St. Louis Anchor off the Air After IRS Complaint

Larry Connors, since-forever KMOV-TV anchor, gets to take a few days off:

The station is examining Conners’ recent allegations that he was targeted by the Internal Revenue Service after interviewing President Barack Obama.

“He’s not suspended. We just all thought it made sense (for him) to take a few days off,” news director Sean McLaughlin said Thursday.

“We take this very seriously, and we don’t expect this to drag on. We’re still looking into the situation and weighing our options,” he said.

As I wrote the other day, Connors is a local institution — I was watching him in junior high three decades ago. McLaughlin may very well be playing with fire on this one.

(Hat tip, Nolte.)

Jay Carney Gaslights America

According to Jay Carney, if you view the Obama administration as secretive and believe that its various scandals are real, you’re seeing things that don’t exist. Carney appeared on Piers Morgan’s CNN show last night. Toward the end of the interview comes this bizarre exchange.

PIERS MORGAN: Final question, Jay Carney. Obviously the president made a big deal when he came into office of being not like previous administrations and was going to be much more transparent. The charge today after this week is that you have had that reputation for transparency pretty heavily dented. Do you accept that and just on a general picture, how are you going to move on now and restore perhaps faith that some Americans have lost this week in your openness and honesty?

JAY CARNEY: Well, I’m not sure, again, you’re concocting scandals here that don’t exist, especially with regard to the Benghazi affair that was contrived by Republicans and I think has fallen apart largely this week. The fact of the matter is that this administration has a record on transparency that outdoes any previous administration, and we are committed to that. The president is committed to that.

“You’re concocting scandals here that don’t exist…” Plural. Carney just denied that any of the massive scandals ripping around this presidency — the AP phone records sweep, the IRS systematically abusing Americans and even a congressman because of their political beliefs, Benghazi — are real. He also insisted that something is true that clearly is not, and hardly anyone believes — that the Obama administration is transparent. Obama appointed more unaccountable czars than any other previous president, and has operated an opaque and very political administration built in part on a philosophy of “punishing your enemies.”

Carney’s statement isn’t denial and it isn’t accidental. It’s gaslighting.

In the book Gaslighting, the Double Whammy, Interrogation and Other Methods of Covert Control in Psychotherapy and Analysis, the late forensic psychiatrist Theodore Dorpat defines gaslighting as a situation in which one individual “attempts to exert control over the feelings, thoughts or activities of another.” According to Dorpat, the gaslighting behavior itself is covert — neither “directly hostile” nor “intimidating.”

“In order to be effective, gaslighting depends on first convincing the victim that his thinking is distorted and secondly persuading him that the victimizer’s ideas are the correct and true ones,” writes Dorpat.

Carney will continue to insist, even as the facts pile up against him, that there is no scandal here and that you’re crazy to think that there is. The facts in the AP scandal suggest that DOJ went on a fishing expedition to retaliate after the news agency ran a story outside of the administration’s preferred timing. The facts of the IRS scandal suggest that it went very high up in and probably beyond that agency’s leadership, and constituted naked political abuse aimed to intimidate Americans and disengage them from the 2012 election. The facts on Benghazi suggest that the administration abandoned Americans under assault so that it could preserve its campaign narrative that al Qaeda had been more or less defeated. The movie was pushed as the reason for the attack to reach that same end.

No one has been held accountable in any of these scandals yet. The State Department’s firings connected to Benghazi turned out to be phony. The IRS resignation turned out to be a sham. Nothing has happened to anyone in connection with the AP sweep yet.

Carney, Obama et al will try to convince America that we’re all crazy to be concerned about and demand justice in these scandals. We’re being gaslit by an abusive and manipulative administration.

IRS Official In Charge of Abusing Non-Profits Now In Charge of ObamaCare

I don’t really have anything new, other than fresh outrage, to add to the news about IRS official Sarah Hall Ingram.

Sarah Hall Ingram served as commissioner of the office responsible for tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012. But Ingram has since left that part of the IRS and is now the director of the IRS’ Affordable Care Act office, the IRS confirmed to ABC News today.

Her successor, Joseph Grant, is taking the fall for misdeeds at the scandal-plagued unit between 2010 and 2012. During at least part of that time, Grant served as deputy commissioner of the tax-exempt unit.

