Monday, May 27, 2013

Labour's 'secret plan' to lure migrants
The release of a previously unseen document suggested that Labour’s migration policy over the past decade had been aimed not just at meeting the country’s economic needs, but also the Government’s “social objectives”. ...

... The original paper called for the need of a new framework for thinking about migration policy but the concluding phrase — “if we are to maximise the contribution of migration to the Government’s economic and social objectives” — was edited out.

Another deleted phrase suggested that it was “correct that the Government has both economic and social objectives for migration policy”. ...
Lawmakers zero in on IRS meetings at White House
...Former Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Doug Shulman visited the White House 118 times between 2010 and 2011. Acting Director Steven Miller, who took over at the IRS in November, also made numerous visits to the White House, though variations in the spelling of his name in White House visitor logs makes it difficult to determine exactly how many times.

The frequent trips to the White House under Obama far outnumbered the times other administrations felt the need to meet with the IRS, according to Mark Everson, who led the IRS under former President George W. Bush. Everson said he remembers making only one trip to the White House between 2003 and 2007 and said he felt like he'd "moved to Siberia" because of the isolation....

Sunday, May 26, 2013

Parking Tickets Issued on Wrecks while Stockholm Burns
Since last Sunday, May 19, rioters have taken to the streets of Stockholm’s suburbs every night, torching cars, schools, stores, office buildings and residential complexes. Yesterday, a police station in Rågsved, a suburb four kilometers south of Stockholm, was attacked and set on fire.

But while the Stockholm riots keep spreading and intensifying, Swedish police have adopted a tactic of non-interference. ”Our ambition is really to do as little as possible,” Stockholm Chief of Police Mats Löfving explained to the Swedish newspaper Expressen on Tuesday.

”We go to the crime scenes, but when we get there we stand and wait,” elaborated Lars Byström, the media relations officer of the Stockholm Police Department. ”If we see a burning car, we let it burn if there is no risk of the fire spreading to other cars or buildings nearby. By doing so we minimize the risk of having rocks thrown at us.”

Swedish parking laws, however, continue to be rigidly enforced despite the increasingly chaotic situation. Early Wednesday, while documenting the destruction after a night of rioting in the Stockholm suburb of Alby, a reporter from Fria Tider observed a parking enforcement officer writing a ticket for a burnt-out Ford....
It's heresy, I know. But not all women are victims. And not all rape is rape: It is a view that will outrage many, but Crimewatch creator NICK ROSS insists it is a debate we must not flinch from
...Take domestic violence, for example. It is almost universally portrayed as though the perpetrators are men. Indeed, in 1989 the Canadian Journal Of Behavioural Science published the results of a survey that was celebrated as a classic exposé of ‘battered wives’, and was taken up as proof of typical male perfidy.

However, two years later the Journal acknowledged a different side to the story after the data had been re-analysed. While 10.8 per cent of the men surveyed had pushed, grabbed or thrown objects at their spouses, 12.4 per cent of women had done so too. And although 2.5 per cent of men used serious violence, so did 4.7 per cent of women....

...In Britain, a large Home Office survey in 1995 found that 4.2 per cent of men said they had been physically assaulted or injured by their partner within the previous year – precisely the same figure as for women. When 15 years of British findings were put together in 2012, they told an essentially consistent story: between 30 and 40 per cent of those assaulted were men and they suffered a quarter of all the attacks....

Debunking The Notion That Men Are The Domestic Abusers And Women Are The Abused
...Among PASK's findings are that, except for sexual coercion, men and women perpetrate physical and non-physical forms of abuse at comparable rates, most domestic violence is mutual, women are as controlling as men, domestic violence by men and women is correlated with essentially the same risk factors, and male and female perpetrators are motivated for similar reasons.

"Although research confirms that women are more impacted by domestic violence," stated Hamel, "these findings recommend important intervention and policy changes, including a need to pay more attention to female-perpetrated violence, mutual abuse, and the needs of male victims."

Hamel also argues that men are not only disproportionately arrested in domestic violence cases, but sometimes arrested for arbitrary reasons, citing, for example, that police often arrest the bigger and stronger party in cases where the perpetrator is unclear. "Such policies are not only ineffective but violate people's civil rights," Hamel concludes. "People in the domestic violence field say that 'it's all about the victims.' Well, the victim is not always the one hit, but sometimes the one arrested."...
How much has DOJ overreached? Other news organizations might have to defend Fox News (Update – Search Warrant added)
... Had I seen this case last month, I’d have assumed that this had everything to do with the Obama team’s war on Fox News. Now, after the AP scandal, I’m not sure that’s all that went behind this. Eric Holder implied in his interview with NPR that spying on reporters has become routine in the Obama administration, so Rosen and Fox are probably not alone. However, I doubt that Rosen’s employer had nothing to do with this pursuit. Regardless, every reporter covering this administration has to wonder whether Big Brother Is Listening — or at least reading their e-mails and phone records. And so does every potential source within the administration.

And that, of course, is the entire point of these intimidation tactics....

Bombshell: Not just Rosen; A livid Megyn Kelly reports more at Fox News targeted by DOJ; Update: Fox statement; Update: Video

Fox News: ‘We Will Unequivocally Defend’ Rosen Against ‘Chilling’ DOJ Investigation
...Clemente’s statement comes as The New Yorker‘s Ryan Lizza uncovers the full warrant application, which makes it seem as though the FBI is interested in investigating Rosen as much as it is interested in investigating Rosen’s source. Chilling indeed.

On “America Live,” Megyn Kelly revealed that two other Fox News staffers were targeted for investigation by the DOJ on stories unrelated to Rosen’s....

Chilling report: Obama’s DOJ spied on Fox News’ James Rosen; Criminalizes reporting; Update: Fox issues statement
...They used security badge access records to track the reporter’s comings and goings from the State Department, according to a newly obtained court affidavit. They traced the timing of his calls with a State Department security adviser suspected of sharing the classified report. They obtained a search warrant for the reporter’s personal e-mails.

The case of Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, the government adviser, and James Rosen, the chief Washington correspondent for Fox News, bears striking similarities to a sweeping leaks investigation disclosed last week in which federal investigators obtained records over two months of more than 20 telephone lines assigned to the Associated Press....

...The focus of the Post’s report yesterday is that the DOJ’s surveillance of Rosen, the reporter, extended far beyond even what they did to AP reporters. The FBI tracked Rosen’s movements in and out of the State Department, traced the timing of his calls, and – most amazingly – obtained a search warrant to read two days worth of his emails, as well as all of his emails with Kim. In this case, said the Post, “investigators did more than obtain telephone records of a working journalist suspected of receiving the secret material.” It added that “court documents in the Kim case reveal how deeply investigators explored the private communications of a working journalist”....

Obama's War Against the Free Press Gets Creepier
Perhaps the most chilling aspect of the U.S. Department of Justice "investigation" of Fox News chief correspondent James Rosen isn't the intrusive tracking of his movements and contacts — although that's disturbing enough — but the basis for the criminal charges he may ultimately face. At its heart, the allegation that Rosen broke the law "at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator” is based on nothing more than meeting with and asking questions of government adviser Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, who told him the non-shocking information that North Korea could very well respond to United Nations sanctions with more nuclear tests. That's right. Meeting an official and asking questions, which is what journalists do, is interpreted as criminal conspiracy. Taken with the already brewing scandal over the snooping of Associated Press phone records, we're looking at a full-fledged assault on the free press....

Obama DOJ formally accuses journalist in leak case of committing crimes
It is now well known that the Obama justice department has prosecuted more government leakers under the 1917 Espionage Act than all prior administrations combined - in fact, double the number of all such prior prosecutions. But as last week's controversy over the DOJ's pursuit of the phone records of AP reporters illustrated, this obsessive fixation in defense of secrecy also targets, and severely damages, journalists specifically and the newsgathering process in general....

...The focus of the Post's report yesterday is that the DOJ's surveillance of Rosen, the reporter, extended far beyond even what they did to AP reporters. The FBI tracked Rosen's movements in and out of the State Department, traced the timing of his calls, and - most amazingly - obtained a search warrant to read two days worth of his emails, as well as all of his emails with Kim. In this case, said the Post, "investigators did more than obtain telephone records of a working journalist suspected of receiving the secret material." It added that "court documents in the Kim case reveal how deeply investigators explored the private communications of a working journalist"....

...Under US law, it is not illegal to publish classified information. That fact, along with the First Amendment's guarantee of press freedoms, is what has prevented the US government from ever prosecuting journalists for reporting on what the US government does in secret. This newfound theory of the Obama DOJ - that a journalist can be guilty of crimes for "soliciting" the disclosure of classified information - is a means for circumventing those safeguards and criminalizing the act of investigative journalism itself. These latest revelations show that this is not just a theory but one put into practice, as the Obama DOJ submitted court documents accusing a journalist of committing crimes by doing this....

...That's what always made the establishment media's silence (or even support) in the face of the criminal investigation of WikiLeaks so remarkable: it was so obvious from the start that the theories used there could easily be exploited to criminalize the acts of mainstream journalists. That's why James Goodale, the New York Times' general counsel during the paper's historic press freedom fights with the Nixon administration, has been warning that "the biggest challenge to the press today is the threatened prosecution of WikiLeaks, and it's absolutely frightening."

