ANNALS OF OFFICIAL SEXISM: Rep. Schakowsky: ‘Our Survival as a Species is Dependent on Women Taking Charge.’
Archive for 2013
May 14, 2013
AT AMAZON, it’s the Memorial Day Sale.
LYING TO CONGRESS? Top IRS official didn’t reveal tea party targeting. “Congress was not told tea party groups were being inappropriately targeted by the Internal Revenue Service, even after acting agency Chief Steven 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.”
UPDATE: A TaxProf roundup: IRS Scandal, Day 5.
And note that some people saw this coming. “We had lots of discussions about fundraising, forming a 501(c)(4) and in the end we decided not to do it specifically because of the threat of an audit.”
David Kirkham emails: “The article says it didn’t hinder us. That isn’t correct. Of course it hindered us–we couldn’t fund raise. We just worked around it the best we could.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Jane Woodson writes: “I know you are hearing a lot of this, but the Sturbridge Tea Party also made the conscious decision to not apply for a 501(c)(4) designation out of fear of the IRS. The impact changed our vision of a grand movement to a very small one.”
BUSTED: WaPo Fact Checker Gives Obama’s Claim That He Called Benghazi “An Act of Terrorism” Four Pinocchios. “The president’s claim that he said ‘act of terrorism’ is taking revisionist history too far, given that he repeatedly refused to commit to that phrase when asked directly by reporters in the weeks after the attack. He appears to have gone out of his way to avoid saying it was a terrorist attack, so he has little standing to make that claim now.”
Candy Crowley was unavailable for comment.
UPDATE: Coverup: State Dept. Kept Media From Speaking To Benghazi Attack Survivors.
ANOTHER UPDATE: McClatchy: In talking points controversy, an unanswered question: Why did CIA say a protest preceded Benghazi attack?
Related: Memo Reading for Idiots: Missing Video Hidden in Third Edit. “The memos have to be read — not as accurate reflections of a policy debate, but as posturing for instant history. It’s what the author(s) want(s) the journalists — working on deadline, and not very eager to dig deeply enough to figure out what was really going on — to write for their readers.”
APPARENTLY, THEY HAD A SPECIAL UNIT FOR THE JEWS, TOO: Politico: Israel-related groups also pointed to IRS scrutiny. “The same Internal Revenue Service office that singled out Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny also challenged Israel-related organizations, at least one of which filed suit over the agency’s handling of its application for tax-exempt status. The trouble for the Israel-focused groups seems to have had different origins than that experienced by conservative groups, but at times the effort seems to have been equally ham-handed. . . . Legal filings show that the problems for Z Street — and apparently for other Israel-related groups — stemmed from an obscure unit in the Cincinnati IRS office: the ‘Touch and Go Group.'”
You can’t make this stuff up. Sadly, you don’t have to. But remember, pay no attention to those voices warning of tyranny.
WHEN MR. WEINER POPS UP.
SMART DIPLOMACY: Russian FSB detains US diplomat accused of spying.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST: Top CBS, ABC, CNN execs all have relatives working as advisors for White House.
MORE COMPLAINTS: Journalism groups, lawmakers voice ire at AP phone records seizure.
STACY MCCAIN ON The Fate of Basseley Nakoula.
“Hillary’s promise of vengeance to the father of a fallen SEAL wasn’t that we’d get the jihadis who killed him but that we’d punish the filmmaker. That’s perverse, but in keeping with the fact that she decided to run ads on Pakistani TV apologizing for the film while Islamist cretins menaced American diplomats across the region.”
– Allahpundit, Oct. 25, 2012The wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time: Nakoula was out on “supervised release” for a federal bank fraud conviction. He was $700,000 behind on restitution payments and operating under an alias when he made “The Innocence of Muslims,” a crappy movie that got turned into a YouTube video clip that in turn became the pretext of riots in Egypt and then — it is now generally acknowledged — was utilized as a flimsy excuse by the State Department in an attempt to distract from its embarrassing failures in the September attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
Having become unintentionally famous, the con man Nakoula was arrested and hustled into federal court amid unusually high security two weeks after the Benghazi attacks. We need not wonder why Eric Holder’s Justice Department made this a top priority:
“We will make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.”
– Hillary Clinton, Sept. 14, 2012 . . . .But this isn’t really about Nakoula at all, is it?
What the case of Nakoula actually demonstrates is the strangely misplaced priorities of the Obama administration: Eight months later, they still haven’t caught any of the terrorists who killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi, but they needed only two weeks to apprehend Nakoula.
Indeed. Nakoula wasn’t a hero, but he was a scapegoat. We’re still waiting to see just exactly what sins of others were loaded onto his shoulders — and who, precisely, those others were.
FORGET BITCOINS. Introducing Amazon Coins.
