The PJ Tatler

The Terrorist Attack in Woolwich

A man thought to be a British soldier has been killed by Islamist terrorists in a horrific attack in broad daylight in a London street. Two men ran the victim over with a car before hacking him to death with knives and a machete, while shouting “Allahu Akbar.”

The attackers apparently filmed themselves carrying out the killing, and invited stunned bystanders to take photos and video of them posing beside their victim. Video has been aired on ITV news of one of the attackers brandishing a blood-stained machete and shouting at bystanders, as onlookers tried to help the slain man. He’s heard saying “I apologize that women had to witness this today, but in our lands women have to see the same.” Judging by the accent of the man speaking in the video, he’s either British born or has spent some years in the country, making it likely that the terrorists were “home-grown,” rather than from outside the country.

Other news outlets have reported that one of the men said, “We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you.”

When armed police arrived on the scene (British police officers are not routinely armed), the attackers confronted them with knives a handgun, and both were shot and wounded. They’re now under guard at London hospitals, and it’s not known at this stage whether they acted alone or are part of a larger plot; however, it’s clear that they had no fear of being killed or captured, and may well have intended to be “martyred.”

The attack took place in Woolwich in south-east London at 2.20 p.m. local time. The victim is believed to be a soldier based at the nearby Woolwich barracks, home to elements of the Royal Artillery; he was wearing a T-shirt from the charity Help for Heroes, which raises money for injured British soldiers.

One witness told a London radio station: “These two guys were crazed. They were just animals. They dragged him from the pavement and dumped his body in the middle of the road and left his body there.”

Prime Minister David Cameron is cutting short a visit to France to return to the UK. In a press conference alongside French President Francois Hollande he condemned the “sickening” attack, and said there were “strong indications that it was a terrorist incident.” He added: “We have had these sorts of attacks before in our country, and we will never buckle in the face of them.”

Since the London bus and subway bombings of July 2005 there hasn’t been a significant terrorist attack in the UK. Numerous bomb plots have been foiled, and last summer the London Olympic Games passed without incident, despite widespread fears of terror attacks.

Today’s attack seems to have been designed to generate the maximum outrage, horror, and fear among the British public, with the intention of both inspiring copycat attacks and encouraging reprisal attacks against Muslims in a bid to create a cycle of violence.

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IRS Internally Investigated Abuse, Withheld Information Until After the Election

The IRS scandal was always about politics.

In the very month that ObamaCare passed, March 2010, the groups of Americans that were organizing to fight against ObamaCare were targeted by the agency that will implement ObamaCare. That’s the essence of the scandal. But it is not the full extent of it.

IRS workers union chief Colleen Kelley had access to President Obama and, according to White House logs, met with him on March 31, 2010. The abuse of Tea Party, conservative, Hispanic, pro-life, Christian and Jewish groups, which must have been in the works for weeks or even months prior, formally began the following day. Americans became April Fools for continuing to believe that we had a government of the people, by the people and for the people. As of April 1, 2010, we had a government arraying itself against the people, or at least against some of the people. According to polls taken at the time, a majority opposed ObamaCare. So it could be said that the IRS was arrayed against a majority of American voters who were organizing to protest the government’s expansion under Obama.

The abuse continued through 2010 and 2011, right into 2012 and to the present. True the Vote, for instance, still has not been granted its tax-exempt status to this day. It filed suit against the IRS yesterday. Its founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, was subjected to Kafka-esque abuses not just by the IRS, but by an alphabet soup of executive branch agencies: the FBI, OSHA and BATF joined in.

The executive branch of our government is topped by the president. The IRS, which answers to his chosen appointee at the Department of the Treasury, abused his critics and opponents, up to and through a mid-term he and his party lost, and through a close re-election that he ultimately won. We may have to put an asterisk after that, though: It’s possible now to assert, based on the evidence, that the IRS helped him win. Just as performance-enhancing steroids helped a generation of baseball players crank home runs they may not have hit without the drugs, the IRS may have been Barack Obama’s electoral performance-enhancing agency and helped him win an election he otherwise may have lost.

