"The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) cancelled its longtime relationship with an email-storage contractor just weeks after ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s computer crashed and shortly before other IRS officials’ computers allegedly crashed. 

"The IRS signed a contract with Sonasoft, an email-archiving company based in San Jose, California, each year from 2005 to 2010.  ... 

"Sonasoft was providing 'automatic data processing' services for the IRS throughout the January 2009 to April 2011 period in which Lerner sent her missing emails.

"But Sonasoft’s six-year business relationship with the IRS came to an abrupt end at the close of fiscal year 2011, as congressional investigators began looking into the IRS conservative targeting scandal and IRS employees’ computers started crashing left and right."

"Of the much-discussed eight million Americans who have signed up for Obamacare, the 'vast majority ... are receiving financial assistance,' according to a Department of Health and Human Services report released this week. What that means is this: Of the eight million, about 85 percent, or 6.8 million, actually paid for coverage. Of those, about 87 percent, or 5.9 million, receive taxpayer-paid subsidies to help them pay. 

"In other words, nearly everyone who has bought insurance through the Obamacare exchanges has done so with money from the government. And the subsidies are significant — an average of $264 a month, according to HHS. The average monthly premium is $346, according to the report, so minus the $264 subsidy, the average subsidy recipient is paying a net cost of $82 a month for coverage. The government pays the rest. ...

"The problem is, for those who are not eligible for subsidies, or for those eligible only for smaller subsidies, Obamacare still presents higher premiums, higher deductibles, and narrow networks of doctors and hospitals."

"The IRS’s claim that it lost the e-mails of multiple key employees, at precisely the moment that Congress began looking into the agency’s unethical and illegal political persecutions, challenges even the most credulous mind. ... 

"The IRS’s version of events heaps implausibility upon implausibility upon implausibility. And given the agency’s well-established history of dishonesty regarding its political persecutions — Lerner’s staged press-conference questions, misleading of congressional investigators — the possibility that the agency’s executives are flat-out lying to Congress and to the public cannot be discounted. ... 

"We have no doubt that Lois Lerner’s hard drive has in fact been compromised. We’d be shocked if it hadn’t been. Goodness knows what else is being done with evidence while Congress proceeds at its customary majestic pace. The question here is not only the crime that has been committed but whether there is a crime in progress."

"'Congressional investigators are fuming over revelations that the Internal Revenue Service has lost a trove of emails to and from a central figure in the agency’s tea-party controversy.' 

"That’s the opening sentence of the Associated Press story on the IRS’s claim that it lost an unknown number of e-mails over two years relating to the agency’s alleged targeting of political groups hostile to the president.  ... 

"Is it really so hard to imagine that if this were a Republican administration, the story wouldn’t be the frustration of partisan critics of the president? It would be all about that administration’s behavior. With the exception of National Journal’s Ron Fournier, who called for a special prosecutor to bypass the White House’s 'stonewalling,' and former CBS correspondent Sharyl Attkisson, it’s hard to find a non-conservative journalist who thinks this is a big deal. ...  

"The storied City News Bureau of Chicago famously lived by the motto 'If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.' The bureau closed down several years ago. Perhaps that kind of skepticism died with it."

"'Comprehensive immigration reform' is not meant to be reform. It is not comprehensive, and it has little to do with legal immigration. If it did, we would be told precisely how the border was first to be secured; on what grounds those illegal aliens with criminal records, those on public assistance and without a work history, and those who just arrived would be deported; and how legal immigration in the future would be adjudicated. All that is never quite spelled out, because activists do not want the border closed. They do not want anyone deported under any circumstances. They do not want legal immigration to be meritocratic and ethnically and racially blind. But they cannot say that publicly, so they revert to the slurs of 'nativist' and 'racist.' To the degree that any would-be reformer wishes any of the above clarifications, it is probably only on the assumption that Barack Obama won’t enforce such laws anyway, but would pick and choose those that suit him, as he has in the past."

