It’s Tuesday, June 25th, 2013…and ya gotta love the Boy Blunder when he interacts with adults:

Had Putin been hungry during the G8 summit, he’d have had this narcissistic dilettante…

…for lunch!

Now, here’s The Gouge!

Since we’re on the subject of Jimmy Carter’s darker-hued, far-less capable, infinitely-more-evil twin, we’ll kick things off with the WSJ‘s…

Portrait in Respect

Our friends in Hong Kong, China, Russia and Ecuador

‘One of the things I intend to do as President is restore America’s standing in the world. We are less respected now than we were eight years ago or even four years ago.”

— Barack Obama, first presidential debate, September 26, 2008.

The Obama Administration wants the world to know that it cares very deeply about bringing self-admitted national-security leaker Edward Snowden back to the U.S. to stand trial. If only the world seemed to care as much about what the U.S. thinks.

Last week the U.S. announced that it had indicted Mr. Snowden on espionage and other charges and asked Hong Kong, where he’d been hiding out and giving interviews, to detain and extradite him. On Wednesday, Attorney General Eric Holder called Hong Kong Secretary of Justice Rimsky Yuen to ask the government “to honor our request for Snowden’s arrest,” according to an official cited in the Washington Post.

Tom Donilon, the White House national security adviser, added his own rare public demarche on Saturday, saying, “Hong Kong has been a historically good partner of the United States in law enforcement matters, and we expect them to comply with the treaty in this case.”

On Sunday, Hong Kong let Mr. Snowden board a plane to Moscow. Hong Kong’s government offered a transparently lame excuse, claiming the documents provided by the U.S. to justify arrest “did not fully comply” with their laws. Yet under terms of the territory’s bilateral 1996 extradition treaty with the U.S., Hong Kong was obliged to detain anyone wanted on criminal charges in America.

Several news outlets are reporting that Chinese officials in Beijing pressed Hong Kong’s leaders to let Mr. Snowden go. Only two weeks ago Mr. Obama hosted new Chinese President Xi Jinping at a “shirt-sleeve summit” designed to build personal goodwill. On Monday, White House press secretary Jay Carney said that “We are just not buying that this was a technical decision by a Hong Kong immigration official.” (Unlike the IRS scandal!)

On Monday night the drama moved to Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, where Mr. Snowden bought a seat on an Aeroflot flight to Havana but didn’t turn up for departure. Secretary of State John Kerry called on Russia to send Mr. Snowden to the U.S., saying, “I would urge them to live by the standards of the law” and “there would be without any question some effect and impact on the relationship” with the U.S. if the Kremlin knew about and facilitated Mr. Snowden’s flight to Russia.

As we write these words, it isn’t clear where Mr. Snowden is, but Russian media are reporting that Russian authorities are saying there are no legal grounds to arrest him. The Kremlin has said nothing in public, so perhaps the FSB (the new KGB) is interrogating him or downloading the secret NSA data he brought with him. A “reset” of U.S.-Russian relations has been one of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy priorities.

Mr. Snowden’s many legal escorts are saying he may next go to Cuba, or Venezuela, or Ecuador, which has already granted asylum in its London embassy to WikiLeaker Julian Assange. Asked about “repercussions” for countries that defy the U.S., Mr. Carney, the White House spokesman, refused to speculate.

Which for Carney, as David Freddoso notes at ConservativeIntel.com, is simply par for the course:

Yahoo News Study On How Jay Carney Has Ducked 9,486 Questions From Reporters

Moving from embarrassing ineptitude to outright scandal, courtesy of the WSJ, Eliana Johnson offers an up-close-and-personal look at…

The IRS’s Best Friend in Congress

Rep. Elijah Cummings says the House investigation is a ‘witch hunt.’ Yet revealing evidence keeps coming.

The House Oversight Committee’s investigation into the Internal Revenue Service’s discrimination against conservative groups continues—but at least one unenthusiastic member seems to think the committee’s work is done.

Over the objections of Chairman Darrell Issa (R., Calif.), Rep. Elijah Cummings (D., Md.) last week released online the full, 205-page transcript of an interview that committee investigators conducted with an IRS employee in Cincinnati named John Shafer. Mr. Cummings explained that he was compelled to release the Shafer transcript because it explodes Mr. Issa’s “conspiracy theories”—chiefly, that the White House played a role in the targeting of conservative groups, and that it was orchestrated out of IRS headquarters in Washington, D.C. In fact, Mr. Issa has never said the former, and much that is known so far about the IRS scandal suggests that the Washington connection is substantial.

