Not John Boehner.  Not from the look of things.  Jonathan Chait watches as Congressional Republicans try to  deal with economic necessities and, well, set themselves up for failure and ridicule.  They still seem to want trouble.

One dynamic that comes through is that, even though the deficit is plunging at an extraordinarily fast rate, and saving the Republic from the supposed imminent threat of the debt crisis was the entire rationale for using the novel and dangerous tactic of holding the debt ceiling hostage, absolutely nobody within the House Republican caucus is even considering just lifting the debt ceiling. Everybody agrees they must demand a new hostage. ...Chait, Daily Intel

Thing is,  they appear to be just begging for trouble.  And, as Chait points out, they're going to get it.  "Their whole thought process seems to extend to coming up with a ransom demand and assuming Obama agrees to it. The most likely way this plays out is that Obama and the Senate don’t agree to the ransom, the debt ceiling looms, business leaders freak out at Republicans, ultra-conservatives freak out at John Boehner, Boehner starts crying and maybe quoting prayers, and then they fold and lift the debt ceiling with Democratic votes."

Economists have been vocal about the damage done to the economy by the focus on deficit reduction. Many of us took a while coming to some understanding of the impact of rightwing fanaticism on daily life for middle-class America.  But (finally!) experiencing results of the fanaticism driving the Republican House is having political as well as economic  repercussions.  The "sequester" and the lawmakers' own avoidance of its effects are doing the trick.

At 7.5 percent, unemployment is still too high, and there’s little sign of rapid improvement. According to most projections, joblessness won’t reach pre-recession levels for another three years.

Congress’ push for deficit reduction has a lot to do with this. As noted in the New York Times last week: “The nation’s unemployment rate would probably be nearly a point lower, roughly 6.5 percent, and economic growth almost two points higher this year if Washington had not cut spending and raised taxes as it has since 2011.”

To put that in more concrete terms, 1.5 million more Americans would have jobs if not for Washington’s decision to pursue deficit reduction in the midst of a sluggish economy.

Unfortunately, news of successful deficit reduction is unlikely to result in any respite from new cuts or tax increases. The Obama administration still has its Social Security cuts on the table — as part of a potential “grand bargain” — and Congressional Republicans are gearing up to demand still more spending cuts in exchange for raising the debt ceiling.

Will Washington avoid endangering the still-fragile recovery with further deficit reduction? If the refusal to end or replace the sequester is any indication, I wouldn’t hold my breath.  ...Jamelle Bouie, WaPo

“Our job is to legislate, and we’re trying to legislate things that will help create jobs in our country,” Mr. Boehner said. “But we also have a responsibility, under the Constitution, to provide oversight of the executive branch of government.”...NYT

That's John Boehner's ironic statement -- who? the Republicans? take time out of their lives to actually legislate? get some work done? -- even as Republican party leaders are wary after the drubbing they took when they went after Bill Clinton.  "Trying to legislate things?"  And did you notice?  They're admitting government can help create jobs?

Representative Charles Boustany Jr., Republican of Louisiana and a key driver in an investigation of the I.R.S. by the Ways and Means Committee, said, “I’m being very cautious not to overplay my hand.”

Working against those methodical plans, however, are the personal passions of the rank and file. Mr. Chaffetz on Thursday repeated his refusal to take the impeachment of the president “off the table.” Representative Michele Bachmann, the Republican firebrand from Minnesota, joined in. ...NYT

With Bachmann leading the charge, how worried should the Obama administration be?  Into the valley of death ride the House's 233?  Even the Washington Post, which has a history of going after Obama,  dismisses the Republicans' efforts.

The government failed to anticipate the attack on Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and to protect him and those who died alongside him, but there was no coverup of the failure and no conspiracy to deceive the American people about what had happened. ...WaPo

Anyway,  the failure belongs to the CIA -- now endemically a failed institution.  The DOJ mess?  Badly handled, but not something the White House knew anything about.  And the IRS?  Ditto.

