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And never mind the fact that no one has really been punished for the overt political targeting of conservatives, including Tea Party and Christian groups.
Representative Cummings is the poster child for what Congress has single digit approval ratings among the American public.
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Hugh Hewitt: Mark, I’d like to begin with a simple request. Please don’t call me at home, because if anybody’s being snooped, I’m sure you are.
Mark Steyn: Yeah, in the days before all this stuff broke, I had, I suddenly became terribly paranoid. I started thinking I heard clicks on the line. And my assistant sent me an email which mysteriously took 13 hours to arrive, and I though oh, yes, that’s gone via Eric Holder. And I think it actually makes sense for the default position to be that you just assume that somewhere, somehow, this is being recorded by some government operative somewhere or other.
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Hugh Hewitt: You know, I was on Sean Hannity’s television show on Monday night with Joe Trippi, and not even Joe, there are no Democrats who will deny that Eric Holder misled Congress. Nobody believes he was telling the truth, Mark Steyn, and yet he’s still the attorney general.
Mark Steyn: Well, yeah, and this is the chief law officer of the United States. And he’s just gone on national television and said he was obligated to lie to the judge. I had to sign some rinky-dink, little affidavit for something or another the other day, and you know, you have to get it notarized and all the rest of it, and you’re not allowed, when the citizen has to file relatively routine bits of information, you’re not allowed to lie. In fact, the point of the law, you’re not allowed to lie to Eric Holder’s minions. You’re not allowed to lie to a federal agent. Martha Stewart went to jail for lying to an employee of the attorney general of the United States. Yet the Attorney General himself is allowed to lie to a judge. This isn’t small stuff, you know. It’s the point at which a respectable society decays into something darker and far more sinister and unattractive.
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The poll’s results are risky for Obama, whose political approval rate has remained relatively high, despite the lousy economy, because of his relatively high personal ratings.
Sixty-two percent of adults disapprove of his handling of the IRS scandal, said the Gallup poll. Only 32 percent of adults approve of his reaction to the scandal.
If his approval ratings falls, he’ll have even more difficulty accomplishing his top political goals. Those goals include passage of an immigration bill and winning a Democratic majority in the House. Read more from this story HERE.
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Gallup: Majority of Americans Believe Obama has Mishandled IRS Scandal
By Lydia Saad. Nearly six in 10 Americans believe that high-ranking IRS officials in Washington were aware the IRS had a practice of targeting conservative political groups for greater scrutiny in recent years. One-quarter think knowledge of this was mainly limited to the agency’s office in Cincinnati where the mishandled applications for tax-exempt status were processed.
These findings are from a June 1-4 Gallup poll of 1,529 national adults. Gallup asked half of the respondents if they think IRS officials were aware of the partisan targeting, and separately asked the other half of respondents about whether high-ranking Obama administration officials were aware of the practice.
Half of Americans believe top administration officials were in the know, slightly less than the 59% saying this of IRS leadership. However, in both cases relatively few Americans believe knowledge was limited to the branch office in Cincinnati. Read more from this story HERE.
On Thursday’s broadcast of Fox News Channel’s “Your World with Neil Cavuto,” conservative talk show host Mark Levin reacted to recent revelations that the National Security Agency had been collecting the phone records of millions of Verizon customers.
He said that the NSA news in addition to other openings for intrusion by the federal government are the makings of a “police state.”
“I tell you what I make of this — we have the elements of a police state here, and I’m not overstating it,” Levin said. “When you step back and realize the Supreme Court the other day ruled 5-to-4 that law enforcement can take DNA from you even if you’re arrested — by the way, you’re arrested even when you’re stopped for a speeding ticket, and Scalia was right, concerned about a national database. That goes way over the line of our traditions.”
Levin listed the areas where the federal government has the opening to exploit private information through its various agencies under the guises of welfare, law enforcement and national security.
Read more from this story HERE.
Given the number of abuses coming to light, it is clear that there is a culture of corruption that is so deep that it cannot be repaired. It is time to abolish the IRS.
In this video, Representative Trey Gowdy gives a passionate opening statement at the House Oversight Committee Hearing on excessive conference spending by the IRS. He states that the institution has a character problem that isn’t going to be “solved with another webinar” and that it may be time to “start over.”
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In an interview with The Daily Caller, Kit Moncrief, a big-money fundraiser and state chair in Texas for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, recounted an unusual telephone call she received from an IRS agent on her personal cell phone in the spring of last year.
“The first place [the agent] called me was on my cell phone,” Moncrief said, explaining that she believed the only place the agent could have accessed the number was from a Romney list. “The number is listed under my husband’s name. She wouldn’t have been able to be able to have my cell phone number because on the IRS form it shows the office number.
“She would have had to have gotten it from the Romney list. That’s the only way I can figure out how she got the number,” Moncrief said.
Read more from this story HERE.
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The videos, “at the time they were made, were an attempt in a well-intentioned way to use humor,” said Faris Fink, moments after the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee showed excerpts from the video. “It’s embarrassing and I apologize.”
Fink is commissioner of the agency’s small business and self-employed division, which has 24,000 employees across the country and organized the conference.
The IRS spending on conferences was “at best, maliciously self-indulgent,” said Rep. Darrell Issa, the committee chairman.
Issa, a California Republican, said he was less concerned about the total IRS spending on conferences — $49 million from 2010 to 2012 — than about perks such as discounted presidential suites and hotel rooms for local employees at the expense of other employees who could have gotten better training.
Read more from this story HERE.
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“So this afternoon, we welcome the latest phrase in the lexicon of Republican attacks on this president: ‘the IRS.’ Three letters that sound so innocent, but we know what you mean.”
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According to a report issued Friday by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), IRS officials spent more than $49 million on more than 200 conferences for employees between 2010 and 2012.
But last year, when Republican Sen. Tom Coburn asked then-Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner how much IRS had spent on conferences during that exact period, Treasury replied that the federal tax collector had spent only $500,000 on just five conferences.
That’s a fraction of what the IRS spent on just one $4.1 million conference in Anaheim, California, during which attendees were treated to a $17,000 keynote speaker who performance-painted portraits of celebrities. According to the TIGTA report, IRS festivities also included parody videos of “Star Trek” and an employee dance routine. Faris Fink, the commissioner of Small Business and Self-Employed division, who portrayed Spock in the “Star Trek” parody, reportedly stayed at the two-bedroom presidential suite at the Anaheim Hilton.
Read more from this story HERE.
Instead of showing endless loops of IRS employees wasting taxpayer dollars line-dancing — Breaking news: Government employees waste millions of your dollars every single day! — I think it would be more useful for the public to hear a few crucial facts about the exploding scandal at the Internal Revenue Service.
At Tuesday’s congressional hearings on the IRS, witnesses provided shocking details about the agency’s abuse of conservative groups.
The IRS leaked the donor list of The National Organization for Marriage to their political opponents, the pro-gay-marriage Human Rights Campaign. This is not idle speculation: The documents had an internal IRS stamp on them. The list of names was then published on a number of liberal websites and NOW’s donors were harassed.
The IRS demanded that all members of the Coalition for Life of Iowa swear under penalty of perjury that they wouldn’t pray, picket or protest outside of Planned Parenthood. They were also asked to provide details of their prayer meetings.
Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash. — who was ordered by the D.C. Circuit Court to pay more than $1 million to John Boehner in 2008 for the sleazy maneuver of publishing an illegally taped private conversation — blamed the conservative groups themselves. “Each of your groups was highly political,” he lectured them, noting that they wouldn’t have been asked any questions if they hadn’t requested tax-exempt status.
Read more from this story HERE.