Mr. Cummings’s enthusiasm for defending the IRS may make him a lonely figure among the 22 Republicans and 16 Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, but he is likely to find an ally in his chief counsel on the committee. She is Susanne Sachsman Grooms, who worked for the IRS between 2008 and 2011 as an adviser to the deputy commissioner for services and enforcement and then as a senior counselor to the chief of criminal investigations. At the time, the deputy commissioner for services and enforcement—her boss—was none other than Steven Miller, who held the post of IRS commissioner from November 2012 until his resignation in May after the scandal broke. Mr. Cummings also has a strong tie to the Obama administration: His staff director on the Oversight Committee, David Rapallo, is a former White House lawyer.

The release of the Shafer transcript came after a June 12 interview with Politico in which Mr. Cummings labeled the Oversight Committee’s investigation a “witch hunt”—in other words, something that should end immediately. A few days before that, in a June 9 CNN interview, he said, “The IG made some recommendations, those recommendations are being adopted by the IRS . . . I think we’re in great shape.” (Yeah…like American economy!)

As it happens, the revelation of Mr. Shafer’s testimony isn’t likely to discourage the investigation. Mr. Shafer, the manager of an IRS screening group in the Cincinnati office, told committee investigators that in February 2010 one of his employees brought a tea-party application for nonprofit designation to his attention.

Given the media coverage that the tea party was receiving, Mr. Shafer deemed the application a “high profile” matter and alerted his managers to its existence. Shortly thereafter, according to his testimony, lawyers in the IRS’s Washington, D.C., office said, “We want to look at the case.” On the evidence of the Washington office’s interest in that initial case, Mr. Shafer said IRS agents in Cincinnati then held the applications of tea-party groups until they were given “further direction” from D.C.

Case closed, according to Mr. Cummings, who wrote in a letter to Mr. Issa: “These statements by the screening group manager appear to directly contradict your allegations of political motivation.”

If Mr. Shafer or Mr. Cummings could read the minds of IRS officials in Washington, that might be true. In reality, Mr. Shafer was unable to say why officials in Washington were so interested in the tea-party cases or whether the officials’ interest was politically motivated.

“Did you have an understanding at the time about what the reason was for sending the cases [to Washington] for review?” investigators asked him. “No,” he responded. They pressed further. “Do you have personal knowledge of the motivations of Washington and how they worked the tea party cases?” “I do not,” Mr. Shafer said.

The testimony offered by other Cincinnati IRS employees—which I have reviewed in full, un-redacted form—contradicts Mr. Cummings’s claims and those of Obama administration officials, such as White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, who has pointed the finger at “line employees” in Cincinnati. The IRS interviews suggest that the agency’s officials in Washington closely controlled the review of tea-party cases.

Consider Gary Muthert, the Cincinnati IRS screener who told investigators that he began singling out tea-party applications at the request of Mr. Shafer, who told him “Washington, D.C., wanted some cases.”

And there is Elizabeth Hofacre, the Cincinnati IRS agent who for several months in 2010 was charged with handling all tea-party applications. She told the committee that she understood the “lookout list” used to flag the applications of tea-party groups was also intended to flag those of Republican and conservative groups. When the applications of liberal groups came in, she sent them along for general processing.

Ms. Hofacre also told the committee’s investigators that IRS lawyers in Washington were controlling her every move. “I was taking all my direction from EO Technical,” she told investigators, referring to the group of IRS tax lawyers in Washington that handles tax-exempt organizations. She went on to say that she had “no autonomy” in her handling of the cases, and she termed the behavior of IRS officials in Washington in the matter “very unusual.”

Mr. Cummings’s efforts have drawn attention away from these troubling accounts, which have been partially released by the House Oversight Committee—and instead bogged the committee down with questions of whether to release full interview transcripts.

Mr. Issa opposes releasing the full transcripts. Disclosing them, he says, threatens to compromise the investigation by providing future witnesses a “road map” of the scope and content of likely questions. It also provides them with time to formulate their answers and to ensure that their testimony corroborates that of other witnesses. Mr. Cummings, who has already made his position clear by unilaterally releasing the Shafer transcript, has called the committee chairman’s position on the matter “bulls—.”

