Earlier today, I caught Jim Hoft’s report on ties between the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU, which represents, among others, employees of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)) and the Democratic Party.  Jim links us to the NTEU’s release just following the 2012 election where its president Colleen M. Kelley congratulated Obama on his reelection and noted the efforts her government employee union made on behalf of that Democrat.

Commenting on a report that President Obama met with Miss Kelley “the day before agency targeted Tea Party“, Ace wonders, as should we all, about the strange coincidence and considers the meaning of the meeting. He surmises how events might have unfolded in circumstances similar to this one, with a hypothetical President Tee meeting with the head of Union N which had supported him politically:

It would seem that President Tee could choose to go outside the normal chain of command to issue an illegal order by simply telling the head of Union N to inform the union members she leads to pursue the policy, rather than issuing a formal order to the head of the IRS.

And journalists should be asking Jay Carney, in his next press briefing, to tell us what transpired in that meeting.  And they should ask the president as well.  Reporters should be doing what they can to learn what passed between the president and the union boss in March 2010.

UPDATE:  Maybe there is nothing to that meeting.  But, the time is indeed curious.

RELATED:  Over on the National Review’s home page, Andrew Stiles has a good piece on Miss Kelley’s union:

The IRS may be “an independent enforcement agency with only two political appointees,” in the words of White House press secretary Jay Carney, but its employees are represented by a powerful, deeply partisan union whose boss has publicly disparaged the Tea Party and criticized the Republican party for having ties to it.

UP-UPDATE: Doug Powers has more.

From Politico:

The White House on Monday once again added to the list of people who knew about the IRS investigation into its targeting of conservative groups — saying White House chief of staff Denis McDonough had been informed about a month ago.

Press secretary Jay Carney said again that no one had told President Barack Obama ahead of the first news reports: not his top aide McDonough, nor his chief counsel Kathy Ruemmler, nor anyone from the Treasury Department.

Monday’s revelation amounts to the fifth iteration of the Obama administration’s account of events, after initially saying that the White House had first learned of the controversy from the press.

Various folks that I follow on Twitter have asked important questions over the past few days such as this one:

I want to know the names of the folks who get to decide what Obama doesn’t need to know. What are their credentials? Who elected them?

— Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor) May 20, 2013

If Obama Doesn’t Know What Going On, Who’s Running This Administration? bit.ly/19VEQFr

— Duane Lester (@Bodhi1) May 20, 2013

And my observations regarding the multi-scandals now enveloping our supposed brilliant and awesome President?

Obama had time to get personally involved with @sandrafluke‘s birth control obsession, but not #Benghazi or #IRSabuse. Got it.

— GayPatriot (@GayPatriot) May 20, 2013

If as outgoing Acting Internal Revenue Service Director Steven Miller claimed in his testimony before the House Ways and Committee that “politics didn’t play a role” in singling out Tea Party and other groups critical of the Obama administration, could he — or anyone at the IRS for that matter — please identify the “progressive” groups subject to the requests made of right-of-center/libertarian groups, including:

• Questions about “the content of their prayers“
• Queries about the books they were reading
• Requests for the name of teenage interns
• Demands for lists of members and donors
• Lists of names of books they were reading
• Questions about “activation with the news media” (whatever that is)

And if these progressive groups were not subject to such scrutiny, could someone at the IRS please explain why not.

Thanks!

UDPATE:  Did they ask any “progressive” groups to agree not to protest any social conservative institutions as a condition of receiving their 501 (c)(4) status from the federal government?

UP-UPDATE: Seems a handful of “progressive” groups were singled out for extra scrutiny: Nonconservative Groups Say IRS Scrutinized Them, Too (Via HotAir headlines).

. . . please explain why such snooping didn’t occur while George W. Bush was President of the United States.

And as a bonus, for those constantly blaming that man for wanting to destroy his enemies, please provide evidence of him — or his minions — rooting around in confidential government files for details about his political opponents.

Some news reports just speak for themselves.

