So now Chris Christie is a climate-change denier. He was at a ceremony Monday, just a few hours before Moore, Oklahoma got pounded for the sixth time in recent years, doing the sort of thing governors love to do—pounding the ceremonial final nail into the rebuilt boardwalk in Lavallette, New Jersey. A reporter from WNYC/New Jersey Public Radio asked him about her station’s investigative report on the state’s extreme lack of preparedness for Hurricane Sandy. Should state agencies, he was asked, have made preparations with climate change in mind?

Well. It wasn’t so long ago that Christie spoke like a rational person on these matters. Campaigning for his first term, he got the endorsements of some environmental groups, like the New Jersey Environmental Federation. In August 2011, just a few months into his term in office, he said “climate change is real” and “human activity plays a role in these changes.” As recently as February, Mother Jones was optimistic enough to run a piece speculating that Christie could lead the Republican Party to a sane position on the issue.

Back in February, Christie was still fairly fresh off his post-Sandy Obama hug-fest. He didn’t say anything then accepting that climate change was real to him. He said he didn’t have time for such “esoteric” questions and might ponder them later. Well, later has arrived. Something else that has arrived, just a week ago, is the devastating WNYC/NJPR report by Kate Hinds and Andrea Bernstein showing that New Jersey’s preparations for Sandy were a joke compared to New York’s.

“I’m a black man…” “Obama Uses Commencement Address to Recall Jim Crow, Racism of 40s, 50s…” “As an African American you have to work twice as hard…” Those were the three headlines on the Drudge Report this morning about President Obama’s commencement speech yesterday at historically black Morehouse College. (Hat tip to my Beast colleague David Frum whose tweet alerted me to them.)

The implication was clear: far from the gaze of white America, Obama had exposed himself as the militant, separatist, blame-whitey black nationalist conservatives have long thought him to be. Breitbart’s Matthew Boyle made the point explicit, tweeting: “Sorry to break it to you Mr. President, but your race is IRRELEVANT to all the problems and scandals facing the country right now.”

It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry. In fact, Obama never used the phrase “I’m a black man.” What he did say was that “there are some things, as black men, we can only do for ourselves.” He went on to declare that “we know that too many young men in our community continue to make bad choices. And I have to say, growing up, I made quite a few myself. Sometimes I wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down. I had a tendency sometimes to make excuses for me not doing the right thing. But one of the things that all of you have learned over the last four years is that there’s no longer any room for excuses … Nobody cares how tough your upbringing was. Nobody cares if you’ve suffered some discrimination.”

Following the attack in Benghazi, senior State Department officials close to Hillary Clinton ordered the removal of a mid-level official who had no role in security decisions and has never been told the charges against him. He is now accusing Clinton’s team of scapegoating him for the failures that led to the death of four Americans last year.

Raymond Maxwell was placed on forced “administrative leave” after the State Department’s own internal investigation, conducted by an Administrative Review Board (ARB) led by former State Department official Tom Pickering. Five months after he was told to clean out his desk and leave the building, Maxwell remains in professional and legal limbo, having been associated publicly with the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other American for reasons that remain unclear.

Maxwell, who served as deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs from August 2011 until his removal last December, following tours in Iraq and Syria, spoke publicly for the first time in an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast.

As one scandal after another engulfed the White House last week, proponents of immigration reform feared the worst—that the voracious focus on the Obama administration’s missteps would overshadow, and perhaps even doom, their efforts for comprehensive immigration reform during the rest of the president’s second term.

What unfolded instead was just the opposite, as advocates of reform had their best week to date even as the White House ducked, parried, denied, and deflected questions related to the IRS, AP, and Benghazi debacles.

“We hope there’s a fourth scandal,” says Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice and a leader on immigration-reform efforts. “While all of this goes on, we’re just plugging along on this under the radar.”

So the Beltway media (of which I am a card-carrying member) has decided President Obama is too aloof. And as a card-carrying member, I, of course, agree.

I mean, how could a president not know the level of scrutiny the Cincinnati branch of the IRS was applying to conservative social-welfare organizations that sought tax-exempt status under Section 501c(4) of the Internal Revenue Act? How detached. How arrogant. How disengaged.

Believe me, George Washington knew exactly what the Tea Party was doing back in his day, and even though Cincinnati was just being settled as Washington became president, you can be sure the Father of Our Country knew what the Cincinnati branch of the IRS was up to.

