It’s official: A plurality of Democrat voters are hypocrites, as they support the Obama DOJ spying on the Associated Press “after Democrats spent the entirety of Bush’s second term loudly despairing over civil liberties and freedom of the press being trod upon” in Allahpundit’s words.

But don’t worry, at least the IRS stands up for the Constitution: Lois Lerner has reportedly invoked the Fifth Amendment in her testimony before Congress, so as not to incriminate herself. Yup. Nothing illegal went on at the IRS, folks. Move along.

Seriously, the IRS scandal wasn’t just some rogue agents in Cincinnati: from the outset, they were guided by IRS lawyers in Washington. To his credit, Sen. Max Baucus (D) is asking why no heads have rolled yet over this scandal.

Kathryn Ruemmler, the top White House lawyer, may take a fall to give more plausibility to Obama’s “Nobody around here tells me anything!” defense. She may also take a fall over Benghazi.

UPDATE: The IRS had internal reports about their targeting of conservative groups, months before the election. And did not tell Congress, as they were obligated to!

It’s starting to look like the Obama crew won the 2012 election by hiding crucial information (sometimes known as lying). Had Americans known the truth about the IRS and about Benghazi, 2% (which is all it would have taken) could well have gone the other way.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to the tornado victims in Oklahoma. Click here for some ways we can all help them.

Turning to Obama scandal news, there is lots of it:

• Claims that new, damaging revelations on Benghazi will be coming. Also, one of Clinton’s scapegoats is starting to balk at being scapegoated for Benghazi.
• Even the liberal-ish Washington Post begins to agree that the ‘Benghazi emails were doctored!’ canard has been debunked.
• Lois Lerner, who “apologized” for the IRS/Tea Party harassment (as if that covers it) and who some insist is “apolitical”, has a history of targeting conservatives from her 14 years at the Federal Election Commission. There she showed a remarkable curiosity about the content of conservatives’ prayers, just as the IRS later did. Coincidence?
• Americans are becoming aware of these scandals, with 55-56% believing that the administration has engaged in a Benghazi cover-up and in deliberate IRS targeting of conservatives. The scandals haven’t yet hit Obama’s approval ratings; then again, they haven’t been clearly tied to his inner circle yet. 59% approve of *the GOP’s* handling of Benghazi.
• Adding to the Department of Justice’s spy-on-AP scandal, as of yesterday we have the spy-on-Fox scandal, in which the DOJ basically makes investigative journalism a crime.
• For background, let’s not forget that AG Holder “has prosecuted more government officials for alleged leaks under the World War I-era Espionage Act than all his predecessors combined, including law-and-order Republicans John Mitchell, Edwin Meese and John Ashcroft.” So much for openness and transparency.
• But Obama’s DOJ seems to be in the habit of smearing critics, as well as prosecuting and/or spying on them.

In the comments, please remember: If another’s argument is ludicrous, there is no need to engage in personal attacks; just tear it apart point by point.

UPDATE: Via HotAir, here is 2008 video of candidate Obama saying, in essence, that a sitting administration must not prosecute or spy on reporters and critics:

That it’s ironic, is clear. Obama was, after all, speaking to the AP and (among his other lies) painted the Bush administration as intolerant of dissenters.

But what I really love about the clip is how Obama looks down his nose, as he speaks. It’s that note of contempt which his white liberal admirers fell for, going “Ooh, he’s so smaaarrt! He has deep integrity and wisdom!” I saw through Obama’s act from the beginning.

The guy who would know, spoke on Morning Joe:

“You were talking earlier about kind of dismissing the Benghazi issue as one that’s just political and the president recently said it’s a sideshow,” said Woodward. “But if you read through all these e-mails, you see that everyone in the government is saying, ‘Oh, let’s not tell the public that terrorists were involved, people connected to al Qaeda. Let’s not tell the public that there were warnings.’ I hate to show, this is one of the documents with the editing that one of the people in the state department said, ‘Oh, let’s not let these things out.’

