Hey, everybody! Welcome to another Sunday. Which means welcome to another day of watching, or reading along to, me. And my exercise in futility. For America! Yes, once again, for you, I am here watching these Sunday morning gobemouches flap their lips, pointlessly, into the teevee cameras. My snap judgments and poor spelling follows in their wake. This week, we all know what's on everyone's mind -- the disclosure of unexpected information, that could change everything we thought we know about the past few years of our lives. By which I mean JOHN HURT IS GOING TO BE THE DOCTOR WHAAAAAAAT?

Also the IRS did some stuff they shouldn't, enough to make them this week's Benghazi, until UmbrellaGhazi starts next week. It'll be EPIC, TNT, we know Drama, et cetera.

As a programming note to all liveblog readers, I want to point out that America's Greatest Arlen, Arlen Gargagliano, has opened her own very tasty and fun restaurant in Tuckahoe, New York called Mambo 64. Named for the Commodore 64 of Mambos. Gargagliano's new restaurant has everything -- Caipirinhas, panuchos, a thing with quinoa in it -- really, something for everyone. So plan your road trips accordingly this summer, okay?

As a second programming note, next week is Memorial Day and this liveblog shall be on vacation. We'll return the week thereafter, unless we develop an unhealthy attachment to Memorial Day. No guarantees are being made.

Anyway, the drill. You know it. It goes a little something like: feel free to converse in the comments, drop me a line if you need, follow me on Twitter if you want, check out my Rebel Mouse page if you're bored.

Shall we begin?

FOX NEWS SUNDAY

[As usual, it sometimes takes time for the liveblog to appear. As you wait, you should check out my Rebel Mouse page for fun, informative, and entertaining reads.]

The austerity policies that gripped the world in the face of the global economic downturn have not worked. Unless the intent was to make a bad situation almost intractably worse. In which case they have worked like gangbusters. Pop some Cristal!

The good news is that people are starting to wake up from this dementia. As Kevin Roose noted, the media are starting to question premises of austerians. As well they should, considering that the holy illuminated manuscript, a study by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, turns out to have been an error-ridden mess. We are in the midst of what Politico calls "an intellectual shift away from austerity." Better late than never, I guess.

So who will be the last man to die for this mistake? The New Republic's Michael Kinsley has volunteered for the job, in a piece that essentially contends that while everything austerity critics have said (about it being a dysfunctional to non-functional set of economic prescriptives that have doled out harm where none was desired) is correct, it was still necessary to punish the proles, because offering help to the ordinary people being ground up in the teeth of the economic downturn would have sent the wrong message, morally speaking.

Kinsley's imagined antagonist here is, of course, Paul Krugman, who has contended the opposite -- by which I mean he has regularly advocated for bringing the economy back to full employment, breaking the back of the aggregate demand crisis, and doing all of this as a priority above blind deficit butchery. Not that he's a particular fan of high deficits. "Give me something that looks like a normal employment situation and I'll become a deficit hawk," Krugman has said. Which seems pretty reasonable.

Krugman's writings seem to bother Kinsley quite a bit, so much so that he gives Krugman top-billing in his piece, even though it was more clearly animated by an op-ed penned for The New York Times by David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu, titled "How Austerity Kills," which discusses, among other things a correlation between unemployment and suicide, and the extent to which the idiotic sequestration -- which is essentially austerity meeting PCP -- could spark all manner of public health crises.

Kinsley writes that Stuckler and Basu "are right, in a way," and that Krugman is also correct. But the reason Kinsley doesn't stop there and close up his laptop and walk away has nothing to do with any sort of economic argument. In the seeming belief that the author's choice of headline, invoking the idea that "Austerity Kills," has opened the door to a moral argument, Kinsley shucks logic aside and simply contends that measures to stimulate the economy and promote full employment are even more immoral. "'Stimulus' is strong medicine, " he writes, "an addictive drug -- and you don’t give the patient more than you absolutely have to."

Kinsley may have not read Krugman's work very clearly, considering the fact that the Times columnist, like the rest of America, is still left in a state of pure, childlike wonderment about what it might feel like to receive too much stimulus, as opposed to their experiences with the inadequate amount that was doled out after the downturn.

Over at Salon, Alex Pareene has subjected Michael Kinsley's recent austerity apologia to a thorough teppanyaki-style slice-and-dice, pointing out that Kinsley, while acknowledging the pain austerity economics have caused, nevertheless believes that the pain is "worth it," because, in Kinsley's words, "Austerians believe, sincerely, that their path is the quicker one to prosperity in the longer run.”

"Kinsley seems to accept that belief as true," Pareene writes, continuing:

It is hugely embarrassing on a number of levels that this is the last line of Kinsley’s column: “They at least are talking about the spinach, while the Krugmanites are only talking about dessert.” First of all, spinach is actually pretty good if it’s prepared well. Maybe instead of “spinach” the metaphor for austerity should be “poison.” “We need to eat our poison to make up for how much cake we had before” is the austerian argument, more accurately put.

Second of all, the “we need our medicine” line always -- literally always -- actually means you need your medicine. One reason austerity has been so popular (and Krugman says this as well) is that its effects don’t harm the rich.

