How Psychiatry Went Crazy

The "bible" of psychiatric diagnosis shapes—and deforms—both treatment and policy.

By CAROL TAVRIS, WSJ

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is often called the "Bible" of psychiatric diagnosis, and the term is apt. The DSM consists of instructions from on high; readers usually disagree in their interpretations of the text; and believing it is an act of faith.

At least the Bible lists only 10 Commandments; the DSM grows by leaps and bounds with every revision. The first edition, published by the American Psychiatric Association in 1952, was a spiral-bound pamphlet that described 11 categories of mental disorder, including brain syndromes, personality problems and psychotic disorders. (The final category, "Nondiagnostic Terms for the Hospital Record," contained Dead on Admission, the one diagnosis that psychiatrists have ever agreed on.) The DSM-II (1968) made homosexuality a mental disorder, a decision revoked by vote in 1973. In the general excitement about that progressive decision, few noted that voting didn't seem to be the most scientific way of determining mental illness. Narcissistic Personality Disorder was voted out in 1968 and voted back in 1980; where did it go for 12 years? Doctors don't vote on whether pneumonia is a disease.

The DSM-III (1980) was an effort to jettison outdated theories and terms such as "neurosis" and replace them with an objective list of disorders with agreed-upon symptoms. The DSM-IIIR (1987) was 567 pages and included nearly 300 disorders. The DSM-IV (1994, slightly revised in 2000) was 900 pages and contained nearly 400 disorders. The new DSM-5, with its modernized Arabic number, is 947 pages. It contains, along with serious mental illnesses, "binge-eating disorder" (whose symptoms include "eating when not feeling physically hungry"), "caffeine intoxication," "parent-child relational problem" and my favorite, "antidepressant discontinuation syndrome." Now psychiatrists can treat the symptoms of going off antidepressants, which is good because the expanded criteria for many disorders allows doctors to prescribe antidepressants more often for more problems. Gone is the "bereavement exemption," for example. You used to get two weeks after a loved one died before you could be diagnosed with major depression and medicated. Now you get two minutes.

(More here.)

Memo to GOP: Don’t Pretend You Care

by Kirsten Powers, The Daiy Beast, May 17, 2013 4:45 AM EDT

Republicans blasting Obama over the AP snooping scandal seem to have selective-memory disorder. They’ve been trying to nail journalists and leakers for years, writes Kirsten Powers.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus demanded Eric Holder's resignation Tuesday, saying the attorney general had "trampled on the First Amendment." This is rich. But there is more.

Preibus wrote in a statement that if Obama doesn’t fire Holder, “the message will be unmistakable: The President of the United States ... does not respect the role of a free press.” Let me save Priebus some time. We already know that Obama doesn’t respect the role of a free press. But neither does the GOP.

So, why the sudden interest? Whatever could make the GOP jump on a media bandwagon and express outrage over government overreach in the investigation of leaks?

You do the math.

A sense of shame does not seem to be a factor here. In what has become as predictable as the sunrise, Holder was up on the Hill this week, being lectured by Republican members of Congress who have wanted him fired since the day he was sworn in. GOP Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin grilled Holder over the AP debacle, saying he wanted to "pin down" who authorized the subpoenas that yielded the AP records. When Holder explained he was recused from discussing the matter for legal reasons, Sensenbrenner nonsensically suggested that Holder go to the Truman Museum and "take a picture of the thing on his desk that said 'the buck stops here.'"

(More here.)

Without Water, Revolution

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, NYT

TEL ABYAD, Syria — I just spent a day in this northeast Syrian town. It was terrifying — much more so than I anticipated — but not because we were threatened in any way by the Free Syrian Army soldiers who took us around or by the Islamist Jabhet al-Nusra fighters who stayed hidden in the shadows. It was the local school that shook me up.

As we were driving back to the Turkish border, I noticed a school and asked the driver to turn around so I could explore it. It was empty — of students. But war refugees had occupied the classrooms and little kids’ shirts and pants were drying on a line strung across the playground. The basketball backboard was rusted, and a local parent volunteered to give me a tour of the bathrooms, which he described as disgusting. Classes had not been held in two years. And that is what terrified me. Men with guns I’m used to. But kids without books, teachers or classes for a long time — that’s trouble. Big trouble.

They grow up to be teenagers with too many guns and too much free time, and I saw a lot of them in Tel Abyad. They are the law of the land here now, but no two of them wear the same uniform, and many are just in jeans. These boys bravely joined the adults of their town to liberate it from the murderous tyranny of Bashar al-Assad, but now the war has ground to a stalemate, so here, as in so many towns across Syria, life is frozen in a no-man’s land between order and chaos. There is just enough patched-up order for people to live — some families have even rigged up bootleg stills that refine crude oil into gasoline to keep cars running — but not enough order to really rebuild, to send kids to school or to start businesses.

So Syria as a whole is slowly bleeding to death of self-inflicted gunshot wounds. You can’t help but ask whether it will ever be a unified country again and what kind of human disaster will play out here if a whole generation grows up without school.

(More here.)

President Obama exercises a fluid grip on the levers of power

By Philip Rucker and Peter Wallsten, WashPost, Published: May 18

President Obama’s professed ignorance of the targeting of conservatives by one government agency and his support of tracking journalists’ sources by another highlight one of the great paradoxes of his presidency: Sometimes he uses his office as aggressively as anyone who’s held it; other times he seems unacquainted with the work of his own administration.

The controversies over the Internal Revenue Service’s scrutiny of tea party and other conservative groups and the Justice Department’s surveillance of Associated Press journalists are only the latest examples of Obama’s a la carte governing style.

Obama has been willing to push the bounds of executive power when it comes to making life-and-death decisions about drone strikes on suspected terrorists or instituting new greenhouse gas emission standards for cars.

