As a newspaper, we have an obvious and direct interest in freedom of expression, and that makes us especially concerned about the federal government’s recent overreach on two fronts.
The Internal Revenue Service, which is responsible for ensuring that nonprofits don’t violate their tax-exempt status by sponsoring political advertising, has admitted that it singled out conservative groups for extra scrutiny.
Many conservatives and liberals have rightly denounced the agency’s practices, and for good reason. A federal agency has no business identifying groups or individuals for possible enforcement actions based strictly on the group’s political leanings. We suspect that this wrong-headed practice had more to do with bureaucratic expedience than a political agenda. Chris Ashby, a lawyer who advises conservative groups, told The New York Times that the IRS might have focused on smaller groups because they seemed less likely to contest closer reviews. That possibility, if true, is equally disturbing, suggesting a bureaucratic bully seeking the path of least resistance.
Another controversy involves the U.S. Justice Department’s secret subpoena of the phone records of more than 100 Associated Press journalists, apparently as part of an investigation into the leaking of information regarding Central Intelligence Agency activities in Yemen.
“In the 30 years since the Department issued guidelines governing its subpoena practice as it relates to phone records from journalists, none of us can remember an instance where such an overreaching dragnet for newsgathering materials was deployed by the Department, particularly without notice to the affected reporters or an opportunity to seek judicial review,” a group of professional media organizations wrote in a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole.
We believe that the recent actions by the IRS and the Justice Department are abuses of government power. We add our voice to those of other Americans who are rightly concerned.
We’re sure that Congress will be convening committee hearings to review these issues, and the prospect of partisan grandstanding at these hearings makes us queasy. The ultimate goal of such congressional oversight shouldn’t be political theater, but a search for the truth. Americans need to know what went wrong so that such abuses can be prevented in the future.
Government can’t be trusted with our health Published 12:58am Sunday, May 19, 2013 Comments
“We have a large government,” political consultant David Axelrod offered as a plea of ignorance to all of the scandals swirling around his boss. “Part of being president is there’s so much beneath you that you can’t know because the government is so vast.”
And yet, thanks to Axelrod and Obama, we now stand on the precipice of the largest expansion of government power in almost half a century: Obamacare, officially known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA).
PPACA massively expands and empowers the same IRS that President Obama himself admits is an out-of-control agency that is being ineffectively managed by his administration.
And it also creates sweeping new powers for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which is being engulfed in its own scandal that, most likely, Obama will also claim to know nothing about.
According to the Government Accountability Office, Obamacare creates 47 broad new tax and regulatory powers for the IRS, including taxes on individuals, employers, health insurance providers, and medical device manufacturers. Implementing these taxes and attendant regulatory requirements will mean collecting a vast amount of data, including sensitive health information.
The IRS has already proven itself unworthy of such new powers. Not only in its systematic targeting of political enemies, shamefully including those groups “educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights,” which was supposed to be a fix to early targeting based on the words “tea party” and “patriot.”
These groups were, illegally, asked to reveal their membership lists and answer detailed intrusive questions. And while hundreds of conservative groups opposed to PPACA and its vast expansion of IRS power were stalled for over two years, liberal groups engaging in the exact same activities were approved quickly with no questions asked.
It is not an open question whether IRS abuse of power will extend to PPACA implementation; it has already happened.
The same IRS commissioner, Douglas Shulman (a Democrat originally appointed by President Bush and retained by President Obama) who told Congress falsely, “There’s absolutely no targeting,” also spearheaded an illegal IRS rulemaking that effectively blocks states from exercising their lawful right under PPACA to opt out of the law’s vast new taxpayer-funded subsidies and employer penalty taxes.
Michael Carvin of Jones Day, the lead counsel in a recently filed lawsuit against the rule said: “The IRS rule we are challenging is at war with the Act’s plain language and completely rewrites the deal that Congress made with the states on running these insurance exchanges.”
So the same IRS that steamrolled political opponents is already overstepping its new health care powers to steamroll states. And the IRS is also, in a separate lawsuit, accused of illegally seizing 60 million private health record of 10 million individuals.
Meanwhile, the other lead agency in PPACA implementation has its own scandal. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has been calling corporate CEOs and shaking them down for donations to a left-wing group called Enroll America to aggressively promote PPACA and urge people to sign up for the law’s new entitlement program.
Her actions violate several federal laws, and any other week it would have been a lead story instead of relegated to the number four scandal slot.
And while Sebelius is dialing-for-dollars, she is also reallocating money from a slush fund created by the law toward public relations and political activity instead of using it to help people with preexisting conditions.
About 40,000 people with preexisting conditions will go without any coverage this year because Sebelius chose to end enrollment in the federal Preexisting Condition Insurance Plan in order to instead fund TV advertising and grants to lobbying groups.