Ingram turns out not to be another lifelong Obama loyalist or even partisan Democrat campaigner, which is welcome news. She has been around the IRS for decades, according to an official agency bio of her. That’s less welcome news. Someone around the agency for that long had to have known how deeply wrong it was to abuse citizens as the IRS did.

Since July 2004, Ingram has been serving as Deputy Commissioner of the Tax Exempt/Government Entities Division (TE/GE). Ingram began her career with the IRS in the former Tax Litigation Division in 1982. She became Employee Plans Litigation Counsel in 1987, providing litigation coordination nationwide for employee benefit cases. In 1992, Ingram became Deputy Associate Chief Counsel, Employee Benefits and Exempt Organizations (EBEO), where she served until her 1994 appointment as Associate Chief Counsel, EBEO. As part of the IRS Modernization program, Ingram was appointed in 1999 to the new position of Division Counsel/Associate Chief Counsel, TE/GE, where she was responsible for providing legal services to the TE/GE Division and its customers as well as other parts of the IRS.

So she isn’t a Tommy Vietor. Nevertheless, her office abused patriots who became engaged in the political process because they love their country. She was handed massive bonuses to the tune of over $100,000 during the abuse years. And is now on track to head IRS’ ObamaCare enforcement.

This won’t do. She needs to be testifying and may need to lawyer up. It’s not possible that a couple of rogue employees ran such a widespread and granular program of abuse. It had to have buy-in from echelons within and above the Cincinnati office, and we know that it did. IRS officials in Washington participated in it.

IRS should never have been involved in our health care. Ever. Of all the horrible ideas Democrats have come up with, putting the IRS essentially between citizen and doctor may be the absolute worst. The House repealed ObamaCare Thursday, again. If Republicans can take the Senate next year and hold it long enough to see a replacement for Obama elected, it can still be repealed in full and it should be.

Crucified Again with Pat Robertson on The 700 Club

I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Pat Robertson and discussing my new book, Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians

Scandal Denial and Holocaust Denial

A hobby of mine is to keep up with the ever-shifting arguments of Holocaust deniers. I do this mainly because it provides me with insight into how insane liars operate. I also do this because it is every decent person’s responsibility to defend history from the lunatic fringe, and doing so requires keeping up with both the latest scholarship as well as the latest pseudo-scholarship.

When you spend enough time reading denialist literature–indeed, if you spend enough time reading conspiracy theorists in general–you notice the same methods and tendencies appear over and over. One of these is what I call the Law of Mutually Exclusive Exculpations. This is when different denialists propose different but mutually contradictory versions of the conspiracy theory. A weird kind of theoretical inbreeding develops wherein the theorists begin to quote and support one another, absorbing these different arguments into their own narratives, which they continually revise, despite all the narratives contradicting one another.

Holocaust deniers do it all the time. The Holocaust never happened, some say. Others say it happened, but it was exaggerated. There were no gas chambers. There were gas chambers, but they were used only for delousing. The Nazis didn’t do it. Actually, they did but Hitler didn’t know about it. Actually, he did know about it but tried to stop it. And so on and so on. Each of these theories contradicts the others, but all deniers seem to support every one of these theories, so long as the general theme of making light of the “official narrative” is maintained. The objective is not to get at the truth, but to subvert it at all costs, even at the expense of internal consistency.

Scandal denial is no different. I hate to traffic in Godwin’s Law and lump people in with Holocaust deniers, but as a lesson in rhetorical slipperiness it needs to be done. Shape-shifting and mutually contradictory arguments are thrown at the wall like wet toilet paper, in the hopes that some of it will stick. The IRS targeted conservatives, but it was only “local officials” who did it. Actually, it was Washington officials too, but this is somehow still “local.” Actually, the IRS didn’t target conservatives. OK, the IRS was just doing its job in targeting conservatives. Actually, it was “bad management,” but it was still good management since it was justified. Somehow, in the denialist universe, all these arguments obtain simultaneously. Each is valid even though each is contradicted by the other. We are expected to be so stupid and naive as to believe all of them.

Breaking: Second IRS Official to Leave

But like Steven Miller, this is not a firing and therefore is not accountability.

An internal IRS memo says Joseph Grant, commissioner of the agency’s tax exempt and government entities division, will retire June 3. Grant joins Steven Miller, who was forced to resign as acting IRS commissioner on Wednesday.

