Though the last few years saw a record number of billion-dollar weather cataclysms, the weather service remains a perennial target for budget cuts.... The good news is that the National Weather Service station in Norman, Oklahoma had a warning in effect for 16 minutes before the most recent Oklahoma City tornado hit."

Drip, Drip, Drip. Juliet Eilperin & Zachary Goldfarb of the Washington Post: "Senior White House officials, including Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, learned last month about a review by the Treasury Department's inspector general into whether the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, but they did not inform President Obama, the White House said Monday. The acknowledgement is the White House's latest disclosure in a piecemeal, sometimes confusing release of details concerning the extent to which White House officials knew of the IG's findings...." ...

... Peter Baker of the New York Times: "The details provided by the White House on Monday went beyond its previous account, and may provide additional fodder for critics pressing to understand what and when the president and his team knew about the I.R.S. misconduct. During a series of television interviews on Sunday, Dan Pfeiffer, the president's senior adviser, made no mention that Mr. McDonough or others had been notified and said that the White House had 'no idea what the facts were' when [Kathryn] Ruemmler, [the White House counsel,] was informed. Mr. Carney on Monday acknowledged that she was in fact told that certain key words like 'Tea Party' and 'patriot' were used to target conservative organizations." ...

... AS of 8 pm ET Monday, video of Carney's briefing is strangely unavailable on the White House site. C-SPAN has it here. Update: the White House site has the presser up now....

... Gee, maybe this is why the White House is changing its story: posted shortly before Carney's presser -- which he delayed by an hour -- came this from Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times: "Senator Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat who is the chairman of the committee, and Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, the ranking Republican, forwarded a six-page letter to Steven Miller, the acting I.R.S. commissioner, who announced his resignation last week. It contained 41 pointed questions about the I.R.S.'s efforts to single out for special scrutiny conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status. Those questions, which are to be answered by May 31, go well beyond the agency's actions and address the questions Republicans have been asking for a week: Who in the Obama administration knew what? And when did they know it?" ...

... Former DOJ Inspector General Michael Bromwich in the Hill: "In those rare cases when information about the audit or investigation goes beyond the agency in the executive branch, it would be unprecedented in my experience for anyone outside the agency to become involved in the customary back and forth between the IG and the agency, much less to intervene with the IG before his work is complete. Intervention of this kind would be foolish, inappropriate and dangerous to those who attempted it. Such actions could be viewed as obstruction of the IG's work." CW: read the whole post. Bromwich explains quite clearly why heads didn't roll before the IG published his report. ...

... It's Tax-Cheatin' Time! Peter Kasperowicz of the Hill: "House Republicans last week proposed legislation that would suspend the ability of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to conduct audits until the IRS itself is audited by Congress. The bill, from Rep. John Fleming (R-La.), is the latest in a string of measures that have been offered in the wake of the IRS's admission it applied extra scrutiny to conservative groups over the last few years."

William Barr, Jamie Gorelick & Kenneth Wainstein in a New York Times op-ed: "As former Justice Department officials who served in the three administrations preceding President Obama's, we are worried that the criticism of the decision to subpoena telephone toll records of A.P. journalists in an important leak investigation sends the wrong message to the government officials who are responsible for our national security. While neither we nor the critics know the circumstances behind the prosecutors' decision to issue this subpoena, we do know from the government's public disclosures that the prosecutors were right to investigate this leak vigorously. The leak -- which resulted in a May 2012 article by The A.P. about the disruption of a Yemen-based terrorist plot to bomb an airliner -- significantly damaged our national security."

Impeachment! This is an administration embroiled in a scandal that they created. It's a cover-up. I'm not saying impeachment is the end game, but it's a possibility, especially if they keep doing little to help us learn more. -- Rep. Jason Chaffetz (RTP-Utah) ...

... Jed Lewison of Daily Kos: "In other words, if Obama doesn't do more to help House Republicans figure out why they should impeach him, then House Republicans might not have any other option than to impeach him." ...

... Robert Costa of the National Review: Rep. "Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican, says President Barack Obama may face impeachment over his administration's response to the Benghazi attack. 'They purposefully and willfully misled the American people, and that's unacceptable,' Chaffetz tells me. 'It's part of a pattern of deception.'" Also, the State Department muzzled people whom Chaffetz wanted to interview, & the White House has been "evasive." Via Greg Sargent. ...

... Kevin Drum: "According to Chaffetz, impeachment isn't a sure thing, it's only a possibility. That's totally non-crazy. All that's left now is to find some actual presidential wrongdoing. But I'm sure that's just a technicality." ...

