A report to be released this week says that senior IRS officials knew that agents were targeting tea party groups in 2011, even as they were denying that this was happening.
Increasingly it appears the Obama administration used the IRS as a tool for harassing its opponents.
Ten crazy and unconstitutional demands made by the IRS to conservative organizations in its effort to harass opponents of the Democratic Party.
All of the examples above are taken from actual IRS correspondence received by ACLJ’s 27 clients. There were many versions of the in-depth questionnaire sent to different organizations, suggesting there was more than one agent or one office involved. Though IRS officials blamed “low-level” employees in the Cincinnati office, which is the central IRS office in charge of tax exemptions, French said the abuse was far more widespread. ACLJ’s clients dealt with inquiries from IRS offices from “coast to coast.” Of ACLJ’s 27 clients, 15 finally had their status approved after 6-7 months with legal help. There are 12 groups whose status remains in limbo.
What could possibly go wrong? The immigration reform measure the Senate began debating yesterday would create a national biometric database of virtually every adult in the U.S.
The IRS admitted today that it targeted conservative political organizations during the 2012 election campaign.
Organizations were singled out because they included the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their applications for tax-exempt status, said Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups. In some cases, groups were asked for their list of donors, which violates IRS policy in most cases, she said.
The IRS also claimed that this action was “initiated by low-level workers in Cincinnati and was not motivated by political bias.” And I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell them.
The words of those who falsely blamed the Benghazi terrorist attack on an obscure YouTube trailer, and were then willing to abandon the First Amendment to defend their lies.
Yesterday’s dramatic congressional testimony about the deadly Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attacks on U.S. interests in Benghazi, Libya convincingly corroborated what was widely reported within days of the attack: that senior American officials on the ground knew immediately, despite the Obama administration’s storyline to the contrary, that the assault did not arise out of a “spontaneous” demonstration outside the U.S. Consulate in protest of an obscure YouTube trailer of a homemade anti-Islam movie called Innocence of Muslims.
Falsely assessing partial blame for the violence on a piece of artistic expression inflicted damage not just on the California resident who made it—Nakoula Basseley Nakoula is currently serving out a one-year sentence for parole violations committed in the process of producing Innocence—but also on the entire American culture of free speech. In the days and weeks after the attacks, academics and foreign policy thinkers fell over themselves dreaming up new ways to either disproportionately punish Nakoula or scale back the very notion of constitutionally protected expression.
The article then shows us who in American politics was willing to abandon freedom of speech for political reasons. If we have any courage, we should throw these words back in their face again and again and again and again.
House Republicans have refused to recommend anyone to the Obamacare Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), labeled “the death panel” by some.
“We believe Congress should repeal IPAB, just as we believe we ought to repeal the entire health care law,” the Boehner and McConnell letter reads.
I personally don’t bother with this new term. I just call them racists and bigots, for that is what they are.
The sad, strange, and ineffective story of the Canadian Firearms Registry.
Heh: A new research study finds that every time someone imagines socialism working, it does so, as much as 98 percent of the time!
“There’s no ambiguity about our findings,” said Dr. Halbert Thursday, “we have proved beyond a doubt: every time someone imagines the economic system of Socialism working, it does. Regardless of what time in history, too,” continued Halbert, “if someone imagined that Socialism has worked in the past, it did. If someone imagined it working currently, it does. And if a person imagined it will work in the future, it will. It’s the most amazing thing…Truly remarkable.”
The study consisted of interviewing 5000 economists and ordinary citizens around the world, from socialist and non-socialist countries alike. No matter where in the world, people realized the repeatedly attempted 200-plus-year-old social and economic system operated fairly, efficiently, and humanely nearly every time they fantasized it would. Said Dr. Halbert, “The people in North Korea we were allowed to interview were the most enthusiastic. They not only declared their economic system the best in the world, but the best ever in the solar system.”
Two reports released today show that gun homicides have dropped steeply in the United States since their peak in 1993.
The drop has coincided perfectly with a comparably steep rise in gun ownership nationwide. What does that tell us?
The European Union’s program to reduce carbon emissions is in disarray.
The article at the link is probably one of the worst written stories in the history of journalism. It is incoherent, disorganized, and confused. Moreover, the authors are so in favor of the regulations to limit fossil fuels that they are unable to even consider any reasons which might explain why Europe’s carbon credit market is collapsing and why the EU’s legislators rejected a rescue plan to save it.
In fact, because of their biases, the authors buried the real story, which is this:
Parliamentarians on April 16 voted 334 to 315 for blocking the carbon market rescue.
“This is the first time I can remember when parliament has put economic survival and jobs ahead of green orthodoxy,” said Roger Helmer, a member of the U.K. Independence Party who has been in the parliament for 14 years and opposes emissions trading. “It marks an absolute watershed.”
The bad economy and high debt in Europe is making the idea of raising taxes and adding more restrictions on fossil fuels very unappealing to politicians.
A second grader in Virginia has been suspended for pointing a pencil like a gun.
He was pretending to be a Marine (like his father) and going after bad guys.