In the Weekly Standard today, Daniel Halper writes:

NBC’s Lisa Myers reported this morning that the IRS deliberately chose not to reveal that it had wrongly targeted conservative groups until after the 2012 presidential election . . .

The IRS commissioner “has known for at least a year that this was going on,” said Myers, “and that this had happened. And did he share any of that information with the White House? But even more importantly, Congress is going to ask him, why did you mislead us for an entire year? Members of Congress were saying conservatives are being targeted. What’s going on here? The IRS denied it. Then when — after these officials are briefed by the IG that this is going on, they don’t disclose it. In fact, the commissioner sent a letter to Congress in September on this subject and did not reveal this. Imagine if we — if you can — what would have happened if this fact came out in September 2012, in the middle of a presidential election? The terrain would have looked very different.”

Via Ace. Barack Obama’s much vaunted commitment to transparency notwithstanding, that Democrat is more interested in winning elections than in opening the books on his administration.

RELATED: Worse and worse: IRS claimed in 2011 that there were no documents related to scrutiny of tea-party groups

Why did the IRS keep the scandal quiet until after the election?

. . . it stands to reason that that man’s minions might be interested in using the IRS to obtain information about his ideological adversaries.

For years, the Left has been trying to link the Tea Party with terrorism. Examples include:

• Vice President Biden agreeing with House Democrats that the Tea Party are terrorists. (Biden later denied it, but not convincingly.)
• Senate majority leader Harry Reid likening the Tea Party to “anarchists”.
• Semi-retired Congressional dumbass Barney Frank claiming that al Qaeda and the Tea Party are “aligned”.
• The New York Times accusing Tea Party-inspired Republicans of “economic vandalism” for opposing debt ceiling increases, the very stance that then-Senator Obama took famously in 2006. Other editorialists also referred to “hostage taking” and “terrorism”, or even called the Tea Party “totalitarian”.
• Media coverage in general showing great bias against the Tea Party. Some note that the media ignored real union violence, while covering imaginary Tea Party violence.
• The media repeatedly trying (and failing) to link the Tea Party to each new mass killer, such as: the Boston Marathon bombers, the Gabby Giffords shooter, the Aurora shooter (wherein ABC rushed to blame a certain Colorado Tea Party activist), the guy who tried to crash a plane into the IRS building in Austin (but who proved to be left-leaning), and more.

Given the climate of bias, hate and fear that our top leaders and media have sought to foment against the Tea Party for years, is it any wonder that self-important IRS bureaucrats would act unethically toward it?

UPDATE: As long as my list is, I know that I’ve missed some juicy examples of our top leaders and media fomenting bigotry against the Tea Party. Please feel free to add more in the comments.

UPDATE: Rick Santelli points out the logical endpoint of the IRS’ approach – namely, your Obamacare death panel Accountability Board saying “No stent for you!” based on your politics – and predicts that Obamacare will be altered partly to prevent such a nightmare.

UPDATE: How could I not mention how they’ve also tried to link the Tea Party with racism? Latest example: a top NAACP leader claims that America’s racist Taliban deserved the IRS scrutiny.

George Will was on a roll today, getting first at the essence of the Benghazi scandal and now about the IRS/Tea Party scandal:

“The Tea Party people have known about this and were working on this,” [George] will [said Sunday’s broadcast of ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos"] “But they said — it was just some odd underlings out in Cincinnati who did this and there was no political motive whatever involved. Now the question is, how stupid do they think we are? Just imagine, Donna Brazile, if the George W. Bush administration had an IRS underling, he’s out in Cincinnati, of course, saying we’re going to target groups with the word ‘progressive’ in their title. We’d have all hell breaking loose.”

Via Instapundit.

Wow.  At least the leftists are so nuts, they’ve become honest about their intentions and disregard for We, The People.

“Bribery isn’t what it once was,” said an official with one of the major gun-control groups. “The government has no money. Once upon a time you would throw somebody a post office or a research facility in times like this. Frankly, there’s not a lot of leverage.”

This is beyond the pale.  I want names.