Indeed, as Harvard Law Professor Yochai Benkler noted recently in the New Republic, when the judge presiding over Manning's prosecution asked military lawyers if they would "have pressed the same charges if Manning had given the documents not to WikiLeaks but directly to the New York Times?", the prosecutor answered simply: "Yes, ma'am". It has long been clear that this WikiLeaks-as-criminals theory could and would be used to criminalize establishment media outlets which reported on that which the US government wanted concealed.

Now we know that the DOJ is doing exactly that: applying this theory to criminalize the acts of journalists who report on what the US government does in secret, even though there is no law that makes such reporting illegal and the First Amendment protects such conduct. Essentially accusing James Rosen of being an unindicted co-conspriator in these alleged crimes is a major escalation of the Obama DOJ's already dangerous attacks on press freedom. ...

...There is simply no defense for this behavior. Obama defenders such as Andrew Sullivan claim that this is all more complicated than media outrage suggests because of a necessary "trade-off" between press freedoms and security. So do Obama defenders believe that George Bush and Richard Nixon - who never prosecuted leakers like this or formally accused journalists of being criminals for reporting classified information - were excessively protective of press freedoms and insufficiently devoted to safeguarding secrecy? To ask that question is to mock it. Obama has gone so far beyond what every recent prior president has done in bolstering secrecy and criminalizing whistleblowing and leaks....

Is the Government Spying on Reporters More Often Than We Think?
The Justice Department's seizure of call logs related to phone lines used by dozens of Associated Press reporters has provoked a flurry of bipartisan criticism, most of which has cast the decision as a disturbing departure from the norm. AP head Gary Pruitt condemned the decision, part of an investigation into leaks of classified information, as a "massive and unprecedented intrusion." Yet there's plenty of circumstantial evidence suggesting the seizure may not be unprecedented—just rarely disclosed....

...It wouldn't be surprising if there were more cases like this we've never heard about. Here's why: The Justice Department's rules only say the media must be informed about "subpoenas" for "telephone toll records." The FBI's operations guidelines interprets those rules quite literally, making clear the requirement "concerns only grand jury subpoenas." That is, these rules don't apply to National Security Letters, which are secret demands for information used by the FBI that don't require judicial approval. The narrow FBI interpretation also doesn't cover administrative subpoenas, which are issued by federal agencies without prior judicial review. Last year, the FBI issued NSLs for the communications and financial records of more than 6,000 Americans—and the number has been far higher in previous years. The procedures that do apply to those tools have been redacted from publicly available versions of the FBI guidelines. Thus, it's no shocker the AP seizure would seem like an "unprecedented intrusion" if the government doesn't think it has to tell us about the precedents. And there's no telling if the Justice Department rules (and the FBI's interpretation) allow the feds to seize without warning other types of electronic communications records that could reveal a journalist's e-mail, chat, or Web browsing activity.

Is it paranoid to fear the Justice Department and the FBI are sidestepping the rules? Consider a case first reported in 2008, and discussed at length in a damning (but heavily redacted) 2010 report from the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General. In this instance, the FBI obtained nearly two years of phone records for lines belonging to Washington Post and New York Times bureaus and reporters—even though the FBI had initially requested records covering only seven months. In what the OIG called a "serious abuse of the FBI’s authority to obtain information," agents seized these records under false pretenses, "without any legal process or Attorney General approval." And these records remained in the FBI’s database for over three years before the OIG or the press found out....
Looking more and more like a DOJ war on Fox News, not just James Rosen
...Newly uncovered court documents show the Justice Department seized phone records associated with several Fox News lines as part of a leak investigation — a revelation that comes as the White House Correspondents’ Association spoke out against the administration’s monitoring of reporters.

Documents from October 2011 appear to show exchanges that match the specific locations of Fox News’ White House, Pentagon, State Department and other operations. The last four digits of each of the phone numbers listed are redacted in the government filing so it is impossible to know the full numbers....

...The Obama Justice Department has seized the phone records of numbers that are associated with White House staffers and, apparently, with Fox News reporters, according to a document filed in the case of Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, on October 13, 2011. Kim is a former State Department contractor accused of violating the Espionage Act for allegedly leaking classified information to James Rosen, a Fox News reporter. Ronald C. Machen, Jr., the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, who is prosecuting the case, has seized records associated with two phone numbers at the White House, at least five numbers associated with Fox News, and one that has the same area code and exchange as Rosen’s personal-cell-phone number (the last four numbers are redacted)....

DOJ seized logs for five Fox News phones, possibly James Rosens’ parents’ house
...Bret Baier revealed Tuesday that, according to Department of Justice documents, one of the numbers listed in DOJ’s demands “also relate to James’ parents’ home in Staten Island.” I can’t yet find a Fox follow-up story on the revelation, but the Staten Island area code, 718, shows up twice in DOJ’s filing in the Stephen Jin-Woo Kim case....

...The document uncovered today suggests the government seized “call detail” records from Rosen’s work and cell phones, which would show whom he called, who called him, how long they spoke, and the times of the calls. The document suggests that the government was seeking only the subscriber records for the two White House numbers targeted, information that a government source said would include the name of the official who used the specific line.

Report: DOJ seized multiple White House, Fox News records in Rosen ‘investigation’
...So, it looks like the DOJ had not ‘merely’ been sticking their big, fat nose into Rosen’s personal and professional e-mails/calls/comings and goings, but just higgledy-piggledy been nabbing up records that may-or-may-not have been associated with the ‘case’ — including five separate Fox News phone numbers — all in the attempt to somehow involve investigative reporting in a probe of potentially criminal behavior? Wow, guys. Really crack team you got there. Bang-up job on protecting and respecting the First Amendment, and all that....

The Justice Department and Fox News’s Phone Records
...In all, Machen has seized records associated with over thirty different phone numbers. In the filing that included the new information, the last four digits of each telephone line targeted by the Obama Administration are redacted. Two of the numbers begin with area code 202 and the exchange 456, which, according to current and former Administration officials, are used exclusively by the White House. (The phone number for the White House switchboard is (202) 456-1414.)

At least five other numbers targeted by the government include the area code 202 and the exchange 824. The phone number for the Fox News Washington bureau, which is publicly available, is (202) 824-0001. Rosen’s work phone number at Fox News begins with the same area code and exchange....

The D.O.J. Versus James Rosen
The Washington Post reported today that, in the course of a leak investigation of a State Department employee who allegedly provided Fox News’s James Rosen with classified information, the Obama Justice Department not only subpoenaed Rosen’s private e-mails but also said that Rosen was “an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator” in the alleged crime.

Rosen was not charged with any crime, but it is unprecedented for the government, in an official court document, to accuse a reporter of breaking the law for conducting the routine business of reporting on government secrets.

Here is the full forty-four-page Justice Department application for the search warrant of Rosen’s Gmail account....
DOJ confirms Holder OK'd search warrant for Fox News reporter's emails
The Justice Department pledged Friday to to review its policies relating to the seizure of information from journalists after acknowledging that a controversial search warrant for a Fox News reporter’s private emails was approved “at the highest levels” of the Justice Department, including “discussions” with Attorney General Eric Holder.

The statement, confirming an NBC News account of Holder’s role, defended the secret warrant to obtain reporter James Rosen’s emails as a legitimate step to obtain evidence as part of an investigation of Stephen Kim. A former intelligence analyst, Kim has since been indicted under the Espionage Act for leaking classified information to Rosen about North Korea. He has denied the charges....

Sharyl Attkisson's computers compromised
Sharyl Attkisson, the Emmy-award winning CBS News investigative reporter, says that her personal and work computers have been compromised and are under investigation.

"I can confirm that an intrusion of my computers has been under some investigation on my end for some months but I'm not prepared to make an allegation against a specific entity today as I've been patient and methodical about this matter," Attkisson told POLITICO on Tuesday. "I need to check with my attorney and CBS to get their recommendations on info we make public."...

How Hope and Change Gave Way to Spying on the Press
...It’s instructive to go back to the dawn of Hope and Change. It was 2009, and the new administration decided it was appropriate to use the prestige of the White House to viciously attack a news organization—Fox News—and the journalists who work there. Remember, President Obama had barely been in office and had enjoyed the most laudatory press of any new president in modern history. Yet even one outlet that allowed dissent or criticism of the president was one too many. This should have been a red flag to everyone, regardless of what they thought of Fox News. The math was simple: if the administration would abuse its power to try and intimidate one media outlet, what made anyone think they weren’t next?...

"What I think is fair to say about Fox … is that it really is more a wing of the Republican Party," said Anita Dunn, White House communications director, on CNN. “[L]et's not pretend they're a news network the way CNN is." On ABC’s “This Week” White House senior adviser David Axelrod said Fox is "not really a news station." It wasn’t just that Fox News was “not a news organization,” White House chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel told CNN’s John King, but, “more [important], is [to] not have the CNNs and the others in the world basically be led in following Fox, as if what they’re trying to do is a legitimate news organization …”

These series of “warnings” to the Fourth Estate were what you might expect to hear from some third-rate dictator, not from the senior staff of Hope and Change, Inc....

