The headlines from yesterday tell you all you need to know: the Obama administration is imploding before our very eyes and it wouldn’t surprise me to hear the word “impeachment” start cropping out in the days and weeks ahead as more and more is learned about who knew what and who gave the orders involving the following scandals enveloping the Obama White House:

Headline: Budget request denied, Sebelius turns to health executives to finance Obamacare. Talk about your Chicago-style gangster politics:

Her unusual fundraising push comes after Congress repeatedly rejected the Obama administration’s requests for additional funds to set up the Affordable Care Act, leaving HHS to implement the president’s signature legislative accomplishment on what officials have described as a shoestring budget.

Over the past three months, Sebelius has made multiple phone calls to health industry executives, community organizations and church groups and asked that they contribute whatever they can to nonprofit groups that are working to enroll uninsured Americans and increase awareness of the law, according to an HHS official and an industry person familiar with the secretary’s activities. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk openly about private discussions.

An HHS spokesperson said Sebelius was within the bounds of her authority in asking for help.

There’s a fine line between “asking for help” and shaking down private industry to open its wallets, especially when you’re the face of the Obama administration and its legacy and greatest legislative victory is being threatened on all sides due to size, scope, and bureaucratic red tape and incompetence. I’d like to know exactly why Sebelius is “asking for help”, who authorized her to do so, and who made the decision on what industries would be targeted and why.

Headline: Government Taps Press Phone Records. For a White House that has had its ass plastered with lipstick by the mainstream media from day one this is really beyond belief:

The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of the calls.

In all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown, but more than 100 journalists work in the offices where phone records were targeted, on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.

In a letter of protest sent to Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday, AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt said the government sought and obtained information far beyond anything that could be justified by any specific investigation. He demanded the return of the phone records and destruction of all copies.

All I can say to mainstream media is, you sleep with dogs, don’t be surprised if you wake up with fleas.

Headline: Watch out for Petraeus in Benghazi scandal. Methinks things are about to get damned interesting as far as the Benghazi cover-up probe is concerned, especially since additional whistleblowers have shown their willingness to come forward and testify:

So little is known about what happened in Benghazi: Where was the commander in chief that night? No pictures from the Situation Room this time. Why didn’t the Pentagon authorize a quick-response team to swoop in? Members of the military say they were ready — burning — to go. The call came in: Stand down. Let them die. There were dozens of witnesses to the attack that night: Where are they? What do they know? What really happened that night?

With the White House putting all blame on the agency, expect push back this week — nuclear push back. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the former director forced to resign after a sex scandal, is a dangerous man to the Obama administration. Mad and intent on getting even, he’s already talking, telling one reporter the talking points were “useless” and that he preferred not to use them at all. The floodgates will open this week, and by the end of business Friday, the scandal will be full blown.

Wouldn’t surprise me if the Patraeus infidelity allegations were leaked to the media by Hillary Clinton’s State Department in retaliation for him not willing to play ball in regards to Benghazi. Hell hath no fury than a scorned (and criminally incompetent) Secretary of State.

Headline: House panel to formally question IRS commissioner Friday. And it wasn’t just conservatives and Tea Party groups, it was – get ready for it – pro-Israel Jewish advocay groups!

The House Ways and Means Committee has scheduled a formal hearing Friday to probe the Internal Revenue Service for placing heavier scrutiny on conservative groups that applied for nonprofit status between 2010 and 2012.

IRS Commissioner Steve Miller and Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George are expected to testify Friday morning during the hearing, which committee leaders said would examine the agency’s “practice of targeting applicants for tax-exempt status based on political leanings.”

Taken individually, any of these scandals would be egregious enough that, had a Republican been in the White House the major news networks and left-leaning newpapers and cable networks would be calling for impeachment hearings to start yesterday. Taken together, even these media outlets are going to have a hard time making the case that the Obama White House isn’t up to its neck in scandal, and not of a minor nature either. This is lawlessness, gangster politics, and reckless (likely criminal) incompetence on such a wide scale there’s no way this administration can expect to do anything but ride out its second term and pray to God no one goes to jail and/or gets impeached before it ends.

I hate to sound so self-serving and tell y’all I told you so, but the fact is, I told you so – infact I used the twrm Nixonian before anyone in the blogsphere or media even thought about it. As I wrote as far back as May, 2008, just four months into the administration’s first term:

Robert Samuelson is right: the Obama infatuation by the media is the great unreported story of our time, and, going forward, an incredibly dangerous one for America. If this President truly believes he and his administration are above any form of criticism and immune from any scrutiny by the media or Congress (and it’s clear just months into his administration that this is exactly what they think, and why shouldn’t they?) one can only imagine how far they’ll want to take this.

Taken together, this administration’s actions recall those of a former president, though not necessarily the one the Anointed One loves to compare himself to. Rather than FDR, however, these actions appear to be downright Nixonian – a term I believe you’re going to be hearing a lot more of as this president becomes increasingly power-drunk and more full of himself.

Now you’ve got major Obama supporters using the political “N-word” and a Republican senator hinting at impeachment hearings. As far as I’m concerned, these guys are all johnny-come-latelys, because if they had been listening to The Great White Shank – and no one does – none of the above scandals would have surprised them in the very least. (BTW, I’m still waiting for the courts to order Eric Holder’s Justice Department’s to turn over to Congress those withheld memos on Operation “Fast and Furious”, which will reveal the DOJ’s complicity in allowing guns to illegally “walk” across the border into Mexico, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of Mexicans and one, perhaps two U.S. Border agents.)

It’s not hard to see how this kind of thing should envelop the Obama White House – this is what happens when, rather than using the power of his office and his “bully pulpit” to bring Republicans and Democrats together to pass legislation and further an agenda that serves the needs the country while providing both sides with political cover, this President has done nothing but create division and hostility by villifying any form of opposition without any push-back from the media and journalists who ought to be responsible for holding the President and his administration accountable. In any organization, abuse of power is in response to the tone set by the person on top, and if this President finds himself immersed in scandal and losing public faith and trust in his administration and its second-term agenda he has only one person to blame – himself.

Perhaps a round or two of golf will help his general disposition. After all, it’s what he does best.

Awesome photo hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