It’s Friday, August 2nd, 2013…and here’s The Gouge!

First up, a late-breaking story forwarded by Carl Polizzi:

Dozens of CIA operatives on the ground during Benghazi attack

 

As Joel Ross noted in Wednesday’s Gouge…

“…There is much more here than has become known as yet, about Benghazi and now the IRS scandal and enemies list. It is a replay of Watergate.”

Stay tuned!

Since we’re on the subject of those “phony scandals”, as the WSJ‘s Kimberly Strassel reports…

New Links Emerge in the IRS Scandal

Emails released this week sweep the Federal Election Commission into the conservative-targeting probe.

 

Congressional investigators this week released emails suggesting that staff at the Federal Election Commission have been engaged in their own conservative targeting, with help from the IRS’s infamous Lois Lerner. This means more than just an expansion of the probe to the FEC. It’s a new link to the Obama team.

In May this column noted that the targeting of conservatives started in 2008, when liberals began a coordinated campaign of siccing the federal government on political opponents. The Obama campaign helped pioneer this tactic.

In late summer of 2008, Obama lawyer Bob Bauer took issue with ads run against his boss by a 501(c)(4) conservative outfit called American Issues Project. Mr. Bauer filed a complaint with the FEC, called on the criminal division of the Justice Department to prosecute AIP, and demanded to see documents the group had filed with the IRS.

Thanks to Congress’s newly released emails, we now know that FEC attorneys went to Ms. Lerner to pry out information about AIP—the organization the Obama campaign wanted targeted. An email from Feb. 3, 2009, shows an FEC attorney asking Ms. Lerner “whether the IRS had issued an exemption letter” to AIP, and requesting that she share “any information” on the group. Nine minutes after Ms. Lerner received this FEC email, she directed IRS attorneys to fulfill the request.

This matters because FEC staff didn’t have permission from the Commission to conduct this inquiry. It matters because the IRS is prohibited from sharing confidential information, even with the FEC. What the IRS divulged is unclear. Congressional investigators are demanding to see all communications between the IRS and FEC since 2008, and given that Ms. Lerner came out of the FEC’s office of the general counsel, that correspondence could prove illuminating.

It also matters because we now know FEC staff engaged in a multiyear effort to deliver to the Obama campaign its win against AIP. This past week, FEC Vice Chairman Don McGahn, joined by his two fellow Republican commissioners, wrote an extraordinary statement recounting the staff’s behavior in the case.

When the FEC receives a complaint, it falls to the general counsel’s office to first issue a report on the merits of the alleged campaign violations. The six-person commission then votes on whether there is a “reason to believe” a violation occurred. No formal investigations are to take place before that point.

The Obama team’s complaint broadly claimed AIP was masquerading as a nonprofit, when it should have registered as a highly regulated political action committee. It was a ludicrous claim (see below), yet the FEC staff issued a report in April 2009 recommending the commission go after AIP, not long after its attorneys had been in touch with Ms. Lerner.

When the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. FEC made most of the Obama complaint irrelevant, the staff withdrew its first report, then took 18 months to come up with a second rationale for why the commission should pursue AIP. All this time, FEC staff—Mr. McGahn recounts—were conducting an unauthorized investigation into AIP. The staff was also improperly withholding the results of its research from AIP.

When new issues made its second attempt moot, the general counsel’s office went after the group with a third report. AIP’s defense all along was that it spent the majority of its money from 2007 to 2010 on its “major” organizational “purpose” of educating and informing the public of conservative principles, and only a minority (less than one-third) on direct campaign expenditures. As such, it easily meets the tests for being a 501(c)(4).

And so the FEC staff’s third report presented a novel theory. The staff argued that AIP ought to be judged on what it spent per “calendar year.” By shortening the timeline, and looking only at AIP’s spending in 2008—an election year—the staff argued AIP had violated campaign law.

