Current Events - May 18, 2013

The Autocrat Accountants
Once government is ensnared in every aspect of life, a bureaucracy grows increasingly capricious.

By Mark Steyn
Speaking at Ohio State University earlier this month, Barack Obama urged students to pay no attention to those paranoid types who “incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity.” Oddly enough, in recent days the most compelling testimony for this view of government has come from the president himself, who insists with a straight face that he had no idea that the Internal Revenue Service had spent two years targeting his political enemies until he “learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this.” Like you, all he knows is what he reads in the papers. Which is odd, because his Justice Department is bugging those same papers, so you’d think he’d at least get a bit of a heads-up. But no doubt the fact that he’s wiretapping the Associated Press was also entirely unknown to him until he read about it in the Associated Press. There is a “president of the United States” and a “government of the United States,” but, despite a certain superficial similarity in their names, they are entirely unrelated, like Beyoncé Knowles and Admiral Sir Charles Knowles. One golfs, reads the prompter, parties with Jay-Z, and guests on the Pimp with a Limp show, and the other audits you, bugs your telephone line, and leaks your confidential tax records. But they’re two completely separate sinister entities. So it’s preposterous to describe Obama as Nixonian: Beyoncé wouldn’t have given Nixon the time of day.
 
If you believe this, there’s a shovel-ready infrastructure project in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you. In April last year, the Obama campaign identified by name eight Romney donors as “a group of wealthy individuals with less than reputable records. Quite a few have been on the wrong side of the law, others have made profits at the expense of so many Americans, and still others are donating to help ensure Romney puts beneficial policies in place for them.” That week, Kimberley Strassel began her Wall Street Journal column thus:

Try this thought experiment: You decide to donate money to Mitt Romney. You want change in the Oval Office, so you engage in your democratic right to send a check.
Several days later, President Barack Obama, the most powerful man on the planet, singles you out by name. . . . The message from the man who controls the Justice Department (which can indict you), the SEC (which can fine you), and the IRS (which can audit you), is clear: You made a mistake donating that money.

Miss Strassel wrote that on April 26, 2012. Five weeks later, one of the named individuals, Frank VanderSloot, was informed by the IRS that he and his wife were being audited. In July, he was told by the Department of Labor of an additional audit over the guest workers on his cattle ranch in Idaho.
 
 In September, he was notified that one of his other businesses was to be audited. Mr. VanderSloot, who had never previously been audited, attracted three in the four months after being publicly named by el Presidente. More to the point he attracted that triple audit even though Miss Strassel explicitly predicted in America’s biggest-selling newspaper that this was exactly what the Obama enforcers were going to do. The “separate, sinister entity” of the government of the United States went ahead anyway. What do they care? If some lippy broad in the papers won’t quit her yapping about it, they can always audit her, too — as they did to Miss Strassel’s sometime colleague Anne Hendershott, a sociology professor who got rather too interested in Obamacare and wrote about it in the Journal and various small Catholic publications. The IRS summoned Professor Hendershott to account for herself, and forbade her husband from accompanying her, even though they filed jointly. She ceased her political writing.
 
A year after he was named to the Obama Dishonor Roll, the feds have found nothing on Mr. VanderSloot, but they have caused him to rack up 80 grand in legal bills. This is what IRS defenders (of whom there are more than there ought to be) mean when they assure us that the system worked: Yes, some rich guy had to blow through the best part of six figures fending off the bureaucrats, but it’s not like his body was found in a trunk at the airport or anything, if you know what I mean, Kimmy baby.
 
Mr. VanderSloot is big enough, just about, to see off the most powerful government on the planet. Most of those who’ve caught the eye of the IRS share nothing in common with him other than his political preferences. They’re nobodies — ordinary American citizens guilty of no crime except that of disagreeing with the ruling party. Yet they were asked, under “penalty of perjury,” to disclose the names of books they were reading and provide the names and addresses of relatives who might be planning to run for public office — a kind of pre-enemies list. Is that banana-republic enough for you yet? Not apparently for Juan Williams, fired from NPR for thought crime a couple of years ago, but who was nevertheless energetically defending the IRS exertions on Fox News on Thursday evening.
 
