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D.C. Turns on Obama (+video)

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By Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei. The town is turning on President Obama — and this is very bad news for this White House.

Republicans have waited five years for the moment to put the screws to Obama — and they have one-third of all congressional committees on the case now. Establishment Democrats, never big fans of this president to begin with, are starting to speak out. And reporters are tripping over themselves to condemn lies, bullying and shadiness in the Obama administration.

Buy-in from all three D.C. stakeholders is an essential ingredient for a good old-fashioned Washington pile-on — so get ready for bad stories and public scolding to pile up.

Vernon Jordan, a close adviser to President Bill Clinton through his darkest days, told us: “It’s never all right if you’re the president. There is no smooth sailing. So now he has the turbulence, and this is the ultimate test of his leadership.” Jordan says Obama needs to do something dramatic on the IRS, and quick: “He needs to fire somebody. He needs action, not conversation.”

Read more from this story HERE.
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Even Charlie Rangel is Going After Obama

By Kevin Robillard. Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) said Wednesday that he believes President Barack Obama owes the American public explanations for both the seizure of Associated Press phone records by the Department of Justice and the IRS targeting of conservative groups.

“I don’t think anyone truly believes that the president has given us a sufficient answer for America, much less the press,” Rangel said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “I think this is just the beginning and the whole idea of comparing this with Nixon, I really think is just, it doesn’t make much sense. But the president has to come forward and share why he did not alert the press they were going to do this. He has to tell the Americans, including me: What was this national security question? You just can’t raise the flag and expect to salute it every time without any reason and the same thing applies to the IRS.”

The White House has said Obama wasn’t involved in either the IRS decision to target conservative groups — a position backed up by an inspector general report released Tuesday — or in the DOJ’s decision to broadly subpoena phone records for 20 Associated Press phone lines in three cities. Read more from this story HERE.
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Chris Matthews sours on Obama

BY Dylan Byers. President Obama “obviously likes giving speeches more than he does running the executive branch,” Chris Matthews said tonight.

Yes, you read that right: The MSNBC host who in 2008 felt a “thrill going up my leg” after hearing Obama speak has grown disenchanted. Tonight’s episode of Hardball saw Matthews delivering a rare, unforgiving grilling of the president as severe as anything that might appear on Fox News.

“What part of the presidency does Obama like? He doesn’t like dealing with other politicians — that means his own cabinet, that means members of the congress, either party. He doesn’t particularly like the press….” Read more from this story HERE.

President Obama’s Allies do More Damage in Days Than GOP Did in Four Years

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In a matter of days, the Obama administration has done something that the president’s political opponents have failed to do over four and a half years: inflicted serious damage to President Obama’s public standing.

Obama has throughout his presidency aggressively combated GOP criticism — on issues large and small — mocking the attacks as political theater short on facts.

But with his own administration now embroiled in a flurry of controversies, including IRS mistreatment of conservative groups and the Justice Department’s secret monitoring of journalists’ phones, the president is coming across not as a forceful defender but as a bystander who claims he didn’t know what the people who work for him were doing. That posture, analysts said, will fuel public cynicism toward government and stoke fears of a White House in crisis.

“The Benghazi, IRS and Associated Press stories have a common thread: They deal with how policy is administered,” said Martha Joynt Kumar, a presidential historian who focuses on White House communication. “Management has been a weak point for the president from early in his administration. That is why these stories hit so hard. He has not been ahead of events but rather has had to rely on news organizations to inform him of what is going on in his own administration.”

But administration officials on Wednesday were still trying to deflect blame from the president, despite a battering in the media and on Capitol Hill.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Ousts Acting IRS Head After Agency is Caught Targeting Conservatives (+video)

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Photo Credit: APPresident Obama on Wednesday forced out the acting director of the Internal Revenue Service and pledged to work with Congress as it investigates why the tax agency was inappropriately targeting conservative groups that opposed Obama and other Democrats.

IRS Acting Director Steven Miller was asked to resign less than a week after the public learned that the agency was giving closer scrutiny to conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status and delaying approval of their status change.

“Americans are right to be angry about it — and I’m angry about it,” Obama said during a hastily scheduled briefing in the East Room of the White House. “I’ll do everything in my power to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.”

Miller’s firing and the administration’s decision earlier Wednesday to release scores of emails about the terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya, marked the start of a what promises to be an extensive damage-control campaign by the White House to quell criticisms over a trio of controversies, including the IRS probing of conservative groups, the Justice Department’s spying on journalists and claims that the president misled the nation about the nature of the Sept. 11 Benghazi attacks that left an ambassador and three others dead.