“And I have to go back 40 years to Watergate when Nixon put out his edited transcripts to the conversations, and he personally went through them and said, ‘Oh, let’s not tell this, let’s not show this.’ I would not dismiss Benghazi. It’s a very serious issue. As people keep saying, four people were killed. You look at the hydraulic pressure that was in the system to not tell the truth…”

Emphasis added.

And, as of this writing: No, the Benghazi e-mails still haven’t been released. Not all; not enough. They held back the most crucial ones, the e-mails from September 12 and 13, releasing only from September 14 on. Why?

UPDATE (from Dan): Jeff, are you anticipating a post I am planning? Or just reading my mind?
UPDATE (from Jeff): Dan, GMTA!

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…)

1. It’s a presidential election. It’s not close; the Democrat has way more popular support. A few of his dumb zealots break into Republican headquarters to spy needlessly. No person is injured, but it’s still unacceptable. The more so, because the president and his crew then lie to obstruct official investigations.
2. A Republican president was recently re-elected. A philanderer and “family values” hypocrite, he has an affair with his White House intern. It would have no public significance, except that it becomes a subject of testimony in lawsuits over his other affairs. And he lies about it, under oath. He, the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, has now lied to a court.
3. A Democrat president must deal with a certain Third World dictator who has attacked four neighboring countries over a period of two decades, costing hundreds of thousands of lives. World intelligence agencies, and Republican leaders in Congress, are nearly unanimous that the dictator would be happy to launch yet another war, has been developing nuclear weapons, and may have nukes already. Acting on that consensus, the Democrat president gets legal approvals from Congress and the U.N. to invade (along with 40 other nations) and remove the dictator. The invasion works, but at a cost of several thousand American lives (including the occupation, afterward). It turns out that the dictator only had chemical weapons, plus some nuclear weapons research (no nuclear bombs, yet). That’s embarrassing, but multiple official investigations clear the President of any intentional wrongdoing.
4. A Republican administration pushes thousands of guns into Mexico, causing the deaths of hundreds of Mexicans. Republicans claim the administration only did what the previous Democrat administration did. But that is not true: the previous operations had controls to minimize deaths and maximize the intelligence-gathering on Mexican drug cartels, controls that the Republican effort abandoned (for reasons unknown). The GOP Attorney General does everything he can to obstruct Congress’ investigation, and eventually is found to be in contempt of Congress. He does not resign.
5. It’s a presidential election. It is going to be close; the Republican incumbent, plagued by four years of economic failure, is not way ahead. But he has been successful, he claims, in fighting terrorism. A month before the election, Islamist terrorists attack a U.S. consulate and kill an American ambassador, plus three others. The Republican administration had warnings and permitted the attack to succeed (through negligence or perhaps for reasons unknown). They lie to the American people about it, implying that it was not a terrorist attack, that they could not have stopped the attack, that the attack was somehow really a protest caused by a YouTube video that nobody ever heard of, etc. The lies work: the Republican wins re-election.

(more…)

For President Obama’s statement after yesterday’s gun bill failure, see transcript here.

Allahpundit (who has video) is not my favorite, but when he’s right, he’s right:

[Obama] kept his mouth shut nice and tight about guns when it was his own ass on the line last year in purple states; he ignored gun control almost completely when he had 60 Democratic votes in the Senate early in his first term; and as we know from the gay-marriage farce, he isn’t above lying outright to voters about his true positions in the name of getting elected…

Given his record, there’s every reason to believe that what’s really bothering him is the fact that red-state Dems [ed: and Senator Toomey(R)!] denied him an easy chance today to demagogue Republicans as the party of child murder…

I think Obama’s statement is itself an example of demagoguery.

• Obama pulls figures from thin air, like his claim that “90% of the American people” supported the bill.
• Obama calls the Senate cloture rules under which the bill failed, “A continuing distortion of Senate rules.” Huh? How can the actual Senate rules, which Democrats gladly use to stop legislation when it suits them, be a distortion of the rules? Or does Obama mean that the rules should only ever help himself?
• Obama once more tries to play the Gabby Giffords card and the Sandy Hook card. But neither of those shootings would have been prevented by the bill.
• Obama claims “There were no coherent arguments” against the bill, then misrepresents arguments against it[1], revealing the true problem (that he never understood the arguments and never wanted to).
• Obama also plays the Dirty Gun Lobby / Dirty Money In Politics card. But, as Bruce’s post mentions, it was the pro-bill side (if anyone) which may have tried to buy votes with money.