Saturday, May 25, 2013

The Inevitable Decline of Great Britain
...The idea of policemen in one of the world’s major cities “wait[ing] helplessly for armed officers to arrive,” while murderers parade up and down the street soaked in blood and the body of a half-beheaded soldier lies in the street, is almost unbelievable. And yet that is the state of law enforcement in Great Britain. The average American household is better armed than a London policeman, and as a result, it was left to a few women from the crowd of bystanders to try to deal with cleaver-wielding murderers.

But that doesn’t mean the British are entirely lax with respect to law enforcement. No, not at all: it just depends which laws you are talking about. If you mean laws against carving up innocent people on the street with knives, well, the Brits have a problem. But if you complain about such an outrage on Facebook or Twitter, you’re going to be crushed by the full majesty of the law. ...
Does welfare cause terrorism, Part XVIII
...“In fact, there’s a good argument that “welfare benefits + ethnic antagonism” is the universal recipe for an underclass with an angry, oppositional culture. The social logic is simple: Ethnic differences make it easy for those outside of, for example, French Arab neighborhoods to discriminate against those inside, and easy for those inside to resent the mainstream culture around them. [Update: See also, Sweden.] Meanwhile, relatively generous welfare benefits enable those in the ethnic ghetto to stay there, stay unemployed, and seethe. Without government subsidies, they would have to overcome the prejudice against them and integrate into the mainstream working culture. Work, in this sense, is anti-terrorist medicine. (And if you work all day, there’s less time to dream up ways and reasons to kill infidels.)”...
I Wonk, Therefore I Am: The Limits Of Republican-Bashing
...Our wonkocracy is not, in fact, just any wonkocracy. Simply contrast it for a moment with, say, China’s, and you will recognize that ours is a decidedly neoliberal one. Even copping to this qualifier, however, does little to diminish our wonkocrats’ claims to functional universality. It is not too much of an exaggeration to summarize their autobiography like this: their job is to determine what policies are best for us; nobody is better at their job than they are, as a class; and history strongly suggests that, on a long enough timeline, anyone who isn’t following the policies that are best for us will catch up to our standpoint eventually, unless their ignorance destroys them first....

...The logic of the neoliberal wonkocrat dictates that “government” is this accumulation of authority, this attribution of legitimacy, and the entitlement to implement policy that flows from it. That’s what governing means. Oppose that, and you oppose not just “an ideology” or “your partisan opponents” — you oppose governance itself. It’s a simple model, really: Be Krugtron the Invincible, follow Krugtron the Invincible, or get out of the way....

...Krugman and any other wonkocrats are just lying when they insist that the foundational issue is political bad faith of an “ideological” kind. No matter how real or important that issue is, it will never transcend the really fundamental claim animating and self-justifying the wonkocracy: that, whatever else is the case, they deserve the power to see their policies implemented...
Strassel: Conservatives Became Targets in 2008
...The Bauer onslaught was a big part of a new liberal strategy to thwart the rise of conservative groups. In early August 2008, the New York Times trumpeted the creation of a left-wing group (a 501(c)4) called Accountable America. Founded by Obama supporter and liberal activist Tom Mattzie, the group—as the story explained—would start by sending "warning" letters to 10,000 GOP donors, "hoping to create a chilling effect that will dry up contributions." The letters would alert "right-wing groups to a variety of potential dangers, including legal trouble, public exposure and watchdog groups digging through their lives." As Mr. Mattzie told Mother Jones: "We're going to put them at risk." ...

The Bauer letters were the Obama campaign's high-profile contribution to this effort—though earlier, in the spring of 2008, Mr. Bauer filed a complaint with the FEC against the American Leadership Project, a group backing Hillary Clinton in the primary. "There's going to be a reckoning here," he had warned publicly. "It's going to be rough—it's going to be rough on the officers, it's going to be rough on the employees, it's going to be rough on the donors. . . Whether it's at the FEC or in a broader criminal inquiry, those donors will be asked questions." The campaign similarly attacked a group supporting John Edwards. ...

...As general counsel to the Obama re-election campaign, Mr. Bauer used the same tactics on pro-Romney groups. The Obama campaign targeted private citizens who had donated to Romney groups. Democratic senators demanded that the IRS investigate these organizations. ...

Peggy Noonan: The Inconvenient Truth About Benghazi
...Because of that, it could not tolerate the idea that the armed assault on the Benghazi consulate was a premeditated act of Islamist terrorism. That would carry a whole world of unhappy political implications, and demand certain actions. And the American presidential election was only eight weeks away. They wanted this problem to go away, or at least to bleed the meaning from it.

Because the White House could not tolerate the idea of Benghazi as a planned and deliberate terrorist assault, it had to be made into something else. So they said it was a spontaneous street demonstration over an anti-Muhammad YouTube video made by a nutty California con man. After all, that had happened earlier in the day, in Cairo. It sounded plausible. And maybe they believed it at first. Maybe they wanted to believe it. But the message was out: Provocative video plus primitive street Arabs equals sparky explosion. Not our fault. Blame the producer! Who was promptly jailed....

...Why couldn't the administration tolerate the idea that Benghazi was a planned terrorist event? Because they didn't want this attack dominating the headline with an election coming. It would open the administration to criticism of its intervention in Libya. President Obama had supported overthrowing Moammar Gadhafi and put U.S. force behind the Libyan rebels. Now Libyans were killing our diplomats. Was our policy wrong? More importantly, the administration's efforts against al Qaeda would suddenly come under scrutiny and questioning. The president, after the killing of Osama bin Laden, had taken to suggesting al Qaeda was over. Al Qaeda was done. But if an al Qaeda offshoot in Libya was killing our diplomats, the age of terrorism was not over. ...

Noonan: A Battering Ram Becomes a Stonewall
"I don't know." "I don't remember." "I'm not familiar with that detail." "It's not my precise area." "I'm not familiar with that letter."

These are quotes from the Internal Revenue Service officials who testified this week before the House and Senate. That is the authentic sound of stonewalling, and from the kind of people who run Washington in the modern age—smooth, highly credentialed and unaccountable. They're surrounded by legal and employment protections, they know how to parse a careful response, they know how to blur the essential point of a question in a blizzard of unconnected factoids. They came across as people arrogant enough to target Americans for abuse and harassment and think they'd get away with it....

...First, only conservative groups were targeted in this scandal by the IRS. Liberal or progressive groups were not targeted. The IRS leaked conservative groups' confidential applications and donor lists to liberal groups, never the other way around.

This was a political operation. If it had not been, then the statistics tell us left-wing groups would have been harassed and abused, and seen their applications leaked to the press. There would be a left-wing equivalent to Catherine Engelbrecht.

And all of this apparently took place in the years leading up to the 2012 election. Meaning that before that election, groups that were anti-Obamacare, or pro-life, or pro-Second Amendment or constitutionalist, or had words like "tea party" or "patriot" in their name—groups that is that would support Republicans, not Democrats—were suppressed, thwarted, kept from raising money and therefore kept from fully operating. ...

Friday, May 24, 2013

IRS scandal a reminder of how I learned about The Chicago Way
..."Are you in your good senses?" said my father. "We have lives here. We have businesses. If we get involved in politics, they will ruin us."

And no one, not the Roosevelt Democrats or the Reagan Republicans, disagreed. The socialists, the communists, the royalists, everyone nodded their heads.

This was Chicago. And for a business owner to get involved meant one thing: It would cost you money and somebody from government could destroy you.

The health inspectors would come, and the revenue department, the building inspectors, the fire inspectors, on and on. The city code books aren't thick because politicians like to write new laws and regulations. The codes are thick because when government swings them at a citizen, they hurt.

And who swings the codes and regulations at those who'd open their mouths? A government worker. That government worker owes his or her job to the political boss. And that boss has a boss.

The worker doesn't have to be told. The worker wants a promotion. If an irritant rises, it is erased. The hack gets a promotion. This is government.

So everybody kept their mouths shut, and Chicago was hailed by national political reporters as the city that works.

I didn't understand it all back then, but I understand it now. Once there were old bosses. Now there are new bosses. And shopkeepers still keep their mouths shut. Tavern owners still keep their mouths shut.

Even billionaires keep their mouths shut.

One hard-working billionaire whose children own the Chicago Cubs dared to open his mouth. Joe Ricketts considered funding a political group critical of Obama before last year's campaign. Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Obama's former chief of staff, made it clear that if the Cubs wanted City Hall's approval to refurbish decrepit Wrigley Field, Ricketts better back off....

Cuomo to Sheriffs on Gun Control: Please Exercise Your Right to Remain Silent
New York county sheriffs have been urged by Governor Andrew Cuomo to not voice their opposition to the state’s new gun-control laws. The governor reportedly threatened to remove them from their posts if they spoke out against the laws.

The bill was hastily passed by a Democrat-controlled legislature and signed by Cuomo earlier this year in response to the Newtown school shooting. Parts of the bill have needed modification because they were unclear or impossible to comply with. The new law put strict limits on the size of magazines in addition to broadening the definition of an assault weapon, a class which is banned.​

Shortly after the bill passed in January, the New York State Sheriffs’ Association sent Cuomo an analysis of the law that included suggested changes. According to Albany’s Times Union newspaper, Cuomo then invited representatives of the assoication to the Capitol last month and had a “heated” meeting with them, in which he told them to refrain from commenting on the bill.

