Friday Obama dump … “Me demand more taxes” [Darleen Click]
Fuck the rich productive!
President Obama’s most recent budget request would reduce borrowing by $1.1 trillion over the next decade compared with current law — almost entirely through higher taxes on the rich, large estates and smokers, congressional budget analysts said Friday.In addition to raising nearly $1 trillion in new taxes, the president’s blueprint would also cut spending modestly, according to the analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
However, those savings include money the government never intended to spend anyway, such as a contingency fund for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and nearly $300 billion in unneeded disaster relief. [...]
On Friday, Democrats ignored the messy details and focused on the report’s bottom line: Obama’s budget request would cancel harsh automatic cuts to agency budgets known as the sequester while shrinking the national debt even more than White House projections, pushing it below 70 percent of the economy by 2023. [...]
Republicans, meanwhile, noted that the president’s budget proposes significant new tax hikes on top of the increases that took effect in January, while never approaching balance.
“This new report shows that the President’s budget doesn’t come close to solving the problem,” House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said in a written statement. “The federal government will take in a record haul over the next ten years. And the President wants yet another massive tax hike…. The government is taking more from hardworking taxpayers only to spend more in Washington.”
IRS Scandal? Eh … just a distraction. Really. Move on, wingnuts [Darleen Click]
NYSlimes sets about to shove criminal IRS behavior down the memory hole
The Washington Post has two front-page above-the-fold articles on the scandal, a news story and an in-depth look at the IRS in the wake of the controversy. There’s also a tough lead editorial expressing renewed outrage at the IRS’s conduct and demanding thorough reform.Yet after the first dramatic day of congressional hearings, the New York Times has no front-page coverage at all of the scandal per se. Instead we have a story on President Obama’s efforts to move his agenda forward, beyond “distraction.” The Times story quotes White House aides accusing Republicans of seizing on “woes” to thwart the president’s agenda. The paper itself seems to be taking the White House line.
Just below the Times story on Obama’s attempts to move past “distraction,” a tiny squib notes that there is an article about the IRS on page 12. The teaser is: “Republicans are widening their aim at the Internal Revenue Service.” The headline of the page 12 Times article itself is: “Republicans Broaden Scope of I.R.S. Inquiry, Hoping to Entangle White House.” For comparison, the Post’s front-page news story headline is: “Panel grills IRS on tax targeting.” In other words, the Times treats the scandal as little more than a Republican-hyped distraction, while the Post takes it as a matter that should concern everyone. In contrast to the Post, there is no Times editorial on the scandal today.
New line of idiocy from DailyKos (I will NOT link to them) is that 3 “Democrat-leaning” groups may have received same letter from IRS so SHUT UP, wingnuts, he said.
More chilling, is Leftists taking up Nancy Pelosi’s line that this is the fault of Citizen’s United and that no one anywhere should be allowed to donate money without their personal information in a government database.
For the Transparency!
Sunny nostalgia
Feel free to ignore this rehash of my old Citizen Journalist’s report. I’m actually re-posting it here so I can have it handy when I next go to my stylist. I think I want to return my hair to the configuration seen herein.
I have to say, though, it holds up well. Ah. What could have been, right?
BREAKING: The Scandals are Falling Apart!
So says Ezra Klein, who may turn out to be one of the stupidest people ever to be given column inches in a printed medium of any variety.
After reading Klein’s desperate attempt to map onto reality his own desires, written in the form of a serious news piece, I’m tempted to say something like “fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.”
But then, the movie that comes from is, like, 35-years old. And back then, slave owners were still running things, and men in tri-cornered hats were acting all pissy and dumping perfectly good tea into a harbor when asked to by the Crown to pay their fair shares.
The fact is, Klein is right, but not for the reasons he wants us to believe. That is, his premise — that a scandal is only a scandal if high-level political figures fall — is true. But his implication — that because Obama and Holder and Hillary Clinton likely won’t fall, we aren’t in the midst of any scandals — is cynical, disingenuous, and largely exactly what you’d expect out of a useful idiot who fancies that he’s respected by those whose approval he so longs for.
