The war on the rule of law; the Deep State, and Coups?

[G M]

Of the damage done to this country by Obama, the destruction of the rule of law is the worst wound inflicted, and will long plague the American people after he leaves office.

[G M]

http://washingtonexaminer.com/ap-exclusive-us-ordered-delay-in-interns-arrest/article/2518616#.UPXaP2_A_y1

Politics: Congress
AP Exclusive: US ordered delay in intern's arrest
January 15, 2013 | 12:45 pm



FILE - This Sept. 27, 2012 file photo shows Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J. speaking in Sayreville, N.J. Federal immigration agents were prepared to arrest an illegal immigrant and registered sex offender days before the November elections but were ordered by Washington to hold off after officials warned of "significant interest" from Congress and news organizations because the suspect was a volunteer intern for Menendez, according to internal agency documents provided to Congress. (AP Photo/Mel Evans, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Federal immigration agents were prepared to arrest an illegal immigrant and registered sex offender days before the November elections but were ordered by Washington to hold off after officials warned of "significant interest" from Congress and news organizations because the suspect was a volunteer intern for Sen. Robert Menendez, according to internal agency documents provided to Congress.

The Homeland Security Department said last month, when The Associated Press first disclosed the delayed arrest of Luis Abrahan Sanchez Zavaleta, that AP's report was "categorically false."

Sanchez, 18, was an immigrant from Peru who entered the country on a now-expired visitor visa. He eventually was arrested at his home in New Jersey on Dec. 6. He has since been released from an immigration jail and is facing deportation. Sanchez has declined to speak to the AP.

After the AP story, which cited an unnamed U.S. official involved in the case, Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa and six other Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee asked the Obama administration for details about the incident.

According to those documents, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Newark had arranged to arrest Sanchez at the local prosecutor's office on Oct. 25. That was fewer than two weeks before the election.

Noting that Sanchez was a volunteer in Menendez's Senate office, ICE officials in New Jersey advised that the arrest "had the possibility of garnering significant congressional and media interest" and were "advised to postpone the arrest" until officials in Washington gave approval. The documents describe a conference call between officials Washington and New Jersey to "determine a way forward, given the potential sensitivities surrounding the case."

The senators, in a letter to the Homeland Security Department, said the agency documents showed that Sanchez's arrest "was delayed by six weeks," as AP had reported. They asked for details about the department's review of potentially sensitive, high profile immigration cases when arrests are delayed.

In a letter Monday, Assistant DHS Secretary Nelson Peacock said an allegation that the government delayed Sanchez's arrest "for political purposes" was categorically false. Neither the unnamed U.S. official cited in AP's original story or the senators in their letters to the department had specifically alleged that the arrest had been delayed for political purposes.

The documents provided to Congress do not indicate why the arrest should have been delayed or whether anyone outside Immigration and Customs Enforcement -- such as in the headquarters offices of the Homeland Security Department -- was consulted.

Menendez, D-N.J., who advocates aggressively for pro-immigration policies, was re-elected on Nov. 6 with 58 percent of the vote. Menendez said last month that his staff was notified about the case immediately before AP's story, he learned about the case from the AP and he knew nothing about whether or why DHS had delayed the arrest.

According to police records, Sanchez was 15 when he was arrested on a charge of aggravated sexual assault in 2009. The records show he was accused of sexually assaulting an 8-year-old boy at least eight times and sentenced to two years' probation and required to register as a sex offender. The AP is not reporting the boy's relationship to Sanchez to avoid identifying the victim.

The agency documents show that Sanchez failed to update his sex offender registration, and local prosecutors considered arresting him for that. During the same time, immigration officials learned that Sanchez had applied for the Obama administration's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which would have allowed him to stay in the country and legally work for two years. He did not disclose his arrest or status as a sex offender on the application and was eventually denied, according to the documents.

Immigration enforcement operations in New Jersey were largely halted starting Oct. 28 as officials prepared for Hurricane Sandy. By Nov. 29, ICE had planned to arrest Sanchez after Citizenship and Immigration Services had formally denied his deferred action application. The following day, the ICE Office of the Principal Legal Advisor was consulted. The agency's chief counsel was also consulted and the arrest was approved Dec. 5.

Sanchez was arrested the next day.

During the final weeks of President George W. Bush's administration, ICE was criticized for delaying the arrest of President Barack Obama's aunt, who had ignored an immigration judge's order to leave the country several years earlier after her asylum claim was denied. She subsequently won the right to stay in the United States after an earlier deportation order, and there was no evidence of involvement by the White House.

In that case, the Homeland Security Department had imposed an unusual directive days before the 2008 election requiring high-level approval before federal agents nationwide could arrest fugitive immigrants including Zeituni Onyango, the half-sister of Obama's late father. The directive from ICE expressed concerns about "negative media or congressional interest," according to a copy of that directive obtained by AP. The department lifted the immigration order weeks later.

___

Follow Alicia A. Caldwell on Twitter at www.twitter.com/acaldwellap

[G M]

http://reason.com/archives/2013/01/09/the-epa-pushes-the-envelope-again

The EPA Pushes the Envelope, Again
A long train of abuses suggests an institutional culture that sees the law as an impediment.
A. Barton Hinkle | January 9, 2013

In accusing the Environmental Protection Agency of trying to regulate “water itself as a pollutant,” Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is not showing an excess of exactitude. But his looseness is rhetorical and harmless. The EPA’s is neither.


Last week federal judge Liam O’Grady sided with Cuccinelli when he ruled that the EPA had overstepped its bounds. As a measure of just how far the EPA had overreached, note that Cuccinelli’s suit against the EPA was joined by Fairfax County, led by Board of Supervisors chairman Sharon Bulova.

Bulova, a Democrat, is nobody’s idea of an environmental menace. A longtime advocate for commuter rail and mass transit, she started a Private Sector Energy Task Force to increase energy efficiency, sustainability, and “green-collar” jobs in the county.  Nevertheless, she and other county leaders objected when the EPA tried to limit the amount of stormwater runoff into the 25-mile-long Accotink Creek, which empties into the Potomac.  “When people talk about federal agencies running amok, this is exactly what [that] looks like,” said GOP Supervisor John C. Cook in July. “The EPA’s overreach is so extreme that the Democrats on the board realized that, even in an election year, they had to do this for the county.”

Concerned about sediment in the Accotink, the EPA had sought to cut stormwater runoff nearly in half—a proposal that would have added perhaps $200 million to the roughly $300 million cost of addressing sediment itself.

But as O’Grady noted, while the EPA can regulate sediment, which is considered a pollutant, it has no authority to regulate stormwater—which is not.

The EPA claimed—notably, “with the support of Virginia[‘s Department of Environmental Quality]”—that it could regulate stormwater as a proxy for sediment itself, even though it had no legal authority to do so, because nothing explicitly forbids it to do so. As Cuccinelli said, “logic like that would lead the EPA to conclude that if Congress didn’t prohibit it from invading Mexico, it had the authority to invade Mexico.”

Why would the EPA insist on regulating stormwater, which it has no authority over, instead of simply regulating sediment? After all, it has written rules for sediment literally thousands of times. That insistence makes no sense. But it does look like part of a larger pattern.

Last spring, the Supreme Court ruled against the agency in the case of Mike and Chantell Sackett. The Sacketts owned a piece of land, a little larger than half an acre, in a growing lakefront development in Idaho. They were building a vacation home on the spot when the EPA declared it might be a wetland and ordered them to cease construction, and restore the land to its prior state or face fines of up to $75,000 a day. The agency decreed that the Sackettshad no right to challenge the order in court.

The Supreme Court unanimously call that bunk. It’s not easy to get Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsberg on the same page, but the EPA managed to do so. The agency also drew the wrath of The Washington Post, which editorialized that “The EPA Is Earning a Reputation for Abuse.”  The editorial began by condemning the now-infamous remarks of now-former EPA administrator Al Armendariz, who compared his enforcement philosophy to Roman crucifixions: “They’d find the first five guys they saw and they’d crucify them. And then, you know, that town was really easy to manage for the next few years.”

Troubling stories about the EPA just keep piling up. In Texas, the agency went after Range Resources Corp. for allegedly polluting two wells. The company racked up more than $4 million in fees defending itself before the EPA grudgingly admitted it had no proof Range Resources had contaminated anything.

In July, the federal district court in D.C. ruled that the EPA had overstepped its bounds regarding Appalachian coal operations. That ruling followed another  concluding the EPA had no business revoking a waste-disposal permit, issued by the Bush administration, for a West Virginia mine.  Judge Amy Berman Jackson—an Obama appointee—called the agency’s action “a stunning power for the EPA to arrogate to itself,” and accused the agency of “magical thinking.”

With the possible exception of a few anarchist cells, nobody questions the need for environmental regulation—or the EPA’s authority to enforce environmental laws. But those objecting to the agency’s abuses—Bulova, Ginsberg, The Washington Post, Judge Jackson—are hardly anarchists. They aren’t even Republicans. That ought to ring warning bells; this isn’t just a partisan vendetta. The EPA’s long train of abuses and usurpations suggests an institutional culture that sees the law as an impediment, rather than a guardrail. It also offers a reminder that those who wield power tend to push the boundaries of their authority. They will succeed, too—unless others push back.

A. Barton Hinkle is senior editorial writer and a columnist at the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

[G M]

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/12/15/Too-Big-To-Jail

HSBC: TOO BIG TO JAIL



by SYDNEY WILLIAMS  15 Dec 2012

It is not often that I find myself in agreement with the editorial page of the New York Times, but I did on Wednesday. The Times criticized the $1.92 billion settlement agreed to by HSBC as “a dark day for the rule of law.” No bank executives, according to the LA Times, were charged. While $1.92 billion sounds like a lot, it is about 0.06% of the banks $2.6 trillion in assets. All banks stretch the limits and meaning of regulation. HSBC, the world’s third largest bank, and one that has been frequently warned, has simply been the most egregious. Without the rule of law, civil society devolves into either totalitarianism or anarchy.
The problem is not just the fact that no one at HSBC was jailed for criminal activities that make Jessie James, Willie Sutton and Bernie Madoff look like amateurs; it is that there seems to be collusion between the bad guys (the big banks) and government. The government imposes fines, which appear steep but are manageable, payable to the agencies charged with monitoring their behavior. It is symbiotic, crony capitalism. Banks simply look at fines as a regular cost of doing business. Agencies view them as a source of revenues. It is the public, the bank’s customers and shareholders who bear the cost. Society’s moral fiber becomes weakened.
What HSBC did was knowingly launder money for drug cartels in Mexico and Colombia, and provide banking services for countries known to harbor terrorists and for exporting terrorism. Both are in contradiction with stated American policy, but more importantly, both violate common rules of humanity. Mexican drug lords are not known for their niceties. According to the current issue of the Economist, 60,000 Mexicans, including 60 mayors, have been killed in the past six years. Bloomberg reports that the cartels used cash boxes precisely the dimensions of “tellers’ windows in HSBC’s Mexican branches.” Colombian narcotics dealers sell drugs in the U.S and then send the funds to Mexican banks to be converted into Colombian pesos. Additionally, the bank has provided banking services for countries like Cuba, Iran, Libya and Sudan. Stuart Gulliver, CEO of HSBC, in paying the fine and accepting responsibility, said “We are profoundly sorry” for what his bank did. Really?
American officials said that they were fearful of imposing punishment so severe that a bank could be destroyed in the process. Fed officials have little concern about smaller banks and the hedge fund industry, which they persist in trying to topple. But big banks remain in a class by themselves. Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) praised the settlement saying that it sends a “powerful wake-up call to multinational banks about the consequences of disregarding their anti-money-laundering obligations.” I suspect the real message is get big enough and you won’t have to worry. It seems beyond credibility that executives who so blatantly violated federal laws should be allowed to go free. While HSBC stock, at $51.68, remains below its all-time high price of $99.52 set in October 2007, it is up 36% year-to-date – not too shabby.
Despite the reluctance of the federal government to prosecute executives of very large banks who have violated more laws than Willie Sutton, we are living, according to the New York Times, in “the era of the star prosecutor in white-collar crime.” The paper noted that Preet Bharara, U. S. Attorney for Manhattan, was on the cover of Time magazine and got a shout-out from Bruce Springsteen during a recent concert, because of his decision to go after hedge funds for “insider trading.”
Certainly trading on inside information is wrong and deserves punishment, but in a world in which information flows like the Mississippi it is difficult to determine what is right and what is wrong. The real reason the Bharara’s of the world go after hedge fund managers is because of the widely spread notoriety of their incomes, which, admittedly, seem excessive at a time of persistent high unemployment. However, their incomes are paid by sophisticated investors. Nevertheless, even if their crimes prove true, their actions pale in comparison to the practices of banks like HSBC. The bank laundered $881 million from drug cartels like Sinaloa in Mexico and Norte del Valle in Colombia. Thousands of deaths have resulted from these cartels and millions of Americans have suffered the consequences of their products. The same bank violated sanctions imposed against regimes by our government. The sanctions were meant to contain terrorist activity. Are not these crimes far more damaging to our society than those highly publicized investigations into the possibility that some hedge funds traded on information that may or may not have been received legitimately?
What message about our society does all this send to our children and to all those who strive to play by the rules?  You can escape punishment if you become an executive at a bank “too big to fail and jail,” As a prosecutor, you get shout-outs from rock stars if you indict a well known hedge fund manager, even if his innocent. If, as a hedge fund manager, you achieve enormous financial success you are automatically deemed a piranha to society, and thus a target for an over-eager prosecutor looking to add another notch to his holster. Firms too small to defend themselves are deemed small enough to fail and jail. It is a rotten message, but unfortunately one that captures the spirit of the downward spiral of our culture.

