She should have been fired long ago, but thanks to unions and bureaucrats who fund political campaigns it’s nearly impossible to fire federal employees…so she gets paid to stay home.

Or, as Andy Levy says:

Lois Lerner is on administrative leave with pay, or as we used to call it back in the day, vacation.

— Andy Levy (@andylevy) May 23, 2013

If you missed his appearance at the Billboard Music Awards the other night, Bieber was booed by the audience and delivered a childish “I should be taken seriously!” speech to a crowd of legendary artists.

Bieber, who wore sunglasses throughout the ceremony, seemed like a five-year-old throwing a temper tantrum. Which Bon Jovi didn’t hesitate to point out.

“Every generation has guys that do that, none of that is new,” the 51-year-old Bon Jovi told the newspaper during a tour stop in Vienna on the European leg of Bon Jovi’s Because We Can tour.

“They run the risk of disrespecting their audience members who have worked hard to pay for their ticket, to give you the permission to take two or three hours of their lives—or in that kid’s case, 80 minutes of their lives.”…

“Do it once, you can be forgiven,” the “Bad Medicine” singer said. “Do it enough times and shame on you. They won’t have you back. Then it just becomes a cliché. It’s really not cool—you’re an a–hole. Go to f–kin’ work!“

Well said.

Bieber is king of the entitlement generation that assumes it deserves your respect simply because it exists and does what it wants to do. Enough already.

MAY 21–Entrusted with a government credit card, an Internal Revenue Service worker allegedly used the plastic for a years-long Amazon.com shopping spree that netted her hundreds of items, including a chocolate fondue fountain; Bollywood movies; Pampers; Harlequin romance novels; Omaha Steaks; Apple Bottoms skinny jeans; mango body wash; and a Ginsu knife set.

Yetunde Oseni, 37, was named this month in a U.S. District Court felony complaint charging her with embezzling government funds. Oseni has worked since 2000 as a secretary in an IRS office in Lanham, Maryland.

According to a court filing, Oseni was given a Citibank MasterCard for the “purchase of office supplies for her business unit.”

She faces 10 years in prison if convicted.

Her defense attorney, William Taylor III, confirmed in a letter that Lerner would refuse to explain to investigators her role in the growing scandal or why it was never disclosed to Congress. Lerner heads the division of the IRS that was responsible for the political persecution.

We’re Americans and our first instinct when seeing tragedy like this is to find a way to help. Authorities say they have enough rescuers on scene for now and want to keep the roads clear, so any help we can provide would have to be from our own parts of the country.

Here’s what you can do now:

• Donate to the American Red Cross either online or text REDCROSS to 90999 to donate $10 (donation will be charged to your cellphone bill). 
• You can also donate to the Salvation Army. You can do that online or by texting STORM to 80888 (same goes with $10 charged to your bill).

Basically they need donations to keep supplies and disaster response operations going for now. If there’s anything else that comes up, I’ll update.

According to employees who spoke to ABC, they’ve been informed that if they speak to the media they’ll risk losing their jobs.

At the IRS office on the fourth floor, a woman who answered the buzzer referred reporters to officials in Washington, though they were not returning very many calls. That staffer also said she was not allowed to speak to anyone – a line that was repeated by agency personnel during the week.

The agency officially denies, but:

Asked whether employees were reminded of the official media policy this week, the spokesman said “no.”

Not so, said IRS folks in Ohio.

One of them, who asked not be named, told ABC News that security guards did remind employees of the official policy not to talk with the press – a warning cemented by the punch line “or risk losing our jobs.”

Even leaders of the local union that represents the IRS workers under fire took the admonition to heart, hanging up on reporters who wanted to ask questions about the scandal. One longtime IRS worker and union member called the response by the National Treasury Employees Union “dazzling.”

And that’s not all. ABC News reporters tried to get answers and speak with employees willing to talk about the scandal. When the reporters tried, they were trailed by armed security.

