I was thinking of making this a four panel cartoon at first, with the doggie growing progressively bigger and a caption, but the simple two panel format won out.  here is the line art that most people will see in their newspapers that print in black and white.

And here is the color.  Readers love the doggies.

I drew the cartoon below when Obama made his first statement about the IRS scandal.  here’s the black and white most people see.

And here’s the color.

Before that I did this one on the ongoing, outrageous, sexual assault scandals in the military.

And I drew this “Energizer Bunny” cartoon about the Benghazi Scandal that the Republicans can’t bear to see fade away.

There was a time when I would see an Energizer Bunny cliche editorial cartoon every week. Alas, those were the good old days.

Up until about an hour ago, most Americans thought Benghazi was the guy who palled around with John Cassavetes back in the ’60s, but now it’s obvious we’re talking about the foreign policy arm of a multi-ramped tar pit the president has found himself swimming — up to his armpits. Yes, friends, it’s pity time at the White House.

Daryl Cagle / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by Cagle)

After flogging the issue nonstop since September 11, the Fox News Team’s persistence finally pushed the story of the Libyan Embassy riot that resulted in the death of four Americans over the cliff into the public consciousness. Space available only because both Survivor and Duck Dynasty are on hiatus.

The hue and cry from the right is demanding many questions be answered. Was the protest planned or spontaneous? Did the group that initiated the attack have any affiliation with Arab terrorists? Who altered the talking points — the CIA or the State Department? Where were the drones? Queens? Wasps? Chigger mites? How many angels can dance on the head of a bent and broken Romney/Ryan pin? What would Cheney do?

Having taken all this in, the American people responded with what can only be characterized as even more penetrating questions such as: “Who cares? What difference does it make? Aren’t we stuffed to the gills with enough partisan gobbled-goop already? Does anyone really give an albino rat’s ass? Isn’t there a seafood buffet around here somewhere?”

The revelations have been as startling as mint jelly on lamb. Tragic, violent events occurring in the Middle East? Oh no! Not that. Perpetual infighting amongst government agencies? That couldn’t happen here, could it? Republicans accusing a Democratic administration of not being patriotic enough? What are the odds?

Next you’ll tell me the Justice Department investigation of the Justice Department’s seizure of AP reporters’ phone records will lead to the Justice Department concluding that the Justice Department did nothing wrong. The public’s eyes are glazing over like a fifth-grader lectured on the nutritional aspects of broccoli rabe.

Haven’t we been told for the last twenty, thirty years that Libya is a godless pit of iniquity and now they want us to heap truckloads of blame onto our own guys because someone got killed over there? After they themselves voted down additional money for embassy security? Another example of that whole “dynamite the front steps then complain what a pain it is to climb into the house on a rope ladder” school of logic.

But the GOP remains convinced they have the administration on the run, and is calling for all sorts of investigative committees and dedicated inquiry boards and pretty soon it will be special prosecutors and courtrooms full of hopping kangaroos and then pointy sticks and barbed wire and dungeon doors with keys specifically designed to be thrown away. Just in time for the midterms.

And if everything goes according to plan, Hillary Clinton and her nascent 2016 Presidential run will wither and rot behind the same Benghazi charges. But the Republicans must know how tricky this sort of maneuver can be. As with all smoke screens, you have to pay real close attention to which way the wind blows, or you could easily end up choking on the same stuff you’re spreading.

Recipient of seven consecutive nominations for Stand-Up of the Year, Will Durst’s new one-man show, “BoomerAging: From LSD to OMG,” is presented every Tuesday at The Marsh, San Francisco. Go to… themarsh.org or willdurst.com for more info.

Copyright ©2013, Will Durst, distributed by the Cagle Cartoons Inc. syndicate. Contact Cari Dawson-Bartley at cari@cagle.com. Will Durst is a political comedian who has performed around the world. He is a familiar pundit on television and radio. E-mail Will at durst@caglecartoons.com. Check out willandwillie.com for the latest podcast. Will Durst’s book, “The All-American Sport of Bipartisan Bashing,” is available from Amazon and better bookstores all over this great land of ours. Don’t forget to check out his rooftop comedy minutes at: http://www.rooftopcomedy.com/shows/BurstOfDurst.

Taylor Jones / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by Jones)

Rhee attracted a lot of attention before getting the top spot in DC. When Mayor Adrian Fenty appointed her superintendent, she went from managing an education non-profit with 120 employees to running a school system with 55,000 students, 11,500 employees and a budget of $200 million. She’d never even been a principal before, and her only classroom experience was Teach for America.