But at other times he has been skittish. When immigration activists first urged him to halt deportations of many illegal immigrants, for instance, Obama said he didn’t have the authority to do so. He eventually gave in after months of public protest and private pressure from immigrant and Hispanic advocates, granting relief to certain people who had been brought to the United States as children.

(More here.)

Rough times for Obama? Sure. But Nixonian? Please.

By Matthew Dallek, WashPost, Published: May 17

Matthew Dallek is an associate academic director at the University of California Washington Center and the author of “The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan’s First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics.”

When a reporter asked Jay Carney this past week how his boss felt about the comparisons he was drawing to one Richard M. Nixon, the White House press secretary shot back: “I don’t have a reaction from President Obama. I can tell you that the people who make those kind of comparisons need to check their history.”

Actually, if Carney checked his history, he’d realize that the “Nixonian” accusation has been a rite of passage for presidents over the past four decades, particularly in their second terms. Critics have routinely charged that presidents’ conduct has demeaned the office, reaching levels of malfeasance not seen since, of course, Watergate.

And with the disputes over the deadly attack in Benghazi, Libya, the targeting of tea party groups by the IRS and the Justice Department’s secret gathering of Associated Press phone records, the Nixon comparisons are rife.

(More here.)

Confusion and Staff Troubles Rife at I.R.S. Office in Ohio

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE, DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI and MICHAEL LUO, NYT

During the summer of 2010, the dozen or so accountants and tax agents of Group 7822 of the Internal Revenue Service office in Cincinnati got a directive from their manager. A growing number of organizations identifying themselves as part of the Tea Party had begun applying for tax exemptions, the manager said, advising the workers to be on the lookout for them and other groups planning to get involved in elections.

The specialists, hunched over laptops on the office’s fourth floor, rarely discussed politics, one former supervisor said. Low-level employees in what many in the I.R.S. consider a backwater, they processed thousands of applications a year, mostly from charities like private schools or hospitals.

For months, the Tea Party cases sat on the desk of a lone specialist, who used “political sounding” criteria — words like “patriots,” “we the people” — as a way to search efficiently through the flood of applications for groups that might not quality for exemptions, according to the I.R.S. inspector general. “Triage,” the agency’s acting chief described it.

As a grim-faced President Obama denounced the “inexcusable” actions of the I.R.S. last week and lawmakers of both parties lined up in Washington on Friday to accuse it of an array of misconduct, everything seemed so clear: the nation’s tax agency had deliberately targeted conservative activists, violating the public trust — and perhaps the law.

(More here.)

Targeting Texas

By THOMAS B. EDSALL, NYT

While the Republican Party struggles to resolve fratricidal conflict over gay marriage and immigration reform, there is another elephant in the room: Texas, the last big-state bastion of the right. Neglected by national Democrats since 1992, when Bill Clinton’s campaign decided to write it off, Texas has emerged as a prime target for partisan realignment.

A group of Democratic operatives, led by two veterans of the 2012 Obama campaign, Jeremy Bird and Jenn Brown, is determined to bring Texas back into the Democratic column. Bird and Brown have put together an independent expenditure committee — Battleground Texas — to combine advances in high-tech microtargeting and digital communication with the volunteer mobilization that characterized Obama’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns.

Battleground Texas has put the fear of God into the Texas Republican Party.

In a speech on April 15 before the McLennan County Republican Club, Greg Abbott, the Republican Attorney General and a potential candidate for governor in 2014, declared that Battleground Texas represents a bigger danger to the state than Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea:

One thing that requires ongoing vigilance is the reality that the state of Texas is coming under a new assault, an assault far more dangerous than what the leader of North Korea threatened when he said he was going to add Austin, Texas, as one of the recipients of his nuclear weapons.

 (More here.)

Five myths about Benghazi

By Michael Hirsh, Published: May 16, WashPost, 

Michael Hirsh is the National Journal’s chief correspondent.
 
by Michael Hirsh The events surrounding the deaths of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012, look dramatically different depending on your politics. Republicans tend to see a cover-up and a scandal. Democrats see an attempt to damage President Obama and former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton. A Pew poll suggests that the public is divided as well, with 40 percent saying the administration has been dishonest, 37 percent saying it has told the truth, and 23 percent saying they’re not sure. Let’s assess what we do and don’t know.

1. U.N. Ambassador Susan E. Rice gave a deliberately false account of the attack.

This is ground zero in the alleged scandal. Conspiracy theorists contend the administration covered up evidence that Stevens was killed in an organized terrorist attack because Obama, during the 2012 campaign, claimed he had “decimated” al-Qaeda. On Sunday talk shows five days after the attack, Rice gave interviews based on talking points supplied by U.S. intelligence agencies; she suggested that Stevens’s death resulted from “spontaneous” protests that spread from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, provoked by a movie trailer lampooning the prophet Muhammad.

In response to charges of a cover-up, the White House this past week released 100 pages of e-mails that show the State Department sought to remove references to possible links to Ansar al-Sharia, an Islamist group tied to al-Qaeda, and to earlier CIA warnings of extremist threats in Benghazi and eastern Libya.

Was there a cover-up? It does appear White House spokesman Jay Carney wasn’t giving the full story when he said, at a Nov. 28 briefing, that the White House and State Department had made only a “single adjustment” to the talking points, changing the word “consulate” to “diplomatic facility.” It is also possible that State wanted to tone down or remove passages that might cast the department or Clinton in a bad light.

(More here.)

The political party that cried 'Kenyan'

Resonance Resistant

By CHARLES M. BLOW, NYT

Whether one thinks the demiscandals being howled about in Washington should or should not resonate more widely, they don’t.

