A U.S. Justice Department lawyer said on Wednesday that if a judge agreed to consider a Republican bid to get administration documents related to a botched operation against gun-trafficking it would prompt a flood of requests for courts to referee Washington political disputes.
President Barack Obama is resisting a congressional subpoena for documents related to how the administration responded to the revelation of the failed operation known as “Fast and Furious” on the U.S.- Mexican border. . .
Justice Department lawyer Ian Gershengorn told a hearing the matter was best left to the give-and-take of the U.S. government’s two elected branches, the president and Congress, and should not be a matter for the courts. . .
[House of Representatives lawyer Kerry] Kircher told Jackson that if she did not intervene, presidents could withhold documents from Congress at will with no consequence and thwart oversight of government agencies.
Kircher is exactly right. If the House has no recourse to the courts to enforce its subpoenas, then it has no subpoena power. That’s exactly what the Obama administration wants, now more than ever with the IRS scandal blooming. But it wasn’t so long ago that Democrats saw things the other way:
In a decision that now helps Republicans, U.S. District Judge John Bates ruled in 2008 that he did have the authority to enforce a subpoena by congressional Democrats in connection with the firing of nine U.S. attorneys.
(ASIDE: It’s funny to recall now what flimsy fare passed for a scandal during the Bush administration, isn’t it?)
Top IRS officials were aware of the IRS’s misconduct, and covered it up:
On Monday, the IRS said Miller was first informed on May, 3, 2012, that applications for tax-exempt status by tea party groups were inappropriately singled out for extra scrutiny. Congress, though, was not told tea party groups were being inappropriately targeted, even after Miller had been briefed on the matter.
At least twice after the briefing, Miller wrote letters to members of Congress to explain the process of reviewing applications for tax-exempt status without disclosing that tea party groups had been targeted. On July 25, 2012, Miller testified before the House Ways and Means oversight subcommittee, but again did not mention the additional scrutiny — despite being asked about it. . .
None of the agency’s responses to Congress acknowledged that conservative groups had ever been targeted, including a response to Hatch dated Sept. 11, 2012 — four months after Miller had been briefed.
In several letters to members of Congress, Miller went into painstaking detail about how applications for tax-exempt status were screened. But he never mentioned that conservative groups were being targeted, even though people working under him knew as early as June 2011 that tea party groups were being targeted, according to an upcoming report by the agency’s inspector general.
David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, seems to be saying that the IRS scandal is no big deal, because it failed to stop the Tea Party. It’s always about political outcomes with this bunch, isn’t it?
It wasn’t just the Tea Party and limited-government groups who were targeted by the IRS, they also targeted pro-Israel groups. One such organization reported being questioned regarding its religious views toward Israel:
“Does your organization support the existence of the land of Israel? Describe your organization’s religious belief system towards the land of Israel,” the IRS asked in a letter sent to the religious group, which asked not to be named.
The IRS admitted applying special scrutiny to pro-Israel groups, but that admission was later retracted by the Justice Department. (ASIDE: Note that the IRS is part of the Treasury Department, so this scandal now spans departments.)
Now, pro-Israel groups are very different from Tea Party groups, but they do have one thing in common: The Obama administration is hostile to both.
In case you had any confidence that the IRS’s internal investigation of the IRS scandal was going to be thorough, don’t. ProPublica, the group (I suppose I should say “a group”, as there are surely more) to whom the IRS leaked confidential information on Tea Party organizations, says they haven’t even been contacted by the Inspector General’s offices.
UPDATE: The IG’s office also appears to be unaware that the IRS targeted pro-Israel groups as well as conservative groups. (At least, IG’s spokesman is.)
The IRS’s misconduct in its Tea Party persecution is not limited to targeting them for extra, intrusive scrutiny. They also were illegally leaking information to the press:
The same IRS office that deliberately targeted conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status in the run-up to the 2012 election released nine pending confidential applications of conservative groups to ProPublica late last year. . .
In response to a request for the applications for 67 different nonprofits last November, the Cincinnati office of the IRS sent ProPublica applications or documentation for 31 groups. Nine of those applications had not yet been approved—meaning they were not supposed to be made public.
Now combine this with the incredibly intrusive demands for information, not only about the applicant organizations, and not only about the organizations’ employees, but about the organizations’ employees’ families, and combine that with an explicit threat to make everything public, and you get a clear picture of what they were trying to do: If they couldn’t intimidate Tea Party groups out of applying for tax-free status, they wanted to damage them by releasing personal information.
Just to be clear, this isn’t speculation. As above, they were already doing this.
Where would they get the idea to do this? As Glenn Reynolds notes, unsealing private records is Obama’s signature move. It’s not exaggerating to say his entire political career was founded on it.
Why would they think they could get away with it? They probably noticed that the Obama administration is very good to its underlings who commit misconduct in (what they view as) a good cause. If you ship thousands of weapons to Mexican drug cartels, you get promoted (while the whisleblowers are punished). If you leak confidential information from the Justice Department in an effort to harm Republicans, and then perjure yourself about it, you get not even a slap on the wrist.
POSTSCRIPT: Now that we know that the IRS is willing to release confidential information to damage the administration’s political opponents, how do you feel about Obamacare giving the IRS access to your health care records?
UPDATE: James Taranto has several more examples of the IRS leaking confidential information.
One of the defenses offered by the IRS’s apologists to try to mitigate the scandal is the idea that this was just a few low-level people in an IRS field office, and thus it doesn’t reflect on the IRS as a whole. Not so.
We learned yesterday that the Cincinnati office that did this was the only office that handles this type of request, so if Tea Party groups were to be targeted this way, Cincinnati is that place it would happen. Today we find out that it’s not true anyway:
Internal Revenue Service officials in Washington and at least two other offices were involved with investigating conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, making clear that the effort reached well beyond the branch in Cincinnati that was initially blamed, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.
It could be broader still. Adding a more sinister aspect to the IRS’s malfeasance, there’s this:
An attorney for a Tea Party group that believes the IRS targeted it for special scrutiny while applying for nonprofit status said an IRS analyst told him over a year ago that the agency had a “secret working group” devoted to investigating conservative organizations.
I don’t know what that means. Probably the analyst was just being dramatic, but the House investigation will surely want to question him under oath.
We’ll get a sense pretty soon of whether the White House feels safely distant from this on Monday. If they do, they will announce an independent investigation. If they don’t, that will be an indication that they are worried this will come back to bite them.
Well, know we know. On Monday the president finally commented, only in response to a direct question and not to announce an independent investigation. He’s sticking with the non-independent one:
The [inspector general] is conducting their investigation and I’m not going to comment prematurely.
UPDATE: This came out later in the day, and I’m not quite sure what to make of it
Attorney General Eric Holder said on Tuesday that he had ordered an FBI investigation to determine whether the Internal Revenue Service broke any laws when it targeted conservative groups for closer scrutiny of their tax-exempt status.
“I have ordered an investigation. … The FBI is coordinating with the Justice Department to see if any laws were broken,” Holder said. “I think as everyone can agree if not criminal, [those actions were] certainly outrageous and unacceptable.”
The FBI is certainly more independent than the IRS inspector general, but it’s no special counsel. One reading of this is that Holder is confident that the scandal won’t come back to the White House. But if that were true, he would appoint a special counsel. He isn’t doing that. Another reading is that he is confident that he can control the investigation.
I actually think a third reading is most likely: If you read his remarks carefully, this could be a very narrow investigation; one in which they’re not looking to get to the bottom of it, just to see if any laws were broken. If they find only disgusting partisan abuse of power, but nothing they can prosecute in court, they fold up shop and say nothing. Then the administration says the FBI cleared them.
We already knew that the White House’s claim that the Benghazi talking points came unedited from the intelligence community was a lie (they were edited a dozen times by the State Department), but here’s a new detail: David Petraeus, then the director of the CIA, thought that the resulting talking points were “essentially useless”.
That’s a quote from ABC’s Jonathan Karl, not a direct quote. Petraeus wrote:
I would just as soon not use them, but it’s their [the White House’s] call.
The Cincinnati office was not filled with low-level apparatchiks. It was the division specifically tasked with evaluating applications for such nonprofit groups.
Within a year of the Tea Party’s appearance on the national scene, the IRS was targeting them for increased scrutiny:
The timeline contained in the draft report indicates that IRS scrutiny of tea-party and other conservative groups began as early as 2010 and came to the attention of Ms. Lerner, the head of the tax-exempt-organizations division, at least by the following year.
