@SiibillamLaw: My mum is a motherfucking badass

#MyMumisaMotherfuckingBadass

• ‘You are going to lose’: A mother of two described Wednesday how she put her life on the line by trying to persuade the terrorists to hand over their weapons. Ingrid Loyau-Kennett, a cub scout leader, talked with the killers and kept her nerve as one of them told her: “We want to start a war in London tonight.” Loyau-Kennett, 48, from Cornwall, was one of the first people on the scene after the two Islamists butchered a soldier in Woolwich, south-east London Wednesday. She was photographed by onlookers confronting one of the attackers who was holding a bloodied knife. Loyau-Kennett was a passenger on a number 53 bus which was travelling past the scene. She jumped off to check the soldier’s pulse. “I said: ’Right, now it is only you versus many people, you are going to lose, what would you like to do?’ He said: ‘I would like to stay and fight?’” The terrorist in the black hat then went to speak to someone else and Loyau-Kennett tried to engage with the other man in the light coat. She said: “The other one was much shyer and I went to him and I said: ‘Well, what about you? Would you like to give me what you have in your hands?’ “I did not want to say weapons but I thought it was better having them aimed on one person like me rather than everybody there. Children were starting to leave school as well.”Loyau-Kennett was not the only woman to show extraordinary courage in the Woolwich street. Others shielded the soldier’s body as the killers stood over them. Joe Tallant, 20, a van loader who lives near the scene, said a friend and her mother went over to help the soldier as he lay dying in the street.

Woolwich killing

• In an attack that raised new fears of terrorism in Britain, a man walking near a military barracks in south London on Wednesday was rammed by a car and then hacked to death by two knife-wielding assailants, according to witness accounts carried by British news media. British officials did not identify the victim, but the French president, François Hollande, referred to him as “a soldier” in expressing France’s sympathy to the visiting British prime minister, David Cameron. Mr. Cameron had been en route to Paris from Brussels when the attack took place. Two suspects were shot and wounded by the police, officials said, and were in separate hospitals under police guard, one in serious condition. One of the men shouted “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great,” as the attack proceeded, government officials said. “There are strong indications that it is a terrorist incident,” Mr. Cameron said. ITV News showed a video taken with a cellphone at the scene in Woolwich in which a man who appears to be in his 20s or early 30s holds a cleaver in one of his bloodied hands. He offers what seems to be a political message before the police arrive. The assault took place near a heavily trafficked junction a short walk from the London headquarters of the Royal Artillery, a unit that has deployed soldiers, including tank units, to Iraq and Afghanistan. A primary school is nearby, and witnesses said some of those who had seen the attack were parents and children returning home.

• An active duty soldier was “beheaded” Wednesday afternoon in London by machete-wielding assailants who were shot by police moments later, British media outlets reported. The man was reportedly stationed at the Royal Artillery Barracks in London, near the location of the attack. Luke Huseyin, who witnessed the attack, told The Telegraph that he noticed the commotion after two dark-skinned men emerged from a wrecked vehicle dragging another man. He went on, explaining: “They started slashing him up with the knife and hitting him in the stomach with the machete. I don’t think it took long before he was dead. There were people passing by who were screaming and running away. I’ve never seen anything like it.” He added that it took about 20 minutes for police to arrive, during which time the men just stood and waited for them. When they arrived, the men allegedly ran at police brandishing weapons, only to be shot down. A photo of one of the attackers was published on Britain’s 4 News, showing a black man in a black jacket holding two large knives, his hands covered with blood. An eyewitness told the channel that the men said they “wanted to give a message to the British government” in retaliation for military deployment on Arab lands. “He was getting people to take photos of him,” the man explained in audio published online. “He was standing there crazed like, ‘Take photos of me!’ Like he wanted to be on TV.”

Drones

• The Obama administration publicly acknowledged for the first time Wednesday that U.S. drone strikes have killed four American citizens since 2009, including the previously undisclosed death of a North Carolina resident who left the United States for Pakistan and was later indicted on federal terrorism charges. Attorney General Eric Holder, in a letter to congressional leaders and chairman of key congressional committees made public on the eve of what was billed as a major counterterrorism speech by President Barack Obama, also confirmed the deaths in drone attacks in Yemen of three other Americans that already had been widely reported: those of radical cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki , his teenage son, Abd al-Rahmn Anwar al-Awlaki; and Samir Khan, the American who ran al Qaeda’s web-based propaganda magazine Inspire.  Previously the Obama administration had only acknowledged the senior Awlaki’s killing and refused to publicly confirm or deny reports of the other deaths. The letter also confirmed that U.S. drones had killed Jude Kenan Mohammed of Raleigh, N.C., more than a  year after a local news report quoted a friend as saying he had died in an attack in Pakistan in November 2011. Holder said in the letter that the senior Awlaki was the only U.S. citizen targeted in a drone strike.

