MSNBC Anchor: 'Everybody Knew About' IRS Scandal 'Long Before the Election'
"Why didn't Romney make more of a big deal of it during the election?"MSNBC anchor and former DNC spokeswoman Karen Finney reveals she was better informed than the President Barack Obama on the recently-reported scandal over the IRS targeting Tea Party and conservative groups for harassment.
"Everyone knew about this long before the election," she claimed during a Wednesday panel discussion.
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2013/05/22/Former-DNC-Spokesperson-Finney-Everyone-Knew-About-IRS-Before-Election
And Straight From The White House
Today, Josh Marshall argues that Lois Lerner should be fired.
Today, Ezra Klein aruges that Lois Lerner should be fired.
So does Salon's reliable lefty Joan Walsh.
Yesterday, both men were seen arriving at the West Wing for, presumably, a new iteration of White House talking points (hey, maybe Walsh was there, too). So we can all assume that President Obama wants Lois Lerner gone.
Why can't he fire her himself? Well, according to Politico,
Even so, Lerner seems pretty senior to qualify for routine civil service protections. Presumably, she could be asked for her resignation, just as Steven Miller was. So why is the President stalling, and instead sending pundits out to seek her scalp instead?
Really, when we learn (1) who -- if anyone -- notified an administration member about the internal IRS report before the election confirming the targeting ; and (2) who was involved in slow-walking the IG report until after the election, a lot of these questions may answer themselves.
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/carolplattliebau/2013/05/22/and-straight-from-the-white-house-n1604093
Targeting Apple
At a Senate committee hearing on Tuesday, federal lawmakers hauled in America’s most successful corporation to investigate why it had so precisely followed the laws those solons have passed.
The targeting of Apple should be no particular surprise, in Congress’s crass calculus: True, even if reducing one’s tax burden and shifting profits overseas were a crime, Apple would probably not be the first company to investigate for such behavior — as chief executive Tim Cook pointed out, Apple paid $6 billion in corporate-income taxes to the U.S. Treasury in 2012, which is enough to run the entire Transportation Security Administration and amounts to about one dollar of every 40 that the corporate-income tax collects. But Apple is America’s richest and most successful corporation, and thus the fattest goose to drag before a committee.
Senator Carl Levin (D., Mich.), chairman of the committee, called Apple to account for its practice of locating subsidiaries and activities abroad in low-tax jurisdictions. It is indeed a problem that U.S. corporations shift much of their income elsewhere and leave it there. But corporations do this because Congress has encouraged them to.
Other developed nations have “territorial” tax systems, in which income earned within a country’s borders is taxed there. In contrast, the U.S. taxes all income earned by its corporations worldwide — but collects these taxes only when corporations bring their profits home. In addition, Congress has set the rate at the highest level in the industrialized world, 35 percent.
Congress should not be surprised, therefore, that Apple goes to great lengths to earn its income elsewhere. The sheer complication of the U.S. tax code — again, Congress’s handiwork — aids the company in this regard. Smaller firms, of course, lack Apple’s tax-planning and income-sluicing capabilities and are generally not able to do this; companies with less market power and intellectual property than Apple also find it harder to reduce their tax burden legally.
The congressional hearing convened this week proposed no solutions to these problems, and certainly not the right one: a lower corporate tax rate and a territorial taxation system, which would primarily benefit not the American fisc but the American worker. With a competitive corporate tax rate, companies would choose to locate their operations here rather than abroad. Instead, Senator Levin and other Democrats propose to reinforce and expand a system that does not work; they suggest various ways of closing tax exclusions and preventing companies from moving income elsewhere.
Congress has in the past come up with other approaches for the huge amounts of cash (in total, almost $2 trillion) held by corporations’ overseas subsidiaries: In 2004, legislators passed and President Bush signed a temporary holiday with a much lower tax rate on corporate income returned to U.S. entities. It is widely considered to have been a complete failure; the repatriation of all this cash generated almost no revenue or investment, essentially adding up to a lightly taxed giveaway to stockholders. Whether multinational corporations’ earnings have yet been legally admitted to the U.S. is, in effect, irrelevant to the question of whether corporations can use this money to invest in new lines of business and pay dividends to shareholders. Apple demonstrated that clearly this spring, when it decided to pay out some of its huge cash holdings to U.S. stockholders but did so by borrowing against its foreign subsidiaries.
