Answer: Sleeping.

Question: How is the question of where Obama was on the night of the Benghazi attacks relevant?

Obama aid spins on Sunday talk-shows.

Remember back to 2009 when Obama joked about using the IRS to audit people?

Good times, good times.

Hey! Here's an idea! Let's turn healthcare enforcement over to these people!

What could go wrong?

Jonathan Tobin at Commentary writes:

But as the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel reminds us today, we know what inspired the whole problem irrespective of which bureaucrat gave the specific order. All the IRS was doing in the course of this scandal was listening to President Obama and his media cheerleaders who had been telling the country for years that the Tea Party and other conservatives were extremists whose illegitimate actions deserved to be placed beyond the pale. The harassment suffered by conservatives by the government’s most intrusive and powerful agency cannot be separated from the calls by the head of that government and his supporters for exactly this sort of prejudicial behavior.

Miller’s evasions and inability to face up to the enormity of this affair are bad enough. So too is the failure throughout the IRS to own up to the problem or to correct it long ago and to promote the person who appears to be among those responsible for the outrages. But the willingness of the IRS to conform its practices to the political opinions of the White House is the root cause of this scandal.

So basically the sham effort to look "transparent" backfired.

The reason for the planted question gambit:

WASHINGTON — It was an unusual way to deliver bad news, even in a town known for its selective leaks, Friday-night news dumps and wag-the-dog distractions.

The Internal Revenue Service, apparently determined to get out ahead of an inspector general report critical of its handling of tax exemptions for Tea Party groups, came up with a plan: Lois Lerner, the official responsible for the tax-exempt division, would publicly apologize in response to a question at the American Bar Association conference in Washington.

Details of the now-infamous planted question emerged Friday after acting IRS commissioner Steven Miller admitted the gambit under questioning from members of the House Ways and Means Committee.

It was the day after Lerner had testified to Congress last week, failing once again to disclose the extent of the Tea Party targeting even under direct questioning. The damning inspector general report would come out any day, and Lerner and Miller wanted to figure out a way to disclose the news publicly.

Miller testified about the thought process behind the release strategy Friday. "Now that the (inspector general) report was finalized, now that we knew all the facts, now that we had responded in writing and everything was done, did it make sense for us to start talking about this in public," he said.

The plan, he said, was to simultaneously notify Congress, but that never happened.

After talking to Miller, Lerner called Celia Roady, a Washington tax lawyer whose office is immediately across Pennsylvania Avenue from the IRS headquarters. She also serves on the IRS Advisory Committee on Tax-Exempt and Government Entities.

Roady released this written statement late Friday explaining her role:

"On May 9, I received a call from Lois Lerner, who told me that she wanted to address an issue after her prepared remarks at the ABA Tax Section's Exempt Organizations Committee Meeting, and asked if I would pose a question to her after her remarks. I agreed to do so, and she then gave me the question that I asked at the meeting the next day. We had no discussion thereafter on the topic of the question, nor had we spoken about any of this before I received her call. She did not tell me, and I did not know, how she would answer the question."

And so that's how it happened. Within minutes, the Associated Press reported her remarks with a one-line news alert: "WASHINGTON (AP) — IRS apologizes for inappropriately targeting conservative political groups in 2012 election."

In a conference call with reporters later that day, Lerner emphasized that her apology came in response to a question.

"I was asked a question at the ABA meeting to give a status update of things that have been in the press" about the agency's treatment of Tea Party groups, she said. Asked why the IRS chose to make an apology that day, she said, "Someone asked me a question today, so I answered it."

Members of Congress in both parties criticized what they called a "scheme" and a "manipulation."

Bozos.

Why didn't Obama choose a staffer to hold his umbrella?

This IBD story seems to capture something about Obama in microcosm:

Another awkward day in the unraveling presidency of Barack Hussein Obama.

Beset by a trio of profound scandals, the Democrat had planned for Thursday's public message to focus on foreign affairs through a joint news conference with Turkey's Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, a NATO ally and fellow conspirator to oust the Syrian regime.

Unfortunately, Obama's advance staff was apparently too busy preparing his next campaign stops to check the Washington weather forecast. It set up the news conference outdoors in the Rose Garden. Wouldn't you know given POTUS' recent luck, it began raining.

Obama did the only thing he would think of: No, he wasn't smart enough to come in out of the rain.

The commander-in-chief ordered two U.S. Marines to bring umbrellas and hold them over the leaders' heads while standing at attention. So, as the two politicians droned on, including translation, the professionals in their dress uniforms got drenched. As did the attending crowd.

Service regulations expressly forbid male Marines from ever carrying an umbrella in uniform. But nothing should ever stop the Real Good Talker from talking at a photo op. Just as oppressive heat and a fainting audience didn't slow his mouth last summer.

At one point Thursday Obama reached over to show the highly-trained Marine corporal how the president wanted the umbrella positioned to keep his face open to cameras.

Speaking of speaking, here's an interesting little revelation from Obama. About the IRS intimidating and harassing conservative political groups, he was asked a straight-forward question:

"Can you assure the American people that nobody in the White House knew about the agency’s actions before your Counsel’s Office found out on April 22nd?"

