First up, an absolutemust-see video, as SC Rep. Trey Gowdy puts the ineptitude, ineffectiveness and gross hypocrisy of our bloated federal bureaucracy into perfect perspective.
Meanwhile, the Some Animals More Equal Than Others will be vacationing at Martha’s Vineyard the ENTIRE summer, with The Dear Misleader commuting back and forth every weekend on Air Force One to the tune of $180K/flight hour. Next to these self-absorbed Socialists…
…Louis and Marie were amateurs.
Next up, the WSJ‘s Kimberly Strassel offers inquiring minds…
An IRS Political Timeline
President Obama spent months in 2010 warning Americans about the ‘threat’ to democracy posed by conservative groups, right at the time the IRS began targeting these groups.
Perhaps the only useful part of the inspector general’s audit of the IRS was its timeline. We know that it was August 2010 when the IRS issued its first “Be On the Lookout” list, flagging applications containing key conservative words and issues. The criteria would expand in the months to come.
What else was happening in the summer and fall of 2010? The Obama administration and its allies continue to suggest the IRS was working in some political vacuum. What they’d rather everyone forget is that the IRS’s first BOLO list coincided with their own attack against “shadowy” or “front” conservative groups that they claimed were rigging the electoral system.
Below is a more relevant timeline, a political one, which seeks to remind readers of the context in which the IRS targeting happened.
Aug. 9, 2010: In Texas, President Obama for the first time publicly names a group he is obsessed with—Americans for Prosperity (founded by the Koch Brothers)—and warns about conservative groups. Taking up a cry that had until then largely been confined to left-wing media and activists, he says: “Right now all around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads . . . And they don’t have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation.”
Aug. 11: The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sends out a fundraising email warning about “Karl Rove-inspired shadow groups.”
Aug. 21: Mr. Obama devotes his weekly radio address to the threat of “attack ads run by shadowy groups with harmless-sounding names. We don’t know who’s behind these ads and we don’t know who’s paying for them. . . . You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation. . . . The only people who don’t want to disclose the truth are people with something to hide.”
Week of Aug. 23: The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer authors a hit piece on the Koch brothers, entitled “Covert Operations,” in which she accuses them of funding “political front groups.” The piece repeats the White House theme, with Ms. Mayer claiming the Kochs have created “slippery organizations with generic-sounding names” that have “made it difficult to ascertain the extent of their influence in Washington.”
Aug. 27: White House economist Austan Goolsbee, in a background briefing with reporters, accuses Koch industries of being a pass-through entity that does “not pay corporate income tax.” The Treasury inspector general investigates how it is that Mr. Goolsbee might have confidential tax information. The report has never been released.
This same week, the Democratic Party files a complaint with the IRS claiming the Americans for Prosperity Foundation is violating its tax-exempt status.
Sept. 2: The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee warns on its website that the Kochs have “funneled their money into right-wing shadow groups.”
Sept. 16:Mr. Obama, in Connecticut, repeats that a “foreign-controlled entity” might be funding “millions of dollars of attack ads.” Four days later, in Philadelphia, he again says the problem is that “nobody knows” who is behind conservative groups.
Sept. 21: Sam Stein, in his Huffington Post article “Obama, Dems Try to Make Shadowy Conservative Groups a Problem for Conservatives,” writes that a “senior administration official” had “urged a small gathering of reporters to start writing on what he deemed ‘the most insidious power grab that we have seen in a very long time.’ “
Sept. 22: In New York City, Mr. Obama warns that conservative groups “pose as non-for-profit, social welfare and trade groups,” even though they are “guided by seasoned Republican political operatives” who might be funded by a “foreign-controlled corporation.”
Sept. 26: On ABC’s “This Week,” Obama senior adviser David Axelrod declares outright that the “benign-sounding Americans for Prosperity, the American Crossroads Fund” are “front groups for foreign-controlled companies.”
Sept. 28:The president, in Wisconsin, again warns about conservative organizations “posing as nonprofit groups.” Sen. Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, writes to the IRS demanding it investigate nonprofits. The letter names conservative organizations.
On Oct. 14, Mr. Obama calls these groups “a problem for democracy.” On Oct. 22, he slams those who “hide behind these front groups.” On Oct. 25, he upgrades them to a “threat to our democracy.” On Oct. 26, he decries groups engaged in “unsupervised spending.”