According to a Gallup report released Thursday, “The amount of attention Americans are paying to the I.R.S. and the Benghazi situations is well below the average for news stories Gallup has tracked over the years.” (The Associated Press phone records case wasn’t mentioned.) Why might this be? I have a few theories:

CREDIBILITY

People know that the Internal Revenue Service is the conservatives’ bogeyman. It’s the agency that collects the taxes that Republicans hate so much. Some Americans see taxes as, at worst, a necessary nuisance; Republicans see them as an absolute evil. The I.R.S. is the agency that collects the wealth from “us” for the government to redistribute to “them.” As National Journal pointed out Friday, “The agency also implements much of the country’s social policy through the tax code.” We all know that anything with “social” in its name activates the conservative gag reflex.

And on the Associated Press front, it just doesn’t ring true to have Republicans standing up as defenders of the “lame-stream media.” It’s like the person with the club feigning common cause with the baby seal. People just don’t buy it.

Furthermore, Republicans have exhibited a near-pathological need to say anything, no matter how outlandish, that would invalidate the Obama presidency. This has left them with little credibility now that there may be legitimate problems. This is the story of the political party that cried “Kenyan.”

(More here.)

Politically flagellating the IRS

Hard of Hearings

By GAIL COLLINS, NYT

Before Congress is finished with the Internal Revenue Service, there’s a serious danger some of us are going to wind up feeling sorry for the auditors.

And, honestly, that is not the way we were planning on spending the spring. Especially since it appears that there are people making decisions at the I.R.S. who have the intelligence of a wet Frisbee.

But, so far, the Congressional hearings of outrage have been even less sympathetic. Perhaps you didn’t have time to spend much of your Friday watching the House Ways and Means Committee grill Steven Miller, the newly axed I.R.S. head, about the agency’s targeting of groups with names like “Tea Party” for unwelcome in-depth attention.

Let me summarize:

Committee Chairman Dave Camp: Thank you all for coming here today. Our topic is abuses in the Internal Revenue Service, an entity that I believe is about the size of China, with long, spiky tentacles that reach out and squash all the hopes and dreams of the American people. My first question, Mr. Miller, is whether your agency is so enormous and evil that it will one day destroy the nation as we know it, or whether it already has, and this committee is actually just sitting on the scattered shards and rubble of what once was a great republic.

Steven Miller: Thank you for inviting me here today. I would like to begin by apologizing for mistakes that have been made. Now I am prepared to begin answering your questions, and then gradually fade into sullen exhaustion.

(More here.)

Trying Unlikely Comeback, Ex-Iran President Strikes Chord With Public

By THOMAS ERDBRINK, NYT

TEHRAN — There was a time when Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani seemed to have it all. A founder of the Islamic Revolution, he headed a family empire that owned the second biggest Iranian airline, Mahan, had a near monopoly on the lucrative pistachio trade and controlled the country’s largest private university, Azad.

But then things started to go wrong. Iranians, angered by his wealth, back-room dealings and supposed involvement in the killing of dissidents, nicknamed him “Akbar Shah,” after the old Persian rulers who sat on velvet cushions in lush courtyards. Political rivals, jealous of his grip on the economy, seized on his support for reformists and labeled him an “aristocrat,” a “capitalist” and a supporter of “American Islam”

His political stock fell so low that in 2002 he could not even muster the votes to win a seat in Parliament. He suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 2005 presidential election, and two of his children ended up in jail. His speech in favor of greater freedom during the 2009 protests alienated him from Iran’s conservative clerics and military commanders.

Now, from the fringes of Iran’s closed circle of power, Mr. Rafsanjani, 79, is attempting a comeback, entering his name last Saturday for the June 14 presidential elections. Though once widely reviled, his reputation as an economic pragmatist and modernizer — by Iranian standards, anyway — seems to be hitting a responsive chord with the public.

(More here.)

The Koch Brothers at Work

Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times — Petroleum coke, a waste byproduct of refining oil sands oil, is piling up along the Detroit River.

A Black Mound of Canadian Oil Waste Is Rising Over Detroit

By IAN AUSTEN, NYT
Published: May 17, 2013

WINDSOR, Ontario — Assumption Park gives residents of this city lovely views of the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit skyline. Lately they’ve been treated to another sight: a three-story pile of petroleum coke covering an entire city block on the other side of the Detroit River.

Detroit’s ever-growing black mountain is the unloved, unwanted and long overlooked byproduct of Canada’s oil sands boom.

And no one knows quite what to do about it, except Koch Carbon, which owns it.

The company is controlled by Charles and David Koch, wealthy industrialists who back a number of conservative and libertarian causes including activist groups that challenge the science behind climate change. The company sells the high-sulfur, high-carbon waste, usually overseas, where it is burned as fuel.

(More here.)

Harry Reid Focuses On July For The 'Nuclear Option'

The Huffington Post | By Gabrielle Dunkley Posted: 05/17/2013 2:33 pm EDT | Updated: 05/17/2013 4:31 pm EDT

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has told top advisers that he is prepared to take action if Senate Republicans block three upcoming nominations, the Washington Post reported on Friday.

Reid is reportedly focusing on the month of July to approach filibuster reform and possibly execute the "nuclear option," which would change the Senate rules and no longer require 60 votes to overcome a filibuster.

“This would take away the right to filibuster on nominations,” a senior Senate Democratic aide told the Washington Post. “All executive branch and judicial nominations would be subject to majority votes. He would not do it on legislative items.”

A Senate Democratic aide confirmed the Post report to HuffPost and said that Reid met recently with Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), a leader of the push to reform the filibuster, to lay out his thinking going forward.