The proper solution, again, is to create a territorial taxation system and reduce the corporate tax rate. While Apple broadly endorsed this kind of reform in its report to Congress, such a shift will not hugely benefit multinational corporations, because the advantages they gain with their elaborate accounting operations will be diminished.
Senator Rand Paul said following the hearing that Congress “should apologize to Apple” and should itself “be on trial here for creating a byzantine and bizarre tax code.” He is just about right: Congress owes an apology to Apple for calling it before a star-chamber subcommittee, but a more serious one to the American people, for the tax code that hurts them more than it does Apple.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/349113/targeting-apple-editors
In his press events, Mr. Obama has said that while he learned about the Cincinnati rogues on the news, he plans to "hold accountable those who have taken these outrageous actions." But the White House began its response by pushing the line that the IRS is an "independent agency," and Mr. Obama has since given the impression that he sits atop a federal government which he does not, and could not possibly, control.
White House senior adviser Dan Pfieffer encouraged that fable on this Sunday's news shows, implying that the Treasury's internal process for handling the unfair treatment of political targets trumped the President's right to know. When CNN political correspondent Candy Crowley asked Mr. Pfieffer why the White House and top Treasury officials weren't notified, he explained that Treasury's investigation was ongoing and "Here's the cardinal rule: You do not interfere in an independent investigation."
Now there's a false choice. The Treasury Inspector General's report, for starters, was an audit, not an inviolable independent investigation. He lacked subpoena power and could bring no criminal charges. Having the President know of the IRS's mistakes so that he could act to correct the problem was not a bridge too far or even clouding the purity of the process. Those things could have been done simultaneously without compromising Treasury's investigation.
At Darrell Issa's House oversight hearing on Wednesday, Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George was criticized for not notifying Congress of the IRS wrongdoing when he became aware of it in July 2012. Emails between the IG's office and committee staff show the IG's office repeatedly evaded Congressional inquiries on the progress of the investigation.
All IGs appear before Congress, but they are really answerable to the President who is responsible for what goes on in the IRS and what the agency actually does. If the IRS is not operating in a way that treats taxpayers evenhandedly and in accordance with its guidelines and mission, it is up to him to change the personnel and make any other corrections so that the taxing power of the federal government is legal and fair. If that isn't the case, voters deserve to know exactly who is accountable for the decisions of the agency that takes a healthy fraction of their income every year.
Mr. Obama's
lesson in lack of political accountability also seems to be trickling
down: Lois Lerner was in charge of the IRS division that discriminated
against conservative groups. But rather than take responsibility, Ms.
Lerner on Wednesday invoked her Fifth Amendment right not to testify at
the House hearing, though not before she read a statement saying that
she had "not done anything wrong."
Asked by Texas Senator John Cornyn at a Finance Committee hearing on Tuesday whether he owed conservative groups an apology, former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman said that he was "certainly not personally responsible for creating a list that had inappropriate criteria on it" though he was sorry that it had happened on his watch.
There's a certain infantilization of the federal government here that should be especially alarming to taxpayers who have ever crossed paths with the IRS. The agency has the power to make citizens lives miserable, ruin their businesses and garnish their wages. Anyone facing an audit is unlikely to get away with the evasions now in display in the federal bureaucracy.
If the scandal is showing anything, it is that the White House has a bizarre notion of accountability in the federal government. President Obama's former senior adviser, David Axelrod, told MSNBC recently that his guy was off the hook on the IRS scandal because "part of being President is there's so much beneath you that you can't know because the government is so vast."
In other words, the bigger the federal government grows, the less the President is responsible for it. Mr. Axelrod's remarkable admission, and the liberal media defenses of Mr. Obama's lack of responsibility, prove the tea party's point that an ever larger government has become all but impossible to govern. They also show once again that liberals are good at promising the blessings of government largesse but they leave its messes for others to clean up.
