Sebelius: Yes, I "Urged" Companies Regulated by Me to "Donate" to Obamacare Promotion
Oh yes, the oft-overlooked fourth scandal. Kathleen Sebelius appeared at a House hearing yesterday and confirmed that the broad strokes of a Washington Post report published last month were true:Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, disclosed on Tuesday that she had made telephone calls to three companies regulated by her department and urged them to help a nonprofit group promote President Obama’s health care law. She identified the companies as Johnson & Johnson, the drug maker; Ascension Health, a large Roman Catholic health care system; and Kaiser Permanente, the health insurance plan. At a hearing of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, Ms. Sebelius said she did not explicitly ask the companies for money, but urged them to support the work of the nonprofit group, Enroll America. The group, led by former Obama administration officials, is working with the White House to publicize the 2010 health care law and help uninsured people sign up for coverage. Republicans in Congress have raised questions about the legality and propriety of Ms. Sebelius’s fund-raising efforts, saying she was trying to circumvent limits on spending set by Congress...Ms. Sebelius said that no federal law prevented her from trying to raise money from companies regulated by her department. However, she said, she voluntarily decided not to make fund-raising appeals to such companies. Ms. Sebelius said that she had made a total of five calls soliciting support for Enroll America, and that she did not know if anyone else in her department had also done so. She said she “never discussed” the solicitations with anyone at the White House.Of course she didn't. No one ever tells anyone else anything within this administration, haven't you heard? And let me see if I'm understanding Sebelius' contention here. She "voluntarily decided not to make fundraising appeals" to companies over which she wields enormous power -- but she did, er, phone them up and "urge" them to support the cause? How exactly does that work? She also cites precedents from the Clinton and Bush years to justify her actions, but those comparisons are strained. Did staffers in those administrations pressure companies under their direct purview to pick up the funding slack on behalf of a controversial law for that Congress had explicitly refused to subsidize any further? I must have missed that. Some Congressional Republicans believe Sebelius may have violated the law in undertaking these
Can she at least say whether or not she took pre-hearing notes from Eric Holder? The Obama transparency foibles continue. On that score, I'll leave you with this, via Bloomberg News:
The Department of Veterans Affairs, which Obama exempted from sequestration to protect veterans, last week tried blaming the cuts for its failure to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request we filed with the agency in December 2011. We wanted access to all documents detailing hundreds of millions of dollars in potentially illegal VA spending with a pharmaceutical supplier. A lot has happened in the 17 months since the request was filed...and the VA still hasn’t given us access to all the documents sought. Reason cited: “Given sequestration and budget cuts, instead of three (3) previously, we now have only two (2) full-time FOIA staff to process about two hundred fifty (250) FOIA requests received per year,” Richard Ha, a Freedom of Information Act officer, said in a letter last week asking us to narrow the scope of our request. “Please be advised that your FOIA requests, as they are, place an unreasonable burden onto this FOIA office.”One sector of the federal government attempted to rationalize their lack of responsiveness to journalists' transparency-seeking FOIA requests by blaming the president's sequester "cuts" (read: reductions in the rate of spending increase)...from which they were explicitly exempted, and that went into effect long after said requests were filed.
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2013/06/05/sebelius-yes-i-urged-companies-i-regulate-to-donate-to-promote-obamacare-n1613258
The Most Transparent Administration Ever, LOL
By Michelle MalkinSun, sun, sun, here it comes. Welcome to the Summer of Belated Epiphanies. Media lapdogs are finally, finally arriving at the conclusion that maybe this isn't the most transparent administration in world history, after all.
On Tuesday, the Associated Press reported on the Obama administration's use of secret email accounts, stonewalling on Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and attempted shakedown of reporters seeking public information on just how widespread the disclosure evasion might be.
Take note: It wasn't the AP that originally uncovered Team Obama's penchant for email sock-puppetry. Chris Horner, Competitive Enterprise Institute fellow and author of "The Liberal War on Transparency," first exposed former EPA Chief Lisa Jackson's Internet alter ego, "Richard Windsor," last year. The free-market environmental think tank filed suit against the government last fall seeking records on the secret, illegal "secondary" email accounts of high-level EPA officials after the agency ignored multiple FOIA filings.
Seven months after President Obama was re-elected, along comes the AP to bolster Horner's assertion that the practice is not just isolated in one bureaucracy. Corruptocrat Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius (whose document-shredding, obstructionist history I chronicled last week) maintained at least one FOIA-subverting address: KGS2@hhs.gov. So did Donald Berwick, former head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and Gary Cohen, a top Obamacare operative.
According to the AP, a whopping 10 agencies have not yet turned over lists of email addresses, including EPA, the Pentagon, the departments of Veterans Affairs, Transportation, Treasury, Justice, Housing and Urban Development, Homeland Security, Commerce, and Agriculture.
And how's this for the audacity of opacity: Can you believe the Labor Department initially asked the AP to pay more than $1 million for its email addresses?
