Yes, the Obama Administration’s Actions Amount to Tyranny

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What the Obama Administration has done with the IRS is nothing short of tyranny.

Let’s begin by stating the obvious. If government were a business, and subject to economic realities and the consequences of its ignoring them, it would have been liquidated long ago — its remaining assets of value would have been reclaimed by its creditors and shareholders (both of which are the American taxpayer), and its market share of consumers (also the American taxpayer, and those they are gracious enough to financially support) would be sought by other, more efficient businesses.

But let’s pretend for a moment that it is a business. And let’s pretend that this business had engaged not only in unethical practices, but illegal practices, completely betraying the trust of its shareholders and customers and and disavowing the very foundational principles upon which its business is predicated.

The IRS, an agency under the control of this government that Obama assures youngsters is no threat to liberty whatsoever, has done exactly that. They have apologized for selectively harassing, excessively scrutinizing, and denying benefits to conservative groups these last years.

Of particular note, the Treasury Department’s inspector general J. Russell George disclosed on Friday that the Obama administration officials were well aware of his auditing the IRS for its political screening policies in June 2012. Convenient as the IRS’s targeting of Democrats’ enemies was, the Obama administration chose not to reveal any of this knowledge to the public in the 2012 election year, yet it now feigns shock and indignation at the prospect that the IRS could have acted irresponsibly and illegally…

Obama is reasonably implicated in this crime, and this crime is nothing short of tyranny.

Read more from this story HERE.

Judge Shafts Joe Miller in FNSB Case

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Photo Credit: KTUUIn yet another dubious move by the Alaska Court System, Judge Stephanie Joannides awarded the news blog Alaska Dispatch an inordinate sum totaling almost 100K in legal fees from the Miller v. FNSB court case. Joe Miller was ordered to pay 85K, this despite the fact that the majority of the fees were billed either before Miller intervened in the case or after they were a relevant party to the case.

The Alaska Dispatch remained party to the case long after the Anchorage Daily News and Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reasonably withdrew, and had agreed not to petition the court for legal fees.

To any remotely objective observer, the Dispatch had no legitimate reason to remain party to the case outside of the source material they may have been able to gain through first-hand observation of the Borough depositions, a raw profit motive, or perhaps prurient interest.

In fact, Dispatch attorneys even admitted that they had no reason to be in the case, given that Mr. Miller had filed no action against them. Yet they still sought fees long after the case was decided in their favor, and from actions they had unilaterally undertaken, dating all the way back to Sept. 2010, weeks before Miller intervened in the case.

How is Miller responsible for expenses accrued by the Dispatch’s lawsuit against the Borough before he chose to intervene? Or for the debts accumulated long after they ceased to be a relevant party to the case?

Following is the breakdown of the fee schedule stated in Mr. Miller’s appeal:

“According to Alaska Dispatch’s counsel, he billed 123.1 hours of attorney’s fees from September 9, 2010 through October 19, 2010, when Mr. Miller intervened in this lawsuit; 34.6 hours from October 20, 2010 through October 26, 2010, when Alaska Dispatch obtained its relief; and 291 hours after October 27, 2010, while the cross-claims and third-party claim between Mr. Miller and FNSB/Whitaker were being litigated.”

Equally troubling is how Judge Joannides was assigned to the case in the first place, and subsequent revelations that she had a financial relationship with a Dispatch employee.

Under normal circumstances a judge would be assigned through a random selection process. However, in the FNSB case, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court intervened and hand-picked Judge Joannides. This is a very rare move, perhaps unprecedented outside of this particular case.

Moreover, Judge Joannides had rented her basement apartment to an Alaska Dispatch employee, but claimed that the fact was irrelevant to the case. This begs the question of whether it was a random coincidence. Does the Judge have further relationships with other folks at the Dispatch?

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Tom is author of the blog ‘It’s a Kwazy Life: Analyzing the Sanity in Politics That Control Our Lives’ and is also a Construction worker in Anchorage Alaska. This story first appeared at his blog HERE.

We Must “Politicize the Hell” out of Benghazi, Obamacare Shakedowns, AP Records Grab and IRS Abuses

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Photo Credit: TownHallBy Kurt Schlichter. Some establishment types are shaking their heads as they warn conservatives that we must not politicize the Administration’s Benghazi bungling, its Obamacare shakedowns, its AP records grab or its IRS abuses.

Like hell we mustn’t. We must. Big time.

