Many Americans hopes that electing a black president would prove that we had turned a corner in race relations. Some actually voted for Obama for that reason; others saw it as a salutary consequence of an otherwise dreadful president.
Alas, it was not to be. For the left, race relations are not something to be improved. Quite the contrary, they are a political weapon. And as this administration has floundered — the economy still not recovering, foreign policy in ashes, and half a dozen major scandals swirling — the more they have turned to race baiting to distract from their failures.
They paint any opposition to Obama’s policies as racist. (In a classical example, under a white president we would have been fine with nationalizing health care, apparently). They deliberately inflame any racial incident they can. And they make explicit calls for racial retribution.
Against that backdrop, it’s not surprising that a new NBC/WSJ poll shows that race relations have dramatically worsened during Obama’s time in office:
Only 52 percent of whites and 38 percent of blacks have a favorable opinion of race relations in the country, according to the poll, which has tracked race relations since 1994 and was conducted in mid-July by Hart Research Associations and Public Opinion Strategies.
That’s a sharp drop from the beginning of Obama’s first term, when 79 percent of whites and 63 percent of blacks held a favorable view of American race relations.
That’s a 27-point drop among whites and a 25-point drop among blacks.
Despite the lack of any concrete evidence that menu labels encourage consumers to make healthier food choices, they have become a popular tool for policymakers in the fight against obesity. Carnegie Mellon University researchers recently put menu labels to the test by investigating whether providing diners with recommended calorie intake information along with the menu items caloric content would improve their food choices. . .
The results showed no interaction between the use of calorie recommendations and the pre-existing menu labels, suggesting that incorporating calorie recommendations did not help customers make better use of the information provided on calorie-labeled menus. Further, providing calorie recommendations, whether calories per-day or per-meal, did not show a reduction in the number of calories purchased.
Here’s a thought: Maybe people who order high-calorie food in restaurants are not ignorant of what they are doing. Maybe they are just making different decisions than the busybodies want them to make.
In any case, this research makes clear that the government should stop mucking with menus.
Yeah, you have the religious freedom; the freedom of speech. And other people also have the civil rights; human rights. You cannot, you know, use your religious belief to tell other people you don’t have a belief, so I don’t believe you need the right to do this, start confrontation, protesting, uh, prot, uh, protest. [unintelligible] You don’t apply for tax exemption. . .
When you come to apply for tax exemption, you have to keep your action to, you know, exactly what is
educational or religious . . . You have no right to, against, other people’s beliefs. . .
You can’t take all kinds of confrontation activities and also put something on a website and ask people to take action against the abortion clinic. That’s not, that’s not really educational.
Speaking at a White House press conference about government surveillance, terrorism, and other topics, the president was asked about his past statements that the people who attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, last year would be brought to justice.
“We have informed, I think, the public that there’s a sealed indictment. It’s sealed for a reason. But we are intent on capturing those who carried out this attack, and we’re going to stay on it until we get them,’’ Mr. Obama said.
While the president of the United States can declassify top secret intelligence information on his own say-so, disclosing secret grand jury material is a different matter. Rule 6(e) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure clearly states: “… no person may disclose the indictment’s existence except as necessary to issue or execute a warrant or summons.’’
Naturally, the White House tried to cover for him, explaining:
A White House official said the president “was simply referencing widely reported information and was not asked about, nor did he comment on any specific indictment.’’
But this explanation doesn’t jibe with Obama’s actual statement: “We have informed . . . the public that there’s a sealed indictment.” According to his own words, he, or his administration, disclosed the indictment.
Copyright is supposed to encourage the development of creative works, and short terms of copyright doubtless do. But today copyright lasts essentially forever, and that has made decades of books disappear:
A book published in 1922 is in the public domain today. A book published in 1923 (that observed the proper copyright formalities) is still copyrighted today, and probably will be forever. And, as the chart shows, some point during the 1920s is exactly when books disappear.
This is tragic. A tool that was supposed to enrich our culture has been perverted by the content owners and their cronies to impoverish our culture instead.
Eliana Johnson finds that Lois Lerner appears to have colluded with an attorney in the Federal Election Commission’s general counsel’s office to influence the record before the FEC’s vote in the case of a conservative non-profit organization. Readers may recall that Lerner, the former head of the IRS’s exempt-organizations division, worked at the FEC from 1986 to 1995, and was known there for aggressive investigation of conservative groups.
Email traffic uncovered by the House Ways and Means Committee indicates that an attorney from the FEC’s enforcement division sought and received tax information about the status of a conservative group, the American Future Fund, before recommending that the commission prosecute it for violations of campaign-finance law. But the IRS is prohibited from sharing confidential taxpayer information, and the FEC is not exempted under that prohibition.
It’s been months since the IRS admitted that it was targeting Tea Party organizations for special scrutiny, but according to the Congressional testimony of an IRS agent, it has never stopped doing so:
In a remarkable admission that is likely to rock the Internal Revenue Service again, testimony released Thursday by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp reveals that an agent involved in reviewing tax exempt applications from conservative groups told a committee investigator that the agency is still targeting Tea Party groups, three months after the IRS scandal erupted.
In closed door testimony before the House Ways & Means Committee, the unidentified IRS agent said requests for special tax status from Tea Party groups is being forced into a special “secondary screening” because the agency has yet to come up with new guidance on how to judge the tax status of the groups.
After all these months, they are still at it! Whoever might have been responsible originally, this is Obama’s baby now. He had months to put a stop to this, and chose not to.
OBAMA: If we don’t deepen our ports all along the Gulf — places like Charleston, South Carolina, or Savannah, Georgia, or Jacksonville, Florida — if we don’t do that, those ships are going to go someplace else.
UPDATE: I think this is remarkable, because this is a prepared remark for the softest of softball interviews. Whoever prepped Obama didn’t realize that Charleston, Savannah, and Jacksonville are on the Eastern Seaboard, not the Gulf Coast, and he didn’t know any better. George W Bush got a reputation as an intellectual lightweight for much less than this: the Bush-as-idiot meme started when he failed to identify all of the people on a list of obscure world leaders (e.g., the president of Chechnya) in an ambush quiz. Here we have Obama making basic geographic mistakes about the United States in a remark volunteered during a softball interview.
In May, the White House said that “nobody’s been more outraged” by the IRS’s misconduct than President Obama. But many of us were skeptical that there was any real outrage, as opposed to mere regret that the IRS’s misconduct had come to light.
Sure enough, the White House now calls the IRS scandal a “phony scandal”.
In a lawsuit over President Obama’s immigration policy (in which he announced that he would not enforce the law for certain categories of illegal immigrants), a federal judge has ruled that Obama’s policy is illegal, but the plaintiff had no standing to sue. Consequently, the suit was dismissed and the illegal policy was permitted to stand.
This might even be the right decision under the law. Nevertheless, someone must have standing to sue. It cannot be the case that the president is breaking the law and the courts are somehow powerless to intervene. Can it?
The federal government is spending $2 billion a year to pay for free mobile phones and service. And if you’ve suspected that the safeguards to ensure that they only go the the truly needy might not be effective — or even exist at all — you’re right of course.
The Obama administration — indeed the president himself — is telling us we needn’t worry about NSA surveillance; they aren’t spying on Americans:
“We don’t have a domestic spying program,” Obama said, according to the media pool report. “What we do have is some mechanisms that can track a phone number or an email address that is connected to a terrorist attack. … That information is useful.”
The National Security Agency is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country, hunting for people who mention information about foreigners under surveillance, according to intelligence officials.
The N.S.A. is not just intercepting the communications of Americans who are in direct contact with foreigners targeted overseas, a practice that government officials have openly acknowledged. It is also casting a far wider net for people who cite information linked to those foreigners, like a little used e-mail address, according to a senior intelligence official.
The implementation of Obamacare is a complete shambles, and the administration is lying about it:
In February, Sen. Orrin Hatch pressed Gary Cohen — who is heading up much of the ObamaCare implementation efforts at the Health and Human Services Department — about the status of “service-level agreements” required with all the agencies before they can open their data to the hub. The agreements define services, responsibilities, performance and other terms for data sharing.