In a classic Captain Obvious moment, the Associated Press points out that these hidden accounts "drive perceptions that government officials are trying to hide actions or decisions." You don't say!
Hostility to transparency, of course, has been a hallmark of this administration from top to bottom. As I reported from the very first days of the Obama regime's vampiric tenure:
--Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for years fought disclosure of massive donations from foreign governments and corporations who filled her husband's library and foundation coffers.
--Former Labor Secretary Hilda Solis failed to disclose that she was director and treasurer of a union-promoting lobbying group pushing legislation that she was co-sponsoring.
--Attorney General Eric Holder overruled his own lawyers in the Justice Department on the issue of D.C. voting rights (which he and Obama support) and refused to make public the staffers' opinion that a House bill on the matter was unconstitutional. His stone wall of obstruction extends from the New Black Panther Party voting rights case to the Fast and Furious gun-walking scandal to the Solyndra green boondoggle bankruptcy and Gitmo closure plans and conflicts of interests -- all while touting a new "Open Plan for Government" from which he has conveniently exempted himself.
--Former No. 2 official at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, former King County, Wash., Executive Ron Sims, had the distinction of being the most fined government official in his state's history for suppressing public records from taxpayers.
--Former green czar Carol Browner infamously bullied auto execs to "put nothing in writing, ever." She was singled out by the White House's own oil spill panel for misleading the public about the scientific evidence for the administration's draconian drilling moratorium. The Interior Department inspector general and federal courts blasted drilling-ban book-cooking by both Browner and former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who falsely rewrote the White House drilling-ban report to doctor the Obama-appointed panel's own overwhelming scientific objections to the job-killing edict, as a culture of contempt and "determined disregard" for the law.
Remember: While head of the Clinton administration's EPA, Browner ordered a staffer to purge and delete her computer files to evade a public disclosure lawsuit. Lambasted by the judge for "contumacious" behavior and contempt of court, Browner claimed it was all an innocent mistake -- and blamed her young son for downloading games on her work computer that she was trying to erase.
And in case you'd forgotten, Obama set the tone by breaking his transparency pledge with the very first bill he signed into law. In January 2009, the White House announced that the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act had been posted online for review. Oopsy: Obama had already signed it -- in violation of his "sunlight before signing" pledge to post legislation for public comment on the White House website five days before he sealed any deal.
In 2010, corporate lobbyists met hundreds of times with administration officials at Starbucks, Caribou Coffee, even on a side lawn -- with the express purpose of circumventing the public's right to know. The coffee loophole klatches were arranged by Team Obama members using, you guessed it, personal email accounts to communicate with the influence industry.
When Obama vowed that "transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency," he didn't mean "touchstones." He meant sinkholes.
Now, when Mr. Sunshine touts his reveal-as-we-say-not-as-we-conceal record, I'll welcome company from the Johnnies-come-lately of the White House press who see the truth and laugh out loud, rolling on the floor.
http://townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/2013/06/05/the-most-transparent-administration-ever-lol-n1613004/page/full
Who Exactly Is Samantha Power — Obama’s New U.N. Ambassador Pick? Everything You Need to Know
This morning it was announced that
President Barack Obama will nominate foreign policy confidant Samantha
Power to replace Susan Rice as the United States ambassador to the
United Nations. But, who is she? If you’ve been a long-time Blaze
reader, you are likely familiar with the controversial figure. If not —
or if you’d simply like a refresher — allow us to provide an overview.
Fall from grace — and her return
Power, a human rights expert and former White House adviser,
left the White House earlier this year, though she was considered the
president’s likely pick to move to the U.N. As TheBlaze reported this
morning, she has long been connected to Obama. And if you’ll recall, she
has had her fair share of controversy, specifically after she was
forced to resign from the president’s 2008 campaign following negative
remarks she made about Hillary Clinton.
In an interview with The Scotsman during the heat of the 2008 presidential race, Power called Clinton a “monster.”
“We f***** up in Ohio. In Ohio, they
are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows
Ohio’s the only place they can win,” she said of the Obama camp’s
efforts and of Clinton’s political prowess. “She is a monster, too —
that is off the record — she is stooping to anything.”
Power’s comments though didn’t lead to
completely severed ties to Obama, as she was soon back in the fold. So,
too, was her husband — she is the wife of former regulatory czar Cass
Sunstein. As early as 2011, TheBlaze covered expectations that Power could possible secure
greater power, specifically if the president was elected to a second
term. Her U.N. appointment appears to solidify these expectations.
Influence on Libya
In the past, Irish Central called her one of the main architects of the Obama administration’s policies in Libya, noting her influence over the White House. And Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, said in a 2011 New York Times profile that “She is clearly the foremost voice for human rights within the White House and she has Obama’s ear.”
Bloomberg has more about her Libya involvement as well:
She played a role, along with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice and other NSC advisers, in convincing Obama to push for a UN Security Council resolution to authorize a coalition military force to protect Libyan civilians.
Other administration figures were concerned about the effectiveness of a no-fly zone and differences within NATO over what Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned would be a “big operation.” [...]
