We lead off the week with a little walk down memory lane; this was then…
…and this is now; or perhaps more appropriately, the “present”…
…cuz’ that’s how he votes, operates and “leads”. It’s almost as if…
Yeah…into something neither any of us nor the Founding Fathers would recognize.
Next up, further evidence the IRS is just like Chicago:
Or the Offal Office for that matter!
In a related item, courtesy of the Morning Examiner, Conn Carroll defines…
Accountability, Obama style
“The government generally has to conduct itself in a way that is true to the public trust,” President Obama said from the East Room of the White House Wednesday, “That’s especially true for the IRS.” “So here’s what we’re going to do,” Obama continued, “First, we’re going to hold the responsible parties accountable.”
Obama then announced that Treasury Secretary Jack Lew had asked for, and received, the resignation of acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller. What Obama failed to mention is that Miller was not in charge of the IRS when the targeting of Obama’s political enemies actually occurred. Nor did Obama mention that under existing federal law Miller was scheduled to leave his post in just three weeks any way.
So not only did Obama’s bold stroke at accountability punish the wrong person, it didn’t really even punish anyone at all.
Meanwhile, The Washington Examiner‘s Mark Tapscott reports, that the IRS employee that was in charge of the tax exempt division that targeted conservatives, Sarah Hall Ingram, was rewarded with more than $100,000 in bonuses between 2009 and 2012.Such large bonuses for career federal workers usually require presidential approval. And not only did Ingram get bonuses for her work, ABC News reports that she was also promoted to become the director of the IRS’s Affordable Care Act office. In other words, the same woman who headed the office that persecuted conservative non-profits is now in charge of enforcing Obamacare.
If this is Obama’s idea of accountability, no wonder public trust in the federal government has plummeted since Obama became president.
Speaking of accountability, or more accurately the complete lack thereof, as the New York Times inexplicably reports:
Weiner’s Wife Didn’t Disclose Consulting Work She Did While Serving in State Dept.
The State Department, under Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, created an arrangement for her longtime aide and confidante Huma Abedin to work for private clients as a consultant while serving as a top adviser in the department. Ms. Abedin did not disclose the arrangement — or how much income she earned — on her financial report. It requires officials to make public any significant sources of income. An adviser to Mrs. Clinton, Philippe Reines, said that Ms. Abedin was not obligated to do so.
…Ms. Abedin declined a request for an interview, but the picture that emerges from interviews and records suggests a situation where the lines were blurred between Ms. Abedin’s work in the high echelons of one of the government’s most sensitive executive departments and her role as a Clinton family insider.
While continuing her work at the State Department, in the latter half of 2012, she also worked for Teneo, a strategic consulting firm, which was founded by Doug Band, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton. Teneo has advised corporate clients like Coca-Cola and MF Global, the collapsed brokerage firm run by Jon S. Corzine, a former governor of New Jersey. At the same time, Ms. Abedin served as a consultant to the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation and worked in a personal capacity for Mrs. Clinton as she prepared to transition out of her job as secretary of state.
Melanie Sloane, executive director of CREW, an ethics watchdog group, said the arrangement that Ms. Abedin had seemed unusual. “If she was being held out as a deputy chief of staff, it would be highly unusual for her to be a part-time employee or a consultant,” she said. “Being a deputy chief of staff at the State Department is generally considered more than a full-time job.”
It’s the basic tenet of Progressivism, Liberalism 101 so to speak; one set of rules for “us”…
…a completely different set for “them”!
Meanwhile, writing at the The Weekly Standard, Steve Hayes asks what inquiring minds…and anyone else with half a brain and not strung-out on Obama-Aid…truly want to know:
So, what about the video? The White House last week released nearly 100 pages of emails detailing some of the discussions within the Obama administration that resulted in major revisions to talking points about the Benghazi attacks drafted by the Central Intelligence Agency.
From the beginning, there have been two big questions about the administration’s deceptive spin on Benghazi: How were the talking points whittled down to virtually nothing from the CIA’s original draft? And how did a previously obscure YouTube video gain such prominence in the administration’s explanation of what happened in Benghazi?…
And what made them think they could carry off such a heinous scam?
Oh,…yeah; never mind.
Moving on, courtesy of NRO, Mark Krikorian offers a tongue-in-cheek yet accurate accounting of why Conservatives should consider immigration reform as proposed a dead issue as long as Team Tick-Tock’s got anything to do with enforcing it:
We Trust Barack Obama
Trust in the administration is the foundation of the Schumer-Rubio bill
MEMORANDUM
To: Conservatives skeptical of the Senate immigration bill
From: Marco Rubio, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Jeff Flake, Grover Norquist, Haley Barbour, Linda Chavez, Al Cardenas, Richard Land, Ralph Reed, et al.