Since the hullabaloo over IRS investigations of Tea Party groups broke last week, Democratic partisans have mostly been telling President Obama the same thing. First, clear this scandal off your plate so you can focus on the others. Second, the people responsible for this mess, at least according to the Inspector General’s report, were bureaucratic grunts and Bush appointees—you don’t owe them anything. Third, everyone hates tax collectors anyway. In other words, stand aside as congressional Republicans beat the IRS to a pulp.

That would be a terrible mistake.

It would be a mistake because while Obama is not personally implicated in the IRS controversy, the things he believes in most deeply are. Conservatives love the IRS scandal because it supposedly rips the smiley-face mask off government and reveals it to be a “sinister” (Peggy Noonan), “arrogant” (Noonan), “ravaging tyrant” (David Brooks) abusing largely powerless American patriots. As a perennial warning against the abuse of government power, that story has merit. But as a description of the actual relationship between the public and private sector in America today, at least outside the national-security realm, it’s mostly nonsense. And if Obama and his fellow Democrats don’t rebut that narrative and defend the IRS, they’ll be surrendering crucial ground in the battle that has roiled American politics since the financial crisis: the battle over whether Washington regulates too much or too little.

Honestly, they act like it’s his first crisis.

Sometime after the infamous Denver debate last fall, which by most media accounts should have forced the president to immediately quit the race and resign in shame, a few of us who had been with him since the earliest days tried to assess where the performance ranked on our list of All-Time Worst ObamaWorld Moments.

It was an exercise in gallows humor, but it lifted our spirits to recall how many times the president had been so mistakenly and definitively counted out over the last eight years. There was the New York Post headline from October 3, 2007, that always hung in Bill Burton’s campaign office: “CLINTON NEARLY READY FOR HER CORONATION.” And who could forget where they were when the news broke about the Reverend Wright or Bittergate scandals that Washington just knew would destroy Obama’s candidacy? In early September 2008, a Politico story even ran the following quote from a Democratic pollster I’ve still never heard of: “A failure to take Sarah Palin seriously will cost the Obama campaign.”

Los Angeles is the second-largest city in the country and arguably its most diverse.  We have beaches and mountains. The superrich and the desperately poor. Beautiful people from all over the planet trying to make it in Hollywood and ugly people here to take 10 percent from them. You name it, we have it.

Except for women on the Los Angeles City Council. 

All signs point to a May 21 city election where all 15 of the L.A. City Council's seats could be filled by men. Who would have thought the only person with binders full of women in Los Angeles would be Heidi Fleiss?

North Dakota: Legalized Abortions Cause School Shootings

U.S. Rep. Kevin Cramer knows why there have been so many school shootings in the U.S. over the past few years, and it’s not because of easy access to guns or inadequate treatment of the mentally ill. No, the Republican from North Dakota insists, the rise in school shootings is directly connected to the legalization of abortion and a supposed decline in Christian values. “We learned this week that the Pentagon is vetting its guide on religious tolerance with a group that compared Christian evangelism to rape and advocated that military personnel and colluding chaplains who proselytize should be court martialed,” Cramer said during a commencement speech at the Catholic University of Mary that, miraculously, went unnoticed by the national media until this week. “Forty years ago, the United States Supreme Court sanctioned abortion on demand. And we wonder why our culture sees school shootings so often.” Cramer’s link between “normalized perversion” and mass murders rings eerily similar to Michele Bachmann’s argument that the September 11 terror attacks in 2001 and 2012 were God’s way of passing judgement on our country’s moral demise.

Missouri: The Gays Killed the Bullying Bill

Missouri's Republican state Rep. Sue Allen has called on her constituents to contact openly gay lawmakers Jolie Justus and Mike Colona and blame them for the death of her anti-bullying bill. The key difference between Allen’s bill and other, more successful anti-bullying legislation is that it bans enumerated lists of specific groups of people that need protection—such as gay and transgender students—because she believes they are too partisan. “I typically try to keep partisanship out of my message, but this is an issue for the Democrats who wish for certain students (LGBT-gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender) to be ‘enumerated’ within school policies ... What they [Justus and Colona] don’t seem to understand is that stronger policies help ALL students, even those they would have characterized.” The problem with Allen’s argument is that listing specific groups does not, as she suggests, negate protection for anyone else, it simply ensures that any bullying of people who identify with these particularly at-risk groups is reported.

The Donald is back with a new book. Not Donald Trump, but the original cantankerous, ill-tempered Donald, who possibly has uttered the expression “You’re fired” with more glee than Trump. I’m speaking of Donald Rumsfeld—the man who served in several positions in the federal government, the most recent his “star turn” as secretary of defense under President George W. Bush.

Rumsfeld new book is titled Rumsfeld’s Rules, and it promises you “leadership lessons in business, politics, war, and life.” It’s sort of like Game of Thrones meets The Secret.

In Rules, Rumsfeld offers numerous lessons to succeed in these various fields. But the No. 1 lesson I have gleaned from his book is: ignore your past and instead re-create yourself so you sound amazing. Rumsfeld has done just that by offering us rules to live by that paint him as a thoughtful, considerate person who is cross between Steve Jobs and Gandhi.

If ever there was a made-for-Twitter revelation, it was the little nugget in Peter Baker’s New York Times report Wednesday that had an aide saying Obama sometimes pines at the thought of “going Bulworth.” In all the commentary I’ve seen on this, I haven’t yet seen anyone point out that going Bulworth is a pretty stupid idea, because the Warren Beatty character, after enjoying a brief resurgence in the polls, became as I recall sort of a laughingstock (at least, that’s what I thought) and then ended up staging his own assassination at the depths of his self-loathing. No. If we’re going to delve into movieland for analogies, it’s not Bulworth that Obama needs to “go,” but Rambo—on the Republicans, and in a hurry.

The House hearings yesterday on the IRS matter only left the Republicans hungry for more. NBC’s Lisa Myers, who repeatedly proved back in the Clinton era that she had good Republican sources and that she took them at their word, now says the IRS chose to withhold information relating to the current mess until after last year’s election. This is meant, of course, to raise the specter that the White House was in on this, possibly the president himself.

Then we have Benghazi. And beyond that we have, you know, the actual affairs of state. This doesn’t quite qualify as that, since it’s a waste of everyone’s time and everyone knows it, but the House voted yet again to repeal Obamacare. Of course it hopes never to have to vote on background checks. But by cracky, a 38th meaningless vote to repeal the health-care act, let’s do it!

This week, Minnesota became the 12th state, plus the District of Columbia, to allow same-sex couples to marry.

During the final debate on the legislation in the Minnesota House, I shared a photo with my colleagues that had been taken at the 1993 gay pride parade in Minneapolis. Pictured there were me and my partner of 24 years, Jacquelyn, standing next to my parents, Millie and Joe Clark, who were carrying a sign that read: “Our Gay Children Should Have the Same Rights as Our Heterosexual Children.”

They’d marched with the Parents and Families of Lesbians and Gays contingent to celebrate the historic passage, a month earlier, of the strongest state civil-rights protection for LGBT citizens in the country. Though my parents did not live to see it, 20 years later their message rang true and helped me to pass the Freedom to Marry Act.

Congress started it all this year when it voted to allow drones to fly in the U.S. as soon as 2015. Now it’s fighting against its self-imposed deadline to pass legislation that limits the scope of the new technology.

At a hearing Friday, the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations discussed what measures should be included in a federal bill that would protect Fourth Amendment rights without limiting the potential benefits of drones.

“The expectation of privacy down the road is going to not be expanded but made smaller,” said Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX). “I think that’s what members of the Supreme Court, to me, are saying, which concerns me. So Congress needs to set a standard.”

I've written that in the end, congressional Republicans won't agree to move forward on the budget, tax reform, immigration, job creation, or any other issues that matter to mainstream America before the presidential elections. But the fall of 2016 is a long time away, and they have to do something in the meantime. Now we know what it is.

It's not much different from what they've done, or haven't done, all along: obstruct Obama. Traduce him, delegitimize him—and slow economic recovery in hopes that voters will cast a protest vote for the GOP. It worked in 2010, and failed miserably in 2012.

Conservatives are back at it again because the GOP lacks any coherent program other than cutting taxes for the wealthy. Republicans are deeply divided—between the government-hating Tea Party Torquemadas and an establishment that dreads primary defeat, or in John Boehner's case, defenestration as speaker; between the isolationists like Rand Paul and the neo-cons and John McCain.