So HHS is abusing taxpayer dollars as well as shaking down private citizens for coerced donations, all to maximize spending on their political push to build support for the unpopular law, instead of actually helping sick people.
The scandals will only get worse. Government is already, by David Axelrod’s admission, too vast for the president to understand, let alone effectively manage. And it is spinning further out of control, with the health of the American people in the balance. Health care is simply too important to subject to politics and bureaucratic manipulation. It’s time to repeal PPACA and start over with real health care reform that empowers patients and doctors, not the IRS and HHS.
Phil Kerpen is the president of American Commitment and the author of “Democracy Denied.” Kerpen can be reached at phil@americancommitment.org.
This hypocritical media's outrage toward the AP scandal infuriates me. The media sat silent when the government announced they were going to eavesdrop and collect communication on all average Americans. The media actually used their power to ADVOCATE for the Patriot Act and warrantless wiretapping. But now when it happens to them...OHH NOOO!!! Now they have a problem with their loss of protection under the 1st and 4th Amendment.
Move over, Chris Matthews; there’s a new flip-flopping liberal “journalist” in town and his name is Piers Morgan. Morgan has had a revelation: Maybe, just maybe, government can become tyrannical after all.
In a conversation with Penn Jillette, CNN’s anti-gun zealot – who has spent the last six months deriding the suggestion that the American government can’t be trusted when it comes to gun control – has had a change of heart after watching the IRS and DOJ/APP scandals unfold.
Yep, Morgan went all Chris Matthews (the flip-flopping one) on Jillette when he came to the following conclusion:
Morgan: I’ve had some of the pro-gun lobbyists on here, saying to me, ‘Well, the reason we need to be armed is because of tyranny from our own government,’ and I’ve always laughed at them. But, actually, this is vaguely tyrannical behavior by the American government.
Jillette: I think that it shows you that how much we can trust the government and just sit back, which is not very much at all.
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."
Obamacare has 47 separate provisions that involve the IRS. It is the second-largest agency, after the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, charged with implementing the Affordable Care Act.
The IRS has to implement Obamacare’s required purchase of health coverage, checking whether millions of Americans are in compliance.
Urgent: Did Obama Lie? Vote Here in Urgent National Poll.
Speaking to the current scandal embroiling the IRS, McConnell tells Newsmax that Congress would investigate the targeting of conservative groups "for as long as it takes to get the truth."
"We'll find out the answers to all these questions. It may take a while, but the finger-pointing stage is going on now. Everybody's pointing the finger at someone else. But the truth always comes out — and it will come out here as well," McConnell says.
Earlier this week, the senator demanded the resignation of IRS Acting Director Steven Miller, who admitted that he had known about the singling out of conservative groups with such words as "tea party" and "patriot" in their names since last May.
Miller resigned late on Wednesday.
McConnell tells Newsmax that the current IRS controversy is yet another effort by the Obama White House to suppress those who oppose its policies. He cites moves by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius regarding Obamacare.
"During the debate, she sent out a directive to the health insurance companies telling them they couldn’t send a letter to their policyholders giving them their impression of the impact of Obamacare on premiums," he says. "Now, the same secretary is shaking down those companies for contributions to a fund that will apparently pay for ads to be beamed at the American people trying to convince them that they should like Obamacare."
The Washington Post reported last week that Sebelius began soliciting insurance companies and other organizations in March seeking financial donations to help implement Obamacare.
"This is just the most recent example, but now they've messed with an agency that everybody understands," McConnell adds. "Everybody knows about the IRS. It couldn't be an agency more powerful than the IRS, an agency that has the power to destroy your life."
He also noted that the agency leaked confidential documents from conservative groups whose tax-exempt status had not yet been approved to the liberal news investigative website ProPublica after last year’s election.
Releasing such data violates IRS rules.
"We know they were right in the middle of the campaign — and how many of them, how high up it goes, we'll find out,” McConnell says. “This is completely unacceptable in our free society — and now we know they probably targeted Billy Graham's organization."
Franklin Graham, son of the organization's founder, said on Tuesday that the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and its offshoot, Samaritan's Purse, were targeted by IRS agents for extra scrutiny.
The organization, based in North Carolina, sponsored ads statewide supporting a traditional marriage amendment during last year’s presidential election.
"There are a number of other conservative donors coming forward now saying that they had inexplicable audits suddenly on their tax returns," the senator tells Newsmax. "This could be widespread — and we're going to find out exactly what happened with this investigation. It'll go on for as long as it takes to get the truth."
