Hide And Seek: DOJ Fought To Keep Monitoring Of Fox News Reporter Secret

Ryan Lizza at the New Yorker, who’s been doing some great reporting on the government’s monitoring of Fox News’ James Rosen, has a new bombshell development that nicely compliments Holder’s alleged perjury: the DOJ tried to keep the search secret.  Lizza wrote today that the Obama administration argued that the warrant be kept secret since they would need to monitor Rosen’s private emails for an extended period of time.

The new details are revealed in a court filing detailing a back and forth between the Justice Department and the federal judges who oversaw the request to search a Gmail account belonging to Rosen, a reporter for Fox News. A 2009 articleRosen had written about North Korea sparked an investigation; Ronald C. Machen, Jr., the U.S. Attorney who is prosecuting Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a former State Department adviser who allegedly leaked classified information to Rosen, insisted that the reporter should not be notified of the search and seizure of his e-mails, even after a lengthy delay.

[...]

Machen insisted the investigation would be compromised if Rosen was informed of the warrant, and also asked the court to order Google not to notify Rosen that the company had handed over Rosen’s e-mails to the government. Rosen, according to recent reports, did not learn that the government seized his e-mail records until it was reported in the Washington Post last week.

According to Lizza, Machen noted that emails “are commonly used by subjects or targets of the criminal investigation at issue, and the e-mail evidence derived from those compelled disclosures frequently forms the core of the Government’s evidence supporting criminal charges.”  If such an investigation were to be “disclosed,” Machen argued, it would prevent government from “monitoring the account,” if it were considered to be necessary.

Additionally, the search warrant not only included Rosen’s emails, but his:

…correspondence with Kim,[as] the government wanted to know about Rosen’s contacts with other government officials, including “records or information relating to the Author’s communication with any other source or potential source of the information disclosed in the Article.”

…[A]mong other things, the search warrant requested access to:

—“Records or information related to Stephen Kim’s or the Author’s knowledge of laws, regulations, rules and/or procedures prohibiting the unauthorized disclosure of national defense or classified information.”

—“Any classified document, image, record, or information, and any communications concerning such documents, images, records, or information.”

—“Any document, image, record, or information concerning the national defense, including but not limited to documents, maps, plans, diagrams, guides, manuals, and other Department of Defense, U.S. military, and/or weapons material, as well as sources and methods of intelligence gathering, and any communications concerning such documents, images, records, or information.”

—“Records or information related to the state of mind of any individuals seeking the disclosure or receipt of classified, intelligence and/or national defense information.”

Keeping Rosen in the dark wasn’t popular with everyone. Lizza noted that two judges ordered the DOJ inform Rosen of the search, but Machen appealed those decisions in 2010 with Royce C. Lamberth, the chief judge in the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia,who granted his request to keep the investigation secret – and overturn the two previous rulings about investigation.  It was also revealed yesterday that Attorney General Eric Holder personally signed off on this monitoring of Rosen.

This just keeps getting worse by the day.

Holder Signed Off On Warrant To Search Emails Of Fox News Reporter

So, Attorney General Holder personally signed off on the warrant to search James Rosen’s emails. Rosen, a Fox News journalist, was targeted by the administration in 2009 in possible connection to a leak in the State Department over his story about North Korea.  After this revelation, the DOJ seized Rosen’s phone records, personal emails, and even looked into his parents’ phone records.  Holder has recused himself during the investigation into AP’s Yemen story, but this one, where he personally signed off on intruding into Rosen’s life and career, will put him straight in the crosshairs on Congress again – and rightfully so.

John Mirkinson of the Huffington Post reported on May 23 that:

Holder [is] at the center of one of the most controversial clashes between the press and the government in recent memory. The warrant he [Holder] approved named Rosen as a “co-conspirator” in a leak investigation, causing many to warn that the Justice Department was potentially criminalizing journalism. The warrant also approved the tracking of Rosen’s movements in and out of the State Department, as well as his communications with his source, Stephen Kim.

The Justice Department later said that it did not intend to press any charges against Rosen. The attorney general is usually required to approve requests to search journalists’ materials, but that rule does not extend to email records.

(Holder recused himself from the investigation into the Associated Press, meaning that he absolved himself of that responsibility.) Holder has previously said that he was not sure how many times he had authorized the search of journalists’ records.

The revelation came hours after President Obama said in a speech that he was concerned about the potential implications of the Fox News and AP investigations. Obama said that Holder would be reviewing the department’s rules for investigations that involve reporters.

Ryan Lizza at the New Yorker, who’s also been covering this story, wrote on May 21 about the contents of the seized records.

[T]he government seized “call detail” records from Rosen’s work and cell phones, which would show whom he called, who called him, how long they spoke, and the times of the calls. The document suggests that the government was seeking only the subscriber records for the two White House numbers targeted, information that a government source said would include the name of the official who used the specific line.

Because the last four digits of each phone number are redacted in the government filing, it is impossible to determine who exactly was targeted by the Justice Department.

Here is the full list of the phone numbers included in the filing, which lists evidence that the prosecution was sharing with the defense:

(202) 506 (Comcast)
(202) 777 (ATT)
(212) 601 (ATT) (According to NewsCorp, the main number for the Fox Business Channel is (212) 601-7000.)

(202) 549 (ATT Wireless) (Rosen’s cell phone begins with these digits.)
(202) 615 (ATT)
(202) 213 (ATT Wireless)
(202) 213 (TracFone)
(202) 824 (The main number for Fox News’s Washington bureau is (202) 824-0001 and Rosen’s work line starts with these six digits.)
(202) 861 (Verizon) (Time uses this area code and exchange, but so do other unrelated entities.)
(202) 883 (Verizon)
(202) 293 (Verizon)
(202) 728 (Verizon)
(202) 456 (Verizon) (The White House uses this area code and exchange.)
(202) 547 (Verizon)
(202) 647 (Verizon) (The State Department uses this area code and exchange.)
(718) 720 (Verizon)
(703) 979 (Verizon)
(202) 628 (Verizon)
(202) 577 (Verizon wireless)
(202) 329 (Verizon wireless)
703-472 (Verizon wireless)
(202) 577
(703) 342
(703) 883
(304) 558 (Frontier Communications)
(212) 301 (Verizon)
(202) 628 (ATT)
(917) 562 (ATT)

So, will Holder be fired over this development?  Let’s see how this turns out.  In the meantime, the Obama administration finds themselves bereft of the political cover provided by the media in this instance.

Has Obama Damaged Hillary’s Possible 2016 Presidential Bid?

When scandal plagues one party, people flock to the other.  Concerning public trust, that’s already happened, with the American people trusting Republicans over Democrats in government.  It’s also possibly damaged Hillary Clinton’s bid for the White House in 2016.  Paul Bedard of the Washington Examiner wrote yesterday of the catastrophic impact Obama’s scandals have on the Democratic Party for 2014 and beyond.

This hurts the Democratic Party and will hurt anybody who runs for president in 2016,” said former Clinton White House counsel Lanny Davis, a major supporter of Hillary Clinton. Speaking on national radio’s Andrea Tantaros Show, he added: “It will make it almost impossible to elect a [Democratic] president. … I’m nervous.”

Meanwhile, several Democratic and GOP political advisers told Secrets that the combined scandals — IRS, Benghazi and the media source hunt — threatens the Democrats’ grip on the Senate. House advisers are even predicting that Republicans will pick up nearly 10 seats if the scandals continue to eat away at trust in the Democratic Party.

Yet, the president’s approval rating are holding steady, but Davis:

[d]ismissed some polls showing that Obama has maintained a level approval rating. “This is going to eat away at his approval ratings,” he said.

And if it turns out that the White House suggested to the IRS that they target Tea Party groups for arduous investigations into their requests for tax-exempt status, “it’s the end of the presidency.”

Buyer’s Remorse Growing With ObamaCare

Well, ObamaCare is going to be fully implemented by 2014, with the IRS being the government’s enforcement arm.  Although, in light of recent events, the Obama administration should have that aspect of their policy changed.  For now, discontent is growing, and some of the president’s biggest allies are calling for revisions to the new health care law.  Currently, 56% of Americans want to go back to the pre-ObamaCare days of obtaining health care.

Dana Blanton at Fox News wrote yesterday that:

[A] Fox News poll released [last] Wednesday finds that while 26 percent of voters say their health care situation will be better under the new law, twice as many — 53 percent — say it will be worse.  Another 13 percent say it won’t make a difference.

Almost all Republicans (85 percent) and just over half of independents (51 percent) say they will be worse off under ObamaCare.  Nearly half of Democrats expect to be better off (48 percent), while about one-quarter believe they will be worse off (24 percent).

Young voters and seniors are pessimistic about ObamaCare.  Majorities of those under age 35 and those 65+ think things will be worse under the 2010 health care law.

That helps explains why a 56-percent majority wants to go back to the health care system that was in place in 2009.  Some 34 percent would stick with the new law.

Three in ten Democrats would rather go back to the pre-ObamaCare system (30 percent).  That view climbs to 55 percent among independents and 85 percent among Republicans.

Additionally, three unions, one of them is part of the Teamsters, have called for revisions since they say the new law will inhibit the way they negotiate health care benefits with management.

The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) — a 1.3 million-member labor group that twice endorsed Obama for president — is very worried about how the reform law will affect its members’ healthcare plans.

Last month, the president of the United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers released a statement calling “for repeal or complete reform of the Affordable Care Act.”

UNITE HERE, a prominent hotel workers’ union, and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters are also pushing for changes.

Joseph Hansen, the president of the UFCW, wrote in a Hill op-ed that:

[a]s currently interpreted, the ACA would block these plans from the law’s benefits (such as the subsidy for lower-income individuals and families) while subjecting them to the law’s penalties (like the $63 per insured person to subsidize Big Insurance). This creates unstoppable incentives for employers to reduce weekly hours for workers currently on our plans and push them onto the exchanges where many will pay higher costs for poorer insurance with a more limited network of providers. In other words, they will be forced to change their coverage and quite possibly their doctor. Others will be channeled into Medicaid, where taxpayers must pick up the tab.

[...]

In addition, the ACA includes a fine for failing to cover full-time workers but includes no such penalty for part-timers (defined as working less than 30 hours a week). As a result, many employers are either reducing hours below 30 or discontinuing part-time health coverage altogether. This is a cut in pay and benefits workers simply cannot afford. For example, a worker making $10 an hour that has his or her schedule cut by six hours a week would lose $3,100 a year in income. With millions of workers impacted, this would have a devastating effect on our economy.

This gives conservatives ammunition to fight the law, but therein lies the problem.  If Republicans retake the senate in 2014 and begin the process to repeal ObamaCare, they won’t have a two-thirds majority needed to override the inevitable veto by Obama.  The same goes for the House.  Republicans wouldn’t have the 290 votes to override an Obama veto.

That brings us to 2016, where 17 million people will already be receiving benefits from the Affordable Care Act.  Are we really going to mount a campaign that tells 17 million people we’re going to take away your free stuff?  It would be suicidal for Republicans to just disregard almost 20 million votes right out of the gate.  If we do retake both chambers of Congress next year, the Obama agenda is effectively over.  After that, conservatives need to hit the books and come up with alternatives, but it looks like the window for total repeal has come and gone.

Running Amok: The IRS Targeted Adoptive Families

There’s been much reporting about the ridiculous review process the Coalition for Life of Iowa was subjected to during their process to become a tax-exempt group.  One question related to the content of their prayers, and an IRS agent is reported to have told the pro-life group that “your application’s ready to go. However, it will not be approved until you send a letter signed by your entire board under penalty of perjury saying that you will not protest at Planned Parenthood.”  Now, it seems the IRS targeted adoptive families in what is rapidly becoming an agency that is running amok in Washington.

David French wrote in National Review yesterday that:

In 2012, the IRS requested additional information from 90 percent of returns claiming the adoption tax credit and went on to actually audit 69 percent. More details from the Taxpayer Advocate Service:

During the 2012 filing season, 90 percent of returns claiming the refundable adoption credit were subject to additional review to determine if an examination was necessary. The most common reasons were income and a lack of documentation.

■ Sixty-nine percent of all adoption credit claims during the 2012 filing season were selected for audit.