The truth is, Obama and Holder and Hillary Clinton likely won’t fall because they will find protection in the arms of the ruling class, while lower-level functionaries will act as fall guys and scapegoats. And that’s because it is, as I’ve been saying, not a real two-party system any longer, but rather the ruling class vs. the rest of us.
Congress never pressed the IRS issue. Boehner is resisting calls to impanel a special committee on Benghazi, and the AP, once they get over the butt hurt of realizing that, for all the cover they’ve given progressives, ObamaCo just really isn’t all that into them, will go right back to fluffing up the President, rationalizing to themselves that they are making a sacrifice to the greater good. There has been no special prosecutor called for in the House to look into the IRS; the Senate is giving us Carl Levin and Max Baucus as investigators — two men who themselves engaged in the very conduct that politicians are now pretending to be outraged by.
So let’s not be coy: if the scandals fall apart it won’t be because no scandals existed, as Klein wants to pretend. Instead, it will be because the ruling class and their parasitic fluffers like Klein care more about the furtherance of big government statism than they do about truth or justice or the people they ostensibly represent or keep informed while working diligently to do neither.
(h/t JD)
“Report: IRS Deliberately Chose Not to Fess Up to Scandal Before Election”
But not because they are politicized, or because their employees tend to give to Democrats overwhelmingly. The very suggestion is, as Chris Matthews would remind us, proof that right wingers cannot stand to be ruled by blacks, and that their racism colors (pardon me) every single issue they pretend to care about.
Instead, the IRS deliberately chose not to admit to the scandal before the election because it — unlike conservatives – isn’t racist. QED.
Incidentally, at this point I’m quite happy — and I realize this will strike some of you as heretical — that the election went the way it did. After all, it’s not like the GOP has done a thing in the House to roll back ObamaCare; it’s not like they didn’t go right along with the nonsense about a “fiscal cliff”; it’s not like they didn’t go right along (by caucusing with Democrats) on redefining violence against women as potentially mere speech; it isn’t like the GOP blocked tax increases on “the rich”; and it isn’t like deficits and debt haven’t continued to soar with the House in GOP control.
So as I’ve been saying all along, rather than lose more slowly, show Americans what it’s like to lose at the pace progressives and New Leftists demand. The result is that despite the media’s best efforts, the lies, the deceit, the rank politics, the scandal, and the tyranny the left wishes to purposely and by institutional design impose upon us is becoming so obvious that even some of the low info voters have started to look up from their “Glee” marathons and take notice.
Of course, Obama will weather the storms. He is, after all, historic — and any attempt to denigrate his legacy would be racist, and we all know how the GOP fears that label — so it isn’t like any but some fall guys will take personal hits from any of these scandals. Even so, the taint is there, and there’s very little at this point the press can do to recall its stink from falling over the body politic, save to try to suggest that these scandals are only scandals because the GOP publicly exposed them. And that’s playing politics with politics, which is itself an OUTRAGE!
But it won’t work. If the electorate, in the post-Obama era, votes to enshrine into power anyone with ties to the radical left — and yes, Hillary Clinton is one of them, and I worry that, come 2016, we’ll be told that “we can’t go there” by our sober, pragmatic betters, wielding their focus group polls — then they aren’t duped.
It will mean this is the kind of government they want. And if that’s the case, those of us who wish to return to a nation of laws and Constitutional protections might have to begin looking elsewhere for a home.
(h/t sdferr)
“Some question whether AP leak on al-Qaeda plot put U.S. at risk”
Oh, how I do love the “some” when deployed by the mainstream press. These are the people who exist in one instance to cast aspersions and float all sort of unsavory allegations against Republicans and conservatives (eg., “Some claim TEA Party groups ‘really really really despise Darkies, Beaners, and all manner of sodomites’”); while in other instances, they exist to minimize the impact of a blow against a preferred group (“Some racists pretend Obama may have ties to Marxists”).