Hatch asked Cohen whether HHS had “signed service-level agreements with IRS, the Social Security Administration, homeland security and all the other agencies that will be providing information to the data hub.”
“We have,” Cohen said.
But at that time there were no service-level agreements in force, according to an inspector general report. HHS didn’t sign its first — with the IRS — until March. And all but two of the seven still haven’t been signed.
At that same hearing, Cohen claimed that the agency was “well along” on its data-sharing tests with “Social Security, with homeland security and with IRS” and would “be able to complete that testing by this spring.”
But a June report from the Government Accountability Office found that such tests didn’t even start until May, and that they won’t be finished until September.
At the time the administration was saying that all its agreements in place, it didn’t have any. When it said its tests were well along, they hadn’t even begun.
Community rating (together with guaranteed issue) is what is going to destroy the US health care system. A Wall Street Journal article tells how New York State destroyed drove out all its health insurers by going down this path.
Ironically, community rating in New York is so strict that Obamacare actually weakens it, so New York is actually seeing premiums fall.
The release of the Lockerbie bomber was linked by the Government to a £400 million arms-export deal to Libya, according to secret correspondence obtained by The Sunday Telegraph. An email sent by the then British ambassador in Tripoli details how a prisoner transfer agreement would be signed once Libya “fulfils its promise” to buy an air defence system.
The disclosure is embarrassing for members of the then Labour government, which always insisted that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi’s release was not linked to commercial deals.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is losing part of his arsenal of local leaders as more and more long-time members of his gun-control group Mayors Against Illegal Guns say they aren’t happy with the coalition’s trajectory and want out.
While the group apparently is growing in membership overall amid an effort to assume a larger profile in the national gun debate, it’s turning some members off. In the past five months, 50 members of the group have quit. Many say they did so because the organization abandoned its mission statement of going after illegal guns, and instead used its political clout to go after lawmakers who supported gun rights.
Most recently, the mayors of Rockford, Ill., and Nashua, N.H., dropped out after saying they felt misled by Bloomberg.
Misled? Maybe if you’re a rube. This was obviously the plan from day one. It’s not about illegal guns, it’s about making guns illegal.
More likely they are facing heat from the voters and complaining of being misled is their way to get out while saving face. Which is fine; if they are turning back from their unconstitutional folly, we can be gracious.
Howard Dean’s op-ed attacking Obamacare’s health care rationing board (a.k.a. death panel), the Independent Payment Advisory Board, doesn’t really break any new ground, but it is notable to see such a prominent Democrat breaking with the administration. Could the dam be breaking?
One of the beneficiaries of Kathleen Sebelius’s shakedown of health care companies (she pressured them, under cover of authority, to contribute to organizations promoting Obamacare) is caught engaging in nakedly political activity:
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ favorite pro-Obamacare nonprofit held a Democrats-only congressional briefing earlier this year, according to emails obtained by nonprofit watchdog Judicial Watch.
Enroll America president Anne Filipic, a former Obama White House aide, exchanged emails with Debra Curtis, a Democratic staffer on the House Ways and Means Committee.
“They [House Democrat leadership] want to do another one next week while Congress is in recess that would be open [to] all House Democratic Staff to start getting folks up to speed,” Curtis wrote to Filipic in a Feb. 11, 2013, email.
“We’ll check IDs to be sure we’ve got all Dems coming as well,” Curtis added the next day while projecting that a 100 people would attend.
Democrats haven’t really had to address Sebelius’s shakedown; with all the other Obama administration scandals sucking up all the oxygen, this didn’t get much attention. But if they did, I’m sure they would say that it was appropriate for her to fundraise for organizations seeking to further the government’s goals.
That wouldn’t be true in its own right — the government has no right to exploit its regulatory power to coerce any financial contributions in excess of legal tax liabilities — but this shows it’s not even true to that extent. Sebelius was extorting financial contributions to organizations engaging in partisan political activity. That’s a crime.
POSTSCRIPT: Yes, this is an old story, but I think it’s important to be reminded each step the sordid case takes as it winds its way through the system.
Under a new Connecticut law, it is a crime to use a handheld device while behind the wheel, even when stopped at a traffic light. So “distracted driving” doesn’t even require driving.
We are not a collection of red states and blue states. We are the United States of America.
That was when he was seeking office. Today, if you’re a Republican, Obama doesn’t care about you. You can’t even attend his speech:
Ten College Republicans were dubbed a security threat and refused admittance to President Barack Obama’s speech at the University of Central Missouri on Wednesday.
Despite the fact that the students had tickets to the event, security personnel turned them away at the door to the recreation center where Obama gave a speech on economic policy, telling the group it wasn’t about their politics but the president’s safety.
ASIDE: It should go without saying that the security justification was just a pretext. If the Secret Service can’t protect the president from a few College Republicans, he can’t be giving public speeches.
This isn’t just disgusting, it’s illegal. As Glenn Reynolds points out, discriminating based on political affiliation at a public university is a violation of the First Amendment. They ought to sue.
UPDATE: The Secret Service claims that they were turned away because the venue was full.
California lawmakers are pushing a controversial, first-in-the-nation plan that would require private-sector employers to remove 3 percent from every worker’s paycheck. The money would go into a new state fund with a guarantee that all withheld funds plus investment gains will be available for distribution at retirement age.
This is nothing more than a thinly disguised 3% tax, as that money won’t be there when people retire. California has already proven it can’t manage pensions.
In a degree of doublespeak that might impress Ingsoc, an atheist group is complaining that a proposed holocaust memorial in Ohio is “exclusionary” because it memorializes all the victims of the Nazis, including Jews. According to the Freedom From Religion Foundation, for the memorial to be acceptable (i.e., inclusive) they need to leave out the symbol representing the Jews. In a holocaust memorial.
So inclusion is exclusionary, while exclusion would be inclusive.
In the statement, Weiner pointed to previous comments he made around the time he announced his bid for New York City mayor, in which he said it was possible for more photos to come out as he made a re-entry into politics.
“I said that other texts and photos were likely to come out, and today they have,” he said Tuesday.
What he didn’t say, when he announced his campaign for mayor, was the reason the material was likely to come out was because he never stopped doing it.
Two defendants in military sexual assault cases cannot be punitively discharged, if found guilty, because of “unlawful command influence” derived from comments made by President Barack Obama, a judge ruled in a Hawaii military court this week.
Navy Judge Cmdr. Marcus Fulton ruled during pretrial hearings in two sexual assault cases — U.S. vs. Johnson and U.S. vs. Fuentes — that comments made by Obama as commander in chief would unduly influence any potential sentencing, according to a court documents obtained by Stars and Stripes. . .
“The bottom line is: I have no tolerance for this,” Obama said, according to an NBC News story submitted as evidence by defense attorneys in the sexual assault cases.
‘I expect consequences,” Obama added. “So I don’t just want more speeches or awareness programs or training, but ultimately folks look the other way. If we find out somebody’s engaging in this, they’ve got to be held accountable — prosecuted, stripped of their positions, court martialed, fired, dishonorably discharged. Period.”
Obama sounded off without bothering to learn of the legal ramifications of a commander ordering a trial to deliver a certain sentence. His unlawful order has prevented exactly what he demanded.
His ill-considered action has tainted at least a dozen sexual assault prosecutions already. Two cases have been dismissed already.
Military law experts said that those cases were only the beginning and that the president’s remarks were certain to complicate almost all prosecutions for sexual assault. . .
“His remarks were more specific than I’ve ever heard a commander in chief get,” said Thomas J. Romig, a former judge advocate general of the Army and the dean of the Washburn University School of Law in Topeka, Kan. “When the commander in chief says they will be dishonorably discharged, that’s a pretty specific message. Every military defense counsel will make a motion about this.”
