Category: Democrats

Portrait of a Thug: IRS Union Boss

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Colleen M. Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union

By now, you’ve probably seen the news:

Report: Head of IRS Employees Union Met
With President Obama the Day Before
Tea Party Targeting Began

Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union which represents employees of the Internal Revenue Service, met at the White House with President Obama the day before two IRS officials created the “Sensitive Case Report” that targeted Tea Party groups for special scrutiny on their applications for non-profit status.
White House visitors logs show that Kelley visited the White House on March 31, 2010, to meet with Obama, a day before an Inspector General’s report shows that the “Sensitive Case Report” was created, Jeffrey Lord of The American Spectator reported . . .

And you might be surprised (but probably not) to learn that Colleen M. Kelley has never worked a day in the private sector:

[A]n NTEU member since 1974, Kelley was an IRS Revenue Agent for 14 years and served in various NTEU chapter leadership positions, including chapter president of NTEU Chapter 34 in Pittsburgh. She was elected National President in August 1999 and was overwhelmingly re-elected to a fourth four-year term in 2011.
Kelley first joined the IRS upon graduation from Drexel University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting. She also earned a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from the University of Pittsburgh.

You might also be surprised (but probably not) that Colleen M. Kelley and her union enthusiastically support Obama:

The leader of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) today applauded the re-election of President Barack Obama.
“NTEU supported the re-election of President Obama as being in the best interests of our country and of the dedicated men and women of the federal workforce,” said NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley. “NTEU is also pleased that so many of our candidates for Senate seats and our staunchest supporters in the House won their races.”
NTEU’s efforts on behalf of President Obama and key candidates spanned the country. “Our 2012 election plan has been in place since the beginning of the year,” said President Kelley. “Many chapters and members were actively involved educating and organizing various types of activities around the country including candidate nights and volunteering for campaigns.”
NTEU’s efforts focused on battleground states where races for the presidency, Senate and House seats were competitive and where the union has substantial numbers of NTEU members including Virginia, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana.
In the days before the election, NTEU members volunteered for phone-banking and canvassing, with a particular focus on contacting other NTEU members and urging them to vote for candidates who support federal employees and federal employee issues.
“Federal employees heard our message loud and clear that everything about the lives of the federal workforce is determined by those elected to office,” said Kelley.

So, now you know who Colleen M. Kelley loves. You may be surprised (but probably not) to learn what happens to people she hates:

Catholic Professor: IRS Asked
About Her Anti-Obama Articles

IRS Requested Details of Christian
Pro-Life Organization’s Prayer Meetings

Leaked IRS Files Were Used to Attack Romney

IRS Scandal: Billy Graham Group Targeted
Last Year; Franklin Graham Charges
Intimidation in Letter to Obama

IRS Inspector General’s Report Released:
‘Inappropriate Criteria’ Used Against Conservative
Groups; Nearly 300 Were Targeted

Reporter Who Interviewed
President Obama: IRS ‘Hammering Me’

South Carolina Tea Party Mom
Describes IRS ‘Harassment’

Marriage Group Accuses IRS of Leaking
Information to ‘Political Enemies,’
Demands Explanation from Agency

 

These things are just coincidences, I’m sure. (But probably not.)

 


Enemies List: Holder’s DOJ and Hillary’s State Department Targeted Fox Reporter

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Everybody’s buzzing today about the Washington Post report that Fox News chief Washington correspondent James Rosen was targeted in a Justice Department investigation of a leak by a State Department official — at least two years before the similar probe of Associated Press that raised cries of outrage from the D.C. media last week.

That probe began after Rosen reported in June 2009 that “that U.S. intelligence officials were warning that North Korea was likely to respond to United Nations sanctions with more nuclear tests,” according to the Post‘s Anne E. Marimow. Rosen’s article at FoxNews.com was filed the same day that a top-secret report on North Korea’s nuclear program “was made available to a small circle within the intelligence community — including Kim.” According to documents in the Kim case obtained by the Washington Post, federal agents obtained phone and e-mail records for Rosen, as well as records of the Fox reporter’s use of a State Department security-badge swipe card . . .

Let’s ask an obvious question here: Of all the leaks from this administration, how many were the subject of this kind of investigation?

Because it seems rather . . . coincidental, we might say, that this 2009 item by a Fox News reporter should have been the focus of such an elaborate inquiry. If you were of a suspicious disposition, you might wonder if the Secretary of State and the Attorney General were determined that, in particular, Fox News should have no sources inside the Obama administration.

C’mon: How many leakers has Eric Holder’s DOJ prosecuted the way they prosecuted Stephen Jin-Woo Kim? Was this intended as a message to administration officials — “Don’t talk to Fox News” — and was it also an attempt to treat Fox News as a criminal enterprise?