Reid has consistently said publicly that he reserves the right to change Senate rules if he considers the GOP to be abusing the ones left in place by the bipartisan agreement in January.

(More here.)

Inheritance: A Sin Against an Efficient Market

By William Handke
We Could Be Great

With the exception of theft, inheritance might be the most inefficient economic transaction that humanity has devised. Consider this: with both theft and inheritance, the recipient of wealth does not have to create any amount of economic benefit in order to be rewarded. At best, the heir receives compensation for effectively doing nothing (being born). At worst, the thief receives compensation for doing something harmful (injuring someone during a robbery). Both transactions serve as examples of how the free market naturally creates pockets of inefficiency: rewarding individuals who haven’t economically earned a reward. Both are problems, but only theft is actually addressed as such.

Though certainly not deserving of criminalization, the problem of inheritance does demand action. If unchecked, the inefficiency it creates will continue to generate negative ripple effects throughout our economy and social unrest within our culture.

Before discussing inheritance’s harmful effects, it is useful to understand its development. The problem of inheritance was nurtured by the advent of money. Under a barter-based economy, wealth was passed-on in the form of physical goods, animals, or land – things that are naturally harder to store, transfer, and maintain. On top of that, it was more difficult to pass on the income–generating properties of these goods because the activities that create further wealth (e.g. turning commodities into finished goods, running a farm, developing land, etc.) require a certain amount of ability and business acumen – traits which, unlike wealth, cannot be transferred to an heir.

With money, the impediments to wealth transfer and the skill requirements for additional wealth creation are sharply lessened. The lines of numbers in modern banking computer systems require no maintenance to store, nor effort to transfer. Moreover, a large wealth management industry now exists, the sole purpose of which is to turn big pools of money into bigger ones, without the owners of them having to lift a finger. The result of these innovations is self-sustaining dynastic wealth on a large scale, such that many fortunate families than thrive in grandiloquent fashion from birth, never burdened by the necessity to create any semblance of economic benefit.

(Continued here.)

Holder vs. the Associated Press

Did the A.P. Leak ‘Put the American People at Risk’? 

By ANDREW ROSENTHAL, NYT

Attorney General Eric Holder tried the other day to justify the government’s secret spying on The Associated Press. He condemned an apparent leak to the A.P. regarding a foiled (remember that word, foiled) terrorist plot hatched in Yemen, which he said posed a dire threat to national security.

It was not just a “very serious leak,” Mr. Holder said. It was “a very, very serious leak.” And that’s not all. “This is among the top two or three serious leaks that I’ve ever seen,” he said, one that “put the American people at risk.” Finding out who put the entire population in jeopardy “required very aggressive action,” he said.

Was it really that bad?

Here is what actually happened: The A.P., one of the most reliable and journalistically conservative news organizations around (full disclosure: I worked for them for a decade) had a story about the foiled plot and, as per usual, gave the administration a heads-up. National security officials asked The A.P. to hang onto the story for a while because publishing it at that time would have posed some unknown danger.

That’s fair enough. Any editor who’s worked with national security-related exclusives has had that happen. When I was Washington Editor and then Foreign Editor for The Times, I was involved in decisions to hold stories. The most basic imperative is not to publish articles that would put actual soldiers’ lives at risk. There are also more intangible kinds of reasons for holding a story — but letting the government avoid embarrassment is most definitely not among them.

(More here.)

The legality of going after the bad guys

Debating the Legal Basis for the War on Terror

By CHARLIE SAVAGE, NYT

WASHINGTON — A top Pentagon official said Thursday that the evolving war against Al Qaeda was likely to continue “at least 10 to 20 years” and urged Congress not to modify the statute that provides its legal basis.

“As of right now, it suits us very well,” Michael A. Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations, said, referring to the “authorization to use military force,” often referred to as the A.U.M.F., enacted by Congress in 2001.

The statute authorized war against the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and those who harbored them — that is, Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Lawmakers are considering enacting a new authorization, because the original Qaeda network has been largely decimated, while the current threat is increasingly seen as arising from terrorist groups in places like Yemen that share Al Qaeda’s ideology but have no connection to the 2001 attacks.

(More here.)

Searching for Godot

Nope, Still No Cover-Up

By ANDREW ROSENTHAL, NYT

Now that the White House has released 100-pages worth of emails between the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency over how to craft post-Benghazi talking points, we know three things.

First, this White House has no clue how to handle a public relations crisis; it should have released those emails ages ago. Second, the more we learn, the clearer it is that there was no cover-up. Third, the Republicans in Congress don’t care about the truth of the matter. They’re going to keep attacking President Obama (to cause him pain right now), and Hillary Clinton’s State Department (to cause her pain if she runs in 2016).

On Wednesday, pretty much every dispassionate news organization reported that the newly released emails do not contain evidence of a scandal. President Obama’s national security team did not try to alter the talking points to shield Mr. Obama’s re-election chances.

As The Times put it, “While the e-mails portrayed White House officials as being sensitive to the concerns of the State Department, they suggest that Mr. Obama’s aides mostly mediated a bureaucratic tug of war between the State Department and the C.I.A. over how much to disclose—all under heavy time constraints because of the demands from Capitol Hill.”

(More here.)

How the White House Scandals Could Hurt Republicans, Too

By enraging the base and strengthening the faction least willing to compromise with Obama, the IRS and Benghazi affairs could hurt a GOP shot at the presidency.

by Ronald Brownstein, National Journal
Updated: May 16, 2013 | 4:05 p.m.
May 16, 2013 | 1:25 p.m.

Scandals large and small are a remarkably common, if unwelcome, house guest for second-term presidents. But President Obama may not prove to be the only one hurt by the eruption of controversies around the Benghazi attack, the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups, and the Justice Department’s seizure of Associated Press phone records.