POSTSCRIPT: I’ll admit, I didn’t know about unlawful command influence before either. But then, I’m not the president.
Specifically, Senators Jon Tester (D-MT) and Chris Murphy (D-CT) want to repeal the freedom of speech and the press as they apply to corporations. As I noted when this awful idea was first floated over a year ago, this would do away with free speech, since most speech (including nearly all journalism) is prepared by people organized as a corporation.
POSTSCRIPT: This part of the proposed amendment is hilarious:
Section 3. Nothing contained herein shall be construed to limit the people’s rights of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, free exercise of religion, freedom of association and all such other rights of the people, which rights are unalienable.
Let’s just forbid the inevitable, direct consequence of the preceding language. Awesome! But why not use this technique more widely: Spending bills should simply clarify that they won’t increase the deficit. Regulatory bills should clarify that they don’t hurt the economy. Defense cuts should clarify that they don’t hurt national defense. All our problems can be resolved simply by clarifying they won’t happen.
We heard about many of Obamacare’s special deals for certain states, especially Nebraska and Louisiana, but a kickback for Massachusetts managed to stay under the radar until now.
The ACLU has changed its long-held position opposing double jeopardy and now approves of it, at least in George Zimmerman’s case.
The ACLU saving grace was always its consistency. They didn’t care about the right to keep and bear arms, and they didn’t much care about religious freedom, but they were strong on free speech and the rights of criminal defendants, even when the target was unpopular (such as the KKK or the cops in the Rodney King beating). Without that consistency, the ACLU is just another liberal pressure group.
POSTSCRIPT: I’ve been reading a lot of commentators who have been saying that re-trying George Zimmerman on federal charges would not be double jeopardy. Saying so is an offense against the semantics of the English language. It may be true that courts have ruled that way (I’m not saying they have, I don’t know), but if so, it is their error and we ought not go along with it. According to the phrase’s plain meaning, it is double jeopardy when the government gets another try at a defendant after he is acquitted. It changes nothing that they are re-trying him in a different venue, or on slightly different charges stemming from the same incident.
One meme going around the blogosphere is to say that Barack Obama is being hypocritical to oppose Stand Your Ground now when he was a co-sponsor of a Stand Your Ground law in Illinois. David Weigel (of Journolist infamy) fires back, writing:
Oh, you can probably guess the twist. [Scofflaw: sucking up to the brilliant readers at Slate, who are oh so much smarter than those stupid wingnuts, check!] Illinois’ 2004 SB2386 was passed by a unanimous vote in the state Senate. It amended a self-defense law first passed in 1961. Alarm bells should be ringing at this point, because Florida was pretty famously the first state to pass a “stand your ground” law, a year after this Illinois bill. Have reporters been blowing that story? No: “Stand your ground” is substantively different than what Obama backed in Illinois. He backed a tweak to the “castle doctrine,” which reads . . .
The degree of similarity between the two laws is debatable. It didn’t take much digging to find that there is a lot of similarity between them, but the similarity in a different area (a shield from lawsuits in self-defense cases) than the one most people are talking about most when they bring up Stand Your Ground. So while there’s some truth to the meme, Weigel also has a point.
Of course, that’s all based on the counterfactual assumption that this debate has anything to do with the substantive contents of the law, rather than pure demagoguery.
But never mind all that, I want to go back to this point, where Weigel seems to believe he proves that Illinois’s law can’t possibly be Stand Your Ground:
Alarm bells should be ringing at this point, because Florida was pretty famously the first state to pass a “stand your ground” law, a year after this Illinois bill.
Absolutely, utterly false, and by saying it Weigel beclowns himself far in excess of any legitimate point he might have had. Florida might have been the first to use the phrase “Stand Your Ground” (doubtful, but I can’t say for sure one way or the other), but the doctrine is over a century old. Andrew Blanca notes numerous cases doing as far back as 1877.
You needn’t be a lawyer to know this. Any history covering the American West (I recommend Paul Johnson) will tell of how the frontier did away with the duty to retreat that was typical back east. That doctrine, which we now call Stand Your Ground, was what gave rise to the gunfighting mythology of the West. That mythology persists today, providing not only most of the misconceptions employed to attack Stand Your Ground, but indeed providing most of the attack terminology (e.g., “the Wild West”) as well.
IRS chief counsel William Wilkins, who oversaw the IRS’s misconduct, and who is one of only two political appointments in the IRS, met with President Obama just two days before authoring the agency’s rules on dealing with Tea Party applications. I do hope someone asks what the meeting was about.
No one who paid attention to the George Zimmerman trial could have been at all surprised by the verdict, given Zimmerman’s story and utter lack of any credible evidence to contradict it. The real question is: with no evidence to convict him, why was Zimmerman charged in the first place?
Much of the story played out in public. The city of Sanford refused to prosecute. Inflamed by false reporting, the public was outraged, and Florida governor Rick Scott wilted under pressure. He appointed the execrable Angela Corey as special prosecutor, with a clear mandate to prosecute Zimmerman, which she did.
But a hidden side to the story is now revealed: Judicial Watch has obtained documents showing that the Department of Justice was working behind the scenes to stir up outrage. (More here.)
The little-known Community Relations Service is tasked with making peace in communities in conflict:
The Community Relations Service is the Department’s “peacemaker” for community conflicts and tensions arising from differences of race, color, and national origin. Created by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, CRS is the only Federal agency dedicated to assist State and local units of government, private and public organizations, and community groups with preventing and resolving racial and ethnic tensions, incidents, and civil disorders, and in restoring racial stability and harmony.
But making peace doesn’t advance Democratic interests, so in Eric Holder’s Justice Department, the CRS did exactly the opposite.
Now Zimmerman is acquitted, and the Justice Department isn’t satisfied with a pointless prosecution. They want to prosecute him for something, but all the talk of charging him with a hate crime is going nowhere. (If the shooting was justified, it can’t be a hate crime; plus there’s no evidence that the shooting had anything to do with race; plus Zimmerman actually has a long record of friendliness toward blacks.)
But, eager to find something they can charge Zimmerman with, the Justice Department has established a tip line:
“They were calling on us to actively refer anyone who had any information,” that might build a case against Zimmerman for either a civil rights violation or a hate crime, [activist Barbara] Arnwine said. “They said they would very aggressively investigate this case.” . . .
DOJ officials also said they would open a public email address so people could send in tips on the case. That email address, which is now in operation, is [redacted].
So this is how American justice works now? First you pick the target, then you inflame public opinion against him, and then you solicit accusations? Absolutely astonishing and appalling. America has sunk far.
The Obama administration has scaled back their ambitions for the Obamacare exchanges considerably from their original grandiose promises:
[Henry] Chao said the main objective is to get the exchanges up and running and signing up the uninsured. “The time for debating about the size of text on the screen or the color or is it a world-class user experience, that’s what we used to talk about two years ago,” he said. “Let’s just make sure it’s not a third-world experience.”
The anti-fracking film Gasland featured an iconic scene in which filmmaker Josh Fox set a kitchen faucet on fire. Fox was aware that the town had reports of methane in the water going back decades, long before fracking, but he didn’t share that information with his viewers.
His follow-up film, creatively named Gasland 2, is even worse. It features a scene in which a garden hose is lit on fire, which is even more bogus than the infamous Gasland scene:
Texas’ 43rd Judicial District Court found in February 2012 that Steven Lipsky, “under the advice or direction” of Texas environmental activist Alisa Rich, “intentionally attach[ed] a garden hose to a gas vent—not a water line” and lit its contents on fire.
(Emphasis mine.)
UPDATE: Josh Fox also made up a cancer spike in fracking country that didn’t exist.
Steve Rattner, the auto bailout czar, says we should bail out the city of Detroit:
But apart from voting in elections, the 700,000 remaining residents of the Motor City are no more responsible for Detroit’s problems than were the victims of Hurricane Sandy for theirs, and eventually Congress decided to help them.