The problem with all gun control legislation is that it burdens the freedom *of the law-abiding*. It’s justifiable only if it will directly hurt law-breakers, a small (if destructive) minority. And, in practice, it usually doesn’t.

Even if it does, there is still the Constitution to consider. As with speech restrictions, property restrictions, measures that would expand home invasion (or search & seizure), etc.: gun control legislation should be difficult to get passed. It should be passed only on cold, slow-moving rationality; never on demagogic falsehoods or appeals to emotion.

[1] For example, Obama says “One common argument I heard was that this legislation wouldn’t prevent all future massacres”; Obama’s insertion of the word “all” making it clearly a Straw Man.

And that settles the question, right? Because, in the new world’s glorious Declarative style of governing, what Obama says he’s doing is what counts; never mind the facts.

Well, let’s try on a few facts:

• Obama’s budget proposes a further 2.5% increase in federal spending, after some years of increases.[**]
• Despite all the talk about budget cuts this year, we have not seen a year-on-year reduction in federal spending.[**]
• “The budget projects a deficit for the current year of $973 billion, falling to $744 billion in 2014. Those would be the first deficits below $1 trillion since 2008.”
• But in FY2008, when Bush ran a budget deficit of $438 billion, Obama called that “unpatriotic”.

Don’t get me wrong: Obama had kind of a point, in 2008. A point which should be applied doubly now, to him.

Hypocrisy alert level Red (Severe): Obama also declared that “Our economy is poised for progress as long as Washington doesn’t get in the way.”

Hmm… What law could Obama be implementing right now that puts businesses in a quandary, making it tougher for them both to plan and to hire people? What could it be?

[**] NB: These points were overstated in the original version of this post; I regret the error. Actual federal spending grew through the 2000s, peaked in 2009 (the Obama “stimulus” budget – thank you, RH at comment #9), declined in 2010, and has increased again since 2010. The increases have been smaller than GDP growth, so that federal spending has declined since 2009 as a percentage of GDP; while still remaining, at 22% of GDP, higher than in the Clinton-Bush era.

Remember the ‘sequester’ spending cuts? Per Obama a month or two ago, they were supposed to be The Apocalypse. His administration even rolled out Janet Napolitano to try to fan public fears of terrorist attack (notwithstanding that her budget is still higher this year, after the sequester cuts).

It’s been a month since the cuts kicked in, and it turns out that the reality is ho-hum. The paltry cuts have mostly had small, manageable impacts.

Except, of course, that school kids still can’t go on White House tours. Obama’s administration has held the tours hostage, even refusing patriotic donations that could have restored them. “Nice guy.”

UPDATE: Defense is hit with $41B in cuts, which will cause civilian Defense Dept. employees to be furloughed 14 days this year. Top Defense officials try to help a little, by returning part of their own salaries. Clearly, they aren’t part of the White House.

I’ve not blogged or read political articles for the last 3 weeks, for several reasons. One reason was that I got a little overwhelmed by (disgust at) the sheer volume of the Obama administration’s negligence and dishonesty, on issue after issue. You just can’t blog it all.

Well “I’m back”, presently scanning the last few days’ news on HotAir. There it is again! The sheer volume of Obama negligence and/or dishonesty. Any of these could make a blog post.

• Obama lying about the budget “sequester”, trying to panic people with a nightmare vision of the effects of its small – no, paltry – cuts to spending. Why would I use the word “lie”? Because even the left-leaning Washington Post can’t get behind Obama’s claims.
• Obama showing his great leadership on the sequester, asking a reporter “What exactly do you want me to do?“
• Donna Brazile scratching her head about why her health care premiums are going up, a result that most intellectually honest observers knew would have to come from the Obamacare bill.
• Bob Woodward saying what others confirm, even including Clinton stalwarts: that the Obama administration actively seeks to intimidate reporters.