"After months of delay in responding to congressional inquiries, the IRS now claims that, for the period of January 2009 to April 2011, all e-mails between Lois Lerner — the IRS official at the center of the scandal — and anyone outside the IRS were wiped out by a 'computer crash.'  As House Ways and Means chairman Dave Camp wrote in a statement, this loss means that 'we are conveniently left to believe that Lois Lerner acted alone.' After all, there isn’t a 'smidgen' of e-mail evidence to suggest otherwise. 

"A growing number of computer professionals are stepping forward to say that none of this makes sense. Norman Cillo, a former program manager at Microsoft, told The Blaze:  'I don’t know of any e-mail administrator [who] doesn’t have at least three ways of getting that mail back. It’s either on the disks or it’s on a TAPE backup someplace on an archive server.'  Bruce Webster, an IT expert with 30 years of experience consulting with dozens of private companies, seconds this opinion:  'It would take a catastrophic mechanical failure for Lerner’s drive to suffer actual physical damage, but in any case, the FBI should be able to recover something. And the FBI and the Justice Department know it.' ... 

"Normally, an independent prosecutor would be appointed to get to the bottom of all this. But don’t expect such a move from Attorney General Eric Holder. When he was the No. 2 official at Justice during President Clinton’s second term, he was instrumental in blocking the appointment of any new special prosecutors for various Clinton scandals. Holder himself has mastered the art of withholding documents from Congress. In 2012, the House of Representatives (including 17 Democrats) voted to hold Eric Holder in contempt for ignoring a subpoena for documents in the Fast and Furious gun-running scandal."

"The Arab Spring is over. Welcome to the Jihadi Spring. ... 

"The good news is that the administration has a policy to deal with the Jihadi Spring. The bad news is that it looks to be the same policy it had for the Arab Spring: nothing. 

"Nothing, that is, beyond casting lots of words and Twitter hashtags into the air like so many magic beans that will sprout into peace and security wherever they find purchase. 

"That’s the hitch. This administration’s words don’t have much traction around the world, or at least where it matters. (He’s still popular in Belgium!)"

"The fall of Mosul, Iraq, to al Qaeda terrorists this week is as big in its implications as Russia's annexation of Crimea. But from the Obama presidency, barely a peep. 

"Barack Obama is fiddling while the world burns. Iraq, Pakistan, Ukraine, Russia, Nigeria, Kenya, Syria. These foreign wildfires, with more surely to come, will burn unabated for two years until the United States has a new president. The one we've got can barely notice or doesn't care. ... 

"The big Obama bet is that Americans' opinion-polled 'fatigue' with the world (if not his leadership) frees him to create a progressive domestic legacy. This Friday Mr. Obama is giving a speech to the Sioux Indians in Cannon Ball, N.D., about 'jobs and education.'

"Meanwhile, Iraq may be transforming into (a) a second Syria or (b) a restored caliphate. Past some point, the world's wildfires are going to consume the Obama legacy. And leave his successor a nightmare."

"Hillary Clinton's State Department memoir, 'Hard Choices,' has just come out, and who among us can contain their excitement? ... 

"Have some sympathy for Clinton. She is an accomplished woman, but writing an exciting book about her unremarkable tenure as secretary of State would be hard enough. Doing so without throwing the president under the bus and telling other tales out of school is simply impossible."

"The email hit my in-box at 9:41 p.m. last Wednesday.  From one of the most powerful Democrats in Washington, a close adviser to the White House, the missive amounted to an electronic eye roll. 'Even I have had enough.' 

"Another Democrat had quit on President Obama. 

"The tipping point for this person was the Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl case -- not the soldier-for-Taliban swap itself as much as how the White House mishandled its obligation to communicate effectively and honestly to Congress and the public. More than that, Obama's team had failed once again to acknowledge its mistakes, preferring to cast blame and seek cover behind talking points. ...  

"[W]hen those closest to him are quitting on him, it's hard to maintain the audacity to hope that Obama will change."