Got that? Apart from the fact that Detroit’s ruin is entirely man-made, caused by irresponsible politicians elected by foolish voters, yes, Detroit is just exactly like a natural disaster.
No, there must be consequences for folly, or folly will reign supreme.
Detroit has been plundered for half a century by liberals and their union allies. It’s a testimony to the former strength of the city that it took so long to go bankrupt.
But according MSNBC’s Ed Schultz, the city’s woes are somehow Republicans’ fault. I’m reminded of the time I was present at an Al Gore rally in 2000 (I had my reasons), and the president of the steelworkers union blamed Ronald Reagan for the collapse of the Pittsburgh steel industry.
My point is this: Some people take comfort in the prospect that liberals will have to see the wreckage wrought by their policies; then they’ll be sorry. They will see the wreckage, but they won’t take responsibility. They could find themselves living in caves and the burnt-out remains of cities, and they will blame whatever tiny aspect of economic freedom they couldn’t stamp out for all of it.
The White House is bragging about the Obamacare provision requiring health insurers’ “medical loss ratio” (the amount of a premium that is spent on medical care) to be at least 80%. This proves that the White House not only does not understand economics, they don’t even understand fractions.
What this provision does is eliminate any incentive that insurers might have to deliver care more efficiently. Without it, an insurer who managed to reduce expenses could turn a tidy profit. Now, if they do reduce expenses, they just have to return the savings to the consumer. So why bother? Thus “medical loss ratio” helps to ensure that wasteful medical spending continues to rise.
It also directly pushes health premiums higher. Insurers cannot make money by keeping expenses down, but they can make more money simply by raising premiums. That way they keep 20% of a larger pie. Even if they have to return some of it, they still come out ahead.
And that is exactly what we are seeing. Yes, some rebates are being sent, but also premiums are skyrocketing. How much of the latter is due to “medical loss ratio” is hard to say.
A federal judge has issued an injunction in the Hobby Lobby case, barring enforcement of the HHS mandate to provide contraceptives and abortifacients.
This seems right to me; under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Hobby Lobby has a very strong case. The Act requires strict scrutiny of government compromises of religious freedom. Even if providing free contraceptive and abortifacients is taken to be a compelling state interest, there’s no way that requiring employers to provide them is a narrowly-tailored solution.
For the first time, [Inspector General Russell] George revealed claims that IRS officials targeted political candidates for audits. . .
The story doesn’t offer any details, but when we do, I’m sure they will be damning. Not a single aspect of the IRS scandal has yet failed to be damning.
The saddest thing about this story might be that it’s not surprising any more:
A government watchdog has found for the first time that confidential tax records of several political candidates and campaign donors were improperly scrutinized by government officials, but the Justice Department has declined to prosecute any of the cases.
Its investigators also are probing two allegations that the Internal Revenue Service “targeted for audit candidates for public office,” the Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration, J. Russell George, has privately told Sen. Chuck Grassley.
In a written response to a request by Mr. Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, Mr. George said a review turned up four cases since 2006 in which unidentified government officials took part in “unauthorized access or disclosure of tax records of political donors or candidates,” including one case he described as “willful.” In four additional cases, Mr. George said, allegations of improper access of IRS records were not substantiated by the evidence.
The story doesn’t identify whose records were improperly accessed, but I think we can assume that the victims were opponents of the Obama administration.
ASIDE: Could one of the victims have been the Koch brothers? The White House claimed knowledge of their tax returns, which they had no legitimate access to. Another victim appears to be Christine O’Donnell.
It’s one thing for the misconduct to take place. A few bad apples and all that. It’s quite another for the Justice Department to refuse to prosecute. By so doing, the Obama administration has approved the misconduct after the fact. Worse, they are encouraging it to happen again.
The IRS claimed that its misconduct was limited to a few rank-and-file employees in Cincinnati. We’ve known that to be a lie almost from the beginning, but not how much until now:
The chief counsel’s office for the Internal Revenue Service, headed by a political appointee of President Obama, helped develop the agency’s problematic guidelines for reviewing “tea party” cases, according to a top IRS attorney.
In interviews with congressional investigators, IRS lawyer Carter Hull said his superiors told him that the chief counsel’s office, led by William Wilkins, would need to review some of the first applications the agency screened for additional scrutiny because of potential political activity.
The IRS scandal now goes all the way to the top. The Chief Counsel is one of only two political appointees in the entire agency.
Let’s dwell on that a little further: The lawyer that President Obama picked to run the IRS legal department was responsible for improperly harassing President Obama’s political opponents.
In a 2011 interview, Lois Lerner explains the IRS’s purpose behind sending massive, intrusive questionnaires:
Receiving a thick questionnaire from the IRS, she says, is a “behavior changer.”
She was discussing the practice in a different context than the IRS scandal, but this confirms — as we have long believed — that the purpose of invasive IRS inquiries is not actually to collect information.
It took a while for the Democrats to find their footing in the astonishing and appalling IRS scandal, but they now seem to have settled on a strategy. Conducting a good-faith investigation and reforming the agency is, of course, out of the question. (Indeed, the much-vaunted IRS investigation seems to be a Potemkin investigation, the FBI has not interviewed any of the targeted Tea Party groups — at least as of earlier this month.) No, Democrats like the IRS just the way it is.
So the strategy they have settled on is to allege that the IRS flagged for special scrutiny not only Tea Party and other conservative groups, but also progressive groups as well. This proves — supposedly — that the IRS was behaving in a non-partisan manner.
This narrative has a small grain of truth to it: The IRS did maintain BOLO (be on the lookout) lists of keywords to search for, and one of the many keywords was progressive. What the Democratic narrative leaves out is that the BOLO lists also instructed agents on what to do with the applicants that they flagged.
For Tea Party applicants the BOLO list instructed:
Any cases should be sent to group 7822. Liz Hofacre [more on this name later] is coordinating. These cases are currently being coordinated with EOT.
(The actual document is here.) From that referral, the harassment would begin.
The instructions for “progressive” applicants was entirely different:
Applicants submit form 1023. Their “progressive” activities appear to show that (c)(3) may not be appropriate.
What this means is that “progressive” groups appear to be involved in politics, which would make them ineligible to be 501(c)(3) “charitable” groups, to whom contributions are tax deductible. (This suggests that progressive groups had a history of improperly applying as 501(c)(3).) In contrast, most (perhaps all) Tea Party applicants applied as 501(c)(4) “social welfare organizations”, which are permitted some political activity.
In short, in regard to progressive groups, agents were just instructed to make sure that political groups were not applying 501(c)(3), which is entirely appropriate. The instructions did not prevent first-line screeners from approving the application, and they did not result in the kind of harassment that Tea Party applicants received.
Indeed, Liz Hofacre (the agent who received Tea Party applications) testified that, on the occasions in which she was sent a progressive application by mistake, she simply returned it:
When that occurred, pursuant to the instructions that were given to me, I would send those applications to general inventory since they were not within the scope of the Tea Party emerging issue.
(Emphasis mine.) And, if that that’s not clear enough, the notes for an IRS screening workshop specifically stated:
“Progressive” applications are not considered “Tea Parties”
(The actual document is here, hosted by the House Democrats, who have nevertheless failed to take notice of this particular element.) It should be obvious that there would be no need to distinguish progressive and Tea Party applicants if they both faced the same treatment.
To summarize then, progressive applicants faced only an appropriate review to ensure they weren’t trying to do politics under the 501(c)(3) umbrella, while Tea Parties were sent off for special treatment. Russell George, the Treasury Dept. Inspector General, made much of this explicit in his letter to the House Democrats:
Our audit did not find evidence that the IRS used the ‘progressives’ identifier as selection criteria for potential political cases between May 2010 and May 2012,” George wrote in the letter obtained by The Hill.
The inspector general stressed that 100 percent of the groups with “Tea Party,” “patriots” and “9/12” in their name were flagged for extra attention, while only 30 percent of the groups with “progress” or “progressive” were highlighted as potentially political. . .
