It’s a happy day in Rightie World. It has been determined that the part of the IRS that oversees and approves tax-exempt status was putting right-wing groups under heavier scrutiny than normal. This has given the Right plenty of cause to whine and wallow in self-pity, which of course is what they live for.

This was not good on the part of the IRS of course. But I’ve slogged through a couple of articles and cannot determine if any organization was actually harmed or even somewhat inconvenienced. Even so, this will be all we hear about for the next several weeks. Well, this and Benghazi.

speaking of which, Kevin Drum observes,

… the real giveaway about this whole thing is that it keeps changing whenever it’s debunked. Originally, the story retailed by Charles Woods, the father of Benghazi victim Tyrone Woods, revolved around the notion that Obama had a live video feed of Benghazi and refused to let a fast-response team deploy even though he knew they could get there in time. That wasn’t true, so another story developed that General Carter Ham was ready to send in a team, received an order to stand down, and was going to disobey orders and send them in anyway. But then his second in command apprehended him and told him that he was now relieved of duty. That wasn’t true either. So then we got a story about a team in Tripoli that Obama refused to deploy. Then a story about a C-110 team in Croatia that could have gone in but wasn’t allowed to. And finally, last week, a different story about a different team in Tripoli that could have gone in the next morning but didn’t.

And when that last story turns out not to be true, they’ll think up another one.

Encouragingly, Public Policy Polling finds that voters trust former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Benghazi over the GOP, by a 49/39 margin.

The New York Times editorial board writes of this week’s Benghazi hearing,

The hearing did not prove anything like an administration cover-up or other hysterical allegations of crimes equal to Watergate that some Republicans, such as Representative Steve King and Senator Lindsey Graham, have alleged. Republicans have held numerous hearings and briefings on Benghazi and are threatening to hold even more. It is a level of interest they did not show during George W. Bush’s administration when there were 64 attacks on American diplomatic targets or in the years they spent cutting back diplomatic security budgets.

The real scandal is that serious follow-up on security in Libya is going unaddressed. Congress needs to make sure that State Department budgets for personnel and security improvements are sufficient and that security reforms are put in place as soon as possible.

The Times‘s Andreww Rosenthal states the obvious:

What’s really going on is that Republicans have been salivating for decades for a chance to get revenge for Watergate and Iran-contra. They yell “cover-up” at the drop of a hat. My Facebook post on the Rove video drew a comment on “Mena.” That’s a reference to the nutty idea that the Clintons (and both Presidents Bush) covered up cocaine trafficking and murder in a sleepy Arkansas town of that name. Get ready to hear about how Mrs. Clinton had Vince Foster, a deputy White House counsel for her husband, murdered.

So if the State Department needs congressional Republicans to pay attention to what’s going on in Libya now, maybe someone should leak a memo saying that Vince Foster’s suicide note is being held for ransom in Tripoli, and can be had for a sum roughly equivalent for what is needed for personnel and security improvements. Confirm the President’s Libya ambassador nominee, and maybe they’ll get Monica’s blue dress as well.

As far as the word “terror” goes, Republicans seem to think that standing in front of a camera and saying it makes them look macho, or amounts to a real response to attacks on Americans. Likewise, they think that sending terrorist suspects to military tribunals is “tougher” than trying them in federal courts.

Take care, Mr. Rosenthal. You’re starting to sound like a blogger.

This just in at Talking Points Memo:

In a letter to President Obama, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) noted their original opposition to Obamacare, reiterated their intent to repeal it entirely, and declared that they would not make any appointments to the Independent Payment Advisory Board.

The IPAB is a 15-member panel whose members must be confirmed by the Senate. The President selects three members himself and is required by law to seek three recommendations each from the top Democrat and Republican in each chamber. With Thursday’s letter, Boehner and McConnell refused to make any recommendations.

As I remember, IPAB is a panel set up to recommend ways to reduce Medicare costs. The panel may not recommend cuts to benefits or increase premiums. It meets only when Medicare costs are increasing faster than economic growth. Congress may review and vote to override the recommendations, but otherwise they automatically go into effect.

“Because the law will give IPAB’s 15 unelected, unaccountable individuals the ability to deny seniors access to innovative care, we respectfully decline to recommend appointments,” Boehner and McConnell wrote in the letter.

But there is a catch: if IPAB fails to do its work for any reason, the Health and Human Services secretary must order the cuts herself. So in a way, Boehner and McConnell are surrendering some of their power in order to appear as though they’re thwarting Obamacare — when in reality they’re merely turning over more control to the executive branch.

So what Boehner and McConnell are doing is just obstruction for the sake of obstruction.

Elsewhere:

Republican members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee boycotted a meeting of the panel on Thursday, blocking a vote on President Obama’s nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency.

The eight Republicans, led by the ranking member Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, said they took the action to protest what they called an inadequate response by the nominee, Gina McCarthy, to more than 1,000 written questions about E.P.A. policies and internal practices.

Since when have nominees been required to answer more than 1,000 written questions? Sounds like harassment to me.

Senator Barbara Boxer, the California Democrat who is chairman of the panel, said that Ms. McCarthy was one of the most qualified nominees ever named to lead the E.P.A. Ms. McCarthy currently heads the agency’s office of air and radiation, a post to which she won easy Senate confirmation in 2009. She previously served as a top environmental regulator in Connecticut and Massachusetts, working for Democratic and Republican governors.