As part of his duties, Grant oversaw the IRS division that targeted tea party groups for additional scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status.

Grant joined the IRS in 2005.

Congressional investigators should keep his name handy.

Islamic Forced Conversions — Past and Present

The lost history of Christians forced to convert to Islam—or die—is reemerging, figuratively and literally. According to the BBC: “Pope Francis has proclaimed the first saints of his pontificate in a ceremony [last Sunday] at the Vatican—a list which includes 800 victims of an atrocity carried out by Ottoman soldiers in 1480.They were beheaded in the southern Italian town of Otranto after refusing to convert to Islam.”

Palestinian Christian protesters lament the forced conversions of loved ones

The BBC adds in a sidebar: “The ‘Martyrs of Otranto’ were 813 Italians beheaded for defying demands by Turkish invaders to renounce Christianity.  The Turks had been sent by Mohammed II, who had already captured the ‘second Rome’ of Constantinople.”

Historical texts throughout the centuries are filled with similar anecdotes, including the “60 Martyrs of Gaza,” Christian soldiers who were executed for refusing Islam during the 7^th century Islamic invasion of Jerusalem. Seven centuries later, during the Islamic invasion of Georgia, Christians refusing to convert were forced into their church and set on fire. Witnesses for Christ lists 200 anecdotes of Christians killed—including some burned at the stake, thrown on iron spikes, dismembered, stoned, stabbed, shot at, drowned, pummeled to death, impaled and crucified—for refusing to embrace Islam.

If history is shocking, the fact is, today, Christians—men, women, and children—are still being forced to convert to Islam.  Pope Francis alluded to their sufferings during the same ceremony: “As we venerate the martyrs of Otranto, let us ask God to sustain those many Christians who, in these times and in many parts of the world, right now, still suffer violence, and give them the courage and fidelity to respond to evil with good.”

Consider some recent anecdotes:

In Pakistan, a “devoted Christian” was butchered by Muslim men “with multiple axe blows [24 per autopsy] for refusing to convert to Islam.” Another two Christian men returning from church were accosted by six Muslims who tried to force them to convert to Islam, but “the two refused to renounce Christianity.”  Accordingly, the Muslims severely beat them, yelling they must either convert “or be prepared to die. . . . the two Christians fell unconscious, and the young Muslim men left assuming they had killed them.”

In Bangladesh some 300 Christian children were abducted in 2012 and sold to Islamic schools, where “imams force them to abjure Christianity.”  The children are then instructed in Islam and beaten. After full indoctrination they are asked if they are “ready to give their lives for Islam,” presumably by becoming jihadi suicide-bombers.  (Even here the historic patterns are undeniable: for centuries, Christian children were forcibly taken, converted to and indoctrinated in Islam, trained to be jihadis extraordinaire, and then unleashed on their former Christian families.  Such were the Janissaries and Mamelukes.)

In Palestine in 2012, Christians in Gaza protested over the “kidnappings and forced conversions of some former believers to Islam.” The ever-dwindling Christian community banged on a church bell while chanting, “With our spirit, with our blood we will sacrifice ourselves for you, Jesus.”… Continue reading

Obama Picks White House Budget Controller for Top IRS Slot

President Obama has picked a White House budget official to serve as the new acting commission of the Internal Revenue Service.

Daniel Werfel currently serves as controller of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Werfel has also served as a trial attorney in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.

“Throughout his career working in both Democratic and Republican administrations, Danny has proven an effective leader who serves with professionalism, integrity and skill,” Obama said in a statement. “The American people deserve to have the utmost confidence and trust in their government, and as we work to get to the bottom of what happened and restore confidence in the IRS, Danny has the experience and management ability necessary to lead the agency at this important time.”

Werfel, 42, has served in other roles at OMB including as deputy controller, chief of the Financial Integrity and Analysis Branch, budget examiner in the Education Branch, and policy analyst in the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

The new acting commissioner takes over on May 22. Obama has yet to nominate a permanent replacement for Commissioner Doug Shulman, who left the job in November.

Obama’s Campaign Spokeswoman Now the Voice of the State Department

New State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki began conducting the daily press briefings this week, taking over from acting deputy spokesman Patrick Ventrell.

If her name sounds familiar, it’s because Psaki was President Obama’s traveling press secretary during his re-election campaign.

