PK'S NOTE: Here's the link to the article this is in response to, if you can bear it:The Real I.R.S. Scandal by Jeffrey Toobin):
Don't Buy the 'Social Welfare' Defense of the IRS
A lot of the calls for the Internal Revenue Service to crack down on
political 501(c)(4) organizations -- which is what the IRS was trying to
do when it touched off the scandal
over Tea Party groups -- focus on the claim that ideological, political
groups are obviously not “social welfare” organizations as required
under the law. Not so fast.
“Social welfare” is a term of art
that doesn’t mean exactly what it sounds like. To qualify, a group must
have the aim of producing benefits that accrue to the community as a
whole, not just its members. “Benefit” and “community” are construed
broadly; organizations do not have to demonstrate that the policies they
promote are good or that they benefit everyone.
You can see this in the IRS regulations governing 501(c)(4) groups. These groups may engage in unlimited lobbying related to their social welfare missions. The IRS offers these specific examples of acceptable activity: “promotion of legislation on animal rights,” “advocacy of anti-abortion legislation,” “legalization of currently illegal activity” and “advocacy of changes in the tax law.”
The groups can also engage in electioneering, even endorsing candidates. Here’s the IRS: “An exempt IRC 501(c)(4) organization may intervene in political campaigns as long as its primary activity is the promotion of social welfare.”
So when Jeffrey Toobin writes in the New Yorker today that what the IRS did was OK in part because “501(c)(4) organizations must refrain from traditional partisan political activity, like endorsing candidates,” he’s wrong.
There are limits: 501(c)(4)'s can't have electioneering as a primary purpose (such organizations must incorporate as 527s, which have to disclose their donors) and they cannot coordinate directly with political parties. They can’t have a narrow focus of advancing their funders’ financial interests; for example, utility companies can’t form a 501(c)4 to lobby for higher utility rates. That doesn’t likely implicate groups with broad goals like shrinking the government.
Some groups are probably running afoul of those regulations, though one reason the rules aren’t enforced well is that “primary” and “electioneering” are difficult to define. But it’s not correct to say that any group that looks nakedly political must be abusing its 501(c)4 status. There is a lot of room to be very political and still be promoting “social welfare” under the law.
You can see this in the IRS regulations governing 501(c)(4) groups. These groups may engage in unlimited lobbying related to their social welfare missions. The IRS offers these specific examples of acceptable activity: “promotion of legislation on animal rights,” “advocacy of anti-abortion legislation,” “legalization of currently illegal activity” and “advocacy of changes in the tax law.”
The groups can also engage in electioneering, even endorsing candidates. Here’s the IRS: “An exempt IRC 501(c)(4) organization may intervene in political campaigns as long as its primary activity is the promotion of social welfare.”
So when Jeffrey Toobin writes in the New Yorker today that what the IRS did was OK in part because “501(c)(4) organizations must refrain from traditional partisan political activity, like endorsing candidates,” he’s wrong.
There are limits: 501(c)(4)'s can't have electioneering as a primary purpose (such organizations must incorporate as 527s, which have to disclose their donors) and they cannot coordinate directly with political parties. They can’t have a narrow focus of advancing their funders’ financial interests; for example, utility companies can’t form a 501(c)4 to lobby for higher utility rates. That doesn’t likely implicate groups with broad goals like shrinking the government.
Some groups are probably running afoul of those regulations, though one reason the rules aren’t enforced well is that “primary” and “electioneering” are difficult to define. But it’s not correct to say that any group that looks nakedly political must be abusing its 501(c)4 status. There is a lot of room to be very political and still be promoting “social welfare” under the law.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-14/don-t-buy-the-social-welfare-defense-of-the-irs.html
PK'S NOTE CONTINUED: B.o.o.y.a.h.
The Core Competency of the Democratic Party
It's
stealing elections. That has to be the answer to the IRS caper. 2010
shook the ramparts of the radical Left. Out of the woodwork came Tea
Partiers, either literally or as conservatives for which the Tea Party label was a hold-all.
