Well, this all escalated quickly.

In case youÂ’re having trouble keeping up hereÂ’s a quick rundown of the scandals engulfing the beleaguered Obama administration. IÂ’ve put them in order of what I think is their seriousness.

1) Obama Sics IRS On Conservatives and Jews

You heard about the Jewish angle, right?

This is the most serious of scandals because itÂ’s an abuse of power that clearly crossing any concept of decency and legality. The idea of using one of the most powerful domestic agencies to deter political activities is such a clear abuse of power, it was once included in an Article of Impeachment.

It’s also the easiest scandal to explain to people. The first reaction of many idiots, er, low information voters is, “they all do it”. Well, they don’t and people know this because unless you’re a left wing loon, everyone hates/fears the IRS. Even idiots, er, low information voters, would remember if this type of police state activity were “business as usual”.

It’s also damning because the scandal has blown up from “some idiots in Cincinnati” to “top officials in DC” and from “giving some groups a hard time” to “illegally sharing information with liberal activists groups”.

One thing to keep in mind…liberals keep saying that the IRS is in a tough spot with enforcing the rules as written. Bull. Nothing about the “rules” made them focus only on political opponents of the administration or leak confidential documents to leftwing groups. Don’t buy the spin.

2) ObamaÂ’s Health And Human Services Secretary Is Extorting Money From HealthCare Industry To Support ObamaCare

This is a little bit of a dark horse but I think it ranks higher than most people seem to at the moment.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is hitting up companies she has tremendous control over in order to circumvent the will of Congress.

Sure some of these companies are willing co-conspirators because contrary to the image Obama is trying to portray, ObamaCare is a boon for health insurance companies. But there are other health care stakeholders, like hospitals and medical device manufacturers who arenÂ’t as fond of ObamaCare but might be able to trade of a few bucks for a favorable waiver or ruling fromÂ…Kathleen Sebelius.

The Obama administration says they need the money because Congress wonÂ’t give them more. WellÂ…tough. Inaction is a policy choice as much as action is. Congress doesnÂ’t want HHS to have money to do certain things. ThatÂ’s not something Obama gets to decide to ignore by selling government favors for private money.

3) Super-Scandal Obama

I making this one up because Obama ‘s IRS and HHS scandals are connected through ObamaCare. Like Super Storm Sandy was a big storm that combined with other elements (location, tides, etc0 to magnify it’s effects, the nexus of the IRS and ObamaCare mean that when these two scandals interact, they have more power than either alone.

ObamaCare is still unpopular, well over budget and pretty much doomed to failure. Add in a corrupt and political active IRS getting involved in peopleÂ’s health care and (at least the appearance) of HHS selling ObamaCare indulgences, you have a powerful Super Scandal that a smart opposition party could use to do real damage to ObamaCare.

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Posted by: DrewM at 06:19 AM | Comments (279)
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• The Benghazi Lie
  
• Photo Of The Year Turns Out To Have Been Photo Shopped
  
• Time: The Real IRS Scandal Is They Went About Targeting The Tea Party In The Wrong Way
  
• Women In Charge IRS Division In Question To Get A Honorary Tribute From A College
  
• Andrea Mitchell Seems To Understand The Seriousness Of This IRS Scandal
  
• Glenn Reynolds: Should I Trust The Government?
  
• Navy To Launch Unmanned Aircraft From Carrier
  
• Detroit Sinks To New Low
  
• Review Of New Start Trek Movie
  
• President Scandal Attends Multiple NYC Fundraising Whines About Rush Limbaugh
  
• Jay Carney Claims He Has No Knowledge Of DOJ's Access To Phone Records
  
• Legal Insurrection And Judicial Watch File Suit To Obtain David Gregory Gun Law Violation Documents
  
• State Pushes To Keep Trayvon Martin's Past Out Of Zimmerman Trial
  
• Introducing Amazon Coins
  
• Has The Future Of College Moved Online?
  