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2008 Campaign Flashback: Obama is the ‘Biggest Celebrity In The World, But Is He Ready To Lead?’

Do you remember this controversial John McCain presidential campaign television spot targeted against then-Senator Barack Obama in the middle of the heated 2008 election?

Here’s the script:

Announcer: He’s the biggest celebrity in the world.

But, is he ready to lead?

With gas prices soaring, Barack Obama says no to offshore drilling.

And, says he’ll raise taxes on electricity.

Higher taxes, more foreign oil, that’s the real Obama.

This ad caused the mainstream media (MSM) who were in the midst of their “slobbering love affair” with Senator Obama to pause briefly for self-examination.

The gravity of the ad’s message forced the MSM to acknowledge that they built the alter upon which the “biggest celebrity in the world” was now standing — while continuing to lead the world’s worship of him.

Here is a sentence from the New York Times report on the TV spot dated July 30, 2008:

This ad’s imagery highlights the McCain view that Mr. Obama offers more sizzle than substance, a theme that the Republican candidate has been trying to underscore on the campaign trail.

“More sizzle than substance.” That nicely summed up Senator Obama in July of 2008. But of course the NYT piece did not delve into the possibility that the statement was true. Nor did the MSM investigate or honestly ask themselves the question posed in the ad, “But is he ready to lead?”

Now fast forward to 2013.

Our proven to be “more sizzle than substance” president, not only pleads ignorance about the details of the numerous scandals engulfing his administration, but uses ignorance as both a defense and a badge of honor.

It appears that “ignorance” has joined “blame” as the most useful tools in Obama’s leadership kit.

So looking back, how has the “biggest celebrity in the world” handled his celebrity?

The answer appears to be, “like an addiction.”

An addiction might explain President Obama’s non-stop campaigning and the obvious self-worth he garners from appearing before adoring crowds — no matter how poorly he is performing in Washington. His celebrity addition could also explain why Obama consistently surrounds himself with celebrities who worship him, thus causing their fan base to worship them even more. Let’s call this a celebrity circle of love.

As the second term of President Obama continues to unravel, those of us who were never sucked in by “the sizzle” will be watching with fascination how the show finally ends for “the biggest celebrity in the world.”

It might even be a tragic ending now that his once adoring MSM has finally begun to widely criticize his performance.

VIDEO: The Woolwich Killer

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Your ObamaCare Fail of the Day

Here’s Dr. Charles Willey on how the IRS has usurped Congress:

Contrary to the clear legislative language in ObamaCare, the administration is directly impeding my ability to design a health plan with proper incentives and long-term affordability for my own employees.

I have always offered quality health insurance to my own employees, striving for a benefit design which increases their short-term economic incentive to become and remain healthy.

As a physician, I know this is a critical strategy to fight chronic illness, especially self-manageable conditions such as obesity, COPD and most type 2 diabetes.

The IRS has, unlawfully, substantively rewritten the employer mandate in the ACA by expanding its enforcement into states where the clear language of the ACA says it does not apply.

The law is only for little people. And as we’ve learned these last few days, the IRS isn’t little people.

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UK Headline: ‘Barack Obama Is Rapidly Losing His Halo’

Shattering the illusion.

Is the worm turning against Barack Obama? After four-plus years of being given the benefit of the doubt by the bulk of the US media, the President now suddenly feels more vulnerable.

Today both the New York Times and the Washington Post have run prominent and angry editorials and columns slamming the administration for its attempt to criminalise a Fox News reporter James Rosen for working a State Department source to obtain a story.

The “Rosen Affair” – as it is now known – is poisoning the well in Washington at an alarming rate for Mr Obama, with an indignant White House press corps now battering the official spokesman Jay Carney at his daily briefings to the point where Politico is running speculative stories wondering whether it’s time for him to go.

While it is critical for the MSM to remain more loyal to themselves than to the president at this point there is no reason to believe that they will actually do so for any length of time. The relationship between the lapdogs and The Idiot King has been a very one-sided, abusive one at best. On the rare occasions that the press has found themselves questioning their idol they have usually returned to covering for the very thing they were curious about in a matter of days.