Left-wing groups had their 501(c)(4) applications approved in weeks, right-wing groups were delayed for months and years and ordered to cough up everything from donor lists to Facebook posts, and those right-wing groups that were approved had their IRS files leaked to left-wing groups like ProPublica. The agency’s commissioner, a slippery weasel called Steven Miller, conceded before Congress that this was “horrible customer service” — which it was in the sense that your call is important to him and may be monitored by George Soros for quality control.
 
A civil “civil service” requires small government. Once government is ensnared in every aspect of life a bureaucracy grows increasingly capricious. The U.S. tax code ought to be an abomination to any free society, but the American people have become reconciled to it because of a complex web of so-called exemptions that massively empower the vast shadow state of the permanent bureaucracy. Under a simple tax system, your income is a legitimate tax issue. Under the IRS, everything is a legitimate tax issue: The books you read, the friends you recommend them to. There are no correct answers, only approved answers. Drew Ryun applied for permanent non-profit status for a group called “Media Trackers” in July 2011. Fifteen months later, he’d heard nothing. So he applied again under the eco-friendly name of “Greenhouse Solutions,” and was approved in three weeks.
 
The president and the IRS commissioner are unable to name any individual who took the decision to target only conservative groups. It just kinda sorta happened, and, once it had, it growed like Topsy. But the lady who headed that office, Sarah Hall Ingram, is now in charge of the IRS office for Obamacare. Many countries around the world have introduced government health systems since 1945, but, as I wrote here last year, “only in America does ‘health’ ‘care’ ‘reform’ begin with the hiring of 16,500 new IRS agents tasked with determining whether your insurance policy merits a fine.” So now not only are your books and Facebook posts legitimate tax issues but so is your hernia, and your prostate, and your erectile dysfunction. Next time round, the IRS will be able to leak your incontinence pads to George Soros.
 
Big Government is erecting a panopticon state — one that sees everything, and regulates everything. It’s great “customer service,” except that you can never get out of the store.
 
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/348687/autocrat-accountants-mark-steyn

Strange Goings-On at the White House

        A tight-knit inner circle plays all politics, all the time, while Obama remains disengaged.

The recent spate of Washington scandals has some liberals finally confessing in public what many of them have said privately for a long time. The Obama administration is arrogant, insular, prone to intimidation of adversaries, and slovenly when it comes to seeing that rules are followed. Indeed, the Obama White House is a strange place, and it’s good that its operational model is now likely to be finally dissected by the media.
 
Joe Klein of Time magazine laments Obama’s “unwillingness to concentrate.”
 
Dana Milbank of the Washington Post tars him as a President Passerby who “seems to want no control over the actions of his administration.” Milbank warns that “he’s creating a power vacuum in which lower officials behave as though anything goes.” Comedian Jon Stewart says Obama’s government lacks real “managerial competence” and that the president is either Nixonian if he knew about the scandals in advance or a Mr. Magoo–style incompetent if he didn’t.
 
But it was Chris Matthews of MSNBC who cut even deeper in his Hardball show on Wednesday. A former speechwriter for President Carter, he wondered if Obama “really doesn’t want to be responsible day-to-day for running” the government. He savaged the White House for using “weird, spooky language” about “the building leadership” that must approve the Benghazi talking points. “I don’t understand the model of this administration: weak chiefs of staff afraid of other people in the White House. Some undisclosed role for Valerie Jarrett. Unclear, a lot of floating power in the White House, but no clear line of authority. I’ve talked to people who’ve been chief of staff. They were never allowed to fire anybody, so they weren’t really chief of staff.” He concluded that President Obama “obviously likes giving speeches more than he does running the executive branch.”
 
