As damning as the scandal at the IRS (as well as the ones at the HHS, the DoJ, Benghazi, the other ones at the DoJ, etc.) is for the presidency of Barack Obama, I am 100% in agreement with Utah Senator Mike Lee‘s take that the scorn should be much broader:

Unfortunately for the president, his best defense is the same reason Americans should reject his liberal agenda to make the federal government more powerful, more intrusive, and more involved in the decisions we make. The bigger government gets, the less control the president has and the more opportunities there are for abuse.

BINGO

I’ll have more to say about this soon, and I could cut-and-paste every word in this article, but you might as well just read the whole thing.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HHQ)

Only days ago, Obama gave a speech in which, rather than warn us against tyranny, he warned us against the people who go around warning us against tyranny.

The IRS revelations only get worse: From the Washington Examiner yesterday (via Ed Morrissey this morning), we learn that the IRS demanded of a pro-life group – under “perjury of the law”, the IRS staffer’s words – that it not engage in legal Planned Parenthood picketing. And required another pro-life group to furnish detailed plans on its constitutionally-protected speech activities.[1]

This is the same IRS that Obama has been beefing up to enforce Obamacare by demanding ever-greater private information of citizens.

The AP snooping scandal speaks for itself. Now from the GP comments, V the K reminds us of something Obama said in 2008:

We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.

Video here.[2]

In these disparate data points, I see a pattern: Obama wants to be a tyrant – while pretending not to. My question is, do liberals really not see the pattern?

I know that some liberals have begun seeing it – and will, for example, condemn the IRS actions – but others don’t. The other day, I noted Julian Bond saying that he thinks conservative groups deserve the IRS harassment. The execrable Bill Maher has joined the fun there.

Obama maintains his democratic pretense by periodically declaring the goodness of his intentions. For example: yes, the other day he called the IRS actions “inexcusable”.

But a troubled President Nixon, as well as actual tyrants like Chavez and worse, also frequently declared their own goodness. So many of Obama’s other words, policies, and actions of his underlings point in a direction opposite to his self-declared goodness. Do liberals really not see? Or are they part of the pretense; de facto pro-tyranny?

—————-
[1] (I don’t know the ins and outs of these tax-exemption laws, but I thought that as long as a group would refrain from electioneering for parties/candidates, it would get a pass.)
[2] Students of history will note that the Fascists also believed in having powerful civilian, national security forces, and will be troubled by the weird applause that Obama’s liberal audience gave him for proposing it.

Speaking to students at Ohio State University on May 5, President Obama said:

Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems. Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave and creative and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham, with which we can’t be trusted.

Obama said, in effect: Disregard people who worry about tyranny. We can have government do the things that they warn against, without it being tyranny, because we are such wonderful people – so well-intentioned – that it isn’t tyranny, when we do it.

Get it? So, when Obama has his administration lie to Americans so he can win re-election, or when he takes an increasing share of people’s incomes, or requires people to engage in private commerce that he happens to want (Obamacare mandate), or eliminates their rightful choices in the free market, or uses the IRS to obstruct his opponents and violate their privacy, or uses the Justice Department to snoop on reporters, or uses the EPA to extort fees from opponents (that progressive groups don’t have to pay – hat tip V the K), it’s not tyranny. Because it’s Obama doing it, and by his account, he can be trusted.

But the Framers of the constitution thought otherwise. They believed in checks and balances. They *were* those people who “warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner.” They founded America, by “gumming up the works.”

Perhaps Obama doesn’t know that the Framers set up the United States as a republic under a limited government, precisely because they knew that all governments tend to degenerate into tyranny. Or perhaps Obama is unaware of his own party’s President Andrew Jackson, who said that “eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty.”

Obama implies that people who warn us of tyranny are distrustful nihilists. Our only choice, Obama implies, is between continuing the crony-social-fascist gargoyle of a government that he now leads – and harmful anarchy. A typical Obama false choice (flowing from a typical Obama straw man), I’m pretty sure it has the Framers rolling in their graves.