Also, the criteria used to identify conservative groups was quite broad:
The Internal Revenue Service’s scrutiny of conservative groups went beyond those with “tea party” or “patriot” in their names—as the agency admitted Friday—to also include ones worried about government spending, debt or taxes, and even ones that lobbied to “make America a better place to live,” according to new details of a government probe.
This is important, because it puts the lie to the notion (never very plausible in the first place) that this was some sort of ill-conceived labor-saving strategy. That might be possible if they were merely using a keyword search, but if they are reading the documents looking conservative content, it’s the opposite of labor-saving strategy. They were expending extra effort to identify conservative applicants.
The Obama administration’s little-recognized war on religion is continuing, and once again the battlefield is the area in which the president has the greatest influence: the military.
During the last year-and-a-half, his administration has banned Bibles at Walter Reed hospital (a policy later rescinded), issued orders to Army chaplains limiting what they could preach from the pulpit, and tried unsuccessfully to strip a freedom-of-conscience clause for chaplains from the law.
Now the administration is pushing new rules to discourage evangelism among the military:
A Pentagon ban on proselytizing has left some conservative activists fearful that Christian soldiers — and even military chaplains — could face court martial for sharing their faith.
The Defense Department said this week that proselytizing — trying to get someone to change faiths — is banned. Its statement does not define proselytizing or address the role of military chaplains. It also does not rule out court martial for those whose share their faith too aggressively.
Supposedly the administration’s concern is superiors who pressure their subordinates to convert. But that is not reassuring, for at least three reasons:
First, there is no evidence that anything like that is going on. Certainly it is not going on in the great numbers that would require a national policy.
Second, the rules as written do not limit themselves to pressure situations, but to any instance in which someone might be “induced” to convert to one’s faith.
Third, the rules were prompted by a meeting between the Pentagon and leaders of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, an Orwellianly named group opposed to religion in the military. Given the rules’ origin, it’s impossible to allow them the benefit of the doubt.
Hand in hand with playing to Chinese viewers comes working with Chinese censors. While experts say that the navigating Chinese rules and mores is still more of an art than a science, it’s generally accepted that red flags are raised when you disparage the image of the People’s Army or police, show obscene or vulgar content, feature ghosts or the supernatural, show mistreatment of prisoners, advertise religious extremism, display excessive drinking or smoking, or oppose the spirit of law.
And if you dare go off script while shooting in China, prepare for punishment. According to Cain, during a shoot a few years ago in Shanghai, the director decided to change things up a bit and film a take with an extra holding a camcorder pretending to tape a movie at a theater. Sensitive to their reputation as the source of a large chunk of the world’s movie piracy, China told the team their movie would be shut down.
“We begged and pleaded and promised to keep the film on track,” Cain told us. “The lesson there was that there is always someone watching.”
As might be expected, the anti-gun establishment instantly freaked out at the prospect of printable guns. (They say they’re concerned about undetectable guns, but that’s disingenuous. Our ability to detect guns is already spotty. They’re worried that if people can print guns, they’ll never be able to ban them.)
But what to do about it? Legislating against printable guns is slow, and would be ineffective anyway. The only thing to do is disappear the plans, and fast.
So that’s what the Federal government is trying to do. The US State Department ordered Defense Distributed to take down the plans from its web site. Why the State Department? Because they are the ones empowered to control arms exports. By posting the plans, Defense Distributed was exporting munitions.
This is obviously pretextual, and also ineffective, since the plans had already been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. But is it even legal? The answer seems to be no:
Wilson has complied with the takedown request for now. But he’s hinted at further challenges to the government’s decision. From his point of view, plans for the Liberator fall into a legal category that escapes regulation. . .
“We’re quite familiar” with the rules, known as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, Wilson told me. . .
He argues that ITAR doesn’t regulate publicly accessible technical information. If your designs are put on library or bookstore shelves (something Wilson has actually done), ITAR effectively passes you over. You can read the relevant sections of the regulation, 120.10 and 120.11, here for yourself.
A year ago, the New York Times was okay with the IRS subjecting Tea Party groups to special scrutiny. Nothing has really changed since then, other than the IRS admitting it did so, but I still wondered if the NYT might change its tune now that the proverbial excrement has hit the fan.
Nope. The NYT’s editorial this morning is its usual fare: an attack against Republicans. No mention of the IRS. The NYT’s editorial Sunday was an attack against opponents of amnesty for illegal immigrants. The NYT’s editorial Friday was an attack against Republicans (for holding the Benghazi hearings!). No mention of the IRS, much less an indication of a change of heart.
In fact, the only mentions of the IRS scandal on the NYT opinion page are from Ross Douthat (the NYT’s token conservative), and one throwaway sentence from Maureen Dowd in an incoherent column about Benghazi.
Here’s something I did not know (but doesn’t surprise me):
I always thought the number of Bill Clinton enemies audited by his Internal Revenue Service was a bit high to be coincidental. . .
According to a Judicial Watch filing, the Clinton enemies audited included
Clinton paramours Gennifer Flowers and Liz Ward Gracen, sexual assault accusers Paula Jones and Juanita Broaddrick, and fired White House Travel Office Director Billy Dale.
as well as these organizations:
The National Rifle Association, The Heritage Foundation, The National Review, The American Spectator, Freedom Alliance, National Center for Public Policy Research, American Policy Center, American Cause, Citizens Against Government Waste, Citizens for Honest Government, Progress and Freedom Foundation, Concerned Women for America and the San Diego Chapter of Christian Coalition.
Now that the IRS has admitted targeting Tea Party groups, let’s take stock of where we are. The IRS claims, risibly, that politics played no role in its decision to target the Tea Party:
Lois G. Lerner, the IRS official who oversees tax-exempt groups, said the “absolutely inappropriate” actions by “front-line people” were not driven by partisan motives.
Even most of the usual leftist apologists find this absurd. For instance, Time’s Joe Klein writes, “Does anyone actually believe this?” The Washington Post adds “it seems that groups with “progressive” in their titles did not receive the same scrutiny.”
ASIDE: The IRS does still have a few apologists. The New York Times seem to think it’s okay, editorializing “The IRS does its job.” (That was in March 2012, but it’s hard to see what has changed materially since then.) National Journal seems to think it’s no big deal, calling it a “mishap” and then revising it to a “blunder”, both of suggest that this can somehow happen without deliberate misconduct.
Let’s not make the mistake of giving the IRS any credit for coming out with this. The agency denied the charges for months. They only admitted to it now because the story was coming out soon anyway, and they tried to dump it on a Friday (as if a story this explosive could be buried).
The claim that only “front-line people” were involved seems to be a lie. Senior officials knew what was going on. The IRS’s director seems to have perjured himself when he testified in March 2012 that Tea Party groups were not being targeted. According to the AP, senior officials were aware by June 2011 at the latest.
Hot Air has a list of some of the outrageous things the IRS demanded. They demanded a whole sheaf of personal information on present and past employees, and their families, and promised to make all of that information public.
Even the left is jumping on this, in part because the IRS’s conduct is too outrageous to excuse (except perhaps by the NYT), and in part because they think that the scandal won’t reach back to the White House. They shouldn’t be so sure. This is a president who jokes about abusing the IRS, and which has snooped through IRS records on its political opponents before.
We’ll get a sense pretty soon of whether the White House feels safely distant from this on Monday. If they do, they will announce an independent investigation. If they don’t, that will be an indication that they are worried this will come back to bite them.
When did it happen that the existence of an investigation became an excuse not to answer any questions? I mean this question seriously; when did it happen?
It doesn’t make any sense; the one has nothing to do with the other. One might argue that one doesn’t want to jeopardize a prosecution, but (1) that doesn’t stop people from answering questions when they want to, and (2) in most of these cases (e.g., Benghazi) there’s no prospect of prosecution in the first place.
Whoever first used the ploy, it has certainly become the Obama administration’s go-to strategy for containing any scandal from Gunwalker to Benghazi: First, you tell a bunch of lies, hoping the thing will go away. If it doesn’t, you launch an investigation. For a year or more, as long as the investigation runs, you answer no questions. When the press finally moves on, you quietly close the investigation and issue a whitewash. Thereafter, if someone has the ill grace to bring up the subject, you say they are dredging up ancient history. (Carney: “Benghazi happened a long time ago.” Clinton: “What difference, at this point, does it make?”)
UPDATE (5/28): I had forgotten about this piece from last September (which I noted here), demolishing the idea that there is any legal impediment to releasing information when investigations are ongoing.