Here's the relevant part of Obama's long reply:

"I can assure you that I certainly did not know anything about the IG report before the IG report had been leaked through the press."

Do you see what Obama did there? He dodged the real question about anyone in his White House knowing of the years-long illegal IRS operations. And he carefully (and revealingly) chose to answer a much more limited, irrelevant and unasked question about his knowledge of the inspector general's report.

Brett Easton Ellis notes the Stalinism of Gay Identity Ideology...

... where saying anything less than that every gay is a courageous, well-adjusted, heroic figure results in vicious attacks: 

Gay activists dive-bombing other gays who express an opinion that doesn’t lean toward their agenda means that within the gay world we are living in a very simplistic place. A barbed observational opinion tweeted by a gay man about gay men in Hollywood—and not directed at anyone—becomes, in the world of GLAAD, hate-speech. When a community prides itself on its differences and uniqueness and bans the gay man because of the way the gay man expresses himself—then a corporate PC fascism has been put into play that needs to be seriously reconsidered by the LGBT community. This is a problem: If you are a gay man who is not The Gay Man as Magical Elf, then you run the risk of being ostracized by the elite gay community. An organization holding an awards ceremony that they think represents all gays and also feels that they can choose which gays can and cannot be a member of the party is, on the face of it, ridiculous. The fact remains that if you aren’t presenting yourself as a happy homosexual promoting healthy mainstream gay values and pimping for GLAAD, then you’re somehow defaming The Cause. 

Ellis's sin was in noting the infantilizing way that gays are treated when they "come out":

Was I the only gay man of a certain demo who experienced a flicker of annoyance in the way the media treated Jason Collins as some kind of baby panda who needed to be honored and praised and consoled and—yes—infantilized by his coming out on the cover of Sports Illustrated? Within the tyrannical homophobia of the sports world, that any man would come out as gay (let alone a black man) is not only an LGBT triumph but also a triumph for pranksters everywhere who thrilled to the idea that what should be considered just another neutral fact that is nobody’s business was instead a shock heard around the world, one that added another jolt of transparency to an increasingly transparent planet. It was an undeniable moment and also extremely cool. Jason Collins is the future. But the subsequent fawning over Collins simply stating he is gay still seemed to me, as another gay man, like a new kind of victimization. (George Stephanopoulos interviewed him so tenderly, it was as if he was talking to a six-year-old boy.) In another five years hopefully this won’t matter, but for now we’re trapped in the times we live in. The reign of The Gay Man as Magical Elf, who whenever he comes out appears before us as some kind of saintly E.T. whose sole purpose is to be put in the position of reminding us only about Tolerance and Our Own Prejudices and To Feel Good About Ourselves and to be a symbol instead of just being a gay dude, is—lamentably—still in media play. 

But, hey, tolerance is not enough.

Frankly, I'm not understanding why Lois Lerner did this.

IRS Tax Exempt chief "planted" question about discrimination against conservatives so that she could issue apology:

The veteran tax lawyer whose pre-arranged question to an IRS official at a panel last week prompted the admission that the agency had targeted conservative groups said in a written statement on Friday that she did not know what the answer to the question would be.

Celia Roady, a partner in the Washington D.C. office of Morgan Lewis and a member of the the IRS’ Advisory Committee on Tax-Exempt and Government Entities, said she got a call from Lois Lerner, head of the IRS’ tax-exempt organizations division, on May 9, the day before Lerner appeared on a panel at the American Bar Association tax section’s annual meeting. 

“On May 9, I received a call from Lois Lerner, who told me that she wanted to address an issue after her prepared remarks at the ABA Tax Section’s Exempt Organizations Committee Meeting, and asked if I would pose a question to her after her remarks," Roady said in the statement, obtained by TPM. "I agreed to do so, and she then gave me the question that I asked at the meeting the next day. We had no discussion thereafter on the topic of the question, nor had we spoken about any of this before I received her call. She did not tell me, and I did not know, how she would answer the question.”

The point of this story could be about humorless, oppressive feminism, but in fact I just like the phrase "walked in like Lady Astor's per horse."

Bras may be used to decorate bar:

I'll let Skowronski explain what happened when a city inspector stopped in recently. 

"We've had bras hanging here for 45 years. It's been a charm of the place. So here comes this gal, and she's walking in here like Lady Astor's pet horse, you know, and she says she wants those bras down because they're a fire hazard. Now how can a bra be a fire hazard unless someone is wearing it? Honest to God."

Dammit, this is America.  If Americans want to court death by self-igniting bras while drinking, that is their god-given right as Americans.

http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/citys-bra-ban-doesnt-hold-up-9m9vimk-207805611.html

IRS asked organization to detail the contents of members' prayers to 510(c)(3) application.

'You've got to be kidding me."

James Geraghty writes:

Today’s hearing on IRS abuses had a lot of “are you kidding me?” moments, but this one stands out:

 

“It would surprise me that that question was asked,” acting commissioner Steven Miller tells Representative Aaron Schock, Republican of Illinois.

