Obama Ousts Acting IRS Head After Agency is Caught Targeting Conservatives (+video)

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Photo Credit: APPresident Obama on Wednesday forced out the acting director of the Internal Revenue Service and pledged to work with Congress as it investigates why the tax agency was inappropriately targeting conservative groups that opposed Obama and other Democrats.

IRS Acting Director Steven Miller was asked to resign less than a week after the public learned that the agency was giving closer scrutiny to conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status and delaying approval of their status change.

“Americans are right to be angry about it — and I’m angry about it,” Obama said during a hastily scheduled briefing in the East Room of the White House. “I’ll do everything in my power to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.”

Miller’s firing and the administration’s decision earlier Wednesday to release scores of emails about the terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya, marked the start of a what promises to be an extensive damage-control campaign by the White House to quell criticisms over a trio of controversies, including the IRS probing of conservative groups, the Justice Department’s spying on journalists and claims that the president misled the nation about the nature of the Sept. 11 Benghazi attacks that left an ambassador and three others dead.

Obama said other changes will be made at the IRS to prevent similar abuses in the future, but said nothing about additional firings.

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Sen. Lee: ‘We are No Longer Citizens but Subjects’

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Photo Credit: APAs all 45 GOP senators united Wednesday in a letter to President Obama demanding cooperation with congressional investigations into the IRS scandal, outspoken conservative Sen. Mike Lee said that the combined IRS and Benghazi affairs and the seizure of Associated Press source files prove the government is abusive and unresponsive.

“When an agency like the IRS can single out Tea Party groups; or the Department of Justice can monitor reporters’ conversations; or HHS regulators can openly extort the regulated; and there are no consequences — we are no longer citizens but subjects,” said Lee, the first Tea Party-backed senator to come to Washington.

And Lee said that the government is bad no matter who is in charge.

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Rand Paul: Obama “Drunk on Power” (+video)

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Photo Credit: YouTubeSenator Rand Paul hits a home run in this interview with Sean Hannity last night. Sen. Paul describes Obama’s presidency as “failing.” He also says that the President is “drunk with power.”

Hannity also asks about Paul’s presidential ambitions and discusses the broadening Internal Revenue Service scandal.

Report: Boehner Trying to Move Gun Control Bill in the House

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House Republicans are not ruling out passing gun legislation this year, according to a key GOP lawmaker.

The collapse of gun control in the Senate last month led many on and off Capitol Hill to believe the issue would not be revived in this Congress.

But House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) told The Hill on Friday that he’s had “a lot of discussions” with Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on guns. Goodlatte suggested the Speaker is more involved in the behind-the-scenes wrangling of how to move a gun bill than the Ohio Republican has let on in public.

“We are trying to improve the system to keep people who are barred under the law from owning firearms, from getting access to them. We don’t think the things that were proposed in the Senate do that. So we have not backed away from trying to figure out how to improve that, but we’ve made no decisions yet about what to do,” Goodlatte explained.

Goodlatte, serving his first year as the head of the Judiciary panel, pointed out that the National Instant Criminal Background Check System needs to be reauthorized before year’s end. The reauthorization could be the vehicle through which the GOP tackles the highly charged issue. Goodlatte, who has an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association (NRA), said earlier this year he wants to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill.

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IRS Approved Obama’s Brother’s “Shady” Charity in Record Time (+video)

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Photo Credit: Vimeo Lois Lerner, the senior IRS official at the center of the decision to target tea party groups for burdensome tax scrutiny, signed paperwork granting tax-exempt status to the Barack H. Obama Foundation, a shady charity headed by the president’s half-brother that operated illegally for years.

According to the organization’s filings, Lerner approved the foundation’s tax status within a month of filing, an unprecedented timeline that stands in stark contrast to conservative organizations that have been waiting for more than three years, in some cases, for approval.

Lerner also appears to have broken with the norms of tax-exemption approval by granting retroactive tax-exempt status to Malik Obama’s organization.

The National Legal and Policy Center filed an official complaint with the IRS in May 2011 asking why the foundation was being allowed to solicit tax-deductible contributions when it had not even applied for an IRS determination. In a New York Post article dated May 8, 2011, an officer of the foundation admitted, “We haven’t been able to find someone with the expertise” to apply for tax-exempt status.

Nevertheless, a month later, the Barack H. Obama Foundation had flown through the grueling application process. Lerner granted the organization a 501(c) determination and even gave it a retroactive tax exemption dating back to December 2008.

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Obama Supporters Suggest Holder May Need to Take a Fall to Correct Course of Presidency

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Photo Credit: Daily CallerBy Jeff Poor. President Barack Obama may need to accept the resignation of Attorney General Eric Holder as part of a plan to “get control” of the three scandals hounding the administration, historian Douglas Brinkley advised Tuesday.

Action is more important than rhetoric in times like these, Brinkley told “Hardball” host Chris Matthews on MSNBC.

“I think immediately he’s got to get control over these three issues,” Brinkley said. “I think he might have to look at accepting a resignation from Eric Holder possibly. I think in Benghazi — it’s drug on too long. Just come clean, talk straight about the talking points, what happened and move on. Look, it’s the cover-up that always gets you in problems, and you just don’t need this. It’s not been a good season for Barack Obama, and I think he has an opportunity to just — I’m sure his poll numbers are going to still stay high. People trust him. But he can’t let his integrity get dented and then do some big things. Don’t just talk about it. If you’re going to close Guantanamo, close it. If you want the Keystone pipeline to happen, then say it’s going to happen. There have been too many trial balloons.” Read more from this story HERE.