In this case, we have the latter: the WaPo headline writer is hoping to blunt the force of what is clearly intimating was the real purpose of the AP tapping scandal: retribution, bullying, payback for failing to abide the White House, who wished to frame and then release information on a foiled terror plot, only to have their thunder stolen by the AP, who — once they were told by the CIA that there was no longer any threat to Americans — ran with the story they had been asked (and agreed) to sit on for a few days.
Obama wanted to go public and make a televised announcement that would further the Administration narrative that Al Qaeda was all but done, that he was strong on terrorism — and he wanted to do this in an election year. The AP balked and stolen ManChild’s thunder.
And you don’t steal ManChild’s thunder and not pay a price.
Of course, Obama never even heard of about the AP phone taps until the media reported on it (kind of like the Benghazi attacks being perpetrated by Islamists!) — this despite the fact that the reasons given for the taps were fears of media leaks concerning a national security threat of the highest order, which presumably Obama had recused himself from knowing about, or maybe just slept through.
Either that, or everything this Administration does — built as it is upon leftist ideology and a post-modernist pose that treats reality as man-made, malleable, and a product of manufactured perceptions — is some form or another of a political calculation meant to create a controlled and controllable narrative frame through which the world must be viewed.
The media and the Administration are right now pushing the former narrative, wherein they are bumbling fools who can’t possibly know what’s going on in every aspect of government at all times. That is, their defense is that they are disconnected and incompetent.
Yet some of us know better, and have since back when Obama was a Good Man who loved his country every bit as much as you Hobbits, and your refusing to say so publicly and in a showy manner marked you as unhelpful, potentially very racist, most certainly dangerously psychopathic, and willing to see the GOP turned into a regional party, putting, as you do, your Puristy True Believership above the kind of sober realism and pragmatism that would, with care and planning, allow us to defeat Obama with Mitt Romney in 2012.
And thus you must be shunned.
Which is why I’m somewhat amazed that such a chorus of voices on the right is nowadays finding it quite plausible — and probable — that the Obama Administration really is a New Left front bent on fundamental transformation and a deconstruction of the Constitution.
Because not so long ago talk like that could keep you from being linked by the serious opinion leaders, and your invites to conservative confabs would all but dry up! Which is still the case today, but at least you still have your integrity.
And that’s nothing to sneeze at.
(h/t Mark Levin)
“Conservative Hispanic Groups Targeted In IRS Scandal”
The Internal Revenue Service scandal involving the apparently unjustified targeting of Tea Party and other conservative groups has also hit home with the Hispanic community.
George Rodriguez, former president of the San Antonio Tea Party, said that when the organization applied for non-profit status, leaders were intimidated by IRS workers with excessive paperwork and meddling questions.
“They asked us all sorts of things that were out of the norm,” Rodriguez, now head of the conservative South Texas Alliance, told Fox News Latino. “We knew these questions were not the norm and we had our suspicions about them.”
Rodriguez said the group received a questionnaire from the IRS with “well over 50 questions,” including inquiries into who the group met with, where they held their meetings, who was in attendance and what the subject of their internal emails were.
“They should have been worried about the numbers, not who we were meeting with,” he added. “It was flat-out dirty politics.”
The complaint from the San Antonio group is one of many nationwide leveled against the embattled federal agency, in the escalating case that surfaced last week when Lois G. Lerner, director of the IRS’ exempt-organizations division, let slip that low-level IRS staffers had given extra scrutiny to conservative groups with words such as “tea party” or “patriot” in their names.
Republicans have pressed the Obama administration for heads to roll. On Wednesday, Obama asked for and received the resignation of the agency’s acting commissioner, Steve Miller.
The scandal sparked a furor among conservative groups and pundits, forcing U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to announce that the Justice Department would open a criminal investigation into the matter.
