The Fact Is That the Targeting of Tea Party Groups by the IRS Helped Democrats Win Elections – Washington Examiner   “What do the Benghazi cover-up and the IRS scandal have in common? They were both about winning elections, under false pretenses. Winning elections, after all, is something Barack Obama is good at. He obviously loves campaigning and delivering grand orations to enormous adoring crowds. He loves it so much that he flew off to Las Vegas to campaign the day after the first murder of a U.S. ambassador in 33 years.”

“…This attempt to mislead the electorate worked. It seems a stretch to say that it determined the outcome of the election. But it certainly helped the Obama campaign. … But in 2009 at Arizona State University’s commencement, he noted that he had not been given an honorary degree and added that the school’s president and board of regents ‘will soon learn all about being audited by the IRS.’ That doesn’t sound so funny now.”

Chris Matthews Sours on Obama – Politico   “President Obama ‘obviously likes giving speeches more than he does running the executive branch,’ Chris Matthews said tonight. Yes, you read that right: The MSNBC host who in 2008 felt a ‘thrill going up my leg‘ after hearing Obama speak has grown disenchanted. Tonight’s episode of Hardball saw Matthews delivering a rare, unforgiving grilling of the president as severe as anything that might appear on Fox News.”

Is This the End of Eric Holder’s Tenure at the Justice Department? – The Atlantic   “Benghazi, the IRS, and now the AP phone-records bombshell: If Obama wants a symbol of accountability in a time of scandal, the attorney general is the only one left to fire. The bombshell disclosure that the Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of Associated Press reporters and editors could be dramatic enough to move even the phlegmatic Obama administration to action. Three concurrent scandals or controversies are just too many.”

“It is unclear how Holder fits into the latest firestorm, but he’s a battered survivor of many controversies and this could be the one that finally convinces him or Obama that it’s time to go.”

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Reports: IRS Spared Liberal Groups as Tea Party Languished, More Conservative Orgs Targeted Than First Thought, as Many as 500 – Townhall    “Remember what we were told when this explosive story first broke less than a week ago?  The IRS official in charge of tax exemptions for organizations said the improper methods employed within her division were executed by ‘low level workers’ in Cincinnati who weren’t motivated by ‘political bias,’ and impacted roughly 75 organizations?  Wrong, wrong and wrong.”

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The Obama Administration Is Making the Case for Conservatism Better than Mitt Romney Ever Did – Slate   “The Obama administration is doing a far better job making the case for conservatism than Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell, or John Boehner ever did. Showing is always better than telling, and when the government overreaches in so many ways it gives support to the conservative argument about the inherently rapacious nature of government. Conservatives argue that the more government you have, the more opportunities you will have for it to grow out of control.”

“…The confluence of these moments of government overreach may not swell the ranks of conservative clubs, but it could have an effect on policy. A general distrust of government most immediately threatens comprehensive immigration reform. House Republicans prefer a step-by-step approach, which is gaining support. … Obamacare is already the law of the land, but as Republicans try to dismantle it they will be assisted by front-page stories about government incompetence and overreach as the program starts getting implemented this fall.”

Claim: Obama Campaign Co-Chair Attacked Romney with Leaked IRS Docs – Breitbart  “One of President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign co-chairmen used a leaked document from the IRS to attack GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney during the 2012 election, according to the National Organization for Marriage (NOM)…. NOM announced Tuesday that it will sue the IRS for this alleged leak.”

“NOM discovered that when HRC published its confidential financial documents, it failed to conceal the source of the documents. ‘After software removed the layers obscuring the document, it is shown that the document came from the Internal Revenue Service,’ NOM asserted in its April 2012 release.

McConnell: IRS Can’t Be Trusted to Implement Obamacare – Newsmax  “Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell tells Newsmax TV that the current scandal facing the Internal Revenue Service proves that the agency cannot be trusted to implement Obamacare. ‘I don’t think so,’ the Kentucky Republican says in an exclusive interview. ‘I don’t think we ought to have Obamacare. We ought to pull it out root and branch, if we possibly can.’”