Good news: North Korea has withdrawn two missiles from their launch site.
The article is very vague, unfortunately, about the rockets themselves and whether either were the orbital rockets that North Korea had been threatening to launch several weeks ago.
Finding out what’s in it: Head Start teachers now expect Obamacare to severely impact their work and income.
What’s not to like? Obamacare’s got everything: Complex regulation, big fines, and high cost, all rolled up in a single package that just keeps surprising us.
The Obama administration has given up trying to force a bible publisher to pay for contraceptives under Obamacare.
At the government’s own request, a federal appellate court Friday dismissed the Obama administration’s appeal of an order that stopped the president from enforcing the HHS birth control mandate against a Bible publisher. The administration’s retreat marks the first total appellate victory on a preliminary injunction in any abortion pill mandate case.
Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys representing Tyndale House Publishers say the administration is apparently nervous about trying to defend its position that a Bible publisher is not religious enough for a religious exemption to the mandate. “Bible publishers should be free to do business according to the book that they publish,” said Senior Legal Counsel Matt Bowman. “The government dismissed its appeal because it knows how ridiculous it sounds arguing that a Bible publisher isn’t religious enough to qualify as a religious employer.”
Video of a successful test firing of Liberator, the first working 3D printed gun.
Not surprisingly, the Democrats in Congress are rushing to outlaw this weapon, as is their typical approach to anything they don’t like: outlaw it, ban it, prohibit it, control it, restrict it.
In other related news, a news paper editor in Colorado has decided that the only fair way to debate the NRA is to send every member of the organization to prison.
No more due process in the clear-cut case of insidious terrorism. When the facts are so clearly before all Americans, for the whole world to see, why bother with this country’s odious and cumbersome system of justice? Send the guilty monsters directly to Guantanamo Bay for all eternity and let them rot in their own mental squalor.
No, no, no. Not the wannabe sick kid who blew up the Boston marathon or the freak that’s mailing ricin-laced letters to the president. I’m talking about the real terrorist threat here in America: the National Rifle Association. [emphasis mine]
Our modern liberal community: Restrict freedom, dump due process, imprison your opponents.
Why gun owners do not trust any anti-gun advocate.
Read the whole essay. It is blunt, honest, and outlines the nature of this growing tragic conflict better than anything I have ever read.
The Fourth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals has ruled that merely carrying a firearm in an open-carry state does not create reasonable suspicion of a crime.
Nathaniel Black was part of a group of men in Charlotte, North Carolina who local police officers suspected might be engaged in criminal activity. In particular, Officers suspected that after seeing one of the men openly carrying a firearm – which was legal in North Carolina – that there was most likely another firearm present. When police began frisking the men one by one, Mr. Black wished to leave, but was told he was not free to leave. Officers chased Mr. Black and discovered that he possessed a firearm; it was later discovered that he was a previously convicted felon. Mr. Black was charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm. Before the United States District Court for the Western District of North Carolina, Mr. Black moved to suppress the evidence against him. His suppression motion was denied, he entered a guilty plea preserving a right to appeal the denial of the suppression motion, and he was sentenced to fifteen (15) years imprisonment. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, however, determined that the officers had improperly seized Mr. Black, suppressed the evidence against him, and vacated his sentence.
Read the whole article. Black had visibly been doing nothing wrong, merely standing on the sidewalk talking to friends. And because it is perfectly legal to openly carry a firearm in North Carolina, the court ruled that the police had not been given cause to detain him or search him. In other words, it though it might be illegal for you to be carrying the gun (as it was with Black), the mere presence of the gun does not give the police the right to suspect him of a crime.
Today I attended an space industry conference here in Orange County, California, sponsored by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Unlike the Space Hackers conference which also occurred today and to which I was also invited, this was not a New Space get-together, but a standard aerospace event which included a lot of old time engineers from the big old-time companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
Most of the talks today were engineering related. For example, one described in detail the engineering advantages of building ion engines and solar sails at the molecular level, nanotechnology to the max. Another talk, which I found astonishing and exciting, was an analysis of the orbital mechanics of getting to Mars. This analysis found that using constant acceleration as low as .01 G it would be possible to get to Mars in weeks, not years, and without the necessity of waiting for the perfect launch window. You could launch almost anytime. Though we don’t have engines that as yet can provide this much constant low acceleration, these numbers are not so high as to make it impossible. With some clever refinements, it might be possible to come up with propulsion systems capable of these constant Gs, and to do it in the near future. If so, it will open up the entire solar system to manned exploration very quickly. Not only will we be able to travel to the planets in a reasonable time, the constant Gs would overcome the medical problems caused by prolonged weightlessness.
It wasn’t these interesting engineering presentations that got my juices flowing however. Instead, it was presentation on public policy issues that completely surprised me and made me think the future of the American aerospace industry is really going in the right direction. This significant take-away was further reinforced by the audience’s reaction to my lecture in the evening.
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Finding out what’s in it: Because of Obamacare Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Tennesee will raise premiums to its customers 3 to 30 percent in 2014.
