danivon wrote:

Ray Jay wrote:The Op Ed also talks about FDR, Nixon, and Clinton, as well as powerful Congressmen from both parties.

I have to say that when I saw Tom's assertion I was a little sceptical. Before 1913, tax collectors werr appointed by patronage, rather than being professionally hired. It would be naive in the extreme to suggest that a patronage system of apppointment would not have led to all kinds of bias in who got chased, based not only on politics but on personal favour.

I would also be very unsurprised if the IRS had been giving suspected supporters of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union a bit of extra scrutiny.

To claim that bad things only started to happen in 2008 when there is abundant evidence that they did seems to be a clear symptom of the ol' ODS.

geojanes wrote:The AP's phone records are even more disturbing to me. I'm surprised that the Dr brings it up as a problem, because, after all, it's done in the fight against global terror.

During an interview with NPR's Carrie Johnson on Tuesday, Holder was asked how often his department has obtained such records of journalists' work.

"I'm not sure how many of those cases ... I have actually signed off on," Holder said. "I take them very seriously. I know that I have refused to sign a few [and] pushed a few back for modifications."

Doctor Fate wrote:If he was really concerned about a conflict, he should have appointed someone outside the Department of Justice.

Doctor Fate wrote:
I think you've got some EODIGDS (Everything Obama Does Is Good Derangement Syndrome).

When you invoke the Nazis and the Soviets in one sentence, you're reaching.

There are some undeniably amazing "coincidences" here. Obama's campaign defines the enemy and the IRS focuses, strangely, on those people. That's a coincidence? Is nthat what you're claiming? Or, are you saying, "Business as usual." In other words, it's fine for a President to use the government against his political opponents?

Doctor Fate wrote:I'm not sure how comforting this is:

During an interview with NPR's Carrie Johnson on Tuesday, Holder was asked how often his department has obtained such records of journalists' work.

"I'm not sure how many of those cases ... I have actually signed off on," Holder said. "I take them very seriously. I know that I have refused to sign a few [and] pushed a few back for modifications."

geojanes wrote:That's actually pretty terrifying. Doesn't the AG have to go to a judge to get a warrant? Or is that one of the many rights the Patriot Act as suspended? If the AG is the both the cop and the judge that can never be good.

geojanes wrote:That's actually pretty terrifying. Doesn't the AG have to go to a judge to get a warrant? Or is that one of the many rights the Patriot Act as suspended? If the AG is the both the cop and the judge that can never be good.

danivon wrote:

geojanes wrote:That's actually pretty terrifying. Doesn't the AG have to go to a judge to get a warrant? Or is that one of the many rights the Patriot Act as suspended? If the AG is the both the cop and the judge that can never be good.

Did anyone get around to reading the Patriot Act yet? If they used NSLs, then until a couple of months ago it does look as if that is the case - no judge needed, and because of the Patriot Act.

IRS officials refused to grant tax exempt status 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.”

Here are some of the weirdest and most notable questions and requests that ABC found in roughly half a dozen IRS questionnaires sent to tea party groups from 2010 to 2012:

“Provide a list of all issues that are important to your organization. Indicate your position regarding each issue.”
“Please explain in detail the derivation of your organization’s name.” (in a letter to the Ohio-based 1851 Center for Constitutional Law)
“Please explain in detail your organization’s involvement with the Tea Party.”
“Provide details regarding your relationship with Justin Binik-Thomas.” (a Cincinnati-area Tea-Party activist)
“Provide information regarding the Butler County Teen Age Republicans and your relationship.”
“Submit the following information relating to your past and present directors, officers, and key employees: a) Provide a resume for each.”
“The names of the donors, contributors, and grantors. … The amounts of each of the donations, contributions, and grants and the dates you received them.”
“The names of persons from your organization and the amount of time they spent on the event or program.” (for events)
“Provide copies of the handbills you distributed at your monthly meetings.”
“Fully describe your youth outreach program with the local school.”
“Please provide copies of all your current web pages, including your Blog posts. Please provide copies of all of your newsletters, bulletins, flyers, newsletters or any other media or literature you have disseminated to your members or others. Please provide copies of stories and articles that have been published about you.”
“Are you on Facebook or other social networking sites? If yes, provide copies of these pages.”
“Provide copies of the agendas and minutes of your Board meetings and, if applicable, members ship meetings, including a description of legislative and electoral issues discussed, and whether candidates for political office were invited to address the meeting.”
“Do your issue-related advocacy communications compare to the positions of candidates or slates of candidates on these issues with your positions? Provide copies of these communications. What percentage do these constitute of your issue-related advocacy communications?”
“Do you have a close relationship with any candidate for political office or political party? If so describe fully the nature of that relationship.”
“Apart from your responses to the preceding, estimate the percentage of your time and what percentage of your resources you will devote to activities in the 2012 election cycle, in which you will explicitly or implicitly support or oppose a candidate, candidates or slates of candidates, for public office.”