“‘And, certainly, the IRS part of administering Obamacare, particularly in the wake of this IRS scandal with regard to suppressing the views of Americans who were critical of the IRS, raises further suspicions about their involvement in the administration of Obamacare.’ … The IRS has to implement Obamacare’s required purchase of health coverage, checking whether millions of Americans are in compliance.”

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D.C. Turns on Obama – Politico    “The town is turning on President Obama – and this is very bad news for this White House. Republicans have waited five years for the moment to put the screws to Obama – and they have one-third of all congressional committees on the case now. Establishment Democrats, never big fans of this president to begin with, are starting to speak out. And reporters are tripping over themselves to condemn lies, bullying and shadiness in the Obama administration.”

“Obama’s aloof mien and holier-than-thou rhetoric have left him with little reservoir of good will, even among Democrats. And the press, after years of being accused of being soft on Obama while being berated by West Wing aides on matters big and small, now has every incentive to be as ruthless as can be.”

“This White House’s instinctive petulance, arrogance and defensiveness have all worked together to isolate Obama at a time when he most needs a support system. ‘It feel like they don’t know what they’re here to do,’ a former senior Obama administration official said. ‘When there’s no narrative, stuff like this consumes you.’”

Progressive Group: IRS Gave Us Conservative Groups’ Confidential Docs – Breitbart     “The progressive-leaning investigative journalism group ProPublica says the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) office that targeted and harassed conservative tax-exempt groups during the 2012 election cycle gave the progressive group nine confidential applications of conservative groups whose tax-exempt status was pending.”

“The commendable admission lends further evidence to the lengths the IRS went during an election cycle to silence tea party and limited government voices. ProPublica says the documents the IRS gave them were ‘not supposed to be made public.’”

COMMENT: But rest assured that the IRS’ actions were not politically motivated!

Benghazi, IRS: Son of Watergate? – Chicago Tribune    “In his defense of President Obama, Press Secretary Jay Carney is beginning to sound a lot like Ronald Zeigler, Richard Nixon’s spokesman. Carney only has to use the word ‘inoperative,’ as Ziegler did when incriminating evidence surfaced that proved his previous statements untrue.”

“… In 1972, Republican partisans initially accused Democrats of wanting to destroy President Nixon, but most were forced to acknowledge his culpability in Watergate once the facts became known. One of the Articles of Impeachment of Nixon concerned his misuse of the IRS to undermine political enemies. Journalists should stop protecting President Obama and Hillary Clinton and do their jobs, like Sharyl Attkisson. Congressional Republicans should press for all the facts. That’s their job.”

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IRS Official Lerner Speedily Approved Exemption for Obama Brother’s ‘Shady’ ‘Charity’ – Daily Caller   “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.”

“… 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.” 

COMMENT: Let’s see if I got this right: IRS: target and harass conservative and anti-Obama groups, but speedily approve Democratic progressive groups.

Obama’s Claim He Called Benghazi an ‘Act of Terrorism’: Four Pinocchios!!!! – Washington Post   “During the campaign, the president could just get away with claiming he said ‘act of terror,’ since he did use those words — though not in the way he often claimed. It seemed like a bit of after-the-fact spin, but those were his actual words — to the surprise of Mitt Romney in the debate. But the president’s claim that he said ‘act of terrorism’ is taking revisionist history too far, given that he repeatedly refused to commit to that phrase when asked directly by reporters in the weeks after the attack. He appears to have gone out of his way to avoid saying it was a terrorist attack, so he has little standing to make that claim now.”

Fact Checker Rating: Four Pinocchios!!!!

Pentagon, Short on Cash, Puts Civilians on Unpaid Leave – Reuters   “The Pentagon told its civilian workforce on Tuesday that it will put most of them on unpaid leave for one day a week starting in July, a deeply unpopular move that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel blamed on sweeping budget cuts imposed by Congress. For those of the more than 600,000 civilian defense employees affected, the decision translates to a salary cut of roughly 20 percent during the furlough period - which runs from July 8 until the end of the fiscal year on September 30.”