This is a big moment in history for the First Amendment and, unfortunately, those who benefit most from it have also been neglecting it at their peril for far too long.

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Former IRS Chief Confesses Why He Was at White House 118 Times

Former IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman was asked at today’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee today why he visited the White House 118 times in 2010 and 2011:

For the record, the White House only holds an Easter Egg Roll once a year.

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Kerry to Oman Embassy: Benghazi Shows Need to Show World ‘You Don’t Have to Hate People’

Secretary of State John Kerry reminded employees at the U.S. Embassy in Muscat, Oman, of the terror attack in Benghazi but said they need to keep proving to the world “that you don’t have to hate people.”

Kerry was in the sultanate to facilitate the inking of a $2.1 billion arms and missile defense system deal with Raytheon and the Omani government.

“This system, which has been selected by the Sultanate of Oman following a thorough evaluation and assessment process, offers high levels of effectiveness, capable of meeting the operational requirements of the Royal Air Force of Oman and providing seamless air protection by virtue of its cutting edge air defense technology,” the State Department said in a statement.

“You are lucky to be in a wonderful place like Oman. It is so beautiful, so beautiful,” Kerry told Embassy workers. “And I had a wonderful meeting with His Majesty Sultan Qaboos yesterday. He is a very, very thoughtful, wise leader who spends a lot of time thinking about issues, as I think you know. And we value — we being the United States and a lot of people in the world — value his sense of the future and his efforts to try to diversify the economy, build for the future, listen to people.”

“Obviously, there is a transition taking place throughout the Middle East, throughout the Arab world, and nobody quite knows sort of how it’s all going to unfold. But some leaders have been ahead of the curve and looking carefully at how to empower people, create a transition, but do it in a way that’s thoughtful and works for everybody. And I think that His Majesty has been particularly thoughtful about that.”

Kerry thanked the regional security officer as “many of us have learned through sad events in various parts of the world that security is always an issue.”

Later in his address, he noted “some sad events, some difficult events, over the last year with Benghazi, and Ankara, Turkey and some other places.”

“What we are doing is engaged in trying to reach out to people in the world and prove to people that peace is possible, that relationships are possible, that you don’t have to hate people, that you don’t have to blow people up that you’ve never met, don’t know, and have no real agenda that would improve things, just blow people up, create terror without any organizing principle around which life is going to be better for people,” the secretary said.

“We have a different point of view. And happily, we share it with most of the people of the world. Most people on this planet want peace. Most people on this planet would like nothing more than to live their lives free of oppression and torture and violence. And it takes work to push back against those things. Because we saw what happened in the last century with World War I and World War II, with Korea and Vietnam, and the Cold War. We can spend a lot of money fighting, or we can do a lot to invest in people, in education, in health, and in the possibilities of life, let families grow up without burying their children. So I think this effort that we are all engaged in to reach out to other countries, to cross cultural barriers, to try to promote your values but not do it a way that is oppressive and that doesn’t give people choice.”

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We Know Nothing! Nothing!

Here’s the latest:

“I have not done anything wrong. I have not broken any laws,” Lois Lerner, head of the IRS tax-exempt unit, told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

“I have not violated any IRS rules or regulations, and I have not provided false information to this or any congressional committee,” she said. “Because I am asserting my right not to testify, I know that some people will assume that I have done something wrong. I have not.”

That Lerner chose to give an opening statement before asserting her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination angered some lawmakers.

You can be certain that statement comes with an expiration date.

Meanwhile, Ezra Klein has bravely declared that “heads should roll” at the IRS:

Put simply, firing civil servants takes a long time, creates a lot of hassle for management, and needs to be for cause. If it’s not for cause, the termination can be overturned, and the entire process would be for naught. This can lead to excessive reluctance on the part of management to go through the trouble of firing anyone. But what remains unclear in the IRS case is whether the directors even wanted to fire anyone.

In other words, Ezra’s “brave” declaration comes with plenty of room for (Administration-approved?) foot-dragging.

It’s gonna be a long, hot summer.

Popcorn?

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Senator: Former IRS Chief is Being Coached

A senator on the Finance Committee says he believes former IRS commissioner Doug Shulman is being coached on his testimony before Congress.