“While we have multiple sources of information corroborating the use of Tea Party and other related criteria we described in our report, including employee interviews, e-mails and other documents, we found no indication in any of these other materials that ‘progressives’ was a term used to refer cases for scrutiny for political campaign intervention,” George wrote to Levin, the top Democrat on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee.
However, having settled on a narrative, the Democrats are not likely to be turned aside merely by a letter from the Inspector Genera. They have simply added George to their attack list. Not only does this help preserve their narrative, it also helps to neutralize the investigation.
The Obama administration announced Friday that it would significantly scale back the health law’s requirements that new insurance marketplaces verify consumers’ income and health insurance status. Instead, the federal government will rely more heavily on consumers’ self-reported information until 2015, when it plans to have stronger verification systems in place.
To call this an invitation to fraud is an understatement.
It’s also illegal. The law offers subsidies, but requires the government to verify eligibility for those subsidies. But no matter, the president is going to go ahead and give those subsidies to anyone who asks.
The Obama administration will delay a crucial provision of its signature health-care law, giving businesses an extra year to comply with a requirement that they provide their workers with insurance.
The government will postpone enforcement of the so-called employer mandate until 2015, after the congressional elections, the administration said yesterday. Under the provision, companies with 50 or more workers face a fine of as much as $3,000 per employee if they don’t offer affordable insurance.
Forty-one percent of the businesses surveyed have frozen hiring because of the health-care law known as Obamacare. And almost one-fifth—19 percent— answered “yes” when asked if they had “reduced the number of employees you have in your business as a specific result of the Affordable Care Act.”
41% of small businesses have frozen hiring! And half of those are actually laying off workers. This is an utter catastrophe, and no less catastrophic for having been predicted.
The Democrats still dream of winning back the House in 2014 so they can have their way with America for Obama’s last two years, and there’s no way that can happen with the entire small-business segment of our economy in a coma due directly to their reckless, tyrannical policies.
The point is, is that the mandate was not delayed. Certain reporting by businesses that could be perceived as onerous, that reporting requirement was delayed, and partially to review how it would work and how it could be better. It was not a delay of the mandate for the businesses, and there shouldn’t be a delay of the mandate for individuals.
What a barrel of utter nonsense. The notion the mandate isn’t delayed, just the reporting, sounds like meaningless hair-splitting. Who cares if the mandate is in place, if no one has to pay it? And indeed it would be hair-splitting, except it isn’t even true. The administration did not only delayed the reporting requirements, they specifically delayed the mandate itself:
We recognize that this transition relief will make it impractical to determine which employers owe shared responsibility payments (under section 4980H) for 2014. Accordingly, we are extending this transition relief to the employer shared responsibility payments. These payments will not apply for 2014. Any employer shared responsibility payments will not apply until 2015.
This post got Fox News’s Todd Starnes blocked from Facebook:
I’m about as politically incorrect as you can get.
I’m wearing an NRA ball cap, eating a Chick-fil-A sandwich, reading a Paula Deen cookbook and sipping a 20-ounce sweet tea while sitting in my Cracker Barrel rocking chair with the Gather Vocal Band singing ‘Jesus Saves’ on the stereo and a Gideon’s Bible in my pocket.
Yessir, I’m politically incorrect and happy as a june bug.
Apparently, these sentiments violate Facebook’s standards:
“We removed this from Facebook because it violates our Community Standards,” Facebook wrote in a message to Starnes. “So you’re temporarily blocked from using this feature.”
These are not the actions of an administration with nothing to hide:
Many if not all of the survivors of the Benghazi attacks along with others at the Department of Defense, the CIA have been asked or directed to sign additional non-disclosure agreements about their involvement in the Benghazi attacks.
Defense Department officials have told members of Congress that Bristol cannot be forced to testify because he retired after stepping down during a March change of command ceremony, according to several media reports. The Pentagon reinforced that point of view to Marine Corps Times on Tuesday. . .
That isn’t the case, however. While Bristol is preparing for retirement, he is on active duty through the end of July, said Maj. Shawn Haney, a Marine spokeswoman, on Wednesday. He will be placed on the inactive list on Aug. 1, she said. That contradicts statements that Pentagon officials have issued to both Congress and the media.
Last week a Florida jury found George Zimmerman not guilty in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. Despite the collective freak-out of the media and the liberal establishment, no one who followed the trial would find the verdict at all surprising.
George Zimmerman told a consistent story from day one: He spotted an individual (Martin) whom he did not recognize and thought was behaving suspiciously. He called the police. He then got out of his car and walked in the same direction as Martin. (Zimmerman says he wasn’t following Martin, but was looking for an address to report to the police. Many people, even defenders of Zimmerman, find that part odd, but it doesn’t really matter.) He lost sight of Martin and subsequently tried to return to his car. Then Martin, who had doubled back, accosted Zimmerman. Martin attacked Zimmerman, pinning him to the ground, and repeatedly smashed his head against the pavement. Martin then saw Zimmerman’s gun, threatened to kill him with it, and tried to take it. Zimmerman then drew the gun and shot Martin once.
If Zimmerman’s story is true, the shooting was clearly justified self-defense. At the trial, the prosecution never presented any plausible evidence that contradicted his story.
Most of the state’s witnesses either were irrelevant to the self-defense claim, and many actually supported it. This was a very strange aspect of the case that I assume is atypical: witness after witness called by the prosecution but whose testimony actually supported the defense. Particularly damaging to the prosecution was the testimony of the lead investigator who said that he believed Zimmerman, and the eyewitness who corroborated a key part of Zimmerman’s story.
Only a few witnesses contradicted Zimmerman’s story at all. One was an excitable woman whose testimony contradicted the physical evidence in multiple ways. Some of Martin’s family members identified the person screaming for help (captured in a 911 call) as Martin. The defense rebutted their testimony with other witnesses who identified the screamer as Zimmerman, and by getting an expert witness for the prosecution to testify that the procedure used with the Martin family prevented a reliable identification.
That left only the prosecution’s star witness, one Rachel Jeantel who testified that she was on the phone with Martin as the fight began. Her testimony was damaging to the prosecution, as she testified that Martin used a racial slur to describe Zimmerman. (This was the only role that race played in the trial.) But she also contradicted Zimmerman’s story, testifying that Zimmerman started the fight and she heard Martin yelling “get off!”
The problem for the prosecution was that Jeantel wasn’t believable. Her behavior on the stand was erratic. During the investigation she told many lies, some of them under oath. But the most astonishing moment was when she admitted that she was unable to read the letter that she supposedly wrote to Martin’s family telling her story.
In short, the prosecution never dented Zimmerman’s story. For their part, the defense presented various witnesses supporting his story, and also got admitted into evidence the fact that Martin was under the influence of drugs at the time. (On the other hand, the judge did not allow the defense to present Martin’s text messages that showed he liked to get into fights.) Zimmerman himself never needed to testify, because — bizarrely — the prosecution played videos of Zimmerman telling his story, essentially giving Zimmerman the opportunity to testify without facing cross examination.
No one who followed the trial is surprised about the verdict. (Even Jimmy Carter!) But the media’s campaign against Zimmerman has never been about the facts. Big Journalism has conveniently collected a rundown of media lies about the Zimmerman.
With all the lies the legacy media tells against Zimmerman, you might expect to find public opinion overwhelmingly against him. But the truth seems to have gotten out, nonetheless. But a Rasmussen poll finds that Americans agree with the verdict by a 48-34 margin. Disintermediation of information is working.
POSTSCRIPT: Not all the lies told about the Zimmerman case are attacking Zimmerman. There’s also a consistent effort to lie about Florida’s (and 33 other states’) “Stand Your Ground” law. From the very beginning, Stand Your Ground has been legally irrelevant. It says that persons facing an attacker are not required to retreat from that attacker, even if they can do so safely. But even states that do require you to retreat, require it only when you can do so safely.
