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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

‘The Borrowers’: IRS Allows Illegal Immigrants To Steal SSNs for Tax-Filing Purposes By Debra Heine

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen struggled to explain on Tuesday why the IRS has been allowing illegal immigrants to illegally use Social Security numbers that don’t belong to them. Sen. Dan Coats, R-Ind. asked Koskinen to shed light on the practice during a Senate Finance Committee session focused on cybersecurity issues on Tuesday.

Via the Washington Examiner:

“What we learned is that … the IRS continues to process tax returns with false W-2 information and issue refunds as if they were routine tax returns, and say that’s not really our job,” Coats said. “We also learned the IRS ignores notifications from the Social Security Administration that a name does not match a Social Security number, and you use your own system to determine whether a number is valid.”

Koskinen replied, “What happens in these situations is someone is using a Social Security number to get a job, but they’re filing their tax return with their [taxpayer identification number].” What that means, he said, is that “they are undocumented aliens … . They’re paying taxes. It’s in everybody’s interest to have them pay the taxes they owe.”

As long as the information is being used only to fraudulently obtain jobs, Koskinen said, rather than to claim false tax returns, the agency has an interest in helping them. “The question is whether the Social Security number they’re using to get the job has been stolen. It’s not the normal identity theft situation,” he said.

About 464,000 illegally obtained Social Security numbers were targeted by hackers in a February cyber breach of the agency, while information on 330,000 taxpayers was stolen in an unrelated breach last year.

Someone should have asked Koskinen why the IRS has kept this policy secret from taxpayers, and why IRS employees are instructed not to tell taxpayers when undocumented aliens use their social security numbers to earn income. Investigative journalist Bob Segall made those shocking discoveries last October in an exclusive report for Indiana’s WTHR Eyewitness News. He also discovered that the IRS actually encourages illegal immigrants to file taxes with mismatched Social Security numbers that don’t legally belong to them.

The IRS website instructs tax preparers that undocumented workers can and should include on their tax returns any income they’ve earned using a Social Security number — even though the IRS admits non-resident aliens are not legally eligible to receive a Social Security number in the first place!

So what does the IRS do with that information? What action does the agency take when it learns someone else used your Social Security number to get work and earn a paycheck?

“We’re not allowed to say anything. Not a word,” explained an IRS whistleblower.

“You were told to ignore it?” I asked, making sure I heard correctly.

“Yes. Identity theft is a crime. It affects real people in a lot of ways. But we are not supposed to do anything. Just let it go,” she said. “I talk to these people every day who don’t understand exactly what happened to them, and it’s heartbreaking.”

Segall spoke with two IRS whistleblowers who said they were coming forward out of love for their country.

Little-Known Zionist Series by Salvador Dalí Goes On Private Display in New York Lea Speyer

A series of biblical and Zionist-themed paintings by Salvador Dalí has gone on private display in the heart of New York City in an effort to showcase through art the historical connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel, the collection’s owner told The Algemeiner.

Art dealer Hillel Philip, who owns one of 250 sets of prints of Dalí’s little-known “Aliyah, the Rebirth of Israel” series, told The Algemeiner, “You have all of Jewish history, all the dreams of the Jews for 2,000 years, in these paintings.”

The paintings were commissioned by Shorewood Publishers in 1967 for the 20th anniversary of the state of Israel. The set is comprised of 25 mixed-media paintings highlighting important religious, historic and political moments in Jewish history. The series received a special endorsement from Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion.

“The distinguished artist Salvador Dalí has succeeded through the power of his great artistry in embodying in a number of prints the marvel of aliyah, which in a short time fashioned a renewed people, a renewed country and a renewed — as well as renewing — state,” Ben-Gurion wrote in a letter on display with the collection. Shorewood exhibited the original series in a New York museum, but each piece was eventually sold to private collectors. Their locations remain unknown to this day.