-Bruce (@GayPatriot)

Jennifer Rubin how the media would cover the story had a right-wing group surreptitiously recorded a meeting of a Democratic Senator’s reelection team as the left-wing “Kentucky Progress” did of Senator McConnell’s staff:

If this were a right-wing plot against a top Democrat there would be wall-to-wall coverage on the cable networks and front-page coverage with the magazine involved taking a beating, but don’t expect too much coverage from the MSM or commentary or much of anything from the lefty pundits, who were only interested in the tape’s contents. Like Benghazi, Libya, in their minds’ if they don’t cover it, it’s not news. Gee, you’d think the “media critics” would notice that egregious bias.

It seems Todd Akin’s 6-second crazy gaffe about rape get more coverage than this left-wing dirty trick against the Senate Republican leader.

I’m wondering how the media would be covering the economy if we saw a surging stock market and sluggish job growth during a Republican administration, particularly as gas prices were climbing and incomes stagnant. In the Obama economy, it seems big corporations and the wealthiest Americans are doing quite well as the New York Times reported last September:

The income gap between the wealthiest 20 percent of American households and the rest of the country grew sharply in 2011, the Census Bureau reported, as an overwhelming majority of Americans saw no gains from a weak economic recovery in its second full year.

Shouldn’t there be some stories about how Obama’s policies favor the wealthy?

Just wondering.

A leaked memo to the Charlotte Observer on Thursday night has political watchers’ tongues wagging across North Carolina today.

Read all about it, here at WatchDogWire.com – North Carolina.

-Bruce (@GayPatriot)

It is Sunday evening and I’ve had a very nice weekend away from the magnifying glass of politics. It has been a normal weekend: chores, laundry, dog walking & mindless television.

Sometime during the day, I started tweeting a series of ideas about where the Republican House of Representatives should go from here. My conclusion: Give Obama everything he wants.

Let’s pretend this is a parliamentary system. Let’s pretend the Democrats won and Obama was re-elected as Prime Minister. In that system, everything Obama wants would pass.

Let them have it. I’m not suggesting that Republicans of principle silence themselves and not warn about the consequences of Obama’s economic plans. Those Republicans would include Sens. Marco Rubio, Jim DeMint, Ted Cruz, Pat Toomey and Govs. Scott Walker, Susanna Martinez and Nikki Haley. Let them put their stakes of opposition forcefully and vocally in the ground.

But let the House GOP and the Senate GOP get out of the way and allow the Democrats what they want on the economy. No obstruction, perhaps a vote of “present”…. but no other sign of getting in the way.

We, as Conservatives, know that these economic policies are disaster. But Obama is right — Americans voted for higher taxes and more regulation — so let them have it.

We will win the long game. We should have allowed the economy to tank harder than it did in 2008 to begin with. And all that’s been happening since is kicking the can down the road.

So I’m in favor of a hard stop. Let the Democrats’ vision of economic “success” play itself out.

The result will be hardship the likes of which no American has faced since the 1930s. But so be it. Americans voted for it — let them have it.

Conservative policies will win in the long game.

-Bruce (@GayPatriot)

Romney didn’t load up on Staples stock, devastating Allred’s case

Ace has more.

She disappointed her man Barry.

Via Drudge, we learn

DNC delegate and partisan Democrat lawyer Gloria Allred attended the “30 Days to Victory” Obama fundraiser at the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles on October 7th…featuring George Clooney and musical acts Katy Perry, Stevie Wonder, Jennifer Hudson, Bon Jovi and Earth, Wind & Fire. After the fundraiser, Allred admitted to O’Reilly Factor correspondent Jesse Watters that she “just had a few words with the President” backstage, “he had some very kind words for me,” and “knows of my work…” but would not elaborate more on the details of her conversation.

On the record, Ms. Allred needs to elaborate and tell us whether or not the president (or his team) encouraged her to file suit to unseal those divorce records.

In an e-mail to me, our reader Kurt quipped, “That Obama even met with her should tell us even more about him” than he does about her.  He’s right.  That’s why Ms. Allred needs to come clean, so we can better see what kind of man this Democrat is.

