Rumpswab Who Is Not Good At Math Also Not Good At Law

On Friday, May 10, 2013 Lois Lerner, head of the IRS Tax-Exempt Unit, apologized for targeting conservative groups by improperly delaying and scrutinizing their applications for tax-exempt status at a conference held by the American Bar Association.

The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty and Zachary Goldfarb noted, “The IRS’s subsequent conference call with reporters was clumsily handled. At one point, Lerner attempted to do arithmetic on the phone and blurted out: ‘I’m not good at math.’”

The following Wednesday, Lerner gave an opening statement before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in which she lied about lying about having done nothing wrong.

 

“I have not done anything wrong. I have not broken any laws, I have not violated any IRS rules or regulations and I have not provided false information to this or any other congressional committee,” Lerner said.

Upon the advice of her attorney she then invoked her constitutional right to plead the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination and declined to testify.

Trey Gowdy, who sits on committee dealing with the IRS scandal objected saying, “Mr. Issa, Mr. Cummings just said we should run this like a courtroom, and I agree with him. She just testified. She just waived her Fifth Amendment right to privilege. You don't get to tell your side of the story and then not be subjected to cross examination. That's not the way it works. She waived her Fifth Amendment privilege by issuing an open statement. She ought to stand here and answer our questions.”

The fact that she restated some of the same answers she gave the inspector general during his investigation prompted the panel’s chairman Darrell Issa to remark, “At this point, I believe you have not asserted your rights, but have effectively waived your rights.”

And the stench we are smelling is from the collective pants-shitting of the regime.

On next year's 1040, I'm gonna scrawl "I'M ON ADMINISTRATIVE LEAVE" in crayon.
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) May 23, 2013

Savage Wars

A cell phone video taken by one witness and given to ITV television showed a young man with bloody hands holding a large knife and a meat cleaver.

The man walked over to the camera and said: “I apologize that women had to witness this today. But in our land, our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your government. They don’t care about you.  We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you.  Your people will never be safe.”

He was one of two men, believed to be Somalis, who hacked to death a British soldier like he was “a piece of meat”.  They are but two of hundreds of thousands of Somali immigrants living inside the United Kingdom.  Some 70,000 live inside London proper.

The archetypal English garden has been immortalized in poetry and music for centuries because of its pristine green lawns, serene lakes and climbing roses around the door. The UK’s practice of importing savages is tearing apart what Britons took centuries to build.

The butchers who perpetrated this latest atrocity wanted to be seen and warned in the most gruesome of ways that we will be murdered in the name of Islam.

As America watches and waits to see how the UK deals with this horrific slaughter, we hear meaningless condemnations of Muslim leaders who say one thing for public consumption and something altogether else sinister in their mosques.

The world is witnessing an irreversible demographic turning point as the chilling video below warns.

Photoshop™ Of The Day: A Unicorn Rots From The Head Down

Please Help Oklahoma

Image Credit:  TulsaWorld.com

“When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something.” —Dmitri Shostakovich

I was gripped by this image of two men, one holding the American flag, as they gazed upon the utter destruction left in the aftermath of the tornado that wiped out much of Moore, Oklahoma on May 20, 2013.

My pitiful attempt to comprehend how these two men must feel seeing their lives churned up by the forces of nature left me weeping for them.  After I dried my tears, I went to the Red Cross site set up to help Oklahomans to make a donation and pray.

I hope you will do the same.  They are our brethren.  May God bless them and may He place His Hand upon their shoulders and give them comfort and the strength to carry on.

God bless Oklahoma.

Pray For Oklahoma

As of 8:22PM Central Time, Reuters News Agency, reported that 51 people have perished in the massive tornado that laid waste to the town of Moore, Oklahoma.  The death toll is expected to rise.

The photo provided by Paul Hellstern of The Oklahoman captures the terror of nature’s wrath in the face of the man who carried a little girl, a student from Briarwood Elementary School, to safety.

God bless him and may God comfort and protect all those affected by the tornadoes that have ravaged that area in recent days.

Armed Forces Day: A Prayer For Our Troops

Our men and women in uniform are in harm’s way constantly from combat, car bombings, and rocket-propelled grenade and mortar attacks. Our worst day in America is so much better than their best day. Extremes of cold and heat and uncomfortable conditions, to say the least, plague these soldiers. They are sacrificing time that could be spent with spouses and children. Yet they continue to faithfully and bravely serve.

"Lord, hold our troops in your loving hands. Protect them as they protect us. Bless them and their families for the selfless acts they perform for us in our time of need. Please place a hedge of protection around each and everyone. I ask this in the name of Jesus, our Lord and Savior. Amen."

He’s Going To Need A Bigger Umbrella

With three scandals rocking Dear Leader’s regime, a dark cloud of dishonesty, corruption and ineptitude has descended over the White House in recent days.

The rain started pouring down when Barack Obama and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan held a joint press conference in the Rose Garden of the White House on Thursday, prompting the president to order Marines to hold umbrellas over them.

“I am going to go ahead and ask folks, why don’t we get a couple of Marines—they’re going to look good next to us,” Obama joked.

Obama vehemently denies abusing government power, while telling a US Marine to hold his umbrella. #CantMakeThisShitUp
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) May 16, 2013

Photoshop™ Of The Day: Drunk With Power

And The Voices That Annoy Him Are Those Of The Founders

Presented for your dining and dancing pleasure—“In IRS Scandal, Echoes of Watergate” by George Will:

The burglary occurred in 1972, the climax came in 1974, but 40 years ago this week—May 17, 1973—the Senate Watergate hearings began exploring the nature of Richard Nixon’s administration. Now the nature of Barack Obama’s administration is being clarified as revelations about IRS targeting of conservative groups merge with myriad Benghazi mendacities.

