It appears that the IRS targeted a Homeland Security whistleblower.
They slapped a lien on his home after investigating him for a year. They hassled him, determined that the government owed him money, and then poof! they were gone. The government still owes Black money.
It’s not just the tea party the IRS goes after, it’s anyone who causes trouble for those in power.
Leftwing debate: A professor at a Tennessee college ordered her students to publicly express support for gay rights or fail her course.
Students in a general psychology class at Columbia State Community College were directed by their professor to wear “Rainbow Coalition” ribbons for an entire day and express their support for the homosexual community, said Travis Barham, an attorney with the Alliance Defending Freedom. …
The professor told students to write a paper about how they were allegedly “discriminated against” because of their support for homosexual conduct. Several students objected to the assignment because their religious convictions prohibit them from supporting conduct their faith teaches them is immoral and unnatural.
Barham said the professor made it clear they had to follow the rules of the assignment to receive credit and allegedly told the students their own beliefs and viewpoints were irrelevant – even when they wrote their papers. The students were also barred from defending or explaining any other views regarding homosexual conduct, dismissing such arguments as “throwing Bible verses” at her,” the attorney said.
A recap of the broken promises of Obamacare.
Most of these will be familiar to regular readers of Behind the Black, though the article lays them out very clearly. However, this one is a new one to me:
If your state ran a program to help the uninsured, that’s also a violation, because Insurance is what the ACA is all about. It’s a mandate that you purchase insurance. Any unique solutions generated in one of our 50 incubators must stop even if they have served people well, because they will be in violation of the Affordable Care Act. One of the most successful state Medicaid systems was denied a waiver by the Obama administration despite its proven track record. The worst part of one-size-fits-all solutions is that they are tailored for no one. [emphasis in original]
A Virginia school board has voted unanimously to revise their zero tolerance policy in connection to guns after two boys were suspended for “using pencils like guns”.
Under the revised policy, school administrators can look at factors such as intentions of harm and whether the object is listed as a weapon to determine the punishment. Ordinary objects will not be considered weapons.
Well, duh. Sounds like common sense, doesn’t it?
Union civility: Union bosses threatened businesses and their families because they had legally hired non-union workers to do Hurricane Sandy cleanup work.
One of LGS’s contract workers recalled a union heckler telling them to “take your country ass back to Mississippi,” and “get your dumb Tennessee ass off that piece of equipment.” “What they would say is, ‘It sure would be sad if your trucks caught on fire,’” recalled the LGS worker, who spoke to TheDC News Foundation on condition of anonymity because the union also made threats against his wife and children.
Local 138 vice president Phil Capobianco made the threats, said the source. “[He] called and said, ‘Look you have to get us involved,’” recalled the source. “I said, first of all, I don’t have to; second of all, we’ve tried; and third you’ve said you refuse to work for the rates we can pay.” Then Capobianco said something that the source would never forget. “He said, ‘I would just hate for anything to happen,’” recalled the source. Capobianco then rattled off a list of the source’s home address, his wife’s name, his kids and their current whereabouts.
“I’m a combat veteran, and I have never in my life been as frightened as I was in that phone call when he started naming my family members and where they were and what they were doing,” recalled the source. “From that point forward I wasn’t polite to him. I told him exactly what he could do with himself, what he could do with his union, and what he could do with his threats.”
Leftwing justice: A liberal state bar spends three years destroying a lawyer’s career merely because she is conservative.
In interviews to Congress, Washington IRS supervisor Holly Paz admitted to scrutinizing tea party applications.
So, very clearly this harassment wasn’t limited to low level employees in Cincinnati. Lois Lerner lied.
Still, this article appears to me to be a leak specifically designed to exonerate the Obama administration and to make it seem that the harassment of conservatives was merely bad management. To me, it reads like hogwash. I suspect when we get to see the entire transcripts of her interviews and when Paz is finally forced to answer some questions publicly things won’t look so innocent. For one thing, it seems impossible that only conservative organizations were picked for harassment without someone making a conscious political decision. For another, the following claim doesn’t meet the smell test for me:
Paz said an IRS supervisor in Cincinnati had commonly referred to the applications as “tea party” cases. But, Paz said, she thought that was simply shorthand for any application that included political activity.
Yeah, right. Anyone could see plainly that “tea party” could also be shorthand for radical leftwing organizations or Democratic Party front groups.
Finally, note that the IRS has admitted to replacing Paz, though they haven’t yet said whether she was actually fired. If she was so innocent, why did they do this?
The world upside down: Even as the IRS was harassing any nonprofit using the word “patriot” in its name, it was rubberstamping exemptions for “Islamic” groups, even those that have violated laws and are thought to have links to terrorist organizations.
