One thing to keep in mind is that the president and his staff have literally thousands of posts to fill. A White House that doesn’t want to get bogged down will defer many of these lower-level appointments to politicians in his party who have some special interest or expertise in a position. The IRS commissioner is usually seen as a low-level position, since the commissioner merely enforces the law and has no ability to actually make law.

When it came time to replace the retiring IRS commissioner in 2007, Senator Charles Grassley, ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee, offered up one of his senior staffers on the committee by the name of Dean Zerbe.

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Three congressional committees are investigating and the FBI is looking into potential civil rights violations at the IRS, Attorney General Eric Holder said.

Other potential crimes include making false statements to authorities and violating the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in some partisan political activities, Holder said.

President Barack Obama said Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew had asked for and accepted Steven T. Miller's resignation.

"Americans are right to be angry about it, and I am angry about it," Obama said Wednesday evening in a televised statement from the White House. "I will not tolerate this kind of behavior in any agency but especially in the IRS, given the power that it has and the reach that it has into all of our lives."

Miller's ouster came five days after an IRS supervisor publicly revealed that agents had improperly targeted groups with "tea party" or "patriots" in their applications for tax-exempt status. It came a day after an inspector general's report blamed ineffective management in Washington for allowing it to happen for more than 18 months.

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In fact, the only known 501(c)(4) applicant to have its status denied happens to be a progressive group: the Maine chapter of Emerge America, which trains Democratic women to run for office. Although the group did no electoral work, and didn’t participate in independent expenditure campaign activity either, its partisan status apparently disqualified it from being categorized as working for the “common good.”

Ironically, the national organization and its earlier chapters had gotten tax-exempt status by the IRS during the Bush administration in 2006. But it appears as though the Maine group’s rejection triggered a review of the entire organization, and Emerge America and all of its chapters had their tax-exempt status revoked. Emerge reincorporated with 527 status, which requires it to report its donors. You can read the IRS letters explaining its decisions at the bottom of this post.

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The second is that while this is the first time this kind of thing has become a national scandal, it's not the first time such activity has occurred.

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That's one of the big - if deliberately ignored - takeaways from the reaction to news that the Internal Revenue Service allegedly targeting conservative organizations for extra scrutiny in their larger review of political groups' tax exempt status. In the last few days, the allegations have generated a wave of national headlines, a congressional investigation, federal legislation and ever-louder calls for impeachment.

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Gates, who was appointed by George W. Bush and kept on during President Obama's first term, continued that he wouldn't have "approved sending an aircraft, a single aircraft, over Benghazi under those circumstances."

"It's sort of a cartoonish impression of military capabilities and military forces," Gates added. "The one thing that our forces are noted for is planning and preparation before we send people in harm's way, and there just wasn't time to do that."

Watch:

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The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), or Scotland Yard, said the estimated cost of surrounding the Ecuadorean Embassy from June 19, 2012, when Assange entered the building, until Jan. 31, 2013, is the equivalent of $4.5 million.

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Syria isn’t Barack Obama’s Vietnam by a long shot. And I seriously doubt that Obama feels the same way Johnson did. But Johnson’s conundrum is in many ways Obama’s, too. In Syria, there are no good options, American credibility is at stake, and the pressures to act are considerable in the face of great uncertainties.

Doing nothing is unacceptable in the face of almost 80,000 dead and millions of Syrians displaced internally and abroad. Limited involvement – even on the military side -- will likely be ineffective, and getting stuck with the check through undertaking a massive military intervention is out of the question.

So what’s a guy to do? Sure, there are risks of acting; but there are consequences of not acting, too.

Indeed, in this regard, Syria is a moral tragedy and humanitarian disaster. It’s hemorrhaging refugees and radicalized jihadists. It’s a threat to regional stability and to Turkey, Jordan and Israel. It’s a potential proliferator of chemical weapons, a way to weaken Iran if only the Americans would recognize the opportunities; and it’s a threat to America’s credibility if Obama doesn’t act boldly in the face of self-declared “red lines.”

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Yet, right now, President Obama is preventing you from learning any of this, by keeping the report classified.

Before the end of the Bush administration, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va. — then the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee — started investigating the torture program. When Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., took over as chairwoman of the committee in 2009, she intensified the investigation and negotiated with the CIA to get access to its files. After almost four more years of work and reviewing 6 million pages of documents, the committee voted out the report in December on a mostly party line vote.

