U.S. House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul has made a not-too-bold prediction.

The Benghazi tragedy of Sept. 11, 2012 will bedevil former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s expected bid for the presidency in 2016, said the Texas Republican.

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/05/hillary-clinton-michael-mccaul-benghazi-91660.html?hp=l6

Uhhh, let me think about that one for a minute.

Yep, I’m sure it will haunt HRC. Why? Because congressional Republicans such as McCaul will ensure that it does.

Clinton was secretary of state when the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya came under siege on the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks. Four people died in the battle, including the American ambassador to Libya. Clinton has been pounded by GOP critics for all kinds of things real and/or imagined. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said he would have fired Clinton had he been president at the time.

It’s turning out, though, that the Benghazi tragedy produced a massive misjudgment at many levels, but it doesn’t constitute the kind of Watergate-style treatment that it’s been getting. There doesn’t to appear to have a cover-up or any other criminal activity, as McCaul and other leading congressional Republicans are suggesting.

Clinton is considered to be the prohibitive favorite to be the Democrats’ presidential nominee in 2016. She’s expected to decide by sometime in 2014 whether to make the run.

So, I’m quite sure Chairman McCaul is right that Benghazi will haunt her – and he’ll do his level best to scare up the ghosts.

I’m getting soft in my old age.
There once was a time when I could watch video images of people suffering from Mother Nature’s wrath, or the wrath that humans have brought to others. No longer.
The Moore, Okla., tornado has brought tears to my eyes as I watch the people struggling now in its aftermath. President Obama has issued a disaster declaration to “expedite” federal relief that must speed toward Oklahoma and just watching him speak a few moments ago – offering a nation’s prayers and love to the stricken residents of Oklahoma – also made my eyes well up.
I couldn’t watch the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing. I cannot watch the video of those coping with the West, Texas fertilizer plant blast. The Joplin, Mo., tornado of 2011 is too much for me to watch. As the years have passed since 9/11, I no longer am able to watch video of that horrifying event unfolding. The scenes of the Oklahoma City federal courthouse bombing in April 1995, with the children’s teeth chattering in the cold as they waited for parents to pick them up after the blast? Can’t watch that, either.
But we know we have to stand with our fellow Americans in this terrible time.
Moore will rebuild – eventually. They know how to do it, as they’ve done so in recent years while recovering from a May 1999 twister that blew the city apart.
A friend of mine wrote Monday that the scenes from Moore make the Texas Panhandle drought seem almost “pleasant.”
Today I am counting my blessings and sending them east toward Moore.

The news out of Oklahoma is grim.

A huge tornado has ripped through Moore, Okla., a town just south of Oklahoma City. News of the latest twister reminds me of a tour my wife and I took through that very town not long after the previous killer storm blew it apart.

We were visiting with the parents of a former colleague of mine. My former colleague is a native of Moore. His parents still lived there in 1999 when we visited them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Bridge_Creek_%E2%80%93_Moore_tornado

We went on a drive through the stricken neighborhoods. Fortunately, our hosts’ home wasn’t damaged by that storm. Incidentally, they’ve since moved out of there and are now living in McKinney, north of Dallas.

But the damage of that 1999 storm was incomprehensible. Entire blocks were leveled. Adjacent to them were neighborhoods that remained intact. The Almighty has this strange way of guiding these storms. Go figure.

We were told of how one high school had been evacuated and how the students were forced to attend class in a rival school while their own campus was repaired.

The city eventually repaired itself from that terrible event more than a dozen years ago.

Now this. By all accounts, today’s disaster seems as ghastly as that earlier one.

And all this just highlights the power over which we mere human beings have no control.

We’re left now just to lend a hand when and where we can and, of course, offer prayer to the very God that delivered this horror to Moore.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is so sure of himself these days that he believes those responsible for the Internal Revenue Service scandal should go to prison.

Never mind a couple of key facts. One is that we don’t even know yet at which level the IRS matter emanated, let alone who did it. Two, we don’t even have all the facts.

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/05/bobby-jindal-irs-91577.html?hp=f2

Jindal is considered a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2016, so he’s going to get his licks in while he can. Sure, there’s plenty to hit.