Obama said other changes will be made at the IRS to prevent similar abuses in the future, but said nothing about additional firings.

Read more from this story HERE.

Rand Paul: Obama “Drunk on Power” (+video)

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Photo Credit: YouTubeSenator Rand Paul hits a home run in this interview with Sean Hannity last night. Sen. Paul describes Obama’s presidency as “failing.” He also says that the President is “drunk with power.”

Hannity also asks about Paul’s presidential ambitions and discusses the broadening Internal Revenue Service scandal.

IRS Approved Obama’s Brother’s “Shady” Charity in Record Time (+video)

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Photo Credit: Vimeo Lois Lerner, the senior IRS official at the center of the decision to target tea party groups for burdensome tax scrutiny, signed paperwork granting tax-exempt status to the Barack H. Obama Foundation, a shady charity headed by the president’s half-brother that operated illegally for years.

According to the organization’s filings, Lerner approved the foundation’s tax status within a month of filing, an unprecedented timeline that stands in stark contrast to conservative organizations that have been waiting for more than three years, in some cases, for approval.

Lerner also appears to have broken with the norms of tax-exemption approval by granting retroactive tax-exempt status to Malik Obama’s organization.

The National Legal and Policy Center filed an official complaint with the IRS in May 2011 asking why the foundation was being allowed to solicit tax-deductible contributions when it had not even applied for an IRS determination. In a New York Post article dated May 8, 2011, an officer of the foundation admitted, “We haven’t been able to find someone with the expertise” to apply for tax-exempt status.

Nevertheless, a month later, the Barack H. Obama Foundation had flown through the grueling application process. Lerner granted the organization a 501(c) determination and even gave it a retroactive tax exemption dating back to December 2008.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Supporters Suggest Holder May Need to Take a Fall to Correct Course of Presidency

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Photo Credit: Daily CallerBy Jeff Poor. President Barack Obama may need to accept the resignation of Attorney General Eric Holder as part of a plan to “get control” of the three scandals hounding the administration, historian Douglas Brinkley advised Tuesday.

Action is more important than rhetoric in times like these, Brinkley told “Hardball” host Chris Matthews on MSNBC.

“I think immediately he’s got to get control over these three issues,” Brinkley said. “I think he might have to look at accepting a resignation from Eric Holder possibly. I think in Benghazi — it’s drug on too long. Just come clean, talk straight about the talking points, what happened and move on. Look, it’s the cover-up that always gets you in problems, and you just don’t need this. It’s not been a good season for Barack Obama, and I think he has an opportunity to just — I’m sure his poll numbers are going to still stay high. People trust him. But he can’t let his integrity get dented and then do some big things. Don’t just talk about it. If you’re going to close Guantanamo, close it. If you want the Keystone pipeline to happen, then say it’s going to happen. There have been too many trial balloons.” Read more from this story HERE.

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Reid slams Obama admin: ‘I have trouble defending what the Justice Department did’

By Alex Pappas. Very rarely do you hear Harry Reid call out the Obama administration, but the Democratic Senate majority leader had tough words for both the scandal-plagued Department of Justice and the Internal Revenue Service on Tuesday.

“I have trouble defending what the Justice Department did,” Reid told reporters during his weekly press availability off the Senate floor, referencing the revelation that the DOJ had secretly obtained two months worth of telephone records of Associated Press employees in 2012.

“I really believe in the First Amendment,” Reid continued. “I think it’s one of the great things we have as a country. And I don’t know who did it or why it was done. But it’s inexcusable. And there’s no way to justify it.” Read more from this story HERE.

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By Mark Memmott. As his Justice Department faces bipartisan outrage for searching phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors, Attorney Gen. Eric Holder says he is not sure how many times such information has been seized by government investigators in the four years he’s led Justice.

During an interview with NPR’s Carrie Johnson on Tuesday, Holder was asked how often his department has obtained such records of journalists’ work.

“I’m not sure how many of those cases … I have actually signed off on,” Holder said. “I take them very seriously. I know that I have refused to sign a few [and] pushed a few back for modifications.”

On Morning Edition, Carrie added that Holder declined to say whether there will be a review of the Justice Department’s policy on searches of reporters’ records.

Tuesday, NPR and other media organizations joined in a letter sent to Holder by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. In it, the news outlets ask that the Justice Department: — “Immediately return the telephone toll records obtained and destroy all copies, as requested by The Associated Press.” Read more from this story HERE.

Jason Chaffetz: Impeachment Not Off Table

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Photo Credit: APRep. Jason Chaffetz says he’s not taking impeachment off the table when it comes to President Obama’s handling of the attacks in Benghazi.

