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.
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.
Finding out what’s in it: The IRS scandal and the fact that Obamacare uses the IRS for enforcement now has the public increasingly frightened.
What could go wrong? No one at the IRS would ever target you and your healthcare coverage because of your politics. Such things never happen in America!
According to two Congressman, almost 500 conservative organizations were targeted for harassment by the IRS, significantly more than the IRS has admitted to.
Working for the Democratic Party: When the IRS harassed this tea party group in Toledo in 2011, demanding what books they read or discussed, they responded by sending the IRS a copy of the Constitution.
“They wanted a synopsis of all the books we read,” Bower said. “I thought, I don’t have time to write a book report. You can read them for yourselves.”
Sadly, I doubt the IRS did that.
The myth of the scientific liberal.
The core trait of a scientific mind is that when its commitments clash with evidence, evidence rules. On that count, what grade do liberals deserve? Fail, given their reaction to the latest evidence on universal health care, global warming, and universal preschool.
The author then delves into each of these topics and shows how the liberal community refuses to deal with the evidence.
A judge has ruled that JPL had no right to displine five scientists for sending emails at work, protesting the security measures taken by the Bush administration after 9/11.
I have no problem with this decision, and in fact I applaud it, as I think it completely inappropriate for JPL to discipline anyone for expressing their opinions about the politics of our time. I contrast this ruling however, which essentially celebrates the freedom of JPL employees to attack the policies of a Republican administration using government resources, with the case of David Coppedge, who was fired by JPL because he happened to express conservative religious opinions while working at JPL. In the case of Coppedge, the courts ruled that it was okay for JPL to fire him.
The contrast illustrates the double standard of our time. In modern America, you are always allowed to express liberal or Democratic Party values, anywhere, anytime, and with whatever resources you can take advantage of. Freedom insists that you have that right. Should you express conservative values, however, be careful. You can be punished for doing so. For some reason (political I suspect) freedom does not permit the expression of these ideas, in all circumstances.
Finding out what’s in it: Seventeen of the nation’s largest healthcare insurance companies now say premiums will rise from 100 to 400 percent under Obamacare.
The key reasons for the surge in premiums include providing wider services than people are now paying for and adding less healthy people to the roles of insured, said the report.
Now ain’t that a surprise? The rates go up when you require insurance companies to provide more services while simultaneously requiring them to insure more sick people! Who wudda thunk it?
Actually, every Republican and conservative in the nation, as well as millions of Americans at townhall meetings in 2010, were screaming these basic facts of reality to the Democrats. They just refused to listen.
Working for the Democratic Party: Documents now show that IRS officials in Washington DC and California were also involved in targeting conservative organizations.
IRS officials at the agency’s Washington headquarters sent queries to conservative groups asking about their donors and other aspects of their operations, while officials in the El Monte and Laguna Niguel offices in California sent similar questionnaires to tea-party-affiliated groups, the documents show.
The IRS tried at first to make it sound as if only low level employees in Ohio were involved. That lie isn’t standing up very long.
The state of Obamacare in Hawaii: “We’re not going to have any health care.”
The article is a compilation of stories from Hawaii about the train wreak that is Obamacare and the difficulties it is causing to the healthcare industry there.
Working for the Democratic Party: There is now evidence that the IRS illegally leaked the tax records of conservative groups to their liberal opponents.
Mickey Kaus notes that this abuse did not have to be ordered by the big bosses in the Democratic Party. The people at the IRS are mostly Democrats, and will do it naturally if they simply feel that their bosses will look the other way.
Remember Romney supporter and businessman Frank VanderSloot? First attacked by the Obama campaign, he was then subjected to two audits, from the IRS and Labor.
Gee, I wonder why?
And here’s a story describing five other examples of the IRS being used to punish opponents of the Democratic Party.
