If you feel like wasting 6 minutes of your life, you can’t do it more efficiently than to watch the weird appearance of Michelle Obama on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, which she used to pitch her health campaign.

◼ Jimmy Fallon & Will Ferrell Exceed the Limits of Weirdness Pushing Michelle Obama's Health Kick - SooperMexican/IJ Review

◼ Jimmy Fallon, Democrat Political Asset - Brent Bozell and Tim Graham/Newsbusters

The Obamas have had few more obsequious media allies than NBC's Jimmy Fallon. Now that he's taking over the hallowed ground of "The Tonight Show," Fallon's proven ability to spread his reach into viral videos on YouTube promises to become even more politically potent.

◼ The changed politics of late-night TV - Hadas Gold/Politico

The curtain rose this week on a new era of late-night TV — altering the terrain for politicians who frequent the shows and complicating life for Republicans, who have lost their most comfortable seat in front of the camera.

“The whole landscape’s about to change,” Arsenio Hall, the recently reincarnated late-night host, said in an interview. “Jay [Leno] going home is going to change it for a lot of people.”

Congrats on a great run at the #TonightShow, Jay

◼ George W Bush

Jay Leno slams IRS over targeting scandals

◼ Red Alert Politics

Bill Clinton went ballistic and threatened retaliation. Obama backed down. He called his favorite journalist, Steve Kroft of “60 Minutes,” and offered an unprecedented “farewell interview” with departing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The result was a slobbering televised love-in — and an embarrassment to all concerned.

◼ Obama was pushed by Clintons into endorsement of Hillary in 2016: book - Edward Klein/New York Post

President Obama made a secret deal to support Hillary Clinton when she runs for president in 2016, campaign sources say, payback for the support her husband gave him in 2012.

Bill Clinton’s animosity toward Obama is legendary. A year before the last election, he was urging Hillary to challenge the sitting president for the nomination — a move she rejected.

According to two people who attended that meeting in Chappaqua, Bill Clinton then went on a rant against Obama.

“I’ve heard more from Bush, asking for my advice, than I’ve heard from Obama,” my sources quoted Clinton as saying. “I have no relationship with the president — none whatsoever. Obama doesn’t know how to be president. He doesn’t know how the world works. He’s incompetent. He’s an amateur!”

...While he was effective on the campaign trail, once in the Oval Office, he becomes a different person, one who derives no joy from the cut and thrust of day-to-day politics and who is inept in the arts of management and governance....

He may yet try to back out of his promise to Hillary Clinton. But as Obama’s presidency sinks deeper into scandal and inaction, the question is — will Clinton even still want his endorsement?

◼ Edward Klein’s “The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House” Out this week, in paperback

◼ Earlier: The Steve Kroft Swoon: Was Obama/Hillary interview on ‘60 Minutes’ or ‘60 Shades of Gray’?



From Jay Leno:

White House officials continue to insist that President Obama knew nothing about the IRS scandal until we all heard about it in the news last week. They said because there was an investigation under way, it would have been inappropriate to tell him.

◼ And besides, Obama was too busy not knowing anything about Benghazi. - Jay Leno via Townhall

"I don't know." "I don't remember." "I'm not familiar with that detail." "It's not my precise area." "I'm not familiar with that letter."

◼ A Battering Ram Becomes a Stonewall - Peggy Noonan/Wall St. Journal

These are quotes from the Internal Revenue Service officials who testified this week before the House and Senate. That is the authentic sound of stonewalling, and from the kind of people who run Washington in the modern age—smooth, highly credentialed and unaccountable. They're surrounded by legal and employment protections, they know how to parse a careful response, they know how to blur the essential point of a question in a blizzard of unconnected factoids. They came across as people arrogant enough to target Americans for abuse and harassment and think they'd get away with it.

So what did we learn the past week, and what are the essentials to keep in mind?

We learned the people who ran and run the IRS are not going to help Congress find out what happened in the IRS.... We have learned that Lois Lerner lied when she claimed she had spontaneously admitted the targeting in a Q-and-A at a Washington meeting. It was part of a spin operation in which she'd planted the question with a friend....

We know that Lois Lerner this week announced she'd done nothing wrong, and then took the Fifth.

And we know Jay Leno, grown interestingly fearless, said of the new IRS commissioner, "They're called 'acting commissioner' because you have to act like the scandal doesn't involve the White House."

...An independent counsel, with all the powers of that office, is what we need.

Again, if what happened at the IRS is not stopped now—if the internal corruption within it is not broken—it will never stop, and never be broken. The American people will never again be able to have the slightest confidence in the revenue-gathering arm of their government. And that, actually, would be tragic.

“Fox News has changed its slogan from ‘Fair and Balanced’ to ‘See, I told you so!’”

Says Jay Leno

Leno Turns Obama-Clinton 60 Minutes Segment Into Cialis Commercial

◼ As NewsBusters reported, CBS's 60 Minutes did an absolutely gushing and fawning segment with President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this past Sunday. - Noel Sheppard

It was so bad that Jay Leno and Company turned it into a Cialis commercial on NBC's Tonight Show Thursday.

Leno: 'Very Dangerous to White House If Journalists Suddenly Start Asking Real Questions'...

◼ Indeed it is, Jay. Indeed it is. - Noel Sheppard/Newsbusters

Ann Romney…

◼ …appearing on the Jay Leno show: biker chic. - Neoneocon

Ann Romney on Tonight with Jay Leno

Jay Leno: "Even Obama Is Doing Worse Under President Obama"

◼ Video at Real Clear Politics