Power, who sought the limelight as a writer and public intellectual, has learned to be a behind-the-scenes policymaker over the past two years, associates say.
Eventually, she repaired relations
with Clinton. That said, she’s still widely seen as a problem by
conservatives who oppose her ideals. After all, it wasn’t only her
comments about the former Democratic presidential candidate that has
caught the ire of critics; her foreign policy, too, is seen by some as
problematic.
Dangerous?
Glenn Beck once covered the controversy surrounding her, while Sean Hannity named her one of the top 10 most dangerous people in the Obama administration.
Why? Let’s explore why Power is seen as such a polarizing figure.
Previously, TheBlaze provided a
plethora of background on the human rights enthusiast. As noted, Power
has a complicated history with the Obama camp and has also been accused,
in the past, of making disparaging remarks about Israel.
Let’s review what Beck has said about
the incoming U.N. ambassador. In March 2011, the popular radio and
television host covered Power on his radio show and a subsequent article on GlennBeck.com recapped the host’s stance:
For anyone who thinks that Samantha Power is just some low level cog in the Washington machine, the New York Times just did a nice profile on her role in the current administration. It turns out that Mrs. Cass Sunstein is probably the most dangerous woman in America, after all. [...]
“Now from her perch on the national Security Council, she is in a position to make the case for the commander in chief and to watch him translate her ideas into action. She’s clearly the foremost voice for human rights with in the White House, says Kenneth Ross. She has Obama’s ear. The Irish‑born Miss Power…functions as kind of an institutional memory bank on genocide,” [Beck said].
“So we have Cass Sunstein’s wife advising on the Responsibility to Protect,” Glenn said “If you’re in the circle of George Soros, she was a queen. George Soros immediately funded a group to push the Responsibility to Protect.”
Last year, The Chicago Sun-Times provided information about Power and her involvement in Obama’s Atrocities Prevention Board, an effort to prevent future genocide (i.e. the doctrine of a “Responsibility to Protect”) and other horrific occurrences:
Samantha Power — who won a Pulitizer Prize for her book on genocide and now advises the Obama administration on the subject–will chair President Barack Obama’s new Atrocities Prevention Board, which gets down to work Monday as Obama delivers a speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. [...]
The Obama White House efforts to address genocide is headed by Samantha Power, Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights. Power won a Pulitizer Prize for her book, “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide”and worked briefly for Obama when he was a U.S. senator from Illinois.
But that has largely been seen as an interventionist policy — something many Republicans and Democrats shy away from.
Israel
Considering her past comments about
Israel and her perceived stance on the Middle Eastern country, it’s
likely that her appointment will be contentious, drawing particular
frustration from conservatives and those who believe that her policy
stances will be damaging to the current Middle Eastern scenario.
Again, these concerns are nothing new. Last year, The Lid blog wondered if Power
would use her position on the Atrocities Prevention Board “as a tool to
de-legitimize Israel.” Now, it’s likely that this same question will
exist surrounding the U.N. and her powerful role there.
Past comments do little to temper
these fears. In 2002, Power sat down with Harry Kreisler, the director
of the Institute for International Studies at Berkeley. Kreisler asked
her the following:
“Let me give you a thought experiment here, and it is the following: without addressing the Palestine – Israel problem, let’s say you were an advisor to the President of the United States, how would you respond to current events there? Would you advise him to put a structure in place to monitor that situation, at least if one party or another [starts] looking like they might be moving toward genocide?”
Power’s response, in the eyes of those
who support Israel, was problematic, as she claimed support for
“external intervention” in the Israeli-Palestinian dilemma and said that
it’s important to consider the “lesser evils” associated with getting
involved in alleviating the issue.
She also, at one point in her
commentary, claimed that Middle Eastern leaders — including Israel, it
seems — are “destroying the lives of their own people.” Here is a
portion of her response, word-for-word:
“What we need is a willingness to actually put something on the line…and putting something on the line might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import. It may more crucially mean…investing literally billions of dollars not in servicing Israeli military, but actually investing in the new state of Palestine.
In investing billions of dollars it would probably take also to support, I think, what would to be, I think, a mammoth protection force…a meaningful military presence because it seems to me at this stage — and this is true of actual genocides as well and not just major human rights abuses which we’re seeing there — but is that you have to go in as if you’re serious. You have to put something on the line and unfortunately the position of a solution on unwilling parties is dreadful, it’s a terrible thing to do its fundamentally undemocratic.”
As TheBlaze highlighted in our
original article about the controversy, it is important to note that
Power differentiated “genocide” from the “major human rights abuses”
that she believes — or at least believed back in 2002 — were occurring
as a result of the conflict.
Still, many will still wonder if her
views surrounding Israel and the Middle East will impact how she manages
her position at the U.N — and, more specifically — her treatment of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
So, Obama has chosen an anti-Israel ambassador to represent the United
States at the anti-Israel United Nations. What could possibly go wrong?