[G M]

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/01/david-gregory-skates-past-prosecution.php

DAVID GREGORY SKATES PAST PROSECUTION
Few will be surprised by the news that David Gregory will not be prosecuted for possessing a high-capacity magazine during his appearance on “Meet the Press.” The decision was made by District of Columbia Attorney General Irvin Nathan, who turns out to be a social acquaintance of Gregory and his wife.

The decision not to prosecute Gregory is explained in a statement you can read here. The statement makes it clear that the decision not to prosecute is an act of prosecutorial discretion. In other words, the AG had no doubt that Gregory violated the law; he simply decided he wasn’t going to prosecute him.

The passage in which the AG explains this exercise of discretion is the following:

Influencing our judgment in this case, among other things, is our recognition that the intent of the temporary possession and short display of the magazine was to promote the First Amendment purpose of informing an ongoing public debate about firearms policy in the United States, especially while this subject was foremost in the minds of the public following the previously mentioned events in Connecticut and the President’s speech to the nation about them.

One can distinguish between violations of the D.C. firearms law that occur as a result of providing information to the public and those that do not. Whether the distinction justifies non-prosecution in the former case is very much another question, but one that falls within the AG’s discretion to decide.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult not to suspect that the AG was moved by the fact that he liked the message behind Gregory’s violation of the law. I can’t help but think that the outcome might well have been different if the “First Amendment informational purpose” had been in service of a pro-gun message.

To be sure, I’m speculating here. But it’s not speculation to say that NBC was advised by the D.C. police that Gregory would violate the law if he proceeded (as he did) to display the magazine. The AG states:

Although there appears to have been some misinformation provided initially, NBC was clearly and timely advised by an MPD employee that its plans to exhibit on the broadcast a high capacity-magazine would violate D.C. law, and there was no contrary advice from any federal official. While you argue that some NBC employees subjectively felt uncertain as to whether its planned actions were lawful or not, we do not believe such uncertainty was justified and we note that NBC has now acknowledged that its interpretation of the information it received was incorrect.

Prosecutorial discretion should not be exercised in the case of flagrant disregard of the law — e.g., a violation that occurs in the face of instruction by the police that the action being contemplated is unlawful.

The AG tries refers to the possibility that “some NBC employees subjectively felt uncertain as to whether its planned actions were unlawful.” But he is plainly not convinced that this was the case — that’s why he prefaces the point by saying “you could argue” it and that’s why he affirms the clarity and timeliness of the police advice. The AG is willing to let NBC walk, but not without letting that outfit know that he’s not buying its B.S.

But the bottom line is that NBC has walked. The AG has given a complete pass to a party that scoffed at D.C. law. He has done so quite possibly because he agrees with the scofflaw’s political message, and perhaps under some influence from his personal acquaintance with the scofflaw.

That’s life in the big city, if the big city is Washington, D.C.

[G M]

http://www.humanevents.com/2012/04/13/napolitano-perjured-herself-to-congress-in-fast-furious-testimony/

NAPOLITANO PERJURED HERSELF TO CONGRESS IN FAST & FURIOUS TESTIMONY
By: Neil W. McCabe    
4/13/2012 06:01 AM


In her explosive new book Fast and Furious, Katie Pavlich makes the case that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano not only failed to stop an operation that led to the death of one of her own, Border Agent Brian A. Terry, but she may have also lied to Congress in sworn testimony at a hearing held to find out what really happened.

Inside sources told Pavlich that Napolitano’s testimony was in direct contradiction to emails she exchanged, and reports and briefings she received, according to an exclusive preview of the book by Human Events.

Pavlich’s book Fast and Furious is due to be released Monday, April 16. It is published by Regnery Publishing, owned by Eagle Publishing, which also owns Human Events.

Most of the focus in the Fast and Furious scandal has been on attorney Gen. Eric Holder, because his Department of Justice ran the program through its Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, still referenced to as ATF, its old initials from before it was tasked with explosives.

But while Holder’s people waved the questionable gun purchasers through the checkout line, Napolitano was in charge of the Mexican border those guns crossed.

Pavlich’s book is particularly revealing, especially considering the lengths the Obama administration has gone to keep anyone from knowing anything about Fast & Furious and other gun-running operations. These operations involved multiple federal agencies facilitating illegal gun purchases, by co-opting the normal checks at gun stores in the Southwest, and then ignoring the guns as they were taken into Mexico. In Mexico, the guns were picked up at hundreds of gun sites.

Letting the guns slip away is a called “gun walking,” because the guns were allowed to walk.

In her September testimony to a Senate committee, Napolitano told senators she knew nothing about Fast & Furious until after Terry was killed in a gunfight on the night of Dec. 14, 2010 with an AK-47 purchased at one of the gun stores that was one of the key retailers where federal agents actively let guns walk.

In October, she told Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) at a hearing at the Senate Judiciary Committee that she never spoke to the Dennis Burke about Fast & Furious. Burke, who was the U.S. Attorney for the   Arizona Department, was her chief of staff when she was the governor of Arizona and a close friend.

In the same month, Napolitano told Rep. Jason E. Chaffetz (R-Utah) at a hearing held by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that she never spoke to Holder about Fast & Furious.

Homeland Security insiders paint a different picture, Pavlich reports.

Members of Congress questioning the secretary seem to know it, too.

One source said to the author, “When she says that [she] and Attorney General Eric Holder have not discussed it, that is a lie. That’s why they keep asking her those questions in the Judicial, Oversight, Homeland Security Committee hearings. They’ve asked her that same questions twice and she’s lied twice.”

How did she know? The source said, “There are five emails linking her to Holder. They go back two days after it happened-the first email was two days after Brian was killed.”

In the emails, Holder and Napolitano discuss Terry’s murder, the source said to Pavlich.

The source concedes that Holder may have “kept her in the dark” about all of the details of the gun walking, but her office approved letting the guns walk into Mexico and one of the agencies under her command, Customs and Border Protection, allowed guns through.

Another source from the ATF confirmed to Pavlich that Napolitano was briefed regularly by an agent from another of her agencies, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE.

“There was an ICE agent assigned specifically to be the co-case agent of Fast & Furious. He had to [file] an ICE report that either mirrored or referenced every ATF report that was done,” the ATF source said.

Beyond reports, there were inter-agency jealousies that had to be settled in Washington, he said.

The source said to Pavlich there were constant battles between ICE and ATF agents over who would get credit for different seizures or other issues. “I know phone calls were made to both headquarters to try and settle those disputes.”

It was Terry’s death that brought Operation Fast and Furious to an abrupt end. But now, more than 16 months later, no one has been charged with crimes associated with either the gun walking programs or the cover-up.

Pavlich makes a strong case that when people are finally charged with crimes, Napolitano will have to answer for her perjury to Congress.

“Let me tell you something about Janet,” another source said to the author. “Janet will be lucky not to go to prison.”

[G M]

http://www.teapartynation.com/forum/topics/the-death-of-the-rule-of-law

The death of the rule of law
Posted by Judson Phillips on July 1, 2012 at 6:51pm


 
Just in case anyone missed it, America is no longer a nation of laws.  It is hard to say what we are now, but the law no longer matters.  Most people would jump to the conclusion this blog is about the really horrible week at the Supreme Court last week.  They would be wrong.
 
There is something else that spells the death knell for the rule of law in America.
 
What is it?
 
In California and New York, cases are working their way through the state supreme court to allow illegal aliens who have gone to law school and passed the bar exam to practice law.
 
Yes, you heard that right.  These candidates are not in the country legally.  They are subject to deportation if the rule of law were in fact applied instead of ignored by the Obama Regime.
 
Yet two states are poised to allow illegal immigrates the rights and privileges of members of the bar.
 
From USA Today:
 
 
Judges in several states are preparing to answer the latest question in the complex world of immigration: Can an illegal immigrant legally practice law in the USA?
 
Illegal immigrants brought to the USA as children, and who later graduated law schools in California, Florida and New York, are trying to gain entry to their state bars so they can work as attorneys.
 
Sergio Garcia's family illegally crossed into the USA from Mexico when he was 17 months old, and he went on to graduate from Chico State University and Cal Northern School of Law. He took the state bar exam in July 2009 and passed it but was told he could not join the state bar — a standard requirement for all practicing attorneys — because he had checked a box on his application that said he was in the country illegally.
 
The California Supreme Court asked for opinions on the question and could hold oral arguments in Garcia's case before making a decision. The California State Bar told the court this month that Garcia and others like him should be allowed to be licensed, but it is awaiting guidance from the Supreme Court.
 
Though the ruling could apply only to Garcia, the 35-year-old said the court's opinion could go a long way in determining the fate of others like him.
 
 
For some, the idea of allowing people in Garcia's position to legally work not only would encourage more people to bypass the legal immigration system but would throw a cloud of illegitimacy over the country's legal system.
 
"There's a certain level of absurdity to someone trying to practice law when they're in violation of the law," said Ira Mehlman of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates lower levels of legal and illegal immigration. "It's unfortunate that children find themselves in these situations due to the decisions that their parents made. But that's unfortunately just the way it works. We all suffer from poor decisions that our parents made."
 
America has suddenly been transformed into bizzaro world.  Someone who breaks the law every morning when he gets up is going to be allowed to practice law?
 
When I entered law school in August, 1985, our first day the Dean of the Law School welcomed us with a pretty boring speech about the majesty of the law and how important it was for us to uphold the law for without the rule of law, all was lost.
 
All is lost because the rule of law in this nation means nothing anymore.  The Supreme Court can rewrite a statute to achieve their desired results.  A sovereign state is not allowed to protect citizens within its own borders.  We are ordered to purchase a product whether we want to or not and are faced with the possibility of government coercion or even prison if we refuse.
 
And the government refuses to enforce the most basic of sovereignty laws.  The laws that restrict the presence of people within the boarders of the nation to those people the nation has approved to come in.
 
I am not without sympathy for Sergio Garcia.  He did not get a vote on what happened.  His parents made a decision that has consequences for him today.  However, he has options.  The military allows illegal aliens to enlist and upon the completion of a term of service will allow them legal status and even citizenship.  I have no problem with someone who wants to be in this country who chooses this route.
 
I have no sympathy for someone who simply says, I am here.  Give me that to which I am not entitled.
 
The rule of law is the glue that holds this nation together.  Liberals are dead set on dissolving that glue and by extension destroying the greatest nation the world has ever seen.
 
As for you and I, our American citizenship is becoming more worthless every day.

[G M]

http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/7358/obama-salutes-geithners-far-reaching-steps-catch-tax-cheats#

Obama Salutes Geithner’s ‘Far-Reaching Steps’ to Catch Tax Cheats
By Jim Geraghty
May 4, 2009 2:31 P.M.

     
President Obama, today: “The Treasury Department and the IRS, under Secretary Geithner’s leadership and Commissioner Shulman’s, are already taking far-reaching steps to catch overseas tax cheats — but they need more support.”

What, is Geithner telling the IRS, “Look for these signs, because that’s how I did it”?

Well, at least the president only praised one tax cheat in his speech denouncing tax cheats
. . . oh, wait:

“These problems have been highlighted by Chairmen Charlie Rangel and Max Baucus, by leaders like Senator Carl Levin and Congressman Lloyd Doggett.”

Geithner and Rangel thanked for helping crack down on tax cheats? What’s next, a ceremony on the importance of accurate information in public-health communication, thanking Joe Biden?

[sgtmac_46]

Half this country is increasingly populated by people who desire a benevolent messianic figure as government leader, ala Hugo Chavez.  Their notion of government is mother and father to provide for them craddle to grave.   That represents an irreconcilable difference with the other half of us with a diametric opposition to despotic figures, benevolent or otherwise.  At it's root is a fundamental disagreement over the very definition of the words 'right' and 'liberty'.....Positive and Negative Liberty....With the left viewing it through the lense of socialism, ones 'liberty' being some service or benefit OWED to them by the government.....One has a 'right to free healthcare', One has a 'right to social safety net', One has a 'right to protection from the government'.......With the rest of us viewing liberty as being FREE from government intervention, 'One has freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of property, freedom of association, right to bear arms'.........These two views are not compatible.

[G M]

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jan/25/federal-court-obama-broke-law-recess-appointments/

In a case freighted with major constitutional implications, a federal appeals court on Friday overturned President Obama’s controversial recess appointments from last year, ruling he abused his powers and acted when the Senate was not actually in a recess.
 
The three-judge panel’s ruling is a major blow to Mr. Obama. The judges ruled that the appointments Mr. Obama made to the National Labor Relations Board are illegal, and the board no longer has a quorum to operate.
 