She did not let seem daunted by the stage. She bragged that she only answered to the mayor and put principals on notice to get those test scores up. Rhee fired more than 1,000 teachers and 36 principals who failed to raise test scores and gave $276,265 in bonuses to employees who performed well.

Passing rates rose, and she became the “it girl” for education reform. Time and Newsweek put her on the cover. Oprah called her “a warrior woman,” and Barack Obama called Rhee “a wonderful new superintendent.” When Fenty lost re-election, Sec. Arne Duncan intervened in an attempt to keep her on the job because her reforms “absolutely have to continue.” When Rhee quit, he issued a press release so laudatory it almost included pom-poms.

Her star rose even further when the documentary Waiting for Superman touted Rhee as a national success. She went back on Oprah to announce she was creating an education reform project called Students First to spread her reforms to other communities. “I am going to start a revolution. I’m going to start a movement in this country on behalf of the nation’s children,” Rhee told Oprah.

Unfortunately, her success was a fraud. In 2011, USA Today identified abnormally high rates of wrong-to-right erasures that coincided with big jumps in test scores in more than half of all DC schools. And according to a “smoking gun” internal DCPS memo released recently, it was worse that suspected. There was evidence of excessive erasures by “191 teachers representing 70 schools,” yet Rhee did nothing to investigate.

Cheating is nothing new in high-stakes testing. Between 2008-2012, test-cheating scandals have occurred in 37 states and in the District of Columbia, but the cult of Rhee’s success has driven similar reforms in 25 states according to Students First. But if Rhee faked her success, why are we copying her?

A new study from The Broader, Bolder Approach to Education out Thursday discredits the fundamental assumption that market-based reforms produce results in education. The study, coauthored by a former program manager for Pearson Education, examined the claims of progress in DC and two other reform-driven school systems and found that test scores regressed and achievement gaps grew relative to other urban school districts.

Where Rhee claimed success, the report found that National Assessment of Education Progress “scores showed minimal-to-no improvement for low-income and minority students, and some losses. Moreover, higher scores were due in most cases not to actual improvements for any age group, but to an influx of wealthier students.”

There was no DC miracle. Browbeating students and teachers into raising scores on state tests only makes them better at taking—or faking—state tests, and reforming our schools in hopes of replicating an illusion is a petty crime against humanity. Even George W. Bush was forced to admit there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and we’ve long since gotten over the shock that Barry Bonds and Mark McGuire were juiced more than a Florida orange grove. We believe lies at our own peril. It’s time to stop waiting for Superman and focus on the hard work of teaching our children the way we know works.

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© Copyright 2013 Jason Stanford, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Jason Stanford is a Democratic consultant who writes columns for the Austin American-Statesman and MSNBC. He can be reached at stanford@oppresearch.com and on Twitter @JasStanford.

This week, the pack of cartoonists all ran in the direction of comparing Barack Obama with Richard Nixon because of Obama’s worsening three scandals: the AP records seizure, Benghazi and the IRS.  I draw metamorphosis cartoons every so often, when the news seems to be calling out for them.  Here is the line art for Obama turning into Nixon, which most readers will see in newspapers that print in black and white.

Here’s the color version.

Just after the presidential election, the folks at Fox News were apoplectic about their loss, and ranted that Obama would be free to be the wild, radical leftist they knew he was all along, now that he was freed from the constraints of needing to be re-elected.  So I drew this metamorphosis cartoon.

Back when Apple was rejecting my iPhone app applications, I drew this Apple metamorphosis cartoon …

And I drew this one when Disney bought Marvel Comics.

Cartoonists draw evolution themed cartoons all the time – which are pretty similar to metamorphosis, I guess.  Here is Mitt Romney, and his evolving views about evolution, from back in 2007.

Here’s an evolving Donald Trump from 2011.

And a general evolution of man cartoon …

Cartooning, evolution and metamorphosis! It’s a tradition!  I’m working on another one today.

Daryl Cagle / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by Cagle)

On September 11, 2012, he got his “opportunity.” Our embassy in Benghazi, Libya was overtaken and four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were killed. Mitt condemned the President of the United States that same day, suggesting that Obama “sympathized with the attackers.” That’s right. The man who made the call to shoot Osama bin Laden in the head was suddenly a terrorist sympathizer because Romney wanted to be Reagan and needed a Carter.