“The governor was of the opinion that the sheriffs around the state should not be interjecting their personal opinions in reference to the law,” said Chemung County sheriff Christopher Moss. Another person briefed on the meeting said Cuomo threatened to remove the sheriffs from their positions, but Moss would not confirm this....
Obama and the IRS: The Smoking Gun?
...The NTEU is the 150,000 member union that represents IRS employees along with 30 other separate government agencies. Kelley herself is a 14-year IRS veteran agent. The union’s PAC endorsed President Obama in both 2008 and 2012, and gave hundreds of thousands of dollars in the 2010 and 2012 election cycles to anti-Tea Party candidates.

Putting IRS employees in the position of actively financing anti-Tea Party candidates themselves, while in their official positions in the IRS blocking, auditing, or intimidating Tea Party and conservative groups around the country....

Obama’s Defenders: He’s Not Corrupt, Just Dishonest and Incompetent
Because this critique of big government is so difficult to deny without appearing foolish, many on the left have tried another tack to minimize the scandals. They argue that President Obama is not corrupt, but rather that he is dishonest and incompetent. This was the defense (such as it was) of Obama and Clinton with regard to Benghazi. The Accountability Review Board, which sought to exonerate Clinton as much as possible, noted that the State Department was a complete mess under Clinton. Security requests were ignored, because Clinton didn’t take the time to understand what was going on in Libya. And the chain of command was difficult to discern, leading to total chaos within the department. In other words, Clinton, who seems to be planning a run for the presidency, is a dangerously poor executive with a shallow grasp of geopolitical realities.

And a similar defense has arisen from the left of Obama on the issue. Here is Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post claiming that Benghazi was brought about by incompetence and carelessness. And here is the New York Times editorial board trying to shift the conversation from Obama’s initial failure in Libya to his ongoing failure in Libya. Liberal “defenses” of Obama and Clinton paint a picture of two hopelessly unqualified leaders.

It doesn’t get much better from there. As Pete noted this morning, Obama’s former chief strategist David Axelrod defended his former boss by saying that the government has become so vast and unwieldy that Obama couldn’t possibly know what his own government was doing or why it was doing it. The fact that Democrats can acknowledge this while still planning to make the government larger and less accountable shows the ideological nature of their obsession with expanding the state at the expense of the people.

And Jeffrey Rosen utilizes this explanation for the Obama administration’s seizure of the Associated Press phone records. Obama isn’t Nixon, Rosen argues, nor George W. Bush. According to Rosen he’s more like the maniacally antidemocratic Woodrow Wilson...
Tax-exempt Obama Foundation doesn’t exist at listed addresses
The “charity” run by President Barack Obama’s half-brother that was fast-tracked for IRS tax-exempt status is based at a Virginia UPS store, according to its website.

The organization’s IRS filings list another Virginia address that is actually a drug rehab center where the foundation does not appear ever to have been based.

The Barack H. Obama Foundation is run by Abon’go “Roy” Malik Obama, the half-brother of Barack Obama....
The Real Lesson of the IRS Scandal
...The dismal performance of the IRS is but a symptom of a much larger disease which has taken root in the charters of many of the major administrative agencies in the United States today: the permit power. Private individuals are not allowed to engage in certain activities or to claim certain benefits without the approval of some major government agency. The standards for approval are nebulous at best, which makes it hard for any outside reviewer to overturn the agency’s decision on a particular application.

That power also gives the agency discretion to drag out its review, since few individuals or groups are foolhardy enough to jump the gun and set up shop without obtaining the necessary approvals first. It takes literally a few minutes for a skilled government administrator to demand information that costs millions of dollars to collect and that can tie up a project for years. That delay becomes even longer for projects that need approval from multiple agencies at the federal or state level, or both.

The beauty of all of this (for the government) is that there is no effective legal remedy. Any lawsuit that protests the improper government delay only delays the matter more. Worse still, it also invites that agency (and other agencies with which it has good relations) to slow down the clock on any other applications that the same party brings to the table. Faced with this unappetizing scenario, most sophisticated applicants prefer quiet diplomacy to frontal assault, especially if their solid connections or campaign contributions might expedite the application process. Every eager applicant may also be stymied by astute competitors intent on slowing the approval process down, in order to protect their own financial profits. So more quiet diplomacy leads to further social waste....

...These three mission statements share a common feature with the tax-exemptions in the IRS: They use broad mandates that foster administrative discretion and delay, both of which pose a threat to the rule of law. Even though the disease is the same in all cases, the cure surely is not. Here is a quick primer on what ought to be done in these different settings....
A Crisis of Authority
...In his Saturday column, the New York Times's Charles Blow, who at 42 is just under a decade younger than Obama, shows us where the corruption of moral authority leads.

He begins by asserting that the Obama scandals are failing to "resonate" with the public. That claim is based on a single opinion poll, so it may prove evanescent even if true. But Blow's explanation of this purported fact is chilling:

As for Tea Party groups that received extra scrutiny from the I.R.S., an Associated Press-GfK poll released last month found that fewer than a fourth of Americans say they support the group. The Tea Party may well be passé. . . .

So an unpopular movement applied for tax-exempt status under conditions made possible by an unpopular court decision, in order to influence politics with unfathomable amounts money from unnamed donors? Good luck gaining sympathy for that. ...
Report: Oversight on IRS targeting came from Washington all along
...From the outset, Internal Revenue Service lawyers based in Washington, D.C., provided important guidance on the handling of tea-party groups’ applications for tax-exempt status, according to both IRS sources and the inspector general’s report released in mid May.

Officials in the Technical Unit of the IRS’s Rulings and Agreements office played an integral role in determining how the targeted applications were treated, provided general guidelines to Cincinnati case workers, briefed other agency employees on the status of the special cases, and reviewed all those intrusive requests demanding “more information” from tea-party groups. At times, the Technical Unit lawyers seemed to exercise tight control over these applications, creating both a backlog in application processing and frustration among Cincinnati agents waiting for direction....

Reality Check Exclusive: Cincinnati agent giving orders in IRS scandal?
The claim that the ongoing IRS scandal is limited to low level employees is falling apart.

The six Cincinnati workers we have identified, who sent scrutinizing letters to conservative groups with words including "patriot, liberty, tea party or 9-12" in their names are Mitchel Steele, Carly Young, Joseph Herr, Stephen Seok, Liz Hofacre and a woman identified only as Ms. Richards.

But was all of this done at the hands of a small group of Cincinnati employees working together? During Friday's congressional hearing, that appeared to be the theme. Now, that explanation just became less likely.

Thanks to two FOX19 sources connected to the IRS, we now understand the chain of command for these workers.

Mitchel Steele, Carly Young, Joseph Herr and Liz Hofacre are IRS agents. Stephen Seok is a supervisor IRS agent.

But according to the IRS employee directory that FOX19 has obtained exclusively, each of these agents has a different manager and then above them a different territory manager.

That is important because while it may sound reasonable to the average person that these workers began targeting groups on their own, the IRS structure is designed to prevent that. ...

...When an application for tax exempt status comes into the IRS, agents have 270 days to work through that application. If the application is not processed within those 270 days it automatically triggers flags in the system. When that happens, individual agents are required to input a status update on that individual case once a month, every month until the case is resolved.

Keep in mind, at least 300 groups were targeted out of Cincinnati alone. Those applications spent anywhere from 18 months to nearly 3 years in the system and some still don't have their non-profit status. 300 groups multiplied by at least 18 months for each group, means thousands of red flags would have been generated in the system.

So who in the chain of command would have received all these flags? The answer, according to the IRS directory, one woman in Cincinnati, Cindy Thomas, the Program Manager of the Tax Exempt Division. Because all six of our IRS workers have different individual and territory managers, Cindy Thomas is one manager they all have common....

On section 1203
...To have a statutory or Internal Revenue Manual deadline like 270 days to process something and to blow past without consequences is inconceivable to me. The day that thing went overage, the manager gets a report, and the employee gets asked why. The manager would keep getting reports until it was fixed, and if it wasn’t fixed soon, the SAC would be on the phone, because he or she is getting the same report, and his or her performance report (and bonuses) is on the line.

I obviously can’t speak for EO, but in CID, for an agent to have multiple overage cases like that would be impossible. This simply could not happen without dire consequences for everyone in the chain, and as a result, it never happened.

So, how do I explain a revenue agent in EO who has open cases that are 300 or even 700 days overdue? The only possible explanation is that management was okay with it, because it is absolutely impossible that they – and this includes everyone in the chain – didn’t know. Maybe they’ve got a good reason why they were okay with it, but the whole chain had to sign off on it. All the way to DC....
Love Behind Bars
“I love you.” They were words I had longed to hear from Justin for years, but when he finally spoke them, something held me back. Three layers of Plexiglass and armed guards, to be precise.