What
to do for 2012? Gotta defund "the enemy." Tax exempts cannot
literally politic for candidates but they can offer polemics, and raise
and shape issues. Conservatives through the Tea Party had their voice -
limited government; fiscal responsibility; free markets. An excellent
summary of the American ideal and one that people responded to in 2010,
depriving the Dems of the only thing dear to their hearts - power. The
Repubs took back the House.
If
that wave was still building out there - and everybody missed it in
2010 - what would or could happen in 2012? So, the word went out -
harass, defund, intimidate, ridicule conservatives and particularly big
conservative donors. How did Propublica become the recipient of IRS data? That
should make a great scene in a movie. Who at the IRS made the pitch?
Who sent the data? Whose fingerprints are on this caper?
We don't know yet. But we do know that the Left cannot win a fair fight. The election
has to be "managed" whether through Jim Crow, or through big city
machines, or through the welfare plantation, or through ballot stuffing
and now, through depriving your rivals of a voice by using the police
powers of the state!
"This is the most transparent administration in history."
Not.
Stewart mocked the blasé manner in which Obama answered the question, and pointed out that this is not the first time Obama has claimed to find out news at the same time as the rest of us. Stewart highlighted how Obama said the same thing about the Fast & Furious ATF gun-running scandal and the time when a low-flying plane freaked out everyone in New York City. And Jay Carney admitted that’s the same way Obama found out about the Justice Department seizing AP phone records.
Stewart quipped, “I wouldn’t be surprised if President Obama learned Osama bin Laden had been killed when he saw himself announce it on television.”
Stewart then brought on correspondent John Oliver, who explained how Obama shouldn’t have had the British prime minister at his press conference yesterday if he wanted a distraction from the press scrutiny, he should have palled around with Prince Harry.
Watch the video below, courtesy of Comedy Central:
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/stewart-tears-apart-obama-you-cant-keep-saying-you-found-out-about-news-at-the-same-time-as-us/
PK'S NOTE: And this is from the Washington Post of things, by a liberal writer.
Obama, the uninterested president
President Passerby needs urgently to become a participant in his presidency.Late Monday came the breathtaking news of a full-frontal assault on the First Amendment by his administration: word that the Justice Department had gone on a fishing expedition through months of phone records of Associated Press reporters.
And yet President Obama reacted much as he did to the equally astonishing revelation on Friday that the IRS had targeted conservative groups based on their ideology: He responded as though he were just some bloke on a bar stool, getting his information from the evening news.
In the phone-snooping case, Obama didn’t even stir from his stool. Instead, he had his press secretary, former Time magazine journalist Jay Carney, go before an incensed press corps Tuesday afternoon and explain why the president will not be involving himself in his Justice Department’s trampling of press freedoms.
“Other than press reports, we have no knowledge of any attempt by the Justice Department to seek phone records of the Associated Press,” Carney announced.
The president “found out about the news reports yesterday on the road,” he added.
And now that Obama has learned about this extraordinary abuse of power, he’s not doing a thing about it. “We are not involved at the White House in any decisions made in connection with ongoing criminal investigations,” Carney argued.
Reuters correspondent Jeff Mason asked how Obama felt about “being compared to President Nixon on this.”
The press secretary laughed. “People who make those kinds of comparisons need to check their history,” he said.
Carney had a point there. Nixon was a control freak. Obama seems to be the opposite: He wants no control over the actions of his administration. As the president distances himself from the actions of “independent” figures within his administration, he’s creating a power vacuum in which lower officials behave as though anything goes. Certainly, a president can’t know what everybody in his administration is up to — but he can take responsibility, he can fire people and he can call a stop to foolish actions such as wholesale snooping into reporters’ phone calls.
At the start of Tuesday’s briefing, the AP’s Jim Kuhnhenn pointed out that in all the controversies of the moment — the Benghazi “talking points,” the IRS targeting and the journalists’ phone records — “you have placed the burden of responsibility someplace else. . . . But it is the president’s administration.”
President Passerby, however, was not joining the fray. Carney repeated Obama’s assertion that the IRS’s actions would be outrageous only “if” they are true. Never mind that the IRS has already admitted the violations and apologized.
