At any rate, at least one potential 2016 contender is taking it upon himself to handle America’s top threat. Andrew Cuomo, Governor of New York, boyfriend to Food Network star Sandra Lee, and proud owner of a dress-eating parrot, sent a formal letter to Khloe Kardashian last week, demanding that her clothing line, Rich Soil, stop pairing white tee shirts with white pants before Memorial Day stop selling a tee shirt that bears what appears to be a New York State seal.

The administration has ordered a high-end clothing line run by Khloe Kardashian and her husband, NBA player Lamar Odom, to stop selling a designer T-shirt, because it bears an emblem that looks suspiciously like a state logo, the Daily News has learned.

And if the reality star and baller don’t comply within five days, the state will sue, according to documents obtained by the Daily News.

Kardashian, the youngest of the three celebrity sisters, was photographed last week wearing a shirt emblazoned with a circular logo featuring the Statue of Liberty surrounded by the words “New York” and “Rich Soil,” the name of the clothing line.

The form-fitting shirt, which retails for $35, is clearly intended to capture attention — and it did, just not the type of attention the designers intended.

Ironically, Rich Soil promoted the tee shirt ”as a vehicle to promote not just a brand but a movement that represents the creative spirit of all people.” Except whoever designed the shirt, apparently, since the seal is suspiciously similar to the logo for “Pride of New York” a program that encourages New York residents to buy products produced and manufactured within the state of New York. Actually, it’s pretty much a direct knock-off, hence the letter.

Rich Soil pulled the tee shirt from its website almost immediately, and Cuomo was able to chalk up an achievement that few Americans can ever claim: a successful, if temporary, battlefield Kardashian defeat.

NOTE: The Rich Soil website is basically a copyright lawyers dream. Alongside the forlorn blank space where their Department of Agriculture tee shirt once lived is a shirt that features another shockingly familiar logo, this time that of Yves Saint Laurent.

Now that’s some creative spirit. Or something.

Okay, more than a little.

He and his staff have also penned an op-ed exclusively for Rare in case that wasn’t enough.

Everyone knows what happened yesterday. You don’t need my report to tell you.

Although it might not mean much in the short run, our thoughts and prayers are with the people of Oklahoma, as they face down what is possibly the single worst tornado in American history. The storm’s winds may have been the highest ever recorded on the face of the planet.

After these events, the most effective thing we can do other than actually be there, which may not be the safest or even the most effective thing when you consider the lack of talent I might have at construction and clean up, is to give directly to people who are already on the ground. Reddit has a complete list of charities  and organizations that are already working to provide food, shelter, medical care and relief services to the people of Oklahoma and Texas. If you are in the area, you can also list spare rooms and space you might have available to people who have lost their homes or are working in the area temporarily. The OKC Food Bank, which serves the people of Oklahoma City, is also accepting donations via text. Simply text “FOOD” to 32333 to donate $10. The charge will appear on your regular phone bill.

There’s good news and bad news then for Hillary. As it turns out, the “Team of Rivals” she put together to handle her ultimately disastrous 2008 campaign will not sign on for another go at the prize, and she’s going to have to assemble a whole new team from scratch. Good news is, they were the ones that lost, so you know, could be worse. Bad news is? Pretty much no one else wants their jobs.

Howard Wolfson, the 2008 communications director for Hillary Rodham Clinton, has said he will not return for a 2016 presidential campaign. Neither, for that matter, will Neera Tanden, the campaign’s policy director. Ditto for Mark Penn, the chief strategist, and Patti Solis Doyle, the embattled campaign manager.

As core members of a dysfunctional “Team of Rivals,” these top advisers were seared, scattered and, to different degrees, forged by the 2008 experience. Haunted by the failures in management and messaging, they have worked hard to get over their shattered White House dreams and rejection by a Democratic base enamored with Barack Obama. They express their requisite hope that Clinton will run and win, but also their lack of interest in jumping back in.

Apparently, these three have spent the last eight years trying to forget that Hillary 2008 ever even happened, and, unfortunately, since Hillary has really never undertaken a massive national campaign – other than the one she lost in 2008 – that’s really the only experience she has. Well, that, and any Democratic guilt at picking a relative unknown and ultimately paying the price as he was more third and fourth Bush terms than third and fourth Clinton terms. That is, if Democrats are willing to cap off the Barack Obama Presidency by admitting they should have gone with the devil they knew.