The government is a very big institution, and the longer you control it, the greater the odds that someone somewhere does something stupid.

In modern times, scandals have routinely afflicted presidential second terms, either because of arrogance, inattention, or the sheer weight of probability: The government is a very big institution, and the longer you control it, the greater the odds that someone somewhere does something stupid. The list of recent presidents facing post-reelection travails extends from Dwight Eisenhower (a gift scandal that claimed his chief of staff), Ronald Reagan (Iran-Contra), George W. Bush (“Plame-gate”), Bill Clinton (impeachment over Monica Lewinsky) and, of course, Richard Nixon, who resigned amid Watergate.

Pending future revelations, the impact of Obama’s difficulties with Benghazi, the IRS, and AP seems pointed toward the less momentous end of that range. That trajectory looks most assured on Benghazi, where the sharpest questions have centered on whether the administration airbrushed its talking points. That may be disappointing behavior, but it probably won’t enrage many Americans beyond those who already dislike Obama.

The IRS investigation is the most volatile. Any targeting of political groups for special tax scrutiny justifiably inflames Americans’ suspicions. Obama’s defenses are strengthened by the indication in this week’s inspector-general report that mid-level IRS managers attempted to broaden the scrutiny beyond conservative organizations to the legitimate issue of whether left and right political groups were misusing their tax-exempt status. But Obama will be hurt—badly—if further investigation finds that administration officials beyond the IRS encouraged politically targeted enforcement.

(More here.)

Stretching the law to hide political donors

IRS problem started with vague tax exemption rules

IRS was ill-equipped to handle the deluge of tax-exempt applications from 'social welfare' organizations and to police their political activities, experts say.

By Matea Gold, Washington Bureau
4:44 PM PDT, May 16, 2013

WASHINGTON — In spring 2010, agents in the Cincinnati office of the Internal Revenue Service, which handles applications for tax-exempt status, faced a surge of filings by new advocacy groups, with little guidance on how to treat them.

Their decision to deal with the problem by singling out tea party and other conservative groups for extra scrutiny has now triggered a criminal inquiry, congressional investigations, the departure of two top IRS officials and the naming of a new acting commissioner Thursday.

For former IRS staff and tax experts, the case confirms what they view as one of the agency's long-standing weaknesses: its inability to cope with the growing number of tax-exempt advocacy groups that appear to stretch the law to engage in politics.

With the IRS now under fire for its practices, campaign finance lawyers anticipate that the agency will shy away even more from regulating such organizations.

(More here.)

Blowing the search for the underwear bomb guy

Leak ended informant's rare opportunity, U.S. officials say

Saudi-born Briton had gained the trust of terrorists in the Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda and helped foil a bomb plot, they say, but his work was cut short by Associated Press and newspaper reports.

By Ken Dilanian, Los Angeles Times
4:46 PM PDT, May 16, 2013

WASHINGTON — Disclosure of a highly classified intelligence operation in Yemen last year compromised an exceedingly rare and valuable espionage achievement: an informant who had earned the trust of hardened terrorists, according to U.S. officials.

The operation received new scrutiny this week after the Justice Department disclosed it had obtained telephone records for calls to and from more than 20 lines belonging to the Associated Press news service and its journalists in April and May 2012 in a high-level investigation of the alleged leak of classified information.

The informant, a British citizen born in Saudi Arabia, had been recruited by British intelligence to operate as a double agent within the group Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, one of the most dangerous franchises of the Al Qaeda terrorist network.

His access led to the U.S. drone strike that killed a senior Al Qaeda leader, Fahd Mohammed Ahmed Quso, on May 6, 2012. U.S. officials say Quso helped direct the terrorist attack that killed 17 sailors aboard the U.S. guided-missile destroyer Cole in a Yemeni harbor in October 2000.

(More here.)

FBI seeks source of prostitution, corruption allegations against Sen. Robert Menendez

By Carol D. Leonnig and Peter Wallsten, Thursday, May 16, 4:30 PM

A pair of FBI agents met on a recent weekday morning with brothers Alfonso “Alfy” and Jose “Pepe” Fanjul in the Palm Beach headquarters of their sugar and real estate empire.

The investigators’ questions struck a discordant note in the Fanjuls’ sun-filled offices overlooking a yacht-filled waterway, according to three people familiar with the meeting: Were the brothers or any of their associates familiar with a plot to bring down a United States senator?

Months after the FBI began probing allegations against Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), investigators are now looking at whether someone set out to smear him while he was running for reelection last year and then ascending to his new post as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, according to four people briefed on the inquiry.

The scene of federal agents interviewing two of the world’s wealthiest sugar barons, whose business holdings include Domino Sugar, underscores the unusual twists of the saga centered on Menendez, who has been battling allegations that he did special favors for a major campaign donor.

(More here.)

Early E-Mails on Benghazi Show Internal Divisions

By MARK LANDLER, ERIC SCHMITT and MICHAEL D. SHEAR, NYT

WASHINGTON — E-mails released by the White House on Wednesday revealed a fierce internal jostling over the government’s official talking points in the aftermath of last September’s attack in Benghazi, Libya, not only between the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, but at the highest levels of the C.I.A.

The 100 pages of e-mails showed a disagreement between David H. Petraeus, then the director of the C.I.A., and his deputy, Michael J. Morell, over how much to disclose in the talking points, which were used by Susan E. Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations, in television appearances days after the attack.

Mr. Morell, administration officials said, deleted a reference in the draft version of the talking points to C.I.A. warnings of extremist threats in Libya, which State Department officials objected to because they feared it would reflect badly on them.

