Blog Posts by Olivier Knox, Yahoo! News

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, in a Senate Judiciary Committee session on May 9, 2013. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)Playing hardball? Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas announced on Thursday that the IRS softball team (“The Cheetahs”—no, really) had canceled a planned faceoff against his office’s team ("The RBIs of Texas").

“We contacted them to confirm our game, which was scheduled for tomorrow night, and they said they needed to reschedule,” Cornyn spokesman Drew Brandewie told Yahoo News by email. “Guess they needed an extension.”

Cornyn has been among the IRS’ sharpest critics in the aftermath of revelations that it improperly subjected conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status to greater scrutiny than it imposed on liberal groups.

The Texas senator noted the IRS default on Facebook and Twitter.

Team Cornyn softball team was scheduled to play the IRS team on Friday, "the Cheetahs." Game has been cancelled... fb.me/1yMU1Y50V

— JohnCornyn (@JohnCornyn) May 16, 2013

President Barack Obama—exasperated by scandals, a seemingly stalled domestic agenda and armchair chiefs of staff in the media—wants to tell you what he really thinks, Washington. Really let you have it. In fact, he’s so frustrated with all of the inside-the-Beltway BS that he might hire an assassin to target him in a couple of days, but not before he’s really ripped politicians (especially Democrats), denounced the outsized weight of money in elections and used “socialism” as a rallying cry against health insurance companies.

Wait, what?

The New York Times reported on Thursday that Obama "has talked longingly of ‘going Bulworth,’ a reference to a little-remembered 1998 Warren Beatty movie about a senator who risked it all to say what he really thought."

“Probably every president says that from time to time,” the Times quoted longtime Obama adviser David Axelrod as saying. ''It's probably cathartic just to say it. But the reality is that while you want to be truthful, you want to be straightforward, you also want to be practical about whatever you're saying.''

The Times' description of the movie is a bit antiseptic. Bulworth, a disillusioned veteran Democratic senator from California facing a tough primary, takes out a rich life insurance policy on himself, with his daughter as beneficiary, and hires an assassin to kill him in a few days' time. Thinking he's going to die, Bulworth decides he has nothing to lose and hits the campaign trail skewering the state of politics—and notably the Democratic Party and race relations.

It’s easy to imagine Obama profoundly unhappy with the state of politics in the infancy of his second term. Most Americans, after all, loathe Congress, worry about the fitful economic recovery and are deeply skeptical that politicians or the media share their concerns.

And White House aides haven’t been shy about bluntly dismissing pundits second-guessing Obama’s strategy for advancing his agenda. (It bears noting, though, that even as those aides roll their eyes at the “Green Lantern Theory of Politics”—the idea that the president just needs to change things by force of will—or at the idea that he needs to cut more deals, or at calls for him to schmooze more with lawmakers, Obama has been putting all of that advice into practice.)

President Barack Obama arrives at the East Room of the White House, May 15, 2013, to deliver remarks on the IRS scandal. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)Bluntly declaring "I am angry" about the IRS scandal, President Barack Obama said late Wednesday that Treasury Secretary Jack Lew had forced out Steven Miller, the acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service. Speaking in the East Room of the White House, Obama called Miller's ouster "the first step" to prevent similar misconduct in the future and vowed to "do everything in my power" to make sure it never happens again.

Obama said he had reviewed the Treasury Department Inspector General's report that details how the IRS targeted conservative groups for special scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status.

"The misconduct that it uncovered is inexcusable. It's inexcusable, and Americans are right to be angry about it and I am angry about it," the president said in a brief prepared statement. "I will not tolerate this kind of behavior in any agency—but especially in the IRS, given the power that it has and the reach that it has into all of our lives."

Obama said the "responsible parties" will be held accountable. Lew "took the first step by requesting—and accepting—the resignation of the acting commissioner of the IRS because given the controversy surrounding this audit, it's important to institute new leadership that can help restore confidence going forward," Obama added.

Myanmar's president, Thein Sein, at the U.N. building in Bangkok on April 29. (Chaiwat Subprasom /Reuters)Straight up: This will only be of interest to foreign policy nerds and people interested in the fate of U.S. relations with this particular Asian country (Shoutout: Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Republican senate minority leader and resident expert in Congress on this issue).

The White House announced Wednesday that President Barack Obama will welcome President Thein Sein of Myanmar next week. It's a historic visit, part of a gradual patching-up of relations after decades of tension and U.S. economic sanctions.

Obama himself became the first sitting president to visit Myanmar in November 2012. But there's one catch: According to the State Department and the CIA, there's doesn't seem to be any such country. According to those agencies, Thein Sein leads "Burma."

It's a notable diplomatic reward. Obama used the name "Myanmar" during his visit there in November. Authorities there have long quested for Washington to recognize the name, but it's still quite rare among U.S. policymakers—and nearly unheard of in Congress.

Here's the State Department's take: "The military government changed the country name to "Myanmar" in 1989. It remains U.S. policy to refer to the country as Burma."

What does the Central Intelligence Agency have to say? This: "Since 1989 the military authorities in Burma, and the current parliamentary government, have promoted the name Myanmar as a conventional name for their state; the US Government has not adopted the name, which is a derivative of the Burmese short-form name Myanma Naingngandaw."

So why the change? National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden has the goods:

Attorney General Eric Holder during testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on March 6, 2013. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus pressed President Barack Obama on Tuesday to fire Attorney General Eric Holder. Priebus argued that the Justice Department had violated the First Amendment by scooping up phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors.