As we traveled the public hallways of the building – watched over by security cameras – an armed uniformed police officer with the Federal Protective Service followed us. We were looking for a particular office—of someone who would not want to be seen talking to reporters–but chose to bypass it because of our official babysitter.

Asked why we were being escorted in a public building, the officer identified himself as Insp. Mike Finkelstein and said he was only trying to make sure that the newsmen were not a “nuisance.” He brushed aside further questions. The cop said a supervisor would call to explain.

No supervisor ever called.

But, according to the White House’s new spin, all of these senior staffers got together and decided to not tell Barack Obama. Which means senior staff, employees of the president, conspired to deny the president important information about an investigation that would alter the news cycle and hurt his presidency.

That’s if you believe the spin. I don’t, but let’s assume – for argument’s sake – it’s true. (It’s not, but for argument’s sake.)

Put yourself in Barack Obama’s shoes. Wouldn’t you be pissed? If you found out about a major scandal that would hurt your presidency, and then found the people who work for you kept that information from you, wouldn’t you be pissed? Wouldn’t you fire at least the ringleaders? Forget morality and decency for a moment. They hurt you and your administration. You’d fire them.

But no. No firings. And the White House is still trying to cover-up exactly who knew what.

They used security badge access records to track the reporter’s comings and goings from the State Department, according to a newly obtained court affidavit. They traced the timing of his calls with a State Department security adviser suspected of sharing the classified report. They obtained a search warrant for the reporter’s personal e-mails.

The case of Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, the government adviser, and James Rosen, the chief Washington correspondent for Fox News, bears striking similarities to a sweeping leaks investigation disclosed last week in which federal investigators obtained records over two months of more than 20 telephone lines assigned to the Associated Press.

By the way, this great leak? Rosen reported that if sanctions were imposed on North Korea, the communist state would likely respond with more nuclear tests. That’s it. For that the Obama Administration spied on him and read his personal emails.

Ryan Lizza, Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, tweets:

If James Rosen’s “clandestine communications plan” were illegal, every journalist in Washington would be locked up. Unreal.

Also obvious from search warrant: DOJ already had Kim completely nailed. They didn’t need to get Rosen’s emails.

Yep. This was retaliation for undermining them, not a serious national security leak investigation. As with the Associated Press investigation, this was just DoJ under Eric Holder trying to get even with reporters for reporting.

I can’t speak to the law here. The law is irrelevant. The activity was outrageous and inexcusable, and it was stopped and it needs to be fixed so we ensure it never happens again.

“The law is irrelevant”? Whether those involved were merely acting inappropriately or committing felonies is “irrelevant”? Whether they were violating constitutional rights is “irrelevant”?

No wonder employees of the Internal Revenue Service saw nothing wrong with politically persecuting Americans. They have a boss who considers the law of the land to be “irrelevant” so long as he condemns what happened later.

According to a federal arrest affidavit, Welden swapped out his girlfriend’s antibiotics with abortion pills, specifically Cytotec.

“I was never going to do anything but go full term with it, and he didn’t want me to,” explained Remee Lee, 26, Welden’s now ex-girlfriend.

On Easter Sunday, Lee went to an area hospital complaining of severe cramping and excessive vaginal bleeding. Doctors told Lee her unborn baby no longer had a heartbeat.

His father’s a doctor and he allegedly forged the dad’s signature to acquire the abortion pills. He then allegedly changed the label indicate the pills were antibiotics for her.

Lee said when she learned she was pregnant, Welden took her to see his father, who is an obstetrician in Lutz. A sonogram and blood test confirmed Lee was six-weeks pregnant.

The next day, Welden called his girlfriend with bad news. Her blood test apparently showed she had a bacterial infection and she would need to take Amoxicillin to clear it up.

On Good Friday, Lee said Welden showed up at her Tampa home with a care package that included the bottle of antibiotics. The label said the pills were A moxycillin .

