• Eric Hananoki @ Media Matters: 8 Reasons Allen West Is The Perfect Fox News Contributor.
• Steve Benen @ The Maddow Blog: There were meaningful Benghazi lies after all.
• Tim Murphy @ Mother Jones: The Next Senator From Georgia Will Probably be Nuts.
• Eric Lach @ TPM: The Daily Caller Accuses Obama Of Breaching ‘Marine Umbrella Protocol.’
• Rebecca Leber @ Think Progress: Rewriting History: GOP Senator Pretends He Voted For Expanded Background Checks.

• How worried is Michele Bachmann about retaining her seat in Congress?  She is already running campaign ads.
• Gary Bauer and Frank Gaffney will headline the American Decency Association summer conference.
• Nice try, Sarah Palin.
• Glenn Beck featured a round-table of Religious Right pastors last night talking about abortion and America's "spiritual darkness."
• Finally, CBN issued a statement in response to Pat Robertson's advice to a wife to get over her husband's infidelity by accepting the fact that men just cheat by claiming that was not what he meant and "we regret any misunderstanding."

Religious Right activist John Stemberger is continuing his fight against a proposal to end the Boy Scouts of America's ban on gay members, telling Tim Wildmon of the American Family Association that "anything that has the word 'gay' on it in our culture ... [is] guaranteed to be inappropriate for kids."

Wildmon asked why gay activists don't just start their own Gay Scouts of America program instead of forcing this sort of change on the Boy Scouts, which prompted Stemberger to respond that gay activists want to "flaunt their sexuality [and] promote political, social agenda" to children, which is just utterly inappropriate.

"You look at anything that has the world 'gay' on it in our culture," Stemberger said, "a gay magazine, a gay blog, a gay website, a gay parade, you name it, it's gonna be guaranteed to be inappropriate for kids. And that's what we're talking about; we talking about injecting hyper-sexuality and a leftist political agenda right into the veins of the Boy Scouts and it will utterly devastate it":

Along with Steve King, Republican congressman Steve Stockman of Texas also appeared on The Steve Deace Show last night to criticize the push for comprehensive immigration reform and President Obama’s speech in Mexico City.

Stockman claimed Obama “basically told everybody in Mexico our doors are open, come up, come up, please,” and that they’re “all going to have a great time because y’all are going to be legal.” “He’s going to be the President of the United States and Mexico,” Stockman said.

After touting the very, very discredited Heritage Foundation report on the immigration bill, Stockman later insisted that “there will never be another Republican president and the entire agenda of the left will become the law of the land” if Congress passes a reform bill: “This is the rope that they’re hanging us and we’re going to hang ourselves with it and we’re willingly doing it.”

Stockman: It’s a horrible bill. It legalizes—I don’t know if you remember this Steve but you go down and look in Mexico, about two weeks ago the President went down there and basically told everybody in Mexico our doors are open, come up, come up, please! They were cheering him. He’s going to be the President of the United States and Mexico, apparently. And when he gave that speech it was tantamount to saying y’all come up here, we’re all going to have a great time because y’all are going to be legal.

Deace: People are finally doing the math on this. Now you’ve got Byron York at the Washington Examiner doing this math, you have National Review doing this math with Andrew McCarhty—

Stockman: Heritage Foundation.

Deace: Heritage Foundation. What they’re finding is, if this is your panacea to get the Hispanic vote you better try harder because Romney was going to have to win 73 percent of the Hispanic vote to win this last election and obviously this is not going to help that at all. I still don’t see what the benefit is to this for people paying taxes and obeying the law and silly me congressman I think we ought to pursue legislation that benefits the people paying taxes and obeying the law.

Stockman: Let me say this. Reagan passed comprehensive immigration reform, which was supposed to be the last time we ever needed to do it. After he passed it, California went totally Democrat. They have two Democrat senators, a Democrat legislature, a Democrat governor and you’re going to continue to see that if we pass this. There will never be another Republican president and the entire agenda of the left will become the law of the land. This is the rope that they’re hanging us and we’re going to hang ourselves with it and we’re willingly doing it because we’re intimidated by the press and intimidated by political consultants in the Republican Party who say this is what we need to do as to hang ourselves.

Rep. Steve King attacked the proposed immigration reform legislation during an appearance on The Steve Deace Show last night, warning that the bill will do great damage to “American liberty” and “the underpinnings of the pillars of American exceptionalism.” He said that undocumented immigrants, whom he believes are approximately 33 million in number, and their children and grandchildren will “be taught to disrespect” the rule of law and collect tens of thousands of dollars in welfare benefits.

King maintained that Democrats are only pushing the reform bill in order to create a voting bloc “similar to that bloc that they have created out of African Americans,” describing Hispanics as a “special interest group” that will become part of the Democrats’ “powerful political base.”

It destroys the rule of law with regard to immigration and if that happens the generations of people who would follow, those beneficiaries of amnesty, would not be taught and raised to respect the rule of law, they’d be taught to disrespect it and they would be rewarded for disrespecting the law. The only claim that this 11.5 million people that’s more legitimately projected to be 33 million people, the only claim to the welfare benefits that range up into the area of $46,000 a year for typical benefits for a household, the only claim that the people have for that is that they broke American law. That is the wrong reason, it’s the wrong thing, it’s wrong economically, it’s wrong culturally, it’s wrong for the underpinnings of the pillars of American exceptionalism such as the rule of law and there’s no way that Americans benefit from this. When we ask the question, why? There is no real reason except Barack Obama and the Democrat Party [sic] for a long time have been seeking to create a monolithic voting bloc out of Hispanics that is similar to that bloc that they have created out of African Americans and they have designs to go right on down the line with each special interest group, creating a more powerful political base at the expense of our American liberty.