So much for Obama. But there’s more! Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee recently said: (more…)

Now, they tell us:

IRS Apologizes For Inappropriately Targeting Conservative Political Groups In 2012 Election

Tell me now, who trying to politicize the federal government? Kudos to the Huffington Post for publishing this (and to AOL for linking it on the home page). Let’s hope more of our left-leaning legacy media cover this story. Goes to the heart of the kind of politics the Obama team practices.

UPDATE: More here and here.

UP-UPDATE:  Looks like this story has legs.  Glenn Reynolds reminds us that when the Democrat was new in office, “BARACK OBAMA JOKED ABOUT TAX AUDITS FOR PEOPLE WHO DISPLEASED HIM. Now the IRS has admitted that it targeted conservative and Tea Party groups in 2012″, adding his own take:

The employees involved should be fired and prosecuted. The affected groups should be compensated for the additional costs they incurred in responding to this illegal harassment, and Congress should take the money out of the IRS’s travel-and-entertainment budget.

I agree.  At least as to the firing.

UP-UPDATE:  Jennifer Rubin finds this to be part of a pattern:  “The degree to which politics has come to predominate on everything from the sequester to national security to the civil rights division and now to the IRS is quite startling. It is a pattern of sublimating everything to partisan politics and electoral advantage.“

Via Sacramento Bee.

H/t: Washington Examiner which alerted me to the study in reporting that the top 10 states for business all led by Republican governors.

Some days ago, cnbc.com ran an article called $2 Trillion Underground Economy May Be Recovery’s Savior. It uses quotes from experts:

The shadow economy is a system composed of those who can’t find a full-time or regular job…

“You normally see underground economies in places like Brazil or in southern Europe,”…

Estimates are that underground activity last year totaled as much as $2 trillion…double the amount in 2009, according to a study… “The jobs are in service industries from small food establishments to landscaping.”…

A report from ADP Research Institute states that many employers, especially in low-wage businesses such as retail and food service, plan to reduce workers’ hours to less than 30 a week to avoid having to offer health benefits through Obamacare…

“The result is less tax money paid to the various levels of government.” “Those working and not paying the taxes puts the burden on those who pay the tax,”…

Workers who aren’t on the books don’t get Social Security or health benefits…

Several points here leap out at me.

1. How Obamacare destroys full-time jobs, as predicted by many on the Right before it passed.
2. How ‘normal’ taxation creates Second or Third World conditions in the economy.
3. How people can at least survive, when taxes are lower (or absent).
4. The experts’ and media’s cluelessness about all this. Despite the information presented by the article, its unspoken perspective remains that government is robbed, when people avoid taxes. Umm… how about people being robbed, when an excessively large and redistributive government taxes them so heavily that they (or their potential employers / trading partners) are forced into the underground economy?

In other words: Shouldn’t we shrink government and lower taxes enough that people won’t need to be in the underground economy?

That’s the question these articles never ask; the one you’re supposed to never think about. They are always written from an assumption that people do something illegitimate, when they avoid the government’s tax man; never from an assumption that the government does something illegitimate, when it charges people enough to drive them to it.

By now, most of us have heard the reports that the Tsarnaev family received some $100,000 in taxpayer-funded assistance.

It touches on a key question that arises when government pays people to basically do nothing: what the heck are they up to, all day?

The classic story that welfare-spending advocates give us is, The Family Who Just Need A Little Help To Get On Their Feet: imperfect but responsible parents who are going to school and looking for jobs (however desperately), while they take care of kids or others who depend on them. I’m sure that some proportion of recipients is like that. I’m also sure that at least some other recipients sit on their rear ends for years at a time. And finally, some others must be up to no good: running meth labs, planning crimes, or studying radical Islam and (perhaps) learning how to commit terror. What are the true proportions of the three groups? That, I do not know.

When people must work for a living, we have a pretty good idea what they’re up to all day: Their jobs. If they’re going to make trouble, they must do it more in their off-hours.

