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Conservative radio host Glenn Beck on Wednesday compared the U.S. government to "rapists" over recent so-called scandals, from the Internal Revenue Service's practice of scrutinizing conservative groups to last year's terrorist attacks in Benghazi.

In a bizarre rant on his radio show, Beck said that he didn't know why Congress was bothering with an investigation into the scandals because the federal government had been building a massive spying database in Utah.

"What is being built in Utah is the largest storage facility ever known to mankind," he explained. "They are storing all of the information. They have already admitted during the Boston bombings that they collect all emails and file it. Why are you asking the White House for the emails? Who is this security system for? Is it to protect the American people?"

"What the hell are we doing? What's wrong with us, America?" he continued. "You paid for it. You own it. You're the boss or are they? Why ask for it? Just go into the system that we paid for and you built for for our -- quote -- protection. You want to find it? Why are you waiting? The more you wait, the more time they have to delete. Go in and get it. You have it."

"Or is that security system you built for our protection not really for our protection?"

Beck added: "The American people have just been raped. Why are you asking rapists to hurry up with the swab test?"

(h/t: Right Wing Watch)

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The Republican nominee for lieutenant governor in Virginia says that he is a Christian and has no reason to apologize for his history against of hate speech against LGBT people, liberals and abortion providers.

It was only after African-American minister E.W. Jackson won the nomination at the Virginia Republican Party Convention last week that many became aware of his history of saying gay people were "perverted" and "sick people psychologically."

"Homosexuality is a horrible sin, it poisons culture, it destroys families, it destroys societies; it brings the judgment of God unlike very few things that we can think of," he said last year.

He has also called Democrats "slave masters" and compared Planned Parenthood to the Ku Klux Klan."

"Liberalism and their ideas have done more to kill black folks whom they claim so much to love than the Ku Klux Klan, lynching and slavery and Jim Crow ever did, now that’s a fact," Jackson said in a 2012 interview.

On Tuesday, Jackson told reporters that he had no intention of apologizing.

"I say the things that I say because I’m a Christian, not because I hate anybody, but because I have religious values that matter to me," Jackson told reporters during a campaign event in Fredericksburg, according to The Washington Post. "Attacking me because I hold to those principles is attacking every church-going person, every family that’s living a traditional family life, everybody who believes that we all deserve the right to live."

"So I don’t have anything to rephrase or apologize for. I would just say people should not paint me as one-dimensional."

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Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) on Tuesday lashed out at fellow members of Congress for looking into how technology giant Apple is able to avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes.

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a report on Monday detailing how Apple had used a network of offshore shell companies in recent year to avoid paying taxes.

At a committee hearing on Tuesday, Paul was livid that Apple CEO Tim Cook was asked to testify.

"I'm offended by a $4 trillion government bullying, berating and badgering one America's greatest success stories," the Kentucky Republican told the committee. "Tell me what Apple has done that is illegal?"

Paul added that he was also "offended" that that the IRS would "bully" tea party groups.

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Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe (R), who maintains that global warming is a hoax created by former Vice President Al Gore and the United Nations, said on Tuesday that it was "hard to explain" why Monday's tornado was "so much worse."

During an interview with John Berman on CNN, Inhofe remarked that the storm had transported a photo 80 miles from Shawnee to his neighborhood in Tulsa.

"So many things happen that are so hard to explain," he told the CNN host. "This thing was huge. This is one of the largest ones that we've had."

"What you're looking at now in Moore, Oklahoma is what you could have seen had you been there in 1999 or in some parts of of Shawnee. Devastation is devastation. And it's just that this is so much worse. Because you're talking about a two mile by 20 mile area. That's very unusual."

In terms of disaster aid, Inhofe said Oklahoma had "everything that we need," but he recommended donating to the Salvation Army and the Red Cross.

"It's going to be necessary to raise a lot of money."

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Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) on Friday declared that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) would have murdered the participants of the original 1773 Boston Tea Party and and would have "killed off" half of the Founding Fathers who signed the Declaration of Independence.

