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The McWeiners of the World

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Most news accounts treated these as two separate scandals: Anthony Weiner, the disgraced Democratic congressman and would-be mayor of New York, had been exposed again as a digital flasher, sending “selfie” pictures of his privates to women. Bob McDonnell, the Republican governor of Virginia, was found to be taking gifts and loans from a businessman McDonnell had helped…

By coincidence, both men found themselves apologizing for their misdeeds on the same day, July 23. McDonnell’s was cowardly, done via Twitter while he was out of the country; Weiner’s was handled in yet another bizarre news conference. But both were reluctant, their statements less expressions of contrition than naked efforts to make the problems go away. These were the apologies of narcissists…

Their offenses are similarly pointless: Weiner threw away a promising career by exchanging smut with women he claims he never met. McDonnell, once mentioned as a possible presidential candidate, undid his reputation by accepting sums — a $6,500 Rolex, a $15,000 splurge at Bergdorf Goodman — that were trivial compared to those he could have earned after leaving office.

Both men seem to have the condition that afflicts so many officeholders who get into trouble, from Clinton to Foley to Sanford to Spitzer: a sense of invincibility, and a belief that the usual rules don’t apply to them. They take ever bigger risks, as if it is a form of thrill-seeking, or they can no longer gauge risk…

The narcissistic strain is common, and it predates the rise to power. It takes a certain personality to believe that one is meant to lead. This is reinforced once in power by sycophantic staffers. The problem has become worse as congressional redistricting leaves more lawmakers with safe seats, but the phenomenon is not Washington’s alone: McDonnell honed his invincibility in Richmond, and Weiner continued his behavior after resigning his House seat.

Read more from this story HERE.

Dear President Obama, the Loss of Glen Doherty’s Life is Not a Fake Scandal, America Doesn’t Take it Lightly

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Photo Credit: Irish CentralThe President referred to scandals that are plaguing his administration as “fake scandals” in his speech the other day … as if by denigrating them they will lose their gravity and importance.

But many Americans are incensed by the cuffing aside by the President, to what they believe are attacks on the very foundation of what our country stands for.

Using powerful and feared tools of the government to attack political opponents is a gross abuse of power by the executive branch.

As each day rolls by, it is becoming evident the IRS was unleashed on groups and individuals that politically oppose the President. Evidence so far goes right up to the White House’s political appointees having full knowledge of this abuse.

The wiretapping and snooping of email accounts by the Justice Department of members of the press who write unfriendly pieces about the administration, is an astounding abuse of power and the Attorney General still has not been held accountable for this.

There are many other scandals simmering and being dragged out because the administration fights investigators trying to get to the truth…every step of the way.

But what is particularly galling to many Americans, is President Obama’s brushing aside the tragic death and injury of Americans during the attack on our consulate in Benghazi Libya.

No, these deaths and injuries are not just a “fake scandal” and cannot be swept under the rug.

America wants answers as to why Glen Doherty, Tyrone Woods, Sean Smith and Ambassador Stevens were killed that night in Benghazi.

Americans want to know exactly how many Americans were wounded as a result of this attack and simply, what are their names? Even that information is being withheld from the public. Why are you forcing everyone connected with the attack to sign non disclosure agreements?

Glen Doherty’s friends and family loved him and miss him very much and want to know why he heroically gave his life. A new video with him in it was just released to the public by his family… Perhaps this will personalize it for you Mr. President. See the video courtesy of Fox News.

Something smells bad in Benghazi Mr. President…Step up and be a leader, give us the truth, don’t hide behind underlings, executive privilege and the letter of the law. We demand answers and so do the family members of the dead and wounded.

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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.

Darrell Issa Reveals Yet Another Potential Obama Administration Scandal: That’s ‘Against the Law’

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Photo Credit: The BlazeU.S. Department of Energy (DOE) officials ordered subordinates not to talk to congressional investigators about their investigation into illicit hiring practices and related whistleblower retaliation allegations, according to House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Rep. Darell Issa (R-Calif.).

Issa, in a letter obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, revealed that the deputy secretary of energy issued a gag order following the release of a highly critical inspector general report last week.

The Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), a division of the DOE, allegedly violated DOE hiring guidelines in a manner than disadvantaged military veterans, according to the scathing IG report.

The BPA employees who cooperated with the IG’s investigation were fired, suspended or disciplined in other ways, the report found.

