Batman is a highly survivable sort of guy.

Open Thread.

Oh, this is somewhat interesting: Workers-comp faker undone by spinning the big wheel on The Price is Right.

Posted by: Ace at 02:46 PM | Comments (54)
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What I'm sensing is that Obama is done with pretending to be "outraged" and "determined to get to the bottom of this" -- that only worked when he thought he wouldn't get to the bottom of it, because everyone would remain silent -- and now they're going on offense, switching to the backup defense, which is a collective Fifth Amendment for the whole government and aggressive attacks against anyone who continues to push for answers.

Chuck Schumer is now warning the GOP to move on.

Drudge's editor Joseph Cur says he hears the thing is about to "explode," and that a paper trail will establish the scandal goes up "high."

Meanwhile, Red State has put together a montage of the media's word of the day: "overreach".

Woodward: The Scandal is on "the Road to Watergate." Indeed.

Posted by: Ace at 05:01 PM | Comments (279)
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There was some unpleasantness on last night's Game of Thrones. If you've managed to avoid the publicity of it up until now, I won't spoil it for you.

Though it would be a bad time to get on the train -- the producers made the whole show in order to get to last night's episode; this was the chapter of the book that convinced them to buy the rights. They've spoken for years about just wanting to do the series right to get to this episode.

In other words: It's all downhill from here.

My take on the episode? Not very good, really. I know it's cliched to say the book did it better. As a general rule, the TV show has been as good as the book, and sometimes better in some ways.

But the book built up a great deal of oppressive foreboding, clearly letting the reader know something bad was coming. I remember when I finally figured out This isn't right and then had a feeling of dread for 40 or 50 pages, hoping I was wrong about it. I kept looking for reassuring hints that I was wrong; instead I got further confirmation that evil was abroad, and so the dread escalated.

The show chose, instead, to cut out virtually all the foreshadowing and hints that not all was well. Thus choosing brief shock over drawn-out suspense and dread.

Based on the video below, I see they got their shock reactions; but the shock only lasted, it seems, for about a minute. The slow-build dread of the book, with all its foreshadowing that a tragedy was coming, lasted, who knows, 30 minutes or so.

So to me it's very strange -- they did the whole show for this one moment, and then, rather than stretching that moment out for 30 or forty minutes, rather than savoring the dread and ominous portents of it all, they just blew it on a quickie shock.

It's a shame-- once I read this part of the book, I really did understand why the producers felt they should buy the rights just to do this one scene. It's a great scene. In the book, I mean.

Eh, the whole season -- The Season that Really Matters, in the eyes of the producers -- has been a let-down. The previous seasons they cared less about were better done.

Maybe they loved this season to death. Maybe the novelty of the show is gone. Maybe it was just a bad idea to split one book into two seasons -- if you've noticed this year's pacing is slow and that the show seems padded, that's because it is. It was a long and eventful book, don't get me wrong, but turning into two full seasons has resulted in it being more plodding and slow than the book (and the book itself was often plodding and slow).

Maybe they should have just done one long season of 14 episodes, rather than doing two seasons of ten episodes each.

Previous seasons benefited by streamlining and compressing Martin's breezy, all-the-time-in-the-world writing into a tight little machine. This season actually exacerbates his pacing problems. (Though I'm glad we didn't spend 400 pages with Arya on the road, as in the book.)

This event, by the way, is about 2/3rds of the way through the book. So next season, unless they poach a lot from books 4 and 5 (which they might), will wind up being even slower.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 02:52 PM | Comments (360)
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Omerta.

IRS employees interviewed during a Treasury inspector generalÂ’s audit would not say who ordered them to target conservative groups, the inspector general told members of Congress on Monday.

“We did pose that question, and no one would acknowledge who, if anyone, provided that direction,” Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George said[.]

You know how the media keeps saying "We mustn't compare this to Nixon"?

You know who disagrees with that? The expert on this scandal, and the expert on IRS ethics -- the Inspector General of the IRS.

Russell George, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), said the targeting at the IRS his probe discovered was "unprecedented," and the closest comparison that came to mind was the targeting of political enemies by the administration of Richard Nixon.