Shulman, who stepped down three days after President Obama’s re-election, testified before the Finance Committee yesterday and is a witness before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee this morning.

Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) chided Shulman for answering “I don’t know” most of the time.

“I’m not an attorney, but I’ve been in enough depositions to watch somebody who’s been coached by an attorney. I think he was advised by an attorney not to make any statements, and he didn’t,” Isakson said last night on Fox.

“I only learned that there still is a culture in the IRS on this issue of mystery, of not disclosing everything that went on. There has to be a who, there has to be a when, there has to be a what. We’ve got to find out those answers. It just didn’t happen in Cincinnati with a handful of operatives,” he added.

However, the senator said he thinks the White House is being honest about its displays of outrage over the IRS scandal.

“It’s quite obvious when they planted a question at a press conference to finally get the information out, they were struggling with how the American people were going to learn of what’s a very bad situation in the IRS,” Isakson said.

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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.

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JournoList’s IRS Angle Begins to Gel

Late Tuesday we reported that several lefty bloggers known to be very close to the Obama White House were in fact meeting in the White House. The meeting came a day ahead of hearings in which IRS official Lois Lerner invoked her Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination and refused to testify to the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee. Lerner even refused to testify about her own previous statements on the IRS abuse scandal.

Today, we may be seeing the results of that Tuesday afternoon confab at the White House.

Josh Marshall (10:15a.m.): Lerner Must Go talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2013/… Ezra Klein (9:45a.m.): Heads should roll at IRS washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog…

— John McCormack (@McCormackJohn) May 22, 2013

The synchronicity is striking.

It’s also an indication of just how worried the White House is, and how it intends to contain the scandal. First, get reliably friendly bloggers and columnists on board with a story that focuses attention away from the White House. Then, isolate and target someone who has already become a central figure in the scandal and, more importantly, who does not work directly for the White House. Finally, make it appear as if these reliably friendly bloggers actually take the IRS scandal seriously, so they become voices in the larger media advocating for a strong response — just strong enough to look decisive, while keeping the White House outside the main storyline.

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Lerner Says ‘I Have Not Done Anything Wrong,’ Refuses to Take Questions

The IRS official who first confessed the targeting of Tea Party and other groups in a planted question at a bar association event told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee this morning that she’s refusing to answer questions because she’s innocent.

But that may not be the end of the story as Republican committee members seized on her potentially fumbled assertion of the right against self-incrimination.

“I have not done anything wrong, I have not broken any laws,” Lois Lerner, who oversees the IRS’ tax-exempt division, said at this morning’s hearing. “…I have not provided false information to this or any committee.”

“After very careful consideration I have decided to take the advice of counsel,” she said, and refused to answer questions.

Lerner said “some people will assume I have done something wrong; I have not.” She added that invoking the amendment also protects innocent people.

Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) noted she’s giving testimony twice before the committee previously and asked her to reconsider. He asked her to immediately consult with counsel about whether she actually asserted her Fifth Amendment right or if she waived it by giving an opening statement.

“I will not answer any questions or testify about the subject matter of this hearing,” Lerner said after shortly whispering with men sitting behind her.

“She just testified,” Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), a former prosector, said angrily. “You don’t get to tell your side of the story and then not be subject to cross-examination.”

Many in the gallery applauded Gowdy.

“She does have a right, I think, and we have to adhere to that,” ranking member Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) said.

Before leaving, Lerner declined to answer a few more questions from Issa. The chairman advised the IRS official that she’s subject to recall after the GOP majority seeks specific counsel on whether her Fifth Amendment right was properly waived.

More:

Senator: Former IRS Chief is Being Coached

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Report: IRS Abuse Involved at Least Six Agents; ‘Red Flags’ Routed to One Supervisor

Cincinnati’s Fox 19 TV has identified six IRS workers that worked on the stymied Tea Party group applications. According to the report, as the tax-exempt cases were delayed, they would have generated thousands of red flags within the system.