Many questions remain for the committee to address, even if Mr. Cummings might disagree. Who at the IRS, for instance, developed the intrusive and exhaustive questions that were sent to the tea-party groups? Why did so many of those groups have to wait years for their applications to be processed, and why are many more still waiting? Who specifically were the IRS officials in Washington directing the Cincinnati agents targeting the tea-party organizations?

If the House Oversight Committee can overlook the distractions thrown up by one of its members, the answers may prove illuminating about the way Washington has worked during the Obama administration.

No…the concern isn’t Elijah Cummings; it’s whether Darrell Issa has the intestinal fortitude to see this investigation through.  Unfortunately, based on what we’ve seen of Chairman Issa’s performance to date, we’re reminded of Bill McKinney’s assessment of Ned Beatty:

Meanwhile, out in the Land of Fruits & Nuts, the WSJ‘s Allysia Finley details yet another…

California Democrats Overreach

Well, that didn’t take long. Less than a week after California’s legislature passed a budget trailer (along party lines) gutting the state Public Records Act, Assembly Democrats backpedaled. Within 24 hours of the Assembly’s retreat, Senate President Darrell Steinberg and Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown—who was still supporting the legislation as late as Thursday morning—caved as well.

Among other things, the legislation would have waived requirements that local governments and school districts respond to public document requests within 10 days and offer a substantive reason for rejecting requests. Democrats claimed that not having to reimburse local governments for complying with the law would save the state $20 million annually (or about 0.02% of the budget).

However, a firestorm erupted after the press got wind of the waivers, which would have made it more difficult to report on government corruption and malfeasance. Hell hath no fury like journalists scorned. The newspaper coverage and subsequent public blowback forced Assembly Speaker John Perez into retreat on Wednesday and apparently caused Mr. Steinberg to back off as well.

On Thursday afternoon, Messrs. Steinberg and Perez released a joint statement supporting a restoration of the Public Records Act. Moreover, they vowed to craft a ballot measure to enshrine the act into the state constitution, which would “give voters the chance to make clear that good government shouldn’t come with an extra price tag.” As if their legislative tinkering was all about fiscal prudence.

Democrats’ attempt to pull a fast one on the public—slipping through the bill after budget negotiations concluded and when they thought nobody was paying attention—illustrates how the party’s legislative supermajority increases the temptation to overreach. Republicans would be wise to use such cases as evidence of the dangers of undivided Democratic control.

We’d say this is just one more example of absolute power corrupting, but we’re talking about Dimocrats; corrupt is the only way they come!

Since we’re on the subject of corruption, we turn now to the latest on the Senate’s open-border initiative, and this report from Steven Hayward and PowerLineBlog.com:

Why Immigration Reform Is The Panama Canal Treaty Redux

At least, nobody in Washington!

We fervently hope Hayward’s right; if the country can’t afford Obamascare, Schumer/Rubio is the straw that will break America’s back.

And just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, it can; as this forward from Jeff Foutch, courtesy of Gabriella Morrongiello writing at the Washington Examiner, confirms:

Illegal immigrants who commit crimes face lesser punishment than U.S. citizens

According to Sen. John McCain, a member of the Senate’s Gang of Eight, criminals will not be legalized under the proposed bipartisan immigration bill. “Anyone who has committed crimes in this country is going to be deported,” the Arizona Republican declared on the Senate floor last week.

However, as Washington Examiner columnist Byron York recently reported, “the bottom line is an immigrant could have more than three misdemeanor convictions in his background check and still qualify for legalization.”

Furthermore, the following chart published June 21 by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a nonprofit organization that opposes liberalization of immigration law, compares the consequences for an array of crimes and discovered that while illegal immigrants might be exonerated and legalized, U.S. citizens and legal immigrants face years of incarceration or temporary expulsion from the country.

The Gang of Eight’s bill would allow illegal immigrants who entered the country before Dec. 31, 2011, and committed up to three misdemeanor offenses including but not limited to assault, battery, identity or document fraud, tax evasion, to remain eligible for Registered Provisional Status. Meanwhile, U.S. citizens and persons who entered the country legally could incur up to $100,000 in fines,15 years of imprisonment, or be prohibited to reenter the country for up to 10 years.