“Attorney General Eric Holder, in permitting the Justice Department to issue secret subpoenas to spy on Associated Press reporters, has trampled on the First Amendment and failed in his sworn duty to uphold the Constitution,” Priebus said in a statement emailed to reporters.

“Because Attorney General Holder has so egregiously violated the public trust, the president should ask for his immediate resignation,” Priebus said.

“If President Obama does not, the message will be unmistakable: The president of the United States believes his administration is above the Constitution and does not respect the role of a free press,” the RNC chief said.

President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron in the Oval Office on Monday, May 13, 2013. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)Exactly 10 days ago, President Barack Obama was piously telling reporters who cover him that free speech and an independent press are “essential pillars of our democracy.” On Monday, The Associated Press accused his administration of undermining that very pillar by secretly obtaining two months’ worth of telephone records of AP reporters and editors.

“We regard this action by the Department of Justice as a serious interference with AP’s constitutional rights to gather and report the news,” AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt wrote in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder.

The latest revelations are sure to pour fuel on the fire of Republican-driven Richard Nixon comparisons. They come in the wake of revelations that the IRS may have improperly scrutinized the tax-exempt status of conservative, tea party-linked groups. This might, in other words, not be a great time to announce a groundbreaking trip to China.

And the news threatens to pile fresh political woes on a second term already burdened by a painful gun-control defeat, a seemingly stalled economic agenda and Republican rage at the botched response to the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attack that killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya.

The revelations that the Justice Department may have sought AP phone records drew an angry response from Republican House Speaker John Boehner's office. “The First Amendment is first for a reason. If the Obama administration is going after reporters’ phone records, they better have a damned good explanation," said Boehner spokesman Michael Steel.

And Laura Murphy, a top American Civil Liberties Union official in Washington, D.C., condemned "unwarranted surveillance" of the press and urged Holder to explain what transpired "so that we can make sure this kind of press intimidation does not happen again.”

Holder was expected to face questions on the issue when he appears Wednesday before the House Judiciary Committee.

A spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office for the District of Columbia did not answer a question from Yahoo News on whether other news outlets had been targeted. The spokesman, Bill Miller, did not confirm the AP allegations, but insisted in a statement that "we take seriously our obligations to follow all applicable laws, federal regulations, and Department of Justice policies when issuing subpoenas for phone records of media organizations."

Pruitt, in his letter to Holder, fiercely disagreed.

President Barack Obama during a joint news conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron on Monday. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP

President Barack Obama on Monday furiously dismissed as a "political circus" Republican charges that his administration had misled the public about the Sept. 12, 2012, attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya. Obama said the accusations of a cover-up dishonor the memory of the four Americans killed in the onslaught.

"There’s no 'there' there,” Obama insisted during a joint question-and-answer session with British Prime Minister David Cameron at the White House. "And the fact that this keeps on getting churned out, frankly, has a lot to do with political motivations."

The president’s angry words came after news reports surfaced Friday that the White House had overseen a process that repeatedly watered down administration talking points on the attack, removing references to possible involvement by al-Qaida and to prior warnings about threats in Benghazi. Republicans have charged that the White House was worried about the potential political fallout from the spectacular terrorist attack during Obama's re-election campaign. The White House has repeatedly denied that it deliberately misled the public.

"The whole issue of talking points, frankly, throughout this process has been a sideshow," Obama said.

The talking points, which portrayed the attack as evolving from a demonstration of anger at an Internet video that mocked Islam, "pretty much matched the assessments that I was receiving at that time in my presidential daily briefing," he added, referring to his top-secret morning intelligence review with the CIA.

While protests against the video in Egypt led to an assault on the American embassy in Cairo, officials in Libya never reported a demonstration outside the compound in Benghazi before the assault that claimed the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

Obama aides have said that the decision to scrub references in the talking points to al-Qaida and another extremist group, Ansar al-Sharia, reflected the intelligence community's uncertainty about the role they played.

"Immediately after this event happened, we were not clear who exactly had carried it out, how it had occurred, what the motivations were," Obama said. "It happened at the same time as we had seen attacks on U.S. embassies in Cairo as a consequence of this film. And nobody understood exactly what was taking place during the course of those first few days."

The president also pointed to his first public remarks on the attack, in the Rose Garden on Sept. 12, 2012, when he lumped the events in Benghazi in with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist strikes as "acts of terror."

But he and other senior officials declined in subsequent days to label the attack the work of terrorists. And U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice linked the Benghazi assault to the Internet video when she appeared on morning news shows the first Sunday after the attack.

President Barack Obama (left) and British Prime Minister David Cameron leave their White House press conference on Monday. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)President Barack Obama declared Monday that Americans have the right to expect "absolute integrity" from the IRS and that it would be "outrageous" if the agency improperly targeted conservative political groups.

"This is pretty straightforward. If, in fact, IRS personnel engaged in the kind of practices that have been reported on and were intentionally targeting conservative groups, then that's outrageous, and there is no place for it," Obama said during a joint question-and-answer session with British Prime Minister David Cameron at the White House. "You don't want the IRS ever being perceived to be biased and anything less than neutral in terms of how they operate."

The president said he learned that the Internal Revenue Service may have improperly scrutinized the tax-exempt status of tea party-related groups when the news broke on Friday.

Obama's strong words followed an outcry from many Republicans over the IRS's apparent display of political bias. Maine Sen. Susan Collins, a GOP moderate, said Sunday that the IRS’s actions needed to be “personally condemned” by the president, who must “make crystal clear that this is totally unacceptable.”

Collins also called into question the IRS’s early claim that the improper behavior was the work of low-level staffers.