Philip told The Algemeiner that a large number of the roughly 300 people — including top art collectors, Jewish leaders and political officials — who came to view “Dalí’s Israel: From Past to Present” expressed their marvel over the artist’s connection to Judaism. “Many people have said to me, ‘I didn’t know Dalí was Jewish.’ I would tell them that no, he wasn’t Jewish and everyone would respond, ‘But I’ve never heard of Dalí doing something like this.’ Everyone just loved it. They are blown away that he did such a thing,” Philip said.

‘Islamophobia’ Is Still Not the Problem: In Kansas, Another Case Study By Andrew C. McCarthy

In March, the Islamic Society of Wichita rescinded an invitation to Monzer Taleb, a longtime sympathizer of Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and a formally designated terrorist organization under American law. Taleb was to speak at a fundraiser, but the Islamic Society canceled his appearance when community members protested and Representative Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.) publicly raised questions about the matter. The Wichita Eagle covered the controversy. In my opinion, the paper’s reporting stressed the allegations of “Islamophobia” posited by Islamist sympathizers in reaction to the protests. The paper also focused on what it described as “a trend by anti-government militias of targeting Muslims.” The impropriety of a prominent Islamic organization’s decision to give a platform to an apologist for a terrorist organization seemed of, at best, secondary importance. Consequently, last Thursday (April 7), I submitted a proposed op-ed to the Wichita Eagle. This weekend, a member of the paper’s editorial board informed me that the paper believed it had adequately covered the matter and therefore had decided to decline my op-ed. I have reproduced it, below.

As a federal prosecutor in 1993, when I led the investigation and trial of a jihadist cell that had bombed the World Trade Center and plotted an even more ambitious attack on New York City landmarks, the first Muslims I encountered were not terrorists. They were anti-terrorists: patriots who embraced America and Western liberty. They helped us infiltrate the cell, thwart the jihadist plots (including the planned attacks in Manhattan), and convict the terrorists.

There was a valuable lesson in this. Radical Islam poses a serious threat to America and the West, very much including a threat against American Muslims, our fellow citizens who reject radical Islam’s authoritarianism and savagery. While terrorists and their atrocities grab the headlines, much of the real battle takes place in Muslim communities. A key to winning that battle and protecting our security involves distinguishing our radical Islamic enemies from our patriotic Muslim allies.

The Muslim Brotherhood and its Palestinian branch, Hamas, which is a terrorist organization and has been formally recognized as such under American law for some 20 years, are on the wrong side of that divide. Representative Mike Pompeo did the people of Kansas — both non-Muslim and Muslim Americans — a great service by calling out the Islamic Society of Wichita (ISW) on its indefensible invitation to Monzer Taleb, a Hamas sympathizer, to speak at a fundraising event.

White versus White America White elites are the main reason Donald Trump’s campaign hasn’t sputtered and failed. By Victor Davis Hanson

Why do the angry white poor and working class support the unlikely populist Donald Trump — a spoiled bully who made and lost fortunes in part by gaming the system, who seems to take gratuitous rudeness and cruelty as a birthright, whose lifestyle is symptomatic of American excess, and who for the last half-century has embraced no ideology other than Trump, Inc.?

Perhaps it’s because Trump is a phantasm. He is not a flesh-and-blood candidate judged as crude or acceptable on the basis of the usual criteria. His attraction rests on about 100 sound bites over the last year that shattered taboos and attacked elite sacred cows, in a manner that no candidate has done in the past — or is likely to do in the future. Trumpism is nihilism. A reckless Trump had no political career or social capital to lose, unless one thinks that The Apprentice discriminates against the outrageous and crass, or that the New York real-estate industry blackballs prevaricators.

His supporters would prefer to lose with Trump than win with a sober and judicious politician such as Jeb Bush or Paul Ryan. If Trump or Hillary is elected as a result of white-middle-class furor or abdication, the Republican establishment pays either way. Trump’s constituents see him as their first and last chance at getting back at their enemies and, more importantly, the enablers of their enemies. Trump is a gladiator, and his supporters are shrieking, thumbs-down spectators. Sheathing his blood-stained blade would empty the stadium and put him back on The Apprentice. Does a Kim Kardashian suddenly stop flashing her boobs on YouTube in worry over what others might think?

