Obama Hopes For Extended Crisis Atmosphere

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller President Barack Obama says he wants to “see if we can institutionalize” in Washington the community spirit that sometimes emerges after a terror attack or an industrial explosion.

The president made the comments during a fund-raising trip to New York, shortly after leaving Washington, D.C. in an uproar over an explosion of scandals, including last week’s revelations of politically motivated IRS investigations and the White House’s editing of reports on the lethal terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya.

Shortly after Obama flew north, D.C. was rocked by another political explosion when the Associated Press said the Justice Department obtained two months of phone records from several of its offices, including its office on Capitol Hill.

“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters … [The records] disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know,” said a statement from AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt.

In New York, however, Obama was welcomed by a community of big-dollar donors from the Big Apple’s fashion, culture and banking industries.

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DOJ Siezed Associated Press Phone Records in “Massive and Unprecedented Intrusion”

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Photo Credit: EspartaThe 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 outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of the calls.

In all, the government seized the 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 where 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.

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Revealed: The 55 Questions the IRS Asked One Tea Party Group – Including Demands for Names of All Its Donors and Volunteers

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Photo Credit: FacebookThe Internal Revenue Service wrote to the Richmond Tea Party last year demanding to know the names of all its financial donors and volunteers, as part of a 55-question inquisition into its application for tax-exempt status, MailOnline has learned.

The agency wanted to know ‘the names of the donors, contributors, and grantors’ for every year ‘from inception to the present.’

It also demanded ‘the amounts of each of the donations, contributions, and grants and the dates you received them.’

‘How did you use these donations, contributions, and grants?’ the IRS asked. ‘Provide the details.’

And in addition to the names of board members, officers and employees, the nation’s taxing authorities insisted on knowing the names of everyone who helped the Richmond Tea Party without compensation. ‘Please identify your volunteers,’ the January 9, 2012 letter from the IRS read.

The agency also required the Virginia conservative group to provide copies of sections of its website that only its members can access.

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Sarah Palin Says ‘No’ to Mark Burnett for TV Talk Show

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Photo Credit: NewsmaxFormer Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has been offered a major syndicated TV talk show by reality show producer Mark Burnett but turned down the deal, Newsmax has learned.

One of country’s sought after speakers on the political circuit, Burnett believed he could turn Palin into the next Oprah, offering to produce a daytime TV talk show hosted by the conservative icon herself.

But so far, Palin has said no — though the deal is not completely dead, say insiders.

The sticking points have been over location and money, people familiar with the deal say. Burnett has insisted that Palin do the show from either New York or Los Angeles, which would require her to move for a significant portion of the year from her residence in Alaska where she lives with husband Todd.

Palin has a distaste for cultural elites in the Big Apple and LA, one person familiar with the discussions said.

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Outrage as KISS Player Mouths Off on Muslims

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Photo Credit: smh.comKISS bass player Gene Simmons has caused an uproar among Australia’s Muslim community by launching an attack on Islamic culture while in Melbourne.

The lizard-tongued rock god who is touring Australia with the world’s most enduring glam rock band launched an attack on Muslim extremists during an interview on Melbourne’s 3AW radio – including comments which were labelled inaccurate.

“Extremism believes that it’s okay to strap bombs on to your children and send them to paradise and whatever else and to behead people,” he said yesterday.

The Israeli-born US musician went on to say Islam was a “vile culture” that treated women worse than dogs.

Muslim women had to walk behind their men and were not allowed to be educated or own houses, he said. “Your dog, however, can walk side by side, your dog is allowed to have its own dog house… you can send your dog to school to learn tricks, sit, beg, do all that stuff – none of the women have that advantage.”

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Insurers Predict 100%-400% Obamacare Rate Explosion

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Internal cost estimates from 17 of the nation’s largest insurance companies indicate that health insurance premiums will grow an average of 100 percent under Obamacare, and that some will soar more than 400 percent, crushing the administration’s goal of affordability.

New regulations, policies, taxes, fees and mandates are the reason for the unexpected “rate shock,” according to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which released a report Monday based on internal documents provided by the insurance companies. The 17 companies include Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Kaiser Foundation.

The report found that individuals will face “premium increases of nearly 100 percent on average, with potential highs eclipsing 400 percent. Meanwhile, small businesses can expect average premium increases in the small group market of up to 50 percent, with potential highs over 100 percent.”

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The Grand Old Poseurs

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Last week, Speaker of the House John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell ostentatiously announced their intention to fight implementation of the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). They sent a letter to the President decrying the way IPAB will “impact America’s seniors … in the absence of the democratic process.” Sadly, the exercise was a charade. McConnell and Boehner know perfectly well that Obama has no intention of setting up this controversial rationing board until after 2015.

