Thursday on America Live with Megyn Kelly, and we discussed the Obama Justice Department’s extensive subpoena of phone records for AP reporters and the IRS scandal: specifically, President Obama’s non responsive answer to a question about what the White House knew of the IRS’s harassment of conservative organizations, which, I argued, was an implied admission that the White House did know, adding that the scandal reflects the ethos of the IRS under Obama — the agency did it because officials understood they had the green-light.
http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/america-live/index.html#http://video.foxnews.com/v/2387120642001/reaction-to-holders-testimony-on-capitol-hill/?playlist_id=87651
Bestselling author Andrew C. McCarthy’s latest book is Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy (Encounter Books, 2012). It is now available in paperback. See this new YouTube video about the book.
Andy is a senior fellow at National Review Institute and a contributing editor at National Review. His two previous books, The Grand Jihad (2008) and Willful Blindness (2010), are New York Times bestsellers.
Follow him at AndrewCMcCarthy.com, as well as on Twitter @AndrewCMcCarthy and Facebook: Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/348589/big-government-deroy-murdock If Obama’s Rose Parade of scandals gives you a headache, here’s why: This is your brain on Big Government. The deteriorating developments on Benghazi, the IRS, the Justice Department’s Associated Press probe, health secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s Obamacare shakedown, and the “Affordable” Care Act’s unaffordability all offer a vivid, daily tutorial on the costs and […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/348559/print
White House Wordplay Benghazi may not be another Watergate, but the administration has a credibility crisis.
Note to the GOP re Benghazi: Stop calling it Watergate, Iran Contra, bigger than both, etc. First, it might well be, but we don’t know. History will judge. Second, overhyping will only diminish the importance of the scandal if it doesn’t meet presidency-breaking standards. Third, focusing on the political effects simply plays into the hands of Democrats desperately claiming that this is nothing but partisan politics.
Let the facts speak for themselves. They are damning enough. Let Gregory Hicks, the honorable, apolitical second-in-command that night in Libya, movingly and grippingly demolish the president’s Benghazi mantra that “what I have always tried to do is just get all the facts” and “every piece of information that we got, as we got it, we laid it out for the American people.”
On the contrary. Just hours into the Benghazi assault, Hicks reported, by phone to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton herself, on the attack with absolutely no mention of the demonstration or video that was later to become the essence of the Susan Rice talking points that left him “stunned” and “embarrassed.”
But Hicks is then ordered not to meet with an investigative congressional delegation. And when he speaks with them nonetheless, he gets a furious call from Clinton’s top aide for not having a State Department lawyer (and informant) present. His questions about the Rice testimony are met with a stone-cold response, sending the message: Don’t go there. He then finds himself demoted.
Get the facts and get them out? It wasn’t just Hicks. Within 24 hours, the CIA station chief in Libya cabled that it was a terrorist attack and not a spontaneous mob. On Day Two, the acting assistant secretary of state for the Near East wrote an e-mail saying the attack was carried out by an al-Qaeda affiliate, Ansar al-Sharia.
What were the American people fed? Four days and twelve drafts later, a fiction about a demonstration that never was, provoked by a video that no one saw (Hicks: “a non-event in Libya”), about a movie that was never made.
The original CIA draft included four paragraphs on the involvement of al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists and on the dangerous security situation in Benghazi. These paragraphs were stricken after strenuous State Department objections mediated by the White House. All that was left was the fable of the spontaneous demonstration.
http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/historys-jury-is-out-has-gosnell-rocked-our-conscience/
The right to a dead baby. That’s not pretty. That’s not a euphemism. That’s not how we talk about abortion in the United States of America. But that is the reality of abortion in the United States of America.
When a woman walks into an abortion facility, that’s what she expects from the doctor and that’s what the doctor is expected to provide.
That’s what the Kermit Gosnell trial exposed.
Now that he has been convicted of at least some of the deaths of women and babies under his care, history records this as a hinge moment. We cannot pretend to not understand the logic of legal abortion: Human dignity is not inherent; a child is not a human life unless its mother wills it to be. We choose to continue to tolerate this or we make it stop.
Kermit Gosnell provided the service expected of him, in his filthy, torturous practice, as officials looked away at complaints about conditions and crimes within.
In the shadow of his trial, Lila Rose’s Live Action released a series of undercover videos, raising grave questions about just what doctors are doing inside top-of-the-line abortion businesses, too. Dr. LeRoy Carhart tells the actress in her 26th week of pregnancy who approached him to schedule an elective late-term abortion: “I think you’ll be affected for the positive. I think you have — I think you can make very difficult, hard decisions that help shape the life — the rest of your future and [that will] make you work harder for the things, you know, that are important.”