Trump is not so much appealing to the ethnic prejudices of the white poor and working class, or playing on their perceived resentments of the Other. It’s more that he, a crass member of the elite (“It takes one to know one”), is resonating with their deep dislike of the hypocrisies of the white elite, both Republican and Democratic. Middle-class whites should be outraged at the cruel and gross manner in which Trump insulted John McCain and Megyn Kelly, but they are not. Perhaps, if asked, they would prefer to have the latter pair’s money and power if the price was an occasional little slapdown from Donald Trump. What they see as outrageous is not Trump’s crude “Get out of here” to Spanish-language newscaster Jorge Ramos, but rather the multimillionaire dual-citizen Ramos predicating his con on a perpetual pool of non–English speakers, many of whom have broken federal immigration law in a way a citizen would not dare break the law on his tax return or DMV application. For an angry Arizonan, ridiculing “low energy” Jeb is not as crude as Jeb’s own crude “act of love” description of illegal immigration. An act of love for exactly whom?

LGBT Toileting: It’s No Longer the Ladies’ Room and the Men’s Room : Janet Levy

PayPal and Apple are incensed that the State of North Carolina restricts public toilet usage to those possessing the actual anatomy corresponding to respective restroom designations. With an estimated .3% of the population classified as “transgender,” according to UCLA LGBT demographer, Gary Gates, you would think that PayPal and Apple would be shooting themselves in the foot by putting political correctness before the protection of women and children from sexual predators. However, in solidarity with the LGBT movement, Facebook and Google, among other businesses and the usual “civil rights” groups, have closed ranks to declare the North Carolina law “out of line with their core values.” Have we really come to the point where mandating male usage of the ladies’ room is a core value?

PayPal CEO, Daniel Schulman, earning his social justice warrior stripes, withdrew plans to open a North Carolina facility that would have brought 400 new jobs to the Charlotte area after learning that the state legislature enacted a law – the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act or HB2 – prohibiting people from using restrooms of the opposite sex. (Yes, that’s “sex,” not “gender.”) PayPal contends that the law “perpetuates discrimination” and “violates the values and principles” of their mission and culture. And you thought PayPal was just in the business of operating an online payment system!

Ironically, in 2011, PayPal had no qualms about opening a global operations center in Malaysia, where homosexual activity is illegal and punished with harsh prison sentences and whippings. Not to be outdone on the hypocrisy score, openly gay Apple CEO, Tim Cook, has taken North Carolina to task for being “anti-gay” but somehow manages to have the moral wherewithal to operate stores in Saudi Arabia, where homosexuals are routinely executed in public.

Contrary to the standard Millennial educational fare of the “diversity of opinion-deprived” campus as well as the twilight zone of Common Core in which “Heather has two mommies” and “Melea has two Dads,” there is a difference (viva la difference!) between “sex” and “gender.”

Bubba Bites Back Former president Bill Clinton was right to stand up to Black Lives Matter, though he’s put his campaigning wife in a tough spot. by Heather Mac Donald

Bill Clinton injected a disruptive element into the Democratic presidential campaign yesterday: truth. The question now is: How will his wife recover from this alien intrusion?

The former president was stumping for Hillary Clinton in Philadelphia when protesters targeted the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act that he had signed into law. The bill lengthened federal sentences for repeat felony offenders and provided federal funding for more state prison construction, among other provisions. Signs bobbing in the audience read: CLINTON CRIME BILL DESTROYED OUR COMMUNITIES and HILLARY IS A MURDERER. A heckler shouted out that Bill Clinton should be charged with crimes against humanity.

At first, Clinton responded by touting the Democratic feel-good elements of the 1994 bill: a ban on assault weapons, funding for after-school programs in inner cities, and money for more cops “so that the police could look like the people they police.” It was then-Senator Joe Biden, Clinton said, who persuaded him to support the tougher sentencing measures in order to get the bill through a Republican Congress. But then, in the first of his inconvenient infusions of truth, Clinton added that it wasn’t just Republican lawmakers who wanted a tougher response to crime—it was also “African-American communities.” They urged him to sign the bill, he said, because their “kids were shot in the street by gangs.” Thirteen-year-olds were planning their funerals, according to Clinton. The result of the bill’s passage? “A 25-year low in crime, a 33-year low in the murder rate—and listen to this,” he said, “because of that and the background-check law, a 46-year low in the deaths of people from gun violence. And who do you think those lives were, that mattered? Whose lives were saved, that mattered?”

