A higher office is implicated.
The IRS scandal was connected this week not just to the Washington office—that had been established—but to the office of the chief counsel.That is a bombshell—such a big one that it managed to emerge in spite of an unfocused, frequently off-point congressional hearing in which some members seemed to have accidentally woken up in the middle of a committee room, some seemed unaware of the implications of what their investigators had uncovered, one pretended that the investigation should end if IRS workers couldn't say the president had personally called and told them to harass his foes, and one seemed to be holding a filibuster on Pakistan.
Still, what landed was a bombshell. And Democrats know it. Which is why they are so desperate to make the investigation go away. They know, as Republicans do, that the chief counsel of the IRS is one of only two Obama political appointees in the entire agency.
To quickly review why the new information, which came most succinctly in a nine-page congressional letter to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel, is big news:
When the scandal broke two months ago, in May, IRS leadership in Washington claimed the harassment of tea-party and other conservative groups requesting tax-exempt status was confined to the Cincinnati office, where a few rogue workers bungled the application process. Lois Lerner, then the head of the exempt organizations unit in Washington, said "line people in Cincinnati" did work that was "not so fine." They asked questions that "weren't really necessary," she claimed, and operated without "the appropriate level of sensitivity." But the targeting was "not intentional." Ousted acting commissioner Steven Miller also put it off on "people in Cincinnati." They provided "horrible customer service."
House investigators soon talked to workers in the Cincinnati office, who said everything they did came from Washington. Elizabeth Hofacre, in charge of processing tea-party applications in Cincinnati, told investigators that her work was overseen and directed by a lawyer in the IRS Washington office named Carter Hull.
Now comes Mr. Hull's testimony. And like Ms. Hofacre, he pointed his finger upward. Mr. Hull—a 48-year IRS veteran and an expert on tax exemption law—told investigators that tea-party applications under his review were sent upstairs within the Washington office, at the direction of Lois Lerner.
In April 2010, Hull was assigned to scrutinize certain tea-party applications. He requested more information from the groups. After he received responses, he felt he knew enough to determine whether the applications should be approved or denied.
But his recommendations were not carried out.
Michael Seto, head of Mr. Hull's unit, also spoke to investigators. He told them Lois Lerner made an unusual decision: Tea-party applications would undergo additional scrutiny—a multilayered review.
Mr. Hull told House investigators that at some point in the winter of 2010-11, Ms. Lerner's senior adviser, whose name is withheld in the publicly released partial interview transcript, told him the applications would require further review:
Q: "Did [the senior adviser to Ms. Lerner] indicate to you whether she agreed with your recommendations?"
A: "She did not say whether she agreed or not. She said it should go to chief counsel."
Q: "The IRS chief counsel?"
A: "The IRS chief counsel."
The IRS chief counsel is named William Wilkins. And again, he is one of only two Obama political appointees in the IRS.
What was the chief counsel's office looking for? The letter to Mr. Werfel says Mr. Hull's supervisor, Ronald Shoemaker, provided insight: The counsel's office wanted, in the words of the congressional committees, "information about the applicants' political activities leading up to the 2010 election." Mr. Shoemaker told investigators he didn't find that kind of question unreasonable, but he found the counsel's office to be "not very forthcoming": "We discussed it to some extent and they indicated that they wanted more development of possible political activity or political intervention right before the election period."
It's almost as if—my words—the conservative organizations in question were, during two major election cycles, deliberately held in a holding pattern.
So: What the IRS originally claimed was a rogue operation now reaches up not only to the Washington office, but into the office of the IRS chief counsel himself.
At the generally lacking House Oversight Committee Hearings on Thursday, some big things still got said.
Ms. Hofacre of the Cincinnati office testified that when she was given tea-party applications, she had to kick them upstairs. When she was given non-tea-party applications, they were sent on for normal treatment. Was she told to send liberal or progressive groups for special scrutiny? No, she did not scrutinize the applications of liberal or progressive groups. "I would send those to general inventory." Who got extra scrutiny? "They were all tea-party and patriot cases." She became "very frustrated" by the "micromanagement" from Washington. "It was like working in lost luggage." She applied to be transferred.
For his part, Mr. Hull backed up what he'd told House investigators. He described what was, essentially, a big, lengthy runaround in the Washington office in which no one was clear as to their reasons but everything was delayed. The multitiered scrutiny of the targeted groups was, he said, "unusual."
It was Maryland's Rep. Elijah Cummings, the panel's ranking Democrat, who, absurdly, asked Ms. Hofacre if the White House called the Cincinnati office to tell them what to do and whether she has knowledge of the president of the United States digging through the tax returns of citizens. Ms. Hofacre looked surprised. No, she replied.