Obamacare was sold as an effort to help uninsured people, particularly those with pre-existing conditions. We know it was nothing of the sort, but here’s a particularly striking example: When Republicans proposed to cut money from an Obamacare slush fund and use it to help people with pre-existing conditions, Democrats opposed the plan:
Democrats objected because the funding source, the “Prevention and Public Health Fund,” is all about patronage and greasing political wheels, and that is, for them, more important than helping sick Americans. Some of the $10 billion in the slush fund has already been used by Health and Human Services (HHS) to fund local groups lobbying for higher soda taxes and moratoriums on fast-food outlets; it’s also gone to for pet neutering, bike paths, and community-gardening projects. By design, there is no congressional oversight.
Obamacare isn’t about helping the uninsured. It’s about graft, and it’s about government control over our health decisions. Democrats’ refusal to cut their slush fund illustrates the point perfectly.
Remember, election fraud never, ever happens. Pay no attention to stuff like this:
A jury in South Bend, Indiana has found that fraud put President Obama and Hillary Clinton on the presidential primary ballot in Indiana in the 2008 election. Two Democratic political operatives were convicted Thursday night in the illegal scheme after only three hours of deliberations. They were found guilty on all counts.
I saw this coming. Last August, President Obama said:
We cannot have a situation in which chemical or biological weapons are falling into the hands of the wrong people . . . We have been very clear to the Assad regime but also to other players on the ground that a red line for us is, we start seeing a whole bunch of weapons moving around or being utilized.
This was clearly taken as a threat of force. (NYT headline: “Obama Threatens Force Against Syria”).
Unfortunately, it was just as obvious that he didn’t mean it. Alas, it was obvious not just to me, but also to Assad. So when Assad started moving his chemical weapons around, the administration claimed it wasn’t clear that he was doing it. When we learned he was using them, they claimed it wasn’t clear that he was using them. And, when the evidence finally became undeniable, they were forced into a humiliating backpeddle.
The bottom line is that Obama is just really bad at this. This is a guy who actually says things like “don’t call my bluff.” In this case, the president’s aides had carefully developed a position that was supposed to scare Assad but not mean anything. But then Obama went and ad-libbed a new policy at the podium:
Moving or using large quantities of chemical weapons would cross a “red line” and “change my calculus,” the president declared in response to a question at a news conference, to the surprise of some of the advisers who had attended the weekend meetings and wondered where the “red line” came from.
This is a president who manages, on the fly, to invent a policy even worse than his intended policy of meaningless talk.
But his weakness goes so much further than that. When trying to develop a response to Assad disregarding Obama’s threats, the White House felt its hands were tied:
Mr. Obama’s advisers also raised legal issues. “How can we attack another country unless it’s in self-defense and with no Security Council resolution?” another official said, referring to United Nations authorization. “If he drops sarin on his own people, what’s that got to do with us?”
Well, that’s the problem with giving foreign dictators a veto over US policy, isn’t it? But what about “what’s that got to do with us”? A year ago Obama thought it had something to do with us, when he vowed to prevent foreign atrocities in a speech at the Holocaust Memorial Museum:
And finally, “never again” is a challenge to nations. It’s a bitter truth — too often, the world has failed to prevent the killing of innocents on a massive scale. And we are haunted by the atrocities that we did not stop and the lives we did not save.
These too are shown to be empty words. In April 2012 he was running for election and had to pretend to be strong, when in fact he is anything but. (See also, Benghazi.)
We’re going to face a major international challenge, ’cause they’re going to want to test him, just like they did John Kennedy, they’re going to want to test him, and they’re going to find out this guy’s got steel in his spine.
Tested he was, but steel in his spine? Not so much.
I’m not sure why this is current again, but Megan McArdle takes a look at the history of the 2000 Presidential election, and how Democrats are trying to revise it to make themselves look less unreasonable.
The deputy of slain U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens has told congressional investigators that a team of Special Forces prepared to fly from Tripoli to Benghazi during the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks was forbidden from doing so by U.S. Special Operations Command Africa.
The account from Gregory Hicks is in stark contrast to assertions from the Obama administration, which insisted that nobody was ever told to stand down and that all available resources were utilized. . .
Hicks told investigators that SOCAFRICA commander Lt. Col. Gibson and his team were on their way to board a C-130 from Tripoli for Benghazi prior to an attack on a second U.S. compound “when [Col. Gibson] got a phone call from SOCAFRICA which said, ‘you can’t go now, you don’t have the authority to go now.’ And so they missed the flight … They were told not to board the flight, so they missed it.”
In short: The military wanted to help but was forbidden to do so, and the Obama administration lied about it after the fact.
There’s a lot we still don’t know about the Benghazi debacle, but there is one thing we know for certain: The White House lied about what they knew when. The excerpt is a little long, but stay with it to the end:
When it became clear last fall that the CIA’s now discredited Benghazi talking points were flawed, the White House said repeatedly the documents were put together almost entirely by the intelligence community, but White House documents reviewed by Congress suggest a different story.
ABC News has obtained 12 different versions of the talking points that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack.
White House emails reviewed by ABC News suggest the edits were made with extensive input from the State Department. The edits included requests from the State Department that references to the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia be deleted as well references to CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding the attack.
That would appear to directly contradict what White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said about the talking points in November.
“Those talking points originated from the intelligence community. They reflect the IC’s best assessments of what they thought had happened,” Carney told reporters at the White House press briefing on November 28, 2012. “The White House and the State Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those talking points by either of those two institutions were changing the word ‘consulate’ to ‘diplomatic facility’ because ‘consulate’ was inaccurate.”
(Emphasis mine.) We now know every single thing in Carney’s statement to be a lie. The talking points did not originate from the intelligence community, they didn’t reflect the intelligence community’s best estimate, and there were many more adjustments than the trivial one Carney cites.
French police are investigating a recent attack on a rabbi and his son outside a Paris synagogue. An Iranian man screaming “Allah-u-Akbar” slashed the rabbi’s throat with a box-cutter. The AP reports that “an official investigation [is] underway to determine a possible motive.”
A case of “possible human trafficking” at a Saudi diplomatic compound in Virginia is under investigation, the Department of Homeland Security confirmed to News4.
Homeland Security Special-Agent-in-Charge John Torres, who is leading the probe, said Fairfax County Police responded to a tip Tuesday night citing a possible case of modern slavery.
U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement/Homeland Security Investigations were called to a home in the 6000 block of Orris Street in McLean and — in the words of a source familiar with the investigation — “rescued” two women. One woman reportedly tried to flee by squeezing through a gap in the front gate as it was closing. . .
The investigation is in its very early stages and complicated by the possibility that some of those involved may have diplomatic immunity, said a State Department spokesperson.
We need to send a strong message to the Saudis and whomever else that bringing your slaves into America won’t be tolerated. We need to, but we won’t.
The Benghazi cover-up is finally unraveling. A well-reported piece in the Weekly Standard exposes the process by which the intelligence estimate on Benghazi was laundered to remove all mention of Islamic militants. The claims that the drivel put out by the administration were the intelligence community’s best estimate are an outright lie.
The piece really needs to be read in its entirely, but a graphic illustrating the laundering process is extracted here. And here is the reason why:
The talking points were first distributed to officials in the interagency vetting process at 6:52 p.m. on Friday. Less than an hour later, at 7:39 p.m., an individual identified in the House report only as a “senior State Department official” responded to raise “serious concerns” about the draft. That official, whom The Weekly Standard has confirmed was State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland, worried that members of Congress would use the talking points to criticize the State Department for “not paying attention to Agency warnings.”
There, in black and white: the estimates were laundered for political reasons.
On the night of the Benghazi terror attack, special operations put out multiple calls for all available military and other assets to be moved into position to help — but the State Department and White House never gave the military permission to cross into Libya, sources told Fox News.
We don’t know who the sources are, I hope they are among the whistleblowers so we can get them on record. But we already know that the CIA operators who defended the consulate personnel were ordered twice to leave them to die, so this is entirely plausible.
Third, the Benghazi attack was an Al Qaeda attack. While we ponder that entirely unsurprising development, think of what transpired the morning after the Benghazi attack: Our feckless diplomats responded to a terrorist attack (one we now know, but always suspected, was an Al Qaeda attack) by apologizing. Mitt Romney said (paraphrasing) maybe we shouldn’t be apologizing to terrorists while we are still burying our dead, and virtually the entire media attacked Romney for it!
