How do you sort out the kooks? With one simple question...

Eugene Robinson, Washington Post
WASHINGTON -- President Obama should spend his remaining years in office making the United States part of the solution to climate change, not part of the problem. If Congress sticks to its policy of obstruction and willful ignorance, Obama should use his executive powers to the fullest extent. We are out of time.With each breath, every person alive today experiences something unique in human history: an atmosphere containing more than 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide. This makes us special, I suppose, but not in a good way.The truth is that 400 is just one of those round-number...

David Zurawik, Balt Sun
The Obama White House has been trying to de-legitimize Fox News almost from the day it took office. Remember the media blitz of 2009 launched by then White House Communications Director Anita Dunn?

The Truth-o-Meter says: Mostly False | Mitch McConnell says HHS put a gag order on insurers about impact of Obamacare

Controversy is swirling around the White House, with inquiries into the consulate attack in Benghazi, the IRS' targeting of conservative groups and the Justice Department’s probe of journalists’ phone records. Some Republicans say these issues are emblematic of the how the Obama White House operates. "There is a culture of intimidation throughout the administration. The IRS is just the most recent example," Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said on Meet the Press on May 19, 2013. "... Over at HHS back during the Obamacare debate, Secretary (Kathleen) Sebelius sent out a directive to help insurance companies telling them ...

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Bevan & Stone, RCP Morning Commute

Michelle Malkin, Townhall
Gird your loins, America. President Obama intends to empty out Guantanamo Bay and send scores of suspected Muslim terror operatives back to their jihadist-coddling native countries. Goaded by anti-war activists and soft-on-terror attorneys (including those from Attorney General Eric Holder's former private law firm), Obama announced Thursday that he'll lift a ban on sending up to 90 Yemeni detainees home and will initiate other stalled transfers out of the compound.This radical appeasement of Obama's left flank is a surefire recipe for more Benghazis, more U.S.S. Coles and more...

Jonathan Chait, NY Magazine
The biggest piece of President Obama’s second-term agenda is his widely expected plan for the Environmental Protection Agency to issue new carbon regulations for power plants, a move that could bring the United States in line with the greenhouse-gas-reduction goals it agreed to in Copenhagen and open the way for an international treaty to control climate change. If the administration unveils such a plan, conservatives will undoubtedly challenge its legality. The legal challenge won’t take place for two years, but the two sides are preparing for war already. The field of...

George Will, Washington Post
Early in an opinion issued recently by a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Judge A. Raymond Randolphsaid: “Although the parties have not raised it, one issue needs to be resolved before we turn to the merits of the case.” The issue he raised but could not resolve — that is up to the Supreme Court — illuminates the Obama administration’s George Wallace-like lawlessness. It also demonstrates the judiciary’s duty to restrain presidents who forget the oath they swear to...

E.J. Dionne, Washington Post
WASHINGTON -- While listening to an NPR report out of Moore, Okla., this week, I was genuinely shocked. Not by the scale of the devastation or the tenacity of people who have grown stoically accustomed to the damage tornados can do, but by a political sentiment that, in almost any other era, would not have been surprising at all.Rep. Tom Cole, a Republican who lives in the very neighborhood that was overwhelmed, was talking about a call he received from President Obama. Hearing Cole, I realized how strange it is these days for politicians to speak in human terms about someone in the other...

Major Garrett, Natl Jrnl
Unconstitutional. Sweeping. Secretive. Abusive. Harassing.Gary Pruitt, the president and CEO of the Associated Press, used those words on CBS's Face the Nation to describe the Justice Department's seizure of two months of AP reporters' phone records in New York, Washington, and Hartford, Conn. As Attorney General Eric Holder said in an entirely different context, that's not hyperbole.Original reports on the subpoena indicated it called for the capture of phone logs of reporters' office phones, cell phones, and home phones. The subpoena did not allow the Justice...

Jonah Goldberg, National Review
Although there's still a great deal to be learned about the scandals and controversies swirling around the White House like so many ominous dorsal fins in the surf, the nature of President Obama's bind is becoming clear. The best defenses of his administration require undermining the rationale for his presidency."We're portrayed by Republicans as either being lying or idiots. It's actually closer to us being idiots." So far, this is the administration's best defense.It was offered to CBS News' Sharyl Attkisson by an anonymous aide involved in...

