A Quick Obama Flashback from April 2013

From the Right Scoop, last month – Obama speaking in Colorado to push for citizen disarmament and greater state power (video at the link):

The opponents of some of these common sense laws have ginned up fears among responsible gun owners that have nothing to do with what’s being proposed, nothing to do with the facts, but feeds into this suspicion about government. You hear some of these quotes:

“I need a gun to protect myself from the government.”
“We can’t do background checks because the government’s going to come take my guns away.”

The government’s us. These officials are elected by you. They are elected by you, I am elected by you. I am constrained as they are constrained by a system that our founders put in place. This is a government of and by and for the people.

Quickly, common sense dictates that criminals and madmen never follow laws, so the laws only impact good people who should never be disarmed.

From there, remember, this is the same guy who was responsible for targeting his political opponents through the IRS.  He’s the same guy who tapped the Associated Press’s phones and targeted journalists reporting things that made him look bad.

Obama’s not constrained at all by the Constitution.  He’s actively ignoring the Constitution.

Those officials are not elected, they are appointed, and those officials are engaged in political campaigns to build the empires of their political masters – targeting enemies so their patrons will succeed.  The police chiefs he goes to for gun control are appointed, the mayors who support him win elections through their appointed goons who engage in the Curley Effect to create political empires through handing out taxpayer money to pay voters.  The IRS stooges he has targeting political enemies are appointed as well – and all believe they are the Ruling Class, above accountability, and above you.

Obama’s lying.  This is a government that operates on its own, with no regards for the citizen; a government that targets citizens, and has tax collectors like eyerolling IRS twerp Shulman targeting unpopular groups and then smirking about it.

(There’s a lot of important nonverbal communication going on with Shulman.  If you haven’t seen it, it’s very relevant.)

Obama shipped guns to the narcoterrorist cartels, he let an ambassador die in Benghazi and then lied about it (and it’s suspected worse was going on than that), and he’s currently engaged in a war on journalists.  And yet he tells you that it’s all “rhetoric” that makes it difficult for everyone to compromise and surrender to his good ideas…

We’ve got to get passed some of the rhetoric that gets perpetuated that breaks down trust and is so over the top that it just shuts down all discussion.

No, Barry, you’re a wannabe tyrant.  And Americans don’t negotiate with tyrants.  There is no “discussion” with tyrants.  There is no “just a little bit” of oppression.  There is no talk and talk and talk and “compromise” with tyranny.

His actions are targeting citizens who disagree, and targeting journalists who might accidentally report the facts or say something he doesn’t like… his words are diplomatic – and telling you everything you see and hear is wrong, and he’s just so reasonable and means well for you and it’s good if you let him do good things for you.  But remember the definition of diplomacy: the art of saying “nice doggy” until you can find a rock.

The IRS: Targeting Americans For Their Political Beliefs

Video from House Oversight and Reform Committee, (via Jawa Report):

And the big exchange with Rep. Trey Gowdy and IRS Official Lois Lerner and her refusal to testify… after she testified with her own statement:

HotAir has a whole lot of conjecture and speculation on where Lerner’s decisions will lead.

True the Vote Targeted By FedGov

Much from HotAir.

I caught the Huckabee segment when it aired, which they linked to as well.  Pretty interesting & informative:

IRS Union Part of Obama’s Use of IRS Authority To Attack Political Enemies

Just connecting some dots.

From Weekly Standard, the IRS commissioner doesn’t think it’s illegal to use the force of government to target those political enemies:

http://youtu.be/7b6U6TJzPWw

Via the Jawa Report, the interesting part is that the IRS is unionized, and heavily supports Democrats:

You best not be a ‘shadowy conservative group’ cuz they really don’t like you if you are.

Where do the anti-sequester, federal government workers-turned-protestors work? They work at the Internal Revenue Service–and they are unionized.

