WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: ObamaCare slowing job growth, at least for now.

Related: The Jobs Question: Work Is A Human Right.

IRS SCANDALS HIT HARD EVEN IN BLUE MASSACHUSETTS: Dems Take A Hard Line.

Frantic Democrats want tough action in the ongoing IRS scandal, fearing the damage that a slow bleed could do to their own electoral futures as President Obama struggles to get out ahead of the issue.

U.S. Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Malden), running for U.S. Senate, quickly denounced the Internal Revenue Service’s 
actions earlier this week and upped the ante yesterday as the scandal spread, saying, “Whoever did this should be found and fired.”

U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Worcester), one of Massachusetts’ more liberal House members, told the Herald his party in Congress is afraid of the ramifications of the scandals, now collectively known as Obamagate — a threefer encompassing the IRS harassment of conservative groups, the Justice Department’s seizure of Associated Press phone records, and the handling of the Benghazi attacks.

“They do worry about what their constituents think about them and how they respond to these issues,” McGovern said yesterday, adding with regard to the IRS scandal that “anybody connected to this ought to be fired.”

Acting IRS chief Steve Miller resigned Wednesday, but a number of those who oversaw and executed allegedly politically biased policy in the tax-exemption unit remain at the IRS. Democrats demanding action include U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), who called for an “audit” of the IRS, which U.S. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) supports, her spokeswoman said.

Sounds good to me.

IF I HAD A 100 BILLION CASH STASH, I’D BE AS OFFENSIVE AS I WANTED: Apple on offense over $100B offshore stash.

A FASCINATING MAP OF The World’s Most And Least Racially Tolerant Countries. Strangely, those horrible capitalist, imperialist Western countries seem to be doing really well.

• Anglo and Latin countries most tolerant. People in the survey were most likely to embrace a racially diverse neighbor in the United Kingdom and its Anglo former colonies (the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and in Latin America. The only real exceptions were oil-rich Venezuela, where income inequality sometimes breaks along racial lines, and the Dominican Republic, perhaps because of its adjacency to troubled Haiti. Scandinavian countries also scored high.

• India, Jordan, Bangladesh and Hong Kong by far the least tolerant. In only three of 81 surveyed countries, more than 40 percent of respondents said they would not want a neighbor of a different race. This included 43.5 percent of Indians, 51.4 percent of Jordanians and an astonishingly high 71.8 percent of Hong Kongers and 71.7 percent of Bangladeshis.

Remember when Gandhi was asked what he thought about Western civilization, and he snarkily replied that it would be a good idea? Back atcha, Mohandas.

And while Venezuela might be “oil-rich,” it’s become socialism-poor. To the point that they’ve run out of toilet paper.

DID THE INTERNET DESTROY THE MIDDLE CLASS? I dunno, I’d take this more seriously if it weren’t coming from Jaron Lanier, who basically says this kind of thing every few years. Here’s my review of his last effort.

PEGGY NOONAN: This Is No Ordinary Scandal: Political abuse of the IRS threatens the basic integrity of our government. “Everyone involved in this abuse of power should pay a price, because if they don’t, the politicization of the IRS will continue—forever. If it is not stopped now, it will never stop. And if it isn’t stopped, no one will ever respect or have even minimal faith in the revenue-gathering arm of the U.S. government again.”

Peggy’s right, but I was saying the same thing — right there in the Wall Street Journal — way back in 2009, when she was still going on about Obama’s transformational energy. So welcome to the party. Wish you’d gotten here before the re-election. . . .

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REASON TV: West Wing Weak: Your Guide to Obama’s Scandal-Filled Week.

POLL: Only 33% want Congress to take up gun control again.

NATIONAL JOURNAL: Obama Goes on the Offensive, Hold the Charm.

GALLUP: 74% of Americans Think IRS Scandal Deserves More Investigation. 69% think that about Benghazi.

MOE LANE ON THE IRS SCANDALS: Remember, this is not a failure of the system. This is the system.

MICHAEL BARONE: In defense of Jason Richwine and Charles Murray.

Funny, Andrew Sullivan was defending them the other day, too.

MICKEY KAUS: Obama’s Most Fiendish Plot Yet. “In its most fiendish strategem yet, Team Obama has launched a series of not-quite-devastating but press-obsessing scandals against itself! The confluence of the Internal Revenue Service, Benghazi and AP stories means that dreadful details of the Schumer-Rubio bill will get pushed off the front pages. Reporters who might otherwise cover it will be temporarily sent to Cincinatti to interview IRS whistleblowers. Meanhwile, the scandals give Sen. Rubio and other Republicans a chance to bash Obama about something new, giving them the anti-Obama cred that might allow them to quietly sell out on amnesty and hand Obama his greatest second-term triumph!”

THE HILL: Lawmakers fear privacy risks from Google Glass. “Eight members of Congress raised privacy fears about Google’s wearable computer, Google Glass, expressing concern the device could allow users to identify people on the street and look up personal information about them. The lawmakers, members of the congressional Privacy Caucus, said they are concerned users could access individuals’ addresses, marital status, work history and hobbies.”

