Category: Behind The Black

The White House defends the woman who was in charge of the IRS office when it harassed conservatives organizations and now runs the IRS Obamacare office.

5:15 pm

The White House defends Sarah Hall Ingram, the person who had been in charge of the IRS office when it harassed conservatives organizations from 2009 to 2012 and now runs the IRS Obamacare office.

If President Obama was so outraged about this scandal, as he claims, you would think he’d tell his minions that it ain’t appropriate to defend this person. Instead, you’d think he’d be doing what he can to get her removed from a position of power.

Instead, Ingram received a promotion and the largest amount of bonuses of any IRS employee. Moreover, the bonuses from 2010 to 2012 were all greater than $25K per year and thus required Obama’s approval to be issued. And she is still in charge of the IRS Obamacare office.

Sounds to me that, to Obama, her harassment of conservatives at the IRS was a job well done.

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AP’s CEO calls the Obama administrations seizure of their phone records “unconstitutional” and says they are considering legal action.

2:59 pm

In other news: The CEO of the Associated Press today called the Obama administration’s seizure of their journalists’ phone records “unconstitutional,” noting that they are considering legal action.

What is most disturbing to me is that, despite the clear pattern of abuse of power by this administration — from using the IRS for political purposes to making illegal appointments to smuggling guns illegally to Mexico — too many of its supporters are still willing to make excuses for it.

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Great Britain’s first official astronaut has been picked for a five month mission on ISS in 2015.

10:01 am

Great Britain’s first official astronaut has been picked for a five month mission on ISS in 2015.

Astronaut Michael Foale was born in Britain, but he flew on Mir as an American. Britain meanwhile had banned spending any government money on space exploration in the 1960s, and hadn’t changed that policy until about two years ago. If the reaction to Canadian Chris Hatfield’s ISS mission is any guide, this mission will liven things up a bit for space exploration in the old country.

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“Simply a brute-force bullying effort in order to sideline grassroots opposition to the current administration.”

5:13 pm

“Simply a brute-force bullying effort in order to sideline grassroots opposition to the current administration.”

The article describes how the IRS focused on harassing small organizations that could not defend themselves while leaving untouched the big organizations with the punch to fight back, the typical behavior of a bully. More important, the IRS did not simply focus on harassing all small organizations, only those whose political philosophies differed from that of the President and the Democratic Party.

In other words, as I like to say, they were working for the Democratic Party, using the tax code to harass and destroy its opponents. Truly corrupt, tyrannical, and vile.

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Scientists have released the first topo map of Titan.

4:40 pm

Scientists have released the first topo map of Titan.

Whereas Earth’s tallest mountain towers nearly 9 kilometers above sea level, Titan’s topographic variations are mild: Its highest point is just half a kilometer above the mean and its lowest just 1.7 kilometers below.

Overall the detail here is not very great. None of the instruments on Cassini can see anything smaller than a half kilometer, about 1,500 feet, so the data doesn’t really show us the rough details. Moreover, the best data is spotty, as it has been accumulated by about a hundred Cassini fly-bys, rather than systematically by an orbiting spacecraft.

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Becket

6:01 pm

An evening pause: “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?”

Watch how a politician gets his underlings to do his dirty work, while keeping his own hands clean. From the 1964 film, Becket. Click through to part 15 to see that dirty work being done.

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Did multiple federal agencies target True the Vote, an organization that has successfully identified numerous examples of voter fraud?

12:14 pm

Did multiple federal agencies target True the Vote, an organization that has successfully identified numerous examples of voter fraud?

True the Vote spokesman Logan Churchwell sent Watchdog.org a timeline of the encounters, which include two unscheduled audits by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, six visits or phone calls by the Federal Bureau of Investigation looking for domestic terrorists, five rounds of questioning by the IRS over True the Vote’s application and one round over King Street Patriot’s application, both of which were filed in July 2010, and neither of which has been approved yet.

That’s not to mention the IRS audit (they actually got money back) or the audit by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and another by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

The only non-federal agency mentioned above is the last.

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Sarah Hall Ingram, the woman who ran the IRS office which harassed conservative organizations and now runs the IRS Obamacare office, received more than $100K in bonuses for her work, three of which were large enough that they requred Presidential approval.

10:15 am

Sarah Hall Ingram, the woman who ran the IRS office which harassed conservative organizations and now runs the IRS Obamacare office, received more than $100K in bonuses for her work, three of which were large enough that they requred Presidential approval.

Her bonuses for 2010, 2011, and 2012, the years in which the harassment policy was established and put into effect, were all higher than $25K, a bonus which cannot issued without the President’s okay.

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The impact of a 100 pound meteorite on the Moon in March produced the brightest flash ever recorded.

9:45 am

The impact of a 100 pound meteorite on the Moon in March produced the brightest flash ever recorded.

Anyone looking at the Moon at the moment of impact could have seen the explosion–no telescope required. For about one second, the impact site was glowing like a 4th magnitude star.

Ron Suggs, an analyst at the Marshall Space Flight Center, was the first to notice the impact in a digital video recorded by one of the monitoring program’s 14-inch telescopes. “It jumped right out at me, it was so bright,” he recalls.

The 40 kg meteoroid measuring 0.3 to 0.4 meters wide hit the Moon traveling 56,000 mph. The resulting explosion1 packed as much punch as 5 tons of TNT.

It will be really interesting to see the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter images of the impact site, which can’t be taken until the spacecraft passes over the site and can photograph it.

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The Mars rover Opportunity has now traveled farther than any other American rover, including the Apollo 17 rover on the Moon.

4:15 pm

The Mars rover Opportunity has now traveled farther than any other American rover, including the Apollo 17 rover on the Moon.

The team operating NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity received confirmation in a transmission from Mars today that the rover drove 263 feet (80 meters) on Thursday, bringing Opportunity’s total odometry since landing on Mars in January 2004 to 22.220 statute miles (35.760 kilometers). … The international record for driving distance on another world is still held by the Soviet Union’s remote-controlled Lunokhod 2 rover, which traveled 23 miles (37 kilometers) on the surface of Earth’s moon in 1973.

We have to once again remind ourselves that the roving part of Opportunity’s mission was originally only supposed to last 90 days, not 9 years.

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The woman who had been in charge of the IRS office when targeted conservatives beginning in 2010 now heads the IRS office that will enforce Obamacare.

3:52 pm

O goody: The woman who had been in charge of the IRS office when it targeted conservatives beginning in 2010 now heads the IRS office that will enforce Obamacare.

Her name is Sarah Hall Ingram. Remember it, you will hear that name again. Meanwhile, the man who announced his resignation from the IRS today, Joseph Grant, had been her deputy until 2012. He only took over her office after that date, which means most of the scandal occurred during her tenure.

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