It wasn't hard to imagine her thought bubble: Do congressmen think presidents call people like me and say, "Don't forget to harass my enemies"? Are congressmen that stupid?
Mr. Cummings is not, and his seeming desperation is telling. Recent congressional information leads to Washington—and now to very high up at the IRS. Meaning this is the point at which a scandal goes nowhere or, maybe, everywhere.
Rep. Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican, finally woke the proceedings up with what he called "the evolution of the defense" since the scandal began. First, Ms. Lerner planted a question at a conference. Then she said the Cincinnati office did it—a narrative that was advanced by the president's spokesman, Jay Carney. Then came the suggestion the IRS was too badly managed to pull off a sophisticated conspiracy. Then the charge that liberal groups were targeted too—"we did it against both ends of the political spectrum." When the inspector general of the IRS said no, it was conservative groups that were targeted, he came under attack. Now the defense is that the White House wasn't involved, so case closed.
This is one Republican who is right about evolution.
Those trying to get to the bottom of the scandal have to dig in, pay attention. The administration's defenders, and their friends in the press, have made some progress in confusing the issue through misdirection and misstatement.
This is the moment things go forward or stall. Republicans need to find out how high the scandal went and why, exactly, it went there. To do that they'll have to up their game.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324448104578614220949743916.html?mod=WSJ_article_comments#articleTabs%3Darticle
Round Two: 'Shoot the Messenger' Flops at IRS Hearings
Much to my surprise, the previous round of witness testimony ended up being more significant and interesting than the late afternoon session. IRS Inspector General Russell George defused many of the Democrats' lines of attack during his opening statement, effectively "pre-butting" gotcha-style questions. A few observations:(1) George reminded the committee that the IRS acknowledged and apologized for its improper targeting of conservative groups prior to the release of his audit in May. Don't forget that the agency's own internal review -- which predated the IG's audit -- came to similar conclusions about the malfeasance, including who was victimized. Both investigations were prompted by complaints from conservative, not liberal, groups regarding excessive wait times, interminable delays, and abusive questioning. During the hearing, George and his team told committee Democrats that their relatively narrow field of inquiry was initially limited by so-called BOLO (be on the lookout) terms provided to them by the IRS itself. George said that throughout his investigation, employees at multiple levels of the agency all confirmed that "Tea Party" (and related terms) was the relevant targeting nomenclature.
(2) Responding to accusatory statements from Democrats -- especially the contemptible Gerry Connolly -- about his political roots, George confirmed that he was appointed by President Bush and had worked for several Republicans many years ago. He also revealed that he worked at the 1980 DNC and helped found Howard University's College Democrats. That took the wind out of the "he's a Republican hatchet man!" line of argument. Also, as pointed out by Rep. Jim Jordan and Chairman Darrell Issa (and yours truly), if George had been working in concert with the GOP, he would have made this scandal public before the 2012 election.
(3) The Inspector General said that since his audit was published, more information has come to his attention regarding BOLO lists that included liberal-sounding buzz words. He said he's looking into those reports, and the investigation remains ongoing. That status also applies to his work with the FBI and DOJ. The witnesses said their inquiry into IRS officials' emails and conduct was fairly limited -- for instance, Lois Lerner's emails haven't yet been probed. Chairman Issa said he hoped that any potential evidence (re: Lerner) remained intact, in light of her decision not to incriminate herself in Congressional testimony. Rep. Jordan commented how unlikely it is that the IRS would have admitted to targeting one side of the aisle if they'd actually been treating both sides equally. He said a few extraneous examples of other BOLO lists and liberal groups possibly being screened have only emerged as Democrats have grappled for fig leaves in the wake of the scandal. Chairman Issa said that if there are any left-leaning groups who were abused the way conservative organizations were (never-ending delays, inappropriate questions, burdensome paperwork, etc), he'd like to see the evidence. And if those examples exist, were they proportional to the Tea Party's blanket treatment? All indications point in one direction. One piece of evidence:
In February 2010, the Champaign Tea Party in Illinois received approval of its tax-exempt status from the IRS in 90 days, no questions asked. That was the month before the Internal Revenue Service started singling out Tea Party groups for special treatment. There wouldn't be another Tea Party application approved for 27 months. In that time, the IRS approved perhaps dozens of applications from similar liberal and progressive groups, a USA TODAY review of IRS data shows.