• President Obama plans to open a new phase in the nation’s long struggle with terrorism on Thursday by restricting the use of unmanned drone strikes that have been at the heart of his national security strategy and shifting control of them away from the C.I.A. to the military. A new classified policy guidance signed by Mr. Obama will sharply curtail the instances when unmanned aircraft can be used to attack in places that are not overt war zones, countries like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. The rules will impose the same standard for strikes on foreign enemies now used only for American citizens deemed to be terrorists. Lethal force will be used only against targets who pose “a continuing, imminent threat to Americans” and cannot feasibly be captured, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a letter to Congress, suggesting that threats to a partner like Afghanistan or Yemen alone would not be enough to justify being targeted.

Guantanamo

• President Barack Obama plans to resume transfers of inmates from Guantanamo Bay to other countries in a fresh bid to close the controversial US prison, The Wall Street Journal reported. In the coming weeks, Obama will try to accelerate efforts to transfer detainees out of Guantanamo partly by lifting a long-running ban on sending Yemeni inmates to their home country, the newspaper said, citing unnamed US officials.

IRS

• Lois Lerner, IRS disaster. The executive who took the Fifth has bungled this mess from start to finish. Why is she still employed? Lerner seemed like a reasonable candidate to lose her job even before she delivered a tin-eared self-defense in front of Darrell Issa’s House Oversight Committee – and then pleaded the Fifth Amendment. Lerner’s lawyers insist that because the Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into the IRS scandal – which was probably, in itself, a ham-handed and unnecessary political response to right-wing pressure – she had no choice but to refuse to testify at the hearing. Not only is she the person who was in charge of the group that wrongly targeted conservatives, she dishonestly testified that she didn’t know about the targeting until 2012, when the inspector general found she knew as early as 2011. She’s the person who told a conference call of reporters, “I’m not that good at math,” even though she’s a manager in an agency that’s at bottom all about math. What I think is even more politically and morally suspect – and has gotten very little attention — Lerner actually presided over the bizarre, bumbling rollout of the story, by planting a question about the controversy with an attorney at an American Bar Association conference. According to Morgan Lewis tax lawyer Celia Roady, Lerner herself asked that Roady inquire about whether the IRS had targeted conservative groups. That led to Lerner’s public apology – and the scandal swirling around the White House, which found itself surprised by the sudden disclosure.

• Jeffrey Toobin explained [on the IRS fiasco], “White House officials seem to have engaged in the opposite of a cover-up. They let the investigation proceed, and let the Inspector General do his job. They let the process play out. They played by the rules, which is what lawyers are supposed to do.”

• Official at Heart of IRS Tea Party Scandal Spiked Audits of Big Dark-Money Donors. In 2011, under pressure from House and Senate Republicans, Miller, then the IRS’ deputy commissioner, spiked audits investigating whether five big donors to 501(c)(4) groups—the type of nonprofit that can get involved in campaigns and elections but can’t make politics its “primary activity”—avoided paying taxes on their donations. Miller’s decision erased any worry that wealthy donors might have had about giving millions to nonprofits during the 2012 campaign season. For some tax lawyers, it was a surprising move that raised red flags. “They were stopped mid-audit, which is an extraordinary move,” says Marcus Owens, a tax lawyer who ran the IRS division that oversees politically active nonprofits for 10 years. “I’ve been practicing tax law for close to 40 years, and I’ve never seen that. To have Miller reach out and stop those audits, that’s something that really deserves an inquiry.” The identities of the donors and nonprofits being scrutinized were never revealed. Owens says he suspects most, if not all, of the five had contributed to Republican groups because GOP lawmakers were the ones raising a ruckus on Capitol Hill.

CBRNE

• An unknown flu-like respiratory illness has killed two people and sickened five others in southeastern Alabama. According to the Washington Post, seven patients have been admitted to hospitals in and around Dothan, Alabama with fever, cough and shortness of breath.

• Matthew Ryan Buquet was arrested Wednesday in a case involving last week’s discovery of a pair of letters containing the deadly poison ricin. A grand jury indictment accuses Matthew Ryan Buquet, 37, of mailing a death threat to U.S. District Judge Fred Van Sickle in Spokane on May 14. A search of federal court records turned up no indication that Buquet had ever appeared before Van Sickle or had any connection to the judge. The indictment did not mention ricin, but the FBI made the link in a news release late Wednesday, saying analysis showed the letter sent to the judge contained “active ricin toxin.”

Military

• Again: A sergeant and decorated Iraq War veteran on-staff at the prestigious U.S. Military Academy at West Point is accused of secretly video taping female cadets in the Academy’s showers, locker rooms, and bathrooms. Army Sgt. 1st Class Michael McClendon, a staff adviser “responsible for the health, welfare, and discipline” of 125 cadets, has been charged with four counts of indecent acts, dereliction of duty, cruelty and maltreatment, and violations of good order and discipline. McLendon has been transferred to the Fort Drum Army base in upstate New York.

Boston Marathon Bombing

• Man with ties to Boston bombing suspect admits role in 2011 murders; shot during FBI questioning. Sources say that what began as a drug ripoff ended in a triple homicide when Tsarnaev and friend Ibragim Todashev realized their victims would later be able to identify them.