Bash: IRS Can’t Locate Its Receipts
IRS wasn't required to do something taxpayers are
CNN correspondent Dana Bash discussed the excesses of the agency in a report on 360, including gifts, video spoofs and upscale hotel rooms for agency higher-ups, but the cost of those and the conference itself was unclear because the IRS had engaged in poor record-keeping:
ANDERSON COOPER: I’ve got to go back to something you said. The IRS facing this audit actually said they couldn’t find some of their own receipts. Is that for real?
DANA BASH: That is for real, Anderson. It really is hard to believe, but the IG report explicitly says, ‘IRS management could not provide any documentation detailing how this money was spent.’ At the time, three years ago, this is also hard to believe, keeping track of and reporting costs of conferences wasn’t required at the IRS. Shoddy record-keeping wasn’t limited to just these videos. The IG couldn’t even verify the overall cost of the conference.http://freebeacon.com/bash-irs-cant-locate-its-receipts/
The IRS and Obamacare, by the Numbers
Chilling new details emerged yesterday about the IRS targeting scandal, as representatives from six conservative groups testified before Congress about the scrutiny and demands they faced from Obama administration bureaucrats.
Yesterday's testimony reminded us once again why Washington bureaucrats cannot be trusted, and why Americans should be so concerned about the new powers granted to the IRS as a result of Obamacare.
These powers are so vast, in fact, they’re difficult to put into words. So instead, we decided to give you the numbers:
18—New taxes in Obamacare, including 12 that directly violate then-Senator Barack Obama’s “firm pledge” to those making under $250,000 per year that he would not “raise any of your taxes.”
47—New provisions Obamacare charges the IRS with implementing, according to the Government Accountability Office.
$695—Tax for not buying “government-approved” health insurance the IRS will be charged with enforcing on all Americans.
1,954—Full-time bureaucrats the IRS wants to devote to Obamacare implementation and enforcement in the upcoming fiscal year.
60,000,000—Medical records the IRS has been charged with improperly seizing, raising concerns about whether the agency can handle the personal health insurance information all Americans will be required to submit to the IRS.
$439,584,000—The IRS’s request for new spending on Obamacare implementation in the upcoming fiscal year; the request did not specify how much of those funds the IRS will spend on the “Cupid shuffle.”
6,100,000,000—Man-hours Americans already devote to tax compliance, according to the National Taxpayer Advocate, a burden that will rise significantly thanks to Obamacare.
$1,000,000,000,000—New revenue raised by Obamacare in its first 10 years alone, according to the Congressional Budget Office, sums that will only rise in future decades.
If ever there were an argument as to why Obamacare should be repealed and defunded, these numbers—coupled with the IRS revelations of recent weeks—tell the tale.
http://blog.heritage.org/2013/06/05/the-irs-and-obamacare-by-the-numbers/?roi=echo3-15865555198-13050850-fee58aa6078e8be6bd7b2bf83a70c488&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell
11-Yr-Old Suspended From School For Merely TALKING About Guns
The father of a middle schooler in Calvert County, Md. says his 11-year-old son was suspended for 10 days for merely talking about guns on the bus ride home.
Bruce Henkelman of Huntingtown says his son, a sixth grader at Northern Middle School in Owings, was talking with friends about the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre when the bus driver hauled him back to school to be questioned by the principal, Darrel Prioleau.
"The principal told me that with what happened at Sandy Hook if you say the word 'gun' in my school you are going to get suspended for 10 days," Henkelman said in an interview with WMAL.com.
So what did the boy say? According to his father, he neither threatened nor bullied anyone.
"He said, I wish I had a gun to protect everyone. He wanted to defeat the bad guys. That's the context of what he said," Henkelman said. "He wanted to be the hero."
The boy was questioned by the principal and a sheriff's deputy, who also wanted to search the family home without a warrant, Henkelman said. "He started asking me questions about if I have firearms, and [the deputy said] he's going to have to search my house. Search my house? I just wanted to know what happened."
No search was performed, and the deputy left Henkelman's home after the father answered questions in a four-page questionnaire issued by the Sheriff's Office.
Principal Darrel Prioleau did not respond to calls and emails seeking comment. Robin Welsh, the deputy superintendent of Calvert County Schools, said federal privacy rules prohibited her from commenting on a specific case, but she said students are not suspended without cause.
"There has to be some violation within the code of conduct that would trigger some type of consequence or intervention," said Welsh, who said the county school system does not have a zero tolerance policy.
Based on information about Henkelman's case provided by WMAL.com, the ACLU of Maryland said the suspension, later reduced to one day, was a poor choice by school administrators.
"It's appropriate for school officials to investigate when there is a concern about student safety. But based on what's been described to us, once the school official concluded that all the young man wanted to do was to be safe at school and that he posed no risk to anyone, the suspension was really inappropriate," said Sonya Kumar, an ACLU staff attorney.
"The school should have been assuring him that they were going to take steps to keep all students safe, not punishing him," she added.