“Gina McCarthy deserves a vote,” said Ms. Boxer, visibly angry. “I have delayed a vote for three weeks. I was assured by Senator Vitter that once he received answers to 1,000 questions — a record-breaking number — they would allow us to move forward with the vote.”

Ms. Boxer and other committee Democrats noted that Republican members had submitted 1,079 questions to Ms. McCarthy, compared with 157 for Mr. Obama’s first E.P.A. administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, and 305 for Michael O. Leavitt, who served in the post under President George W. Bush.

See also Another Obama nominee obstructed, another threat from Harry Reid

When he’s good, he’s really good.

The Cabbage writes, thus:

… immigration opponents are effectively trying to restrict the flow of conservatives into this country. In survey after survey, immigrants are found to have more traditional ideas about family structure and community than comparable Americans. They have lower incarceration rates. They place higher emphasis on career success. They have stronger work ethics. Immigrants go into poor neighborhoods and infuse them with traditional values.

I infer from this that liberals oppose families and careers and want more people to go to jail. See also David Gelman, “According to David Brooks, staying out of jail is a conservative value.”

Brooks fails to mention that “immigrants” (by which he mostly means “Latinos”) tend to vote for Democrats. It is well documented that increases in the percentage of immigrant populations in a voting district correlates to fewer votes for Republicans.

Even assuming that only immigrants and conservatives love their families and hope to stay out of jail, it may be that immigrants recognize that the Republican Party is less the party of work than the party of moneyed interests trying to establish a corporate encomienda system. The racist dog whistles probably aren’t helping the GOP, either.

This may cheer you up — Rush Limbaugh is costing Cumulus Media millions of dollars.

Cumulus Media today reported a $2.4 million first-quarter decline in revenue related to talk programming, a loss that CEO Lew Dickey attributed, indirectly, to Limbaugh’s controversial remarks about Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke.

The earnings call came one day after POLITICO reported that Limbaugh was considering ending his affiliation agreement with Cumulus because he was frustrated with Dickey for blaming him for advertising losses.

Yet when asked about the Limbaugh on today’s earnings call, Dickey again suggested that Limbaugh’s remarks about Fluke played a significant role in the company’s revenue decline.

“We’ve had a tough go of it the last year,” Dickey said. “The facts are indisputable regarding the impact certain things have had on ad dollars.”

Mediaite:

Mediaite’s own sources confirm that the ad troubles in connection with Limbaugh’s show are, indeed, severe. In fact, one source within the radio advertising world with direct knowledge of the ad buys on Limbaugh’s show confirms the extent of the problem: “The vast majority of national advertisers now refuse to air their ads during Rush Limbaugh’s show,” our source tells us.

Radio Ink:

People close to Cumulus tell Radio Ink, “48 of the top 50 network advertisers have “exclude Rush and Hannity” orders. Every major national ad agency has same dictate.”

Enjoy.

I see that the Right is still trying to make an issue out of Benghazi. They’re still struggling to make out just what was done that was so awful, however. Jonathan Bernstein writes,

No, there’s no particular reason that it makes any sense…there’s still no core story that this cover-up was (supposedly) covering up for. But there do appear to be plenty of Usual Suspect conservative movement lawyers and flacks involved. …

…this is another case of how the minimal standards of the GOP-aligned press make Republican politicians lazy. Just chant “Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi” and you’re sure to generate plenty of positive publicity, so what’s the incentive for actually mastering the substantive issues involved?

And second: there’s a real dogs-not-barking aspect to this; the continued focus on what has appeared for months to be a dry well suggests that there are no real Barack Obama (or Hillary Clinton) scandals to investigate.

See also “They’ve Lost Fox And Friends: GOP Claims Of Benghazi ‘Cover Up’ Collapses”

First off, Howard Kurtz has been fired from the Daily Beast. I didn’t know it was possible to be so bad as to be fired from the Daily Beast. How low can you go? Maybe Weekly World News has an opening.

Elsewhere — The Right has seized on a new study that they claim proves that Medicaid doesn’t help anyone and is a big waste of money. As usual, the Right can’t read. Jonathan Cohn and bloggers at the Incidental Economist explain what the study actually says. The Incidental Economist explains,

Let’s review. The good: Medicaid improved rates of diagnosis of depression, increased the use of preventive services, and improved the financial outlook for enrollees. The bad: It did not significantly affect the A1C levels of people with diabetes or levels of hypertension or cholesterol.

This has led many to declare (and we’re not linking to them) that the ACA is now a failed promise, that Medicaid is bad, and that anyone who disagrees is a “Medicaid denier”. How many people saying that are ready to give up insurance for themselves or their family? If they are arguing that Medicaid needs to be reformed in some way, we’re open to that. If they’re arguing that insurance coverage shouldn’t be accessible to poor Americans in any form, we don’t agree. Medicaid may not be perfect, but we don’t think being uninsured is better. This new study supports this view, though certainly not as strongly as it might have.

Cohn makes the point that the purpose of health insurance is not to keep you well, but to pay the medical bills.

That may sound obvious—of course people with insurance are less likely to struggle with medical bills. But it’s also the most under-appreciated accomplishment of health insurance: Whatever its effects on health, it promotes economic security. “The primary purpose of health insurance is to protect you financially in event of a catastrophic medical shock,” Finkelstein told me in an interview, “in the same way that the primary purpose of auto insurance or fire insurance is to provide you money in case you’ve lost something of value.”

And, anyway, the study has been following subjects for only two years. The difference in health care outcomes after five or ten years might be more significant, assuming the study continues.

A day that really has lived in infamy. How could I forget?