http://www.nationalreview.com/article/349000/toxic-immigration-‘reform’-alex-alexiev Why are Republican luminaries trying to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? Barely into its second term, the Obama administration is reeling from the mounting evidence of its callous disrespect for the rule of law and willingness to lie to the American people, as has been demonstrated in the cases of Benghazi, the […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/348982/no-special-counsel-irs-scandal-andrew-c-mccarthy
It would address the symptoms, not the underlying cancer.
It is the Washington way. Egregious misconduct surfaces, showcasing the militantly officious nature of bloated big-government bureaucracy. But the Beltway and the commentariat cry in unison for a special counsel, ensuring that the symptoms — a few corrupt bureaucrats — will get all the attention while the underlying cancer metastasizes.
In the unfolding IRS scandal, we already know President Obama’s conservative political opponents were targeted for the revenue agency’s version of waterboarding. On cue, prominent Republicans and conservatives are starting to call for a special counsel — clearly under the misimpression that a “special counsel” would mean a prosecutor “independent” of the Obama Justice Department. Here at NRO, my friend Larry Kudlow lends his voice to those advising the GOP that a special counsel is the way to go. With due respect, I think it would be a blunder.
The special counsel is a legal anomaly. More important, pushing for one sends entirely the wrong signals. It indicates that criminal culpability takes precedence over political accountability. Worse, it suggests that the evil here is the malfeasance of a few government officials. To the contrary, the problem is a perversely complex regulatory framework that gives the IRS — which should simply collect taxes based on an easily knowable formula — enormous discretionary power to discriminate and intimidate. That makes the IRS an un-American weapon, particularly when it is controlled by an Alinskyite will-to-power administration.
Sure, we can worry about prosecuting the weapon-wielders at some point. The urgent problem here, though, is the weapon itself. Our energy should be devoted to exposing the scandal in the light of day and shaming Washington into dismantling the IRS — which is actually planned to swell markedly, and grow even more intrusively offensive, under Obamacare.
Let’s start with the law. Special-counsel proponents seem to think “special” means “independent.” Larry, for example, contends that “an independent special counsel can investigate any possible White House connections with senior Treasury officials, connections that could lead to the Oval Office” (emphasis in original) — adding in conclusion that “only an independent special counsel could possibly straighten this mess out.” Under our law, however, special counsels are not independent of the administration in power.
A quarter-century ago, Justice Antonin Scalia presciently argued against the independent counsel in his famous Morrison v. Olson dissent. In our constitutional system, all executive power is reposed in the president. The conduct of criminal investigations is, unquestionably, a purely executive power. Consequently, there cannot be any legitimate federal exercise of prosecutorial authority independent of the executive branch.
“Special” counsels may be special in the sense that they are singularly dedicated to a particular investigation. They may even be exempted from the Justice Department’s ordinary prosecutorial structure (in which each case is investigated by the U.S. attorney’s office in the district with jurisdiction over the offenses alleged to have taken place). But special counsels are not independent of the executive branch. They still answer to the attorney general and, ultimately, the president.
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
The use of the IRS to target conservative groups should be the least surprising development in years. Not only does that sort of thing date back to Clinton and JFK, both of whom unleashed the IRS on their enemies, not to mention Nixon who never managed to pull off the things that JFK grinned, did and got away with, but there was no reason for not to do it.
The two reasons not to sic the IRS on your enemies are decency and the law. Is there anything in Obama’s career, including his treatment of fellow Democrats, to suggest that he cares for either one?
The man in the White House clawed his way to power by stabbing his mentor in the back, leaking the divorce records of his political opponents and throwing out the votes of Democrats in Florida and Michigan to claim the nomination.
And he was just getting started.
In the last election, Obama urged voters to punish our “enemies”. It was a window into the mindset of a man who moans and groans about partisan politics, but talks like Huey Long when he gets in front of the right audience.
But these days the description is fairly apt. Who was the last president that both sides could agree was an okay sort of guy or something less than the devil incarnate? The answer might be George H. W. Bush, who was pilloried for being an out of touch rich guy, but really not all that bad when you think about it. And that means we have to go back two decades to find a president that the other side didn’t think should be put on an ice floe and pushed out to sea.
http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2013/05/20/avant-garde-institutionalized-meet-millie-brown-lady-gagas-favorite-vomit-artist/?print=1
What is it about the word “art”? Pronounce it, and the IQ of susceptible folk is instantly halved. (I’ve seen cases where it is diminished by 87 percent.) Normally sensible people who do not, as a rule, appreciate being being made fools of stand idly by as someone tells them that a video of some charlatan climbing naked up a scaffolding while applying vaseline to sensitive parts of his body is “the most important American artist of his generation.” Instead of throwing something soft and rotting at such mountebanks, they nod solemnly and reach for their wallets. They are only too eager, when a stiffy arrives from the Museum of Modern Art or some similar establishment, to don the soup and fish and buzz round to the super exclusive evening event where scores of beautiful people line up to sip the shampoo and admire a tank full of formaldehyde and a dead tiger shark.