The press secretary said repeatedly that “we have to wait” for a formal report by the agency’s inspector general before the most powerful man in the world could take action. By contrast, Carney didn’t think it necessary to wait to assert that nobody in the White House knew about the IRS activities until “a few weeks ago.” (They apparently didn’t tell the boss about the matter until Friday.) Tuesday night, Obama issued a statement saying he had seen the I.G. report and directed Treasury Secretary Jack Lew “to hold those responsible for these failures accountable.”
The response to the deep-dive into AP phone records — more than 20 work, home and mobile phone lines in three cities over two months — also got the President Passerby response: “He cannot comment specifically on an ongoing criminal investigation or actions that investigators at the Department of Justice may or may not have taken.”
It didn’t matter to Carney that the Justice Department had already admitted the actions in a letter to the AP. “But we know it happened, just as the IRS admitted what it had done,” Fox News’s Wendell Goler protested.
“Again, it would be inappropriate to comment,” said Carney, one of the 42 times he used the words “appropriate” or “inappropriate” in his hour-long briefing. One of the few things Carney thought it appropriate to say was that Obama thinks the press should be “unfettered.”
NPR’s Ari Shapiro asked Carney to square Obama’s belief in an unfettered press with the fact that he has prosecuted twice as many leakers as all previous administrations combined.
Carney said Obama’s love of press freedom “is backed up by his support for a media shield law.” This would be the shield law that died in Congress in 2010 because of Obama’s objections.
Alexis Simendinger, from RealClearPolitics, challenged Carney to harmonize his refusal to meddle in an “ongoing investigation” with Obama’s comments on the Trayvon Martin case last year, when a Justice Department investigation was ongoing.
“Come on,” Carney replied with scorn, repeating the excuse that “we have no knowledge” of the phone snooping “beyond the press reports that we’ve read.”
And that’s just the problem.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-obama-the-uninterested-president/2013/05/14/da1c982a-bcd7-11e2-9b09-1638acc3942e_story.html
The End of the Obama Illusion
President Obama is shattering the illusions of his supporters, and eyes are opening, even among his former media allies. As if waking from a slumber, a newly aggressive White House press corps yesterday raked Jay Carney over the coals over various lies and evasions, prompting Megyn Kelley of Fox News to quip, "What's happened? Who are these reporters who showed up here?"They are disillusioned and angry liberals who are starting to grasp that they have been lied to, who realize that a skeptical stance is necessary when examining a narrative offered by team Obama on Benghazi or the IRS scandal.
Even worse, the media have discovered that they are themselves targets of government abuse, just like those Tea Partiers the IRS was picking on. The Associated Press, whose newsroom and reporters' personal phone line records were secretly subpoenaed, is collectively owned by members of the mainstream media. As the largest newsgathering organization in the country, it stands for media freedom itself in their minds. An attack on it is an attack on them.
Right now, there's a lot of cognitive dissonance going on in the punditocracy: how could a constitutional law professor turn on the free press? Obama's just not behaving like the good guy they thought him to be. Awkward questions of character are being raised in their minds.
The love they offered Obama all those years has not been reciprocated. John Yoo observed, "[T]his is how you get treated when you are in a politician's pocket." As with many scorned lovers, they are ripe to reframe their understanding of their ex-amour in a more negative light. The illusion of Obama the godlike light-bringer, the man who could bring us together, has dissolved into an uncomfortable, soon to be angry, memory.
And therein lies serious peril for President Obama. Once it becomes accepted that his narratives are false, a Pandora's Box opens. To a remarkable degree, the biographical narrative he offered to the media when he suddenly appeared on the national scene, and which they accepted and aggressively defended, was built on illusion. Serious questions about Frank Marshall Davis, Bill Ayers, his authorship of Dreams from my Father, and his academic transcripts once were rudely brushed aside as racism and paranoia.