All of this shows massive malfeasance on the part of the administration, and the media that covers for them, but it misses the true scandal. The administration put a filmmaker in jail over the Benghazi attack, and he is still there. I can scarcely imagine a greater dereliction of presidential duty than jailing a man for exercising his free speech because it offended foreign Islamists. (Glenn Reynolds isn’t letting this go either.)
ASIDE: Please, no nonsense about how Nakoula Nakoula is in jail for parole violations. Yes, those were the charges they used to jail him, but they never would have cared about a minor parole violation if not for him making the video that they claimed was responsible for the Benghazi attack. In fact, they never would have known his identity if not for a federal investigation that pierced his pseudonym. We need to know who ordered that investigation and why (although we can guess). Efforts to get to the bottom of Benghazi won’t have even begun until we know that, as far as I’m concerned.
The basic problem at Sandy Hook and other shooting incidents comes down to this: There were too many armed bad guys, and not enough armed good guys. You can resolve the problem by having fewer armed bad guys (hard to accomplish), or more armed good guys.
However, this administration has worked to have more armed bad guys, and fewer armed good guys. This is sheer idiocy.
A quick note about the Manchin-Toomey gun-control bill that failed today: David Kopel explains that while the bill purports to forbid a gun registry, it actually authorizes one, and that, and while the bill purports to strengthen interstate transport protection, it actually eviscerates it. (UPDATE: Much more here.) Others have pointed out that, despite purporting not to do so, the bill’s vagueness and arbitrariness effectively require background checks for all private sales.
Are those interpretations correct? There is one thing on which you may depend: If the bill had passed (or if it still yet passes), the people who are complaining today about the supposed lies against the bill are the very same people who will be calling for the courts to adopt that strongly anti-gun interpretation.
This is why there is no such thing as moderate gun control. Whatever the bill is supposed to say, indeed whatever it does say, bears no resemblance to how it will look once Obama’s regulation-drafters and solicitors are through with it. And they know it. That’s the whole point.
Last week, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KT) staged a 13-hour filibuster to try to extract from the Obama administration an answer to a very simple question: Under what circumstances does the president have the power to kill Americans on US soil without any judicial process?
The answer to this question is not obvious. Even in a purely law-enforcement context, sometimes an active criminal needs to be shot on sight. But, at the other extreme, no one would suggest that the president may assassinate Americans for political differences. Clearly the power should exist but is severely limited.
But what exactly are those limitations? The problem is that the administration won’t say. Paul succeeded in getting the administration to admit that its power to kill Americans is not unlimited:
Dear Senator Paul:
It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: “Does the president have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill Americans not engaged in combat on U.S. soil?” The answer to that question is no.
Sincerely,
Eric H. Holder, Jr.
Yes, that’s the entire letter. (ASIDE: Either due to a strange oversight or a fit of pique, the White House released the letter to the media but never actually sent it to Paul.) It’s good that the administration admits to some limits, but this tells us virtually nothing about where they see those limits.
On September 11, 2001, while the Pentagon was still burning, the Justice Department was already at work drafting legal rules that would govern the War on Terror. Some of those rules came under fire, of course, but the Bush administration put them out forthrightly and abided by them. That’s called respect for the rule of law.
Later, when the Bush administration’s critics (most of them hypocritically, but some in good faith) attacked those rules, they had specific legal opinions to dispute.
Barack Obama’s attitude toward all this is clarified by a revealing exchange with Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV):
Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) confronted the president over the administration’s refusal for two years to show congressional intelligence committees Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel memos justifying the use of lethal force against American terror suspects abroad. . .
In response to Rockefeller’s critique, Obama said he’s not involved in drafting such memos, the senators told POLITICO. He also tried to assure his former colleagues that his administration is more open to oversight than that of President George W. Bush, whom many Democratic senators attacked for secrecy and for expanding executive power in the national security realm.
“This is not Dick Cheney we’re talking about here,” he said.
Instead of offering a legal justification (which the administration refuses to give), Obama explains that he (unlike Dick Cheney) is a good guy. To paraphrase: We don’t need legal strictures when the right person is making the decisions. More tersely: I don’t need legal justification; I’m Obama.
That’s called disrespect for the rule of law.
This matter is too important to allow the Obama administration to make it up as they go along. If the administration will write and publicize rules governing domestic drone strikes, we can debate those rules. But if they refuse to do so, Congress needs to do it.
The canceled tours prompted a pointed question to Obama from House Administration Committee Chairwoman Candice Miller (R-Mich.) during the president’s meeting with House Republicans on Wednesday. Miller asked why Obama put an end to the tours instead of just cancelling the congressional Christmas party or the congressional picnic.
When Obama said the decision was prompted by the Secret Service, some lawmakers groaned in disbelief.
“Now, now, let’s be respectful,” Obama replied.
Note that, when he says “let’s be respectful”, he means “you be respectful to me”. He’s not going to respect them even enough to refrain from obvious, ridiculous lies.
POSTSCRIPT: By the way, if a well-deserved groan in private is disrespectful, what was this?
When it comes to horribly complicated legislation, Obamacare was no piker (1600 pages!), but the legislation itself pales to what it became once the bureaucrats got their hands on it:
That’s 20k pages and counting. When we started letting Congress delegate its power to bureaucrats, this was the inevitable result.
It used to be that Congress’s time would impose some practical limit on the number of rules they could impose on us, but now that the executive branch makes most of the rules without the messy process of legislation, there’s no practical limit on the rules they can burden us with.
The top U.S. immigration enforcement official acknowledged Thursday that the Obama administration has in fact released thousands of illegal immigrants from local jails over the last month despite prior claims that the release was only in the hundreds.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director John Morton, at a House appropriations subcommittee hearing, said the agency released a total of 2,228 illegal immigrants from local jails “throughout the country” between Feb. 9 and March 1 for “solely budgetary reasons.” . . .
But Morton’s acknowledgement that more than 2,000 were released appeared to conflict with prior claims from the administration, which said it was only releasing hundreds.
The Associated Press first reported March 1 that the administration had released more than 2,000 illegal immigrants since at least Feb. 15 and planned to release 3,000 more in March due to looming budget cuts, but Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said days later that the AP’s report was “not really accurate” and that the story had developed “its own mythology.”
(Emphasis mine.)
Do not believe anything the Obama administration says, ever.
What is a coup d’etat? I would say it refers to a seizure of power unjustified by country’s constitution or customs. A few years ago there was a great hue and cry over the supposed coup in Honduras, in which the Honduran supreme court ousted the president for violating the constitution. Even though the action complied with the Honduran constitution, and was acknowledged not to be a coup by the US Secretary of State, the Obama administration pressed ahead with sanctions against Honduras to try to force them to restore the socialist, would-be dictator to power.
However, this month we’ve seen a coup staged in Venezuela without a peep from the Obama administration or the legacy media. When Hugo Chavez died in Cuba earlier this month, he had been elected to a new term in office but had not been inaugurated. The Venezuelan constitution makes clear who assumes the presidency in such a case:
When an elected president becomes permanently unavailable to serve prior to his inauguration, a new election by universal suffrage and direct ballot shall be held within 30 consecutive days. Pending election and inauguration of the new president, the president of the National Assembly shall take charge of the presidency of the Republic.
The president of the National Assembly is Diosdado Cabello, but instead Nicolas Maduro — Chavez’s handpicked successor — has been sworn in as acting president. This is plainly a coup.
So why is the Obama administration silent about an actual coup in Venezuela, when it got so exercised over a non-coup in Honduras? It’s hard not to see it as politics. This administration likes Hugo Chavez’s brand of socialism, and in Honduras, a chavista was ousted, while in Venezuela a chavista was installed.
President Obama said his administration was looking at ways to resume White House tours for school groups. “This was not a decision that went up to the White House,” noted Obama in an ABC News interview aired on Wednesday, saying the directive came from the Secret Service.
White House spokesman Jay Carney, March 7:
In order to allow the Secret Service to best fulfill its core mission, the White House made the decision that we would, unfortunately, have to temporarily suspend these tours.
(Emphasis mine.) One of these two statements, certainly, is a lie.
Almost certainly, it’s the former. Is the White House really going to cease tours without directions from the White House? Come on. Besides, we have plenty of examples of the White House directing its people to make the sequester as painful as possible, so this would be well within precedent.
Moreover, when Jay Carney was questioned on this, he explained that the decision absolutely did go to the White House. (Trying to square the circle, he also explained that the decision nevertheless was really made by the Secret Service.)
