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.

Field Day: Cleaning Out The News Stories Folder

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.

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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.

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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.

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(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.)

First Woodward, Now Bernstein

Remember a few months back, Bob Woodward criticized the White House about the sequester limiting military movements, and then was threatened?

Of course, Woodward was blasted by his fellows in the media for criticizing Obama, and it’s not like Woodward was actually going to say anything serious, since Woodward never thought there were any questions worth asking about Benghazi or Fast and Furious.  He made one comment that wasn’t wholly in lock-step with the Obama-loving media and was verbally attacked and threatened for it.

Now today, Carl Bernstein is calling out Obama for targeting Associated Press reporters.

He’s not targeting the White House’s actual activities.  He’s not calling them out for suppressing Fast and Furious and targeting whistleblowers for retaliation.  Bernstein’s only mad because reporters who need to be monitored for party loyalty are now targets.

Bernstein said “the president should long ago have put a stop to this in his administration”.  Apparently he doesn’t understand or refuses to acknowledge that the president is a Chicago street organizer who was raised by Alinskyite communist thugs and terrorists.  This president does not favor freedom, he does not favor free speech.  His political agenda is one that would criminalize unpopular speech, and would actively targets opposition speech.  This is not a surprise to Country Class Americans.

Bernstein:

“There is no reason that a presidency that is interested in a truly free press and its functioning should permit this to happen.”

Y’know what that means, Carl?  Y’know what you should be able to get from that without having Mark Felt spoon-feed it to you?  It means this presidency DOESN’T favor a free press.

From the Obama administration targeting FOX news and calling it “destructive” for having a viewpoint that opposes his to Obama specifically blaming Rush Limbaugh for all the problems in America, to calling anyone who is opposed to the socialist manifest destiny an “obstructionist” or “destructive”, this administration, from the President down through all of his true-believer lackeys, are on the same page.  If you oppose them and their autocratic mania to tell you how to live, you must be destroyed.

Bernstein is a dinosaur.  He’s in the tank for the Democrats, but he still thinks they’re the same silly Democrats of yesteryear.  He’s still got some smidgen of journalistic integrity left, too, and he’s wondering why the Democrats are trying to crush and control journalists now.  He doesn’t understand what he’s dealing with, and he doesn’t understand that the ruling Democrats are tyrants.

He sounds mad because he can’t figure out why Obama’s doing these horrible things.  He’s like a battered wife who still thinks her abusive husband who just molested their children is a good guy, and she doesn’t understand all these horrible things that surely can’t be the truth.  The facts stare him in the face, but he refuses to understand.

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As just one more example, Sharyl Attkisson has been yelled at for being a journalist and actually reporting on a big story – gunrunning by the US DOJ/ATF, and the subsequent coverup by the Obama administration.  The media has already hushed up a few hundred murders in Fast and Furious, and hushed up Benghazi as much as they can, and they’re going to spin the IRS story as either justified because conservative=evil or as an accident.  They’ve been accomplices to tyranny for so long, are they just so blind that they’re now surprised when they’re the targets?

Somewhere, Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov are sharing a joke at the US media’s expense.

NAACP Chairman a Strong Proponent of Government Cracking Down on Groups He Doesn’t Like

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.

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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.

California Looking to Have Aliens Convict US Citizens

More stuff that stacked up in my notes pile…  California’s looking to have non-citizens serve on juries.

Jury duty long has been held up as a privilege of U.S. citizenship, along with voting and a few other civic actions.

But in move that is drawing controversy, California is considering extending the right to serve on a jury to legal immigrants who are not naturalized citizens. The California Assembly passed a bill on Thursday that would  allow non-citizens who are in the country legally to serve on jury duty.

Not a jury of your peers.

Assemblyman Bob Wieckowski, a Democrat, sponsored the bill, arguing that the state needs to broaden the pool of eligible jurors, and that fulfilling jury duty would help integrate immigrants.

United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, the branch that deals with naturalization, said that only U.S. citizens may serve on federal juries, but that some local jurisdictions in the nation allow non-citizens to be jurors. The same is true of voting, which at the federal level requires citizenship.

Local jurisdictions allowing aliens to vote on how you live in your country is absurd.  It surrenders sovereign franchise to aliens, whether they be illegal (which is the real point in Cali), or legal.  Legal permanent residents aren’t citizens.  They’re just living here, they aren’t Americans.  They haven’t so much as sworn any allegiance to the US, they’re just here on papers.

If they want to be Americans, then once they get citizenship they can enjoy the right to vote, and they can enjoy the right to serve on juries and convict or acquit their fellow citizens (though some may find that a dubious honor, given the time commitments).

Democratic lawmakers who voted for the bill said there is no correlation between being a citizen and a juror, and they noted that there is no citizenship requirement to be an attorney or a judge.

Yeah, actually there is.  A jury of one’s peers means having citizens of the country you reside in be your jurors.  That anyone can hire any attorney they want is no big deal, but that a judge, as a state official, could bear allegiance not to the US, but to a foreign nation, is frankly absurd.

The Democrat argument for it basically comes down to “we need them to serve on juries US citizens are too lazy to serve on”.

Noting that women were once kept off juries, Assembly Speaker John Perez, D-Los Angeles, said the judicial system should be changed to allow a person to be judged by their peers.

He then went on to talk about apples and oranges.

Paula Hannaford, an expert at the Center for Jury Studies, confirmed that California would be the only place — state or locality — in the country to allow non-citizens to serve jury duty.

Because non-citizens on jury duty is patently absurd.

Why not just have Incitatus on the jury?  There’s nothing that says horses can’t serve on juries.

Glenn Beck’s NRA-ILA Leadership Forum Speech

A fair number of highlights.  Good speech.

Some folks don’t like his delivery (just a tad melodramatic at times), but few can argue against the actual message.

Why Are We Selling Anti-Sub Patrol Planes to Vietnam?

Just something I dug up while cleaning through notes to blog about, from Janes, last month:

The Socialist Republic of Vietnam is expected to request from the US government the sale of Lockheed Martin P-3 Orion maritime patrol aircraft (MPA), a senior company official told IHS Jane’s on 10 April.

Speaking at the LAAD Defence and Security 2013 exhibition in Rio de Janeiro, Clay Fearnow, director maritime patrol programmes, said the Vietnamese Navy was keen to buy up to six surplus P-3s to help patrol the country’s nearly 3,500 km coastline and 1,396,299 km² Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).

“The Vietnamese Navy has expressed a lot of interest [in the P-3], and there is [US government] support to move forward,” said Fearnow.

Why is the US government supporting this?

According to Fearnow, any P-3s sold to Vietnam by the US would in the first instance be non-weaponised, being fitted exclusively with an MPA mission kit such as forward looking infrared (FLIR) sensors and other systems. However, he noted that as relations between the two countries continue to improve there could be scope for weapon systems to be provided at a later date.

Fearnow said Lockheed Martin would recommend they opt for the latter P-3C aircraft, as they are the most advanced and have the fewer airframe hours on them.

The P-3 Orion already has a fairly broad base of users beyond the US, but this still seems strange.

For those who’ve forgotten, the P-3 Orion featured rather prominently in the early 2000s with the Hainan Island incident, where a Chinese fighter crashed into a US P-3, which was then seized by the Chinese government.

Relations between the US and Vietnam have improved in the last few decades, but it still seems peculiar.  Maybe relations have improved a lot more than they seem.

But given Obama’s early support of Honduran dictator-for-life-wannabe Zelaya and his general distaste for American allies (Mubarak, Iranian protesters, etc.) and embracing America’s enemies (Muslim brotherhood, etc.), this seems suspect.