Two polar opposite ways of seeing Barack Obama emerged in his first presidential campaign. The mainstream view saw an inspiring, brilliant high achiever who could bring us together, while among conservatives, as exemplified over the years at American Thinker, a decidedly more negative interpretation of the biographical facts emerged. Just a few of many possible examples include:
| Mainstream media | Conservative dissident | |
| Brilliant academic career | Transcripts remain sealed, affirmative action could have helped him | |
| Community organizer -- man of the people, leader of others, cares about the poor | Saul Alinsky follower, ginned up astroturf demonstrations, ruthless | |
| Constitutional law professor at famous university | Lecturer, leftist course, no academic distinction | |
| Just a guy in the neighborhood. You're a McCarthyite | Started his political career in Bill Ayers's living room | |
| Dreams proves he's brilliant | Dreams was written by Bill Ayers | |
| Inspiring community leader | Annenberg Chicago Challenge he headed accomplished nothing | |
| Greatest. Orator. Ever. | Off the teleprompter, not so much. |
The problem is that not only is Obama a liar; he is a phony. And bit by bit, the evidence is becoming clearer to more and more of the people who were taken in.
This drawing, the so-called Young Lady/Old Lady illusion, illustrates the way reframing can change the way a person perceives something. It is possible to see either a young lady or an old lady in the picture below:
The big worry now for Obama has to be what Professor Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit calls a "preference cascade." He explains:
In his book, Private Truths, Public Lies, economist Timur Kuran looked at the way "preference falsification" can distort societies, and then collapse suddenly.
The classic example is in a totalitarian society, where everyone has to pretend to love the Great Leader on pain of death. If the authorities manage it right, 99% of the populace can be ready to revolt -- but won't, because each individual thinks he or she is the only one who feels that way. This works until some event suddenly shocks the system, and people realize that they're not alone. When that happens, things can go south in a hurry. That's a "preference cascade."Some on the right are already talking impeachment, which is a big mistake. Others counsel speed. Instead, Obama's opponents would be wise to focus on discovery of facts, taking all the time necessary to staff up a highly capable select committee or two, issuing subpoenas and using congressional hearings to ferret out the truth of Benghazi and the suppression of conservative groups taking advantage of the Citizens United decision and setting up nonprofit counterparts to Media Matters and other progressive groups.
The United States isn't a totalitarian society, but media bias has the same sort of effect: By privileging some views and suppressing others, the media give Americans, and itself, a distorted idea of reality. Then, when things crack, it's a big surprise.
The preference cascade is our friend. Let the Committee Democrats decide which side they want to be on. Already, the signs are that House Democrats are not about to defend the IRS or obstruct the inquiry in any way. Having thrown the CIA under the bus on the Benghazi talking points, the Obama administration has delivered a message to potential witnesses and fall guys: you're expendable.
Once upon a time, Barack Obama rode as high as a politician can get, at least as the big media portrayed him. It's a long way down.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/05/the_end_of_the_obama_illusion.html#ixzz2TNMzeIFF
IRS Demanded Tea Party Reading Lists, Facebook Posts
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) demanded that limited government and tea party groups produce Facebook posts, donor lists, and even what books group members were reading, reports Politico.The IRS’s hardball political tactics were all part of a strategy to relegate conservative groups to a “state of purgatory” that kept their tax-exempt statuses in limbo to neutralize their effectiveness, says Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA).
The strategy worked: over 80% of the conservative groups targeted were delayed more than a year, and some cases were left open for over three years, according to the IRS Inspector General’s report released late Tuesday.
The thin 54-page IG report, however, raises more questions than it answers, names no names, and contains gaping holes.
The report, for example, does not examine the possible connections or alliances between the IRS personnel who implemented the conservative targeting strategy and outside political operatives or campaigns. Instead, the IG auditors merely asked IRS personnel whether they were “influenced by any individual or organization outside the IRS” and, not surprisingly, “all of these officials stated that the criteria were not influenced by any individual or organization outside the IRS.”
That was the extent of the IG’s “investigation” into whether the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups involved coordination with campaigns or political operatives.
The IG report ignored core issues at the heart of the scandal. It did not, for example, mention the IRS’s leaking of conservative groups’ tax materials to media organizations. As Breitbart News reported yesterday, the progressive-leaning investigative journalism group ProPublica admitted that the IRS officials at the heart of the scandal gave them “confidential” tax-related documents of conservative groups that were “not supposed to be made public” and that ProPublica received no similar documents for liberal groups—all facts the IG report curiously failed to include.