■ Of the completed adoption tax credit audits, over 55 percent ended with no change in the tax owed or refund due in fiscal year 2012. The median refund amount involved in these audits is over $15,000 and the median adjusted gross income (AGI) of the taxpayers involved is about 64,000. The average adoption credit correspondence audit currently takes 126 days, causing a lengthy delay for taxpayers waiting for refunds.

While many returns had missing or incomplete information (more on that in a moment), what was the outcome of this massive audit campaign? Not much:

Despite Congress’ express intent to target the credit to low and middle income families, the IRS created income-based rules that were responsible for over one-third of all additional reviews in FY2012.

■ Of the $668.1 million in adoption credit claims in tax year (TY) 2011 as a result of adoption credit audits, the IRS only disallowed $11 million — or one and one-half percent — in adoption credit claims. However, the IRS has also had to pay out $2.1 million in interest in TY 2011 to taxpayers whose refunds were held past the 45-day period allowed by law.

This issue does strike close to home.  As a Korean adoptee, I would hope the federal government would incentivize families willing to take in unwanted or abandoned children from overseas and at home.  The process is incredibly expensive, and when families needed the assistance from the tax credit – all they got was a lousy audit.

[T]he IRS responded by implementing an audit campaign that delayed much-needed tax refunds to the very families that needed them the most. Oh, and the return on its investment in this harassment? Slightly more than 1 percent.

This audit wave got almost no media coverage, but what was the experience like for individual families? In a word, grueling. Huge document requests with short turnaround times were followed by lengthy IRS delays in processing, all with no understanding for the unique documentation challenges of international adoption.

As French concluded in his piece, he’s part of an adoptive family, and there are a multitude of stressful activities associated with the process.  Besides the bureaucratic side of things, you have the possibility that you may need to carefully guide your child through culture shock, identity crisis, and other ailments associated with “not fitting into your environment.”  Some Korean adoptees have struggled with this, and pondered if they’re Korean or American at heart.  The same goes for any international adoptee. Luckily, I never experienced those issues, but as French aptly noted it’s just cruel to be subjected to an audit for such a low rate of return.

all of this [the adoption process] places a great strain on family finances and emotions. To then face an audit on the other side? All so the IRS can collect a whopping 1 percent additional revenue? It’s beyond the pale. If the IRS is concerned about fraud, it can audit random samples, not the vast majority of adoptive families claiming the credit.

Clearly, the IRS has been unhinged, unaccountable, and unethical for far too long.  The agency is bordering in lawlessness.  And attacking Americans for their political beliefs, and their choice to start, or expand, their families is simply outrageous.  The liberal dogma of faith in government is misplaced in the extreme.

Will Obama’s Scandals Mobilize Conservatives For 2014?

While Obama’s approval ratings are unscathed for now, the election map for the 2014 midterms is very different.  Liberals’ fetishism with gun control cost the president his most precious moments of his second term, it went down in flames, and made the election map more favorable towards Republicans.  Now, with the AP, Benghazi, and IRS scandals dominating the news cycle, will it carry over until next year?

It certainly looks that way, especially with the revelation that the IRS targeted conservatives for their political beliefs.  It was already a suspicion amongst Tea Party groups, and now they’re vindicated.  Furthermore, the IRS draws the ire of the right anyway – and coupled with malfeasance – could mean turnout gold by the time 2014 rolls around.  To make things more sweeter for Republicans, Democrats have yet to field a heavyweight candidate in any of their senate races.  Mitch McConnell, who is beatable next year, campaigns against no one for the time being.

The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin cited Stuart Rothenberg today on how these scandals could lead to a replay of  the 1974 elections when Republicans got shellacked after Nixon left the White House in disgrace. Rothenberg noted that:

[t]he Obama scandals put the White House “on the defensive and should boost enthusiasm on the political right throughout this year…. Given the different natures of midterm electorates, the new political narrative increases the risk for Democratic candidates in red states, where Democrats must win independent and, in many cases, Republican voters to be successful.”

Rubin wrote that the following races have changed due to these developments.

1. West Virginia (Open seat; John D. “Jay” Rockefeller IV, a Democrat, is retiring): From tossup/tilt Republican to lean Republican.
2. South Dakota (Open seat; Tim Johnson, a Democrat, is retiring): From tossup/tilt Republican to lean Republican.
3. Arkansas (Mark Pryor, a Democrat): From tossup/tilt Democratic to pure tossup.
4. Louisiana (Mary L. Landrieu, a Democrat): From tossup/tilt Democratic to pure tossup.
5. Alaska (Mark Begich, a Democrat): From lean Democratic to tossup/tilt Democratic.
6. North Carolina (Kay Hagan, a Democrat): From lean Democratic to tossup/tilt Democratic.

Like with Nixon, the Obama administration is on defense, and the political narrative has changed.  Nixon was unable to reap the benefits of removing the United States from Vietnam, as Obama is unable to pursue his second term agenda since these scandals have 1/3 of all House committees investigating some aspect of his presidency.   Finally, the frivolous and hopelessly idealistic aura of hope and change that Obama proudly capitalized on is tarnished.  Yet, Rubin also mentioned that Republican overreach during the Monica Lewinsky scandal cost them five House seats, with no gains in the senate.

These scandals may or may not be as bad as Watergate, but 2014 could be a lot like 1974. Richard Nixon wasn’t on the ballot; he’d already been forced to leave office.Republicans lost nearly 50 House seats and four Senate seats, ceding control of both houses to the Dems. Before anyone belabors the point that no one thinks Obama will resign, understand that the point of the reference is to remind us that scandal-plagued White Houses are bad for their own party in midterms. The counter-example is 1998 when the Republicans were perceived as going nuts on the Monica Lewinsky scandal and lost five seats in the House and gained none in the Senate. (Not since 1934 did the party out of power in the White House fail to make gains in the midterm of the president’s second term.)

To sum up, Democrats are kidding themselves if they think the scandals aren’t bad news for 2014, but Republicans must stick to the facts and appear judicious in order to capitalize in the midterms.

We have a golden opportunity to cut the achilles tendon of this administration – and halt the expansion of liberalism run amok.  The  latter of which is the most important goal of winning in 2014.

Obama and The IRS Walk Into A Bar…Illegality Ensues

Ok, it’s not a bar, but there was a meeting between the White House and IRS union boss Colleen Kelley back in 2010.  The American Spectator and Breitbart have reported that President Obama met with Kelley the day before the IRS began its campaign against conservative groups.   Jeffrey Lord over at the Spectator found this information perusing the White House logs, which he posted on May 20.

According to the White House Visitors Log, provided here in searchable form by U.S. News and World Report, the president of the anti-Tea Party National Treasury Employees Union, Colleen Kelley, visited the White House at 12:30pm that Wednesday noon time of March 31st.

The White House lists the IRS union leader’s visit this way:

Kelley, Colleen Potus 03/31/2010 12:30

[...]

The very next day after her White House meeting with the President, according to the Treasury Department’s Inspector General’s Report, IRS employees — the same employees who belong to the NTEU — set to work in earnest targeting the Tea Party and conservative groups around America. The IG report wrote it up this way:

April 1-2, 2010: The new Acting Manager, Technical Unit, suggested the need for a Sensitive Case Report on the Tea Party cases. The Determinations Unit Program Manager Agreed.

In short: the very day after the president of the quite publicly anti-Tea Party labor union — the union for IRS employees — met with President Obama, the manager of the IRS “Determinations Unit Program agreed” to open a “Sensitive Case report on the Tea party cases.” As stated by the IG report.

The NTEU is the 150,000 member union that represents IRS employees along with 30 other separate government agencies. Kelley herself is a 14-year IRS veteran agent. The union’s PAC endorsed President Obama in both 2008 and 2012, and gave hundreds of thousands of dollars in the 2010 and 2012 election cycles to anti-Tea Party candidates.

Something that may be missing from the IG report, according to Lord, is the fact that they didn’t review any of the White House’s emails, calls, or visitor logs.  Additionally, Lord noticed another visit in 2009, where  the NTEU was given more authority concerning the “day-to-day” operations of the IRS following the meeting.

Kelley is recorded as visiting the White House over a year earlier, listed in this fashion:

Kelley, Colleen Potus/Flotus 12/03/2009 18:30

The inclusion of “FLOTUS” — First Lady Michelle Obama — and the 6:30 pm time of the December event on this entry in the Visitors Log indicates this was the White House Christmas Party held that evening and written up here in the Chicago Sun-Times. The Sun-Times focused on party guests from the President’s home state of Illinois and did not mention Kelley. Notably, the Illinois guests, who are reported to have attended the same party as Kelley, included what the paper described as four labor “activists”: Dennis Gannon of the Chicago Federation of Labor, Tom Balanoff of the Service Employees International Union, Henry Tamarin of UNITE, and Ron Powell of the United Food and Commercial Workers.

Six days following Kelley’s attendance at the White House Christmas party with labor activists like herself, the President issued Executive Order 13522 (text found here, with an explanation here). The Executive Order, titled: “Creating Labor-Management Forums To Improve Delivery of Government Services” applied across the federal government and included the IRS. The directive was designed to:

Allow employees and unions to have pre-decisional involvement in all workplace matters….

 With the revelation of the IRS’ alleged illegal activity, Kelley has sprinted into the bunker, and has been quiet about this fiasco since the story broke.   Wynton Hall at Breitbart, who cited Lord’s story, wrote on May 20 that all that Kelley has said about his scandal is that:

“NTEU is working to get the facts but does not have any specifics at this time…moreover, IRS employees are not permitted to discuss taxpayer cases. We cannot comment further at this time.”

So, who’s digging around with this lead, besides the Spectator?  It’s Bloomberg News.

Last Thursday at the President’s press conference with the Turkish prime minister, Julianna Goldman of Bloomberg News asked the following question, bold print for emphasis:

“Mr. President, I want to ask you about the IRS. Can you assure the American people that nobody in the White House knew about the agency’s actions before your Counsel’s Office found out on April 22nd? And when they did find out, do you think that you should have learned about it before you learned about it from news reports as you said last Friday? And also, are you opposed to there being a special counsel appointed to lead the Justice Department investigation?”

The President’s response? (Again bold print emphasis.)

“But let me make sure that I answer your specific question. I can assure you that I certainly did not know anything about the IG report before the IG report had been leaked through the press.”

Take note: Goldman’s question was:

“Can you assure the American people that nobody in the White House knew about the agency’s actions before your Counsel’s Office found out on April 22nd?”

Two meetings that ended with more power given to the NTEU, which precipitated the targeting of conservative groups – and the president doesn’t know anything?   Additionally, while the president may or may not have know, his Chief of Staff, Denis McDonough, knew last month before the story broke.  So, while the Obama administration can admit to the incompetence of their most senior official on the White House staff not relaying this information to the president, questions still surround whether Obama “didn’t know anything about the IG report” since those two meetings with Kelley seem to be the epicenter of the malfeasance that engulfed the IRS.

This is starting to become the opening of a very bad joke.

Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher Says Bush Is To Blame For IRS Fiasco

Tommy Christopher of Mediaite had a rather much ado about nothing post on May 16 concerning Martin Bashir’s show, where he – and Joy Reid of the Grio – forced Republican strategist Ron Christie to admit that former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman was a Bush appointee.

While the outrage at the political targeting by the IRS is warranted, the strength of the “chilling” effect of it relies on a bit of a Catch-22, in that the delays arguably prevented them from affecting the outcome of the election, which they’re really not supposed to be doing anyway. The IRS wasn’t wrong for targeting political organizations, they were wrong for not targeting more political organizations.

“Joy, this is not about bureaucratic ineptitude,” Christie disagreed, “this is about a culture within the Obama administration…”

That’s where he ran into trouble. “Wait a minute, the IRS is not the Obama administration, Ron,” Reid shot back.

“That is a flat-out lie,” Christie replied. “The IRS commissioner is a political appointee by the president.”

What ensued then was several moments of Christie repeating that “The President of the United States appoints the IRS commissioner,” and Reid asking who had appointed the IRS commissioner who oversaw the “culture” that Christie decried.

