What follows is a brief exchange on Saturday between  MSNBC’s kook host Ed Schultz and his kook guest, Michael Eric Dyson:

“ED SCHULTZ: IRS is apologizing to conservative groups over a number of audits. I ask the question “why”? IRS says there’s been a surge of application of applications since 2010 for tax exempt status from groups with “tea party” or “patriot” in their title names. So the IRS admits it’s singling out those groups for audits to make sure that they are real non-profits. Now, look, this is all because of Citizens United. All of these groups popped up, it was new to the Internal Revenue Service and the issue is how they’re spending their money.

“MICHAEL ERIC DYSON: What about the groups that have been racially profiled or ethnically profiled or profiled because of gender. So the reality here is that I think this is much ado about nothing.

“SCHULTZ: They want to plant the seed that the White House picked up the phone and called Ogden, Utah and said get on these guys.

“DYSON: Of course, and that’s ridiculous. There’s no way. First of all, we know that Obama doesn’t have that kind of juice. We know the Republicans and all of the other people in the government aren’t going to listen to him.”

There are multiple reasons why MSNBC’s ratings are in the bottom of the septic tank, with Ed Schultz being chief among them.

Have you gotten your raise yet?

As evinced by NARAL’s statement about Kermit’s conviction, the Left will use today’s decision to try to make abortion more accessible.

Read Charles Cooke’s post at NRO’s “The Corner.”

To sum up my thoughts on the show tonight,

1) It didn’t seem possible seven months ago, but it’s been a rough start for the President’s second term.

2) Benghazi, I’ve always maintained, will be the way Obama is impeached; other things–the IRS scandal chief among them–will serve as bi-partisan motivation (it might turn out to be among the articles of impeachment, falling under the rubric of “abuse of power”).

3) Bill Clinton, who A) wants to be back in the White House, and B) is surely not thrilled about being the only elected impeached President, will be working behind the scenes to bring about impeachment when the time comes, because,

4) At the end of the day, the Benghazi cover up is going to be a battle, not between Republicans and the White House, but between Barack and Hillary’s culpability. And when it comes to managing scandals, the Clintons don’t lose.

He can start by losing the defiant, arrogant tone that he displayed during his press conference today.

It’s remarkable what the Left will say to advance their agenda.  From The Washington Times: “Vice President Joseph R. Biden said in a wide-ranging magazine interview that gun-control legislation will pass eventually because several senators who voted against it are experiencing a public backlash.

“’To use the vernacular, there’s suddenly a lot of senators out there who have seen the Lord,’ Mr. Biden told Rolling Stone magazine. ‘You find out that the senator from New Hampshire [Republican Kelly Ayotte] is in trouble; she voted no. I can name you four senators who called me and said, Jesus, I guess you were right — maybe we can find some other way of doing this. Can we bring this back up?”

The lead editorial in today’s Boston Globe begins, “This state’s universal health care law was the model for the federal Affordable Care Act, but so far, Massachusetts’s experience with the new national law has proved frustrating. Certainly the experience here doesn’t fully comport with President Obama’s recent assertion that the new law is ‘working fine.’

“Bureaucratic hurdles are inevitable when attempting to reconcile local rules and practices to new federal standards. But even people who strongly support Obamacare, as many people in Massachusetts do, shouldn’t hesitate to call attention to areas where the law is unnecessarily complicated, or where local practices accomplish the same purposes in simpler ways.”

Local practices?  Imagine that!  Obamacare is becoming a primer on the benefits of federalism.

It’s a vulgar question, I know. But as I’ve often said, sometimes good politics and good policy intersect. This is one of those times. Good policy in the case of Benghazi would be to impeach the President.

Remember, when Bill Clinton was impeached, the Left protested that it was preposterous because it was “all about sex.”

This isn’t. It’s about national security, transparency, a cover-up (not unlike the one which properly did Nixon in), and, most importantly, the death of four Americans. The question of whether or not their lives could have been saved is an impossible question to answer, but the salient point is that the Obama administration didn’t even try; they were too busy figuring out a way to minimize the political impact that Benghazi would have on their re-election effort.

Some Republicans (Darrell Issa comes to mind) are pressing for answers—not because they are pre-emptively launching a campaign against Hillary’s 2016 ambitions, but because they want to fill in the blanks in what we already know is an untruthful narrative being promulgated by the administration.

Others in the Republican Party, when directly asked whether or not they’re accusing Team Obama of a cover up, are reluctant to answer the question with an unambiguous “yes,” choosing instead to enumerate the details of the Big Lie, ranging from the two orders that the military not respond to the attacks to the twelve changes in Susan Rice’s talking points.

As I wrote on Facebook earlier today, if I were asked whether or not I was accusing the administration of a cover up, my answer would have been short and sweet: “I’m connecting the dots. Anyone who doesn’t see a cover up here isn’t.”

