The Daily Mail has the 55 questions the IRS asked one tea party group including demands for names of all its donors and volunteers.

Jon Stewart skewered the IRS for targeting conservative groups and bashed President Obama for validating the “tinfoil behatted.”

The Week: “For all the grief Jon Stewart gives conservatives on The Daily Show, there are some nights he hands them a must-watch gift.”

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Journalists called the news the Justice Department seized records from phone lines assigned to Associated Press offices and its reporters over a two month period “chilling” and a “dragnet to intimidate the media,” Politico reports.

Ben Smith: “President Obama, elected with the new technology of microtargeting, is now in danger of a new perception: That he’s the president of microtargeted drone warfare and government surveillance. This is a different critique from the loud and ultimately unpersuasive one Republicans have long made, that initiatives like a health care overhaul, tax increases, and background checks for gun buyers represent a broad, unprecedented, and out-of-control new assertion of power by the American government. The power Obama is now under fire for asserting isn’t broad: It is narrow, even personal. Specific groups and individual reporters were targeted by extremely powerful government agencies.”

The Justice Department “secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a ‘massive and unprecedented intrusion’ into how news organizations gather the news,” the AP reports.

“News of the Obama Administration’s role in the extensive editing of CIA talking points on Benghazi rocked the political world last week and prompted a demand from Speaker of the House John Boehner for the release of all related White House emails, but it should not have been a revelation to the Speaker,” ABC News reports.

“The White House first briefed the House leadership on the talking point revisions on March 19. The briefing was given to the House Intelligence Committee, but the White House also invited Speaker Boehner and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to attend or to send a senior staff member.”

Greg Sargent notes other top GOP officials and their staffs were also briefed.

After three days, President Obama strongly condemned the fact that IRS officials were targeting conservatives groups.

Washington Post: “The question being asked in the political world today is whether the condemnations are too little, too late. As in, did the Obama Administration — and other Democrats in the House and Senate — miss their chance to claim some sort of high(ish) message ground by largely taking a pass on the story when it broke on Friday morning?”

“You don’t want the IRS ever being perceived to be biased and anything less than neutral in terms of how they operate. I’ve got no patience with it, I will not tolerate it and we will make sure we find out exactly what happened on this.”

— President Obama, quoted by NBC News.

First Read: “One reason why is because Benghazi has already been litigated so much (at congressional hearings, at two presidential debates, during Susan Rice’s consideration for the secretary of state job). But Friday’s revelation that the IRS had targeted conservative-sounding names (and not liberal-sounding ones) in applications for tax-exempt status will trigger new congressional hearings and new questions for the president and his team. More significantly, the IRS news is a political gift to a Republican Party whose base was strained on immigration (remember that Heritage Foundation study?) and even on guns (remember the tough questions Sens. Kelly Ayotte and Jeff Flake were getting?). Now, you’re seeing a GOP base united by two things they absolutely dislike: President Obama and the Internal Revenue Service. The news also is a gift to Republicans like Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, or any incumbent Republican in Washington hoping to avoid a tough primary in 2014 — they get to demagogue the heck out of this story and show they will stand up for the Tea Party.”

Glenn Thrush:
“President Barack Obama genuinely believed he could buck the
second-term curse of fecklessness and scandal that afflicted the last
three two-term presidents, even if history — and his
adversaries — suggested otherwise. The combination of clever and
determined Republican resistance on nearly every front, bad luck,
Obama’s overconfidence in his capacity to leverage a decisive reelection
victory into legislative clout and his own administration’s past
mistakes have left the president feeling deeply frustrated, even
angry — and eager to find a way to recapture the offensive.”

First Read: “For the Obama White House, if there’s one common theme to both the
Benghazi and IRS stories, it’s how slowly it responded to them.”

Investigators have found that the IRS “scrutinized conservative groups for raising political concerns over government spending, debt and taxes or even for advocating making America a better place to live,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“The latest details about the IRS handling of applications for tax-exempt status by tea party, patriot and other conservative groups in recent years were provided to congressional investigators by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.”

“It is absolutely chilling that the IRS was singling out conservative groups for extra review. And I think that it’s very disappointing that the president hasn’t personally condemned this and spoken out.”

— Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), in an interview on CNN.

“Not four months after his ambitious inaugural address, President Obama finds himself struggling to move his legislative agenda through an unbudging Congress,” the Washington Post reports.

“And over the past week, two flaring controversies — one over his administration’s handling of the killing of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans in Libya, the other over Internal Revenue Service employees targeting tea party groups for special scrutiny — have dominated the discussion in Washington.”

“It is far from clear how big a political liability either will turn out to be. At a minimum, they represent diversions working against a president who is keenly aware of how little time he has left to achieve big things. And they are a test of the insular Obama team’s skill at keeping its footing in an environment of hyperpartisan politics and hair-trigger media.”

Stu Rothenberg: “The last five presidents elected to a second consecutive term – Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush – all suffered through problems, ranging from economic and foreign policy to personal.”

“Senior Internal Revenue Service officials knew employees were singling out conservative groups for extra scrutiny as early as 2011, according to a watchdog agency’s report set to be released next week,” Politico reports.

“The disclosure that senior officials knew agents were flagging applications containing the words ‘patriot’ or ‘tea party’ contradicts public statements by former IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman. He repeatedly denied that his agency was targeting conservative groups when asked by Congress last year.”

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) told Newsmax that the Obama administration is guilty of disseminating “deliberate misinformation” regarding the Benghazi attack and continues to “stonewall” efforts to uncover the facts behind the tragedy.

He also predicted that the Benghazi affair could lead to President Obama’s impeachment.

Douglas Brinkley’s Rolling Stone interview with Vice President Joe Biden is a must-read but, if you don’t have the time, The Week has seven highlights.

A top Internal Revenue Service admitted the agency “inappropriately flagged conservative political groups for additional reviews during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status,” the AP reports.

Organizations were singled out because they included the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their applications for tax-exempt status.

Douglas Brinkley: “Never before have a president and vice president been as close personally and professionally as Barack Obama and Joe Biden – just think about the past 80 years. FDR switched out VPs with the regularity of a farmer rotating his crops. Harry Truman had little use for the lightweight Alben Barkley. Dwight Eisenhower never really trusted Richard Nixon. Historian Robert Caro just published an award-winning 736-page biography – The Passage of Power – that essentially chronicles JFK’s deep aversion for LBJ. Nixon’s selection of the pugilist Spiro Agnew in 1968 as his vice president blew up in his face a few years later: A volcanic eruption of ethics charges were levied against Agnew, and he was forced to resign. Gerald Ford and his vice president, Nelson Rockefeller, never quite jelled. Ford, in fact, asked Bob Dole to run as the VP candidate in 1976 – an awful slap to Rockefeller. Although it’s true that Jimmy Carter was extraordinarily close to Walter Mondale, their relationship lacked the two-term gravitas of Obama and Biden’s ironclad bond. Ronald Reagan wasn’t particularly intimate with George H.W. Bush; their wives often feuded. And when Bush became president, he didn’t take Dan Quayle very seriously. (Nor did the country.)”

“Of course, Al Gore and Dick Cheney were formidable presences in the past two White Houses. But by the time both of those men left Washington, their relationships with their bosses were strained.”