Wednesday, April 22, 2015
Lying Democrat Hack Commissioner: Basically Screw the Taxpayers
▶ Report: IRS Diverts Funding Away From Customer Service - America's Newsroom - YouTube
Apr 22, 2015
Report: IRS Diverts Funding Away From Customer Service - America's Newsroom
It is a Big Mystery How Anyone Could Vote For Her
Hillary Can’t Win. Or Can She?
By Bruce Thornton On April 22, 2015 In Daily Mailer,FrontPage
By Bruce Thornton On April 22, 2015 In Daily Mailer,FrontPage
Hillary Clinton has formally announced she is running for president. Thus begins one of the most interesting and consequential political experiments in American history, one that will unfold over the next year and a half. We are going to see if a candidate for president with no real-world experience, no notable achievements, and no charisma or likability can fool 62 million voters into making her president.
Some may argue that we already conducted that experiment with Barack Obama, but there are several important differences. As a candidate, Obama could at least pretend to be likable. He made all the right noises about “no blue state America, no red state America,” promised “hope and change” for an electorate reeling from two wars and the Great Recession, and sold voters the notion that he would transcend the old politics of government gridlock and zero-sum partisanship. Also, he had a nice smile and could read a teleprompter well.
More important, Obama was just black enough to make voters think that by electing him they could leave behind the old racial guilt drummed into America for the last 60 years, and finally reach the sunny uplands of racial reconciliation and harmony. Thus they were already predisposed to give him the benefit of the doubt and provide him with qualities they so longed for him to possess but, as we learned, he didn’t really have. His lack of practical experience; the long lacunae in his personal history; his dodgy friendships with race-baiters (Jeremiah Wright), terrorists (Bill Ayres), sketchy ward heelers (Tony Rezko), and apologists for terror (Rashid Khalidi); his numerous gaffes blunders, and verbal stumbles; and his record as a dyed-in-the-wool leftist––all were outweighed by the mere fact that he was “black.” Not scare-the-white-folks black, but as Joe Biden said, “The first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”
That reservoir of goodwill, that desperate desire not to appear “racist,” and that deep yearning to move beyond the racial melodrama, along with a besotted left-wing media covering his flanks, played a large role in getting Obama elected twice, the second time in the teeth of blunders and scandals that would have sunk a Republican, and perhaps even a different Democrat.
But the Obama phenomenon strikes me as a one-off, a fortuitous conjunction of our dysfunctional racial obsessions, grievance politics, multicultural delusions, and the economic downturn. Some will want to blame the Republican candidates as well, and there’s room for criticism of campaigns waged with the preemptive cringe. The question now is, can Hillary put that same lightening back in the electoral bottle?
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Those Ethics Agreements are Just for the Little People
The Bitch-of-Benghazi has "Higher" loyalties. m/r
The Hillary File: State Dept. Ethics Agreements - Judicial Watch
The Hillary File: State Dept. Ethics Agreements - Judicial Watch
APRIL 16, 2015
The Clinton international shakedown took a new turn today with news that the Clinton Foundation would “limit” foreign government donations to a mere six countries—Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and the U.K.—but allow other governments to participate in the glitzy Clinton Global Initiative. Future historians will note the brazenness of the Clintons’ thoroughly modern political machine. For the rest of us, we can turn to the wisdom of Rand Paul, who memorably called the foundation’s acceptance of foreign money “thinly veiled bribes.”
The foreign money scandal—this one, not the 1996 campaign finance scandal—of course has its roots in Mrs. Clinton’s recent tenure as secretary of state. For the record, here are the ethical standards the Clintons agreed to abide by at that time.
In a December 12, 2008 Memorandum of Understanding between the Clinton Foundation and the Obama presidential transition team, the Clintons “agreed to a set of protocols…for managing conflicts of interest, and the appearance of conflicts of interest.”
The document outlined the constellation of “Initiatives”—all seeking funds and donors—in the Clinton universe. During Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, the foundation pledged to “publish annually the names of new contributors.” Bill Clinton agreed to “not solicit funds” for the Clinton Global Initiative, which would be incorporated as a “separate entity from the foundation.”
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There was an Overflow Trash Crowd at Earth Day Concert 2015 on the National Mall
Crowd Trashes National Mall for Earth Day
Posted by Aleister Sunday, April 19, 2015
There was a concert for Earth Day on the National Mall this weekend. It’s good to have events like this to remind us that we need to be responsible stewards of the environment.