These were not off-the-cuff remarks. They were repeated by the White House and echoed by its allies in campaign events, emails, social media and TV ads. The president of the United States spent months warning the country that “shadowy,” conservative “front” groups—”posing” as tax-exempt entities and illegally controlled by “foreign” players—were engaged in “unsupervised” spending that posed a “threat” to democracy. Yet we are to believe that a few rogue IRS employees just happened during that time to begin systematically targeting conservative groups? A mere coincidence that among the things the IRS demanded of these groups were “copies of any contracts with and training materials provided by Americans for Prosperity”?
This newspaper reported Thursday that Cincinnati IRS employees are now telling investigators that they took their orders from Washington. For anyone with a memory of 2010 politics, that was obvious from the start.
Anyone with a memory…or half a brain; which eliminates most Liberals.
But the Left need not fear; for as James Taranto notes, at least one Progressive pundit’s identified all that’s needed to turn around an Administration which is driving off a cliff faster than Thelma & Louse:
An Anxious Nation Holds Its Breath
“What is President Obama fighting for?” asks E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post. “What is the point of his second term?”
Aren’t rhetorical questions the best? But actually Dionne doesn’t seem to see these questions as rhetorical. In fact, he ventures an answer: “a coherent effort to improve the living standards and opportunities of middle-class and lower-income Americans, to speed the recovery and to leave his successor a thriving economy.”
How will Obama accomplish these things? You can’t make this stuff up: “On Friday, Obama plans to give a speech in California.”
Man, we cannot wait until Saturday!
Can you spell…
We knew you could!
Then again, as this next snippet from Rush Limbaugh clearly indicates, if there’s something this Administration could possibly do to cause a majority of the MSM to cease carrying its water, we can’t think of it:
US Press Blames George W. Bush for Obama’s Unprecedented Eavesdropping
…Then if there is anything suspicious, the contents might be subpoenaed or requested. But it is massive. It is every phone call that Verizon handles. Every phone call! If you call Domino’s on your Verizon cell phone, that call is being turned over to the NSA. Every phone call. There’s nothing like this that has ever happened. And the media, they just can’t believe it, either. So our buddy Ron Fournier writes: “Welcome to the Bush-Obama White House — They’re Spying on Us.”
Welcome to “the Bush-Obama Era…” Whose name is first in this story? Bush! And it’s not just Ron Fournier. It’s all over. F. Chuck Todd at NBC says this is all Bush’s fault. If Bush hadn’t been the guy that started this, Obama and Holder would not be doing it themselves. (I kid you not.) “Welcome to the era of Bush-Obama, a 16-year span of US history that will be remembered for an unprecedented erosion of civil liberties and a disregard for transparency.
“On the war against a tactic — terrorism — and its insidious fallout, the United States could have skipped the 2008 election.” We coulda left Bush in, and everything would have been the same. I mean, this is utterly embarrassingly shameless. To bend over backwards or forwards or to pretzel yourself in whatever perverted position is necessary to include George W. Bush in this? But that’s what they’re doing, because it just can’t be Obama’s fault.It just can’t be!
They think they are Obama. They think they’re the same culture, the same education, the same value system, the same pedigree, the same worldview, the same age. All of it! They think they are Obama, and they wouldn’t do anything like this. So it has to be some hidden, sinister force that is tugging Obama in this direction that’s totally against his own instincts — and it has to be that Bush paved the way to make it possible!
In a related item, if you’re ever confronted by an ill-informed Liberal (is there any other kind?!?) who refuses to recognize the hypocrisy which is The Obamao’s very soul, have them consider the numerous and glaring contradictions between candidate Obamao…
…and the current occupant of the Offal Office.
Speaking of bullsh*t, even the Old Grey Nag seems to have had its fill of The Obamao’s:
Then again, as The Daily Caller via Drudge reports, despite the overwhelming…and still mounting…undeniable evidence, the Timesstill couldn’t bring itself to fully admit the obvious:
New York Times quietly changes published editorial to make it less damning of Obama
The New York Times‘ editorial board: now in original bias and extra partisan.
The New York Times edited its damning editorial condemning the Obama administration for collecting phone call data from Americans to make it less stinging shortly after the editorial was published online Thursday afternoon.