Right wing idiots

• The Southern Poverty Law Center on Wednesday accused South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley of appointing a white supremacist to her steering committee. In February, the Republican governor announced she had formed the committee to explore her re-election options. Roan Garcia-Quintana of Greenville was listed as one of the 164 co-chairs. The Anti-Defamation League has described Garcia-Quintana as a “white supremacist” and “a well-known leader” in the Council of Conservative Citizens.

• Aw, precious!: Mitch McConnell is claiming that Harry Reid is intimidating him by threatening filibuster reform if Republicans don’t cease their endless campaign of obstruction.

In other news

• Electric carmaker Tesla Motors pays off government loan 9 years early

• Chaffetz brings the crazy: If Obama doesn’t do more to help House Republicans figure out why they should impeach him, then House Republicans might not have any other option than to impeach him.

Scandalpalooza

• Clarification on the timing of the IG report (IRS). So our whole point has been that knowing that this was coming does not change the fact that there was nothing we could have or should have done about it, because it was an independent Inspector General report. And, again, as I said at the end, I think it’s somewhat ironic that there has been some suggestion that action should have been taken because we were aware that the IG was — an independent IG was reaching the conclusion of a report and that it might have these findings, that somehow the President should have been notified or that we should have done something. And, of course, the opposite is true, because these kinds of independent investigations need to be independent. There should be no intervention by a White House.

• Republicans’ Hatred of Obama Blinds Them to Public Disinterest in Scandals. Republicans are so focused on their bitter battles against Obama, they can’t see how little impact the “scandals” have had on public opinion.

• We’re Subsidizing The Group That Wants More GOP Obstruction. For over a week, Republicans have refused to focus on anything but so-called scandal. And, it turns out, that’s exactly the way they want it. On Thursday, the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank, sent a letter to GOP leaders, and told them to avoid working on any legislation that could take the focus off of the Obama Administration.…They want Republicans to use the media’s scandal obsession to keep the focus off of in-fighting within the Party, and to avoid getting any real work done. It’s also important to note that Heritage Action is a registered 501(c)(4) organization. That means you and me are subsidizing the very organization that’s telling our lawmakers not to do their job.

• Yesterday we noted that Lois Lerner, the IRS official in charge of the unit overseeing tax exempt groups, would apparently plead the fifth at today’s hearings. Rick Hasen said he thinks the issue is that she’s the person who is most likely to have lied or actively misled Congress when asked about the targeting issue earlier. People above her may not have had as direct information.

• About the press – they’re not all angels: The press also includes people like Jonathan Karl – who blatantly lie to the American public based on information that is planted by political opponents for the express purpose of undermining an administration. It also doesn’t take into account the fact that Republicans have demonstrated – through their “leaks” to the press – that they are willing to use the media (who are willing to be played) to lie us into a war and put national security at risk in order to undermine their critics. Its clear to most of us outside the media that it is a continuation of those kinds of abuses that is being investigated here.

Oklahoma

• Oklahoma: The National Weather Service upgraded its estimate of the storm’s force, saying it was the strongest type, EF-5 and packing incredible fury with winds of more than 200 mph. A day earlier it had said the storm was an EF-4.

Oklahoma Crazy

• Inhofe and Coburn: Red state hypocrites. Apparently, we have deserving and undeserving disasters, Oklahoma senators James Inhofe and Tom Coburn explain

• Alex Jones Explains How Government “Weather Weapon” Could Have Been Behind Oklahoma Tornado. Conspiracy theorist radio host Alex Jones explained to his audience today how the government could have been behind the devastating May 20 tornado in Oklahoma. On the May 21 edition of The Alex Jones Show, a caller asked Jones whether he was planning to cover how government technology may be behind a recent spate of sinkholes. After laying out how insurance companies use weather modification to avoid having to pay ski resorts for lack of snow, Jones said that “of course there’s weather weapon stuff going on — we had floods in Texas like fifteen years ago, killed thirty-something people in one night. Turned out it was the Air Force.” Following a long tangent, Jones returned to the caller’s subject. While he explained that “natural tornadoes” do exist and that he’s not sure if a government “weather weapon” was involved in the Oklahoma disaster, Jones warned nonetheless that the government “can create and steer groups of tornadoes.” According to Jones, this possibility hinges on whether people spotted helicopters and small aircraft “in and around the clouds, spraying and doing things.” He added, “if you saw that, you better bet your bottom dollar they did this, but who knows if they did. You know, that’s the thing, we don’t know.”

• Reaching the ‘weather weapon’ stage – Alex Jones craziness: We’ve seen Republican officeholders in state legislatures, the U.S. House, and even the U.S. Senate take Alex Jones’ ideas seriously. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) intends to run for president — of the United States — and he’s been a guest on Alex Jones’ show. In other words, the guy raising the specter of Obama using “weather weapons” to kill Oklahomans is the same guy helping influence several Republican policymakers in 2013. Maybe it’s just me, but I find that rather alarming.

Terrorism

• FBI agent kills man linked to Boston bombing suspects. An FBI agent was involved in a deadly shooting connected to the Boston Marathon bombing case. The man who was shot, Ibragim Todashev, had been interviewed about his connections to the bombing suspects before by the FBI and started out cooperative, NBC sources said. The suspect then went to attack the agent and was shot, the sources said.