"During the Nixon administration, there were attempts to use the Internal Revenue Services in manners that might be comparable in terms of misusing it. I'm not saying the actions taken here are comparable," he told a House Appropriations subcommittee. "This is unprecedented."

Posted by: Ace at 02:01 PM | Comments (252)
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Apparently we're allowed to discuss the Obama Administration's scandals only if we stick to the Approved DNC Playbook of pretending this was all done by a few bad-apple rogue operatives, a couple of front-line low-level employees.

Jay Carney lies to the press and the nation every day; Darryl Issa calls him a liar. Who's to say which is worse?

In the last post I noted it's a standard political play for politicians to plant a story in the press, and then turn to the American people and say "Look at what the independent, objective press is saying!"

And so: On Friday, the DNC press secretary issued this missive:

Memorandum

To: Interested Parties
From: Michael Czin, DNC National Press Secretary
Date: May 31, 2013
Subj: The Month of GOP Overreach

Blocking the President’s policies for purely political reasons has always been the top priority of Congressional Republicans, but in the last month they’ve really pushed the envelope – even for them. There’s one word that best describes the GOP’s efforts in May: overreach.

Emphasis in original -- and then the same word, "overreach," is hypnotically bolded in subsequent mentions in the document. Mostly they cite the media's concern trolling that the RNC may overreach... in the future.

But now the DNC says that the RNC has overreached, and lo! What lovely fruits blossom from this fecund seed:

I disagree with Allah here. Oh, he's right, but he's wrong.

Some people on Twitter are trying to draw a straight line from Friday’s DNC memo to today’s overreachapalooza but I’m skeptical. Why assume that like-minded reporters need written prompting from the DNC to start pushing this? They’re liberals exasperated by a flurry of scandals on a Democratic president’s watch; they’ll start whining about Republican “overreach” eventually whether they’re lobbied to do so or not. Frankly, I doubt even sympathetic media people pay attention to the parties’ dreary official talking points. If anything they’ve read has inspired them to push this, it’s more likely to be the lefty blogs they consume than some party apparatchik’s meme memo.

On that last point, that the media might have gotten the meme from the lefty blogs that they love, love, love, that might be true, but it's irrelevant; whether the leftist media takes its Meme Marching Orders from the grassroots of the leftist party or from the official organs of the leftist party is a bit moot.

But I do think the media may have actually "taken its orders" from this memo. The media is very butthurt about these scandals -- they're butthurt as partisans, and they're butthurt professionally, as they've vouched up and down the line for the singular perfection of one Barack Hussein Obama. Politically and personally, they want to push back against these narratives. They want their Old Narratives back.

@justkarl linked National Journal's "objective" reporter Ron Fourier confessing as much:

“You and others have said that no one in the White House knew about IRS actions before getting the heads up on the inspector general's report last month,” George Stephanopoulos told senior White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer on Sunday. “Are you absolutely sure of that?”

“Yes,” Pfeiffer replied.

Do you believe him?

Knowing the consequences that would befall the Obama administration if the White House or ObamaÂ’s reelection campaign knew in real time that the IRS was targeting conservatives, I desperately want to believe Pfeiffer.

"I desperately want to believe him" in order that the Obama administration should not be damaged -- this is a confession of a rather strong emotional rooting interest in Obama.

Now, assuming Ron Fourier is representative of Butthurt Liberals everywhere (and I think this is a fair assumption), we have a bunch of emotionally-invested, emotionally-upset liberals -- really no different than Rachel Maddow viewers generally -- who are "desperate" for a way out of this. For a way to start "fighting back." For a way to start "changing the Narrative."

But there seems to be no way out -- it's like quicksand. Every step taken seems to sink them, and their Magic Boyfriend, deeper into the mire.

And now someone at the DNC throws out a rope, a rope which, if it appeared in a hack political cartoon, would be labled "PARTISAN LIFELINE."

And of course they all scramble for it. They wanted a partisan lifeline, whatever form that might take, and now they've been thrown one.