“He told me to keep taking them. I was supposed to take three a day for days,” she recalled of Welden’s instructions.

Those pills, of course, were the abortion-inducing Cytotec.

“Everyone dreams of becoming a mom. This was my chance,” she said.

First-degree murder is a capital offense, and Florida — where the crime took place — regularly imposes the death penalty as punishment.

WASHINGTON — The Treasury Department’s inspector general told senior Treasury officials in June 2012 he was investigating allegations that the Internal Revenue Service had targeted conservative groups, disclosing for the first time on Friday that Obama administration officials were aware of the matter during the presidential campaign year.

And yet the IRS only went public with this information last Friday, and even then the admission only came because the Inspector General was set to go public with his investigation.

The Internal Revenue Service official in charge of the tax-exempt organizations at the time when the unit targeted tea party groups now runs the IRS office responsible for the health care legislation.

Sarah Hall Ingram served as commissioner of the office responsible for tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012. But Ingram has since left that part of the IRS and is now the director of the
IRS’ Affordable Care Act office, the IRS confirmed to ABC News today.

So the person who oversaw political persecution will be making your health care decisions for you. Sleep well.

State Rep. Tyrone Brooks, D-Atlanta, was indicted Thursday by a federal grand jury for allegedly, misappropriating almost $1 million in charitable funds, the U.S. Attorney’s office said.

Barack Obama and Eric Holder have insisted the seizure wasn’t an attempt to intimidate the press but rather a serious investigation into a leak that, they claim, placed American national security at risk.

One problem: According to the Washington Post, the AP held the story for five days at the request of the CIA, which was reviewing it for security purposes. Then the CIA cleared it. And the Obama Administration was planning to go public with it.

They had a big announcement planned, where the president would brag about how his administration had foiled another plot. So they asked the AP to hold off reporting it until the administration could go public. The AP refused and ran the story.

So the alleged security threat? No longer existed. The story had been cleared for publication by intelligence officials. And the White House itself was going to tell the world. If the Washington Post report is accurate, the only problem with AP’s publication is that it stepped on the White House’s political toes. It denied Obama a great political moment.

The U.S. Marshal Service has been “unable to locate” two former participants in the federal Witness Security Program “identified as known or suspected terrorists,” states the public summary of an interim Justice Department Inspector General’s report obtained by CNN.

The Marshals have concluded that “one individual was and the other individual was believed to be residing outside of the United States.”

The news comes from an audit of the Witness Security Program by the IG’s office , which states that “the Department did not definitively know how many known or suspected terrorists were admitted into the WITSEC program,” among other “significant issues concerning national security.” The report makes 16 recommendations.

The “Interim Report on the Department of Justice’s Handling of Known or Suspected Terrorists Admitted Into the Federal Witness Security Program” notes that while in the midst of an audit of the WITSEC program, the Inspector General felt the need to notify the Justice Department of national security vulnerabilities, and the IG’s office “developed the interim report to help ensure that the Department promptly and sufficiently addressed the deficiencies we found.”

Oh, also, the Department of Justice forgot to add their names to the no-fly list.

First came Esquire, which called on Holder to go. Then Daily Kos (Kos linked it from Facebook).

And now liberal talk show host Bill Press:

I still haven’t heard a legit justification for the subpoenaing the AP phone records. They didn’t notify AP, they didn’t narrow search.

What “breach of national security” are we talking about re the AP story? It’s BS and Holder should be fired.

For once we agree.

Not only did IRS employees improperly target groups based on politics, but they also improperly demanded a host of details about the groups’ activities, according to a report on the abuses by a Treasury Department inspector general.

Some groups, including several interviewed by The Washington Post, were asked to provide names of donors or membership lists, which experts say the IRS cannot legally do. The agency also demanded names of board members, copies of meeting minutes and résumés, details of community organizing efforts and numerous other details, according to questionnaires obtained by The Post.

