Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
Working for the Democratic Party: Did the IRS audit the conservative Leadership Institute in 2011 as part of its effort to target conservatives for harassment?
Socialism does it again! Venezuela has run out of toilet paper.
Why is it that socialist- and communist-ruled nations always have shortages of toilet paper? The Soviet bloc was famous for its lack of toilet paper. Now Venezuela has joined the party!
The law is such an inconvenient thing: A second appeals court has ruled that Obama’s appointments to the National Labor Relations Board were unconstitutional.
Earth under fire from the Sun!
The Sun’s sunspot production might be down, but we are still in the solar maximum, weak as it is, and this last week the Sun has been producing the strongest flares in years. The sunspot producing these flares is now rotating into a position where any further flares will be aimed at the Earth. Should be interesting.
And if you don’t yet know who Lois Lerner is, you might want to find out.
What could go wrong? In order to enforce Obamacare, the federal government, led by the IRS, is creating the largest federal database ever of the personal tax, income, and health records of American citizens.
Known as the Federal Data Services Hub, the project is taking the IRS’s own records (for income and employment status) and centralizing them with information from Social Security (identity), Homeland Security (citizenship), Justice (criminal history), HHS (enrollment in entitlement programs and certain medical claims data) and state governments (residency).
The data hub will be used as the verification system for ObamaCare’s complex subsidy formula. All insurers, self-insured businesses and government health programs must submit reports to the IRS about the individuals they cover, which the IRS will cross-check against tax returns.
Working for the Democratic Party: Two pro-life groups were told by the IRS that they had to change their position on abortion in order to get their tax exemption request approved.
In one case, the IRS specifically told them they had to guarantee in writing that their organization would not protest against Planned Parenthood.
In other news: The U.S. Departments of Justice and Education today demanded that every college and university in the United States establish strict speech codes that would violate the First Amendment and decades of legal precedent.
“They simply did what their bosses ordered.”
Remember this story when the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress try to pin the IRS scandal on a handful of low level IRS employees.
The IRS is deeply political — and very Democratic.
The analysis explains how President Obama doesn’t have to give an order to get what he wants. Instead, the partisan nature of the people who gravitate to these government jobs gives the Democrats an advantage, naturally.
In other words, you want freedom you don’t give power to the government, for it will eventually abuse that power, no matter what.
Did the IRS audit two long-established well-known Christian ministries because of their opposition to Democratic policies?
The timing of both audits is quite intriguing, especially considering that both organizations have existed for many decades without ever getting an audit. Note too that while the audits cost the organizations money, neither found anything wrong.
Sounds like harassment to me.
Working for the Democratic Party: After waiting fifteen months for IRS approval of its tax-exempt status and getting no response, a conservative group reapplied using a liberal-sounding name and got its approval in three weeks.
There are certainly a lot of caveats to this story, but the circumstances are quite interesting, considering all we now know about the IRS’s efforts to harass conservatives.
The Kepler mission has lost its second gyroscope, ending the ability of the telescope to aim precisely. More details here.
The telescope’s primary mission, to stare continuously at one section of sky, looking for exoplanet transits, is over, though it might still be re-purposed for other astronomical research.
Not in a vacuum: It appears that a number of Senate Democrats have been demanding, in writing, that the IRS harass conservative organizations since 2010. More details here.
The same Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee who this week is calling for hearings into IRS activities, specifically called on the IRS to engage in that very conduct back in 2010. And he wasn’t the only one. Just last year, a group of seven Senate Democrats sent another letter to the IRS urging them to similarly investigate these outside political organizations.
I mean, really, what’s the IRS for if not to harass your political opponents?
A small business owner explains the hard facts of Obamacare to his employees.
And it ain’t pretty.
Did the writings of a prominent Catholic professor, critical of Obama and Democratic Party policies, cause the IRS to audit her? Key quote:
Her writings for the Catholic Advocate soon ceased because, Hendershott admits, the IRS audit silenced her. If her suspicions are true, this may have been its chilling intention. “I haven’t written for them since the audit, because I was so scared,” she said (records show her last article for the organization was on July 10, 2010 — the same month the IRS audit unfolded).
So far, she has only shared her story with friends and those close to her, but in light of the recent IRS scandal, she has decided to speak out. “It was clear they didn’t like me criticizing the people who helped pass Obamacare,” she said of the audit,” later adding, ”The IRS is very frightening.”
Good news? New estimates of the 2013 federal deficit show it will be the lowest deficit since 2008.
The CBO claims that much of the reduction comes from new revenue, but I suspect that the real cause was sequestration, which actually forced real cuts in federal programs for the first time since Obama took office.
I put a question mark on the “good news” above in that the deficit will still be higher than $600 billion, and that spending is still out of control. This drop is merely the tiniest glimmer of hope in a black storm of disaster.
The IRS now faces a class action lawsuit over the illegal seizing of the medical records of 10 million patients.
In this case, the seizure, while illegal, was not for political reasons. It appears that in executing a search warrant for specific financial information, the 15 IRS agents also improperly grabbed the medical records.
Did the White House use the IRS to pressure this critic of Obamacare?
They called my editor and feigned concern that the Washington Times was taking advantage of me… by publishing my op-eds critical of Barack Obama. Around the same time the IRS put a hold on our tax refund that required an arbitrator and several months to resolve. We finally received our refund (and interest) but never an explanation. The local IRS office and the arbitrator seemed genuinely confused by the ordeal using terms like “very strange” and “unusual” but never could explain why it happened. One wonders. [emphasis mine]
A lot of these stories have been popping up in the news since the IRS scandal broke last week. In these examples, which differ from the IRS scandal itself in that the IRS hassled an individual in some petty way, the harassment occurred soon after it was clear that this individual was publicly critical of Democratic Party policies,
The competition heats up: Richard Branson recently told an audience in Dubai that the first commercial flight of SpaceShipTwo will occur before the end of 2013, and that commercial flights from Dubai will occur two years later.