The IRS targeting conservative opponents of Mr. Obama for special scrutiny is horrifying and inexcusable. We still don’t have a full picture of how the practice originated, how high in the administration knowledge of it rose and how members of Congress came to be repeatedly misinformed on the subject. But there is so far no evidence of White House knowledge or instigation of the practice. ...WaPo

In the end, after sighing about the White House's defensive attitude and flat-footedness, the Post questions -- as the Times does -- Congressional Republicans' judgment. 

There will be no shortage of investigations of the IRS affair, which is as it should be, and Republicans in Congress will no doubt pursue Benghazi until the last talking point is gasping for breath. Fine. At the same time we hope Congress will keep in mind that serious business is pending: immigration reform, a tax code overhaul, a looming debt-ceiling deadline and more. The world, from Syria to the South China Sea, remains dangerous. ...WaPo

After more than two years of conflict, Syria is breaking up. A constellation of armed groups battling to advance their own agendas are effectively creating the outlines of separate armed fiefs. As the war expands in scope and brutality, its biggest casualty appears to be the integrity of the Syrian state. ...NYT

Syria?  How about George W. Bush's favorite place for war games?

Iraq is a basket case these days, and none of its problems came out of the blue. In the latest bout of sectarian and ethnic bloodletting, coordinated bomb attacks ripped through Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad and also northern Iraq, killing more than 30 people. The spasm of violence followed clashes between the Iraqi army and Sunni protesters and insurgents last month, where the federal government temporarily lost control of some town centers and urban neighborhoods in Kirkuk, Nineveh, and Diyala provinces. ...

... The resurgence of violence since 2010 is shown very clearly in the metrics used to gauge the strength of the insurgency. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy's Iraq Violence Database has tracked violence since 2004, drawing on both open-source and privileged information provided by security forces in Iraq. In the first quarter of 2011, monthly attacks bottomed out at an average of 358 reported incidents -- the lowest quarterly average since 2004. By the first quarter of 2012, the average monthly attacks had risen to 539. By the first quarter of 2013, it was 804. These figures not only provide evidence an increasingly active insurgency, but one that has more than replaced anti-U.S. targeting with Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence. ...Foreign Policy, Michael Knights

Quick!  Find another domestic "scandal" and maybe people won't notice the mess.

I'd just as soon jettison "national security."  It's a misleading phrase (deliberately misleading, most of the time).  Whose security are we talking  about?  The security of the lies we tell ourselves about our nation's "interests"? 

Certainly not the security of  the average American.  We have all evidence we need and more about the breaches of our personal security  -- privacy and safety -- by successive administrations and by corporate America.  I think "national security" really means protection of those who benefit most from  our system or -- to put it another way -- protection of a system that guards the interests of the top 10%.   Surely the invasion of Iraq did nothing for the average American's security.  On the contrary, it took the lives of many of their kids while acting as a goad to those who resented us already and who look for opportunities to plant a bomb here, start trouble there. 

Leaked information about our government may be all we have left as a way of getting fragments of truth.  You never know.  Still, Representative Lamar Smith (a tidy little cocksucker who was once our district's representative here in gerrymandered TX), got after President Obama about leaks last year.

Smith’s letter was sent to President Obama in 2012. It complained about national security leaks that set off the very investigation which this week prompted fury over the Justice Department’s seizure of two months’ worth of telephone records from a group of Associated Press reporters.

Isn’t it odd that many Republicans who demanded a thorough investigation a year ago are now condemning the Justice Department for doing what they asked for? Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus even called on Attorney General Eric Holder to resign, saying he had “trampled on the First Amendment.”

It’s a funny thing about media leaks: They are either courageous or outrageous, depending on whether they help or hurt your political party.

Forgive me for feeling cynical and depressed about our nation’s political conversation. Scandalmania is distorting our discussion of three different issues, sweeping them into one big narrative — everything is a “narrative” these days — about the beleaguered second-term presidency of Barack Obama.

What’s being buried under a story line?

On leaks, I don’t believe that the media have unlimited immunity. But I am very pro-leak because such disclosures are often the only way citizens in a free society can find out things they need to know. ...EJDionne,WaPo

Well, exactly!

Tina Brown (Vanity Fair>Newsweek>Daily Beast) isn't someone I'd turn to for the last word on our political culture. She may be condemned by her position at the Beast to chase the latest scandal.  Whatever.  But when, in an interview this morning, she made  it sound as though Obama will never climb out of this mess (you choose.. there are so many), I had to switch her off. 