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The IRS Admits to ‘Targeting’ Conservative Groups, but Were They Also ‘Leaking’? – Daily Caller    “In a 2012 speech, Sen. Mitch McConnell noted, ‘The head of one national advocacy group has released documents which show that his group’s confidential IRS information found its way into the hands of a staunch critic on the Left who also happens to be a co-chairman of President Obama’s re-election committee. The only way this information could have been made public is if someone leaked it from inside the IRS.’”

“‘There is little question that one or more employees at the IRS stole our confidential tax return and leaked it to our political enemies, in violation of federal law,’ said NOM’s president Brian Brow, in a prepared statement. ‘The only questions are who did it, and whether there was any knowledge or coordination between people in the White House, the Obama reelection campaign and the Human Rights Campaign. We and the American people deserve answers.’”

Gingrich: IRS Targeting Scandal Raises Issues About Obamacare – Newsmax    “‘[President Barack Obama] has a huge problem, because Obamacare relies very heavily on the IRS.’ ‘Why would you trust the bureaucracy with your health if you can’t trust the bureaucracy with your politics?’”

“The former speaker, who ran for president last year, insisted it would be ‘almost madness’ to put the responsibility for enforcing the requirements of Obamacare under the IRS, given the circumstances now.  ‘How can you put Obamacare under an Internal Revenue Service? Remember, this is an administration which will not profile terrorists, but [will] profile patriots, profile constitutional groups,’ he said.”

McConnell: IRS Revelations ‘Just the Beginning’ – Breitbart    “The scandal, McConnell said, extends up the chain. ‘The Obama effort to shut up opponents isn’t limited to the IRS,’ he stated. ‘It applies to the FCC [Federal Communications Commission], SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission], FEC [Federal Elections Commission], HHS [Department of Health and Human Services] …. And you remember, the Obama campaign last year published a list of eight businessmen who it believed were enemies.”

“They finally messed with an agency everybody fully understands. When they try to quiet the critics through other agencies, it doesn’t get attention. This does. Everybody understands the IRS and how powerful they are. This is just one example of an administration-wide effort to silence critics.”

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More IRS Lies on Friday: IRS Officials in Washington Were Involved in Targeting of Conservative Groups – Washington Post   “Internal Revenue Service officials in Washington and at least two other offices were involved in the targeting of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, making clear that the effort reached well beyond the branch in Cincinnati that was initially blamed, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. IRS officials at the agency’s Washington headquarters sent queries to conservative groups asking about their donors and other aspects of their operations, while officials in the El Monte and Laguna Niguel offices in California sent similar questionnaires to tea party-affiliated groups.”

“IRS employees in Cincinnati also told conservatives seeking the status of ‘social welfare’ groups that a task force in Washington was overseeing their applications, according to interviews with the activists. Lois G. Lerner, who oversees tax-exempt groups for the IRS, told reporters on Friday that the ‘absolutely inappropriate’ actions were undertaken by ‘front-line people’ working in Cincinnati to target groups with ‘tea party,’ ‘patriot’ or ’9/12′ in their names.”

Gov’t Secretly Obtains Wide AP News Phone Records in Probe – AP News/MyWay   “The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a ‘massive and unprecedented intrusion’ into how news organizations gather the news.”

“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters.”

COMMENT: It is very interesting to watch as the Justice Dept. goes after one of the Obama’s biggest liberal media supporters in this case. If this can happen to AP News, it can happen to anyone!

Did David Plouffe Justify IRS Targeting Conservatives? – National Journal   “Obama adviser says he was addressing impact of ‘dumb’ actions, but tweet is likely to fan flames. … Two days after the IRS apologized for targeting conservative groups for reviews of their tax-exempt status, a top adviser to President Obama said ‘GOP groups flourished’ in the last two elections cycles ‘and they will use this to raise more money.’”

“The tweet by David Plouffe, who left the White House in January, could give GOP reason to accuse Obama’s team of playing politics with the IRS controversy by defending or justifying the agency’s actions.”

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Watch Out for Petraeus in Benghazi Scandal - Washington Times   “Make no mistake: Benghazi is a major scandal. Carnival barker Jay Carney looked almost ashen Friday as he took the podium to face a suddenly invigorated press corps. Of course, the public briefing came after a private session with ‘reporters who matter,’ a sure sign the White House is in full hunker-down mode — and, more precisely, terrified.”