Henkelman said the incident happened last December right before students were sent home for winter break, but he did not feel compelled to take his story to the public until he learned that a 5-year-old Calvert County boy was suspended for bringing a toy cap gun on a school bus.
"[My son] was very scared at the fact that he was interviewed by the principal and a sheriff's deputy alone. He didn't know where I was," Henkelman said.
The ACLU's Kumar said there are too many cases of school officials coming down hard on students for relatively harmless offenses.
"Across the board, we are concerned about practices where we have these sort of knee-jerk reactions without really stopping to think and use our common sense about whether what a kid is doing or saying actually presents any sort of concern for the safety and well-being of others," Kumar said.
http://pro.wmal-af.tritonflex.com/common/page.php?pt=WMAL+EXCLUSIVE%3A+11-Yr-Old+Suspended+From+School+For+Merely+TALKING+About+Guns&id=26543&is_corp=0
Fighting the fanaticism in education
For the last several decades, courts have done their best to rid public schools of any reference to religion in order to impose a separation of church and state in education. What’s replaced it, Glenn Reynolds writes in his USA Today column, is another kind of religious fanaticism that borders on the pathological. It’s the Church of Guns are Evil, and the crusade has already taken the form of the ridiculous:Lego guns, cap guns, bubble guns, nibbled Pop Tarts, and fingers are no threat to safety. And the wild overreaction in these cases says there’s more going on here than simple school discipline. As I said, who treats a 5-year-old this way? It smacks of fanaticism.
In fact, it seems like a kind of quasi-religious fanaticism. I think it’s about the administrative class — which runs the schools with as little input from parents as possible — doing its best to exterminate the very idea of guns. It’s some sort of wacky moral-purity crusade. If a few toddlers have to suffer along the way, that’s tough. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.
But that raises two questions. First, what business do public schools have in trying to extirpate “impure” thoughts? Aren’t we supposed to celebrate diversity? And, second, why should public schools decide that a longtime staple of American childhood, the toy gun, is suddenly evil?
When Horace Mann first campaigned to introduce compulsory public schooling, the model he chose was based on the schools in Prussia. Some of his critics objected: The Prussian system, they said, was based on the presumption that the government was smarter than the people. In America, presumption was precisely the reverse. Mann won out, but the result raises some questions about who’s smarter.Actually, the events of the past week tend to answer those questions rather than raise them. Be sure to read the whole piece, but keep this in mind — the hostility to religion in education even as a reference was about secularizing values in an institution that forms succeeding generations. What values replaced those that have been driven out? Besides hysteria, I mean …
http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2013/06/04/fighting-the-fanaticism-in-education/
The GOP and the IRS
As usual, the Congress is all over a scandal after the fact. The hearings on the IRS fiasco are good theatre and admittedly necessary; but where were the Republicans, not only over the past three years that the IRS was targeting conservative groups, but over the past three decades as the more and more power was granted to this same agency -- an agency with the potential to be transformed into a de facto secret police. The Republicans were, by consistently agreeing to more complexities in the tax code and the need for stringent tax enforcement due to ever expanding government expenditures, complicit in the creation of a bureaucracy now out of control.While tax reform is always a good item for inclusion in the Party's platform and sounds great on the campaign trail, it has never been seriously attempted as the nearly 74,000 pages of the tax code is one of the foundational elements of power in Washington D.C. Within that immense waste of paper there is essentially something for everyone who can influence those in Congress, either Republican or Democrat, to insert a favorable provision for their clients. Those in Congress receive in return either campaign contributions or other favorable emoluments to guarantee re-election or a more pleasant standard of living.
It is understandable that the Democrats, as the party of tax and spend as well as an all-powerful central government, would view the tax code and its enforcement arm, the IRS, as vital to their end-game.
However, when the Republicans controlled the White House and one or both houses of Congress, they never seriously proposed any significant change to the tax code and paid little or no attention to evolving near-fascist mindset within the IRS.
Over the past three years, while the IRS management, with a wink and a nod from the White House, targeted conservative groups of all stripes, many Republicans in Congress were inundated with letters and complaints from these same constituents. Rather than aggressively pursue these grievances, many simply wrote letters to the IRS hierarchy and accepted at face value whatever they were told in response. The political persecution of conservatives thus continued guaranteeing the re-election of Barack Obama.
Why was there a reluctance to assertively come to the aid of the Tea Party or other conservative groups when it was obvious what was happening? Was it because the IRS has grown into such a monolithic power center that they can intimidate politicians asking too many questions? Was it because the Republican establishment has such an ambivalent attitude towards these groups that they were not really interested in helping them? Was it because the government needs to wring out every bit of money it can from the American taxpayer to fund an out of control government that it doesn't matter what the IRS does?
Over the years I have had many conversations with politicians and bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. concerning the increasing power of the IRS. As an immigrant to this nation from a continent nearly destroyed by a World War fomented by all-powerful governments controlled by megalomaniacs and their secret police, I have always been acutely sensitive to any aggregation of power by government agencies that directly impact the daily lives of the citizenry. However, a personal experience with the IRS convinced me that this agency could easily be transformed into a political and enforcement bludgeon.