The editorial originally declared that the Obama “administration has lost all credibility” as a result of the recently revealed news that the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been secretly collecting call data from American users of Verizon under the authority of the Patriot Act. But hours later the stinging sentence had been modified to read the Obama “administration has now lost all credibilityon this issue.” [Emphasis added]
Since we’re on the subject of credibility, as this next item demonstrates, absent its editorial page, the WSJ has little more than any other major newspaper:
U.S. Economy Added 175,000 Jobs in May
The U.S. economy added 175,000 jobs in May, signaling the economic recovery remains broadly on track. The Labor Department said the unemployment rate rose slightly to 7.6% from 7.5% in April. Economists had forecast that payrolls would rise by 169,000 and that the unemployment rate would hold steady at 7.5%.
REALLY?!? Despite the fact “the industries with the strongest employment growth in the last month were temporary help agencies, which added 26,000 jobs; and food services, which added 38,000 jobs in May and 337,000 over the past year”? And there are still “2.4 million fewer jobs than when the recession officially began 66 months ago”, not to mention “4.4 million workers who have been unemployed for six months or longer”…and that “outside this downturn, the previous post-war record was under 3 million, back in the 1980s”? Not to mention “over 37% of the total unemployed are long-term unemployed”, and “the previous post-war record, also back in the 1980s, was a comparatively low 26%”?!?
If these numbers indicate a recovery which is at all on track, to borrow a quote from our friend Ed Cassity, “We wouldn’t want a ticket…
…on that train!”
And in the Society Section, we learn…
Putin and Wife to Divorce, Blaming Demands of Presidential Life
Mrs. Putin
Mistress Putin
“Demands of presidential life”?!? Yeah…
Turning to the Health Section, as Hope ‘n Change details, there’s good reason the more the public learns about Obamascare, the less they like it:
Straight To The Back Of The Line
In the growing shadow of the IRS “War on Conservatives” scandal, the Obama administration has just confirmed our worst nightmares by proudly announcing that there really will be a political component to your IRS-administered healthcare.
Specifically, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen “Shakedown Money” Sibelius says that Obamacare will be putting a “special focus on the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered community because for too long (they) were pushed out of the way.”Which means that if you’re not a member of that community, then it’s time that you were pushed out of the way for awhile.
Secretary Sibelius says that the LGBT community will be getting some benefits specific to their needs, including help with smoking – which LGBT folks apparently do more of than straight folks (although we don’t know if that’s only after sex).
Interestingly, this isn’t the first time smoking has been mentioned with regard to Obamacare recently – because in some cases smokers can be charged up to 50% more for their health insurance under the new rules. Unless, we suppose, those smokers argue that they were “born that way” rather than making the choice to light up.
Frankly, as much as Hope n’ Change doesn’t like the idea of sexual identity being used to assign favored or unfavored status in healthcare, we’re not overly worried about it. After all, everyone’s healthcare is going down the toilet as soon as Obamacare is fully implemented.
But just to keep the odds on our side, in the event of a heart attack we plan to be wearing women’s underwear and a medical alert bracelet which says “trapped in a man’s body.”
Thus it should come as a surprise to no one the chief architects of this Obamanation…
…are having a hard time recollecting how they sold it in the first place. Oh,…if there’s a more obnoxious voice on earth, we’ve never heard it.
On the Lighter Side…
And as this cautionary forward from Hank Murphy suggests, male readers would be well-advised to avoid the Kohl’s at Midtown Park:
Finally, we’ll call it a week with the Sports Section, and another reason we’ll miss Matt Birk:
NFL champ skips WH visit because Obama said ‘God bless’ Planned Parenthood
Retired Baltimore Ravens center Matt Birk, who won a Super Bowl with the team last year, skipped the team’s visit to the White House due to President Obama’s support for Planned Parenthood.
“I have great respect for the office of the presidency but about five or six weeks ago, our president made a comment in a speech and he said, ‘God bless Planned Parenthood,’” Birk, a former Minnesota Viking, told a local Minnesota sports blog. “I’m very confused by [Obama’s] statement,” he explained. “For God to bless a place where they’re ending 330,000 lives a year? I just chose not to attend.”
Kirk said he’s a pro-life Roman Catholic. “Planned Parenthood performs about 330,000 abortions a year,” he said. “I couldn’t endorse that in any way.”
Loading ...
You must be logged in to post a comment.