Very interested. Like, possibly going to charge him pursuant to an Espionage Act interesting. Check the docs.

In addition to using their access to information concerning Rosen’s security badge, tracking him as he moved around DC, the DOJ appears to have traced his phone calls, and according to this search warrant, was somehow convinced that, as a reporter, he was part of a conspiracy to reveal classified information, even though the classified information used to create the resulting story seems a little less than…classified.

BUT FOX NEWS. Or, something.

Just eight?

She’s no Doonesbury (motto: Unchanged by events since 1968!) but it’s been a lot longer than eight years since Dowd had an original idea. Like her NYT colleague Tom Friedman (motto: China kicks ASS and I wish I lived there!) she’s been running on fumes since long before September 11.

But leave it to the Obama Administration, which, as of yesterday, is not even sure it runs actual things, to commit this one, crucial faux pas. I mean, if you’re going to put a tail on a reporter who you think might be exposing a leak in the State Department, and treat his legitimate reporting as evidence of criminal behavior, you could at least pick a reporter from an organization that wasn’t going to spend the next 48 hours hammering you over it, right?

Right?

When the Justice Department began investigating possible leaks of classified information about North Korea in 2009, investigators did more than obtain telephone records of a working journalist suspected of receiving the secret material.

They used security badge access records to track the reporter’s comings and goings from the State Department, according to a newly obtained court affidavit. They traced the timing of his calls with a State Department security adviser suspected of sharing the classified report. They obtained a search warrant for the reporter’s personal e-mails.

The case of Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, the government adviser, and James Rosen, the chief Washington correspondent for Fox News, bears striking similarities to a sweeping leaks investigation disclosed last week in which federal investigators obtained records over two months of more than 20 telephone lines assigned to the Associated Press….

Court documents in the Kim case reveal how deeply investigators explored the private communications of a working journalist — and raise the question of how often journalists have been investigated as closely as Rosen was in 2010. The case also raises new concerns among critics of government secrecy about the possible stifling effect of these investigations on a critical element of press freedom: the exchange of information between reporters and their sources.

Essentially, what the Department of Justice – and by extension, the Obama Administration – did in this case was accuse a reporter looking for a story of criminal behavior, and assume his reporting, which he considered to be pretty routine, was a criminal act worthy of an investigation using the full extent of power at the DOJ’s disposal. And worse, it demonstrates that, as far back as 2009, the DOJ thought it had the power to circumvent a reporter’s Constitutional rights, so long as they assumed the reporter to be in on an alleged conspiracy to disseminate state secrets, a power they seem to have consistently expanded on as time wore on, from stalking a single reporter and obtaining his email records with a search warrant (which they likely had to present to a judge, even if just a judge who rubber stamped their efforts), to wiretapping an entire bank of phones in a major global news agency for weeks.

Luckily, reporters who came for the AP investigation are staying for the full circus.

Glenn Greenwald further elaborates:

New revelations emerged yesterday in the Washington Post that are perhaps the most extreme yet when it comes to the DOJ’s attacks on press freedoms. It involves the prosecution of State Department adviser Stephen Kim, a naturalized citizen from South Korea who was indicted in 2009 for allegedly telling Fox News’ chief Washington correspondent, James Rosen, that US intelligence believed North Korea would respond to additional UN sanctions with more nuclear tests – something Rosen then reported. Kim did not obtain unauthorized access to classified information, nor steal documents, nor sell secrets, nor pass them to an enemy of the US. Instead, the DOJ alleges that he merely communicated this innocuous information to a journalist – something done every day in Washington – and, for that, this arms expert and long-time government employee faces more than a decade in prison for “espionage”.

As it turns out, Kim, whose trial may not even take place until 2014, is not the only such victim of the DOJ’s Assault on Leakers. According to Greenwald, the Administration has prosecuted more perceived leakers under the 1917 Espionage Act than all other Presidential administrations combined. So either a lot of people are just spilling all kinds of government secrets over vodka tonics to global news agencies, or someone’s just a teensy bit paranoid.

Lots of people are all like, “well, what do you expect when George Bush set the precedent?” And that’s true. Obama has done nothing if not expand on the bizarre policies of his forefathers. But you could also say, “what do you expect when you hire Eric Holder and the dudes who know him best?” After all, homeslice spent his time at the RIAA threatening grandmothers with million dollar lawsuits for letting their grandkids download Anne Murray discs off Limewire.  

