AP: “After years of trying to discipline him, the leaders of al-Qaida’s North African branch sent one final letter to their most difficult employee. In page after scathing page, they described how he didn’t answer his phone when they called, failed to turn in his expense reports, ignored meetings and refused time and again to carry out orders. Most of all, they claimed he had failed to carry out a single spectacular operation, despite the resources at his disposal.” Read the rest here.
A sad day for TPM, as Michele Bachmann takes her leave. A quick and dirty recap of some of the highlights of the Bachmann oeuvre.
Marco Rubio says the only way to get to the bottom of the IRS scandal is to repeal Obamacare. Watch.
Gun rights group in Colorado offering free ammo to volunteers working to unseat pro-gun control state legislators.
The immediate rush of the IRS scandal has slackened a bit. But the story and the investigations are clearly by no means over. One of the things I’m most interested in, however, is what you might call the underbrush of the scandal cropping up in the right-wing media. We have a relatively narrow case of targeting of right-wing groups by keywords out of the IRS’s Cincinnati office. It’s still sort of mind-blowing how even line-level IRS employees didn’t get that that was a problem. But happen it did.
And yet, that’s now triggered an avalanche of claims of harassment or targeting where there seems little or no evidence any targeting ever happened. Basically any conservative group that ever got audited or scrutinized is now taking it as a given that they were targeted as conservatives. Conservative religious groups are now saying they’re being targeted too. Read More
Suburban New York school guard threatens to go home for his guns and come back and blow up the school.
Michele Bachmann’s announcement that she would not seek re-election was greeted with surprise and a good deal of skepticism:
Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales to admit to massacre of 16 Afghan villagers to avoid death penalty.