In a 30-minute floor speech to express his outrage over a report in The Daily Caller that said the Department of Homeland Security was "protecting the free speech rights of pro-Shariah Muslim supremacists," Gohmert noted that President Barack Obama's administration had a number of other problems like the recent news that the IRS had scrutinized the tax-exempt status of tea party and other conservative groups.

"Homeland Security has had reports warning their employees about the dangers of people that may be involved in such heinous activity as being classified as evangelical Christians or as being concerned about the Constitution and that people should be following the Constitution, and concerned about people who may have tea party in their name," he explained.

"You know, thank goodness that the IRS was not around to have helped the Founders when they founded the country or otherwise they would have probably shot the Boston Tea Party participants, they would have killed off over half of the signers of the Declaration of the Independence," Gohmert added.

"And this country would have never had gotten started if this Department of Homeland Security had been around to be helpful -- so called -- to our founders."

In referencing the Declaration of Independence and the Boston Tea Party, Gohmert seems to be suggesting that the IRS and the Department of Homeland Security do not have legitimate authority -- similar to the claims the American colonists made against the British empire prior to the Revolutionary War.

(h/t: Twitter/Scott Keyes)

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A female former staffer for the Iowa state Senate Republicans says she was fired only hours after she reported sexual harassment by male lawmakers.

In an interview on Sunday, Kirsten Anderson told WHO-TV that she had worked as the communications director for the state Senate Republican Caucus until Friday when she was fired after providing documentation about the sexual harassment.

"When you go to the workplace, you should have a safe environment," she explained to WHO-TV's Dave Price. "Women especially should not have their body parts scrutinized, objectified. People should not be ridiculed or mocked for simply the color of their pants that they are wearing, and those sorts of things were taking place at the Capitol."

"Things that would make you blush," she recalled. "Things that you don't want your daughter, your mother, your sister having to put up with. And that sort of attitude about women -- objectifying women -- it has to change."

Anderson said she was told that the senators "had the authority to terminate me at this time."

Pressed by Price, the former staffer said that she was not prepared to name names because her complaint "was more about changing the work environment."

Ed Failor Jr., a top assistant to state Senate Republican Leader Bill Dix, on Sunday insisted that Anderson had been fired for failing to improve her work performance.

"I can assure you that under Senator Dix’s leadership, sexual harassment is not and will not be tolerated," Failor told the Des Moines Register. "She was given an opportunity to improve her work performance and it did not improve."

(h/t: Talking Points Memo)

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The Nation editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel on Sunday said that Republicans were succeeding at using "weapons of mass distraction" to obstruct President Barack Obama's second term agenda.

During an ABC News panel discussion about the a number of scandals that Republicans are using to attack the Obama administration, Washington Post columnist George Will asserted that IRS scrutiny of tea party groups was like Watergate because "it's the use of the federal machinery to punish enemies of the administration."

"Watergate? Seriously, George?" Vanden Heuvel replied. "I mean, Watergate was a scandal unique in its depths of criminality. You had a president at the heart of the White House directing the subversion of the FBI and other institutions, including the IRS... And the key scandal -- which you will disagree with -- is that we had after Citizens United a flood of money coming in, and you had groups which were clearly political and partisan trying to use this 501(c)4 [tax-exempt] categorization to escape political scrutiny."

Vanden Heuvel went on to point out that the Republican Party was trying to substitute the so-called scandal at the IRS, attacks in Benghazi and the Justice Department's seizure of Associate Press phone records for a real political agenda.

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Republican strategist Karl Rove says that Crossroads GPS, which is a part the American Crossroads super PAC that he founded, is a legitimate tax-exempt organization because it promotes "social welfare" like the NAACP.

During a panel discussion on Fox News Sunday about the IRS scrutinizing tea party groups, host Chris Wallace asked why Rove's political action committee qualified as a tax-exempt status as a social welfare group.

