Politico

Talk to some of the foremost practitioners of the dark arts of web journalism, and they'll all tell you the same thing: There's no secret formula for making a story go viral on the Internet.

It's a mix of informed guesswork, innate sensibility and trial and error. And as these three titans of traffic show, there's more than one way to skin a cat.

House Republicans will take up several 2015 spending bills in the coming weeks but have no plans to move forward on immigration reform or a minimum-wage increase -- key priorities for President Barack Obama and Democrats. In a memo sent to all House Republicans, Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) also said the full House will take up a contempt resolution against former IRS official Lois Lerner.

Lerner is the center of an alleged scheme by IRS employees to target conservative non-profit groups for special scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status. Lerner has refused to testify before the Oversight and Government Reform Committee. That panel has already voted to hold her in contempt.

The House is currently scheduled to be in for three weeks - a total of 12 legislative days - during May, according to the official calendar maintained by Cantor’s office. Cantor said that House Republicans will move forward on bills allowing states to use federal funds for charter schools, as well as six legislative initiatives designed to combat human sex trafficking, and issue with huge bipartisan support. In addition, Cantor said the House would move on a tax extenders package that includes a permanent extension of a research and development tax credit.

The Obamacare website may work for people buying insurance, but beneath the surface, HealthCare.gov is still missing massive, critical pieces -- and the deadline for finishing them keeps slipping.

As a result, the system’s “back end” is a tangle of technical workarounds moving billions of taxpayer dollars and consumer-paid premiums between the government and insurers. The parts under construction are essential for key functions such as accurately paying insurers. The longer they lag, experts say, the likelier they’ll trigger accounting problems that could leave the public on the hook for higher premium subsidies or health care costs.

It’s an overlooked chapter in the health care law’s story that has largely escaped scrutiny because consumers aren’t directly affected. Yet it bolsters the Republican narrative that the government has mishandled the implementation of Obamacare.

Former CIA and NSA director Gen. Michael Hayden will write a bimonthly column called "Inside Intelligence" for the Washington Times.

“Gen Hayden is known as a broad-minded and independent thinker on military and intelligence matters. His columns will be must-reads inside and outside the Beltway,” Washington Times Editor John Solomon said. “We’re thrilled to have him as part of our growing team of columnists. His topics go to the heart of our mission as a newspaper.”

A new directive issued by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper prohibits employees of certain government agencies from discussing any intelligence-related matter with the media, classified or not.

“[Intelligence Community] employees … must obtain authorization for contacts with the media” on intelligence-related matters, and “must also report… unplanned or unintentional contact with the media on covered matters,” the directive says.

DNI spokesperson Shawn Turner said that after the "damaging leaks in 2012," Clapper ordered a review to determine if there were a "consistent baseline requirement" for the intelligence community for engaging the media.

"The review demonstrated that baseline requirements were not consistent across the IC, but that there were best practices within the Community that could inform a consistent approach. That approach took shape as IC Directive 119," Turner wrote in an email. "This policy is being issued together with IC Directive 120 to ensure that members of the Intelligence Community are made aware of the protections provided them as whistleblowers who make protected disclosures. As with ICD 119, ICD 120 was initiated before Edward Snowden stole NSA property and leaked it to the media.”

FreedomWorks has paid more than $6 million in recent years to have Beck promote the group, its initiatives and events.

The FreedomWorks-Beck relationship is just one example of a powerful and profitable alliance between the conservative movement’s most aggressive groups and the most popular radio hosts. The details of the arrangements are little-known, but they have been lucrative for the recipients, and, in turn, have helped ensure that the groups get coveted airtime from hosts with a demonstrated ability to leverage their tens of millions of listeners to shape American politics.

It’s an alliance that helped spawn the anti-establishment tea party and power Republicans to landslide victories in the 2010 midterms. It’s also exacerbated congressional gridlock by pushing a hard line on the budget, immigration and Obamacare, and it is roiling the Republican Party headed into critical midterm elections.

It’s Comcast vs. Sen Al Franken -- Round Two.

The Minnesota Democrat, who pilloried the telecommunications giant and its plans to purchase Time Warner Cable at a congressional hearing, continued his attack a day later -- stressing in an interview that the $45.2 billion megadeal threatens competition and could spike consumers’ cable rates.

Asked during the interview what he’d do with Comcast’s merger, the senator added, “The first thing I would do is not let the largest cable TV company buy the second-largest cable TV company.”

Sen Franken also repeated his criticism that Comcast hadn’t kept some of the promises it made to federal regulators during the company’s 2011 purchase of NBCUniversal. Specifically, Sen Franken said that Comcast hadn’t done enough to market its standalone broadband service to consumers. And he charged that Comcast had tried to shaft programmers like Bloomberg, which competes with Comcast’s own business offering, CNBC.

The Justice Department charged a trio of men with defrauding the so-called Obamaphone program of $32 million in a scam that allegedly featured a jet, a Lamborghini and a yacht called Knight Crew.

Thomas Biddix, Kevin Brian Cox and Leonard Solt were charged in a Florida court with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and 15 counts of wire fraud, false claims and money laundering for bilking the phone subsidy program for the poor, which is officially known as Lifeline and managed by the Federal Communications Commission.

The indictment -- the result of an investigation by the FBI, the FCC inspector general and the Internal Revenue Service -- represents another effort by the Obama Administration to crack down on abuses of the controversial program. Republicans in Congress, as well as some Democrats, have criticized Lifeline for poor management and misuse. The program has been dubbed Obamaphone by critics, even though it dates back to Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

Biddix, Cox and Solt allegedly oversaw the submission of falsely inflated claims to Lifeline from September 2009 to March 2011 that diverted $32 million in fraudulent funds to a company called Associated Telecommunications Management Services. Biddix is the chairman of ATMS, according to DOJ.

Hillary Clinton discussed her work at the State Department, called for young women not to take criticisms personally and rapped the media for treating powerful women with a double standard at the kickoff of “Women in the World” in New York City.

Midway through the panel, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman asked Clinton if there is “still a double standard in the media in how we talk about women in public life?”

“There is a double standard,” Clinton said, adding, “We have all experienced it [or seen it]. The double standard is alive and well, and I think in many respects the media is the principal propagator of its persistence,” she added. “And I think the media needs to be, you know, more self-consciously aware of that.” She added that her advice to women who want to, as Friedman put it, “rise up in the world” is that they have the task of making other people, “predominantly” men who they will deal with, relate to them and listen to their ideas.

The main US Spanish-language nightly news programs skew liberal on domestic issues and spent most of their air times in the last few months covering the new health care law, immigration reform, and immigration law enforcement, the conservative-leaning media watchdog group Media Research Center found in a new study.

Ken Oliver-Méndez, Director of MRC’s new Spanish-language watchdog group MRC Latino, said in an interview that of the newscasts of Noticiero Univision and Noticiero Telemundo from November through February, 45 percent of stories on US domestic policy issues tilted liberal, 49 percent were balanced or neutral and 6 percent skewed conservative.

According to the study, Univision’s stories tilted left 50 percent of the time, were balanced 43 percent and were perceived as conservative 7 percent of the time, while Telemundo’s stories tilted left 54 percent of the time, were balanced 40 percent of the time and tilted conservative 5 percent of the time. The study also found that Democratic surrogates and liberal-leaning groups were featured on both networks more frequently than Republicans or conservative groups, but the group also faulted conservatives for not reaching out more to Latino media.