But the ruling has even broader constitutional significance, with the judges arguing that the president’s recess appointment powers don’t apply to “intrasession” appointments — those made when Congress has left town for a few days or weeks.
 
The judges signaled the power only applies after Congress has adjourned sine die, which is a legislative term of art that signals the end to a long work period. In modern times, it means the president could only use his powers when Congress quits business at the end of a year.
 
“The dearth of intrasession appointments in the years and decades following the ratification of the Constitution speaks far more impressively than the history of recent presidential exercise of a supposed power to make such appointments,” the judges wrote.
 
“Recent presidents are doing no more than interpreting the Constitution. While we recognize that all branches of government must of necessity exercise their understanding of the Constitution in order to perform their duties faithfully thereto, ultimately it is our role to discern the authoritative meaning of the supreme law.”
 
The case is likely to end up before the Supreme Court, and it turns on the definition of what the Constitution means when it says “recess.”
 
Last January Mr. Obama named union lawyer Richard Griffin and Labor Department official Sharon Block, both Democrats, and a Republican, NLRB lawyer Terence Flynn, to the labor board using his recess powers. He also named Richard Cordray to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, using those same powers.
 
Noel Canning, a bottling company, sued the NLRB, arguing that a rule issued by the new board was illegal since the recess appointments were unconstitutional. Senate Republicans, led by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, joined in the suit.
 
The appeals court panel, which sits in Washington, D.C., was skeptical of Mr. Obama’s case during oral argument in early December, with Chief Judge David B. Sentelle and Judge Thomas B. Griffith peppering the administration lawyers with questions.
 
The Constitution gives the president the power to nominate judges and executive branch officials, but the Senate must vote to confirm them before they take office. Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution grants the president powers “to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate.”
 
Those powers have produced centuries of give-and-take, with senators regularly slow-walking nominees and the White House looking for ways to get its way — including the recess appointment.
 
Mr. Obama’s move, though, appeared to break new ground by acting at a time when the Senate was meeting every third day, specifically to deny him the chance to make appointments.
 
The problem is the word “recess” has several meanings in legislative-speak. It can mean a short break during the day, it can mean a break of days or weeks for a holiday, or it can mean the end of a yearly session.
 
The president argued that even though the Senate was convening every three days, the pro forma sessions didn’t allow any business, and nearly every senator was absent from the chamber, signaling that the Senate wasn’t able to perform its confirmation duties and should be considered essentially in recess.

His opponents had warned that if Mr. Obama’s stance prevailed, then presidents could make appointments when the Senate takes its recess for weekly party caucus lunches.
 
The judges on Friday ruled that the only clear bright line is when the Senate recesses at the end of the year


Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jan/25/federal-court-obama-broke-law-recess-appointments/?page=2

[G M]

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2012/08/17/report_obama_cronie_jon_corzine_wont_be_prosecuted_for_losing_billions_in_private_investments

Report: Obama Crony Jon Corzine Won't Be Prosecuted For Losing Billions in Private Investments


 Katie Pavlich
 News Editor, Townhall





Aug 17, 2012 12:10 PM EST
 


 
It's good to be friends with President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, who are friends with Attorney General Eric Holder. Former New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine helped dream up and craft the $1 trillion taxpayer funded stimulus program which turned out to be a $1 trillion boondoggle riddled with fraud, waste, abuse and payouts to President Obama's union buddies.
 
FLASHBACK:
 
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=buRO9TSlScQ[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xm3VMrKqJSA[/youtube]


 
 


 
 
Corzine is also the former CEO of MF Global, a now bankrupt company under Congressional and Department of Justice investigation for losing billions in private investments. According to the New York Times, Corzine won't be prosecuted for the loss of those private funds by Holder's DOJ.
 

Federal prosecutors do not expect to file criminal charges against the former New Jersey governor. Mr. Corzine has not yet received assurances that he is free from scrutiny, but two rounds of interviews with former employees and a review of thousands of documents have left prosecutors without a case against him, say the people involved in the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
 
The good news is, Corzine could still face consequences for the loss of funds through the civil side of the legal system.
 

While the government’s findings would remove the darkest cloud looming over Mr. Corzine — the threat of criminal charges — the former Goldman Sachs chief is not yet in the clear. A bankruptcy trustee on Wednesday joined customers’ lawsuits against Mr. Corzine, and regulators are still considering civil enforcement actions, which could cost him millions of dollars or ban him from working on Wall Street.
 
So, without the worry of facing prison, what's Corzine's latest project? He wants to be a hedge fund manager.   


Mr. Corzine, in a bid to rebuild his image and engage his passion for trading, is weighing whether to start a hedge fund, according to people with knowledge of his plans. He is currently trading with his family’s wealth.

 If he is successful as a hedge fund manager, it would be the latest career comeback for a man who was ousted from both the top seat at Goldman Sachs and the New Jersey governor’s mansion.
 
What could possibly go wrong?

[G M]

Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime

Glenn Harlan Reynolds
University of Tennessee College of Law

January 20, 2013



Abstract:     
Though extensive due process protections apply to the investigation of crimes, and to criminal trials, perhaps the most important part of the criminal process -- the decision whether to charge a defendant, and with what -- is almost entirely discretionary. Given the plethora of criminal laws and regulations in today's society, this due process gap allows prosecutors to charge almost anyone they take a deep interest in. This Essay discusses the problem in the context of recent prosecutorial controversies involving the cases of Aaron Swartz and David Gregory, and offers some suggested remedies, along with a call for further discussion.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 6

Keywords: due process, criminal law, grand jury, plea bargain, overcriminalization, robert jackson, tim wu, harvey silverglate, gene healy

working papers series

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2203713

[Crafty_Dog]

Jenkins: Was the AIG Rescue Legal? Never explained is why some were bailed out and some weren't.
By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.
 
AIG is winding up an ad campaign to thank taxpayers for its bailout and note that the rescue returned a profit to the government. That's nice, but we aren't quite ready to wash our hands of the matter.

One reason for dwelling on the AIG bailout is that we may not be done with bailouts. In the next emergency, government is likely to behave arbitrarily in dealing with private parties who come seeking rescues—or whom government feels compelled to rescue against their will. Our accumulation of precedents in this regard rests uneasily in a society built on law, and where trust in law is a precondition for the return of normal business and investment activity.

One lawsuit brought by former AIG CEO Hank Greenberg (who left before the meltdown) was thrown out in November on a technicality, though not before the judge editorialized that government must be free to act in a national crisis. Fine. But that still leaves unanswered questions.

The government wiped out AIG shareholders while using AIG to bail out other companies whose shareholders were not wiped out. Why?

AIG's owners perhaps deserved their fate due to AIG's reckless reliance on rating agencies and bond insurers. But other companies (including many foreign banks) were excused from suffering for their own reckless reliance on AIG. Why?

All the more so because government's profit on the bailout ($22.7 billion) so clearly accrued because taxpayers acquired AIG's assets at fire-sale prices even while sparing other companies similar embarrassment.

GE wasn't required to hand over chunks of shareholder equity in return for government guarantees of its commercial paper. The money-fund industry wasn't required to turn over an 80% stake to Uncle Sam in return for a bailout of the money-fund industry. No exaction was required of Goldman Sachs GS +1.38%and Morgan Stanley MS +3.11%in return for access to the Federal Reserve's lending window.

Maybe a courtroom isn't the right place to explore these choices. Maybe AIG doesn't make a sympathetic plaintiff. But explanations would be nice.

As the world was recently reminded, Mr. Greenberg has another lawsuit pending, which proposes that the AIG rescue was an illicit "taking" under the Constitution. This was the lawsuit AIG itself contemplated joining last month until it was buried in an avalanche of media opprobrium.

Mr. Greenberg's claim seems a tad less fanciful now that the rescue has paid off so handsomely for taxpayers and for AIG counterparties, and so badly for AIG shareholders. AIG shareholders might have been better off had the company filed for bankruptcy rather than submitting to an ad hoc Washington "rescue."

If the nuances here sound familiar, they should. In the Chrysler and General Motors GM +0.28%bankruptcies, government played the role of "debtor-in-possession" financier, then behaved as no DIP financier would, using its leverage to do favors for an important Democratic constituency group, the United Auto Workers, at the expense of debt holders.

The regulator of Fannie Mae FNMA +1.79%and Freddie Mac FMCC +2.11%trumpeted them as solvent and well-capitalized amid the crisis, then gave their boards immunity from shareholder lawsuit in the government takeover that followed a short time later, wiping out their shareholders.

Not directly related to the financial crisis but coming in the same moment of untrammeled government discretion was the BP oil spill. The White House dictated a $20 billion compensation program, funded by BP shareholders, without benefit of any legal process at all.

One might look upon these criticisms the way history does Henry Stimson's insistence that "gentlemen don't read each other's mail"—as the sort of excessive scruple that must be tossed aside in a crisis.

But so much of today's economic frustration arises because all sectors of the economy (except government) are sitting on cash, reluctant to commit to consumption or investment. Microsoft, MSFT +1.75%when it found itself under assault during the 1990s by marauding trustbusters posturing as servants of "the law," kept enough cash on hand to survive a full year without revenues—without a penny coming in. This was a remarkable statement of insecurity in its property and legal rights. Now every company is Microsoft.

There is also a growing consensus that uncertainty about government actions played the biggest part in turning a housing correction into a general panic.

Do we have a solution? No, just a bad feeling. President Obama's second inaugural address wrote a lot of checks—especially about the inviolability of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—that the Fed might be called upon to cash in coming years as the buyer of last resort for U.S. Treasury debt. If so, more disturbances lie ahead, and we may rue the precedent that the rule of law goes out the window just because financial markets are acting up.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/inside-politics/2013/feb/4/obama-misses-budget-deadline/

[ccp]

Enough is enough.  Our money is our money.

Stop stealing it from us.

Folks we need a crash.  That is the only thing that will wake up enough people.

The f* mass propaganda media will have to address the corruptness of it all.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://townhall.com/columnists/michaelbarone/2013/02/14/obamas-gangster-government-operates-above-the-law-n1511638/page/full/

Presidents' State of the Union addresses are delivered in the chamber of the House of Representatives in the Capitol. The classical majesty of this building where laws are made symbolizes the idea that we live under the rule of law. Unfortunately, the 44th president is running an administration that too often seems to ignore the rule of law.

"We can't wait," Barack Obama took to saying after the Republicans captured a majority in the House and refused to pass laws he wanted. He would act to get what he wanted regardless of law.

One example: his recess appointments in January 2012 of three members of the National Labor Relations Board and the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled unanimously that the NLRB recess appointments were unconstitutional.

The decision, written by Judge David Sentelle, noted that the Constitution speaks of "the recess," not "a recess," and reasoned that it could only be referring to the recess between annual sessions of Congress.  Obama, like many presidents before him, interpreted the phrase as referring to any recess during which Congress is not in session. But he went one step further.  When Harry Reid became Senate majority leader in 2007, he started holding pro forma meetings of the Senate every three days and stating that the Senate was not in recess. George W. Bush, who had made recess appointments before, stopped doing so.  Bush took the view that, since the Constitution says that each branch of Congress makes its own rules, the Senate was in session if the Senate said so. Obama took the view that he would decide whether the Senate was in session. Who cares what the Constitution says?

As Sentelle pointed out, Obama's view would entitle the president to make a recess appointment any time the Senate broke for lunch. "This cannot be the law," the judge wrote.
Critics of his decision argue that under it the recess appointment power would be vanishingly small. But under Obama's view, the Senate's power to advise and consent could effectively vanish.

The Framers contemplated that the Congress would take long recesses (as for many years it did) and that it could take months for senators to return to Washington to act on appointments.  It's plausible that the Framers would have considered recess appointments unnecessary in an era of jet travel. It's not plausible that they would have approved of getting rid of the Senate's power to vote on appointments altogether.

Meanwhile, decisions of the NLRB and the CFPB are in legal limbo, pending a Supreme Court decision. Hundreds of thousands of people and are affected and millions of dollars are at stake. There is a price for not observing the rule of law.

There are other examples. For several years, the Obama administration has refused to obey a law requiring the president's budget to be submitted on a certain date. As Budget Director, Treasury nominee Jack Lew refused to obey the law requiring him to issue a report in response to the trustees' report on Medicare.

During the 2012 campaign, the Pentagon told defense contractors not to inform employees that they may be laid off if the sequester took effect as required by the WARN Act.

They were even told that the government would pay any fines for not complying. What law authorizes that?

Similarly, Health and Human Services has stated that the federal government can fund health insurance exchanges run by the feds for states that refuse to create their own exchanges. But nowhere does the Democrats' hastily crafted Obamacare legislation say that.

In spring 2009, we got our first glimmers of this modus operandi. In arranging the Chrysler bankruptcy, administration officials brushed aside the rights of secured creditors in order to pay off the United Auto Workers.  University of Pennsylvania law professor David Skeel pointed out that this violated the standard rules of bankruptcy law established, interestingly, during the New Deal.

"We have just seen an episode of gangster government," I wrote at the time. "It is likely to be a continuing series."

It looks like that's one prediction I got right. This president, like all his predecessors since Woodrow Wilson started delivering these speeches in person, looks magnificent in the temple where laws are made. But he doesn't seem to consider himself bound by them.