UPDATE: Chris Moody at Yahoo has the IRS letter and responses that began this line of inquiry: “Please explain how all of your activities, including the prayer meetings held outside of Planned Parenthood, are considered educational as defined under 501(c)(3).”

Among the other questions the IRS posed to the Iowa Coalition for Life: “You stated that you sponsored a Forum on Stem Cells, End of Life Decisions and a possible forum on Contraception. Please describe in detail the information provided at each of these forums.”

The fact that Democrat Senators were asking for heightened scrutiny of Americans based on their political views is itself - with nothing more - a scandal.

Tolerance - the moment between breathing out one orthodoxy and breathing in another.

DOJ guidance states that silence about LGBT rights will be assumed to be disapproval.

Our sources have provided Liberty Counsel an internal DOJ document titled: “LGBT Inclusion at Work: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Managers.” It was emailed to DOJ managers in advance of the left’s so-called “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Pride Month.”

The document is chilling. It’s riddled with directives that grossly violate – prima facie –employees’ First Amendment liberties.

Following are excerpts from the “DOJ Pride” decree. When it comes to “LGBT pride,” employees are ordered:

“DON’T judge or remain silent. Silence will be interpreted as disapproval.” (Italics mine)

That’s a threat.

And not even a subtle one.

Got it? For Christians and other morals-minded federal employees, it’s no longer enough to just shut up and “stay in the closet” – to live your life in silent recognition of biblical principles (which, by itself, is unlawful constraint). When it comes to mandatory celebration of homosexual and cross-dressing behaviors, “silence will be interpreted as disapproval.”

This lawless administration is now ordering federal employees – against their will – to affirm sexual behaviors that every major world religion, thousands of years of history and uncompromising human biology reject.

Somewhere, right now, George Orwell is smiling.

The directive includes a quote from a “gay” federal employee to rationalize justification: “Ideally, I’d love to hear and see support from supervisors, so it’s clear that there aren’t just policies on paper. Silence seems like disapproval. There’s still an atmosphere of LGBT issues not being appropriate for the workplace (particularly for transgender people), or that people who bring it up are trying to rock the boat.”

Of course there’s “still an atmosphere of LGBT issues not being appropriate for the workplace.” When well over half of federal employees, half the country and most of the world still believe in objective sexual morality (and immorality), “the workplace,” especially the federal workplace, should, at the very least, remain neutral on these highly controversial and behavior-centric issues.

Still, to borrow from self-styled “queer activist,” anti-Christian bigot and Obama buddy Dan Savage, “it gets better”:

“DO assume that LGBT employees and their allies are listening to what you’re saying (whether in a meeting or around the proverbial water cooler) and will read what you’re writing (whether in a casual email or in a formal document), and make sure the language you use is inclusive and respectful.”

Is this the DOJ or the KGB? “[A]ssume that LGBT employees are listening …”? And what are “LGBT allies”? If you disagree with the homosexual activist political agenda, does that make you the enemy?

Yes, in any workplace, language should remain professional, but who defines what’s “inclusive”? Who decides what’s “respectful”? If asked about “LGBT issues,” for instance, can a Christian employee answer honestly: “I believe the Bible. I believe God designed sex to be shared between husband and wife within the bonds of marriage”? Or is that grounds for termination?

Peggy Noonan on - 

No ordinary scandal:

It is not even remotely possible that all this was an accident, a mistake. Again, only conservative groups were targeted, not liberal. It is not even remotely possible that only one IRS office was involved. Lois Lerner, who oversees tax-exempt groups for the IRS, was the person who finally acknowledged, under pressure of a looming investigative report, some of what the IRS was doing. She told reporters the actions were the work of "frontline people" in Cincinnati. But other offices were involved, including Washington. It is not even remotely possible the actions were the work of just a few agents. This was more systemic. It was an operation. The word was out: Get the Democratic Party's foes. It is not remotely possible nobody in the IRS knew what was going on until very recently. The Washington Post reported efforts to target the conservative groups reached the highest levels of the agency by May 2012—far earlier than the agency had acknowledged. Reuters reported high-level IRS officials, including its chief counsel, knew in August 2011 about the targeting.

I repeat, it is passing strange that the IRS just happened to go rogue and target only the enemies of Obama after Obama became President.

Also, as bad as this is for the health of democracy, the Benghazi scandal - leaving Americans to die, ordering a stand-down on the rescue, going to bed, blaming American free speech - is the one that pisses me off.

Gay marriage, the importance of elites and social conformity.

Brendan O'Neill at Spiked writes:

With gay marriage turned into ‘a kind of common sense’, opposing it became more difficult, potentially even threatening one’s social and moral standing. The ‘common sense’ of gay marriage has been turned into something like a dogma of gay marriage, in a very subtle way. So the very act of debating gay marriage has been implicitly demonised, since in the words of one observer, ‘The fact that there is a debate over whether to deny a group of people their civil rights is unacceptable’. Here, through further linking gay marriage to the old civil-rights movement, even discussion itself can be branded ‘unacceptable’.

