Eric Holder does not know about IRS but does secretive Obama? Abuse of power round-up and great video
US Attorney General Eric Holder sat before the House Judiciary Committee and told them all the things he does not know. Does he know about the politicising of the Internal Revenue Service? Organisations with “Tea-Party” and “Patriot” in their names were vetted more than others. The IRS asked groups to identify their donors and provide print outs of their tweets and Facebook posts.
Does he know why the State subpoenaed phone records of Associated Press reporters? He just doesn’t know.
“In a sense, the two topics that dogged Holder most on Wednesday — the AP phone records and the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups — were one and the same. In both cases, Americans are being punished and intimidated for exercising their right of free expression — by the taxing authorities, in the conservatives’ case, and by federal prosecutors, in the reporters’ case.”
“I stopped watching The Daily Show the day after the ’04 election, because Jon Stewart’s open grief was too much to bear. (I was a different person then.) Plus, once I saw through his Clown Nose Off/Clown Nose On routine — ‘You should listen to me because what I’m saying is important, but I’ll brush off your rebuttal by insisting I’m just a comedian’ — it was like the optical illusion with the cows. It might take you a minute to see it, but once you do, you can’t unsee it. Which just makes this all the more delicious.”
NFL player Evan Mathis, of the Philadelphia Eagles posted a picure of himself pissing on the IRS building.
“The IRS has usually done an excellent job of stifling investigations of its practices. A 1991 survey of 800 IRS executives and managers by the nonprofit Josephson Institute of Ethics revealed that three out of four respondents felt entitled to deceive or lie when testifying before a congressional committee. The agency also has a long history of seeking to intimidate congressional critics.”
Steven Miller, the now resigned acting commissioner of the IRS, is telling staff that the abuse scandal is not the reason he’s leaving.
It is with regret that I will be departing from the IRS as my acting assignment ends in early June,’ Miller wrote. “This has been an incredibly difficult time for the IRS given the events of the past few days, and there is a strong and immediate need to restore public trust in the nation’s tax agency.”
The testy press conference entrenched concerns at the White House and among its allies that the controversies could overwhelm Obama’s agenda.
“We now have focused the attention of everyone, including all of you, on the lengths to which the administration’s willing to go to quiet the voices of its critics,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Tuesday at a press briefing that addressed none of Obama’s legislative priorities.
The scandals also risk reinforcing and worsening some of the biggest criticisms of the president: that he is arrogant, secretive and interested in bending his political opponents to his will rather than in working with them.
In February 2010, the Champaign Tea Party in Illinois received approval of its tax-exempt status from the IRS in 90 days, no questions asked.
That was the month before the Internal Revenue Service started singling out Tea Party groups for special treatment. There wouldn’t be another Tea Party application approved for 27 months.
In that time, the IRS approved perhaps dozens of applications from similar liberal and progressive groups, a USA TODAY review of IRS data shows.
As applications from conservative groups sat in limbo, groups with liberal-sounding names had their applications approved in as little as nine months. With names including words like “Progress” or “Progressive,” the liberal groups applied for the same tax status and were engaged in the same kinds of activities as the conservative groups.
“More than 75 percent of the campaign contributions from that office in the past three elections went to Democrats. In 2012, every donation traceable to employees at that office went to either President Obama or liberal Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio. The IRS officials whose names appear in the IG report are also Democrats with partisan histories. William Wilkins, IRS general counsel and one of the agency’s two explicitly political appointees, is a former Democratic congressional aide, lobbyist (clients included the Swiss Bankers Association), and Democratic donor. Joseph H. Grant, who ran the Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division that includes the Cincinnati office, is a former Democratic staffer on the House Ways & Means Committee.”
Would You Believe The Administration Got Phone Records of The House Of Representatives.
That’s the revelation made by California Congressman Devin Nunes, who sits on the House Ways And Means Committee on Hugh Hewitt’s Show Wednesday night. Here’s the key part of that transcript:
HH: The idea that this might be a Geithner-Axelrod plan, and by that, the sort of intimation, Henry II style, will no one rid me of this turbulent priest, will no one rid me of these turbulent Tea Parties, that might have just been a hint, a shift of an eyebrow, a change in the tone of voice. That’s going to take a long time to get to. I don’t trust the Department of Justice on this. Do you, Congressman Nunes?
DN: No, I absolutely do not, especially after this wiretapping incident, essentially, of the House of Representative. I don’t think people are focusing on the right thing when they talk about going after the AP reporters. The big problem that I see is that they actually tapped right where I’m sitting right now, the Cloak Room.
HH: Wait a minute, this is news to me.
DN: The Cloak Room in the House of Representatives.
HH: I have no idea what you’re talking about.
DN: So when they went after the AP reporters, right? Went after all of their phone records, they went after the phone records, including right up here in the House Gallery, right up from where I’m sitting right now. So you have a real separation of powers issue that did this really rise to the level that you would have to get phone records that would, that would most likely include members of Congress, because as you know…
HH: Wow.
DN: …members of Congress talk to the press all the time.
HH: I did not know that, and that is a stunner.
DN: Now that is a separation of powers issue here, Hugh.
HH: Sure.
DN: And it’s a freedom of press issue. And now you’ve got the IRS going after people. So these things are starting to cascade one upon the other, and you have the White House pretending like they’re in the clouds like it’s not their issue somehow.
And then there are the Banghazi lies.
Posted: 16th, May 2013 | In: Politicians Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