So if Obama is not fully engaged, who does wield influence in the White House? A lot of Democrats know firsthand that Jarrett, a Chicago mentor to both Barack and Michelle Obama and now officially a senior White House adviser, has enormous influence. She is the only White House staffer in anyone’s memory, other than the chief of staff or national security adviser, to have an around-the-clock Secret Service detail of up to six agents. According to terrorism expert Richard Miniter’s recent book, Leading from Behind: “At the urging of Valerie Jarrett, President Barack Obama canceled the operation to kill Osama bin Laden on three separate occasions before finally approving” the mission for May 2, 2011. She was instrumental in overriding then–chief of staff Rahm Emanuel when he opposed the Obamacare push, and she was key in steamrolling the bill to passage in 2010. Obama may rue the day, as its chaotic implementation could become the biggest political liability Democrats will face in next year’s midterm elections.
 
A senior Republican congressional leader tells me that he had come to trust that he could detect the real lines of authority in any White House, since he’s worked for five presidents. “But this one baffles me,” he says. “I do know that when I ask Obama for something, there is often no answer. But when I ask Valerie Jarrett, there’s always an answer or something happens.”
 
Last month, Time broke new ground when it decided to throw the spotlight on Jarrett’s influence, which the press till then had not much covered: The magazine named her one of the “100 most influential people in the world.” Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, gushed about Jarrett in an accompanying essay: “Above all else, however, and beyond all doubt, Valerie Jarrett is loyal.”
 
No one doubts that President Obama has the White House management structure he wants; he has populated it with trusted aides such as Jarrett whose loyalty he can count on. But it’s increasingly clear that this structure — supported by functionaries who are often highly partisan and careless — hasn’t served the country well and hasn’t received sufficient scrutiny from the media. That’s why many liberals are openly expressing concern over the “mini-Politburo” at the White House — the small number of people who have centralized White House decision-making.
 
The Obama White House management team doesn’t share the bunker mentality of the Nixon White House (though there are similarities). Nor does it have the frat-house atmosphere of the early Clinton White House, or the “happy talk” air of unreality of the latter George W. Bush administration. But its “all politics, all the time” ethos demands scrutiny now that the scandals are mounting and its shortcomings are becoming all too clear.
 
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/348591/strange-goings-white-house-john-fund

Redacted truth, subjunctive outrage

By Charles Krauthammer
Note to GOP re Benghazi: Stop calling it Watergate, Iran-contra, bigger than both, etc. First, it might well be, but we don’t know. History will judge. Second, overhyping will only diminish the importance of the scandal if it doesn’t meet presidency-breaking standards. Third, focusing on the political effects simply plays into the hands of Democrats desperately claiming that this is nothing but partisan politics.
 
Let the facts speak for themselves. They are damning enough. Let Gregory Hicks, the honorable, apolitical second-in-command that night in Libya, movingly and grippingly demolish the president’s Benghazi mantra that “what I have always tried to do is just get all the facts” and “every piece of information that we got, as we got it, we laid it out for the American people.”
 
On the contrary. Far from assiduously gathering and releasing information, the administration was assiduously trying to control and suppress it.
 
Just hours into the Benghazi assault, Hicks reports, by phone to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton herself, on the attack with absolutely no mention of any demonstration or video, later to become the essence of the Susan Rice talking points that left him “stunned” and “embarrassed.” “My jaw dropped,” he testified last week to Congress.
 
But Hicks is then ordered not to meet with an investigative congressional delegation — the first time in his 22-year career he had been so ordered. And when he speaks with them nonetheless, he gets a furious call from Clinton’s top aide for not having a State Department lawyer (and informant) present. His questions about the Rice TV statements are met with a stone-cold response, sending the message — don’t go there. He then finds himself demoted.
 
Get the facts and get them out? It wasn’t just Hicks. Within 24 hours, the CIA station chief in Libya cabled that it was a terrorist attack and not a spontaneous mob. On Day Two, the acting assistant secretary of state for the Near East wrote an e-mail saying the attack was carried out by an al-Qaeda affiliate, Ansar al-Sharia.
 
What were the American people fed? Four days and 12 drafts later, a fiction about a demonstration that never was, provoked by a video that no one saw (Hicks: “a non-event in Libya”), about a movie that was never made.
 