Mr. Morell, officials said, acted on his own and not in response to pressure from the State Department. But when the final draft of the talking points was sent to Mr. Petraeus, he dismissed them, saying “Frankly, I’d just as soon not use this,” adding that the heavily scrubbed account would not satisfy the House Democrat who had requested it.

(More here.)

Aiming for the wrong target

The scandals are falling apart

By Ezra Klein, WashPost, Updated: May 16, 2013

Things go wrong in government. Sometimes it’s just bad luck. Sometimes it’s rank incompetence. Sometimes it’s criminal wrongdoing. Most of the time you never hear about it. Or, if you do hear about it, the media eventually gets bored talking about it (see warming, global).

But every so often an instance of government wrongdoing sprouts wings and becomes something quite exciting: A political scandal.

The crucial ingredient for a scandal is the prospect of high-level White House involvement and wide political repercussions. Government wrongdoing is boring. Scandals can bring down presidents, decide elections and revive down-and-out political parties. Scandals can dominate American politics for months at a time.

On Tuesday, it looked like we had three possible political scandals brewing. Two days later, with much more evidence available, it doesn’t look like any of them will pan out. There’ll be more hearings, and more bad press for the Obama administration, and more demands for documents. But — and this is a key qualification — absent more revelations, the scandals that could reach high don’t seem to include any real wrongdoing, whereas the ones that include real wrongdoing don’t reach high enough. Let’s go through them.

(More here.)

The true tragedy of the IRS 'scandal': Missing the real problem

Behind the I.R.S. Mess: A Campaign-Finance Scandal 

By STEVEN RATTNER, NYT

Let’s stipulate that the scandal involving the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative nonprofit groups portrays government as if drawn in caricature — an almost Keystone Kops-style comedy of errors on the part of low-level staffers, with a vein of possible political bias.

Of course, the matter needs to be fully investigated, those responsible need to be held accountable and procedures need to be put in place to ensure that nothing like this can happen again.

But let’s also remember what the I.R.S. brouhaha is not. Unlike the abuse of the I.R.S. by President Richard M. Nixon, in this case there’s no evidence that anyone in the White House had any involvement in — nor even any knowledge of — what was going on within the agency’s Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division.

In the post-Watergate years, legislation was passed to protect the I.R.S. against political meddling from the executive branch. That included — unusually — a five-year term for the I.R.S. commissioner.

(More here.)

Big week for the GOP, not so much for the Prez

On the Plus Side ...

By GAIL COLLINS, NYT

Let’s try to come up with some positive thoughts about the recent political fortunes of the Obama White House:

• Economy’s getting a little better. Deficit’s dropping. 
• Bill Clinton had a really terrible second term and look how well things turned out for him. 
• Nobody in the administration has been caught driving to Canada with Bo the dog strapped to the car roof. 

It’s been quite a week, what with the I.R.S. scandal, the Benghazi controversy and revelations about the Justice Department’s sweep of The Associated Press’s phone records. Plus, the Russians came up with an alleged American spy in a bad wig who they said was caught carrying a compass, an atlas of Moscow and a ridiculous traitor-recruitment letter. That one could be a set-up, but if it’s real, then we are just going to have to cancel the summer.

(More here.)

The liberals' mea culpa

Scandalous vs. Scandal Lust

By CHARLES M. BLOW, NYT

I have watched in recent days as a parade of conservatives have used specific and real governmental missteps to justify their wide-ranging paranoia and irrational hostilities. “Aha!”

You have to take their glee in sorrow with a grain of salt. For them this is more about their scandal lust than what’s scandalous. These people have been searching for a scandal — Kenyan birth certificates and a Michelle Obama “whitey” tape — for years. The fact that they now have something solid and not made of sand is going to make sad souls happy. That’s to be expected.

What’s not to be expected — but has become depressingly predictable — is to watch liberals rending their garments and gnashing their teeth in woe-is-us doom chanting. The overreaction is exhausting and embarrassing.

Let’s say what this confluence of missteps is and what it is not — at least as the evidence now suggests.

(More here.)

See no evil, hear no evil

Eric Holder’s abdication

By Dana Milbank, WashPost, Published: May 15

As the nation’s top law enforcement official, Eric Holder is privy to all kinds of sensitive information. But he seems to be proud of how little he knows.

Why didn’t his Justice Department inform the Associated Press, as the law requires, before pawing through reporters’ phone records?

“I do not know,” the attorney general told the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday afternoon, “why that was or was not done. I simply don’t have a factual basis to answer that question.”

Why didn’t the DOJ seek the AP’s cooperation, as the law also requires, before issuing subpoenas?

“I don’t know what happened there,” Holder replied. “I was recused from the case.”

(More here.)

As American as apple pie: Tax-exempt political campaigning

The Real I.R.S. Scandal

By SHEILA KRUMHOLZ and ROBERT WEINBERGER
WASHINGTON, NYT

NEWS that employees at the Internal Revenue Service targeted groups with “Tea Party” or “patriot” in their name for special scrutiny has raised pious alarms among some lawmakers and editorial writers.

Yes, the I.R.S. may have been worse than clumsy in considering an avalanche of applications for nonprofit status under the tax code, and that deserves scrutiny whether or not the agency’s employees were spurred by partisan motives. After all, some of these “tea party” groups are most likely not innocent nonprofit organizations devoted to the cultural significance of hot beverages — or to other, more civic, virtues. Rather, they and others are groups that may be illegally spending a majority of their resources on political activity while manipulating the tax code to hide their donors and evade taxes (the unwritten rule being that no more than 49 percent of a group’s resources can be used for political purposes).

The near vertical ascent in political spending by these “dark money” groups was prompted by the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in the Citizens United case, among others, freeing them to be more active in this realm.