What, only four items? Here’s a bonus: What happens to your city, when Democrats run it for generations?

UPDATE: An Obama advisor allows, in tortured fashion, that the “sequester” cuts were their idea. So why have the Obama crew recently been pretending the opposite?

UPDATE: Via Ace and the New York Post, more tales of the Obama administration’s techniques for shaping reporters’ discourse:

“I had a young reporter asking tough, important questions of an Obama Cabinet secretary,” says one DC veteran. “She was doing her job, and they were trying to bully her. In an e-mail, they called her the vilest names — bitch, c–t, a–hole.”…

UPDATE: WaPo upgrades one of Obama’s sequester lies from two Pinocchios (run-of-the-mill political lie) to four (indisputable, big lie).

From Newsday:

President Barack Obama demanded Monday that lawmakers raise the nation’s $16.4 trillion federal debt limit quickly, warning that “Social Security benefits and veterans’ checks will be delayed” if they don’t and cautioning Republicans not to insist on cuts to government spending in exchange.

“They will not collect a ransom in exchange for not crashing the economy,” he said at the 21st and final news conference of his first term. “The full faith and credit of the United States of America is not a bargaining chip. And they better decide quickly because time is running short.”

[...]
“We are not a deadbeat nation,” he declared…

Orwellian language – speaking as though the opposite of the situation is somehow the situation – is a hallmark of the Obama presidency, and the statement reported above is typical. So many things wrong with it, it’s tough to know where to start.

First, who is holding hostages and demanding ransoms? Obama is. (more…)

Because he, by his own admission, as Charles Krauthammer explains, relied on the White House communications director:

. . . New York Times editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal, who at first repeated Pfeiffer’s denunciation of the Churchill bust “falsehood,” . . . later honorably corrected himself, admitting that “I got some facts wrong, because I made the mistake of relying on a White House blog post by the communications director Dan Pfeiffer.” Rosenthal then chided Pfeiffer for posting “a weaselly follow-up comment” after the facts became clear that “fails to acknowledge that his post the previous day was false.”

Emphasis added.  Read the whole thing.  (Via Instapundit.)

The U.S. Supreme Court today upheld the mandate to purchase health insurance as a tax.

“As an exercise of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause,” writes the Washington Examiner’s David Freddoso, “the individual mandate does not hold water. But under Congress’s taxing power, it is a legitimate provision.”

My quick analysis. Pyrrhic victory for Obama. He’ll have a few good days. Vote holding Eric Holder in contempt won’t get much media coverage.  But, decision could prove to be political headache for the president.  The court may have found the law constitutional, but it remains unpopular.  Mitt Romney will be able to use this against him:  the only way to repeal this law is to replace Obama.

So, if Obama celebrates the decision, he’ll be acknowledging that he broke this campaign promise:

UPDATE: Walter Olson offers a roundup of his tweets here.  Glenn has a great roundup here; seems others bloggers/blogresses have offered titles similar to my own.

Ann Althouse is more sanguine than are most conservatives, having “said repeatedly that Obama would be worse off if Obamacare were upheld, but what I’m really seeing is how bad it is for him with the mandate declared a tax.”

UP-UPDATE:  From Ira Stoll, linked by Glenn above:

By calling the mandate a tax, the court made an official ruling that President Obama had violated his 2008 campaign promise not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $250,000 a year. And the ruling also keeps ObamaCare alive as a political issue. A ruling that struck down the law might have energized Obama supporters. This ruling may make the law’s opponents even more determined to elect a Republican president and Congress so that they can repeal the law or, failing that, defund it.

UP–UP-UPDATE: “The Supreme Court,” quips Jim Geraghty, “just gave Mitt Romney a very, very useful line: ‘As President, I will repeal President Obama’s health care tax.’”

FROM THE COMMENTS:  boatseller forecasts that “in about 4 weeks, liberal bloggers are going to start chattering about a conspiracy between Justice Roberts and the Romney campaign to uphold the law in order to hurt the President.”  Heh.