Also missing from the report by the Treasury Department--overseen by President Barack Obama’s former chief of staff-turned-Treasury Secretary Jack Lew--was any mention of claims that one of Obama’s reelection campaign co-chairmen, Joe Solmonese, may have used leaked IRS documents from a conservative group, the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), to attack his GOP challenger Mitt Romney.
The IG report also failed to mention the IRS’s targeting of Billy Graham, the targeting of pro-Israel groups, the expediting of Obama’s brother’s tax-exempt group, or the IRS’s demands that conservative educational groups release lists of the high school and college students it trained.
Indeed, the IG report was so incomplete that it even admitted inspectors "could not specifically determine who had been involved in creating the criteria" used to go after conservative groups.
Even ardent Obama supporters, like top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) are expressing frustration with the IRS scandal. "I think laws were probably broken,” said Cummings, “but at the least there have been some improper actions on the part of the IRS."
Cummings added: “I’d love for my committee to have a hearing on this. Because I have great concerns about what they knew, when they knew it, and what if anything they did about it, whether or not they were honest with the Congress.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) agrees.
"No more stonewalling, no more incomplete answers, no more misleading responses, no holding back witnesses, no matter how senior their current or former positions—we need full transparency and cooperation," said McConnell.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/05/15/IRS-Demanded-Tea-Party-Reading-Lists-Facebook-Posts
IRS IG Report Could Not Determine Who Was Involved in Creating Criteria
It's Deja Vu all over again. From the Inspector General's report on IRS profiling: "We could not specifically determine who had been involved in creating the criteria." And that morsel of information was relegated to a footnote.How is that even possible? No emails? No memos? Did everyone at the IRS spontaneously decide to single-out applicants with BOLO (be on the look out) words like "tea party" or groups critical of the government, but not words like "progressive?"
Now don't get me wrong, I don't think any group should be singled-out. Either you meet the IRS criteria for non-profit status or you don't.
Let's add this to the list of other things we couldn't find out: Who gave the "stand-down" order during the Benghazi attack? Who altered the Benghazi talking points? Who is intimidating Benghazi witnesses? Who authorized Fast & Furious?
Let me guess...it was some "low-level" staffer.
http://www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2013/05/15/IRS-IG-Report-Could-Not-Determine-Who-Was-Involved-in-Creating-Criteria
Obama Admin Ignores Regulatory Agenda Deadline
The Obama administration has neglected to release its regulatory agenda for the second year in a row, leaving businesses apprehensive and unprepared for new federal regulations.
The Hill reports:
The Obama administration’s failure to release its legally required regulatory agenda has business groups worried that they could be blindsided by costly new federal rules.The Unified Agenda “provides uniform reporting of data on regulatory and deregulatory activities under development throughout the Federal Government,” and covers “60 departments, agencies, and commissions.” Federal agencies have been required to publish this information since 1978.
Federal regulators are required to release a Unified Agenda in the spring and fall — typically occurring in April and October — that details plans and anticipated deadlines for regulations.
But Obama officials have missed the spring deadline for the second year in a row, stoking anxiety for businesses that want to know what mandates and rules are coming down the pike.
“The Regulatory Information Service Center (RISC)—an office within the General Services Administration—and the OMB are charged with compiling the regulatory playbook every six months,” according to the Hill.
Small businesses have been particularly wary of the missing regulations because unlike larger corporations with more “manpower,” they “rely on the documents to anticipate what new rules are on the horizon.” Consequently, “the advanced notice that the agenda provides is also crucial for stakeholders because most of the deliberations over regulations and revisions happen before official proposal documents are even released.”
Without a unified agenda, businesses do not know what regulations the administration plans to implement. Each agency may implement different rules that effect specific industries.
The Hill quotes Rosario Palmieri, vice president of infrastructure, legal, and regulatory policy at the National Association of Manufacturers, as being worried about this possibility:
“Each agency is kind of off on its own, trying to accomplish its specific mission.”