Romney: I Don’t Care If These Decades-Old Divorce Records Are Released

Wonder if she’ll drop the case now.

Gloria Allred may well be the lawyer, as per TMZ, attempting to unseal the divorce records of “Staples co-founder Tom Stemberg and his first wife Maureen”, but the move has Barack Obama’s fingerprints all over it.  As Sarah Hoyt, blogging at Instapundit, reminds us unsealing private records is the Democrat’s signature move.

He did it twice in his 2004 race for the U.S. Senate seat from Illinois, first against his strongest primary opponent, Blair Hull, then against Republican nominee Jack Ryan.  Now, to be sure, it was the Chicago Tribune, not Mr. Obama (or his team) who filed suit to unseal the records, but it does seem interesting that, in both cases, the paper was looking into sealed information about that Democrat’s opponent.

Indeed, about the Hull matter, the New York Times did report that, “The Tribune reporter who wrote the original piece later acknowledged in print that the Obama camp had ‘worked aggressively behind the scenes’ to push the story.”   Do hope some people ask Miss Allred today whether or not David Axelrod had asked her to purse this matter.  And why she waited until just two weeks before the general election to do so.

Ace, who has looked at the details of the case in question, a divorce settlement from 1986, doesn’t “really see the Romney angle, except in extremely contrived fashion.”  (Read the whole to see why.)  Trying to figure out what Mr. Romney’s testimony in a 26-year-old divorce case have to do with his ability to govern the United States of America. (more…)

But Voter ID laws are not necessary….

UPDATE: Daily Caller is now running the story.

Videographer James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas caught an official for President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign helping who she thought was an Obama supporter set herself up to vote more than once in November.

Stephanie Caballero is the regional field director for Obama’s Organizing For America in Houston, Texas. Federal Election Commission documents show, according to Project Veritas, that Caballero is a “salaried employee of the DNC [Democratic National Committee].”

Caballero is caught on camera helping the young woman try to vote in Florida and Texas in the upcoming election.

Remember — if this were a Republican Presidential re-election effort…

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

UP-UPDATE (from Dan): Great minds. Had seen the story on Jim Geraghty’s Campaign Spot and thought it might make a good blog post!

UP-UP-UPDATE (from Dan):  OBAMA SUPPORTER BRAGS ABOUT ILLEGAL FOREIGN DONATIONS ON PRESIDENT’S OWN WEBSITE

“Can you imagine,” Hugh Hewitt asks, “if George Bush had told Karl Rove to get Howard Dean nominated and to spend millions to do so?”

The blogger cites a story in the Orlando Sentinel which would have gotten national attention had the incumbent’s much maligned predecessor done just that:

The Democrats are targeting Mitt Romney as if he were already the Republican nominee running against President Barack Obama, with campaign ads, Internet videos, daily news conferences and dozens of news releases attacking the former Massachusetts governor.

Traditional Democratic partners are jumping in, too. Both theAmerican Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees’ and Service Employees International Union’s political-action committees are running their own TV commercials in Florida this week — attacking Romney.

Gingrich and the other two Republican candidates, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and Texas U.S.Rep.Ron Paul, are being all but ignored by the DNC and its allies. Instead, they’re hammering Romney harder even than his rivals are, paying for TV and radio ads saying that Romney changes his positions on issues such as abortion; that his hard-line positions on immigration would be “devastating” to Hispanics in a state full of them; that his business record was characterized by “greed.”

Hugh contends that “Obama fears Romney so he is trying to eliminate him early“, adding that “In the old days it would be called a ‘dirty trick,’ but MSM loves the president and won’t criticize his operation.”

Via Powerline where Scott Johnson observes that Sentinel reporter Scott Powers compares this tactic to Richard Nixon’s reelection strategy in 1972, quipping that “When the shenanigans of Nixon’s crew were exposed . . . , I seem to recall that they were held out as something of a scandal“.  Scott, that’s because when Republicans do such thing, they are scandals.   When Democrats do them, well, they’re just not newsworthy.