Back in 2001, Mickey Kaus noted some of the links between welfare benefits and terrorism. I also remember Bruce Bawer talking about it in his 2006 book: the idea that the European welfare state paid benefits to its unassimilated Islamist immigrants as a kind of appeasement, oblivious to the fact that it was (in effect) paying them to remain unassimilated and Islamist.

The headline is what I just saw on Yahoo! (hence the quotes). The article is from Peter Grier of the Christian Science Monitor:

Former GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul has slammed US law enforcement for responding to the Boston Marathon bombing with “police state tactics.”

In a post on the website of libertarian activist Lew Rockwell, Mr. Paul said Monday that the governmental reaction to the tragic explosions was worse than the attack itself. The forced lockdown of much of the Boston area, police riding armored vehicles through the streets, and door-to-door searches without warrants were all reminiscent of a military coup or martial law, Paul added.

“The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city,” according to Paul.

Furthermore, this response did not result in the capture of suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Paul charged. He was discovered hiding in a boat by a private citizen, who called police…

The article seems to be written by a leftie: it unfortunately goes on to quote the pompous and silly Glenn Greenwald, and uses guilt-by-association to insinuate that Austrian economics (Ludwig von Mises) somehow goes with racism.

But brush that aside: the main topic is still interesting. Your thoughts? Who went too far: Ron Paul, or the Boston police?

Answer: When you’re a federal employee:

The U.S. House on Friday eliminated a key requirement of the insider trading law for most federal employees [ed: the 2012 STOCK Act], passing legislation exempting these workers, including congressional staff, from a rule scheduled to take effect next week that mandated online posting of financial transactions…

One advocacy group pushing for greater government transparency blasted the move, saying it “guts” the law…

To be precise: Federal employees would still have to report trades. But mainly to Big Brother. Not in a form that would let the proverbial Army of Davids (online citizen-journalists) catch inside trades.

But hey, at least we know now what the ‘gun control’ drama is about:

The House vote followed similar action by the Senate Thursday. The votes were done with little notice and came at a time when most people were paying attention to the Senate’s work on high profile issues like guns and immigration.

Hat tip, Zero Hedge.

UPDATE: The IRS is now watching your transactions; even your eBay auctions and Facebook updates.

Here’s the thing. As America has devolved into a social-fascist state these last several decades, we have increasingly developed a presumption that government employers can spy on monitor the taxpayers. But, taxpayers monitoring the government employees? Perish the thought! Repeal it by a unanimous vote of Congress, with Obama signing the repeal swiftly! That’s the opposite of what the American Revolution was fought for.

And they do it as only leftists can: by blaming nasssssty Republicans for magically changing how the voters feel about the word “entitlement”, which now begins to sound bad.

From the linked article:

Obama Programs Derided by Republicans as Pejorative Entitlements

…Republicans have been working to convert the once-neutral entitlement label into a negative…

…“‘Entitlement’ used to be a fairly positive thing,” said historian Edward Berkowitz, an expert on social-welfare policy at George Washington University in Washington. “Now, the term is being changed. Entitlement is this form of social spending that’s getting out of control.”

Look, Mr. Berkowitz: If Republicans’ power to mold language/voters were that good, Romney would have won in 2012.

But further down, some facts creep into the article:

…Obama [ed: yes; not Republicans] last week proposed changing the formula for calculating cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security recipients [to reduce future benefits]…

Spending on Social Security and…Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and jobless benefits — rose 40 percent over the decade ending in 2012…more than twice the inflation-adjusted increase in the size of the economy…

…while Democrats portray the most costly entitlements as benefits that voters have paid for, typical wage-earners retiring in 2010 will receive at least $3 for every $1 they contributed to [Medicare]…

Social Security’s disability trust fund is expected to be exhausted in 2016…A two-income couple with both individuals earning an average wage of $44,600 who reached age 65 in 1960 received more than seven times as much in lifetime benefits as they paid in…

Golly, do you think maybe the facts are what make the word “entitlement” seem bad? That maybe entitlements are a “form of social spending that’s getting out of control”?

Easy: As I’ve suggested before, Obama always wants to empower the State.