Finally, Bashir stepped in. “Ron, I accept your assertion. Joy is asking you very politely to answer that question. Who appointed the head of the IRS?”

“Doug Shulman,” Reid helpfully added.

A stubborn Christie intoned “The IRS commissioner is appointed by the President of the United States.”

“Who appointed Mr. Shulman?” Bashir asked.

“Mr. Shulman was appointed in the previous administration,” Christie finally admitted.

What’e the point?  Christopher concluded saying:

Christie continued to argue that the IRS is not independent, because the President was able to fire Miller (or to demand his resignation), but that’s the key difficulty that the President’s opponents will have with this scandal, going forward. In order to argue that the misconduct was the result of an administration culture, they have to pin this on George W. Bush, but the credit for fixing it will all go to President Obama.

Really? So, because this current administration is in the suck, the left has resorted to blaming Bush – again?  That won’t spin this scandal away, and it’s nonsensical since this whole mess began in 2010.  Liberals seem to have trouble digesting this: it happened under the Obama administration.  Also, Obama’s White House Counsel knew about this last month, but that’s not all.

The DOJ took two months of phone records from the Associated Press. The EPA, which usually gives fee waivers to media and watchdog groups, cooperated with environmental groups, but denied conservative ones.  We still have questions on Benghazi, and let’s not forget Fast and Furious.  Is Bush to blame for all of these disasters?  No. Obama’s second term agenda is on life support.  It’s like whack-a-mole.  You could try to discredit one scandal by blaming Bush, but this fact remains.  These scandals are here to stay, and the president’s grossly overrated rhetorical skills won’t be able to save him. The American people’s patience wears thin quickly with scandal-ridden politicians.

The Return of NYT’s Nate Silver

The IRS is under siege, but have no fear for Nate Silver is here.  While Silver does concede that Tea Party organizations were unduly targeted, he also tried to discredit the WSJ’s Peggy Noonan on May 17  to show that the individuals being singled out in this scandal isn’t a big deal. He also he also has the mathematical calculations prove it.  In fact, Silver has a very blasé attitude since hundreds of thousands of Romney and Obama supporters were subjected to audits in 2012, but that doesn’t discredit anything.  Conservative groups are at the core of this government malfeasance.  Yet, here’s what’s telling about the post. Silver wrote:

to be clear, this calculation assumes that individuals’ risk of being audited is independent of their political views. In fact, there is no way to know exactly how many supporters of each candidate were chosen for an audit — nor could there be, since individual-level voting records and audit records are private.

The point is, however, that even with no political targeting at all, hundreds of thousands of conservative voters would have been chosen for audits in the I.R.S.’s normal course of business. Among these hundreds of thousands of voters, thousands would undoubtedly have gone beyond merely voting to become political activists.

So, Nate Silver just said that there were a lot of audits that we can’t verify were politically motivated, but it happens anyway – which means it’s ok. All of this proved was that Silver has too much time on his hands, and gave us an irrelevant tally of audited Romney and Obama voters.  Now, let’s say they were targeted.  The scandal is now much more serious and larger in scope.  And the fact the people on both sides were hunted down means that the IRS – and Washington – are running amok. Concerning Silver’s calculations on individual audits from 2012, Joel Pollack at Breitbart wrote yesterday that:

the telling omission in Silver’s post is that he cannot prove that these conservatives–some of whom were subjected to several audits at once–weren’t audited for political reasons. The fact that some were statistically more likely to have been audited (once) for ordinary reasons does not mean that they were not audited for political reasons.

In fact, it is precisely the unlikely nature of some of these audits that has led to legitimate suspicion of the IRS’s motives.

Consider Noonan’s account of what happened to Romney donor Frank VanderSloot: “He found himself last June, for the first time in 30 years, the target of IRS auditors. His wife and his business were also soon audited.” Were his wife and business also statistically likely to have been chosen?

Granted, Silver did concede that the targeting of conservative organizations was “very clear.”

And evidence could yet emerge that there was targeting of politically active individual taxpayers. But the principle is important: a handful of anecdotal data points are not worth very much in a country of more than 300 million people.

Math cannot spin away a scandal any better than magic fairy dust.  Just because one angle of a scandal looks shoddy doesn’t mean the whole fiasco is now disproved.  That’s the problem with liberals.  They fail to see that big government will execute ways to maximize their power in any way, shape or form.  Conservative groups were targeted, and I’m glad Silver admits that point. But if organizations were targeted – what’s to stop the IRS from going after individuals?  With an administration that seems aloof to all of these scandals, we shouldn’t be surprised if future developments show that the IRS did just that.  I guess that’s the price you pay for a government that’s “too vast.”

Nevertheless, an investigation is underway.  Let’s see what happens.

Top Secret! Verizon Gave Phone Records To DOJ

Well, this is great.  Ryan Gallagher at Slate, a Washington Post affiliate, reported yesterday that:

when the feds came knocking for AP journalists’ call records last year, Verizon apparently turned the data over with no questions asked. The New York Times, citing an AP employee, reported Tuesday that at least two of the reporters’ personal cellphone records “were provided to the government by Verizon Wireless without any attempt to obtain permission to tell them so the reporters could ask a court to quash the subpoena.”

[...]

Controversially, the AP was not given advance notice of the seizure, which is considered the usual protocol when the government is seeking to obtain journalists’ records. However, Verizon Wireless could have notified the reporters, which may have helped them challenge its legality. Companies like Dropbox and Twitter have made it their policy to inform users (whenever possible) that the government is seeking access to their data, and Twitter has been applauded for how it has been willing to challenge authorities’ surveillance attempts in court. But Verizon—like AT&T, Facebook, and Comcast—has been criticized in the past for its lack of willingness to stand up for users’ privacy rights, which suggests its decision to hand over AP reporters’ records is true to form. The company has been rated as one of the worst in the United States for three consecutive years in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s annual “Who Has Your Back?” reports.

Should we initiate the Drudge protocol?

MSNBC: Into Darkness

The liberal network is the Iron Dome for the Obama administration, but that doesn’t seem to be working in its favor concerning ratings.  In his May 16 column, Joe Concha at Mediaite showed how the network was successful in turning “Mitt Romney into Gordon Gekko” in 2012, and saw its ratings soar to its highest levels.  As a result, MSNBC vowed to overtake CNN, which really isn’t a all that impressive.  What’s even more embarrassing was that during the Boston Bombing, everyone decided to watch CNN and HLN.  In fact, HLN and CNN overtook MSNBC in the ratings with the coveted 24-54 demographic.  Why? Concha said:

[I]n short, Phil Griffin’s network revolves around one thing: Politics. And that world just ain’t that compelling unless there’s ballot box somewhere in the near future. MSNBC is also built on pointing out the hypocrisy and/or evil nature of the Republican Party and Fox News, two cornerstones of its content. But now it is President Obama and his promise to be a completely transparent administration that is being gleefully exposed as hypocritical by the GOP and Fox.

[...]

In other words, the President is (to quote Tom Cruise in The Firm): “…like a ship carrying a cargo that will never reach any port”.

On the U.S.S. Obama is MSNBC. And in making a run at Fox and in an effort to distance itself from CNN, they simply rearranged the deck chairs by doing things like moving Chris Hayes from weekday mornings to primetime. The result has been nothing short of disastrous, as he now trailsThe O’Reilly Factor by a 7-to-1 margin while failing to get 500,000 viewers per night (Keith Olbermann, conversely, routinely generated over 1.2 million viewers before being asked to leave).

The only hope, of course, is Hillary and the Clinton for President 2.0 2016 campaign. It was somehow the lead story on the Chris Matthews Show on Sunday. All complete with fat jokes aboutChris Christie (lather, rinse, repeat) from the host, who ain’t exactly Calista Flockhart himself…

Benghazi? IRS? AP phone records seized? Nope…it’s all about an election 42 months away. Why? Because it’s a challenge to defend the President these days. His party won’t win in 2014. He’s already past tense, a lame duck. What to do?

Well, they’re trying to defend the president.

I do not believe what the IRS was reported to have been doing is an outrage. I believe that the IRS agents in this case did nothing wrong. Let me say it again, you won’t hear it anywhere else: the IRS agents did nothing wrong. They were simply trying to enforce the law as the IRS has understood it since 1959.” – Lawrence O’Donnell on the IRS.

“Conservatives still want to change the subject to the fake, ginned up scandal they’ve been pushing month after month.” – Chris Hayes on Benghazi.

Franklin Center May Have Been On IRS Hit List

In the wake of the IRS scandal, it was discovered that the Leadership Institute was targeted with what is being described as a “yearlong harassing audit.”  The Leadership Institute trains conservative activists across the country.  The Washington Free Beacon’s CJ Ciaramella cited Morton Blackwell, LI’s founder and president, yesterday  saying,

[T]he IRS’ indefensible behavior is worse than we first thought, as it targeted both new and existing conservative groups in politically motivated attacks…fortunately my Leadership Institute had the resources to stand up to the government’s bullying and intimidation. Other groups, including grassroots and tea party groups we’ve helped train, did not.

In the end, the IRS accepted the Leadership Institute’s 2008 tax return, which was under review, but not after the non-profit spent $50,000 in legal fees.  Yet, it seems the Franklin Center, which trains citizen journalists, was also on the IRS’ hit list.

The Franklin Center’s Watchdog project reported on May 15 that there was an unusual jump in IRS.gov and EOP.gov traffic to their site from December of 2012 through May of 2013.  Franklin Center staff went back to see if they correlated with Drudge hits, or something of that nature, but couldn’t come to anything conclusive regarding the spike.  What is interesting is that on December 14th, 2012, the IRS visited their site 111 times, despite the average of one or two visits a day. The second highest day for page views from the IRS is twenty.

Will Swaim and Ryan Ekvall, who wrote the piece on Watchdog, mentioned that:

according to Google analytics, the IRS generated 456 unique visitors, between January 2009 and May 2013. The report notes 552 visits and 709 page views from the IRS. Most of the traffic occurred between the second half of 2012 and this week.

[...]

The analytics show 60 unique visitors and 84 page views to Watchdog.org from eop.gov, the Executive Office of the President, between December 2009 and May 2013.

The IRS has apologized in recent days for targeting conservative organizations applying for tax-exempt status. Republicans are calling for criminal prosecutions, and the FBI is now investigating.

The source of White House visits, eop.gov, redirects visitors to the official White House website. A message on that redirect reads, “You have requested a page on EOP.gov and have been redirected here. EOP.gov is a domain operated by the Executive Office of the President. WhiteHouse.gov is the public-facing website for the EOP.”

Oh, this scandal reeks of Nixon.

Typical: Rep. Markey Owned By Interests He Oversees on His Committees

So, this past week Rep. Ed Markey held a fundraiser, which was co-hosted by lobbyist – and ex-Gore Chief of Staff – Ron Klain.  Klain is a former lobbyist of Fannie Mae, and Markey voted in favor of the Fannie and Freddie bailouts.  Hence, Ron’s invite was probably a top priority.  In all, it was a lobbyist-heavy, DC insider-packed event, which isn’t the crowd a man of the people heavily associates with  in his bid to represent the state of Massachusetts.  In fact, special interests dominate Ed.

As the Boston Globe notes: “For all [Markey’s] moral outrage about secret money being funneled into his opponent’s campaign, Markey’s real goal is to keep the financial advantage on the Democratic side. As the Globe reported last January, he entered the race with a $3.1 million war chest, much of it funded by the telecommunications and media industries, which he helps regulate as chairman of a powerful congressional committee. According to a memo circulated by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Markey received more than $1 million from outside groups during the 2013 Senate primary campaign, more than any other primary candidate.”