If the President isn't accountable, then we really have the tea party nightmare of the runaway administrative state accountable to no one. If Mr. Obama and his aides are to be taken at their word, that is exactly what we have.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323475304578499293514955294.html?mod=opinion_newsreel
What was a DHS agent doing at the San Jose Tea Party protest? Why aren't DHS officers protecting the homeland against foreign enemies armed with explosives and hate? Perhaps because the Obama Administration is more worried about domestic "enemies" armed with the Constitution and love of country.
It gets scarier.
The DHS spy-babysitter-hall monitor informed the protesters that only a handful of Tea Partiers showed up to the San Francisco IRS office. What's so significant about this statement?
Well, it tells us that Big Sis (aka Janet Napolitano) was not only watching Tea Partiers in San Jose but also in San Francisco! WATCHING us!
As if that weren't scary enough, this will send shivers down your spine:
DHS Agent Man also let slip (or, conveniently leaked in an effort to intimidate) this juicy tidbit: San Jose had the largest turnout in all of California.
Whoa!
So they weren't just spying on us in San Jose and monitoring us in San Francisco, they were watching us throughout the entire state!
(I bet Big Sis didn't deploy her agents to the Occupy Wall Street venues.)
It is further evidence of the Soviet style "War on Dissent" that this Administration would send out DHS agents to monitor Tea Party protests in the wake of scandals in which the Administration is under fire from left and right for singling out Tea Party applications for tax-exempt status; squashing the First Amendment rights of the little guy in an election year; spying on AP reporters in violation of their First Amendment press freedoms; and covering up the truth about Benghazi in a manner that makes Watergate look like Amateur Day.
One would think they would be just a bit more circumspect and maybe even exercise a modicum of restraint before dispersing KGB, I mean, DHS agents to free speech rallies protected under the Constitution.
The fact that they did this so blatantly despite the scrutiny they are under is symptomatic of a government on the verge of a constitutional breakdown -- a government that doesn't hesitate to bully the little guy while giving the Constitution the proverbial political finger.
If Obama thought for a second that the Tea Party was dead, he just did a good job of rousing the living dead and unleashing a "War on Tyranny" to his "War on Dissent."
How many political lives does this President have? How many times can his Administration -- State, DOJ, IRS, DHS -- stomp with a boot on the people and goose step all over the Constitution and get away with it? When will average Americans realize that we aren't in Kansas anymore and face the disturbing reality that this government is more comfortable dishing out intimidation than ensuring liberty?
It was never supposed to. Holder's DOJ deployed the crass subpoena weapon as a way to intimidate, under color of law, scandal talkers, not leakers.
Holder's DOJ did this even at the cost of disillusioning the AP, because it (Holder's DOJ) reasoned that it had more to lose by not doing so.
Talkers in regard to Benghazi, talkers in regard to the IRS scandal, and talkers in regard to who knows what else--that's who Holder's DOJ is trying to shut up. It's why, in spite having been utilized several months ago, the subpoena was disclosed the same day as the pre-planned IRS "targeting" confession.
What's the next step after an overreaching subpoena the genuine purpose of which had nothing to do with American interests, and everything to do with Obama's interests?
"Accidents" connected to information even more scandalous than that which we have seen so far.
The project has been completed, Barbara Abney, director of marketing and communications at UCF, told CNSNews.com.
“Forty-four low-income early adolescent Hispanic girls took part in the study, which included peer resistance skill curriculum followed by specially developed, technology-assisted, social interaction game play,” Abney said.
Researchers found “that by using an avatar-based, virtual reality, peer-resistance skill-building game, in combination with curriculum, teenage girls were better able to resist peer pressure to participate in risky behaviors.”
According to Recovery.gov, the website for tracking stimulus funds, the project created 0.91 jobs.
Abney told CNSNews.com that “several” part-time positions were created over the project’s two-year lifespan. This included two research assistants, a part-time project manager, four positions for people who worked less than 60 hours a year and two high school student research assistants.
