Photograph by Pete Marovich/Bloomberg

Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, questions a witness during a Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hearing in Washington, D.C., on May 21, 2013. Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook defended his company’s use of offshore tax shelters before U.S. senators who castigated the most-valuable technology company for avoiding $9 billion and more in payments.

A small corner of hell may be freezing over.

Sen. Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican and fierce Obama administration critic, today opposed a bill to provide arms to Syrian rebels with an argument that could have come straight from the White House. Officials there have resisted greater involvement in the two-year-old civil war between rebel groups and President Bashar al-Assad.

White House spokesman Jay Carney, asked about arming rebels on May 9, said the administration doesn’t want to “make decisions that inadvertently cause more chaos or more violence in Syria.”

Paul warned of the same danger during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting to mark-up the bill.

“I’m concerned with the slippery slope to war,” Paul told fellow senators before the bill passed with a bipartisan boost, 15-3. It now goes to the Senate for a vote.

Paul wasn’t alone in his objections. Democratic Sens. Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Tom Udall of New Mexico also raised concerns.

“By arming, are we making the situation better?” Udall asked his colleagues.

Paul said U.S. officials don’t know enough about the opposition fighting the “murky” war. The bill would allow the U.S. to arm “people associated with al Qaeda” who are fighting against Assad, and U.S. weapons could also reach Islamists who target Christians, he suggested.

Either way, he said, there’s no way to be sure that any U.S. weapons reach “good, liberty-loving Jeffersonian democrats.”

Original post is Paul Echoes White House in Opposition to Arming Syrians by Political Capital.

Photograph by Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

Central Intelligence Agency building in Langley, Virginia.

The Central Intelligence Agency is better known for secrecy than it is for family fun.

But tomorrow you will find spies amid the cotton candy, crafters and carnival rides at the annual McLean Day fair at Lewinsville Park, some three miles from CIA headquarters in McLean, Virginia.

Rather than occupying an Undisclosed Secret Location, a safe house or a Secure Compartmented Information Facility, the spooks will be manning Booth 003, between Chain Bridge Bank and Post 8142 of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

For undisclosed reasons, the Old Dominion Animal Health Center got Booth 007.

No word, either, on whether those staffing the Agency’s booth will be using their real names or wearing their own hair.

The CIA didn’t respond to requests for comment on its participation in the event.

Original post is CIA Day at the Fair: 007 is Taken by Political Capital.

Photograph by STR/AFP via Getty Images

A vehicle and the surround buildings burn after they were set on fire inside the U.S. consulate compound in Benghazi late on September 11, 2012.

President Barack Obama, addressing a live television audience from the White House, said the commissioner in charge of the IRS has been removed following the agency’s targeted scrutiny of conservative groups.

“The misconduct uncovered is inexcuseable,” Obama said in a brief statement delivered from the East Room. “Americans have a right to be angry about it, and I am angry about it. I will not tolerate this kind of behavior at any agency, especially the IRS.”

“We’re going to hold the responsible parties accountable,” he said, announcing that Treasury Secretary Jack Lew had accepted the resignation of the acting IRS commissioner, Steven Miller.

The president said “new safeguards” will be put in place to ensure this doesn’t happen again, and he will cooperate with Congress in its oversight “to get this thing fixed.”

“I’ll do everything in my power to ensure that nothing like this happens again,” Obama said in remarks delivered in under three and a half minutes.

The White House has faced widespread criticism for not standing up more quickly to the questions emerging from the fatal attacks on a U.S. mission in Libya, the Internal Revenue Service’s handling of requests for tax exemptions from Tea Party-related groups and the Justice Department’s tracking of Associated Press reporters’ phone calls.

The White House rose to all three today:

– Obama faced the television cameras this evening after meeting with high-level Treasury officials at the White House today about what the IRS’s inspector general had called “ineffective management” in the screening of requests for tax-exempt status for groups organized under section 501(c)(4) of the U.S. tax code — groups that are supposed to have only limited political activity. IRS employees in Cincinnati screened for the words Tea Party in their scrutiny. The broadcast and cable networks lined up to carry his words live.

– The Obama White House this afternoon released almost 100 pages of e-mail traffic among officials at the White House, CIA and State Department. The e-mails show the Central Intelligence Agency made major revisions to administration talking points after the attack that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya in Benghazi —as they were developed and before they were delivered to Congress and supplied to United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice. See the talking points here.

– This afternoon, the White House allowed that it had spoken with Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York about reintroducing a shield law to protect the confidential sources of reporters, following the revelation that the Justice Department had tracked the phone records of AP reporters citing an investigation into a leak with national security implications. The president supports the First Amendment, press secretary Jay Carney said today — a shield law should prove it.

In that scandal-industrial complex, that’s one busy day.

Original post is Charge of the Obama Brigade: IRS, Benghazi, Reporters by Political Capital.

Photograph by AP Photo

Former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford and his fiancee, Maria Belen Chapur, at his primary election victory party.