This administration aggressively hawked the fiction that the Benghazi attack was just an excessively boisterous movie review. Now we are told that a few wayward souls in Cincinnati, with nary a trace of political purpose, targeted for harassment political groups with “tea party” and “patriot” in their titles. The Post reported Monday that the IRS also targeted groups that “criticized the government and sought to educate Americans about the U.S. Constitution.” Credit the IRS’s operatives with understanding who and what threatens the current regime.

Jay Carney, whose unenviable job is not to explain but to explain away what his employers say, calls the IRS’s behavior “inappropriate.” No, using the salad fork for the entree is inappropriate. Using the Internal Revenue Service for political purposes is a criminal offense.

It remains to be discovered whether the chief executive is guilty of more than an amazingly convenient failure to superintend the excesses of some executive-branch employees beyond the Allegheny Mountains. Meanwhile, file this under “What a tangled web we weave”:

The IRS official in charge of the division that makes politically sensitive allocations of tax-exempt status said Friday that she learned from news reports of the targeting of conservatives. But a draft report by the IRS inspector general says this official was briefed on the matter two years ago.

An emerging liberal narrative is that this tempest is all the Supreme Court’s fault: The Citizens United decision—that corporations, particularly nonprofit advocacy groups, have First Amendment rights—so burdened the IRS with making determinations about who deserves tax-exempt status that some political innocents in Cincinnati inexplicably decided to begin by rummaging through the affairs of conservatives. Ere long, presumably, they would have gotten around to groups with “progressive” in their titles.

Remember, all campaign “reform” proposals regulate political speech. And all involve the IRS in allocating speech rights.

Liberals, whose unvarying agenda is enlargement of government, suggest, with no sense of cognitive dissonance, that this IRS scandal is nothing more sinister than typical government incompetence. Five days before the IRS story broke, Obama, sermonizing 109 miles northeast of Cincinnati, warned Ohio State graduates about “creeping cynicism” and “voices” that “warn that tyranny is . . . around the corner.” Well.

He stigmatizes as the vice of cynicism what actually is the virtue of skepticism about the myth that the tentacles of the regulatory state are administered by disinterested operatives. And the voices that annoy him are those of the Founders.

Time was, progressives like the president 100 years ago, Woodrow Wilson, had the virtue of candor: He explicitly rejected the Founders’ fears of government. Modern enlightenment, he said, made it safe to concentrate power in Washington, and especially in disinterested executive-branch agencies run by autonomous, high-minded experts. Today, however, progressivism’s insinuation is that Americans must be minutely regulated because they are so dimwitted they will swallow nonsense. Such as: There was no political motive in the IRS targeting political conservatives.

Episodes like this separate the meritorious liberals from the meretricious. The day after the IRS story broke; The Post led the paper with it, and, with an institutional memory of Watergate, published a blistering editorial demanding an Obama apology. The New York Times consigned the story to page 10 (its front-page lead was the umpteenth story about the end of the world being nigh because of global warming). Through Monday, the Times had expressed no editorial thoughts about the IRS. The Times’ Monday headline on the matter was: “IRS Focus on Conservatives Gives GOP an Issue to Seize On.” So that is the danger.

If Republicans had controlled both houses of Congress in 1973, Nixon would have completed his term. If Democrats controlled both today, the Obama administration’s lawlessness would go uninvestigated. Not even divided government is safe government, but it beats the alternative.

For your ironic reading pleasure: the Nixon Articles of Impeachment watergate.info/impeachment/ar…

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) May 14, 2013

AP Condemns Unprecedented Intrusion By DOJ

“The habits and language of clandestinity can intoxicate even its own practitioners.”--William Colby

WASHINGTON (AP)—The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative's top executive called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather the news. 

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed incoming and outgoing calls, and the duration of each call, for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. 

In all, the government seized those records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown but more than 100 journalists work in the offices whose phone records were targeted on a wide array of stories about government and other matters. 

In a letter of protest sent to Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday, AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt said the government sought and obtained information far beyond anything that could be justified by any specific investigation. He demanded the return of the phone records and destruction of all copies. 

"There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters. These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP's newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP's activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know," Pruitt said.

Derek Mead at Motherboard opines, “It's an almost unfathomably arrogant move. Right in the middle of a growing privacy shitstorm in Washington—which includes the IRS, NSA, and every other TLA you can imagine—the DoJ decided to notify one of the largest press agencies in the world that it had been spying on it.”

Ace asks, “But was this about national security—or was it about political embarrassment? Did the Administration take extraordinary steps to protect national security secrets, or to cover up yet another Benghazi-like massaging of talking points?”

One must assume the AP is sufficiently infuriated given the fact that they found out about the seizure on Friday but waited until Monday to release the story.  Can you say “maximum impact?”  Yep.  They.  Are.  Pissed.

Maybe now the MSM will finally decide the Obama administration is worth investigating.

Truth is suppressed, not to protect the country from enemy agents, but to protect the government against the people.

Jay Carney says WH had no knowledge before today's press reports of Justice Dept attempt to obtain seek phone records of the AP reporters.
— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) May 13, 2013

DOJ secretly spying on AP? Gee, imagine what they do to journalist who don't regularly fellate them.
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) May 13, 2013