“This ‘shovel ready,’ two-year project is guided by an interdisciplinary team working in collaboration with an afterschool and summer camp program for low income, middle school children in a predominately Latino community in Orlando, Florida,” the grant states. “Game design is driven by a theoretical framework integrating social cognitive theory, the communication competence model, and Piaget's theory of cognitive development.”
The emphasis was placed on Latinas because they have a pregnancy rate that is twice that of non-Hispanic whites. “The middle school years are targeted because this is an ideal point at which to intervene to delay initiation of intercourse,” the grant said.
“A delay in initiation until after middle school could have considerable cost savings, given the positive association between age at first intercourse and use of contraceptives, and the costs associated with early adolescent pregnancy,” it said.
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/434k-stimulus-help-latina-middle-schoolers-resist-sex-created-091-jobs
The grant was awarded in July of last year for the project “Alcohol's Role in Sexual Assault: Development of Virtual Reality Simulation Proxy”. The project is funded through June of 2014.
“The Specific Aims of the proposed research involve developing a virtual reality simulation with a virtual woman (an embodied female agent) that male participants rate as realistic and involving,” the National Institutes of Health project description says.
Project Leader Professor Antonia Abbey of Wayne State University tells CNSNews.com, “Male participants will have the opportunity to select a variety of actions, some of which are sexual. The female agent will agree to some sexual activities and refuse others. Sexual aggression will be defined as repeated attempts (close together in time) despite the female agent's refusals.”
Abbey says the project is to enhance involvement through suggestions in the simulation’s literature to make the responses from the subjects more natural.
“Researchers often have people read a story about a situation and ask them to put themselves in the place of one of the characters in the story. I would never claim that any laboratory study is the same as real life, but I am hoping that responses will be more natural in the simulation than when we ask people to read a story and fill out a questionnaire.”
According to the grant description, an evaluation of the simulation's usefulness in alcohol administration research “will be conducted by comparing the responses and actions of intoxicated and sober participants during the simulation.”
“The goal of the proposed research is to develop a virtual reality simulation of a potential sexual assault situation that can be used in experimental research. This will allow the effects of alcohol consumption on sexual aggression to be examined under controlled conditions, thereby increasing confidence that differences found between drinkers and nondrinkers are due to alcohol, not other factors.”
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/287967-fed-study-developing-virtual-woman-who-will-agree-some-sexual-activities-and
Today, Ezra Klein aruges that Lois Lerner should be fired.
So does Salon's reliable lefty Joan Walsh.
Yesterday, both men were seen arriving at the West Wing for, presumably, a new iteration of White House talking points (hey, maybe Walsh was there, too). So we can all assume that President Obama wants Lois Lerner gone.
Why can't he fire her himself? Well, according to Politico,
It appears that no one has been formally reprimanded and a spokesperson for the union representing IRS workers said it hasn’t been called to help any employees yet. Most employees involved in the targeting program are covered by protections for federal workers that could drag out the termination process.If you want "reforms," this would be a good place to start. Stuff like targeting citizens for their political beliefs should be a no-brainer.
Even so, Lerner seems pretty senior to qualify for routine civil service protections. Presumably, she could be asked for her resignation, just as Steven Miller was. So why is the President stalling, and instead sending pundits out to seek her scalp instead?
Really, when we learn (1) who -- if anyone -- notified an administration member about the internal IRS report before the election confirming the targeting ; and (2) who was involved in slow-walking the IG report until after the election, a lot of these questions may answer themselves.
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/carolplattliebau/2013/05/22/and-straight-from-the-white-house-n1604093
Targeting Apple
At a Senate committee hearing on Tuesday, federal lawmakers hauled in America’s most successful corporation to investigate why it had so precisely followed the laws those solons have passed.