We seem to be stuck in an endless "scandal" that always turns out to be largely fictive.  I'm sorry, but we need to remember that Obama "couldn't possibly" be elected, much less reelected. In the end, no matter how hard they work at it,  our in-House fascists can't erase is that Obama represents, as Michael Tomasky points out, the "most transformational presidency in modern history." 

I don't think Tomasky is wrong.  I just think we're stuck with the media we support with our dollars and often can't see beyond them to reality.  We are hoist, to coin a phrase, with our own petard.  There's a whole world of events going on out there that will "go down in history" that we've stopped paying attention to.  To put it another way, we seem to be inhaling the breath we just exhaled, never taking in fresh air.  No wonder we're woozy-headed.*

To think back over Obama’s tenure is to be struck by a paradox that has, I think, little precedent. Obama’s is the most transformational presidency in modern history, but it simply doesn’t feel that way. Recall the famous words he spoke to a Nevada newspaper in January 2008 when he declared that Ronald Reagan “changed the trajectory of America in a way that…Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not.” Aside from trying to throw then-opponent Hillary Clinton off her stride a bit, Obama clearly meant to be saying that he would be changing history as Reagan did.

His tenure so far hasn’t been much like Reagan’s at all. In large part this is because Reagan’s ascension represented the rise to the very apex of power of a relatively new force, the “movement conservatism” that first sprang to life in the mid-1950s. Before Reagan, that brand of conservatism had been consigned to the barely acceptable fringes of Washington, given voice by a few second-tier legislators (Roman Hruska of Nebraska, for example) and cranky columnists (James J. Kilpatrick). Reagan altered Washington’s chemistry in a vast number of ways, from questions of domestic and foreign policy to seating arrangements in Georgetown society. The many cumulative billions from rich conservatives that helped build conservative think tanks and media outlets such as Fox News started changing the balance of power in Washington as well during Reagan’s term.

Obama has not presided over that kind of political and cultural change, and it’s hard to see how he will. And yet, his record of accomplishments in both the policy and political realms is formidable. He passed near-universal health care and sweeping financial regulation. He ended the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on military service. He was the first president to endorse same-sex marriage (which I predicted in these pages—wrongly, I’m happy to note—might prove costly at the polls). The night before the election, Rachel Maddow devoted the first ten or so minutes of her MSNBC program to listing Obama’s policy achievements. It was a staggering list.

The political accomplishments are notable as well. Bear in mind that many conservatives (and not a few liberals) believed that 2008 had to be unique, and that Obama’s aberrational triumph was made possible only by a storm of events that conspired to do in the Republicans—the financial meltdown, John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin, the media’s supposed lionization of Obama, and so on. Surely, conservatives thought, that 2008 coalition was a fluke; America will never reelect a man such as this. ...NYRB

*By the way, if you want to spend your time in good (intelligent) company online,  this is highly recommended. 

Chris Hedges is the son of a minister and is himself a Divinity School product, a journalist, a war correspondent, and a commentator on our society and America's growing failures. 

If you're a progressive of either party, you'll listen to what he has to say.  If you tend to wander away from reason, you'll be suspicious of his intentions.  Fellow Christians admire him; the American "Christian" community are likely to find his comments insulting at best.  He wrote about those Christians-in-quotes in "American Fascist."

... The first chapter of that book is on despair and how, you know, when the walls close in on you, when there are no options, when life or the real world defeats you - and of course having spent two years writing that book, a lot of the people that went into the embrace of the Christian right struggled with, you know, drug addictions, alcoholism, you know, sexual abuse, family breakdown.

And if you go back and look at all of the writers on totalitarianism, whether it's Hannah Arendt, Fritz Stern, Karl Popper, they all talk about that despair as essentially driving you into a non-reality-based belief system. And the despair is only growing. I think we have powerful proto-fascist movements in this country, and I look at the Tea Party, the militia, the Christian right, where they celebrate the language of violence, they celebrate the gun culture. And they channel what I would describe as a very legitimate rage and a legitimate sense of betrayal towards the vulnerable, towards Muslims, towards undocumented workers, towards homosexuals, intellectuals, feminists, liberals. They have a long list of people they don't like. And I think that is a very - remains a very frightening and powerful undercurrent within American society.