The IRS matter involves the behavior of the taxing agency regarding conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status under federal law. It’s been revealed that the agency got pretty tough with conservative groups seeking such status, kind of like what happened to liberal groups seeking the status during the Bush administration.

The current stink has brought about a couple of forced resignations, as well as a pledge from President Obama to work with Congress to fix the problem. That’s not good enough for some key GOP leaders, who want to see folks tried, convicted and imprisoned.

Jindal seems to want to get right to the imprisonment part, which is what suggested to a group of political activists recently.

I’m aware, along with the rest of the nation, that this story is an important one. I don’t like the notion of The Taxman dropping the hammer unfairly on a group based on that organization’s political leanings.

Can’t we just hold off on the jail talk until we get some more facts sorted out?

Who did it? Who ordered it? When did the authorities know and what did they do when they learned about it? Was there a cover-up?

I’m all ears regarding those key questions.

Well, there goes my interest in the Triple Crown of horse racing.

A beast named Oxbow won the Preakness today. The horse that won the Kentucky Derby two weeks ago, Orb, didn’t make it.

So, there goes any chance of my watching the Belmont Stakes.

You see, I’m kind of a fair-weather horse racing fan. I’ll watch only the Belmont Stakes on one condition: if the same horse wins the first two races of this Triple Crown.

It’s been a good while since a horse won the Triple Crown. Affirmed won it in 1978, just a year after Seattle Slew turned the trick. And it was the great Secretariat who made mincemeat out of the Belmont field in 1973. That, honestly, was the first time I ever got excited about a horse race.

Secretariat had set race records in the Derby and Preakness. He was the heavy favorite to win the Belmont and become the first Triple Crown winner since 1948. My wife and I lived in a small house in Portland, Ore., at the time. We settled down to watch the Belmont that year.

Secretariat not only won the race, the set some kind of record, winning it by 31 lengths. There’s that great shot of jockey Ron Turcotte looking back toward the field as the horse pounded down the stretch. Turcotte said later he looked back because he couldn’t hear the usual sounds one hears in a horse race, such as hooves and other horses’ grunts.

This year, though, the Belmont Stakes is just another horse race. I’m now waiting for next year.

Did I hear this correctly? Former half-term Alaska Gov. Sarah “Barracuda” Palin made some snarky remark about the Marines shielding President Obama from rainfall during his joint press conference the Turkish prime minister?

http://www.politico.com/gallery/2013/05/the-week-in-photos/001035-014667.html?hp=l17

The comments had something to do with the president “disrespecting” the Marines who held the umbrellas over his head and that of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan.

Holy … mackerel!

What in the bleeping world have we come to here?

Palin and some other folks currently and formerly associated with the Fox News Channel said the president should have gone inside rather than ask the Marine guards to perform such a menial task.

http://www.policymic.com/articles/42911/obama-umbrella-umbrella-controversy-is-right-wing-desperation-at-its-worst

Have these folks ever done this before? My guess: Uh, yes, plenty of times.

But now that we have all these social media outlets to vent such pettiness, we’re getting a snootful from the right-wingnuts who think they’ve got yet another “scandal” to hang on the guy they despise with such passion.

Pitiful.

No doubt about it, President Obama has had a tough week.

His emphasis now shifts to what Republicans once thought would end his presidency: the economy.

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/300545-obama-shifts-focus-to-economy

Interesting how fortunes can turn and how bad news becomes good news, and how one can turn a perceived weakness into a perceived strength.

GOP critics had been yammering all through the 2012 election cycle about how the economy was dragging everything – and everyone – into the dumps. Joblessness was too high; new job creation was much too slow; that deficit was going to bankrupt the country; we were “outsourcing” jobs to places like China and India.

Then what? Unemployment has kept ticking downward. Job creation is starting to accelerate. The deficit is now “down” to something on the order of $600 billion.

Those “scandals” involving the IRS, Benghazi and the Associated Press phone records appear as of today to be contained. Obama now is turning his sights toward the economy to (1) divert people’s attention from the embarrassing missteps and (2) perhaps lift our spirits just a bit.