The Salt Lake Tribune reported Monday that the Utah Republican had called the handling of Benghazi an “impeachable offense,” and that he had vowed to keep searching for answers from the White House.

Asked Tuesday on CNN what he meant by the comments, Chaffetz said it wasn’t what he was hoping for, but that impeachment was in the “realm of possibility.”

“It’s not something I’m seeking, it’s not the endgame, it’s not what we’re playing for,” he said. “I was simply asked if it was within the realm of possibilities, and I’d say ‘yes.’”

Chaffetz said that the version of events that he had heard from witnesses on the ground versus what the White House released were “two totally different things.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Rush Limbaugh Offers to Sit Down With Obama

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Photo Credit: WNDBy Joe Kovacs. In the wake of news reports that President Obama is blaming Rush Limbaugh for the political gridlock in Washington, the radio powerhouse is now offering to sit down with the commander in chief to hold face-to-face discussions.

“In the spirit of doing whatever I can to move things forward in this country,” Limbaugh said Tuesday afternoon, “I would like to make myself available to the president of the United States to sit down and talk with him at a place of his choosing and discuss the problems facing the country, and maybe working together, since I am the opposition, since I am the obstacle, since I am the reason he can’t get things done.”

“I’ll be glad to sit down with him, any time, any place that he wants. Perhaps we can hash this out and come to a … mutual understanding or agreement of how to get things off the dime and to move things forward.”

On Monday, Obama reportedly met with top-name fundraisers including entertainer Justin Timberlake and his wife, actress Jessica Biel, as well as designer Tommy Hilfiger at the Greenwich Village home of producer Harvey Weinstein.

Obama complained about the lack of progress on his agenda, specifically blaming Limbaugh. Read more from this story HERE.
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Rush Limbaugh: I live in Obama’s head

By KEVIN CIRILLI. Rush Limbaugh taunted President Barack Obama on Tuesday, saying he lives “rent free” in the president’s head less than a day after Obama criticized the conservative radio host at a fundraiser hosted by Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein.

“He simply cannot get me off his mind. I live rent free in his head. And he is using me as his convenient excuse for not being able to get anything done. He really thinks the Republicans would work with him if it weren’t for me,” the conservative radio host said on his program Tuesday, according to a show transcript.

Monday night Obama was in New York at a fundraiser that Weinstein hosted and celebrities like Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel attended. During Obama’s remarks at the fundraiser, Obama took a jab at Limbaugh. Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Congratulates Pakistan for Electing Islamist Prime Minister Linked to Osama bin Laden

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Photo Credit: APPakistan held another one of those democratic elections that the reformers claim is the solution to terrorism. And Obama seemed upbeat about the Pakistan Muslim League’s big win.

President Obama congratulated the people of Pakistan on national elections Saturday that marked the country’s first democratic transfer of power.

“I congratulate the people of Pakistan on the successful completion of yesterday’s parliamentary elections,” Obama said in a statement. “The United States stands with all Pakistanis in welcoming this historic peaceful and transparent transfer of civilian power, which is a significant milestone in Pakistan’s democratic progress.

The next Prime Minister is an Islamist fellow by the name of Nawaz Sharif who doesn’t like America, but does like Osama bin Laden.

The former prime minister of Pakistan, now one of President Pervez Musharraf’s chief political rivals, once received a million-dollar payoff from Osama Bin Laden as a thanks for not cracking down on the militant tribal areas in Pakistan’s northwest border province, according to a former member of bin Laden’s inner circle. Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who was ousted by Musharraf in a 1999 coup, returned to Pakistan earlier this week after spending seven years in exile living in Saudi Arabia. When in power, Sharif aggravated the United States by detonating Pakistan’s first nuclear weapon and turning a blind eye to the Taliban in Afghanistan. Now a former member of bin Laden’s inner circle is saying that Sharif was handsomely rewarded by bin Laden for his policies.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Hopes For Extended Crisis Atmosphere

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller President Barack Obama says he wants to “see if we can institutionalize” in Washington the community spirit that sometimes emerges after a terror attack or an industrial explosion.

The president made the comments during a fund-raising trip to New York, shortly after leaving Washington, D.C. in an uproar over an explosion of scandals, including last week’s revelations of politically motivated IRS investigations and the White House’s editing of reports on the lethal terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya.

Shortly after Obama flew north, D.C. was rocked by another political explosion when the Associated Press said the Justice Department obtained two months of phone records from several of its offices, including its office on Capitol Hill.

“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters … [The records] disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know,” said a statement from AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt.

In New York, however, Obama was welcomed by a community of big-dollar donors from the Big Apple’s fashion, culture and banking industries.

Read more from this story HERE.