(4) A few Democrats bizarrely claimed that George had "withheld" his lack of evidence that the Tea Party targeting was explicitly political. It was in his written report, and he's testified to that effect several times. One Democrat, Rep. Jackie Spier of California, advanced the long-debunked claim that the IRS was only trying to "streamline" their review system due to the huge influx of new applicants. I also feel compelled to commend Democratic Congressman Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts for another fair-minded performance today. It's clear he's a loyal Democrat, but he also seems genuinely interested in the truth and put off by the partisan misdirection tactics employed by some of his colleagues.
(5) In summary, the rancor that I anticipated this afternoon never really materialized. Mr. George and his colleagues explained their actions well, and assured members on both sides that their investigation continues. Democrats continue to hope that at least one example of improper scrutiny of a liberal group emerges, although that's not what the IG has found so far. Which makes sense for numerous reasons:
Zero Tea Party conservative groups were approved for tax-exempt status over a period of 27 months, while dozens of lefty groups received the green light. Conservative organizations were deliberately buried in burdensome paperwork, fraught with wildly inappropriate
questions and outrageous demands. This emanated from, and was sometimes micromanaged by, DC. The IRS' former commissioner testified under oath that only conservative-leaning groups were mistreated this way. When the House Oversight Committee held hearings featuring the IRS' victims, committee Democrats couldn't produce a single liberal witness. Oh, and the IRS admitted and publicly apologized for their wrongful targeting of conservatives following their own internal investigation, and before the IG report was published. If the truth was "we did it to both sides!" they would have presented that evidence early and often. They didn't.
Parting thought: If, as Democrats suggest, the targeting impacted both sides and this is all a big non-scandal, where is the "progressive-assigned" version of Elizabeth Hofacre? That is to say, where is the IRS employee tasked with screening dozens of targeted liberal organizations whose superiors wouldn't permit any resolutions for months (and ultimately years) on end? If such an employee exists, don't you think we'd have heard about him or her by now?
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2013/07/18/round-two-expected-irs-hearing-fireworks-fizzle-n1644058
Obama quietly institutes mandatory HIV testing
With almost no public notice, President Obama has issued an imperial decree executive order requiring universal HIV testing. Yasmeen Abutaleb of Reuters published a blandly-title dispatch, "Obama orders stepped up effort against U.S. HIV/AIDS epidemic" that takes seven paragraphs before getting to what should be the lead:The new order follows recommendations this year from the U.S. Preventive Service Task Force that all 15 to 65 year olds be screened for HIV infection, something that will be covered under Obama's signature heath reform, the Affordable Care Act.
If you've never engaged in receptive anal intercourse or shared a needle, the odds of you getting AIDS are very low, now that blood for transfusions is tested. Nevertheless, Kathleen Sebelius going to be coming up with a plan to order you to report for the blood draw the government will now require.
The order said a working group chaired by Grant Colfax, director of the Office of National AIDS Policy, and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius would have 180 days to deliver recommendations to the president.
It is fascinating that the people who decry as invasive mandatory sonograms prior to abortion have remained silent abot this far more invasive procedure being required of everyone, including those not at risk. And who is at risk?
A study published last July by a team at Atlanta's Emory University found that overall infection rates among U.S. black, gay and bisexual men rival those seen in sub-Saharan African countries that are hardest hit by HIV.
The 2010 AIDS strategy aims to slow the spread of HIV by 25 percent over five years. It focuses especially on African Americans, gay and bisexual men, Latinos, and substance abusers, groups most at-risk of infection.
AIDS does not just happen to people; it is not an airborne contagious infection. Subjecting the entire population to this test is ridiculous overkill, and unwarranted. Since when does the president have the right to require everyone to be tested? What about medical confidentiality?
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/07/obama_quietly_institutes_mandatory_hiv_testing.html#ixzz2ZVNNrFvs
Exclusive--Rand Paul: Obama Will Bail out Detroit 'Over My Dead Body'
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said he will use every resource he has at his disposal to stop President Barack Obama from bailing out newly-bankrupt Detroit because he believes the city can and must save itself and learn from its fiscal mistakes. "I basically say he [Obama] is bailing them out over my dead body because we don’t have any money in Washington.”“There’s some good things that come out of bankruptcy,” Paul said in a phone interview from Iowa. “One is you get to start over. Bankruptcy lets you be forgiven of your debt. And you do so by getting new management, better management, and by getting rid of unwieldy contracts, contracts that give you where public employees are getting paid twice what private employees are and things come back more to normal. That’s the way cities and businesses can recover.
"I basically say he [Obama] is bailing them out over my dead body because we don’t have any money in Washington.”