Subject: We trust Barack Obama
It has come to our attention that some bitter-enders are clinging to their opposition to S.744, the Gang of Eight immigration bill now being considered by the Senate. The most vexing issue for us is the skeptics’ lack of trust in the Obama administration’s willingness to faithfully execute the immigration laws. Since the whole bill is predicated on trust in Obama, we wanted to dispel any lingering doubts you may have about the legislation.
We trust Barack Obama to implement in good faith the border-control plans his Department of Homeland Security will submit to Congress within six months of his signing the bill, which is the trigger for legalizing virtually all illegal immigrants.
We trust Barack Obama to rigorously apply the requirements for legalization, rejecting and deporting all applicants who fail to qualify.
We trust Barack Obama to permit ICE and Border Patrol agents to enforce the laws as written, without interference from political appointees or pressure from well-connected advocacy groups.
We trust Barack Obama to accurately determine whether the bill’s border-security goals have been met, enabling the former illegal immigrants to upgrade to full green-card status.
We trust Barack Obama to make sure that no legalized immigrants are able to access federal benefit programs, including subsidized health care, or receive certain tax credits, as stipulated in S.744.
We trust Barack Obama to implement an improved E-Verify system on schedule and to encourage the Social Security Administration and USCIS to root out identity fraud.
We trust Barack Obama to insist that employers follow the worksite measures in the bill, as they failed to do after the 1986 amnesty.
We trust Barack Obama to ensure complete transparency in the reporting of statistics about immigration services and enforcement, so the public and Congress can gauge the effectiveness of the law and the administration’s activities.
We trust Barack Obama to ensure that his administration is judicious and sparing in its use of the hundreds of waivers and exemptions in the bill.
We trust Barack Obama to be firm with those countries that do not accept their own citizens back, thus blocking our ability to deport criminal aliens and those who will come here illegally after the amnesty.
We trust Barack Obamato be evenhanded in awarding the tens of millions of dollars the bill sets aside for community-organizing groups, and not favor one political perspective over another.
We trust Barack Obama to resist lobbying pressure from favored corporations to administer the law in ways that benefit them.
We trust Barack Obama to zealously ensure the removal of any legalized aliens who are out of work for more than 60 days or who become dependent on taxpayer support, as the bill requires.
We trust Barack Obama to collect all assessed taxes that should have been paid, but were not, by illegal aliens seeking legal status.
We trust Barack Obama to vigorously enforce provisions of the law demanding that employers seeking H-1B workers from abroad offer jobs to Americans first.
We trust Barack Obama to make sure that all dangerous non-citizens taken into custody will be placed in detention pending their deportation, so that they will neither flee nor threaten their community.
We trust Barack Obama to ensure that no criminal aliens will be released for budgetary or political reasons.
We trust Barack Obama to doggedly fight any litigation aimed at stopping the bill’s various enforcement provisions after the amnesty goes into effect.
We trust Barack Obama to fill hundreds of new immigration-judge positions with men and women who will impartially and objectively balance the requirements and standards of the law and the intent of Congress with their compassion for immigrants.
We trust Barack Obama not to attack Republicans as soon as the bill is signed by blaming them for the restrictions placed on amnesty beneficiaries until they receive green cards.
Wetrust Barack Obama. Don’tyou?
Like HELL we do; we wouldn’t trust him to wok,…er,…walk our dog! Is it just us, or does Marco Rubio seem less and less attractive…and more and more naive…with every passing day?!?
Since we’re on the subject of those undeserving of even a modicum of trust, in another piece from NRO, Kevin Williamson details…
The Nine Lies of Lois Lerner
Lie No. 1: Lois Lerner’s apology last Friday was a spontaneous reaction to an unexpected question from an unknown audience member. In fact, the question came from tax lawyer and lobbyist Celia Roady. Ms. Roady has some interesting career highlights: She was part of the 1997 ethics investigation of Newt Gingrich, but, more to the point, she was appointed to the IRS’s Advisory Council on Tax-Exempt and Government Entities by IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman. She is a longtime colleague of Lerner, who is director of tax-exempt organizations.
Ms. Roady has declined to comment on whether her question was planted, but it obviously was. The IRS had contacted reporters and encouraged them beforehand to attend the otherwise un-newsworthy event, and it had an entire team of press handlers on hand. So what we have is the staged rollout of what turns out to be — given the rest of this list — a disinformation campaign.