Others say there should be no ‘acknowledgment of subtleties and cultural differences’ on gay marriage, since ‘there is a right answer’ on this issue. Those who insist on possessing ‘cultural differences’ on gay marriage – or even worse, opposing it – feel the fury of campaigners. A chicken restaurant in America was boycotted after its owner criticised gay marriage, while voters in American referendums who have said no to gay marriage have been called every name under the Sun by the respectable political and media classes: ‘ill-informed’, ‘deceived’, ‘plain ignorant’, ‘knuckle draggers’. This has the effect of beating down critical questioning. Gay marriage supporters actually boast of using moral pressure over political debate to win people’s acquiescence. Scientific American magazine recently discussed the apparently brilliant way that social media is being used to influence people’s ‘attitudes and behaviour’ on gay marriage. Everyone is ‘susceptible to the powers of peer pressure’, it said, so constantly saying favourable things about gay marriage on social-media websites can be a way of ‘send[ing] out a message about what’s acceptable, appropriate and… well, normal’. That is – never mind convincing someone with reason; just heavy-handedly let them know it’s normal to support gay marriage, and thus presumably abnormal to oppose it.

This is how conformism is forged and enforced today: elites devise an idea or campaign, far away from what one gay-marriage proponent calls ‘the tyranny of the majority’; that idea or campaign gets disingenuously depicted as something that protesters and campaigners demanded and actually put pressure on the elites to come up with; and through a process of debate-demonisation and pathologisation of dissent, through the treatment of acceptance as normal and criticism as abnormal, the idea or campaign is spread more widely through society. Eventually, in the words of Caldwell, even those who are unsure about gay marriage ‘quell their natural misgivings’. Indeed, when I interviewed the British pop star Dappy recently, and asked him if he supported gay marriage, he said: ‘I want to say no… but I get so much stick already. So say “yes”. Definitely say “yes”.’ How many other people are saying ‘yes’ not because they believe in gay marriage, but because they don’t want, in Caldwell’s words, to be thought of as ‘losers’ who have failed to ‘emulate their betters’?

The conformism around gay marriage cannot be put entirely down to handfuls of campaigners, of course, and certainly not to any conscious attempt on their part to enforce political and moral obedience. The fragility of society’s attachment to traditional marriage itself, to the virtue of commitment, has also been key to the formulation of the gay-marriage consensus. Indeed, it is the rubble upon which the gay-marriage edifice is built. That is, if lawyers, politicians and our other assorted ‘betters’ have successfully kicked down the door of traditional marriage, it’s because the door was already hanging off its hinges, following years of cultural neglect. It is society’s reluctance to defend traditional views of commitment, and its relativistic refusal more broadly to discriminate between different lifestyle choices, that has fuelled the peculiar non-judgmental tyranny of the gay-marriage campaign, which judges harshly those who dare to judge how people live. Through a combination of the weakness of belief in traditional marriage and the insidiousness of the campaign for gay marriage, we have ended up with something that reflects brilliantly John Stuart Mill’s description of how critical thinking can cave into the despotism of conformism, so that ‘peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes, until by dint of not following their own nature, these [followers of conformism] have no nature to follow’.

Welcome to the next Banana Republic.

IRS used power to protect Planned Parenthood:

IRS officials refused to grant tax exempt status to two pro-life organizations because of their position on the abortion issue, according to a non-profit law firm, which said that one group was pressured not to protest a pro-choice organization that endorsed President Obama during the last election.

“In one case, the IRS withheld approval of an application for tax exempt status for Coalition for Life of Iowa. In a phone call to Coalition for Life of Iowa leaders on June 6, 2009, the IRS agent ‘Ms. Richards’ told the group to send a letter to the IRS with the entire board’s signatures stating that, under perjury of the law, they do not picket/protest or organize groups to picket or protest outside of Planned Parenthood,” the Thomas More Society announced today. “Once the IRS received this letter, their application would be approved.”

Isn't ironic that the IRS just happens to go off the reservation and start targeting Catholics and conservatives during the Obama administration?

From the Blaze:

n the midst of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) scandal, individuals and groups, alike, are continuing to come forward with ever-startling allegations. On Wednesday, Dr. Anne Hendershott, a devout Catholic and a noted sociologist, professor and author, exclusively told TheBlaze that she believes she may have been one of the IRS’s targets.

According to Hendershott, the IRS audited her in 2010 and demanded to know who was paying her. While they did not ask directly it seemed as though the agent wanted to know about the leanings of these particular organizations.

It all started with a phone call she received at her home in May of that year — a call during which Hendershott was told she would be audited. A letter that followed on May 19, 2010 solidified the IRS’s request to meet her in person two months later in July. While IRS investigations are certainly not uncommon occurrences, the professor believes that the situation surrounding hers was more-than-curious.

“The IRS calls my house and says … ‘I just wanted to let you know that we’re going to be auditing your business’ and I said ‘My businesses?’ and he said, ‘You know the expenses you take off for writing,” the academic recalls.

AP Leak Investigation Scandal - The Holder Recusal.

From Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin:

Attorney General Eric Holder told the House Judiciary Committee he recused himself from the leak investigation involving sweeping surveillance of the Associated Press because he was a “fact witness,” meaning he had access to the classified data at issue and was questioned about it. But he can’t recall when he recused himself. And it wasn’t in writing. In one of the worst security leaks of which he is aware (he says), he never told the White House (he says) that he took himself out of the loop.

Remarkable really, even if true. John Yoo, who authored the enhanced interrogation memos in the Bush Justice Department and was widely criticized by the left for taking a broad view of executive power, was somewhat incredulous when I asked him about the Justice Department’s behavior. As for the paperless recusal, he told me, “There must be something in writing to at least the DAG [deputy attorney general].”

Former attorney general Michael Mukasey agreed, emailing me that ”it is inconceivable to me that you would not do it formally. Of course, you’d have to inform all the people who might otherwise have to contact you. Indeed, if you didn’t you might conceivably come into possession of information you should not have.” He added that “in the one case I can recall in which I recused myself I did it in writing. Hard to imagine how else you’d do it — shout ‘I recuse myself’ in your office? In the hall?”

But it is the unrestrained nature of investigation that is breathtaking, beyond anything Mukasey has seen, he told me. Yoo observed, “I cannot think of another example this broad that didn’t turn out to be unauthorized. The only comparable thing was cases where a court tried to get a journalist to reveal a source. But I cannot think of the actual monitoring of reporters and editors.” He added, “If something like that had ever come up during the Bush administration in my time at DOJ, I would have said it was unconstitutional.”

The "worst security leak" that the President is never told about.

The recusal that wasn't in writing.

These people are lying clowns who think we are idiots.

Benghazi E-mail dump -the e-mail trail.

Interesting reading from Powerline.

n Congress, “they all think it was premeditated,” so we need to “correct the record.” In fact, though, it was premeditated, as everyone now knows. Furthermore, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was already well aware, based on her famous 2 a.m. conversation with Greg Hicks, that the attack was premeditated; that there was no demonstration; that armed terrorists assaulted the Benghazi compound and overran it. Yet Hillary Clinton did not participate in the email communications, and she apparently never communicated what she learned from Hicks to anyone involved in the messaging process.

Not only that, the emails show that the FBI had already concluded that al Qaeda (not just al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) was involved. Yet this information never saw the light of day:

I have not seen this reported anywhere. It strikes me as a blockbuster revelation.

Lots more questions to answer.

E-Mail Dump on Benghazi.

From the Weekly Standard:

The initial CIA changes softened some of the language about the participants in the Benghazi assault – from “Islamic extremists with ties to al Qaeda” to “Islamic extremists.” But CIA officials also added bullet points about the possible participation of Ansar al Sharia, an al Qaeda-linked jihadist group, and previous warnings about the deteriorating security situation in Benghazi. Those additions came out after the talking points were sent to “the interagency,” where the CIA’s final draft was further stripped down to little more than boilerplate. The half dozen references to terrorists – both in Benghazi and more generally – all but disappeared. Gone were references to al Qaeda, Ansar al Sharia, jihadists, Islamic extremists, etc. The only remaining mention was a note that “extremists” had participated in the attack.

As striking as what appears in the email traffic is what does not. There is no mention of the YouTube video that would become a central part of the administration’s explanation of the attacks to the American people until a brief mention in the subject line of emails coming out of an important meeting where further revisions were made.

Carney, in particular, is likely to face tough questioning about the contents of the emails because he made claims to reporters that were untrue. “The White House and the State Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those talking points by either of those two – of these two institutions were changing the word ‘consulate’ to ‘diplomatic facility,’ because the word ‘consulate’ was inaccurate,” he told reporters on November 28, 2012.

That’s not true. An email sent at 9:15 PM on September 14, from an official in the CIA’s Office of Public Affairs to others at the agency, described the process this way. “The State Department had major reservations with much or most of the document. We revised the document with their concerns in mind.”

That directly contradicts what Carney said. It’s also difficult to reconcile with claims made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during testimony she gave January 23 on Capitol Hill.

“It was an intelligence product,” she said, adding later that the “intelligence community was the principal decider about what went into talking points.” (See here for the original version of the talking points and the final one.)

This is looking more likely now than it did in October of 2012.

The Daily Caller asks "Did the IRS give Mitt Romney’s tax returns to Harry Reid?"

During the 2012 presidential campaign, Harry Reid claimed to have intimate knowledge of what was secretly inside Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s tax returns.

As President Obama’s campaign slammed Romney nearly every day for not releasing more tax returns, the Senate majority leader repeatedly made the unsubstantiated claim that, at one point in his life, Romney hadn’t paid taxes for almost a decade.

He even did so from the floor of the U.S. Senate.

“The word’s out that he hasn’t paid any taxes for 10 years,” the Nevada Democrat claimed on the floor in August. “Let him prove that he has paid taxes, because he hasn’t.”

It made big news at the time, but Reid’s old accusations are popping back up now that it’s been revealed that the IRS has been targeting conservative groups and in some cases, reportedly leaking their tax information.

Knowing that, could someone at the IRS have leaked Romney’s tax information to Reid? At the time, Reid claimed he learned of Romney’s tax background from someone who had once been an investor in Romney’s firm, though he wouldn’t say who.