The White House said it is monitoring the situation in Detroit, but has not made any official moves towards a bailout yet. But Obama’s former auto czar Steven Rattner said on MSNBC on Friday that he is calling on Obama to bail out Detroit. Paul said that "apparently" Obama is "making indications that Detroit can be expected to be bailed out."
Paul said the reason he is going to fight to stop any efforts to bail out Detroit is that if the president succeeds in bailing it out, that will send a signal to the rest of cities and states nationwide that the federal government will bail them out to if they conduct reckless spending.
“Those who don’t have their house in order, who are teetering on disaster, will continue to make bad decisions. And by the way these [local and state budget choices] are tough decisions. I’m not saying they are all prescient and that it will be easy on everybody who works for the city or the state, but you need to make these decisions and the sooner you make them the better. If you wait to make them, it’s even harder on people.”
Detroit is just the latest in the long line of cities that have found themselves in financial trouble lately. Stockton, Calif., is another example of a major city that needed to file for bankruptcy. Paul said that any federal bailout would only make those problems worse.
“You don’t set up an implicit promise from the federal government that everybody is getting bailed out,” Paul said. “It’s sort of like too big to fail for banks. If you have too big to fail for cities or for states and they believe they’ll be bailed out they’ll continue to make unwise decisions.
"So, really, the answer is, just like the federal government, live within your means and spend what you have but don’t spend money you don’t have. The problem is so many of our state governments, the politicians are being elected by the public service unions. If the public service unions want to be paid twice as much as what private sector employees make, they want twice as good benefits and twice as good a pension.
"I mean the statistics in California are staggering. I think there’s over 100,000 people there getting over $100,000 a year in retirement. You got police chiefs in medium-sized cities getting $350,000 a year for a salary. It’s become untenable. But the main thing is we cannot send a signal from the federal government that cities and states are going to be too big to fail.”
Ultimately, Paul said, if Detroit had been more fiscally responsible before, this process would not have needed to happen. “Bankruptcy in Detroit is going to much harder than if ten years ago, they had started downsizing and making their pensions and salaries more commensurate with the private sector,” he said.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/07/19/Exclusive-Rand-Paul-Obama-bails-out-Detroit-over-my-dead-body
Hobby Lobby Clears Another Major Hurdle in Fight Against Obamacare
A federal judge is temporarily
exempting Hobby Lobby Inc. from a provision in the new federal health
care law that requires it to offer insurance coverage for the
morning-after pill and similar birth control or face steep fines.
“The tide has turned against the HHS
mandate,” said Kyle Duncan, General Counsel with the Becket Fund for
Religious Liberty, and lead attorney for Hobby Lobby.
After hearing brief arguments Friday,
U.S. District Judge Joe Heaton issued a preliminary injunction for the
Oklahoma arts and crafts chain.
“There is a substantial public interest
in ensuring that no individual or corporation has their legs cut out
from under them while these difficult issues are resolved,” the court
said.
The judge stayed the case until Oct. 1 to give the federal government time to consider an appeal.
“This victory comes less than a month
after a landmark decision by the full 10th Circuit Court of
Appeals, which ruled 5-3 that Hobby Lobby can exercise religion under
the First Amendment and is likely to win its case against the mandate,”
the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty said today in a statement.
“This is a major victory for not only Hobby Lobby, but the religious liberty of all for-profit businesses,” the statement adds.
The Christian owners of Hobby Lobby
and the Mardel Christian bookstore chain argue that their religious
beliefs are so deeply rooted that having to provide every form of birth
control would violate their conscience.
And they’re not the only ones to challenge the controversial HHS mandate.
“There are now 63 separate lawsuits challenging the HHS mandate,” the Becket Fund statement adds.
The religious liberties groups
currently represents Hobby Lobby, Wheaton College, East Texas Baptist
University, Houston Baptist University, Colorado Christian University,
the Eternal Word Television Network, Ave Maria University, and Belmont
Abbey College.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/07/19/hobby-lobby-clears-another-major-hurdle-in-fight-against-obamacare/
Landmark-study alert: We still can’t actually find a link between fracking and groundwater contamination. Shocker.
Despite extreme environmentalists’ hysterical pursuit of evidence to conclusively link up the drilling practice of hydraulic fracturing with the regional phenomenon of groundwater contamination over the past couple of years… What am I saying. The dearth of actual evidence hasn’t done much to deter the really hardcore eco-radicals, like “documentary” filmmaker Josh Fox’s now infamous and completely misleading image of drilling-area residents lighting the methane in the water from their sinks on fire, and his attempt to double down on the outright falsehood in his recent sequel.But even the zealous and well-funded bureaucrats at Environmental Protection Agency have so far failed to find that much-desired connection. Last month, the administration suddenly pulled back from their study exploring the potential links between fracking and instances of groundwater contamination in Wyoming — based on the oh so unfortunate lack of science available to support their foregone conclusion.