It was a mixture between stalling in the hopes the group would go away, and trying to intimidate people into silence. Coincidentally, almost exclusively critics of their bosses in the Obama Administration.

But hold on.

It turns out Miller was set to resign next month anyway.

‘Lew took the first step by requesting and accepting the resignation of the acting director of the IRS,’ Obama said.

‘It’s important,’ he added, ‘to institute new leadership that can help restore confidence going forward.’

But in an email to IRS employees, Miller claimed he would only be leaving next month because his assignment would be over.

So basically he’s leaving a few weeks early. That’s a sufficient response to the revelation that a federal agency engaged in political persecution for years?

Lerner received $17,220 for 2009, $24,691 for 2010 and $10,620 for 2011, the most recent year for which the IRS said data was available.

That would be Lois Lerner, who admitted on Friday her department improperly targeted conservative groups.

The Attorney General was asked when he recused himself from the Justice Department’s investigation into Associated Press reporters. His answer? He doesn’t remember.

But that should be simple enough to fix. Just go back and look at the paperwork. Oh, wait, there is no paperwork. He then told Congress his recusal isn’t actually written down.

So Holder doesn’t remember when he recused himself from the growing scandal, and there’s no actual evidence that he did recuse himself in the first place.

Update: Via Twitter, federal law actually requires the Attorney General to put his recusal down in writing.

The Treasury Department’s Inspector General report has been issued, but throughout the report exactly how the targeting initiated is redacted. When asked for specifics, an IRS spokesman referred questions to Treasury. The Treasury forwarded the Washington Examiner reporter to the IG. The IG didn’t return requests for comment.

The rest of the report references dates earlier than February, 2010, in laying out how the IRS came to target Tea Party groups. But the reference to February in both appendixes indicates something particularly noteworthy happened then in the evolution of the IRS’s policy. What was it?

What, or more specifically who, initiated the targeting? Why a sudden, and apparently systemic, shift in handling conservative applications?

WASHINGTON — In February 2010, the Champaign Tea Party in Illinois received approval of its tax-exempt status from the IRS in 90 days, no questions asked.

That was the month before the Internal Revenue Service started singling out Tea Party groups for special treatment. There wouldn’t be another Tea Party application approved for 27 months.

In that time, the IRS approved perhaps dozens of applications from similar liberal and progressive groups, a USA TODAY review of IRS data shows.

As applications from conservative groups sat in limbo, groups with liberal-sounding names had their applications approved in as little as nine months. With names including words like “Progress” or “Progressive,” the liberal groups applied for the same tax status and were engaged in the same kinds of activities as the conservative groups.

These left-wing organizations intended to engage in the same activities under the same tax code provision as their conservative counterparts. Only difference being their political ideology. If you supported the Obama Administration’s political ideology, you were approved swiftly. If not, you sat in limbo for more than two years.

The IRS did not respond to follow-up questions Tuesday.

Yeah, I would imagine they didn’t.

For the record, the IRS is now under criminal investigation.

At Rep. Steny Hoyer’s weekly meeting with reporters on Tuesday, the Maryland Democrat was asked if he was concerned about the DOJ seizing phone records from Associated Press journalists working in the House press gallery in the Capitol building.

Hoyer’s answer was well-delivered: Articulate, clear, firm and precise.

One problem: He responded to the wrong scandal.

“The IRS activity was inappropriate, inconsistent with our policies and practices as a country, very concerning, needs to be reviewed carefully,” Hoyer, one of the top-ranking House Democrats, said in response to a question from Fox News’ Chad Pergram about the DOJ. “We need to ensure that this does not happen again, and we need to find out how long it continued, when it was stopped. It is my understanding—there was a front-page story on this at the [Washington] Post—it’s my understanding that [IRS official] Lois Lerner, who was apparently overseeing this, at some point in time found out about this and said …”

When Hoyer named Lerner, Pergram interrupted.

