IRS-Approved Reading Lists and Other Outrages

Earlier today Bloomberg View columnists Ramesh Ponnuru and Margaret Carlson met online to chat about the IRS scandal. Below is a lightly edited transcript.

Ramesh: I see what you did in your column this week, Margaret, signaling your high esteem for the IRS. An esteem I share! It's best to stay on that particular agency's good side, because it has awesome powers. Which is why its abuses are, as President Barack Obama said last night, "intolerable." And those abuses look worse the more we learn. It turns out that Democratic Senator Carl Levin had urged the IRS to go after specific, mostly conservative groups: He had a list. It turns out that the misconduct was not limited to one Cincinnati office, as was initially claimed. And it turns out that the IRS released confidential information to the media organization ProPublica. Who will audit the auditors?