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=4347 One argument made by opponents of a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities is that there is still time for sanctions and/or a diplomatic solution to prevent the Islamic republic from acquiring the bomb. To support such an assertion, politicians and pundits point to the great success that the West has had in setting […]
http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2509/Afghanistans-Benghazi-Grieving-Families-Want-Answers.aspx Grief and politics don’t mix. When raw, aching grief and the dirtiest kind of politics meet, a hot volcano of pain and outrage erupts that is unstoppable. But it is necessary. It is the only way things might ever be clean again. I am thinking of recent casket transfer ceremonies that have taken place […]
http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2013/05/16/the-lying-king/
At a dinner not long ago someone described the wonders of a new product which uploaded your vital signs to the Cloud, a process that was so much more accurate than having to take it yourself and write it down on a piece of paper. It’s a great idea and there are an increasing number of such services which plan to offer that feature such as this, which proclaims “doctors can now establish online CarePods™ to assemble extended care teams, share medical records, collect and analyze real-time clinical information, and coordinate treatment plans with patients, their families and health providers.”
One thing that may give a customer pause, however, are headlines like this: “IRS Official in Charge During Tea Party Targeting Now Runs Health Care Office”.
The Internal Revenue Service official in charge of the tax-exempt organizations at the time when the unit targeted tea party groups now runs the IRS office responsible for the health care legislation.
Sarah Hall Ingram served as commissioner of the office responsible for tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012. But Ingram has since left that part of the IRS and is now the director of the IRS’ Affordable Care Act office, the IRS confirmed to ABC News today.
The American economy increasingly runs on information. That also means that it increasingly runs on trust. Peggy Noonan, writing about the Obama’s IRS scandal says “as always it comes down to trust”. She is right but doesn’t go far enough. The level of trust that Noonan talks about is simply whether the President can be trusted in the ordinary political sense.
Do you trust the president’s answers when he’s pressed on an uncomfortable story? … The president, as usual, acts as if all of this is totally unconnected to him. He’s shocked, it’s unacceptable, he’ll get to the bottom of it. He read about it in the papers, just like you. But he is not unconnected, he is not a bystander. This is his administration. Those are his executive agencies. He runs the IRS and the Justice.
The assertion that Obama knew nothing of his underling’s actions seems almost an obvious lie. But do lies still matter? Kimberly Strassel, writing in the Wall Street Journal asks the same question as Noonan, but with a different slant. The way Strassel puts it is ‘what did the President say’? Can we determine the content of the administration’s policy from what the President says. Or do we have to decrypt it by breaking into a “second channel” where the real signal is sent?
Was the White House involved in the IRS’s targeting of conservatives? No investigation needed to answer that one. Of course it was.
President Obama and Co. are in full deniability mode, noting that the IRS is an “independent” agency and that they knew nothing about its abuse. The media and Congress are sleuthing for some hint that Mr. Obama picked up the phone and sicced the tax dogs on his enemies.
But that’s not how things work in post-Watergate Washington. Mr. Obama didn’t need to pick up the phone. All he needed to do was exactly what he did do, in full view, for three years: Publicly suggest that conservative political groups were engaged in nefarious deeds; publicly call out by name political opponents whom he’d like to see harassed; and publicly have his party pressure the IRS to take action.
Mr. Obama now professes shock and outrage that bureaucrats at the IRS did exactly what the president of the United States said was the right and honorable thing to do. “He put a target on our backs, and he’s now going to blame the people who are shooting at us?” asks Idaho businessman and longtime Republican donor Frank VanderSloot.
Listen to the “dog whistle”, Strassel seems to say, don’t listen to the fancy, eloquent speeches. That’s just for show. The real goodies are inside the wrapper.
Lee Smith raises the exact same question not in regards to the IRS, but in respect to the President’s nuclear containment policy. If you were a foreign president, what should you believe when the President talks? Smith raises the possibility that the Iran policy was doubletalk all along. Smith cites the case of a thinktank which after years of tirelessly assuring the public that Obama would never let Iran get the bomb now argues that we should start thinking about what to do when it does.