Howard Husock at Forbes writes about the Obama administration’s continuing attack on private charity. The attack is boringly technical because, naturally, the administration does not want people riled up:

The Administration has, since 2009, pushed unsuccessfully to allow only 28 cents on a dollar donated to charity to be deducted—even though the top tax rate for the wealthy donors who make most use of the deduction has been 35 percent. In the budget released today, the President again proposes to cap the charitable deduction at 28 percent—despite the fact that the top rate on the highest earners has increased to 39.6 percent.

So, a bunch of rich people wouldn’t see as much tax benefit from their charitable donations. “Who cares?”, says the lefty. Well, you should care, because:

When one taxes something more, of course, one gets less of it—and it’s likely that the current $168 billion in itemized charitable giving would decline…The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports that the reduction in giving could be as high as $9 billion a year.

Husock’s piece is worth reading in full, for its good information. But I don’t think he quite grasps Obama’s motive.

The average private charity helps people better than government does. Usually, private charities are closer to the problem and spend money more efficiently. Leftists quietly hate the competition, in that they would rather see an expanded government program.

When the Left wants to take over (or destroy) something that private actors have been doing relatively well, the Left will propose some governmental program or rule change which seems small, technical, boring and even halfway reasonable, but which makes it harder for the private version to survive, and which sets a precedent for deeper changes to come. The slippery-slope approach.

That is why Obama keeps trying to get this tax change. If he can get this ‘reasonable’ change that only hurts rich people, he will have his bad precedent in place (for further steps to reduce or kill the charitable deduction).

In addition, he will have hurt private charities’ budgets, which means they will do less to help people, which means they will be a little bit less important in our society. I believe Obama prefers that, deep down. Because he always proposes the thing whose effects will make people more, rather than less, dependent on government.

Look up at CNN any time you are working out at your gym or waiting to catch a flight at the airport and you will see Piers Morgan or Anderson Cooper droning out about guns, as if that were the biggest issue on Americans’ minds.

Listen to the president who travels around the country, returning on more than one occasion to Connecticut, to lecture us about the need to act quickly on gun control legislation.  Perhaps, if you watched CNN and listened to the president, until your bills come due, you might forget that personal income is down, gas prices are up and many of your friends are having trouble finding a job commensurate with their abilities and experience.

Seems the president would rather focus on guns than address the real problems facing the American middle class and the fiscal crisis facing the federal government.  The man who, as a candidate warned us that we were “living beyond our means” (with high federal spending) and claimed that adding $4 trillion to the federal debt was “unpatriotic“, has released, as president, a budget that does nothing to address those problems.  According to the Wall Street Journal:

President Obama is pitching his new budget proposal as a fiscal peace offering to Republicans, but the details suggest everyone should expect more conflict. The fiscal 2014 plan he released Wednesday is a very slightly modified version of his previous budgets that reduces the deficit by raising taxes and trading defense cuts for more domestic spending.

The real news is that his budget ratifies much of the spending increase of the first term and tries to lock it in. He wants the feds to spend $3.78 trillion next year ($11,944 per American), which would still be 22.2% of national output nearly four years into an economic recovery. Before the financial panic in 2008, the government was spending about $1 trillion less, or closer to $2.7 trillion a year and an average of 20% of GDP—and President Bush was no slouch as a spender himself.

The editors titled this opinion piece, “The President’s Priorities.”  From his actions these past few months, seems his priorities are speaking about gun control rather than controlling federal spending — or addressing economic insecurity.

Don’t worry, I’m probably not going to make these headline summaries a regular feature. Other bloggers do it better.