[G M]

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/02/26/barack-obama-pulls-a-move-almost-worthy-of-saddam-hussein/

Barack Obama Pulls a Move Almost Worthy of Saddam Hussein by
Bryan Preston

Bio
February 26, 2013 - 9:34 am     Shortly before U.S. troops stormed Iraq to oust its dictator, Saddam Hussein released thousands of prisoners from Iraqi jails. Some were petty criminals, some were hardcore, some were terrorists. Hussein unleashed them to build his own popularity and to sow chaos.

Today, Barack H. Obama’s Department of Homeland Security is doing this:

The sequester is officially still three days away, but the Obama administration already is making the first cuts, with officials confirming that the Homeland Security Department has begun to release what it deems low-priority illegal immigrants from detention.

The move is proving controversial. Immigrant-rights groups say it shows the administration was detaining folks it never should have gone after in the first place, while Republicans questioned the decision-making.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency that runs the detention facilities, said in a statement that the “current fiscal climate” has forced it to do a review of spending, and part of that is taking a look at who is being detained.

“As a result of this review, a number of detained aliens have been released around the country and placed on an appropriate, more cost-effective form of supervised release,” ICE said in a statement.

The cynicism of the move is breathtaking, even for this cynical administration. The “current fiscal climate” is one in which we are spending more than a trillion dollars per year than we take in. The 2009 stimulus spending is locked in. The sequestration threatens just $22 billion this year — and the president gets to choose where to cut. If the sky falls, it’s being brought down on our heads by this unethical rogue president.

So these releases are his choice. And he’s choosing them for pure racial politics and demagoguery. He’ll blame it all on Republicans, while shoring himself up with the amnesty chorus.

More: The president is also threatening to drop our border guard. In a rational age, these acts would be impeachable. Not too many years ago Californians recalled a governor for offering drivers licences to illegal aliens, and here we have a president flagrantly violating his oath to defend the nation.

[G M]

http://washingtonexaminer.com/dhs-plans-to-release-5000-illegal-immigrants-due-to-sequestration/article/2523295


DHS plans to release 5,000 illegal immigrants due to sequestration

March 5, 2013 | 1:45 pm


Joel Gehrke



House investigators learned Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials developed plans to release about 5,000 illegal immigrant detainees, although Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has denied responsibility for the decision.
 
“An internal document obtained by the House Judiciary Committee shows that Administration officials at ICE prepared cold calculations to release thousands of criminal aliens onto the streets and did not demonstrate any consideration of the impact this decision would have on the safety of Americans,” committee chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., announced.
 
The ICE document contains a table that proposes “reduc[ing] invoiced daily population by 1,000 weekly.” Between February 22 and March 31st, this plan would drop the number of detainees from 30,748 to 25,748.
 
“The decision to release detained aliens undermines the Department of Homeland Security’s mission to keep our homeland secure and instead makes our communities less safe and more vulnerable to crime,” Goodlatte said. “[R]egardless of sequestration, DHS actually has plenty of funding to pay for the detention of criminal aliens.  Unfortunately, it seems Administration officials are more interested in using sequestration to promote their political agenda than as an opportunity to get our nation’s fiscal house in order.”

Napolitano said that it wasn’t her decision, even though ICE is part of DHS. “Detainee populations and how that is managed back and forth is really handled by career officials in the field,” she told ABC.
 
She also confirmed that the releases would continue. “We are going to manage our way through this by identifying the lowest risk detainees, and putting them into some kind of alternative to release,” Napolitano said at a Politico event, per The Daily Caller.
 The New York Times profiled a “low risk” detainee released by ICE. The detainee was taken into custody “when it was discovered that he had violated probation for a conviction in 2005 of simple assault, simple battery and child abuse, charges that sprung from a domestic dispute with his wife at the time.” NRO’s Jim Geraghty asked, “If convictions for ‘simple assault, simple battery and child abuse’ make you ‘low-risk,’ what do you have to do for Janet Napolitano to consider you ‘high-risk’?”

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.humanevents.com/2013/03/05/obama-admin-wants-to-deport-christian-homeschoolers/

Obama Admin Wants to Deport Christian Homeschoolers



By: Todd Starnes 
3/5/2013 03:01 PM




The Romeike family fled their German homeland in 2008 seeking political asylum in the United States – where they hoped to home school their children. Instead, the Obama administration wants the evangelical Christian family deported.
 
The fate of Uwe and Hannelore Romeikie – along with their six children – now rests with the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals – after the Dept. of Homeland Security said they don’t deserve asylum.
 
Neither the Justice Dept. nor the Dept. of Homeland Security returned calls seeking comment.
 
“The Obama administration is basically saying there is no right to home school anywhere,” said Michael Farris, founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association. “It’s an utter repudiation of parental liberty and religious liberty.”
 
The Justice Dept. is arguing that German law banning home schooling does not violate the family’s human rights.
 
“They are trying to send a family back to Germany where they would certainly lose custody of their children,” Farris told Fox News. “Our government is siding with Germany.”
 
Farris said the Germans ban home schools because “they don’t want to have religious and philosophical minorities in their country.”
 
“That means they don’t want to have significant numbers of people who think differently than what the government thinks,” he said. “It’s an incredibly dangerous assertion that people can’t think in a way that the government doesn’t approve of.”
 
He said the Justice Dept. is backing that kind of thinking and arguing ‘it is not a human rights violation.”
 
Farris said he finds great irony that the Obama administration is releasing thousands of illegal aliens – yet wants to send a family seeking political asylum back to Germany.
 
“Eleven million people are going to be allowed to stay freely – but this one family is going to be shipped back to Germany to be persecuted,” he said. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”
 
The fear of persecution is why an immigration judge granted the family political asylum in 2010.
 
German authorities demanded the family stop home schooling. They faced thousands of dollars in fines and they initially took away their children in a police van.
 
German state constitutions require children attend public schools. Parents who don’t comply face punishment ranging from fines to prison time. The nation’s highest appellate court ruled in 2007 that in some cases children could be removed from their parents’ care.
 
“Families that want to have an alternative education can’t get it in Germany,” Farris said. “Even the private schools have to teach public school curriculum.”
 
After authorities threatened to remove permanent custody from the Christian couple – they decided to move to the United States.
 
Uwe, a classically-trained pianist, relocated their brood to a small farm in the shadow of the Smokey Mountains in eastern Tennessee.
 “We are very happy here to be able to freely follow our conscience and to home school our children,” he told Fox News. “Where we live in Tennessee is very much like where we lived in Germany.”
 
Uwe said he was extremely disappointed that their petition to seek asylum was appealed by the Obama administration.
 
“If we go back to Germany we know that we would be prosecuted and it is very likely the Social Services authorities would take our children from us,” he said.
 
Uwe said German schools were teaching children to disrespect authority figures and used graphic words to describe sexual relations. He said the state believed children must be “socialized.”
 
“The German schools teach against our Christian values,” he said. “Our children know that we home school following our convictions and that we are in God’s hands. They understand that we are doing this for their best – and they love the life we are living in America on our small farm.”
 
Farris said Americans should be outraged over the way the Obama administration has treated the Romeike family – and warned it could have repercussions for families that home school in this nation.
 
“The right of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children has been at the pinnacle of human rights,” he said. “But not in this country.”
 
Todd Starnes is the host of Fox News & Commentary, heard daily on more than 250 radio stations. He’s also the author of “Dispatches From Bitter America.” His website is www.toddstarnes.com

[Crafty_Dog]

 

[G M]

IRS official Lerner speedily approved exemption for Obama brother’s ‘charity’
 
5:06 PM 05/14/2013

Charles C. Johnson

Lois Lerner, the senior IRS official at the center of the decision to target tea party groups for burdensome tax scrutiny, signed paperwork granting tax-exempt status to the Barack H. Obama Foundation, a shady charity headed by the president’s half-brother that operated illegally for years.
 
According to the organization’s filings, Lerner approved the foundation’s tax status within a month of filing, an unprecedented timeline that stands in stark contrast to conservative organizations that have been waiting for more than three years, in some cases, for approval.
 
Lerner also appears to have broken with the norms of tax-exemption approval by granting retroactive tax-exempt status to Malik Obama’s organization.
 
The National Legal and Policy Center filed an official complaint with the IRS in May 2011 asking why the foundation was being allowed to solicit tax-deductible contributions when it had not even applied for an IRS determination. In a New York Post article dated May 8, 2011, an officer of the foundation admitted, “We haven’t been able to find someone with the expertise” to apply for tax-exempt status.
 
Nevertheless, a month later, the Barack H. Obama Foundation had flown through the grueling application process. Lerner granted the organization a 501(c) determination and even gave it a retroactive tax exemption dating back to December 2008.
 
The group’s available paperwork suggests an extremely hurried application and approval process. For example, the group’s 990 filings for 2008 and 2009 were submitted to the IRS on May 30, 2011, and its 2010 filing was submitted on May 23, 2011.
 
Lerner signed the group’s approval [pdf] on June 26, 2011.
 
It is illegal to operate for longer than 27 months without an IRS determination and solicit tax-deductible contributions.
 

The ostensibly Arlington, Va.-based charity was not even registered in Virginia despite the foundation’s website including a donation button that claimed tax-exempt status.
 
Its president and founder, Abon’go “Roy’ Malik Obama, is Barack Obama’s half-brother and was the best man at his wedding, but he has a checkered past. In addition to running his charity, Malik Obama ran unsuccessfully to be the governor of Siaya County in Kenya. He was accused of being a wife beater and seducing the newest of his twelve wives while she was a 17-year-old school girl.
 
Sensing something wrong when he and a group of Missouri State students visited Kenyan in 2009, Ken Rutherford, winner of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on banning landmines, determined that Malik Obama was an “operator” and elected to give a donation of 400 pounds of medical supplies to a local clinic instead.
 
“We didn’t know what he was going to do with them,” Rutherford told the New York Post in 2011.


Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/14/irs-official-lerner-approved-exemption-for-obama-brothers-charity/

[G M]

http://pjmedia.com/blog/immigrating-to-america-is-not-an-entitlement/?singlepage=true

Immigrating to America Is Not an Entitlement

Immigration law may be broken but you don't fix it by rewarding law breakers.



by
Ying Ma


As the drumbeat for comprehensive immigration reform grows louder, the related public debate has not become any more edifying.  Self-serving Democrats, delusional Republicans, and shameless illegal aliens (who prefer to call themselves “immigration rights activists”) insist that legalizing some 11 million illegal immigrants in this country is the right thing to do and label those who disagree as anti-immigrant and anti-Hispanic.
 

Amid the finger pointing and political intimidation, some fundamentally flawed assertions have repeatedly surfaced. Below is some common sense that highlights the absurdity of the faulty assumptions.
 

Immigrating to the United States is a privilege, not a right. It certainly is not an entitlement program.
 
 
 
Proponents of comprehensive immigration reform like to emphasize that America’s immigration system is broken, and they are right. Yet they often justify illegal immigration by pointing out that even if aspiring immigrants wanted to get in line for legal immigration, many do not have a line to get into — because they do not have relatives in this country with whom to reunite or they cannot qualify for a limited number of visa categories (such as those for work, education, or investment).
 

Few acknowledge that in life, reality is by nature more unpleasant than our most fervent wishes. Just because people really, really want to come to the United States does not mean they have the right to do so.
 

By numerous measures, America’s tax system is broken as well, and supporters of limited government resent the fact that their tax dollars are extracted to fund a bloated welfare state they despise. Nevertheless, these individuals continue to pay their taxes. Similarly, those who wish to move to America should not be excused from respecting this country’s laws.
 

Certainly, changes to the existing system should be made. For instance, proposals to increase the flow of high-skilled labor make perfect sense. But America’s broken immigration system is not a justification for illegals to walk across the border or overstay their visas.
 

Do not let anyone obfuscate the difference between legal and illegal immigration. Denouncing the latter does not mean being hostile to the former.
 

This country has a legal immigration process in place. It is by no means perfect and imposes cumbersome restrictions. Nevertheless, that process is the law of the land. Numerous individuals from around the world follow it out of respect for the rule of law and for the country they wish to adopt as their new home. They make huge sacrifices, incur heavy financial costs, and wait patiently. Husbands are separated from their wives for years; siblings wait over a decade to be reunited; and high-skilled laborers whose visas are not renewed end up returning to their home countries. Reform efforts to ease the restrictions for these legal applicants are sensible, but amnesty for those who have violated U.S. immigration laws not only rewards bad behavior; it dishonors and dismisses the persistence and sacrifice of legal immigrants.
 

No matter how politicians spin it, offering provisional legal status to illegals is rewarding them with amnesty.
 
 
 
The right to live and work in the United States is a precious commodity. It is also precisely what the Senate’s bipartisan Gang of Eight proposes to offer to illegal aliens who are already here. Although these individuals must wait ten years to apply for a green card and 13 to apply for citizenship, they would be eligible for provisional legal status almost immediately.
 

To be sure, these illegal immigrants would have to pay a fine, pay taxes, and not have a serious criminal record before they qualify for provisional legal status, but these conditions hardly amount to a stiff punishment for lawbreaking behavior. In fact, they form the baseline of what America demands from immigrants who seek to enter this country legally.
 