Of course they scramble for it. What else would a butthurt partisan do?

Whenever a team is knocked back on its heels, it's open to suggestions about how to proceed. The particulars of the suggestion aren't important. But psychology says that a shellshocked bunch will be very receptive for any possible offer of a New Strategy.

So the DNC offers just that. This isn't really a "Marching Order," of course. That's hyperbole. The press, who are almost all partisan liberals, is under no compulsion to obey orders issued from a partisan liberal press secretary.

But why wouldn't they? It's a welcome, optimistic plan and rallying cry from a fellow team-mate (and yes, Ron Fourier and all the rest are on the same team as the DNC press secretary, even if they falsely wear different colors), and they all have the same imperative in mind -- PROTECT OBAMA -- so it's only natural that one voice crying out to the desperate would spark the very action the voice suggests.

So yes, Allah's right that the partisan liberals of the media need no formal coordination and planning with the partisan liberals of the DNC and the White House.

But given that their goals are all precisely the same, and they mutually trust each other, why wouldn't the Rallying Cry from the DNC spark echoing Rallying Cries from the media?

Posted by: Ace at 01:19 PM | Comments (190)
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The IG Report redacts the first incident in the scandal. But we know it occurred on February 25, 2010.

He notices something that I think everyone else missed -- the next line in the chronology reads thus:

"The Determinations Unit Group Manager asked a specialist to search for other Tea Party or similar organizationsÂ’ applications in order to determine the scope of the issue." [Emphasis added]

This suggests that the first incident (redacted) concerned the first Tea Party scrutinized, and the second entry then described the hunt for others.

This would also jibe with officials' statements as to why this initial incident was redacted -- they have said that it would be routine to redact information about specific taxpayers. If this first entry concerned a specific application, then it would fit that stated criterion for redaction.

He speculates that the Patient Zero for the scandal may have been a Tea Party group which applied for 501(c)4 status and which was profiled in a We-Must-Stop-These-Monsters-from-Abusing-a-Rigged-Game-We-Have-Long-Exploited-Ourselves NPR report on February 10, 2010.

One thing, though: At the end of his piece he calls this hypothesis, if true, a "relatively benign" start to the scandal. I don't agree with that part of it at all.

NPR is a partisan organization-- the IRS is not permitted to choose a partisan organization from which it will take its marching orders. That is to say, saying "We got the idea from NPR!" hardly lets the IRS off the hook.

Furthermore, all liberals, not just NPR, were buzzing about how to stop these Monsters (that is, law-abiding US citizens) at this time. The fact that NPR reported on it hardly means that no political actors then picked up the ball. In fact, I'd bet good money someone in the Administration or in Congress sent an Action Demand to the IRS, clipping the NPR article as "proof" of the allegations leveled.

This is the way it works in the Media-Government complex. The Democrats give marching orders sotto voce to the media, and the media shouts the marching orders back to the Democrats. It's a two-step manner of "laundering" the marching orders.

Political actors planting stories in the press in order to then justify their intention from the start -- "Look what the media is saying!" (unmentioned: I planted the story so that the media would say this) -- is very well-known tactic. It happens, literally, 100 times a day in Washington.

None of this means that the political witchhunt wasn't political and wasn't a witchhunt.

Posted by: Ace at 11:57 AM | Comments (395)
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Live feed at CSPAN. It's on TV on CSPAN-3.

The Appropriations committee has jurisdiction because they appropriate money for the IRS (and for everything else).

The big witness in this hearing will be the new acting commissioner of the IRS, Daniel Werfel. I don't believe he's connected to the lawbreaking -- he will be chiefly grilled on what he's doing in response to the lawbreaking (if anything). I imagine that if there are any fireworks, they will come when Werfel is asked why the presumed lawbreakers are still receiving checks from the US Government.

This comes just a week after it was revealed the IRS had spent taxpayer money to record another musical "training film" to instruct employees as to how they should treat citizens.

