The Toronto Star says two of its reporters have also viewed the video Gawker says shows Toronto Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack cocaine.

“It appears to show Ford in a room, sitting in a chair, wearing a white shirt, top buttons open, inhaling from what appears to be a glass crack pipe. Ford is incoherent, trading jibes with an off-camera speaker who goads the clearly impaired mayor by raising topics including Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau and the Don Bosco high school football team Ford coaches.”

Said Ford at one point in the video: “I’m fucking right-wing. Everyone expects me to be right-wing. I’m just supposed to be this great.”

New York Times: “The most pressing question for Congressional Republicans is no longer how to finesse changes to immigration law or gun control, but how far they can push their cases against President Obama without inciting a backlash of the sort that has left them staggering in the past.”

“Working against those methodical plans, however, are the personal passions of the rank and file.”

A new Gallup poll finds slim majorities of Americans are closely following the situations involving the Internal Revenue Service (54%) and the congressional hearings on the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and its aftermath (53%) — comparatively low based on historical measures of other news stories over the last two decades.

A records check with the North Carolina State Bar shows John Edwards has reactivated his license to practice law, which had been inactive for more than a decade, the AP reports.

John Edwards is hitting the speaking circuit with an appearance on June 6, the AP reports.

“Edwards has remained largely out of public view since his May 2012 acquittal on one charge of campaign finance fraud. A judge declared a mistrial on five other criminal counts after jurors couldn’t agree if Edwards illegally used campaign money to hide his pregnant mistress as he ran for president in 2008.”

Ezra Klein: “The crucial ingredient for a scandal is the prospect of high-level White House involvement and wide political repercussions. Government wrongdoing is boring. Scandals can bring down presidents, decide elections and revive down-and-out political parties. Scandals can dominate American politics for months at a time.”

“On Tuesday, it looked like we had three possible political scandals brewing. Two days later, with much more evidence available, it doesn’t look like any of them will pan out. There’ll be more hearings, and more bad press for the Obama administration, and more demands for documents. But — and
this is a key qualification — absent more revelations, the scandals
that could reach high don’t seem to include any real wrongdoing, whereas
the ones that include real wrongdoing don’t reach high enough.”