Last week was supposed to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week for President Obama. The IRS was doing something terrible. The Justice Department was doing something horrible. And in Washington, Republicans held hearings in which they stripped Hillary Clinton naked, tied her to a pole in the Capitol Rotunda, set her on fire, and danced and sang while she burned. No, actually, they threatened to shoot her in the vagina. (That part’s real.) And you know what happened after that? America just liked Hillary Clinton even more.

I respect Marines. I’ve known a few, know how rough and tough and loyal and committed they can be, both to each other and to their mission. I know I’ve never possessed the physical resources to be a Marine, and their “see the hill, take the hill” ethos has usually been refashioned to “see the donut, take the donut” in my own hands. They've given more and sacrificed more in defense of this country than I have at my piddly little keyboard.

As the immortal hip hop duo Mobb Deep rapped back in 1995, “ain’t no such thing as halfway crooks.” In "Shook Ones Pt. II," Prodigy warns, if you “speak the wrong words, man you will get touched.”
 
 
Given the actions of the Department of Justice this past week, it seems like they might know a little bit about that. In response to a report from the Associated Press in May of last year regarding a foiled bombing plot in Yemen, the DOJ launched a two-month-long probe into the AP’s phone records, netting communications information from more than 100 reporters and editors across multiple bureaus, according to AP estimates. In some cases, the secret probe extended to home and cell phone records as well, so the investigation was thorough.

Here’s a not-so-modest prediction about the near future of our politics:

 

• President Obama will be impeached within a year for one (or more) of the current “scandals” buzzing around his administration. Take your pick: Benghazi, the IRS, or the seizure of AP reporter phone records.

 

• When that happens, Amercia may become completely, finally ungovernable.

On Tuesday, Swedish photographer Paul Hansen, winner of the 2012 World Press Photo award for best picture, was vindicated of charges that his winning image was a “fraudulent forgery” following weeks of mudslinging by a handful of photo-purists who took issue with the way the picture was created.  The striking photograph, which depicts a group of Palestinians mourning two young victims of an Israeli missile strike, raised a stink due to its creative use of toning and Hansen's reliance on post-production processing techniques to add an emotive quality to the work.
 
 
 
 
In a strongly worded rebuke published on the photography blog...
I am so angry! I was reading this week how the Internal Revenue Service was found to be targeting certain conservative groups. C’mon guys, you’ve got some serious power at your disposal. You can make people’s lives miserable just by putting them on a list, and you’re wasting your time targeting the Tea Party? Really? Those guys don’t have any real influence.
 
 
But feel free to continue your targeting! We know you’ve been doing it for years now, so why hide anymore? Tell the public you’re providing a service and target the following.
The Jerusalem Post released its hotly anticipated "50 most influential Jews in the world" today, and all we can say is, there are probably a couple dozen mothers out there who are plotzing. So much better than being a dentist.
 
 
Below, I've singled out some favorites, particularly those with a local connection. Enjoy!
 
 
Binyamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel
 
 
Rank: No. 3
 
Local connection: Bibi went to Cheltenham High School, from which he graduated, and which obviously determined his success as a world leader. The best sentence on his entire Wiki page is this one: "To this day, he speaks American English with...
[caption id="attachment_343921" align="aligncenter" width="440" caption="PSU football coach Bill O'Brien is the highest-paid PA state employee."][/caption]
 
 
Last week, Deadspin published an infographic revealing that the highest-paid state employees in 80 percent of the U.S. are college football and basketball coaches. That includes Penn State football boss Bill O’Brien.
 
 
Cue the hysteria.
I could never be a Yeshiva student in Brooklyn. My new glasses are too cool for school.
 
 
Borough Park’s Bobover Yeshiva B’Nei Zion has banned students from wearing thick-framed, retro glasses because the now-chic eyewear represents “the new modernism,” the New York Post reports.

Well, at least Daniel Snyder never owned Chink’s Steaks.