The last couple weeks’ revelations of fresh and compelling examples of the kind of duplicity and petty tyranny we conservatives have been screaming about for five years have presented us with what military folks call a “seam.” A “seam” is the border where two different units meet, and it is generally the kind of weak point you want to drive your forces into in order to split your opponent’s front and rout him. These latest scandals have revealed a seam between two elements of the liberal coalition, the liberals who actually believe some of what they say and the cynical leftists who merely crave power.

Let’s split that seam.

But to do so, conservatives must ignore the voices of the fussy and the fainthearted and ruthlessly exploit it. We can and should – and must – politicize the hell out of these shameful imbroglios. Read more from this story HERE.

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AP president rips ‘unconstitutional’ Obama administration investigation

By Jeff Poor. On this weekend’s broadcast of CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Associated Press President and CEO Gary Pruitt ripped the Obama’s administration’s Justice Department for the tactics it used in its investigation into leaks about a foiled terror plot in Yemen and the use of the Stuxnet virus against Iran’s nuclear program.

According to Pruitt, the government investigation overstepped by casting such a broad net under a veil of secrecy.

“Under their own rules, they are required to narrow this request as narrowly as possible so as to not tread upon the First Amendment,” Pruitt said. “And yet they had a broad, sweeping collection, and they did it secretly. Their rules require them to come to us first, but in this case they didn’t, claiming an exception, saying that if they had it would have posed a substantial threat to their investigation. But they have not explained why it would and we can’t understand why it would.” Read more from this story HERE.

The 10 P.M. Phone Call: Clinton and Obama Discussed Benghazi. What Did They Say?

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Photo Credit: National Review What would you be focusing on in the Benghazi investigation?” I spent many years in the investigation biz, so it’s only natural that I’ve been asked that question a lot lately.

I had the good fortune to be trained in Rudy Giuliani’s U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan. Rudy famously made his mark by making law enforcement reflect what common sense knew: Enterprises take their cues from the top. Criminal enterprises are no different: The capos do not carry out the policy of the button-men — it’s the other way around.

So if I were investigating Benghazi, I’d be homing in on that 10 p.m. phone call. That’s the one between President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — the one that’s gotten close to zero attention…

We do not have a recording of this call, and neither Clinton nor the White House has described it beyond noting that it happened. But we do know that, just a few minutes after Obama called Clinton, the Washington press began reporting that the State Department had issued a statement by Clinton regarding the Benghazi attack. In it, she asserted: “Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet. The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Penny Pritzker: Obama’s Worst Insult to His Left-Wing Base

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Photo Credit: breitbart In a crowded field, Chicago billionaire, bundler, sub-prime banker and union buster Penny Pritzker is clearly the worst nominee that President Barack Obama has chosen for his second term cabinet.

Though the position for which she has been nominated, Secretary of Commerce, often goes to a presidential crony or political insider, Pritzker would exceed all her predecessors and peers with her shocking record of cronyism and failure.

Pritzker ran Superior Bank into the ground by dealing in sub-prime mortgages. As Breitbart News noted recently, the bank’s depositors lost $6000, on average, and the taxpayers got fleeced–but the investors got paid out first. Pritzker recently served on the board of the Chicago Public Schools during a period of abject educational failure, and earned a bad reputation with labor unions both there and at her family’s Hyatt hotel chain.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Tax Reform Moment

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Photo Credit: kenteegardinRupert Murdoch took some heat for observing on Twitter, “Growing IRS scandal makes perfect case for flat tax and abolition all deductions. Nothing could be fairer and abuse free.”

Several responses took Murdoch to task because the abusive treatment of certain groups applying for tax-exempt status, based on their politics, doesn’t have any direct relationship with the progressive income tax system, or plans to replace it.

But if I might be a bit more charitable to Murdoch, I think he was trying to make the broader case that a Flat Tax system would greatly reduce the size and power of the IRS. If his suggestion is taken literally, and all deductions are abolished, it follows that no one would be applying for any sort of tax-exempt status at all. One of the complaints raised by the groups targeted in the IRS scandal is that it put them at a competitive disadvantage against liberal groups, which sailed right through the Tax Exempt Organizations unit and secured approval in a matter of weeks – even when they were actually violating tax law at the time, as in the case of the Barack H. Obama Foundation, run by the President’s half-brother. This isn’t just a scandal about those who were given a hard time; it’s also about those who weren’t.

Read more from this story HERE.

This Is No Ordinary Scandal

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Photo Credit: APPolitical abuse of the IRS threatens the basic integrity of our government.