The Republican commissioners were appalled, noting that FEC staff had always taken a multiyear view of expenditures, including when it came to cases against liberal groups, like the League of Conservation Voters or the Moveon.org Voter Fund. The FEC staff also sought to impose this new standard after the fact, with no notice to election players and no input from the commissioners.

Vice Chairman McGahn’s statement is scathing. “Here,” he writes, FEC staff “could be seen as manipulating the timeline to reach the conclusion that AIP is a political committee. . . . Such after-the-fact determinations create the appearance of impropriety, whether or not such impropriety exists.”

The broader AIP case is, in fact, beyond improper. It’s fishy. The Obama campaign takes its vendetta against a political opponent to the FEC. The FEC staff, as part of an extraordinary campaign to bring down AIP and other 501(c)(4) groups, reaches out to Lois Lerner, the woman overseeing IRS targeting. Mr. McGahn has also noted that FEC staff has in recent years had an improperly tight relationship with the Justice Department—to which the Obama campaign also complained about AIP.

Democrats are increasingly desperate to suggest that the IRS scandal was the work of a few rogue agents. With the stink spreading to new parts of the federal government, that’s getting harder to do.

Which leads us to recall the immortal words of Jimmy Malone in The Untouchables, who so eloquently opined of Chicago and its politicians…

In a related item, the WSJ weighs in on what amounts to nothing more than another attempt by The Obamao at obfuscation through prevarication, this time by regurgitating his same tired, time-worn tax-and-spend “reforms”:

Obama’s ‘Grand Bargain’ With Obama

He proposes tax reform with higher taxes and not much reform.

 

In Chattanooga on Tuesday, the latest stop on his economic inequality tour, President Obama made himself an offer he couldn’t refuse. If Congressional Republicans agree to a corporate tax increase, he said, then he’ll agree to spend more money on his favorite public-works projects. If Republicans bargain hard, will he also offer an expansion of ObamaCare as a sweetener?

We know this sounds like an exaggeration, but that’s the essence of what the President proposed as what he called a new “grand bargain.” Mr. Obama will agree to reform the corporate tax code—a GOP priority and one even the President claims to support—but only if the reform raises more revenue and only if he is allowed to spend that windfall on his priorities.

A White House press release clarified that the President would also like to raise taxes on individuals, not just businesses, while allowing federal spending to rise still higher. But showing they retain a sense of humor in the West Wing, the press release suggests that the President is willing to forgo this tax increase for now because he wants to “work with Republicans.”

As the The Weekly Standard via Drudge so astutely noted in response to The Great Prevaricator saying…

“I’m willing to simplify our tax code in a way that closes those loopholes, ends incentives to ship jobs overseas, and lowers rates for businesses that create jobs right here in America.”

…neither…

“…Obama’s Tuesday speech nor his February 2012 corporate tax reform plan explained in detail which loopholes would be closed. During the 2012 presidential campaign, the Obama campaign hammered Mitt Romney for not saying which loopholes he would close to pay for a proposed reduction in individual income tax rates.”

…i.e., he won’t bore you with the details!

Meanwhile, the WSJ‘s Dan Henninger ignores all the noise and focuses in on Der Obafuhrer’s actual endgame:

Obama’s Creeping Authoritarianism

Imposed law replaces checks and balances.

 

If we learned anything about Barack Obama in his first term it is that when he starts repeating the same idea over and over, what’s on his mind is something else.

The first term’s over-and-over subject was “the wealthiest 1%.” Past some point, people wondered why he kept beating these half-dead horses. After the election, we knew. It was to propagandize the targeted voting base that would provide his 4% popular-vote margin of victory—very young voters and minorities. They believed. He won.

The second-term over-and-over, elevated in his summer speech tour, is the shafting of the middle class. But the real purpose here isn’t the speeches’ parboiled proposals. It is what he says the shafting of the middle class is forcing him to do. It is forcing him to “act”—to undertake an unprecedented exercise of presidential power in domestic policy-making. (Or, more accurately, assuming Congress’ prerogative of making law!) ObamaCare was legislated. (Though in a highly questionable fashion.) In the second term, new law will come from him.