Still, I must again express my amazement at how, on any given day, a quick scan of the headlines reveals a world gone awry. Just from Ace and HotAir today:

• The IRS may be spying on your Facebook page and Twitter stream, for God-knows-what reason.
• Hundreds of leftists celebrate Thatcher’s death by partying and/or rioting. Meanwhile, an MSNBC host claims that she embodied greed. So much for human freedom, I guess.
• In Massachusetts, people are no longer allowed to defend themselves from wild animals.
• When are women *not* entitled to control the product of their bodies? When a creepy, duck-speaking lefty feels the need to take control of their kids.
• On the Aurora shooter, a tragedy of errors.
• It comes out that police were warned about him, a month before. That kinda works against the narrative in favor of gun control, so now…
• The Fox reporter who brought it out may go to jail. And…
• The rest of the media doesn’t care. A contrast to the Plame case which, remember, was much ado about nothing (except that it played against a GOP President).
• Meanwhile, North Korea threatens to launch nuclear missiles… and Obama still wants to cut missile defense spending.
• And lefty GWU students can’t get over the fact that a Catholic priest would teach Catholic teachings.

I need to start looking for things that are going right. Of course Obamacare, which kills both jobs and worker benefits, isn’t one of them.

But maybe the fight for gun rights is. Like seeing Mark Matteoli (of Sandy Hook) or Manuel Martinez (formerly of Communist Cuba): two men who understand freedom, and speak out in its favor.

California now leads nation in unemployment at 9.8 percent:

California Democrats now control every statewide elective office and have veto proof majorities in both chambers of the state legislators. They passed a $6 billion tax hike last November and the state’s carbon cap and trade and renewable electricity mandates are now being implemented. No state that has embraced the progressive policy vision more than California.

There is just one problem: California now leads the nation in unemployment.

I must hat-tip John M. Mason at Seeking Alpha for inspiring this post. He weaves some recent news articles into a story which I shall sharpen, with my own viewpoint and commentary.

First, consider that “Recovery in U.S. is lifting profits, but not adding jobs” (says the New York Times). As percentages of national income, corporate profits today are they highest they’ve been since the 1950s, and employee income is the lowest it’s been since the 1960s.

So what are companies doing with their profits?

• “More U.S. Profits Parked Abroad, Saving on Taxes” (says the Wall Street Journal).
• “U.S. Firms Send Record Cash Back to Investors” as dividends, share buybacks and mergers (says the Wall Street Journal).

In other words: Companies just don’t feel that they have many productive opportunities / uses for their money, in the U.S. And do feel that they face unpredictable, yet ever-growing regulation – as well as relatively high taxes. So, they don’t hire (in the U.S.). Instead, they dispose of their profits in ways that accomplish little but to reward their shareholders, thus raising the stock market.

Connect that, folks, to the market’s recent highs. But what does a rising stock market accomplish? Little but to make the wealthiest households feel wealthier.

And so, to the extent that rising consumer spending has contributed something to U.S. recovery, that spending has come more from the wealthier households. “Wealthier Households Carry the Spending Load”, says the Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart and Target, who serve less-wealthy households, have reported slower sales.

This is an economy suffering from the anti-market, anti-growth policies of the Obama administration. Not surprisingly, it is also an economy skewed to the wealthy.

I say “not surprisingly”, because I know that the two things are connected. It is precisely the middle and working classes which (more…)

Over the past few weeks, I have awakened to hear snippets of stories such as this one on NPR about “the obesity epidemic.”  The stories are all part of a series reporting on a recent poll undertaken by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health.  The poll looked at the attitudes and the self-reported actions of parents towards the ways their children ate and about their children’s activity levels.

Among the key findings of the survey highlighted in the NPR reports have been these two points:

• “Recent public opinion polls show that most American adults think obesity is a serious problem for society, but most parents in the poll here are not concerned their own children will become overweight as adults.”
• “In most cases, parents don’t seem to believe that the way their child ate on a given day is likely to make them gain unhealthy weight.”

The NPR story linked above blames a psychological factor known as “optimism bias,” and says that parents may think they are doing the right things, but really they are just poorly informed and/or deluding themselves.

Since this is an ongoing series on NPR, one can expect it to culminate with an interview with Michelle Obama or someone behind her “Let’s Move” campaign, or with a series of suggestions for more government action, or calls for more spending on government nutrition programs, or possibly with all of the above.

