Cory Booker is running for Frank Lautenberg’s U.S. Senate seat.

There are days I do things beside dredge the Intertubes looking for news, and this has been one of those days. So I’m going to defer to other bloggers on the NSA/FBI/PRISM data mining story.

Good overview of what’s been happening and the constitutional issues involved — “How All Three Branches Conspired to Threaten Your Privacy” by Scott Lemieux

See also “President Obama’s War” by Charles Pierce and “PRISM Stopped Najibullah Zazi From Blowing Up Backpacks in the Subway” by Dan Amira.

Earlier this week the First Lady was heckled at a private fundraiser, and the way she handled the heckler drew both praise and criticism. I’ve seen the incident reported a couple of ways, but my impression is that the FLOTUS gave the audience (who had paid to be there) a choice between who they wanted to speak, her or Ms. Heckler. And if the heckler took over the program, the FLOTUS said, she would leave.

This NPR story suggests that lots of liberal commenters thought the FLOTUS was out of line, and not the heckler, who interrupted the First Lady’s speech about providing a better future for our children with the demand that the President sign an executive order banning discrimination against gays working for federal contractors.

Heckling is very much justified when it’s about some issue Power isn’t addressing, or is addressing stupidly. But there is a bill the President supports making its way through the legislative process that addresses the issue, and there’s a solid argument to be made that, in the long run, it’s much better to settle this matter through law than through an executive order that would be weaker and that a future POTUS could rescind. It seems to me this week’s heckler was serving no real purpose other than to hear herself heckle.

I also think interrupting a speaker should be a last resort thing. Was there going to be Q&A time after the prepared remarks? Was the First Lady planning to shake hands and schmooze a bit with the participants? In other words, would there have been another point in the program at which the heckler could have spoken her mind without interrupting the speech? If so, what was the purpose of interrupting the speech, especially at a private event?

The thing with heckling is that there’s a soft, fuzzy line between bravely speaking truth to power and just being an asshole. And, yes, perception is in the eye of the beholder. But there’s skillful and fearless heckling and asshole heckling, and to me, the heckler in question was mostly the latter.

I’ve been at events and also taken classes that were hijacked by an audience member/class participant, and sometimes the only purpose actually served is that whatever everyone else was there to see didn’t happen. And sometimes that’s a righteous thing, and sometimes it’s just rude. And well-meaning people will disagree with each other about which is what.

However, seems to me there are vocational hecklers who believe heckling is always righteous, under all circumstances, and I’m saying it isn’t. Nor should it always be condoned and encouraged. Sometimes people need to be told to stuff a sock in it and sit down.

It’s also the case that some people looking at this week’s incident see a privileged white twit disrespecting a black First Lady, and there may be something to that.

See also Michelle Obama is Awesome. Hecklers, not so much.

The House seems to be entirely given over to IRS hearings. Today the Ways and Means Committee is hearing testimony from “victims” (I’m seeing newspaper headlines about “IRS Victims,” even though it’s a matter of opinion whether anyone was actually victimized) that include tea party, anti-reproduction rights, and anti-gay marriage groups. Social welfare organizations, my ass.

From Atlantic Wire,

Tom Price of Georgia called Eastman’s testimony, “absolutely chilling.”

Eastman’s testimony, it’s worth noting, focused on a separate IRS issue. The National Organization for Marriage plans to sue the agency for apparently leaking confidential donor lists to The Huffington Post. This prompted Eastman to note that, after the fight over Proposition 8 in California, donors to the campaign faced public harassment. Eastman worried that the recent leak would scare donors, that it might “keep them from donating again to the political fight that we’re in the middle of.”

Which at its heart is the problem. The IRS’ efforts to filter Tea Party groups appears largely to have been a shorthand for flagging groups that were likely engaging in undue political activity. Blumenauer asked the witnesses if they understood where the line was drawn on what political activity was allowed; no one asked provided such an understanding.

Charles Pierce:

You will note that among the social-welfare activities organized by these fine social-welfare advocates was a warning to people to mind their social welfare against the encroachment of our old pal, Agenda 21, the secret UN plot to steal all our golfs. (There’s some cool stuff in there, too, about keeping the Muslims and their sharia law away from your social welfare of your community, too. And something about The Hunger Games.)

One more time — social welfare, my ass. See also Steve M.

Ron Fournier takes Darrell Issa apart.

Issa shifted focus to the IRS’s admission that its agents targeted conservative groups for review of their tax-exempt status. “Well, first of all, we’re looking at the IRS for how big the problem is,” he replied. “As you know as late as last week the administration is still trying to say there’s a few rogue agents in Cincinnati when in fact the indication is they were directly being ordered from Washington.”

Note what Issa is doing. He does it all the time–start an unsubstantiated allegation with an absolute declaration (“when in fact”) and follow it with weasel words (“the indication is”). This smear-and-caveat technique allows him to ruin reputations without being called a liar.

Do read the whole thing.

Dana Milbank:

Congressional investigators have not produced evidence to link the harassment of conservative groups to the White House or to higher-ups in the Obama administration. But the lack of evidence that any political appointee was involved hasn’t stopped the lawmakers from assuming that it simply must be true. And so, they are going to hold hearings until they confirm their conclusions.

Ed Kilgore thinks the witch-hunters have about a week “to make the IRS investigations interesting and/or revelatory before it begins to look like conservatives are quite literally just talking to themselves, at which time the whole thing could backfire.” But, y’know, I don’t think they’re going to stop. Remember the Clinton Administration, when it seemed the only word that ever came out of a Republican’s mouth was “Whitewater,” until they discovered Monica. IMO they’re going to keep at this IRS thing until something juicier comes along, or until there’s a Republican in the White House.

