The whole point of the scandal (about which you are clearly uninformed, or about which you are being deliberately disingenuous and deceptive) is that the IRS put applying conservative groups through the ringer specifically to delay their activities through then-upcoming election cycle. They dragged out conservative-sounding applications for months or years through an intimidating, recurring process of illegally asking for information like personal information about group members' lifestyles, the books they read, their personal religious musings, and other complete BS. It wasn't about approving or denying the groups' non-profit status, it was about keeping them in limbo while more quickly approving groups that were more likely to back the administration before the election.

You really think the word scandal needs quotes around it, because none of that was real or mattered? Or are you dismissive of that illegal treatment because you, like the administration, just don't happen to like the thinking of the fellow citizens that were abused in that way?

You are, to put it simply, lying.

The agency deliberately put conservative groups through a years-long tedium of intrusive personal questions. They asked them, for example, about what books their members were reading. Progressive non-profits were ushered through the system in a fraction of the time, while conservative groups were delayed and intimidated as a matter of policy (you know, the very thing the IRS "apologized" for deliberately doing to specific groups).

Your contentions have been thoroughly debunked, which you have to know. Which makes your post anything but the "informative" that it's been modded, since you're being purposefully deceptive.

No, they found a single email from him to the general council's office, asking about legal issues around a training program. The government hasn't found/verified anything such thing as the fiction you just described.

It's agencies like the NSA that - among other things - are tasked with making internal US government communications a lot harder to hack than a lot of other countries' systems are. But if you think for a second that dozens of intelligence agencies around the world don't make every effort to get inside info on communications between US government officials (from agency staffers right through the military and up through the administration to the top) then you're absolutely clueless. You're confusing "ARE tapping Obama's cell phone" with "would LOVE to be tapping Obama's cell phone given any means and opportunity to do so."

You mean other than, just for starters, the lies he told his co-workers in order to get their system credentials? Or the fundamental lie that he told as he swore not to divulge classified information to places like China and Russia? He was lying on that most recent job from the moment he sat down, never mind when he started harvesting other people's passwords so he could gather all of that classified info he's spreading around.

Citation needed. I've seen only one mention of a very luke-warm single email exchange that could even begin to be Snowden attempting any such thing. Cite your "admit" event, in detail.

You don't need extraordinary proof. It's the basic bones of the NSA's charter. They monitor overseas communications with an eye on collecting information that can help people in this country make informed security, military, and foreign policy decisions and actions. That's their entire reason for existing. It's why they're separate from the FBI.

Because, as he's caught red handed doing on a regular basis about all sorts of things, he was once again lying. Of course our intelligence operations will continue to try to learn what other governments are up to, just like they do to us and everyone else.

But it's perfectly reasonable as a vehicle to prosecute someone who provides sensitive information about overseas surveillance methods to people who pronounce themselves to be enemies of the country. Handing material to the Chinese, and then to the Russians, is bad enough. Spreading it around to make absolutely sure that Pakistan is helping the Taliban and Al Queda to make good, constructive use of it - exactly why he's a fool, and a traitor. All of his vague hand-waving and his holier-than-thou I'm-more-patriotic-than-you road show is laughable. Just ask his current host.

So, you're still pretending that it wasn't Richard Armitage that disclosed her name, and that the matter on which Libby was convicted had words in it that weren't shown to the public? What is your point? That you know things that nobody else, including hundreds of reporters who wrote about the case, knew? Please.

No, he escaped doing time for disclosing Valerie Plame's name to the press because it turns out that someone else is the person who did it. Try to keep up.

No, he wasn't. Where do you get this stuff?

How's that Koolaide tasting? Richard Armitage not only was the guy the reporter got her name from, he sat down for interviews and said as much. Then, the reporter conceded as much. If you're going to revise history, pick a topic that isn't so well documented - you'll still look like an anonymous coward, but perhaps like a slightly less foolish one.

Are you really that misinformed, or are you just trying to deceive?

The person who disclosed Valerie Plame's name was Richard Armitage, not Libby. Libby's legal trouble revolved around how cooperative he was during one round of questioning, and his prosecution had nothing whatsoever to do with her name getting out. Because ... it was a guy in the State Department, not the White House, who told the reporter her name. And Armitage never got any grief during the witch hunt.

Of course, Armitage was NOT the last person to "out" an operative. Just a few days ago, the White House stupidly disclosed the name of the top CIA official in Kabul. You know, a guy actually out dealing with dangerous ground, rather than occupying a desk in Virginia like Plame was.

Right, because only a Republican would refer to a facial tissue as a Kleenex, right? The political douche here is you. The GP's comment had nothing to do with ads or money, that's entirely you projecting your own twisted, vitriolic world view into the situation, coward.

Serious academic research has gone into that topic, and studies from the CDC contribute as well. Let's say that those studies' numbers are over estimating the number of times that self defense brandishment has turned away an assault, a home invasion, etc., by a factor of a couple hundred percent. So we'll chop their numbers by 75%. That still leaves well over 100,000 times a year. And you're right, we can't know about the rest of them because most people don't report such stuff. I didn't, on the occasion of a violent person trying to break down our back door in the middle of the night, but I guarantee that there would have been a violent outcome if he hadn't been run off. But that's just another anecdote that you don't have to worry about, since the formal studies wouldn't have it in their large numbers.