President Obama’s pincer movement on the middle class continues.  To the rich, Obama has bequeathed billionaire Penny Pritzker as Commerce Secretary, and to the poor he bestows North Carolina Congressman Mel Watt to head the Federal Housing Finance Administration. As for the middle class, Obama sticks them with a Social Security tax hike. So let’s consider each pincer, top and bottom.

First, from the billionaire top, Ms. Pritzker, aptly described in The Atlantic as “Obama’s Mitt Romney.”  In fact, she is far richer than Romney – and has even more money stashed offshore.

Pritzker makes Treasury Secretary Jack Lew look like an amateur.  As Forbes explained, “Lew only had $56,000 invested in the offshore venture fund.  By contrast, offshore tax avoiding trusts seems to have played a substantial role in the growth of the Pritzker fortune” that give Penny a net worth of $1.85 billion.

CIA officers at the Benghazi mission’s annex had responsibility for vetting the Libyan militia that they counted on, but failed to arrive, as one of the first responders on the night of the 9-11 anniversary attacks last September, according to U.S. intelligence officers and U.S. diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.

Yet the CIA has managed to avoid much Congressional scrutiny as House Republicans turn attention to the dramatic testimony of two new State Department whistleblowers this week that testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

The CIA has been singled out for praise because of the heroic rescue performed by its security contractors at the Benghazi annex. On that evening, two former SEALs—Glenn Doherty and Tyrone Woods—helped lead a team that rescued all but two of the U.S. personnel at the Benghazi mission that evening. U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens and Sean Smith, a communications specialist, died of smoke inhalation after the attackers set the U.S. compound ablaze with cans of kerosene the raiding party found after breaching its gates. Doherty and Woods were killed at around five the next morning by mortar fire.

Forget slow-news Friday. The IRS admission today that it singled out for scrutiny political action committees with the words “Tea Party” and “Patriot” in their names rocketed around the Internet, fueling conservatives’ feeling of persecution. 

The actions were apparently taken in isolation by workers at a local Cincinnati, Ohio, branch and announced with a public apology by Lois Lerner, head of the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups. 

This imposition of political impulses into IRS inquiries is completely out of line —and given the Nixon administration’s record of using audits for political purposes, the feeling of persecution has some roots in reality.  But the inevitable rhetorical rush to the ramparts—that this was part of a concerted effort by the Obama administration to investigate its political enemies—is not rooted in fact, to date. Beyond the fact that the White House and the IRS now keep each other at arm’s length because of past abuses, the larger slumber scandal at the IRS is actually a reluctance to aggressively investigate the systemic abuse of tax-exempt status by nonprofit groups in the wake of the Citizens United decision. 

First came the GOP filibuster of Chuck Hagel’s nomination as Defense secretary in February, then the slow-walk of John Brennan’s confirmation as CIA director in March. In April, Republicans put a hold on Ernest Moniz’s nomination as Energy secretary, and Wednesday brought an anonymous delay of a committee vote on Thomas Perez to become secretary of Labor.

On Thursday, the brewing battle over President Obama’s political appointees blew up into a full-fledged war after Republicans boycotted a committee vote on Gina McCarthy, Obama’s nominee for Environmental Protection Agency administrator who was once an environmental adviser to Mitt Romney.

“If Republicans think we’re going to be quiet about this, they have another thing coming,” said the chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, Sen. Barbara Boxer, who learned of the GOP boycott 45 minutes before she planned to hold the vote.

Conservative activists are furious with Marco Rubio. Almost every day, Breitbart and The Daily Caller slam the immigration legislation he helped draft. A week ago, National Review put Rubio’s face on its cover above the word “Folly.” The Tea Party Patriots recently staged an “intervention” targeting Rubio’s legislation. And the man Rubio has called his mentor, former South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, just unveiled a Heritage Foundation report alleging that Rubio’s bill will cost over $6 trillion.

Rubio should thank them all for boosting his chances of winning the presidency in 2016.

Earlier this week, Daily Beast contributor Stuart Stevens argued that Rubio’s work on immigration reform “offers almost no foreseeable political gains with his party’s base.” But the Republican base isn’t Rubio’s problem. Yes, Rubio’s immigration push will hurt him among his party’s most hard-core ideologues. But the candidates they support rarely win. Of the last five Republican presidential nominees—Mitt Romney, John McCain, George W. Bush, Bob Dole, George H.W. Bush—none were the most conservative major candidates in the GOP primary. But each won because they were conservative enough and because the party establishment rallied behind them. As Ramesh Ponnuru has pointed out, “the Republican establishment always wins presidential-nomination contests, and conservative insurgents almost never do.”