On Monday, the Center for New American Security published an 84-page report, called “If All Else Fails: The Challenges of Containing a Nuclear-Armed Iran.” The subject matter is particularly noteworthy given the report’s provenance. CNAS is a think tank close to the Obama administration that, among other things, advised the White House early in its first term on Afghanistan policy. Several of its scholars joined the administration, including CNAS founder Michelle Flournoy who served as undersecretary of defense for policy from 2009-2012; and Colin Kahl, formerly the Obama administration’s deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, who is lead author of this latest CNAS report….
Kahl’s CNAS report asserts that prevention is still the policy. Obama, the paper argues, has “made clear that, on matters of war and peace, ‘I don’t bluff.’ There are good reasons to believe Obama means what he says.”
Sure, Obama believes it, but what if he can’t make his belief a reality? What happens, asks the CNAS paper, if the administration has to move to containment? “This is not because the United States wants to find itself in a situation in which containment becomes necessary,” the report says. “But rather because prevention – up to and including the use of force – could fail, leaving Washington with little choice but to manage and mitigate the consequences of a nuclear-armed Iran.”
http://pjmedia.com/blog/a-tie-of-two-scandals-benghazi-and-the-ap-phone-records/?print=1
A Tie of Two Scandals: Benghazi and the AP Phone Records
Taken together, the multiple scandals simultaneously weighing on the White House show at the very least an administration with little control over its departments as it claims ignorance of each wrongdoing, mismanagement and blunder.
But the AP phone records scandal, while having its own power boost as it infuriates free press advocates on both sides of the aisle, has an irrefutable tie to what many believe is the underlying reason for a Benghazi cover-up.
On April 30, 2012, President Obama’s counterterrorism adviser John Brennan gave a touted address titled “The Ethics and Efficacy of the President’s Counterterrorism Strategy” at the Woodrow Wilson Center in D.C.
The lengthy address, with remarks released early to the press by the White House, hailed the commander in chief as a fearless leader of a crushing effort resulting in the steady decimation of al-Qaeda.
“Al-Qaeda leaders continue to struggle to communicate with subordinates and affiliates. Under intense pressure in the tribal regions of Pakistan, they have fewer places to train and groom the next generation of operatives. They’re struggling to attract new recruits. Morale is low, with intelligence indicating that some members are giving up and returning home, no doubt aware that this is a fight they will never win,” Brennan said.
“In short, al-Qaeda is losing, badly. And bin Laden knew it. In documents we seized, he confessed to ‘disaster after disaster.’ He even urged his leaders to flee the tribal regions, and go to places ‘away from aircraft photography and bombardment.’”
http://pjmedia.com/blog/at-the-brink-dr-john-lott-defines-americas-calamity/?print=1
At The Brink [1], the new book by economist Dr. John Lott (author of More Guns, Less Crime [2] and other books; also, he is a friend of mine), provides a detailed examination of five areas where the Obama administration is about to take us over the edge into, perhaps, the irrevocable collapse of our republic. Unfortunately, Dr. Lott makes it clear that these problems are not just Obama’s doing, but the result of bad policy decisions that have been coming from D.C. for a long time.
The five areas that Dr. Lott examines, in his thorough but readable manner: Obamacare; the stimulus bills that actually destroyed more jobs than they created; how Obama’s gun control policy was politically driven when not actually criminal; the regulatory destruction of business (at least businesses that were not contributing money to the Obama campaign); and the effects of tax policy.
The theme of each chapter was not new to me and I suspect may not be new to many readers of this review, but the depth of information that Dr. Lott marshals is gratifying. For example: I knew that 90% of Americans were happy with their medical care before Obamacare. What was a bit surprising was hearing that even the uninsured were satisfied with their health care. Only 3.9% of uninsured Americans in a 2006 Kaiser Family Foundation survey described themselves as “dissatisfied” or “very dissatisfied” with their medical care. A 2003 ABC News/Washington Post survey taken in 2003 was only a bit worse: 4.9% of the uninsured were “somewhat dissatisfied or very dissatisfied” with their medical care.
Dr. Lott uses statistics for the U.S. and Europe to demonstrate that the U.S. performs better — often much better — than Europe at the factors that should be among the demanding tests of the quality of a medical care system. For example: the percentage of cancer patients who survive for five years. The U.S. — ranked only 37th in medical care by the World Health Organization — performs better or far better on this measure than a number of countries that WHO ranks as having better medical care systems.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324767004578485040214322234.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop Those AP Subpoenas The press corps finally discovers a case of government overreach. The same press corps that has blessed every Obama Administration enforcement action and regulatory intrusion has suddenly concluded that the feds are dangerously overreaching. The reason? The government is now investigating the press. Welcome to the club, but we’d also add […]