Josh Rogin in the Daily Beast: "Following the attack in Benghazi, senior State Department officials close to Hillary Clinton ordered the removal of [Raymond Maxwell,] a mid-level official who had no role in security decisions and has never been told the charges against him. He is now accusing Clinton's team of scapegoating him for the failures that led to the death of four Americans last year.... One person who reviewed the classified portion of the ARB report told The Daily Beast that it called out Maxwell for the specific infraction of not reading his daily classified briefings, something that person said Maxwell admitted to the ARB panel during his interview." ...

... Joan Walsh of Salon: "What's most disturbing ... is that the paranoia and anger of the Tea Party base, as echoed by an intimidated, primary-averse GOP leadership, are taken seriously by Beltway journalists, who then lose their own ability to distinguish fact from right-wing fantasy." ...

... It's the Economy, Stupid. Nate Silver: "There are a lot of theories as to why Mr. Obama's approval ratings have been unchanged in the wake of these controversies, which some news accounts and many of Mr. Obama's opponents are describing as scandals. But these analyses may proceed from the wrong premise if they assume that the stories have had no impact. It could be that the controversies are, in fact, putting some downward pressure on Mr. Obama's approval ratings -- but that the losses are offset by improved voter attitudes about the economy."

Nelson Schwartz & Charles Duhigg of the New York Times: "Even as Apple became the nation’s most profitable technology company, it avoided billions in taxes in the United States and around the world through a web of subsidiaries so complex it spanned continents and went beyond anything most experts had ever seen, Congressional investigators disclosed on Monday. The investigation is expected to set up a potentially explosive confrontation between a bipartisan group of lawmakers and Timothy D. Cook, Apple's chief executive, at a public hearing on Tuesday." ...

... There is a technical term economists like to use for behavior like this. Unbelievable chutzpah. -- Prof. Edward Kleinbard ...

... Tony Romm of Politico: "A report released ahead of Apple CEO Tim Cook's inaugural Capitol Hill appearance Tuesday alleges the tech giant took advantage of numerous U.S. tax loopholes and avoided U.S. taxes on $44 billion in offshore, taxable income between 2009 and 2012 -- a characterization Apple flatly rejects."

Edward Wyatt of the New York Times: "The Federal Communications Commission’s attempt to defend its net neutrality rules against a court challenge got major support on Monday from the Supreme Court, which ruled in a separate case that regulatory agencies should usually be granted deference in interpreting their own jurisdictions. In a 6-to-3 decision, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that in cases where Congress has left ambiguous the outlines of a regulatory agency's jurisdiction, 'the court must defer to the administering agency's construction of the statute so long as it is permissible.'" ...

... AP: "Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by Justices Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy, dissented."

Adam Liptak of the New York Times: "The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to decide [a] case concerning prayers at the start of town meetings...." CW: I expect the Court to endorse Jesus. ...

... RE: the Washington Post's story on the Fox "News" leak investigation linked yesterday, Josh Gerstein of Politico writes, "In September 2010, Chief U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth ... ruled ... that the Justice Department was not required by law to notify Fox reporter James Rosen that prosecutors had obtained his emails in connection with an investigation into a leak about North Korean plans to test a nuclear weapon." CW: The New Republic on Lamberth, a Reagan appointee.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is really pissed off at President & Mrs. Obama. CW: I think he's wrong -- till the next-to-last paragraph -- but his complaints are worth considering.

Brookings Institution fellows Elizabeth Kneebone & Alan Berube in a New York Times op-ed: "...in the 1990s, poverty in suburbia began to accelerate at a faster rate than poverty in the cities. Sometime after the 2001 recession, more poor people lived in suburbs than in cities for the first time (even though the poverty rate remains higher in cities). The Great Recession, set off by a subprime mortgage crisis that began in suburbs and exurbs, accelerated the trend.... Policies to help poor places -- as opposed to poor people -- haven't evolved much beyond the War on Poverty's neighborhood-based solutions."

Philip Bump of the Atlantic on the Robert Gibbs-Maureen Dowd feud: "Does Gibbs have a point? Has Dowd's writing been the same for eight years? When it comes to covering Gibbs' favorite topic, the president, the answer is basically yes. Since before the 2008 campaign, Dowd has repeatedly argued that Obama can be weak and distant." Bump republishes pertinent excerpts from some of Dowd's old columns. (See also yesterday's Commentariat, which now includes Dowd's response to Gibbs.)