So it wasn’t that close after all.

Why would it have been, in a congressional district that Republican Mitt Romney carried by 18 percentage points in November.

Because:

– The Republican candidate who won, former Gov. Mark Sanford, went off to Argentina with a mistress in 2009 while his office claimed he was hiking the Appalachian Trail, and even during this spring special election campaign for the open 1st Congressional District seat showed up at his ex-wife’s home, contrary to a restraining order, to watch football with his son. His erstwhile mistress, now fiancee, has helped him celebrate his election victories.

– The Democratic candidate, Elizabeth Colbert Busch, sister of Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert, outspent Sanford with the help of outside groups and raised a legitimate question about trust in American politics.

Yet special elections draw small crowds, the voters most motivated, the polls portraying a close race overrun by the reality of who really votes in such contests. So the margin of victory was something like 10 percent, with almost all the votes counted. Sanford had 54 percent of the vote, Colbert Busch 45 percent, with 98 percent of precincts reporting, according to the Associated Press.

And Sanford, who also has represented South Carolina in Congress in the past (from 1995 to 2001), will return to Washington claiming a political redemption, the ultimate forgiveness, thanking the people of the 1st district for recognizing that we all, as Sanford says, have “feet of clay.”

And in the aftermath of this nationally watched local election there is, predictably, a difference of opinion:

Thank you to each and every person who helped make tonight possible! twitter.com/MarkSanford/st…

— Mark Sanford (@MarkSanford) May 8, 2013

Mark Sanford is what is wrong with American politics.

— Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) May 8, 2013

So I hear @gopconference plans to put Mark Sanford on the Foreign Affairs Committee – he seems to have done both.

— Brad Woodhouse (@woodhouseb) May 8, 2013

How excited are House Republicans at the idea of Mark Sanford’s potential return to Washington? Not very. on.wsj.com/15ncOpI

Congrats to @marksanford on his victory. Obama hasn’t figured it out yet on jobs, happy to work together to hold him accountable

— Reince Priebus (@Reince) May 8, 2013

 

— Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) May 7, 2013

Original post is Sanford Hiking Washington Trail Again – For Real by Political Capital.

Photograph by Sebastiano Tomada/Sipa USA via AP Images

FSA fighters clear a room in a newly conquered building along the front line of Sheikh Saeed a highly contested area of Aleppo, Syria, on March 18, 2013.

President Barack Obama is remembering Iraq.

And the world, he says, will remember what the U.S. did about Osama bin Laden and Muammar Qaddafi.

All of this has to do with the “red line” — the use of chemical weapons in Syria which Obama has said the U.S. will not tolerate. And what the world is to make of the time Obama is taking assessing evidence that Syria has crossed it.

At a joint White House news conference with President Park Geun-Hye of Korea today, Obama was asked at what point the costs of doing something are outweighed by the costs of doing nothing.

“I think there’d be severe costs in doing nothing,” Obama replied. “`That’s why we’re not doing nothing.”

The U.S. is providing nonlethal aid to the opposition.

“If what you’re asking is, are there continuing reevaluations about what we do, what actions we take in conjunction with other international partners to optimize the day when, or to hasten the day when we can see a better situation in Syria, we’ve been doing that all along and we’ll continue to do that,” he said.  “Understandably, there’s a desire for easy answers.”

Intercepting a question posed to his Korean counterpart — asked if the U.S. failing to act on perceived violations of the red line in Syria “could embolden” U.S. enemies elsewhere, such as North Korea — Obama said:

“The operative word there, I guess, is… perceived. And what I’ve said is we have evidence that there has been the use of chemical weapons inside of Syria, but I don’t make decisions based on `perceived’… And I can’t organize international coalitions around “perceived.”  We tried that in the past, by the way, and it didn’t work out well. ”

That would be Iraq, where the U.S. went to war over weapons of mass destruction never found.

Yet the world should take notice of what his administration has done when he has declared that a leader must go, as he did in Libya, and as he has done in Syria, and what he did after a decade-long search for Osama bin Laden.

“In the end, whether it’s bin Laden or Qaddafi,” Obama said, “if we say we’re taking a position, I think at this point the international community has a pretty good idea that we act on our commitments.”

Original post is Obama: ‘Not Doing Nothing’ in Syria by Political Capital.

Photograph by Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images

A T-shirt at a souvenir stand near the White House in Washington.

Republican Gabriel Gomez, running for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts for the seat vacated by Secretary of State John Kerry, spent last year working for a Republican-leaning nonprofit that attacked President Barack Obama for taking too much credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden.

When his Democratic opponent, U.S Rep. Edward Markey pointed that out, Gomez’s fellow Republicans cried foul. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus today called it “bizarre” and “offensive” for Markey to run an ad featuring pictures of Gomez and bin Laden. “It’s a sign of his true political desperation,” Priebus said in a statement.