More importantly, legal status in America — even if short of a green card or citizenship — is a status coveted by millions around the world. Impoverished men and women in sub-Saharan Africa, unemployed or under-employed college graduates in China or India, political and religious dissidents who are persecuted by authoritarian governments from Tehran to Moscow, or even scientists from Canada or Europe would gladly accept provisional legal status TODAY if it were offered to them. Numerous legal immigration applicants who are currently standing in line would do the same, especially since many have waited and will continue to wait for years.
 

But it is America’s existing illegal immigrants who will receive preference for the right to live and work in the United States.
 
 
 
Offering a pathway to citizenship to illegal aliens who arrived in America when they were young only strengthens the incentives for more illegal immigration.
 

Republicans and Democrats have been falling all over themselves to offer a pathway to citizenship to young illegal immigrants who are known as Dreamers. According to President Barack Obama, these are “young Americans in all but name.” Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush has written that these are “children who were brought here illegally have committed no crime and in most instances know no other country.” Thanks to Obama, these young illegals have now received a two-year reprieve and a chance to apply for work permits, assuming they have no criminal records, are successful in school, or have served in the military. The Senate’s Gang of Eight has proposed offering Dreamers a fast track to citizenship, which begins with a five-year path to a green card.
 

Before politicians on both sides of the aisle gush about their effort to create new Americans, let’s not forget that in the immigration experience, children are not just innocent bystanders of an illegal act. Rather, they are often the primary reason for a family to leave one life to seek another in a foreign land. They are the impetus for adults to work at sub-minimum-wage jobs and the reward for a family’s hard work and shared sacrifice. It is for their brighter future that immigrants — both legal and illegal — fight. By rushing to give them amnesty, Congress would be strengthening, not weakening, the incentives for illegal immigration.
 

Moreover, the absurdity of this mad rush to amnesty would only be compounded by the even more absurd minimal requirement that such young illegals have attended school and will continue to do so. Getting an education in America, just like living and working here, is a privilege sought by millions around the world. Unlike joining the military, going to school is not a sacrifice that requires fighting and dying for America. It is not even a social service that young illegals have somehow provided for their adopted home and for which they now deserve a reward.
 

If the U.S. immigration policy is meant to be a vehicle of American altruism, there are more qualified recipients than the citizens of Mexico.
 

Amnesty proponents like to harp on the heart-wrenching personal stories of illegal immigrants who leave destitution and desperation in their home country to seek a new life in America. Some have even suggested that rejecting such immigrants would be un-American. If poverty and tragedy were to serve as the core criteria for which America should expand its legal immigration flow (and this is a debate policymakers need to have), there are many more individuals around the world who would be more deserving of legal status in America than many of those who are currently here illegally.
 

At the moment, a majority of the illegal immigrants in America are Hispanic and most of them hail from Mexico. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, unauthorized immigrants from Mexico made up 58 percent of America’s illegal immigrant population in 2010. Yet however touching their stories or however painful their journeys, illegal immigrants from Mexico are not the only ones who harbor aspirations for a life in America; they are not even most in need of it.
 

While the World Bank reports gross national income (GNI) per capita for the world’s least developed countries (such as Myanmar, Haiti, Afghanistan, and Tanzania) as $748 in 2011, the GNI per capita for Latin America and Caribbean countries was $8,575 for the same year. It is to this latter, richer set of countries that Mexico belongs. If charity were a key goal of U.S. immigration policy, why not expand immigration privileges to citizens of the world’s poorest countries (including some that are south of the border)? Citizens from these countries lack the ability to just walk across America’s southern border, but their plight is in many ways far more wretched. No doubt they would gladly immigrate to the United States for provisional legal status and work hard for the American Dream.
 

The media has now taken to raving regularly about illegal Hispanic high school students who earn 4.0 plus GPAs, but does a boy suffering from starvation in Senegal or a girl suffering from malnutrition in Uganda deserve less of Americans’ sympathy or less of a chance to have a home and an education in the United States? Certainly, Americans do not believe that such children are any less capable of earning a 4.0 GPA.
 

Just because you’re illegal does not make you inhuman, but it does mean that you are a lawbreaker who should face the risk of deportation.
 

Americans do not have the heart or the resources to deport all 11 million plus illegal immigrants who live in this country, especially since almost two-thirds of them have lived here for over a decade and nearly half are parents of minor children. But reasonable Americans have the right to ask why their government has failed to enforce immigration laws in decades past and why it now continues that failure by refusing to arrest and deport those who flagrantly flaunt their illegal status in public.
 

Already, the Obama administration prohibits Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, under most circumstances, from carrying out two crucial elements of the country’s immigration laws: 1) apprehending persons solely for entering the United States illegally, and 2) apprehending persons for overstaying their visas in the United States. As such, illegal immigrants in America not only receive de facto amnesty, they proudly call themselves “immigration rights activists” and grant interviews to the New York Times, testify before Congress, openly protest on the streets, and otherwise brazenly spit in the face of America’s rule of law — and face no legal consequences. It is no surprise that America’s immigration system is broken and continues to provide incentives for more illegal immigration.

[Crafty_Dog]

Investor’s Business Daily: "Did The IRS Try To Swing Election To Obama?
"It looks like a concerted effort to hobble Obama's political foes. . . As details of the IRS scandal emerge, it's increasingly giving the appearance of a wide-scale effort to tilt the playing field against conservative activist groups who might have been helpful to Republican candidates in the 2012 election, while at the same time coddling liberal groups helpful to Obama.
"In the end, the IRS managed to put its thumb on the political scale by squelching political activity on the right — some groups report curtailing get-out-the-vote efforts, spending piles of money on legal fees or disbanding altogether in the face of IRS inquisitions.
"All of it happened during a close and hotly contested presidential election where such mischievousness could make a real difference.
Does any of this sound like it’s the result of a random bureaucratic snafu or the work of a couple of 'rogue agents'?"

[DougMacG]

Obama is stuck on saying how awful this IRS thing is - IF it happened.  It happened.  And it IS awful.  What have they ever gotten to the bottom of, fast and furious, job losses, crony green energy abuse, Benghazi, AP, IRS?  How hard can it be to get to the bottom of something when you have the largest intelligence operation in the world (for Benghazi, Mexican arms running, Secret Service scandal, etc.), the largest, most intrusive computer system in the world (IRS scandal), and nearly complete control over everything including their phone records, emails and texts needed to get to the bottom of this.

In the case of IRS abuse, the federal government is the prosecutor (as well as the accused).  The prosecutor doesn't need to get stuck on innocent until proven guilty; they need to put the charges in the form of a criminal complaint, make arrests and prosecute crimes.  Generally that leads to plea bargains on the way up to the top. 

How about appointing an Independent Counsel to investigate and prosecute if he is serious?

When did the administration know that the victims were being victimized?  They monitor the right wing sites, they should have known all of this AS IT WAS HAPPENING!  The claim by the head of the executive branch that everyone near him is deaf, dumb, blind and stupid, is tempting to believe - but I don't buy it.  If these were left wing women were being harassed by powerful, white, right wing men, would this have been ignored for this long?  I don't think so.

Whoever called these people, who are professionals of the federal government entrusted with the power to investigate and destroy America, LOW LEVEL EMPLOYEES should be fired too!  MHO

[Crafty_Dog]

At present, Baraq is have Sec Treasury Lieu (sp?) handle the investigation.  In that IRS is part of Treasury, this bodes poorly for sincerity in the investigation.  A special prosecutor is called for here.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/irs-face-lawsuit-over-theft-60-million-patient-health-records

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/05/14/Obama-campaign-co-chair-attacked-Romney-conservative-group-in-2012-with-leaked-IRS-scandal-documents

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/irs-obama-tea-party/2013/05/14/id/504419

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2325068/Documents-IRS-letters-harassing-conservative-groups-came-Washington-DC-headquarters-California-offices-despite-Inspector-Generals-focus-Cincinnati-employees.html

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-15/irs-delay-in-disclosing-groups-scrutiny-focus-of-probes.html

http://blogs.marketwatch.com/election/2013/05/15/irs-gave-liberal-groups-a-pass-as-it-targeted-conservatives-report/?mod=WSJBlog&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/348441/director-irs-tax-exempt-determinations-office-obama-donor-eliana-johnson

[DougMacG]

At present, Baraq is have Sec Treasury Lieu (sp?) handle the investigation.  In that IRS is part of Treasury, this bodes poorly for sincerity in the investigation.  A special prosecutor is called for here.

Exactly.  Sec. Lew should be facing his own perjury and contempt of congress charges for the last time he lied to congress under oath, instead receiving appointment to higher office.

I realize he is new to Treasury, but he is not new to serving at the highest levels of the administration.  This happened under his watch and we just saw how they change facts at the highest levels to avoid criticism.  Wasn't Lew the Chief of Staff when Susan Rice was looking for direction?  Neither Lew nor Eric Holder, nor any other administration political appointee is removed or impartial enough to investigate or prosecute this.  

"A special prosecutor is called for here." !!
------------------------------------------------

Also needed is reform and re-write of the 501c3/c4 laws they purport to be enforcing.  

[Crafty_Dog]

WSJ
This Is No Ordinary Scandal
Political abuse of the IRS threatens the basic integrity of our government.
 By PEGGY NOONAN
 
We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate. The reputation of the Obama White House has, among conservatives, gone from sketchy to sinister, and, among liberals, from unsatisfying to dangerous. No one likes what they're seeing. The Justice Department assault on the Associated Press and the ugly politicization of the Internal Revenue Service have left the administration's credibility deeply, probably irretrievably damaged. They don't look jerky now, they look dirty. The patina of high-mindedness the president enjoyed is gone.

Something big has shifted. The standing of the administration has changed.

As always it comes down to trust. Do you trust the president's answers when he's pressed on an uncomfortable story? Do you trust his people to be sober and fair-minded as they go about their work? Do you trust the IRS and the Justice Department? You do not.

The president, as usual, acts as if all of this is totally unconnected to him. He's shocked, it's unacceptable, he'll get to the bottom of it. He read about it in the papers, just like you.  But he is not unconnected, he is not a bystander. This is his administration. Those are his executive agencies. He runs the IRS and the Justice Department.

A president sets a mood, a tone. He establishes an atmosphere. If he is arrogant, arrogance spreads. If he is to too partisan, too disrespecting of political adversaries, that spreads too. Presidents always undo themselves and then blame it on the third guy in the last row in the sleepy agency across town.

The IRS scandal has two parts. The first is the obviously deliberate and targeted abuse, harassment and attempted suppression of conservative groups. The second is the auditing of the taxes of political activists.

In order to suppress conservative groups—at first those with words like "Tea Party" and "Patriot" in their names, then including those that opposed ObamaCare or advanced the second amendment—the IRS demanded donor rolls, membership lists, data on all contributions, names of volunteers, the contents of all speeches made by members, Facebook FB -1.77% posts, minutes of all meetings, and copies of all materials handed out at gatherings. Among its questions: What are you thinking about? Did you ever think of running for office? Do you ever contact political figures? What are you reading? One group sent what it was reading: the U.S. Constitution.

The second part of the scandal is the auditing of political activists who have opposed the administration. The Journal's Kim Strassel reported an Idaho businessman named Frank VanderSloot, who'd donated more than a million dollars to groups supporting Mitt Romney. He found himself last June, for the first time in 30 years, the target of IRS auditors. His wife and his business were also soon audited. Hal Scherz, a Georgia physician, also came to the government's attention. He told ABC News: "It is odd that nothing changed on my tax return and I was never audited until I publicly criticized ObamaCare." Franklin Graham, son of Billy, told Politico he believes his father was targeted. A conservative Catholic academic who has written for these pages faced questions about her meager freelance writing income. Many of these stories will come out, but not as many as there are. People are not only afraid of being audited, they're afraid of saying they were audited.

All of these IRS actions took place in the years leading up to the 2012 election. They constitute the use of governmental power to intrude on the privacy and shackle the political freedom of American citizens. The purpose, obviously, was to overwhelm and intimidate—to kill the opposition, question by question and audit by audit.

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.

The White House is reported to be shellshocked at public reaction to the scandal. But why? Were they so high-handed, so essentially ignorant, that they didn't understand what it would mean to the American people when their IRS—the revenue-collecting arm of the U.S. government—is revealed as a low, ugly and bullying tool of the reigning powers? If they didn't know how Americans would react to that, what did they know? I mean beyond Harvey Weinstein's cellphone number.

And why—in the matters of the Associated Press and Benghazi too—does no one in this administration ever take responsibility? Attorney General Eric Holder doesn't know what happened, exactly who did what. The president speaks in the passive voice. He attempts to act out indignation, but he always seems indignant at only one thing: that he's being questioned at all. That he has to address this. That fate put it on his plate.

We all have our biases. Mine is for a federal government that, for all the partisan shootouts on the streets of Washington, is allowed to go about its work. That it not be distracted by scandal, that political disagreement be, in the end, subsumed to the common good. It is a dangerous world: Calculating people wish to do us harm. In this world no draining, unproductive scandals should dominate the government's life. Independent counsels should not often come in and distract the U.S. government from its essential business.

