(TheBlaze.com) TheBlaze’s S.E. Cupp battled liberal filmmaker Michael Moore on the gun issue Friday, arguing against gun restrictions and schooling him on basic statistics on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher.”

Cupp, contending with boos from the “Real Time” audience, said the problem with a gun registry is that “it treats law-abiding citizens as if they are guilty until proven innocent.”

She went on, “The problem with background checks, five-day waiting periods, they assume that I have criminal intent to use my gun to pursue my Second Amendment rights…I go to get a background check, ‘Prove to me you’re not a criminal.’ I go to get a gun, ‘Prove to me you don’t want to use it in the heat of passion right now, wait five days, you need to cool off.’ That’s not fair — the government is not in the business of intimidating me away from my Second Amendment rights. It’s an abuse of power, and it seeps into the culture — it’s why newspapers think they can publish gun owners’ addresses, as if they are pariahs. It’s not appropriate.”

(FoxNews.com) For the first time in years, the IRS was knocked down a peg or two.

In a hearing that escalated into a boisterous public shaming of one of the country’s most-feared government agencies, lawmakers took turns Friday calling outgoing IRS Commissioner Steven Miller on the carpet for his department’s scandalous practice of targeting conservative groups.

Miller rebuffed attempts to extract the names of those responsible, saying he did not know. But lawmakers vowed that the tense hearing would mark only the start of a series of investigations, in which criminal activity could be probed.

(DailyCaller.com) The Department of Homeland Security, which under Secretary Janet Napolitano has shown a keen interest in monitoring and warning about outspoken conservatives, takes a very different approach in monitoring political Islamists, according to a 2011 memo on protecting the free speech rights of pro-Shariah Muslim supremacists.

In a checklist obtained by The Daily Caller entitled “Countering Violent Extremism Dos and Don’ts” the DHS’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties notifies local and national law enforcement officials that it is Obama administration policy to consider specifically Islamic criticism of the American system of government legitimate.

This policy stands in stark contrast to the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis’ 2009 memo “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment” [pdf], which warned of the dangers posed by pro-life advocates, critics of same-sex marriage and groups concerned with abiding by the U.S. Constitution, among others. (Read more…)

(Newsmax.com) Sen. Marco Rubio says the mushrooming controversies surrounding the Obama administration reflect a “culture of intimidation” created by President Barack Obama.

In an exclusive interview Thursday with Newsmax TV, the Florida Republican explained: “You have a president and an administration and a political apparatus around him that has decided the way to win the political battles of the day is to destroy your political opponents, to basically impugn their motives, to talk bad about them, to convince people that they’re bad people, and that they’re doing things for bad reasons.”

That take-no-prisoners attitude, he said, “permeates throughout their entire organization.”

(HotAir.com) The Inspector General of the Treasury reported this week that the IRS began applying extra scrutiny and conducting harassment of Obama administration opponents as early as March 2010. However, for at least two pro-life groups, that scrutiny appears to have started a year earlier. Joel Gehrke reports that one group was told its tax-exempt application depended not on promising to stay out of electoral politics, but on pledging not to protest Planned Parenthood — a prominent supporter of Barack Obama:

IRS officials refused to grant tax exempt status two pro-life organizations because of their position on the abortion issue, according to a non-profit law firm, which said that one group was pressured not to protest a pro-choice organization that endorsed President Obama during the last election.

“In one case, the IRS withheld approval of an application for tax exempt status for Coalition for Life of Iowa. In a phone call to Coalition for Life of Iowa leaders on June 6, 2009, the IRS agent ‘Ms. Richards’ told the group to send a letter to the IRS with the entire board’s signatures stating that, under perjury of the law, they do not picket/protest or organize groups to picket or protest outside of Planned Parenthood,” the Thomas More Society announced today. “Once the IRS received this letter, their application would be approved.”