"Didn't the IRS have a problem in the wake of the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling in getting a handle on the question of what groups did and didn't qualify under the tax code for 501(c)4 status?" Wallace wondered.

"Look, 501(c)4s have been around for a long time," Rove explained. "And the Democrats and the left have used these for years, these social welfare groups to do some politics and a lot of social welfare. NAACP voter fund, for example, ran a $10 million advertising blitz in 2000 against George W. Bush. The League of Conservation Voters, the Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood, National Abortion Rights Action League and so forth. All of them are 501(c)4s, and there are pretty clear rules about what you can and cannot do. You have to spend a majority of you money on social welfare and a minority of your money on political activity."

"So what happened is the Democrats had this for decades -- literally decades -- and no criticism at all, and then Republicans began in 2010 to say if it's good enough for them, we'll duplicate that structure as well. And then suddenly we get what we get, which is a huge bunch of activity aimed at conservative groups that are filing as 501(c)4s."

"The only advantage of a 501(c)4 is it allows you to take your contributions and not pay taxes on them," Rove insisted. "That's the one advantage that this allows you to do."

"And also the donors aren't revealed," Wallace pointed out.

"Well, because again, it's a social welfare organization," Rove agreed. "This literally goes back to the 1940s when criminal penalties were added for the revelation by the IRS of donors because southern attorneys general were attempting to get the donors to the NAACP."

After criticizing President George W. Bush's administration, the NAACP was hit with an audit in 2004 over accusations of improper political activity. At the time, the IRS insisted that the audit had been initiated by the Kentucky office and was not done for political reasons.

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Former Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan (R-WI) on Sunday used the news that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had scrutinized tea party groups to slam the agency's connection to President Barack Obama's heath care reform law.

Host Chris Wallace pointed out to Ryan on Fox News Sunday that the Treasury inspector general had suggested that a recent IRS scandal had been a "bureaucratic snafu" because tea party groups only represented 96 of the 298 groups that received special scrutiny about their tax-exempt status.

Ryan, however, insisted that the IRS had targeted conservative groups based on their political beliefs and "to suggest that this is some bureaucratic snafu, that's already been disproven."

"The other point I'd say is that as bad as this is, the person in charge of this bureaucratic snafu is now been put in charge of implementing Obamacare," he continued. "I mean, the IRS is now going to be granted huge amounts of unprecedented power over our health care in the implementation of Obamacare."

"And so this is just rotten to the core. This is arrogance. This is big government cronyism. And this is not what hard-working taxpayers deserve."

CBS News observed last week that there was no evidence that Sarah Hall Ingram, who headed the IRS office overseeing tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012, "sanctioned or was even aware of the targeting practices."

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White House Senior Adviser Dan Pfeiffer on Sunday told Fox News host Chris Wallace that it was "offensive" to suggest that President Barack Obama had allowed last year's attacks in Benghazi that killed four Americans.

In an interview with Pfeiffer on Fox News Sunday, Wallace explained that there were "lingering questions" about where the president was and what he was doing on Sept. 11, 2012 when the attacks happened.

Pfeiffer pointed out that Republicans had been spinning a "series of conspiracy theories," but the president had been updated about the attacks throughout the night by his national security team.

"Was he in the [White House] Situation Room?" Wallace pressed. "Do you not know?"

"I don't remember what room the president was in," Pfeiffer replied. "And that's a largely irrelevant fact. The premise of your question is that there is something that could have been done differently, okay, that would have changed the outcome here. The accountability review board has looked at this, people have looked at it, it's a horrible tragedy what happened. What we have to do is make sure it doesn't happen again."

"No one knows where he was or how he was involved or who told him there were know forces," the Fox News host insisted.

"The suggestion of your question is that somehow the president allowed this to happen," Pfeiffer observed. "The assertions from Republicans here that somehow the president allowed this to happened or didn't take action is offensive. It is absolutely offensive. And there's no evidence to support it."