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.

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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:

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Here’s that Dynamic Scoring You Asked for, Senator Rubio

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Photo Credit: Daily CallerThe Heritage Foundation recently issued a comprehensive report showing that Sen. Marco Rubio’s plan to instantly legalize 11.5 million illegal immigrants would add $6.3 trillion to the nation’s budget deficits over the next 50 years. Heritage assumed there are 11.5 million illegals, but other estimates put the number at 33 million, which would mean adding another $18 trillion to the deficit. To put that in perspective, the largest U.S. budget deficit in history was $1.4 trillion in 2009.

Currently, the average illegal alien gets about $24,721 in taxpayer-funded benefits and pays about $10,334 in taxes. After full legalization, they will be eligible for a whole new panoply of government benefits such as direct welfare payments, Obamacare, Social Security and Medicare. Heritage concludes that the total government benefits to these former illegal aliens will then rise to about $43,900 per household, while the taxes paid by them will increase only modestly to around $16,000.

Rubio says Heritage’s report is all wrong because it fails to use “dynamic scoring.”

The sentence ends there. It’s like when Obama responds to questions about Benghazi by saying it’s a “political circus,” or liberals say their position on abortion is that “it’s a complex issue.” What isn’t political? What isn’t complex? Those aren’t answers; they’re deflections.

How about Rubio explain the hidden rays of sunshine that will appear by applying “dynamic scoring” to his amnesty bill.

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A Brief History of Slimy Dem Snoops and Dumpster Divers

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Photo Credit: Town HallIt’s always the “low-level” peon’s fault, isn’t it? When Democrats get caught red-handed abusing government powers and bullying their political enemies small and large, nobody at the top knows nuttin’. The buck stops … in the janitors closet or something.

Here’s what I know: While they pretend to champion privacy rights, top left-wing operatives have routinely ransacked and plundered through the private documents and personal records of conservative groups, business owners and public figures. Through it all, those on the right standing against government tyranny have refused to stand down.

During the Clinton years, senior IRS official Paul Breslan revealed that the administration’s auditors specifically targeted conservative critics. On the hit list: Judicial Watch, Paula Jones and Gennifer Flowers, the National Rifle Association, The National Review, The American Spectator, Freedom Alliance, National Center for Public Policy Research, Citizens Against Government Waste, Concerned Women for America, and the San Diego Chapter of Christian Coalition.

Steven Miller, one of the Clinton IRS agents who helped conduct those witch hunts in the 1990s, is currently the head of the Obama IRS department that has now admitted it discriminated against tea party groups. Jackboot history repeats itself.

In 1997, far-left Congressman Jim McDermott obtained and leaked an illegally taped phone call involving House GOP leaders to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The New York Times. Far from a low-level underling, McDermott was the top Democrat on the House Ethics Committee at the time. Ohio GOP Rep. John Boehner won a $1 million civil lawsuit against McDermott. McDermott’s leak was condemned by U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Hogan as “willful and knowing misconduct (that) rises to the level of malice in this case.”

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President Obama’s Allies do More Damage in Days Than GOP Did in Four Years

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In a matter of days, the Obama administration has done something that the president’s political opponents have failed to do over four and a half years: inflicted serious damage to President Obama’s public standing.

Obama has throughout his presidency aggressively combated GOP criticism — on issues large and small — mocking the attacks as political theater short on facts.

But with his own administration now embroiled in a flurry of controversies, including IRS mistreatment of conservative groups and the Justice Department’s secret monitoring of journalists’ phones, the president is coming across not as a forceful defender but as a bystander who claims he didn’t know what the people who work for him were doing. That posture, analysts said, will fuel public cynicism toward government and stoke fears of a White House in crisis.

“The Benghazi, IRS and Associated Press stories have a common thread: They deal with how policy is administered,” said Martha Joynt Kumar, a presidential historian who focuses on White House communication. “Management has been a weak point for the president from early in his administration. That is why these stories hit so hard. He has not been ahead of events but rather has had to rely on news organizations to inform him of what is going on in his own administration.”

But administration officials on Wednesday were still trying to deflect blame from the president, despite a battering in the media and on Capitol Hill.

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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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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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Obama’s Missile Defense Giveaway Feeding Impeachment Movement

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As many Restoring Liberty readers will remember, in March of last year Obama was caught on a hot mic promising Putin stooge Dmitry Medvedev that after his “last election,” he would have far more flexibility on missile defense issues. Medvedev obediently responded that he’d “transmit this information to Vladmimir.”

At the time, Charles Hurt, of the Washington Times, observed – tongue in cheek – that this proved Obama was not “Kenyan after all. He’s KGB.” Hurt went on to note – more seriously – that the hot mic event revealed Obama “plotting with the leader of one of our oldest adversaries to thwart the will of American voters and advance the interests of enemies who want to see the world’s last remaining beacon of freedom finally destroyed.”

And what exactly did Obama promise Russia? Obama whispered, “On these issues — but particularly missile defense — this can be solved.”

Fast forward to May 2013. Obama has gone through his “last election.” Apparently, he’s now making good on his 2012 “secret” promise to the Russians. According to the Associated Press, the “head of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency says that the Obama administration has discussed declassifying key data on U.S. missile defense in order to provide it to Russia.”

Why? Purportedly, Obama is “exploring how to ease Russian concerns that the U.S. missile defense shield is aimed at countering Russia’s nuclear arsenal.”

So the plan is to give away critical missile defense data to a nuclear power that is in bed with Iran’s Ahmadinejad as well as other radical US enemies throughout the world.

This is insanity.

The GOP-controlled house should add this to its myriad of reasons to seek Obama’s impeachment.

The Dollar – and the USA – are Toast

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Photo Credit: WNDObama has done it. He has brought America down. It only took him just over four years. The Republicans could have stopped him. They didn’t.

How did the nihilistic left succeed in destroying America? Simple. They learned just a little of the capitalism they hate, and they drove your nation into outright bankruptcy.

And here is what the GOP has to say about it: just about nothing.

The once-mighty United States is now the most indebted nation on Earth. In round numbers, here are just some of the vital statistics as the patient dies:

National debt: $17 trillion, or $50,000 per man, woman and child, or $150,000 per taxpayer. Annual federal deficit: $1 trillion. Medicare/Medicaid/Obama”care”: $1 trillion a year. Social Security: another $1 trillion a year. Defense: two-thirds of a trillion. Unemployment handouts: $2 billion per working day. Debt interest: $1 billion per working day. Federal pensions, ditto.

Now for the big numbers. Your government’s Social Security liability is as big as the national debt: $17 trillion. Its prescription drug liability is $22 trillion. Then there’s the Medicare liability of $86 trillion. Total unfunded liabilities of the U.S. government are $125 trillion.

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IRS Mess

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Photo Credit: APThe Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups is outrageous. Those who did this should be fired immediately. That’s obvious.

It continues a slovenly week for Barack Obama. The President has been very proud of the absence of scandal in his administration, and rightly so. The inability of his opponents to find any significant corruption in the historic $800 billion stimulus package was a real achievement, given the speed of the payout. None of his top aides have been caught up in taking bribes while in office–although their race through the revolving door into lucrative private sector positions is well beyond nauseating.

As in most presidencies, there have been an awful lot of political hacks populating the mid-reaches of this Administration. In the Obama instance, these have shown an anachronistic, pre-Clinton liberal bias when it comes to the rules and regulations governing many of our safety net programs, like social security disability. And now they have violated one of the more sacred rules of our democracy: you do not use the tax code to punish your opponents.

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