Would cheerfully ginning up the events in Benghazi win Romney the White House? No, his accusations were offensive and demonstrably untrue.

But losing an election means nothing to Republicans. They’ve had nine congressional hearings about Benghazi. What have they uncovered? The fact that you can have nine congressional hearings and uncover nothing.

According to the Global Terrorism Database amassed by the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, there were 64 attacks on diplomatic targets during the Bush Administration. Still, former veep Dick Cheney said of Benghazi, “I think it’s one of the worst incidences, frankly, that I can recall in my career.” Having the memory of a goldfish must be very soothing.

Benghazi is a cynical attempt to gain traction with a nontroversy. The more Congress spends time investigating, the less time they have to spend being ineffective at negotiating with the President. In other words, doing their jobs. Under John Boehner’s leadership the 112th Congress passed just 219 bills that became laws. The least since we’ve been counting; half the amount of a normal Congress in a two-year term.

But what about all the other scandals!?

Since the president who touted torture as a foreign policy, lied us into two quagmires and outed an undercover CIA agent in retaliation for her husband’s New York Times op/ed, has been out of office for a couple of years, our bar for scandal is pretty low.

The IRS uproar is an example. In the wake of Citizens United, the only agency with the authority to oversee tax exemptions has every right to be skeptical of non-profit 501(c)(4)s. These groups, after all, are begging for a government handout under the guise of providing “social welfare.” Plus they’re allowed the anonymity of their donors. Some tea partiers want to see all welfare recipients take drug tests, you’d think a couple of extra questions on an application would be warranted. According to the Inspector General’s report, of the 300 groups who were flagged by the Cincinnati IRS office for greater scrutiny, only 100 were tea party groups. The other two-thirds—the vast majority of those flagged? Liberal groups. Other non-profits. Has the tea party fallen victim to the worst injustice since colonialism, slavery and the Inquisition combined? Most definitely.

Is this a scandal? Meh. Will this exist everlastingly in the mouth foam of those with Obama-as-Hitler placards? You bet!

The Department of Justice bypassing courts and seizing Associated Press phone records is this week’s only real scandal, the only breaking news story that deals with a violation of Constitutional rights. It’s a clear infringement of the free press. It also happens to be a violation that George W. Bush committed as a matter of policy. The right wing was fine with it when a Republican did it.

But now that it’s Obama’s DOJ it’s a bit less palatable.

The difficulty for the right-wing Indignation Industrial Complex is that they don’t like the press. They only like their press. But they also dislike Obama.

Getting the right wing up in arms over the DOJ intimidating a mainstream media outlet — or even more to the point — a cracking down on whistleblowers within the government — could be tricky. Because the enemy of your enemy isn’t as intriguing as innuendo and just making stuff up.

Or as a tea partier I was on television with this week put it, “We still haven’t seen the birth certificate yet!”

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© Copyright 2013 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of TheContributor.com. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

— Mantra of those who opposed HillaryCare in the 1990s.

In the idealistic constitutional fantasies of those who harbor high hopes and short memories, the accumulating effect of the scandals piling up like rotting garbage at the front door of the White House will result in the impeachment and removal from office of Barack Hussein Obama, 44th President of the United States. Despite the dog and pony show Congress will inevitably put on, no such scenario will ever play itself out.

Daryl Cagle / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by Cagle)

Like Bill Clinton, Obama will never relinquish control of the empire the American people have allowed him to create for himself. And unless the United States Senate magically becomes populated with 67 clones of Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, there will never exist a quorum of statesmen willing to remove the modern day equivalent of what Nixon aide John Dean called “a cancer growing on the presidency.”

While Benghazi-gate is the scandal that could most easily be laid directly at Obama’s feet, the atmosphere created by a huge, out-of-control, left-leaning government (and a president who likes it that way) is symptomatic of why we are experiencing such rapid erosion of our freedom. To utilize the tortured term for political scandal even further, this atmosphere is how we ended up with IRS-gate, AP-gate and who knows what other gates?

Obama was right about one thing: what is needed is fundamental change — and it must start with our federal tax code. The 16th Amendment to the United States Constitution states: “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration.” To those 30 words, over the last century, Congress has added so many thousands of pages of rules, restrictions, regulations, exemptions and officious gobbledygook that we now have a government entity that no one trusts and everyone fears.