Stephen Colbert takes care of Jonathan Karl (this part of the segment begins at about 3:55 min. in:

Yes, Karl never saw the e-mail, so when he quoted from it, those "quotes" were in "quotes." I mean that's what you call "journalism."

Right Wing World

It's Easy Bein' Black. Kate McDonough of Salon: "Rush Limbaugh announced on Monday that President Obama won't be impeached over recent controversies and that 'Benghazi is not going to touch' him ... because Obama is black, and 'the American people are not going to tolerate the first black president being removed from office.' ..." With audio. ...

Brian Beutler of TPM: "The Secret Service is following up on recent comments by right wing radio host Pete Santilli, who claimed to want to shoot former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the vagina and see President Obama tried and shot for treason. 'We are aware of Mr. Santilli's comments and will take the appropriate follow up action...,' a Secret Service spokesperson, told TPM on Monday. 'He certainly has a right to free speech, but the Secret Service has a right and an obligation to determine what a person's intent is when making comments like this.'" Beutler publishes some of Santilli's remarks & links to an audio of his comments.

The Louie Gohmert News

Thank goodness that the IRS was not around to help the founders when they founded the country, or otherwise they'd [have] probably shot the Boston Tea Party participants. They would have killed off over half of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.... And this country would have never had gotten started if this Department of Homeland Security had been around to be helpful -- so called -- to our founders. -- Louie Gohmert, on the House floor

Following "Gohmert logic," I have to wonder why the IRS didn't shoot all those Tea Party C-4 applicants. -- Constant Weader

News Ledes

New York Times: "Jamie Dimon, the nation's most powerful banker, can hold onto his title of chairman after JPMorgan Chase's shareholders decisively defeated a proposal to split the two top jobs. The vote to split the roles of chairman and chief executive -- both of which have been held by Mr. Dimon since 2006 -- received only 32.2 percent of shares voted. That is down from a vote of roughly 40 percent in support of a similar proposal last year. All 11 directors of the bank's board were also re-elected."

New York Times: "Emergency crews and volunteers continued to work through the early morning hours Tuesday in a frantic search for survivors of a huge tornado that ripped through parts of Oklahoma City and its suburbs, killing at least 91 people, 20 of them children, and flattening whatever was in its path, including at least two schools." The Oklahoman currently has links on its front page to many tornado-related stories. ...

     ... The Lede has updates here.

The Commentariat -- May 20, 2013

** E. J. Dionne: Democracy is in trouble here & abroad. "... politicians might contemplate their obligations to stewardship of the democratic ideal. They could begin by pondering what an unemployed 28-year-old makes of a ruling elite that expends so much energy feuding over how bureaucrats rewrote a set of talking points."

Philip Rucker of the Washington Post: "President Obama on Sunday summoned the graduates of historically black Morehouse College to 'transform the way we think about manhood,' urging the young men to avoid the temptation to make excuses and to take responsibility for their families and their communities. Delivering a commencement address at the all-male private liberal arts college in Atlanta, Obama spoke in deeply personal terms about the 'special obligation' he feels as a black man to help those left behind":

... AND for another inspirational (pre)commencement address, Stephen Colbert speaks at the University of Virginia's "valedictory exercises":

     ... Jenna Johnson of the Washington Post reports on Colbert's address.

CNN: "President Barack Obama comes out of what was arguably the worst week of his presidency with his approval rating holding steady, according to a new national poll.... 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."

Meghashyam Mali of the Hill: "White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer on Sunday defended the White House handling of the Internal Revenue Service scandal, saying the legality of the political targeting was 'irrelevant' and vowing the administration would ensure it 'never happens again.' Pfeiffer, who made the full round of Sunday talk shows, as the administration seeks to calm anger over the IRS, the Justice Department's seizure of reporters phone records and lingering GOP questions about the Benghazi attacks, vowed that the administration would act quickly to address the tax scandal." ...

... AP: Pfeiffer "insisted Sunday that President Barack Obama learned the Internal Revenue Service had targeted tea party groups only 'when it came out in the news' while Republicans continued to press the administration for more answers." ...

... Peter Nicholas of the Wall Street Journal: "The White House's chief lawyer learned weeks ago that an audit of the Internal Revenue Service likely would show that agency employees inappropriately targeted conservative groups, a senior White House official said Sunday. That disclosure has prompted a debate over whether the president should have been notified at that time." ...