And now, a preliminary federal study released today actually just comes right out and says it: We tried. No luck. Boom.
A landmark federal study on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, shows no evidence that chemicals from the natural gas drilling process moved up to contaminate drinking water aquifers at a western Pennsylvania drilling site, the Department of Energy told The Associated Press.
After a year of monitoring, the researchers found that the chemical-laced fluids used to free gas trapped deep below the surface stayed thousands of feet below the shallower areas that supply drinking water, geologist Richard Hammack said.
Although the results are preliminary — the study is still ongoing — they are a boost to a natural gas industry that has fought complaints from environmental groups and property owners who call fracking dangerous.
Drilling fluids tagged with unique markers were injected more than 8,000 feet below the surface, but were not detected in a monitoring zone 3,000 feet higher. That means the potentially dangerous substances stayed about a mile away from drinking water supplies.The eco-radicals’ misbegotten quest to implicate hydraulic fracturing as at all costs will never cease to mystify. With natural gas acting as the leading cause of the United States’ lately reduced carbon emissions — their own stated goal — you’d think they’d want to take “yes” for an answer, wouldn’t you?
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/07/19/landmark-study-alert-we-still-cant-actually-find-a-link-between-fracking-and-groundwater-contamination-shocker/
The Marissa Alexander Case Wasn’t About “Stand-Your-Ground” Either
By now some of you may have heard about the Marissa Alexander case in Florida.
Many people are trying to twist the facts of this case in a fashion that will be familiar to the rational among us who watched the Zimmerman case.
Essentially they want to know why Florida’s stand-your-ground law was sufficient to win Zimmerman an acquittal yet when applied in the Alexander case it produced a speed-of-light guilty verdict in a mere 12 minutes (did the jurors even bother to sit down, or were they putting on their coats while coming to consensus?), and a sentence of 20 years.
The essential facts of the Alexander case are as follows. She and her husband, Gray, were engaged in a heated verbal dispute in the presence of his two children. There seems to have been little if any physical confrontation, but whatever might have occurred was of a non-deadly nature. At some point Alexander walked past Gray and the children into the garage, where she obtained a gun. She then fired the gun at, or in the direction of, Gray and the two children.
Alexander was charged with multiple counts of aggravated assault, and asserted a “stand-your-ground” defense.
Before we compare this fact situation to Zimmerman, we must first ensure that we all understand just what “stand-your-ground” means.
Traditionally, it was required that you take advantage of a safe avenue of retreat, if such was reasonably available to you, before using deadly force in self-defense. This was what is referred to as a generalized duty to retreat. It always had exceptions, such as the Castle Doctrine which lifts the duty when you are in your home.
The “stand-your-ground” law expands the scope of the Castle Doctrine beyond your home to every place you have a right to be. So, even if there were a safe avenue of retreat reasonably available to you, you no longer have a legal duty to attempt to make use of it before using deadly force in self-defense.
The duty to retreat itself, however, only applies where safe retreat is possible. If there is no safe avenue of retreat, there is no duty. If there is no duty, the “stand-your-ground” statute that relieves you of that duty is irrelevant.
This was this situation in the Zimmerman case. When George Zimmerman made the decision to use deadly force in self-defense he had already been trying to escape for at least the 45 seconds he was screaming for help and getting his head smashed into a sidewalk. There simply was no reasonably safe avenue of retreat available to him. Therefore he had no duty to retreat, and without any such duty “stand-your-ground” has no role to play in lifting that duty.
So, now that it is clear that “stand-your-ground” was irrelevant in the Zimmerman case, how might it apply here?
It simply doesn’t.
Here, if we consider the facts in a manner most favorable to Alexander, there was an initial physical, non-deadly conflict with her husband. Perhaps we can even assume that her husband was the aggressor in that conflict. In that case he may well bear legal liability for that non-deadly fight.
Alexander, however, took things to another level when she retrieved her firearm. She escalated a non-deadly confrontation to a deadly confrontation. In the eyes of the law this is effectively a second, separate fight, one in which Alexander was the aggressor.