 

Chink’s, you’ll remember, is the northeast Philly steak shop that changed its name to Joe’s Steaks + Soda Shop a couple of months ago, after years of protests that the name was insensitive to Asian-Americans. Shop owner Joe Groh wanted to expand his business, and he did—and he made the right decision, it appears: The shop just made Zagat’s list of Top 10 Philly “guilty pleasures” in part because the name change meant customers didn’t have to feel too guilty. Changing the name to reflect 21st-century sensibilities, it seems, was a smart move by Groh.

Hi there! I'm in your English 101 class with you, and you look like a nice person. Would you like to go out on a date with me?
 
 
No? Okay, well, never mind, then, I’ll just—
 
 
What? You say I sexually harassed you? How? By asking you out? Since when does that qualify as sexual harassment?
This is what comes of not obsessively Googling my own name: I missed that Fox News decided to quote me a week or two ago. Take a look at this video:
 
Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com
 
 
What’s weird: The quote comes from a column I wrote more than year ago for Scripps Howard News Service, back at the height of the Tim Tebow craze. I wasn’t a fan of Tebow’s “Look At My Awesome God!” antics, and said so.
 
 
“Most of us have learned to live with boundaries—to avoid thrusting our religion into arenas where it is unexpected or unwelcome,” I...
The New York Times recently fanned the flames of the controversy over whether many cases of ADD, and even ADHD, are actually cases of sleep deprivation. Every time this idea hits big media, the same reactions happen: Other media picks it up, overgeneralizes and twists it; camps are formed, and people go to (verbal) war.
Philadelphia's foodies are in a tizzy over video that surfaced this week showing a gaggle of rats enjoying after-hours pizza at the Green Eggs Cafe Midtown in Center City. The video has sparked an outpouring of revulsion on local social media, but I honestly don't know what all the fuss is about.
 
 
In her recent preview of Philadelphia magazine’s (excellent, by the way) new cover story, "The Ultimate Guide to Obamacare," editor Sandy Hingston urged readers to “not let Republicans scare you about healthcare.”
 
 
I’m a fan of Sandy’s but … ouch! I’m one of those “fear-mongering” Republicans. Worse, I’m a Republican business owner who’s also a certified public accountant. Please don’t hate me. I like puppies. Really, I do! I think Barbra Streisand is a great singer and Rachel Maddow is really smart (and kind of cute too). I went to an Earth Day event back in 2010, and I even wore...
 
 
It appears Al Gore is now "Romney-rich." That was the phrase used in a piece earlier this week by Bloomberg News, and repeated in an extensive New York magazine profile of the former vice president. Gore, according to Bloomberg, now has a personal net worth of around $200 million, money gleaned from the recent sale of his Current TV network, as well as his various investments since leaving public life. By comparison, the piece said, Gore's net worth at the time of his 2000 presidential bid was less than $2 million.

If President Obama asked you to renovate your house to include a new, tiny room where a government agent could sleep and listen to all of your family’s conversations—and could do so in secret, without you ever knowing whether the agent was there or not—how would you feel? Would you protest? Or would you build the room … and simply stop having candid discussions with your own family?

 
 
Online harassment is as old as the Internet itself, but the present-day scourge of so-called revenge porn—a morally corrupt subculture where online sleaze mongers host naked and/or sexually explicit photos of people (mostly young women) against their will, accompanied by links to their private information and Facebook pages—owes its existence largely to a soulless, pan-faced misogynist named Hunter Moore, whose now-defunct Isanyoneup.com exploded to cyber-infamy in 2011 and inspired a gaggle of degenerate wanna-bes to launch their own fly-by-night Web fiefdoms with names like Private Voyeur and ugotposted.com.
One of the things I hate most about the Internet is the comments section under any posts that address some marker of identity, be it gender, race or sexuality. The Real America lives in those comment spaces, finding a safe haven for things they are socialized not to say aloud. On the Internet, the Real America is protected by the cloak of anonymity. I've stopped scrolling to below the articles I read online, careful not to fall into the abyss of the comments section.
For the past few years, my colleague, health and fitness editor Emily Leaman, and I have worked together to produce our annual “Top Doctors” feature. This year, when we sat down with editor in chief Tom McGrath to plan what we’d do, there really only seemed to be one option. As Tom put it, “This is the only time we’ll ever be able to introduce our readers to Obamacare.”