Justin and I had dated off and on for years, and some part of me always believed we would end up married. Our parents were close friends, and we’d grown up together. He had always been a troublemaker. In fact, that might be what drew me to him. I was quiet, studious, painfully shy; he was full of boisterous energy and crude jokes. I loved his pug nose, his fiery red hair, and his teasing smiles. But as his school detentions led to expulsions and, eventually, arrests for possession of weed and then burglaries, we fell out of touch. I was ambitious, and my sights were set on anywhere but Delaware. I couldn’t afford to have Justin drag me down. Maybe when got his act together, I told myself, we could finally have a real relationship.

But in the spring of 2006, Justin came back into my life with a phone call from my mother. This time, he’d really screwed up, my mom told me; he’d been arrested as an accomplice in a double murder. His friend, a prescription drug addict, snapped one night and shot two of his dealers. Justin said his friend turned the gun on him and demanded that he help bury the bodies; Justin was, in turn, arrested and imprisoned....
Cops Beat Woman For Filming Another Beating
Baltimore police beat up a woman and smashed her camera for filming them beating up a man, telling her: "You want to film something bitch? Film this!" the woman claims in court. ...

..."Officer Church saw plaintiff filming the beating and ran at her," the complaint states. "He scared her and she sat back in her vehicle. As he ran at her, he yelled, 'You want to film something bitch? Film this!'

"Officer Church reached into plaintiff's car and grabbed her telephone-camera out of her hand, threw it to the ground and destroyed it by smashing it with his foot. ...
Cook’s 97% consensus study falsely classifies scientists’ papers according to the scientists that published them
Cook survey included 10 of my 122 eligible papers. 5/10 were rated incorrectly. 4/5 were rated as endorse rather than neutral. —Richard Tol (@RichardTol)

...Idso: “That is not an accurate representation of my paper. The papers examined how the rise in atmospheric CO2 could be inducing a phase advance in the spring portion of the atmosphere’s seasonal CO2 cycle. Other literature had previously claimed a measured advance was due to rising temperatures, but we showed that it was quite likely the rise in atmospheric CO2 itself was responsible for the lion’s share of the change. It would be incorrect to claim that our paper was an endorsement of CO2-induced global warming.”...

...Scafetta: “Cook et al. (2013) is based on a strawman argument because it does not correctly define the IPCC AGW theory, which is NOT that human emissions have contributed 50%+ of the global warming since 1900 but that almost 90-100% of the observed global warming was induced by human emission.

What my papers say is that the IPCC view is erroneous because about 40-70% of the global warming observed from 1900 to 2000 was induced by the sun. ...

...Shaviv: “Nope… it is not an accurate representation. The paper shows that if cosmic rays are included in empirical climate sensitivity analyses, then one finds that different time scales consistently give a low climate sensitiviity. i.e., it supports the idea that cosmic rays affect the climate and that climate sensitivity is low. This means that part of the 20th century should be attributed to the increased solar activity and that 21st century warming under a business as usual scenario should be low (about 1°C)....
Lerner signed IRS cover letters to conservative groups demanding intrusive tax-exemption info — after she learned what was going on
...This letter dated March 16, 2012 sent to the Ohio Liberty Council is representative of the other letters that Lerner sent to our clients. This letter, posted here, was sent on letterhead out of the IRS office in Cincinnati. The cover letter bears Lerner’s signature, who runs the Exempt Organizations division out of the Washington, DC office. It includes more invasive and improper questions about membership of the group and demands information about all public events conducted or planned for the future. And it specifically requested information about the organization’s website, Facebook page, and other social media outlets…

In addition to the letter sent to the Ohio Liberty Council, our records indicate that Lerner sent 14 other letters to 14 of our clients in the March-April 2012 timeframe. It’s unclear why her name appears on letters to some organizations, and not others. But one thing is clear: this correspondence shows her direct involvement in the scheme. Further, sending a letter from the top person in the IRS Exempt Organizations division to a small Tea Party group also underscores the intimidation used in this targeting ploy....

Top IRS Official Will Invoke Fifth Amendment
...A top IRS official in the division that reviews nonprofit groups will invoke the Fifth Amendment and refuse to answer questions before a House committee investigating the agency’s improper screening of conservative nonprofit groups....

IRS's Lerner Had History of Harassment, Inappropriate Religious Inquiries at FEC
...Lerner was appointed head of the FEC's enforcement division in 1986 and stayed in that position until 2001. In the late 1990s, the FEC launched an onerous investigation of the Christian Coalition, ultimately costing the organization hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless hours in lost work. The investigation was notable because the FEC alleged that the Christian Coalition was coordinating issue advocacy expenditures with a number of candidates for office. Aside from lacking proof this was happening, it was an open question whether the FEC had the authority to bring these charges.

James Bopp Jr., who was lead counsel for the Christian Coalition at the time, tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD the Christian Coalition investigation was egregious and uncalled for. "We felt we were being singled out, because when you handle a case with 81 depositions you have a pretty good argument you're getting special treatment. Eighty-one depositions! Eighty-one! From Ralph Reed's former part-time secretary to George H.W. Bush. It was mind blowing," he said....

...FEC attorneys continued their intrusion into religious activities by prying into what occurs at Coalition staff prayer meetings, and even who attends the prayer meetings held at the Coalition. This line of questioning was pursued several times. Deponents were also asked to explain what the positions of “intercessory prayer” and “prayer warrior” entailed, what churches specific people belonged, and the church and its location at which a deponent met Dr. Reed.

One of the most shocking and startling examples of this irrelevant and intrusive questioning by F EC attorneys into private political associations of citizens occurred during the administrative depositions of three pastors from South Carolina. Each pastor, only one of whom had only the slightest connection with the Coalition, was asked not only about their federal, state and local political activities, including party affiliations, but about political activities that, as one FEC attorney described as “personal,” and outside of the jurisdiction of the FECA [Federal Election Campaign Act]. They were also continually asked about the associations and activities of the members of their congregations, and even other pastors....
Youth gang riots in the Swedish capital Stockholm have entered fifth straight night
...“The problem is not from the Swedish government or from the Swedish people,” [said Swedish journalist Ingrid Carlqvist]. “The last 20 years or so, we have seen so many immigrants coming to Sweden that really don’t like Sweden. They do not want to integrate, they do not want to live in [Swedish] society: Working, paying taxes and so on.”

“The people come here now because they know that Sweden will give them money for nothing. They don’t have to work, they don’t have to pay taxes – they can just stay here and get a lot of money. That is really a problem,” Carlqvist added.

“The police could do so much, [instead] they have told the public that they mean to do as little as possible. But they could go there and use water cannons, they could not let people out onto the streets at night. There are so many things they could do within the law – but they don’t do it,” she said....

British troops told not to wear uniforms outside bases after yesterday’s attack in London ...Defence sources said the order had been given that uniform should not be worn by those travelling alone, or on public transport as a “common sense precaution” immediately after the killing

A source stressed the order was temporary while investigations into the killing carried on and the decision would be reviewed in the next few days…

“Personally, I would argue against it,” [Col Richard Kemp] told the Today programme. “As we saw in this case you don’t need to have somebody in uniform, you just need to have someone who knows a bit about soldiers and does a bit of observation in the vicinity of a barracks and you can identify a soldier very quickly…...
Inside Obama's bank CEOs meeting
...But President Barack Obama wasn’t in a mood to hear them out. He stopped the conversation and offered a blunt reminder of the public’s reaction to such explanations. “Be careful how you make those statements, gentlemen. The public isn’t buying that.”

“My administration,” the president added, “is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” ...

WOLF: Tyranny in our time
...This abuse is not limited to the IRS. Mr. Obama’s appointee to the Environmental Protection Agency likened himself to a Roman conqueror ready to wield his government power to arbitrarily “crucify” — his word — energy companies just to keep them obedient and fearful. His forced resignation fails to hide what we’re learning today, that even in his absence, the EPA routinely waives burdensome fees for politically acceptable groups but imposes them to their fullest on adversaries.

This is not simply picking winners and losers — it is something so much more. This is a government declaring friends and enemies among fellow Americans, and it goes all the way up to the Oval Office. In 2010, it was Mr. Obama himself, who declared to a roaring crowd, “We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends.” Chilling.

Punishing enemies and rewarding friends will be the sad, pathetic and enduring legacy of the Obama presidency. The stimulus failed to create jobs — there are 3 million fewer today than when Mr. Obama took office — but it did succeed at its real purpose: rewarding political friends and connected crony donors. The IRS witch hunt unleashed a culture of intimidation.

“Obamacare” is poised to force everyone else to get in line. Consider this: The IRS has demanded that conservative groups report the content of the prayers and reading clubs report the content of the books. The same IRS agent who ran this witch hunt has now been put in charge of enforcing Obamacare.

“After we win this election, it’s our turn. Payback time,” warned Valerie Jarrett, Mr. Obama’s longtime senior adviser. “Everyone not with us is against us, and they better be ready because we don’t forget. The ones who helped us will be rewarded, the ones who opposed us will get what they deserve. There is going to be hell to pay.”...

Monday, May 20, 2013

Obama was just joking about IRS audits, not sending signals
...I didn’t understand it all back then, but I understand it now. Once there were old bosses. Now there are new bosses. And shopkeepers still keep their mouths shut. Tavern owners still keep their mouths shut.