By Peggy Noonan. We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate. The reputation of the Obama White House has, among conservatives, gone from sketchy to sinister, and, among liberals, from unsatisfying to dangerous. No one likes what they’re seeing. The Justice Department assault on the Associated Press and the ugly politicization of the Internal Revenue Service have left the administration’s credibility deeply, probably irretrievably damaged. They don’t look jerky now, they look dirty. The patina of high-mindedness the president enjoyed is gone.

Something big has shifted. The standing of the administration has changed. As always it comes down to trust. Do you trust the president’s answers when he’s pressed on an uncomfortable story? Do you trust his people to be sober and fair-minded as they go about their work? Do you trust the IRS and the Justice Department? You do not.

The president, as usual, acts as if all of this is totally unconnected to him. He’s shocked, it’s unacceptable, he’ll get to the bottom of it. He read about it in the papers, just like you.

But he is not unconnected, he is not a bystander. This is his administration. Those are his executive agencies. He runs the IRS and the Justice Department.

A president sets a mood, a tone. He establishes an atmosphere. If he is arrogant, arrogance spreads. If he is too partisan, too disrespecting of political adversaries, that spreads too. Presidents always undo themselves and then blame it on the third guy in the last row in the sleepy agency across town. Read more from this story HERE.

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President Asterisk: Why the Obama IRS scandal may be worse than “a cancer on the presidency.”

By James Taranto. No one can deny that Barack Obama is a highly skilled politician, at least by the measure of election outcomes. His record is undefeated, save for an ill-advised 2000 primary challenge to an entrenched incumbent congressman. His 2008 presidential victory, after a fraction of a term in the U.S. Senate, was especially dazzling. It disproved those who said that Hillary Clinton was invincible, that a left-wing Democrat couldn’t win, and that America wasn’t ready for a black president.

No one can deny that Lance Armstrong and Mark McGwire were highly skilled athletes. But their accomplishments are forever tainted by their use of banned performance-enhancing drugs. The use of the Internal Revenue Service’s coercive power to suppress dissent against Obama is the political equivalent of steroids. The history books should record Obama’s re-election with an asterisk to indicate that it was achieved with the help of illicit means.

The Weekly Standard notes that NBC’s Lisa Myers “reported this morning that the IRS deliberately chose not to reveal that it had wrongly targeted conservative groups until after the 2012 presidential election”:

The IRS commissioner “has known for at least a year that this was going on,” said Myers, “and that this had happened. And did he share any of that information with the White House? But even more importantly, Congress is going to ask him, why did you mislead us for an entire year? Members of Congress were saying conservatives are being targeted. What’s going on here? The IRS denied it. Then when–after these officials are briefed by the [inspector general] that this is going on, they don’t disclose it. In fact, the commissioner sent a letter to Congress in September on this subject and did not reveal this. Imagine if we–if you can–what would have happened if this fact came out in September 2012, in the middle of a presidential election? The terrain would have looked very different.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Administration Getting Caught in its Own Tangled Web of Deceit – the White House Been Lying Through its Teeth

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Photo Credit: Irish CentralJournalist Bernie Goldberg, a newsman with CBS for 28 years, wrote a book that best describes the Obama administrations treatment by the main stream media. The title, “A Slobbering Love Affair,” describes how the media has fawned over President Obama.

An excerpt from the book jacket best describes it:

“From the day Barack Obama announced his candidacy to the moment he took the oath of office, the mainstream media fawned over him like love-struck school girls. Even worse, this time they went beyond media bias to media activism.”

But this week saw a chink in that journalistic love affair as one scandal after another descended upon the White House. There was no place for the media to run, no place to hide, as facts behind these scandals descended upon them…..They had to start looking into the swamp that was enveloping the White House and they didn’t like what they found.

For eight months, the main stream media pretty much ignored the attack on our Benghazi consulate and basically reported the “facts” about the travesty as conveyed to them by White House press spokesman, Jay Carney and UN Ambassador Susan Rice.

But explosive testimony from eyewitnesses last week in front of Congress, as well as revelations of previously undisclosed emails, show that Carney was brazenly lying through his teeth about material facts relating to the attack. See: Jay Carney Benghazi untruths. It also revealed what Ambassador Susan Rice told the American public was a compete falsehood. See Rice loses credibility

The media got a huge slap in the face with these revelations and started to report on the many unanswered questions still remaining on this unfolding Benghazi scandal.

But to add insult to injury, three other scandals were revealed to the media that cut to their heart.

It was revealed the Justice Dept had been looking at the phone records of many Associated Press reporters and even had seized records from the Congressional cloakroom. This gives the Justice Dept. access to journalist’s source of information inside the Congress and elsewhere and has a chilling effect on the right of a free press. Anyone that was giving the Associated Press inside information on the Obama administrations malfeasance by phone has now been outed.