There are a number of reports out today about various things. My favorites:

1. Anyone who has ever worked in a big corporation cube farm will find this one hysterically and pathetically funny.

In the months before the 2012 election, a group of high-powered consultants and political operatives prepared a secret report for candidate Mitt Romney, explaining how he should take over and restructure the federal government should he win the presidency.

“The White House staff is similar to a holding company” read one PowerPoint slide, which would have been presented to President-elect Romney as part of an expansive briefing on the morning after Election Day. It went on to list three main divisions of the metaphorical firm: “Care & Feeding Offices,” like speechwriting, “Policy Offices,” like the National Security Council, and “Packaging & Selling Offices,” like the office of the press secretary. This was the view of the Presidency Romney would have brought with him to Washington, a glimpse of the White House that never was — and plan that never saw the light of day.

Be sure to follow the link and savor the powerpoint illustration. A hoot.

Among the recommendations for the Romney administration:

• Corporate-style training seminars were planned for appointees and nominees before the inauguration to teach management skills.
• A plan to restructure White House operations to suit Romney’s corporate management style, with clear deliverables.
• Detailed flow charts delineating how information and decisions were disseminated through the administration to achieve “unity.”
• Plans to evaluate Cabinet secretaries’s performance by “systematically assessing the efforts of their departments in contributing to [Romney’s] priorities and objectives, perhaps by a newly created ”deputy chief of staff for Cabinet oversight.”

Any past or present cube farm drones will recognize this stuff as the same inane nonsense executive staffs come up with so that the big shots can pretend they know what they are doing. It amounts to the CEOs re-arranging their deck chairs while the crew in the engine room keeps the ship going, same as always.

2. The College Republican National Committee has issued a report explaining why the GOP is losing the youth vote. A sampling:

Gay marriage: “On the ‘open-minded’ issue … [w]e will face serious difficulty so long as the issue of gay marriage remains on the table.”
Hispanics: “Latino voters … tend to think the GOP couldn’t care less about them.”
Perception of the party’s economic stance: “We’ve become the party that will pat you on your back when you make it, but won’t offer you a hand to help you get there.”
Big reason for the image problem: The “outrageous statements made by errant Republican voices.”
Words that up-for-grabs voters associate with the GOP: “The responses were brutal: closed-minded, racist, rigid, old-fashioned.”

Alex Pareene:

Now, you and I know this, but apparently Republicans still haven’t figured out that another name for “errant Republican voices” is “people honestly and clearly stating the dominant policy and philosophical positions of the modern conservative movement.” This is where they may run into some trouble. In fact, most of these unfortunate impressions people have of the party are accurate reflections of the party’s positions.

Hey, it is what it is.

He fought the good fight, and will be missed.

Very much worth reading — “The $2.7 Trillion Medical Bill” by Elisabeth Rosenthal at the New York Times. It examines why health care costs so much more here than anywhere else. Basically, it’s the fault of a free market — because there are no constraints on what providers and vendors can charge, they’re all squeezing as much out of the system as they can. Other countries treat health care more like a public utility, with cost and rate regulations. But do read the article.

Also, see Paul Krugman, “We Are Not Having A Serious Discussion, Obamacare Edition”

The first thing I did when I heard about this video was to check Erick Erickson’s Wikipedia page to see if he is married. The page doesn’t mention a wife, which gives me hope he is not. Otherwise I’d feel compelled to organize an intervention for the poor girl. But on watching it, I was even more appalled.

Most of the time, conservatives pooh-pooh the pay gap as a result of women’s “choice” to work less and attend to the home more. They’re not against equality, they assure us, but equality just naturally fails on its own because women make it so! That ruse lasted right up until the announcement that four out of ten households with children now have a female breadwinner. So how did Fox News respond? By gathering a panel of all male pundits to explain that, under no uncertain terms, the disappearance of male economic dominance signals the end of life as we know it.

Choice phrases tossed around, including from resident liberal Juan Williams: “disintegration of marriage,” “society dissolve around us,” and “something going terribly wrong in American society.” Then there’s Lou Dobbs, darkly intimating that women’s escape from economic dependence turns them into killers: “And those are the children who survive!” he exclaims at one point, in reference to all those money-grubbing ladies having abortions on their lunch break.

Here is a portion of Erickson’s contribution:

“I’m so used to liberals telling conservatives that they’re anti-science. But liberals who defend this and say it is not a bad thing are very anti-science. When you look at biology — when you look at the natural world — the roles of a male and a female in society and in other animals, the male typically is the dominant role. The female, it’s not antithesis, or it’s not competing, it’s a complementary role. We’re lost the ability to have complementary relationships … and it’s tearing us apart.”

I can think of a number of species, including primate species, that don’t fit Erickson’s notions of male dominance, but let’s go on … a big chunk of those primary breadwinner moms are never married or divorced. Having lived that life myself, I have no doubt that a large majority of those single moms would dearly love to have a decent man in their lives to help support them and raise those children. But while there are a lot of decent men out there, there are not nearly enough to go around, it seems. So, women end up raising children by themselves.

I propose convening a panel of women asking why so many of today’s men fail to abjectly at being husbands and fathers. Erick Erickson could be Exhibit A.

By now you’ve all heard that Michele Bachmann will be out of the House next year. Feel free to pile on the snark.