Even billionaires keep their mouths shut.

One hard-working billionaire whose children own the Chicago Cubs dared to open his mouth. Joe Ricketts considered funding a political group critical of Obama before last year’s campaign. Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former chief of staff, made it clear that if the Cubs wanted City Hall’s approval to refurbish decrepit Wrigley Field, Ricketts better back off.

It happened. He backed off. It was sickening. But it was and is Chicago.

And now — with the IRS used as political muscle and the Obama administration keeping that secret until after the president was elected — America understands it too....
Strassel: The IRS Scandal Started at the Top
Was the White House involved in the IRS's targeting of conservatives? No investigation needed to answer that one. Of course it was.

President Obama and Co. are in full deniability mode, noting that the IRS is an "independent" agency and that they knew nothing about its abuse. The media and Congress are sleuthing for some hint that Mr. Obama picked up the phone and sicced the tax dogs on his enemies.

But that's not how things work in post-Watergate Washington. Mr. Obama didn't need to pick up the phone. All he needed to do was exactly what he did do, in full view, for three years: Publicly suggest that conservative political groups were engaged in nefarious deeds; publicly call out by name political opponents whom he'd like to see harassed; and publicly have his party pressure the IRS to take action.

Mr. Obama now professes shock and outrage that bureaucrats at the IRS did exactly what the president of the United States said was the right and honorable thing to do. "He put a target on our backs, and he's now going to blame the people who are shooting at us?" asks Idaho businessman and longtime Republican donor Frank VanderSloot....

...The Obama call for scrutiny wasn't a mistake; it was the president's strategy—one pursued throughout 2012. The way to limit Romney money was to intimidate donors from giving. Donate, and the president would at best tie you to Big Oil or Wall Street, at worst put your name in bold, and flag you as "less than reputable" to everyone who worked for him: the IRS, the SEC, the Justice Department. The president didn't need a telephone; he had a megaphone.

The same threat was made to conservative groups that might dare play in the election. As early as January 2010, Mr. Obama would, in his state of the union address, cast aspersions on the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, claiming that it "reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests" (read conservative groups).

The president derided "tea baggers." Vice President Joe Biden compared them to "terrorists." In more than a dozen speeches Mr. Obama raised the specter that these groups represented nefarious interests that were perverting elections. "Nobody knows who's paying for these ads," he warned. "We don't know where this money is coming from," he intoned.

In case the IRS missed his point, he raised the threat of illegality: "All around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates . . . And they don't have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don't know if it's a foreign-controlled corporation."...

Big Government Loses Control
What to make of the political scandals that are dominating the headlines and forcing the Obama administration into Nixonian damage control? Technology is finally doing to big government what it has done to big business, big media and other institutions that once could operate with nearly full control over information. The government is losing the ability to manipulate information to avoid accountability.

Consider how the news broke that the Internal Revenue Service has been targeting conservative groups. The admission by IRS official Lois Lerner came in response to a question from the audience at a low-profile meeting of the tax section of the American Bar Association. For a week, perplexed reporters quoted her supporters saying she was apolitical and must not have meant to make news this way.

Then reports online cited lawyers who had been at the ABA event saying they saw her consult prepared remarks as she answered the supposedly impromptu question. On Friday, the acting IRS commissioner confessed to Congress that the question was planted. Its purpose was to give Ms. Lerner a chance to minimize IRS wrongdoing before the release of the Treasury inspector general's report early last week.

The attempt to spin the story worked for a time. Ms. Lerner blamed everything on low-level IRS employees in the Cincinnati office and said that the targeting of conservative groups ended when higher-ups learned about it. But as targeted groups went online to reveal the communications they had received from numerous IRS offices, it became clear that abuses were widespread, including at headquarters, and that the targeting went on for years....

Sunday, May 19, 2013

Former Hero Officer Accused of Raping Women, Held on $60M Bail
A former Philadelphia police officer, once hailed as a hero and given a seat next to the first lady at a speech by President Obama, is being held on $60 million bail after he allegedly raped two women and assaulted another....
IRS To Pro-Life Groups: You Know You’re Gonna Have To Give Up This Whole Protest Thing, Right?
...Yes, and we had obviously been reading through all the material throughout the week as this thing was coming out. And not only did they ask what were the contents of you prayers, but they were asking pro-life groups to have their board of directors commit that they will not protest in front of Planned Parenthood clinics, which again, never heard of in my life. And it ought to frighten people that the IRS, that the government, is that intrusive on behalf of a political agenda....
The IRS Will Come for You Next, Unless Congress Acts Now
...Applications that contained the phrases “tea party,” “government spending,” “government debt,” “taxes,” “make America a better place to live,” “patriots,” and “9/12” were isolated from other applications and subjected to extra paperwork and inquiries, delaying some approvals by as much as 1,138 days. Targeted groups were instructed to disclose hundreds of pages of private information, including the names of volunteers, donors, and even relatives of volunteers; résumés for each governing group member; printouts of websites and social-media content, and book reports of the clubs’ suggested reading materials.

This wasn’t standard protocol—it was opposition research. The IRS abused its power, bullying groups of citizens who didn’t have the financial and legal resources to fight back and violating their First Amendment right to assemble freely and criticize the federal government.

It’s the type of corruption that developing-world juntas aspire to, and not something the greatest constitutional republic in human history should be reduced to. It is unacceptable for a government agency to profile and discriminate against some citizens because of their beliefs, whether it is political, religious, or any other voluntary personal affiliation....

...White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters the White House counsel’s office learned about the IRS’s discrimination against small-government groups last month, on April 22—yet insisted that President Obama had no knowledge of the scandal until reading about it in the news with the rest of America.

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew found a sacrificial lamb in IRS Commissioner Steven Miller, requesting his resignation despite the fact that he was promoted into the position in November 2012—well after the targeting started—and was scheduled to retire from his position next month anyway....

...This is not a political scandal. The implications of unchecked abuses of executive power extend way beyond the battle for Congress in 2014. There are real public-policy issues at hand, such as making sure that citizens who try to obtain health-care coverage through Obamacare are not subject to the same selective abuse by unelected paper-pushers....
"Look, I can't speak to the law here. The law is irrelevant. The activity was outrageous and inexcusable."
...In talking about Benghazi, the interviewer, Chris Wallace, is trying to extract a specific fact about the events, a fact that has not yet come out and that Pfeiffer might know. Pfeiffer blows out a tirade of truly irrelevant verbiage to distract us from the question asked, including the notion that the fact isn't important. Who cares where the physical body of Obama was as long as he was "in touch"?

Well, some people would like to know, so tell us the fact and let us decide what use to make of it. To withhold the fact — on the ground that, in your opinion, we don't need it — is to make us think it would be damaging. We're likely to think Obama went golfing or something like that. Otherwise, why not just cough up the irrelevant fact? It must be relevant, we think, at least for political purposes, or Pfeiffer wouldn't strain so hard to suppress it. (He does claim at one point that he doesn't remember where Obama was.)...
Cook's unreported finding
...The guidelines for rating [the] abstracts show only the highest rating value blames the majority of global warming on humans. No other rating says how much humans contribute to global warming. The only time an abstract is rated as saying how much humans contribute to global warming is if it mentions:

that human activity is a dominant influence or has caused most of recent climate change (>50%).

If we use the system’s search feature for abstracts that meet this requirement, we get 65 results. That is 65, out of the 12,000+ examined abstracts. Not only is that value incredibly small, it is smaller than another value listed in the paper:

Reject AGW 0.7% (78)

Remembering AGW stands for anthropogenic global warming, or global warming caused by humans, take a minute to let that sink in. This study done by John Cook and others, praised by the President of the United States, found more scientific publications whose abstracts reject global warming than say humans are primarily to blame for it....
UPDATED: IRS tax exemption/Obamacare exec got $103,390 in bonuses; Did Obama OK them?
Sarah Hall Ingram, the IRS executive in charge of the tax exempt division in 2010 when it began targeting conservative Tea Party, evangelical and pro-Israel groups for harassment, got more than $100,000 in bonuses between 2009 and 2012.

More recently, Ingram was promoted to serve as director of the tax agency's Obamacare program office, a position that put her in charge of the vast expansion of the IRS' regulatory power and staffing in connection with federal health care, ABC reported earlier today.

Ingram received a $7,000 bonus in 2009, according to data obtained by The Washington Examiner from the IRS, then a $34,440 bonus in 2010, $35,400 in 2011 and $26,550 last year, for a total of $103,390. Her annual salary went from $172,500 to $177,000 during the same period.

The 2010, 2011 and 2012 bonuses were awarded during the period when IRS harassment of the conservative groups was most intense. The newspaper obtained the data via a Freedom of Information Act request.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., described the Ingram awards as "stunning, just stunning."