The hecklers weren’t placated. As chants continued to disrupt his speech, Clinton broke out in obvious exasperation: “I don’t know how you would characterize the gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids hopped up on crack and sent them out on the street to murder other African-American children,” Clinton said heatedly. “Maybe you thought they were good citizens, [Hillary] didn’t. You are defending the people who killed the people whose lives you say matter! Tell the truth. You are defending the people who caused young people to go out and take guns.”

Clinton also defended the historic 1996 welfare reform bill, currently the subject of a rearguard left-wing assault. If it increased poverty as its critics charge, he asked, “Why then did we have the largest drop in African-American poverty in history?”

Clinton’s equation of today’s virulent anti-cop protests with the enabling of criminals is about as visceral and daring a response to the Black Lives Matter movement as one could imagine. It also happens to be accurate. Data-driven, accountable policing and lengthened sentences for violent criminals have saved thousands of black lives since 1994. And now, as cops back off from proactive policing under the relentless charge that they’re racist for enforcing the law in minority neighborhoods, black lives—including children’s lives—are once again being lost at elevated rates, prompting no outcry or protests from Black Lives Matter. Clinton understands at a gut level the need for vigilant, strong law enforcement. He also knows that the people most hurt by crime are blacks.

Obama’s Ahistorical Scolding About the Supreme Court The Founders deliberately gave the Senate control over judicial nominees. Read the debate from 1787. By Betsy McCaughey and Michael B. Mukasey

President Obama is hitting the road and the airwaves trying to convince the nation that the Senate has a constitutional duty to consider his nominee, Merrick Garland, for the Supreme Court. On Thursday the president said at the University of Chicago that Republicans’ refusal to consider Mr. Garland threatens a “dangerous” politicization of the courts “that erodes the institutional integrity of the judicial branch.”

Not so fast. History and the wording of the Constitution teach otherwise. The framers expected that judicial nominations would be political matters—and even that the Senate sometimes might deliberately ignore a president’s nominee.

That is exactly what the upper chamber did after Associate Justice John McKinley’s death in July 1852. The political climate then was intensely partisan, as it is today, and a presidential election loomed that November. In August, President Millard Fillmore, a Whig, nominated Edward A. Bradford, a highly regarded Louisiana lawyer and a graduate of Harvard Law School, to fill the vacancy.

But the opposition Democrats controlled the Senate and expected to win the presidency in a few months. The New York Daily Tribune acknowledged that Bradford was “deserving and qualified” but predicted that the nomination would fail. The Senate refused even to consider Bradford despite his outstanding qualifications. As expected, Democrat Franklin Pierce won the presidency and made his own nomination the following spring.

That wasn’t the only time lawmakers snubbed a Supreme Court nominee for political reasons. In the 1840s, President John Tyler also faced a hostile Senate. Four of Tyler’s five Supreme Court nominees were blocked, including one—Reuben Walworth—whose nomination the Senate completely ignored. After the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson, a southern Democrat, couldn’t get the Republican-dominated Senate to consider his nominee, Henry Stanbery.

That is how the framers planned it. The wording of the Constitution and the decisions they made in the summer of 1787 show they wanted the Senate to control the confirmation process, free to consider or ignore a nomination. The Constitution directs that the president “shall nominate,” but he may appoint only with the advice and consent of the Senate. There is no direction that the Senate “shall” provide its advice and consent, no corresponding obligation on legislators to act. CONTINUE AT SITE

The ‘Corrosive Culture’ at Veterans Affairs Congress stepped in two years ago, but signs of progress are hard to find. By Kyndra Miller Rotunda

When Congress enacted the Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act of 2014 in the wake of revelations about bureaucratic dysfunction at the Veterans Affairs Department, the plan was to reduce wait times at VA hospitals, give veterans access to outside health care and allow the VA to quickly terminate problem employees.