She was then picked by new Secretary of State John Kerry to be his press secretary, replacing Victoria Nuland. Since Psaki’s mid-February selection, she’s been undergoing intensive training within the State Department on global affairs.

Daily briefings at the State Department include reporters from around the world, and the questions usually span a wide range of countries. Psaki comes to the job with no foreign policy experience.

Nuland, on the other hand, was a former U.S. ambassador to NATO in the George W. Bush administration and a former foreign policy adviser to Dick Cheney.

Kerry knows Psaki from her work on his 2004 presidential campaign, but unlike the messaging she shaped for Obama’s and Kerry’s campaigns the State Department is expressly a nonpartisan agency.

Richard Grenell, who was press secretary for four U.S. ambassadors at the United Nations including John Bolton, weeks ago sent Psaki flowers and a note wishing her well in her new role. He hasn’t received a reply.

Suffice to say she’s not being treated with kid gloves by the State Department press corps. Here’s a sampling from today’s briefing, on Benghazi:

QUESTION: And you mentioned the e-mails that were released. Overall, in this building, what is the reaction to that release? Do you think it will quell the debate? Well, let’s start with that.

PSAKI: Well, the White House release yesterday, it allows the American public, including all of you, to see firsthand the conversation that took place over the course of e-mails. It does confirm that these were CIA-drafted and CIA-finalized talking points and that a number of the concerns raised in this building were separately on a different track raised in that building, as well.

I leave that to all of you and to others to determine whether it quells the concern, but I think it certainly does put a lot of facts in clarity for people.

QUESTION: So if it’s such a good thing, why did you wait more than nine months to do this?

PSAKI: Well, they’ve been released now…

(CROSSTALK)

PSAKI: I don’t want to look into a rear-view mirror on that.

QUESTION: You don’t want to look forward, you don’t want to look backward.

(CROSSTALK)

PSAKI: I do want to look forward. I’m all about looking forward.

QUESTION: You do? And then you don’t want to prejudge…

(CROSSTALK)

PSAKI: That’s what the implementation of the ARB is about.

QUESTION: You don’t want to prejudge anything or predetermine…

PSAKI: Well, that’s separate.

It’s been widely speculated around Washington that Psaki is being groomed to eventually replace Jay Carney in the press secretary role at the White House.

The Bengazi Inbox

Yahoo is doing a nice service re the Benghazi emails that the White House released last night. As released they were difficult to process. Many were smudged making them hard to read. Having them all in an unsearchable PDF made them difficult to cross reference.

Yahoo is digitizing all of them and creating an interactive that works like an email inbox. You can click through and see which email was sent when, and by whom. Check it out.

Only about 25% of the emails have been digitized and included so far. But just looking at the inbox at this point, two things are apparent. Tommy Vietor, the loyalist bus driver who became Obama’s national security spokesman, is the one who looped the State Department into the talking points discussion. That’s in the 9/14/2012 email sent at 6:21 PM. It’s after that that State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland has a conversation with her “building’s leadership” and comes back with substantive edits to the CIA’s talking points.

h/t Drew M.

WaPo: Eric Holder May Have Lied About that Whole ‘It Put Americans at Risk’ Thing

When he was asked why the Department of Justice subpoenaed the AP’s phone records, Holder responded that the leak involved was “very, very serious.” So serious, in fact, that “It put Americans at risk.” So the DOJ had to act.

Yeah, about that. It appears not to be true.

For five days, reporters at the Associated Press had been sitting on a big scoop about a foiled al-Qaeda plot at the request of CIA officials. Then, in a hastily scheduled Monday morning meeting, the journalists were asked by agency officials to hold off on publishing the story for just one more day.

The CIA officials, who had initially cited national security concerns in an attempt to delay publication, no longer had those worries, according to individuals familiar with the exchange. Instead, the Obama administration was planning to announce the successful counterterrorism operation that Tuesday.

Get that? The administration wanted to own the story, and wanted AP to hold off publishing until Obama et al could announce it themselves.

The CIA, which would later allow the State Department to edit the Benghazi talking points, continued arguing with the AP to delay releasing the story even after all the security concerns about it went away.

The news service was prepared to publish its scoop on May 2, 2012. But in discussions with government officials, the CIA stressed to AP that publishing anything about the operation to obtain the bomb and thwart the plot would create grave national security dangers and compromise a “sensitive intelligence operation.”