An eight grade high school student, suspended from school for wearing an NRA t-shirt, now faces the possibility of a year in jail.
My heart bleeds: A Democratic Congressman thinks it “is simply not fair” to make his staffers subject to Obamacare like everyone else.
The problem it seems is that
Dozens of lawmakers and aides are so afraid that their health insurance premiums will skyrocket next year thanks to Obamacare that they are thinking about retiring early or just quitting. The fear: Government-subsidized premiums will disappear at the end of the year under a provision in the health care law that nudges aides and lawmakers onto the government health care exchanges, which could make their benefits exorbitantly expensive.
Well, ain’t that just too damn bad. As I say, my heart bleeds.
The law is such an inconvenient thing: It appears that Homeland Security and Customs both train their officers to believe that pilots have “no right to refuse a search” of their planes.
To put it another way, these agencies think that they don’t need a warrant to search the private property of pilots.
Why doctors are bailing out of health insurance.
And yes, Obamacare is a major reason, though not the entire reason. It is instead the worst symptom of an on-going philosophical failure that goes back decades.
Stonewalling: Not one tea party group has yet been contacted by the FBI, one month after the IRS scandal began.
Worse, the head of the FBI can’t even name the FBI person in charge of the investigation.
Republican Rep. Jim Jordan lit into Mueller for his lack of knowledge during a House judiciary committee hearing. “This is the most important issue in front of the country in the last six weeks, and you don’t know who the lead investigator is?” Jordan asked, sounding shocked.
“At this juncture, no I do not,” Mueller responded.
“Do you know if you’ve talked to any of the victims?” Jordan went on. “Have you talked to any of the groups that were targeted by their government? Have you met with any of the tea party groups since May 14, 2013?”
“I don’t know what the status of the interviews are by the team that’s on it,” Mueller said.
Reached for comment Thursday afternoon, the FBI’s Washington, D.C. press office transferred TheDC to a long-ringing phone line and eventually hung up.
I have embedded the video of this hearing testimony below the fold. Watch and you will know that the claims of “outrage” by Obama and Holder are utter crap.
» Read more
The law is such an inconvenient thing: An audit has revealed that in 2010 and 2011 more than 1,000 IRS employees misused government charge cards.
The key quote from the article is this conclusion from the audit:
The inspector general’s bottom line conclusion in this area was that the IRS is more tolerant of its own employees who misuse government charge cards than it is of American taxpayers who fail to pay their taxes in a timely manner.
“Of particular concern is the fact that the IRS ask taxpayers to voluntarily pay taxes owed in a timely manner and yet was more tolerant when its employees became delinquent and defaulted on outstanding payments, violated the terms of the Citibank contract, abused a Government-provided resource (travel funding), and compromised the integrity of the IRS.”
Finding out what’s in it: Under Obamacare it looks like health insurance will be unaffordable for most low wage workers.
I guess that’s why Obama and the Democrats officially named Obamacare the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act”. Like most badly written government laws, it is achieving exactly the opposite of its intentions.
The world upside down: The Obama administration demands the right to snoop on American private communications, but it specifically forbids any spying in mosques.
Which might explain why this administration completely failed to catch the Boston marathon bombers, despite plenty of evidence that they were a threat.
No matter. They’ve got us covered. If anyone decides to criticize Obama they will be right on the case!
We’re here to help you: A researcher of fuel cells, manhandled and arrested because he used the wrong mailing labels in selling and shipping sodium to fund his research, was then prosecuted by the EPA because he wasn’t home to maintain his sodium supplies.
On May 27, 2004, federal agents in two black SUVs, waving assault rifles, forced Krister’s car off the road. Manhandling him as if he were a terrorist, they arrested, interrogated, and jailed him. For what? Putting the wrong shipping label—with the correct instructions, mind you—on a box of raw sodium that he sold on eBay.
A jury saw that it was an honest mistake and found Krister “not guilty.” But while Krister was on trial, sodium from his experiments sat in steel drums at an industrial warehouse. The Environmental Protection Agency learned of the additional sodium, determined that Krister had “abandoned” it, and charged him with a federal crime.
Although Krister’s expert witness testified that the sodium was stored properly, a jury found Krister guilty. He served 13 months in federal prison and eight more in a halfway house.
So, what did he do that was morally wrong? Nothing. Not that this matters to our lovely federal government. He did not obey their rules to the letter, even when they themselves made it impossible for him to do so. Thus, he must be destroyed.
The new freedom: The Secret Service raided a man’s home expressly and solely because he was a frequent critic of President Obama.
The man wasn’t violent, had never threatened Obama in any way (something the Secret Service admitted). His only crime was that he expressed his first amendment rights to criticize the president. For that, his house was searched and he was threatened.