Complete and total repeal of the 16th Amendment is the only way to forever drive a stake through the heart of the liberty-sucking vampire known as the Internal Revenue Service. Tinkering around the edges will not suffice. A flat tax will not do it, because the IRS remains behind as the most powerful and odious collection agency on the planet.

America needs the Fair Tax — a national sales tax that replaces all federal taxes on income, including payroll taxes that support Social Security and Medicare.

Space does not permit me to detail the benefits of the Fair Tax. If you are truly interested in it, look it up at www.fairtax.org. Bold, conservative members of Congress like Steve King of Iowa and John Linder of Georgia (the original sponsor of the legislation in the House of Representatives) have been elected repeatedly on its merits.

The Fair Tax would allow each of us to keep every dime we earn. We would then pay a federal sales tax on all new consumer items. You, not your congressman, would decide how much tax you paid. What could you do with the extra funds if you were taking home that gross figure every payday rather than the so-called “net,” which is nothing more than what the federal government allows you to keep?

Picture a trillion dollar anchor being dragged through our economy every year, with half the population having no skin in the game. And we wonder why we are sliding toward banana republic welfare-state status.

Imagine no more April 15th. No more receipts. No more endless forms. No more manipulating your income or outgo to reflect what the feds want you to do. No more undeclared hidden income from shadowy activities. No more playing favorites, deciding who receives or who is denied tax exempt status. No more abuse of a powerful agency by bureaucrats trying to please their tyrannical bosses to punish their political enemies. Imagine not having to tell the government how much you earn, because it is none of their business!

So don’t bother imagining no more Obama. Imagine instead no more IRS. Study the issue and then call your congressman. The will of the people could make this happen.

© 2013 by Doug Patton – Doug Patton describes himself as a recovering political speechwriter who agrees with himself more often than not. His weekly columns are distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For more info contact Cari Dawson Bartley at cari@cagle.com. Readers are encouraged to email him at dpatton@cagle.com and/or to follow him on Twitter at @Doug_Patton.

Steve Sack / Minneapolis Star Tribune (click to view more cartoons by Sack)

President Roosevelt used the IRS to intimidate and exact revenge on political enemies. Richard Nixon, JFK and Clinton co-opted the agency into a partisan sledgehammer designed to ruin lives and crush honest political opposition.

John Andrew’s 2002 book, “The Power to Destroy,” unearths these dank political corpses, destroying whatever naive notions you may have of those storybook figures.

What’s most heinous is that a President would use the IRS to intimidate and harass ordinary Americans who believe a smaller, more effective government is best for their country and legally enjoy their constitutional right to assembly, sharing knowledge and education with fellow citizens.

Apparently, that’s a serious threat to Mr. Obama.

The idea that a small group of rogue Midwestern agents decided to ruin their careers by illegally targeting nonprofit organizations whose names include the words “Tea Party” or “Patriot” and had a mission of constitutional education is absurd. It’s even more absurd when you know the history of former presidents who have misused the IRS combined with the history of President Obama.

Here are some examples of the President’s previous duplicitous behavior:

Mr. Obama has often regaled supporters with an emotional delivery of his “Thanks for your vote; I wish I could close Guantanamo” monologue.

Constitutional lawyers have written gigabytes on how Obama can close Guantanamo.

The ways to do it include applying the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, giving the president power to wage war against al-Qaeda and its affiliates. The NDAA authorizes the president to detain enemy combatants and forbids him from transferring Guantanamo detainees to American soil.

The NDAA does not ban the President from releasing detainees. Lawyers have written that section 1028 authorizes him to release them to foreign countries that will accept them. That’s all he has to do. It may not be a very bright thing to do, but he can do it.

The President also has the power to end the hostilities with al-Qaeda by declaring our War on Terror with al-Qaeda is over. Ended. Done.

Such a declaration would result in the release of all the Guantanamo prisoners.

Do you think he really believes in the green energy schemes and was tricked by really smart campaign bundlers, or, rather, that he knew all along from government accountants and analysts that these companies were going bankrupt and he just wanted their millions of campaign dollars?

Report after report shows the Obama administration knew these companies were going bankrupt and that some of their technologies would not work. Still, the millions of dollars in bundled campaign contributions from their executives and commissioned venture capital firms flowed into Democratic bank accounts.

Billions of taxpayer dollars then flowed into the green scheme accounts of companies like bankrupt Solyndra, Abound Solar, SpectraWatt and Evergreen Solar.