Michael J. Morell, the CIA’s deputy director, gave AP reporters some additional background information to persuade them to hold off, Vietor said. The agency needed several days more to protect what it had in the works.

Then, in a meeting on Monday, May 7, CIA officials reported that the national security concerns were “no longer an issue,” according to the individuals familiar with the discussion.

When the journalists rejected a plea to hold off longer, the CIA then offered a compromise. Would they wait a day if AP could have the story exclusively for an hour, with no government officials confirming it for that time?

It’s after the AP decides to run with the story, that the DOJ goes after its phone records in a sweep so vast that it even included the AP’s phone at the US House of Representatives. Given who the AP may have been talking to on that phone, we may have a violation of the separation of powers.

Obama bus driver Tommy Vietor helpfully wraps the story up for his boss.

“We shouldn’t pretend that this leak of an unbelievably sensitive dangerous piece of information is okay because nobody died,” he said.

We shouldn’t pretend that lifelong Obama loyalists are qualified to be national security spokesmen, either.

h/t Allahpundit

Goodlatte: DOJ Didn’t Follow the Law in AP Subpoenas

The White House must be speed-dialing foreign leaders to ask them which one wants to be next to stand next to Barack Obama. There is a danger, though, of lightning striking with each lie he tells.

House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) said Thursday that it appeared the standard procedures for subpoenaing records from a media organization were not followed in the Justice Department’s seizure of phone records from The Associated Press.

“There is a process when you are subpoenaing documents from a media organization that apparently were not followed in this case and we need to find out why,” Goodlatte told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

Now, even liberal talker Bill Press is calling for Obama to fire Attorney General Eric Holder.

“I have no confidence in Eric Holder anymore, and you shouldn’t either,” Press wrote. “This AP story from the Justice Dept is too far-reaching. Seizing these phone records is a violation of freedom of the press. FIRE Holder.”

On Thursday, Press renewed his call for Holder’s dismissal, writing, “I still haven’t heard a legit justification for the subpoenaing the AP phone records. They didn’t notify AP, they didn’t narrow search.”

“What ‘breach of national security’ are we talking about re the AP story? It’s BS and Holder should be fired,” Press tweeted.

On Fox just now, Democrat talker Julie Roginsky said that Obama’s claim that he only learned about the IRS abuse last Friday, in the press, means one of two things: Either he’s uniformed because his staff aren’t doing their jobs, or he knows more than he is saying and is not being “entirely forthcoming.” It clearly pained Roginsky to speak both of those possibilities.

It’s such a distinct pattern we have here: Obama doesn’t know anything. Holder doesn’t know anything. Hillary Clinton doesn’t know anything. About anything.

The truth, obviously, is that they all knew. They’re just lying about it now.

More: WaPo: Eric Holder May Have Lied About that Whole ‘It Put Americans at Risk’ Thing

Associated Press, Why Do You Keep Carrying Obama’s Water?

On its front page, the Associated Press says that it is protesting the Department of Justice’s seizure of its phone records. But in its news coverage, the AP is still associating itself with Democrat talking points.

By now, everyone who has paid any attention knows that budget cuts had nothing to do with the terrorist attack in Benghazi. The State Department’s Charlene Lamb testified to that fact, after Democrats raised the question months ago.

But take a look at how the AP reports President Obama’s remarks today regarding Benghazi and embassy security.

Headline: OBAMA: CONGRESS MUST ‘FULLY FUND’ EMBASSY SECURITY

Below that, a story that quotes the president notes how much money the State Department wants to upgrade security, and this:

Since the attack, Democrats have complained that Republicans cut $300 million from the Obama administration’s budget request of $2.6 billion for diplomatic and embassy security in 2012.

Nothing — at all — about the fact that a senior State Department official, Deputy Assistant Secretary Charlene Lamb, testified that budget cuts and finances had nothing to do with the attacks, or the denials to upgrade security in the months leading up to it.

The AP may need to spend some time in a battered media shelter, to get away from the man it still obviously loves.

Reid Halts Paul’s IRS Resolution

From Senator Rand Paul:

Today, Senate Democrats placed a hold on Sen. Rand Paul’s recent resolution that condemns the targeting of Tea Party groups by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and calls for an investigation into this practice.

