This time around, he'll start with higher-name ID -- "I think we started off last time around at 18 percent and now we're pushing 75 to 80 percent" -- and more support from national Democrats, who were initially skeptical about his chances and didn't get heavily involved until mid-October. "I don't think they jumped in at all," Graves quipped of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, before quickly excusing them in a typical Minnesota-nice fashion: "There was lower-hanging fruit, I don't blame them."

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Inhofe, of course, believes his state deserves those resources, even though he voted down aid to Hurricane Sandy victims. On MSNBC, Chris Jansing confronted Inhofe about his calling the Sandy aid bill a “slush fund,” and the brazen right-winger insisted the two issues shouldn’t be linked.

“Let’s look at that, that was totally different,” Inhofe told Jansing. “They were getting things — for instance that was supposed to be in New Jersey, they had things in the Virgin Islands, they were fixing roads there, they were putting roofs on houses in Washington, D.C.; everyone was getting in and exploiting the tragedy taking place. That won’t happen in Oklahoma.”

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Inhofe contended on Tuesday that the Hurricane Sandy relief bill was different because it was filled with pork. “They were getting things, for instance, that was supposed to be in New Jersey," he said on MSNBC. "They had things in the Virgin Islands. They were fixing roads there, they were putting roofs on houses in Washington, D.C. Everybody was getting in and exploiting the tragedy that took place. That won’t happen in Oklahoma.”

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Clearly Obama is a horrible boss, and the White House is a toxic work environment, probably, where people are afraid to report bad news to their superiors. Just like Nixon, times ten thousand.

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"That's always been his position [to offset disaster aid]," Coburn spokesman John Hart told the Huffington Post. "He supported offsets to the bill funding the OKC bombing recovery effort."

Both Coburn and his colleague James Inhofe, also a Republican from Oklahoma, have repeatedly voted against federal disaster relief for various parts of the country, including, most recently, the aid package for Hurricane Sandy victims. Both have also opposed increasing FEMA's funding.

But, as the Huffington Post points out, Coburn and Inhofe have also previously supported disaster aid for their own state:

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It's because Obama is black, and "the American people are not going to tolerate the first black president being removed from office," according to Limbaugh.

h/t Media Matters

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“It’s not hard to recruit women to run; they are running,” Jankowski said Monday, the Washington Post reports. “I think sometimes our party does not value them as much.”

“It’s safe to say that there are institutional barriers. We've met with candidates who felt like they weren't part of the old boy network,” he continued. “It can be a bit of a male-dominated club at that level, and it’s important that they feel welcome and they’re given the resources.”

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“I don’t know what the issues will be next year. If I were predicting what’s likely to be the biggest issue in the 2014 election, I think it would be Obamacare,” he said on Meet The Press, the Washington Post reports. “I think it’s coming back big-time.”

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“Anyone who participated in this targeting of Americans for their political beliefs, anyone who knew about it, anyone who simply looked the other way, and anyone under whose watch this occurred needs to be fired,” CNN reports Jindal planned to say in a speech before Virginia Republicans on Saturday, according to his prepared remarks.

“But in this instance, it is the IRS, people in a position of public trust, who have violated the Constitution of the United States of America. You cannot take the freedom of law-abiding Americans, whether you disagree with them or not, and keep your own freedom. When you do that, you go to jail,” he continued.

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Semantic infiltration means one undermines one’s own position in negotiations by adopting unknowingly the terms which the adversary “infiltrates.”

As a conservative, Ikle drew most of his examples of semantic infiltration from liberal usages that became mainstream, like “affirmative action” for race- or gender-based preference policies. But in recent years, it is arguably the center-left that has suffered the most from the successful semantic infiltration of public discourse by loaded conservative terminology.

Witness the two terms “the welfare state” and “entitlements.” The right has managed to turn “welfare state,” once a neutral description for a modern system of economic security for individuals, into a pejorative phrase.