Gramm & McMillin, Wall St. Journal
President Obama has raised the national debt by nearly $6.2 trillion, the equivalent of $78,385 per family of four. It is true that projected deficits recently have been reduced. April tax filings increased 28% from 2012, but much of this was thanks to a one-time rush at the end of 2012 to report income before rates rose in January. The second largest reduction in the deficit came from Fannie Mae FNMA +11.04% taking a one-time accounting adjustment.

Cohen & Balz, Washington Post
Majorities of Americans believe that the Internal Revenue Service deliberately harassed conservative groups by targeting them for special scrutiny and say that the Obama administration is trying to cover up important details about the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans last year. But a new Washington Post-ABC News poll also finds that allegations of impropriety related to the controversies have yet to affect President Obama’s political standing.

Jim Geraghty, New York Daily News
Don't let anyone fool you: Everyone in politics is tempted to believe that their noble ends could justify unethical and illegal means.Those who had hoped that President Obama would usher in a new era of higher standards in Washington must be shell-shocked by last week's revelations:-The Internal Revenue Service admitted to delaying conservative organizations' tax-exempt status while quickly approving groups that had liberal or progressive orientations. The IRS asked these groups all sorts of invasive questions, including what kind of books they read, and leaked some information...

Chris Cillizza, Washington Post
John Edwards was right. There are two Americas. In one America, the events of the past 10 days have exposed the true colors of President Obama and his administration. From edited talking points about the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, to the secret seizure of phone records of Associated Press reporters to the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups, a single message has emerged: This is the inevitable result of government run amok.

Ryan Lizza, The New Yorker
The Washington Post reported today that, in the course of a leak investigation of a State Department employee who allegedly provided Fox News’s James Rosen with classified information, the Obama Justice Department not only subpoenaed Rosen’s private e-mails but also said that Rosen was “an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator” in the alleged crime.Rosen was not charged with any crime, but it is unprecedented for the government, in an official court document, to accuse a reporter of breaking the law for conducting the routine business of reporting on...

J.D. Tuccille, Reason
Perhaps the most chilling aspect of the U.S. Department of Justice "investigation" of Fox News chief correspondent James Rosen isn't the intrusive tracking of his movements and contacts — although that's disturbing enough — but the basis for the criminal charges he may ultimately face. At its heart, the allegation that Rosen broke the law "at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator” is based on nothing more than meeting with and asking questions of government adviser Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, who told him the...

Carl M. Cannon, RealClearPolitics
My father, Lou Cannon, covered the White House with distinction for the Washington Post for many years, beginning in the Nixon administration. He employed an easy rule of thumb when fielding phone calls from anonymous tipsters:If the caller said, "I have a story that will make Watergate look like a picnic," Dad would hang up on him.In the past week, Richard Nixon's name has been invoked often, and not in a way that pleases President Obama or his loyalists. Unless it's a reference to his dramatic 1972 visit to China, Nixon is not the president any of his successors...

WASHINGTON -- Every day for two weeks, 10-year-old Stephanie Pucheta sat down in front of a camera and talked about her father, Julio Cesar Pucheta, who was deported in January. She talked about the day a judge told her father he would be forced to leave home, about how she was removed from the room because she couldn't stop crying, about her mother's chronic illness, and about doing her homework alone without her father's help.

"My life has changed without my father," Stephanie, an American citizen born in the United States, said to the camera in Spanish. She began to cry. "Since he's been gone, I miss him every day. Every morning when I wake up I wonder why they didn't let him stay here. Why do they have to be so cruel to the families that are here?"

When she was done, she sent the video to Cuéntame, an organization that shares immigrant stories. Cuéntame had sent her a video camera so she could use it to tell hers. The video above was her first take.

Stephanie had contacted Cuéntame earlier this year, one of countless groups she reached out to in a desperate bid to find someone who could help her stop her father from being sent to Mexico, but it was too late. Now she, like thousands of other children in the U.S., is living in the country without one of her parents because of an immigration policy that often leaves family-child relationships out of the equation.

Congress has been debating comprehensive immigration reform since 2001, aimed at preventing predictable tragedies like the one that hit Stephanie. Families like hers are paying the daily price for the ongoing congressional failure to pass a bill and the Obama administration's track record of deporting immigrants at record-setting rates.