Since the new IRS scandal broke, Republicans have found the question of who Reid got his information from — and from where — intriguing.

“We all wondered how Harry Reid had Mitt Romney’s taxes,” Republican National Committee spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski told The Daily Caller. “The question is, will he call for a full investigation into the IRS?”

The Pius Wars.

My review of "Inside the Vatican of Pius XII."

These are the war time memoirs of American diplomat Harold Tittman, Jr., who spent 1941 to 1944 within the Vatican with other Allied diplomats, and who thereby had the opportunity to observe Pius XII and  Vatican officials as they attempted to maintain Vatican neutrality.  Tittman's memoirs ought to end the nonsense that Pius was indifferent to human suffering or that he was in any way pro-fascist.

It's Science!


Here's the reason that whenever someone says "I was raised a Catholic, so I know what it teaches," what follows will be the weirdest farago of nonsense you will ever hear.

According to the research blog of the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate:

//In comparison to the Pew study, D'Antonio et al. find that half of self-identified adult Catholics (50%) are unaware that the Catholic Church teaches the following about the bread and wine used for Communion: "the bread and wine really become the body and blood of Jesus Christ." However, 63% of adult Catholics, regardless of what they think the Church teaches, believe that "at the Consecration during a Catholic Mass, the bread and wine really become the body and blood of Jesus Christ."

As shown below, this creates four groups. The largest are "knowledgeable believers," representing 46% of adult Catholics, who are aware of the Church's teachings about the Real Presence and say they believe these to be true. Additionally, there is another 17% who believe in the Real Presence but who are unaware that this represents a Church teaching. These are the "unknowing believers." 

The second largest group is the "unknowing unbelievers" who do not believe in the Real Presence (i.e., they believe the bread and wine are only symbols) and do not know that this represents a teaching of the Church. There is something hopeful about this group, which represents a third of adult Catholics (33%). Even though they currently do not believe the Church's teaching, they may come to believe it if they knew and understood it better. Knowledge and belief of this may even bring more of them to a Catholic parish on Sundays.

What is rare, representing only 4% of adult Catholics, is someone who knows about the Church's teachings regarding the Real Presence and who states they do not believe this teaching to be true. These are the "knowledgeable doubters" (...note that this study uses the same methods of CARA Catholic Polls, e.g., anonymity, self-administered response without an interviewer, which limit social desirability bias).

And a handy graph to prove the point!

Are there any new heresies?

This post by Father Z suggests that the modern "old school" nun of the LCWR have simply re-invented the heresy of Montanism - the notion that the Holy Spirit speaks directly to prophetesses - in order to to circumvent orthodox Catholic teachings:

Why is Florence Deacon saying this? She is manifesting yet another dimension of the Magisterium of Nuns.

She is using the “poor”, and the poor can be translated loosely, as a hermeneutic for just about everything they want to justify doing. La Voz de los Pobres, The Voice of the Poor (it’s just better in Spanish), is a cover for setting aside Magisterial teaching.

This is how this works.

First, I take the “experience” of the person I am talking to. That person, who has some sort of conflict or problem, is in the category of “the poor”, or “the marginalized”, no matter what their income is. When that “poor” person speaks, I am listening to the voice of God, because the voice of God is heard in La Voz de los Pobres. So, the “poor” person’s experience, and then my “experience” of listening, become the grounding of interpretation of God’s will. See?

Then, after this listening, I interpret what the person wants to do. For example, the “poor” person wants to have sex with someone of the same sex, or wants to simulate ordination to the priesthood, or wants to vote for pro-abortion politicians who support certain social justice programs, or even wants to have an abortion.

Then, because the “poor” person told me what they want, and because I, the interpreter of La Voz de los Pobres have listened, I give the “poor” permission to do what they want. I have effectively bypassed the Church and the authentic Magisterium. I, wielding the Holy Spirit, have listened to God in La Voz de los Pobres and that listening has given me all the authority I need no matter what the “official” Church says.

Say for the sake of this exercise I am a LCWR nun. I encounter another “gay” person. I listen. I can now affirm her in her “gayness”. I can affirm her because I listened to the voice of God in La Voz de los Pobres.

This blah blah from Sr. Deacon, reveals what these nuns are after: they seek to set aside the defined teaching of the Church and simply affirm their own desires. They are seeking to supersede the Magisterium of the Pope and bishops with their own Magisterium of Nuns, rooted in whatever the hell they want to do.

Reprisals...

Dissent.Will.Not.Be.Tolerated!

Billy Graham organizations harassed by IRS after taking out ads in favor of traditional marriage.

Want to get your non-profit approved by the IRS?

Give it a liberal name like "Greenhouse Solutions."

Obama has done nothing about the IRS scandal.


Wasn't it weird that Obama's fierce response to the corruption of the IRS was to ask for the resignation of the "acting commissioner" who had only been in that position since November and had nothing to do with the problems?

Well, here's the answer. 

Steven Miller, the now resigned acting commissioner of the IRS, is telling staff that the abuse scandal is not the reason he’s leaving.

