A summary of the IRS scandal testimony today before the House Oversight Committee.
With video. The key point is that the harassment of conservatives was managed and controlled in Washington, D.C., by high IRS officials including Lois Lerner and White House appointees.
The new brownshirts: The New Black Panther Party is offering a $10,000 bounty for the capture and kidnapping of George Zimmerman.
Watch the video at the link. (I was especially struck by the uniforms, which strongly reminded me of Nazi uniforms in the 1930s.) They are holding themselves above the law, with the right to kidnap and imprison anyone they happen to dislike or disagree with.
Update: A commenter has noted that this is not a new story. The Panthers offered this bounty back in March 2012, before Zimmerman was charged. I should note however that this really doesn’t change anything, as these thugs were still making themselves judge, jury, and executioners, and above the law.
The IRS scandal moves up the chain of command: Testimony today revealed that the harassment of conservatives was managed by a White House appointee in the IRS chief counsel’s office.
It appears that one of the four individuals whose tax records were illegally accessed for political reasons was Delaware senatorial Republican candidate Christine O’Donnell.
Investigators for Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, an influential Republican who serves on the Finance and Judiciary committees, have uncovered one key issue: a backdoor system in which state officials can access Americans’ private tax records in the name of investigating with little oversight or accountability. [emphasis mine]
Now isn’t that reassuring?
The law is such an inconvenient thing: A third federal court has ruled that Obama’s fake recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Broad violated the Constitution.
The worst part of this violation by Obama and his cohorts is that, even after these rulings, the illegally appointed board has continued to issue regulations, ignoring the decisions of all the courts.
Congresswoman Mary Edwards (D-Maryland) is proposing a merger of two NASA centers to save money.
The amendment would establish a Center Realignment and Closure Commission that would be given six months to evaluate “[c]onsolidating all rocket development and test activities of the Marshall Space Flight Center and Stennis Space Center in one location” and recommend a location promising the greatest cost savings. The commission would also be asked to look at “[r]elocating all operations of the Marshall Space Flight Center to both the Stennis Space Center and Johnson Space Center.”
Now this is interesting. The Marshall Space Flight Center has been looking for a reason to exist for decades, since the end of the Apollo program. Any smart private company would have shut it down long ago to save money.
But then, this is government. The article, hostile to the idea of eliminating any government facility, describes quite succinctly why NASA can’t build anything cheaply and why nothing in government ever shrinks. Our legislators don’t represent us, they represent the small number of employees at these specific government facilities.
Working for the Democratic Party: The harassment of conservative groups by the IRS was planned and run by officials in Washington, D.C., according to a retiring IRS lawyer who will testify Thursday in the House.
Retiring IRS lawyer Carter C. Hull implicated the IRS Chief Counsel’s office, headed by Obama appointee William J. Wilkins, and Lois Lerner, the embattled head of the IRS’ exempt organizations office, in the IRS targeting scandal and made clear that the targeting started in Washington, according to leaked interviews that Hull granted to the Oversight Committee in advance of Thursday’s hearing.
It appears he is naming names. Thursday’s hearing should be quite interesting.
O goody: The IRS now claims that the government official who willfully accessed confidential tax records illegally was not an IRS employee.
How does this make anything better? Instead of an IRS official rummaging through confidential tax records for political purposes, they apparently let others in government do it directly.
A survey shows that three quarters of all small businesses still plan to fire workers and cut hours in 2014 to avoid Obamacare, even though the Obama administration says it will not enforce the law unitl 2015.
This makes sense. The law is still the law, even if the Obama administration won’t enforce it. If a business doesn’t cut the hours or the number of its workers to avoid the Obamacare mandates, but then does not provide those mandates, its employees can then sue the business and likely win.
The result: Expect the economy to tank next year as this turkey of a law takes hold and chokes the life out of American enterprise.
The law is such an inconvenient thing: The Obama Treasury Department admitted today that the IRS tax records of several political candidates and campaign donors were illegally disclosed to unnamed government officials.
[O]f the four instances in which tax records were improperly accessed, three cases were determined to be “inadvertent.” “In the fourth case, we presented evidence of a willful unauthorized access to the Department of Justice, but the case was declined for prosecution,” Mr. George wrote. Of the three cases that the inspector general called “inadvertent” disclosures, Mr. George said his office referred one to Justice with a recommendation that no prosecution be brought. He said Justice officials agreed with his office’s assessment. No reason was given for Justice’s rejections of prosecutions.
I wonder why the Obama Justice Department declined to prosecute that fourth case, which was “willful” and thus very illegal.
An evening pause: There are many intellectual fools these days who love to denigrate the United States and its history. These words, however, tell its true story, honestly and simply. Woe to us if we forget it.
Violating the third amendment: Nevada police arrested a family for refusing to let officers use their homes as lookouts for a domestic violence investigation of their neighbors.
The Mitchell family’s claim includes Third Amendment violations, a rare claim in the United States. The Third Amendment prohibits quartering soldiers in citizens’ homes in times of peace without the consent of the owner.