“This resolution is not about Republican vs. Democrat or conservative vs. liberal. It is about arrogant and unrestrained government vs. the rule of law. The First Amendment cannot and should not be renegotiated depending on which party holds power,” Sen. Paul said. “Each senator took an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution, yet Senate Democrats chose to block my resolution and thus refused to condemn the IRS for trampling on our First Amendment rights. I am incredibly disappointed in Washington’s party politics and I am determined to hold the IRS accountable for these unjust acts.”

The problem is exactly that it’s about an “arrogant and unrestrained government vs. the rule of law.” Unrestrained government doesn’t take kindly even to modest critiques, and Harry Reid is one of its most arrogant enforcers.

Do These Foreign Leaders Realize that Obama is Using them as Props?

As Obama’s worst week ever grinds on, he has overcome his media shyness. The president who has given fewer press conferences than his predecessor had at this point has held two press conferences in as many days, along with a statement about the IRS scandal.

But in none of them, did Barack Obama ever face the media alone.

On Tuesday, he was accompanied by UK Prime Minister David Cameron.

Wednesday night, he was flanked by Treasury Secretary Jack Lew.

Today, he had Turkey Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan alongside.

Two things are obvious in this pattern.

One, Barack Obama is terrified of the press and refuses to face them on his own.

Two, out of fear he is using foreign leaders as props to keep the press from getting out of hand, and to force them to ask questions having nothing to do with his scandals.

Obama is disrespecting our allies, while trying to control the press. Because he is scared.

Flash: Obama Carefully Issues Non-Denial Denial in IRS Scandal (Updated)

President Obama answered a press question about the IRS scandal by denying that he knew anything about the IG report until it started turning up in press reports. Spokesman Jay Carney has said the same thing.

This is not a denial that the president knew that the abuse was going on. He merely denied knowing about the IG report. But when chopped down to a soundbite for news reports and newscasts, it may come off as the president denying all knowledge of the IRS’s abuses.

He did not issue such a denial.

Update: Here is the president’s exact answer. Juliana Goldman of Bloomberg asks him:

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?

She also asked about appointing a special counsel to investigate it.

The president answered, first saying that

My main concern is fixing a problem, and we began that process yesterday by asking and accepting the resignation of the acting director there.

As we now know, that resignation was less than he made out. Miller was on his way out anyway. The president went on to say:

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.

That wasn’t the question. The question was, when did he learn about the IRS abuse itself?

The safest way to bet after that answer is that Obama and/or someone in the White House did know. It’s also safer now to assume that there was some level of involvement.

Science Says: Democrats are Wusses

Hey you anti-gun leftists, don’t shoot me. I’m just the messenger here.

Men who are physically strong are more likely to take a right wing political stance, while weaker men are inclined to support the welfare state, according to a new study.

Researchers discovered political motivations may have evolutionary links to physical strength.

Men’s upper-body strength predicts their political opinions on economic redistribution, according to the research.

Take one look at Chuck Norris, if you dare, and Barack Obama and tell me you’re surprised.

Or take one look at Glenn Reynolds and Matt Yglesias and tell me you’re surprised.

Leftists may respond “Yeah, but it says we’re smarter.” No, it doesn’t. The research didn’t go there.

Holdering On

Jill Lawrence wants to know if this is “the end” for Eric Holder:

The attorney general has been in the middle of controversies over whether to shut down Guantanamo Bay prison and whether to try suspected terrorists in U.S. courts. He has defended the U.S. right to wage drone strikes, to stage the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, and to use lethal force against a leader of al-Qaida who was also U.S. citizen.

He also was a lightning rod for conservative complaints about Fast and Furious, a federal sting that allowed U.S. weapons to fall into the hands of suspected gun smugglers on the theory that they could then be tracked to Mexican drug cartels. Instead, hundreds of the guns went missing, and many of them have been linked to crimes. One of them was the December 2010 killing of Brian Terry, a border patrol agent.

Lawrence says it’s “unclear how Holder fits into the latest firestorm.”

But isn’t that the problem here? We have a four-year-old running history of increasing lawlessness and abuses of power, either at the behest of, or right under the nose of our nation’s chief law enforcement officer.

He should have been gone a long time ago, and it’s shameful that the press began to pay real attention only once they’d found out the AG had gone after one of its own.

New York Democrat to Female Staff: Touch My Tumors!

The tumors on New York Democrat Assemblyman Vito Lopez are on his neck. And armpit.