How is the VA doing? For starters, government statistics show that hospital wait times are 50% longer than two years ago.

Trying to increase access to outside care also isn’t working. That’s no surprise. The law allows veterans to see outside doctors, but only for 60 days. Then it’s back to the VA queue. Congress is considering a bill that would undo time limits on outside care.

What about the law’s third aim, to address the VA’s chronic lack of accountability in the past? The law allows the firing of top-level VA officials with less notice and fewer appellate rights than government employees enjoy. The fired VA worker must appeal within seven days of the discipline; administrative judges must hear and decide the case within 21 days, or the department’s discipline stands; judges cannot mitigate penalties; and decisions are final. But that plan, too, has backfired. Judges instead appear to be more inclined to side with misbehaving VA officials.

Over the past month alone, judges at the Merit Systems Protection Board, which hears appeals by federal employees, sided with three VA officials who challenged their disciplining. The MSPB reinstated all three. In each case the misconduct was severe.

One case involved the VA’s termination of a senior employee, Linda Weiss, for ignoring numerous complaints about an abusive nurse assistant. The judge agreed that the nurse assistant was abusive and the supervisor’s disregard was serious. But the judge ordered the supervisor’s reinstatement; he would have opted for mitigation, the judge said, but that’s not allowed under the 2014 law. CONTINUE AT SITE

BILL CLINTON BACKTRACKS AFTER STANDING UP TO RACIST BULLIES

The Big Dog Backs Down

Steve wrote here and Paul here about Bill Clinton’s standing up to Black Lives Matters bullies who tried to disrupt his speech yesterday. It was classic Big Dog: Clinton effectively put the unschooled demonstrators in their place, and taught them a history lesson. Why were strict criminal penalties, e.g. for crack cocaine, enacted during his administration? Because drugs and crime were ravaging the black community, and African-American leaders properly demanded a crackdown.

Black Lives Matter is an unpopular movement, supported by only a small minority of Americans. It is repellent to far more, especially because of its refusal to admit that all lives matter. Beyond that, disruptive protesters in general are held in ill repute by a large majority of Americans. So Bill Clinton’s putting the protesters in their place was approved of by most.

But not, apparently, by those who counted. Left-wing web sites like Jezebel and Salon criticized him, as did some black leaders. That was all it took. No matter that history and logic are on his side, even the Big Dog can’t get in the way of the Democratic Party’s need to kowtow to one of its key constituents.

So today, Bill more or less apologized. The New York Times reports:

Former President Bill Clinton said Friday that he regretted drowning out the chants of black protesters at a rally in Philadelphia the day before, when he issued an aggressive defense of his administration’s impact on black families. …

“I know those young people yesterday were just trying to get good television,” Mr. Clinton said Friday of the Black Lives Matter protesters who had accused him and Hillary Clinton of supporting policies that devastated black communities. “But that doesn’t mean that I was most effective in answering it.”

Actually, he was very effective in answering the ill-informed demonstrators’ criticisms of his administration, but perhaps not so effective in bowing to the irresistible political winds of the day. By today, he was standing on a narrow ledge, almost apologizing–but not quite:

By Friday, Mr. Clinton said, “I almost want to apologize.”

Homeland Security Boss: Fear of Muslims is Just Like Fear of Communism April 8, 2016 Daniel Greenfield

Is this really the argument he wants to make?

The US domestic security chief on Wednesday compared current anti-Muslim sentiment to the anti-communist “Red Scare” of the 1940s and ’50s, suggesting that divisive statements by Republican presidential candidates are to blame.

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, who is black, noted that his grandfather was forced to testify in front of the House of Representatives in 1949.

“He had to, in the height of the Red Scare, to deny he was a member of the communist party, and went on to give an impassioned statement about how American negroes are patriotic,” Johnson said at a conference in Washington about countering violent extremism.

Those who don’t know history “are bound to repeat it,” Johnson added.

True.