• The U.S. has identified five men who might be responsible for the attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, last year, and has enough evidence to justify seizing them by military force as suspected terrorists, officials say. But there isn’t enough proof to try them in a U.S. civilian court as the Obama administration prefers. The men remain at large while the FBI gathers evidence.

• Anthrax drug brings $334 million to Pentagon advisor’s biotech firm. Biowarfare consultant Richard J. Danzig urged the government to stockpile a type of anthrax remedy. But he had a stake in one such drug’s success. Over the last decade, former Navy Secretary Richard J. Danzig, a prominent lawyer, presidential advisor and biowarfare consultant to the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, has urged the government to counter what he called a major threat to national security. Terrorists, he warned, could easily engineer a devastating killer germ: a form of anthrax resistant to common antibiotics. U.S. intelligence agencies have never established that any nation or terrorist group has made such a weapon, and biodefense scientists say doing so would be very difficult. Nevertheless, Danzig has energetically promoted the threat — and prodded the government to stockpile a new type of drug to defend against it. Danzig did this while serving as a director of a biotech startup that won $334 million in federal contracts to supply just such a drug, a Los Angeles Times investigation found. By his own account, Danzig encouraged Human Genome Sciences Inc. to develop the compound, and from 2001 through 2012 he collected more than $1 million in director’s fees and other compensation from the company, records show.

Reproductive rights

• If We Keep Criminalizing Abortions, Women Will Keep Being Treated Like Suspects

• On Tuesday, judges on the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down an Arizona law that would have banned abortions at 20 weeks. The judges called the law “unconstitutional under an unbroken stream of Supreme Court authority.” This is the first 20-week ban to be struck down in court. The judges wrote that Arizona “may not deprive a woman of the choice to terminate her pregnancy at any point prior to viability,” echoing the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade 40 years ago that abortion should be legal up to the point that a fetus is can survive outside of the womb, which is usually construed as 24 weeks.

Christian supremacy

• CNN’s Wolf Blitzer tells atheist tornado survivor: ‘You gotta thank the Lord’. With the number of atheists continuing to rise, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Tuesday afternoon learned the danger of assuming on live television that his interviewee is a Christian. “I guess, you gotta thank the Lord, right?” he told the survivor of a deadly tornado that ripped through Oklahoma. “Do you thank the Lord?” “I — I’m actually an atheist,” the woman politely responded. “Oh, you are? Alright,” Blitzer replied. The woman, however, handled the embarrassing situation with grace. “We are here, and I don’t blame anybody for thanking the Lord,” she told Blitzer.

• On Friday of last week, the Texas legislature passed the so-called “Merry Christmas Bill,” a fusillade by conservative lawmakers in the “War on Christmas.” The law is designed as a legal firewall to protect educators or other public officials who wish to openly celebrate Christmas in the state, but fear legal action from secular groups. Raw Story spoke with Russell Glasser, co-host of the Austin public-access TV show “The Atheist Experience,” who said that the law is a way for Christian lawmakers to burrow further into their illusion of constant persecution and win the votes of “people who don’t live in Austin.” “There’s a million idiotic little bills going through the Texas legislature all the time,” Glasser said, which sometimes makes it hard to keep track of exactly what the state’s Republican lawmakers are attempting to do. The “Merry Christmas Bill,” he said, “sounds like the usual ‘War on Christmas’ nonsense.” “As far as I can tell, nobody has ever actually stopped saying ‘Merry Christmas’ because they’re afraid to get sued,” he continued. “Does anybody sue anyone for saying ‘Merry Christmas?’ Because I think that’s a bunch of bullshit.” “They’re claiming that they’re under oppression,” he said, “and they use this as an excuse all the time to pass laws that basically codify Christianity and make sure that everybody hears about it as often as possible.”

Politics

• Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper on Tuesday dismissed a mushrooming expenses scandal as a distraction, but also said he was “very upset” that members of his Conservative Party had apparently tapped the public purse for personal gain. Harper, facing the biggest crisis since he won power in early 2006 with promises to clean up government, urged legislators to focus on the economy, which the Conservatives see as their strongest suit.

• Obama launches panel to reduce long lines at polls. More than six months after declaring on election night that “we’ve got to fix” long lines at the polls that forced some voters to wait up to eight hours, President Obama has announced the members of his commission on election administration. The list includes a mix of business executives, public officials, and election administrators, but no dedicated voting-rights advocates. Obama also announced that Nathaniel Persily, a professor at Columbia Law School who has generally been skeptical of voting restrictions aimed at combating fraud, will be the commission’s senior research director. And the commission unveiled a new website, supportthevoter.gov.

James S. Brady Press Briefing Room / 2:15 P.M. EDT

MR. CARNEY: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for being here. I have no announcements to make, so I will go straight to your questions. Julie Pace.

Q: Thank you. There seems to be a little bit of confusion about what exactly the White House Counsel’s Office was told the week of April 22nd about the IG report. Can you tell us what Kathy Ruemmler was told?

MR. CARNEY: Sure. Well, I appreciate the question. (Laughter.) There have been a lot of questions this morning that we’ve gotten based on recent reports about when we here at the White House learned of the Inspector General’s report, what we learned and how we learned, so I’d like to back up and just go through the fundamentals here first, if I may.