Further, Deputy Secretary of Energy Daniel Poneman “verbally instructed Elliot Mainzer, the individual [Poneman] chose to serve as acting administrator of BPA, that no BPA employees were to talk with anyone regarding these allegations, including congressional investigators,” Issa wrote in a July 17 letter.

Read more from this story HERE.

Bombshell Drops in IRS Scandal: Obama’s IRS Chief Counsel Directly Involved (+video)

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesBy Peggy Noonan. The IRS scandal was connected this week not just to the Washington office—that had been established—but to the office of the chief counsel.

That is a bombshell—such a big one that it managed to emerge in spite of an unfocused, frequently off-point congressional hearing in which some members seemed to have accidentally woken up in the middle of a committee room, some seemed unaware of the implications of what their investigators had uncovered, one pretended that the investigation should end if IRS workers couldn’t say the president had personally called and told them to harass his foes, and one seemed to be holding a filibuster on Pakistan.

Still, what landed was a bombshell. And Democrats know it. Which is why they are so desperate to make the investigation go away. They know, as Republicans do, that the chief counsel of the IRS is one of only two Obama political appointees in the entire agency…

Mr. Hull [a retired, 48-year veteran of the IRS] told House investigators that at some point in the winter of 2010-11, Ms. Lerner’s senior adviser, whose name is withheld in the publicly released partial interview transcript, told him the applications would require further review [by the IRS Chief Counsel]…

The IRS chief counsel is named William Wilkins. And again, he is one of only two Obama political appointees in the IRS. Read more from this story HERE.

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IRS Inspector Attacked by Democrats, Claims Liberals’ Treatment of IG is “Unprecedented”

By Fox News. The government watchdog who issued the report that found the IRS was targeting conservative groups was turned into a punching bag by Democrats in the second half of a tense hearing Thursday, leading Inspector General J. Russell George to chide lawmakers for their attacks on his office.

“This is unprecedented,” he said of his treatment before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee at the end of the hearing.

The first half of the hearing was devoted to testimony from IRS officials who claimed higher-ups in Washington, D.C., were involved in applying additional scrutiny to Tea Party and other groups. Read more from this story HERE.

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Rep. Chaffetz Lets Administration Have It Over Misleading Nation on IRS Scandal

“When you have the spokesman for the president of the United States make a definitive statement that it was two rogue agents, and start poking at these people who have no power to do anything about it, that is wrong,” Rep. Chaffetz stated during congressional hearings on the IRS scandal today.

Fox News Says Rep. Issa Will Reveal White House Connection to IRS Scandal at Today’s Hearing (+video)

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FOX News reporter Carl Cameron told Bill O’Reilly tonight that on Thursday House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) has information that will move the IRS scandal up into the White House.

“What he said to me today was make sure to watch tomorrow’s hearing because he’s going to present the evidence to prove it…. That he can get it right up all the way into the White House before it was all revealed.”

Where’s the Shame? Scandals May No Longer End Political Careers

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Photo Credit: Alejandra VillaSex. Drugs. Cheating on a spouse. Those words used to add up to shame. Put them in the same sentence as a politician’s name, and they ended careers.

Not anymore. The latest batch of unlikely back-from-the-swamp hopefuls are Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer. Weiner resigned his New York City congressional seat two years ago after revelations that he’d tweeted a sexually suggestive picture of himself to a woman who was following him on Twitter. Spitzer left the state’s governorship in 2008 after reports surfaced that federal investigators had tagged him as “Client 9,” soliciting high-end prostitutes.

Each now has a decent shot at a big prize, Weiner New York’s Democratic mayoral nomination, Spitzer the city’s comptroller job. Spitzer led his closest rival by 9 percentage points in a Wall Street Journal-NBC 4-Marist poll released Thursday.

They join the growing roster of comebacks, or at least serious attempts, by scandal-tarred politicians:

Mark Sanford was elected to a South Carolina congressional seat in May, after admitting an affair in 2009 that resulted in the then-governor paying a large ethics fine and led state lawmakers to consider impeaching him.

Read about more scandals at this story HERE.

Yet Another Scandal: IRS Publicly Posts Thousands of Social Security Numbers Associated with Political Tax Exempt Groups

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Photo Credit: APThe IRS mistakenly posted the Social Security numbers of tens of thousands of Americans on a government website, the agency confirmed Monday night. One estimate put the figure as high as 100,000 names.

The numbers were posted to an IRS database for tax-exempt political groups known as 527s and first discovered by the group Public.Resource.org.