When an application for tax exempt status comes into the IRS, agents have 270 days to work through that application. If the application is not processed within those 270 days it automatically triggers flags in the system. When that happens, individual agents are required to input a status update on that individual case once a month, every month until the case is resolved.

Keep in mind, at least 300 groups were targeted out of Cincinnati alone. Those applications spent anywhere from 18 months to nearly 3 years in the system and some still don’t have their non-profit status. 300 groups multiplied by at least 18 months for each group, means thousands of red flags would have been generated in the system.

So who in the chain of command would have received all these flags? The answer, according to the IRS directory, one woman in Cincinnati, Cindy Thomas, the Program Manager of the Tax Exempt Division. Because all six of our IRS workers have different individual and territory managers, Cindy Thomas is one manager they all have common.

It turns out Cindy Thomas’ name is one we have heard before. The independent journalism group ProPublica says in November of 2012 they had requested information on conservatives groups that had received non-profit status. Along with that information, the IRS released private information on nine conservative groups that had not yet been approved and personal information had not been redacted. The person who signed off on that release, Cindy Thomas.

According to the report, Thomas is the highest ranking IRS official outside Washington who was involved in the determinations office and abuse of hundreds of groups across the country. She has not been subpoenaed, yet.

Fox 19′s report identifies at least six agents who were involved in the targeting. They all work for different supervisors. So as the story’s lead says, the agency’s story that the abuse was conducted by two rogue agents in Cincinnati has fallen completely apart. One of the people who proffered that story is expected to plead the Fifth Amendment in House testimony today.

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Weiner Officially in New York Mayoral Race

And the disgraced ex-congressman even employs his wife, Huma Abedin, in his launch video to talk about his “big mistakes” and 64 ideas for New York:

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NASA 3-D Food Printer Pizza Open Thread

Hey, if they’re not going to get me to a Mars colony any time soon, they might as well do something useful here.

Mmmmm…pizza…

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Study: Labeling Foods ‘Healthy’ Ends Up Being A License To Pig Out

Shocked, I tell you.

People will choose larger portions of food if they are labeled as being “healthier,” even if they have the same number of calories, according to a new study.

“People think (healthier food) is lower in calories,” said Pierre Chandon, a marketing professor at the INSEAD Social Science Research Center in France, and they “tend to consume more of it.”

That misconception can lead to people eating larger portion sizes of so-called healthy foods, and therefore more calories.

Some nimrod politician somewhere will use this as an excuse to get even more involved with our dietary choices. The stupid people are forever screwing things up for those of us who paid attention in the fourth grade.

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Is It Racist If Even The New York Times Thinks This Administration Is Getting Creepy?

Asking for a friend…

With the decision to label a Fox News television reporter a possible “co-conspirator” in a criminal investigation of a news leak, the Obama administration has moved beyond protecting government secrets to threatening fundamental freedoms of the press to gather news.

This is a seminal moment for the mainstream media. They’ve been shameless partisan hacks for this president since he was a candidate in 2008. For them to notice that he’s overreaching (the rest of us knew the emperor had no clothes long ago) is huge. Now that The Idiot King is a lame duck they migh-MIGHT-just have enough perspective left to realize that even the most loyal lapdogs among them could quickly find themselves out of favor and being targeted by the White House.

If they let this slide, they deserve as quick a demise as possible and they will have no one to blame but themselves.

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Howard Fineman: White House Not Doing Itself Any Favors with IRS Scandal

Ya think?

So far, voters don’t seem to be abandoning President Barack Obama over controversies gripping the Beltway world. But White House aides are tempting fate with their reluctant, piecemeal and contradictory disclosures of what they knew and when they knew it, especially about a report on the Internal Revenue Service’s 18-month effort to target tea party and other conservative groups for special scrutiny.

The aides either have forgetten or are unable to implement the basic lesson of scandal control in Washington: Get the full story out — all of it — as fast as you can before your critics accuse you of a cover-up or worse.

Fineman goes on to mostly indict Jay Careney’s incessant buffoonery but paints a picture of a grossly incompetent response to a pretty big deal. I’m not the first to make this observation but it bears repeating: the press and hardcore fans of the Idiot King still speak as if he single-handedly killed Osama bin Laden because he’s the guy who is always in control. Now, in an effort to cover for him, they’re willing to portray him as an executive who has no control whatsoever over his people.