• “One woman was made to feel the tumors on his neck, shoulder and armpit as Lopez, who has cancer, told her he was dying and “needed” her.” (Daily News)
• “Mr. Lopez also demanded that several women write effusive and flirtatious text messages, in one case even writing a sample note for them to follow: ‘Vito, I wanted to be nice to you. Hope you like way I look,’ he wrote. He then sometimes used such letters to forestall complaints made against him.” (NY Times)
• After pressuring an employee to go to a bar, “instead of talking about legislation, however, Lopez only spoke to Employee 3 about ‘completely personal matters,’ such as her relationship with her boyfriend and her father. At the end of the evening, Lopez gave Employee 3 $50 in cash and told her to purchase a low-cut blouse to wear…. [The next day] Employee 3 gave the money back to Lopez, telling him that she was “uncomfortable” with his offer. Lopez calmly took the money. Later that evening, they attended the Brooklyn Unidos Christmas party, and Emplooyee 3 said that Lopez threw the $50 in her face, while yelling she should never “disrespect him” again and that when he gives her something, she should take it.” (JCOPE report)
• “During the car ride home, a staffer said that Mr. Lopez once again put his hand between her legs on her inner thigh. She squeezed her legs together in an effort to prevent him from touching her and was scratched by one of Mr. Lopez’s jagged fingernails.” (Politicker)

More at the link. If you’re interested. He also made them touch his pinkeye. Lopez has escaped criminal prosecution, and is running for NYC city council. Being a Democrat, his odds of waging a pervy war on women and gaining a battlefield promotion for it are pretty good.

Questions for the President

President Obama is set to hold a news conference shortly with Turkey’s prime minister. Supposing he takes questions from the press, someone should ask him the following.

Mr. President, on Wednesday you gave a brief statement on the IRS abuse scandal, in which you said that acting commissioner Steven Miller had been asked for and had handed in his resignation. You suggested that this was the beginning of accountability in the IRS abuse scandal. But an hour later, Miller told IRS staff that he was merely ending his term a couple of weeks early, and that he expected an “orderly transition” to the next commissioner. In light of Miller’s remarks, Americans are wondering if you, Mr. President, really held Mr. Miller accountability for anything, or if you allowed him to depart on his own terms. Is Mr. Miller’s account accurate? Do you believe that he has undermined your effort to hold the agency accountable? Related to that, this morning America woke to the news that Ambassador Susan Rice is in line for a promotion to become your next National Security Adviser. Mr. President, do you think she deserves a promotion, after misleading the American people about the origins and nature of the terrorist attack in Benghazi that left four Americans dead? And related to that, your spokesman, Jay Carney, has insisted that the White House only made “stylistic” changes to the Benghazi talking points. But the emails released last night show much more involvement, and that changes were made at a deputies meeting conducted inside the White House. Carney’s statements clearly were not accurate, and he speaks on your behalf. Looking at these three cases, what conclusion should Americans reach about your view of holding your subordinates accountable for their actions?

Benghazi Emails Show that We’re In the Very Best of Hands

Our government is so expensive we can’t pay for it and so vast that even the lightworker himself with his jedi temperament cannot effectively run it. But our Mandarin masters soldier on despite all the sequestration damage, doing the very best that they can with what they have.

One of the White House officials involved in the talking-points debate, former National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor, issued a statement Wednesday defending the way the administration handled the matter.

“Some people have understandably asked how we were so wrong about there being a protest,” Mr. Vietor said in the statement. “I don’t know. When I was in government, I asked some intelligence officials how it happened. They told me that there were many different strands of information indicating there was a protest, both open source and intelligence based.”

He added, “In fact, a number of news outlets reported there were protests.”

So they read about it in the paper. I guess the problem, then, is that they’re just reading the wrong paper.

By the way, this National Security Council spokesman, Tommy Vietor, does not hail from the military or any intel agency or even the State Department. He’s a lifelong Obama loyalist who started out as Barry’s bus driver.

We’re in the very best of hands, indeed.

h/t Denis Boyles

Hey, Remember When Harry Reid Pestered Mitt Romney About His Taxes?

Democrat Sen. Harry Reid waged one of the more pernicious attacks on Mitt Romney during last year’s election. In July, Harry told the Huffington Post that he had learned from a source he never named that Romney hadn’t paid taxes for 10 years.