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Reid slams Obama admin: ‘I have trouble defending what the Justice Department did’

By Alex Pappas. Very rarely do you hear Harry Reid call out the Obama administration, but the Democratic Senate majority leader had tough words for both the scandal-plagued Department of Justice and the Internal Revenue Service on Tuesday.

“I have trouble defending what the Justice Department did,” Reid told reporters during his weekly press availability off the Senate floor, referencing the revelation that the DOJ had secretly obtained two months worth of telephone records of Associated Press employees in 2012.

“I really believe in the First Amendment,” Reid continued. “I think it’s one of the great things we have as a country. And I don’t know who did it or why it was done. But it’s inexcusable. And there’s no way to justify it.” Read more from this story HERE.

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By Mark Memmott. As his Justice Department faces bipartisan outrage for searching phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors, Attorney Gen. Eric Holder says he is not sure how many times such information has been seized by government investigators in the four years he’s led Justice.

During an interview with NPR’s Carrie Johnson on Tuesday, Holder was asked how often his department has obtained such records of journalists’ work.

“I’m not sure how many of those cases … I have actually signed off on,” Holder said. “I take them very seriously. I know that I have refused to sign a few [and] pushed a few back for modifications.”

On Morning Edition, Carrie added that Holder declined to say whether there will be a review of the Justice Department’s policy on searches of reporters’ records.

Tuesday, NPR and other media organizations joined in a letter sent to Holder by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. In it, the news outlets ask that the Justice Department: — “Immediately return the telephone toll records obtained and destroy all copies, as requested by The Associated Press.” Read more from this story HERE.

Jason Chaffetz: Impeachment Not Off Table

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Photo Credit: APRep. Jason Chaffetz says he’s not taking impeachment off the table when it comes to President Obama’s handling of the attacks in Benghazi.

The Salt Lake Tribune reported Monday that the Utah Republican had called the handling of Benghazi an “impeachable offense,” and that he had vowed to keep searching for answers from the White House.

Asked Tuesday on CNN what he meant by the comments, Chaffetz said it wasn’t what he was hoping for, but that impeachment was in the “realm of possibility.”

“It’s not something I’m seeking, it’s not the endgame, it’s not what we’re playing for,” he said. “I was simply asked if it was within the realm of possibilities, and I’d say ‘yes.’”

Chaffetz said that the version of events that he had heard from witnesses on the ground versus what the White House released were “two totally different things.”

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Backlash Against Common Core

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Photo Credit: James SarmientoCommon Core means government agencies will gather and store all sorts of private information on every schoolchild into a longitudinal database from birth through all levels of schooling, plus giving government the right to share and exchange this nosy information with other government and private agencies, thus negating the federal law that now prohibits that. This type of surveillance and control of individuals is the mark of a totalitarian government.

Common Core reminds us of how Communist China gathered nosy information on all its schoolchildren, stored it in manila folders called dangans and then turned the file over to the kid’s employer when he left school.

The New York Times once published a picture of a giant Chinese warehouse containing hundreds of thousands of these folders. That was in the pre-Internet era when information was stored on paper; now data collection and storage are efficiently managed on computers in a greater invasion of privacy.

Common Core is encrusted with lies. It is not, as advertised, “state” written; it is a national project created in secret without any input from teachers or state legislatures. It is not “internationally benchmarked”; that never happened.

The readings assigned in the CC English standards are 50 percent “informational” texts instead of great American and English literature and classics. The result is that CC standards are very political.

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NAACP’s Julian Bond: It’s OK for IRS to Target ‘Racist’ Tea Party

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Photo Credit: Associated PressJulian Bond, with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said during a Tuesday interview on MSNBC that it’s only right and just that the federal government and the IRS target tea party groups.

Tea party groups are, after all, “overtly racist” and the “Taliban wing of American politics,” Mr. Bond said, Mediaite reported. The IRS ought to look over these groups’ shoulders, he said — at the same time condemning former President Bush, for what he alleged was that administration’s biased push for the IRS to investigate the NAACP.

The NAACP was investigated for improper political activities in 2004 after Mr. Bond made a speech that was highly critical of Mr. Bush, Mediaite reported. The group was later cleared of any wrongdoing. But Mr. Bond hasn’t forgotten, and said his group was “unfairly targeted,” Mediaite said.

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Outrage at Syrian Rebel Shown ‘Eating Soldier’s Heart’

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsThe video, which cannot be independently authenticated, seems to show [Abu Sakkar] cutting out the heart.

“I swear to God we will eat your hearts and your livers, you soldiers of Bashar the dog,” the man says, referring to President Bashar al-Assad as he stands over the soldier’s corpse…

“The desecration and mutilation of a killed person is definitely a war crime,” Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director of Human Rights Watch, told the BBC. “This one particularly disturbing because of the sectarian nature of the language used by Abu Sakkar.”

HRW said those committing war crimes on either side had to know that there was no impunity and that they would be brought to account.

The human rights group said Abu Sakkar had been filmed before, firing rockets into Shia areas of Lebanon and posing with the bodies of guerrillas from the Lebanese Hezbollah movement killed fighting alongside Syrian government forces.

Read more from this story HERE.