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In the Daily Beast, Lloyd Green says this president’s agenda will leave behind a strong government and a weak country.
In Barack Obama, America elected a chief executive whose Department of Justice has repeatedly targeted the press, whose Internal Revenue Service has gone gunning for conservatives, and whose government has elevated secrecy into a cardinal virtue. The Obama administration’s data grab is not just about national security, or Edward Snowden. It is also an epilogue befitting a candidate who delivered his 2008 convention acceptance speech in front of a temple façade dedicated to himself, and whose faith in government and the state is at the center of his presidency.
Under the Obama Rules, the unauthorized dissemination of non-classified government information is now “tantamount to aiding the enemies of the United States.” Think Nixonism without the sweaty five o’clock shadow; Cheneyism without the dyspepsia, armed with a jump shot instead of a shotgun.
Forget Obama’s paeans to civil liberties. The Age of Obama is a celebration of ever-growing and ever-more intrusive government, with mandated healthcare, crony capitalism, and First Family daytime and late-night television appearances as the modern iterations of bread and circuses.
On Tuesday, Obama environmental adviser Daniel Schrag announced to the world that “a war on coal is exactly what’s needed,” only hours before the president rolled out his environmental regulatory scheme that would have the EPA issue more regulations, while constraining development of the Keystone XL Pipeline — jobs be damned. Talk about timing! Just a day later, first quarter GDP growth was revised downward to 1.8 percent.
Having previously been rebuffed by Congress over a carbon tax, the President didn’t propose anything to Congress this time. He simply announced what his executive branch would do unilaterally. …
Jennifer Rubin says Putin has slapped down the prez once again.
… Obama has an uncanny knack of simultaneously demonstrating a lack of spine and a lack of tact. In this case, that knack has proved doubly embarrassing. It is in this light that we should evaluate his recent pledge to cut our nuclear arsenal in hopes that Russia will follow suit. It was daft when he said it and it’s more so now that we see vividly how Putin operates.
In the future, it may be good for a president to avoid going on bended knee to the Russian autocrats to bail the United States of a geopolitical loss (as Obama did on Syria), entering into arms agreements the Russians have no intention of abiding by, slashing our armed forces and promising to cut unilaterally our nuclear arsenal. Russian leaders tend to regard such behavior as unserious or downright foolish, which is precisely how Putin now sees Obama.
Peggy Noonan will not let go of the IRS scandal.
‘Documents Show Liberals in I.R.S. Dragnet,” read the New York Times headline. “Dem: ‘Progressive’ Groups Were Also Targeted by IRS,” said U.S. News. The scandal has “evaporated into thin air,” bayed the excitable Andrew Sullivan. A breathlessly exonerative narrative swept the news media this week: that liberal groups had been singled out and, by implication, abused by the IRS, just as conservative groups had been. Therefore, the scandal wasn’t a scandal but a mere bungle—a nonpolitical series of unhelpful but innocent mistakes.
The problem with this story is that liberals were not caught in the IRS dragnet. Progressive groups were not targeted.
The claim that they had been rested mostly on an unclear, undated, highly redacted and not at all dispositive few pages from a “historical” BOLO (“be on the lookout”) list that apparently wasn’t even in use between May 2010 and May 2012, when most of the IRS harassment of conservative groups occurred.
The case isn’t closed, no matter how many people try to slam it shut.
On Wednesday Russell George, the Treasury inspector general whose original audit broke open the scandal, answered Rep. Sander Levin‘s charge that the audit had ignored the targeting of progressives. In a letter released Thursday, Mr. George couldn’t have been clearer: The evidence showed conservative groups were singled out for abuse by the IRS, not liberal groups. While some liberal groups might have wound up on a BOLO list, the IRS did not target them. “We did not find evidence that the criteria you identified, labeled ‘Progressives,’ were used by the IRS to select potential political cases during the 2010 to 2012 timeframe we audited.” One hundred percent of the groups with “Tea Party,” “Patriot” or “9/12″ in their names were given extra scrutiny. “While we have multiple sources of information corroborating the use of Tea Party and other related criteria . . . including employee interviews, e-mails, and other documents, we found no indication in any of these other materials that ‘progressives’ was a term used to refer cases for scrutiny for political campaign intervention.” …
More from AllahPundit at Hot Air.
Righties on Twitter are citing this as proof that, contra desperate liberal claims, the scandal’s not over yet. Isn’t the real significance of this that it makes the scandal worse? Three days ago, the IRS’s new acting director hinted that the agency had been targeting progressives too, a claim supposedly confirmed by the IRS’s latest report to Congress. Lefties naturally took that to be a smoking gun that there was never any political bias. Now here comes IG Russell George to say that, according to his audit, it’s all basically a lie:
‘ “Our audit did not find evidence that the IRS used the ‘progressives’ identifier as selection criteria for potential political cases between May 2010 and May 2012,” George wrote in the letter obtained by The Hill.
The inspector general also stressed that 100 percent of the groups with “Tea Party,” “patriots” and “9/12” in their name were flagged for extra attention. ‘
Rick Manning at Politico posts that timelines of the IRS scandal point to White House culpability.
… This leads a reasonable person to conclude that either the orders from the White House demanding that the targeting be discontinued were never issued, or the orders were ignored by those in charge of the IRS operation in spite of the extensive public scrutiny.
Neither conclusion is good.
One indicates that the White House’s concern was merely about political backlash and not about the activity itself. This wink-and-nod approach to the IRS abuse scandal gives them ownership of it, something that would not be surprising given the public calls for this exact political targeting in 2010 by Sen. Max Baucus (Mont.) and other Democrats.
If no one at the White House demanded that the action stop, in spite of admitted knowledge about the scandal by the White House chief of staff, it shows either a stunning complicity or an equally stunning incompetence.
The other possible, but much less likely scenario, paints a picture of an out-of-control bureaucracy immune from a White House demand that it stop illegal activity and unwilling to bend to public outrage over its actions. …
Tory Aardvark writes on another unintended consequence of the liberal push against oil. It is the story of the 14,000 abandoned wind turbines in the U. S.
There are many hidden truths about the world of wind turbines from the pollution and environmental damage caused in China by manufacturing bird choppers, the blight on people’s lives of noise and the flicker factor and the countless numbers of birds that are killed each year by these blots on the landscape.
The symbol of Green renewable energy, our saviour from the non existent problem of Global Warming, abandoned wind farms are starting to litter the planet as globally governments cut the taxes that consumers pay for the privilege of having a very expensive power source that does not work every day for various reasons like it’s too cold or the wind speed is too high.
The US experience with wind farms has left over 14,000 wind turbines abandoned and slowly decaying, in most instances the turbines are just left as symbols of a dying Climate Religion, nowhere have the Green Environmentalists appeared to clear up their mess or even complain about the abandoned wind farms. …