And here’s the really interesting part, via Breitbart:

Obama Met With IRS Union Boss Day Before Tea Party Targeting Began

The White House Visitors Log reveals that President Barack Obama met with Internal Revenue Service (IRS) union boss Colleen Kelley on March 31, 2010—the day before the Inspector General’s report says the IRS began its scheme to target tea party and conservative groups.

Furthermore, Obama appointed Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), to the Federal Salary Council whose job is to recommend pay raises for IRS and other federal employees one week after Obama and Democrats suffered historic midterm losses in 2010.  Two years later, Kelley’s 150,000-member union had raised $580,412, 94% of which went to Democratic federal candidates. The group also strongly backed Obama’s reelection.

Mitt Romney on Leno, Discusses Benghazi, IRS & AP

Pretty good interview posted over at Real Clear Politics.

It’s interesting to watch, not just for the discussion, but to hear the crowd’s reaction.

Lefty Laments: “When Governments Go Bad”

Via HotAir, David Brooks at NYT wants so much more government involved in your life, but it’s so sad that sometimes so much more good government that will tell you how to live doesn’t turn out perfect like it should.  Aww.. poor statist tyrant:

Most government workers are amazingly dedicated and talented, and they put in a level of commitment that is far out of proportion to their salaries.

But we’re also seeing government workers, who, far from checking their own desire for control, have taken it out for a romp.

Brooks is an idiot.  At the bottom of the page, it notes that he’s filling in for Paul Krugman, who’s also an idiot, so he must be competing with Paul Krugman for some inter-office idiocy award.

Auditing low-level agents at the IRS do not “take their desire for control out for a romp”.  Doesn’t work that way.  They may agree with the IRS conservative crackdown plans and go along with them, but the guy doing the paperwork does not come up with schemes and machinations.  The mid-level manager gal doing the office paperwork to make sure the guy doing the lower paperwork doesn’t come up with these schemes.  She may go along with them, but they have to be passed down to her from someone with the authority to be able to waive all the concerns about repercussions for IRS personnel doing something wrong and getting fired.  Normal people do not get together to “take their desire for control out for a romp” at the low level, as though there’s some spontaneously generated lust for power in people who double-check math all day.

It’s hard to tell now if the I.R.S. scandal is political thuggery or obliviousness. It would be one thing if the scandal is just a group of tax people targeting the most antitax groups in the country. That’s just normal, run-of-the-mill partisan antipathy.

Sure, it’s okay if they target people who try to restore the nation to founding priciples.  That’s okay.  It’s fine if you’re tax collectors who target people who want the tax burden reduced through legal means and legislation.  Of course that’s fine.  No problem with that kind of targeted oppression by government whatsoever.

It’s just as okay as if the government targeted any other group that the government didn’t like.  Because after all, the citizen exists solely for the government to deem either worthy or unworthy.

It would be far worse if the senior workers of the I.R.S. have become so isolated by their technocratic task that they didn’t even recognize that using the search term “Tea Party” was going to be a moral and political problem.

Gee, it’s too bad they didn’t come up with a more clever way to target those sniveling teabaggers.  If only they had been smart enough not to outright say they were targeting the Tea Party.  Then they could’ve gotten away with it.

Everyone is treating the I.R.S. issue as a bigger deal, but the Justice Department scandal is worse. This was a sweeping intrusion that makes it hard for the press to do its job. Who is going to call a journalist to report wrongdoing knowing that at some future date, the government might feel perfectly free to track the phone records and hunt you down?

I would have thought a dozen Justice Department officials would have risen up and splashily resigned when they learned of the scope of this invasion. Aren’t there some lawyers in the Justice Department, and, if so, did they go to law schools where the Constitution is left unassigned?

The DOJ smuggled guns to narcoterrorist cartels and hushed it up and you and your reporter friends helped hush it up.  Brooks, when the DOJ decides to make you sign your own confession Soviet-style, you will have earned your statist utopia and all the hard labor it will sentence you to until the end of your days.  Maybe after a few decades in the ground, they’ll even take the time to posthumously rehabilitate you.