Number one, as the independent Inspector General testified and as his report says, he found no evidence that anyone outside of the IRS had any involvement in the inappropriate scrutinizing of conservative groups who were applying for tax exempt status.

Number two, no one in this building intervened in an ongoing, independent investigation or did anything that could be seen as intervening in that investigation.

Number three, the misconduct had stopped in May of 2012. So despite all the media interest in our April 2013 awareness, it’s important to remember that the misconduct, of course, had stopped almost a year earlier.

But going to your question, and in light of those questions, let me walk you through this because we don’t have any interest in being anything other than clear with you about that timeline.

So, as we have said, the White House Counsel, Kathy Ruemmler, learned during the week of April 22nd — the specific date is April 24th — that the Inspector General was finalizing an audit. That’s what they call this kind of report. At the time, the audit was still ongoing and the Inspector General had not issued its final report.

The White House Counsel’s Office routinely receives notification of pending Inspector General matters, as does Congress, and in fact, this was one of several IG reports likely to be released soon that were communicated to staff in the White House Counsel’s Office on April 16th in a series of items.

But on April 24th, as I said, the White House Counsel, Kathy Ruemmler, was informed that the Inspector General for Tax Administration was completing a report about line IRS employees improperly scrutinizing what are known as 501(c)(4) organizations by using words such as “tea party” and “patriot.” Counsel was further informed that the report had not been finalized and the publication date of the report was uncertain but likely soon.

While we had an indication of the likely findings, until the IG finalizes his report, the findings and conclusions are subject to change. And in fact, many IG reports do change significantly before they are published.

So to be clear, we knew the subject of the investigation and we knew the nature of some of the potential findings, but we didn’t have a copy of the draft report; we did not know the details, the scope or the motivation surrounding the misconduct; and we did not know who was responsible. Most importantly, the report was not final and still very much subject to change.

After that initial notification in April, the White House Counsel informed the Chief of Staff and other members of the senior staff. At no time did anyone on the White House staff intervene with the IRS Inspector General audit. There were communications between White House Counsel’s Office and White House Chief of Staff’s Office, with Treasury Office of General Counsel and Treasury’s Chief of Staff Office to understand the anticipated timing of the release of the report and the potential findings by the IG.

We know that the Hill also got briefings. As Congressman Issa said, he was aware of “approximately” what was in the report. But he, rightly, chose to not take action, because the cardinal rule is to not intervene in an independent investigation or take any steps that could be seen as intervening. That’s what we abided by, and that’s what any White House should do.

I just want to say that some reporting today suggests — and this is I think worth noting — suggests that given awareness of the potential findings, we should have done more. That could not be further from the right course of action. The cardinal rule, as I said, is that you do not intervene in an independent investigation, and you do not do anything that would be — that would give such an appearance, particularly when the final conclusions — as was the case here — have not been reached. And that’s the doctrine we followed.

And the bottom line is — and this isn’t just the most important fact, it’s what we have said from the beginning — not the White House, nor Treasury intervened in the Inspector General’s audit. So I hope that — anticipating this question, understanding there was some confusion about it, I hope that supplies the answers that you were hoping to get.

…So our whole point has been that knowing that this was coming does not change the fact that there was nothing we could have or should have done about it, because it was an independent Inspector General report. And, again, as I said at the end, I think it’s somewhat ironic that there has been some suggestion that action should have been taken because we were aware that the IG was — an independent IG was reaching the conclusion of a report and that it might have these findings, that somehow the President should have been notified or that we should have done something.

And, of course, the opposite is true, because these kinds of independent investigations need to be independent. There should be no intervention by a White House. And, of course, there was not in this case. And that’s why we had to wait, appropriately, until the report was publicized, or published, for the President to be able to review it and respond, as he did very quickly. He took action right away. He made sure that Secretary Lew asked for and accepted the resignation of the acting commissioner. He appointed a new acting commissioner. He very quickly made sure that the new acting commissioner would institute a top-down 30-day review of everything we could find out about this, or they could find out about this, to make sure that those who participated in the failings are held responsible, and that the activity doesn’t happen again.

• Death toll from the Moore, Oklahoma tornado is still officially 51, but expected to climb by another 40.

• Dozens dead after devastating tornado rips through Oklahoma City. Stunned weather forecasters reported a two-mile (three-kilometer) wide swathe of vicious winds and television news helicopters tracked a dark and deadly funnel plowing through densely-packed suburbs. National Weather Service gave the tornado a preliminary rating of EF-4, indicating that it packed winds of 166 to 200 miles per hour (267-322 km/h) — more severe than a category five hurricane.

• Oklahoma Republican US Senator Tom Coburn takes own constituents hostage, demands budget cuts or no tornado aid. In the face of a major tornado disaster in his home state, that has taken the lives of over 90 Oklahomans, including at least 24 children in a devastated elementary school, Coburn says he won’t support disaster relief for his home state unless the budget is cut elsewhere. Yes, Coburn is taking his own constituents hostage as budget-cutting human shields. One thing is clear, this isn’t about the deficit. How many Republicans asked for our wars to be paid for up front?

