IT’S A TRAP! Peter Ingemi: Beware of Impeachment Whispers.

TRANSPARENCY: State Department shuts down Benghazi questions: ‘You’ll have to take my word for it.’

NICK GILLESPIE: Rand Paul Plays The Maverick at CPAC and the Evangelical in Cedar Rapids. “In Paul’s defense, there is nothing rhetorically inconsistent between the senator’s CPAC and Cedar Rapids comments. Paul has long preferred to call himself a constitutional conservative rather than a libertarian and, as my Reason colleague Mike Riggs has pointed out, he has never actually embraced pot legalization, even at the state level.”

OVERSIGHT: Top House Democrat demands more information on national security leaks. “Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) said the Justice Department’s secret subpoena of two months worth of phone records from the Associated Press was ‘chilling.’ As the ranking member on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Cummings called on U.S. Attorney Ron Machen to explain in more detail why the news organization’s information was key to the investigation.”

GARRETT EPPS: Why Is It So Hard to Keep the IRS Out of Politics? Government officials need a refresher course in the First Amendment “anti-retaliation” principle.

Two observations: (1) Obama was joking about auditing his enemies in 2009; and (2) Go to a flat tax or a national sales tax and this problem largely disappears.

DANA MILBANK: The Uninterested President. “President Passerby needs urgently to become a participant in his presidency.”

AT TAXPROF: IRS Scandal Roundup, Day 6.

MEANWHILE, IN NON-OBAMA SCANDAL DEVELOPMENTS: Bloomberg’s Privacy Breach And The New Church/State Divide. “In fact, the decision to grant Bloomberg reporters a degree of visibility into the activities of terminal clients was a deliberate one, as Winkler acknowledges.”

FOR OBAMITES, ADVICE YOU CAN USE: How To Walk Away: The psychology of lost causes. “Most of us know what it’s like to stay in a job or a relationship after it’s stopped being satisfying, or to take on a project that’s too big and be reluctant to admit it. . . . The costs to a person who does not know when to quit can be enormous. In economics it’s known as sunk cost fallacy, though the costs are more than financial. While we recognize the fallacy almost immediately in others, it’s harder to see in ourselves.”

COMING: An Obama-Limbaugh Summit?

THE HILL: Controversies threaten President Obama’s second-term agenda.

The testy press conference entrenched concerns at the White House and among its allies that the controversies could overwhelm Obama’s agenda.

“We now have focused the attention of everyone, including all of you, on the lengths to which the administration’s willing to go to quiet the voices of its critics,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Tuesday at a press briefing that addressed none of Obama’s legislative priorities.

The scandals also risk reinforcing and worsening some of the biggest criticisms of the president: that he is arrogant, secretive and interested in bending his political opponents to his will rather than in working with them.

Well, since those criticisms are demonstrably correct, yeah, that’s a problem.

USA TODAY: IRS Routinely Approved Liberal Groups While Leaving Tea Party Applicants In Limbo.

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.

Maybe we should just remove the requirement for IRS certification. Want to be a tax-exempt group? Just be one.

NATIONAL JOURNAL: Democrats in Triage Mode on White House Scandals. “On Capitol Hill, Democrats are seeking to cordon off the most toxic scandal – currently believed to be the IRS case – while remaining loyal to Obama on the long-simmering Benghazi probe. In the phone-records case, Democrats began to distance themselves from the White House on Tuesday.”

Don’t forget the Kathleen Sebelius ObamaCare shakedown. Oh, and also the EPA’s fees-for-enemies-but-not-for-friends policy.

BYRON YORK: IRS scandal raises fears about enforcing Obamacare.

JAKE TAPPER: Why You Should Care About Whistleblowers.

SHOCKER: Government report finds regulations have spiked under Obama.

DAVID LIMBAUGH: Partisan Obama Culture Spawned a More Abusive IRS.

Hey, Obama sent the signal.

IT’S PRESIDENT SCHULTZ AT THE BOSTON HERALD:

Hilary Chabot: White House reels from 3 scandals.

Howie Carr: Targeted By The Feds? Join The Club!

John Dean’s Advice To Obama: Come Clean!

Plus, roundup of reactions.

BLUE STATE UPDATE: Rich Manhattan moms hire handicapped tour guides so kids can cut lines at Disney World.

TOM MAGUIRE: Apparently Erroneous Reporting About Allegedly Erroneous Reporting:

Jake Tapper, now of CNN but a bulldog for truth while at ABC News, is getting lots of love from the left for debunking a bit of the Benghazi talking points story. His gist – the summaries of the emails put forward by ABCNews and the Weekly Standard exaggerate (to the point of invention) the mention of State Department concerns by the White House as a topic needing to be addressed.

However, there is trouble in their Blue Heaven: Tapper’s summary of the Weekly Standard is wrong and somewhat misleading.

I’m sure it’ll all get sorted out.

J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: Add Me to the List of IRS Targets.

Franklin Graham, the Tea Party, and Larry Conners all faced the wrath of the Obama IRS.

You can add me to that list.

After Obama was elected, I faced my first IRS audit shakedown after decades of filing income tax returns. Overdue coincidence? Perhaps.

Given the headlines of the past 48 hours, perhaps not.

My audit experience was a headache, as anyone who has experienced one can attest. When it happened, a former IRS lawyer with whom I associated in private practice told me – “it’s no accident you were audited.”

See, if we went to a flat tax, or better yet a national sales tax, a lot of these problems would go away.

ADVICE FROM SARAH HOYT: Get Up Off The Floor.

MODIFIED LIMITED HANGOUT: Jay Carney walks back denial of White House involvement in IRS scandal.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction. Hopefully, the “scattering” will be beyond Earth, and throughout the galaxy.

GOOD: US shale oil supply shock rocks global power balance.

Over the next five years, the US will account for a third of new oil supplies, according to The International Energy Agency (IEA).

The US will change from the world’s leading importer of oil to a net exporter.

Demand for oil from Middle-East oil producers is set to slow as a result.

“North America has set off a supply shock that is sending ripples throughout the world,” said IEA executive director Maria van der Hoeven.

Like I said, good.