Trail getting warm again
Some of the once missing emails from former Internal Revenue Service administrator Lois Lerner now appear to show that the Department of Justice was involved in the targeting of conservative groups during President Obama's first term, according to Forbes.
"Ms. Lerner," according to magazine columnist Robert W. Wood, "met with top officials from the DOJ's Election Crimes Branch in October 2010. Although Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the DOJ, the DOJ coughed up information only on court order. Even then, the DOJ handed over only two pages of heavily redacted emails."
What was available shows that Lerner worked with the DOJ on targeting conservative groups and even that she sent the DOJ a "1.1 million page database of information from 501(c)(4) tax exempt organizations" that contained confidential tax records.
Some 30,000 of the IRS emails that IRS officials said earlier this year were "unrecoverable" were found last month by the IRS inspector general.
The president of Judicial Watch said the documents show the Justice Department was "up to its neck in the IRS scandal" and that its Public Integrity Section, which usually investigates such abuse of authority, is "now implicated in the IRS crimes."
Could the trail lead higher? Will a Republican Congress have the guts to find out? Stay tuned.
Ready for Hil ... Warren
President Barack Obama is not saying if he's got a favorite Democrat in the 2016 presidential sweepstakes, in which former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is figured to be the front-runner, but more than 300 former Obama campaign staffers aren't so reticent.
And their pick isn't Clinton. It's Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, figured -- if one could imagine -- to be more liberal than Clinton.
In a letter titled "We helped elect Barack Obama -- now we're calling on Elizabeth Warren to run in 2016," they remind readers that Warren, like Obama, was at one point thought to be an unlikely winner. And, it continues, they worked for him and won in Iowa, "we organized like no campaign had organized before," "we built a movement" and "we know that the improbable is far from impossible."
The organizing group, interestingly, is called Ready for Warren. "Ready for Hillary" was one of the slogans that coalesced around the former first lady in her 2008 run for the Democratic nomination and for her presumed 2016 try.
The list of signatories on the letter is not one to make anyone sit up and notice. They range from graphic designers to a director of modeling to field organizers in cities like Great Falls, Mont., and Laurinburg, N.C.
Please fence me in
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio pawned himself off on voters as a man of the people, but he just doesn't want those people too close.
The Democrat recently had a privacy fence built inside Gracie Mansion's existing brick wall and wrought-iron fence that already ring the home.
"So much for being mayor of the people," a law enforcement spokesman told the New York Post. "That brick fence was good enough for Rudy Giuliani and his family and for Ed Koch and all the mayors before him. They didn't need a taller fence. That's the same house where everybody else lived for years."
"Security concerns" was given as the reason the fence was erected, although, thanks to former Mayor Giuliani, who is generally given credit for his efforts, the city is safer than it was in 1970s and 1980s.
"The fence really turns me off because he always advertised himself as the 'people's mayor' and [said] he would always make himself so available," Joni Dropkin, an Upper East Side neighbor, told the Post. "There's something so shady about it."
Hurting those who need it most
School children all over the country have been turning thumbs down on the food that has to be served up thanks to new food guidelines implemented through the guidance of first lady Michelle Obama. Now, not only are the children in one South Carolina school district not getting to have the lunch they'll eat, but underprivileged and special needs children will go without the extra-curricular activities that had been funded by profits that used to come from the sale of Chick-fil-A sandwiches sold in the cafeterias, according to American Overlook.
The first lady's guidelines require all lunch entrees to be 90 calories or under, and the chicken sandwich apparently was not.
"They don't meet the standards," Socastee High School Principal Paul Browning told a local news affiliate. "We're struggling with it. The Chick-fil-A profits went directly to the field trips. We've got to raise some money, but we will figure something out."