Lie No. 2: Lerner said about 280 organizations were given extra scrutiny, about 75 of them TEA Party groups or similar organizations. The actual number of organizations that were targeted is closer to 500.
Lie No. 3: This was the work of low-level grunts in Cincinnati. In truth, very senior people within the IRS, including its top lawyer, were aware of the situation, and had been since at least 2011. The home office in Washington was very much involved in the process.
Lie No. 4: Lerner says that the situation came to her attention through allegations from TEA Party groups carried in media reports. In fact, the matter has been under both internal and external investigation for some time.
Lie No. 5: Lerner says she put an end to the practice as soon as she found out about it. In fact, the IRS continued to do precisely the same thing, only monkeying a little bit with the language: Instead of targeting “tea party” groups explicitly, it targeted those groups with an interest in such esoterica as limited government, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, etc.
Lie No. 6: She says that the commissioner of the IRS didn’t know about the targeting project. While the targeting was going on, Ms. Lerner’s boss was being asked some very pointed questions by Congress on the subject of targeting TEA Party groups. He enthusiastically denied that any such thing was going on, in direct contravention of the facts.
Ms. Lerner says he didn’t know about the situation, because it was confined to those aforementioned plebes in Cincinnati. But given that this was not the case, her explaining away the commissioner’s untrue statements to Congress is a lie based on another lie — a compound lie, if you will. And acting commissioner Steven Miller was briefed on the situation in May of 2012 — and then declined to share his knowledge of it with Congress when asked about it during a hearing in July.
Lie No. 7: Lerner says she came forward with her apology unprompted by any special consideration. In fact, an inspector general’s report was about to be released, making the matter public.
Lie No. 8: When Congress was investigating complaints from conservative groups, Lerner told them that she could not release information about organizations with pending applications. But her group was in fact releasing such information — to the left-leaning news organization ProPublica, rather than to congressional investigators.
Lie No. 9: Lerner says that there was no political pressure to investigate TEA Party groups. In fact, Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) repeatedly pressed the agency to investigate conservative groups falling under Lerner’s jurisdiction. What we have, then, is this: Under a Democrat administration, the IRS was under pressure from Democrat elected officials to investigate political enemies of the Democrat party. The agency did so. Its commissioner lied to Congress about its doing so. When the inspector general’s report was about to make these abuses public, the agency staged a classic Washington Friday news rollout at a sleepy American Bar Association tax-law conference, hoping to minimize the bad publicity. Lerner lied to the public about the nature, scope, and extent of the IRS intimidation campaign.
That she has a job today is a scandal in itself.She’ll be receiving an award — for public service! — from the Western New England University School of Law on May 18. An orange jumpsuit would suit her better than academic robes.
P.S. As Bret Baier recently reported:
The folks at Western New England University School of Law let out a sigh of relief, one would think today, when one of the IRS officials at the center of the tax scandal, Lois Lerner, canceled her appearance as the speaker for Saturday’s graduation ceremony.
Earlier this month, the school praised her work for transparency and ethics.
And just when you thought you’d heard it all…
Second ‘house of horrors’ abortion clinic where doctor ‘twisted heads off fetus’ necks with his bare hands’ is investigated in Texas
Here we thought Kermit Gosnell was evil.
On the Lighter Side…
Finally, we’ll call it a day with one more titillating tale ripped from the pages of the Crime Blotter…
Motorist Blames “Bad” Chinese Food For His Decision To Flee Accident Scene
A Florida man who fled the scene of a fender-bender explained to cops that he had consumed some “bad” Chinese food and was “on the verge of defecating in his pants” when he went in search of relief, police report. Carlos Baca, a 27-year-old Honduran citizen, took off last Monday after backing his pickup truck into another vehicle on a Port St. Lucie road, according to an arrest affidavit.
Baca returned to the scene soon after the 6:30 AM crash and apologized for leaving, but “believed he had no choice” due to gastrointestinal distress caused by the Chinese food (which is not further itemized). Arrested for driving without a license, Baca was booked into the county jail on a misdemeanor count and later released on $375 bond.
Honduran citizen…leaving the scene of an accident…driving without a license; can someone please tell me why this guy wasn’t on the first flight out of Miami to Tegucigalpa?!?
Here’s the juice; if you or we were to conduct ourselves similarly in any one of a hundred countries on the planet, we’d never be heard from again. Yet here, he’s not only released on bond, we’ll likely pick up the tab for his public defender!
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