If you’re a fan of electric cars, you won’t like this:
A 2012 comprehensive life-cycle analysis in Journal of Industrial Ecology shows that almost half the lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions from an electric car come from the energy used to produce the car, especially the battery. . . When an electric car rolls off the production line, it has already been responsible for 30,000 pounds of carbon-dioxide emission. The amount for making a conventional car: 14,000 pounds.
While electric-car owners may cruise around feeling virtuous, they still recharge using electricity overwhelmingly produced with fossil fuels. Thus, the life-cycle analysis shows that for every mile driven, the average electric car indirectly emits about six ounces of carbon-dioxide. This is still a lot better than a similar-size conventional car, which emits about 12 ounces per mile. But remember, the production of the electric car has already resulted in sizeable emissions—the equivalent of 80,000 miles of travel in the vehicle.
So unless the electric car is driven a lot, it will never get ahead environmentally. And that turns out to be a challenge. Consider the Nissan Leaf. It has only a 73-mile range per charge. Drivers attempting long road trips, as in one BBC test drive, have reported that recharging takes so long that the average speed is close to six miles per hour—a bit faster than your average jogger.
It gets worse:
To make matters worse, the batteries in electric cars fade with time, just as they do in a cellphone. Nissan estimates that after five years, the less effective batteries in a typical Leaf bring the range down to 55 miles. As the MIT Technology Review cautioned last year: “Don’t Drive Your Nissan Leaf Too Much.”
And if you replace the batteries, you get to start your carbon footprint all over. Bottom line:
If a typical electric car is driven 50,000 miles over its lifetime, the huge initial emissions from its manufacture means the car will actually have put more carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere than a similar-size gasoline-powered car driven the same number of miles. . . Even if the electric car is driven for 90,000 miles and the owner stays away from coal-powered electricity, the car will cause just 24% less carbon-dioxide emission than its gas-powered cousin.
(Emphasis mine.)
But, electric cars put a lot of money into the pockets of Obama’s cronies, so they have that going at least.
Remember when the Obamacare’s health exchanges were supposed to make shopping for health care easy? The reality is quite the opposite:
Applying for benefits under President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul could be as daunting as doing your taxes. The government’s draft application runs 15 pages for a three-person family. An outline of the online version has 21 steps, some with additional questions. . .
That’s just the first part of the process, which lets you know if you qualify for financial help. . . Once you’re finished with the money part, actually picking a health plan will require additional steps, plus a basic understanding of insurance jargon. . .
Some are concerned that a lot of uninsured people will be overwhelmed and simply give up.
Of course, giving up isn’t actually allowed. With the individual mandate, giving up means paying a heavy fine.
Another new technology for nuclear reactors is reaching maturity: the molten-salt reactor. One important aspect of the design is it’s “walk-away safe”. That means it doesn’t require any power to remain safe; you can walk away from it and it will safely coast to a halt.
A company says it’s ready to commercialize the design. Unfortunately, as is so often the case, government is in the way:
Bringing the new reactor to market will be challenging. Although the basic idea of a molten-salt reactor has been demonstrated, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s certification process is set up around light-water reactors. The company will need the NRC to establish new regulations, especially since the commission must sign off on the idea of using less steel and concrete if the design’s safety features are to lead to real savings.
There’s an old adage that goes: if it’s too good to be true, it probably is. The legacy media ought to keep it in mind when they consider quoting wonderfully implausible people, like self-hating gun owners. Yes, he’s a fake.
The Obama administration is cutting White House tours and national park visiting hours, but a $704 thousand gardening project in Belgium for the US ambassador to NATO is going ahead.
(Somehow, that bunch got away with portraying the Romneys as out-of-touch with ordinary people. Amazing.)
UPDATE: The White House says they weren’t responsible for the decision to cancel tours, and they’re trying to figure out a way to restart them. Amazing how little influence the White House has when it doesn’t want one.
One obvious way to restart them (other than just, you know, restarting them) would be to accept the contributions of variouspersons who have offered to pay for tours, “but the White House has turned down the request, saying that it could not allow private individuals to pay the Secret Service.” Because that would defeat the purpose of cancelling tours in the first place.
Gabby Gifford’s husband buys an AR-15. Having been caught, he now says he’s not going to keep it.
POSTSCRIPT: I wonder if this story is burying the lede, though. Mark Kelly impulse-bought an AR-15. That means there’s a gun store in Arizona that has AR-15s in stock!
UPDATE: C’mon, this doesn’t even pass the laugh test:
Appearing on CNN’s The Situation Room With Wolf Blitzer on March 11, Mark Kelly said he planned from the start to hand over an AR-15 rifle he purchased to the Tuscon Police Department.
Please. If you’re doing it to make a point, you make a media circus out of it. Doing it quietly accomplishes no purpose but throwing your own money away.
People argue against universal government-run preschool on grounds like (1) it’s too expensive, or (2) it doesn’t work, or (3) the government has no business doing it anyway. All of that is true, but Katherine Mangu-Ward has an even better point:
Which do you think is more likely?:
(a) We make preschool universal and that starts a cascade of awesomeness into the general public school system, or
(b) we graft a universal preschool entitlement onto the existing universal K-12 entitlement, and preschool starts to suck just as much as the rest of the system?
The 9th Circuit Appeals Court has ruled that the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches does apply at the border. This might seem obvious, but it goes against existing precedent which holds that there is an exception at the border.
That decision will probably be overturned, but I’m guessing that the DHS claim to be able to perform unreasonable border searches nearly anywhere will not stand up.
The court also ruled that password-protecting a computer does not create reasonable grounds for suspicion. I certainly hope that holds up.
Another federal employee has come forward to claim the Obama administration resisted efforts to ease the impact of sequester.
A U.S. park ranger, who did not wish to be identified, told FoxNews.com that supervisors within the National Park Service overruled plans to deal with the budget cuts in a way that would have had minimal impact on the public. Instead, the source said, park staff were told to cancel special events and cut “interpretation services” — the talks, tours and other education services provided by local park rangers.
“Apparently, they want the public to feel the pain,” the ranger said.
Yesterday I spent much of the day in a waiting room with Fox News on the television, and they were going after the administration hammer and tongs, with case after case of the administration deliberately making cuts hurt. I don’t think it’s going to work. The White House tours and national parks won’t stay closed forever, and when they reopen them, how will they explain it?
Meanwhile, while cutting services that people can see, the administration has advertised for 2596 new jobs since sequestration went into effect.
Glenn Kessler, who has been doing yeoman’s work debunking the White House’s stream of sequestrationlies, debunks another. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan:
It just means a lot more children will not get the kinds of services and opportunities they need, and as many as 40,000 teachers could lose their jobs. … There are literally teachers now who are getting pink slips, who are getting notices that they can’t come back this fall.
Lie. After being pressed for days for an example, the White House finally produced a single district in West Virginia, but even that wasn’t true. In Kanawha County, five or six teachers (not 40,000) are being transferred (not laid off), due to a change in state policy (not due to sequestration).
These aren’t matters of opinion where the administration can simply argue assumptions; these are easily checkable statements with hard numbers attached. From this I infer that the administration is having a hard time finding concrete examples of bad things that the sequester is going to do. Nor is that a huge surprise. Whether you’re for or against the sequester, we are talking about relatively small sums, in the scope of the federal deficit. They’re simply not going to show up in much measurable way as devastating hardship.
POSTSCRIPT: Despite being on the front line of the administration’s lies, Kessler still wants to give them the benefit of the doubt:
In other words, Duncan’s scare story about teacher layoffs — right now, at this moment — was apparently too good to check. If the Obama administration had learned anything about the Susan Rice-Benghazi debacle, you would have thought it was to make sure the talking points for the Sunday shows are rock-solid. Given that Duncan had made this claim once to reporters, couldn’t anyone in his office have bothered to pick up the phone and double-check the information?
It’s not a matter of checking. The Benghazi misinformation wasn’t a mistake; it was a lie. So is this.
Caught on tape: Jan Schakowsky (D-IL, Democratic chief deputy whip) admitting that the proposed “assault weapons” ban is just the first step, and they will ultimately try to ban all guns, Second Amendment or not.
Has there ever been a US president who spent more time bellyaching about about the constitutional separation of powers than Barack Obama? It’s really quite unseemly.
But more worrisome than the president’s disdain for constitutional government is the left’s lack of concern about his disdain. If half the country and nearly the entire media are tired of constitutional government, we are in serious trouble.
In the latest instance, Obama complains in his radio address that “our democratic debates messy and often frustrating.” Which they are, of course, but that’s by design.
Obama goes on to say that “what makes us special is when we summon the ability to see past those differences.” Wrong. What makes us special is not when we get past differences, but when we see the beauty in having differences!
