Late last week, the Minneapolis Post and other outlets reported that the FBI has now joined the investigation into alleged corrupt activities by Tea Party Caucus Chairperson Michele Bachmann during her failed presidential campaign last year:

The FBI joins the Office of Congressional Ethics, the Federal Elections Commission and an Iowa state Senate ethics committee in probing whether Bachmann’s presidential campaign paid an Iowa state senator from her MichelePAC, a fund that should not have been used for campaign expenses, and whether the state senator stole the email list of an Iowa home-school group from another Bachmann staffer, Barbara Hekki, prior to the Iowa caucuses in January, 2012.

Andy Parrish, former Bachmann chief of staff and one of the directors of Bachmann’s Iowa GOP presidential campaign, will be interviewed by the FBI, according to his attorney, John Gilmore.

“I can confirm that Andy Parrish has been contacted by the FBI for a scheduled interview next week,” Gilmore said. “He will cooperate fully.”

More after the jump »

There is good news about the economy — the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has reported that the federal budget deficit is reducing even more quickly than had been projected– so, naturally, it is being spun by Fox News as bad news:

Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade reacted to a new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report showing the 2013 deficit dropping by $200 billion by lamenting that the report might discourage further austerity measures…

Kilmeade reacted to this news with calls for increased austerity, lamenting that the “positive news” in the CBO report might lead away from a mindset of “fiscal discipline.” Kilmeade concluded, “I just hope we still feel the urgency to get our budget in order.”

Rachel Maddow’s report follows:

It hasn’t yet seeped into the political media’s central narrative about the Benghazi attacks yet — and if the past is a guide, it probably never will — but there has finally been a bona fide revelation of doctoring information about the attacks for political purposes, just as Republicans have claimed from the outset of the attack on September 11, 2012, in which Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others were killed at what is now being described as a CIA outpost.

The culprits who have been caught red-handed are not the administration officials Republicans have accused of spinning intel in order to make Pres. Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton look good, but rather the Republican accusers themselves.

It seemed to come as a great shock when it was recently revealed that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) examines some taxpayers more closely than others.

Really? Because no one has ever objected to the IRS targeting some tax returns for audit. Among them:

• Millionaires (in fiscal 2011, the IRS audited 12.5% of them)
• People reporting more than $200,000 in income
• People claiming confusing tax breaks like the first-time homebuyer credit
• Home office workers
• Small business and self-employed people generally
• Very low income filers who claim the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)

So why, in the wild west of the first election years since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling allowing political action groups, many with questionable funding, to mushroom and proliferate…why should anyone be surprised the IRS would exercise scrutiny on these here today, gone tomorrow groups? Why, in fact, would they not demand that the IRS do precisely that before granting tax-exempt status to whoever applies for it?

And why not specifically take a hard, cold look at tea party groups?

CBS News headline: “Recharged tea party demands justice in IRS targeting scandal”

In public, tea party activists and pundits and the lobbyists who fund them may be expressing outrage over the admission by the IRS that it has targeted tea party groups over their claims of nonprofit status, but away from the cameras and microphones, the movement’s members and the corporatists who back them are surely dancing the happy dance. Miracles do happen. A purportedly anti-tax movement has been resurrected — by the IRS.

Before the scandal broke last week, the tea party was at its lowest point nationally since its inception four years ago. Now it’s alive again and surely to be increasingly reinvigorated as the scandal drags out over the next weeks and months into next year — just in time to give it the power and influence to tilt the 2014 midterm elections to the extreme right, just as it did in the in 2010 midterms.

In fact, the lobbyists who run the tea party couldn’t have asked for a better scandal. By targeting the tea party, the IRS has played into the movement’s key motivator: the victimhood of conservatives in general and of white right-wingers specifically.

The fundamental paranoia of the movement is evident in its foundational myths:

Republican legal apparatchiks Toensing and DiGenova

Basically all you need to know about the Fox News-sponsored hearings on the Benghazi attacks scheduled for today is that two of the “whistleblowers” — Gregory N. Hicks, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Libya at the time of attacks, and Mark I. Thompson, a former Marine who is now the deputy coordinator for Operations in the State Department’s Counterterrorism Bureau — are being represented, reportedly pro bono, by Victoria Toensing and Joe DiGenova, a husband and wife team of lawyers who are longstanding political apparatchiks for the Republican Party.

The role played by Toensing and DiGenova in the hearings is damning evidence, if any were needed, that the “scandal” around the terror attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi last September is what it appears to be: a bogus political ploy fabricated by Fox News and its allies on the Hill intended to damage the Obama administration politically in the short term — perhaps opening the way to impeaching the president, as right-wing talk show host Mike Huckabee predicted it would yesterday — and, over the longer term, to weaken the prospective candidacy of Hillary Clinton should she decide to run in 2016.

The presence of Toensing and DiGenova is also likely a sign that all the high-powered nonpartisan attorneys in D.C. declined to take the case.

Why does the NRA hate America? The final speaker at the gunmakers’ convention in Texas last weekend was Ted Nugent, who, during the Vietnam War, conned his way out of conscription by defecating in his clothing and not bathing before going in for a physical examination at the Draft Board.

Nugent was last seen when he was the guest of a Texas tea bagger congressman at the State of the Union speech in February.

Rush Limbaugh’s big fat feelings might be hurt, and he is considering leaving the distributor of his show over it. Cumulus Media, which contracts with Limbaugh, is blaming reduced company revenues on last year’s boycott of advertisers on Rush’s show. The boycott was called after Limbaugh labled a “slut” the lone female who provided testimony to a Congressional committee examining insurance company coverage of birth control.

Although several dozen advertisers either permanently left the show or suspended their ads until the dust settled, Rush at the time described the situation this way.

“That’s like losing a couple of French fries in the container when it’s delivered to you at the drive-through,” Limbaugh said. “You don’t even notice it.”

But to Cumulus CEO Lew Dickey, the advertiser stampede must have been more like more being shorted the fries AND the burger, being left with the ketchup packets and the soft drink.

In an August 2012 earnings call, Dickey said Cumulus’s top three stations had lost $5.5 million, in part because of the boycott. In a March 2013 earnings call, Dickey said the company’s talk radio side had “been challenged… due to some of the issues that happened a year ago.”

Rush could actually be right that Cumulus Media’s losses aren’t all his fault. In addition to his show, the company carries The Mike Huckabee Show and The Huckabee Report, Focus on the Family “Commentary,” and The Savage Nation. I don’t know about you but I sure wouldn’t want to advertise on any of those shows.

Former Gov. Mark Sanford’s braying jackassiness shone through in his recent debate with opponent Elizabeth Colbert-Busch. Both are running from South Carolina for a seat in the United States House of Representatives.

The election is Tuesday, May 7, and polls show Busch expanding her lead or tying with Sanford, depending on the political affiliations of the pollsters. Either way, Sanford is no longer going into the election with an air of inevitability.

Come on South Carolina! Every seat in Congress counts, and it’s time to stop sending fiscal hypocrites and knee-jerk “NO!” ninnies* to Washington, and then wondering why nothing gets done there.

*With all due respect to the late Vice Pres. Spiro Agnew.