“What it [the Gang of Eight bill] indicates is this is more than just an amnesty, it’s an amnesty for all kinds of violations,” said FAIR’s media director, Ira Mehlman. “We say nobody is above the law, but apparently illegal immigrants are.”

Not to mention they get in-state tuition!

…as Hertitage.org‘s The Foundry notes:

As John Fund writes at NRO…

…It’s telling that the scare tactics deployed by the proponents of comprehensive immigration reform all revolve around politics: massive rallies on the Washington Mall and an angry Hispanic electorate. In reality, it might be the folks using the scare tactics who are the ones running scared. Maybe they’re afraid that the longer their bill is debated and the more sunshine it’s exposed to, the less likely the American people are to support it.

Just like the last open-border initiative the Senate tried to slip past voters back in Bush II.

Here’s the juice: if you think illegal immigration’s a problem now, just wait until after the Schumer/Rubio…

…solution!

On the Lighter Side…

Then there’s this beauty forwarded by Jim Gleaves:

Next up, another titillating tale torn from the pages of the Crime Blotter, as…

Mother and Daughter Charged for Poisoning Family to Death with Antifreeze

A Missouri woman and her daughter confessed to fatally poisoning two relatives with antifreeze and attempting to kill a third over a 14-month period, according to court documents. Diane Staudte, 51, of Springfield, was charged Friday with two counts of first-degree murder, one count of first-degree assault and one count of armed criminal action. Her daughter, Rachel Staudte, 22, was charged with the same counts Saturday.

Diane Staudte initially told law enforcement that her husband, Mark Staudte, 61, hadn’t been feeling well and suffered from seizures before his April 2012 death, the probable cause statement said. And she said her son, Shawn Staudte, 26, had been sick with flu-like symptoms before his death in September. The medical examiner in Greene County at first ruled that the husband died of natural causes and the son as a result of prior medical issues. But an anonymous tip led authorities to re-examine the deaths earlier this month following the hospitalization of Diane Staudte’s daughter, 24-year-old Sarah Staudte, the statement said.

A detective wrote that a nurse told him that although Sarah Staudte’s condition was potentially fatal, Diane Staudte had visited only a couple times and not stayed long. The nurse described Diane Staudte’s actions as “inappropriate,” saying she joked and laughed with hospital personnel. The nurse also told the detective that Diane Staudte told her that she planned to go on an upcoming vacation to Florida regardless of her daughter’s status. A doctor told the detective that Sarah Staudte’s condition was “very suspicious” and said he suspected the young woman had been poisoned.

Diane Staudte admitted under questioning to poisoning her family by putting antifreeze in their soda and Gatorade over several days, the statement said. She told the detective that she killed her husband because she “hated him” and her son because he was “worse than a pest.” She said she wanted to kill her daughter, Sarah, because the young woman “would not get a job and had student loans that had to be paid,” the probable cause statement said.

To borrow a phrase from immortal John “Dean Vernon Wormer” Vernon:

We guess, particularly since they’re Missourians, she really…

…”showed” them?!?

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with yet another sign the Apocalypse is upon us:

Transgender 6-year-old wins civil rights case to use girls’ bathroom at Colorado school

The Colorado Civil Rights Division has ruled an elementary school discriminated against a transgender 6-year-old child by barring her from using the girls’ bathroom. Kathryn Mathis said in a statement that the family is “thrilled that Coy can return to school and put this behind her.”

Coy, who had attended the school since kindergarten, had been allowed to use the girls’ restroom until December 2012, Reuters reports. The school’s principal informed the child’s parents that after the holiday break Coy must either use the boys’ restroom or a gender-neutral one. Her parents withdrew Coy from the school. In February, they filed a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Division.

The division’s report said the Fountain-Fort Carson School District violated a state law that extends protections to transgender people, according to Reuters. “Given the evolving research into the development of transgender persons, compartmentalizing a child as a boy or girl solely based on their visible anatomy is a simplistic approach to a difficult and complex issue,” the report said.

…The Mathis family has since moved to Denver, and Coy plans to attend a school there from now on, KDVR reports.

Gee…any chance the supposed-adults in the house sorta helped little Coy reach his…er,…her conclusion?!?

Submitted for your perusal, another Liberal conundrum…a riddle as it were; while youthful killers under the age of 18 are supposedly incapable of determining right from wrong, 6-year-olds are fully cognizant of their sexuality.

Yeah…

Magoo