The ticking IRS IT department time bomb.

The ticking IRS IT department time bomb.

Itโ€™s one thing to get a political hack to lie under oath or to take a fall to keep himself viable in that world, itโ€™s quite another to get the non political people who have no real skin in the game to be willing to perjure themselves before congress in an attempt to claim incompetence.

These guys simply arenโ€™t going to take the fall for a bunch of political hacks.

The clock is ticking, as soon as the IT guys are under oath the IRS scandal is going to explode and that blast is going to take a lot of people with them.

The only way this bomb will go off, however, is if the Republicans in Congress light the fuse. They have to push the issue, forcing these lower level IT people to testify. Sadly, these Republicans too often act like they are afraid of their own shadow, thus letting the worst acts of corruption slip without so much as a peep.

Hopefully the results of the November election will give these guys some backbone.

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The IRS claim that two years of Lois Lerner’s emails were lost when her computer crashed is simply not believeable.

Working for the Democratic Party: The IRS claim that two years of Lois Lerner’s emails were lost when her computer crashed is simply not believeable.

More here. And here a Democrat demands a special prosecutor.

I have been traveling so I missed posting the original story about this absurd claim by the IRS. It is a downright lie and a coverup and should be answered with prosecutions and imprisonment.

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What Cantor’s loss and Graham’s win mean.

What Cantor’s loss and Graham’s win mean.

I think Trende’s analysis here is the best I’ve seen of this ongoing primary election cycle. These three paragraphs especially pinpoint why things are happening as they are:

We are in a deeply anti-Washington environment, both throughout the country and in the Republican Party in particular. In this environment, representatives who pay insufficient attention to what is going on in their districts are in grave danger of losing. There are two components to this explanation.

First, analysts need to understand that the Republican base is furious with the Republican establishment, especially over the Bush years. From the point of view of conservatives Iโ€™ve spoken with, the early- to mid-2000s look like this: Voters gave Republicans control of Congress and the presidency for the longest stretch since the 1920s.

And what do Republicans have to show for it? Temporary tax cuts, No Child Left Behind, the Medicare prescription drug benefit, a new Cabinet department, increased federal spending, TARP, and repeated attempts at immigration reform. Basically, despite a historic opportunity to shrink government, almost everything that the GOP establishment achieved during that time moved the needle leftward on domestic policy. Probably the only unambiguous win for conservatives were the Roberts and Alito appointments to the Supreme Court; the former is viewed with suspicion today while the latter only came about after the base revolted against Harriet Miers.

His second component notes that the politicians who understand this environment win, while those who do not lose. Read the whole thing. It will help clarify not only what has happened but what will happen in the coming months.

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A petition signed by 87,000 people wants George Will fired by the Washington Post because he wrote a column saying things they don’t like.

Fascists: A petition signed by 87,000 people wants George Will fired by the Washington Post because he wrote a column saying things they don’t like.

The petition drive was put together by a group called UltraViolet led by Nita Chaudhary.

Who is UltraViolet co-founder Nita Chaudhary? In 2004, she was the Democratic National Committee’s first director of online. And she is the former campaign director at MoveOn.Org. … Chaudhary is also the wife of Jesse Lee, the White House’s director of progressive media and online response.

The author then asks this blunt but totally valid question:

And so I ask a genuinely scary question: does the broader progressive movement, which includes the White House media team, believe in free speech? By that I mean the actual kind of free speech, not the increasingly common progressive view where you profess fealty to the First Amendment as an anachronistic legal technicality solely so you can deflect criticism when someone calls out your totalitarian impulses. Real free speech means a culture of free speech, where we all confront opinions that bother us, in the understanding that regularly challenging our assumptions makes us a more thoughtful, cohesive, and, yes, tolerant people.

I think we can safely conclude that Chaudhary and Lee don’t believe in the meaningful kind of free speech.

And Lee is part of the team that runs the White House media operations. What does that tell us about the Democratic Party and the left?

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Obamacare has caused a significant spike in emergency room use.

Finding out what’s in it: Obamacare has caused a significant spike in emergency room use.

That 12 percent spike in the number of patients โ€” many of whom aren’t actually facing true emergencies โ€” is spurring the Louisville hospital to convert a waiting room into more exam rooms. “We’re seeing patients who probably should be seen at our (immediate-care centers),” said Lewis Perkins, the hospital’s vice president of patient care and chief nursing officer. “And we’re seeing this across the system.”

That’s just the opposite of what many people expected under Obamacare, particularly because one of the goals of health reform was to reduce pressure on emergency rooms by expanding Medicaid and giving poor people better access to primary care. Instead, many hospitals in Kentucky and across the nation are seeing a surge of those newly insured Medicaid patients walking into emergency rooms.

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Mississippi’s new voter ID law went into effect and there were no problems.

The biggest non-event in this past Tuesday’s election: Mississippi’s new voter ID law went into effect and there were no problems.

As Sid Salter from the Clarion Ledger put it, the voter ID law was a โ€œnon-eventโ€ and โ€œvoters expressed little, if any, inconvenience at the polls due to the new law.โ€ So how is the new law being covered by the media? Instead of reporting that the voter ID law is โ€œsailing through,โ€ the mainstream media has instead elected to remain silent.

The media did not report this non-story because it didn’t serve the partisan fear-mongering of the Democratic Party, which has been claiming since 2000 that voter id laws are designed to suppress the black vote — as if black voters are too stupid to have ID. The truth is that these laws only suppress one thing: voter fraud, something that it appears the Democratic Party depends on all too often to win elections.

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Oklahoma today joined Indiana and South Carolina in rejecting the Common Core education standards that have been imposed by the federal government.

Oklahoma today joined Indiana and South Carolina in pulling out of the Common Core education standards that have been imposed by the federal government.

All told, seventeen states are pushing back against the federal standards, with four states, Alaska, Nebraska, Texas, and Virginia, refusing to participate at all.

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