Oh wait, that's the wrong song. The right one is below. Enjoy it, you paid for it.
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Posted by: Ace at 11:14 AM | Comments (194)
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This might not all that bad until you realize that not all arrestees are criminals -- an arrest does not equal a conviction. An arrest is just a stop, a detainment. Traffic stops are short-duration arrests. Can DNA be taken if you're accused of having broken the speed limit?

The case split the course along statist/libertarian lines rather than left/right lines. Thus Kennedy, Roberts, and Alito joined liberal Breyer, and, maybe a little surprisingly, Clarence Thomas joined the majority opinion too. Scalia wrote the dissent that the other liberals joined.

I think it's pretty clear that Scalia is right about what the law is, and Kennedy & Co. are puffing gas about what they think the law should be, in order to run a more efficient government law enforcement operation.

And I think that's pretty clear because Kennedy and the others resort to obfuscation, which Scalia rubbishes.

Kennedy's claim is that DNA can and should be routinely taken from mere arrestees because of its important value in identifying a suspect. This is a vague word, in this context, and it selected precisely because it's vague.

The Fourth Amendment broadly rejects "suspicionless searches." It specifies that any search -- any involuntary evidence collection, that is, where the targeted person has a reasonable expectation of privacy -- be conducted pursuant to a specific, particularlized, announced suspicion of a crime, written up in a warrant, signed by a judge.

The taking of DNA as a routine operation is not that-- there is no warrant, no judge's signature, no specific annunciation of rational reasons to suspect a person. It's just a "suspicionless search" of, in this case, the arrestee's genetic makeup.

Now, to argue against that -- which is hard to do, because that's plainly what the DNA sampling is -- Kennedy resorts to claiming that there are reasons that have noting to do with suspicionless searches of the arrestee's body, mundane bureaucratic functions like "identifying" the suspect -- that is, confirming that the man you have arrested, calling himself, say, Allen Brown, is in fact Allen Brown, by checking the DNA you take from him against the National Genetic Identify File and thereby determining yup, it's Allen Brown.

Of course, this is ludicrous, as there is no "National Genetic Identity File," and no one checks CODIS, the national unsolved-crime DNA databank, to determine if the man calling himself Allen Brown is in fact Allen Brown. What they check it for is to see if Allen Brown's DNA matches up with any DNA collected from unknown persons at crime scenes.

This is what sets Scalia off, the pure intellectual and verbal dishonesty of this bait-and-switch, wherein Kennedy asserts that DNA is being taken to check if Allen Brown is Allen Brown, when he knows that's not the purpose of taking it. In fact, in the instant case, the police never bothered checking the arrestee's DNA for almost three months; if they really were concerned about the "identity" of the arrestee -- if they really weren't sure they had the right name for the guy in their custody -- they would have rushed the DNA test a lot quicker than that.

But of course they did know exactly who they had in their custody, and the DNA was not taken for purposes of "identifying" him. It was taken to check his DNA profile against the profiles of unknown perpetrators of past crimes.

Which is why he was subsequently arrested for rape.

There is no doubt that this arrest is good for society generally -- but based on Kennedy's dishonest defense of the practice, it also does not seem to conform to the Constitution or to American law.

And further, it seems that it would be a rather easy thing to correct: Post-conviction, the state could more easily justify swabbing all convicted criminals for DNA and, thereafter, checking those profiles against those in CODIS (a database of unknown criminal genetic signatures, as Scalia points out, not known ones, which would be way of it were it really for purposes of "identification.")

But this seems to be a case where we're throwing out the Constitution to help the State function more smoothly and efficiently.

We seem to be doing an awful lot of that lately.

Posted by: Ace at 10:30 AM | Comments (273)
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Um, wow.

It is ironic that the right-wingers who argue against protectionism, against the minimum wage, against unions (which inflate wage rates) and against Obamacare want to keep domestic wages artificially high by restricting the labor market (e.g. keeping out immigrant workers). That effort is not only inconsistent with free market principles, but, according to stacks of research, it also is empirically dubious.

...