So, who are Ed’s biggest fans.  The NRSC discovered through public FEC reports that:

Outside Groups Spent At Least $1.3 Million Supporting Markey

• League Of Conservation Voters Inc. Spent $472,892. (FEC Website, www.fec.gov, Accessed 5/1/13)
• LCV Victory Fund Spent $360,885. (FEC Website, www.fec.gov, Accessed 5/1/13)
• League Of Conservation Voters Action Fund Spent $2,500. (FEC Website, www.fec.gov, Accessed 5/1/13)

SEIU COPE Spent $303,450 Supporting Markey. (FEC Website, www.fec.gov, Accessed 5/1/13)

NARAL Spent $51,123 Supporting Markey. (FEC Website, www.fec.gov, Accessed 5/1/13)

Local 1199 SEIU Spent $39,564 Supporting Markey. (FEC Website, www.fec.gov, Accessed 5/1/13)

350.org Action Fund Spent $19,576 Supporting Markey. (FEC Website, www.fec.gov, Accessed 5/1/13)

Planned Parenthood Spent $9,807 Supporting Markey. (FEC Website, www.fec.gov, Accessed 5/1/13)

Yid With Lid wrote on May 5 that:

As part of his Congressional responsibilities Markey has the following committee work:

• Committee on Energy and Commerce
  • Subcommittee on Communications and Technology
  • Subcommittee on Energy and Power
  • Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations

• Committee on Natural Resources

Based on information from Open Secrets, during his 2012 Reelection campaign the largest donors to his campaign committee and/or his PAC (119 donors in total) contributed a total $586,263 to his reelection efforts, $408,963 (70%) of those contributions came from industries involved with his committees or unions.

Markey also scheduled former congressman Ben Jones, Cooter from the Dukes of Hazzard, and his band to play at the $5,200 a head fundraiser, but barred him once it was known that Jones liked the Confederate flag.

Actor and former Georgia congressman Ben Jones, best known as “Cooter” on “Dukes of Hazzard,” was scheduled to play with Cooter’s Garage Band at the $5,200-a-person fundraiser for Markey’s Massachusetts’ senate campaign. But at the last minute, Markey asked Jones not to come. “The fact that this is regarded as a political liability means that they think it’s going to be a close race,” Jones told the Boston Globe.

Markey found out about Jone’s spirited defense of the controversial flag just hours before the party. Jones posted a letter on his website last year after NASCAR banned the show’s iconic car “General Lee” from appear­ing at Phoenix International Raceway because the Confederate flag is painted on the car roof. Jones wrote that NASCAR had dishonored Southerners and caved to political correctness and corporate sponsors.

Jones was unrepentant Tuesday, saying that the Markey staffer who called to cancel his appearance at the home of Ginny Grenham and Paul Zevnik “insulting me, my beliefs, my politics, my heritage, and everything else, and I guess my musicianship. I basically told the guy to fold it four ways and put it where the sun don’t shine.” But, he added, he would still vote for Markey if he lived in Massachusetts.

in 1976, Markey Supported A Constitutional Amendment To Prohibit Abortion. “Markey supports a constitutional amendment to prohibit abortion, and opposes busing to achieve racial integration in public schools. He says his abortion position is a matter of conscience, because he thinks abortion is wrong.” (David B. Hilder, “Ed Markey: The Milkman’s Son Who Broke The Rules,” The [Harvard University] Crimson, 11/22/76)

NYT: Real Scandal Is Republican Obstructionism

On May 16, the New York Times editorial board was appalled by Republican obstructionism for stalling Obama’s agenda, and said that nothing really bad happened at the IRS.  All of this scandal talk is a diversion.

When politicians want to turn scandals into metaphors, actual details of wrongdoing or incompetence no longer matter. In fact, the details of the troubles swirling around the White House this week are bluntly contradicting Republicans who want to combine them into a seamless narrative of tyrannical government on the rampage.

IRS Official Cancels Commencement Address

When you become the face of a scandal, it’s probably not the best idea to deliver a commencement address to graduating students.  Lois Lerner, who became infamous for her “I’m not good a math” comment, was supposed to receive an honorary awards at Western New England University, but has since rescinded her invitation.  Ms. Lerner seems to be thinking of the students, and for this – I commend her decision.  If she had attended, the whole event would have been about her, which isn’t right.  Scott Greer at Campus Reform wrote today that:

Lerner withdrew to keep the focus on the graduates rather than on her controversial actions, a spokesman for the university told Campus Reform on Wednesday.

“She grew concerned that the focus would be on her and the development the IRS rather than on the law graduates,” said Dave Stawasz, spokesman for WNE.

In a press conference about the growing scandal last Friday, Lerner famously downplayed her own mathematical skills when she was asked by a reporter to clarify how many conservative groups had been inappropriately targeted by IRS agents.

What’s ironic about this whole university situation is that:

the school praised in her [Lerner] in a press release for the commencement for designing forms for applying for tax exempt status from the IRS and for overseeing over 900 employees. 

Lerner is an alumnae of the school.

Then again, to add on to her tax-exempt foul up, Lerner excusing herself from the commencement could be due to the fact that she received over $42,000 in bonuses since 2009.  Also, the “rogue” employees CNN mentioned this afternoon, included her.

The director of the Internal Revenue Service division under fire for singling out conservative groups sent a 2012 letter under her name to one such group, POLITICO has learned. The March 2012 letter was sent to the Ohio-based American Patriots Against Government Excess (American PAGE) under the name of Lois Lerner, the director of the Exempt Organizations Division…

Oh, and there’s that Barack H. Obama Foundation.  Bryan Preston reported that:

Lois Lerner, the senior IRS official at the center of the decision to target tea party groups for burdensome tax scrutiny, signed paperwork granting tax-exempt status to the Barack H. Obama Foundation, a shady charity headed by the president’s half-brother that operated illegally for years.

In that latter case, Obama had collected money long before he was granted his tax-exempt status. Lerner helped him out by making his status retroactive all the way to 2008, shielding him from exposure to any tax evasion nastiness.

So, one could say she did it for the students, but knowing how the Potomac messes with people in this town – I’m guessing she’ll be using the time to find a good lawyer.

A Second Kermit Gosnell? In Texas?

With the conclusion of the trial involving Philly abortionist Kermit Gosnell, another may be in the works.  This time we’re in Texas.  Sordid details have been documented about  an abortionist, who twisted the heads off of babies.  Additionally, he allegedly ripped living babies apart during the procedure.  As Live Action’s investigation into the late-term abortion industry have exposed, Gosnell is not alone.

Steven Ertelt at Life News reported today that three women:

Deborah Edge, Gigi Aguliar, and Krystal Rodriguez, have come forward to tell of their horrific experiences working for abortionist Douglas Karpen, at one of three of his Texas abortion clinics, the Aaron Women’s Clinic in Houston. A fourth informant has co-operated with Operation Rescue, filing an affidavit about her experiences, but remains at this time anonymous.

The pictures these women took of the dead children are graphic, disturbing, and were beyond 24 weeks, making them illegal abortions.

…show babies that are huge, with gashes in their necks, indicating that these babies were likely born alive, then killed, just as Kermit Gosnell did at his ‘House of Horrors’ clinic in Philadelphia,” said Troy Newman, President of Operation Rescue. “In fact, there are numerous similarities between Karpen and the Gosnell case, including the disregarding of complaints by the authorities that allowed both men to continue their illegal operations.”

Deborah Edge “described how some babies would emerge too soon and would be alive, moving, and breathing. She also told of how Karpen would sometimes deliver the babies feet first with the toes wiggling until he stabbed them with a surgical implement. At the moment the toes would suddenly splay out before going limp. Sometimes he would kill the babies by “twisting the head off the neck.”

That’s not all.  In 2005, a sewer broke at Karpen’s Texas Ambulatory Surgical Center, and its contents spilled onto a neighboring parking lots of a car dealership. According to Ertelt, “Maribeth Smith, an employee of the car dealership said she is convinced she saw human body parts mixed in with the sewage. She took photographs, believing the human tissue came from the clinic.”  Edge also made a list of felonious activity occurring at Karpen’s clinic.

• Falsification of ultrasounds to produce younger fetal ages of babies over the legal limit or older fetal ages to extract more money out of women.
• Fraudulent billing practices.
• Surgical equipment not properly sterilized.
• Reuse of disposable instruments.
• Unqualified workers drawing and administering drugs.
• Late-term abortions done at 28 weeks and later. (Texas law permits only to 24 weeks.)
• Lack of adequate nursing staff.
• Concealing poorly kept logs from inspectors to prevent deficiency citations.
• Hiring nurses through a temp agency to work only on days when inspections are scheduled.
• Mistreating heavy women and inappropriately touching attractive women while under sedation.
• Sexual harassment.

The notion of a “Kermit Gosnell” operating in Texas is so offensive to Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, that he’s ordered an investigation into Karpen.

In a week when serial murderer Kermit Gosnell was found guilty of killing babies, I read with disgust about the allegations of Houston-based abortionist Douglas Karpen performing illegal late-term abortions surrounded by appalling sanitary conditions in his clinic…the Harris County authorities should perform a full-scale investigation and take action against those who broke state law.”

Let’s see how this turns out.  Let’s see how this turns out. In the meantime, Sen. Richard Blumenthal could stop blocking abortion resolution in the wake of Gosnell, and health officials in all 50 states should respond to the congressional letter asking them what are they doing to prevent other Gosnells from operating.  Sadly, in Texas, it seems one has already made it his home.

IRS Commissioner Knew About Targeting … A Year Ago

The IRS tax fiasco has most in a frenzy.  Some Democrats say the scandal reeks of Nixon.  On a lighter note, Obama is keeping pace with most second term presidents, regarding political scandals and poor economic performance.  This is just one of five scandals which are plaguing this administration.  So much for “hope and change,” huh? This could dominate the remainder of Obama’s second term, especially as the president’s Benghazi narrative seems to be crumbling all around him.  With the IRS scandal, it’s the same situation. 

At the time, now-ex IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman, on more than one occasion, told Congress that the targeting of conservative groups wasn’t happening  back in March of 2012.  Well, as the Washington Post reported on May 13, his successor, Steve Miller, was informed that the agency was executing this protocol in May of 2012.

As Ed Morrissey of Hot Air reported on May 13:

The current commissioner knew for a full year that the agency was targeting Tea Party groups  and other opposition organization for aggressive auditing? And in the middle of an election year, no less?  And yet, today Barack Obama insists that he knew nothing of this practice until last Friday.

This is either the most incompetent administration ever, or one of the least honest.  I don’t think there’s a third option any longer, especially in this scandal.

Guess who gets to be on the hot seat for Friday?

[...]

Who told him to keep quiet? That will certainly be one of the questions.  At the same time, this poses a fresh set of problems for Shulman, too. It will be very difficult to argue that he didn’t know anything about the practice in March 2012 when his chief counsel knew about it in August 2011, but that Miller came up to speed on it just after his departure.  And both men will have to answer whether and when they briefed the White House on this — or whether the White House briefed them to put the practice in place.

Yet, the IRS also released confidential documents from conservative groups.  According to Kim Barker and Justin Elliott at ProPublica, they received applications for non-profits by the IRS before they were made public.

The same IRS office that deliberately targeted conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status in the run-up to the 2012 election released nine pending confidential applications of conservative groups to ProPublica late last year.

The IRS did not respond to requests Monday following up about that release, and whether it had determined how the applications were sent to ProPublica.

For Obama, the notion that he heard about this from the newspapers seems to be a lie since the White House Counsel’s office knew about the IRS’ operations in April.

The White House counsel’s office was informed in April of an inspector general’s review of the Internal Revenue Service, press secretary Jay Carney said Monday.

Carney told reporters that the counsel’s office was told of the examination into the targeting of conservative groups during the week of April 22, but not given details about the review’s findings. President Obama, Carney said, was not told about the review and learned of it only after news reports emerged Friday.

[...]

Though attention has turned to the IRS and Benghazi controversies, Carney said the president will stay focused on accomplishing his goals, since that’s what Americans want. “Broadly speaking, the American people want Washington to focus on the issues that matter most to them, and that generally means focusing on growing the economy, helping it create jobs, strengthening the middle class, expanding opportunity, expanding security for middle-class families and seniors,” he said. ” And that’s what the President will continue to focus on. “

Is that why Obama has spent only 3.6% of his presidency  so far trying to fix the economy?

On Benghazi, The Left Exposes ‘Cargo Pants-Gate’

Talk about pulling a Seymour Hersh, Hayes Brown at Think Progress is trying to discredit Gregory Hicks, a Benghazi whistleblower, by attacking his managerial style and professionalism. By the way, all the sources cited in the piece are unnamed.