That’s not a political answer; it’s the responsible one.  Republicans in Congress need to be responsible—even, Heaven forbid, if it benefits them politically.

Hats off to Hot Air for providing the actual IRS demands.

When I said earlier today on Facebook that Obama had lost the press on Benghazi, I had no idea that the BBC, no enemy of Obama, was willing to tell the story.

But they are.

John Fund, writing in The American Spectator, correctly says, “Nothing Fits the Obama administration’s economic project better than high-speed rail. It’s based on visions of a utopian future, employs gobs of union labor in its construction, can be used to reward political allies and donors, and makes use of analysts eager to churn out dubious studies justifying it on economic grounds. Call it Solyndra on steroids.”

And then there’s the fact that the Left wants to tell us how to live our lives, including how to get to work.  For the record, my father, the Atlanta Planning Engineer for the Georgia Power company, took MARTA, Atlanta’s subway, to work every day.  He liked it, he told me, because he could read the paper, and he didn’t have to worry about traffic.

Some of us, though, would prefer to drive ourselves, and we shouldn’t feel guilty about it.

In March of last year, Roger Hedgecock wrote a piece for Human Events cataloging the historical targeting by the IRS of groups sitting Presidents didn’t like. He included the current President:

“In the 1970s, Richard Nixon had an enemies list. Nixon asked the IRS to investigate tax returns of those on the list. Liberals were outraged. To be on Nixon’s list became a liberal badge of honor.

“In the 1990’s Bill Clinton had an enemies list too. The Clinton administration targeted for IRS audit the National Rifle Association, the Heritage Foundation, the National Review, the American Spectator, Citizens Against Government Waste, Citizens for Honest Government, Concerned Women for America and the San Diego Chapter of Christian Coalition.

“Today, Obama has an enemies list. The IRS is investigating conservative political groups including the Tea Party who oppose Obama’s agenda.”

Nixon, Clinton, and Obama. What a trio!

You can read the whole Human Events story here.

Today, The AP reports on the IRS’s apology for targeting the Tea Party. “‘That was wrong. That was absolutely incorrect, it was insensitive and it was inappropriate. That’s not how we go about selecting cases for further review,’ [Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups] said at a conference sponsored by the American Bar Association.”

Insensitive?!?

Of course, as is always the case with this administration, there’s always a caveat: “Lerner said the practice was initiated by low-level workers in Cincinnati and was not motivated by political bias. After her talk, she told The AP that no high level IRS officials knew about the practice.”

Are you sick of this administration yet?

The word nullification has a bad connotation, given its historical use by states resisting integration in the sixties.

Which is why, when asked whether or not opposition to Common Core in Alabama amounted to nullification, State Senator Dick Brewbaker, a Republican, replied, “I might wish we had another word to describe what this Legislature and what legislatures in many states are doing. But essentially you can use the word nullification but what that means is an effort to try to push back against an overreaching federal government.”

The federal government is overreaching on multiple fronts, and to say so doesn’t imply racism.

The pendulum continues to swing away from the President and toward the Republicans, reports The Pew Research Center: “Despite GOP leaders’ poor job ratings, the Republican Party runs about even with the Democrats on leading issues such as the economy, immigration and gun control. Overall, 42% say the Republican Party could do the better job dealing with the economy, while 38% say the Democratic Party. The public is similarly divided over which party could better handle gun control policy and immigration policy.”

Specifically, lying to Congress is no different, legally, than lying under oath.

The bill has passed the Senate; it’s having problems in the House.  Ed Henry Tweets: “The gun bill is going to have to wait till the 30th legislative day to be passed. The Dems are filibustering & reading every bill at length.”

— Ed Henry (@Ed_Henry_HD9)

Here’s the salient part of George Will’s column in The Washington Post today:

“Democrats are more apt to lose control of the Senate than gain control of the House. Republicans need to gain six Senate seats; Democrats are defending seven seats in states where Obama averaged just 40.5 percent of the vote in 2012. Democrats need to gain only 17 House seats, but just 17 Republicans hold seats from districts Obama carried last year, when he won 209 districts and lost 226. Analyst Charlie Cook says that the House, having reached ‘partisan equilibrium,’ has little ‘elasticity.’ Now that 96 percent of House Democrats represent Obama districts and 93 percent of Republicans represent districts that voted for Mitt Romney, ‘The House is now more sorted along partisan lines than ever.’”

From Al.com: “Gov. Robert Bentley this afternoon signed the home brewing bill into law, ending Alabama’s status the only state in the nation that bans the making of beer and wine at home.”

Congratulations to the Legislature and the Governor.

Global warming has many benefits–longer growing seasons for farmers, for example. And now there’s this.

Gregory Hicks, the number two in command in Libya, called it a “non-event.”