The original CIA draft included four paragraphs on the involvement of al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists and on the dangerous security situation in Benghazi. These paragraphs were stricken after strenuous State Department objections mediated by the White House. All that was left was the fable of the spontaneous demonstration.
 
That’s not an accretion of truth. That’s a subtraction of truth.
 
And why? Let the deputy national security adviser’s e-mail to the parties explain: “We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities” — fancy bureaucratese for “interests of the government agencies involved.” (He then added — “particularly the investigation.” But the FBI, which was conducting the investigation, had no significant objections. That excuse was simply bogus.)
 
Note that he didn’t say the talking points should reflect the truth — only the political interests, the required political cover, of all involved. And the overriding political interest was the need to protect the president’s campaign claim, his main foreign policy plank, that al-Qaeda was vanquished and the tide of war receding.
 
But then things got worse — the coverup needed its own coverup. On Nov. 28, press secretary Jay Carney told the media that State and the White House edited nothing but a single trivial word. When the e-mail trail later revealed this to be false, Carney doubled down. Last Friday, he repeated that the CIA itself made the edits after the normal input from various agencies.
 
That was a bridge too far for even the heretofore supine mainstream media. The CIA may have typed the final edits. But the orders came from on high. You cannot tell a room full of journalists that when your editor tells you to strike four paragraphs from your text — and you do — there were no edits because you are the one who turned in the final copy.
 
The Clintonian wordplay doesn’t stop with Benghazi. Four days after the IRS announced that it discriminated against conservative organizations, Carney said repeatedly in his daily briefing that, if true, the president would be outraged.
 
If? By then, the IRS had not only admitted the grievous misconduct but apologized for it — and the president was speaking in the conditional.
 
This could be the first case in presidential history of subjunctive outrage. (It turned into ostensibly real outrage upon later release of the Inspector Generalreport.) Add that to the conditional truths — ever changing, ever fading — of Benghazi, and you have a major credibility crisis.
 
Note to the White House: Try the truth. It’s easier to memorize.
 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-krauthammer-redacted-truth-subjunctive-outrage/2013/05/16/de28aee8-be64-11e2-97d4-a479289a31f9_story.html

IRS asked pro-life group about their prayers?
 
I suppose this means that if pro-life people prayed to a GOP victory, they would have been denied tax exempt status.
 
Washington Examiner:

During a House Ways and Means Committee hearing today, Rep. Aaron Schock, R-Ill., grilled outgoing IRS commissioner Steven Miller about the IRS targeting a pro-life group in Iowa.
"Their question, specifically asked from the IRS to the Coalition for Life of Iowa: 'Please detail the content of the members of your organization's prayers,'" Schock declared.
"Would that be an inappropriate question to a 501 c3 applicant?" asked Schock. "The content of one's prayers?"
"It pains me to say I can't speak to that one either," Miller replied.

It doesn't pain him at all. It was clear by this point in the hearing that Miller had decided to give Republican members absolutely nothing with which they could criticize him or the IRS - even something so outrageously intrusive as being forced to reveal the content of a group's prayers.
 
Miller claimed it would "surprise" him if that question were asked. They should have asked him if he were "surprised" when his employees asked groups about their donors, their reading lists, and other inappropriate questions that violated the First Amendment rights of American citizens.
 
No doubt it would "pain" him too.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/05/irs_asked_pro-life_group_about_their_prayers.html#ixzz2Tgc63RaD
 
Phone call between Hillary and Obama may be 'genesis' of anti-Muslim video lieAndrew McCarthy makes the case that the 10:00 PM phone call on September 11 last year between Hillary Clinton and President Obama may be the conversation that led to the bogus story of an anti-Muslim video setting off "demonstrations" in Benghazi that led to the deaths of Americans.

Fraud flows from the top down, not the mid-level up. Mid-level officials in the White House and the State Department do not call the shots -- they carry out orders. They also were not running for reelection in 2012 or positioning themselves for a campaign in 2016. The people doing that were, respectively, President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton. 

Obama and Clinton had been the architects of American foreign policy. As Election Day 2012 loomed, each of them had a powerful motive to promote the impressions (a) that al-Qaeda had been decimated; (b) that the administration's deft handling of the Arab Spring -- by empowering Islamists -- had been a boon for democracy, regional stability, and American national security; and (c) that our real security problem was "Islamophobia" and the "violent extremism" it allegedly causes -- which was why Obama and Clinton had worked for years with Islamists, both overseas and at home, to promote international resolutions that would make it illegal to incite hostility to Islam, the First Amendment be damned. 

All of that being the case, I am puzzled why so little attention has been paid to the Obama-Clinton phone call at 10 p.m. on the night of September 11. 

Even in the conservative press, it has become received wisdom that President Obama was AWOL on the night of September 11, after first being informed by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, in the late afternoon, that the State Department facility in Benghazi was under attack. You hear it again and again: While Americans were under attack, the commander-in-chief checked out, leaving subordinates to deal with the crisis while he got his beauty sleep in preparation for a fundraising campaign trip to Vegas. 

That is not true . . . and the truth, as we've come to expect with Obama, is almost surely worse. There is good reason to believe that while Americans were still fighting for their lives in Benghazi, while no military efforts were being made to rescue them, and while those desperately trying to rescue them were being told to stand down, the president was busy shaping the "blame the video" narrative to which his administration clung in the aftermath.

Jay Carney first revealed the existence of the phone call and the time in February. Hillary Clinton confirmed she spoke to Obama "later that evening." What was said between the two?

We now know from the e-mails and TV clips that, by Sunday morning, the White House staff, State Department minions, and Susan Rice were all in agreement that the video fairy tale, peppered with indignant rebukes of Islamophobia, was the way to go.
How do you suppose they got that idea?

The theory makes sense. What's more, there may be a phone log of the conversation and what was discussed in the records of both principles.
 
That would be a fascinating document to discover.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/05/phone_call_between_hillary_and_obama_may_be_genesis_of_anti-muslim_video_lie.html#ixzz2Tgcmvr4G

Lawmakers to investigate EPA FOIA scandal
 
Republican lawmakers are launching an investigation into claims that the Environmental Protection Agency, while giving preferential treatment to environmental groups, made it harder for conservative groups to obtain government records.
 
“According to documents obtained by the Committees, EPA readily granted FOIA fee waivers for environmental allies, effectively subsidizing them, while denying fee waivers and making the FOIA process more difficult for states and conservative groups,” wrote Republican lawmakers, including Rep. Darrell Issa and Sens. David Vitter, Chuck Grassley and Jim Inhofe in a letter to the EPA.
 
Citing a report by The Daily Caller News Foundation, Republicans are asking the EPA to hand over all Freedom of Information Act fee waiver requests, responses to requests, and FOIA officer training materials since the beginning of the Obama administration.
 
Lawmakers are also asking for all communications regarding FOIA fee waiver requests or appeals under the Obama administration.
 
The free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute obtained documents showing that since January 2012, the EPA granted fee waivers for 75 out of 82 FOIA requests from major environmental groups and only denied seven of them, giving green groups a 92 percent success rate.
 
At the same time, the EPA rejected or ignored 21 out of 26 fee waiver requests from conservative groups.
 
“The startling disparity in treatment strongly suggests EPA’s actions are possibly part of a broader effort to collude with groups that share the agency’s political agenda and discriminate against states and conservative organizations,” the lawmakers wrote. “This is a clear abuse of discretion.”
Republicans are tying the EPA to the broader controversy over the Internal Revenue Service targeting conservative groups.
 
“We know the Obama EPA has completely mismanaged FOIA, but granting fee waivers for their friends in the far-left environmental community, while simultaneously blocking conservative leaning groups from gaining access to information is really no different than the IRS disaster,” said Vitter.
 