We clearly have a values problem in the federal government. We clearly have a few or many agencies where the leaders don’t emphasize that workers need to check themselves, or risk losing what remains of the people’s trust.

There is no “values problem” in the fedgov.  There is a fedgov that is unconstrained by the document that created it.  Men are the same, that’s why we have a Constitution.

We have a Constitution, and that creates our government.  The Constitution is what creates the government and limits it – it is the laws by which the government is created and those it must abide by.  When government ignores the Constitution, as it has been doing, it should have no trust – because it is an entity of domination composed of men with power – whether malignant or benign.   When it ceases to be an entity that exists at the behest of the citizen, it becomes oppressive.  A massive, distant power composed of men with power and no constraints are never deserving of any trust.

I generally support the little behavioral nudges that Cass Sunstein describes in his outstanding book “Simpler” — the subtle policy shifts that induce people to save more, or eat healthier.

Ah, David Brooks, lickspittle for tyrants.

I’d trust somebody with a minimalist disposition like Sunstein to implement these policies.

That’s so precious that you want to be dominated, David.  You’re so vanilla.

But I wouldn’t necessarily trust the people at the I.R.S. or Justice Department to implement them.

Guess who you’re going to get?  Guess who’s going to be running your health care?  Guess who’s been hushing up the murders of your Mexican neighbors to the south?

Cass Sunstein is a tyrant wannabe, along with all of his authoritarian ilk.  Revisit his rave review of “Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism”.  They want to coerce you – to force you – into something they think is good for you.  Brooks wants to be coerced – to be forced – into something someone else thinks is good for him – and he wants you forced as well.  Everybody knows what’s best for you, and they’re going to force it on you, because they’ve decided you need to be forced into what they think you should be.  Brooks wants to be dominated and be controlled by government.

Brooks wants a bad government to dominate him, he just wants one that doesn’t spank too hard.

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But I’ll end this with a quote from a tax collector and freedom fighter:

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.

Watergate and Obama

From the UK Telegraph:

…Four decades after Watergate and two decades after his death, we still can’t stop talking about the dark anti-hero of American politics. …

The latest non-Watergate to be labelled its second coming is actually a combination of three separate scandals afflicting the Barack Obama administration.

The collective weight of this scandalabra threatens to derail the president’s ambitious legislative agenda, dragging him to premature lame duck status. But it doesn’t represent outright criminality emanating from the Oval Office or promise to provoke a constitutional crisis, however fervently Obama’s critics might wish it.

In fact the ritualistic invocation has the opposite to the desired effect, making the scandals look smaller than they are by comparison with Nixon’s. So, partisan projections aside, how do these scandals really stack up?

The Telegraph author criticizes the comparison of Watergate, then goes on to note how “the IRS scandal is the most serious”, but frankly, he’s got it backwards.

Fast and Furious, which was hushed up by a complicit media, was the most serious.  Then Benghazi, which is starting to get attention.  Hundreds have died from Fast and Furious.  Four have died from Benghazi.

The IRS scandal and the AP snooping scandal are chilling effects of tyranny, but they aren’t the administration covering up murders, or covering up leaving an ambassador and his staff to die.

Finally, there is the continuing inquiry into the killing of four Americans in Benghazi. After damning congressional testimony from former deputy chief Libya diplomat Greg Hicks, the White House belatedly released a barrage of emails – which showed that the editing of the now-infamous “talking points” used by officials in television interviews was largely the product of a bureaucratic turf war between the CIA and the State Department.

Yeah, except that doesn’t cut it.  The talking points are a question of who’s covering up what and why.  The “bureaucratic turf war between CIA and State Department” is a whitewash by the media.

Who ordered the stand-downs?  Why wasn’t there an F18 doing a low altitude flyby over Benghazi at supersonic speeds  and terrifying the terrorists by showing American air power was there?