• Angelina Jolie Had A Double Mastectomy Because She Might Get Breast Cancer One Day
  
• New Bill Would Boost Penalties On IRS Lawbreakers
  
• Rich Manhattan Mom's Hire Handicapped Tour Guides So Kids Can Cut In Line At Disney World
  
• US Shale To Drive Down Price Of OPEC Oil
  
• Season Four Arrested Development Trailer (auto play)
  

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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:21 AM | Comments (262)
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New Obama administration scandal by noon? I'll take the under.

Posted by: andy at 02:55 AM | Comments (507)
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Quote of the Day

When I am speaking to students, I like to show them a still from the Oliver Stone movie Wall Street in which the masterful financier Gordon Gekko is talking on his cell phone, a Motorola DynaTac 8000X. The students always - always - laugh: The ridiculous thing is more than a foot long and weighs a couple of pounds. But the revelatory fact that takes a while to sink in is this: You had to be a millionaire to have one. The phone cost the equivalent of nearly $10,000, it cost about $1,000 a month to operate, and you couldn't text or play Angry Birds on it. When the first DynaTac showed up in a movie - it was Sixteen Candles, a few years before Wall Street - it was located in the front seat of a Rolls-Royce, which is where such things were found 25 or 30 years ago. By comparison, an iPhone 5 is a wonder, a commonplace miracle. My question for the students is: How is it that the cell phones in your pockets get better and cheaper every year, but your schools get more expensive and less effective? (Or, if you live in one of the better school districts, get much more expensive and stagnate?) How is it that Gordon Gekko's ultimate status symbol looks to our eyes as ridiculous as Molly Ringwald's Reagan-era wardrobe and asymmetrical hairdos? That didn't just happen.

  -- Kevin Williamson in iPencil.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:13 PM | Comments (823)
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NOTE: This was originally set for early last week, but Scandalgate broke, and it was impossible to find a slot for it in prime-time.

Every tragedy in this country seems to be an excuse for the Left and its mouthpieces to yarble for a "Debate" on how to prevent children from suffering. Notably missing however, from both the media and their dutiful reader's endless litany of causes to be outraged over is, not so surprisingly, anything that has the potential to roast one of their sacred cows.

One line in Breitbart's article on the multiple guilty in the 1st degree verdicts in the Gosnell murder trial has me steaming a bit, as it repeats one of the Left's unexamined lies that, if I could borrow the eloquent words of Tank Girl, really works my titties.

Both sides of the abortion divide seized on the case. Abortion foes said it exposed the true nature of abortion in all its disturbing detail. Abortion rights activists warned that Gosnell's rogue practice foreshadows what poor and desperate young women could face if abortion is driven underground with more restrictive laws. [emphasis mine]

Here, let me take apart this abortion of an argument that so offends my sensibilities:
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Posted by: Open Blogger at 08:40 AM | Comments (77)
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Well, the initial lie survived nightfall, but only just.

(I have to break embargo here.)

Internal Revenue Service officials in Washington and at least two other offices were involved in the targeting of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, making clear the effort reached well beyond the branch in Cincinnati that was initially blamed, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

IRS officials at the agencyÂ’s Washington headquarters sent queries to conservative groups asking about their donors and other aspects of their operations, while officials in the El Monte and Laguna Niguel offices in California sent similar questionnaires to tea party-affiliated groups.

...

Lois G. Lerner, who oversees tax-exempt groups for the IRS, told reporters on Friday the “absolutely inappropriate” actions were undertaken by “front-line people” working in Cincinnati to target groups with “tea party,” “patriot” or “9/12” in their names.

...

“For the IRS to say it was some low-level group in Cincinnati is simply false,” said Cleta Mitchell, a partner in the law firm Foley & Lardner LLP who sought to communicate with IRS headquarters about the delay in granting tax-exempt status to True the Vote.

Moreover, details of the IRSÂ’s efforts to target conservative groups reached the highest levels of the agency in May 2012, far earlier than has been disclosed....

...

Orrin Hatch wrote to the IRS to raise these concerns-- and was given a horseshit reply.