It’s often not one regulation that can burden an industry, Palmieri said, but several can combine to create a flurry of compliance hurdles if agencies don’t coordinate.
“Two agencies might be doing something separately that could have an impact on business that they don’t even realize,” he said.
http://freebeacon.com/obama-admin-ignores-regulatory-agenda-deadline/
PK'S NOTE: Ladies and gentlemen, meet your scapegoat...Don't get me wrong, she is a criminal but they will eventually put this all on her and protect the White House.
IRS official Lerner speedily approved exemption for Obama brother’s ‘charity
Lois Lerner, the senior IRS official at the center of the decision to target tea party groups for burdensome tax scrutiny, signed paperwork granting tax-exempt status to the Barack H. Obama Foundation, a shady charity headed by the president’s half-brother that operated illegally for years.According to the organization’s filings, Lerner approved the foundation’s tax status within a month of filing, an unprecedented timeline that stands in stark contrast to conservative organizations that have been waiting for more than three years, in some cases, for approval.
Lerner also appears to have broken with the norms of tax-exemption approval by granting retroactive tax-exempt status to Malik Obama’s organization.
The National
Legal and Policy Center filed an official complaint with the IRS in May
2011 asking why the foundation was being allowed to solicit
tax-deductible contributions when it had not even applied for an IRS
determination. In a New York Post article dated May 8, 2011, an officer
of the foundation admitted, “We haven’t been able to find someone with
the expertise” to apply for tax-exempt status.Nevertheless, a month later, the Barack H. Obama Foundation had flown through the grueling application
process. Lerner granted the organization a 501(c) determination and
even gave it a retroactive tax exemption dating back to December 2008.The group’s available paperwork suggests an extremely hurried application and approval process. For example, the group’s 990 filings for 2008 and 2009 were submitted to the IRS on May 30, 2011, and its 2010 filing was submitted on May 23, 2011.
Lerner signed the group’s approval [pdf] on June 26, 2011.
It is illegal to operate for longer than 27 months without an IRS determination and solicit tax-deductible contributions.
The ostensibly Arlington, Va.-based charity was not even registered in Virginia despite the foundation’s website including a donation button that claimed tax-exempt status.
Its president and founder, Abon’go “Roy’ Malik Obama, is Barack Obama’s half-brother and was the best man at his wedding, but he has a checkered past. In addition to running his charity, Malik Obama ran unsuccessfully to be the governor of Siaya County in Kenya. He was accused of being a wife beater and seducing the newest of his twelve wives while she was a 17-year-old school
girl.Sensing something wrong when he and a group of Missouri State students
visited Kenya in 2009, Ken Rutherford, winner of the 1997 Nobel Peace
Prize for his work on banning landmines, determined that Malik Obama was
an “operator” and elected to give a donation of 400 pounds of medical
supplies to a local clinic instead.“We didn’t know what he was going to do with them,” Rutherford told the New York Post in 2011.
It is also not clear what the Barack H. Obama Foundation actually does. Its website claims the organization has built a madrassa and was building a imam’s house but there is no other evidence that the nonprofit was actually helping poor Kenyan children.
“The Obama Foundation raised money on its web page by falsely claiming to be a tax deductible. This bogus charity run by Malik had not even applied and yet subsequently got retroactive tax-deductible status,” Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, told The Daily Caller. Boehm described Malik Obama’s attempt to raise money as constituting “common law fraud and potentially even federal mail fraud.”
Boehm doubted that the charity is doing what it says it’s doing and wondered why the charity was given tax-exempt status so quickly after the evidence of wrongdoing came to light.
“How do you get retroactive tax-exempt status when you haven’t even applied to get it in the first place?” Boehm said.
Lerner continues to draw fire for her handling of the IRS targeting of conservative and citizen groups, but her colleagues have started to defend her, alleging that she behaves “apolitically.”
Larry Noble, who served as general counsel at the FEC from 1987 to 2000, hired and promoted Lerner. “I worked with Lois for a number of years and she is really one of the more apolitical people I’ve met,” Noble told The Daily Beast. “That doesn’t mean she doesn’t have political views, but she really focuses on the job and what the rules are. She doesn’t have an agenda.”