As we’ve seen so many times in the past five years, there seems to be a neverending supply of room under the Obama bus and it’s not inconceivable that the lapdog media is helping set up any number of White House staffers to throw under it to save the “historic” president.

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DOJ Seized Records of Five Fox Phone Numbers…and James Rosen’s Parents

Earlier tonight, Fox News’ Brett Baier reported that the seizure of phone records relating to reporter James Rosen went much farther than was initially believed. His parents’ phone records were evidently seized in the Department of Justice’s fishing expedition.

During a panel discussion on the Department of Justice seizing the phone records of Fox News’ James Rosen, Bret Baier revealed that the seizure included the phone records of Rosen’s parents. The entire panel agreed the scandal was an outrage, with Kirsten Powers pointing out that there have been a number of high-profile leaks from the Obama administration, but the only ones they seem interested in going after are the ones that make them look bad. Charles Krauthammer found it amazing that the government would make such a “huge assault on the first amendment” in trying to go after Rosen for doing his job.

Assaulting the First Amendment is well within the character of the Obama administration. It similarly attacked the free press in the AP phone records seizure, and a film maker still sits in one of the most obscure prisons in the country after the Obama government blamed the Benghazi terrorist attack on the movie that he made. The president also directly assault freedom of religion and free speech in his remarks to the UN Sept. 26, 2012, in which he said that “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” Who is he to dictate what “slander” is, whose prophet gets official protection, or to whom the future will belong? Through ObamaCare, Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services has made providing abortifacient drugs mandatory, in violation of millions of Americans’ right of religious conscience.

The Rosen case is merely a fresh outrage against the First Amendment piled atop the others, and it’s unlikely to be the last as long as this president remains in office.

And it gets even worse. According to Ryan Lizza, the DOJ sweep hit at least five phone lines at Fox and scores elsewhere.

The Obama Justice Department has seized the phone records of numbers that are associated with White House staffers and, apparently, with Fox News reporters, according to a document filed on October 13, 2011, in the case of Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a former State Department contractor accused of violating the Espionage Act for allegedly leaking classified information to James Rosen, a Fox News reporter. Ronald C. Machen, Jr., the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, who is prosecuting the case, has seized records associated with two phone numbers at the White House, at least five numbers associated with Fox News, and one that has the same area code and exchange as Rosen’s personal-cell-phone number (the last four numbers are redacted).

In all, Ronald C. Machen, Jr., the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, has seized records associated with over thirty different phone numbers.

Who’s next?

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Maverick Is In His Element, Making Lefties Love Him Again

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before…

In the latest expression of Republican frustration with conservative GOP colleagues, Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Susan Collins (R-ME) excoriated Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rand Paul (R-KY) for persistently refusing to initiate House-Senate budget negotiations.

Their comments on the Senate floor Tuesday reflect a growing Republican schism over how to approach the tax and spending fights that have hamstrung Congress for years and dragged its approval ratings to historic lows.

Here outside of the Progressive mothership we know that disgruntlement by McCain or Collins do not a schism make. In fact, if they are both irritated at the same time it more often than not means the GOP is doing something right for once.

Nowhere in the post is it explained how a guy who has been a senator for two years and another who’s had the job for four months are reflective of a problem that Congress has had “for years”.

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Why is the White House Having a Secret Meeting with a Bevy of Lefty Columnists?

Isn’t this interesting…

Spotted: @joshtpm @capehartj @ezraklein & other lefty columnists headed into the West Wing as a group. POTUS coffee? Carney meeting? Anyone?

— Ari Shapiro (@arishapiro) May 21, 2013

What’s this about? Maybe Jay Carney will be asked about it tomorrow.

Those columnists should be very careful. Obstructing justice is still a crime.

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Benghazi Suspects ID’d, But Administration Won’t Nab Them Because It Doesn’t Want to Send Them to Gitmo

Despite the fact that the Obama administration regularly strike at terrorists with lethal drone hits in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, the White House is reportedly not rounding up five suspects identified in the Benghazi attack because of a lack of evidence to try them in civilian court.