He has used his executive power to obstruct the investigation into ATF gun-running to Mexican drug lords and is blocking the testimony of a Benghazi whistleblower.

His marketing group, Organizing for America, is engaged in a smear campaign of another Benghazi whistleblower, veteran diplomat Gregory Hicks.

President Obama and Eric Holder have also been caught spying on Associated Press reporters, stealing records of outgoing calls for both the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery.

If you can ignore these behaviors and many more, then perhaps the idea that our President was unaware of his IRS illegally intimidating and harassing innocent fellow Americans is possible.

Perhaps you can also believe he wasn’t behind this illegal harassment and intimidation of innocent fellow Americans that just happened to occur during the last Presidential election cycle.

Perhaps.

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© Copyright 2013 Rick Jensen, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Rick Jensen is Delaware’s Award-Winning Conservative Talk Show Host on 1150AM WDEL and 93.7FM HD3, Streaming live on WDEL.Com from 1pm — 4pm EST. Contact Rick at rick@wdel.com, or follow him on Twitter@JensenVoiceover.

Eric Allie / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by Allie)

PPACA massively expands and empowers the same IRS that President Obama himself admits is an out-of-control agency that is being ineffectively managed by his administration. And it also creates sweeping new powers for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which is being engulfed in its own scandal that, most likely, Obama will also claim to know nothing about.

According to the Government Accountability Office, Obamacare creates 47 broad new tax and regulatory powers for the IRS, including taxes on individuals, employers, health insurance providers, and medical device manufacturers. Implementing these taxes and attendant regulatory requirements will mean collecting a vast amount of data, including sensitive health information.

The IRS has already proven itself unworthy of such new powers. Not only in its systematic targeting of political enemies, shamefully including those groups “educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights,” which was supposed to be a fix to early targeting based on the words “tea party” and “patriot.” These groups were, illegally, asked to reveal their membership lists and answer detailed intrusive questions. And while hundreds of conservative groups opposed to PPACA and its vast expansion of IRS power were stalled for over two years, liberal groups engaging in the exact same activities were approved quickly with no questions asked.

It is not an open question whether IRS abuse of power will extend to PPACA implementation; it has already happened. The same IRS commissioner, Douglas Shulman (a Democrat originally appointed by President Bush and retained by President Obama) who told Congress falsely, “There’s absolutely no targeting,” also spearheaded an illegal IRS rulemaking that effectively blocks states from exercising their lawful right under PPACA to opt out of the law’s vast new taxpayer-funded subsidies and employer penalty taxes.

Michael Carvin of Jones Day, the lead counsel in a recently filed lawsuit against the rule said: “The IRS rule we are challenging is at war with the Act’s plain language and completely rewrites the deal that Congress made with the states on running these insurance exchanges.”

So the same IRS that steamrolled political opponents is already overstepping its new health care powers to steamroll states. And the IRS is also, in a separate lawsuit, accused of illegally seizing 60 million private health record of 10 million individuals.

Meanwhile, the other lead agency in PPACA implementation has its own scandal. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has been calling corporate CEOs and shaking them down for donations to a left-wing group called Enroll America to aggressively promote PPACA and urge people to sign up for the law’s new entitlement program. Her actions violate several federal laws, and any other week it would have been a lead story instead of relegated to the number four scandal slot.

And while Sebelius is dialing-for-dollars, she is also reallocating money from a slush fund created by the law toward public relations and political activity instead of using it to help people with preexisting conditions. About 40,000 people with preexisting conditions will go without any coverage this year because Sebelius chose to end enrollment in the federal Preexisting Condition Insurance Plan in order to instead fund TV advertising and grants to lobbying groups. So HHS is abusing taxpayer dollars as well as shaking down private citizens for coerced donations, all to maximize spending on their political push to build support for the unpopular law, instead of actually helping sick people.

The scandals will only get worse. Government is already, by David Axelrod’s admission, too vast for the president to understand, let alone effectively manage. And it is spinning further out of control, with the health of the American people in the balance. Health care is simply too important to subject to politics and bureaucratic manipulation. It’s time to repeal PPACA and start over with real health care reform that empowers patients and doctors, not the IRS and HHS.

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© Copyright 2013 Phil Kerpen, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Mr. Kerpen is the president of American Commitment and the author of “Democracy Denied.” Kerpen can be reached at phil@americancommitment.org.