Which explains why Kinsley can sit atop a puffy cloud and contend that while the harms and misery that austerity policies are piling up as their legacy (atop their foundation of junk economics) are plain and self-evident and unfortunate, the important upside is that normal human Americans are finally getting the comeuppance they so richly deserve. And that's the efficacy of austerity -- it's the economic version of a black-site stress position. The longer you have to stand there with your armed pinioned behind your back, the more you'll want to be a good boy and never have to suffer this pain again. As economic beliefs go, it's particular in its unrestrained sociopathy.

But these beliefs are fairly persistent. Back in July 2009, Chris Hayes wrote at length about the well-heeled belief that every boom-to-bust peregrination of the economy was an example of excess that needed a steady dose of Calvinism, in the form of immiseration, to correct. Hayes recalls the admonition of robber-baron Andrew Mellon, thanking Mammon for the Great Depression: "It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people."

Hayes wrote:

It's not hard to find this same view among bankers, financiers and sundry Wall Streeters today. Recently a bond trader told me he hoped that the Fed would raise interest rates and plunge economy into a truly deep, painful (but he hoped, quick) depression. "I don't think that would be good for you," I said. "Oh, I'd be fine," he responded. ( I meant politically: as in, there'll be people with pitchforks at your door. We were talking past each other I suppose.)

There's no question that economic contraction feels quite different to a bond trader and an unskilled worker. A spike in unemployment hits those on the margins of the labor market the hardest, while contractions also usher in deflation, which has a strong tendency to make the rich richer. But the faith in the salutary effects of economic misery also derives from a puritanical view of the economy, one that can manifest itself on both the left and right. Under this view contractions are collective punishment for our trespasses; we are sinners in the invisible hands of an angry God.

Or, as Joseph Schumpeter put it, "a depression is for capitalism like a good, cold douche."

Speaking of, let's go back to Kinsley. The plainly risible portion of Kinsley's paean to psychosis as an economic remedy is this:

I don’t think suffering is good, but I do believe that we have to pay a price for past sins, and the longer we put it off, the higher the price will be. And future sufferers are not necessarily different people than the past and present sinners. That’s too easy. Sure let’s raise taxes on the rich. But that’s not going to solve the problem. The problem is the great, deluded middle class -- subsidized by government and coddled by politicians. In other words, they are you and me. If you make less than $250,000 a year, Obama has assured us, you are officially entitled to feel put-upon and resentful. And to be immune from further imposition.

The group of people who Kinsley refers to as the "great, deluded middle class" happen to be the people who have already paid a huge price for the profilgacy of those who personally took actions that specifically tipped the economy into a downturn. And there's a dollar figure you can put on the price they paid: $4.7 trillion. That's how much taxpayer wealth was "disbursed by the U.S. government in an effort to aid the financial services industry," after the financial services industry cocked up the economy of the whole damn planet. The middle-class has also paid for that error by being subjected to a massive unemployment crisis.

As for being "subsidized" and "coddled," I don't really know to what Kinsley is referring. Credit was loose in the aughts? The Bush administration promoted an "ownership society?" There was a housing bubble? The economy glided forward and upward on the dream of spending beyond your means? Treat that as some sort of moral failing if you like. It's generally considered to be immoral to engage the services of a prostitute, but we all know that it's the pimps who drive that business who get rich. And whatever "subsidization" and "coddling" transpired in the pre-crash era still made a few people very wealthy.

And then the "coddled" bailed them out when they got in trouble.

So, the middle class, far from needing some sort of further punishment or admonition against how much they've been coddled (that's as sick a joke as there ever was), has very ably served as the sin-eater in post-crash America. Whatever debt they've owed, it's been paid in full several times over.

The pain prescription, at this point, is nothing but pure sadism. But, happily, it gives me another opportunity to cite Joe Wiesenthal, who contends against the argument that "pain" is a necessary economic remedy. Though he understands the appeal:

It's understandable why the pain metaphor is so popular. One, it's logical to think that the answer to big deficits is cuts, and cuts are painful. More importantly, it appeals to an innate sense that pain is frequently a long-run redeeming thing to experience. You go to do Crossfit, and you feel pain. But then pretty soon you're a beast that's never felt better. Some religious people used to mutilate their own flesh to show proper respect to The Lord.

So this is just a popular idea: Take the pain now, be redeemed.

But this Calvinist Calvinball is bunk, as Wiesenthal goes on to explain at length, beginning most importantly with the reminder that as far as debt-slashing engines go, there's never been a better one than full employment.

A chart that everyone needs to have seared into their brains is this one, which shows the deficit as a percentage of GDP (red line) vs. the unemployment rate (blue line).

For 60 years (!) the pattern has held. When unemployment drops, the deficit as a percentage of GDP drops. When unemployment rises, the deficit rises.

"The bottom line," Wiesenthal writes, "is that pain and belt tightening are associated with higher deficits" and that it's "entirely the wrong way to think about closing the deficit." So, it's not just that it's inhumane to believe that what the middle class needs is a continuing reminder of how they deserve the pain of the post-crash economy, Kinsley's maniacal anti-stimulus beliefs are the entry to a vicious cycle. The supposed cure is actually the disease in disguise. The more we lessen the pain of the middle class, the better the economy fares. The more we deepen the pain, the worse the economy gets.