Acting EPA administrator Bob Perciasepe announced Thursday that he was asking the inspector general to look into the matter. "I am going to get an independent look at all that information so I can get a determination,” said Perciasepe, adding that the agency’s shift to an online system often means that groups are not charged any fees even if they are not formally waived.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/18/lawmakers-to-investigate-epa-foia-scandal/#ixzz2Tghuwrii

Obama, IRS and Eric Holder: The Axis of Hear No Evil, See No Evil

You know the people I’m talking about. The Know-Nothings.

You know the folks who pushed that one law regarding almost 20 percent of the entire economy before they even read the bill? The ones who rushed it into law just to see what was in it? The ones who managed to write a bill, while still not being familiar with what the bill actually did? 
 
Yeah, those guys? The Know-Nothings.

Well, they know nothing about a lot of other stuff too.

Obama’s one of those guys. So is Eric Holder. So, apparently, is the entire staff at the IRS from the executive offices upward.

They are kind of an “Axis of See No Evil, Hear No Evil”.

Below is a laundry list from the Huffington Post about Attorney General Eric Holder’s gripping testimony to congress regarding his department’s latest suppression of the First Amendment while seizing phone records from a news organization.

You know, just in case you didn’t know about it, this will clear everything up for you. And just in case you miss the subtlety below, Holder, by the way, knows nothing:

· "I was not the person involved in that decision,"

· "I am not familiar with the reasons why the subpoena was constructed in the way that it was because I'm simply not a part of the case."

· "I do not know, however, with regard to this particular case, why that was or was not done."

· "I simply do not have a factual basis for answering that question."

· "Again, Mr. Chairman, I don't know."

· "I assume he was, but I don't know."

· "I don't know what has happened in this matter."

· “This is both an ongoing matter and an ongoing matter about which I know nothing.”

· Holder also said he did not know "precisely" when he had recused himself from the investigation.

 

Liberal publications, including the Washington Post, carry similar lists.

However, Holder’s Know-Nothing affiliation shouldn’t surprise us because his boss is a Know-Nothing too.

In fact, he’s the chief Know-Nothing.

When asked about the recent Inspector General’s report on the IRS’s practice of targeting conservative groups, the president said: Hey! I just read about that!

“I first learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this,” Obama said in a statement that says nothing, but still reveals much. “I think it was on Friday.”

As a follow-up I wish someone had thought to ask Obama what he had for lunch on Friday. It’d be nice to know if our president knows nothing about that as well.

Obama apparently knew nothing about Boston, about the illegal seizure of Associated Press phone records, the strong-arming of State Department employees, the constitution, the economy, job creation....

In fact, as I wrote at the beginning of the month, Obama, the know-it-all, suddenly seemed to know nothing, even before the IRS-AP fracas:

Still, it’s surprising that the administration that knows more about banking than bankers, more about healthcare than doctors, more about firearms than people who legally possess arms, more about budgets than citizens who have to balance their checkbooks and more about practically everything than anyone else, would admit that on a few things, they really know nothing.

“On most days it's hard to tell him he's wrong about anything,” recently confessed one top Democrat about the Commander in Brief.

It’s seems equally hard to TELL him about anything too.

But here it is:

Obama knows nothing about Benghazi.

He knows nothing about Boston’s Tsarnaev brothers.

He knows nothing about Fast and Furious; he knows nothing about green energy loans, either.

Yes, the man who recently proclaimed: I AM IN CHARGE NOW, FINALLY! knows nothing.

This seems strange coming from the administration that leaked every damn detail about how Barack Obama personally hunted down and killed Osama bin Laden, while simultaneously saving Detroit from bankruptcy… saved Detroit at least until after the election in 2012, that is. 
  
But the Know-Nothing party isn’t just a celebration of individual ignorance, it’s institutional too:
“Republicans seem to be losing patience with [ousted head of the Internal Revenue Service Steven] Miller because his answers don’t change,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “of course, neither have their questions. Miller, in response to rough questioning from [Republican] Dave Reichert, says he doesn’t know who is primarily responsible for initiating these searches of tea-party groups.”

“I don’t have that name, Sir,” Miller said.

Nor does anyone else at the IRS.