Saying he had “no problem with somebody being really, really wealthy,” Reid sat up in his chair a bit before stirring the pot further. A month or so ago, he said, a person who had invested with Bain Capital called his office.

“Harry, he didn’t pay any taxes for 10 years,” Reid recounted the person as saying.

“He didn’t pay taxes for 10 years! Now, do I know that that’s true? Well, I’m not certain,” said Reid. “But obviously he can’t release those tax returns. How would it look?”

Romney dismissed Reid outright and said he was wrong.

Reid never did name his “source,” though he claimed it was someone who had worked for Bain Capital. He never provided any evidence that he even knew what he was talking about. But he continued waging his war against Mitt Romney’s taxes through the election, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi eventually joined in. In both cases, the Democrats used the Huffington Post to wage this part of their campaign.

“Harry Reid made a statement that is true. Somebody told him. It is a fact,” Pelosi told The Huffington Post in a Sunday interview. “Whether he did or not can easily be disposed of: Mitt Romney can release his tax returns and show whether he paid taxes.”

Reid’s and Pelosi’s gambit was obviously part of the Obama campaign’s overall strategy to paint Romney as rich and unethical. The twosome were acting as attack dogs on the campaign’s behalf. The question is, did they actually have any real knowledge of Romney’s taxes? If they did, how did they obtain it? After this week, neither Reid nor Pelosi deserve the benefit of the doubt. Many in the Democratic Party had been putting pressure on the IRS to investigate Republicans and Tea Party groups before the IRS actually did it. Some of them still justify this abuse.

It’s common for political campaigns to question their opponents’ taxes and tax returns. Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s campaign dogged their 2010 opponent about his taxes through the entire campaign, for instance, to try to get him to release his returns (Perry has released his going back a couple of decades or more). But those attacks tend not to claim anything specific about the contents of the tax returns. They’re demands that the opponent release them to be transparent with the voters, to put the opponent on the defensive and off message.

Reid’s claim was different. He claimed to have some knowledge of Romney’s tax returns, thanks to this source he never named.

Even now, Reid is condemning the IRS for doing the very thing that he still wants it to do: Investigate “shadowy” groups opposed to the president.

Holder Doesn’t Know if Born-Alive Infants Protection Act has Ever Been Enforced

Attorney General Eric Holder told Congress yesterday that he doesn’t know if the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, passed during President George W. Bush’s first term, has ever been enforced.

During an oversight hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) brought up the case of Philadelphia abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, who just cut a deal for life in prison after being convicted of three newborn murders.

“I suppose the unique thing about it is is that it’s not all that unique. While we might sanitize the clinics and other places, about 18,000 babies a year, 20 weeks or older are aborted in this country. And that’s the Guttmacher Institute’s quotes and there are about 44,000 abortion survivors living in the country today,” Franks said.

“I guess my first question would be along the lines, where is our president on this subject, but unfortunately, I already know that answer. He voted against the Born Alive Infant Protection Acts when he was in his home state several times,” the congressman continued. “…So my question to you — and it’s a sincere question, and I hope you take it so — in 2002, Congress enacted the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, and it provides that all federal protections, including from your office, sir, for persons apply to every infant born alive.”

“So will you enforce the infant — the Born Alive Infant Protection Act as attorney general? And will you consider carefully what’s happening in clinics across the country like happened at the clinic that Kermit Gosnell ran?”

“Well, like you, I share the many of the concerns that you talked about. I’m a father. I have three kids. And I am interestingly married to a woman who is an obstetrician, a gynecologist, very accomplished in her field. I have responsibilities as attorney general to enforce all the laws that Congress passes,” Holder said.

“Have you ever enforced this law even one time?” Franks asked.

Holder said he didn’t know. “We can examine that and see whether the U.S. attorneys — well, since the law was passed — you said in 2002?” he asked. “What the — how many prosecutions there have been under that law?”

“Well, there’s been 18,000 opportunities a year since then approximately. So I’m just wondering if you’ve even even enforced once?” Franks continued.

“I don’t know whether there was enforcement during the Bush administration or the Obama administration since the passage of the law in 2002. I just don’t know what the statistics are,” Holder said.

Franks told the attorney general that “to stand by in silence while the most helpless of all children are tortuously and agonizingly dismembered, day after day after day, year after year, Mr. General, is a — quite honestly a heartless disgrace that really can’t be described by the vocabulary of man.”