It is with regret that I will be departing from the IRS as my acting assignment ends in early June,’ Miller wrote. “This has been an incredibly difficult time for the IRS given the events of the past few days, and there is a strong and immediate need to restore public trust in the nation’s tax agency.”

Basically, he’s saying that he’s just leaving a couple weeks early, no big deal. Incredible.

The president’s big statement today was a big nothing as far as accountability goes. The only head that has rolled was already scheduled to roll even if the scandal had never come up. It now looks like Obama came out with that statement for two reasons: To look like he was doing something useful, and to bully Republicans not to aggressively pursue the scandal.

Our President thinks we are all idiots.

Sad mother's day.

It's easy to sympathize with everyone in this story, but it does suggest that perhaps forgiveness might be an answer.

Date rape victim refuses to meet daughter.

This is a start to explaining the stand-down order -

Peggy Noonan writes:

Because the White House could not tolerate the idea of Benghazi as a planned and deliberate terrorist assault, it had to be made into something else. So they said it was a spontaneous street demonstration over an anti-Muhammad YouTube video made by a nutty California con man. After all, that had happened earlier in the day, in Cairo. It sounded plausible. And maybe they believed it at first. Maybe they wanted to believe it. But the message was out: Provocative video plus primitive street Arabs equals sparky explosion. Not our fault. Blame the producer! Who was promptly jailed. 

If what happened in Benghazi was not a planned and prolonged terrorist assault, if it was merely a street demonstration gone bad, the administration could not take military action to protect Americans there. You take military action in response to a planned and coordinated attack by armed combatants. You don't if it's an essentially meaningless street demonstration that came and went. 

Why couldn't the administration tolerate the idea that Benghazi was a planned terrorist event? Because they didn't want this attack dominating the headline with an election coming. It would open the administration to criticism of its intervention in Libya. President Obama had supported overthrowing Moammar Gadhafi and put U.S. force behind the Libyan rebels. Now Libyans were killing our diplomats. Was our policy wrong? More importantly, the administration's efforts against al Qaeda would suddenly come under scrutiny and questioning. The president, after the killing of Osama bin Laden, had taken to suggesting al Qaeda was over. Al Qaeda was done. But if an al Qaeda offshoot in Libya was killing our diplomats, the age of terrorism was not over. 

The Obama White House didn't want any story that might harm, get in the way of or lessen the extent of the president's coming victory. The White House probably anticipated that Mitt Romney would soon attempt to make points with Benghazi. And indeed he did pounce, too quickly, the very next morning, giving a statement that was at once aggressive and forgettable, as was his wont.

And recall how Romney was criticized for "making politics" out of Benghazi.

A culture that despises children is a culture on its way to extinction.

An Israeli mom reflects on the social ostracism that followed becoming a parent.

Nevertheless, a few years ago, when I was about 34 and my biological clock started waking me up in the morning, I thought I’d carefully bring the subject to the table. It was met with equal amounts of ridicule, contempt, and pity. Some of my friends treated me as if I declared myself a right-wing fascist or just stared at me as if they felt sorry for me for leaving the realm of rational thought and voluntarily crossing over to the other side—the side of brain-dead baby-talk. Having a baby, they explained, is akin to throwing your life away. The thought of not fitting into your skinny jeans for a few months or missing out on nights of debauchery in the presence of some highly regarded international DJ is considered by some a fate worse than death.

For months before I got pregnant, my friends tried to convince me that having a baby would be a horrible mistake. They emailed me links to academic studies and research showing that children don’t, in fact, make you happy. They told me that wishing to reproduce is narcissistic. I couldn’t always argue with their logic, and in hindsight I must admit that they were right in predicting that once I had a baby, I’d be having more conversations about the different shades and textures of poo than political debates or semiotic analysis of films.

But their ignorance turned into outright denial when I actually did get knocked up. From week to week my belly grew, but my friends around the Friday café table didn’t seem to notice—or, maybe, they didn’t want to notice. At one point I couldn’t take it anymore and decided to blatantly point to my baby bump. The first reaction was a series of blank looks. Then: “What? You got a new shirt?”

***

A few months after my boyfriend and I became parents, we found out we weren’t invited to an afternoon barbecue at a friend’s house. I tried to remember if one of us said anything to annoy him, or if a notorious ex might be on the guest list, thwarting our invitation. After some unsuccessful speculation, I decided to confront my friend, who simply said that he was sorry, but the other guests didn’t want babies at their party. I assumed even baby-haters know that a sleeping infant in a baby-carrier wouldn’t be much of an imposition, but maybe they were afraid I’d be so rude as to breastfeed while people are eating—a vulgar and thoughtless act that might propel someone to lose his spareribs.

Even the Washinton Post is appalled by the Obama IRS's breaches.

Here is the opinion piece:

A BEDROCK principle of U.S. democracy is that the coercive powers of government are never used for partisan purpose. The law is blind to political viewpoint, and so are its enforcers, most especially the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service. Any violation of this principle threatens the trust and the voluntary cooperation of citizens upon which this democracy depends. 

So it was appalling to learn Friday that the IRS had improperly targeted conservative groups for scrutiny. It was almost as disturbing that President Obama and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew have not personally apologized to the American people and promised a full investigation.