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Cutting through a park, they came across six men drinking beer. The men had recently finished a gang initiation ceremony and decided to celebrate by having “fun,” as one of them would later put it. But after raping and beating the girls for about an hour, the men started to worry that the girls might recognize them. So they strangled the girls to death. They used a belt. Then the belt broke, so they used shoelaces. Then they started stomping on the girls’ necks, to make sure.

All of the men were arrested several days later. The three who were older than 18 at the time would eventually be executed. But one of them, Jose Medellin, challenged the sentence all the way to the Supreme Court. The issue was that he was a Mexican national, having only moved to the United States when he was three, and none of the Houston police had bothered to notify the Mexican Consulate when he was arrested.

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Goldberg’s piece takes aim at, among other things, the alleged dishonesty of Qatari foreign policy. Citing Qatar’s dual policy of good relations with Israel and funding of the Hamas-led administration of the Gaza Strip, Goldberg excoriates Haim Saban – an Israeli-American and another major funder of Brookings (along with the Qatari government itself) – for his public embrace of Qatari Prime Minister Hamid bin Jasim Al-Thani. Denouncing Qatar as “seeing nothing incongruous about maintaining open contacts with Israelis while funding an organization whose declared goal is killing Israelis,” Goldberg fails to grasp the distinction between preventing the economic collapse of the Gaza Strip and of funding terrorist attacks against Israel. Qatar explicitly falls into the former category. Saban, the Israeli government and the Israeli private sector are willing to talk to Qatar regardless of its relationship to Hamas, so why isn’t Goldberg?

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Actually, you probably did miss the news because most major media outlets didn't cover it in a serious way, if at all. Instead, they and their audiences evidently view such information as far less news-, buzz- and tweet-worthy than (among other things) the opening of George W. Bush's library and President Obama's jokes at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

Such an appetite for distraction, no doubt, comes from both those who deny the problem of climate change and those who acknowledge the crisis but nonetheless look away from what feels like an unsolvable mess.

That sense of hopelessness is understandable. After all, some of the most hyped ways to reduce carbon emissions -- electric cars, mass-scale renewable energy power plants, etc. -- require the kind of technological transformations that can seem impossibly unrealistic at a time when Congress can't even pass a budget.

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"It took the case and decided it at a time when it was still a big election issue," she told the Chicago Tribune editorial board in an interview on Friday. "Maybe the court should have said, 'We're not going to take it, goodbye.'"

From the Tribune:

The case, she said, "stirred up the public" and "gave the court a less-than-perfect reputation."

"Obviously the court did reach a decision and thought it had to reach a decision," she said. "It turned out the election authorities in Florida hadn't done a real good job there and kind of messed it up. And probably the Supreme Court added to the problem at the end of the day."

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So, is this week making you feel a bit nostalgic for the Bush era? Don't. It's been almost half a decade since the 43rd president left office, and he's looking as bad as ever. Of course, that won't stop a small circle of admirers (many of whom used to be on his payroll) from trying, so here's your guide to taking on the five biggest specious pro-Bush talking points put forward this week:

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When he ran against Republican Sen. John McCain, Obama campaigned in 2008 against what he called “eight years of failed policies” from George W. Bush. But, today, Obama spoke reverently about becoming a part of “the world’s most exclusive club,” a group of “living former presidents” and one that included Bush.

We do have a pretty nice clubhouse. But the truth is, our club is more like a support group. The last time we all got together was just before I took office. And I needed that. Because as each of these leaders will tell you, no matter how much you may think you’re ready to assume the office of the presidency, it’s impossible to truly understand the nature of the job until it’s yours, until you’re sitting at that desk.

And that’s why every President gains a greater appreciation for all those who served before him; for the leaders from both parties who have taken on the momentous challenges and felt the enormous weight of a nation on their shoulders. And for me, that appreciation very much extends to President Bush. [emphasis added]

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So I’ve found it a sad commentary on GOP rebuilding that there’s been so much talk this week about the likelihood and desirability of a Jeb Bush candidacy. And apparently one influential Republican, his mother, Barbara, agrees with me.

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In an interview with Charlie Rose on CBS News, Bush said that he wouldn't comment on same-sex marriage (after happily commenting on national security and immigration reform, it is worth noting): “Yeah, well, I’m not, I’m not weighing in on these issues, as you know, because I’ve made the decision to get off the stage. And so I’m off the stage,” he told Rose.

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