On the issue of the janitors, if you work for an hourly wage and you earn overtime, and you depend on that overtime to make ends meet, it is simply a fact that a reduction in overtime is a reduction in your pay.
Glenn Kessler looked at this one too:
Still, the White House has kept up its spin offensive, claiming that a cut in “overtime” was a de facto pay cut and thus the president was right — or at least not wrong.
So, we wondered: How much overtime do Capitol Hill janitors actually make? . . .
It averaged $304 per employee in fiscal year 2012 and $388 per employee thus far in the current fiscal year. “Cleaning technicians do not earn what I would consider to be a great deal of overtime pay,” Swanson said.
In other words, overtime amounts to only pittance of the overall pay — about $6.50 a week on top of wages of $1,000 a week. That’s much different from Carney’s claim of having to “depend on that overtime to make ends meet.” Indeed, even before the sequester was implemented, Capitol Hill janitors have already earned more overtime pay than they did in all of last year.
A White House spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
I’ll bet.
Finally, Kessler had an insight on how the White House messaging machine works:
First of all, we should note that the White House’s story kept evolving as we reported last week’s column. It’s almost as if the president’s aides had to scramble to come up with reasons why the president could be correct, without actually knowing the facts.
So, when we forwarded to White House aides an AOC memo saying no furloughs were planned, White House aides latched onto a line about overtime reductions. For a couple of hours, we were also told that the janitors were on contract — and contracts were being curtailed. But that line of reasoning turned out to be incorrect. Then, after the statements from the Capitol were issued, there was no longer any response.
But, as seen by the quotes above, the talking point about “overtime” did not fade away.
Kessler is too charitable. When this bunch repeatedly says things “without actually knowing the facts”, it’s reasonable to assume that they don’t actually care what the facts are. Still, I’m glad he’s starting to figure this out. Maybe he will be less willing to cover for them in the future.
The gun banners are telling us that shotguns are the responsible alternative to semi-automatic rifles. (Well, Joe “shoot through the door” Biden doesn’t exactly stress the responsibility part. . .) But the gun control bill that looks likely to pass in Colorado would ban semi-automatic and pump-action shotguns, which is to say nearly all shotguns in use.
A leaked email from the Agriculture Department shows the administration rejecting plans to mitigate the consequences of the sequester:
We have gone on record with a notification to Congress and whoever else that “APHIS would eliminate assistance to producers in 24 States in managing wildlife damage to the aquaculture industry, unless they provide funding to cover the costs.” So, it is our opinion that however you manage that reduction, you need to make sure you are not contradicting what we said the impact would be.
(Emphasis mine.)
It would an injustice of historic proportions if the Democrats get away with blaming Republicans for the sequester when the Democrats are deliberately making it as painful as possible. But with the press on their side, they might still get away with it.
Remember when Obama promised if you like your health care you could keep it? Yep, that was a lie. Obamacare’s Medicare cuts which will push millions of seniors from their Medicare Advantage plans into standard Medicare, are going ahead.
Remember when the Democrats were strongly against so-called domestic surveillance? Back then, we were talking about Americans who take phone calls from foreigners under surveillance. Now we’re talking about Americans just going about their business, and Democrats think it’s hunky-dory.
I think there ought to be a simple bright-line rule: DOD can have drones (but posse comitatus applies), DOJ and DHS cannot.
Fox News has a column running down some of the out-of-control NLRB’s most outrageous rulings. I think the most outrageous is its decision that employers must turn over the names of whistleblowers to the union, so the union can punish them. A close second is its decision that stores cannot forbid clerks to post signs telling customers to take their business elsewhere.
Fortunately, these rulings are all likely to go away, since they were issued by illegal recess appointees. Unfortunately, once Obama loses the appeal, he’ll just appoint the same lunatics again, and they’ll make the same decisions again.
Time was when our presidents were proud to be part of the Constitutional system, limited by checks and balances. George Washington turned aside an effort to make him king. Thomas Jefferson famously was wracked with guilt for carrying out the Louisiana Purchase without clear Constitutional authorization.
Obama says that we don’t need the sequester because he’s already made $2.5 trillion in budget cuts. It turns out that that figure is based on current law, which includes the sequester. He’s arguing that we don’t need the sequester, because we’ve got the sequester.
In a recent post, I argued that gun-control advocates want you to be at the mercy of aggressors, and you’ll probably never find a better example of their mandatory victimhood than this one:
A Florida high school student wrestled a loaded gun away from another teen on the bus ride home this week and was slapped with a suspension in return. . .
The student said the suspect, a football player, threatened to shoot a teammate because he had been arguing with his friend.
Authorities confirmed to WFTX the weapon was indeed loaded, and the arrest report stated the suspect, identified by WVZN-TV as Quadryle Davis, was “pointing the gun directly” at the other student and “threatening to shoot him.”
That’s when, the teen told the station, he and two others tackled the suspect and wrestled the gun away. The next day, all three were suspended. . . The school’s referral slip said he was given an “emergency suspension” for being involved in an “incident” with a weapon.
The hero of the incident, who was unarmed and did nothing wrong, is being punished for preventing a shooting. Tar and feathers are too good for these jackals.
A brief history of the sequester: (1) Democrats and Republicans were supposed to work together to devise a deficit reduction plan based on spending cuts and no tax increases. (2) If the parties couldn’t agree, the sequester would automatically impose spending cuts. (3) Both parties were supposed to be motivated to avoid the cuts, but Democrats never negotiated in good faith because they planned to renege on the ground rules and demand tax hikes. (4) Once this became clear, Republicans decided that it would be better just to let automatic cuts take place, but proposed legislation that would give the president the power to allocate those cuts to the least damaging places. (5) Senate Democrats killed that legislation, because they want the sequester to be as painful as possible. (6) The Obama administration, now, is making sure the sequester is as painful as possible.
Before the sequester, the White House promoted sequester pain by lying about what would happen. For example:
Starting tomorrow everybody here, all the folks who are cleaning the floors at the Capitol. Now that Congress has left, somebody’s going to be vacuuming and cleaning those floors and throwing out the garbage. They’re going to have less pay. The janitors, the security guards, they just got a pay cut, and they’ve got to figure out how to manage that. That’s real.
That’s President Obama, telling an outright lie. Glenn Kessler obtained two different documents explaining that capitol janitors and guards would not be effected. In Kessler’s assessment, “nothing in Obama’s statement came close to being correct.”
Now that the sequester is under way, the White House plan is to promote pain, using the time-honored “Washington Monument strategy”, in which you cut key functions but preserve the waste. Thus, in one example, the Department of Agriculture is cutting meat inspectors, but preserving a wine-tasting junket.
Will Obama get away with this cynical strategy? I wouldn’t bet against it. It all depends on the honor of the press: will they act as the administration’s lackies, and report only the painful cuts, or will they also report the wasteful spending that the administration did not cut? We’re in trouble.
There is a bizarre, pernicious myth that the left are the defenders of civil liberties. I can’t fathom how they managed to get that reputation, since they always are coming out in opposition to free speech. In Minnesota, Democrats have proposed an “anti-bullying” bill that would prohibit K-12 students from saying anything unkind about another student.
Hugo Chavez is dead. It’s a pity he didn’t go the way of Nicolae Ceausescu, but I suppose this will have to do.
Unfortunately, I’m not optimistic about Venezuela’s future. During the last year, even while denying his ill health, he was planning for his death, and his people are fimly entrenched in Venezuela’s supreme court, electoral council, and other key government institutions. They will be difficult to evict without a revolution.
Rosalynn and I extend our condolences to the family of Hugo Chávez Frías. We met Hugo Chávez when he was campaigning for president in 1998 and The Carter Center was invited to observe elections for the first time in Venezuela. We returned often, for the 2000 elections, and then to facilitate dialogue during the political conflict of 2002-2004. We came to know a man who expressed a vision to bring profound changes to his country to benefit especially those people who had felt neglected and marginalized. Although we have not agreed with all of the methods followed by his government, we have never doubted Hugo Chávez’s commitment to improving the lives of millions of his fellow countrymen.
It’s appalling that this idiot was once president of the United States.
When Michelle Obama, interviewed by Good Morning America, made an important factual error (claiming that a shooting death in Chicago was at the hands of an automatic weapon, which it almost certainly was not), the folks at ABC were good enough just to edit her mistake out.
I wonder if I’ve simply misunderstood what the phrase “news coverage” means? I always thought it meant to cover (i.e., report) what people say and do, but maybe it means to cover for them.
If this story in the Huffington Post is true, Justice Department officials have admitted to Congress that Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for his support for open information:
A Justice Department representative told congressional staffers during a recent briefing on the computer fraud prosecution of Internet activist Aaron Swartz that Swartz’s “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” played a role in the prosecution, sources told The Huffington Post.
Swartz’s 2008 manifesto said sharing information was a “moral imperative” and advocated for “civil disobedience” against copyright laws pushed by corporations “blinded by greed” that led to the “privatization of knowledge.” . . .
The “Manifesto,” Justice Department representatives told congressional staffers, demonstrated Swartz’s malicious intent in downloading documents on a massive scale.
This is the Huffington Post, so the story could well be bogus. But it’s worthy of note because it would confirm my theory of the reason for the Swartz prosection, which is otherwise hard to explain.
Gun-controllists complain that “assault weapons” (i.e., rifles that look scary) have no legitimate self-defense purpose, but that complaint is being undermined by the Department of Homeland Security, which says select-fire weapons can be “suitable for personal defense”.
In a recent solicitation, the DHS is looking to buy “5.56x45mm NATO, select-fire firearm[s] suitable for personal defense”. Basically, this refers to either the M-16 or M-4. In particular, select-fire means that the weapon can be switched from semi-automatic to fully automatic.
So the DHS is saying that fully automatic weapons (in particular the M-16 and M-4) are suitable for personal defense. The AR-15 is the same gun, except it does not support select fire, and is semi-automatic only. So while the controllists claim (falsely) there is no self-defense use for the AR-15, DHS is saying that a strictly more effective weapon is suitable for self-defense.
The University of Michigan is following Vanderbilt’s lead and forcing Christian student organizations off-campus. As at Vanderbilt, the pretext is the organizations’ refusal to allow non-Christians to be leaders of the group.
The end goal of the gun-controllists is to confiscate all firearms. Some Democratic politicians try to deny this, but their denials are undermined by the rhetoric of gun control groups, their own unguarded remarks, historical precedent, and by the actions of politicians (such as in New York, Oregon, Missouri, etc.) who are proposing and indeed enacting gun confiscation bills.
California authorities are empowered to seize weapons owned by convicted felons and people with mental illness, but staff shortages and funding cuts have left a backlog of more than 19,700 people to disarm, a law enforcement official said Tuesday.
Those gun owners have roughly 39,000 firearms, said Stephen Lindley, chief of the Bureau of Firearms for the state Department of Justice.
Leftists who say that we should get past our obsession with the Constitution don’t realize the slender thread on which their tyranny rests. Glenn Reynolds puts it well:
Here’s the problem with public officials . . . deciding to ignore the Constitution: If you’re the president, if you’re a member of Congress, if you are a TSA agent, the only reason why somebody should listen to what you say, instead of horsewhipping you out of town for your impertinence, is because you exercise power via the Constitution. If the Constitution doesn’t count, you don’t have any legitimate power. You’re a thief, a brigand, an officious busybody, somebody who should be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail for trying to exercise power you don’t possess.
Hunters across Louisiana are outraged after state health officials ordered a rescue mission to destroy $8,000 worth of deer meat because venison is not allowed to be served in homeless shelters.
The Dept. of Health and Hospitals ordered the staff at the Shreveport-Bossier Rescue Mission to throw 1,600 pounds of donated venison in garbage bins – and then ordered then to douse the meat with Clorox – so other animals would not eat the meat. . .
The mission’s chef asked if they could at least return the meat to the processing plant – but the state officials said no. “They actually took it out to the dumpsters, split the packages open and poured Clorox on it,” Martin told Fox News.
Remember, government does not operate on autopilot. Some human being thought it would be a good idea to destroy $8000 of venison and leave homeless people hungry. Which brings us back, once again, to this.
This is two years old, but it’s appalling enough to be still worthy of note. The Bank of England is telling people (or, at any rate, told people two years ago), to stop saving money and spend their savings:
Savers should stop complaining about poor returns and start spending to help the economy, a senior Bank of England official warned today.
Older households could afford to suffer because they had benefited from previous property price rises, Charles Bean, the deputy governor, suggested. They should “not expect” to live off interest, he added, admitting that low returns were part of a strategy. . .
He continued: “Savers shouldn’t necessarily expect to be able to live just off their income in times when interest rates are low. It may make sense for them to eat into their capital a bit.”
Now, this is manifestly awful, but it’s even worse than it appears at first appears. Those who do as they are told and blow through their savings are still going to need income to survive. They will have to go on the public dole. So what the British government is doing is taking people who want to provide for themselves, and have saved their whole lives in order to do so, and move those people into dependency on the government.
This isn’t just bad economic administration. It’s immoral.
It’s a good thing that voter fraud never happens, because otherwise I might be worried about the news that unknown fraudsters nearly obtained 2,552 absentee ballots, and they remain at large.
The very same people who want to lecture us about how dangerous guns are haven’t the first clue about how to safely handle firearms. On some level, I suppose that isn’t surprising, but they ought to be required to get some basic firearms instruction before prattling on about banning guns.
This story perfectly illustrates the point, while also providing yet another instance of our vice-president being a blithering idiot. No one should ever take Joe Biden’s advice. If you do, you could go to jail:
I did one of these town-hall meetings on the Internet and one guy said, “Well, what happens when the end days come? What happens when there’s the earthquake? I live in California, and I have to protect myself.”
I said, “Well, you know, my shotgun will do better for you than your AR-15, because you want to keep someone away from your house, just fire the shotgun through the door.”
As any responsible gun owner could tell you, you never pull the trigger without being sure of your target, which is difficult to do when firing through a door.
Not for the first time, taking Joe Biden’s gun advice could get you arrested for reckless discharge of a firearm. In fact, a Virginia man has been arrested for exactly that. We don’t know that he actually got the idea from Biden (although if Biden is to be believed, he gives the advice often), but he did exactly what Biden suggests — fire his shotgun through a door — and, sure enough, was arrested for reckless discharge of a firearm.
A pernicious notion has entered our universities that reflects a deep and very strange misunderstanding of free speech. The notion is that if you don’t approve of what someone is saying, you can stop them from saying it, and that doing so is actually an exercise of free speech.
Thus, if you don’t like a speaker, you can go to the talk and shout him down, and you’re simply exercising your free speech. Or if you don’t like a display, you vandalize it, and that vandalism is an act of free speech.
It should be self-evident that this is wrong. Stopping other people’s expression is not free speech, it’s the opposite of free speech. But people seem profoundly confused by this, and it’s not just our students, but the administrations:
On January 22, 2013, the DePaul chapter of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), having attained the required permits, erected a pro-life display. . . That afternoon, numerous DePaul students vandalized the display. . .
With the investigation completed, DePaul Assistant Dean of Students Domonic Rollins provided Del Campo with a report from the Department of Public Safety, containing the names of 13 DePaul students who had admitted to vandalizing YAF’s display. On February 5, the national YAF organization posted this document on its website. . .
DePaul found Del Campo responsible for the charge of “Disorderly, Violent, Intimidating or Dangerous Behavior,” as well as a charge related to “Judicial Process Compliance.” Del Campo has been placed on disciplinary probation and is prohibited from all contact with the students named in the public safety report. DePaul has also required that Del Campo complete an “Educational Project” in the form of a reflection letter.
As yet, the vandals have apparently not been punished, but the university is punishing the victim for publicly naming them. This is insanity.
I think the slogan Censorship is Peace would go very well with War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength.
The New York Times reports that you can buy access to President Obama for $500k:
President Obama’s political team is fanning out across the country in pursuit of an ambitious goal: raising $50 million to convert his re-election campaign into a powerhouse national advocacy network. . .
Those contributions will also translate into access, according to donors courted by the president’s aides. . . Giving or raising $500,000 or more puts donors on a national advisory board for Mr. Obama’s group and the privilege of attending quarterly meetings with the president, along with other meetings at the White House.
Watch Jay Carney struggle to defend this, and ultimately give up and walk out:
What is hilarious — beyond his repeated efforts to change the subject, and his inability to make eye contact as he does it — is how transparently bogus his defense is. He tries to shuck this aside as the activities of an “independent group”, as if (1) Obama’s own campaign crew could be independent of the president, (2) a truly independent group would have even a prayer of becoming one of the nation’s top pressure groups overnight, or (3) the fact that they are selling access to the president — the very issue he’s being questioned about — doesn’t eviscerate any idea that they could be independent.