My wife is Canadian. Canadian culture is different in many ways, but fundamentally it's different in that it doesn't have this kind of belief, which has been part of the American fabric from our inception, and that is regeneration through violence.

We are a very violent nation. You can see it just in the numbers of shootings since Newtown. I think we're close to 2,000 almost every day. And so yes, I think those forces, as we see an unraveling of the economy, continued sort of slow unraveling or certainly an inability to ameliorate the chronic unemployment or underemployment, a kind of chipping away at Head Start and Social Security and, you know, failure to prolong unemployment benefits, these are really throwing large sections of the United States into distress.

And what you get when you enter that kind of ideological belief system is you no longer deal with reality. You believe that - you believe in magic. You believe that Jesus will intervene to protect you and promote you, and then it becomes impossible to have a kind of rational discussion, for instance with people who believe that, you know, everything - the Earth was created 6,000 years ago, and there were dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden.

You know, I went, in "American Fascist," to the Creationist Museum in Peterborough, Kentucky. And we're going on the tour, and they have the tour of the Garden Eden and a fake waterfall and Adam and Eve, who are naked, but Eve's sort of turned, you know, so you can't see her plastic breasts or anything.

And there's a T. rex there, and the guide is explaining to us, well, I'm sure you all wonder why the T. rex has such big teeth. Well, it's because Adam and Eve used T. rex to open the coconuts. And then we went into the next room, which was a replica of Noah's ark, and she's saying, well, I'm sure you all wonder how Noah got the dinosaurs on the ark. Well, Noah only put baby dinosaurs on the ark.

I mean this kind of utter walking away from rational thought, from science, that's what totalitarian systems are. But it puts you in a kind of cocoon. ...NPR, Talk of the Nation, 5/15/13

In the battle over regulation, Wall Street is poised to notch another win.

Lobbyists for the nation’s biggest banks have persuaded federal regulators to soften a proposed rule under the Dodd-Frank Act, the financial overhaul law passed after the crisis of 2008. The rule, which regulators plan to approve on Thursday, could protect Wall Street’s control over the $700 trillion derivatives market, a lucrative business that helped cause the financial crisis. ...NYTDealBook

For the 37th time since 2011, House Republicans will hold a vote to repeal Obamacare on Thursday, bringing the total cost of all of their failed repeal votes to roughly $55 million in taxpayer money, according to one estimate. Last year, CBS News calculated that the number of hours spent on 33 repeal votes — then roughly 80 hours, or two full work weeks — cost taxpayers an estimated $48 million. Since then, Republicans have held three more votes (another $4.5 million) and will add another $1.5 million with their latest. ..ThinkProgress

For this supporter of the President, the biggest problem with his presidency -- the most significant lapse in  judgment -- has been his willingness to placate the troublemakers.  The latest example of this comes in his hand-wringing over the IRS field office's attempt to scrutinize the extent of politicking by groups on the right seeking non-profit tax status and specifically tea party groups.  It's a mistake to concede malpractice on  the part of the IRS when, if you look at the matter with cool eyes and some knowledge of 501(c) requirements, its employees in Ohio probably did the right thing. The wrong way. 

The New York Times sorts through the distinctions.

 The Internal Revenue Service was absolutely correct to look into the abuse of the tax code by political organizations masquerading as “social welfare” groups over the last three years. The agency’s mistake — and it was a serious one — was focusing on groups with “Tea Party” in their name or those criticizing how the country is run. ...NYT editorial board

But how the heck would you locate the potential fraud if you avoided the words "tea party"?

The I.R.S. should have used a neutral test to scrutinize every group seeking a tax exemption for “social welfare” activity — Democrat or Republican, conservative or liberal. Any group claiming tax-exempt status under Section 501(c)(4) of the internal revenue code can collect unlimited and undisclosed contributions, and many took in tens of millions. They are not supposed to spend the majority of their money on political activities, but the I.R.S. has rarely stopped the big ones from polluting the political system with unaccountable cash. ... NYT editorial board

The Times editors lament the absence of equal scrutiny of similar groups on the left trying to pull a fast one.  But doesn't the IRS pull its punches -- thanks to pressure from all  sides in Congress?