Shorter Dan Pfeiffer: ‘Your Partisan Questions Are So Largely Irrelevant and Offensive, I’m Not Going to Answer Them’

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When the White House sent Obama’s senior adviser out to do five Sunday shows, his orders were obviously to claim that (a) only Republicans care whether the administration is lying about Benghazi, and (b) the answer to any question about Benghazi is “largely irrelevant”:

Wallace repeatedly asked Pfeiffer where the president was and what he was doing while terrorists were attacking the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. Pfeiffer refused to answer Wallace’s question of whether Obama entered the White House Situation Room during the Sept. 11 attack, saying, “I don’t remember what room the president was in on that night, and that’s a largely irrelevant fact.” . . .
On CBS Sunday, Pfeiffer said that the question of who edited the administration’s “talking points” about the Benghazi was “largely irrelevant.”

The Obama answer to everything: “Shut up, Republicans!”

Notice who is included in the Memeorandum aggregation on Daniel Halper’s Weekly Standard story: Rick Moran at PJ Tatler, Scott Johnson at Power Line, Ann Althouse, Doug Brady at Conservatives4Palin, Dan Riehl at Riehl World News, William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection and Andrew McCarthy at National Review. In other words, not a single liberal blogger or journalist considers it newsworthy that Obama’s senior adviser refused to say where the president was on the night of the Benghazi attack. This strategy of ignoring the obvious functions as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy: If Democrats don’t pay any attention, interest in the administration’s scandals is therefore, by definition, strictly a Republican affair, and . . . “Shut up, Republicans!”

Tautologically confining any scandal to the category of “partisan fishing expeditions” (another Dan Pfeiffer talking point) does not, however, work as an explanation: If the answers to these questions are “largely irrelevant,” why won’t Pfeiffer answer the questions?

“Shut up, Republicans!”

 

Benghazi and Other ‘Concocted’ Scandals

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U.S. consulate, Benghazi, Libya, Sept. 11, 2012

“Fraud flows from the top down, not the mid-level up. Mid-level officials in the White House and the State Department do not call the shots — they carry out orders.”
— Andrew McCarthy

Well, that’s just “common sense,” but what does common sense count for nowadays? In an interview with Piers Morgan on CNN Thursday, Jay Carney dismissed the Benghazi scandal as a Republican “concoction.”

Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom caught JournoLister Ezra Klein offering a similar argument that these aren’t really scandals, which sounds a bit like Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” talk:

“We lied about a terrorist attack that killed four Americans, the Justice Department secretly seized phone records for the Associated Press, and the IRS used ‘inappropriate criteria’ to punish the president’s Enemies List, but these aren’t really scandals. Besides, those bitches deserved it. Shut up, Republicans.”

Jay Cost of the Weekly Standard pointed out the pervasiveness of the media’s “Not Really Scandals” meme.

As is usual when this kind of elite “consensus” groupthink agenda gets rolling, the consensus is itself cited as tautological proof that skeptics are irrational, biased and therefore untrustworthy. You’re a Flat Earther or a Tinfoil Hatter if you think there was a deliberate effort by the White House to suppress the ugly truth, or if you believe that such a cover-up would actually amount to a scandal.

“Polls show that nobody cares! Shut up, Republicans!”

But no matter what the polls say — low-information voters care more about celebrity mastectomies than about politics — it’s obvious the administration is lying about pretty much everything. For example, IRS officials tried to blame the problems on an alleged “surge” in non-profit applications that didn’t actually happen, and this bogus rationale was offered via a dishonest ruse that they lied about.

OK, so if the first public excuse was a lie,  and we then learn that this was revealed via a phony set-up question, and if every new fact we discover — “Tell us about your prayer meetings” — tends to make the situation seem worse . . . Well, what would we know if we knew everything?

We don’t know, and thus we must be cautious in asserting that we’ve found the “smoking gun” that will result in federal indictments, the resignation of a half-dozen Cabinet secretaries, perp walks for White House staffers and the Impeachment of the President.

On the other hand, when the best excuse Obamaphiles like Ashley Banfield can come up with is that the President of the United States doesn’t know anything about anything and his administration is plagued by rampant stupidity, we should probably keep asking questions.