An even greater triumph of semantic infiltration by the right has been the universal use of the term “entitlements.” As used by conservatives and liberals alike, “entitlements” usually refers to three social insurance programs — two of them universal (Social Security and Medicare) and one means-tested (Medicaid).

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Less obvious? It’s bad for Republicans.

Now, in electoral terms, it can’t be bad for both parties, since electoral politics is a zero-sum game. Indeed, that’s sort of the problem for Republicans; obstruction of these nominations almost certainly has zero electoral effect. After all, most voters couldn’t tell you who the nominees for secretary of labor or to head the Environmental Protection Agency are, let alone the obscure rules Republicans are using to delay their confirmation.

So the effects of massive, across-the-board obstruction are going to be on policy, not elections. And that’s not a zero-sum game – and it will hurt Republicans and Republican-aligned groups, too.

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Legend and myth was important to ancient Roman society. They practiced augury, such as reading the way birds fly, then attributing bad situations to unhappy gods. In reality, their government (a republic, no less) was run by a few elites who made bad decisions. Americans tend to be similar in buying into myths, while a real culprit of our stagnant democracy is right before our eyes. Nero may have fiddled while Rome burned, but too many of us are focused on distractions -- like blaming Citizens United v. FEC for everything wrong with politics -- while political insiders rig the game.

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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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From the poll:

Republicans are much more likely to say they are following these news stories closely than are independents or in particular Democrats. There is a 21-percentage-point gap between Republicans and Democrats in terms of following the Benghazi story closely, and a 27-point gap on the IRS story.

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The version of the emails initially sent out last Friday purported to show that the State Department and the White House gave input into the talking points issued by the CIA following the attacks on the U.S. consulate. But on Wednesday the White House released 100 pages of emails that contradict this conclusion.

CBS News reports:

On Friday, Republicans leaked what they said was a quote from Rhodes: "We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don't want to undermine the FBI investigation."

But it turns out that in the actual email, Rhodes did not mention the State Department.

It read: "We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities, particularly the investigation."

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Gruenhagen was speaking on the House floor, and cited "facts from CPAC" showing that "in the last 16 years, there's been no global warming." He continued: "So members, I'd recommend that you keep breathing, OK? Because, you know, man-made global warming believes that exhaling causes global warming. I mean, the more you study it the more utter nonsense you see it is."

Watch, via Minnesota City Pages:

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The Denver Post reports:

Contacted Wednesday by The Denver Post, Tancredo said he has not yet made a final decision.

In 2010, Tancredo ran in a tumultuous gubernatorial contest as a third-party candidate, netting more than 35 percent of the vote in a lopsided Democratic victory by then-Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper. Republican candidate Dan Maes received 11 percent of the vote.

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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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“There are laws in place to prevent this type of abuse," Boehner continued. "Someone made a conscious decision to harass and to hold up these requests for tax-exempt status. I think we need to know who they are and whether they violated the law. Clearly someone violated the law."

On Tuesday, Attorney General Eric Holder said that he has ordered the FBI to investigate whether any criminal violations occurred. Holder is scheduled to appear before a House committee on Wednesday, where he will likely face questions about this scandal, as well as the Department of Justice's decision to subpoena phone records from the Associated Press.

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"This is not the first time we've seen this," Reid told reporters, according to the Huffington Post. "It wasn't long ago that the IRS inappropriately targeted the NAACP, Greenpeace and a California church that was progressive, called the All-Saints Church in Pasadena. It was interesting at that time, we didn't hear a single Republican grandstand the issue then. Where was their outrage when groups on the other side of the political spectrum were under attack?"

Reid emphasized that he believes the IRS's behavior was "inappropriate," adding: "I believed it then, I believe it now."

He continued that accusations about a Benghazi coverup by the Obama administration are "about smear politics and nothing else." Reid added: "Earlier this year, they didn't say a word when Republicans held up for months and months security funding of our embassies."

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