And it’s a bipartisan scandal, though it’s hard to tell that judging by the names some groups have adopted — as the I.R.S. should know. Can you tell which of these lean left and which ones right? Patriot Majority USA, Crossroads GPS, American Future Fund and the Citizens for Strength and Security Fund. (Nos. 1 and 4 are liberal, 2 and 3 are conservative.)''

(More here.)

Let's stop screwin' around: Time to bring back Glass-Steagall

Big Banks Get Break in Rules to Limit Risks 

By BEN PROTESS, NYT
9:33 p.m. | Updated

Under pressure from Wall Street lobbyists, federal regulators have agreed to soften a rule intended to rein in the banking industry’s domination of a risky market.

The changes to the rule, which will be announced on Thursday, could effectively empower a few big banks to continue controlling the derivatives market, a main culprit in the financial crisis.

The $700 trillion market for derivatives — contracts that derive their value from an underlying asset like a bond or an interest rate — allow companies to either speculate in the markets or protect against risk.

It is a lucrative business that, until now, has operated in the shadows of Wall Street rather than in the light of public exchanges. Just five banks hold more than 90 percent of all derivatives contracts.

Yet allowing such a large and important market to operate as a private club came under fire in 2008. Derivatives contracts pushed the insurance giant American International Group to the brink of collapse before it was rescued by the government.

(More here.)

An Onset of Woes Raises Questions on Obama Vision

By PETER BAKER, NYT

WASHINGTON — Thwarted on Capitol Hill, stymied in the Middle East and now beset by scandal, President Obama has reached a point just six months after a heady re-election where the second term he had hoped for has collided with the second term he actually has.

Mr. Obama emerged from a heated campaign last November with renewed confidence that he could shape the next four years with a vision of activist government as a force for good in American society. But the controversies of recent days have reinforced fears of an overreaching government while calling into question Mr. Obama’s ability to master his own presidency.

The challenges underscore a paradox about the 44th president. He presides over a government that to critics appears ever more intrusive, dictating health care choices, playing politics with the Internal Revenue Service and snooping into journalists’ phone records. Yet at times, Mr. Obama comes across as something of a bystander occupying the most powerful office in the world, buffeted by partisanship and forces beyond his control.

On Wednesday, announcing the departure of the acting director of the I.R.S., he portrayed himself as an onlooker to the scandal, albeit one with the power to force changes. “Americans have a right to be angry about it, and I’m angry about it,” he said.

(More here.)

A New 'Smart Rifle' Decides When To Shoot And Rarely Misses

by Mark Dewey, NPR

May 15, 2013 4:47 PM

A new rifle goes on sale on Wednesday, and it's not like any other. It uses lasers and computers to make shooters very accurate. A startup gun company in Texas developed the rifle, which is so effective that some in the shooting community say it should not be sold to the public.

It's called the TrackingPoint rifle. On a firing range just outside Austin in the city of Liberty Hill, a novice shooter holds one and takes aim at a target 500 yards away. Normally it takes years of practice to hit something at that distance. But this shooter nails it on the first try.

The rifle's scope features a sophisticated color graphics display. The shooter locks a laser on the target by pushing a small button by the trigger. It's like a video game. But here's where it's different: You pull the trigger but the gun decides when to shoot. It fires only when the weapon has been pointed in exactly the right place, taking into account dozens of variables, including wind, shake and distance to the target.

The rifle has a built-in laser range finder, a ballistics computer and a Wi-Fi transmitter to stream live video and audio to a nearby iPad. Every shot is recorded so it can be replayed, or posted to YouTube or Facebook.

(More here.)

Christian, Republican meteorologist says climate change is real

Meteorologist Paul Douglas talks climate change at Senior Expo

By Robb Murray
rmurray@mankatofreepress.com

The Free Press, Mankato, MNMay 14, 2013

Meteorologist Paul Douglas says he isn't your typical voice for action in the climate change debate.

“I'm a Christian, I'm a Republican,” he told an audience of several hundred attendees at the ninth annual Senior Expo in Mankato. “And I believe climate change is one of the greatest challenges we've ever faced. We're just seeing the tip of the iceberg. We're going to be seeing more crazy weather.”

With all the charm that made him one of Minnesota's favorite forecasters, Douglas made a case for taking climate change seriously.

Douglas, who rose to Minnesota fame after getting a job at KARE-11 in 1983, said he noticed in the 1990s that something odd was happening with the planet's weather patterns. More than ever, weather was hitting extremes in a way it never had.

“It was like Mother Nature lost her equilibrium, and now we're floundering somewhat,” he said. “This week, we're gonna go from frost on Mother's Day, to 100 degrees in two days. I've never seen that.”

He says skeptics, meanwhile, will sound their usual refrain: “They'll say, 'Where's you climate change, Paul? It's snowing in May.' To that I say, 'Can you see the entire globe from your window?'”

The problem with most skepticism is that people make judgments about climate change without having the facts, by listening to someone who doesn't have the facts (such as talk radio), or by making assumptions about global weather trends based merely on what's happening in their backyard.

Armed with facts, he says, any reasonable person must conclude that climate change not only is real, but that humans are contributing to it.

(More here.)

While Republicans Rant About Benghazi and IRS, Public Mostly Yawns

Benghazi and IRS controversies have Republicans up in arms, but they might not hurt President Obama’s approval ratings

by Charlie Cook, National Journal
Updated: May 14, 2013 | 7:17 a.m.
May 13, 2013 | 9:30 p.m.