Back in 2009, Obama joked about using tax audits to punish his enemies.

At his Arizona State University commencement speech last Wednesday, Mr. Obama noted that ASU had refused to grant him an honorary degree, citing his lack of experience, and the controversy this had caused. He then demonstrated ASU's point by remarking, "I really thought this was much ado about nothing, but I do think we all learned an important lesson. I learned never again to pick another team over the Sun Devils in my NCAA brackets. . . . President [Michael] Crowe and the Board of Regents will soon learn all about being audited by the IRS."

Just a joke about the power of the presidency. Made by Jay Leno it might have been funny. But as told by Mr. Obama, the actual president of the United States, it's hard to see the humor. Surely he's aware that other presidents, most notably Richard Nixon, have abused the power of the Internal Revenue Service to harass their political opponents. But that abuse generated a powerful backlash and with good reason. Should the IRS come to be seen as just a bunch of enforcers for whoever is in political power, the result would be an enormous loss of legitimacy for the tax system.

Our income-tax system is based on voluntary compliance and honest reporting by citizens. It couldn't possibly function if most people decided to cheat. Sure, the system is backed up by the dreaded IRS audit. But the threat is, while not exactly hollow, limited: The IRS can't audit more than a tiny fraction of taxpayers. If Americans started acting like Italians, who famously see tax evasion as a national pastime, the system would collapse.

One reason why Americans don't act like Italians is that they see the income-tax system as basically fair in execution. A tax audit or a tax-fraud prosecution is still seen, usually, as evidence that someone has done something wrong. If it comes instead to be seen as "just politics" then the moral component of the system will be gone. For the system to work, people have to believe that it is fundamentally fair.

This is why the IRS is so strict with its own employees. Paul Caron, a professor at the University of Cincinnati who writes the TaxProf blog, noted in response to Mr. Obama's remarks that the law calls for the termination of IRS employees who make audit threats for illegitimate reasons. He suggested that Mr. Obama's "joke" might be grounds for firing if he were an IRS employee.

He's not, of course, but as the president his words carry much more weight and he should be much more careful. That's particularly true given that people still haven't forgotten about the Obama administration's other tax issues -- the appointment of Tim Geithner as Treasury secretary despite an inexcusable failure to pay $34,000 in Social Security and Medicare taxes while working for the International Monetary Fund, and the scandals involving Tom Daschle and others whose appointments failed. (When the Geithner issue came up, news reports indicated that IRS employees were very upset. They can be fired over a simple late filing or a failure to report a mere $500 in income, making Mr. Geithner's "pass" on much more serious questions quite demoralizing.)

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news...

...such as using the IRS to target Americans for their political views.

IRS anti-Tea Party scandal gets real — senior IRS officials aware of targeting (Update – Chief Counsel knew and targets expanded to groups “educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights"

Yesterday it was just some “low level” employees involved. Now AP is reporting that senior IRS officials were aware of the targeting, via AP, IRS watchdog: Senior IRS officials knew in 2011 tea parties’ tax-exempt status being targeted (h/t @GabrielMalor):

The Obama administration apparently also targeted Jewish organizations.

One thing about reading a Dan Brown novel is that it makes you feel smart!

From recent article on Dan Brown's most recent literary offense: 

The critics said his writing was clumsy, ungrammatical, repetitive and repetitive. They said it was full of unnecessary tautology. They said his prose was swamped in a sea of mixed metaphors. For some reason they found something funny in sentences such as “His eyes went white, like a shark about to attack.” They even say my books are packed with banal and superfluous description, thought the 5ft 9in man. He particularly hated it when they said his imagery was nonsensical. It made his insect eyes flash like a rocket.

And, of course, my much lauded 2004 reflection on Dan Brown's literary works - "The DaVinci Code - I've read the book so you don't have to"  -

I am on record as assuming - based on its sale’s performance - that while the DVC would be a scholastically ignorant work purveying a knee-jerk ideology, it would also be well written. After reading the book, I have to issue a mea culpa. The DVC really is poorly written.  

Brown employs several literary artifices which are simply amateurish. For example, Brown has perfected the “expository lecture” device. Under this device, some comment or question induces the hero, Robert Langdon, to flash back to some lecture he gave which gives Brown the opportunity to inject some purportedly relevant academic information into the book. Hence, a casual comment about “PHI” leads to a three page disquisition on the Fibonacci Numbers (p. 93 - 97). See this article on Fibonacci Numbers. Now, the point of this disquisition is unclear. Apparently, it’s designed to “Wow” the reader with Brown’s encyclopedic knowledge since Brown rattles off innumerable purported examples of the “Golden Mean.” The Golden Mean really exists, but the problem is that Brown is too lazy to do any serious research to get it right. And he boots what he does write. One thing about Brown's style is that his constant injection of tendentious "scientific" or "literary" or "historical" points, suchs as the throw-away comment about the ratio of male to female bees in every hive in the world being 1.618, raised “red flag” that suggested that Brown was “making shit up”(hereinafter “MSU”), about which more later.