Many years ago I received a notice that I and a company I owned were subject to a TCMP (Taxpayer Compliance Measurement Program) audit. These audits were ostensibly performed in order to collect statistical information for the IRS database; they were also euphemistically nicknamed the "audits from hell." Essentially the tax payer has to produce documentation to justify every line on the tax form. This includes all income, deductions, expenses etc regardless of the complexities of the return.
As the year being audited was two years in the past, gathering and finding all the information was a major project, particularly for the business. This included cancelled checks, invoices, bank deposits, expense reports among many other necessary documents. After this came the meetings with the IRS agents to review literally everything that had to be produced in order to reconstruct the tax returns. There were six meetings with the IRS over a six month period until the audit was complete. During that period of time I was pulled away from the business for over 200 hours and the direct out of pocket costs exceeded $18,000.00. The result of the audit: the company was assessed an additional $450.00 in taxes due to a mistake in a depreciation schedule on a company car.
But what concerned me more was the ability of the IRS to intimidate the taxpayer and the enormity of the power they had at their disposal to destroy anyone. My admittedly overly sensitive antenna convinced me that if those with narcissistic and megalomaniacal tendencies were ever to dominate the federal government for any extended period of time this agency would become there quasi secret police and too powerful to control.
Over the years whenever I expressed these concerns to those in Washington I was greeted with a quizzical expression and told I was being paranoid. Essentially the belief was it could never happen here. This attitude extended to those in the Republican Party, which ostensibly is the party of individual freedom and liberty.
As this ever-expanding scandal reveals, the IRS has become a rogue agency and an arm of the political machinery in the Obama White house. What I have feared is coming to pass. The IRS must be dissolved and the tax code replaced by either a "Fair Tax" or an exceedingly simple flat tax requiring no more than a four or five line return. Never has there been a better time to put an end to this government tyranny. Any Republican either in office or running for office that cannot support these positions must be defeated as they are, essentially, in support of the status quo and the growth of a police state.
‘Everything Is Up for Grabs’: Beck Explains Why World War III Could Be on the Horizon
Glenn Beck dedicated the entire hour of
his television program Tuesday to the follow-up of what he says got him
into “so much trouble” during the so-called Arab Spring: a chalkboard
that predicted the protests would cascade, and that radicals would work
with Islamists overturn stability.
On Tuesday, Beck told his audience where he believes the road will now lead: World War III.
“The one thing that always gets me in
trouble is usually I am way ahead of the game, and I have no perception
of time,” Beck said. “I see things on a flat wall. They are coming, but
it won’t be tomorrow.”
He added: “I hope with everything in me
that I’m wrong, but the pattern of history is incredibly
consistent…Everything is up for grabs in the world, and the rush for
power is on.”
Beck argued that there are currently three dominant groups:
‘The Caliphate’: “It is the stated goal of Muslim Brotherhood leaders and many far left Islamists to re-establish the Caliphate, the Ottoman Empire, or the global Islamic state,” Beck said, playing video of Islamist leaders across the globe saying just that.
But, he added, this group is divided between Sunni and Shia Muslims. While Sunni Muslims — who dominate much of post-Arab Spring North Africa, Saudi Arabia, and the Muslim Brotherhood — aim to implement an Islamic state, Beck said the radical Shiites who wield influence in places like Iran, Assad’s Syria, and Pakistan are more focused on hastening the return of the twelfth imam. They believe he will only appear when the world is drowned in blood and chaos, so they aim to create those conditions.
“But either way, they both [believe] they control the entire world in the end,” Beck said.
‘The Controllers’: “Whether they are communists, socialists, fascists, progressives, Fabian socialists, bankers, Bilderbergs, Nazis, drug lords, Mayor Bloomberg… ” Beck stated. “[This is] anyone who wants either wants power in their own little fiefdom, or wants to control the planet through the United Nations or whatever. Anyone who wants a slice of that ‘control’ pie.”
He put countries like Russia, China, and North Korea in the “control” category.
‘Those That Just Want to Survive’: But throughout the world, most people aren’t thinking in terms of global domination, Beck said. Most people just want to live their lives, or, depending on where they live, just want enough food and water to get by. Beck put about 90% of the world into this category.
“The problem is, nobody is offering you a real choice,” Beck said, proceeding to draw out the potential “new map.”“That, unfortunately, this is the group that loses in the end, because this group is always forced to choose between stuff and sacrifice,” Beck said. “They have to choose sides eventually.”
“The only way we stand in the end is
to stand for something. If we don’t, we’ll have to choose between one
of [the first] two groups,” Beck declared.
At the end of the show, Beck invited
Patrick Poole, the national security expert at PJ Media, and Frank
Gaffney, the former assistant secretary of defense and the founder of
the Center for Security Policy, to weigh in on his conclusions.
All three agreed that Syria is a lynchpin, and that intervention will have major, international ramifications.