... An Inconvenient Fact for Conspiracy Theorists. Steve Benen: "Last July, in the middle of the presidential election, the administration told House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) about an investigation into the IRS's potential mishandling of applications for tax-exempt status. And what did Issa do when he learned about this? Not a thing -- he decided to wait for the IG's report itself." ...

I know approximately what's in [the IG report]. I knew what was approximately in it when we made the allegations about a year ago. This is one of those things where it's been, in a sense, an open secret, but you don't accuse the IRS until you've had a nonpartisan, deep look. That's what the IG has done. That's why the IGs in fact exist within government, is to find this kind of waste and fraud and abuse of power. -- Darrell Issa, speaking to Bloomberg News a week ago, before publication of the IG report ...

Taegan Golldard: "Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) told CNN there was a 'written policy' floating around the agency that said IRS officials were 'targeting people who were opposed to the president.' ... When pressed for details about the memo he was referring to, Paul said he hasn't seen such a policy statement but has heard about it." Via Greg Sargent. ...

     ... CW: "Leaders" like Rand Paul are a real threat to democracy. Since most of us know that members of Congress are privy to information not circulated to the public, it's not unreasonable to believe a Senator or Congressperson when s/he asserts, "there's a document that says blah-blah." In fact, that's how Jonathan Karl got in trouble, isn't it? So when these people lie or mislead the public, voters will form their opinions on disinformation. Oftentimes the truth comes out -- eventually -- but usually the "never mind" gets less publicity than the original inflammatory charge. I doubt (but I don't know) that Fox "News" was all over the debunking of Karl's claims, for instance.

... Glenn Kessler: Lois G. Lerner, the IRS’s director of the exempt organizations division, is a big fat liar.

Igor Volsky of Think Progress: "On Sunday, during an appearance on Meet The Press, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) -- the GOP leader in the senate -- distanced himself from Republican efforts to portray the Obama administration's response to the attacks on a U.S. diplomatic issue in Benghazi, Libya as a Watergate-level scandal that should result in impeachment." ...

... MEANWHILE ... Zack Colman of the Hill: on "Face the Nation," "Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said the Obama administration owes its recent troubles and controversies to a 'culture of cover ups and intimidation' within the White House." CW: both McConnell & Cornyn are up for re-election in 2014 & both face the prospect of winger primary challenges.

CNN: "Jonathan Karl, chief White House correspondent for ABC News, addressed criticism of his reporting on the Benghazi talking points controversy, saying in a statement to CNN that he regrets the inaccuracy of his report. 'Clearly, I regret the email was quoted incorrectly and I regret that it's become a distraction from the story, which still entirely stands. I should have been clearer about the attribution. We updated our story immediately,' he said in the statement to Howard Kurtz, host of CNN's 'Reliable Sources.'" CW: yeah, the story still stands; it's just substantially different from what you wrote. Jerk. ...

... John Cole of Balloon Juice: "I guess when it is someone as ethically challenged as Howard Kurtz holding your feet to the fire, you probably just think you can tell people to piss off and be done with the whole matter.... Karl lied to us because he trusted his source. His source, however, burned him, and Karl's lie was exposed.... If the editors at ABC News had any damned integrity, Karl would be forced to expose his source, apologize, and then take a couple weeks off. Maybe some summer school ethics course." ...

... Just Who Is ABC News's Chief White House Correspondent? Peter Hart of FAIR says he's "a right-wing mole at ABC News": "Karl came to mainstream journalism via the Collegiate Network, an organization primarily devoted to promoting and supporting right-leaning newspapers on college campuses ... such as the Rutgers paper launched by the infamous James O'Keefe .... The network, founded in 1979, is one of several projects of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which seeks to strengthen conservative ideology on college campuses. William F. Buckley was the ISI's first president, and the current board chair is American Spectator publisher Alfred Regnery.... He was a board member at the right-leaning youth-oriented Third Millennium group and at the Madison Center for Educational Affairs -- which ... seeks to strengthen young conservative journalism. After moving to ABC in 2003, Karl contributed several pieces to the neo-con Weekly Standard." Read on.

Ann Marimow of the Washington Post: "The case of Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, the government adviser, and James Rosen, the chief Washington correspondent for Fox News, bears striking similarities to a sweeping leaks investigation disclosed last week in which federal investigators obtained records over two months of more than 20 telephone lines assigned to the Associated Press.... Court documents in the Kim case reveal how deeply investigators explored the private communications of a working journalist -- and raise the question of how often journalists have been investigated as closely as Rosen was in 2010. The case also raises new concerns among critics of government secrecy about the possible stifling effect of these investigations on a critical element of press freedom: the exchange of information between reporters and their sources." ...

... Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker: the Keystone XL pipeline -- "another step on the march to disaster."

CW: a couple of weeks ago I wrote that doctoral committees of most major universities would not approve a doctoral dissertation built on discredited assumptions that intelligence is race-based. Well, a thousand-plus Harvard students are wondering why their particular university isn't up to snuff. Jeff Spross of Think Progress: "Over 1,000 Harvard students delivered a petition to Harvard University's JFK School on Saturday, demanding an investigation into how and why the school approved a 2009 doctoral thesis arguing that Hispanics have lower IQs. The thesis was written by Jason Richwine, a co-author of a paper by the conservative Heritage Foundation that argued immigration reform would cost taxpayers $6.3 trillion. The discovery of Richwine's paper by the Washington Post sparked a firestorm around the Heritage study, and several days later Richwine resigned from the think tank."

Erica Werner of the AP: "The Senate Judiciary Committee is aiming this week to pass a landmark immigration bill to secure the border and offer citizenship to millions, setting up a high-stakes debate on the Senate floor." ...

... Kevin Robillard of Politico: Two unions representing a total of 20,000 customs & immigration agents oppose the bill the Gang of Eight is crafting. They say provisions of the bill worsens the problems agent face. They claim the U.S. immigration service has turned into an "'approval machine' ...discouraging the denial of any applications." The complain the bill's authors did not consult them, instead relying on the input of "special interests."

Danielle Douglas of the Washington Post: "Banks have paid less than half the $5.7 billion in cash owed to troubled homeowners under nearly 30 settlements brokered by the government since 2008, delaying help to the millions of victims of discrimination and shoddy lending that epitomized the housing crisis, according to a Washington Post analysis...."

New York Times Editors: "New rules to regulate derivatives, adopted last week by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, are a victory for Wall Street and a setback for financial reform. They may also signal worse things to come." CW: Read the whole editorial. I think the fix is in -- and it's another swell career move for Barack & Michelle Obama.

Paul Krugman: "In elite mythology, the origins of the [economic] crisis of the 70s, like the supposed origins of our current crisis, lay in excess: too much debt, too much coddling of those slovenly proles via a strong welfare state. The suffering of 1979-82 was necessary payback. None of that is remotely true.... It would be bad enough if we were basing policy today on lessons from the 70s. It's even worse that we're basing policy today on a mythical 70s that never was." ...

... ** Tim Noah, in a New York Times op-ed, on the skills gap nobody wants to talk about.

When the "P" in PBS is David Koch. Jayne Mayer of the New Yorker: how public television tried -- and failed -- to placate board member & big contributor David Koch. As Michael Moore said, "The words 'chilling effect' came immediately to mind." ...

     ... You can watch full video of the documentary "Park Avenue" at this PBS page.

Tough Critique. Steve M. of No More Mister Nice Blog has a good critique of MoDo's latest advice for Obama. Dowd has "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." ...

... Tougher Critique. I don't normally read Maureen.... I don't largely because it's sort of largely the same column for the last, like, eight years. -- Robert Gibbs, former Obama press secretary

I don't normally listen to Robert. I don't largely because it's sort of largely the same tired defense of President Obama for the last, like, six years. -- Maureen Dowd, in response to Gibbs' remark

Local News

Nicole Flatow of Think Progress: "The Virginia Republican Party this weekend nominated for lieutenant governor [E. W. Jackson,] a minister who has a history of virulent anti-gay statements, accuses the Democratic Party of enslaving African Americans, and criticized President Obama for having 'Muslim sensibilities.' The former Senate candidate, who in 2012 garnered less than 5 percent of the vote in the Republican primary, bested six other candidates during the Virginia GOP convention, and will join conservative Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli on the Republican ticket. He is the first black candidate the state party has endorsed since 1988."

News Ledes

New York Times: "Homes were flattened, cars were flung through the air and at least two schools packed with children were destroyed as a huge tornado, perhaps a mile wide, tore through towns near Oklahoma City on Monday, killing at least 37 people and sending rescuers and residents dashing to dig out survivors buried in rubble." The Lede has updates here; it includes live video. A map shows the path of the tornado.

AP: "Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy ... warned that Monday's commute is expected to be 'extremely challenging' following the collision and derailment of two trains outside Bridgeport last week that injured 72 people."

