There’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):
The IRS scandal is bad, and it’s nationwide, despite attempts to limit it to the Cincinnati office.
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.
How Media Matters, the Praetorian Guard of the Democratic Party Media Complex, stays tax exempt through a shell game. Both 501(c)3 and 501(c)4 versions are far more obviously creatures of the Democratic Party than the NRA is for Republicans.
For a shocking change of pace, the Friday LinkSwarm will be on Friday:
“How can we ‘gun people’ honestly be expected to come to the table with anti-gunners when anti-gunners are willfully stupid about guns, and openly hate, despise and ridicule those of us who own them?” Read the whole thing.
The lovely qualities of Jihadi Facebook pages: “The further I crawled down the extremist rabbit hole and the more caved-in skulls and headless corpses I saw.”
“The Euro cannot be destroyed by any craft that we here possess. It was made in the fires of Frankfurt. Only there can it be unmade.” What does it say when Sauron wants the ring, er, Euro destroyed as well? Though once again: Austerity hasn’t failed in Europe, it hasn’t been tried.
“It was one thing to do amnesty during the white hot Reagan economy of the mid to late 80s. It’s quite another to do it in the midst of the Obama depression.”
London mayor Boris Johnson thinks it would be a good thing for democracy if the UK were to just walk away from the EU.
Travis County Democratic District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg is out of the clink after serving half a 45 day sentence for DWI. A jury will evidently determine “whether her drunken driving was habitual or whether the recent arrest was the result of a one-time event.” Because lots of people without alcohol problems suddenly decide “Hey, I’m going to go cruising around town with an open bottle of vodka and a blood alcohol level of .239! That sounds like a great idea!” I might believe that…if Lehmberg was 21.
Hat tip: Dwight, who brings us news that Lehmberg “won’t be seeking reelection.” Well, duh. People who have been removed from office don’t run for reelection…
“Clearly, some observers fear ordinary Americans more than they do terrorists; they fret more over how dangerously unintelligent and hateful Yanks will respond to bombings than they do over the bombings themselves. But where is this Islamophobic mob? Where are these marauding Muslim-haters undergoing a post-Boston freakout? They are a figment of liberal observers’ imaginations.”
Finally catching up on work Andrew Breitbart and Lee Stranahan were doing three years ago, The New York Times finally discovered that there was massive fraud in the Pigford “black farmer settlement, namely hundred of millions of dollars going to people who had never farmed in their life for “discrimination” by the Department of Agriculture.
Walter Russell Mead on the Wreck of the Euro. “Meanwhile everything in Europe gets worse. As we’ve said before, with the exception of communism itself, the euro has been the biggest economic catastrophe to befall the continent (and the world) since the 1930s. Politicians in Europe thought they were living in a post-historical period in which mistakes didn’t really matter all that much. They were horribly wrong, and the wreck of the euro is blighting lives and embittering spirits on a truly staggering scale.” Quibble: $500,000 won’t just buy you “a pretty nice house;” in most of the country, it will buy you mansion.
Denmark rethinks welfare. “Denmark’s long-term outlook is troubling. The population is aging, and in many regions of the country people without jobs now outnumber those with them.”
“If Maureen Dowd’s evisceration manqué of President Obama’s gun control strategy in the New York Times is any indication, Ms. Dowd is in the wrong line of work. She doesn’t understand American politics. She doesn’t know how votes are gained and lost, she doesn’t know what presidents do or understand what powers they have, and above all she doesn’t understand how politicians think.” On the plus side, Dowd did say that Obama “still has not learned how to govern.”
Max Baucus to retire. “Mr. Baucus is the sixth Democrat since the start of the year to opt not to run for re-election in 2014, following Sens. Carl Levin of Michigan, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, Tom Harkin of Iowa, Tim Johnson of South Dakota and Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey.”
Funny what 4+ years of Obama has done for Bush43′s image. “Among registered voters, his approval rating today is equal to President Obama’s, at 47 percent.”
“Kerry possesses neither principle nor expertise, and so the odds of him saying something both daft and morally bankrupt are always high.”
Mother of the Boston bombers: “If they are going to kill him. I don’t care. My oldest son is killed, so I don’t care. I don’t care is my youngest son is going to be killed today. I want the world to hear this. And, I don’t care if I am going to get killed too. And I will say Allahu Akbar!” Media: Just what is she trying to say? I don’t understand! It’s like she’s speaking in code!
Mark Steyn: “As is now traditional in these stories, we’re now being told that the Brothers Tsarnaev are merely the latest card-carrying members of Local 473 of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves.”
Kurt Schlichter: “’Extraordinary’ is the natural condition of Americans.”
Naturally, clueless apologists set up a #FreeJahar tag on Twitter. As Aaron Gardner noted: “If twitter had been around in the time of Jesus there would have been a #FreeBarabbas tag.” And just imagine the reality show potential! “It’s down to two! No one will want to miss the stunning climax of Survivor: Golgatha!”
To me, Free Jahar sounds like a heartwarming, direct-to-DVD Disney film about a boy and his magic genie trying to free an Islamic whale.
Via Michael Totten comes Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s Amazon wish list. Hard to tell from that whether he wanted to become a terrorist, a singer or a Mafia wiseguy…
I’m seeing a report that the Boston Bomber Brothers are members of a Wahabist terrorist cell Problem: That report comes from DEBKA, a site that has a track record only slightly better than Infowars, so take it with a shaker full of salt.
Just in case you weren’t breathlessly watching coverage of being unable to see a suspect hiding under a tarp in a boat that wasn’t on fire you couldn’t see in a trailer behind a house you couldn’t see, the second Boston bombing suspect has been apprehended alive.
A few random interesting bits about the Boston Bombing suspects/events/coverage:
I’ve seen people say “Al Qaeda couldn’t have done this because it’s too small-scale and sloppy.” Too which i would like to point out that: 1.) Al Qaeda has bungled plenty of attacks, and 2.) As the Ft. Hood and UNC attacks showed, there’s no shortage of freelance Jihadis willing to kill Americans.
As for it possibly being “tax protestors” (it being April 15 an all), maybe. Suspected Plano pipeline bomber Anson Chi fit under that description. (Of course, he was also a pro-organic food, pro-WTO, pro-Occupy, anti-GMO type, so he doesn’t fit neatly in any left-right schema.)
Mary Steyn on Margaret Thatcher: “A generation on, the Thatcher era seems more and more like a magnificent but temporary interlude in a great nation’s bizarre, remorseless self-dissolution. She was right and they were wrong, and because of that they will never forgive her.”
The top story today (despite MSM attempts to avoid covering it) is the trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell for murdering babies. “This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women. What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable babies in the third trimester of pregnancy – and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors.” I guess doctors murdering black babies just isn’t a big deal for many white liberal journalists. Hell, Margaret Sanger encouraged it. Just contrast their reluctance to report on it compared to how they would have exploded if a guy walked into a hospital and shot seven infants in the head…
Man in Massachusetts arrested for shooting a bear that was trying to eat him.
America doesn’t need an official eugenics program when it has the Ivy league.
Head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents union calls out Sen. Marco Rubio for supporting amnesty.
