RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324715704578481461934680982.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Even as the politicized tax enforcement scandal expands, the Internal Revenue Service continues to expand its political powers thanks to the Affordable Care Act. A larger government always creates more openings for abuse, as Americans will learn when the IRS starts auditing their health care in addition to their 1040 next year.

Over the last decade or so the tax agency has stretched its portfolio and become an enforcer and decision-maker for government benefits and programs. Three years ago, National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson, who operates within the IRS, presciently noted that ObamaCare is “the most extensive social benefit program the IRS has been asked to implement in recent history.”
This March the IRS Inspector General reiterated that ObamaCare’s 47 major changes to the revenue code “represent the largest set of tax law changes the IRS has had to implement in more than 20 years.” Thus the IRS is playing Thelma to the Health and Human Service Department’s Louise. The tax agency has requested funding for 1,954 full-time equivalent employees for its Affordable Care Act office in 2014.

Instead of going after tax cheats, these bureaucrats will write and enforce tax regulations for parts of the economy in which they have no core competence. For example, do ski instructors or public school teachers count as seasonal workers? How long is a “full time” work week? Is it 40 hours, or 30?

The IRS will also dispense ObamaCare’s insurance subsidies since technically they’re “advanceable” tax credits, i.e., transfer payments made prior to filing a tax return. The IRS will also police the individual mandate-tax to buy health insurance, as well as the business penalties for not offering Washington-approved coverage to employees.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/that-nineties-show/?print=1

Enemies lists, IRS audits of same, cover-ups at high levels of government, an aloof president who has others do his (unspoken?) bidding — after the events of the past week, many have been comparing the Obama administration to another one that ended almost forty years ago. And while many of the comparisons of Barack Obama to Richard Nixon are indeed apt, one doesn’t have to go that far back in history to find an even better parallel.

For those of us politically aware in the 1990s, the Obama administration has come to seem like a bad rerun of the corrupt Clinton era, complete with witness intimidation and character attacks on their political opponents, stonewalling and obfuscating while claiming that their crimes are being “politicized,” false claims of “exoneration” by official reports, and, yes, even IRS audits of their political enemies. All with a sycophantic media complicit, and even incestuous and inbred [1], with the White House.

For example, several days ago, when the Benghazi scandal started to climb out of the grave to which the administration and its enablers in the press thought they had consigned it last fall, the first response from the president’s spokesman was that it was something that happened a long time ago [2], seemingly back in the Cambrian era of late 2012. As opposed, of course, to the Bush administration, which apparently remains evergreen four and a half years after its departure, at least when it comes to assigning blame for otherwise unexplainable and “unexpected [3]” mishappenings during this one. Of course, as PJ Media’s Ed Driscoll points out, Jay Carney’s own corruption is not exactly new-fallen snow [4].

This was a standard tactic of the Clinton administration and its defenders, in every scandal from Whitewater [5] and Castle Grande [6], to the illegal campaign donations from James Riady (who, in another case of what was old is new again, has somehow recently turned up in the new series as well [7]). And then there was John Huang [8] and the Chinese donations [9] (and others too numerous to recount in this brief piece), to L’Affaire Grand — the Lewinsky scandal.

In each and every case, the tactic would be to prevaricate, stonewall, and withhold requested documents for weeks, months or years. Then, when some evidence managed to evade the combined media/administration cover-up and come to light (such as Hillary Clinton’s law-firm billing records [10]), it would suddenly become “old news.”

We’re seeing a repeat of other tactics as well.

In the nineties, whenever they were withholding documents, they would say “we’ve released thousands of documents,” not mentioning that they didn’t include all requested, or that they had been redacted of all useful information. We see exactly the same thing now. In the Fast and Furious Mexican gun-walking non-scandal, Attorney General Eric Holder (a notable cast member from the previous series, in which he played a corrupt Justice Department official who approved pardons of a man who had paid off Bill Clinton) said that they had released thousands of documents, many of them with pages entirely blacked out [11]. Many more thousands remained unreleased, for which he was found in contempt of Congress. And just this past Sunday, Senator Jack Reed, running interference for a Democrat administration, said that [12] “Congress has already had 11 hearings on the topic, over 25,000 pieces of documentation have been provided to the Congress.” But there remains much that we don’t know.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/05/saluting_pamela_geller_a_champion_of_liberty.html Tragically, during these times of great peril, truth is sacrificed by the politically correct, the myopic self-serving in the liberally dominated media, and the ruling class.  Against this backdrop, a women of great courage and integrity labors tirelessly in speaking the truth and in the defense of liberty  Pamela Geller’s work in objectively revealing […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/05/the_end_of_the_obama_illusion.html

President Obama is shattering the illusions of his supporters, and eyes are opening, even among his former media allies. As if waking from a slumber, a newly aggressive White House press corps yesterday raked Jay Carney over the coals over various lies and evasions, prompting Megyn Kelley of Fox News to quip, “What’s happened? Who are these reporters who showed up here?”