McConnell says federal investigators are determining whether there was a link between the Obama White House and Shawn Reilly, the executive director of Progress Kentucky, the super PAC accused of bugging his Louisville campaign headquarters in February.
According to news reports, Reilly visited the White House in December, days before he criticized McConnell on Twitter.
"What we do know is the office was bugged," McConnell tells Newsmax. "We know there's an FBI investigation underway.
"We don’t know if charges will be brought, but I guess we’ll find out soon. And we do know that one of the perpetrators of this criminal act was in a meeting in the White House back in December.
Urgent: Did Obama Lie? Vote Here in Urgent National Poll.
"The effort will be made by all of us to get to the truth and we'll find out what actually happened," he says.
Noting that politicizing the IRS was one of the articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon during Watergate, McConnell says it is too soon to say whether President Barack Obama should face similar consequences.
"We need to find out what the facts are first," he reiterates to Newsmax. "Let’s first find out exactly who did that."
The Obama Scandals Aren’t About Bad Government, but Big Government
By: Senator Mike Lee (Diary) | May 16th, 2013 at 12:42 PM | 78
RESIZE: AAA
Lee-Paul-Cruz
When scandal rocks any administration, its partisan opponents smell blood in the water and move in to inflict as much political damage on the president as possible.
Consultants assure us it’ll “gin up the base.” It makes headlines. And it’s always easy to kick someone when he’s down.
But for conservatives, especially in the case of the various scandals enveloping the Obama Administration this month, it’s also unwise.
For these scandals present conservatives a much greater opportunity than the chance to win a few news cycles or claim a few bureaucratic scalps.
The ballooning Obama scandals – IRS, HHS, DOJ, EPA – are not really about character or competence, but the danger of big government itself.
The more power any government has, the more power it will abuse. The more money it spends, the more money it will mis-spend. Dysfunction and corruption grow on government like mold on otherwise perfectly good bread.
It has nothing to do with party or ideology – it has to do with human nature.
This is one of the fundamental tenets of conservatism, and one of the hardest to communicate past the credulous liberalism of the mainstream media. Yet thisweek, the media and the Obama Administration are making the case for us.
President Obama’s political guru David Axelrod himself said yesterday that, “Part of being president is there’s so much beneath you that you can’t know because the government is so vast.”
James Madison could not have said it better himself!
These scandals shine a light on the inherent flaw of the progressive ideology: the idea that government can and should be trusted with more and more power, because it alone can wield that power in the disinterested pursuit of the common good.
This week, the Obama administration’s words are being impeached by the administration’s deeds.
With the possible exception of the Benghazi cover-up, all of the recent Obama scandals do not so much impeach the president’s character; they indict his worldview.
And his agenda.
The president’s entire program is based on giving more and more power to the same executive branch agencies demonstrating themselves this week to either be criminally incompetent or tyrannically corrupt.
Obamacare? Expanded gun background checks? Comprehensive immigration reform? They’re all based on competent collection and ethical use of personal information coerced from the American people by the federal bureaucracy.
Today it’s your 501(c)4 application; tomorrow it’s your medical records.
Rather than chasing mid-level scapegoats, conservatives – especially elected conservatives – should be communicating the lessons of the Obama scandals to delay, defund, and repeal Obamacare, and to cut the huge Gang of Eight immigration bill down to a series of smaller, manageable, incremental reforms.
Perhaps even more importantly, conservatives need to take this opportunity to communicate how civil society and the free market can and would do a better job delivering the services government monopolizes.
AnAmerica without HHS shakedowns and EPA cronyism would not only enjoy more honest government, but also better, more affordable health care and a cleaner environment.
Congress should absolutely get to the bottom of these various scandals. And the American people should absolutely be outraged.
But we should not be surprised that a $3.7 trillion government is corrupt. What should surprise us is that anyone would expect a $3.7 trillion government not to be.
Conservatives – and elected conservatives especially – should recognize that these scandals aren’t about Republicans versus Democrats – they’re about Washington, D.C. versus everyone else.
They’re about an entrenched, entitled political elite protecting its unearned power and privileges from accountability, whether challenged by reformers or reporters.
This is what always happens when government gets too big. The Founders knew thatover time, either the people would control the government, or the government would control the people. That’s why they bequeathed to us a constitutionally limited government – a republic, if we could keep it.
I hardly ever watch the LAME STREAM MEDIA.....but since in was a boring rainy day i decided to check them out.....and lo and behold.........CNN is eating obama and his administration up and spitting him out!!! It is just too funny....cause while they are slamming the hell out of the obama administration....they are actually claiming to be 'good journalists'...
they are basically in DAMAGE CONTROL right now.....gotta love it!!!
When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
“How fortunate for those in power that people never think.” Adolph Hitler
Logged