Holder followed the announcement by adding Wednesday that the FBI’s criminal investigation could include charges of civil rights violations, false statements and potential violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in some partisan political activities.
“I can assure you and the American people that we will take a dispassionate view of this,” Holder said. “This will not be about parties, this will not be about ideological persuasions. Anybody who has broken the law will be held accountable.”
And by “anybody,” Holder of course means “anybody working within the IRS Determinations Unit who happens to have posted something to YouTube.” Other than that, you’re safe. So stop worrying, Carl Levin, and begin your rigorous investigation dedicated to getting to the bottom of yourself. At which point, John McCain will absolve you of your sins. Because collegiality.
It’s good not being included among the little people, isn’t it?
“IRS official who oversaw unit targeting Tea Party now heads ObamaCare office”
Right wing hips and knees and colons and prostates and heart valve transplants hardest hit.
– Though, on the glass-half-full side, streamlining approval for progressives wishing to have those Rachel Maddow glasses grafted directly to their faces is soon to be a reality.
Yes we can!
(h/t Drudge)
A View to a Kill: “Dems offer gun control bill inspired by latest James Bond movie ‘Skyfall’”
Personally, I believe Republicans should respond by introducing a bill that would require any lawmaker introducing a bill have at least a working knowledge of what it is s/he is hoping to legislate. But then, that’s my idea of a Utopia — and admittedly, it lacks that whole forward feel. The Hill:
A House Democrat inspired by the last James Bond movie has offered legislation to produce handguns with “personalization technology.”
The idea is to produce guns that can only be used by the gun’s owners. Rep. John Tierney (D-Mass.) cited the latest James Bond movie, “Skyfall,” as inspiration for the bill.
“In the most recent James Bond film, Bond escapes death when his handgun, which is equipped with technology that recognizes him as its owner, becomes inoperable when it gets into the wrong hands,” Tierney’s office said in a statement introducing the bill. “This technology, however, isn’t just for the movies — it’s a reality.”
As are shock therapy and frontal lobotomies. And yet Democrat lawmakers keep resisting my urgings to have themselves retrofitted with either of those before they’re allowed to propose banning something. Like, in this instance, transferability, commerce, sharing, test driving, family safety, individual liberty, etc.
In pushing for his ridiculous, liberty-denying bill, Tierney cites cases of children getting hold of weapons and discharging them, resulting in the death of a sibling or a friend. That is, he wishes to legislate against accidents — though for now he seems interested in only those accidents in which firearms are involved. Which is fortunate, because retrofitting pool water or stairs to only work for individual users would probably prove too costly even for Democrats — though of course they could demand that the stair makers or chlorine distributors pick up the tab.
But notice that carefully bracketed out of his argument by way of emotional blackmail are those instances — some very recent and well-publicized — of, eg., a teenager using a parent’s firearm to defend the home and his siblings from home invaders while the parents were away. And then of course, there are those scenarios one can dream up wherein a family being under siege is not, alas, part of Her Majesty’s Secret Service and lacks the training to, for instance, drive cars that transform into submarines or fire surface to air missiles from the tailpipe of their Ford Flex, and so perhaps while fighting back, the registered gun owner is wounded and can’t return fire — and the other spouse, or some other member of the family picking up the pistol, then has the option of maybe throwing it at the attackers. Which, God speed, hard charger!
[...]
Under his bill, guns made in the United States would have to be built with this technology two years after the bill becomes law. Older guns being sold by a business or individual would have to be retrofitted with this technology after three years.The bill says the cost of retrofitting these older guns would be paid out of the Department of Justice’s Asset Forfeiture Fund, where confiscated assets from criminal investigations are placed.Gunmakers who do not comply with these requirements could be held if they don’t meet the new federal standards, which would be developed by the Consumer Protect Safety Commission.Tierney’s bill is supported by the Children’s Defense Fund Action Council, and is co-sponsored by 13 House Democrats, including five other Massachusetts Democrats.