Hicks gave testimony to Congress last week about Benghazi, and highlighted how he knew from the beginning that this was a terrorist attack.  He said his “jaw dropped” when the Obama administration blamed a YouTube video for the attack.  Well, for liberals, he’s an awful manager, so his testimony is worthless.

According to the Brown’s May 10 post, a couple unnamed State Department staffers dished on Hicks.  Concerning Hicks’ claim that he was demoted, due to political reasons, after the attack:

A second State Department employee present in Libya before and during the Benghazi attacks confirmed the meetings occurred. Assistant Secretary Jones’ meetings with the staff prior to Oct. 2 were “entirely” focused on Hicks’ performance, according to this second employee, who also believed that Hicks should be removed from his position. “The group of us who were here during the attacks, we sat here two nights ago and watched [the hearing] with our jaws dropped,” the staffer said, referring to Hicks’ claim that he was demoted out of retribution for speaking out.

“He was removed from here because he was a disaster as a manager,” the second employee went on to say, expressing the belief that Hicks’ reassignment had “nothing to do with him being a whistleblower, it had everything to do with his management capacity or lack thereof.” This statement contradicts the narrative promoted on conservative media outlets that Hicks was being forced to remain silent and being punished for speaking out.

The same employees also told ThinkProgress of several troubling incidents involving Hicks and the staff at the Tripoli Embassy both before and after the September 11, 2012 assault in Benghazi. During the aftermath of Benghazi, Hicks showed a lack of diplomatic protocol that both staffers found extremely questionable given the tense times. This includes going to a meeting with the Libyan Prime Minister Mohammed Magarief in a t-shirt, cargo pants, and baseball cap. “I’m too upset to wear a suit,” Hicks allegedly told a staffer. “I want the Libyans to know how upset I am about this attack.”

Well, David Freddoso, who responded on the same day, at Conservative Intel. Briefing aptly noted that Hicks was a State Department employee for twenty-two years, but the Obama lapdogs just realized – from an anonymous source – that Hicks was a bad manager?

Hicks was removed in October 2012. So this provides a nice reminder that even if the State Department’s senior leadership couldn’t be bothered to provide adequate security in Benghazi or Tripoli, or to get an investigation underway into the attack in a timely fashion, there was plenty of time to settle bureaucratic scores in the weeks immediately following the attack. After all, do YOU want to be represented by someone who shows up to meetings in…cargo pants?

On the issue of  cargo pants, Freddoso caustically  said, “if that doesn’t prove this guy’s “testimony” is a total wingnut sham, then I just don’t know what will.”

So, the left is taking something that could embarrass or smear one’s reputation, and try to make that frivolous angle the story for the media to eat up.  So, the managerial style of a State Department employee discredits his knowledge of the attack?  It’s pathetic – and it’s always been that way.

During the Monica Lewinsky Scandal, the left used the same tactics in smearing Rep. Henry Hyde and others in Congress were pushing hard for impeachment. Liberals decided to slap him with his past indiscretions.  Hyde did have an extramarital affair with Cherie Snodgrass in the late 1960s.  Salon was the site that ran with the story, and explained why they did it:

It will be argued that Hyde’s 30-year-old affair cannot be compared to Clinton’s, because Hyde’s sexual intrigue was not carried out in Washington and because he did not lie under oath. Clinton is not being investigated because he had an affair, those who argue this insist, but because he lied about it. This is, we submit, either absurdly naive or disingenuous: Lying and having an affair can’t be separated. To have an affair is by definition to lie about it — an affair is a lie. Consequently, the notion that Clinton’s lies about the nature of his relationship with Lewinsky could constitute an impeachable offense is blatant politics, hiding under a legal fig leaf.

It’s true that an affair is a lie, but Hyde wasn’t the President of the United States, nor did he allegedly lie under oath. It’s a whole other ballgame when you allegedly perjure yourself in a legal deposition.  Additionally, Hyde’s tryst didn’t carry an obstruction of justice charge with it.  Just because someone else did something of a similar nature back in the day, doesn’t excuse the most powerful man in the world, who purportedly abused his power.  That’s not an argument.

This attempt to discredit Hicks’s testimony for being a bad manager – from people we don’t know – carries the same undertones.  Then again, let’s say Hicks was a bad manager, you still have the Benghazi talking points undergoing twelve revisions, and removing the word “terrorism” from the final draft.  It also omitted al-Qaeda’s involvement, but Hicks wore cargo pants!

Gosnell Case Launches Congressional Probe Into Abortion in America

Philly Abortionist Kermit Gosnell’s atrocities are well-documented in the grand jury report, and the case’s sparse coverage in the news has set up a rather powerful narrative concerning media bias and censorship.  Even the left has admitted that the media covered up Gosnell to protect abortion.  Yet, conservatives shamed the mainstream media to cover the case.  It now has national attention, with a congressional probe into abortion in America.  Yes, feminists, pro-aborts, and liberals aren’t going to be happy, and this could bring up the ever irritating “war on women” narrative from 2012.  Nevertheless, Steven Ertelt at Life News reported on May 9 that:

A House committee has launched a nationwide investigation in response to the trial of Kermit Gosnell, the abortion practitioner charged with multiple counts of murder for gruesome abortions and infanticides.

The move follows letters from another committee to public health officials in all 50 states asking them what they are doing to prevent “House of Horrors” abortion clinics like the one Kermit Gosnell ran in Pennsylvania.

Because the Gosnell Grand Jury report identified a “regulatory collapse” that allowed Gosnell to go undetected for decades, the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to all 50 state attorneys general asking questions about efforts to protect the civil rights of newborns and their mothers.

[...]

Responding to that, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and Constitution and Civil Justice Subcommittee Chairman Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) have sent a letter to all 50 state attorneys general seeking to find out if state and local governments are being stymied in their efforts to protect the civil rights of newborns and their mothers and if the federal government might be able to partner with states to prevent newborn homicides.

The letter asks the state attorneys general to respond to several questions and to provide copies of any official written procedures or guidance that relate to the gathering of information on, or the prosecution of, newborn homicides by June 1, 2013.

This comes after Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut blocked Sen. Mike Lee’s resolution to have hearing on Gosnell and abortion.  As a result, the House wants to know what the states are doing to prevent more Gosnells from operating freely, and committing infanticide.  Do you hear that?  It’s the sound of angry feminists and pro-aborts on the horizon.

MA Sen: Gomez Trails By Three, Markey Loathed By Independents

The Massachusetts special election to fill John Kerry’s vacancy is a statistical dead heat.  Markey’s rather unimpressive record after nearly four decades in Congress seems to be keeping from jumping ahead in the polls, despite the Bay State being a Democratic stronghold.  Republicans have been hammering Markey on his 1992 ethics investigation, and the ninety-two bounced checks that contributed to the closure of the House bank.   While the poll was conducted by a Republican pollster, it’s the independents that really stand out.  They’re a major voting bloc in the state, as indies make up more than half of the electorate. In all, the Hill reported yesterday that:

 [O]nMessage Inc., gives Markey 46 percent support to Gomez’s 43 percent, with 11 percent of respondents undecided. Markey’s lead is within the poll’s 3.4 percent margin of error, indicating the race is a statistical dead heat.

Both Markey and Gomez have similarly high favorables overall, but fewer respondents view Gomez unfavorably than Markey, likely due to the fact that voters haven’t yet tuned into the race and still don’t know much about him.

But Gomez fares better among independents, a key voting bloc in Massachusetts, as more than half of the state’s voters aren’t registered with either party. Only 10 percent of independents view him negatively, while 44 percent view Markey negatively, putting Markey underwater with independents.

The internal poll was conducted among 800 likely special election voters from May 5-7.

[...]

Pollster Wes Anderson writes in his memo on the survey that Markey can’t continue to be seen so negatively by independents “and hope to win.”

The special election will be held on June 25.  Markey has some work to do.

Left to right: Gabriel Gomez (R) and Rep. Ed Markey (D)

WaPo: Yeah, The IRS Tax Fiasco Should Be Investigated

On May 10, it was discovered that the IRS had improperly targeted seventy-five conservative tax-exempt groups that had the words “patriot” or “tea party” on their forms. In a statement, the IRS said, “mistakes were made initially, but they were in no way due to any political or partisan rationale.”  It also didn’t help when Lois Lerner, the IRS division head for tax-emept groups, said that she wasn’t “good at math.”  In the wake of this public relations disaster, the Washington Post published a scathing editorial last Friday calling for an investigation, and called Obama’s failure to publicly apologize for this catastrophe “disturbing.”

A BEDROCK principle of U.S. democracy is that the coercive powers of government are never used for partisan purpose. The law is blind to political viewpoint, and so are its enforcers, most especially the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service. Any violation of this principle threatens the trust and the voluntary cooperation of citizens upon which this democracy depends.

So it was appalling to learn Friday that the IRS had improperly targeted conservative groups for scrutiny. It was almost as disturbing that President Obama and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew have not personally apologized to the American people and promised a full investigation.

“Mistakes were made,” the agency said in a statement. IRS official Lois Lerner explained that staffers used a “shortcut” to sort through a large number of applications from groups seeking tax-exempt status, highlighting organizations with “tea party” or “patriot” in their names. The IRS insisted emphatically that partisanship had nothing to do with it. However, it seems that groups with “progressive” in their titles did not receive the same scrutiny.

If it was not partisanship, was it incompetence? Stupidity, on a breathtaking scale? At this point, the IRS has lost any standing to determine and report on what exactly happened.

[...]

The agency said that it now has rules in place to make sure this sort of thing never happens again. How could such basic safeguards not have existed in the first place? And what are the new rules? In response to our questions, officials did not say.

First, I commend the Washington Post, but at the same time, who are these people – and what did they do to the real editorial board? Some left-wing blowhards, like Ed Schultz, dismissed this story, but new details have shown that the IRS knew about the targeting back in 2011.

So, this is another issue that could frustrate Obama’s second term agenda, with the other being Benghazi. As William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection reminded us last Friday, the IRS will be the enforcement arm of Obamacare when it’s fully implemented in 2014.  With this latest development, I think we can safely assume that Barack Obama won’t be different than other second term presidents in avoiding scandals and lingering economic ills.  The shameless serial politicization of government agencies – and the mess left by Obamacare – will be Obama’s legacy.

Here’s to transparency and openness in government.

Sebelius To Health Care Industry: Give Me Money

While last Friday’s IRS bombshell was disturbing, another story is equally shocking.  Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is hungry for funds to implement the Affordable Care Act on time.  Congress has rejected the Obama administration’s request for more funds to subsidize the initiative.  Sarah Kliff wrote on May 10 that the HHS is working with a “shoestring budget,” and now its secretary is going to the health care industry pleading for money.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has gone, hat in hand, to health industry officials, asking them to make large financial donations to help with the effort to implement President Obama’s landmark health-care law, two people familiar with the outreach said.

[...]

Over the past three months, Sebelius has made multiple phone calls to health industry executives, community organizations and church groups and asked that they contribute whatever they can to nonprofit groups that are working to enroll uninsured Americans and increase awareness of the law, according to an HHS official and an industry person familiar with the secretary’s activities. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk openly about private discussions.

An HHS spokesperson said Sebelius was within the bounds of her authority in asking for help.

But Republicans charged that Sebelius’s outreach was improper because it pressured private companies and other groups to support the Affordable Care Act. The latest controversy has emerged as the law faces a string of challenges from GOP lawmakers in Washington and skepticism from many state officials across the country.

[...]

Meredith McGehee, policy director for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, which researches government ethics issues, said she was troubled by Sebelius’s activities because the secretary seemed to be “using the power of government to compel giving or insinuate that giving is going to be looked at favorably by the government.”

The success of the Affordable Care Act largely hinges on whether enough people sign up for insurance coverage. If only a small number of sick people participate, premiums would spike. But spreading information about the law to the 30 million uninsured Americans has been a struggle, partly because there isn’t enough money to fund the effort, HHS officials have argued.