Please don’t complain later that you didn’t see it coming. As always, Mr. Obama states publicly what his intentions are. He is doing that now. Toward the end of his speech last week in Jacksonville, Fla., he said: “So where I can act on my own, I’m going to act on my own. I won’t wait for Congress.” (Applause.)

The July 24 speech at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., has at least four references to his intent to act on his own authority, as he interprets it: “That means whatever executive authority I have to help the middle class, I’ll use it.” (Applause.) And: “We’re going to do everything we can, wherever we can, with or without Congress.”

Every president since George Washington has felt frustration with the American system’s impediments to change. This president is done with Congress. The political left, historically inclined by ideological belief to public policy that is imposed rather than legislated, will support Mr. Obama’s expansion of authority. The rest of us should not.

The U.S. has a system of checks and balances. Mr. Obama is rebalancing the system toward a national-leader model that is alien to the American tradition. To create public support for so much unilateral authority, Mr. Obama needs to lessen support for the other two branches of government—Congress and the judiciary. He is doing that.

Mr. Obama and his supporters in the punditocracy are defending this escalation by arguing that Congress is “gridlocked.” But don’t overstate that low congressional approval rating. This is the one branch that represents the views of all Americans. It’s gridlocked because voters are.

Take a closer look at the Galesburg and Jacksonville speeches. Mr. Obama doesn’t merely criticize Congress. He mocks it repeatedly. Washington “ignored” problems. It “made things worse.” It “manufactures” crises and “phony scandals.” He is persuading his audiences to set Congress aside and let him act.

So too the judiciary. During his 2010 State of the Union speech, Mr. Obama denounced the Supreme Court Justices in front of him. The National Labor Relations Board has continued to issue orders despite two federal court rulings forbidding it to do so. Attorney General Eric Holder says he will use a different section of the Voting Rights Act to impose requirements on Southern states that the Supreme Court ruled illegal. Mr. Obama’s repeated flouting of the judiciary and its decisions are undermining its institutional authority, as intended.

The three administration nominees enabled by the Senate’s filibuster deal—Richard Cordray at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Thomas Perez at the Labor Department and EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy—open a vast swath of American life to executive authority on steroids. There won’t be enough hours in the day for Mr. Obama to “act on my own.”

In a recent Journal op-ed, “Obama Suspends the Law,” former federal judge Michael McConnell noted there are few means to stop a president who decides he is not obligated to execute laws as passed by Congress. So there’s little reason to doubt we’ll see more Obamaesque dismissals of established law, as with ObamaCare’s employer mandate. Mr. Obama is pushing in a direction that has the potential for a political crisis.

A principled opposition would speak out. Barack Obama is right that he isn’t running again. But the Democratic Party is. Their Republican opponents should force the party’s incumbents to defend the president’s creeping authoritarianism. If Democratic Senate incumbents or candidates from Louisiana, Alaska, Missouri, Arkansas, North Carolina, Montana and Iowa think voters should accede to a new American system in which a president forces laws into place as his prerogative rather than first passing them through Congress, they should be made to say so.

And to be sure, the other purpose of the shafted middle-class tour is to demolish the GOP’s standing with independent voters and take back the House in 2014. If that happens—and absent a more public, aggressive Republican voice it may—an unchecked, unbalanced presidential system will finally arrive.

A final quotation on America’s system of government: “To ensure that no person or group would amass too much power, the founders established a government in which the powers to create, implement, and adjudicate laws were separated. Each branch of government is balanced by powers in the other two coequal branches.” Source: The White House website of President Barack Obama.

For a second, decidedly more dire opinion on the same subject, we turn to the latest from Kevin Jackson writing at TheBlackSphere.net via PatriotUpdate.com, who provides the…

Answer to Why Obama Wants to Destroy America

 

When people ask me, “Why would Obama want to destroy America”—at least the America that most Conservatives know and love? It’s simple: Why wait for Hell, when you can create Hell on Earth.