The targeting of Apple should be no particular surprise, in Congress’s crass calculus: True, even if reducing one’s tax burden and shifting profits overseas were a crime, Apple would probably not be the first company to investigate for such behavior — as chief executive Tim Cook pointed out, Apple paid $6 billion in corporate-income taxes to the U.S. Treasury in 2012, which is enough to run the entire Transportation Security Administration and amounts to about one dollar of every 40 that the corporate-income tax collects. But Apple is America’s richest and most successful corporation, and thus the fattest goose to drag before a committee.
Senator Carl Levin (D., Mich.), chairman of the committee, called Apple to account for its practice of locating subsidiaries and activities abroad in low-tax jurisdictions. It is indeed a problem that U.S. corporations shift much of their income elsewhere and leave it there. But corporations do this because Congress has encouraged them to.
Other developed nations have “territorial” tax systems, in which income earned within a country’s borders is taxed there. In contrast, the U.S. taxes all income earned by its corporations worldwide — but collects these taxes only when corporations bring their profits home. In addition, Congress has set the rate at the highest level in the industrialized world, 35 percent.
Congress should not be surprised, therefore, that Apple goes to great lengths to earn its income elsewhere. The sheer complication of the U.S. tax code — again, Congress’s handiwork — aids the company in this regard. Smaller firms, of course, lack Apple’s tax-planning and income-sluicing capabilities and are generally not able to do this; companies with less market power and intellectual property than Apple also find it harder to reduce their tax burden legally.
The congressional hearing convened this week proposed no solutions to these problems, and certainly not the right one: a lower corporate tax rate and a territorial taxation system, which would primarily benefit not the American fisc but the American worker. With a competitive corporate tax rate, companies would choose to locate their operations here rather than abroad. Instead, Senator Levin and other Democrats propose to reinforce and expand a system that does not work; they suggest various ways of closing tax exclusions and preventing companies from moving income elsewhere.
Congress has in the past come up with other approaches for the huge amounts of cash (in total, almost $2 trillion) held by corporations’ overseas subsidiaries: In 2004, legislators passed and President Bush signed a temporary holiday with a much lower tax rate on corporate income returned to U.S. entities. It is widely considered to have been a complete failure; the repatriation of all this cash generated almost no revenue or investment, essentially adding up to a lightly taxed giveaway to stockholders. Whether multinational corporations’ earnings have yet been legally admitted to the U.S. is, in effect, irrelevant to the question of whether corporations can use this money to invest in new lines of business and pay dividends to shareholders. Apple demonstrated that clearly this spring, when it decided to pay out some of its huge cash holdings to U.S. stockholders but did so by borrowing against its foreign subsidiaries.
The proper solution, again, is to create a territorial taxation system and reduce the corporate tax rate. While Apple broadly endorsed this kind of reform in its report to Congress, such a shift will not hugely benefit multinational corporations, because the advantages they gain with their elaborate accounting operations will be diminished.
Senator Rand Paul said following the hearing that Congress “should apologize to Apple” and should itself “be on trial here for creating a byzantine and bizarre tax code.” He is just about right: Congress owes an apology to Apple for calling it before a star-chamber subcommittee, but a more serious one to the American people, for the tax code that hurts them more than it does Apple.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/349113/targeting-apple-editors
Watch the other hand: Immigration reform advances under cover of scandals
While some of President Obama’s most
outspoken critics are working overtime to expose details of the various
scandals plaguing his administration these days, it seems there are
games afoot on Capitol Hill — specifically, the little-noticed
advancement of the “Gang of Eight” immigration reform proposal.
Bloomberg reports that the perfect storm of scandals has created a “honeymoon period” for pending immigration legislation.
As Glenn likes to say, watch the other hand…
The congressional probes into various government agencies diverted attention at a critical time, allowing the Senate Judiciary Committee a respite from the spotlight as it reached critical compromises on the measure and approved it on a bipartisan 13-5 vote on May 21. The bill would allow the estimated 11 million immigrants living in the U.S. without authorization a chance at citizenship.
“It’s like magic — you distract the audience while the real trick is being done — and I think right now, while Americans focus on President Obama’s unending difficulties, it’s good news for the Gang of Eight working on immigration,” said Republican strategist Alex Castellanos, referring to the four Republicans and four Democrats who crafted the bill.