Or, it could be that the new health care law is unpopular – and that includes 37% of Democrats who are also skeptical of the legislation’s impact.  Nevertheless, this new lobbying push by HHS, regardless if it’s ethical, displays the vast powers the secretary has over health care policy.  Back in 2010, Philip Klein wrote in the American Spectator that:

there are more than 2,500 references to the secretary of HHS in the health care law (in most cases she’s simply mentioned as “the Secretary”). A further breakdown finds that there are more than 700 instances in which the Secretary is instructed that she “shall” do something, and more than 200 cases in which she “may” take some form of regulatory action if she chooses. On 139 occasions, the law mentions decisions that the “Secretary determines.” At times, the frequency of these mentions reaches comic heights. For instance, one section of the law reads: “Each person to whom the Secretary provided information under subsection (d) shall report to the Secretary in such manner as the Secretary determines appropriate.”

The powers given to Sebelius are wide ranging. In the coming years, if she remains in office, the former Kansas governor will be able to determine what type of insurance coverage every American is required to have. She can influence what hospitals can participate in certain plans, can set up health insurance exchanges within states against their will, and even regulate McDonald’s Happy Meals. She’ll run pilot programs that Democrats have set up in an effort to control costs, and be in a position to dole out billions of dollars in grant money.

But the full breadth of her powers will be known only over time, due to the ambiguity of the language in many parts of the health care legislation. As conservatives make the case for repealing ObamaCare over the course of the next several years, it will be imperative to highlight the arbitrary new powers given to an unelected bureaucrat.

Thus, it’s no surprise – and quite fitting – that Klein called Sebelius the ‘Empress of ObamaCare.”  Yet, she’s could be – no she is– benevolent towards her friends given that:

many of Sebelius’s calls have gone to current supporters of Enroll America, the most prominent nonprofit group working on the health care law’s implementation, an HHS official said. Its president, Anne Filipic, joined the group in January after serving as the White House’s deputy director for public engagement.

Yeah, nothing stinks about this new development.  The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin posted today that Congress should investigate this new fundraising ploy by the Obama administration, which, on top of the IRS and Benghazi fallout, will be another shady use of government power by this president.  As DrewM. at Ace of Spades wrote on May 10,  the folks who do give Sebelius money should expect ”a little something extra in the regulations for those that pony up. [After all,] they are just doing it out of the goodness of their tiny, black, capitalist hearts.”

Here’s to free stuff.

(H/T Ace of Spades)

Students For Life: Revoke Irish PM’s Invite To Boston College

Edna Kenny, Ireland’s Prime Minister (Taoiseach) since 2011, plans to address Boston College on May 20.  Boston College is a Catholic university, but Kenny is supporting a vote on Irish legislation that could open the way for abortion on demand for the island nation.  Granted, the Huffington Post reported on May 7 that:

Kenny defied leaders of the Catholic Church on Monday, stressing his commitment to a scheduled vote on abortion legislation. Catholic leaders in the Irish Republic had earlier threatened lawmakers who would vote in favor of the proposed bill with excommunication.

Irish legislators are set to vote on a bill proposed by the prime minister’s cabinet that would legalize abortion in case of a threat to the life of the pregnant woman. The Irish government insists the proposed bill will not change the Republic’s laws on abortion, but is meant to clarify the rules on terminating pregnancies. As the Associated Press explains, the Irish constitution bans abortion but Ireland’s Supreme Court ordered in 1992 that the procedure should be legal when the woman’s life is at risk.

To many, this legislation may seem rational.  I happen to know a few pro-lifers, who would agree that such an exception should be made.  Yet, Kenny promised not to legislate on abortion, and the “Protection of Life during Pregnancy Bill 2013″ has been discovered that it has no limits on gestational age.  As a result, the Catholic Church has denounced the bill, and Students for Life are calling on BC’s executive staff to revoke the invitation.  In a press release, they stated:

Make no mistake about it: Prime Minister Enda Kenny supports allowing abortion, on-demand, in Ireland. But, before he makes abortion legal in Ireland for the first time, Kenny has been invited by Catholic leaders in America to speak at Boston College’s commencement ceremonies and receive an honorary Doctor of Laws degree.

DEA Closes Abortion Clinic That Was Stealing Women’s Blood

Well, this is rather disturbing.  Last month, the state of Ohio shut down an abortion clinic  after it was discovered they were stealing women’s blood.  The DEA got involved with the Capital Care center in Cuyahoga Falls after a report from the Ohio Department of Health cited numerous violations, including one involving drugs.  Yet, that wasn’t this clinic’s only offense.

Concerning blood:

A staff member told inspectors that “many of the facility’s patients underwent frequent surgical procedures at the facility.” There is so much wrong here, one scarcely knows where to begin.

One thing is certain: Capital Care was counting on these Rh- women to show up repeatedly to supply them with blood.

However, there was no doctor’s order for any of these women to have a tube to be drawn instead of just a finger stick, “nor was there documentation the patient was made aware of the blood sample’s intended use.”

Staffers at the clinic would keep the blood in refrigerators to be used every day over a period of two weeks.  As Pro-Life Action League noted, Rh- blood is very rare, and only 15% of the U.S. population carries this type. Hence,they would harvest it every time their “repeat customers” would arrive.

Some medical records were worthless.

One record (for “Patient #6″) deserves to be quoted in full:

Patient #6 was admitted to the facility on 12/05/12. Review of the surgical procedure documentation revealed there was no documented evidence the identification of the patient was checked, a physical exam was completed, or that a beginning or ending time for the procedure had been recorded. Review of the checklist before anesthesia revealed no vital signs were checked before or after IV sedation.

Records for five other patients were nearly as bad:

Patients #33, #36, #37, #39 and #43 were admitted between 10/29/12 and 02/14/13. The medical records were noted to be either illegible and undecipherable in regards to the surgical procedures performed by the physicians. The physicians’ post operative orders were illegible and surgical procedures lacked beginning and ending times.

Staff records were inaccurate, and the clinic didn’t have enough nurses on hand.  However, it was Capital Care’s handling of controlled substances that finally closed this shop.  In fact, the facility’s pharmacy license expired in December of 2012, and they continued to administer pain killers.

A Capital Care medical assistant (identified to in the inspection records as “Staff D”) was administering controlled substances. She was also signing the Controlled Substance Count Sheets and stated that she only gave medications when the physician directed her to do so.

But the law doesn’t allow that. A physician may not delegate to an unlicensed person the administration of a controlled substance.

[...]

Additionally, Capital Care was operating without a valid Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Controlled Substance Certificate. Their old certificate had expired a full year earlier, on December 31, 2011.

When inspectors reviewed the Capital Care’s controlled substance log, it indicated that all of the facility’s Fentanyl (a painkiller) was used up. According to the log, there was none in the entire facility.

But inspectors found a portable box on top of a file cabinet in the administration office.  It was double-locked, but could have been picked up and taken away, as it was not secured to anything.

A week later, on February 21, DEA staff arrived at the facility to “conduct a review of the pending application.” (Presumably, the clinic’s administration had since contacted the DEA about getting their Controlled Substance Certificate up to date.)   The double-locked box kept on the on the file cabinet was opened and revealed the presence of six syringes containing Fentanyl.

If anything, this should give more reason as to why abortion clinics should be regulated, but pro-aborts aren’t budging.

GALLUP: 58% Think Most Abortions Should Be Illegal, Including 57% of Women

We’ve known that Americans feeling that abortion should be illegal in most circumstances have been rising since the 2012 election.  As with any emotionally charged issue, it can change with the political winds.  Additionally, public opinion easily changes with the political tide.  With the pervasive “war on women” barrage throughout 2012, the serial rape and pregnancy gaffes Republicans made surely hurt the pro-life movement at the time.  Yet, a new Gallup poll shows that 58% of Americas are opposed to abortion in most circumstances, which includes 57% of women.

Steven Ertelt at Life News reported today that:

Gallup’s annual Values and Beliefs poll, conducted May 2-7, find 58 percent of Americans want either all or almost all abortions illegal — with 20% saying it should be illegal in all circumstances and 38% favoring it in only in a few circumstances.

Just 39 percent of Americans support all or most abortions remaining legal, with only 26% of Americans favoring legalized abortion under any circumstances (the position of Planned Parenthood and President Barack Obama) and 13% favoring legality under most circumstances.

The poll also showed varying groups of Americans also strongly oppose abortions and want it illegal in all or most circumstances. Some 59 percent of men and 57 percent of women want all or most abortions illegal as do 57 percent of young Americans under the age of 34.  Republicans want all or most abortions illegal on a 78-21 percentage point margin while 59 percent of independents and even 43 percent of Democrats oppose all or most abortions.

The Democratic figure is promising, but given how pro-life Democrats – what’s left of them – operate in Congress, they’re squishy on the issue of defending life.  Regardless, while we’re edging closer to becoming a pro-life nation, but more work needs to be done.

An Armed March on Washington Is A Horrible Idea

Yeah, this is where the libertarian movement goes off the hinges. Adam Kokesh, an Iraq war veteran and radio talk show host, is planning an armed march on Washington for July 4th. He made headlines for his “musings” about assassinating Mitt Romney, and is a 9/11 truther.  Business Insider reported that on May 6 that:

The plan, according to his Facebook event page, is to march across Memorial Bridge with rifles loaded and slung across the back “to put the government on notice that we will not be intimidated [and] cower in submission to tyranny.”

The invite continues, stating, ” … This will be a non-violent event, unless the government chooses to make it violent.”

Kokesh writes that if 10,000 attendees RSVP by June 1st, “we have the critical mass necessary to pull this off.” He said he wants to have at least 1,000 actually marching in the event, and as of this writing, more than 1,400 have said they were going.

Now, those planning on attending is over 3,000.  Granted, this is Facebook, and only 300 or less could show up. Yet, the news media is going to have a field day with this fiasco – and paint gun rights supporters as anti-government zealots. For now, conservatives have beaten the anti-gun wing of America.  Yes, they’ll be back, but if there is one thing that’ll strengthen their resolve, it’s idiotic sideshows like this, and libertarians wonder why their movement – by itself – hasn’t moved in the past two decades.  That’s not to bash libertarians. I tend to lean that way on some social issues, but this will accomplish nothing towards beating the left in their gun control pushes.

The NRA faced the most vicious attack by liberals – and their allies in the media – in recent memory after Newtown.  In the end, they prevailed, and it wasn’t because they organized armed marches.  It was due to their stellar grassroots network, and engaging legislators to remind them that their organization is effective, efficient, and doesn’t forgive – or forget – those who mess with the Second Amendment.

The NRA placed red state Democrats in the crosshairs, it made the 2014 senate map more favorable to Republicans, and made Obama squander the most critical moments of his second term of a failed piece of legislation.  That’s winning.  For Kokesh, he’ll only make a fool of himself this summer.

DSCC Is Not Looking Good

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee must be in a panic.  They’ve got nobody.  If anything, Rep. Gary Peters in Michigan and Rep. Bruce Braley in Iowa, who are third- tier at best, are the cream of the Democratic Senate crop in 2014 – and that’s not a good sign. It gets even worse with the latest development out of Georgia.

They did have a chance in retaking the state, but that went up in flames once Congressman John Barrow decided not to run. As a result, the National Journal reported on May 7 that:

His [ Barrow's] decision to forgo the race leaves national Democrats pining for Michelle Nunn, an Atlanta-based philanthropist and the daughter of former Sen. Sam Nunn. Nunn and Barrow had reportedly met to discuss which of them would seek the seat, so his decision not to enter the race could be a sign that Nunn will get in.

Yet, as David Freddoso at Conservative Intel. Report noted, Nunn may have clogged the spot – and ruined her party’s chances of recapturing Georgia.  She’s from the liberal wing of Georgia’s Democratic Party. Barrow wasn’t going to pull a Blanche Lincoln by engaging in intra-party warfare, only to emerge beaten and bloody for a tough general election campaign.  Nunn also didn’t seem all that convinced that she should stand aside, which contributed to Barrow’s decision.

In the aftermath of the South Carolina’s special election for 1st congressional district, Freddoso mentions James Richardson’s post on George Tipsheet saying this could be an omen for George Democrats.  ’Georgia’s Colbert-Busch’ = disaster at the polls.  Overall:

the problem for national Democrats is that this is probably their most promising opportunity to pick up a GOP Senate seat in the 2014 midterm election and offset possible losses in states like West Virginia, South Dakota, Arkansas, Louisiana, and others. The only other state that looks even remotely promising at this point is Kentucky, where nobody well-known wants to step up and longshot “some dude” challengers are suddenly getting profiled in The Hill.