But that bias does not fit these circumstances.
Peggy Noonan's Blog

Daily declarations from the Wall Street Journal columnist.

What happened at the IRS is the government's essential business. The IRS case deserves and calls out for an independent counsel, fully armed with all that position's powers. Only then will stables that badly need to be cleaned, be cleaned. Everyone involved in this abuse of power should pay a price, because if they don't, the politicization of the IRS will continue—forever. If it is not stopped now, it will never stop. And if it isn't stopped, no one will ever respect or have even minimal faith in the revenue-gathering arm of the U.S. government again.

And it would be shameful and shallow for any Republican operative or operator to make this scandal into a commercial and turn it into a mere partisan arguing point and part of the game. It's not part of the game. This is not about the usual partisan slugfest. This is about the integrity of our system of government and our ability to trust, which is to say our ability to function.

[Crafty_Dog]

Was the White House involved in the IRS's targeting of conservatives? No investigation needed to answer that one. Of course it was.

President Obama and Co. are in full deniability mode, noting that the IRS is an "independent" agency and that they knew nothing about its abuse. The media and Congress are sleuthing for some hint that Mr. Obama picked up the phone and sicced the tax dogs on his enemies.

But that's not how things work in post-Watergate Washington. Mr. Obama didn't need to pick up the phone. All he needed to do was exactly what he did do, in full view, for three years: Publicly suggest that conservative political groups were engaged in nefarious deeds; publicly call out by name political opponents whom he'd like to see harassed; and publicly have his party pressure the IRS to take action.

Mr. Obama now professes shock and outrage that bureaucrats at the IRS did exactly what the president of the United States said was the right and honorable thing to do. "He put a target on our backs, and he's now going to blame the people who are shooting at us?" asks Idaho businessman and longtime Republican donor Frank VanderSloot.

Enlarge Image
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Getty Images

At the White House, President Obama addresses the IRS scandal, May 15.

Mr. VanderSloot is the Obama target who in 2011 made a sizable donation to a group supporting Mitt Romney. In April 2012, an Obama campaign website named and slurred eight Romney donors. It tarred Mr. VanderSloot as a "wealthy individual" with a "less-than-reputable record." Other donors were described as having been "on the wrong side of the law."

This was the Obama version of the phone call—put out to every government investigator (and liberal activist) in the land.

Twelve days later, a man working for a political opposition-research firm called an Idaho courthouse for Mr. VanderSloot's divorce records. In June, the IRS informed Mr. VanderSloot and his wife of an audit of two years of their taxes. In July, the Department of Labor informed him of an audit of the guest workers on his Idaho cattle ranch. In September, the IRS informed him of a second audit, of one of his businesses. Mr. VanderSloot, who had never been audited before, was subject to three in the four months after Mr. Obama teed him up for such scrutiny.

The last of these audits was only concluded in recent weeks. Not one resulted in a fine or penalty. But Mr. VanderSloot has been waiting more than 20 months for a sizable refund and estimates his legal bills are $80,000. That figure doesn't account for what the president's vilification has done to his business and reputation.

The Obama call for scrutiny wasn't a mistake; it was the president's strategy—one pursued throughout 2012. The way to limit Romney money was to intimidate donors from giving. Donate, and the president would at best tie you to Big Oil or Wall Street, at worst put your name in bold, and flag you as "less than reputable" to everyone who worked for him: the IRS, the SEC, the Justice Department. The president didn't need a telephone; he had a megaphone.

The same threat was made to conservative groups that might dare play in the election. As early as January 2010, Mr. Obama would, in his state of the union address, cast aspersions on the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, claiming that it "reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests" (read conservative groups).

The president derided "tea baggers." Vice President Joe Biden compared them to "terrorists." In more than a dozen speeches Mr. Obama raised the specter that these groups represented nefarious interests that were perverting elections. "Nobody knows who's paying for these ads," he warned. "We don't know where this money is coming from," he intoned.

In case the IRS missed his point, he raised the threat of illegality: "All around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates . . . And they don't have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don't know if it's a foreign-controlled corporation."

Short of directly asking federal agencies to investigate these groups, this is as close as it gets. Especially as top congressional Democrats were putting in their own versions of phone calls, sending letters to the IRS that accused it of having "failed to address" the "problem" of groups that were "improperly engaged" in campaigns. Because guess who controls that "independent" agency's budget?

The IRS is easy to demonize, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. It got its heading from a president, and his party, who did in fact send it orders—openly, for the world to see. In his Tuesday press grilling, no question agitated White House Press Secretary Jay Carney more than the one that got to the heart of the matter: Given the president's "animosity" toward Citizens United, might he have "appreciated or wanted the IRS to be looking and scrutinizing those . . ." Mr. Carney cut off the reporter with "That's a preposterous assertion."

Preposterous because, according to Mr. Obama, he is "outraged" and "angry" that the IRS looked into the very groups and individuals that he spent years claiming were shady, undemocratic, even lawbreaking. After all, he expects the IRS to "operate with absolute integrity." Even when he does not.

Write to kim@wsj.com.

[Crafty_Dog]

Normally the following might belong in the Legal Issues thread or something like that.  Given the overall gestalt of things however I'm thinking it belongs here:
========================

President Obama's non-recess recess appointments got another legal rebuke Thursday, when the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that another of his NLRB appointments violated the Constitution and left the board without a quorum.

In a 2-1 decision, Judge D. Brooks Smith ruled in National Labor Relations Board v. New Vista Nursing and Rehabilitation that Mr. Obama's recess appointment of Craig Becker in March 2010 was illegal because the Senate was not between sessions. To allow such appointees, Judge Smith wrote, "would eviscerate the divided-powers framework the two Appointments Clauses establish.

"If the Senate refused to confirm a president's nominees, then the president could circumvent the Senate's constitutional role simply by waiting until senators go home for the evening. The exception of the Recess Appointments Clause would swallow the rule of the Appointments Clause."

The decision is significant because the Third Circuit panel adopted the reasoning of the D.C. Circuit in January's Noel Canning decision. But the implications go further. Mr. Becker's term began earlier than the other recess appointees, thus invalidating hundreds of other decisions that the labor board made without a legal quorum. The number of NLRB decisions jeopardized by the three illegal recess appointments now stand at some 1,200. Yet the Obama NLRB keeps issuing rulings as if it operates in its own legal universe.

And still our media friends wonder how the Justice Department could possibly send out those overbroad subpoenas to AP or the IRS could punish conservative political groups.

[Crafty_Dog]

second post


Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty
May 17, 2013

Mass Seizure of Reporters' Phone Records . . . Over a Grudge about Story-Release Timing?

The Washington Post reports that the administration's explanation for the AP phone-record snooping may not be accurate:

For five days, reporters at the Associated Press had been sitting on a big scoop about a foiled al-Qaeda plot at the request of CIA officials. Then, in a hastily scheduled Monday morning meeting, the journalists were asked by agency officials to hold off on publishing the story for just one more day.

The CIA officials, who had initially cited national security concerns in an attempt to delay publication, no longer had those worries, according to individuals familiar with the exchange. Instead, the Obama administration was planning to announce the successful counterterrorism operation that Tuesday.

AP balked and proceeded to publish that Monday afternoon. Its May 2012 report is now at the center of a controversial and broad seizure of phone records of AP reporters' home, office and cellphone lines. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said the unauthorized disclosure about an intelligence operation to stop al-Qaeda from detonating explosives aboard a U.S. airliner was among the most serious leaks he could remember, and justified secretly obtaining records from a handful of reporters and editors over a span of two months.

Now, some members of Congress and media advocates are questioning why the administration viewed the leak that led to the May 7 AP story as so grave.

The president's top counterterrorism adviser at the time, John O. Brennan, had appeared on "Good Morning America" the following day to trumpet the successful operation. He said that because of the work of U.S. intelligence, the plot did not pose an active threat to the American public.

Holder said this week that the unauthorized disclosure "put the American people at risk."

Bryan Preston: "Get that? The administration wanted to own the story, and wanted AP to hold off publishing until Obama et al could announce it themselves."
Doug Mataconis: "Even if this leak didn't compromise national security, the fact that there's someone in the government leaking information like this raises the possibility that they'd leak something damages in the future. At the same time, however, it seems fairly clear that the claim that this leak was among the most damaging in American history simply doesn't add up. If that's the case, then why would the CIA have told the AP that the national security concerns it had previously expressed were 'no longer an issue?'"


That sound you heard was the "national security" justification going POOF! The AP dutifully held back on reporting the story in order to protect national security and the Obama administration screwed them anyway. The AP reported the story only after it was made clear that the information wasn't sensitive anymore. The information was going to be used for PR purposes by the Obama administration and the AP essentially stole their thunder.
Stealing the Obama administration's thunder is now grounds for secret subpoenas on the press.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/05/19/by-badge-phone-email-heres-how-obamas-doj-snooped-on-top-fox-news-reporter/

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/05/20/is-this-the-smoking-gun-that-ties-the-irs-scandal-to-the-white-house/

[G M]

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/05/19/by-badge-phone-email-heres-how-obamas-doj-snooped-on-top-fox-news-reporter/

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/05/20/is-this-the-smoking-gun-that-ties-the-irs-scandal-to-the-white-house/

Glad the FBI was focused on this and not the Tsarnaev brothers ....

[Crafty_Dog]

A Journalist 'Co-Conspirator'
The feds accuse a Fox reporter of criminal behavior for doing his job.


Ok, we've learned our lesson. Last week we tried to give the Obama Administration the benefit of the doubt over its far-reaching secret subpoenas to the Associated Press, and now we learn that was the least of its offenses against a free press. No attempt to be generous to this crowd goes unpunished.

The latest news, disclosed by the Washington Post on Monday, is that the Justice Department targeted a Fox News reporter as a potential "co-conspirator" in a leak probe. The feds have charged intelligence analyst Stephen Jin-Woo Kim with disclosing classified information to Fox reporter James Rosen. That's not a surprise considering that this Administration has prosecuted more national-security cases than any in recent history.

The shock is that as part of its probe the Administration sought and obtained a warrant to search Mr. Rosen's personal email account. And it justified such a sweeping secret search by telling the judge that Mr. Rosen was part of the conspiracy merely because he acted like a journalist.

In a May 2010 affidavit in support of obtaining the Gmail search warrant, FBI agent Reginald Reyes declared that "there is probable cause to believe that the Reporter has committed or is committing a violation" of the Espionage Act of 1917 "as an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator." The Reporter here is Mr. Rosen.

And what evidence is there to believe that Mr. Rosen is part of a spy ring? Well, declares Mr. Reyes, the reporter published a story in June 2009 saying that the U.S. knew that North Korea planned to respond to looming U.N. sanctions with another nuclear test. That U.S. knowledge was classified. But the feds almost never prosecute a journalist for disclosing classified information, not least because reporters can't be sure what's classified and what isn't.

We can recall only a single such prosecution of a journalist under the Espionage Act in 95 years. Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, who isn't a journalist, published far more damaging leaks but has never been indicted for it.

To add to his cloak-and-dagger hype, Mr. Reyes also makes much of the fact that Mr. Rosen used an alias, "Alex," while his alleged source Mr. Kim used the alias, "Leo." Believe it or not, Mr. Rosen also disclosed in one email that he is interested in "breaking news ahead of my competitors." And he even went so far as to urge "Leo" to help him "expose muddle-headed policy when we see it—or force the administration's hand to go in the right direction, if possible."

On the evidence of five years in office that isn't possible, but trying isn't a criminal motive. And if working with a source who uses an alias is now a crime, we've come a long way from the celebration of Bob Woodward and "Deep Throat."

The best face on these accusations is that Mr. Reyes was playing up the conspiracy angle to get the judge to approve a more sweeping search, which he did. The feds were then able to read widely in Mr. Rosen's personal email account, and thus potentially use it against him.

As with the AP subpoenas, this search is overbroad and has a potentially chilling effect on reporters. The chilling is even worse in this case because Mr. Rosen's personal communications were subject to search for what appears to be an extended period of time. At least in the AP case, the subpoena was for past phone logs during a defined period. The message is that anyone who publishes a story the Administration dislikes can be targeted for email searches that could expose personal secrets.

Mr. Reyes is far exceeding his brief here, but the larger fault lies with higher-ups. U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen, who is conducting the AP and Kim leak investigations, clearly has little regard for normal Justice standards and protocol for dealing with the media. Such a sweeping probe should also have been approved by senior Justice officials, at least by the Deputy Attorney General.

With the Fox News search following the AP subpoenas, we now have evidence of a pattern of anti-media behavior. The suspicion has to be that maybe these "leak" investigations are less about deterring leakers and more about intimidating the press. We trust our liberal friends in the press corps won't mute their dismay merely because this time the target is a network they love to hate.

[Crafty_Dog]

The reliability of this source is unknown to me, but I have seen this mentioned in a couple of other places as well.

===============================

May 20th, 2013
SHTFplan.com

The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 was  originally established to protect
American citizens from the federal use of  military troops to enforce and
execute the laws of the land unless expressly  authorized by the Constitution or 
Congress. Since then, for over a  century, this task has fallen upon local
and federal law enforcement. But with  the War on Terror taking center stage
in the United States for the last decade,  elements within the government
have been working tirelessly to expand the  mission of the US military on the
domestic front.