Zimmerman could not retreat safely (according to his story, at least). Indeed, being pinned to the ground, he could not retreat at all. Thus, Stand Your Ground never came into play. This hasn’t stopped the media from trying to implicate Stand Your Ground in this case. For example, the New York Times, always eager to get things wrong, editorialized that Stand Your Ground played a role in the case, despite its own reporting to the contrary. (In a very narrow sense it did: since Stand Your Ground is the law, it appears in the standard jury instructions, but it wasn’t relevant.)
A postscript to the TSA’s reversal of a proposed sensible policy to allow small knives on planes once again. Passengers trapped on Asiana flight 214 by jammed seatbelts nearly burned to death because no one on the flight had a knife to free them. They were saved only when police officers arriving at the plane threw up knives for the crew to use.
Right in the midst of this month’s revolution/coup in Egypt, CBS News spotted Secretary of State John Kerry boarding his yacht. The Obama administration then did what they do, they lied through their teeth:
“Since his plane touched down in Washington at 4 a.m., Secretary Kerry was working all day and on the phone dealing with the crisis in Egypt,” spokeswoman Jen Psaki said. “He participated in the White House meeting with the president by secure phone and was and is in non-stop contact with foreign leaders, and his senior team in Washington and Cairo. Any report or tweet that he was on a boat is completely inaccurate.”
Of course, by “completely inaccurate”, they meant completely accurate, as they admitted in their subsequent climb-down. But first, the State Department somehow stood by its denial even when CBS sent them photos of Kerry on the yacht. Only after CBS released its photo along with State’s absurd denial, did they reverse themselves:
While he was briefly on his boat on Wednesday, Secretary Kerry worked around the clock all day including participating in the President’s meeting with his national security council,” said State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki.
Note that the reversal came from the exact same spokesperson as the initial lie. If Psaki’s name rings a bell, it’s because she was the official spokesman of Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.
This administration will lie about anything at all.
POSTSCRIPT: Politico didn’t exactly cover themselves with laurels by un-correcting their story (is that what you call it when you “correct” a story that was already accurate?) on such flimsy evidence as an unequivocal denial from the Obama administration.
See, like many of you, I didn’t grow up in a family with a lot of money.
I suppose I should give her a break — she’s just trying to connect with some children — but I find this offensive. No one in America faces the kind of poverty that poor children face in the third world. Michelle Obama comes from a working-class family without many luxuries, but with food on the table. For these children, her upbringing would be like winning the lottery.
As many as 1,165 people starved to death in NHS hospitals over the past four years fuelling claims nurses are too busy to feed their patients. . .
According to figures released by the Office for National Statistics following a Freedom of Information request, for every patient who dies from malnutrition, four more have dehydration mentioned on their death certificate.
Absolutely appalling. And Democrats are determined to bring it here.
Remember the White House’s long list of disasters that would befall if sequestration took effect? The Washington Post evaluated those claims and found that hardly any of them happened.
The law is supposed to forbid the IRS from compromising the privacy of taxpayers’ information, but as we well know, it has failed to prevent it. Nevertheless, with astonishing chutzpah, the IRS now claims that same law also forbids the IRS from revealing which of its employees violated the law.
After repeated attacks on the rights of members of the armed forces to practice their religion, a corrective is necessary. The House’s defense bill for 2014 includes a provision that would protect servicemen and women’s religious freedom except in cases of military necessity.
People have tried to defend Obama administration intelligence chief James Clapper for lying to Congress, saying that Ron Wyden’s question on classified operations in an unclassified setting put him in an awkward situation. That seems to make some sense, until you learn that Clapper was warned of the question in advance. He also failed to avail himself of the opportunity to correct his statement after the fact.
In short, he lied, not because he wanted to keep the operation secret from the world, but because he wanted to keep it secret from Congress.
A State Department whistleblower has accused high-ranking staff of a massive coverup — including keeping a lid on findings that members of then-Secretary Hillary Clinton’s security detail and the Belgian ambassador solicited prostitutes.
A chief investigator for the agency’s inspector general wrote a memo outlining eight cases that were derailed by senior officials, including one instance of interference by Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills.
Among the bombshell findings: A DS agent was called off a case against US Ambassador to Belgium Howard Gutman over claims that he solicited prostitutes, including minors.
“The agent began his investigation and had determined that the ambassador routinely ditched his protective security detail in order to solicit sexual favors from both prostitutes and minor children,” says the memo. . .
Undersecretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy ordered the investigation ceased, and the ambassador remains in place, according to the memo.
Gutman was a big Democratic donor before taking the post, having raised $500,000 for President Obama’s 2008 campaign and helping finance his inaugural.
Like many of my fellow Americans, I’m getting pretty concerned about a fringe group in our country that’s growing increasingly isolated and paranoid. Worse, we now have indications that this group is lashing out in ignorance and fear.
It’s time that we finally confront the problem of federal workers’ growing anti-citizen extremism.
The feds have shown warning signs for years, becoming increasingly withdrawn, hunkered down in their bunkers in DC. They’re disconnected from what’s going on in the rest of the country, getting their news only from extremist sources like Media Matters, MSNBC and The New York Times.
And in their fear and isolation, federal workers seem willing to believe almost any crazy conspiracy theory about the American public — such as that everyone is secretly racist against the president and that people are going to form militias to fight the government.
And now we know they’ve started attacking those they fear, with IRS workers targeting right-wing groups and Justice Department employees going after journalists. Others are apparently engaged in some massive spying operation on anyone who’s ever put a cat photo on Facebook. (To be fair, these last may really just be trying to spy on their ex-girlfriends.)
Now, citizen have plenty to worry about with the feds lashing out. After all, for years the government has stockpiled dangerous weapons like assault rifles, nuclear weapons and audit forms.
It hasn’t started blowing up US citizens in drone strikes (other than the four), but who knows what the feds will do if their paranoia is allowed to grow?
So what can be done? Well, we can’t do much as average citizens, as, of course, the government never listens to us. But certain people hold a lot of sway over it, and maybe they should start to watch what they say, considering that excitable, easily influenced groups like federal workers are out there listening.
Now, I’m all for freedom of speech — along with the iPad, it’s one of the modern conveniences I use the most — but some people need to be more careful with what they say about the citizenry, so they don’t feed federal workers’ paranoia.
I’m thinking especially of President Obama, as people in the federal government tend to listen to him. When Obama and his colleagues talk about how dangerous the Tea Party and other conservatives are, with their dislike of taxes and spending, most folks are discerning enough to dismiss that as partisan rhetoric. But impressionable people not known for independent thinking — bureaucrats — will hear talk of the “dangers” these groups pose and act as if the dangers are real.
I’ll bet when the IRS went after Tea Party groups and Eric Holder signed warrants to investigate reporters, these people ignorantly thought they were helping Obama and that he’d be happy with them.
I’m not trying to say this is Obama’s fault — it’s not like it’s his job to know what goes on in the federal government — but if he were more careful with what he says, he could probably end a lot of federal workers’ paranoia about our citizens right now. He could instead explain to the people in the government that there is nothing to fear from ordinary Americans — that, in fact, a healthy country needs not only a flourishing government, but also a strong, powerful citizenry.
And once the feds have calmed down and are no longer scared of the people, we need someone to finally keep an eye on it so it doesn’t do crazy things out of fear again. In fact, I thought there were already people who are supposed to do that.
After the Fast & Furious mess, we should have known someone like Eric Holder can’t be responsible for himself, but we need to have a long talk with whoever his supervisor is.
(I’ve corrected a few typos that somehow got past the Post’s editors.)
When Glenn Reynolds said that lefty blogger (and Obama favorite) Josh Marshall would call any scrutiny of Obama’s travel costs racist, I assumed he was humorously extrapolating from Marshall’s previous work. I mean, who would actually say such a thing?
Pew has an interesting poll on public opinion toward NSA surveillance in 2006 and today:
Now, to some extent this is just showing partisan differences, with both Republicans and Democrats sticking up for their guy. What I think is interesting is that the two NSA programs in question are very different.