This media look at the Obama scandals is entirely backwards, but it is right to recognize that Watergate and Obama’s four scandals are different.

Nixon had CREEP and the Plumbers out playing political tricks and breaking into hotels.

Obama shipped guns to narcoterrorist cartels that have killed hundreds (including two USBP Agent Brian Terry and ICE Agent Jaime Zapata), left a US ambassador and his staff to die and then lied about it and played politics with the coverup, then he went after political opponents with the IRS and went after media with the DOJ.

Nixon’s Watergate was some shady political tricks.  Obama’s scandals are murder.

Piers Morgan Finds Reality Conflicting

Via HotAir:

“Vaguely tyrannical.”

They say a conservative is just a liberal who’s been mugged.

Morgan isn’t mugged, but he’s been given a wonderful opportunity to see what tyrannical regimes do.  He wouldn’t care at all were it someone else, but when the AP and his fellow lefty media hacks are targeted because the party wants to make sure they’re towing the party line and not talking to whistleblowers, he’s taking a tiny bit of notice.

That’s a good thing, but it probably won’t stick with him.  He’s still a cretin who falsified stories about Tommy Atkins and was kicked out of the UK for it, but he’s showing that when confronted with the actual tyrannical force of government, at least he understands enough to be interested in his own skin.

Obamacare in Three Words

On Twitter.  Via Legal Insurrection:

And just so there’s also a high road response:

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“Tax to live” works as well.  Frankly, it’s the kind of smugness to be expected from this White House that smuggles guns to narcoterrorist cartels to undermine the Second Amendment, leaves our ambassadors to die and blames it on the First Amendment, targets citizens with different opinions with the IRS, and targets reporters who aren’t quite being the perfect Obama-propagandists with wiretaps.  Hence why the low road response comes first.  They’ve earned it.

There were several really good tweets by a host of folks who find this insulting and demeaning, if not tyrannical:

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And the best for last:

Democrat Senators Signed Letter Asking IRS To Crack Down On Conservative Groups

The letter here:

http://www.independentsector.org/uploads/Policy_PDFs/LettertoIRS501c4s_021612.pdf

Dated Feb 16, 2012.

Looks interesting.

Update: Took down the question mark at the end of the title.  We can pretty well see this for what it is in light of the IRS data from the last few days.

Like the saying goes: “once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, and three times is enemy action”.

Update 2: From nonprofit group Independent Sector, their context for the letter:

• Democratic Senators letters to the IRS
  • On March 12, 2012 a group of seven Democratic senators sent a letter to the IRS calling on the agency to adopt a bright line test to define a purpose “primarily” related to social welfare activities, as well as require 501(c)(4) organizations to document social welfare activity on Form 990s. The letter was a follow up to their February 16 letter to the IRS, which urged the agency to investigate abuse of the tax code by 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations.

That first part is this letter.

These two parts are the lead-up events to it, as Republicans asked about selective enforcement, and Democrats complained about the Citizens United decision in order to target conservative groups – which we’ve had verified over and over for the last few days.

• Senate Democrats convene task force to craft response to impact of Citizens United
  • A group of seven Democratic senators, led by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), announced on March 13, 2012 that they are convening a taskforce to craft a new legislative response to what they see as the harmful impact of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. The taskforce said it intends to pursue all available legislative and administrative means to disclose to the public who is influencing American elections.

• Senate Republican letter to the IRS
  • On March 14, 2012 a group of Senate Republicans sent a letter to the IRS questioning recent allegations of selective enforcement on tax-exempt organizations and requested a detailed analysis of the agency’s process for the approval and renewal of a tax-exempt designation under tax code Section 501(c)(4). The group is led by Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT), ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee and Senator Rob Portman (R-OH).

Smoke, fire, all that.

Wonder if any of these fine senators were leaning on the IRS?

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Boehner’s now wondering who should go to jail.  He’s got a whole new group of people to look at.