Bonuses as large as those awarded to Ingram typically require presidential approval, according to federal personnel regulations....
Oops: IRS’s rationale for scrutinizing tea partiers debunked by nonprofit application data
...By the way, in case you’re updating your scandal meme scorecard, we’ve now moved on from “Obama’s passive and disinterested, but certainly not culpable” to out-and-out assertions that the IRS was completely in the right here, despite their (and O’s) acknowledgment of their wrongdoing. MKH was on that last night, but here’s Scary Larry from Wednesday evening’s MSNBC broadcast proving he’s the most progressive progressive of them all. I’ll leave you with this from HuffPo’s business editor, who felt moved to opine in favor of these fine, hard-working public servants:

The Tea Party stands for many things, but a big part of its message is that sending money to Washington amounts to the perpetuation of a dangerous welfare state that’s intent on turning America into a helpless land where our lone skill is filling out the forms to go on the dole.

Isn’t it reasonable to assume that people who hold such beliefs might feel additional motivation to pursue grey areas and loopholes at tax time? Wouldn’t the people who oversee federal coffers have been derelict had they not at least had a good look? ...


IRS official in charge during Tea Party targeting now runs agency’s Obamacare office
...The Internal Revenue Service official in charge of the tax-exempt organizations at the time when the unit targeted tea party groups now runs the IRS office responsible for the health care legislation.

Sarah Hall Ingram served as commissioner of the office responsible for tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012. But Ingram has since left that part of the IRS and is now the director of the IRS’ Affordable Care Act office, the IRS confirmed to ABC News today....

The IRS Was Dead Right To Scrutinize Tea Party
...In castigating government as the root of all evil while portraying taxation as a form of tyranny, the Tea Party is no less than a mass celebration of the evasion of the basic responsibilities of American citizenship. Common sense alone tells you that people drawn to its ranks may feel extra temptation to find ways to limit what they surrender to the rogue federal bureaucrats who have supposedly seized the nation....

...Which gets us back to the Tea Party. Here is a group that has made no effort to hide its contempt for the very institution of taxation. This is what it says on the website of the Cincinnati Tea Party: "Individuals need to have a direct connection between their efforts and the fruits of their labor. This is the magical spark that has led the United States from a loosely conglomerated political experiment into the most exceptional, strongest and most powerful nation on earth. Too many taxes and regulations ultimately serve to snuff out that spark."...

...This scandal does not stem from the IRS actually levying action that contravenes the law. It's simply about whom the IRS decided to scrutinize. And the IRS had abundant reason to look carefully at the applications for tax exempt status sent in by people who are prone to portray taxes as something as base as slavery....

"I was just a stay-at-home mother. I was pregnant with another baby, and I wanted to do what was right. My Tea Party group was becoming really large..."
...So I started calling other groups and I thought I would file and create an organization, and here they were all getting targeted by the IRS, and I got scared....

"Send us your Facebook pages, your Twitter pages," and I said, "Does that include personal pages?" and they said, "Everything." They wanted to know your personal relationships with politicians and political parties. And I asked, "What would happen if I don't send this to you?" and they said, they made an insinuation like, "Look, it can be considered perjury if you omit things from the IRS." I'm a pregnant stay-at-home mother on one income, I thought, "Oh, my goodness, I'm not doing anything." I stopped....
Update on Deadly Bakersfield Police Beating: Seized Phone’s Video Disappears, Sheriff Calls in FBI
Last Friday, Brian Doherty passed along reporting of what sounds like a horrific, deadly beating by law enforcement officers of a Bakersfield, Calif., man outside a hospital for the crime of maybe being drunk in public. The beating was captured by cell phone video by at least two witnesses. The Kern County Sheriff’s Department then seized those phones as well.

You may suspect that when those phones are returned to their owners, the videos were suspiciously gone. You would be half-right. One video cannot be found. The other one is apparently intact. In a slightly good piece of news, Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood has asked the FBI to investigate the phone as well to see if there was an actual video on the phone that had been deleted and to see if it can be recovered....
Tim Carney: The IRS is deeply political — and very Democratic
...In the past three election cycles, the Center for Responsive Politics' database shows about $474,000 in political donations by individuals listing "IRS" or "Internal Revenue Service" as their employer.

This money heavily favors Democrats: $247,000 to $145,000, with the rest going to political action committees. (Oddly, half of those GOP donations come from only two IRS employees, one in Houston and one in Annandale, Va.)

IRS employees also gave $67,000 to the PAC of the National Treasury Employees Union, which in turn gave more than 96 percent of its contributions to Democrats. Add the PAC cash to the individual donations and IRS employees favor Democrats 2-to-1.

The Cincinnati office where the political targeting took place is much more partisan, judging by FEC filings. More than 75 percent of the campaign contributions from that office in the past three elections went to Democrats. In 2012, every donation traceable to employees at that office went to either President Obama or liberal Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio....

IRS Scandal Strikes a Severe Blow to Big Government
...Nor is that the only issue with the IRS and potential politicization. A prominent donor to the Mitt Romney campaign, Frank Vandersloot, revealed yesterday that after donating to Romney (and being attacked by the Obama campaign as being “less-than-reputable”), he was targeted for not just one but two IRS audits, plus a Department of Labor audit.

Vandersloot claims that more Romney donors also got the IRS audit treatment during the 2012 campaign, but are understandably reluctant to come forward. Franklin Graham, the son of legendary evangelist Billy Graham and the man running the family’s ministries also claims that the IRS targeted his organization for political purposes during the presidential campaign, costing them over $80,000 and lots of wasted time.

One of the offices of the IRS handling the tax-exempt requests also leaked nine confidential files in progress to the liberal watchdog site ProPublica, according to ProPublica itself....

...“The law authorizes the IRS to share confidential taxpayer information with the Department of Health and Human Services for the purpose of determining those subsidies,” York reminds us. “In addition, the IRS will keep track of even the smallest changes in Americans' financial condition. Did you get a raise recently? You'll need to notify the IRS; it might affect your subsidy status. Have your hours been reduced at work? Notify the IRS. Change jobs? Same.”

Now consider what may happen when all of this intimate detail ends up in the hands of a politicized IRS, as happened over the last three years. Newt Gingrich asked Monday, “Why would you trust the bureaucracy with your health if you can't trust the bureaucracy with your politics?"

It’s a good question. Undoubtedly, it’s one of the questions that a certain-to-be-revitalized Tea Party will be asking, especially since the IRS proved every warning the grassroots conservatives have about the dangers of big government. This scandal has the potential to deliver a crippling blow to the cult of big government, thanks to the behavior of big government itself.

My Tea Party group’s futile attempt to get IRS tax-exempt status
...we heard back from the IRS that they needed more information from us, and we complied [early 2010]. We didn’t have a ton of information for them however as we had only begun, we had no long term budgets because we were a new organization. But we sent all we had. Then we heard the IRS did not like that we had formed as an LLC, and not just incorporated. I told them that we saw no law or regulations that said we could not be an LLC and asked them to justify which laws or regulations this broke so we could do further research. We learned after this that it was futile to keep fighting with the IRS as they held all the cards and we had nothing to leverage our selves with, so we gave up. [April 2010]...

...“It became just this mountain of paperwork back and forth. And we just decided at that point that you know we saw the writing on the wall … We were some of the biggest critics of the federal government, of course they weren’t going to help us out…. We knew we were the beginning of some big snowball. We kept hearing from other groups, oh, there’s a two-year backlog.”...

...Lois Lerner, the senior IRS official at the center of the decision to target tea party groups for burdensome tax scrutiny, signed paperwork granting tax-exempt status to the Barack H. Obama Foundation, a shady charity headed by the president’s half-brother that operated illegally for years….

Lerner also appears to have broken with the norms of tax-exemption approval by granting retroactive tax-exempt status to Malik Obama’s organization....

Did The IRS Try To Swing Election To Obama?
...And why is it that, as the New York Times reports, no one involved with the scandal at the IRS has been disciplined while "one in Cincinnati was promoted"?

In the end, the IRS managed to put its thumb on the political scale by squelching political activity on the right — some groups report curtailing get-out-the-vote efforts, spending piles of money on legal fees or disbanding altogether in the face of IRS inquisitions.

And all of it happened during a close and hotly contested presidential election where such mischievousness could make a real difference....
IRS Has Long History of Political Dirty Tricks
If you think the IRS's targeting of Americans for their political views is something new, think again.

Historians, tax lawyers, civil libertarians and past victims of abuse say the practice goes back to the Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy and FDR adminstrations, all of which reportedly used the agency as a weapon against political enemies. ...

...Andrew's book, says Schuyler, "documents that Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon were complicit, to varying degrees, in using the IRS for political purposes. And it didn't end there. John had enough material to take it up through the 1970s and '80s. That's all in our college archives."

During the Clinton administration, Paula Jones, who had filed a sexual-harassment suit against President Clinton, alleged she was being audited by the IRS because of it.

Targets of the IRS during the Kennedy administration, according to Andrew and Schuyler, included such groups as the conservative John Birch Society. Former editor of the Washington Post Ben Bradlee in his 1976 book "Conversations With Kennedy," wrote that Kennedy had shared with him confidential information from the tax returns of rich conservatives H.L. Hunt and J. Paul Getty. ...