First, they passed the Patriot Act, which gave the government sweeping  new
powers to categorize any individual as a terrorist, whether they are 
operating on foreign lands or here at home. In 2011, as America brought in the 
New Year, they signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act, which 
made it possible for American citizens who were categorized as domestic 
terrorists under the Patriot Act to be detained and imprisoned indefinitely 
without charge or trial.

Finally, last week we learned that, as President Obama came under fire  for
the many scandals rocking his administration, the government was quietly 
moving to give the Department of Defense unprecedented authority on U.S.
soil,  effectively nullifying Posse Comitatus.

Eric Blair of Activist Post writes:

First, the senate is debating an expansion of the already broad powers  of
the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) so the U.S. can 
essentially engage any area in the world in the war on terror, including  America.
Which brings us to the second development: the Pentagon has recently 
granted itself police powers on American soil.

Assistant Secretary of Defense Michael Sheehan told Congress yesterday 
that the AUMF authorized the US military to operate on a worldwide battlefield 
from Boston to Pakistan.  Sheehan emphasized that the Administration is 
authorized to put boots on the ground wherever the enemy chooses to base 
themselves, essentially ignoring the declaration of war clause in the US 
Constitution.

While Americans were distracted with three developing scandals pushed  by
both wings of the mainstream media, sinister developments were taking place 
behind closed doors. In essence, the US military has granted itself the
power to  deploy troops on the streets of America without approval from the
President or  Congress, and the AUMF, which was originally designed to target
the terrorists  responsible for 9/11, has been expanded to give the government
authority to use  military assets on the domestic front without a
declaration from Congress.

Charlie McGrath of Wide Awake News explains:

Thanks to the hard work of Eric Blair at Activist Post we understand  that
Washington D.C. has been very busy eroding your freedom.

In fact, Senator Angus King went so far as to say that the hearing he  was
involved in was the most astonishing and disturbing hearing he has ever 
seen.

Even John McCain, war hawk John McCain, came out and said the  government
has gone way beyond its authority.

What are they talking about? The AUMF – Authorization to Use Military 
Force.

This piece of legislation that was put into place way back when we  started
the war on terror that is now turning from foreign enemies to YOU. Don’t 
be shocked by that, because you are on the list if you are a freedom minded, 
free thinker that believes in a Constitutional Republic.

They are changing the wording of this thing so that the military can be 
used on the streets of this country.
It’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s not  some kind of a fancy fantasy that
may come true down the road.
It is  happening right now, in the guise of other news events that are not
news  events.

Even more terrifying is the fact that West Point has come out recently  and
said that you – if you have a theory that the federal government is trying 
to take over and implement a national police force – you could fall into
the  category of a domestic terrorist.

A domestic terrorist that can be dealt with by military force…

The only conspiracy here is what the government is telling us.

This legislation is real. The militarization of America is in full  force.
We are the targets.

http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/its-not-a-conspiracy-theory-it-is-happ
ening-right-now_05202013
*****

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/may/20/group-fighting-voter-fraud-among-those-waiting-on-/
Group fighting voter fraud among those waiting on IRS; reams of documents still not enough
By Stephen Dinan
The Washington Times
Monday, May 20, 2013


A Texas group dedicated to combatting voter fraud applied for tax-exempt status in 2010 and has suffered three years of delays, been through four different IRS agents, undergone six FBI inquiries and submitted thousands of pages of documentation — and its still hasn’t been approved.

True the Vote is just one of the dozens of groups caught up in the IRS plan to give extra scrutiny to conservative groups in the 2010 and 2012 elections.

SEE RELATED: Carney: White House aides insulated Obama from IRS scandal

As Congress delves into the question of whether the burgeoning scandal was bureaucratic malfeasance, as the IRS now acknowledges, or a more sinister political witch hunt, as some Republicans believe, True the Vote’s experience is poking holes in the IRS‘ version of events, and lending credence to the nefarious explanations.

In one example, the IRS asked other Texas-based tea party groups what their relationship was with True the Vote — a fishing expedition that group President Catherine Engelbrecht didn’t learn about until the IRS scandal burst onto front pages.

“It suggests that they are trying to construct some kind of web in which to trap groups that they believe are somehow working together,” Ms. Engelbrecht said.

Enlarge Photo

The IRS‘ inspector general released a report last week that found the IRS targeted conservative groups for added scrutiny beginning in 2010, looking particularly at those that used “tea party,” “patriot” or “9/12” in their names.

The IRS acknowledges asking inappropriate questions but bristles at other charges. Acting Commissioner Steven Miller said the agency was trying to weed out groups engaging in political activity in violation of tax laws. He said the scrutiny was enhanced because of a surge of new groups after the 2010 Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case.

The IRS also said that the actions were taken by employees in an Ohio office, and that the agency has been taking steps to curtail inappropriate information requests in 2011.

But most of those claims appear to be untrue, based on the experience of True the Vote and other groups subjected to extra scrutiny.

Both Ms. Engelbrecht and True the Vote’s lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, said they had conversations with IRS agents who indicated that the files were being scrutinized in Washington, not in the Cincinnati office blamed by the IRS.

“More than one agent in Cincinnati has advised me that his/her instructions regarding the processing of my ‘tea party’ related organization client(s) were coming from the Washington, D.C., office,” Ms. Mitchell said in a letter to the IRS earlier this month.

And the probing letters continued well after the time the IRS said it began curtailing them, with the most recent inquiries to True the Vote coming in November and again in March.

Conservative target

True the Vote stemmed from Ms. Engelbrecht’s experience in the 2008 and 2009 elections, when she said she worked the polls and saw everything from administrative dysfunction to situations that looked like they could lead to fraud.

In July 2010, she and other supporters formed King Street Patriots under the tax code’s section 501(c )(4), which allows groups to do some politicking as long as it’s not their primary purpose.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/05/20/washington-times-writer-fox-news-scandal-goes-much-deeper-w-h-sitting-on-something-top-obama-aides-terrified-about/

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/05/20/doj-reportedly-snooped-on-two-additional-fox-employees/

[Crafty_Dog]

Investigative Reporter Sharyl Attkisson's Computers 'Compromised'*
(http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2013/05/21/investigative-reporter-sharyl-attkissons-computer-compromised-n1602448)

Katie Pavlich | May 21, 2013
 


CBS Investigative Reporter Sharyl Attkisson, who has been at the forefront of the
Benghazi and Fast and Furious scandals, has revealed to POLITICO that her personal
and work computers have been compromised.

   
---Quote---
"I can confirm that an intrusion of my computers has been under some investigation
on my end for some months but I'm not prepared to make an allegation against a
specific entity today as I've been patient and methodical about this matter,"
Attkisson told POLITICO on Tuesday. "I need to check with my attorney and CBS to get
their recommendations on info we make public."

    In an earlier interview with WPHT Philadelphia, Attkisson said that though she
did not know the full details of the intrustion, "there could be some
relationship between these things and what's happened to James [Rosen]," the Fox
News reporter who became the subject of a Justice Dept. investigation after
reporting on CIA intelligence about North Korea in 2009.
---End Quote---
Remember when Attkisson was screamed and yelled at by DOJ and White House officials
for inquiring about Operation Fast and Furious? I do.

 Investigative reporter says WH official cussed at her over ATF scandal
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=uS1t87pRix0#!)

Yesterday we found out that Fox News Reporters James Rosen, William LaJeunesse and a
producer were secretly monitored by the Department of Justice. Rosen's personal and
work emails and phone calls were monitored in addition to his movement. In an
affidavit filed by the FBI against Rosen, Rosen was named as a "co-conspirator" and
treated as a criminal for gathering the news. LaJeunesse was targeted for his work
on Operation Fast and Furious.

Two weeks ago, the Associated Press revealed that the Justice Department had
secretly monitored 20 phone lines and dozens of reporters.

This won't stop here. It is clear Obama's Department of Justice, with Attorney
General Eric Holder at the helm, has made monitoring reporters routine.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://reason.com/24-7/2013/05/24/gibson-guitars-competitor-used-the-same

http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/26/paper-gibson-guitar-raids-may-be-another-case-of-obama-administration-targeting/

http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/052313-657569-gibson-guitar-raid-like-tea-party-intimidation.htm

[DDF]

The rule of law is for people that are afraid to die. "Give me liberty or give me death." A far cry from today's coffee shop patriots that sit around discussing politics and policy as though they have something in common with the founding fathers.
Mostly, people in the world have lost their balls. They've fallen right off or been traded for the promise of a larger television and an annual 5% raise.
Therein lies the war on the rule of law. 

[Crafty_Dog]

The Foundation

"Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly
respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or
his possessions." --James Madison

Editorial Exegesis

"On Aug. 24, 2011, federal agents executed four search warrants on
Gibson Guitar Corp. facilities in Nashville and Memphis, Tenn., and
seized several pallets of wood, electronic files and guitars. One of the
top makers of acoustic and electric guitars, including the iconic Les
Paul introduced in 1952, Gibson was accused of using wood illegally
obtained in violation of the century-old Lacey Act, which outlaws
trafficking in flora and fauna the harvesting of which had broken
foreign laws. ... Interestingly, one of Gibson's leading competitors is
C.F. Martin & Co. According to C.F. Martin's catalog, several of their
guitars contain 'East Indian Rosewood,' which is the exact same wood in
at least 10 of Gibson's guitars. So why were they not also raided and
their inventory of foreign wood seized? Grossly underreported at the
time was the fact that Gibson's chief executive, Henry Juszkiewicz,
contributed to Republican politicians. ... By contrast, Chris Martin IV,
the Martin & Co. CEO, is a long-time Democratic supporter, with $35,400
in contributions to Democratic candidates and the Democratic National
Committee over the past couple of election cycles. ... Juszkiewicz'
claim that his company was 'inappropriately targeted' is eerily similar
to the claims by Tea Party, conservative, pro-life and religious groups
that they were targeted by the IRS for special scrutiny because they
sought to exercise their First Amendment rights to band together in
vocal opposition to the administration's policies and the out-of-control
growth of government and its power. The Gibson Guitar raid, the IRS
intimidation of Tea Party groups and the fraudulently obtained warrant
naming Fox News reporter James Rosen as an 'aider, abettor,
co-conspirator' in stealing government secrets are but a few examples of
the abuse of power by the Obama administration to intimidate those on
its enemies list." --Investor's Business Daily

Upright

"Our Founding Fathers feared the emergence of an agency such as the IRS
and its potential for abuse. That's why they gave us Article 1, Section
9 of the Constitution, which reads: 'No Capitation, or other direct, Tax
shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein
before directed to be taken.' A capitation is a tax placed directly on
an individual. That's what an income tax is. The founders feared the
abuse and the government power inherent in a direct tax. In Section 8 of
Article 1, they added, 'But all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be
uniform throughout the United States.' These protections the founders
gave us were undone by the Progressive era's 16th Amendment, which
reads, 'The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on
incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the
several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.' ...
The bottom line is that members of Congress need such a ruthless tax
collection agency as the IRS because of the charge we Americans have
given them." --economist Walter E. Williams
The Foundation

"Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly
respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or
his possessions." --James Madison

Editorial Exegesis

"On Aug. 24, 2011, federal agents executed four search warrants on
Gibson Guitar Corp. facilities in Nashville and Memphis, Tenn., and
seized several pallets of wood, electronic files and guitars. One of the
top makers of acoustic and electric guitars, including the iconic Les
Paul introduced in 1952, Gibson was accused of using wood illegally
obtained in violation of the century-old Lacey Act, which outlaws
trafficking in flora and fauna the harvesting of which had broken
foreign laws. ... Interestingly, one of Gibson's leading competitors is
C.F. Martin & Co. According to C.F. Martin's catalog, several of their
guitars contain 'East Indian Rosewood,' which is the exact same wood in
at least 10 of Gibson's guitars. So why were they not also raided and
their inventory of foreign wood seized? Grossly underreported at the
time was the fact that Gibson's chief executive, Henry Juszkiewicz,
contributed to Republican politicians. ... By contrast, Chris Martin IV,
the Martin & Co. CEO, is a long-time Democratic supporter, with $35,400
in contributions to Democratic candidates and the Democratic National
Committee over the past couple of election cycles. ... Juszkiewicz'
claim that his company was 'inappropriately targeted' is eerily similar
to the claims by Tea Party, conservative, pro-life and religious groups
that they were targeted by the IRS for special scrutiny because they
sought to exercise their First Amendment rights to band together in
vocal opposition to the administration's policies and the out-of-control
growth of government and its power. The Gibson Guitar raid, the IRS
intimidation of Tea Party groups and the fraudulently obtained warrant
naming Fox News reporter James Rosen as an 'aider, abettor,
co-conspirator' in stealing government secrets are but a few examples of
the abuse of power by the Obama administration to intimidate those on
its enemies list." --Investor's Business Daily

Upright

"Our Founding Fathers feared the emergence of an agency such as the IRS
and its potential for abuse. That's why they gave us Article 1, Section
9 of the Constitution, which reads: 'No Capitation, or other direct, Tax
shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein
before directed to be taken.' A capitation is a tax placed directly on
an individual. That's what an income tax is. The founders feared the
abuse and the government power inherent in a direct tax. In Section 8 of
Article 1, they added, 'But all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be
uniform throughout the United States.' These protections the founders
gave us were undone by the Progressive era's 16th Amendment, which
reads, 'The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on
incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the
several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.' ...
The bottom line is that members of Congress need such a ruthless tax
collection agency as the IRS because of the charge we Americans have
given them." --economist Walter E. Williams

[Crafty_Dog]

Second post

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/05/29/former-obama-adviser-deletes-bizarre-explanation-of-koch-tax-mystery/

[Crafty_Dog]

Full Dimensions Of IRS Scandal Emerge

By DICK MORRIS

Published on DickMorris.com on May 30, 2013

The revelation that Acting IRS Commissioner Douglas Schulman visited the White House
at least 157 times during the period in which conservative groups were being
targeted with tax audits gives us the first real indication of the extent to which
this scandal reaches into the White House.

