John Wayne in The Longest Day
An evening pause: As this is June 6, the anniversary of D-Day in World War II, let’s watch John Wayne show us how Americans once did it. From the 1962 film, The Longest Day.
An evening pause: As this is June 6, the anniversary of D-Day in World War II, let’s watch John Wayne show us how Americans once did it. From the 1962 film, The Longest Day.
The KGB comes to America: A senator asks Attorney General Holder if the Obama administration has spied on Congress with its access to Verizon phone records and Holder refuses to answer.
Video below the fold.
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Despite the failure of any climate model to predict the climate, the Obama administration is increasing the cost and strictness of regulation because of what it sees as the “social cost of carbon dioxide.”
[E]ssentially, the government is now incorporating newer climate models that capture the future damage from sea-level rise more explicitly. Those models also project that agriculture will suffer more heavily in a hotter world. So, in its central estimate, the federal government now assumes a ton of carbon-dioxide emitted in 2013 does roughly $36 in damage, rather than its previous estimate of $22, with the value rising each year.
Meanwhile, new data also suggests increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere might actually be beneficial, not damaging.
Shouldn’t the EPA and the Obama administration get their heads out of the sand?
Two IRS employees in Cincinnati have told congressional investigators that officials in Washington directed and established the policy of harassing conservative groups that began in 2010.
I especially like this quote:
Hofacre said she was outraged last month when IRS higher-ups, including Lois Lerner, then the head of the IRS tax-exempt division, blamed the problem on employees in Cincinnati. “I was furious,” Ms. Hofacre told interviewers. “It looked like Lois Lerner was putting it on us.”
Yup, that is exactly what Lerner was doing — looking for a fall guy.
Two more IRS agents have been put on leave.
Both are charged with accepting free food and other items inappropriately. One is also implicated in the IRS harassment scandal and is the deputy to Sarah Hall Ingram, who now runs the IRS Obamacare office and was in charge of the enforcement division when it was implementing the harassment policy.
The new freedom: An eleven-year-old in Maryland was suspended from school for merely talking about guns.
Hmm: A liberal campaign finance reform activist, who had called for the targeting of conservative organizations, had meetings with Obama about the time the IRS harassment began.
Did an IRS employee illegally leak the donor list of a conservative organization to one of its left wing opponents?
The day of reckoning looms: A new report from Social Security has raised its predicted unfunded liabilities over the next 75 years by one trillion dollars, for a total of $9.6 trillion.
According to the report, “Through the end of 2087, the combined funds [OASI and DI] have a present-value unfunded obligation of $9.6 trillion.” That is “$1.0 trillion more than the measured level of $8.6 trillion a year ago,” states the report, in reference to the data available for 2011. That $9.6 trillion shortfall equals approximately $83,894 per household based on the Census Bureau’s latest estimate that there are 114,430,000 households in the country.
The report also looks farther into the future and saw the shortfall rise to $23 trillion.
Said by an ABC news reporter today.
In related news, it appears that the IRS not only targeted conservative organizations which applied for tax exempt status, the tax agency also targeted the donors to those organizations.
Transcript excerpts of House testimony by two IRS employees show that the policy to harass conservatives was ordered by supervisors in Washington.
When these employees testify publicly, it will not be pretty for the Obama administration. The next question will of course be: Who were those supervisors, and who gave them their orders?
Working for the Democratic Party: When IRS thug Lois Lerner worked for the FEC she offered to drop a case against a conservative running for the Senate if he promised never to run for office again.
The conservative refused, and the case went to court, where all charges were dismissed. Nonetheless, the conservative subsequently decided that the harassment from the government, which also included a visit from the FBI, was not worth it, and has not run for office since.
In other words, Lerner’s harassment worked, to the benefit of the Democratic Party.
The IRS has told a House investigation that almost 90 IRS agents were involved in harassment scandal.
If I was Obama and had anything at all to do with this policy, I would be very very nervous. With this many IRS agents involved it will be impossible to control this scandal. Someone is going to spill the beans and tell us who established this harassment policy, and it certainly wasn’t some “low level rogue agents”, as Lois Lerner first claimed.