What's been exposed here is actually pretty interesting. The promise of austerity economics was that those economic tactics would right the ship of our economy, and bring it safely into the port of prosperity. It was "the quicker path," remember?

This plainly did not happen. Now, bereft of any evidence to point to, lacking any means of documenting that austerity has achieved anything other than widespread pain and misery, Kinsley's left to argue that the pain and misery were the real virtue of austerity all along. And he takes a righteous pleasure pointing that out. Kinsley insists that "austerians don’t get off on other people’s suffering." I'm willing to believe that. But if Kinsley's any guide, they sure do get their kicks pointing out that the suffering is deserved. The moral posturing is an addictive drug.

Well, I'll just say that if Michael Kinsley really needs help getting his ya-yas out, he should just check Yelp for a decent bondage club in his area, and leave the rest of middle-class America the hell alone.

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It's an open question as to whether any of our recent Beltway scandalettes will heat up or peter out, but in the meanwhile, it's best to be reminded of a hidden upside in all of this, for America. Per Greg Sargent:

Liberals who are dreading the scandal-mania that is taking hold should note that it contains a potential upside: It could make a Grand Bargain that includes cuts to Medicare and Social Security benefits even less likely than it already is. That’s because when scandal grips Washington, a president actually needs his core supporters more than ever to ward it off, making it harder to do anything that will alienate them.

There is precedent for this. President Bill Clinton long entertained ambitions to dramatically reform Social Security, but those plans were shelved amid the Lewinsky crisis. While there is some argument over whether the crisis was the cause, it did make him more reluctant to alienate Democratic supporters. As John Harris put it in his book about the Clinton presidency: “Come 1998, when Clinton needed every Democratic vote possible in order to survive the Republican attack over Monica Lewinsky, the work of challenging his own ground to a halt. He had no political latitude to push for the reform of the entitlement programs for the aged.”

Of course, with the GOP now fully in partisan agitator mode, the teensy, remote likelihood that it might sign on to anything Grand Bargain-y that President Barack Obama might actually sign into law is an even teensier remote likelihood.

Naturally, the larger picture here is that with the current scandal overhang, the work of promoting government as a useful tool that could improve the lives of the American people gets harder, and a campaign promoting government as a heavy-handed force for pointless intrusion gets much easier. In the main, that's a bad set of circumstances. But every day without a Grand Bargain is a happy day for America, so that's at least a good consolation prize.

READ THE WHOLE THING:
Why Washington scandal-mania may save Medicare and Social Security [The Plum Line]

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Via Wonkette, one of our favorite HuffPost Hill characters of recent memory, Tennessee State Rep. Jon Lundberg (R-Bristol), has avenged a slight against his person using the legislative powers at his disposal.

The Nashville City Paper has the nitty-gritty:

A state lawmaker whose vehicle was shown speeding by a traffic camera in upper East Tennessee co-sponsored a bill to take that camera down this year.

Rep. Jon Lundberg (R-Bristol) was cited for driving 60 miles an hour in a 45 mile-per-hour zone while driving in Bluff City in 2010, just weeks before voters elected him to a third election. The photo-enforced traffic cameras did not show images of the driver, and Lundberg said an employee of his public relations firm was driving the company vehicle at the time.

The traffic camera speeding ticket “has absolutely zero effect” on his decision to sponsor the bill, Lundberg told The City Paper. “In fact, until you said that, I completely forgot about that.”

Lundberg is co-sponsoring the bill, authored by state Rep. Tim Hill, "whose district shares parts of Sullivan County with Lundberg and encompases Bluff City." Speaking of, the bill has been "[n]arrowly written to apply only in Bluff City," and would affect only two traffic cameras, including, presumably, Lundberg's nemesis.

The Nashville City Paper reports that Bluff City's city manager, Judy Delaney, is concerned that the removal of the cameras would turn those streets into a "race track ... again," and is rightly confused that these lawmakers don't have anything better to do with their time, saying, "I think there’s more important things for them to do than to try to intervene in local traffic control.”

But Lundberg's not the first lawmaker to pitch a feverish fight against traffic cameras after being nabbed by one. Over in Missouri, state Sen. Jim Lembke similarly went all Inigo Montoya after his car got caught going through a red light in St. Louis back in January of 2010.

Of course, it is obligatory to mention that Lundberg's whole approach to politics is basically #YOLO. As HuffPost Hill recalls, he is best remembered for that time his staff wrote a resolution honoring Jon Lundberg, and his P.R. firm, making note of the fact that the "owners and employees" of said firm were "many such noteworthy persons," and that "the company has continued to set the standard for the highest quality professional services."

Lundberg also "passed another resolution back in 2009 honoring his daughter for graduating high school." I guess it was a real struggle.

Anyway, that's the continuing story of one man's quest to use his legislative power to remove minor inconveniences from his life and to celebrate his picayune achievements.