IPAB, as you will recall, was created by the authors of Obamacare to do the dirty work of cutting Medicare costs. It will be, for all intents and purposes, a death panel composed of 15 unelected apparatchiks whose method of “cost control” will be old-fashioned government rationing. It will simply deny payment for expensive medical procedures without which the lives of many seniors will be forfeit. However, as David Hogberg pointed out last month, the President has made no move to implement this integral component of “reform.”

Why not? Well, IPAB comes into play only if Medicare costs increase at a certain rate above the Consumer Price Index. Perhaps Obama had a presentiment that the program’s costs, which have been out of control for decades, would miraculously stop increasing at their usual rate. As it happens, that is precisely what his new CMS actuary has reported. On April 30, acting actuary Paul Spitalnic advised his boss that “the projected 5-year Medicare per capita growth rate” won’t hit the trigger amount that would require the intervention of IPAB.

This memo was sent 9 days before Boehner and McConnell sent their meaningless missive. They have no doubt been planning for some time to make IPAB an issue in the 2014 midterms, and were caught flat-footed when our wily President and his creatures at HHS contrived to put off implementation until after those crucial elections. In other words, these two Republican “leaders” have once again been outmaneuvered by President Obama and are now attempting to obscure that pathetic reality with empty words and impotent posturing.

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Multiple Agencies Involved with IRS Intimidation

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Photo Credit: APTea party groups’ allegations that the IRS has long been targeting them for their political beliefs were recently confirmed by an apology from the IRS. The scandal gained traction as congressional leaders began efforts to hold the IRS accountable and understand the depths of the federal government’s politically-motivated abuses of power.

Yet given the history of such abuses, the problem may extend further than the IRS, and require a “government-wide” probe across several agencies, as Senate [Minority] Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has suggested.

The issue was initially believed to only involve groups with “Tea Party” or “patriots” in their names being singled out for greater scrutiny by the IRS, but recent admissions reveal that a wide range of conservative and constitution-oriented groups were singled out by the federal government. Most media outlets have focused on 2012 as the year the abuses occurred, but one prominent Tea Party-initiated organization, True the Vote, began to run into alleged federal government abuses in 2010–from a variety of agencies.

True the Vote, a Houston-based nonprofit which focuses on election integrity issues, was formed by Catherine Engelbrecht and her King Street Patriots Tea Party group. True the Vote applied to the IRS for their 501(c3) non-profit status in July 2010, and almost immediately their problems began.

Within two years, multiple federal agencies, along with an EPA-affiliated Texas state agency, began auditing True the Vote and its founders, visiting their group, their businesses, and asking questions of people who knew them. The IRS was not the only governmental agency involved.

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Father Dies After Begging For Life While Cops Struck Him With Batons; Cellphone Videos Seized

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Photo Credit: KERO-TVA California father of four died after being beaten by police outside of a Bakersfield hospital, while witnesses say he begged for his life. A couple witnesses filmed the gruesome scene, but say they were later forced to give their cellphones to authorities and have yet to receive their devices back.

The Bakersfield Californian reported 33-year-old David Sal Silva died early Wednesday morning in the hospital after he was struck an unknown amount of times by nine authorities seeking to subdue him. Silva was considered possibly intoxicated and an autopsy is expected to reveal if he was killed by injuries sustained in the beating or other complications.

Police and county sheriffs were responding to a call regarding a possibly intoxicated man outside Kern Medical Center Tuesday night and say Silva resisted them.

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Monthly Federal Tax Revenues Hit All-Time Record in April; Individual Income Taxes Up 36%

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Photo Credit: APFederal tax revenues hit an all-time non-inflation-adjusted monthly high of approximately $406.7 billion in April, according to newly released data from the U.S. Treasury.

Overall federal tax revenues in April 2013 were up 28 percent from April 2012, and individual-income-tax revenues specifically were up 36 percent.

Because federal income tax returns are due on April 15, April is almost always the peak month for federal tax revenues. (Over the past twelve years, the only year that deviated from that pattern was 2010, when the federal government took in $251 billion in July compared to $245.3 billion in April.)

Prior to this April, nominal federal monthly tax revenues had hit their historic peak in April 2008, when they reached approximately $403.8 billion. The third highest month for federal tax revenues was April 2007, when they hit $383.6 billion, and the fourth highest month was April 2012, when they hit $318.8 billion.

The $406.7 billion in overall tax revenue the Treasury raked in this April was an increase of about 28 percent from the $318.8 billion raked in last April.

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