President Obama and his administration now find themselves in the middle of not one but two tough situations: the tragic killing of four Americans at a U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, and the Internal Revenue Service’s scrutiny of tea-party and other conservative groups. At best, they are cases of bad mishandling and embarrassment; at worst, they rise to the level of legitimate and consequential scandals. At this point, the significance of each is more in the eye of the beholder. Liberals and Democrats tend to de-emphasize both affairs, while many conservatives and Republicans think that each rises to the level of impeachment. It will take time to know which end of this ridiculously broad spectrum of assessments proves to be more accurate.

Whether the White House is in Democratic or Republican hands, we have to put up with a degree of selective outrage from one side and the turning of a blind eye from the other. Democrats who were quick to pounce on any possible transgression during George W. Bush’s presidency are noticeably quiet these days. At the same time, one wonders whether the same Republicans who are frothing over Benghazi would have been quite as vigilant had they been in Congress after the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in October 1983, which killed 220 U.S. Marines, 18 sailors, and three Army soldiers in the largest single-day loss of American military since Vietnam and the largest number of Marine Corps fatalities since the Battle of Iwo Jima. By the end of December 1983, hearings and investigations were complete, reports had been issued, and the tragic episode soon became history (other than to the families and friends of those lost). In today’s political culture, such sad events have considerably longer shelf lives.

Those with a more historical bent immediately understand that presidential second terms amount to a political Bermuda Triangle. Scandals, wars, and recessions have been the scourge of post-World War II presidents from Dwight Eisenhower through George W. Bush, and if it wasn’t one of those three problems, it was two. If Yogi Berra were a political commentator, he might say that “it’s like déjá [sic] vu, all over again,” but it seems a little early to pronounce that just yet.

Perhaps the best way to determine whether either (or both) of these stories is starting to resonate with the American people is to simply watch Obama’s daily and weekly Gallup job-approval ratings. After all, this is the first presidency that will be covered from start to finish with daily public-opinion samplings. Since the beginning of March, the president’s approval ratings each week have been between 47 and 51 percent, and between 48 and 50 percent for all but two weeks. For the week of May 6-12, with the last interviewing being conducted Sunday night, Obama’s approval rating was at 49 percent, down a point from the previous week, and his disapproval was at 44 percent, the same as the week before.

(More here.)

More Benghazi BS — blah, blah, blah ...

White House Releases Benghazi Emails

By COLLEEN MCCAIN NELSON And ADAM ENTOUS, WSJ
REUTERS

The U.S. Consulate in Benghazi is seen in flames during a protest by an armed group said to have been protesting a film being produced in the United States in this September 11, 2012 file photo.

WASHINGTON — The White House succumbed to mounting pressure Wednesday and decided to publicly release the chain of administration emails surrounding the controversial Benghazi talking points.

The move came a week after public interest in last year's terror attack unexpectedly rebounded with testimony by three State Department employees that reopened lingering questions about the assault. The documents were being released late Wednesday afternoon.

While many of the emails have already leaked out, the release of the complete set of communications paints a fuller picture of an administration struggling with how much to disclose about an attack that eight months later remains a focus of partisan division.

The decision to release them represented a major shift that officials hope will tamp down the controversy. Administration lawyers for months had rebuffed calls to hand over the emails on the grounds the exchanges were part of internal administration deliberations.

(More here.)

The Christian jihadist from Minnesota is at it again

Bachmann urges ‘spiritual warfare’ to impose religious values on government

By Stephen C. Webster
The Raw Story
Tuesday, May 14, 2013 9:45 EDT

Topics: michele bachmann ♦ spiritual warfare

Speaking to the Liberty Council’s “The Awakening 2013″ conference last month, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) urged a religious crowd to focus on “spiritual warfare” in their continuing fight to impose religious values on government.

“You see, if we retreat from our values and fail to make the case on issues like marriage, because it is one man, one woman — because God said it is, not because it’s poll tested, because God said it is,” she said in video that surfaced online Monday thanks to Right Wing Watch.

“And life, not because it’s poll tested, because God stands for life,” she continued. “He made us in his image and likeness. And if we tread too softly on issues like taking on Islamic jihad, and if we fight too timidly and if we strive too meekly, then I think we all understand, we very easily could come face to face with defeat and then our nation would, in fact, pay a great and a lasting price, one that none of us wants to face.”

(More here.)

501(c) what?

The Real I.R.S. Scandal

Posted by Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker

Washington’s scandal machinery, rusty from recent disuse, is cranking back up to speed due to the alleged targeting of conservative groups by the Internal Revenue Service. Darrell Issa, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said, “It’s the kind of thing that scares the American people to their core. When Americans are being targeted for audits based on their political beliefs, that needs to change.” Senator Susan Collins, of Maine, called on the President to apologize. George Will said President Obama could be impeached. Obama himself is taking the path of contrition. At a news conference Monday, the President said, “If in fact I.R.S. personnel engaged in the kind of practices that have been reported on and were intentionally targeting conservative groups, then that’s outrageous. And there’s no place for it.” More hearings, with more outrage, are planned.

In light of this, it might be useful to ask: Did the I.R.S. actually do anything wrong?

The stories began to come to light on Friday, when the Associated Press reported that a draft report by a Treasury Department inspector general had found that the I.R.S. subjected certain Tea Party-affiliated groups to undue scrutiny. Lois Lerner, head of the I.R.S. tax-exempt-organizations division, said the agency was “apologetic” for what she termed “absolutely inappropriate” actions by lower-level workers.

It’s important to review why the Tea Party groups were petitioning the I.R.S. anyway. They were seeking approval to operate under section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code. This would require them to be “social welfare,” not political, operations. There are significant advantages to being a 501(c)(4). These groups don’t pay taxes; they don’t have to disclose their donors—unlike traditional political organizations, such as political-action committees. In return for the tax advantage and the secrecy, the 501(c)(4) organizations must refrain from traditional partisan political activity, like endorsing candidates.

(More here.)