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I know there was probably a time where those who supported a Benghazi inquiry were able to deftly maintain that their interests had nothing to do with politics. But with no one really interested in pursuing a critique of the Libyan intervention itself -- of which four dead Americans were a predictable, natural consequence -- there's little left to do but focus on the horserace.

So here's the National Review, pivoting all the way to 2016:

May as well give it a shot, I guess! One of the galling things for the Benghazi Agonistes crowd is that Clinton's favorability ratings have actually ticked slightly upward in the past three months.

At any rate, this is a pretty good indication that the substantive period of Benghazi inquiry is now passing, which is too bad, because a searching look at the policies that led to it might chill those with ambitions to begin a similar misadventure in Syria.

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Chances are, by the time all the facts come out in L'Affaire IRS, we'll be assaying an example of how a fumbling sort of incompetence, as opposed to active malice, can fuel a scandal. Until then, however, one of the major problems with this scandal is that it's pretty easy to assume malice. And so everyone who thinks they've been improperly targeted by the IRS is adding their briefs to the pile.

Over at the National Review, Rep. Bill Flores (R-Texas) has a funny feeling that he was a target of some sort of IRS shenanigans. Flores believes that the assistance that he provided the Waco Tea Party in dealing with the IRS put the agency onto him as a result:

A few months later, Flores received a notification from the IRS requesting additional documents regarding his tax returns.

“Was it just an independent review of my return or was it because I was asking them questions about their activities for tax-exempt organizations?” Flores asks. “I don’t know, but once the trust is broken, you know, you lose confidence.”

Flores says his accountant sent in the requested information within the time frame allotted by the IRS, but he hasn’t heard from them since, even though the agency is required by law to respond to his submission.

This may be the next stage in this story: people coming forward in the belief that they were part of some wide-ranging witch hunt. Franklin Graham, who now runs his father's Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, believes that his organization was targeted by the IRS, writing in a letter, "I believe that someone in the administration was targeting and attempting to intimidate us."

Not all of these complaints are credible. Two days ago, a news anchor from St. Louis named Larry Conners who'd interviewed President Barack Obama told his Facebook followers, "Shortly after I did my April 2012 interview with President Obama, my wife, friends and some viewers suggested that I might need to watch out for the IRS. I don't accept 'conspiracy theories', but I do know that almost immediately after the interview, the IRS started hammering me."

Conners later explained that his "issues with the IRS preceded that interview by several years." Guess he just got caught up in the moment!

At any rate, I don't want to dismiss any of these latter-day agitants of the IRS out of hand. It sounds like Flores deserves, at the very least, some sort of explanation. But I will point out that the more this particular story plays out, you'll have more claimants taking a number and asking to have their concerns addressed. And the likelihood of Texas sharpshooters coming out of the woodwork with complaints is high as well. So, even if the IRS can assiduously put these claims to bed, it could be sufficient to give this scandal those proverbial "legs."

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Florida, somehow, is becoming the state that produces more Republican lawmakers with a professed love of the hip-hop music than any other state. By which I mean Florida has produced two such people, and I have not been paying attention to the other states.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio's love for hip-hop is well-known, and it would have been useful to have him lending everyone some perspective back when Common visiting the White House was some major-crazy scandal in American life. But thanks to the good people at NowThisNews, straight out tha Florida 19th comes Rep. Trey Radel (R-Fla.) who says he can "kill it" in an "old-school" match-up with Rubio. (I do not know, exactly, what that means. Does he want a rap battle with Rubio? Does he want to go toe-to-toe in a hip-hop trivia fight? Whatever it is, I will very happily host this on the roof of our D.C. offices.)

Radel likes the song "Fight The Power," because reasons:

"Chuck D ... and I may disagree on certain philosophies of government, but I think at the end of the day -- and this is where I take my love for hip-hop music -- of where you can see, where there have been issues and problems, with heavy handed either law enforcement, like the Department of Justice like we see right now with the AP, or with government itself, what I believe in, as a lover of hip-hop, especially older school hip-hop, like so-called gangsta rap to Big Daddy Kane to Eric B & Rakim who I have a huge affinity for, that New York rap, that listening to some of this music as musicians and artists have done for generations, what they do is open the eyes of people from maybe different walks of life."

So, he and Public Enemy's Chuck D might not agree on much, except Eric B & Rakim were great, and the Department of Justice sucks. One could infer that like Chuck D, most of Radel's heroes don't appear on no stamps, but that's okay because as a member of Congress, Radel enjoys franking privileges anyway.

He also likes to create "electro-housey hip-hop" beats "at home," so he's got that going for him.

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So, someone at CNN needs to get everyone up to speed on soccer, apparently. For instance, suppose you happened to look up at the TV screen and saw this:

You may have experienced a lot of confusion. "Wait," you might have said, "David Beckham is many things -- star athlete, bon vivant, style icon -- but one thing that he definitely is not is 'French.'" That's correct. Beckham, from the time of his birth, up until this moment, is English. And England would probably be pretty cheesed off if he went out and helped France win a championship.

There's also the little matter of the next World Cup not happening until next year, and there being no European Championship tournament scheduled until 2016, which means that "France" cannot win anything for a while, with or without David Beckham, but really without, because he's not French.