We often hear of Liberals use of Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, and people discuss Alinsky’s organizing abilities. What they omit is his underlying philosophy. Alinsky built his organizing model on a love of creating hell. Saul Alinsky interview in Playboy, 1972:

ALINSKY: Hell would be heaven for me. All my life I’ve been with the have-nots. Over here, if you’re a have-not, you’re short of dough. If you’re a have-not in hell, you’re short of virtue. Once I get into hell, I’ll start organizing the have-nots over there.

PLAYBOY: Why them?

ALINSKY: They’re my kind of people.

The man who wrote what Liberals use as the definitive book on community organizing admits to having no virtue. So what he destroys communities, using his kind of people.

Take Hillary Clinton for example. Hillary loved Alinsky’s work so much that she actually wrote her senior thesis at Wellesley College on his work, his most notable being the bible of Liberalism: Rules for Radicals. Obama loved Hillary’s work so much, he made her Secretary of State, or what I like to call America’s Marketing Department. Why stop at America, when you can ruin the world.

Alinsky dedicated Rules for Radicals to Lucifer:

 “Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins — or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer.”

Another Alinksy disciple was America’s very own Barack “You didn’t build that” Obama who built his community organizing model around that of Alinsky, not worrying much about the results. The Washington Times reports:

“Under Reagan, adult black unemployment fell by 20 percent, but under Mr. Obama, it has increased by 42 percent. Black teenage unemployment fell by 16 percent under Reagan, but has risen by 56 percent under Mr. Obama. The increase in unemployment rates has been far worse for blacks under Mr. Obama than for whites and Hispanics. Inflation-adjusted real incomes are slightly higher for Hispanics and whites than they were in 2008, but are lower for blacks. The labor force participation rate has fallen for all groups, but remains far lower for blacks than for whites and Hispanics.”

How in the Beelzebub could you have results like this, and still be held in high esteem without some sort of satanic intervention. Liberal blacks appear unconcerned about the devastation to the black community by Obama and the Left. It should be no surprise that while the Congressional Black Caucus of satanic worshipers met in Chicago, 9 black people were shot; by other black people.

Is Obama a leader? Certainly. And like the Pied Piper, Obama is leading black people to the gates of Hell. The good news is that most black Liberals don’t have to go far. They are already there. Thanks to Saul Alinsky…and Liberalism.

Or, more accurately, Marxism.  And remember, one of the central tenets of Marxism preaches the internal enemy is always the most dangerous; and that, dear hearts, is all of us!  And so what if America burns; he’s intent on ruling the ashes.

Moving on, as the Fight of the Century continues to loom on Capitol Hill, the Washington Examiner suggests…

A sensible compromise, for now, on Obamacare defunding

 

“We’ve gone beyond the romance of all of this,” Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., told CNBC shortly after the President announced he would not be enforcing Obamacare’s employer mandate or its income verification provisions. “The makeup and lipstick are off. People are waking up to look at this bill. It is a serious pig.” But that was then. Now, three weeks later, Corker is singing a different tune. “Oh, I think it’s a silly effort,” Corker told MSNBC Tuesday about conservative plans to either defund or delay Obamacare in the coming continuing resolution to keep the federal government running through September 2014.

“I don’t look at that as very courageous,” Corker continued. “Most of us see through it and realize that these people are really just taking themselves out of the debate.” But the only person taking himself out of the debate on the most important issue of the day is Corker and others in the Republican pantheon who would surrender to Obama without a fight. First, there is little doubt that Obama’s unilateral decisions to delay the Obamacare employer mandate and the law’s income verification requirement were illegal. As Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, told the New York Times, “this was the law. How can they change the law?”

Second, as the Heritage Foundation’s Chris Jacobs recently explained, removing the income verification provisions from Obamacare’s premium subsidy eligibility process is an invitation to defraud the American people. “In many of these cases, individuals will receive more in benefits than they will have to repay the federal government,” Jacobs wrote of individuals who lie about their income. “Therefore, as long as they qualify for some subsidy, dishonest individuals have incentive to fudge their income so they receive the maximum subsidy.”