“We’re talking about two things,” Pergram, who apparently had not heard the first mention of the IRS, said from across the table, “You said Lois Lerner and the IRS.”

Another reporter sitting closer to Hoyer, Public Radio International’s Todd Zwillich, learned over and said softly, “He’s talking about the AP story.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, excuse me,” Hoyer said, pausing briefly. “Whatever happened, we need to find out why it happened. But clearly it should not have happened. I don’t know enough about whether there was a warrant sought.”

He wasn’t done.

“I don’t know fully the rationalization or justification that was being used, but the president’s statement that it was outrageous, that there was no place for it and that they have to be held fully accountable is a statement in which I agree,” Hoyer went on to say.

The only problem is that President Barack Obama didn’t comment about the DOJ story. And he certainly didn’t call it “outrageous.” In fact, the White House has declined to say much of anything about the DOJ investigation. Was he talking about the IRS story again? Yup.

Hoyer continued: “He then points out in another statement with which I agree: ‘I can tell you that if you’ve got the IRS operating in anything less …’” Hoyer’s voice trailed off. “Oh I keep going IRS. I’m really fired up on the IRS.”

Yikes.

The Washington Post reports IRS officials in Washington were involved in the politically-motivated targeting of conservative groups, groups with words like “patriot” in their names, and groups that opposed higher taxes and taught about the Constitution.

Internal Revenue Service officials in Washington and at least two other offices were involved in the targeting of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, making clear the effort reached well beyond the branch in Cincinnati that was initially blamed, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

IRS officials at the agency’s Washington headquarters sent queries to conservative groups asking about their donors and other aspects of their operations, while officials in the El Monte and Laguna Niguel offices in California sent similar questionnaires to tea party-affiliated groups.

The Associated Press earlier today revealed that current IRS Commissioner Steve Miller learned of the targeting back in May 2012 — a year ago. And yet the activity apparently continued through the 2012 election year.

Then it was revealed the IRS leaked classified information pertaining to the pending tax status of conservative organizations to watchdog group ProPublica. ProPublica itself says nine of the documents weren’t supposed to be made public by the agency.

Finally, we learned today that White House Counsel learned of the Inspector General’s report back in April. Yet President Obama today insisted he knew nothing of the unfolding scandal until Friday when it broke publicly.

The Associated Press now reports the Obama Administration’s Justice Department secretly tracked the communications of journalists for the wire service. And we’re not talking one or two reporters.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed incoming and outgoing calls, and the duration of each call, for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP.

In all, the government seized those records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown but more than 100 journalists work in the offices whose phone records were targeted on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.

The wire service says it was provided no explanation for the investigation.

Amazing that the Obama Administration had time to edit Benghazi talking points in between tracking journalists and targeting tax status of political opponents.

In the death of Karnamaya Monger, Gosnell was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter. He was further convicted of many lesser charges including corruption and infanticide, according to reporters in the courtroom.

Gosnell faces the death penalty.

At various points over the past two years, Internal Revenue Service officials singled out for scrutiny not only groups with “tea party” or “patriot” in their names but also nonprofit groups that criticized the government and sought to educate Americans about the U.S. Constitution, according to documents in an audit conducted by the agency’s inspector general.

The documents, obtained by The Washington Post from a congressional aide with knowledge of the findings, show that the IRS field office in charge of evaluating applications for tax-exempt status decided to focus on groups making statements that “criticize how the country is being run” and those that were involved in educating Americans “on the Constitution and Bill of Rights.”

This comes after the Associated Press learned that senior IRS officials knew of the political persecution in 2011 — and did nothing to stop it from continuing through 2012. That despite the fact the IRS commissioner had told Congress repeatedly that such persecutions weren’t happening.

The IRS admitted to the persecution of political opponents of Barack Obama last week, shortly before an investigative report by the Treasury Department’s Inspector General was set to be released. Use of the IRS to target opponents was one of the articles of impeachment leveled against Richard Nixon in 1974.