There is no evidence President Obama knew about the audits by the I.R.S. The groups involved were seeking not to pay taxes on large amounts of income by claiming that they promote social welfare. No one has an automatic right to this tax exemption; those seeking one should expect close scrutiny from the government to ensure it is not evading taxes.

For many years, however, the I.R.S. hasn’t provided it. Democratic groups were the first ones to start abusing their social-welfare tax status in the 2004 election; the Republicans followed suit and became the biggest players in this field beginning in 2008. Far bigger than any Tea Party group, Crossroads GPS nakedly violated the tax code by spending tens of millions on behalf of Republican candidates, claiming it wasn’t political because it ran only “issue ads.” It never lost its tax exemption....NYT editorial board

In spite of orders from on high within the IRS, some employees are said to have kept their focus on the tea party while overlooking breaches on the left.  But this is nothing like Nixon's deliberate use of the IRS to intimidate his opposition, as the Times points out.  And it seems to me that many of us, during the early days of the tea party movement, were already aghast at what those groups were getting away with -- in the streets, in their extreme behaviors, and in their claims for special tax status. 

The IRS field office in Cleveland used their best intuitions, faced reality.  Reality is deeply unpopular in politics -- particularly on the right.  The IRS is only the latest in a string of victims of Republican "political correctness."

Hint:  It's not just about Republicans.   It's really about the media -- about who's angry in the White House press corps and why. What the story has become isn't the killing of diplomats.  It's about reporters' (and Republicans') egos.  Surprised?  I'm not. 

I'm not -- in part because my memory of that incident and what Republican politicians seem to "recall" are quite different.  Now, thank goodness, along comes Kevin Drum with some actual background to the story.  I think Drum has nailed it. As usual.

If Benghazi continues to have legs, it won't be because Fox is hyping it. They've been hyping it for eight months now. It won't be because the initial talking points were wrong. We've known that since the end of last September. It won't be because there were military assets on the night of the attacks that could have been used but weren't. This is the "stand down" conspiracy theory, which keeps morphing into something new whenever the old version is debunked, and it's long since been thoroughly hashed out. It won't be because references to al-Qaeda were removed from the final draft of the talking points. David Petraeus explained that last November. And it won't be because we learned that the editing of the talking points involved some squabbling between State and CIA. Nobody over the age of five is surprised or scandalized by that.

No, it will be because the small group of reporters who are credentialed to the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room feels aggrieved that the press secretary told them something to their faces that concealed bit of unseemly bureaucratic squabbling. It doesn't matter if the subject matter itself was important. In this case, it wasn't: the nickel version is that the State Department objected to the CIA adding a sentence making sure everyone knew they had warned about possible attacks beforehand, a statement that was both gratuitous and off subject. But trivial or not, Carney misled the reporters in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room about this, and that makes it personal.

Never underestimate the power of a press corps that suddenly decides the story is personal. It may be a while before they let go of this. ...Kevin Drum, MoJo

___

During the weekly focus on international news Friday on the Diane Rehm show the Benghazi hearings kept coming up. Once again it was clear that the neither the media nor the American people appear to be interested in the whole story. Well, not all the American people -- just some of us.  Here's a key part of that discussion, prompted by a question from a listener:

Jonathan Landy, McClatchy: Actually the CIA annex was not part of that compound. It was in another part of Benghazi and it did have a security force which was the security force that responded to the attack on the compound, went there and rescued the Americans that were in the compound, brought them back to the CIA annex, and took them to the airport. Two of those people were CIA, two former SEALs, CIA contractors, and security guard contractors who died on the roof of the annex in a mortar attack.

And in fact, those Islamists were among the leading rebel forces that overthrew Gaddafi. And so it seems that because he was gone, the CIA needed to be able to keep an eye on people who he had been keeping an eye on. That part of this whole terrible tragedy has really yet to be talked about and that is where perhaps any kind of Congressional inquiry should be going.