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.
Fun from MSNBC’s early afternoon “news” bloc of programming via Noah Rothman. The logic is ironclad and inexorable: Doug Shulman, appointed IRS commissioner by Bush in March 2008, was so fiercely loyal to his Beltway Republican masters that he decided to risk his career to kneecap conservative insurgents’ nonprofits in 2010 … even though Bush had left office more than a year before and the GOP establishment he represented was widely loathed by pretty much everyone in America. Oh, and even though (again per Rothman) Shulman himself has donated to the DNC in the past.
Later, MSNBC anchors discussed how chemtrails sprayed by the trilateral commission actually created the reptilians, and that’s also all Bush’s fault. They went on to explain how FEMA death camps were actually testing grounds for MK Ultra so their mind control devices could be used on Rick Santelli to create the genesis of the Tea Party, all in order to purge the disloyal GOPers from Karl Rove’s ultimate dream of a galactic empire ruled by EBEs, grays, and the Loch Ness monster (and they put flouride in the water so the Loch Ness monster’s miniaturized spy offspring created by DARPA can survive in public water supplies).
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.
“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:
…He sent back a Feb. 20 email from Victor Bonett in the attorney general’s office that said, “OAG is withholding the Jan. 9, 2013 letter from Lee Levine and certain responsive emails between OAG and MPD, pursuant to D.C. Official Code Section 2-534(a)(3)(A)(i), (a)(4) and (e).”
Mr. Levine’s letter provided new information, such as that the source of the “high-capacity” magazine. “Meet the Press briefly borrowed the empty magazine from a private citizen who lives outside of the District of Columbia and who ‘Meet the Press’ understood possessed the magazine lawfully,” he wrote.
The NBC lawyer also claimed, “The magazine was immediately returned to its owner following the broadcast.”
However, according to a police “property record” document, a Kay Industries 30-round magazine was recovered from Mr. Gregory (at a redacted address) as part of an active investigation. The document is signed on Jan. 9, two days after Mr. Levine said the magazine had been returned to its owner.
So the mag they claim they borrowed was returned and yet a mag was still seized. So no matter what NBC’s story, if the DC police seized a mag, that’s all it takes to violate the law. Mere possession, and that’s it.
Good to see folks with resources, regional proximity, and ability are pursing this.
No matter how it turns out, it’s a splendid case to use for anyone who’s arrested or charged from now on to illustrate a failure of equal application of the law.
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?
William Bond, chairman emeritus of NAACP, asked about the NAACP being investigated vs the Tea Party being harassed by the IRS:
No I don’t think there’s a double standard at all. I think it’s entirely legitimate to look at the Tea Party. I mean here are a group of people who are admittedly racist, who are overtly political, who tried as best they can to harm President Obama in every way they can. I don’t think there are correct parallels between these two incidents.
They are the Taliban wing of American politics and we all ought to be a little worried about them.
Allahpundit referred to Bond’s expressed feelings as the “political id”. Rather apt. Stable Hand called him an assmaggot. Also apt.
But there’s something both more and less to this guy.
He’s a hard-core leftist, a harsh, power-hungry race hustler whose power would evacuate if there were no more crises to exploit. He’s one of those who has to create boogeymen in order to justify his own crusade.
“One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other.”
- Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals
If there’s no villainous oppressor for him to go after, he’ll just have to make one. And Mia Love and Sonja Schmidt and Katrina Pierson apparently are the “American Taliban”.
And if Bond becomes the villainous oppressor? If his ideology leads to what the destructive, suppressive acts of the IRS? Well, that’s impossible to him, since any actions he takes are fine because he’s doing it for the “greater good”.
To him, there can be no double standard – all actions by him and those leftists like him are justified because the Tea Party is the embodiment of evil in his warped worldview.
He just happens to be outwardly expressing it in the clip. The IRS was acting on his worldview. Of course he agrees with it.
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As one more wacky juxtaposition, he calls the Tea Party “admittedly racist” (see the three women listed above as Tea Party representatives), and would doubtless put them in the category of “islamaphobic”… yet he compares the Tea Party to the Taliban. Because small government, reduced-taxation types who actually are all-inclusive are just the same as those who want a violent all-powerful Islamic theocracy.
From “moderately libertarian” Megan McArdle at the otherwise lefty Daily Beast:
the IRS method for dealing with the volume was to take an unrandom sample. And how did they decide that you deserved extra scrutiny? Because you had “tea party” or “patriot” in your name. Since the Tea Party was a brand-new movement in 2010, they couldn’t possibly have had any data indicating that such groups were more likely to be doing something improper. So how exactly did they come up with this filter?
Yet she comes up with the answer:
There is no answer that does not ultimately resolve to “political bias.”
The current commissioner knew for a full year that the agency was targeting Tea Party groups and other opposition organization for aggressive auditing? And in the middle of an election year, no less? And yet, today Barack Obama insists that he knew nothing of this practice until last Friday.
This is either the most incompetent administration ever, or one of the least honest.
Ed, remember this is the same administration that sent guns to Mexican narcoterrorist cartels, murdering hundreds of Mexicans and two US federal agents, and then exerted executive privilege to hush it all up. I’d hate to see a poll between Putin and Obama on who people would trust more.
“Having been in the position of a chief executive officer, I can understand why a businessman might be reluctant to speak out against the actions of federal agencies that have the power to harm their enterprises,” he wrote in Rumsfeld’s Rules, which goes on sale Tuesday.
“By doing so, corporate leaders could expose themselves and their companies to government retaliation–from the IRS, the SEC, congressional committees, or the many other agencies of the federal government that regulate and oversee their operations,” he added.
The thing to remember is the enemy was elected. A street-level Chicago agitator is who we have as president, someone who was raised by communists in the Alinsky and Ayers mold, someone who views political power as the only end, and someone whose administration and subordinates are of like mindset.
The only question I’d like answered is why did the IRS come out and apologize last Friday?
Who was going to break this story if the IRS didn’t apologize?
If the NRA really cared about gun rights…they wouldn’t support policies that take away the ability of thousands of people every year to keep and bear arms because they’re f***ing dead. By this simple fact the NRA reveals itself not to have any concern for gun rights or gun owners, but merely to be an advocate for the gun business – a quasi-criminal syndicate of shady industrial corporations for whom the deaths of their customers and innocent bystanders are actually more profitable than keeping them alive.
It gets stupider, but it’s all basically Tim Robbins’ speech from Team America:
As long as the death rate is low enough for people in general to still leave their houses to visit a gun store, murder is all profit for them: It perpetually sows the seeds of fear, insecurity, paranoia, alienation, and rage that bring more people to patronize their business.
Yeah, it’s pretty stupid. In fact, it’s unintentional parody of the left. And here we get to the best part:
The NRA and its fellow-traveler gun anarchy organizations have nothing whatsoever to do with Constitutional rights: They are a priesthood of murder fanatically committed to the promotion of human destruction and suffering, because at their core are businesses that depend on it, and that could not financially survive on the idle interests of hobbyists in a safe and secure America.
That a Daily Kos diarrheaist doesn’t understand natural rights isn’t a surprise. That he (or she, or shim/he-er or whatever) thinks that their rambling “businesses=evil” rant accurately reflects reality is both funny and sad. Funny because it’s ludicrous, sad because it displays such a narrow breadth of mind that’s completely devoid of any receptiveness to data that would disprove or at the very least give pause to such wild-eyed manic hatred and belief in the pure evil of the NRA and people who believe in the natural rights of self defense and the tools that enable those rights. (Troubadour bolded that “Priesthood of Murder”, not me, btw.)
And this brings us to my real point here. Criticizing Troubadour’s rant is sort of like criticizing a North Korean propagandist. They’re either so woefully misguided that you have to pity them, or they’re so absurdly convinced of their own ludicrous crackpot nonsense that all you can do is laugh at them. Besides, Cam already criticized it.
But in this case, Troubadour has unconciously made one of the most badass and fun critiques of the NRA, and totally for the wrong reasons. Troubadour devolves into unwitting self-parody, but a self-parody that’s made utterly sidesplittingly hilarious to me because…
PRIESTHOOD OF MURDER IS SO INCREDIBLY METAL.
The entire diarrheaist diatribe is so over the top that every new phrase is worthy of an album title (or even a band name).
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So let’s explore the fictional history of the most metal of all civil rights organizations, the NRA. \m/ d(-_-)b \m/
Priesthood of Murder is obviously the most metal, and the NRA’s signature album. It was both a critical and commercial success, and marked the turningpoint for the NRA from just another metal band into the devastating metal powerhouse that they ultimately have become.
But the NRA’s badass discography doesn’t just begin there. It starts way back with their low-budget garage releases when they first got going:
Those early days were marked with a distinct sound that the metal world hadn’t yet warmed to. But the band stayed dedicated, despite some lineup changes as members settled into their roles and some dealt with the difficulties of a harsh tour schedule.
At least one of their later studio albums would recapture those intial sounds, going back to some of their older work that had matured out on the road, forging an album that showed the same spirit, but greater skill:
The DK criticism gets even more metal as it goes:
For decades this vile exercise in the banality of evil has driven murderous civil wars and genocides throughout the world without any sort of consequences blowing back on them, and now they have brought their agenda home.
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NRA, as happens to many bands, found themselves in a rough patch for a year after their harsh touring schedule. After a short break, the band members realized that the regular world they’d returned to off the tour bus wasn’t for them. The returned to the studio with a renewed look at the world after their resting period, and cranked out another of their early albums, now widely regarded as a technical advance for the band as their skills developed:
And their next release was after a very successful European tour, which garnered the band not only attention from an international audience, but spiked interest in the band back in the United States. It included a 2-disc set, the first being the album, and the second being a collection of European-only singles that were previously unreleased in the US.
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This is about as metal as it gets:
Now the American people are the grist for their mill, grinding human bodies of all ages to make their bread, and cavalierly dictating terms to the US government in the face of overwhelming outcry from 90% of the citizenry demanding greater regulation and accountability.
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It was then that NRA kicked out one of their most popular albums, considered by purists to be the truest-to-form NRA, and widely considered the last of their “early” albums.
That period of early albums was later revisited when they released a collection of studio jams and songs from out-of-print records:
Coming out only 9 months after “Overwhelming Outcry”, the NRA fiercely charged up the charts with their next album:
It just keeps getting better (or worse, if the clown wanted to be taken seriously):
No one is free while the manufacturers of arms can overrule and hijack the Constitution without the consent of the people whose lives they harvest like demons in business suits. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness cannot be protected in a state of deliberately cultivated violence.
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While “No One Is Free” proved to be a turning point in the early years with the band’s new guitarist…
…it was widely considered to be eclipsed by the return of their old guitarist from “Fanatically Committed” – but unlike some bands, NRA welcomed the older and kept the newer, though the next album’s title would be an inside joke about the guitar lineup changes:
After another tour, they released a solid live album, with tracks from various tours – both early and late, that was well-received by fans:
But little could prepare the metal world for the NRA’s most recent release, an aggressively badass studio album hailed by metalheads as staying true to form that had just revisited in “Sowing the Seeds of Violence” – and taking new steps from that album, yet again refining their sound:
There’s also been much talk of some alternate projects, including a punk album called “Anarchy Organizations”, and a collaborative effort called “Smirking at Irony”, neither of which have been discussed much by the band in interviews. Rumors have circulated for years about a country-horror themed album called “Cold Dead Hands”, but right now the band’s focus is on their current tour.
Whatever the future may be for NRA, their impressive discography of heavy metal has dominated the charts for years, and shows no signs of stopping. Rock on.
ShortTimer
JBH