The current iteration of the reform bill includes many provisions that would be good for families like Stephanie's. The legislation proposed by the bipartisan "gang of eight" senators would provide some undocumented immigrants with a pathway to citizenship and allow some who have already been deported to come back to the U.S. and reunite with their families. Immigration officials would be given more discretion to consider the hardships faced by children when a parent is up for deportation.

But the bill has to make it through the Judiciary Committee, where it is now under consideration, and pass on the Senate floor. A number of amendments could threaten those provisions during that process. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) proposed one that would prevent immigration judges from using discretion to decline to deport someone because of the presumed hardship on their U.S. citizen child. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), proposed one that would make citizenship an almost impossible goal for poor undocumented immigrants, due to restrictively high income requirements, and another that would make it harder for would-be immigrants to come to the U.S. based on family ties here.

Axel Caballero, the founder of Cuéntame, said the group hopes sharing Stephanie's video will help lawmakers think about families like hers when working on immigration reform. HuffPost readers: If you have a story to tell about deportation or detention, send a clip to openreporting@huffingtonpost.com or call to record your story at 860-348-3376.

"Stephanie’s story is emblematic of the over 25,000 immigrants who apply for family unity waivers each year only to be torn apart by an immigration system that emphasizes blind enforcement policies over sensible and human rights solutions," Caballero said in an email. "We are urging our legislators to listen to Stephanie and the thousands of defenseless migrant children looking for a prompt and effective solution in as they discuss immigration reform provisions."

Stephanie Pucheta was born in Georgia in 2002, a few years after her parents came to the U.S. from Mexico without authorization. She didn't find out about her parents' undocumented status until she was 8 years old while working on a project for school. Her father was picked up after a traffic arrest in 2012 and detained for a year before he was deported. Stephanie's mother, Maria Ortiz, is ill with a chronic condition and the family fears Stephanie could be left alone -- losing one parent to death, the other to deportation.

With Julio Cesar Pucheta in Mexico, Stephanie and her mother could move there to be with him, but they do not know if Maria could receive the same level of medical treatment. And Stephanie, as an American citizen, does not believe she should have to leave her home country. She wants to stay here in the U.S. and become an immigration attorney.

"Sometimes I think about it," she said in a phone interview about moving to Mexico. "But sometimes I say, I shouldn't go because I got an education here, and like my mom said, I want to be somebody in this world."

John Nichols, The Nation
Sure, Christie goes out of his way to say nice things about President Obama, who worked closely with the governor to provide immediate and essential support to New Jersey communities battered by Superstorm Sandy. And yes, Christie’s been willing to call out some of the most absurd excesses of his fellow Republicans. But these gestures are about style, not policy. The first-term governor has been meticulous about positioning his fall re-election campaign as a “bipartisan” effort. Christie knows that New Jersey, which gave Obama 58 percent of the vote last November...

Donna Brazile, CNN

This week saw the kickoff of Second Term Scandal Season, though the first entrants fall on very different parts of the manufactured scandal vs. real scandal continuum. On the deeply-contrived end is Benghazi -- with supposedly damning White House emails having been altered by GOP leakers. On the actually scandalous end is the administration's snooping through the AP's phone records, which the New York Times called "an effort to frighten off whistle-blowers." The incident points out the hypocrisy of a White House that praises whistleblowers in the abstract, but then goes after them -- aggressively and often. "Speaking truth to power is now a criminal act," says whistleblower and former NSA executive Thomas Drake, who the DOJ charged under the WW I-era Espionage Act. It's President Obama's war against whistleblowers that is the true scandal.

Former Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney appeared on "The Tonight Show" Friday, where he discussed a number of scandals unfolding in Washington.

Romney addressed the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of conservative groups in the lead-up to the 2012 election, saying he thinks "a special counsel should be appointed because only a special council can investigate the administration."

"The IRS reports to the Treasury Department, that reports to the president. The buck stops at the president's desk," Romney said. "He's indicated he wants to look into it and has already taken action to remove the head of the IRS.

"The president is saying that, he and his team will look into it. But frankly, they can't investigate themselves," Romney continued.

Romney made it clear he still hasn't warmed up to the idea of Obama as president.

"I'm not a fan of the president, in case you didn't know that," Romney said. "But look, I believe he cares for the country and wants to make America a better place for the American people. But I think he's not being successful as he would have hoped to have been."

Romney also weighed in on the scandal surrounding the talking points on the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, and the Department of Justice secretly seizing phone records of Associated Press reporters.

Click here for more on Romney's appearance from RealClearPolitics.