y Lightning Round: IRS targeting probe

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Friday Lightning Round: IRS targeting probe

Panel sums up this week's hot topics

This is a rush transcript from "Special Report," July 5, 2013. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JORDAN SEKULOW, AMERICAN CENTER FOR LAW AND JUSTICE: Here we are, you know, a month-and-a-half later, not one of our 41 clients who have filed suit in federal court against IRS, the IRS and IRS officials, have been contacted by the FBI.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SHANNON BREAM, ANCHOR: The IRS, all right each week we ask you to vote in our Friday Lightning Round poll for your favorite topic. Today you chose the investigation into the IRS targeting scandal, or lack thereof, by some accounts. We're back with our panel. Chuck, what do you make of it?

CHARLES LANE, EDITORIAL WRITER, WASHINGTON POST: Well, I'm in the lack thereof camp. And, you know, the more we learn about this, the more we learn that groups across the ideological spectrum were being parsed for their political content by the IRS. Senator Roy Brown of Missouri, a Republican today, made a statement suggesting that, well, maybe this wasn't quite the scandal we thought it was in the first place.

BREAM: All right, what do you think, Jonah?

JONAH GOLDBERG, AT LARGE EDITOR, NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE: Well, it seems to me that at minimum if the President of the United States goes on live television to denounce an outrage and insists that they're going to investigate this fully, that you would at least get the FBI to start investigating it at all. And that seems to be a low standard. Whether it turns out to be the scandal I think it is and you don't think it is, that's one thing. But it doesn't sound like they're even trying to figure that out.

BREAM: And Charles, at least for appearances sake you would think that it would be good for the administration to look at the FBI, that an agency is on it?

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: If you had a press that had any backbone. But in the absence of that, outside of Fox --

BREAM: Present company excepted, of course.

KRAUTHAMMER: Outside of Fox, there's nothing the administration has to worry about. You mount an investigation. You then deflect any question, by saying, I can't talk about it because it's being investigated. You do nothing about it, and then you wait. You let other news and scandals overtake it, like explosions in Egypt, and then you count on the press to say nothing, and then it dies in time. And that's the strategy on Benghazi, on the Rosen affair, and on this. That's how they do it -- their MO.

BREAM: All right, today we're also going to talk about jobs numbers that came out today. Unemployment says at 7.6 percent. Here is a bit of what Alan Krueger, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, had to say about these numbers today.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ALAN KRUEGER, COUNCIL OF ECONOMIC ADVISERS CHAIRMAN: We've seen solid job gains over the last six months, 1.2 million jobs added over that period. Over the last 40 months we've added 7.2 million jobs. We have a deep hole that we're digging our way out of. The hole was created by the severe recession back in 2008. We're making progress. We want to build on this progress.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BREAM: Jonah, they're doing the best they could with the Bush mess they were given.

GOLDBERG: Yeah, this is a summer recovery three, four, I can't keep it straight. Look, it's a better jobs report than they've had in a while. And so when you grade on a curve, you know, it's sort of like the best Oktoberfest in Orlando. It's saying something. But, most -- a huge chunk of these jobs are these part-time jobs that are the kind of jobs that get created by the ObamaCare mandate. These are the kind of jobs that people settle for when they can't find the kind of jobs that they want. We still have a pretty rough economy.

GUPTA: In Wendell Goler's report today from the White House, he said the number of people working only part-time, though they wanted full-time jobs, has taken its biggest jump in eight months. Chuck?

LANE: Well, you guys just stole the negative points I was going to make so I'm forced to say something positive about this jobs report, which was, for goodness sakes, this is -- with the corrections of the last two months, three straight months of approximately 200,000 jobs, which is the pace the Fed is looking for to justify its taper later on this year. So I think, it's obviously too slow. It's not sufficient growth, it's not going to make anyone happy. But the economy you could say is reaching a soft landing, and at least we're still moving in the right direction.

BREAM: Alright, and a lightning-ish answer from you, so we can get to everybody's winners and losers.

KRAUTHAMMER: You're both right. You've got a little clockwise spin, a little counterclockwise spin, and the result is that it's not moving. To change analogies, we're treading water.

BREAM: We are -- 7.6, it stays there. All right, now --

KRAUTHAMMER: Was that short enough?

BREAM: Yeah that was -- listen, by Krauthammer standards that's brevity at its most.
GOLDBERG: But the shock that ensued is eating up all the time now.

(LAUGHTER)

BREAM: It is. OK, and we want to make sure we get through everybody's winners and losers this week. So we'll go right down the line and Jonah, I'm very interested to hear about yours.

GOLDBERG: OK, so, the -- I'll start with my losers. The pro-abortion rights groups in Texas, they rallied around a woman who took a position that 80 percent of the American people don't like and they ended up violating one of the oldest rules in public relations, don't yell "Hail Satan" on national TV. The winner --

BREAM: But even the Satanist groups come out and say we're not associated with that.

GOLDBERG: And then the Church of Satan themselves condemned them.

BREAM: Right.

GOLDBERG: Which is just a wonderful move. And then my winner is King Albert of Belgium, who finally threw off the gilded shackles of the throne, decided to abdicate, and in a PR triumph reminded the world that Belgium has a king in the first place.

BREAM: Yeah, fascinating. All right, Chuck?

LANE: I think it's King Albert, actually.

GOLDBERG: When he was a prince he was in a can.

LANE: Yeah, exactly.

Well, my winner this week, picking up on what we were just talking about with the jobs report is the Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke because he's been criticized from both sides on his monetary policy, but it looks like he's getting some results now. And my loser, it's obvious Mohamed Morsi, the now ex-president of Egypt –

(CROSSTALK)

LANE: -- who has lent new meaning to the term overplaying your hand. You know, made a hash out of his one year as president.

BREAM: Charles?

KRAUTHAMMER: ObamaCare is the big loser. The announcement of the delay in the employer mandate, it's a train wreck and it's now started.  The winner, Bashar Assad. You might remember that it was Morsi who called a few weeks ago for a jihad of Sunnis against Syria, which sort of angered Assad. And now he gloats that he's in power, and he's winning his war and Morsi is in some undisclosed location under police protection.

BREAM: It's going to be a long week for him.

KRAUTHAMMER: Could be longer than a week.

BREAM: Yeah. All right, well, gentlemen, thank you very much.  Winners and losers all, you're all winners is what I mean by that, as are our viewers. Thank you for voting in this week's Lightning Round poll.

That's it for the panel. But stay tuned.

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