In the 2006 program, the government was spying on specific foreign terrorists. In the 2013 program, the government is spying on all Americans (no one believes that the program is really limited to Verizon, do they?). Moreover, the current program actually excludes foreigners.
So when 75% of Republicans were okay with spying on foreign terrorists, but only 52% are okay with spying on all Americans, there’s a logic to that. (Indeed, I would have expected the first number to be higher and the second lower.)
But the apparent Democratic position — foreign terrorists deserve privacy but not American citizens — makes no sense on the merits. It has to be blind partisanship.
POSTSCRIPT: What about the independents, who are hovering right around a lukewarm 50% but are somewhat more comfortable now than then? I think they are responding to a partisan media. Not that the media is so keen on NSA surveillance now, but their opposition is muted. If you recall the media in 2006, you would have thought that spying on foreign terrorists was the end of the republic.
My judicial nominees have waited three times longer to receive confirmation votes than those of my Republican predecessor. Let me repeat that: My nominees have taken three times longer to receive confirmation votes than those of my Republican predecessor.
Despite the specific detail (Obama knows that specifics like “three times longer” are key to making a story sound believable), his claim isn’t remotely true:
Obama’s claim seemed heartfelt, but it wasn’t anywhere near true. As it happens, the Congressional Research Service has just done a study comparing judicial nominations in the first terms of several recent presidents. Among other things, the study noted how long each president’s nominees waited from the day they were nominated to the day they were confirmed. . .
The CRS study found that Bush’s first-term nominees waited an average of 277 days for confirmation, while Obama’s waited 240 days. So not only did Obama’s nominees not wait three times longer than Bush’s, they actually made it to the bench faster.
As for the U.S. district courts, which have far more seats than the circuit courts, the study found that Obama’s nominees have waited an average of 222 days, while Bush’s waited 156. So Obama’s picks have waited longer before confirmation — but nowhere near three times as long.
But what about the final results? As it turns out, Obama has had a higher percentage of his circuit court nominees confirmed during his first term than Bush did. The CRS report notes that 71.4 percent of Obama’s circuit court nominees were confirmed in his first term, compared with 67.3 percent in Bush’s first term.
Obama’s complaint is also amazingly hypocritical, given his own record of stalling judicial nominees when he was in the Senate.
President Barack Obama’s push back to criticism of the National Security Agency surveillance programs is that he has increased checks and balances, bringing the foreign surveillance courts into the process, for instance, and – he insists – looping in Congress.
“When it comes to telephone calls, every member of Congress has been briefed on this program,” the president said Friday.
Here’s the problem with that: It is not true – every member of Congress has not been briefed on the phone data program.
I’m sure this guy must tell the truth sometimes, but I can’t remember the last time.
The IRS claims that all its misconduct was limited to a few front-line workers. We already knew that wasn’t true, but those front-line workers — tired of being scapegoated — are starting to give specifics and name names:
Two Internal Revenue Service agents working in the agency’s Cincinnati office say higher-ups in Washington directed the targeting of conservative political groups when they applied for tax-exempt status, a contention that directly contradicts claims made by the agency since the scandal erupted last month.
The Cincinnati agents didn’t provide proof that senior IRS officials in Washington ordered the targeting. But one of the agents said her work processing the applications was closely supervised by a Washington lawyer in the IRS division that handles applications for tax-exempt status, according to a transcript of her interview with congressional investigators.
Her interview suggests a long trail of emails that could support her claim.
One of the agents explained that she had no autonomy when it came to Tea Party targeting:
Elizabeth Hofacre, the Cincinnati staffer, said that she started receiving applications from Tea Party groups to sift through in April, 2010. Hofacre’s handling of those cases, she said, was highly influenced by Carter Hull, an IRS lawyer in Washington.
Hofacre said that she integrated questions from Hull into her follow-ups with Tea Party groups, and that Hull had to approve the letters seeking more information that she sent out to those organizations. That process, she said, was both unusual and “demeaning.”
“One of the criteria is to work independently and do research and make decisions based on your experience and education,” Hofacre said, according to transcripts reviewed by The Hill. “Whereas in this case, I had no autonomy at all through the process.”
“I thought it was over the top,” she added, in interviews held by investigators in both parties from the House Oversight and Ways and Means committees. “I am not sure where it came from, but it was a bit unusual.”
One of the defenses offered for the IRS’s targeting of conservative, Christian, and pro-Israel groups is that is that political organizations oughtn’t be tax exempt in the first place. For example, here’s extreme leftist Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA):
We’re talking about whether or not the American taxpayers will subsidize your work. We’re talking about a tax break. If you didn’t come in and ask for this tax break, we would have never had a question to ask of you.
(ASIDE: The “we” is a nice touch. McDermott actually identifies himself with the IRS’s misconduct. Most liberals aren’t that honest.)
So what about the 501(c)(4) tax-exempt organization Organizing for Action? Until a few months ago the organization went by a different name: Barack Obama 2012. Indeed, their web site is still located at barackobama.com. There is no more political organization in America.
Vermont’s insurance commissioner denied a license to a new statewide Obamacare health care cooperative because it is “fatally flawed” and likely to be insolvent within three years, The Washington Examiner has learned.
Commissioner Susan L. Donegan of the Vermont Department of Financial Regulation also criticized Vermont Health CO-OP’s business practices, especially an “illegal” contract that would generate as much as $500,000 in income for a company owned by its president.
Donegan further criticized what she described as the co-op’s “deceptive” consumer advertising. . .
She predicted the health co-op would lose money each year, attract too few customers and face insolvency in only three years.
Paul Mirengoff at Power Line has an interesting piece on Obamacare “navigators”, the legions of government advisers recruited to fan out and help people make health insurance decisions. A few of the problems Mirengoff identifies are:
The navigators are specifically barred from giving complete advice. Specifically, they will not volunteer the fact that purchasing insurance may be more expensive than the Obamacare penalty.
The navigators will be given access to a wealth of personal information, but will undergo no background check, even to exclude known felons and identity thieves.
The federal government is paying for the navigators, despite being barred by law from doing so.
I can’t even keep track of all the scandals any more. Here’s the latest:
CBS News has uncovered documents that show the State Department may have covered up allegations of illegal and inappropriate behavior within their ranks. . .
CBS News’ John Miller reports that according to an internal State Department Inspector General’s memo, several recent investigations were influenced, manipulated, or simply called off. The memo obtained by CBS News cited eight specific examples. Among them: allegations that a State Department security official in Beirut “engaged in sexual assaults” on foreign nationals hired as embassy guards and the charge and that members of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s security detail “engaged prostitutes while on official trips in foreign countries” — a problem the report says was “endemic.”
The memo also reveals details about an “underground drug ring” was operating near the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and supplied State Department security contractors with drugs.
Aurelia Fedenisn, a former investigator with the State Department’s internal watchdog agency, the Inspector General, told Miller, “We also uncovered several allegations of criminal wrongdoing in cases, some of which never became cases.”
In such cases, DSS agents told the Inspector General’s investigators that senior State Department officials told them to back off, a charge that Fedenisn says is “very” upsetting.
Sexual assaults and drug trafficking, and “senior State Department officials” quashed the investigations.
Beyond the appalling misconduct itself, just think about the ramifications: The people defending our embassies are being sexually assaulted and given drugs. Is it just possible that this might reduce their effectiveness a little bit? But “senior State Department officials” are fine with that. Is it no wonder the attack against our Benghazi consulate succeeded?
Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL) questioned Attorney General Eric Holder last Thursday at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing about whether the NSA spied on members of Congress.
“Mr. Attorney General, I want to take you to the Verizon scandal and — which I understand takes us to possibly monitoring up to 120 million calls. You know, when government bureaucrats are sloppy, they’re usually really sloppy. Want to just ask, could you assure to us that no phone inside the Capitol were monitored of members of Congress that would give a future executive branch, if they started pulling this kind of thing off, would give them unique leverage over the legislature?” he asked.