“We’re watching flash points
developing all over the world,” Gaffney added. “North Korea, China,
Sweden, Venezuela and what’s coming next in Latin America, Africa…The
problem is, we’ve got these tectonic shifts that are taking place, and
we’re not an anchor.”
Why Turkey Matters
The riots in Turkey can turn our world upside-down fast. Turkey's geographical position as a European and an Asian nation which commands the natural straits into the Black Sea are important as long as sea lanes have value. The history of this land -- the home of Troy, the place where Constantine founded his great city and empire, the marches across which Achaemenid emperors sent their polyglot hordes against the fledging city-states of Greece, the center of much of the early Christian church -- makes Turkey as important in atlases of the past as Rome or Persia.The Ottoman Empire, the "sick man of Europe" in its last days, threatened the gates of Vienna and the heart of Europe a few decades before the American colonies won independence. It was not so nearly "sick" then. But for us today, Turkey holds a special place as the first overwhelmingly Muslim nation to become a thoroughly non-Islamic, secular government.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was not a nice man. He was, in fact, a ruthless strongman, but he believed passionately in a Turkey which could enter into the company of modern industrial nations, as Japan had done. Atatürk and his followers revolutionized Turkey, creating a state in which women had equality before the law, in which all religions were tolerated and no state religion reigned, and in which Turkey would become a "rational actor" among the family of nations.
This meant that Turkey wisely sat out the Second World War, although Muslims around the world overwhelmingly yearned for Nazi victory. This pretty strict Turkish neutrality not only spared the Turkish people all the horrors of war, but also prevented the Nazis from overrunning the Middle East or, in the event of a Nazi defeat, prevented Stalin from occupying Turkey. The cautious Turkish government played the diplomatic game perfectly and tilted, to the extent that it titled at all, in favor of the British, who hated both totalitarianism and world war.
During the Cold War, Turkey became one of the earliest converts to containing communism, and its membership in NATO was vitally important to the security of the West. More than that, as the other nations of the world which were Muslim gained independence, Turkey became an important model for Muslim nations of how to enter the Western world.
Iran followed this model, becoming a close ally of America and the West, a Muslim land in which other faiths were welcome, a nation in which the lands of the mullahs were redistributed to peasants and the status of women was elevated, as in Turkey. Much of the nightmare we face with global Islam today is the product of the overthrow of the shah and his replacement by a blatantly theocratic and anti-Western clique.
Iran, like Turkey, is not an Arab nation. Most Muslims are not Arabs. What happens to this non-Arab Muslim world in places like Uzbekistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Pakistan matters to us...a lot. If these people and these lands behave like Turkish Muslims have behaved over the last sixty years, then George W. Bush's rather silly statement about Islam being a "religion of peace" won't matter much.
When Iran was lost to the West, it not only affected the Cold War and condemned millions of Afghans to the nightmare of the Taliban, but it also meant that a nation which had normal diplomatic and trade relations with Israel suddenly condemned Israel to its present tag as the "Little Satan." Turkey, unlike the Arab Muslim world, has had normal relations with Israel.
If Turkey becomes another Iran, if the belt of non-Arab Muslims from Kazakhstan to Malaysia become viscerally and inalterably hostile to the existence of Israel, if these nations do what seemed four decades ago unthinkable in Iran, then we may be quickly faced with two very powerful forces: the hatred of Israel, which could propel conventional war and more against the Jewish state, and the absolute determination of the vast majority of Israelis to survive in the nation they made.
Watch Turkey. It matters.
Barack Obama Climbs through the Overton Window
Have you ever heard of the Overton Window? It was named after its creator, Joseph P. Overton, a former vice president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, who developed it in the mid-1990s. The "Window" is simply the defining of a narrow "window" of political ideas that the public will find acceptable.Overton observed that in a well-defined public policy area, a relatively small number of potential policies will be considered politically acceptable (or tolerable). "The Overton Window" states that the political viability of an idea is defined by the window of acceptable policy ideas rather than by politicians' preferences. The "window" comprises several political policies considered acceptable in the current climate of public opinion. It also defines what policies a politician can recommend without being considered too extreme.
It is defined not by what politicians would prefer, but what they believe they can support and still win re-election. The Overton Window shifts to include different political policy options when ideas change (by truth or lies) in the society that elects them, rather than when politicians' ideas change.
The Window is defined in terms of societal freedoms by utilizing the following scale:
- Unthinkable
- Radical
- Acceptable
- Sensible
- Popular
- Policy
It is a way to visualize political ideas by where they fall on the scale. Freedoms are forfeited as society's perceptions change, as political policies shift or "move down" the scale.
One problem with the Window is that the policy concepts can be easily manipulated, easily shifted, easily moved from one scale point to another by lies, distortions, or misconceptions. The shifts occur so that political policies can more easily and/or quickly be implemented. The Overton Window reflects what society believes, which makes a large number of "low-information voters" quite dangerous. As Rush Limbaugh often says, "How can we fool 'em today?"