1. A New Jersey company has created the world’s first “sex robot.” Apparently, they tried to create robots to do other things, but this was the only area where bureaucracy wasn’t standing in their way.

2. The Obama Administration probably put a tail on Fox News reporter James Rosen because when someone said he had a mole, they took it as seriously as an Austin Powers sketch.

3. It’s also possible that the Department of Justice spent way too much time following a reporter covering  North Korea in 2009. Because why worry about the big things like the economy when you can chase around guys talking to the State Department.

4. CNN isn’t so much worried about the IRS as they are worried about what kind of crazy thing they can pretend Rand Paul said about it.

5. Maureen Dowd has been writing the same column for eight years and her cover has just been blown.

It’s Monday, America. Let’s roll.

Or, just do it.

The Atlantic has discovered that putting the word “sex” in a blog post drives traffic. So have I. So I’ll comment on the Atlantic’s post commenting on sex. See how smoothly that works?

The author quotes Dr. Theodore Dalrymple at length:

“In my hospital, for example, adolescent and young adult visitors to their hospitalized boyfriends or girlfriends not infrequently climb into bed and indulge in sexual foreplay with them, in full view of the staff and of old people occupying the beds opposite. This gross disinhibition would once have been taken as a sign of madness but is now accepted as perfectly normal: indeed, objection to such behavior would now appear objectionable and ridiculous. No one seems to have noticed, however, that a loss of a sense of shame means a loss of privacy; a loss of privacy means a loss of intimacy; and a loss of intimacy means a loss of depth.”

It’s interesting that Dr. Dalrymple cites young lovers happily giving up their privacy to fool around. It was, after all, the “right to privacy” in sexual matters on which the Supreme Court hung its Roe v. Wade decision. Fascinating that he’d argue they we’re willingly giving away that very power (right) every day.

“If we want sex to be sexy again, perhaps we should speak less about it,” The Atlantic concludes.

Sounds good; you first.

Bill Clinton was cheating on his wife? Anthony Weiner’s a perve? Yea, we knew those things. Just nice to see them confirmed in print, I guess.

So there’s something underwhelming about the IRS-Tea Party scandal. Conservatives have always known we’re under greater scrutiny. We don’t like big government, and so there’s no reason Big Government would like us.

Besides, as James Bovard writes in the WSJ, this has been going on for decades. Presidents from FDR to JFK to Richard Nixon used the IRS to harass political foes.  In the late 1999, the Associated Press reported: ”officials in the Democratic White House and members of both parties in Congress have prompted hundreds of audits of political opponents in the 1990s.” And that didn’t even cause enough of a stir to force the Justice Department to track APs phone calls.

Yes, there are scandals here. If you work for the government and you’re called to testify before Congress, it’s best not to lie. If you attempt to cover up what you know, you’ll get caught eventually (it’s also a Washington truism that the cover up is always worse than the scandal, which is especially true when the cover up is an ugly blue dress).

“I wrote to the IRS three times last year after hearing concerns that conservative groups were being targeted,” Sen. Orrin Hatch, R., Utah, says. “Yet it didn’t occur to anyone at the IRS to let us know that this targeting was in fact happening?” So there’s your cover up.

During Obama’s first term, a friendly press corps always stood ready to help advance his agenda. That’s why they never investigated his untrue claims about ObamaCare (won’t low-information voters be surprised when their premiums double or more), and it’s why — during the presidential debates — CNN’s Candy Crowley was all too ready to help the president along when he issued a misleading statement about Libya.

With the IRS and Associated Press phone stories, the press corps may finally be hearing its alarm clock. Better late than never.

As for the rest of us, we need to think bigger. “We can be almost certain that IRS audits will remain irresistible political weapons,” Bovard concludes. True, unless we get rid of the IRS. Think about it: If congress would pass a flat tax, there would be no need for the hated IRS. We could all file returns on the back of a postcard and forget all the complex math and stuff we need to do now.

Plus,  the IRS is going to be pivotal in implementing ObamaCare, the first “health care” plan in the world that hires tax collectors instead of doctors and nurses. Get rid of the IRS, and you also deal a blow to ObamaCare. It’s a win-win, and a way that conservatives can use a Washington scandal to bring real change to Washington.