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.
Much from HotAir.
I caught the Huckabee segment when it aired, which they linked to as well. Pretty interesting & informative:
Via Hotair:
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).
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.
-
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.
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:
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.
Smoke, fire, all that.
Wonder if any of these fine senators were leaning on the IRS?
–
Boehner’s now wondering who should go to jail. He’s got a whole new group of people to look at.
I’ve got a lot of stories saved up to blog about, but like a lot of folks, have things to do besides blog. As such, I’ve got a large number of those news stories that are still worthy of comment, but not timely enough any more for full posts. So here goes with a few of those:
NY Post: Occupy Wall Street Mob Steals Sacred Chalice From Church
There’s no longer room at the inn at a Manhattan church that’s sheltering Occupy Wall Streeters after a holy vessel disappeared from the altar last week.
When the Rev. Bob Brashear prepared for Sunday services at West Park Presbyterian Church on West 86th Street, he noticed parts of the bronze baptismal font were gone.
In a fire-and-brimstone message to occupiers later that day, he thundered, “It was like pissing on the 99 percent.”
In Brooklyn, at another church housing OWS protesters, an occupier urinated on a cross, according to Rabbi Chaim Gruber, who has angrily abandoned the OWS movement.
…
The artifact vanished just three weeks after a $2,400 Apple MacBook vanished from Brashear’s office. He told the occupiers that even when the 100-year-old Upper West Side church extended help to addicts during the 1980s drug scourge, no visitors touched its $12,500 sacramental instrument.
“Not even crackheads messed with that,” he said.
Occupy Wall Street: Piss-spraying desecrating thieves that are worse than crackheads.
-
NY Post: JFK’s Teen Mistress. The UK Daily Mail’s version of intern Mimi Alford’s story it is directly from the book:
‘This is a very private room,’ he said. The next thing I knew, he was standing in front of me, his face inches away, his eyes staring directly into mine.
He placed both hands on my shoulders and guided me toward the edge of the bed. I landed on my elbows, frozen halfway between sitting up and lying on my back.
Slowly, he unbuttoned the top of my shirtdress and…
Morally objectionable is an understatement, but at least the guy understood free markets a bit and how reduced taxes help the economy.
-
And from SadHill news, and sadly, it looks like it’s not parody – US Army Troops Forced to Wear Fake Belly And Empathy Breasts To Understand Pregnant Troops’ Concerns:
And if you don’t believe it, notice the video is from Stars and Stripes. And so is this story:
This week, 14 noncommissioned officers at Camp Zama took turns wearing the “pregnancy simulators” as they stretched, twisted and exercised during a three-day class that teaches them to serve as fitness instructors for pregnant soldiers and new mothers.
Army enlisted leaders all over the world are being ordered to take the Pregnancy Postpartum Physical Training Exercise Leaders Course, or PPPT, according to U.S. Army Medical Activity Japan health promotion educator Jana York.
Somewhere, there is a balance to be struck on gender issues between having a Democrat president exploit his position to overwhelm and overpower a 19 year-old girl and the PC-gone-totally-weirdo idea of strapping a “pregnancy simulator” on Army Sergeants.
–
(Yes, technically field daying the folder would mean cleaning it into nothingness, but I’m just going to use it as a term to title & tag these clean-up posts.)
From both Jawa Report and HotAir:
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.
-
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.
Drudge’s headline all day, from AP:
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Internal Revenue Service apologized Friday for what it acknowledged was “inappropriate” targeting of conservative political groups during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status.
IRS agents singled out dozens of organizations for additional reviews because they included the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their exemption applications, said Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups. In some cases, groups were asked for lists of donors, which violates IRS policy in most cases, she said.
Spin begins on the next paragraph:
The agency — led at the time by a Bush administration appointee — blamed low-level employees, saying no high-level officials were aware. But that wasn’t good enough for Republicans in Congress, who are conducting several investigations and asked for more.
Blame Bush, and blame the low-level people, who apparently just off and do this stuff on their own. Just like how Fast and Furious was really just done by a couple guys in the field and totally wasn’t so connected to the White House so Obama had to invoke executive privilege to cover his own corrupt ass. Oh, wait… that’s right.
White House spokesman Jay Carney declared it was indeed inappropriate for the IRS to target tea party groups. But he brushed aside questions about whether the White House itself would investigate.
Why investigate it? They agree with it.
The big question is: why is the IRS apologizing?
They must’ve gotten caught, and there must’ve been something about to break. They also timed this release on a Friday – when the White House does its traditional document dumps, because normal folks who go and do normal things on the weekends aren’t around to pay attention to this stuff. They don’t listen to Rush in the afternoon on weekends, they don’t sit down to Hannity on Saturday evening – they’ve got better things to do like go to the lake and go fishing or go out clubbing or hang out with their kids.
This is an apology sent out for something that’s horribly, offensively partisan – the IRS targeted enemies of the White House – and this was released on a day when the news from it can’t gather steam. It’s also released as the mainstream media is actually beginning to wonder what’s going on with Benghazi (which they hushed up last year so Obama could be reelected).
–
They’ve even got some of the questions that were asked by the IRS:
The full IRS questionnaire is here at the link.
ShortTimer
JBH