Two Republicans made big news this week. One had a comeback, the other a lapbelt operation. The first was a sideshow, the second points toward a decisive test of whether the Republicans can be a competitive presidential party in 2016.

A special election in South Carolina saw the defeat of a first- rate Democratic candidate, Elizabeth Colbert Busch, who deserves to be known as something other than Stephen Colbert's sister. Congresswoman would have been nice. It was not to be. I was wrong and John Avlon was right: It turns out the mythical trip on the Appalachian Trail didn't lead Mark Sanford to political oblivion, but to the House of Representatives. It also turns out that the self–ordained, self-righteous voters in the land of Bob Jones University believe in family values—-until they don't.

Their flexibility could be critical to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who has acknowledged shedding 40 pounds with the help of weight-loss surgery. He's right that it's "ridiculous" to assume that his poundage precluded a race for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. Fat is an easy, unproven shibboleth of a barrier to the White House—much like age used to be, until that truism was soundly disproved by Ronald Reagan. The New Jersey governor says he had the operation for his health, his family, his children.

Rand Paul makes his maiden 2016 journey into Iowa on Friday to introduce himself to a Republican Party that has been largely overtaken by his father’s top allies.

And that unique dynamic could prove critical to his chances in the first-in-the-nation caucus state as he prepares for a likely White House run.

Iowa Republican Party chairman A.J. Spiker says the senator’s rollicking 13-hour March filibuster against the president’s drone policy was the impetus behind the decision to extend the invitation to the Kentucky freshman to headline Friday’s Lincoln Day dinner in Cedar Rapids.

Say this for Glenn Beck: the guy really knows how to make an entrance.

Just as it was announced last week that the cable distributor Cablevision has picked up the conservative shock-jock’s fledgling Internet channel, The Blaze, Beck has again found himself fending off a series of controversies of his own making.

First, there was his keynote address at the National Rifle Association’s annual convention in which he appeared to compare Mike Bloomberg to Hitler—only to later say that in fact, he was only comparing the New York City mayor to Lenin. A few days prior, on his radio show, he said that God “has got to destroy us” because “We are denying his existence. We are denying his power. We are slapping him in the face.”  And the week before, he had alleged a coverup by the federal government in the Boston Marathon bombings.

Every politician looks for a niche where they can combine their passion and their ambition, and advocating for women fits both for New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. Her rapid rise in the Senate since being appointed to fill Hillary Clinton’s seat in 2009 has made her a force to be reckoned with on key issues, notably this week on sexual assaults in the military, and along with her increased visibility, Gillibrand has become one of the most mentioned potential female candidates for president—after Clinton of course.

“When I heard her challenge the general or whoever it was speaking for the military, it was pretty presidential,” says Marie Wilson, founder of the White House Project. “She’s not only good on issues and standing up, she’s gotten to be a real force. She is someone who has grown leaps and bounds in the job.”

Gillibrand was at the White House Thursday, one of 15 senators attending a meeting called by Valerie Jarrett to talk about the alarming increase in sexual assaults in the military. Gillibrand called the meeting “super-productive,” and as the first woman to chair the personnel subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee, she has been instrumental along with the increased presence of women in the Senate, Republicans and Democrats, in finally generating outrage about behavior that has been tolerated for far too long.

The debt ceiling should really be renamed the default ceiling. This catastrophic game of chicken cost the U.S. our AAA credit rating and $19 billion when it was last employed in the summer of 2011 by House radicals who pretended their intransigence was a stand for fiscal responsibility.

Now the default ceiling is looming again, promising yet another showdown between President Obama and House Republicans. But even Speaker John Boehner realizes that the 50 or so radicals on the far right of his own party—the Bachmann, Broun, Gohmert and King crew—are the greatest impediment to responsible self-government right now.

That’s why the new responsible Republican proposal, which passed the House Thursday by a vote of 221-207, could be the best way to defuse the debt ceiling from its most destructive impact.

How in the hell did Democrats wind up struggling in the Virginia governor’s race?

Virginia is an important state. An emerging purple state. A state poised to have the kind of election-swinging clout of Ohio or Florida.

Upping the ante this cycle, Virginia Republicans, for their gubernatorial standard-bearer, have tapped the proudly inflammatory Ken Cuccinelli, who has used his reign as state attorney general to, among other notable hits, crusade against climate change and on behalf of the state’s recently junked anti-sodomy laws. For a party struggling to dispel its reputation as a bastion of right-wing nuttery, putting Cuccinelli front and center is a bit like tapping Mitt Romney to dispel the GOP’s rep as a bastion of rich old white guys.