Lerner could not be reached for comment. Calls to the Barack H. Obama Foundation went directly to the organization’s voicemail and were not returned.
The politics of the political right,” Charles Blow blew in a recent New York Times column, “have become the politics of paranoia.” If this is true, it is to the Right’s immense credit. Contrary to the derisive dismissals of our elites, paranoia is among the most transcendent of American virtues. In a week in which it was revealed that the Department of Justice undertook
As it happens, Mr. Blow’s infelicitous sneer was a weak echo of the president’s. On May 5, Barack Obama shamefully told graduating students at Ohio State University:
Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems. Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave, and creative, and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can’t be trusted.This statement is telling. Contrary to the manner in which both Al Gore and President Obama customarily use the term, “self-rule” does not in fact describe a process by which the citizen submits himself to the state and, in return, is given occasion to cast a vote on how the government may run the more significant parts of his life. Instead, “self-rule” denotes a system in which a free man may maintain control over the lion’s share of his decisions while maintaining some say over the government’s conduct in those few areas where it is necessary for government to operate.
To listen to the amateur philosophizing of Obama and Blow is to be unhappily reminded of a 1767 essay, “On Public Happiness,” in which that execrable Frenchman Jean-Jacques Rousseau argues terrifyingly that one should “give man to the State or leave him entirely to himself.” This dichotomy — pristine solitude or total immersion in the State — is both false and dangerous. Yet Obama shows a particular fondness for it. The government cannot become tyrannical, it essentially holds, because, as Obama seems never to tire of intoning, the government is us. How many times has he insinuated that those who issue warnings about government are “anarchists”?
James Madison, writing as “Publius” in Federalist No. 47, insisted that it didn’t matter whether tyranny was “hereditary, self-appointed or elective,” because tyranny was tyranny. Who cares whether l’état, c’est moi or l’état c’est nous? “Even under the best forms of government,” Jefferson recognized, “those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.” Alas, in the age of universal suffrage, this truth has been lost on many. In response, we might insist more loudly that democratization does not necessarily equal government virtue and recall that the Bill of Rights effectively presumes that government is guilty, holding as it does that government may not intrude in certain areas of life however good it claims to be, and that the people may not be asked to relinquish their ultimate checks on power however secure they feel themselves to be. This is nothing short of codified paranoia, and America is better off for it.
The straw men who populate the Right of Obama’s imagination contend that, because the state is flawed, it should not exist at all. No conservatives think this. But they do understand that to acknowledge that we need a state is not to deny that the state is a credible potential threat. It is by no means “deranged” — nor does it imply that one need don a “straitjacket,” as Blow fatuously suggests in his column — for citizens to worry that the bigger the government, the greater the chance that it will spin out of control, nor that the more potent the state, the more potent the temptation for rogue elements to hijack its power in order to harass those they do not like.
Madison made an apt and brutal observation that was the product of learning, of an appreciation of man’s flawed nature, and of his own tough experience: “The nation which reposes on the pillow of political confidence, will sooner or later end its political existence in a deadly lethargy.” The conceit (in both senses of the word) that such concerns are vestigial rather than timeless — or, worse, that they apply only to a world that we have left behind — is folly. It is especially curious that the modern arbiters of trust reject the possibility of tyranny at this point in human history. Whatever one might have thought of the pernicious and widespread statolatry that cast the world repeatedly into darkness over the course of the 20th century, one can at least grant that many of those guilty of practicing it were unaware of the terrors they would inevitably unleash. Now, a cursory glance at a history book is sufficient warning.
“Paranoia is just having the right information,” William S. Burroughs once observed. We have that information. Who can look at the 20th century with a cold eye and conclude that the problem was that people were “too fearful” of their governments? Who will claim that our blood-drenched last hundred years was the product of people insisting too emphatically that they must retain their liberties? Who will claim that the great flaw of the last century was that the people were armed — or able to speak freely? Most important, who will claim that the progressive conception of government has proved superior to that of the Founders?