The incredible frequency of the White House visits -- essentially weekly -- indicate
that Obama must have been deeply involved with the inner workings of the audits and
harassment of conservative groups.  If Schulman was in the White House every week,
what was he there to talk about? 

Not ObamaCare.  Not without having HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in attendance,
you wouldn't.  About Treasury issues?  Deficit reduction?  Not without Treasury
Secretary Tim Geithner.

The obvious reason is that Obama was following the IRS audits with an obsessive,
personal involvement.  Apparently, the Citizens United scandal so galvanized him
into action and tapped so deeply into his psyche that he was determined personally
to supervise the castration of the wealthy people and groups whose access to the
political system was opened wide by the Court.

To see a man who held a subordinate, non-policy making position 157 times, you have
to be a president on a mission.

It transforms one's sense of the scandal from a rogue agency to a rogue president
using the agency as his personal instrument.  An instrument of vengeance, or
self-defense, and of political influence.

Nixon was doomed when we all realized that the paranoia of the man had infected his
entire administration.  When Chuck Colson led the plumbers unit to investigate leaks
and to use the IRS to terrify and intimidate his enemies, we realized that he was
operating as Nixon's man doing Nixon's bidding based on the needs of Nixon's psyche.

No we realize that the IRS audits and the harassment of conservative groups went
very very deep in Obama's priority system. This scandal will destroy him.

Or, as the Greeks said in ancient times: "Those whom the Gods would destroy they
first make mad with power."

[rickn]

Yesterday, I finished a one year term as a federal grand juror.  Every other week we would meet and review the cases presented to us by the US Attorney before any case could proceed to indictment and arrest.  It was a great inconvenience to my work.  It also interfered with my ability to participate consistently in this group.

Inside the jury room, I was impressed by the seriousness that some of “the lowest common denominator” jurors applied to their duty.  Everyone understood that we stood between an unjust indictment and the accused.  And many of the presumptive more highly educated (mainly teachers) were pushovers for government authority.  

Here are some thoughts.

1.  Every federal agent is called a special agent; but no one could explain to me why they are special.

2.  The federal government has defined for itself a huge amount of power; and it has assumed all of that power and then some.  The lip service paid to the Commerce Clause is scary.  Everything is now a federal crime as long as something used in the crime has been a part of interstate commerce at one time in its existence.  That includes a firearm or ammunition purchased legally in a private sale in your own State as long as that firearm or ammo was manufactured years earlier in another State. (When this applies to a convicted felon, there is not a lot of sympathy.  But when will it be applied to everyone?)  It also includes file sharing if the contents of the file were ever involved in interstate commerce even though the accused himself did not use interstate commerce to obtain the file.  The government's theory is that if an ISP owns a server in another State, that is a sufficient interstate nexus even if the user's packets never left the State. (Again, when this concept is applied to a person selling child pornography, it engenders little sympathy for the accused.  What happens when it is applied to someone sharing a political file?)There is no crime for which the Federal government cannot prosecute a person.  (For example, it is a federal crime to possess or brandish a firearm if that action would constitute another crime.)  The most cynical were bank fraud cases in which a lender makes a bad loan and then co-opts the federal criminal justice system to try and collect the bad debt via criminal prosecution by flyspecking a liar loan application.

3.  The federal government is devoting a lot of its resources to the apprehension and eviction of illegal aliens.  That was the largest group of cases that we heard.  But the southern border is like a sieve.  Unless that border is secured, there is no point to other reforms.

4.  I wonder what is intended for the new agency called Homeland Security Investigations.  Keep an eye on this agency because it seems to be popping up in a lot of different situations.  It was originally the new name for ICE (Immigration & Customs Enforcement).  But we encountered their “special” agents in more than just immigration and customs cases.

5.  Be very careful with your personal data.  The new growing crime is acquisition of your personal data by crooks who then electronically file false income tax returns under your data and receive large refunds sent to debit cards that they control.  They get your information from all sorts of different places including medical facilities.   They don't get the data from hacking computers.  They have people on the inside who are authorized to look at your data.  They are paid to record it and transmit it to the ringleader.  

6.  The IRS does not need a search warrant to invade your privacy.  To us, it was apparent that it was out of control months before the current scandal hit the media.

7.  HHS seeks to indict people and recover money on the basis of statistical samples from "audits" rather than actual proof of every fraudulent billing.

I was glad that I served.  There are a lot of well-intentioned and hard working bureaucrats.  However, the power assumed by the federal government is all-encompassing.  We no longer have a real federal system.  We have a national government with a lot of subservient provinces instead of a federal republic of States.  When the feds need to bolster their stats, they reach into the State system and federalize a case.  And the States are only too happy to transfer the financial cost of these prosecutions to the Feds.

I'm not as concerned about the federal employees as I am concerned about the Congresses that have enacted all of these laws.  They all took oaths to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.  Now, the social contract seems to be ignored for the mere sake of expediency.

[DougMacG]

Rick, What a great post even though it sends a chill down my spine.  Reading the Obamacare decision opened my eyes further to the process where we are giving up our liberties and expanding the powers of our central government. The Justices know the transformation is happening incrementally and instead of being alarmed by it are actually looking for ways to accelerate it.  No one joined with Justice Thomas where he simply stated that he would revisit previous commerce decisions too.  Between control of financial affairs and healthcare I don't know what is left to make us a totalitarian state.

The privacy warning is right and I don't know how to get around it.  Yesterday I had small encounters with a bank and with the healthcare system and gave nearly everything that should be private over to complete strangers in their roles as employees of the big business/big government complex.  Either person could easily steal or sell my info; they would have to be quite honest not to.  Auto insurance violates privacy the same way, storing amazing amounts of private information and requiring us to divulge it back to them with every contact.  As a landlord, I find myself on the other side of the privacy issue.  People willingly hand over their personal info while knowing almost nothing about me.  Living under the radar is nearly impossible today and most certainly illegal.

The 'Special Agent' observation is hilarious.  We are all special, aren't we?

Thanks for serving, and the respect you expressed toward the other grand jurors is encouraging.  Hope to see you here more and I hope others have followup on the many points presented.  - Special Poster Doug

[G M]

Very insightful, good post.

[Crafty_Dog]

Rick: 

Excellent post!  --- I hope you will continue to hang out with us.

Marc

[Crafty_Dog]

The Benghazi scandal was and is shocking, and the Justice Department assault on the free press, in which dogged reporters are tailed like enemy spies, is shocking. Benghazi is still under investigation and someday someone will write a great book about it. As for the press, Attorney General Eric Holder is on the run, and rightly so. They called it the First Amendment for a reason. But nothing can damage us more as a nation than what is happening at the Internal Revenue Service. Elite opinion in the press and in Washington doesn't fully understand this. Part of the reason is that it's not their ox being gored, it's those messy people out in America with their little patriotic groups.

Those who aren't deeply distressed about the IRS suffer from a reluctance or inability to make distinctions, and a lack of civic imagination.

An inability to make distinctions: "It's always been like this." "Presidents are always siccing the IRS on their enemies." There's truth in that. We've all heard the stories of the president who picked up the phone and said, "Look into this guy," Richard Nixon most showily. He got clobbered for it. It was one of the articles of impeachment.

Enlarge Image

Associated Press
Our government shouldn't treat the public as the enemy.

But this scandal is different and distinctive. The abuse was systemic—from the sheer number of targets and the extent of each targeting we know many workers had to be involved, many higher-ups, multiple offices. It was ideological and partisan—only those presumed to be of one political view were targeted. It has a single unifying pattern: The most vivid abuses took place in the years leading up to the president's 2012 re-election effort. And in the end several were trying to cover it all up, including the head of the IRS, who lied to Congress about it, and the head of the tax-exempt unit, Lois Lerner, who managed to lie even in her public acknowledgment of impropriety.

It wasn't a one-off. It wasn't a president losing his temper with some steel executives. There was no enemies list, unless you consider half the country to be your enemies.

It is considered a bit of a faux pas to point this out, but what we are talking about in part is a Democratic president, a largely Democratic professional administrative class in Washington, and an IRS whose workers belong to a union whose political action committee gave roughly 95% of its political contributions last year to Democrats.

Tim Carney had a remarkable piece in the Washington Examiner this week in which he looked for campaign contributions from the IRS Cincinnati office. "In the 2012 election, every donation traceable to this office went to President Obama or liberal Sen. Sherrod Brown." An IRS employee said in an email to Mr. Carney, "Do you think people willing to sacrifice lucrative private sector careers to work in tax administration . . . are genuinely going to support the party directed by Grover Norquist?" Mr. Carney noted that one of his IRS correspondents had an interesting detail on his social media profile. He belongs to a Facebook FB -0.82% group called "Target the Shutdown at the Tea Party States." It advised the president, during the 2011 debt-ceiling fight: "For instance, shut down air traffic control at airports in Norfolk, Tampa, Nashville."

Wow. I guess that was target practice.

Peggy Noonan's Blog

Daily declarations from the Wall Street Journal columnist.

Here is the thing. The politicization of government employees wouldn't have worried a lot of us 40, 30 or even 20 years ago. But since then, as a country, we have become, as individuals, less respectful of political differences and even of each other, as everything—all parts of American life—has become more political, more partisan, more divided and more aggressive.

There has got to be some way to break through this, to create new rules for the road in a situation like this.

Because people think the IRS has always, in various past cases, been used as a political tool, they think we'll glide through this scandal too. We'll muddle through, we'll investigate, the IRS will right itself, no biggie.

But when a scandal is systemic, ideological and focused on political ends, it will not just magically end. Agencies such as the IRS are part of what Jonathan Turley this week called a "massive administrative state," one built with many protections and much autonomy.

If it is not forced to change, it will not.

Which gets us to the part about imagination. What does it mean when half the country—literally half the country—understands that the revenue-gathering arm of its federal government is politically corrupt, sees them as targets, and will shoot at them if they try to raise their heads? That is the kind of thing that can kill a country, letting half its citizens believe that they no longer have full political rights.

Those who think this is just business as usual are ahistorical, and those who think nothing can be done, or nothing serious should be done, are suffering from Cynicism Poisoning.

The House wants to proceed with hearings and an investigation itself, and understandably. One reason is pride. "We are the ones who got the IRS to do the audit," a congressman said the other night. Another is momentum: An independent counsel would take time and take some air out of the story. But Congress is operating within a lot of political swirls. The IRS certainly doesn't seem to fear them—haven't its leaders made that clear in their testimony so far? Congress itself is not highly regarded by the public. Didn't I say that politely?

Some members have been scared into thinking that tough hearings will constitute "overreach." But when you spend all your time fearing overreach, you can forget to reach at all. A defensive crouch isn't a good posture from which to launch a probe. And some members fear that if they pursue and give time to something that is not an economic issue, it will be used against them. But stopping the revenue-gathering arm of the federal government from operating as a hopelessly politicized and aggressive entity is an economic issue. It has to do with basic American faith in, and compliance with, half of the spending/taxing apparatus of the federal government. How could that not be an economic issue?

There will be more hearings next week, and fair enough. But down the road an independent counsel is going to be needed because the House does not have all the prosecutorial powers an independent counsel would—the powers to empanel a grand jury, grant immunity to potential witnesses, find evidence of criminal wrongdoing, indict.

Another reason to want an independent counsel: There are obviously many good, fair-minded workers in the IRS, people of sterling character. They deserve to be asked about what they were forced to put up with, what they felt they had to bite their tongues about.

There may even be a few stories about people who stood up and said: "You know you're targeting Americans because they hold political views you don't like, right? You know that's wrong, right? And I'm not going to do it."

It would be worth an investigation that breaks open the IRS to find that person, and that moment. You have no idea how much better it would make us feel, how inspiring and comforting, too.

A version of this article appeared June 1

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2013/06/02/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+daybydaycartoon%2FkUnt+%28Day+by+Day+Cartoon+by+Chris+Muir%29#006969

[Crafty_Dog]

Horrifying description!  This sounds truly totalitarian!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2334123/Secret-court-jails-father-sending-son-21st-birthday-greeting-Facebook-gagged-naming-him.html

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/06/02/interviews-with-irs-agent-suggest-tea-party-targeting-came-from-washington/#ixzz2V7Hvyghq