And how does being the aggressor affect one’s right to “stand-your-ground”? It obliterates it. Florida’s “stand-your-ground” provision, 776.013(3), applies ONLY to “[a] person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked . . . ”
Here Alexander WAS engaged in criminal activity–she initiated a deadly force confrontation–and it was not she who was attacked but she who was doing the attacking. The Court tossing out stand-your-ground in this Florida case was not even a tough call, as “stand-your-ground” was inapplicable on its face.
http://legalinsurrection.com/2013/07/the-marissa-alexander-case-wasnt-about-stand-your-ground-either/
Lawsuit: Arizona college suspended student because she wanted English-only classes
A nursing student at Pima Community College (PCC) has filed a lawsuit claiming that she was illegally suspended after she complained that her classmates were speaking in Spanish and orally translating English to Spanish so excessively that she was failing to learn.In early April, the student, Terri Bennett, formally requested a rule limiting classroom discussion to English. Nursing program director David Kutzler allegedly responded by called her a “bigot and a bitch,” reports Courthouse News Service.
Kutzler allegedly charged that Bennett was “discriminating against Mexican-Americans” and threatened to report her complaint as a violation of the school’s policies against discriminatory behavior and harassment.
“You do not want to go down that road,” he said, according to the filing.
Bennett, 50, recalls leaving the meeting in distress and in tears.
A second meeting two days later involved Bennett, Kutzler and three more PCC staffers. The public school officials allegedly told Bennett that she would “not get a job” because of her desire to limit class discussion to English. She claims they said she should “seek counseling” and that she might have a learning disability.
Kutzler also allegedly produced an anonymous evaluation form that Bennett had filled out, also suggesting a “no Spanish in the classroom” rule.
Later in April, Bennett received critical feedback from a teacher—for the first time, she maintains. The critique chastised Bennett for “ineffective communication skills.”
Then, on April 22, Bennett received a suspension letter from the state-owned school. The charges levied against her included discrimination, “stalking” and “bullying.” She also allegedly argued with a professor about the correct answer to a test question.
Her indefinite suspension was to last “until she receives counseling to improve her communication style and to learn to be less abrasive,” the lawsuit states.
“Six armed” campus security officers promptly escorted her off PCC’s Desert Vista campus. The officers then allegedly followed her several miles down the road to Interstate 10.
Bennett sued the community college and its boards of directors in an Arizona state court under several causes of action including harassment, breach of contract, retaliation, discrimination and violations of the Arizona Constitution. The college and its board of governors are the only defendants.
Article 28 of Arizona’s state constitution establishes English as “the official language of the state.” Section 3 states: “A person shall not be discriminated against or penalized in any way because the person uses or attempts to use English in public or private communication.”
The language barrier had been a festering problem for Bennett. Things came to a head in a course called Introduction to Nursing.
The lawsuit states — in the passive voice — that Spanish-speaking students “were asked not to speak in Spanish in front of non-Spanish speakers.”
“Bennett believes some students were translating the lessons into Spanish for students who were not able to speak English,” the lawsuit states.
In response, the Spanish speakers “laughed and mocked” Bennett and the other English speakers.
At that point, Bennett decided that PCC “was hostile” to people who don’t speak Spanish. “She felt ostracized, excluded, and segregated from the rest of her class, the majority of which all spoke Spanish (including the instructors),” according to Courthouse News.
Bennett is represented by John Munger of the Arizona law firm Munger Chadwick. Munger is a Republican who unsuccessfully ran for the 2010 GOP nomination for governor.
Another figure on the plaintiff’s side is Phil Kent, an Atlanta-based activist who is very hostile to illegal immigration. He is a spokesman for a lobbying group called ProEnglish, which wants to make English the sole official language of the United States and which is providing seed money for the lawsuit, reports TucsonSentinel.com.
A Broken System
The current presidential nomination system serves both parties poorly.
You can get agreement from almost all points on the political spectrum that the worst aspect of our political system is the presidential nomination process. It is perhaps no coincidence that it is the one part of the system not treated in the Constitution.That’s because the Founding Fathers abhorred political parties and hoped that presidents would be selected by something like an elite consensus. But we have political parties, the oldest and third-oldest in the world, and they are not going away.
Surely a better system is possible. The current system of primaries, caucuses, and national conventions is the result of reforms initiated by Democrats in the late 1960s and constantly fiddled with, mostly, but not entirely, by Democrats, ever since.
The resulting system is replete with oddities. Nothing in the Constitution says that Iowa and New Hampshire vote first, but they do. Any politician thinking of ever running for president wouldn’t dare suggest otherwise.
Then suddenly a raft of states vote all at once. All of this means that candidates have to spend two years campaigning and raising prodigious amounts of money. No other democracy chooses its chief executive in a manner anything like our system.
That rules out many potentially serious candidates who currently hold important government jobs or who lack an appetite for permanent campaigning.