In sum, if you believe in free markets, you shouldnÂ’t advocate artificially restricting the U.S. labor market and you should consider the market-driven behavior of a raft of industries. But then again, the anti-immigration forces believe many things that arenÂ’t so. That is the prerogative I suppose, but they shouldnÂ’t invoke Friedman when doing so, and lawmakers should understand what they are saying isnÂ’t supported by evidence.

Rubin is one of the most dishonest supporters of amnesty out there (and on most things she writes about) but this is really something.

She links to some articles from Libertarian and liberal sources to back her claim but they don't say anything about US wages being high, artificially or otherwise. They make a dubious claim that flooding the market with millions of new legal workers won't drive down wages because...magic.

One of the articles she links to (they aren't "research" papers, just articles summing up the pro-amnesty case) came out in July of 2009. I sort of recall something happening in the interim....the economy crashed, unemployment skyrocketed and much personal wealth evaporated but I guess none of that changes anything.

Personally, I don't think wages are too high (nor should they be made higher by the government) but I also don't see anything wrong with favoring Americans over the rest of the world when it comes to competing for jobs in this country.

The idea that a country exists mainly or solely to create a libertarian dream of a perfect free market is nonsense. All countries favor their citizens over others in numerous ways and rightly so. I, and most conservative s I know and have read, donÂ’t think the government should penalize people for freely using their capital across the globe but thatÂ’s not to say the government should be in the business of importing an unending supply of foreign workers to compete with citizens in the name of economic freedom or helping companies keep labor costs down.

No matter what Team Amnesty claims, when supply (workers) is high, price (wages) goes down.

While building her Libertarian straw man, Rubin sort of nods at but never admits something very importantÂ….you canÂ’t have this idealized (and never actually implemented) international labor market while at the same time providing a massive welfare state. If you want to talk about unfettered access to the American labor market for everyone around the world, you also better be talking about excluding those new comers from access to any element of social spending (including schools and health care). This is simply not on the table.

As for the politics of this, it’s an awful place to be for anyone who is a Republican or a conservative. If you want to cement the idea in Americans that the GOP only cares about the “rich”, then place yourself at the head of the group demanding that US companies have an nearly unlimited supply of cheap workers to push up profits while dragging wages down. That’s the economics of amnesty and it stinks.

Posted by: DrewM at 09:44 AM | Comments (290)
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Get in their faces.

Former officials of FreedomÂ’s Watch say they believe all five of the IRS audits involved donors to their group, based on conversations with IRS agents and donors at the time of the audits in 2011.

***

In February 2010, the same month the tea-party targeting started, according to a recent inspector generalÂ’s report, FreedomÂ’s Watch was subjected to an IRS audit that focused largely on its political activities, an uncommon but not unprecedented action, election lawyers say. The probe broadened into other areas, including executive compensation.

About a year later, as many as five donors to FreedomÂ’s Watch were subjected to IRS audits of their contributions that sought to impose gift taxes on their donations to the group, according to lawyers and former officials of FreedomÂ’s Watch.

Tax experts say that effort was highly unusual. The IRS generally hadnÂ’t sought to impose the gift tax on donations to tax-exempt groups such as FreedomÂ’s Watch in at least 20 years, perhaps longer, following an unfavorable court ruling and changes in the law by Congress, according to lawyers and IRS documents.

Andy linked yesterday this important story, which shouldn't get forgotten just because of its weekend timing. From FoxNews:

[I]nterviews with an IRS field agent involved in the division that targeted Tea Party groups for additional vetting appear to contradict the White HouseÂ’s assertion that rogue agents -- not the administration -- were behind the effort, according to partial transcripts released Sunday by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

The agent in the Cincinnati office, in which the targeting took place, told congressional investigators that he or she was told by a supervisor in March 2010 to search for Tea Party groups applying for tax-exempt status and that “Washington, D.C., wanted some cases.”

The agent said that by April the office had held up roughly 40 cases and at least seven were sent to Washington. The agent also said a second IRS employee asked for information on two other specific applicants in which Washington was interested in.

...

The administration has denied involvement in the scandal, repeatedly saying it was limited to the Cincinnati office.

Posted by: Ace at 08:24 AM | Comments (379)
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