What Beckham has done is help Paris Saint-Germain FC clinch the championship of Ligue 1 (which also entitled PSG to play in the European Champions League next year). But every team in Ligue 1 is French. France can't not win the Ligue 1 championship.

This is like saying that Joe Flacco just helped America win the Super Bowl. Thanks, Joe Flacco.

Later, CNN tells us that Beckham "played for England, America and France." First of all, the Oxford comma, use it. Second, again, Beckham only played "for" England. The preposition you are looking for is "in," not for. You are also hopefully looking for someone who knows about this stuff, so that this doesn't happen again.

Our congratulations goes out to France for having a soccer league in France for French people.

[Hat tip: @nickpwing]

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By now, you've probably heard that the Department of Justice is taking all manner of slings and arrows ever since it came to light that the agency went out and secretly obtained reporter and editor phone records from journalists at the Associated Press. This intrusion into two months' worth of private records of AP journalists was apparently carried out in pursuit of whoever leaked information to the AP's Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo, after the pair wrote a May 2012 piece about the CIA's involvement in thwarting a terror attack.

AP head Gary Pruitt is not at all pleased about any of this. As the editors of The New York Times noted, Pruitt said that "two months' worth of records could provide a 'road map' to its whole news-gathering operation." Generally speaking, those who practice journalism -- like The Times' editors -- have been outraged on the AP's behalf. CNN's John King put it best: "When this happens, however it happens, it sends a chilling message from the government to people in our business and the AP, I think, is justifiably outraged."

The DoJ's actions are simply not the sort of thing that anyone who works in the journalism or media industry are likely to defend. Or so I thought, until I found out today that Media Matters For America has prepared a set of talking points for people who maybe want to see the whole matter from the point of view of the agency that improperly surveilled journalists in a free society underpinned by First Amendment protections.

Which is wack, plain and simple.

Naturally, it should be said that Media Matters has not done something so horrifying as to mount a specific, fervent defense of the government surveilling AP reporters. The problem, however, is that they also don't mount a specific, fervent defense of the press freedoms to which the Associated Press (or any news outlet) is entitled. Caught between the knowledge that what the DoJ did was way beyond shady and the desire to defend a Democratic White House, Media Matters awkwardly attempts to "split the baby," as they say. Frankly, they quarter the baby. There are just ... baby parts, everywhere.

It's gross.

Their talking points come with some elegant caveats. "While it's early in this story and we don't have all the facts," Media Matters writes, "this case raises important questions about the balance between a free press and effective national security."

Well, it's not too early in the story to know these facts: THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, WHILST ON A LEAK HUNT, SECRETLY OBTAINED TWO MONTHS OF PHONE RECORDS FROM JOURNALISTS AT THE ASSOCIATED PRESS.

Those are facts that we know. We can also make a set of reasoned judgments about these facts, beginning with the fact that the press often depends on whistleblowing sources and information leaks to keep the public apprised of what their government is doing. Snooping around in phone records puts the chill on that activity. It makes people with information less likely to come forward. It makes reporters and editors less likely to take risks. It puts journalists back on the path of covering the news on the basis of access and favor-trading.

That's all stuff that we know. And we should also know that in resolving the conundrum between national security and a free press, there are a lot of steps that probably should be taken before we jump to, "I know, let's just have the DoJ start pulling the AP's phone records!"

Media Matters seems to think that the facts of the matter are somehow in flux, and the larger issue is hazy enough to accommodate an allowance of the DoJ's actions. They are wrong on both counts, and their talking points are a hot mess, as a result.

Let's begin with their "Key Issues To Raise," the first of which is: "If the press compromised active counter-terror operations for a story that only tipped off the terrorists, that sounds like it should be investigated."

I don't know, guys. I think that when you "raise a key issue," you should sound like you've made up your mind about it. If it's not possible to phrase this talking point without the "if" and the "sounds like," you should probably just sit this one out. But like I said, just because something "sounds like it should be investigated," it doesn't mean that the next step is snooping through two months of phone calls.

Also, I do not understand the whole "for a story that only tipped off the terrorists," part. Who is arguing that the Associated Press "only tipped off the terrorists?" Surely we can all agree that the Associated Press is a global news organization, and there is no chance that their stories are somehow "only tipping off terrorists." What they do is called "informing the public."

They go on: "It was not acceptable when the Bush administration exposed Valerie Plame working undercover to stop terrorists from attacking us. It is not acceptable when anonymous sources do it either."

Can you name the terrorists that Valerie Plame stopped? I don't doubt that she was a terrific protector of the homeland, guys, but you've suddenly gone from a lot of equivocating to saying something very definitive, without much in the way of supporting evidence. Also, are we equating the Associated Press with the Bush administration, here? Because that is not a good idea.

The next point: "Is this story about a government source blowing the whistle on government misbehavior, or about a source gratuitously exposing ongoing counter-terrorism operations?"

Like I said, this is a story about the DoJ cold grabbin' two months of journalists' phone records, on a witch hunt for a source, in a manifestly improper and unconstitutional reaction.

Then, Media Matters loses the thread entirely: "Did Republicans in Congress who are now exploiting the situation to score political points oppose the media shield law that likely would have protected the Associated Press in this situation?"