Gomezs’ group, Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund Inc., kept its donors hidden as it spent $485,000 against Obama during the 2012 election. At the time, Kerry, a decorated Vietnam War hero, called the campaign “outrageous” and likened it to the attacks he faced from Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which was funded by major Republican donors and later fined by the Federal Election Commission for violating U.S. election laws.

The Democrats weren’t backing down. Today, Newton, Massachusetts, Mayor Setti Warren, an Iraq War veteran, was to hold a press conference at Markey’s Senate headquarters to press the line of attack against Gomez.

Original post is Republicans Cry Foul on Bin Laden Ad by Political Capital.

The Onion

Onion Twitter Password Changed To OnionMan77 — ‘That Ought To Do It’

Original post is Onion-Hacking: ‘Just the Beginning’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by U.S Attorney Office for the Southern District of New York via AP Images

The fossil of the Tyrannosaurus bataar.

Who says the U.S. border is porous?

The patrol stopped a Tyrannosaurus.

And now they’re sending it home.

In a repatriation ceremony on Monday, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will hand off a “70 million-year-old nearly complete Tyrannosaurus Bataar skeleton” to the government of Mongolia.

The skeleton was looted from the Gobi Desert and illegally smuggled into the United States, ICE says. It was seized by ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations special agents in New York.

The U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, will be on hand for the ceremony, as will ICE Director John Morton. Along with the Mongolian minister of culture, Oyungerel Tsedevdambda.

Make no bones about it, this is a friendship no longer on ice.

Original post is Border Patrolosaurus: Going Home by Political Capital.

Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

President Barack Obama and President Enrique Pena Nieto of Mexico share a toast prior to a working dinner at Los Pinos, Mexico City, Mexico, on May 2, 2013.

One of the perks of working at the highest levels of the White House is the travel.

President Barack Obama’s journey to Mexico this week carried him and his staff to the historic presidential palace in Mexico City, where the air is something less than refreshing.

The food is worth the trip, though, and the host on this occasion gracious:

Pres Obama and Pres Pena Nieto toast last night before dinner in Mexico twitter.com/petesouza/stat…

— petesouza (@petesouza) May 3, 2013

Costa Rica makes up for all that hustle and bustle, however.

Just landed in Costa Rica. Absolutely gorgeous!!

— Valerie Jarrett (@vj44) May 3, 2013

He who lives in La Casa Blanca is off to Casa Amarilla:

POTUS is wheels down in Costa Rica. First stop: Casa Amarilla for a meeting with President Chinchilla.#ObamainCostaRica

— @NSCPress (@NSCPress) May 3, 2013

Those perks don’t stop at the White House staff. From Ed Henry, tourist:

People waiting for a glimpse of President Obama in Costa Rica twitter.com/edhenryTV/stat…

Costa Rica declared a national holiday for Obama’s visit, Bloomberg’s traveling Lisa Lerer reports.

— Ed Henry (@edhenryTV) May 3, 2013

Laura Chinchilla, elected in 2010 to a 4 year term, is first woman pres of Costa Rica. She has a Masters in Public Policy from Georgetown

— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) May 3, 2013

Original post is Travels with Obama: Casa Amarilla by Political Capital.

Photograph by Louai Beshara/AFP via Getty Images

A Syrian officer is seen through the wreckage of a vehicle following an explosion in the Mazzeh district of Damascus on April 29, 2013, which is believed to have targeted the prime minister’s convoy.

Opening the second news conference of his second term without an opening statement of his own, President Barack Obama fielded an opening question about Syria.

The U.S. needs credible evidence that stands up here and in the international community, he said, before he can address what “range of options” the U.S. might take in response to the use of chemical weapons in Syria.

“I think it’s important to understand that for several years now what we’ve been seen is a slowly unfolding disaster for the Syrian people,” Obama said. “My policy from the beginning has been that President Assad lost credibility, that he attacked his own people… The only way to bring peace and stability in Syria is for Assad to step down… We have worked to strengthen the opposition…There are a whole host of steps we have taken… We’ve got to make sure we are doing everything we can to protect the Syrian people.”

“What I’ve also said is that the use of chemical weapons would be a game-changer,” the president said. “When you use these types of weapons, you have the potential of killing massive amounts of people in the most inhumane way possible… We don’t want that Genie out of the bottle.”

“What we now have is evidence that chemical weapons were used inside of Syria, but we don’t know how they were used, when they were used and who used them,” he said. “I’ve got to make sure I’ve got the facts… If we end up rushing to judgment without hard independent evidence,” he said, the U.S. could find itself in the position where it can’t mobilize international support. “It’s important for us to do this in a prudent way… to establish with some certainty what has happened in Syria, what is happening in Syria,” he said, and he is seeking “a clear baseline of facts.”

Still, he wouldn’t specify how the game will change.

“By game-changer, I mean that we would have to rethink the range of options that are available to us,” Obama said. “Obviously, there are options available to me that are on the shelf right now that we have not” used. That is “a spectrum of options,” he said.

Original post is Obama: ‘Game-Changer’ Means ‘Range of Options’ in Syria by Political Capital.