Scandalpalooza

• Conservative Groups Were Not “Targeted,” “Singled Out” Or Anything Else. You are hearing that conservative groups were “targeted.” What you are not hearing is that progressive groups were also “targeted.” So were groups that are not progressive or conservative. All that happened here is that groups applying to the IRS for special tax status were checked to see if they were engaged in political activity. They were checked, not targeted. Only 1/3 of the groups checked were conservative groups. Once again: Only 1/3 of the groups checked were conservative groups. Conservative groups were not “singled out,” were not “targeted” and in the end none were denied special tax status — even though many obviously should have been.

• If the White House’s detractors hoped to argue that President Obama’s team learned about the trouble at the IRS last year and did nothing, that could conceivably be a real controversy, but it’s not what happened — the White House learned about the IG investigation in late April 2013, not April 2012. Besides, it’s not as if nothing happened in response to the IRS criticisms — the Inspector General launched an audit, as Congress requested. Similarly, if Obama’s critics believed the White House learned of the controversy last year, but kept it under wraps before the election, this too might be the basis for a genuine controversy, but that’s not what happened either — Congress was notified of the investigation back in July 2012. That notification included House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who hates the president with the heat of a thousand suns, but who nevertheless said nothing during the 2012 campaign about the ongoing probe.

• Republicans in Congress have known that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) asked additional questions of some tea party groups seeking tax exempt status since last July, only recently raising the issue as a matter of controversy according to documents released by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

• The Justice Department (DOJ) sought a warrant in 2010 to inspect the private emails of Fox News correspondent James Rosen, according to court documents obtained by the Washington Post and unveiled on Monday. The department calls Rosen “an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator” to the leaking of classified materials, in its application for a search warrant, which was approved by a U.S. magistrate judge in May 2010. The revelation that the DOJ would classify a journalist as an un-indicted co-conspirator under the 1917 Espionage Act is “even a bigger deal” than the department’s seizure of Associated Press phone records, said Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.

Rightwingers being awful

• VA GOP’s Attorney General Nominee Wanted Women To Report Miscarriages To Police Or Face Jail Time. Virginia state Sen. Mark Obenshain (R) won the Republican nomination to replace Ken Cuccinelli as the state’s attorney general this weekend. As Think Progress reported Monday, Obenshain once introduced a bill that would charge women with a Class 1 misdemeanor if they failed to report a miscarriage to police. The bill, introduced in 2009, stated that if a miscarriage occured without medical attendance, the woman would be required to report the “fetal death, location of the remains, and the identity of the mother” to the local or state police department.

• The U.S. Secret Service is eying fringe right-wing radio host Pete Santilli, who recently said he wanted to shoot former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the vagina. Secret Service spokesperson told Talking Points Memo on Monday that the agency was “aware of Mr. Santilli’s comments and will take the appropriate follow up action.” The spokesperson noted that Santilli had a right to free speech, but added, “the Secret Service has a right and an obligation to determine what a person’s intent is when making comments like this.”

• A female former staffer for the Iowa state Senate Republicans says she was fired only hours after she reported sexual harassment by male lawmakers. In an interview on Sunday, Kirsten Anderson told WHO-TV that she had worked as the communications director for the state Senate Republican Caucus until Friday when she was fired after providing documentation about the sexual harassment.

In other news

• EI board appointees made banned donations to Conservatives. Dozens of people appointed to plum patronage jobs have been donating to the Conservative party, despite government rules that forbid it. A Canadian Press investigation found as many as one of every five chairpersons on the Employment Insurance Boards of Referees gave money to political parties, riding associations and election candidates while they served on the tribunal. All but one of the dozens of donations went to Conservatives, Election Canada records show. The lone non-Tory donation went to a Liberal riding association in the Toronto area. Those donations run afoul of guidelines for administrative tribunals, such as the EI referees boards, which hear complaints about EI decisions about issues such as denied benefits and fraud.

• Syrian army says it destroyed ‘Israeli vehicle with everyone in it’, but Israel reports only minor damage and no injuries. A cross-border exchange of fire in the Golan Heights between the Israeli and Syrian armies early on Tuesday triggered a claim by the Damascus regime that a jeep manned by Israeli troops had entered Syrian territory and was destroyed. The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) denied the claim, saying shots were deliberately fired at a patrol inside the Israeli-controlled the Golan Heights, causing minor damage and no injuries. “In response, IDF forces returned precise fire at the source and reported a direct hit,” it said.

• Guatemala’s top court has overturned the genocide conviction of former dictator Efrain Rios Montt, ordering that the trial be taken back to the middle of proceedings. The ruling late on Monday threw into disarray a process that had been hailed as historic for delivering the first guilty verdict for genocide against a former Latin American leader.