Huh, what now? A minute ago you guys were advocating for the government's right to investigate the press for matters of national security leaks. Now you are advocating for a law that would enshrine protections against such investigations. Whose side are you on? (Also, need I point out that it was the Republicans who wanted the DoJ to investigate these leaks?)

And in the next breath, we're back to implying that the DoJ's actions were justifiable: "How should the Justice Department strike the balance between respecting our free press and investigating damaging leaks that jeopardize counter-terrorism operations?"

By not secretly obtaining two months of phone records. That could be a good place to start.

The Media Matters brief trundles on through an entirely different section, vacillating wildly between taking the DoJ's side and being angry at Republicans for blocking "shield laws" and the like that would have protected journalists from the sort of witch hunt the DoJ undertook.

There are a lot of things now that you would think I would not have to tell Media Matters, but which their wackness makes necessary.

First and foremost, Media Matters, you exist because you'd like the press to adhere to your preferred set of norms, specifically norms that preclude an improper, rightward partisan tilt in news coverage. There's no denying that you guys make good cases. Here's the thing, though: If you'd like the press to listen to your urgings, you are probably not going to get that to happen while taking the position that it's OK for the government to snoop through the phone records of reporters and editors. To the perspective of those reporters and editors who were subject to the DoJ's probe, and to the journalists who take the AP's side in this matter, you guys are just dicks for putting out these talking points.

Secondly, anyone who does anything in journalism understands that there are basic protections that are necessary for a free press to function. Sources must be protected, whistleblowers must not be chilled, vital information has to flow to the American people. How much of your own work, Media Matters, depends on a courageous source, or a reporter willing to risk losing access to powerful officials -- or their own privacy! -- to get the truth out? I daresay that this matters very much to your business model. So, you should probably not put out talking points that imperil your own work.

Finally, the most obvious thing needs to be said: I'm pretty sure that if this probe of the Associated Press had been conducted by a Republican administration, you would not be doing all of this "Let's give the snoopers the benefit of the doubt."

I am pretty sure that your anger over the breach of these journalists' privacy would be epic and righteous and uncowed.

ThinkProgress! You guys need to check yourselves as well!

There are some deeds, I'm afraid, for which having the favored party identification is not an affirmative defense. It is not OK that the DoJ did this because the DoJ is being run by the guys who you perceive to be wearing the white hats. Snooping through the phone records of reporters doesn't become OK because Democrats are doing it, and it doesn't become evil by dint of the fact that Republicans are doing it. IT IS EITHER ALWAYS RIGHT, OR ALWAYS WRONG.

The thing is, Media Matters, you have painted yourselves into a corner here. Someday, in America, there is going to be a Republican in the White House. They will run the DoJ. They will contend with leaks of their own. They will face a choice as to whether to abridge the rights of the press to hunt that source down. They might even choose to do something very much like the DoJ did in this instance.

I think that what the DoJ did in this instance is wrong, and it's going to be wrong even if Republicans or antelopes or sentient toasters or Tralfamadorians are in the White House.

But after today, Media Matters, you are not going to be able to disapprove of these things. You are going to have to extend, to these hypothetical Republicans, the same generosity and the same benefits of the doubt. And you are not going to like that. Not one bit!

Sorry, guys, you are wack!

UPDATE: Media Matters is sort of semi-disowning this talking points memo because it was prepared by...some sort of renegade Media Matters faction, I guess? Here, let David Brock explain, as best he can:

Media Matters for America monitors, analyzes, and corrects conservative misinformation in the media and was not involved with the production of the document focusing on the DOJs investigation. That document was issued by “Message Matters,” a project of the Media Matters Action Network, which posts, through a different editorial process and to a different website, a wide range of potential messaging products for progressive talkers to win public debates with conservatives.

As a media watchdog organization, Media Matters for America recognizes that a free press is necessary for quality journalism and essential to our democracy. A healthy news media is what we fight for every day. Yesterday, 52 news organizations signed a letter to the Department of Justice expressing concerns that the DOJ’s broad subpoena of Associated Press reporters' phone records runs counter to First Amendment principles and injures the practice of journalism. We stand with those news organizations and share their concerns.

Right so, Media Matters mostly stands "with those news organizations and share their concerns," except for the people from their "Message Matters" program, who are sort of on the fence, because what's important in this instance is winning "public debates with conservatives." (Also, there's a "different editorial process," guys, which seems to mean "a slipshod one.")

David Brock chairs both Media Matters for America and the Media Matters Action Network, so this is a pretty neat trick.

Extant statements from Eric Cantor spokesman Doug Heye and John Boehner spokesman Michael Steel indicate that they, too "stand with those news organizations and share their concerns," so it's not clear what argument anyone is having here, that needs to be won.

What remains clear is that if this is an attempt at formalizing a cogent argument on the matter, this "Message Matters" team is not particularly good at their job.

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Wondering why former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton never went on a Sunday morning political chit-chat show to talk about the goings-on in Benghazi, or to be asked 500 times by "Meet the Press" host David Gregory if she is going to run for president? According to Politico's Glenn Thrush, the reason you don't see that happen is that Clinton has properly assayed the Sunday shows as terrible institutions that should be destroyed with fire:

But three sources close to the situation tell POLITICO that it was less a matter of fatigue, and more a matter of Clinton not wanting to go on the shows.