The Associated Press cites officials who said there is enough evidence to seize the men as enemy combatants and send them to Guantanamo Bay.

But apparently the Obama administration wants civilian trials for anyone involved in the Benghazi attack and has sent the FBI back to collect more evidence, which could be challenging in a more tumultuous Libya today.

From the AP:

The decision not to seize the men militarily underscores the White House aim to move away from hunting terrorists as enemy combatants and holding them at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The preference is toward a process in which most are apprehended and tried by the countries where they are living or arrested by the U.S. with the host country’s cooperation and tried in the U.S. criminal justice system. Using military force to detain the men might also harm fledgling relations with Libya and other post-Arab-Spring governments with whom the U.S. is trying to build partnerships to hunt al-Qaida as the organization expands throughout the region.

A senior administration official said the FBI has identified a number of individuals that it believes have information or may have been involved, and is considering options to bring those responsible to justice. But taking action in remote eastern Libya would be difficult. America’s relationship with Libya would be weighed as part of those options, the official said, speaking only on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss the effort publicly.

…The FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies identified the men through contacts in Libya and by monitoring their communications. They are thought to be members of Ansar al-Shariah, the Libyan militia group whose fighters were seen near the U.S. diplomatic facility prior to the violence.

In March, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) estimated that drone strikes have killed about 4,700, including some senior members of al-Qaeda.

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True the Vote Sues IRS

The IRS still has not granted True the Vote its 501(c)3 status after three years. True the Vote filed suit against the agency today.

HOUSTON, TX. May 21, 2013 – True the Vote (TTV), the nation’s leading voters’ rights organization, filed suit in federal court in Washington today against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), asking the Court to grant its long-awaited tax exempt status and seeking damages for the unlawful actions by the IRS in the processing of its application for exempt status. ActRight Legal Foundation, a 501(c)3 fundamental rights and public interest law firm represents True the Vote in the lawsuit.

“We’ve been waiting for three years to receive a decision from the IRS about our tax exempt status,” True the Vote President Catherine Engelbrecht said. “After answering hundreds of questions and producing thousands of documents, we’re done waiting. The IRS does not have the power to pocket veto our application. Federal law empowers groups like True the Vote to force a decision in court – which is precisely what we aim to do.”

The discovery process should be interesting in this case. After True the Vote filed for its tax-exempt status, founder Catherine Engelbrecht was subjected to a flurry of abuse by not just the IRS but also the FBI, OSHA and the BATF. Discovery might help ferret out any connections between the IRS and those other agencies that just happened to come down on Engelbrecht and her family.

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Did the White House Help Plan and Plant the Question that Kicked off the IRS Abuse Scandal?

Earlier today, fake-fired acting IRS commissioner Steven Miller admitted that planting the question that sparked the IRS abuse scandal was his idea. But was it his idea alone?

During today’s White House press briefing, spokesman Jay Carney allowed that the White House was consulted about how to inform the public that the abuse had been going on.

Carney also said that White House deputy chief of staff Mark Childress spoke with Treasury Department officials about how to best reveal the IRS’s targeting, including a “discussion about the possibility of a speech.” The targeting was instead revealed when Lois Lerner responded to a planted question about the targeting at a conference earlier this month.

So, to unpack this a bit, the White House deputy chief of staff was informed of and involved in managing the abuse to the level of working with Treasury officials about how to let the public know. Rather than come up with an honest and straightforward way of communicating it, the IRS planted a question in an obscure conference call on a Friday that would elicit a very incomplete apology, a few days before the IG report was expected to hit.

Are we supposed to expect that Childress was acting alone? He’s the deputy White House chief of staff, his boss is chief of staff Denis McDonough. We learned on Monday that McDonough and the White House counsel learned of the IRS abuse in April at the latest. Did he not know — did he order — Childress to work with IRS to manage the planted question? What did McDonough know about the planted question? Was the White House counsel involved in planting the question? What did Obama know about any of this?

The White House’s story has changed about five times since the scandal broke. There’s no reason to take their word on anything.

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