To the conservative Heritage Foundation, comprehensive immigration reform is an epic boondoggle. To wit, in a report released earlier this week, Heritage puts the cost of immigration reform at a whopping $6.3 trillion. That’s nearly half the size of the United States economy.

But there’s a problem. To come to this number, Heritage assumes that unauthorized immigrants will claim the full array of federal benefits as soon as they become citizens. As Heritage president Jim DeMint explained on ABC News’ This Week, “We just want Congress, for once, to count the cost of a bill. They’re notorious for underestimating the cost and not understanding the consequences.”

Not only does Heritage assume a world where every unauthorized immigrant becomes a citizen, but it assumes one where upward mobility has disappeared—every immigrant is taking more in benefits than paying in taxes—and one where there are no economic gains from legalizing and integrating immigrants.

Finally, committee action is set to start today in the Senate on the immigration bill. The dead-enders on the right are gearing up. Utah’s Mike Lee, for example, is evidently introducing amendments that say in essence, “strike everything after the words ‘an act.’” Less extreme colleagues are still trying to push the bill rightward in various ways. This puts Marco Rubio in a spot. He needs to placate these forces if he’s going to have a shot at the GOP nomination in 2016. But somewhere on that continuum, there’s a tipping point, at which he loses the trust of the Democrats he has spent months negotiating with, and the bill itself perhaps loses some Democratic support. The sweet spot is awfully small, and if he doesn’t find it, his 2016 hopes, and maybe even the bill, are in agua caliente.

Here’s the situation. What the conservatives are hopping mad about—aside of course from the general idea that they have to do this in the first place, which in many ways is the inescapable problem—is something called the RPI provision. That’s “registered provisional immigrant” status. In the current language, if an undocumented immigrant was in the United States on December 31, 2011, that person can come forward and get a work authorization and permission to travel. Then they start the 10- or 13-year process of becoming a citizen.

But this is all contingent, to some extent, on the border being secure. In the first year of the law’s life, the secretary of Homeland Security has to put forward a plan to achieve 90 percent control of the border. Once the plan is submitted, processing of the people applying for RPI status can begin.

Say what you will about Chris Christie, the man can laugh at himself—that is, as long as he’s the one making the jokes, of course. In attempt to remain in the spotlight while redirecting the national conversation away from his recent lap-band surgery, the gregarious New Jersey governor has decided to bring back the fleece joke for an encore. You remember the fleece. That notorious blue pullover Christie sported for weeks as a symbol of his commitment to Hurricane Sandy relief. Despite telling SNL’s Seth Meyers that the fleece was “fused to my body,” the governor eventually took it off, which was clearly a huge mistake as he realizes, in a new star-studded YouTube video, that he is nothing without fleece.

In the not-quite-viral video, the governor turned actor is at first unconcerned by the news that his precious fleece has disappeared from its glass case. “The fleece was so last year,” he scoffs. “I’m back in the Time 100 most influential people in the world. Bruce is my new best friend. I’m friends with Bon Jovi and now I’m back on Morning Joe!” But he soon discovers that his newfound clout came with a fleece attached. Mika and Joe are sick of him, he can’t get into a Bruce Springsteen show, and Jon Bon Jovi won’t give him the time of day. As the seven-minute-plus video carries on, we learn that James Carville is in cahoots with Hillary Clinton, who stole the fleece but accidentally left it with Alec Baldwin, whose wife, Hilaria, adheres to the “finders keepers” rule of life. This ultimate sequence is not only funny, but it makes the point that Christie can not only take a joke, but that he’s chummy enough with some pretty public Democrats that they’d be willing to appear in this silly video of his.

Christie has used this tactic before. Last year, instead of stewing in silent jealousy as Newark Mayor Cory Booker was repeatedly hailed for his heroism, the governor took matters into his own hands and made a video acknowledging how inadequate he is in comparison to the valiant Booker. Whether this video will actually make anyone forget about the lap-band surgery, or keep them from making 2016 predictions, is unlikely. But it does serve as a good reminder that Christie is the kind of guy who can take a joke—as long as it’s on his terms, of course. 

The redemption tour is over and Congress has a new Comeback Kid.

Scandal-laden former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford won back his old congressional seat on Tuesday night, defeating Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch by a 54 percent to 45 percent margin in a high-turnout special election.

The victory shocked the national press corps, who had been predicting a Colbert-Busch victory—with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, for example, declaring “this is not serious” after a PPP poll found Sanford 9 points behind the Democratic nominee two weeks from Election Day.