The New Republic: Hey, didn’t Tea Parties kinda bring this on themselves by trying really hard to follow the law?
...But, in fact, the IRS’s great conservative crackdown is even more innocent than that. It turns out that the applications the conservative groups submitted to the IRS—the ones the agency subsequently combed over, provoking nonstop howling—were unnecessary. The IRS doesn’t require so-called 501c4 organizations to apply for tax-exempt status. If anyone wants to start a social welfare group, they can just do it, then submit the corresponding tax return (form 990) at the end of the year. To be sure, the IRS certainly allows groups to apply for tax-exempt status if they want to make their status official. But the application is completely voluntary, making it a strange basis for an alleged witch hunt.

So why would so many Tea Party groups subject themselves to a lengthy and needless application process? Mostly it had to do with anxiety—the fear that they could run afoul of the law once they started raising and spending money. “Our business experience was that we had to pay taxes once there was money coming through here,” says Tom Zawistowski, the recent president of the Ohio Liberty Coalition, which tangled with the IRS over its tax status. “We felt we were under a microscope. … We were on pins and needles at all times.” In other words, the groups submitted their applications because they perceived themselves to be persecuted, not because they actually were…

So the crime here had nothing to do with “targeting” conservatives. The targeting was effectively done by the conservative groups themselves, when they filed their gratuitous applications. The crime, such as it is, was twofold. First, in the course of legitimately vetting questionable applications, the IRS appears to have been more intrusive than justified, asking for information about donors whose privacy it should have respected. This is unfortunate and intolerable, but not quite a threat to democracy....

...Stefano said she tried to start her own group called The Loyal Opposition between 2010-2011. But when she applied for tax exempt status, the IRS responded with a litany of questions that put her off.

“I was pregnant and on a single income and they were asking me questions like, ‘Are you on Facebook,” she said incredulously. “They wanted my personal Facebook page.”

“A lawyer told me, ‘They’re going to come after you and if you make one mistake they could ruin your life’,” Stefano added. “I like to think of myself as very tough, but I’m ashamed to say I was intimidated and frightened, and I shut it down.”...

...“We’re just regular citizens,” said one member who only spoke on condition of anonymity. “It’s not like we have access to resources to deal with this. Whenever you get pushback from the IRS of this magnitude you’re not able to deal with it.”

The member said the IRS replied to their 2009 application for tax exempt status with the same multi-questionnaire response other groups had gotten. Six months, thousands of dollars, and countless hours later, they gave up.

“As a result of receiving that questionnaire, the person who was our treasurer quit, and the group decided to not move forward with tax exempt status,” the member said. “That’s an example of the type of affect this type thing has.”...

Embattled IRS official Lois Lerner’s husband’s law firm has strong Obama connections
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) official who apologized for targeting conservative nonprofit groups for extra scrutiny is married to an attorney whose firm hosted a voter registration organizing event for the Obama presidential campaign, praised President Obama’s policy work, and had one of its partners appointed by Obama to a key ambassadorship.

IRS Exempt Organizations Division director Lois G. Lerner, who has been described as “apolitical” in mainstream press coverage of the IRS scandal, is married to tax attorney Michael R. Miles, a partner at the law firm Sutherland Asbill & Brennan. The firm is based in Atlanta but has a number of offices including in Washington, D.C., where Miles works.

The 400-attorney firm hosted an organizing meeting at its Atlanta office for people interested in helping with voter registration for the Obama re-election campaign.

This is not the first of Lerner’s connections to the president to surface. Earlier this week The Daily Caller reported that Lerner personally signed the tax-exemption approval for a shady charity run by Obama’s half-brother, after an inexplicably brief one-month application process....

Data Doesn't Support IRS Explanation for Scandal
Applications for tax exemption from advocacy nonprofits had not yet spiked when the Internal Revenue Service began using what it admits was inappropriate scrutiny of conservative groups in 2010.

In fact, applications were declining, data show.

Top IRS officials have been saying that a “significant increase” in applications from advocacy groups seeking tax-exempt status spurred its Cincinnati office in 2010 to filter those requests by using such politically loaded phrases as “Tea Party,” “patriots,” and “9/12.”...
David Brooks: ‘We as a country have become over-addicted to scandal’
...“I have a perverse relationship to Watergate, because it made me interested in politics,” Brooks said. “It was those hearings, watching those hearings on TV that really lit the fire for me that this was really important, that what happened in Washington was tremendously important, for good and evil, a test of character and a test of virtue. And it should be pointed out that, in Watergate, we saw acts of cowardice. We also saw some incredible acts of courage from some of the people chasing it down and reacting with integrity. To me, the aftershocks have been negative mostly, in part, as Mark [Shields] described, with loss of trust in government, in part the rise of a scandal culture.”...

Oddly, the IRS didn’t seem interested in large 501s
...The nation’s tax agency has admitted to inappropriately scrutinizing smaller tea party organizations that applied for tax-exempt status, and senior Treasury Department officials were notified in the midst of the 2012 presidential election season that an internal investigation was underway. But the IRS largely maintained a hands-off policy with the much larger, big-budget organizations on the left and right that were most influential in the elections and are organized under a section of the tax code that allows them to hide their donors....

Why might that be? Groups like American Crossroads and Priorities USA can afford to defend themselves, even if we entertain for a moment the fantasy that this IRS would go after a group of former Obama advisers. Bullies don’t pick on those who can effectively defend themselves. Also, these groups get a lot of attention, and starting a war with Karl Rove would have exposed this effort a lot more quickly than anyone in the IRS or the Obama administration might have wanted.

Had these enforcement efforts actually been legitimate, the IRS would have wanted that kind of attention. The fact that they actively avoided accruing it speaks volumes about its perceived legitimacy even among its perpetrators.

This tells us, then, that the IRS wanted to target conservative groups who couldn’t afford to defend themselves, and who could be easily intimidated out of organizing for their agendas. That’s not a strategy for reform or enforcement, but simply a brute-force bullying effort in order to sideline grassroots opposition to the current administration. Contra the AP, that’s not irony at all, but corruption and abuse....

Saturday, May 18, 2013

Strassel: The IRS Scandal Started at the Top
...President Obama and Co. are in full deniability mode, noting that the IRS is an "independent" agency and that they knew nothing about its abuse. The media and Congress are sleuthing for some hint that Mr. Obama picked up the phone and sicced the tax dogs on his enemies.

But that's not how things work in post-Watergate Washington. Mr. Obama didn't need to pick up the phone. All he needed to do was exactly what he did do, in full view, for three years: Publicly suggest that conservative political groups were engaged in nefarious deeds; publicly call out by name political opponents whom he'd like to see harassed; and publicly have his party pressure the IRS to take action.

Mr. Obama now professes shock and outrage that bureaucrats at the IRS did exactly what the president of the United States said was the right and honorable thing to do. "He put a target on our backs, and he's now going to blame the people who are shooting at us?" asks Idaho businessman and longtime Republican donor Frank VanderSloot....

Mr. VanderSloot is the Obama target who in 2011 made a sizable donation to a group supporting Mitt Romney. In April 2012, an Obama campaign website named and slurred eight Romney donors. It tarred Mr. VanderSloot as a "wealthy individual" with a "less-than-reputable record." Other donors were described as having been "on the wrong side of the law."

This was the Obama version of the phone call—put out to every government investigator (and liberal activist) in the land.

Twelve days later, a man working for a political opposition-research firm called an Idaho courthouse for Mr. VanderSloot's divorce records. In June, the IRS informed Mr. VanderSloot and his wife of an audit of two years of their taxes. In July, the Department of Labor informed him of an audit of the guest workers on his Idaho cattle ranch. In September, the IRS informed him of a second audit, of one of his businesses. Mr. VanderSloot, who had never been audited before, was subject to three in the four months after Mr. Obama teed him up for such scrutiny. ...

...The Obama call for scrutiny wasn't a mistake; it was the president's strategy—one pursued throughout 2012. The way to limit Romney money was to intimidate donors from giving. Donate, and the president would at best tie you to Big Oil or Wall Street, at worst put your name in bold, and flag you as "less than reputable" to everyone who worked for him: the IRS, the SEC, the Justice Department. The president didn't need a telephone; he had a megaphone. ...

...Short of directly asking federal agencies to investigate these groups, this is as close as it gets. Especially as top congressional Democrats were putting in their own versions of phone calls, sending letters to the IRS that accused it of having "failed to address" the "problem" of groups that were "improperly engaged" in campaigns. Because guess who controls that "independent" agency's budget? ...

My Tea Party group’s futile attempt to get IRS tax-exempt status
... …we heard back from the IRS that they needed more information from us, and we complied [early 2010]. We didn’t have a ton of information for them however as we had only begun, we had no long term budgets because we were a new organization. But we sent all we had. Then we heard the IRS did not like that we had formed as an LLC, and not just incorporated. I told them that we saw no law or regulations that said we could not be an LLC and asked them to justify which laws or regulations this broke so we could do further research. We learned after this that it was futile to keep fighting with the IRS as they held all the cards and we had nothing to leverage our selves with, so we gave up. [April 2010]

“It became just this mountain of paperwork back and forth. And we just decided at that point that you know we saw the writing on the wall … We were some of the biggest critics of the federal government, of course they weren’t going to help us out…. We knew we were the beginning of some big snowball. We kept hearing from other groups, oh, there’s a two-year backlog.”...