Political & Elections

Did anyone else notice the irony of an executive of the government agency which, as one of its major functions, with the weight of the coercive and punitive power of government behind it, asks questions and demands answers about some of the most personal aspects of everyone's lives, refusing to answer ANY questions?

From the administration that campaigned on transparency, no less.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9GSBT_-JoQ

If the supposedly nonpartisan IRS is perceived as skewing our taxes on the basis of our politics, then the entire system of trust in self-reporting is rendered null and void. Worse still, the bureaucratic overseer at the center of the controversy, Sarah Hall Ingram, now runs the IRS division charged with enforcing compliance with the new Obamacare requirements.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/349069/big-government%E2%80%99s-abuses-power-victor-davis-hanson

I think you'd have a hard time passing all that off as vetting per code, but there'll be no shortage of flacks making an attempt. Which reminds me of the best line of the last couple of days: "when you're carrying water for this administration, everything looks like a bucket".

About now would be when, if the shoe was on the other foot, the White House would be making noises about the creation of a website and toll-free lines to share your own poignant story about being screwed by the evil republican machine.

 

Disappointed, to tell the truth.

The Houston Chronicle has managed to bury everything, from the Benghazi hearing on, in the back pages. AP and NYT pieces that are equal parts amazement at the complexity of each of the issues and the republican partisanship at the root of it all.

I haven't much hope, because you're correct about the truth being whatever is repeated. Loudly. If the truth does ever comes out, it'll be long after it doesn't matter at all. One of the WaPo pieces I saw this week, while drowning one or another of the scandals in moral relativism, admitted Joe Wilson was a lying sack of ****.

Who would have ever known?

 

Whatever it took to get their man re-elected and I'm afraid I mistook Pelosi's incoherence on the issue as just more of the same. It's always the money - always - and she couldn't help but blather the truth out. I'd forgotten the man said Citizen's United was unfairly decided, to the court's face, thereby giving his minions their marching orders.

Baucus, outraged as he is, sure picked a good time to throw in the towel, didn't he?

Obama's diehard apologists in the media, such as Ezra Klein and various TNR writers, have been proffering the line that the IRS wasn't engaging in political targeting, but were only trying to deal efficiently with the surge in 501(c)(4) applications following Citizens United, that happened to be disproportionately tea party type groups. Even if this were the case, it would be unacceptable, but we now know that this explanation is just another pack of lies from this administration.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/05/there-was-no-surge-in-irs-tax-exempt-applications-in-2010/275985/

 

My favorite of the day, though it's early yet.

"Back in Chicago, Obama isn't known as your stand-up kind of guy. He's never met anyone that wouldn't fit under his bus."

When you've got MediaMatters calling Maureen Dowd a liar for mocking Jay Carney with: "it's not true, it's not true, it's not true, it's old news" and Nancy Pelosi somehow working a constitutional amendment into the expected mindless babble about the IRS scandal, it's funny as all get out. Finding out Ben Rhodes' brother's the head of CBS is more along the lines is just informative, though.

But, in the long run, will it mean anything or will the press, after smacking him around a bit, start feeling guilty and uneasy about where it might really lead to? Go back to circling wagons and regurgitating spin?

I think I've seen this movie.

 

 

Doesn't it go something like: "Be careful lest you become what you're fighting against"?

Spent years feeling guilty for voting for the party of Nixon, years being coaxed to feel guilty for thinking profiling was a sensible thing, and here they are taking that chain off my leg. Free at last.

That Plouffe thinks "no harm, no foul" wipes their sins away is just too rich for words.

1. He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, endeavoured to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposed not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be intitiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.

Articles of Impeachment of Richard Nixon, adopted by House Judiciary Committee on July 27, 1974.

http://watergate.info/impeachment/articles-of-impeachment