What is it about the word “art” that endows it with this mind-and-character-wrecking property? Why does it induce incontinent gibbering, not to mention mind-boggling extravagance, among normally hard-headed souls? A full answer would take us deep into the pathology of our time. It has something to do with what I’ve called elsewhere the institutionalization of the avant-garde, the contradictory project whereby the tics and outré attitudes of the avant-garde go mainstream. The half-comic, half-contemptible result is that ordinary bourgeois adults find themselves in the embarrassing position of celebrating the juvenile, anti-bourgeois antics of people who detest them.
Our misuse of the word “art” also has something to do with our age’s tendency to look to art for spiritual satisfactions traditionally afforded by religion. “In the absence of a belief in God,” Wallace Stevens observed, “poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.”
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/05/dewey_stalins_propagandist_the_worlds_teacher.html
Joseph Stalin had been General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party for six years in 1928, when John Dewey, “the father of modern education,” toured Russia with a group of educators. Later that year, The New Republic published Dewey’s Impressions of Soviet Russia and the revolutionary world. This polemic stands as a remarkable testament to progressivism’s disdain for mankind, reason, and truth. It is also Dewey’s most honest and concise primer on the principles of his progressive education method. Anyone prepared to defend the idea of government-controlled schooling after reading this work is perhaps beyond reach of rational argument.
Dewey’s general assessment of the Stalinist Russia he claims to have encountered is unabashedly positive, not to say romantic. Here is a very typical example:
But since the clamor of economic emphasis, coming… from both defenders and enemies of the Bolshevik scheme, may have confused others as it certainly confused me, I can hardly do better than record the impression, as overwhelming as it was unexpected, that the outstanding fact in Russia is a revolution, involving the release of human powers on such an unprecedented scale that it is of incalculable significance not only for that country, but for the world. [p. 15]
Note the peculiar effect of combining the most understated, non-judgmental language to describe a murderous dictatorship (“the Bolshevik scheme”) with the most unobjective hyperbole (“overwhelming,” “unprecedented,” “incalculable”) to describe something as abstract and speculative as “the release of human powers” under communism. This passage, and indeed the entire document, written by a sixty-nine year old eminent intellectual, reads like the silly postcard effusions of a ten-year-old girl on her first trip to Disneyland.
Furthermore, notice Dewey’s expression of surprise at the disparity between the Russia he claims to have encountered and the one he supposedly expected to find. Knowing that he is writing for American readers inclined to disapprove of the Soviet dictatorship, Dewey carefully peppers his reminiscences with expressions of shock. The pretense that he never expected to find Russia so wonderfully transformed by communism is this lifelong leftist’s cynical reversal of Socratic irony — his feigned wide-eyed innocence is intended to entrap the unsuspecting reader in naïve acquiescence to irrationalism. The technique is used frequently to punctuate his most outrageous declarations of admiration for Soviet tyranny. Two more examples:
If I learned nothing else, I learned to be immensely suspicious of all generalized views about Russia; even if they accord with the state of affairs in 1922 or 1925, they may have little relevancy to 1928, and perhaps be of only antiquarian meaning by 1933. [22]
I am only too conscious, as I write, how strangely fantastic the idea of hope and creation in connection with Bolshevist Russia must appear to those whose beliefs about it were fixed, not to be changed, some seven or eight years ago. I certainly was not prepared for what I saw; it came as a shock. [40]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obama-breeds-rebellion-among-the-states?f=puball The resistance to Obamacare is writing a new chapter in U.S. history. It may well become the most unpopular law since Prohibition became an Amendment to the Constitution in 1919. By 1933, another Amendment repealed it. Obamacare passed by a straight Democratic party vote on Christmas Eve in 2009. No Republican voted for it […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/hypocrisy-as-policy Rarely in the history of this republic has hypocrisy been a public policy position. As Rochfoucaud noted hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays virtue. But suppose virtue has nothing to do with it. Suppose hypocrisy becomes a way to deceive and deflect criticism. Two recent examples prove this point. Recently President Obama argued that […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/left-wing-tyranny-heres-what-it-looks-like?f=puball It’s chilling. As the curtain lifts, a little here, a little there, we see the tyrannical left cementing itself in big government – and it gives me shivers. The most leftist administration in American history has been using the Internal Revenue Service to harass conservatives. It’s been lying about radical Muslim terrorism, and spying […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/un-pressures-germany-to-bow-to-hate-speech-hysteria?f=puball A recent decision by the United Nation’s (UN) Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) foreshadows an ominous future for free societies should Muslim entities like the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) achieve their goal of having “Islamophobia” defined internationally as a form of prejudice. Former German central bank board member Thilo Sarrazin […]
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=4393 Tax shekels poorly spent Last week, when thousands of Israelis protested against the 2013-2014 state budget, all they could do was shout out the usual socialist hokum about redistributing the wealth of the rich. In this respect, they are completely clueless. But they are right about one thing: The ever increasing tax burden on […]