The proposed legislation is under the
radar now, but that will change when it comes up for a high-profile vote
in the Senate next month.
Nevertheless, the lack of attention focused on the Judiciary Committee’s markup may still have significant consequences:
Republican Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, a member of the group of eight that wrote the compromise bill as well as the Judiciary Committee that signed off on it, said the scandal fever that has broken out in Washington has “been good” for the legislation, lowering the emotional temperature that has surrounded past failed efforts to make immigration changes.
“To be able to go through this markup where nobody can claim that we’ve short-circuited the process — it’s been an open process, we’ve adopted some substantive amendments — to be able to do that without people calling press conferences outside and without groups calling members, it’s been a good process,” Flake said in an interview, referring to the Judiciary panel’s actions. “I’d have to say it probably helped.”
http://www.theblaze.com/blog/2013/05/23/watch-the-other-hand-immigration-reform-advances-under-cover-of-scandals/The final day of Judiciary’s markup of the bill was a case in point. While former IRS officials testified before the Senate Finance Committee, the panel convened in the building next door for its fifth day of deliberations. Senator Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, quietly reached agreement with Democrats on changes to a high-skilled visa program, clearing an impediment to his party’s support for the bill.
The Unaccountable Executive
If the President doesn't run the government, then who does?
Every day brings new revelations about who knew what about the IRS targeting conservative groups during President Obama's re-election campaign, but the overall impression is of a vast federal bureaucracy run amok. While the White House continues to peddle the story of a driverless train wreck, taxpayers are being treated to a demonstration of the dangers of an unwieldy and unaccountable administrative state. Look, Ma, no hands!In his press events, Mr. Obama has said that while he learned about the Cincinnati rogues on the news, he plans to "hold accountable those who have taken these outrageous actions." But the White House began its response by pushing the line that the IRS is an "independent agency," and Mr. Obama has since given the impression that he sits atop a federal government which he does not, and could not possibly, control.
White House senior adviser Dan Pfieffer encouraged that fable on this Sunday's news shows, implying that the Treasury's internal process for handling the unfair treatment of political targets trumped the President's right to know. When CNN political correspondent Candy Crowley asked Mr. Pfieffer why the White House and top Treasury officials weren't notified, he explained that Treasury's investigation was ongoing and "Here's the cardinal rule: You do not interfere in an independent investigation."
Now there's a false choice. The Treasury Inspector General's report, for starters, was an audit, not an inviolable independent investigation. He lacked subpoena power and could bring no criminal charges. Having the President know of the IRS's mistakes so that he could act to correct the problem was not a bridge too far or even clouding the purity of the process. Those things could have been done simultaneously without compromising Treasury's investigation.
At Darrell Issa's House oversight hearing on Wednesday, Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George was criticized for not notifying Congress of the IRS wrongdoing when he became aware of it in July 2012. Emails between the IG's office and committee staff show the IG's office repeatedly evaded Congressional inquiries on the progress of the investigation.
All IGs appear before Congress, but they are really answerable to the President who is responsible for what goes on in the IRS and what the agency actually does. If the IRS is not operating in a way that treats taxpayers evenhandedly and in accordance with its guidelines and mission, it is up to him to change the personnel and make any other corrections so that the taxing power of the federal government is legal and fair. If that isn't the case, voters deserve to know exactly who is accountable for the decisions of the agency that takes a healthy fraction of their income every year.
Asked by Texas Senator John Cornyn at a Finance Committee hearing on Tuesday whether he owed conservative groups an apology, former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman said that he was "certainly not personally responsible for creating a list that had inappropriate criteria on it" though he was sorry that it had happened on his watch.
There's a certain infantilization of the federal government here that should be especially alarming to taxpayers who have ever crossed paths with the IRS. The agency has the power to make citizens lives miserable, ruin their businesses and garnish their wages. Anyone facing an audit is unlikely to get away with the evasions now in display in the federal bureaucracy.
If the scandal is showing anything, it is that the White House has a bizarre notion of accountability in the federal government. President Obama's former senior adviser, David Axelrod, told MSNBC recently that his guy was off the hook on the IRS scandal because "part of being President is there's so much beneath you that you can't know because the government is so vast."
In other words, the bigger the federal government grows, the less the President is responsible for it. Mr. Axelrod's remarkable admission, and the liberal media defenses of Mr. Obama's lack of responsibility, prove the tea party's point that an ever larger government has become all but impossible to govern. They also show once again that liberals are good at promising the blessings of government largesse but they leave its messes for others to clean up.
***
Alexander Hamilton and America's Founders designed the unitary executive for the purpose of political accountability. It is one of the Constitution's main virtues. Unlike grunts in Cincinnati, Presidents must face the voters. That accountability was designed to extend not only to the President's inner circle but over the entire branch of government whose leaders he chooses and whose policies bear his signature.If the President isn't accountable, then we really have the tea party nightmare of the runaway administrative state accountable to no one. If Mr. Obama and his aides are to be taken at their word, that is exactly what we have.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323475304578499293514955294.html?mod=opinion_newsreel
Why was the Department of Homeland Security monitoring Tea Party IRS demonstrations?
What was a DHS agent doing at the San Jose Tea Party protest? Why aren't DHS officers protecting the homeland against foreign enemies armed with explosives and hate? Perhaps because the Obama Administration is more worried about domestic "enemies" armed with the Constitution and love of country.
It gets scarier.
The DHS spy-babysitter-hall monitor informed the protesters that only a handful of Tea Partiers showed up to the San Francisco IRS office. What's so significant about this statement?
Well, it tells us that Big Sis (aka Janet Napolitano) was not only watching Tea Partiers in San Jose but also in San Francisco! WATCHING us!
As if that weren't scary enough, this will send shivers down your spine:
DHS Agent Man also let slip (or, conveniently leaked in an effort to intimidate) this juicy tidbit: San Jose had the largest turnout in all of California.
Whoa!
So they weren't just spying on us in San Jose and monitoring us in San Francisco, they were watching us throughout the entire state!
(I bet Big Sis didn't deploy her agents to the Occupy Wall Street venues.)
It is further evidence of the Soviet style "War on Dissent" that this Administration would send out DHS agents to monitor Tea Party protests in the wake of scandals in which the Administration is under fire from left and right for singling out Tea Party applications for tax-exempt status; squashing the First Amendment rights of the little guy in an election year; spying on AP reporters in violation of their First Amendment press freedoms; and covering up the truth about Benghazi in a manner that makes Watergate look like Amateur Day.
One would think they would be just a bit more circumspect and maybe even exercise a modicum of restraint before dispersing KGB, I mean, DHS agents to free speech rallies protected under the Constitution.
The fact that they did this so blatantly despite the scrutiny they are under is symptomatic of a government on the verge of a constitutional breakdown -- a government that doesn't hesitate to bully the little guy while giving the Constitution the proverbial political finger.
If Obama thought for a second that the Tea Party was dead, he just did a good job of rousing the living dead and unleashing a "War on Tyranny" to his "War on Dissent."
How many political lives does this President have? How many times can his Administration -- State, DOJ, IRS, DHS -- stomp with a boot on the people and goose step all over the Constitution and get away with it? When will average Americans realize that we aren't in Kansas anymore and face the disturbing reality that this government is more comfortable dishing out intimidation than ensuring liberty?
Holder, the AP, and CIA: Subpoena Subterfuge?
...No matter what, the leak investigation is going nowhere in court in any legitimate sense, and everyone with an IQ above room temperature in Washington knows it.It was never supposed to. Holder's DOJ deployed the crass subpoena weapon as a way to intimidate, under color of law, scandal talkers, not leakers.
Holder's DOJ did this even at the cost of disillusioning the AP, because it (Holder's DOJ) reasoned that it had more to lose by not doing so.
Talkers in regard to Benghazi, talkers in regard to the IRS scandal, and talkers in regard to who knows what else--that's who Holder's DOJ is trying to shut up. It's why, in spite having been utilized several months ago, the subpoena was disclosed the same day as the pre-planned IRS "targeting" confession.
What's the next step after an overreaching subpoena the genuine purpose of which had nothing to do with American interests, and everything to do with Obama's interests?
"Accidents" connected to information even more scandalous than that which we have seen so far.
$434K in Stimulus to Help Latina Middle-Schoolers 'Resist' Sex Created 0.91 Jobs
According to the grant description, “This study will test a prototype for a game that builds the skills that Latinas need to resist pressure to engage in intercourse when they are in middle school, thereby decreasing their risk for teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. Study results will also be helpful to other researchers developing technology-based health games designed to promote health.”The project has been completed, Barbara Abney, director of marketing and communications at UCF, told CNSNews.com.
“Forty-four low-income early adolescent Hispanic girls took part in the study, which included peer resistance skill curriculum followed by specially developed, technology-assisted, social interaction game play,” Abney said.
Researchers found “that by using an avatar-based, virtual reality, peer-resistance skill-building game, in combination with curriculum, teenage girls were better able to resist peer pressure to participate in risky behaviors.”
According to Recovery.gov, the website for tracking stimulus funds, the project created 0.91 jobs.
Abney told CNSNews.com that “several” part-time positions were created over the project’s two-year lifespan. This included two research assistants, a part-time project manager, four positions for people who worked less than 60 hours a year and two high school student research assistants.
“This ‘shovel ready,’ two-year project is guided by an interdisciplinary team working in collaboration with an afterschool and summer camp program for low income, middle school children in a predominately Latino community in Orlando, Florida,” the grant states. “Game design is driven by a theoretical framework integrating social cognitive theory, the communication competence model, and Piaget's theory of cognitive development.”
The emphasis was placed on Latinas because they have a pregnancy rate that is twice that of non-Hispanic whites. “The middle school years are targeted because this is an ideal point at which to intervene to delay initiation of intercourse,” the grant said.
“A delay in initiation until after middle school could have considerable cost savings, given the positive association between age at first intercourse and use of contraceptives, and the costs associated with early adolescent pregnancy,” it said.
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/434k-stimulus-help-latina-middle-schoolers-resist-sex-created-091-jobs
$287,967 Fed Study Developing 'Virtual Woman' Who 'Will Agree to Some Sexual Activities and Refuse Others' with Drunk Men
The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism has awarded $287,967 to a study that will develop a virtual woman who will agree to some sexual activities and refuse others requested by "intoxicated" men.The grant was awarded in July of last year for the project “Alcohol's Role in Sexual Assault: Development of Virtual Reality Simulation Proxy”. The project is funded through June of 2014.
“The Specific Aims of the proposed research involve developing a virtual reality simulation with a virtual woman (an embodied female agent) that male participants rate as realistic and involving,” the National Institutes of Health project description says.
Project Leader Professor Antonia Abbey of Wayne State University tells CNSNews.com, “Male participants will have the opportunity to select a variety of actions, some of which are sexual. The female agent will agree to some sexual activities and refuse others. Sexual aggression will be defined as repeated attempts (close together in time) despite the female agent's refusals.”
Abbey says the project is to enhance involvement through suggestions in the simulation’s literature to make the responses from the subjects more natural.
“Researchers often have people read a story about a situation and ask them to put themselves in the place of one of the characters in the story. I would never claim that any laboratory study is the same as real life, but I am hoping that responses will be more natural in the simulation than when we ask people to read a story and fill out a questionnaire.”
According to the grant description, an evaluation of the simulation's usefulness in alcohol administration research “will be conducted by comparing the responses and actions of intoxicated and sober participants during the simulation.”
“The goal of the proposed research is to develop a virtual reality simulation of a potential sexual assault situation that can be used in experimental research. This will allow the effects of alcohol consumption on sexual aggression to be examined under controlled conditions, thereby increasing confidence that differences found between drinkers and nondrinkers are due to alcohol, not other factors.”
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/287967-fed-study-developing-virtual-woman-who-will-agree-some-sexual-activities-and
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