This is all the more infuriating because “today’s mess,” as Jeffrey H. Anderson and Jay Cost write in the summer issue of National Affairs, “is the product of accident and afterthought.”
And one that is particularly troublesome for Republicans, which bothers Anderson, director of the conservative 2017 Project, and Cost, a writer for The Weekly Standard.
It doesn’t “reflect the interests and values of the nationwide Republican electorate,” they say, but gives too much influence to elite donors, the media, the early-voting states, professional campaign consultants, and independent voters.
Tinkering around the edges, as party commissions, conventions, and state legislatures have been doing for 40 years, won’t help. Instead, Anderson and Cost say the answer is to “revitalize the local and state party organizations.”
I agree with pretty much their entire diagnosis. The current system ill serves both parties, but especially the Republicans.
But I’m not sure it’s possible to pump new life into what they admit are now moribund organizations. They agree that local parties are “no longer a locus of political power or influence” and blame the Democratic reforms starting in the 1960s.
I would argue that local and state parties were already on life support, which is why they were so easily brushed aside.
Still, their proposal is interesting and merits scrutiny. It is based on the conventions that, pursuant to the Constitution, ratified that document.
In the week of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, some 3,000 delegates selected by local parties and 300 designated Republican officeholders would meet in a national nominating convention and would nominate five finalist candidates. These candidates would debate six times (no mainstream media moderators, please).
There would be a series of regional direct-ballot elections, with the winner required to get 50 percent of the votes and to win by a 10 percent margin. Otherwise, there would be a runoff between the top two finishers.
The nominee would be determined by the end of April and could choose a VP candidate for formal acceptance in a summertime “made-for-TV convention.” There are more details, but you get the idea.
There are some practical problems here. The Republican National Committee can change its nominating rules, but in many states the nominating process is controlled by state law, and Republicans don’t control every legislature.
The courts have generally let parties set their own rules, but someone must pay for the nominating conventions and the regional elections.
“The new system would reinvigorate local and state party organizations,” Anderson and Cost argue. It would certainly give conscientious Republicans an incentive to participate in local parties, which currently attract only political junkies.
But another possibility is that it will just give presidential candidates an incentive to pack local parties, starting long before the week of Lincoln’s birthday. Ron Paul enthusiasts have already been doing this.
That might require scads of money, which means the influence of elite fundraisers would not be reduced.
Anderson and Cost make strong arguments that it would be “more efficient, more cost-effective, more deliberative, more consensus-based, more republican, and more conducive to victory” than the current system. Let’s think about it.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/353848/broken-system-michael-barone
Opposing Extremism Is Not Extremism
Bless The New York Times for, yet again, selflessly exposing the political fault lines of the GOP and encouraging it to become more like the Democratic Party so it can start winning presidential elections again. I'm trying not to laugh.In his piece "Has the G.O.P. Gone Off the Deep End?", Thomas Edsall lines up establishment Republican after establishment Republican to testify to the "extremism" of the dominant forces in the party. And he blames conservative talk radio, one of the few remaining bastions of sanity in this country, for the GOP's demise.
Thomas Doherty, "political enforcer for the former New York governor George Pataki," tells Edsall he has "come to the conclusion that (the) party has elements within it that dislike homosexuals and think America is still in the 1940s." Nice.
Tom Korologos, a GOP lobbyist, says the Republicans' "rigidity is killing them."
Jeb Bush chastises Republicans because many people believe they "are anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-science, anti-gay, anti-worker ... (and) because those voters feel unloved, unwanted and unwelcome in (the) party." Et tu?
Bob Dole says that even Ronald Reagan wouldn't be accepted in today's Republican Party.
Former GOP congressional staffer Mike Lofgren says the GOP is "becoming less and less like a traditional political party" and "more like an apocalyptic cult." I suppose Edsall considers Lofgren credible because he made these observations on the extremist liberal website Truthout.
Edsall mentions other insider critics, but you get the idea: Republicans are mean-spirited, bigoted, rigidly authoritarian, ideological, regressive, anti-intellectual, misanthropic extremists who will never win the presidency again unless they become more like Democrats.
The Times' take on this is to be expected. But shame on the "Republicans" Edsall quotes to denigrate the Republican Party from the left and slander conservatives as bigots and rubes.
The irony is that the Republican Party has become less conservative over the years. The party's presidential difficulties can just as convincingly be attributed to its failure to articulate a principled, inspiring conservative message.
Over the past decades, we've witnessed a steady, incremental advancement of liberalism and statism -- a steady centralization of power in the federal government and a consequent erosion of our individual liberties. It is liberals and their Democratic Party that have become increasingly extreme -- especially since Obama's election. If anything, the Republican Party has become too tolerant of these alarming changes.