Upon news that Republicans altered emails from government officials to make it appear that the State Department was engaged in a cover-up of the attack in Benghazi, Sen. Rand Paul attempted to revive the non-scandal in his column for the Washington Times.

Paul writes that “[Gregory] Hicks testified that he spoke with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on the night of the attack and that a special-forces unit was stopped from deploying.”

I think Mr. Obama has failed that test of power. From the cover-up in Benghazi to letting the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) target the Tea Party to First and Fourth Amendment violations in obtaining records from the press, Mr. Obama has shown disregard for the Bill of Rights and his responsibilities as commander in chief.

The handling of the tragedy in Benghazi continues to raise more questions than it produces answers. The White House’s original story, that no one was told to “stand down” on the night of the attack, was contradicted last week by Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens‘ deputy, Gregory Hicks. Mr. Hicks testified that he spoke with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on the night of the attack and that a special-forces unit was stopped from deploying.

But Hicks actually testified that the order came from Special Operations Command Africa, not the State Department or anyone in the Obama administration, and that the security team in question was not organized to intervene in the attack but to secure the airport for evacuation.

PolitiFact explains:

But Hicks’ testimony and a State Department review board report show it was clear the “people that were getting killed” were already dead when the security team was ready to go.

…

“We determined that we needed to send a second team from Tripoli to secure the airport for the withdrawal of our personnel from Benghazi after the mortar attack,” he said.

…

During Hicks’ testimony last week, Rep. Robin Kelly, D-Ill., read from a Defense Department press release explaining the security team was directed to stay in Tripoli because those in Benghazi “had shifted to evacuation.”

"We continue to believe that there was nothing this group could have done had they arrived in Benghazi, and they performed superbly in Tripoli," she read. "In fact, when the first aircraft arrived back in Tripoli, these four played a key role in receiving, treating and moving the wounded."

…

But it’s clear from Hicks’ testimony that four Americans "getting killed" in Benghazi were already dead when the decision was made to keep the special forces team in Tripoli. The mortar attack was over. A Defense Department drone watched overhead in Benghazi as Libyan militia members helped Americans get to the airport.

Alan Keyes, who recently warned that gay marriage is leading to the creation of a totalitarian government, is now arguing that President Obama is using the IRS scandal as a distraction from his plan to allow terrorist attacks to take place and impose martial law.

Speaking with Stan Solomon on Wednesday, Keyes maintained that Obama “could very well be working a strategy that collaborates with and comports with the strategy of the very people who are trying to kill us,” with the goal of bringing America down and “destroying our way of life.”

By collaborating with terrorists to allow these attacks, Keyes continued, Obama will be able to consolidate “the tools and instruments that would be needed to fasten the structure of martial law and totalitarian tyranny on this country by force.”

He concluded that the “implementation of a terrorist strategy [is] aimed at producing the very kind of disorder, confusion, fear and anger that would then provide an excuse for that fastening on the country of martial law.”

Watch:

Following the passage of his state’s marriage equality law, Minnesota Republican state representative Glenn Gruenhagen is urging constituents to “resist the implementation of the gay agenda in public and parochial schools.” The blog Bluestem Prairie noticed Gruenhagen’s letter to the editor of the McLeod County Chronicle Wednesday, in which he claims that in Massachusetts there have already been cases where “citizens who would not succumb to politically correct speech have been charged with hate crimes.”

He cites the anti-gay group MassResistance as the source of his information and links to their website.

Of course, there are no such cases of people being “charged with hate crimes” for not using “politically correct speech.”

What is more troubling is that a state lawmaker is citing an organization whose leader Brian Camenker suggested gay marriage led to a rise in homelessness, crime, poor air quality and domestic violence, denies that gay people died in the Holocaust, likened pro-gay rights educators to “Nazi concentration camp guards” and compared gay rights efforts to Jim Crow laws.

Under this legislation, children could be chided and corrected for using gender specific terms like “mother and father” and instead will be told to use gender neutral terms like “parent and spouse” so as not to offend certain groups.

This may be difficult to believe, but as a long-term school board member, I do not make this statement lightly. I have personal experience as a board member, where state statutes were changed and eventually school curriculum and speech had to conform. I was then chided for public comments on school issues when I used terminology that was not politically correct.

In other countries and in the state of Massachusetts, where gay marriage has become the law, we have observed that citizens who would not succumb to politically correct speech have been charged with hate crimes and their parental rights infringed upon. (Seewww.massresistance.com for more information.)

When signed, this bill will become the law of our state. We are a nation of laws, however we still have the right as citizens, parents and school officials to passively resist the gay agenda coming into our schools. …

During these past several months, Lutheran and Catholic organizations were key groups opposing the gay marriage bill. As your state representative, I am very thankful for their help in opposing the passage of gay marriage.

I plan to introduce legislation next session in an attempt to strengthen parental rights and school official rights to resist the implementation of the gay agenda in public and parochial schools. I will also introduce legislation to strengthen protection for our religious freedoms.

For Glenn Beck, anything that doesn't quite fit into the grand global narrative that he has concocted and that only he understands must therefore be part of some effort to distract people from that very narrative.

Thus, the release of information about the current IRS and AP scandals must itself have been orchestrated by the White House itself in order to draw attention away from Benghazi because that "is literally where the bodies are buried":