"Move over, Carlos Danger, there's a new alias in town: Toby Miles, an electronic front for Lois Lerner.

"Lerner famously took the Fifth rather than testify about how the Internal Revenue Service came to target right-leaning advocacy nonprofits in the run-up to the 2012 election. ...

"Mind you, it's been two-plus years since the scandal broke, yet the agency that promised to clean up its act is only now revealing this fresh evidence. ...

"The capper: One Lerner acquaintance says 'Toby Miles' is the name of Lerner's dog.

"Nothing quite says truth and transparency like doing Uncle Sam's work under your dog's name."

"Washington (CNN) -- Vice President Joe Biden received President Barack Obama's 'blessing' to make a 2016 bid for the White House, according to a senior Democrat.

"But that's if Biden chooses to run -- the decision is his. While he doesn't need the President's permission, of course, a potential presidential candidacy was among the topics of their lunch Monday at the White House. The President made clear he would not stand in his way or counsel him against a run, the senior Democrat said."

"[A]s the likely Democratic standard-bearer and former cabinet officer in the Obama administration, it is a stretch to assume the Justice Department will do a vigorous and impartial investigation into the email controversy and be entirely forthcoming with the results.

"For the sake of everyone's credibility, a special prosecutor should be appointed with the tools to quickly answer the questions before the presidential primaries begin.

"That's not a lot of time. The urgency of getting to the bottom of this argues for the tools a special prosecutor can bring to a probe."

"A few months ago I wrote that the 2016 presidential primary looked to come down to Bloody versus Boring. The Republican race would be bloody -- more than a dozen candidates scrapping for attention, trying to gain traction, pounding each other. The Democrats would be boring, the long glide of the queen.

"Our late-summer report? Different. So far it's Exciting (24 million people watched the Republican debate! Donald Trump set fire to the joint!) versus, I don't know, Ominous -- a big, dark, soggy cloud threatening at any moment to burst. Hillary Clinton's campaign is not boring, but it's leading a considerable portion of the nation toward suicidal ideation. Do we have to go back there? Do we have to do this again? Will a Clinton candidacy ever be anything but scandal after scandal?"

"The bigger that government gets, the more employees who are hired, and the more unaccountable power that accrues to bureaucracies, the more government takes on a life of its own. Public grandees resemble Hollywood's out-of-control androids or Frankenstein monsters that turn on their creators -- in these cases, us, the taxpayers. ...

"Big government has become the new Terminator, at war with those who created it, who fund it -- and who must obey it."

"Hillary seems rattled, so rattled that she invokes Benghazi to deflect attention from the email scandal. 'Here is what I won't do,' she said at a rally at 'a wing ding' at Storm Lake, Iowa, 'I won't play politics with national security or dishonor the memory of those who we lost.'

"The irony, which she may not appreciate, is that it was the Benghazi investigators who stumbled on to the lady's private server and the emails. Tall oaks from little acorns grow."

"The Internal Revenue Service announced in May that hackers had gotten into its system, and it estimated then that 114,000 taxpayers' accounts had been compromised. But a thorough review of activity on the IRS site throughout the 2015 tax-filing season revealed that the intrusion affected nearly three times that many accounts, the agency said Monday.

"In its investigation, the IRS found about 220,000 additional instances where intruders were able to clear a verification system meant to keep sensitive tax information safe, as well as about 170,000 failed attempts to get around the verification system. ...

"The hackers filed $50 million in fraudulent tax refunds, the IRS said in May."

"Dear Democrats: It's too late to start over.

"As in, there's no replacing Hillary Rodham Clinton as your party's front-runner for the presidential nomination. Not with Vice President Biden -- even if he runs. Not with former vice president Al Gore. (I mean, come on.) Not with your ideal rich-person-with-no-record-and-a-fresh-faced-appeal. ...

"The idea of a late entrant reshaping the race -- and unseating Clinton -- might make sense to doubting Democrats. But the nature of the modern presidential contest makes it more fantasy than reality. Democrats threw their lots in with Clinton more than a year ago. Now they just have to try to ride it out. They don't have any choice. Not really."

"The first rule of Clintonism is that someone else is always to blame. That's why the first iteration of Clinton's defense was that evil Republicans were simply smearing her. When that didn't stick, Team Clinton expanded the indictment to include the partisan witch hunt by that famously right-wing organ the New York Times and two independent inspectors general (one at the State Department, the other for the intelligence community). ...

"So now that the FBI and the Justice Department, both run by Obama appointees, are on the case, attacking the motives of inconvenient people no longer works. So the Clinton campaign has invoked a little-known codicil to the first rule of Clintonism: Blame an inanimate object. ...

"Hopefully the server will one day be able to testify on its own behalf: 'I was just following orders.' ...

"I've talked to several lawyers who assure me that the FBI doesn't conduct criminal probes into anthropomorphized IT equipment. The bureau does investigate criminal abuses of them -- by people."

"The only thing more outrageous than the EPA's release of three million gallons of toxic waste into Colorado's Animas River has been its cavalier response to the disaster in the days since. ...

"This is an agency that will aggressively fine businesses, municipalities and anyone or anything else for even the slightest violation of its ridiculously strict standards, but that will face zero fines for its own environmental catastrophe.

"It's an agency that claims that even the tiniest levels of pollutants are extremely hazardous, yet has been busy downplaying the damage after its own incompetence caused the release of millions of gallons of toxic waste. ...

"The 'safe' level for arsenic in drinking water is a tiny 10 parts per billion. ...

"Yet tests have shown lead spiking at thousands of times higher than government-approved levels, arsenic at 800 times and extremely high levels of beryllium, cadmium and mercury because of the EPA spill."