What hasn’t occurred to the geniuses at NPR, though, is that perhaps the parents really have been listening to the advice coming from the government and the media for the past twenty five years and they really do think they are doing the right things, but the advice is flawed.

Ronald Reagan famously remarked that “the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”   In recent years, Gary Taubes has become the best-known of those who have challenged the nutritional and dietary orthodoxy which has been promoting a high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet.  Writing in Newsweek last spring, he explained that:  ”The problem is, the solutions this multi-level campaign promotes are the same ones that have been used to fight obesity for a century—and they just haven’t worked.”

(more…)

If President Obama were serious about preventing the supposedly draconian cuts in the sequester, instead of demagoguing Republicans in campaign-style events, he wouldn’t be waiting until the after the last minute to sit down with congressional Republicans.

But, as Jim Geraghty reminds us, campaign-style events are this Democrat’s modus operandi:

How did Obama try to pass his stimulus? Campaign-style events. How did Obama try to pass Obamacare? Campaign-style events. How is Obama pushing for amnesty legislation? Campaign-style events. How is Obama pushing for gun control? Campaign-style events. Fiscal cliff? Campaign-style events. This is all separate from his actual presidential campaign.

Geraghty cites Moe Lane who observes that

Barack Obama knows how to do one thing: elect Barack Obama to public office.  And that’s not ‘elect Democrats.’  Or ‘elect liberals.’  Or even ‘elect people that Barack Obama likes.’  It’s just him: his team is trying pretty hard right now to figure out how to use their over-specialized skill more generally, but they don’t have much time to figure it out and the system is actually rigged against them in this case.

Perhaps, Republicans can be more effective in standing up to this Democrat if every time he attacks them, they respond by pointing out the problem and asking for his plan to fix it, in this case, out-of-control federal spending.

They might also remind Americans of Barack Obama’s promise of a “net spending cut” and pledge to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term.

The incumbent President of the United States has decided to lay off blaming his predecessor for the nation’s sorry economic and fiscal situation and is now blaming someone else:

Facing an end of the week deadline, President Barack Obama said Monday that Congress can avert sweeping across-the-board cuts with “just a little bit of compromise,” as he sought to stick lawmakers with the blame if the budget ax falls.

Obama’s always trying to stick someone else with the blame.  He tries to pin the blame on Congress even while, as Jim Geraghty reports, he “has not met any congressional leaders face-to-face to discuss avoiding sequestration yet.”

If he really wanted to avoid these cuts, he’d been holding regular meetings with these leaders.  Seems he’d rather blame Congress than sit down with its leaders.

And this from the guy who four years ago told Jay Leno that one thing he wanted “to break is a pattern in Washington where everybody is always looking for somebody else to blame.”

Physician, heal thyself.

News from the world of the absurd…..

Hallie Kuperman loves to dance. But what she loves even more is sharing this passion with visitors to her social dancing club, the Century Ballroom.

Hallie purchased the vintage dancing space 16 years ago, turning it into a Seattle institution. The Century Ballroom not only teaches swing, tango and the foxtrot, it also hosts cabarets and other live performances for an eclectic crowd of all ages. The club’s trendsetting owner has become a prominent and beloved figure in the community.

Business was swinging until a surprise bill arrived from Washington’s Department of Revenue. The state agency decided to reinterpret an obscure old tax, audited the Century Ballroom, and demanded a check for $92,000.

Read the WHOLE THING at FreedomWorks by my blogger friend Jon Gabriel.

-Bruce (@GayPatriot)

Just caught this headline on Yahoo!

Then read this on the Washington Examiner, Obama pushes $50 billion stimulus plan as automatic budget cuts loom:

The White House on Wednesday pushed for tens of billions of dollars in stimulus funding for decaying roads and bridges, a request dismissed by Republicans as not serious amid the broader debate over spending cuts in Washington.

The plan outlined by administration officials Wednesday calls for $50 billion in spending on highways, transit systems and airports, part of the president’s push for a wave of new government investments. Like other ideas touted in President Obama’s State of the Union address, it lacks a payment plan.

The Democrat does seem oblivious to our nation’s spending problem.