Have any conservatives advocated "fundamental transformation" of America? No, we merely want to restore the principles and policies that made America great, the abandonment of which are leading to its destruction. We are advocating, essentially, the same principles we were during the Reagan years, not because we're stuck in the past but because these principles are timeless and historically validated as effective to produce the greatest liberty, prosperity and national security.
Look at what the Obama left advocates and/or presides over today: open borders, abortion on demand (even at very late stages), federal deficits averaging $1 trillion, obstruction of entitlement reform, same-sex marriage, divisive identity politics, universally failed socialized medicine, the politicization of the Internal Revenue Service and its targeting of political opponents, a head-in-the-sand political correctness that forces us to deny not only that we are at war with jihadis but that they are in a war with us (e.g., Fort Hood shooter), the glamorization of terrorists on the cover of a liberal culture publication, booing God, hailing Satan, imposing a new normal for frightening levels of unemployment, sabotaging the entire conventional energy industry, endless schemes of growth- and liberty-stifling taxation, class warfare, the demonization of Christians and the suppression of their religious liberties, runaway food stamps and other programs to increase government dependency and reduce productivity and growth, an exploding bureaucratic and regulatory state, increasing usurpations of power by the executive branch to circumvent a duly elected legislative branch, an activist Supreme Court, and the constant erosion of the Constitution and the rule of law.
Conservatives, on the other hand, want the border actually to be enforced; market forces to be restored; protection of the unborn; reasonable restraints, far from extreme, on federal spending; a fair, simple and less corrupt tax code; racial colorblindness; essential structural entitlement reform; serious reductions in the administrative and bureaucratic "branch" of government; to remove burdens to economic growth; unemployment at historically acceptable levels; a restoration of the separation of powers; a judiciary that will honor its duty to interpret and not make laws; the unshackling of coal, oil, natural gas and other reliable energy sources; market reforms for health care; peace-through-strength national security and defense policies; and counterterrorism policies based on reality, not rooted in fantasy idealism, pacifism, appeasement or a negative view of America.
People who still love America as founded are horrified with the ongoing destruction of this country. They are beside themselves that nothing is sacred anymore and that our entire world is being turned upside down by secular, relativist forces in the seductive name of progressivism and enlightenment.
They want their political leaders to stand up and stop this madness, not cower, pander and cater to the forces leading us over the cliff to national ruination.
Call us extreme for trying to stop the true extremists. Proudly guilty as charged.
http://townhall.com/columnists/davidlimbaugh/2013/07/19/opposing-extremism-is-not-extremism-n1643975/page/full
Obamacare, Simplified
With open enrollment in Obamacare’s exchanges set to start in fewer than three months, the law’s supporters are attempting to change the subject from Obamacare’s many delays and glitches. Instead, they're mounting a campaign to sell the unpopular measure to the public.
President Obama yesterday gave a speech on Obamacare, trying to justify the fact that premiums continue to rise, violating his 2008 campaign promise to lower them by $2,500 per family per year. The Kaiser Family Foundation even released a video that attempts to simplify and explain the 2,700-page measure.
But there’s another helpful chart that shows how Obamacare will work, and it’s taken from an official report released by government auditors. Click on the image below to see how the Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration explained the Obamacare enrollment process, in testimony before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday:
The process for determining subsidy eligibility could require 21 different steps, involving at least five separate entities—the Social Security Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Internal Revenue Service, and state exchanges—and utilizing a process called the Income and Family Size Verification Project.
Given this bureaucratic nightmare, it’s little wonder that another report from government auditors released last month said that “critical” deadlines to create the Obamacare exchanges had been missed. Nor should any be surprised that yesterday, Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration testified it “is concerned that the potential for refund fraud and related schemes could increase” due to Obamacare.
Yet the Obama Administration believes spending more money will solve the problem. Just for the IRS implementation of Obamacare, the Administration requested $439.6 million for nearly 2,000 bureaucrats.
Obama yesterday attempted to portray Obamacare as defending Americans from insurance companies. But who will defend the American people from Obamacare? The law’s confusing maze of programs, regulations, and processes brings to mind Ronald Reagan’s famous maxim that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”
If a picture is normally worth a thousand words, the Obamacare chart above should be worth trillions. Because Congress—seeing that Obamacare is not just too big to fail, but too big to succeed—should refuse to spend a single dime implementing this behemoth of a health care law.
http://blog.heritage.org/2013/07/19/obamacare-simplified/?roi=echo3-16307356191-13754759-261797a3a78ced1451e4e96646e8f30d&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell
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