Holder responded, “With all due respect, Senator, I don’t think this is an appropriate setting for me to discuss that issue. I’d be more than glad to come back in a — in an appropriate setting to discuss the issues that you have raised.”
Kirk, a Naval intelligence officer, pressed Holder remarking, “I would interrupt you and say the correct answer would be say no, we stayed within our lane, and I’m assuring you we did not spy on members of Congress.”
If Holder won’t say it didn’t happen (which he usually has no qualms about saying, even when it’s not true), then we may assume it did.
We are at a uniquely dangerous point in American history. When Richard Nixon tried to use the IRS to target his enemies, the agency told him to take a hike. Today, the agency is happy to target the president’s enemies. In fact, if the White House is telling the truth (a big if, I know), they don’t even have to be asked to do it! As Mark Steyn puts it:
Indeed, let’s take the president at his word that the existence of this shadowy IRS entity working deep within the even shadowier U.S. Treasury planted in deep cover within the shadowiest conspiracy of them all, this murky hitherto unknown organization called “the executive branch,” that all this was news to him.
What that means then is not that this or that elected politician is corrupt but that the government of the United States is corrupt.
Combined with this historically unusual affinity for misconduct, the government also has unprecedented capabilities to abuse. Again, Mark Steyn:
Perhaps this is just the way it is in the panopticon state. Tocqueville foresaw this, as he did most things. Although absolute monarchy “clothed kings with a power almost without limits” in practice “the details of social life and of individual existence ordinarily escaped his control.” What would happen, Tocqueville wondered, if administrative capability were to evolve to bring “the details of social life and of individual existence” within the King’s oversight? Eric Holder and Lois Lerner now have that power. . .
When the state has the power to know everything about everyone, the integrity of the civil service is the only bulwark against men like Holder. Instead, the ruling party and the non-partisan bureaucracy seem to be converging. In August 2010, President Obama began railing publicly against “groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity” (August 9th, a speech in Texas) and “shadowy groups with harmless-sounding names” (August 21st, radio address). And whaddayaknow, that self-same month the IRS obligingly issued its first BOLO (Be On the Look-Out) for groups with harmless-sounding names, like “tea party,” “patriot,” and “constitution.”
It may be that the strange synchronicity between the president and the permanent bureaucracy is mere happenstance and not, as it might sound to the casual ear, the sinister merging of party and state. Either way, they need to be pried apart. When the state has the capability to know everything except the difference between right and wrong, it won’t end well.
The danger here isn’t Barack Obama. This is not the first corrupt administration and it won’t be the last. The danger here is the government. It must be scaled back.
We should not attack Obama primarily for being personally responsible for the scandals. For most of them he probably isn’t. We should attack Obama primarily for refusing to do anything about them, and for thwarting Congress’s efforts. (No, he hasn’t thwarted Congress’s efforts to clean house yet — other than by stonewalling investigations — but is there any doubt that he will?) And, since nothing can be done while Obama is still in office, we must remember. Unfortunately, remembering is something that the American people seem to be very bad at.
“You can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience. We’re going to have to make some choices as a society,” Obama said.
He’s right now, and was demagoguing then. That doesn’t mean he’s making the right choices, just that he’s belatedly recognized the need to make them.
The wife of Douglas Shulman (commissioner of the IRS when its targeting of conservative, Christian, and pro-Israel groups began) works for Public Campaign, a left-wing organization working for “fair” elections that is funded by a knave’s gallery of leftist groups:
Earlier this month, when news broke of the targeting scandal broke, Public Campaign president and CEO Nick Nyhart belittled the concerns of disenfranchised conservatives.
“There are legitimate questions to be asked about political groups that are hiding behind a 501(c)4 status,” Nyhart said in a statement provide to ABC. “It’s unfortunate a few bad apples at the IRS will make it harder for those questions to be asked without claims of bias.” . . .
Public Campaign receives “major funding” from the pro-Obamacare alliance Health Care for America NOW!, which is comprised of the labor unions AFL-CIO, AFSCME, SEIU, and the progressive activist organization Move On, among others.
So many top Obama officials have lied to Congress that it’s hardly even a thing any more, but you can add James Clapper to the list:
Weeks before the National Security Agency (NSA) began a massive phone sweeping operation on U.S. cellular provider Verizon, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told Congress the agency does not conduct intelligence on American citizens. . .
“Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” committee member Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Clapper during the March 12 hearing.
In response, Clapper replied quickly: “No, sir.”
As we know now, that wasn’t even remotely true. I’m sure the administration will put forward some argument why this wasn’t wasn’t a lie, but I can’t imagine what it will be. It will also be interesting to find out whether Clapper was under oath.
I’m starting to think that the Obama administration’s plan to deal with the scandals is to have so many of them we can’t keep them straight any more. In the latest scandal, the NSA collected call data on all telephone calls placed on Verizon’s network in the United States. (The dragnet explicitly excludes calls that originate and terminate in foreign countries.) Before I got a chance to note it here, it was revealed that the NSA is collecting credit-card transactions as well.
This was so bad that even Obama’s boot-lickers at the New York Times lost patience with him, writing that he had “lost all credibility”, although they softened their criticism a few hours later.
This was Barack Obama in 2007, pledging to end the supposed abuses of the Bush administration:
Obama proclaimed, “No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime.” He then cast his massive dragnet to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime using the FISA court rather than national security letters. Oh, that’s much better.
I feel it necessary to contrast what Obama is doing (I suppose I should say, what Obama’s administration is doing, since he will surely turn out have been out of the loop once again) with what happened during the Bush administration. The Bush-era terrorist surveillance program was tapping the phones of specific foreign terrorists.
That, of course, is exactly what they should have been doing. The part that somehow became controversial is they kept listening when those foreign terrorists placed calls to the United States. Of course. It’s utter foolishness to suggest that we should stop listening to terrorists when the call the United States; indeed, those are the calls we most need to hear. But a dishonest media reported the matter as though the administration was tapping domestic phones rather than foreign ones.
The Bush-era program was spying on foreign terrorists, not Americans. The Obama-era program is the exact opposite: It spies on every American who uses Verizon or a credit card, and it specifically excludes foreigners!
The nation that invented individual liberty has abandoned it:
A 22-year-old man has been charged on suspicion of making malicious comments on Facebook following the murder of British soldier Lee Rigby.
Benjamin Flatters, from Lincoln, was arrested last night after complaints were made to Lincolnshire Police about comments made on Facebook, which were allegedly of a racist or anti-religious nature.
He was charged with an offence of malicious communications this afternoon in relation to the comments, a Lincolnshire Police spokesman said.
We don’t know the specifics of the “malicious comments”, but they don’t matter. If the comments weren’t inciting violence (which is not reported, and presumably would have been had it been so), they should have been protected speech, and once would have been, no matter how offensive they might be.
Fortunately this could never happen in America. Oh, dang:
The [Eastern District of Tennessee’s] top federal prosecutor, Bill Killian, will address a topic that most Americans are likely unfamiliar with, even those well versed on the Constitution; that federal civil rights laws can actually be violated by those who post inflammatory documents aimed at Muslims on social media. “This is an educational effort with civil rights laws as they play into freedom of religion and exercising freedom of religion,” Killian says in the local news story. “This is also to inform the public what federal laws are in effect and what the consequences are.”
Doug Shulman, the IRS commissioner when most of the known IRS misconduct took place, made at least 157 visits to the White House. If that seems like a lot, it really is. It’s nearly twice the number of known visits as the second-most-frequent high-level visitor (86). Shulman’s boss, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, made only 48 known visits.
Nevertheless, he says he can’t remember the substance of any of those meetings.
When the IRS demanded to know the substance of tax-exempt applicants’ prayers, it was not a few isolatedincidents. The IRS made a practice of inquiring into applicants prayers:
Please explain in detail the activities at the prayer meetings. Also, please provide the percentage of time your organization spends on prayer groups as compared with the other activities of the organization.
Posted by K. Crary 
Internet Scofflaw 
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