They are disillusioned and angry liberals who are starting to grasp that they have been lied to, who realize that a skeptical stance is necessary when examining a narrative offered by team Obama on Benghazi or the IRS scandal.

Even worse, the media have discovered that they are themselves targets of government abuse, just like those Tea Partiers the IRS was picking on. The Associated Press, whose newsroom and reporters’ personal phone line records were secretly subpoenaed, is collectively owned by members of the mainstream media. As the largest newsgathering organization in the country, it stands for media freedom itself in their minds. An attack on it is an attack on them.

Right now, there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance going on in the punditocracy: how could a constitutional law professor turn on the free press? Obama’s just not behaving like the good guy they thought him to be. Awkward questions of character are being raised in their minds.

The love they offered Obama all those years has not been reciprocated. John Yoo observed, “[T]his is how you get treated when you are in a politician’s pocket.” As with many scorned lovers, they are ripe to reframe their understanding of their ex-amour in a more negative light. The illusion of Obama the godlike light-bringer, the man who could bring us together, has dissolved into an uncomfortable, soon to be angry, memory.

And therein lies serious peril for President Obama. Once it becomes accepted that his narratives are false, a Pandora’s Box opens. To a remarkable degree, the biographical narrative he offered to the media when he suddenly appeared on the national scene, and which they accepted and aggressively defended, was built on illusion. Serious questions about Frank Marshall Davis, Bill Ayers, his authorship of Dreams from my Father, and his academic transcripts once were rudely brushed aside as racism and paranoia.

Two polar opposite ways of seeing Barack Obama emerged in his first presidential campaign. The mainstream view saw an inspiring, brilliant high achiever who could bring us together, while among conservatives, as exemplified over the years at American Thinker, a decidedly more negative interpretation of the biographical facts emerged. Just a few of many possible examples include:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/14/army-sexual-assault_n_3275941.html

WASHINGTON — A soldier assigned to coordinate a sexual assault prevention program in Texas is under investigation for “abusive sexual contact” and other alleged misconduct and has been suspended from his duties, the Army announced Tuesday.

Just last week an Air Force officer who headed a sexual assault prevention office was himself arrested on charges of groping a woman in a parking lot.

The Army said a sergeant first class, whose name was not released, is accused of pandering, abusive sexual contact, assault and maltreatment of subordinates. He is being investigated by the Army Criminal Investigation Command. No charges have been filed.

He had been assigned as an equal opportunity adviser and coordinator of a sexual harassment-assault prevention program at the Army’s 3rd Corps headquarters at Fort Hood, Texas, when the allegation arose, the Army said.

“To protect the integrity of the investigative process and the rights of all persons involved, no more information will be released at this time,” an Army statement said.

The back-to-back Army and Air Force cases highlight a problem that is drawing increased scrutiny in Congress and expressions of frustration from top Pentagon leaders. Pentagon press secretary George Little said after Tuesday’s announcement that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is angry and disappointed at “these troubling allegations and the breakdown in discipline and standards they imply.”

http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/novelists-view-world/2013/may/14/snooping-ap-stirs-blind-deaf-and-dumb-reporters/ NEW YORK, May 14, 2013 — Fellow journalists, only yesterday you found out that Holder’s DOJ has been snooping on the Associated Press and collectively you express “outrage.” Dozens of AP reporters and editors, some say up to a hundred, have just learned that their phones had been bugged. Now you are awake. Finally. […]

http://righttruth.typepad.com/right_truth/2013/05/honor-for-dishonor.html HONOR for DISHONOR I perceive Moral Equivalence to be a comparatively new phenomenon – it surely wasn’t around during World War II, when we could distinguish our enemy from ourselves. But in an era where everything is reversed – truths are interchanged with lies, textbooks spew a revised history with fabrications and omissions, people cannot […]

  http://www.JewishWorldReview.com Now we know. Or at least we know more than we did about what happened at Benghazi, and, even more telling, what happened afterward. And there’s doubtless more to come. With each congressional hearing, with each appearance by another whistleblower, the picture becomes more complete. And it’s not pretty. It’s more like that […]

  http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3711/scottish-universities-anti-jewish The greatest problem to tackling anti-Jewish incitement is the denial that there is any such problem. The facts, as we have seen, tell a rather different story. A charity ball organized by the University of St. Andrew’s Jewish Society, guarded by plain-clothes police officers, was held in secret last week after threats were […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3715/germany-islam-christianity Muslims attending the German Islam Conference were apparently offended by the insinuation that Islam could be radical or violent. A major conference on German-Muslim relations has ended in failure after Muslims attending the event refused to acknowledge the government’s concerns about the threats to security posed by radical Islam. German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich […]