TV News LIES

There’s something rotten in the state of North Carolina — and it smells like money. Specifically, Art Pope’s money. In fact, Pope and his cash are responsible for North Carolina’s recent meteoric rise as the poster child for regressive, conservative politics.

As the head of Variety Wholesalers (a family-run discount store holding company) and the $150 million Pope Family Foundation, he has invested in an array of think tanks and advocacy groups dedicated to aggressively aligning the state’s political terrain with his business interests. Gov. Pat McCrory, whose campaign he bankrolled, recently named Pope to the powerful post of state budget director.

An IRS manager in Cincinnati elevated the first tea party case that prompted the targeting of conservative groups, and another employee from that Ohio office developed the initial search criteria, according to the House oversight committee’s top Democrat.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) on Sunday revealed new details about the IRS controversy that he said should absolve the White House of blame for the issue, providing excerpts of interviews between IRS workers and congressional investigators.

Yesterday, we learned that the NSA received all calling records from Verizon customers for a three-month period starting in April. That's everything except the voice content: who called who, where they were, how long the call lasted -- for millions of people, both Americans and foreigners.

This "metadata" allows the government to track the movements of everyone during that period, and a build a detailed picture of who talks to whom. It's exactly the same data the Justice Department collected about AP journalists.

National security adviser Thomas E. Donilon will resign his post, White House officials said Wednesday, and will be replaced by U.N. Ambassador Susan E. Rice, a close confidant of President Obama with deep foreign policy experience who is disliked by Republicans but had been widely expected to move into the job.

White House officials said Donilon’s resignation will take effect early next month. A seasoned Washington insider, Donilon has held senior national security posts in the administration since Obama took office, rising from the principal deputy national security adviser to his current job.

Democrats and Republicans alike are criticizing New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s decision to call an Oct. 16 special general election to fill the seat of late Democratic Sen. Frank Lautenberg.

The Republican said his decision was dictated by state election law and sources say his office believes it would lose a court fight if he had scheduled the election a month later in November instead. But the move all but ensures criticism that he is unnecessarily spending millions of taxpayer dollars to serve his own political needs.

Karl Rove, the co-founder of Crossroads GPS, has taken of late to asking why his 501(c)(4) social welfare group has been scrutinized, while “liberal groups have operated for decades in the same way GPS does without Democrats complaining.” He singled out the League of Conservation Voters, NARAL Pro-Choice America, unions and the NAACP.

It’s true that, as congressional scholar Norm Ornstein put it recently,  “hypocrisy is the coin of the realm in politics,” and both sides are less vexed when their guys are bending the laws. But when it comes to Crossroads GPS, there really is no comparison.