Glenn Beck wrote a 2010 thriller, entitled The Overton Window, about how the strategy will be used to destroy America. A similar concept was presented in the novel Phineas Finn, by Anthony Trollope, in 1868.
The Overton Window explains why Saul Alinsky's Rules For Radicals -- particularly rule 10: "The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition" -- have been so successful. John Hawkins wrote, in April 2012, an article entitled "12 Ways To Use Saul Alinsky's Rules For Radicals Against Liberals." It's a good read. Perhaps we should ask Hawkins to duplicate his efforts with respect to the Overton Window.
The Overton Window explains quite a lot about what is currently happening to this country. It also explains a lot about both Democrats' and Republicans' thinking and actions. And it explains why the "alternative" or internet news sites, such as American Thinker, as well as talk radio, are so popular, and why liberals/progressives/Democrats want to shut them down. Opponents of current policies seek to educate people, to convince them that the current policies should be considered unacceptable, by disseminating the whole, complete truth, not just what Democrats and/or the MSM want the public to know.
What is perhaps most upsetting is that Dear Leader Barack Hussein Obama is practicing the Overton Window strategy, particularly through executive orders, and the Democrat Party and MSM are letting him get away with it. They have his back.
The Evil of Banality
In a book published in 1963, Hannah Arendt immortalized an expression that since has become the signature line to describe a person who commits acts of prodigious evil simply in the process of following orders. The individual in question was Adolf Eichmann, whose trial resulted in her treatment titled, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Eichmann was banal, all right; in fact, as alluded to in T. S. Eliot's famous poem, "The Hollow Men," he resembled Mister Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's chilling Heart of Darkness -- "hollow at the core." Which did not prevent him from carrying out horrific acts befitting a moral cypher whose only defense was "do not judge me."Such a sentiment, along with a reverse formulation of Arendt's famous line, lurk beneath the responses of those called to testify before Congress to justify their behaviors in the three scandals currently being investigated by outraged Republicans as well as a smattering of concerned and perhaps embarrassed Democrats. Variations of responses that range from "I don't recall," and "I have no memory of that detail," to a simple "I don't know" pepper the testimonies of thickly credentialed functionaries whose main goal, it seems, is to barricade themselves behind pillars of paperwork that shield them from efforts to ascertain professional responsibility. Call this the Eichmann-Kurtz defense, which was manifested to a ridiculous extreme by Lois Lerner at the IRS, who proclaimed innocence of any wrongdoing -- and then took the Fifth Amendment for protection from self-incrimination.
Certainly the individuals in question -- representing the IRS, the Justice Department, and whoever made the final decisions in the Benghazi affair -- are not guilty of anything like Eichmann's crimes, nor of Kurtz's fictional depredations. In short, we're obviously not talking about evil on that scale, although four murdered diplomats and their families attest to criminal negligence at the highest levels. It is rather an Eichmannesque refusal to take responsibility for the seriousness of one's acts, a refusal to acknowledge the claims that morality makes on the professional lives of those entrusted to preserve the honor of the American republic. From this perspective, many in the current administration being questioned are not banal in terms of being bereft of laws, regulations, precedents, and so forth to cover their actions; quite the contrary, they are all, so to speak, full of those things. It is the moral core that is lacking, that falls short of the levels of responsibility involved. One senses an ethical hollowness that reduces otherwise "respectable" public servants into bastions of banality capable of inflicting evil in the American democratic republic. Or rather, their moral development reaches only to the level of banal officiousness, but not to that deeper level where moral courage prevails.
Consider for instance the story of Catherine Engelbrecht, who told her story on Mike Huckabee's program and has now been widely reported. She is a conservative who applied to the IRS for tax-exempt status for an organization she wanted to create. Agencies of the United States government descended upon her like a bevy of jackals. She was investigated by the FBI numerous times, and audited by the IRS, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, on multiple occasions. By way of contrast, groups favorable to the current regime received no such heavy-handed treatment. And at no time, as nearly as can be determined, did anyone in a position of authority reveal any moral qualms about what they were doing. As to be expected from banal functionaries, they saw nothing wrong in their actions, any more than did Justice Department officials see anything wrong in seizing email records of AP reporters or classifying James Rosen of Fox news as a "co-conspirator and/or aider and abettor...committing the criminal offense...." One could cry in exasperation and proclaim, "surely, not here, not in the land of the free. It can't happen here!" It can and it does.
In the superb documentary series, The World at War, Lawrence Olivier narrates an account of a German woman who witnessed a synagogue burning after Kristallnacht. She noted an observer saying, "Shame to our culture!" A Gestapo agent standing nearby immediately reported him to the government. The lesson was clear; you don't take a position against government policy and get away with it.
This is an extreme example, of course. But still frightening and instructive nonetheless. And these cases -- Benghazi, the IRS, and journalist intimidation -- cannot be dismissed as mere "distractions" or footnotes in the adventures of partisan politics. Together they are daggers aimed at the heart of the American democratic process, and perhaps, God help us, harbingers of worse things to come. All of which is more than just "chilling." It's evil. The evil of banality.
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