Sebelius has encouraged that donations be made to Enroll America, a sort of community organizing group for Obamacare. The Times reports, “The president of Enroll America, Anne Filipic, worked on Mr. Obama’s 2008 campaign, became an aide to Ms. Sebelius, was later deputy executive director of the Democratic National Committee and then worked in the Obama White House as deputy director of the Office of Public Engagement.” Comically, it adds, “But a former Obama administration official, who spends time raising money for Enroll America, said its work [is] ‘not political.’”

Whether these actions are strictly illegal is not entirely clear. The Post writes, “Federal regulations do not allow department officials to fundraise in their professional capacity. They do, however, allow Cabinet members to solicit donations as private citizens ‘if you do not solicit funds from a subordinate or from someone who has or seeks business with the Department, and you do not use your official title,’ according to Justice Department regulations.”

The notion that Sebelius is fundraising as a private citizen, when her fundraising is plainly aimed at supporting the legislation she’s charged with implementing as a cabinet secretary, seems laughable. It’s not as if Sebelius is asking people to buy a few boxes of her granddaughter’s Girl Scout cookies. In addition, she is clearly soliciting funds from those who seek to do business with her department. Worse, she’s asking for donations from entities whose actions she’ll be regulating. One former senior HHS official calls her actions “truly unbelievable,” adding that “the conflicts are breath-taking.”

The Post writes, “HHS spokesman Jason Young added that a special section in the Public Health Service Act allows the secretary to support and encourage others to support nonprofit groups working to provide health information and conduct other public-health activities.” But it seems highly unlikely that this exception was designed to green-light a cabinet secretary to ask for million-dollar donations from entities whose businesses she has the power to make or break.

This is hardly the first time Sebelius has engaged in questionable, or outright illegal, practices, in the interest of promoting Obamacare and the man who spearheaded its passage. The U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) ruled last summer, without much fanfare from a press corps that wasn’t feeling particularly inquisitive at the time, that Sebelius violated federal law by using her official position to campaign for Obama. The OSC wrote that she “violated the Hatch Act’s prohibition against using official authority or influence to affect the results of an election.”

At a North Carolina event at which her official title was emphasized, Sebelius said, “This Administration is committed to keep working with you but I have to tell you, we have just begun, and a lot of what I have just explained could be wiped out in a heartbeat. So…one of the imperatives is to…make sure that in November he [Obama] continues to be President for another four years….North Carolina is hugely important in this next election…and it’s hugely important to make sure that we reelect the President.” Politico observes that “Hatch Act violations against sitting Cabinet secretaries are relatively rare,” and the Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon describes them as offenses “for which other federal workers are fired.”

A few months prior to violating federal law in that instance, Sebelius had launched the Senior Swindle, an $8.3 billion (yes, with a “b”) gambit to help Obama get reelected and of course help herself stay in office as well. That $8.3 billion in taxpayer money, about eight times what Obama raised for his campaign from private sources, was spent to hide the damaging effects of Obamacare’s Medicare Advantage cuts until after election. Sebelius used the money to avoid cuts to Medicare Advantage through November and did so under the guise of funding a “demonstration project,” since HHS secretaries are empowered to conduct modest demonstration projects from time to time.

But the federal government’s own Government Accountability Office (GAO) — the nonpartisan congressional watchdog — highlighted this “demonstration project” as a sham. It wrote that Sebelius “should cancel” the project and perhaps, sometime in the future, consider “conducting an appropriately designed demonstration.” The GAO noted that there had been 85 HHS demonstration projects since 1995, but this “demonstration project” would cost more those previous 17 years’ worth of projects combined. After Sebelius ignored the GAO and continued the project, and Mitt Romney and other Republicans failed to call attention to it, the GAO released another letter, declaring that it remained “concerned” about the project’s legality.

Ben Sasse, HHS’s assistant secretary for planning and evaluation until early 2009 and now the president of Midland University, said of the Senior Swindle, “If a presidential administration can simply make up the authority to make law and give itself the power of the purse to implement its new law — which not only isn’t designed to make existing law work but is actually against the purpose of existing law — why do we need a Congress?” Sasse added, “In scope and intention, this is something completely new, and if it’s allowed to establish precedent, the only limit on what future administrations could spend money on, or how much they could unilaterally spend, would be their own electoral calculations about what they could get away with.”

Now, Sebelius is looking to extend that dubious standard — doing whatever one can get away with politically — to cabinet secretaries’ solicitations of private donations to fund politically contentious efforts that they are undertaking as secretary.

Doctor Fate wrote:Not necessarily true. The government can't just willy-nilly do as it pleases. 2 months and 20 phone lines--it seems more like a fishing expedition than any pressing "national security" concern.

I think the pressure is on the Administration to prove there was a legitimate need.