Didn’t the Republican opposition tell us the economy would be Barack Obama’s downfall? At this rate, it might be his salvation. Imagine that.

Buried deep in the story attached to this blog post is a number that virtually no one has noticed.

http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/budget/300467-cbo-obama-budget-adds-52-trillion-in-deficits

The number is $669 billion.

That’s the newest estimate on the size of the current federal budget deficit. The Congressional Budget Office says President Obama’s budget would boost the deficit to that total and would bump it to $615 billion in 2014.

So what’s the big deal here?

The deficits have been running a trillion bucks-plus annually for the past several years. The deficit is now “down” to a “mere” $600 billion and change. And it’s projected to slide even farther in the years just ahead.

Why isn’t there any applause, especially from congressional conservatives who keep yammering about the deficit? They gripe that Barack Obama’s economic and tax policies are spending us into oblivion. With the deficit now reduced by an estimated $400 billion annually from where it was, isn’t that good news?

I’m aware, certainly, of the sequestration that’s kicked in. The mandatory budget cuts surely will have their impact. I get all that.

What I don’t get is the continuing fixation on negative happenings when something quite positive – especially to the president’s most vocal critics – is occurring right under their noses.

Bob Schieffer is a smart Texan who’s been around the center of power longer than most people can remember.

The veteran CBS news anchor/reporter/commentator had it quite right this morning when he said President Obama has to stop acting like a “bystander” in his own government.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/05/16/schieffer_on_scandals_its_very_very_disturbing_what_were_seeing.html

Schieffer, who grew up in Fort Worth, has been a frequent target of conservative critics who contend he’s a member of the “liberal mainstream media” (I’m still trying to learn just who comprises the “mainstream media”). But he takes serious the criticism that has engulfed the president in recent days as controversies have erupted all around the White House.

It’s not that the Barack Obama has become the second coming of Richard Nixon, Schieffer said. It’s that the president and those closest to him are acting like there’s nobody in charge. The attorney general didn’t know precisely about the seizure of phone records at the Associated Press, the head of Internal Revenue Service didn’t know about the hassling of conservative political action groups, and the president himself didn’t know about the Benghazi tragedy as it was unfolding nearly a year ago in Libya.

I’m waiting for the president to get back into the game. He was re-elected in November despite presiding over a still-struggling economy. He wants to build a legacy he can leave behind when he exits his office in January 2017. But as Schieffer noted, he’d better “get hold” of these controversies or else nothing will get done.

The Internal Revenue Service boss believes his agency didn’t do anything illegal when it targeted conservative groups’ seeking tax-exempt status.

He did, though, say the behavior was “obnoxious.”

http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/domestic-taxes/300447-irs-chief-defends-targeting-of-groups-as-obnoxious-not-illegal

This story continues to swirl. It involves the IRS giving extra scrutiny to tea party-type groups seeking exemptions from paying taxes. They seek non-profit status. The IRS has rules about that, saying that political groups don’t qualify. I happen to question whether tea party patriots, such as they are, qualify as non-profits organizations the way, say, the Red Cross and the Salvation Army do.

Of course the revelation of the hassling of these groups has drawn the ire of conservatives all across the country. President Obama called it “outrageous.” The interim IRS boss has resigned and the president vows to work “hand in hand” with Congress to ensure fair treatment all across the board.

And right there is the answer.

The IRS must follow the law in vetting these groups. It must do so without bias or prejudice. Is this the first time the IRS has gone after political groups? Well, no. During the Bush administration, the IRS reportedly hassled liberal political action groups seeking the same status as the tea party folks. The alleged motive at the time was because of their opposition to our war effort in Iraq. The IRS probe of these groups raised a bit of a ruckus at the time, but nothing like what has occurred in recent days.

I’m guessing conservatives are better at roiling the waters than liberals, given that the IRS matter plays right into the right-wing’s wheelhouse of distrust of The Taxman.

The IRS matter isn’t likely to be settled soon. It will fester likely for the remainder of the president’s term in office. If we take the long view, the matter should result in tough – but fair – treatment for all those groups on both ends of the spectrum who think they should be taken off the tax rolls.