The California-based group said it learned of the “privacy breach” Tuesday while working on an unrelated audit of an “improperly vetted shipment” of IRS data on DVDs and promptly informed the agency, which shut down the site the next day.

An IRS spokesman told FoxNews.com on Monday the agency was alerted about a “substantial number” of Social Security numbers posted on the site and removed web access to the information “out of an abundance of caution.” The spokesman also said the IRS is now “assessing the situation and exploring available options.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Judicial Watch: Obama Admin Collecting Financial Data From Private Citizens Without Warrants

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Photo Credit: ezola

Photo Credit: ezola

Well, we almost made it through a whole week without a new Obama Regime scandal, but the good folks at Judicial Watch never rest, and they announced today that they’ve obtained records from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) exposing that millions of dollars have been spent by the agency on the warrantless collection and analysis of Americans’ financial transactions.

The full extent of the CFPB personal financial data collection program is revealed in a document obtained by Judicial Watch entitled “INDEFINITE-DELIVERY INDEFINITY-QUANTITY (IDIQ) STATEMENT OF WORK.” According to the IDIQ document’s stated Objective: “The CFPB seeks to acquire and maintain a nationally representative panel of credit information on consumers for use in a wide range of policy research projects… The panel shall be a random sample of consumer credit files obtains from a national database of credit files.”

To accomplish this objective, the CFPB describes the scope of the program accordingly:

The panel shall include 5 million consumers, and joint borrowers, co-signers, and authorized users [emphasis added]. The initial panel shall contain 10 years of historical data on a quarterly basis [emphasis added]…

Read more from this story HERE.

Tea Partyers Rally at Capitol, Blame White House for IRS Mess

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Photo Credit: Andrew Harnik

Photo Credit: Andrew Harnik

Thousands of activists rallied outside the Capitol on Wednesday to protest the IRS targeting of conservative and tea party groups, with many of the event’s speakers laying the blame for the fiasco squarely at the White House.

The “Audit the IRS” rally, organized by the Tea Party Patriots organization in response to the agency’s improper scrutiny of conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status, drew members and leaders of tea party groups across the country, radio personality Glenn Beck and the Senate’s tea party trio: Republicans Rand Paul of Kentucky, Mike Lee of Utah and Ted Cruz of Texas.

“When Richard Nixon tried to use the IRS to target his political enemies, it was wrong,” Mr. Cruz said. “And when the Obama administration does it, it’s still wrong.”

Rep. Tim Huelskamp, Kansas Republican, said the two presidents have become so intertwined in his mind that he thinks of Mr. Obama as “President O’Nixon.”

Ken Hoagland, chairman of Restore America’s Voice PAC, accused former White House counsel Bob Bauer of sending “memo after memo to the Justice Department, to the IRS and other interested parties urging them to go after law-abiding citizens who wanted to end voter fraud [and] exercise their rights to stop an out-of-control government. This abuse of Americans was directed by Washington at the very highest levels of the Obama administration and campaign.”

Read more from this story HERE.

As Alaska Goes, So Goes America?

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Photo Credit: TownHall

Photo Credit: TownHall

Mid-term elections are problematic for the party holding the Presidency; mid-term elections following scandals or highly divisive policy choices are particularly problematic.

The Republican Party experienced disaster in 1974 following Watergate, the granddaddy of all modern political scandals, losing 49 seats in the House and four in the Senate, giving Democrats a filibuster-proof majority in that body. When Reagan won his second term in 1984 (carrying 49 out of 50 states), the GOP held a 53 to 47 majority in the Senate only to give up 8 seats in 1986 and control to the Democrats following the Iran-Contra Affair.

Bill Clinton sold himself as a New Democrat in 1992, but after seeking to implement Hillarycare and raising taxes, voters sent his party to the cleaners in 1994, with the Republicans gaining back control of the House (in a 54 seat swing) and the Senate (9 seat change) for the first time since the 1950s.

The mid-term elections of 2010 followed a strikingly similar path. After the passage of the Stimulus Bill and Obamacare, the Democrats experienced the greatest reversal of party fortunes in House history. The GOP picked up 63 seats and leadership of the House, as well as 6 seats in the Senate, though Democrats retained control of that body.

Both scandal and unpopular policy choices are once again in the mix as 2014 begins to take shape, and the outcomes in a few key states may change the entire balance of power in Washington.

Read more from this story HERE.