They also have no heavyweights in Texas.

In Massachusetts, the race has taken a rather bizarre turn with Congressman Ed Markey’s “Osama bin Gomez ad.”  He now claims credit for satellite dishes, Hulu, YouTube, Facebook, Google, and Amazon, which is probably to offset the fact that he’s accomplished nothing during his four decades in Congress.  Nevertheless, he released an ad reiterating these points.

Additionally, Markey seemed to have had problems managing his finances while in Congress.

In 1992, Markey Was Embroiled In Scandal After He Was Found To Have Bounced 92 Checks From The Private U.S. House Of Representatives Bank. “As Speaker Tom Foley (D-Wash) declared the House Bank issue a closed matter, many Members found themselves in deep trouble as a result of Thursday’s public release of the final list of overdrafters. … Ed Markey (D-Mass) 92: Redistricting awaits, but one of Markey’s potential opponents, Democrat-turned-Republican Frank Vallarelli, may have overplayed his hand before the release of the list, accusing Markey of 166 overdrafts. Markey could also face Mike Conway, the creator of the rubber check (see above).” (Tim Curran, “Who’s In Trouble On The New List?” Roll Call, 4/20/92)

In September 1991, The General Accounting Office Issued A Report Saying House Members Had Bounced 8,331 Checks Between July 1989 And June 1990, And The Private House Bank Had Covered Them. “While there had been questions about the bank’s practices in the past, the controversy began Sept. 18, when the General Accounting Office, the bank’s auditor of record, issued a report saying that House members had bounced 8,331 checks between July 1989 and June 1990 and the bank had covered them.” (Guy Gugliotta, “House Votes To Shut, Audit Bank,” The Washington Post, 10/4/91)

In October 1991, The House Voted To Shut Down The Private Bank And Ordered The Bank’s Audit Record Sent To The Ethics Committee For An Investigation. “Bowing to an outpouring of public outrage, the House yesterday voted overwhelmingly to shut down its private bank and ordered the bank’s audit records sent to the ethics committee for an investigation into possible abuses by members of Congress who have bounced thousands of checks on their personal accounts.” (Guy Gugliotta, “House Votes To Shut, Audit Bank,” The Washington Post, 10/4/91)

So, in all, the DSCC ‘s performance in its campaign strategy is underwhelming – and devolving into a clown show.

A Republican Governor Suspended PA Abortion Clinic Inspections After 1993

One of the best articles to read about the Gosnell trial is Conor Friedersdorf’s April 12 piece in the Atlantic.  JD Mullane of the Bucks County Courier – and his Twitter account – has been exceptional with his live tweeting of the trial.  He’s been covering the Gosnell trial from the beginning.  Yet, during my interview on the Conservative Commandos Radio Show with Rick Trader last Tuesday to discuss my Planned Parenthood piece, I was asked why did PA stop abortion clinic inspections after 1993?  I honestly didn’t know.  Then again, the news media – in general – has dropped the ball on covering Gosnell, and I’m somewhat embarrassed that I let this slip through the cracks.  Nevertheless, it seems that former PA Gov. Tom Ridge, a Republican, has some explaining to do.

In Friedersdorf’s piece, he mentioned the grand jury report indicating that:

[N]umerous violations were already apparent, but Gosnell got a pass when he promised to fix them. Site reviews in 1992 and 1993 also noted various violations, but again failed to ensure they were corrected.

But at least the department had been doing something up to that point, however ineffectual. After 1993, even that pro form a effort came to an end. Not because of administrative ennui, although there had been plenty. Instead, the Pennsylvania Department of Health abruptly decided, for political reasons, to stop inspecting abortion clinics at all… The only exception to this live-and-let-die policy was supposed to be for complaints dumped directly on the department’s doorstep. Those, at least, would be investigated. Except that there were complaints about Gosnell, repeatedly.

So,why did the inspections stop? Only Tom Ridge knows the answer to that.  Elected in the 1994, Ridge suspended all abortion clinic inspections, and “tacitly allowed late term abortions to be performed in violation of Pennsylvania’s Abortion Control Act,” according to Strieff of RedState reading from the report. 

Under Governor Robert Casey, she said, the department inspected abortion facilities annually. Yet, when Governor Tom Ridge came in, the attorneys interpreted the same regulations that had permitted annual inspections for years to no longer authorize those inspections. Then, only complaint driven inspections supposedly were authorized.  [Janice] Staloski [the Dir. of Home Health for the PA DOH] said that DOH’s policy during Governor Ridge’s administration was motivated by a desire not to be “putting a barrier up to women” seeking abortions.

[...]

Indeed, in many ways State had more damning information than anyone else. Almost a decade ago, a former employee of Gosnell presented the Board of Medicine with a complaint that laid out the whole scope of his operation: the unclean, unsterile conditions; the unlicensed workers; the unsupervised sedation; the underage abortion patients; even the over-prescribing of pain pills with high resale value on the street. The department assigned an investigator, whose investigation consisted primarily of an offsite interview with Gosnell. The investigator never inspected the facility, questioned other employees, or reviewed any records. Department attorneys chose to accept this incomplete investigation, and dismissed the complaint as unconfirmed.

Fred Lucas of CNS News reported last month that:

Janice Staloski… “blamed the decision to abandon supposedly annual inspections of abortion clinics on DOH lawyers, who, she said, changed their legal opinions and advice to suit the policy preferences of different governors.”

[...]

The report goes on to say that the department’s senior counsel Brody backed up what Staloski said.

“He described a meeting of high-level government officials in 1999 at which a decision was made not to accept a recommendation to reinstitute regular inspections of abortion clinics,” the grand jury report said. “The reasoning, as Brody recalled, was: ‘there was a concern that if they did routine inspections, that they may find a lot of these facilities didn’t meet [the standards for getting patients out by stretcher or wheelchair in an emergency], and then there would be less abortion facilities, less access to women to have an abortion.”

Before Ridge was elected, during the Casey administration, Staloski actually personally inspected Gosnell’s clinic.

But Staloski isn’t holier than thou in this case.  According to Lucas, the grand jury report noted that she gave Gosnell a pass on his violations, rose through the ranks of the PA DOH, and became the director of the division that regulates abortion providers.  After that, she never looked into Gosnell, despite additional complaints.  Ridge would go on to be the nation’s first Secretary for the newly-created Department of Homeland Security after the 9/11 Attacks.

Mullane noted that Ridge has been silent on the Gosnell trial, as is Democratic gubernatorial candidate Rep. Allyson Schwartz.

Dem. Congressman Blames Budget Cuts For Libya Attack

So, when it comes to names, dates, and facts – it seems that isn’t something Congressman William Lacy Clay (D-Missouri) has mastered.  During today’s hearings on Benghazi, which was live blogged by PJ’s Bryan Preston, Rep. Clay actually had the temerity to blame budget cuts for the terrorist attack.

1:36 pm Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-MO) uses his time to blame budget cuts for the lack of security at Benghazi. That line has been debunked, by the State Department itself. He is wasting time and intentionally distracting from the facts of the situation in Benghazi.

Clay, like his fellow Democrats, is delivering a speech. Filibustering.

Clay is citing the Accountability Review Board’s findings, but the ARB was hand-picked by Clinton and failed to interview her. A skeptic could view the ARB as an exercise in giving Clinton the appearance of seeking the facts, while giving her enough cover to get past the 2012 election. Clay makes no allowance for this possibility.

Issa reminds Clay that Charlene Lamb testified in October that budget cuts were not the issue. Clay claims that he cannot remember what Lamb said, but that the ARB said resources were an issue. Selective memory. Laughable. Clay is, so far, the least serious member of the panel, and that’s saying something after Cummings’ and Maloney’s antics.

Additionally, besides Lamb’s testimony, U.S. special forces were ready to be sent in, but were ordered to stand down – and it wasn’t because of budget cuts.  I agree that Clay was filibustering, he was giving a speech, and he was engaging in political hackery.   The problem is that he sucks at it.

Live Action Captures Familiar Face In Latest Investigative Video

Is that Dr. LeRoy Carhart?  It seems Live Action ran into a familiar face during their six-month investigation into the late-term abortion industry, and Carhart is one of the many faces of this heinous business.  The Live Action investigator saw him in December of 2012, which was before Carhart claimed his latest victim in twenty-nine-year old Jennifer Morbelli, who died after suffering massive internal bleeding from a botched late-term abortion.  Also, when Morbelli was bleeding, Carhart was unreachable for emergency care since he skipped town.  This was a tragic replay of what happened in 2005, where Carhart performed a late-term abortion on Christin Gilbert, who also died in the process.  She was only nineteen.

In the Nebraska investigative video, Carhart suggests to the Live Action investigator to come to his clinic in Germantown, Maryland – the location of the future Morbelli abortion – which wasn’t even inspected by state health officials.  Live Action investigators visited Carhart twice, with the initial “doctor’s appointment” in in December of 2012.

Once there, Carhart details how an injection into the womb kills the baby, the disposal of the body parts, and denies having Christin Gilbert as a patient.

Dr. Carhart: …We haven’t even–I’ve never had to send anybody to the hospital with my patients, so.

Woman: Oh, really?

Justice Department: Gun Violence Is Down

As New England liberals have a conniption over the NRA’s Annual Meeting, they say that the Second Amendment rights organization is becoming a “paramilitary” group, and that their resolve to institute more gun control has been strengthened.  The only problem is that the Department of Justice reported today that gun violence is down.

Yet, Senators Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, both Democrats from Connecticut, can say these things because they’re safe in the relative confines of a liberal state.  Yet, Sen. Murphy also had this comparison for those who support the Bill of Rights.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) on states nullifying federal gun laws: I mean, let’s look at the context of nullification. Nullification was last used by Southern states to try to eviscerate Civil Rights legislation, to try to prevent states from basically enforcing desegregation and frankly, I think history will look back on this round of nullification as kindly as it did on the last round.

It is laughable also because it is a total bastardization of the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment is not an absolute right, not a God given right, always had conditions upon it like the First Amendment has. The idea that the Second Amendment was put in there in order to allow citizens to fight their government is insane.

If that was the case, we wouldn’t have also included treason in the United States Constitution. We basically said if you take arms up against the government, we’re going to knock your block off. And that’s what the early presidents ended up doing in Shays’ Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion. The Second Amendment is not designed to allow the citizenry to arm itself against the government and nullification is another example of states not really understanding the true nature of that amendment.

So, before we get on with this history lesson, let’s look at what the Washington Post reported today on this issue of guns – and gun violence.

Gun violence has dropped dramatically nationwide over the past two decades, but nearly three-quarters of all homicides are still committed with a firearm, the Justice Department said in a report released Tuesday.

The report, by the department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, painted an encouraging picture of long-term trends at a time of divisive political debate over guns and legislation to regulate them. Firearms-related homicides declined 39 percent between 1993 and 2011, the report said, while nonfatal firearms crimes fell 69 percent during that period.

[...]

Overall, the Justice Department report said, firearm-related homicides dropped from 18,253 homicides in 1993 to 11,101 in 2011, while nonfatal firearm crimes declined from 1.5 million in 1993 to 467,300 in 2011. The drop extended to schools: Homicides at schools declined from an average of 29 per year in the 1990s to an average of 20 per year in the 2000s.

Although the rate of firearms homicides for African Americans declined by 51 percent over the past two decades, that rate was still 14.6 per 100,000 people in 2010 — compared to 1.9 for whites.

Well, you saw that black to white crime juxtapostion coming from the Post, but it still dropped by 51%.  All of these figures are positive, and it wasn’t because the U.S. adopted more gun control.

Liberal Commentator: On Abortion, Liberals Are ‘The NRA Of The Left’

Kirsten Powers at Daily Beast made a shocking comparison – legislatively speaking – concerning the Gosnell trial and the abortion rights movement in her column today.  They’ve become “the NRA of the left.”  She eviscerates the pro-abort argument in the first two paragraphs, saying how Gosnell’s clinic wasn’t:

“illegal…it was a licensed medical facility. The state of his clinic was well known: there were repeated complaints to government officials and even the local Planned Parenthood.”

