The torrent of Obama scandal information is flooding the news is something to behold. In contrast to the tiny drops of Benghazi information the MSM would begrudgingly dole out last year, every day seems to bring a new outrage about how the Obama Administration is trampling on the rights of American citizens. I wish they would put 1/10th the effort of snooping on innocent Americans into tracking and deporting illegal aliens as required by law.
How the NSA lies with numbers. “We only issued 1,789 requests for warrentless wiretaps last year…that just happened to cover every phone and data provider in America.” Plus that number was just 21 in 2009.
NSA’s Verizon request targeted Americans, not foreigners. “This is [an] indiscriminate dragnet. Say what you will about warrantless wiretapping, at least it was targeted at agents of Al Qaeda. This includes every customer of Verizon Business Services.”
“And when we swear up and down, cross our hearts and hope to die, that the NSA does no domestic spying on Americans, what we actually mean is that there’s an awful lot of it.”
So why does #NSA’s #PRISM use the Dark Side of the Moon logo? “All that you touch, all that you see…”
The eye-on-the-pyramid scheme came from the Great Seal of the United States – it’s on the back of the dollar bill – and is still beloved of conspiracy theorists all over the world. It’s meant to be the all-seeing eye of God, but it’s also commonly associated with freemasonry, the occult and a shadowy New World order presided over by the Illuminati. To deploy it in a logo for a creepy-sounding spy agency simply justifies the paranoia of people who think the world is run by lizard-shaped aliens. David Icke’s next podcast will write itself.
The New York Timessoftens its editorial on Obama within hours of publishing it. Bet they never did that for an editorial critical of Bush…
The NSA scandal has even hit the sports pages: “LeBron James and his friends should be worried right now, and not just because the government is tracking their phone calls.”
The season has switched from not Summer to Summer here in Texas, so here’s a hot, humid LinkSwarm:
In Europe, youth unemployment is climbing to scary, stratospheric heights. So scary I’m going to swipe their chart:
Notice how countries that have kept their deficit spending relatively low (Germany and even the UK, where deficits has at least decreased under Cameron) are doing much better than the PIIGS. Again, Austerity hasn’t failed in Europe, it’s been declared difficult and left untried.
Harry Reid calls his close personal friend and business associate Harvey Whittemore (and his wife) “wonderful people.” Oh, and Whittemore is now also a convicted felon.
Eric Holder: Obama’s sin eater. “The attorney general has done little in his tenure to protect civil liberties or the free press. Rather, Holder has supervised a comprehensive erosion of privacy rights, press freedom and due process. This ignoble legacy was made possible by Democrats who would look at their shoes whenever the Obama administration was accused of constitutional abuses.”
Remember how Jay Carney said that the IRS targeting of conservative groups stopped in May 2012? He lied. (I know. Try to contain your shock.) It’s still going on today.
This administration’s management of the Obama Internal Revenue Service scandal so far consists of a slow-walking, rolling disclosure of facts; equal parts equivocation, amnesia and indignation from IRS witnesses; deer-in-the-headlights non-responses by the White House press secretary; parsed, lawyerly statements from the president himself; and now one of the central key players is taking the Fifth. And all this comes from what the president claimed would be the “most transparent administration ever… if the president is innocent, he will end up needing and wanting a special prosecutor sooner rather than later. If he and his White House already have too much to hide, then they must clam up, cry partisanship and hope their allies on the Hill and in the media have the stamina for the long, hard slog ahead.”
What do you know, those crazy right wing activists were right, when they claimed the IRS was targeting conservative groups all the way back in February 2012. Though like many of the IRS articles I’ve seen lately suggests that the Tea Party was in decline when the scandal broke. Tell that to Dick Luger. Or Ted Cruz.
Goal of the top aides for Presidents Reagan, Bush 41 and Bush 43? Keep him informed. Goal of Obama’s top aides? Keep him out of the loop. Or should I say “Keep him from being indicted”?
Three Fox reporters targeted by DOJ. At this point I think it’s far to ask if Obama flipped through All the President’s Men looking for management tips.
Eurozone shrinks for sixth consecutive quarter and no one knows what to do about it. Well, that’s not true. I know what to do about it: Cut all budgets until they match receipts, reform the welfare state, and abandon the Euro. But I suspect Eurocrats would prefer another six quarters of shrinkage (at a minimum) before they’re willing to contemplate such heresy…
Republican in charge of Hispanic outreach in Florida switches to the Democratic Party. That’s some mighty fine staffing you’ve got going on there, Lou…
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.
So we have a powerful and feared government agency, the IRS, which has admitted to targeting Obama’s political opponents, now being accused of illegally seizing confidential medical records. I’m sure there’s no way the information in those records (which included “included psychological counseling, gynecological counseling, sexual/drug treatment”) could possibly be used against Obama’s political opponents. (You know, like sealed divorce records.)
Funny how often supposedly confidential information just magically appears in the hands of Obama Administration bureaucrats. Like those AP phone records. It just happens, like the waxing of a pestilence.
So what’s next in the hopper of scandal? Or we going to find out the NSA has been monitoring all telephone conversations in America and providing the records directly to the DNC?
The burglary occurred in 1972, the climax came in 1974, but40 years ago this week — May 17, 1973 — the Senate Watergate hearings began exploring the nature of Richard Nixon’s administration. Now the nature of Barack Obama’s administration is being clarified as revelations about IRS targeting of conservative groups merge with myriad Benghazi mendacities.
Snip.
Jay Carney, whose unenviable job is not to explain but to explain away what his employers say, calls the IRS’s behavior “inappropriate.” No, using the salad fork for the entree is inappropriate. Using the Internal Revenue Service for political purposes is a criminal offense.
In fact, the Obama Administration’s use of the IRS to harass political enemies, and the threat to do so, has been long-running and pervasive.
The Boston Herald also breaks out the N Word (Nixon):
President Obama’s second-term campaign slogan was “Forward,” but instead we’ve got cover-ups, congressional investigations and the government persecution of political opponents and reporters.
That sounds like “backward” to me. All the way to, say, 1972.
Who would have guessed that just a few months into his second term, President Obama would be compared to Tricky Dick. And by a liberal Massachusetts Democrat — U.S. Rep. Michael Capuano.
Republicans could not even have scripted this one. The agency most hated by voters, the Internal Revenue Service, admits to going on a Nixonian witch hunt against Tea Party and conservative groups during the re-election campaign.
This is a story even the most partisan Massachusetts liberal cannot defend. It’s so bad that even Ed Markey is calling for heads to roll.
The multiple scandals are so obvious that even the MSM is waking up. Jay Carney has spent six months peeing on reporters’ legs and calling it rain. Reporters have finally started waking up. “Hey, wait a minute! I don’t think rain is usually this warm!”
Then there’s the IRS scandal. Not only was the IRS targeting and auditing Tea Party groups, there were asking for a ridiculous amount of personal information. Like the names of family members and a list of all the members of the news media the group has ever interacted with. Then they released some completed comments to ProPublica before they had been approved, i.e., they weren’t public documents yet.
Senator Rand Paul has launched an old-fashioned filibuster against Obama’s CIA nominee John Brennan to protest the Obama Administration’s refusal to rule out drone strikes against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.
And here’s Cruz getting in on the filibuster action:
This is potentially even a bigger story than it’s being made out to be (and it’s already plenty big). There’s lots of support for Rand and Cruz coming from some unusual quarters. I don’t have time to go into all the ramifications now, but this could be the issue on which finally the vast majority of Americans look at the unchecked growth of federal power under Obama and finally yells “Enough!”
