Citing their belief that the flag is the symbol of the Tea Party, the city council of New Rochelle voted 5-2 to order the familiar rattlesnake banner removed and banned from all city property. Specifically the town’s historic Armory, where the Gadsden flag was raised and lowered by local veterans under the US and State flags, was ordered to strike the suddenly offensive symbol.
The City Manager Chuck Strome had originally ordered it taken down and then reversed his decision after the United Veterans Memorial and Patriotic Association of New Rochelle protested. After this Pyrrhic victory, the matter was addressed by the City Council who decided to ban it once more.
According to the Washington Examiner, the council objected to the flag because they said Parente is a member of the Tea Party and wants to display the flag to push a political agenda.
Parente said no one in the veterans group is a Tea Party member.
Irrelevant to the leftists. The Tea Party must be destroyed, and all symbols that resist leftists’ Greater Good Government must be destroyed. Historical symbols of resistance to tyranny, even if used in a manner unrelated to the Tea Party, must be destroyed.
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.
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.
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.
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?
ShortTimer
JBH