REPORT: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev note found in boat points to mystifying motive we may never truly understand. ““Basically the note says that he does not mourn his brother Tamerlan, that Tamerlan was a martyr now and that he was in paradise, that Dzhokhar expected to join him there soon,” . . . . That the bombings were in retribution for the US crimes against Muslims in places like Iraq and Afghanistan; that the victims of the Boston bombing were ‘collateral damage,’ the same way innocent victims have been collateral damage in US wars around the world, summing up that when you attack one Muslim, you attack all Muslims.”

So, probably just teen alienation then.

TAXPROF: Roundup: IRS Scandal, Day 8.

JAMES TARANTO: What Would Bulworth Do? Barack Obama’s Bizarre Movie Idol.

What would it mean for Obama to “go Bulworth”? We suppose we had a hint of it a month ago tomorrow, when he raged against the Senate for rejecting his calls for gun control, a subject on which he had cultivated a pretense of moderation during both his presidential campaigns.

Another example is a June 30, 2003, video of Obama, then a state senator, telling an AFL-CIO gathering: “A single payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I’d like to see.” Bulworth might have added: But you ain’t gonna get it from no insurance company.

Given the revelation that Obama fantasizes about going Bulworth, and the long-established fact that Obama has made statements consistent with the fictitious senator’s view that only socialized medicine will ever save the day, it seems to us some apologies are in order from those who insisted it was crazy to think Obama is a socialist. John Avlon should go first.

Let us be clear: We think it unlikely that the president will go Bulworth, and although we’re sure we’d enjoy the spectacle, we think it would be bad for the country if he did. An unhinged president would be dangerous to America and the world in a way that an unhinged senator would not.

That’s certainly true.

SHOCKINGLY, there’s more to that study on physical strength and politics than the newspaper reports indicated.

IT JUST GETS WORSE: IRS tax exemption/Obamacare exec got $103,390 in bonuses.

Sarah Hall Ingram, the IRS executive in charge of the tax exempt division in 2010 when it began targeting conservative Tea Party, evangelical and pro-Israel groups for harrassment, got more than $100,000 in bonuses between 2009 and 2012.

More recently, Ingram was promoted to serve as director of the tax agency’s Obamacare program office, a position that put her in charge of the vast expansion of the IRS’ regulatory power and staffing in connection with federal health care, ABC reported earlier today.

Great. So the woman who oversaw the targeting of Tea Partiers is now in charge of healthcare regulation? You may be paranoid. But are you paranoid enough?

IN CONGRESS: Bipartisan Coalition Proposes Fix to AP Phone Hack. “Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI), joined by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-SC), and Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO), today introduced legislation to prevent federal agencies from seizing Americans’ telephone records without a court order. H.R. 2014, the Telephone Records Protection Act, requires court approval when the government demands telephone records from service providers. Current law allows the government to subpoena such records unilaterally, without any judicial review. The Department of Justice likely used its administrative subpoena authority to seize the Associated Press’s telephone records in its recent investigation of a CIA leak.”

WELL, THEY SHOULD: Tea party leader: Media apologized for not taking IRS targeting seriously last year.

SO WHY DIDN’T ROMNEY, OR THE GOP, PUSH THESE SCANDALS HARDER BEFORE THE ELECTION? A variety of explanations are offered, and I find this one troublingly plausible: “Obama’s prime target was the Tea Party (which had crushed him in the 2010 midterms), and the establishment Republicans were at odds with the Tea Party movement. I’m not saying I believe this, but sober reflection tells us we need to redraw the line between paranoia and vigilance. The theory is that establishment Republicans appreciated the suppression of the Tea Party.”

Plus, from the comments: “The IRS chilling hampered some of the exact groups who might have brought this stuff to light.”

NOW AVAILABLE ON SSRN, MY LATEST SECOND AMENDMENT PIECE, coauthored with Brannon Denning: How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Second Amendment: a Reply to Professor Magarian.

Download it early and often!

THE TWO ACTUALLY TEND TO GO TOGETHER: The IRS: Not Just Thuggish, But Also Incompetent.

The report shows that little oversight at the IRS has led to erroneous refunds sent to dead taxpayers, millions of extra tax credits mistakenly allocated to the Highway Trust Fund and major miscalculations of how much the agency is owed in unpaid taxes, among other issues.
GAO auditors found calculating errors totaling at least $829 million between 10 taxpayer accounts with balances equal to or exceeding $32 million, which went undetected by the agency’s internal review procedures.

“…IRS does not have a detailed listing, or subsidiary ledger that accurately tracks and accumulates unpaid tax assessments and their status on an ongoing basis,” the report said.

The IRS also lacked an effective policy to identify deceased taxpayers- – leading the agency to send refunds to dead Americans. . . . Add to this an almost comical mistake regarding the amount of quarterly excise tax revenues distributed to the Airport and Airway Trust Fund and the Highway Trust Fund. For example, in March 2012, IRS added $138 million in kerosene credits to the HTF when it should have subtracted $166 million. In another instance, IRS erroneously omitted $3 million in collections from the AATF for the third quarter of 2012.

The country’s in the very best of hands.