New York Times: "Three months after hackers working for a cyberunit of China's People's Liberation Army went silent amid evidence that they had stolen data from scores of American companies and government agencies, they appear to have resumed their attacks using different techniques, according to computer industry security experts and American officials."

New York Times: "Vast stretches of Texas farmland lying over the [High Plains] Aquifer no longer support irrigation. In west-central Kansas, up to a fifth of the irrigated farmland along a 100-mile swath of the aquifer has already gone dry. In many other places, there no longer is enough water to supply farmers' peak needs during Kansas' scorching summers. And when the groundwater runs out, it is gone for good. Refilling the aquifer would require hundreds, if not thousands, of years of rains."

Reuters: "At least 43 people were killed in car bomb explosions targeting Shi'ite Muslims in the Iraqi capital and the southern oil hub of Basra on Monday, police and medics said. About 150 people have been killed in sectarian violence over the past week and tensions between Shi'ites, who now lead Iraq, and minority Sunni Muslims have reached their highest level since U.S. troops pulled out in December 2011."

Reuters: "North Korea fired two short-range missiles on Monday, making six launches in three days, and it condemned South Korea for criticizing what it said were its legitimate military drills."

The Commentariat -- May 19, 2013

Scott Wilson of the Washington Post: "President Obama will deliver a speech Thursday at the National Defense University in which he will address how he intends to bring his counterterrorism policies, including the drone program and the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in line with the legal framework he promised after taking office." CW: but can substance beat scandalmania?

Nicholas Confessore of the New York Times has a very good report on how the Cincinnati IRS office got into trouble, and the answer is -- quite innocently. ...

... Justin Elliott & Kim Barker of ProPublica have another excellent take on the makings of a mess. They also answer the question that may have been floating int the back of your mind -- why Cincinnati? ...

... CW: the real culprits here are not IRS bureaucrats but Congressional Republicans, President Obama & the Supreme Court, who have (1) cut funding for the IRS, (2) cut staffing, (3) increased the IRS workload, & (3) failed to write laws that provide clearcut guidelines. Needless to say, this was not an entirely innocent series of errors on conservatives' part; they have long tried to prove that government doesn't work by setting it up for failure. What better agency to hold up as a nest of vipers than the IRS? Naturally, Obama & Congressional Democrats fell into the GOP trap. Again. ...

     ... Update. Oh, pretty much what I said. Robert Reich on "the real IRS scandal," a short post that gets to the heart of it. ...

... But Seth Meyers & Amy Poehler are still really pissed off:

CW: Reading a Maureen Dowd column on Obama almost always makes me want to defend Obama.

At some point obstruction becomes ... treason. -- Bill Maher

James Dao of the New York Times: Members of Congress -- and more importantly, Jon Stewart -- are holding Secretary of Veterans of Affairs Eric Shinseki responsible for the huge and growing backlog of unprocessed veterans' claims for disability compensation. CW: to me, failing to process 600,000 veterans' claims is a much bigger scandal than making a few phonies sweat over their claimed "social welfare" tax exemption.

Lincoln Caplan of the New York Times: "There is little doubt, statistically, that the Supreme Court presided over by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr.has been more sympathetic to corporate interests than any court since World War II. A comprehensive study of more than 1,750 decisions from 1946 to 2011, published recently in the Minnesota Law Review, found that the Roberts court has repeatedly shielded business from lawsuits involving class actions, workplace disputes and consumer complaints.... There are few better (and more outrageous) examples of this pro-business bias than Genesis HealthCare Corp. v. Symczyk." CW: read the post. Kagan (in her dissent) lets Thomas have it, saying flat-out that the majority opinion is the product of fantasyland & bears no relation to reality. "By taking a fallacy as its premise, the majority ensures it will reach the wrong decision." The Court's conservatives are dumber than first-year law students, she implies. The decision & dissent are here (pdf). Kagan's dissent starts on the 14th page. She knows how to write!

Local News

Laura Vozzella of the Washington Post: "Thousands of Virginia Republicans on Saturday picked a slate of statewide candidates who vowed to stay true to conservative principles, resisting calls to remake the GOP message after losses in 2012. At the top of the ticket is gubernatorial hopeful Ken Cuccinelli II, the attorney general. Known for high-profile battles against 'Obamacare,' abortion and a university climate scientist, Cuccinelli stood by what detractors have called an out-of-the-mainstream agenda."

News Lede

Wall Street Journal: "Yahoo, Inc. has agreed to pay $1.1 billion for Tumblr, a six-year-old company with more than 100 million users but very little revenue...."