But of course the only people who seem surprise by this outbreak of ignorance are those other Know-Nothings, the press.

The rest of us?

We knew that this administration knew nothing a long time ago.
 
http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/johnransom/2013/05/18/obama-irs-and-eric-holder-the-axis-of-hear-no-evil-see-no-evil-n1599622/page/full/

Bill Maher: GOP guilty of ‘treason’; Michael Moore: ‘They hate America’
On Friday’s “Real Time” on HBO, two of the most prominent liberal personalities, Bill Maher and Michael Moore, said the Republican Party’s opposition to President Barack Obama at almost every turn amounts to anti-American criminality.
 
According to Maher, the show’s host, House Republicans’ efforts to repeal Obama’s health care reform and Senate Republicans’ blocking of his judicial nominations go beyond loyal opposition and could rise to the level of treason.
 
“What about trying to repealing [Obamacare] for the 37^th time? Is that a wise use of our resources and time? I mean, at some point obstruction becomes, I don’t know, treason, you know? I mean they’ve also blocked Obama’s head of the EPA. There’s no head of the circuit court in D.C. You know, at some point it just becomes more about hating him than loving your country.”
 
But Moore said it was much more than that. The documentary filmmaker said opponents of Obama’s agenda hate their country.
 
“No, they hate America,” Moore replied. “That’s really what it is. I think these conservatives and right-wingers for as much as they say they love this country — they hate it. They hate the government. They hate the people.”
 
Maher reacted to Moore’s remarks and asked if the government and the country are two different things, but Moore maintained his claim.
 
“It shouldn’t be,” he said. “The government is supposed to be of, by and for the people, right? So why is the government the big evil bastard here?”
 
“Because Mike, it got taken over by a Kenya socialist, that’s why,” Maher replied, with a faux southern accent in a mocking tone. “That’s why we need our guns. We might have to take over the government.”

http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/18/bill-maher-gop-guilty-of-treason-michael-moore-they-hate-america/#ixzz2Tgfxkqmj

What could be worse than an al-Qaeda controlled Syria?
How about a fractured and broken up Syria with several armed fiefdoms in control of terrorists?

On Israel's border.

New York Times:

The black flag of jihad flies over much of northern Syria. In the center of the country, pro-government militias and Hezbollah fighters battle those who threaten their communities. In the northeast, the Kurds have effectively carved out an autonomous zone. 

After more than two years of conflict, Syria is breaking up. A constellation of armed groups battling to advance their own agendas are effectively creating the outlines of separate armed fiefs. As the war expands in scope and brutality, its biggest casualty appears to be the integrity of the Syrian state.
[...]
But as evidence of massacres and chemical weapons mounts, experts and Syrians themselves say the American focus on change at the top ignores the deep fractures the war has caused in Syrian society. Increasingly, it appears Syria is so badly shattered that no single authority is likely to be able to pull it back together any time soon. 

Instead, three Syrias are emerging: one loyal to the government, to Iran and to Hezbollah; one dominated by Kurds with links to Kurdish separatists in Turkey and Iraq; and one with a Sunni majority that is heavily influenced by Islamists and jihadis. 

"It is not that Syria is melting down - it has melted down," said Andrew J. Tabler, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of "In the Lion's Den: An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle with Syria." 

"So much has changed between the different parties that I can't imagine it all going back into one piece," Mr. Tabler said. 

Fueling the country's breakup are the growing brutality of fighters on all sides and the increasingly sectarian nature of the violence.

This is a direct consequence of an American and western policy failure to strengthen the non-jihadist opposition either politically or militarily. With no uniting force to rally around, the rebels joined independent commands - the most effective units being jihadists who are seeking to turn Syria into a Muslim Brotherhood or Salifist state. The al-Qaeda units aren't very interested in a united Syria either. They will seek to carve out their own safe haven in order to be able to operate freely in the region - and against our interests.
It's hard to see a turn of events that would be more threatening to Israel's basic security.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/05/what_could_be_worse_than_an_al-qaeda_controlled_syria.html#ixzz2TgiZL3fI