From the LA Times:

The Internal Revenue Service has told a prominent Pasadena church that it has ended its lengthy investigation into a 2004 antiwar sermon, church leaders said Sunday.

But the agency wrote in its letter to All Saints Episcopal Church that officials still considered the sermon to have been illegal, prompting the church to seek clarification, a corrected record and an apology from the IRS, the church’s rector told standing-room-only crowds of parishioners at Sunday’s services.

The church also has asked the Treasury Department, which oversees the IRS, to investigate allegations that officials from the Justice Department had become involved in the matter, raising concerns that the investigation was politically motivated.

This IRS investigation was launched way back in June 2005, but suddenly ramped up just before the 2006 mid-term elections. Now, no action from the IRS, just an ominous warning without apparent foundation. More here on the history of this odd case.

Larry Johnson reads the long piece in the Sunday Washington Post on those missing nukes and has a succinct response: Simple error, my ass.

In Mitt Romney’s new ad, touting himself as the scourge of all presidents of Iran, he’s got this hilarious line, saying he did “what was right, not what was politically correct” in refusing to provide security last year for a visit of former Iranian Pres. Khatami to Harvard last year.

As you can see in our feature story over on the right, the White House’s new line is that Barack Obama may be too “intellectually lazy” to run a serious presidential campaign let alone be President of the United States.

But don’t think this allusion to generations of stereotypes about black men was just some stray comment.

The RNC just shot off an email building on the slur. With the headline “Razzle Dazzle”, the email continues the theme that Obama is just another black fancy-pants with a slick smile and nice turn of phrase but either without the candle-power or stick-to-it-iveness to actually get things done.

“Chicago Star Obama Continues His All Show, No Substance Campaign With Event On Broadway,” the email begins.

What to expect next out of the RNC? Obama would be a better singer and tap dancer than president?

Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) has earmarked $100,000 for a Louisiana group that advocates stopping the teaching of evolution in public schools, the Times-Picayune reports. Vitter has close ties to the group, the Louisiana Family Forum (insert joke about Vitter and DC Madam here), which calls evolution a “dangerous” theory. The spending bill containing the earmark is pending before the Senate.

2008 Democratic frontrunner Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) took the airwaves by force Sunday morning, flexing her political might with appearances on all five Sunday talk shows. And her dial was turned to 11 the entire time, flooding the zone with details of her recently unveiled healthcare proposal, denunciations of the Bush approach to Iraq, and a wall-to-wall drumbeat of determination to become the next President of the United States. Check out the highlights in today’s Sunday Show Roundup episode of TPMtv …

The New Yorker‘s Jeffrey Toobin will be at TPMCafe’s Table for One this week. He will be discussing his book The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court. I have a feeling the discussion may veer in other directions, but so far I don’t see any comments about a certain former Heisman Trophy winner.

House GOPer demands congressional investigation of New York Times over MoveOn ad, which apparently comes in response to yesterday’s column by the NYT’s public editor.

Late Update: Or as Matt Stoller puts it, “I’m a little worried about upcoming fights over funding for Iraq, inasmuch as they might distract us from discussing the Moveon ad.”

Now, was that so hard?

As you know, Iranian President Ahmadinejad spoke yesterday before a raucous crowd at Columbia University. The president of the university excoriated him. He backtracked a bit from his statements about Israel, perhaps as some commentators have noted because they’ve caused him trouble within Iran. In other cases he put together a fairly incoherent mix of religious interpretation and political rambling. And in still more he simply sounded ridiculous, as when he assured the audience that there were no gays in Iran — a claim that prompted a round of guffaws from the audience.

I think it’s hard to come to any conclusion but that Ahmadinejad was diminished by yesterday’s events, not elevated. And America seemed bigger for not having cowered before him, as so many wanted to.

You don’t have to get into the appropriateness of the MoveOn ad or the intricacies of the NYT‘s ad rate schedule to conclude the obvious: The GOP is engaged in another round of cynical, exploitative caterwauling to change the subject from their party’s Iraq debacle. The manufactured indignation over the MoveOn ad has the added benefit of letting the vast right wing fund-raising machine milk a little more money from what’s left of its base, not to mention that it turns MoveOn into a proxy candidate for president, which may be the only candidate the weak GOP field can beat.

Not convinced? Watch this David Shuster interview with the pathetic Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), who is prepared to slam the MoveOn ad and mock the NYT’s financial difficulties (the point of which is what?), but who is brought up short, first when she is asked to repudiate a similar “betray us” remark made by Rush Limbaugh and then when she is asked to name the last soldier from her district to die in Iraq. She won’t and she can’t. Take a look:

As a rule, I’m not much into gotcha politics, and normally Shuster’s question about the name of the soldier from Blackburn’s district would be a cheap shot. But right there and right then, it was right on the mark.