This story just keeps getting stranger and stranger as Mayor Bloomberg weighs in on the potential electoral disaster predicted by the Board of Elections:  He wants to bring back the mechanical lever machines. The rest of the country have long left the lever voting machine with the horse and buggy. To provide a bit of context, the lever machine first saw service in New York in 1892.  Yes, that is no typo, 1892.  It is so old, there is a lever machine on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. 

After the Board of Elections complained they would be unprepared to
handle the new electronic machines for the upcoming mayoral election,
Mayor Michael Bloomberg is calling for the agency to bring back the
lever voting machines.

Link to Watchdog story.

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Link.

I will be discussing the Justice Department, the AP, the IRS and the swirl of scandal.  Tonight, top of the hour, Fox Biz.

A very very familiar sight to many of us: “It sounded like people were running wild, doing what they wanted because they could.”

More:

“The task then is to make the unthinkable impossible again; to restore the belief that bad things won’t come in night. For in the end everyone has his turn at power; every party has its time in office. Robert Bolt put the argument succinctly in A Man for all Seasons, when Thomas More explained why he would not trash the law. The law is all we have to keep us off each other’s throats. Destroy the law and all the bets are off. . . . And that really sums it up. The challenge to resolving the scandals is not simply to leave someone holding the bag; to pin it on somebody and return to the same old bad behavior — but to convince everyone — both from the Left and the Right — that these things will never reoccur, that the remainder of second term will be different from the first, and that a third term, will all it implies, can never ever come.”

The Foundry discusses some of the crimes which may have been committed with IRS officials targeted election integrity organizations.  Yesterday Rep. Ted Poe grilled Eric Holder about DOJ and the IRS targeting True the Vote. 

And ABC analyst has said what this blog reported yesterday: that there are a very few number of people in the administration who were 1) obsessed with speech regulation 2) had attacked tea party groups, and 3) had the clout to get the IRS to behave in this fashion.

ABC Link here.  ABC analyst drops bombshell: People very close to Obama authorized IRS actions

“Advisors in the West Wing connected to the campaign operation” were involved in authorizing the IRS behavior. 

As I said yesterday, there are very few people who were at the White House obsessed with speech regulation and also connected with the campaign at the time this plan was hatched.

Some questions to ask: how many of the outside speech regulators, those in favor of government restrictions on campaigns, were visiting the White House, and who were they visiting at the time this plan was hatched in 2010?  The list of people who satisfy points 1-3 above is very short.  Stay tuned.

Illinois is poised to allow 17 year old teenagers vote in primaries and the suburb city of Takoma Park, Maryland has lowered the age to vote in local elections to 16.

President Barack Obama on Wednesday announced the resignation of the
top official at the Internal Revenue Service following a controversy
over the agency’s targeting of conservative political groups.

Link.