“In the Obama era, the question isn’t whether you’re paranoid. It’s whether you’re paranoid enough.”
— Professor Glenn Reynolds

 

 


Our Lawless President: Obama’s IRS Thuggery Certainly Was No Coincidence

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Dan Collins calls attention to Obama’s dog-whistle tactics, as described by Kimberly Strassel in the Wall Street Journal:

The way to limit Romney money was to intimidate donors from giving. Donate, and the president would at best tie you to Big Oil or Wall Street, at worst put your name in bold, and flag you as “less than reputable” to everyone who worked for him: the IRS, the SEC, the Justice Department. . . .
The president derided “tea baggers.” Vice President Joe Biden compared them to “terrorists.” In more than a dozen speeches Mr. Obama raised the specter that these groups represented nefarious interests that were perverting elections. “Nobody knows who’s paying for these ads,” he warned. “We don’t know where this money is coming from,” he intoned.
In case the IRS missed his point, he raised the threat of illegality: “All around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates . . . And they don’t have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation.”

Ed Morrissey politely refers to “circumstantial evidence” that the IRS was in the tank for Obama’s re-election. Of course, they managed to keep a lid on the scandal until after the election:

The IRS commissioner “has known for at least a year that this was going on,” said [NBC’s Lisa] Myers . . . “[W]hat would have happened if this fact came out in September 2012, in the middle of a presidential election? The terrain would have looked very different.”

Just another random coincidence, you see? But at least one member of Congress is having none of these lame-ass “I don’t remember” excuses:

 

President Cosmic Lightworker Expresses Disappointment in Mere Mortals at IRS

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“Obama: Anatomy of a World Leader,” by Alex Gray (detail)

“Difficult as it may now be to recall, there were once ‘spiritually advanced people’ who looked at this Chicago machine politician and saw ‘a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being . . . who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet.’”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Oct. 25, 2012


Do not question His Divine Wrath at the career IRS guy who has only been “acting commissioner” since November and drew the short straw:

President Obama said the acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service resigned Wednesday and promised that he “will not tolerate” the types of abuses reported by the agency’s inspector general. Speaking from the East Room of the White House, the president promised to “hold the responsible parties accountable” and said the administration “will work with Congress” on their investigations.
The agency’s acting commissioner, Steven Miller blamed two “rogue” employees in the Cincinnati IRS office for targeting conservative groups, but Obama said that Treasury Secretary Jack Lew had requested and received Miller’s resignation Wednesday. The political abuses were “inexcusable,” the president said. …

Inexcusable, “rogue employees,” to get caught targeting the Enemies List: Tea Party, Christians, assorted People Not Down for the Agenda.

Inexcusable, and it would have been even worse, if we had known about this at some point prior to November 6, but . . . hey, Lightworker.

One of the things about covering this stuff as a journalist is that it’s so predictable, it’s not exactly what you’d call “news,” eh?

Cynical? No, just not a complete sucker. Who ever really believed a word they said in the first place? They’re Democrats: People of the Lie.

“What’s that wonderful smell? Ah, unicorn farts!“

 

 


ObamaGate Scandal Mania!

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“Obama: Anatomy of a World Leader,” by Alex Gray (detail)

Ed Morrissey’s headline at The Week summarizes the situation:

A flood of scandals engulfs Obama

It’s not only engulfing Obama, it’s engulfing me and everybody else who’s trying to keep up with all this stuff. Easy to become confused:

Recent headlines from Viral Read:

IRS Admits Wrongly Targeting Tea Party Groups

Marriage Group Accuses IRS
of Leaking Information to ‘Political Enemies,’
Demands Explanation from Agency

South Carolina Tea Party Mom
Describes IRS ‘Harassment’

Jon Stewart Flips Out Over
IRS and AP Scandals

Reporter Who Interviewed President
Obama: IRS ‘Hammering Me’

Jay Carney ‘Unfettered’
White House Press Conference

IRS Inspector General’s Report Released:
‘Inappropriate Criteria’ Used Against
Conservative Groups; Nearly 300 Were Targeted

President Obama Reacts to IRS
Inspector General’s Report:
‘Intolerable and Inexcusable’

What’s truly intolerable and inexcusable is that all of this is happening at once, with new developments all day, every day, until Scandal Fatigue sets in and it’s impossible to keep up with even a fraction of it. So, yeah, it’s engulfing Obama and engulfing us, too.

UPDATE: Dear Lord, there’s still more:

Last week, the Benghazi talking points took center stage in the ongoing investigation of the 9/11 anniversary attacks in Libya. Jay Carney came under intense questioning at Friday’s White House press briefing as he struggled to justify a dozen iterations of talking points before Susan Rice used the final version for her now-infamous five Sunday talk show appearances on September 16, 2012. However, a background briefing by the State Department four days before Rice’s appearances provides the earliest extended look at the information used to prepare those talking points.

You really need to read the whole thing. Me, I’ve barely got time to skim half this stuff. My bedtime reading tonight will be 54 pages entitled, “Inappropriate Criteria Were Used to Identify Tax-Exempt Applications for Review,” by Michael E. McKenny. Sweet dreams.