Republicans are being told by political leaders with an ear to history to tamp it down, but I don’t think they WANT to tamp it down, which is why you’re seeing this dissonance in their public statements. They’re being warned that all this scandal-mongering is actually hurting the right, and may even be helping Obama, whose approval numbers have actually gone up 2 points during all this crap. But that urge to take swipes dies hard and the right is still beholden to the crazies in their base. So you end up with this mish-mash. That evidence is coming out that makes these so-called scandals a little muddier surely helps drive the need to quiet them down. The Benghazi fiasco is obvious by now: faked emails, nuff said. The IRS? Not only teabaggers were targeted, as much as rightwingers want to wave that bloody shirt. AP? Republicans called for that investigation. So. It’s muddy, and the people likely to come out looking worse for it are the Republicans. This all amounts to a big ‘never mind’, with a wink to the far right base.

• Obama Approval Rating Not Hurt By Scandals. A new poll shows that recent scandals haven’t hurt President Obama’s approval rating. The poll, from CNN and ORC International, found that 53% of Americans approve of the job Obama is doing, while 45% disapproved. This number remains virtually unchanged from polls taken before the scandals hit. The poll was taken on May 17th and 18th, and has a 3% margin of error. A CNN poll taken in early April showed Obama’s approval rating to be 51%. According to a Gallup poll taken in early May, the president’s approval rating was 50%.

• White House Fights Back: We’ve Seen the GOP Playbook of False Allegations Before. Top White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer fought back against the week of Republican lies on Meet the Press, telling David Gregory, “We’ve seen this playbook from the Republicans before. What they want to do when they are lacking a positive agenda is they want to drag Washington into a swamp of partisan fishing expeditions, trumped up hearings, and false allegations. We’re not going to let that happen.”

Benghazi

• Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff is calling for answers into how emails about the attacks on Benghazi were leaked and altered, reportedly by Republican aides, which Schiff says was “intended to further a politically-driven narrative.” Schiff, a Congressman from California who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement on Saturday that the House Oversight Committee, and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., who chairs the committee, should provide answers for how the emails leaked in the first place, saying that Congress’s oversight authority “certainly does not justify the leak of falsified information intended to further a politically-driven narrative.”

When the GOP was given access to the lengthy email documents weeks ago, it was clear that their theory the White House inserted the ‘protest’ in the talking points to mislead the country had been completely debunked. The erroneous statement that the attacks on our facilities in Benghazi began as a protest was drafted by the intelligence community and remained in the talking points from beginning to end. This was the intelligence community’s belief at the time, and as flawed as that assessment was, the emails made clear the White House had no role in it.

But instead of coming clean with the country, someone in the GOP decided to change portions of the emails to discredit the White House, and leak them. This is deplorable conduct, and all the more so if it comes from those entrusted to fairly and objectively investigate claims of misconduct in government. Congressman Issa owes the public an answer as to who doctored these emails, who leaked them to the press, and who is being held accountable.

• Benghazi emails – Gut Check Time. Somebody does, indeed, need to go to jail and it’s looking more and more to me that it needs to be Darryl Issa.

• Benghazi Bullshit: The Real Scandal is the Media Pretending that Republicans Aren’t Lying. The real scandal, the only scandal, is that your “free press” is once again pretending as if Republicans are not lying to them. They are pretending that House Republicans did not feed a lie to the press in order to forward their bullshit Benghazi narrative.

• Sen. Rand Paul continued with his charges from earlier this week that former Sec. of State Hillary Clinton had “her fingerprints all over these talking points” on the Benghazi attack and claims that she never “really accepted culpability” because she failed to resign shortly after the tragedy.

• Paul Ryan On Benghazi: ‘I Don’t Know’ If There Was A Cover-up. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said Sunday that he does not know whether President Barack Obama intentionally misled the public about the nature of the September 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, backtracking from previous comments that the administration had engaged in a “cover-up.”

• Jon Karl makes things worse. He regrets “inaccurate” Benghazi email but says his story based on it “still entirely stands.” Really. ABC News? Karl admits the email that served as an electronic smoking gun, proving the White House intervened on the side of State, “was quoted inaccurately,” but the story “still entirely stands.” That’s gutsy – and crazy. The passive voice “was quoted inaccurately” sounds a lot like “mistakes were made.” Who quoted it inaccurately? Was it Karl’s source? Or was it Karl himself? Indeed, Karl “updated” his story “immediately” — only to say that despite the fact that Rhodes’s email didn’t say what he claimed it did, he stood by his story, and the real problem was that the White House refused to release the chain of emails. He hasn’t spoken since the White House took his advice and made the emails public – which unraveled his story entirely.

IRS

• The latest Republican Obama scandal is starting to fall apart too. The IRS didn’t just target conservative groups. They also questioned the tax exempt status of liberal groups too. The real reason why Republicans are desperately trying to drum up a scandal here is because they don’t want the IRS forcing their dark money groups to pay taxes. The IRS is threatening their Citizens United fueled political slush fund, and Republicans want it to stop. Republicans are trying to bully the IRS into backing off.

• Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Sunday conceded that there is no evidence that President Barack Obama or the White House were involved in the IRS’ targeting of groups affiliated with the tea party. The acknowledgement follows a week of strong insinuations that the White House used the IRS to intentionally intimidate conservative groups — talking points McConnell reiterated when making his comments. “There is a culture of intimidation throughout the administration,” McConnell said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “The IRS is just the most recent example.” “Do you have any evidence that the President of the United States directed what you call a culture of intimidation at the IRS to target political opponents?” host David Gregory asked. “I don’t think we know what the facts are,” McConnell replied. “That hasn’t stopped you from accusing,” Gregory noted.

• When it comes to the IRS’s scrutiny of groups applying for tax-exempt status, Paul believes there are secret memos that exist in his imagination that point to a conspiracy that only he understands. “While the Internal Revenue Service maintains it was not focusing on conservative groups out of political bias, Sen. Rand Paul claimed Sunday there was a “written policy” floating around the agency that said IRS officials were “targeting people who were opposed to the president.” “And when that comes forward, we need to know who wrote the policy and who approved the policy,” the Republican senator from Kentucky said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” Pressed for more precise details about the memo he was referring to, Paul said he hasn’t seen such a policy statement but has heard about it.”

AP/Press

• Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Sunday appeared to defend the Obama administration’s controversial leak investigation into the Associated Press. During an appearance on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” McConnell declined to attack the administration over the issue. “Actually, I do think these national security leaks are very important and it looks to me like this is an investigation that needs to happen because national security leaks, of course, can get our agents overseas killed,” McConnell said.

• Federal judge finds probable cause Fox News reporter helped leak classified docs. In the wake of reports that the Department of Justice seized phone records from The Associated Press while investigating an intelligence leak, The Washington Post revealed on Monday that a Fox News reporter had been fingered has a “co-conspirator” in a previous leak of classified documents. According to the Post, a federal judge found probable cause that Fox News Chief Washington Correspondent James Rosen solicited a top-secret CIA report on North Korea from government adviser Stephen Jin-Woo Kim in 2009. The report concluded that additional United Nations sanctions would only push North Korea to conduct more nuclear tests. Rosen published details about the report the same day it was made available to Kim and a small number of others in the intelligence community.

Batshit crazy

• FBI reportedly joins Bachmann campaign finance probe. The FBI joins the Office of Congressional Ethics, the Federal Elections Commission and an Iowa state Senate ethics committee in probing whether Bachmann’s presidential campaign paid an Iowa state senator from her MichelePAC, a fund that should not have been used for campaign expenses, and whether the state senator stole the email list of an Iowa home-school group from another Bachmann staffer, Barbara Hekki, prior to the Iowa caucuses in January, 2012. Andy Parrish, former Bachmann chief of staff and one of the directors of Bachmann’s Iowa GOP presidential campaign, will be interviewed by the FBI, according to his attorney, John Gilmore.

• This is who they are: Pete Santilli, Right Wing Radio Host: Hillary Clinton Needs To Be ‘Shot In The Vagina’. “I want to shoot her right in the vagina and I don’t want her to die right away; I want her to feel the pain and I want to look her in the eyes and I want to say, on behalf of all Americans that you’ve killed, on behalf of the Navy SEALS, the families of Navy SEAL Team Six who were involved in the fake hunt down of this Obama, Obama bin Laden thing, that whole fake scenario, because these Navy SEALS know the truth, they killed them all. On behalf of all of those people, I’m supporting our troops by saying we need to try, convict, and shoot Hillary Clinton in the vagina.”

• Funny how the imagery of women getting shot in their reproductive organs keeps being brought up by right-wing men, isn’t it? Remember Steve Stockman’s campaign bumper sticker, “If babies had guns they wouldn’t be aborted”? How about Rush Limbaugh saying that abortions should be done with a gun. Remember that?

• Drudge Report Falsely Attributes Quote to President Obama: “I’m a Black Man”. Here’s a transcript of the prepared speech — the words “I’m a black man,” which Drudge put in quotation marks, do not appear in the speech. The link for Drudge’s headline goes to a Washington Post article, and the words “I’m a black man” do not appear in that article either. Drudge simply made it up.

Canada

• Harper chief of staff resigns amid Senate expense scandal.Nigel Wright has resigned as Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s chief of staff, following revelations he wrote a $90,000 cheque to repay improperly claimed housing expenses for Senator Mike Duffy. Ray Novak, Harper’s principal secretary since 2008, will take over as chief of staff, the CBC’s Hannah Thibedeau reports. Early on in his political career, Novak interned in the office of former Reform leader Preston Manning and then became Harper’s executive assistant when Harper returned to federal politics in 2001 to lead the Canadian Alliance party.

• With Nigel Wright gone, Harper faces even more questions. Did Prime Minister Stephen Harper have foreknowledge of a backroom deal between his now former chief of staff, Nigel Wright, and Sen. Mike Duffy, in which the latter’s $90,172 tab for improper housing expenses would be made to go away? That question now takes centre stage, as Harper finds himself, for the first time in his seven-plus years in power, in the grip of a full-blown crisis at the highest levels of his government, with as-yet unknown consequences for all the players involved, including him. Tuesday, the PM is set to meet with his caucus. The exchange, one suspects, will be neither pleasant nor brief.

Afghanistan

• Karzai says US can establish military bases in Afghanistan. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said the United States can establish military bases in Afghanistan after the two sides sign US-Afghan bilateral security agreement.