FIGHTING FINANCIAL REPRESSION: House Bill Aims to End Operation Choke Point.

Related: Justice Department doubles down on Operation Choke Point as Congress cries foul.

Also: Holder Not Backing Down on DOJ’s ‘Choke Point’ Probes. I don’t understand why this isn’t a criminal conspiracy to deprive people of their civil rights.

UH OH. HE “JOKED” ABOUT AUDITING PEOPLE’S TAXES, TOO: Obama Jokes about Executive Order to Make Boys Play Fair.

REMINDER: In 2009, President Obama “Joked” About Having His Enemies Audited By The IRS.

WHAT TRUE “IMMIGRATION REFORM” WOULD LOOK LIKE: “There are many things wrong with America’s immigration laws, but one of the biggest flaws is the tilted playing field that hurts the economy. Nearly two-thirds of legal immigrants come not for work, but because of family preferences—not only for spouses and minor children of citizens, but for parents and siblings, too. They in turn receive preferences, leading to the phenomenon of chain migration. But with limits on the overall numbers, who gets crowded out? The immigrants we need for economic growth. The US needs to scrap chain migration, limiting preferences to nuclear families. A better alternative is an expanded system of visas based on work and skills. Eliminating chain migration would free up hundreds of thousands of visas each year, even without increasing overall immigration numbers.”

STEPHEN CARTER: No-Fly Lists: Rational, But Not Right.

JOEL KOTKIN: Dawn of the Age of Oligarchy: the Alliance between Government and the 1%.

When our current President was elected, many progressives saw the dawning of a new epoch, a more egalitarian and more just Age of Obama. Instead we have witnessed the emergence of the Age of Oligarchy.

The outlines of this new epoch are clear in numerous ways. There is the diminished role for small business, greater concentration of financial assets, and a troubling decline in home ownership. On a cultural level, there is a general malaise about the prospect for upward mobility for future generations.

Not everyone is suffering in this new age. For the entitled few, these have been the best of times. With ever more concentration of key industries, ever greater advantage of capital over labor, and soaring real estate values in swanky places such as Manhattan or San Francisco which , as one journalist put it, constitute “vast gated communities where the one percent reproduces itself.” The top hundred firms on the Fortune 500 list has revenues, in adjusted dollars, eight times those during the supposed big-business heyday of the 1960s.

This shift towards oligarchy well precedes President Obama’s tenure. It was born from a confluence of forces: globalization, the financialization of the economy, and the shift towards digital technology. Obama is not entirely to blame, it is more than a bit ironic that these measurements have worsened under an Administration that has proclaimed income inequality abhorrent.

Despite this administration’s occasional rhetorical flourishes against oligarchy, we have seen a rapid concentration of wealth and depressed conditions for the middle class under Obama. The stimulus, with its emphasis on public sector jobs, did little for Main Street. And under the banner of environmentalism, green cronyism has helped fatten the bank accounts of investment bankers and tech moguls at great public expense.

Hey, they don’t call him President Goldman Sachs for nothing. But read the whole thing.

THE HILL: IRS Staredown Not Going Away.

ANN ALTHOUSE DEBUNKS HuffPo’s Pre-Decision Agitprop On The Hobby Lobby Case.

HuffPo doesn’t bother to mention that the case is based on a federal statute — the Religious Freedom Restoration Act — which Congress could amend and to which Congress could have put an exception in the Affordable Care Act. Except that Congress couldn’t do any of those things, and the contraceptive mandate wasn’t even something Congress put in the ACA, because Congress only just barely passed the ACA, and an exception from the need to provide religious exemptions would have made the ACA less politically viable, not more.

Which is why — however you feel about birth control, religious objections to it, and for-profit corporations that find a way to be religious — it’s not bad for Hobby Lobby to win.

But if it does, the “worst decision” will instantly plunge us into war-on-women, election-year politics.

Well, it’s going to be all war-on-women all the time anyway, at least until the Dems nominate a man and the Republicans nominate a woman. Then, overnight, jokes about PMS and menopause will be de rigeur.

JEAN CARD: The GOP Establishment Should Stop Calling The Tea Party Crazy: It’s Dumb To Deride Your Own.

INFORMED CONSENT: Facebook’s News Feed manipulation touches off firestorm. I see a class action lawsuit.

MICKEY KAUS: I was wrong: Obama’s amnesty strategy isn’t a partial shambles. “Politically, it would seem to be disastrous for Obama to further weaken immigration enforcement when the weakening that’s already taken place seems to be attracting a new wave of illegals and threatening total border breakdown.”