“… Despite protestations by the White House, this scandal is just beginning. And the White House has picked a very bad scapegoat: the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA follows RFK’s edict: Don’t get mad, get even.’ And when the CIA gets even, it isn’t pretty. With the White House putting all blame on the agency, expect push back this week — nuclear push back.. The floodgates will open this week, and by the end of business Friday, the scandal will be full blown.”

ObamaCare Propels Mark Sanford Back Into Office – Real Clear Politics   “Compelling new evidence reveals that Congressman-Elect Mark Sanford won last week’s special election victory because voters who made their choice in the last week of the campaign broke overwhelmingly in his favor – and the number one reason they cited was the need to repeal ObamaCare.”

“While there was no killer issue against Colbert Busch – each of the issues worked together to reinforce one another and drive her negatives up – it turned out there was a silver bullet in terms of persuading the remaining undecideds to vote for Sanford: ObamaCare, and Colbert Busch’s refusal to sign a pledge to work to repeal it. According to the GEB after-action survey, 19 percent of the electorate said repealing ObamaCare was the single biggest reason to vote for Mark Sanford. That was the number one response given to the question.”

Susan Collins: I Don’t Buy ‘Rogue IRS Agents’ Claim – AP/Newsmax    “‘I just don’t buy that this was a couple of rogue IRS employees,’ said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. ‘After all, groups with ‘progressive’ in their names were not targeted similarly.’ ‘If it were just a small number of employees,’ she said, ‘then you would think that the high-level IRS supervisors would have rushed to make this public, fired the employees involved, apologized to the American people and informed Congress. None of that happened in a timely way.’”

“Collins said the revelations about the nation’s tax agency only contribute to ‘the profound distrust that the American people have in government. It is absolutely chilling that the IRS was singling out conservative groups for extra review.’ She said she was disappointed that Obama ‘hasn’t personally condemned this.’ The president, Collins said, ‘needs to make crystal clear that this is totally unacceptable.’”

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Budget Request Denied, Sebelius Turns to Health Executives to Finance Obamacare – Washington Post   “Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has gone, hat in hand, to health industry officials, asking them to make large financial donations to help with the effort to implement President Obama’s landmark health-care law, two people familiar with the outreach said. … But Republicans charged that Sebelius’s outreach was improper because it pressured private companies and other groups to support the Affordable Care Act. The latest controversy has emerged as the law faces a string of challenges from GOP lawmakers in Washington and skepticism from many state officials across the country.”

“Meredith McGehee, policy director for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, which researches government ethics issues, said she was troubled by Sebelius’s activities because the secretary seemed to be ‘using the power of government to compel giving or insinuate that giving is going to be looked at favorably by the government.’” 

COMMENT: This situation is just getting worse and worse, particularly when the person in charge of implementing Obamacare has to violate conflict of interest rules by seeking  to ‘force’ already-involved healthcare companies to help pay for Obamacare enrollment, since Sebelius has not managed or planned appropriately.

Obamacare: Taxpayers Must Report Personal Health ID Info to IRS – Americans for Tax Reform    “When Obamacare’s individual mandate takes effect in 2014, all Americans who file income tax returns must complete an additional IRS tax form. The new form will require disclosure of a taxpayer’s personal identifying health information in order to determine compliance with the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate.”

COMMENT; To speed up their medical information flow, you might want to attach a stool sample, so they will have your DNA also.

Democratic Strategist: Party ‘in Decline’ and ‘at Considerable Risk’ When President Obama Leaves – Politico   “‘Since Obama was elected President, the Democrats have lost nine governorships, 56 members of the House and two Senate seats,’ Doug Sosnik, the political director in Bill Clinton’s White House, writes in a new memo. While Republican branding problems get the lion’s share of attention, the Democratic Party’s favorability rating has declined by 15 points since Obama took power.”

“Obama neither directly campaigned nor raised money for down-ticket Democrats last year. The post-election creation of Organizing for Action to push his own agenda has upset party regulars because it makes the Democratic National Committee less relevant than ever, squeezes fundraising for other Democratic groups and emphasizes issues that put moderates in a bind.”

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