Congressional Republicans can disagree on how to defeat Obamacare ultimately, but fraud prevention should be a high priority for all public servants regardless of party. But Obama is far more interested in launching his signature domestic program than he is in preventing fraud. Hence, his unlawful postponement of the income verification requirement. Normally, this issue would be resolved by the courts.

And if things don’t change between now and January 1, 2014, he ain’t EVER going away!

Unfortunately, there is no citizen-suit provision in Obamacare and establishing standing to contest fraud in a federal program is exceptionally difficult. Plus, the subsidy payments begin Jan. 1, 2014. The only hope the American people have of preventing Obama’s fraud on the American people is for Congress to act. And that is exactly what the movement to defund or delay Obamacare through the continuing resolution is all about.

Will the Senate pass, and Obama sign, a full defunding of Obamcare, even for just one year? No and no. But that doesn’t mean Congress should sit idly by as Obama heedlessly sends hundreds of millions of tax dollars to fraudsters. Instead, Republicans should demand that at a minimum language be included in the continuing resolution forbidding the disbursement of any health insurance subsidies until Obamacare’s income verification requirement is restored and fully functioning. Everybody should agree on that.

Sensible indeed…which means the nominal leaders of The Gang Who Still Can’t Shoot Straight will likely ignore it.  At least on the Senate side, where, as David Drucker details in the Washington Examiner, the less-than-sharpshooters who typify the GOP Old Guard are determined to spoil the aim of those whose aim is true:

GOP wants to kill Obamacare but is divided over how to do it

 

Susan Collins:

“There is growing opposition to Obamacare in this country; and I think that opposition will soar once it is fully implemented. And, to me that provides an opportunity to Republicans to replace the onerous and unworkable and unwise provisions of the law with better health care policy — and I think that should be our focus,” Collins told reporters. “To lay down this gauntlet that we are not going to fund the government unless Obamacare is completely repealed is a totally unrealistic policy, when the Senate is controlled by the Democrats and President Obama is still in the White House and would veto the bill.“

Ted Cruz:

“The Obama administration’s plan, I believe, is to get to Jan. 1; Jan. 1 is when the exchanges start and the subsidies start, and the administration’s plan is to try to get as many Americans as possible addicted to the sugar — addicted to the subsidies,” Cruz said. “In modern times, no major entitlement that has been implemented has ever been unwound. And, so in my view, if we do not stand on principle, now, it is likely that we never will repeal Obamacare.”

“There is no good alternative,” he said. “We either stand for principle now, or I believe we surrender to Obamacare permanently.“

As Sam Adams so artfully articulated, “Our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty”.

The stakes couldn’t be higher…and this idiot’s…

…apparently intent on playing our hand.

Meanwhile, even the man whose agency is tasked with enforcing this abortive Obamanation isn’t hot on personally participating:

IRS chief says he’d rather not switch to ObamaCare plan

 

The head of the agency tasked with enforcing ObamaCare said Thursday that he’d rather not get his own health insurance from the system created by the health care overhaul. “I would prefer to stay with the current policy that I’m pleased with rather than go through a change if I don’t need to go through that change,” said acting IRS chief Danny Werfel, during a House Ways and Means Committee hearing.

The statement quickly fueled Republican criticism of the law, as well as their calls to block the IRS from enforcing it.

Then there’s today’s Money Quote, and this snippet from a recent installment of Hope ‘n Change:

“If Lewis & Clark had tried to find their way across America using the Clintons’ moral compass, their bones would still be missing and moldering in some godforsaken Brazilian jungle.“

On the Lighter Side…

Howz ’bout this rather accurate assessment of Newt’s moral relativity, aka “chutzpah”?

Finally, in “We Can Do It In Three Words” segment…

Kate Upton’s super sexy body explained

 

As we said, it takes all of three words: “major league yabahos”!

Magoo