Been busy, stuff on my plate, fish to fry, insert polite noise here.
So, a few links:
A Tiny Smidgeon of Random Obama Scandal News
May 20th, 2013LinkSwarm for May 17, 2013
May 17th, 2013And here’s another Friday LinkSwarm!
Obama Scandals Midday Update for May 16, 2013
May 16th, 2013There’s so much information about various Obama scandals that I’m hard-pressed to keep up, but here are a few nuggets of savory scandal goodness (or rather, badness):
Under a Democratic administration, the IRS was under pressure from Democratic elected officials to investigate political enemies of the Democratic party. The agency did so. Its commissioner lied to Congress about its doing so. When the inspector general’s report was about to make these abuses public, the agency staged a classic Washington Friday news rollout at a sleepy American Bar Association tax-law conference, hoping to minimize the bad publicity. Lerner lied to the public about the nature, scope, and extent of the IRS intimidation campaign.
Another Day, Another Obama Scandal
May 15th, 2013I’ve been joking on Twitter that Tea Party membership would count against people during their death panel hearings. Now comes word that the IRS illegally seized some 60 million medical records from over 10 million people in California, and suddenly the joke isn’t so funny anymore. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades.)
So we have a powerful and feared government agency, the IRS, which has admitted to targeting Obama’s political opponents, now being accused of illegally seizing confidential medical records. I’m sure there’s no way the information in those records (which included “included psychological counseling, gynecological counseling, sexual/drug treatment”) could possibly be used against Obama’s political opponents. (You know, like sealed divorce records.)
Funny how often supposedly confidential information just magically appears in the hands of Obama Administration bureaucrats. Like those AP phone records. It just happens, like the waxing of a pestilence.
So what’s next in the hopper of scandal? Or we going to find out the NSA has been monitoring all telephone conversations in America and providing the records directly to the DNC?
Stay tuned…
The Obama/Nixon Moment
May 14th, 2013I was about 10 hours ahead of the curve:
The burglary occurred in 1972, the climax came in 1974, but40 years ago this week — May 17, 1973 — the Senate Watergate hearings began exploring the nature of Richard Nixon’s administration. Now the nature of Barack Obama’s administration is being clarified as revelations about IRS targeting of conservative groups merge with myriad Benghazi mendacities.
Snip.
Jay Carney, whose unenviable job is not to explain but to explain away what his employers say, calls the IRS’s behavior “inappropriate.” No, using the salad fork for the entree is inappropriate. Using the Internal Revenue Service for political purposes is a criminal offense.
The IRS was using the information to build an enemies list.
In fact, the Obama Administration’s use of the IRS to harass political enemies, and the threat to do so, has been long-running and pervasive.
The Boston Herald also breaks out the N Word (Nixon):
President Obama’s second-term campaign slogan was “Forward,” but instead we’ve got cover-ups, congressional investigations and the government persecution of political opponents and reporters.
That sounds like “backward” to me. All the way to, say, 1972.
Who would have guessed that just a few months into his second term, President Obama would be compared to Tricky Dick. And by a liberal Massachusetts Democrat — U.S. Rep. Michael Capuano.
Republicans could not even have scripted this one. The agency most hated by voters, the Internal Revenue Service, admits to going on a Nixonian witch hunt against Tea Party and conservative groups during the re-election campaign.
This is a story even the most partisan Massachusetts liberal cannot defend. It’s so bad that even Ed Markey is calling for heads to roll.
The man behind The Pentagon Papers thinks that Obama is worse than Nixon ever was.
The multiple scandals are so obvious that even the MSM is waking up. Jay Carney has spent six months peeing on reporters’ legs and calling it rain. Reporters have finally started waking up. “Hey, wait a minute! I don’t think rain is usually this warm!”
And here’s a nice image from Buzzfeed:
Obama Is Not A Crook!
May 13th, 2013Or so he would have us believe. But the Obama Administration has been acting pretty Nixonian as of late.
First there’s how the White House lied about Benghazi, and how the CIA’s original talking points were altered to support the lie. (Exactly how those edits in talking points evolved can be found here.) And they’re still lying.
Then there’s the IRS scandal. Not only was the IRS targeting and auditing Tea Party groups, there were asking for a ridiculous amount of personal information. Like the names of family members and a list of all the members of the news media the group has ever interacted with. Then they released some completed comments to ProPublica before they had been approved, i.e., they weren’t public documents yet.
And here’s the IRS crew responsible.
Then there’s that whole getting all AP telephone records for two months thing.
Time even breaks out the Kleins in an attempt to poo-poo the very idea of Obama’s resemblance to Tricky Dick.
Indeed, Obama seems to be following the Nixonian blueprint far more effectively than Nixon ever could.
Of course, there is one big difference between Obama and Nixon…
LinkSwarm for May 10, 2013
May 10th, 2013For a shocking change of pace, the Friday LinkSwarm will be on Friday:
Texas vs. California Update for May 9, 2013
May 9th, 2013Time for another Texas vs. California update!
South Carolina CD1 Election Fallout
May 8th, 2013A roundup of interesting commentary on Mark Sanford’s defeat of Elizabeth Colbert-Busch in the SC1 special election:
“We gave it a heck of a fight,” Colbert Busch said in her concession speech. No, you didn’t. You were obliterated by the most beatable Republican in the House. Between campaign and independent spending, you blew upwards of $2 million, and got trounced by a candidate the National Republican Congressional Committee refused to support. You ran a weak, lazy campaign that never had much to say beyond harping on Sanford’s extramarital affair, and reminding voters that your brother is a TV star, while he threw himself furiously into shoe-leather retail politics. Sanford was still holding public events on Election Day, while you were nowhere to be found. You backed away from a crucial debate opportunity, leaving Sanford to own the stage by debating a cardboard cutout of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. It’s hard to imagine how you could have fought less for the seat, short of holding all your campaign events by closed-circuit TV from your brother’s house.
More:
The mythical backlash against opponents of gun control didn’t materialize to help Colbert Busch, which should only come as a surprise to those who take liberal media manipulation seriously. She took labor union money, which wasn’t going to endear her to voters in the state where unions tried to kill a Boeing plant. Between the ObamaCare disaster, the failure of their Sequester Terror efforts to cudgel more taxes out of the American people, and the gathering Benghazi storm, the Democrat Party isn’t looking its best at the moment…I would imagine we’ll be hearing a lot about Nancy Pelosi in tight 2014 races.
What we see here is another refutation of what I’ve called a “beautiful little fairy tale that liberals tell themselves,” that the American public is broadly supportive of their worldview, and they only lose because Republicans manage to Jedi-Mind-Trick the electorate into caring about distractions, silliness, and those irrelevant ‘wedge issues.’…The fairy tale is that Americans, deep down, really agree with liberals on all of these issues and would heartily embrace their agenda if only these side issues, scandals, and manufactured distractions would just get out of the way. But the electorate doesn’t always think liberal ideas are better, and we may argue that they rarely do.
More: “Today you’re hearing a lot of talk along the lines of, ‘Oh, everyone knew this was a really conservative district and that Sanford would probably win.’ Well, you don’t spend more than $2 million ($1.2 million in donations to Colbert Busch, more than $929,000 on independent expenditures against Sanford) for a race you know you can’t win.”
Sandford Beats Colbert-Busch
May 7th, 2013In the South Carolina First Congressional District race. In fact, it wasn’t even particularly close.
Stephen Colbert may be America, but his sister can’t be a U.S. Representative on his coattails.