Above the law: The IRS has refused to meet the deadline for answering questions put to it by the Senate Finance Committee concerning its harassment of conservatives.
The questions were focused on trying to find out exactly who established the IRS’s policy in this scandal. If Obama was as outraged as he claims about this, and had nothing to do with it, he should have been very willing to make the IRS respond to this quickly. That they are instead stonewalling once again tells us that they, and Obama, do not really want the public to know who conceived the harassment policy. I wonder why.
In California, Obamacare will increase individual health insurance premiums from 64% to 146%.
The article is a very detailed response to the claims made last week by California that Obamacare is lowering rates.
Working for Islam: An attorney for the Obama Justice Department is warning Americans they could be prosecuted if they use social media to criticize Muslims.
In other words, Muslims can commit murders and terrorists acts, but don’t you dare say anything bad about them or else the Obama administration will come after you. And based on the IRS scandal, they are very much willing to do it.
One of the IRS agents who signed letters harassing conservatives was recently promoted.
Through 2012, then-Exempt Organization Specialist Stephen Seok signed many of the intimidating letters sent to conservative nonprofits. For example, this January 2012 letter sent to the Richmond Tea Party demanded the date, time and location of all group events, as well as copies of all handouts provided at the events, and the names and credentials of all organizers. Seok also demanded the names of all speakers and the contents of the speeches they made.
According to WXIX-TV/Fox 19 in Cincinnati, Seok is no longer an exempt organization specialist. He has since been promoted to “supervisor IRS agent.”
Remember, don’t listen to what Obama says, watch what he actually does. Expressions of outrage mean nothing if he rewards the agents involved.
Working for the PLO: Did the IRS target five pro-Israeli organizations for harassment because they opposed Obama’s policies towards Israel?
It’s official: Today 25 tea party organizations filed suit against the IRS and the Obama administration for its harassment of conservatives.
Future fascists: College students gladly sign a big thank you card to the IRS for specifically targeting conservatives for harassment. With video.
I repeat: The problem here isn’t that the IRS was researching and challenging organizations that wanted tax exempt status. The problem is that the IRS chose to only challenge (and harass) conservative organizations. The partisan and political nature of the agency’s actions is unacceptable in a civilized society. This video suggests that we no longer live in one.
IRS letters show that the decisions relating to the harassment of conservatives by the IRS came from upper management.
The IRS has been directed to lock down all its data in connection with the four ongoing investigations of its harassment of conservatives.
When government is bankrupt and freedom takes over — in Detroit.
“Why are liberals so rude to the right?”
This column was published not by the right but by the very leftwing Guardian. It has been years since I’ve seen a leftwing publication willing to let these kinds of questions be asked. Could we finally be seeing a crack in the wall of silence that the left has erected since the 1990s to protect itself?
A high school teacher faces punishment because he properly reminded his students of their Constitutional rights.
The bankruptcy of modern journalism.
The story focuses on CBS’s Sharyl Attkisson, one of the few establishment reporters willing to do some hardnosed investigation of the Obama administration, and the rumors that say she might be dumped by CBS because of this. Key quote, from her:
“[The White House and Justice Department] will tell you that I’m the only reporter — as they told me — that is not reasonable,” Attkisson told Ingraham. “They say The Washington Post is reasonable, the L.A. Times is reasonable, The New York Times is reasonable, I’m the only one who thinks this is a story, and they think I’m unfair and biased by pursuing it.”
Reporters should always be unreasonable when responding to the talking points of politicians. That so many establishment news outlets today try to be “reasonable” while condemning the few reporters who are tough tells us that this industry has been co-opted and is no longer trustworthy.
A new report on state economies shows that the states governed by Republicans generally outperform states governed by Democrats.
Two attorneys representing eleven organizations claim that the IRS’s targeting of conservatives is still ongoing and plan to file suit.
A Democratic Senator analyzes the First Amendment: “Are these people [bloggers and tweeters] journalists and entitled to constitutional protection?”
Yeah, makes sense. Protect some people, but really, no one ever thought the first amendment applied to those people.