The aides said Clinton had a “default” policy of rejecting all Sunday requests.

[...]

“[Hillary] has a standing refusal [to do Sunday shows]. She hates them. She would rather die than do them,” said one aide on condition of anonymity. “The White House knows, so they would know not to even ask her.”

Okay, so this isn't exactly new news, but these are harsher terms than Clinton has used herself to describe her antipathy for the Sunday shows. Regardless, the default position is correct. Presidential administrations of all parties and creeds would do well to keep themselves, and anything important they have to say to the American people, far away from them.

The good news is that only Beltway insiders (and luckless livebloggers) watch these shows, so nothing that's said on them gets disseminated to "the American people." So it's all good. The sensible call for the Obama administration, in fact, would have not to send Susan Rice to talk about Benghazi at a time when the events on the ground were still foggy -- both in the "who-what-when-where-why" sense, and the "we're at peak potential for an interagency Charlie Foxtrot" sense.

So much trouble could have been avoided if everyone had just waited a day!

I have been watching these Sunday shows -- staring into their mewling, Satanic void, really -- for more than five years, with only occasional relief for my soul. Despite this, I cannot improve on the catch-all term that Esquire's Charlie Pierce uses for the people who appear on these shows: "gobshites." Clinton is, at the very least, making this one call correctly. If everyone followed her example, we would all have a better country and brighter future.

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Way back when, we noted that mathematical odds and political science all but ensure that eventually, scandals happen in presidencies.

But the Obama White House, for many years, defied the overall trend of scandal, and remained scandal-free for a very long amount of time. In May 2011, political scientist Brendan Nyhan recognized this -- and determined it was due:

Going forward, though, the odds of scandal are high and rising. Obama already faces low approval among GOP identifiers and a similarly hostile climate in Congress. Back in March, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman noted that Republicans hadn't yet made a serious effort to back up claims that the Obama White House is "one of the most corrupt administrations." As more time passes, pressure to find evidence of misconduct is likely to build -- my data suggest that the risk of scandal increases dramatically as the period without a scandal stretches beyond two years.

He even provided a helpful chart, for those who love things like, "PRESIDENTIAL SCANDAL TIMES A-LOOMING ON THE HORIZON IN ONE CHART":

So, Nyhan was off by about a year. But as we all eventually learn the hard way, Nyhan ALWAYS COLLECTS HIS MONEY, HONEY. And over at Ten Miles Square on Tuesday, he got his swag on:

My research suggests that the structural conditions are strongly favorable for a major media scandal to emerge. First, I found that new scandals are likely to emerge when the president is unpopular among opposition party identifiers. Obama’s approval ratings are quite low among Republicans (10-18% in recent Gallup surveys), which creates pressure on GOP leaders to pursue scandal allegations as well as audience demand for scandal coverage. Along those lines, John Boehner is reportedly “obsessed” with Benghazi and working closely with Darrell Issa, the House committee chair leading the investigation. You can expect even stronger pressure from the GOP base to pursue the IRS investigations given the explosive nature of the allegations and the way that they reinforce previous suspicions about Obama politicizing the federal government.

In addition, I found that media scandals are less likely to emerge as pressure from other news stories increases. Now that the Boston Marathon bombings have faded from the headlines, there are few major stories in the news, especially with gun control and immigration legislation stalled in Congress. The press is therefore likely to devote more resources and airtime/print to covering the IRS and Benghazi stories than they would in a more cluttered news environment.

I am not nearly as canny as Nyhan. (Nor am I as uncanny. It's weird how the English language works.) Back in May 2011, I assayed Nyhan's work and predicted, "scandal is all but certain. And yet I'll still bet you $10 that when and if it surfaces, the story won't be broken by the White House Press Corps." ABC News White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl broke the story on the 12-times-revised Benghazi talking points, so I guess I owe him $10.

Also, I predicted:

He's got a whole administration full of people who could slip up at any moment and, say, funnel arms to anti-American extremists.

Yeah, and then I linked to David Wood's story, "Anti-American Extremists Among Libyan Rebels U.S. Has Vowed To Protect", like a boss.

Nyhan also points out that it is in a second-term "scandals are most likely to take place." According to Karen Tumulty and Philip Rucker, historians believe that scandals are part of something they call the "second-term curse." They get the obligatory quote from Michael Beschloss:

“After the election, the president said he was familiar with the literature on second-term difficulties,” said presidential historian Michael Beschloss. “We scholars may be about to see whether knowledge of that history can help a president when they begin to strike.”

“What we’ve seen in the past week reignites the question scholars ask about problematic second terms,” Beschloss added. “Is it mainly a coincidence that every president of the past 80 years has had a hard time after getting reelected? Or is it somehow baked into the structure of a second-term presidency that some combination of serious troubles is going to happen?”

The takeaway, I guess, is that America should just not have second-term presidents.

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If you're wondering why the Department of Justice has been paging through two months' worth of various Associated Press journalists' phone records, you have to cast your mind back to the Spring of 2012.