[...]

Gosnell was not forced to operate in the dark because of anti–abortion rights regulations. It’s the opposite: he was able to flourish—pulling in $1.8 million a year—because multiple abortion rights administrations decided that to inspect his clinic might mean limiting access to abortion. It’s all in the grand jury report, if you don’t believe me.

Towards the end of her column, Powers admits that – as a liberal – she’s for more government regulation of “practically everything,” but is stupefied that when it comes to abortion, pro-aborts take a rather laissez faire position.

More and more, the abortion rights community has become the NRA of the left: unleashing their armies of supporters and lobbyists in opposition to regulations or restrictions that the majority of Americans support. In the same way the NRA believes background checks will lead to the government busting down your door to confiscate your guns, the abortion rights movement conjures a straight line from parental consent to a complete ban on abortion.

Now, you may disagree over the rights Powers is using in this analysis, but it’s true that just as the right is vociferous about their Second Amendment rights, the left will do anything to protect infanticide. The only difference is the right to bear arms is explicitly clear in the U.S. Constitution, while the right to an abortion isn’t.  Roe v. Wade gave those rights, and we’ve been in a cultural mess every since 1973.  Additionally, it’s murder, and government laws concerning the prosecution of murderous individuals is rather nonpartisan.

Powers, a former Democratic operative, should be commended for her courage for calling late-term abortion “legal infanticide.”  In the body of her piece, she noted that:

medical advances since Roe v. Wade have made it clear to me that late-term abortion is not a moral gray area, and we need to stop pretending it is. No six-months-pregnant woman is picking out names for her ‘fetus. It’s a baby. Let’s stop playing Orwellian word games. We are talking about human beings here.”   She also thinks that life begins at conception.

Concerning the media, she’s disconcerted that:

that so many people in the media seem untroubled by the idea that 12 inches in one direction is “private medical decision” and 12 inches in the other direction causes people to react in horror, should be troubling. Indeed, Gosnell’s defense attorney Jack J. McMahon has relied on the argument that Gosnell killed the babies prior to delivering them, therefore he is not guilty of murder. His exact words were: “Every one of those babies died in utero.”

Although, in liberal fantasyland, Powers should tread carefully since she’s acting like a misogynist.

Planned Parenthood Knew About Gosnell Clinic’s Conditions – And Did Nothing

Last month, Gloria Steinem gave a speech at Planned Parenthood’s Southeastern Pennsylvania annual Spring Gathering.  The event was held during the Kermit Gosnell trial.  It’s ironic since there’s been inquiries about whether Planned Parenthood knew about the Philly abortionist’s house of horrors.  Well, it’s been confirmed that they knew in Pennsylvania, and they did nothing.

The Gosnell trial has shifted the focus off the high-quality services we provide,” said Dayle Steinberg, the organization’s president and chief executive. “These are criminal, horrendous . . . acts and should be appropriately punished.”

Steinberg said that when Gosnell was in practice, women would sometimes come to Planned Parenthood for services after first visiting Gosnell’s West Philadelphia clinic, and would complain to staff about the conditions there.

“We would always encourage them to report it to the Department of Health,” Steinberg said

What about PP staff?  Aren’t they required to report egregious health violations?  According to Mary Chastain at Breitbart, under PA’s  ”Abortion Control Act, [it] requires any doctor who treats a woman because of a complication arising from an abortion to make a report to DOH. Willful failure to do so constitutes ‘unprofessional conduct’ and subjects the treating doctor to sanctions by the Board of Medicine.”

As details of the macabre grand jury report were made public, Chastain noted that:

the conditions of the clinic alone should have prompted Planned Parenthood to do something, especially since they ostensibly are focused on women’s health. The facility was filthy: countless witnesses told the grand jury about blood soaked recliners and medical tables, cats wondering about the place and relieving themselves in plants, baby feet in jars, and equipment that did not work. It was normal to see patients lying around, drugged up and waiting for their baby to be born.

What’s really mind-numbingly inane about this whole episode is that Planned Parenthood’s Steinberg said, “these are criminal, horrendous . . . acts and should be appropriately punished.” Why? Why is Planned Parenthood in favor of prosecuting a person who does what they do, albeit in a more sterile environment?  Does PP consider a baby a living thing at 24 weeks? If so, why not at 24 days?  It’s intellectually dishonest.  It’s either a person or it isn’t.  Then again, Steinberg seems to have trouble keeping her facts straight as this admission about Gosnell’s clinic contradicts what she said in 2010 when the abortion center was shut down.

Local media outlet WHYY reported at that time that planned Parenthood had no foreknowledge: “Steinberg says she knows that Gosnell has provided abortions in Philadelphia for many years, but says she hadn’t heard of any problems at clinic until the allegations surfaced in recent days.”

Concerning the political impact, it could all fall upon Democratic Congresswoman and 2014 gubernatorial candidate Allyson Schwartz, who helped launch – and operated – a Planned Parenthood clinic in Philly.  The clinic was performing abortions at the timeKermit Gosnell was engaging in infanticide.  The clinic has stopped performing abortions since the late 1980s, but why is Rep. Schwartz silent on this issue?  Did she refer people to Gosnell? Michael Warren at the Weekly Standard wrote on May 3 that:

A Planned Parenthood official denies that [Elizabeth] Blackwell [Heath Center, Schwartz's abortion clinic] ever referred mothers seeking abortions to take the 10-minute drive across town to Gosnell’s clinic, though she did not explain how she knew this.

“We have never referred to Gosnell,” said the official in an email to THE WEEKLY STANDARD. Could she confirm that going all the way back to 1972, the year Gosnell first opened his clinic? The official did not immediately respond.

There have been rumblings amongst PA Democrats that Schwartz is just too liberal, and won’t perform well outside of the Philly area.  But that’s irrelevant if she did refer people to the clinic in 1972, it’s the makings of a political disaster.

Ed Markey Steps In It With ‘Osama bin Gomez’ Ad

Ed Markey and Gabriel Gomez are the Democratic and Republican candidates who are vying to fill Secretary of State John Kerry’s former senate seat. Yet, in the land of unchecked liberalism, Rep. Ed Markey really isn’t doing well against Gabriel Gomez.  Gomez is trailing by just four points against Markey, who released this puzzling ad slamming Gomez for being part of OPSEC, which is an organization dedicated to exposing politicians who leak classified national security information for political gain.  The group released a film called Dishonorable Disclosures last year that made allegations that the Obama administration purposefully leaked information about ongoing covert operations.

The Markey ad, which is way too long, juxtaposes Gomez’s image with that of Osama bin Laden.  There’s no context about Gomez’s position.  It’s just a good old-fashioned smear. Liberals may make the accusation that Saxby Chambliss did the same thing to Max Cleland during the 2002 Georgia Senate race, but unlike Markey, Chambliss went after Cleland’s votes against Bush policies aimed to make our nation more secure at the time. Yet, the Gomez campaign should’ve seen this coming given how close the race is in a deep blue state.  On the other hand, Markey doesn’t thrill the press all that much either.

After all, when some members of the press think of you as a relic — a haggard career politician that decided to step outside of the walls of his crypt — you need to something.

Fox 25’s Jim Polito: ”The difference is, the old white guy is Democrat Ed Markey. Oops, looks like the democrats have real dilemma.” (Jim Polito, “Democrat vs ‘Democrat,’” My Fox Boston, 5/3/13)

Boston Globe’s Joan Vennochi: “There’s nothing groundbreaking about Markey. He has served in Congress since 1976, and the bags under his eyes make him look his age — 66. If anyone needed to be reminded that the Democratic establishment stands with him, the establishment — Coakley included — stood right behind him on primary night.” (Joan Vennochi, “Like Brown, but in a bomber jacket,” The Boston Globe, 5/2/13)  

Boston Herald’s Margery Eagen:  “Markey, meanwhile, looks like he could fit right in on the set of ‘Downton Abbey.’ He talks like he grew up not in Malden, but next to John Kerry in Louisburg Square.” (Margery Eagen, “Race shaping up as Brown V. 2.0,” The Boston Herald, 5/2/13)

The Hill: “Markey has rarely faced a competitive challenger, and there were early concerns among some Democrats that he might make a weak candidate.” (Alexandra Jaffe, “Six ways the GOP can make the Massachusetts Senate race competitive,” The Hill, 5/2/13)

Patriot Ledger: “That makes it a bit hypocritical for Markey to challenge Gomez to sign the ‘People’s Pledge,’ which would limit spending from outside groups.” (Our Opinion: Lots to consider in US Senate race,” Patriot Ledger, 5/2/13)

Ouch! That’s gotta hurt.  Nonetheless, even with Markey’s “Osama bin Gomez ad  — to borrow a phrase from David Freddoso — this is still going to be an interesting race.  Nonetheless, there are a few differences, as Freddoso noted from the PPP poll on May 3:

• “Gomez is “up 47/31 with independents and winning over 21% of Democratic voters…[O]ur final poll in the 2010 special election found Scott Brown winning them by a 64/32 margin (sic)…
• “One reason the race is surprisingly competitive is that we are seeing an electorate that’s about 5 points more Romney friendly than the results of the election in Massachusetts in November. That sort of enthusiasm gap was a big part of what let Brown win in 2010 and what more broadly allowed Republicans to be successful nationally that year…
• “Barack Obama remains pretty popular in the state. He has a 53/41 approval rating. Obama was at only 44/43 when Brown won in 2010 and the President’s lack of popularity was a big contributor to the upset.

He also wrote on May 2 that, unlike Brown, Gomez lacks the element of surprise this year, but he could out-work Markey to push him over the top.  In fact, this should motivate him even more.  With the electorate 5% more Romney friendly, Gomez — and the Republicans — have another chance to embarrass the Democratic Party in their own backyard.  It will — or should — boost the morale of Republicans before the 2014 midterms.

As for Markey, he may have misfired with this ad given that a Medal of Honor recipient is calling it “outrageous” and “dishonorable.”

Boston, MA – Medal of Honor recipient Thomas Hudner today called Congressman Ed Markey’s negative attack ad, the first of the special election for U.S. Senate, “dishonorable,” and should be taken down “immediately.”

The attack ad, entitled “Meet Gabriel Gomez: Just Another Republican,” points to a split screen shot of Osama Bin Laden and Gabriel Gomez, the former U.S. Navy SEAL and Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in the Massachusetts open seat special election.

“I was shocked to see that the first advertisement from Congressman Ed Markey’s campaign is a negative attack on Gabriel Gomez that places a picture of him next to the terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden.” said Hudner. “This dishonorable political attack is beneath the dignity of the office for which Congressman Ed Markey is running for and he should immediately take down this outrageous ad.

Gabriel Gomez is a former Navy Pilot and Navy SEAL and fought like so many other brave men and women to defend this country against threats from abroad. As a Veteran, he deserves better than to be juxtaposed with a terrorist for Congressman Markey’s political gain.”

Gomez said, “Career Politician Ed Markey has started his campaign with a textbook despicable political attack to attempt to connect me with Osama Bin Laden in the minds of voters. This attack is an insult to my service and an insult to the intelligence of the people of Massachusetts. Congressman Markey should direct his campaign to immediately stop this ad, stop his mudslinging and debate me on issues that Massachusetts voters care about, the economy and jobs.”

Nice going, Ed.

Pre-Exisiting Condition Insurance Plan Is Going Broke

Well, half the country saw this coming.  A cornerstone initiative within our new trillion dollar new health care entitlement program, which doesn’t address rising costs, is going broke.  Yet another example of Obama’s failed domestic agenda.  We have another example of how liberalism fails – and another example why government should do things piecemeal.  According to the Associated Press today:

State officials say thousands of people with medical problems are in danger of losing coverage as the Obama administration winds down one of the earliest programs in the federal health care overhaul.

At risk is the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan, a transition program that has turned into a lifeline for the so-called “uninsurables” — people with serious medical conditions who can’t get coverage elsewhere.

The health care law capped spending on the program, and now money is running out.

In a letter this week to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, state officials said they were “blindsided” and “disappointed” by a federal proposal they say would shift the risk for cost overruns to states in the waning days of the program.

HHS didn’t comment.