The news that the IRS was targeting pro-Constitution groups with “patriot” and “tea party” in their titles is almost implausibly ironic. But that the IRS was “targeting” anyone is flatly unacceptable. Herein lies the silver lining: By reminding its citizenry that government tyranny is not an abstract concept, the IRS has done America a considerable favor. “Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then,” wrote Philip K. Dick in A Scanner Darkly. Indeed. Next time an authoritarian explains how, say, a national gun registry will be just swell — and labels its naysayers as neurotic — his opponents will have a new and useful shorthand: “IRS scandal.”
Why, you might ask, do I use “paranoia,” instead of the more palatable “skepticism”? Paranoia, after all, is an involuntary reaction — less of a tendency to “wait and see” than a recipe for constant fear. I will tell you why: because reflexive suspicion of government power is a magnificent and virtuous tendency, and one that should be the starting point of all political conversation in a free republic.
In his Second Treatise of Civil Government, Locke observed that the captain of the ship would feint away from the slave markets of Algiers even when they were his settled destination, so it was in his passengers’ interest to mistrust him no matter where the ship’s bow was pointed. “The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt,” considered G. K. Chesterton in Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State. “It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt,” because “sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. It is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists.”
Always essential. Always.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/348328/praise-paranoia
The President's Ruinous Energy Policy: Once More with Feeling
... Meanwhile, Obama's campaign promise of expanded oil and gas production has gone nowhere. His moderate rhetoric was dropped immediately after the election. He has reverted to the mindless fantasy of vast solar farms and offshore windmills.Clearly, Obama never had any intention of pressing for greater oil and gas exploration. That is a tragedy for America, because without abundant supplies of oil and gas, living standards will decline, and tens of millions will continue unemployed or underemployed. The Obama administration has never presented a credible plan of any sort that addresses the need for millions of good jobs. A vigorous oil and gas policy -- one that promotes exploration and development instead of restricting it -- would go a long way toward supplying those jobs.
The S&P Global Clean Energy Index, a proxy for green energy investment returns, affords a clear measure of just how disastrous Obama's green energy policy has been. Since April 2009, the beginning of the economic recovery, the index of global green energy companies has lost more than 50%. During that same time-frame, the iShares U.S. Oil and Gas index (IEO) has returned over 50%. This difference in performance mirrors the reality that oil and gas (and coal) are efficient, cost-effective sources of energy, while wind and solar are inherently flawed.
Any sane individual would prefer to be invested in oil and gas rather than green energy -- but Obama has invested taxpayer money exclusively in green energy. He has lost more than half of the taxpayer's money when he could have been backing productive companies, or simply allowed taxpayers to retain their funds and spend or invest as they wished. In other words, Obama has been the most foolish of investors. He has probably done even worse than the global green energy index with its loss of 50%.
Despite his token support for greater oil and gas exploration, Obama has done nothing in the past but oppose carbon fuels, and he shows no sign of supporting them in the future. The appointment of Gina McCarthy as EPA director is an ominous sign. McCarthy's own statements make it clear that she will continue to pursue an activist EPA agenda while flouting the wishes of Congress. "I didn't go to Washington to sit around and wait for congressional action," she has stated. How does that attitude differ from that of her predecessor, Lisa Jackson?
Obama's campaign rhetoric favoring increased oil and gas production was just that -- a campaign ploy designed to soften opposition until after the election. What we are seeing in Obama's second term is more regulation, more talk of higher taxation, more obstruction, and more foot-dragging on oil and gas development. Meanwhile, our nation's energy future is put at risk, and the economy continues to crawl along at 2%.
That's about how effective Obama has been as a president: 2%. Or when it comes to oil and gas, minus 40%. That, after all, is the level of new exploration on lands over which the president has control. All of the positive developments have come about on private lands regulated by the states.
Imagine a future in which the U.S. was not only energy-independent, but a net exporter of oil and gas. If not for Obama, we would already be close to that milestone. Instead, what we have to look forward to is a future of subpar growth and structurally high unemployment. America is paying a high price for Obama's ruinous energy policy.
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