Christine Rousselle of Townhall:
National Mall Trashed After Global Citizen 2015 Earth Day ConcertOh, the delicious, delicious irony.Yesterday was Global Citizen 2015 Earth Day, which was celebrated with a concert and other festivities on the National Mall. While the concert itself was powered by solar energy, the attendees could have learned a lesson or two about taking care of planet Earth.For instance, check out these trash and recycling cans I spotted near the National Mall, close to the Washington Monument:
What Happened to REPEAL OBAMACARE? - The Old Boys Running the GOP want Big Gov't
They work for Government, not those Little People who foolishly vote them in. m/r
Why Republicans Can’t Debate Obama
By Daniel Greenfield On April 22, 2015 In Daily Mailer,FrontPage
Why Republicans Can’t Debate Obama
By Daniel Greenfield On April 22, 2015 In Daily Mailer,FrontPage
The Republican Party is a party that does not know what it stands for. It has a voter base, but no identity, and it is facing an ideological war while lacking an ideology to guide its counterattack.
Democrats and Republicans both form progressive parties. The GOP doesn’t publicly embrace this identity, instead paying lip service to small government and individualism, but Democrats have been hitting most of the same notes ever since the backlash from the New Deal and the Great Society went critical. Even Obama says many of the same things when he needs to.
Internally both parties embrace the progressive essentials of a large centralized government that coordinates with major corporations and non-profits to manage society, making the expert supreme over the individual, the university over the village and the study over common sense in an endless cycle of reform, not of government, but of social institutions and human behavior.
The difference is that the Democrats are a progressive party with a left-wing ideology and Republicans are a progressive party without the left-wing ideology.
The political difference is significant, but the policy difference is insignificant because the mechanisms of progressive governance, the unionized bureaucrat, who defines what government does, and the expert adviser, whose studies and committees define what government should be doing, are mostly of the left, especially when the policies in question relate to social issues.
Progressive governance is built around the university. Its form of government embeds the prejudices and hobbyhorses of academia into the realm of policy. The tilt of universities toward the left has made progressive governance a vehicle for implementing left-wing ideology.
The Democratic and Republican parties are both in denial about the implications of this reality. …
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Obama is Evil: He Says F U to US
Obama's Executive Power Grab - YouTube
Apr 8, 2015
Ben Shapiro takes a look at President Obama's troubling grab for power through executive action on everything from immigration to foreign policy and even gun rights.
Nearly 90% of the Government is "Nonessential" and BS
That is why the poverty rate never goes down. Government serves itself! m/r
By Washington’s own metrics, the program makes no dent whatsoever on poverty rates—except when it does.
Vilsack and his cohorts want to have it both ways: when they want to show lots of people in poverty in order to sell the public on more anti-poverty funding, then food stamps don’t count; but when they want to tout the program’s success, then suddenly food stamps do count.The Food Stamp Pirouette by Francis Menton, City Journal April 21, 2015
By Washington’s own metrics, the program makes no dent whatsoever on poverty rates—except when it does.
You’re not alone if you’ve ever wondered how the government at all levels can spend about $1 trillion per year on “anti-poverty” programs, while the poverty rate never goes down. By the federal government’s official standard, the poverty rate stood at about 15 percent when the War on Poverty began more than 50 years ago—and it remains about 15 percent today, despite more than $20 trillion of anti-poverty spending since then. Could all that money really have had no effect? The question puts government officials in a tricky position. On the one hand, they feel duty-bound to defend the effectiveness of the spending; on the other, any major reduction in the official measure of poverty risks undermining political support for continued and increased spending.
Congressional budget trimmers are currently eyeing the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, a.k.a. SNAP, a.k.a. food stamps, which is administered by the Department of Agriculture. The recent budget resolution envisions converting the program into block grants to the states, a move that would put about three-quarters of the USDA out of business. In late March, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to defend the program against such a move.
Among the many federal anti-poverty programs, food stamps play a role that seems almost magical. The program currently spends approximately $80 billion per year, supposedly to combat poverty and hunger. Yet in official Census Bureau poverty statistics, food stamps are defined as “in-kind” benefits that don’t count as part of the “cash-income” poverty measure. And the food stamp program also somehow manages not to make a dent in the government’s most-cited proxy for “hunger”—the annual “food insecurity” survey, also administered by Vilsack’s department, which asks people whether they felt “food insecure” at any time during the past year. Since food stamps require recipients to make a budget last for a month, many beneficiaries understandably answer that question in the affirmative. And thus, somehow, the number of people declaring food insecurity has barely declined at all during the Obama presidency, even as the number of food stamp recipients has mushroomed, from about 32 million to more than 46 million.
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