The memo, under the name of one of the Justice Department’s leading crime researchers, critiques the effectiveness of gun control proposals, including some of President Barack Obama’s. . .
The memo says requiring background checks for more gun purchases could help, but also could lead to more illicit weapons sales. It says banning assault weapons and high capacity ammunition magazines produced in the future but exempting those already owned by the public, as Obama has proposed, would have limited impact because people now own so many of those items.
It also says that even total elimination of assault weapons would have little overall effect on gun killings because assault weapons account for a limited proportion of those crimes.
The nine-page document says the success of universal background checks would depend in part on “requiring gun registration,” and says gun buybacks would not be effective “unless massive and coupled with a ban.”
The administration calls the memo “an unfinished review of gun violence research”. That’s because it’s never finished until it supports the president’s policy.
That ban on big sodas being pushed by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is about to spoil family pizza night.
The ban on sodas over 16 ounces takes effect on March 12, and the New York Post reports it has some previously uncontemplated effects. For instance, ordering a 2-liter bottle of Coke, Pepsi, Sprite or whatever the family desires with a pizza delivery won’t be allowed. Even pitchers of soda at children’s birthday parties are going to be a no-no under Bloomberg’s far-reaching ban, according to the paper. . .
Customers will have to order smaller bottles, which cost more and increase plastic waste. It doesn’t seem to matter that the big bottles are typically meant to be shared – as are the pitchers of soda served up at kids’ pizza parties. . .
The ban will even take a toll on nightlife in the city that never sleeps. That’s because when clubgoers spring for a big bottle of booze, they expect to get the mixers thrown in. The typical carafe holds 32 ounces of soda, juice or tonic water. Under the ban, only water or pure juice will be allowed in containers measuring more than 16 ounces.
The primary form, prepared by the government, had an error. The price was copied from the invoice, but DHS changed the currency from Canadian to U.S. dollars.
It has language at the bottom with serious sounding statements that the information is true and correct, and a signature block.
I pointed out the error and suggested that we simply change the currency from US $ to CAD $ so that is was correct. Or instead, amend the amount so that it was correct in U.S. dollars.
I thought this was important because I was signing it and swearing that the information, and specifically the price, was correct.
The DHS agent didn’t care about the error and told me to sign the form anyway. “It’s just paperwork, it doesn’t matter,” she said. I declined.
She called another agent and said simply “He won’t sign the form.” I asked to speak to that agent to give them a more complete picture of the situation. She wouldn’t allow that.
Then she seized the boat. As in, demanded that we get off the boat, demanded the keys and took physical control of it.
What struck me the most about the situation is how excited she got about seizing the boat. Like she was just itching for something like this to happen. This was a very happy day for her.
This man will probably get his boat back eventually, but it will cost him thousands in legal fees. However, under the doctrine of official immunity, the DHS agent who was too lazy to fix a form but was delighted to steal a man’s property won’t face any sanction whatsoever. This is our government today. We are being occupied by a hostile power.
Vanderbilt is taking its persecution of Christian student organizations to the next level. Among a variety of other petty oppressions, they are not permitted to include persons from outside Vanderbilt in their activities, even though Vanderbilt is already denying them any recognition, and therefore has no business telling them who they can associate with.
They can employ a staff worker, but that staff worker must submit to a criminal background check conducted by the university. Vanderbilt actually has the audacity to claim that this provision is to protect the students.
Democrats and their allies in the legacy media like to call Republicans the party of big business. This is the exact opposite of the truth. Republicans are the party of free markets, while Democrats are the party of big business. In reality, big business opposes free markets much more often than it supports free markets. It’s small business that really wants markets to be free.
In the latest example, Minnesota Democrats are proposing a big new tax on business-to-business transactions. Such a tax wouldn’t affect big businesses very much, since they can do most of their legal and marketing work in house. However, small businesses, which need to contract all of that out, will be hit hard. This, of course, is just what big businesses want; they don’t want small competitors nipping at their heels and are happy when small businesses are driven out of business. In fact, rent seeking — such as driving out small competitors — has historically been the purpose of most economic regulation.
The now-public FBI file on Aaron Swartz supports my theory about what was behind his persecution at the hands of the US Attorney. The FBI long had their eye on him because of his PACER caper, in which Swartz tried to download public court documents and make them available to the public. (The government quickly shut down the program that Swartz used, defending the important principle that public court documents should not be easily accessible by the public.)
I speculated that the government later threw the book at Swartz, not because of JSTOR (even the nominal victim didn’t want to press charges), but because of PACER. The fact that they were watching Swartz for years because of PACER makes that all the more likely.
Researchers have discovered a stunning new process that takes the energy from coal without burning it — and removes virtually all of the pollution. . .
Fan discovered a way to heat coal, using iron-oxide pellets for an oxygen source and containing the reaction in a small, heated chamber from which pollutants cannot escape. The only waste product is therefore water and coal ash — no greenhouse gases. As an added benefit, the metal from the iron-oxide can be recycled. . .
Fan’s process, called “coal-direct chemical looping,” has been proven in a small scale lab at OSU. The next step is to take it to a larger test facility in Alabama, and Fan believes the technology can be commercialized and used to power an energy plant within five to 10 years, if all goes smoothly. . .
The notion of carbon sequestration, in which CO2 would be pulled out of the air and stored, seems awfully hard. This sounds much more plausible. I hope it can be made cost effective.
POSTSCRIPT: Interestingly, the environmentalists — who ought to be delighted by a way to burn coal and generate only solid waste — seem to be against it. One might get the impression that they aren’t anti-pollution but anti-energy.
Have you noticed that the legacy media are much more willing to believe obviously fake stories when they come from a leftist point of view?
In the latest, the Atlantic was taken in by an obviously faked still from a Fox News broadcast, photoshopped to say “Was the Russian meteor a plot by President Obama to prove that global warming is real?”
That provision in the Washington State gun-control bill calling for warrantless searches of anyone owning an “assault weapon”, the one that Democrats assure us was just an accident (all three times it was proposed), has turned up in Oregon’s gun-control bill as well.
This is not an accident. This is what these people want. If they don’t respect the 2nd Amendment, why would they respect the 4th?
POSTSCRIPT: Also, the bills allows you to possess only one “assault weapon”, even if you give up your 4th Amendment rights. Any more than one are to be confiscated. Remember this when they tell you they’re not looking to confiscate guns. It’s a lie. It’s always a lie. They are just waiting for the opportunity. Don’t ever believe them again.
Lew, being a good lawyer and a loyal presidential adviser, then shifted to denial mode: “Senator, the demand for an enforcement mechanism was not something that the administration was pushing at that moment.”
That statement was not accurate.
(Emphasis mine.)
But this is also interesting:
The final deal reached between Vice President Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in 2011 included an agreement that there would be no tax increases in the sequester in exchange for what the president was insisting on: an agreement that the nation’s debt ceiling would be increased for 18 months, so Obama would not have to go through another such negotiation in 2012, when he was running for reelection.
So when the president asks that a substitute for the sequester include not just spending cuts but also new revenue, he is moving the goal posts. His call for a balanced approach is reasonable [If you say so. -Scofflaw] . . . But that was not the deal he made.
Of course, expecting Obama to honor a promise is foolishness.
Last December, in Moore v. Madigan, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Second Amendment protects the right to carry guns in public. In light of Heller and McDonald, the decision was pretty much a no-brainer. The ruling threw out Illinois’s law banning the bearing of arms in public, but stayed the ruling for 180 days to give Illinois time to craft a new law that comports with the Constitution.
However, the Cook County (Chicago) state attorney’s office has said that Illinois can ignore the ruling. In what can only be called a novel legal theory, they claim that the federal courts are powerless to declare state laws unconstitutional:
“Only the Illinois Supreme Court can declare a statue from (the legislature) unconstitutional,” Castiglione told lawmakers Tuesday.
Astonishing.
POSTSCRIPT: Just a couple of days later, the full 7th Circuit denied Illinois’s appeal. The case now goes to the Supreme Court, if they chose to take it. I think they will, not to overturn it, but to extend it to the entire country.
The NLRB, which has been operating illegally for the last year, announced last month that it will simply ignore the Appeals Court ruling against it, and has been proceeding to carry out its agenda as if nothing had happened. In essence, they decided to cover their ears and yell “I can’t hear you!”
In view of their brazen lawlessness, the Appeals Court has now stepped in once again, ordering the NLRB to respond to a petition challenging their authority to continue operating.
Posted by K. Crary 
Internet Scofflaw 
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