When Attorney General Holder was asked about this huge violation of the 1st Amendment, he did his usual bob and weave and said “I know nothing of the facts” and he had “recused” himself from the case. Although, he doesn’t recall exactly when he did “recuse” and there is no paper evidence of it. See Holder denies knowledge in AP scandal

At about the same time another bombshell of scandal erupted on the White House steps when it was revealed the IRS had been specifically targeting right leaning organizations and donors, probably one of the worst abuses a government can do to its citizens. Of course when President Obama was asked directly about his knowledge of this scandal his answer was, he learned about it in the news. See Obama answer to IRS abuse in the article in PJ Media.

But facts are starting to add up that the White House knew long ago about this IRS targeting of conservatives, possibly as far back as 2010.

But even more abuse of power by the administration was revealed this week, which should have made headline news, but was suppressed by other emerging scandals. In the House Wednesday the Environmental Protection Agency, was accused of exempting left-leaning political groups and green energy producers from various fees and fines that it routinely assesses to right-learning groups.

According to Congressman Whitfield who chairs the House Energy & Commerce Subcommittee on Energy & Power,: “The EPA has a pattern of conduct in which this administration rewards its friends and punishes its opponents.” See the excellent story on this in The Hill.

There is much more emerging almost on a daily basis that points to an administration that holds itself above the very law it has sworn to uphold. It is also evident that it is used to getting away with it because a systematic lack of journalistic curiosity by the media has allowed them to. A lazy media who found it easier to accept at face value the explanation of the Whitehouse talking points, rather than digging in to fact check.

If they had bothered to pay attention, many of these scandals were already simmering, just waiting to bubble to the surface if a curious reporter had bothered to check.

Perhaps these and other unfolding scandals will finally wake up the main stream press.

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Ed Farnan is the conservative columnist at IrishCentral, where he has been writing on the need for energy independence, strong self defense, secure borders, 2nd amendment, smaller government and many other issues. His articles appear in many publications throughout the USA and world. He has been a guest on Fox News and a regular guest on radio stations in the US and Europe.

President Obama Is Not Doing His Job

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Photo Credit: White House FlickrGovernment is bad for personal freedom. That argument is premised upon the truism that everything government does interferes with freedom because it either prohibits or compels. Everything it owns it has taken from others. Much of what it says is divorced from the truth. President Obama, like President George W. Bush, has argued that his first job is to keep America safe, and if he impairs personal freedom in the process, that is a small price to pay for safety. Many of my colleagues in the media on the left and right have bought this argument, notwithstanding its fallacies.

Until now.

This past week, we learned that the IRS has targeted for additional scrutiny the tax exemption applications of groups with whose messages it disagrees. We also learned that the Department of Justice obtained the personal telephone records of hundreds of reporters and editors employed by the Associated Press without a search warrant issued by a judge. And during this past week we learned that the White House, the Department of State and the CIA all engaged in a conspiracy of disinformation so that the official version of events of what caused the murders of four Americans at our consulate in Benghazi, Libya, would not impair Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012.

The common threads in all of this government secrecy and lying are a general rejection of government’s moral obligation to tell the truth, a disturbing yet brazen willingness to evade and avoid the restrictions the Constitution has deliberately built around government, and a glib admission that the government can do as it pleases so long as it can politically get away with it.

The Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause requires that the government treat all similarly situated entities in a similar manner. The Constitution’s First Amendment prohibits the government from using the speech and expressive activities of persons in America as a basis for the disparate treatment of them.

Read more from this story HERE.

After IRS, Benghazi, Should I Trust Government?

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Photo Credit: AFPBlogger and professor Daniel Drezner tweeted over the weekend: “So, in all, this has been a pretty crappy week for people who dislike conspiracy theories.” Well, yes.

The week started out with President Obama disparaging those who worried about tyranny as conspiracy theorists, and telling college students to reject them:

“Still, you’ll hear voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s the root of all our problems, even as they do their best to gum up the works; or that tyranny always lurks just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave, creative, unique experiment in self-rule is just a sham with which we can’t be trusted.”

The rest of the week consisted of scandal after scandal, suggesting that maybe our government is . . . a sham with which Obama, at least, can’t be trusted.

Generating the most bipartisan outrage were the revelations that IRS agents went after Tea Party groups for political reasons. And — despite repeated denials to Congress — it turns out that senior IRS officials knew as far back as 2011. As the editors of The Washington Post commented:

Read more from this story HERE.