BRYAN PRESTON: A Few of the Crazy Things the IRS Asked Conservative Groups to Divulge Add Up to a Pattern and Purpose. “It’s pretty clear that gathering the information through the IRS was not the end game, it was a stop on the way to an end: Public exposure, humiliation and attack against the individuals that the IRS had scooped up on these forms — donors, staff, members, and their families. Secondarily, anyone thinking about donating to or working with any of the targeted groups would have to think twice about the consequences that might follow their exercise of their free speech rights. . . . It’s clear from the questions above that while the IRS may not have had an enemies list when its intrusive questioning regime began in 2010, it was building one, and a very large and sophisticate one at that.”
Well, unsealing private records is an Obama signature move.
And hey, lookie here: IRS Office That Targeted Tea Party Also Disclosed Confidential Docs From Conservative Groups.
ACCOUNTABILITY: New bill would boost penalties on IRS lawbreakers. “In the wake of an admission by an IRS official that conservative groups had been targeted for additional scrutiny, Rep. Michael Turner will introduce legislation Monday that would increase the penalty for singling out ideological organizations —including the possibility of jail time. . . . Turner’s bill would expressly prohibit an IRS employee from discriminating against a group or individual based on protected statuses. It also expressly states that political speech and expression are protected statuses and protect all political speech from being targeted by the IRS — not just that of conservative groups. IRS employees are already prohibited from discriminating in the course of the work, but the highest level of punishment is termination. Under Turner’s law, the penalty would be increased to a fine up to $5,000, five years in prison or both.”
Civil damages and a waiver of official immunity would be nice. But the real solution to abuses of IRS power isn’t to increase penalties, but to give the IRS less power by going to a flat tax or a national sales tax.
MEANWHILE, IN THE WORLD OF PRIVATE-SECTOR SCANDALS: More Clients Ask Questions of Bloomberg.
May 13, 2013
THE BOSTON HERALD GOES ALL IN ON THE OBAMA SCANDALS:
Hilary Chabot: Critics draw comparisons to Watergate.
President Obama’s angry dismissal of the growing outcry over the handling of last year’s Benghazi terrorist attack that left a U.S. ambassador dead shows all the signs of a White House in “damage control” mode, critics say.
“They are in damage control, and this story is now gaining traction because people are now talking about it even more,” said Richard Benedetto, an American University political science professor and former White House correspondent for USA Today. “This story to me has all the makings of a Watergate kind of story. What did they know and when did they know it, and what did people in the White House do to cover it up?”
Joe Battenfeld: Obama knee-deep in Nixon-esque scandal. “Who would have guessed that just a few months into his second term, President Obama would be compared to Tricky Dick. And by a liberal Massachusetts Democrat — U.S. Rep. Michael Capuano.”
Plus: Bay State Dems vow: ‘Hell to pay’ if IRS allegations ring true.
Outraged Bay State Democrats are blasting President Obama for exhibiting a Nixonian abuse of power after the stunning news that the Department of Justice secretly obtained Associated Press phone records and the IRS targeted conservative groups — new scandals emerging against the backdrop of heightened Benghazi criticism.
“There’s no way in the world I’m going to defend that. Hell, I spent my youth vilifying the Nixon administration for doing the same thing. If they did that, there should be hell to pay,” U.S. Rep. Michael E. Capuano (D-Somerville) said about the IRS scandal. “Not only is it bad government and bad to society, it is horrendous politics. The worst thing you can do is give your opponent an easy hammer with which to hit you.”
“It doesn’t seem to be a couple rogue employees. This appeared to be a systemic issue,” said U.S. Rep. Stephen F. Lynch (D-South Boston), who wants to investigate the matter as a member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The committee already has scheduled a hearing on the issue for this week, Lynch said, adding, “No American should find themselves the target of the IRS or any other federal organization because of their political beliefs.”
Both U.S. Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Malden) and the GOP’s Gabriel Gomez, rivals in the Senate special election, slammed the administration’s actions, as new reports emerged yesterday that the Department of Justice seized two months’ worth of phone records from Associated Press reporters and editors.
Read ’em all. If this is how it’s playing with Massachusetts Democrats . . . .
UPDATE: At BuzzFeed a creepy morphing Obama/Nixon .gif.
“Obama is personally obsessed with leaks, to the extent that his second chief of staff, Bill Daley, took as one of his central mandates a major and ill-fated plumbing expedition. Attorney General Eric Holder, who pressed the leak policy, is a trusted Obama insider.” Sounds familiar.
MORE: Donald Sensing: Barack Milhous Obamixon. “Nixon was a beginner compared to Obama, which we already knew back in 2009.”
MESSAGING: Pope Bestows Sainthood on Italians Massacred by Ottomans. “Pope Francis has proclaimed his first Roman Catholic saints, including hundreds of Italians who were beheaded for refusing to convert to Islam in the 15th century.”
NOT JUST A LOCAL FIELD OFFICE: WaPo: IRS officials in Washington were involved in investigation of conservative groups. “Internal Revenue Service officials in Washington and at least two other offices were involved in the targeting of 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.”
Related: Inspector General: Targeting Of Conservatives Began In 2010.
THE SORRY SIDE OF DATING IN D.C. Now, see, I never followed this passive-aggressive strategy. Maybe that’s why so many women said yes. And I just thought it was my irresistible charm!