Back then, the news was brimming with all sorts of exciting stories on the national security front. The AP reported in May that the CIA had "thwarted an ambitious plot by al-Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen to destroy a U.S.-bound airliner" using "an upgrade of the underwear bomb that failed to detonate aboard a jetliner over Detroit on Christmas 2009." And The New York Times, in June, reported that President Barack Obama had "secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities."

The AP story, to the minds of critics, offered al Qaeda insight into the fact that the CIA was aware of the group's activities. And the Times reporting on the U.S./Israeli cyber war with Iran was full of details that had never previously been disclosed.

The timing of these disclosures seemed rather suspicious to Republicans, 31 of whom sent Attorney General Eric Holder a letter asking him to "immediately appoint a special counsel to investigation [sic] national-security leaks from the executive branch," The Hill reported.

“The numerous national-security leaks reportedly originating out of the executive branch in recent months have been stunning,” they wrote to Holder.

“If true, they reveal details of some of our nation’s most highly classified and sensitive military and intelligence matters, thereby risking our national security, as well as the lives of American citizens and our allies. If there were ever a case requiring an outside special counsel with bipartisan acceptance and widespread public trust, this is it,” they wrote.

The upshot was that the GOP believed Obama was using strategic leaks to burnish his national security cred in an election year. (This was not an unreasonable thing to infer, frankly.)

But, with that in mind, Alex Pareene makes a similarly reasonable judgment that the GOP will probably not be too quick to jump on this DOJ probe of the Associated Press writing, "It will be hard (but not impossible!) for Republicans to act hugely upset and offended about this one."

Good thing he tossed in that "but not impossible" qualifier! Because as Zeke Miller and Michael Crowley report, Republicans are going to give it a go:

“Whether it is secretly targeting patriotic Americans participating in the electoral progress [sic] or reporters exercising their First Amendment rights, these new revelations suggest a pattern of intimidation by the Obama Administration,” Doug Heye, a spokesman for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, said in a statement to TIME. “The First Amendment is first for a reason,” added Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner. “If the Obama Administration is going after reporters’ phone records, they better have a damned good explanation.”

Miller and Crowley note that this is "a particularly surprising response." Not if you're relentlessly cynical! Otherwise, yes.

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By now, if you haven't heard of Orly Taitz -- well, read no further. You are winning at the game of life. Whatever amount of time you are spending on the internet is the right amount, yay! But, if you've yen to press on, then all you need to know is that Taitz is the "Queen of the Birthers," and she has achieved that distinction by being the Birther Loon Movement's most vexatious litigant. Obviously, she and the rest of these fringe weirdos have failed to convince anyone of their ornate conspiracy theories, and Taitz herself is just going to live the rest of her life aggrieved and unhappy.

Nevertheless, she presses on! And we were really sort of running out of ways to talk about her until we hit upon the novel idea of taking her recent appearance on the David Pakman show and watching it with YouTube's closed captioning function enabled. And you know what? Now Taitz potentially makes sense? You can take the highlights clipped below and judge for yourself if they actually make Birtherism sound credible. Did anyone really stop to consider the habitat rugby ads, and the extent to which they may have endured in a forest environment? Were any efforts really made, during court proceedings, to get beyond a reasonable people barroom? What about these panther shindigs? They sound suspicious! At the very least, can we just agree that "The Pan African-American Drama Tactics" would be a cool band name?

Could it be that Taitz really was on to something? No. But we can at least cover her in a more deserving manner.

(Watch Taitz on The David Pakman Show above. Turn on closed captioning for deeper meaning.)

The news today is that the Justice Department "secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press," in what the AP president and chief executive officer Gary Pruitt called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into newgathering. The Justice Department has not cited a reason for this snooping, though it is generally presumed that the precipitating event was a May 2012 story that "disclosed details of a CIA operation in Yemen that stopped an al-Qaida plot in the spring of 2012 to detonate a bomb on an airplane bound for the United States."

Politico's MacKenzie Weinger has a roundup of journalist reactions, and they are decidedly not positively inclined toward the government's point of view. Fox News' Greta van Susteren referred to it as a "dragnet to intimidate the media." CNN's John King said that the actions are "chilling," and that the AP is right to be angry.

King's colleague, Wolf Blitzer, on the other hand, can totally see the other side of things. You know, the side where the press essentially gives up its constitutional freedom?

“Although if you look it from the other side, if there was a serious leak about an al-Qaeda operation or whatever, they’re trying to find out who may be leaking this information to the news media, do they occasionally have the right to secretly monitor our phone calls?” Blitzer asked.

Yeah, totes! I mean, from time to time, the government is just going to want to know who the media's sources are, for stories ranging from "an al-Qaeda operation" to "or whatever." And on those occasions, does the government have "the right" to "secretly monitor" the phone calls of reporters, in order to obtain that information. Wolf Blitzer is pretty sure the answer is maybe or whatever, who knows, really?

Fun fact: Wolf Blitzer hosts a show called "The Situation Room," whose name is taken from the room in the White House from which the president and his national security team conduct overseas operations on secure lines of communication. But in CNN's case is mostly full of holograms.

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