“Knowing what we know now,” he added, “the IRS was at best being far from forth coming, or at worst, being deliberately dishonest with Congress.”

Posted by: Ace at 04:32 PM | Comments (523)
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Wow.

ItÂ’s amazing that ProPublica is willing to burn its source, at least in a general sense, as the key update that it is. This shows that the aggressive actions from this office were hardly apolitical. All nine of the confidential files involved conservative groups, not just a cross-section of 501(c)4s applying for exemptions. This was a coordinated effort to attack conservative groups, although ProPublica ran their article after the election.

Posted by: Ace at 02:44 PM | Comments (213)
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Greg Sergeant is of course a zealous hack on behalf of Obama.

Regarding this latest scandal, let's not let AP jump to the head of the line on scandal investigations. As @drewmtips is pointing out (and as I mentioned in my article, obliquely), there may actual be justification here for finding a leaker, depending on what information the leaker actually compromised.

The Obama Administration has a lot of callow sissies in it who kind of get off on telling stories about CIA missions and SEAL operations. They think talking about men of action sort of makes them manly themselves. They don't seem to care that this behavior might put real men in jeopardy.

We saw this a lot with SEAL Team 6, as a bunch of Obama people (including, who knows, possibly Obama himself) could not wait to tell their Best Girfriends Forever in the media all this awesome boy-stuff the SEALs were doing!

Related: Obama says Republicans are making people cynical about government.

Ah yes. We're the ones doing that. Got it.

Posted by: Ace at 02:28 PM | Comments (130)
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Via AP:

This may be part of an investigation into the leak of details of a terrorist bombing plot in Yemen in May, 2012. Testifying about the matter this past February, CIA Director John Brennan said that the FBI had asked him if he he himself was the source of the leak. (He said he wasn't.) Among the numbers whose calls were logged were those of five reporters and an editor who'd worked on the Yemen story.

The AP has objected to the "intrusion" as "unprecedented."

Now, here's where it gets a little bit worse. Up until now, one can say that the Administration was simply looking to find an illegal leaker who compromised national security.

But was this about national security -- or was it about political embarrassment? Did the Administration take extraordinary steps to protect national security secrets, or to cover up yet another Benghazi-like massaging of talking points?

The May 7, 2012, AP story that disclosed details of the CIA operation in Yemen to stop an airliner bomb plot occurred around the one-year anniversary of the May 2, 2011, killing of Osama bin Laden.

The plot was significant because the White House had told the public it had "no credible information that terrorist organizations, including al-Qaida, are plotting attacks in the U.S. to coincide with the (May 2) anniversary of bin Laden's death."

The AP delayed reporting the story at the request of government officials who said it would jeopardize national security. Once government officials said those concerns were allayed, the AP disclosed the plot because officials said it no longer endangered national security. The Obama administration, however, continued to request that the story be held until the administration could make an official announcement.

Note that the Obama Administration no longer had national security concerns, but continued to insist the story be held until they could get out in front of it with their own announcement.

However, for arguments that the anger was actually about the leak of national security details (as well as embarrassing the US by also leaking MI-6's involvement), see this old story from May 11, 2012. (I can't quote enough of it to deny a leak.)

By the way, Obama's insistence that the media not cover this story a few months before an election seems to have paid off in spades -- I don't remember this "New and Improved Underwear Bomber" story at all. Now that my memory's refreshed, I have a recollection of it, but it wasn't exactly front-page news.

It was an inconvenient story for an administration determined to claim that Al Qaeda was beaten and on the run. The press was pressured into not reporting it.

We saw this again after Benghazi.

Posted by: Ace at 01:25 PM | Comments (306)
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Actual words: "fetuses... removed from their mothers."

Michelle Malkin notes that even Gosnell's lawyer was able to admit the "baby problem" in defending his vile client.

The New York Times, then, is more protective of Gosnell than his own paid mouthpiece.

Posted by: Ace at 12:25 PM | Comments (368)
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