"The decision, and the left's predictably overwrought response to it, underscore a contradiction in the contemporary liberal worldview. 'Corporate power is too big,' fumed Sally Kohn on CNN this morning. 'The Supreme Court is doing the bidding of big business.'

"But Hobby Lobby brought this lawsuit in the name of conscience, not profit. And isn't it usually liberals who fault corporations for being insufficiently conscientious?"

"Americans are losing confidence in all three branches of government, as confidence in the Supreme Court and Congress has dropped to record lows and the White House has hit a six-year dip, according to a new poll. 

"In a Gallup poll released Monday, 30 percent of Americans expressed confidence in the Supreme Court, 7 percent in Congress and 29 percent in the presidency. 

"The numbers represent the lowest levels of confidence that Gallup has recorded for both the legislative and judicial branch since the poll question began being asked regularly in 1991. The executive branch experienced the largest decrease in confidence level, down 8 percentage points since 2013, compared to the 7-percentage-point drop for the Supreme Court and a 7-point dip for Congress."

"Three cheers for right-wing obstructionism. Can we have more, please, and louder? 

"This week's unanimous Supreme Court ruling on President Obama's illegal recess appointments is a double smackdown. First, it's a rebuke against arrogant White House power-grabbers who thought they could act with absolute impunity and interminable immunity. Second, the ruling is a reproach of all the establishment pushovers on Capitol Hill who put comity above constitutional principle. ... 

"Thanks to patriotic obstructionism, this should and will be far from the last rebuke. Continued accommodation of this control-freak president and his cronies is suicide. There are only two responsible replies to a Constitution-trampling, end-run executive unilaterally declaring, 'Yes, I can':

"1) 'No, you can't.'

"2) 'Hell no, you can't.'"

"The Democratic mantra for more than a year now has been that there’s no evidence that the targeting was directed by anyone higher than Lois Lerner. Now the mantra has an addendum — some of the material that potentially could indicate otherwise has gone missing. ... 

"Even if the original destruction of Lerner’s correspondence was an innocent coincidence, all of this reeks of bad faith and is itself scandalous. We aren’t talking about getting to the bottom of wrongdoing at the U.S. Board on Geographic Names or the Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization. This is the IRS, the most intrusive and demanding agency of the federal government that will destroy you unless you deal with it honestly and make your life an open book on its say-so. Yet it can’t straightforwardly cooperate with a investigation into misconduct that — once upon a time — outraged even the president of the United States."

"Are we seeing a full-scale Democratic Party meltdown? We might be. 

"The most recent polling shows the president at all-time lows. This matters because presidential approval has, in the past, been a key factor in the results of midterm elections. ... 

"The president is backing his party into a corner. The health-care rollout has cast a permanent shadow on the 2014 election."

"Testifying in front of the House Oversight Committee Monday night, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen was asked for details surrounding the alleged 'computer crash' and 'lost' emails belonging to former head of tax exempt organizations Lois Lerner and six other IRS officials. When asked who told him about the 'crash' in April, Koskinen says he doesn't remember who in his agency told him about the crash because 'it was the middle of filing season.'  

"'I do not recall who told me, no,' Koskinen said. 'I don't remember when I was told or by whom.'"

"The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) cancelled its longtime relationship with an email-storage contractor just weeks after ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s computer crashed and shortly before other IRS officials’ computers allegedly crashed. 

"The IRS signed a contract with Sonasoft, an email-archiving company based in San Jose, California, each year from 2005 to 2010.  ... 

"Sonasoft was providing 'automatic data processing' services for the IRS throughout the January 2009 to April 2011 period in which Lerner sent her missing emails.

"But Sonasoft’s six-year business relationship with the IRS came to an abrupt end at the close of fiscal year 2011, as congressional investigators began looking into the IRS conservative targeting scandal and IRS employees’ computers started crashing left and right."

"Of the much-discussed eight million Americans who have signed up for Obamacare, the 'vast majority ... are receiving financial assistance,' according to a Department of Health and Human Services report released this week. What that means is this: Of the eight million, about 85 percent, or 6.8 million, actually paid for coverage. Of those, about 87 percent, or 5.9 million, receive taxpayer-paid subsidies to help them pay. 

"In other words, nearly everyone who has bought insurance through the Obamacare exchanges has done so with money from the government. And the subsidies are significant — an average of $264 a month, according to HHS. The average monthly premium is $346, according to the report, so minus the $264 subsidy, the average subsidy recipient is paying a net cost of $82 a month for coverage. The government pays the rest. ...

"The problem is, for those who are not eligible for subsidies, or for those eligible only for smaller subsidies, Obamacare still presents higher premiums, higher deductibles, and narrow networks of doctors and hospitals."

"The IRS’s claim that it lost the e-mails of multiple key employees, at precisely the moment that Congress began looking into the agency’s unethical and illegal political persecutions, challenges even the most credulous mind. ... 

"The IRS’s version of events heaps implausibility upon implausibility upon implausibility. And given the agency’s well-established history of dishonesty regarding its political persecutions — Lerner’s staged press-conference questions, misleading of congressional investigators — the possibility that the agency’s executives are flat-out lying to Congress and to the public cannot be discounted. ... 

"We have no doubt that Lois Lerner’s hard drive has in fact been compromised. We’d be shocked if it hadn’t been. Goodness knows what else is being done with evidence while Congress proceeds at its customary majestic pace. The question here is not only the crime that has been committed but whether there is a crime in progress."

"'Congressional investigators are fuming over revelations that the Internal Revenue Service has lost a trove of emails to and from a central figure in the agency’s tea-party controversy.' 

"That’s the opening sentence of the Associated Press story on the IRS’s claim that it lost an unknown number of e-mails over two years relating to the agency’s alleged targeting of political groups hostile to the president.  ... 

"Is it really so hard to imagine that if this were a Republican administration, the story wouldn’t be the frustration of partisan critics of the president? It would be all about that administration’s behavior. With the exception of National Journal’s Ron Fournier, who called for a special prosecutor to bypass the White House’s 'stonewalling,' and former CBS correspondent Sharyl Attkisson, it’s hard to find a non-conservative journalist who thinks this is a big deal. ...  

"The storied City News Bureau of Chicago famously lived by the motto 'If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.' The bureau closed down several years ago. Perhaps that kind of skepticism died with it."