Ed Driscoll has a good summary of all the latest buzz on our esteemed Atty General at PJ Media: Ice Cracking Beneath Eric Holder’s Florsheims?
Perhaps having read the Gray Lady’s tea leaves, Obama booster Tom Brokaw of NBC joined the chorus predicting Holder’s resignation today:
Veteran NBC News reporter Tom Brokaw said it is “tough to see how” Attorney General Eric Holder can keep his job in the wake of recent scandals involving the Justice Department.
“Boy, I think it’s tough to see how he does [in] this case,” Brokaw said, when asked by NBC’s David Gregory if Holder was likely to remain as attorney general, given the multiple Congressional inquiries and general media uproar over the DOJ’s aggressive surveillance of journalists at the Associated Press and Fox News.
Brokaw said we are seeing “that familiar Washington two-step” with respect to Holder; the administration and its allies have express public support for the embattled attorney general, but behind the scenes, some are beginning to suggest it would be better if Holder stepped down.
“From a political point of view, one of the ways that you can measure the impact of all this, and the fairness of it, is think if this had happened in the Bush administration, with John Ashcroft as the attorney general,” Brokaw said. “You know full well that the Democrats and the left would be going very hard after them with these issues that are in play.”
And that’s an awfully fast turnaround for Brokaw, considering that as recently as Thursday, when Brokaw dropped by the MSNBC set, he was blaming Holder and Obama’s troubles solely on — who else? — the GOP, Tim Graham writes today at Newsbusters:
Then Brokaw took after Peggy Noonan and the Reagan administration: “Peggy Noonan wrote recently that the IRS scandal was the worst scandal since Watergate. It occurred to me I was covering Iran-Contra during the Reagan administration when she was working for that president, in which we were funding a war illegally. We were trying to make a deal with the Iranians at the time. That was a pretty big damn scandal, quite honestly.”
But as Noonan wrote in her blog on Friday:
In previous IRS scandals it was the powerful abusing the powerful—a White House moving against prominent financial or journalistic figures who, because of their own particular status or the machineries at their disposal, could pretty much take care of themselves. A scandal erupts, there are headlines, and then people go on their way. The dreadful thing about this scandal, what makes it ominous, is that this is the elites versus regular citizens. It’s the mighty versus normal people. It’s the all-powerful directors of the administrative state training their eyes and moving on uppity and relatively undefended Americans.
That’s what makes this scandal different, and why if it’s not stopped now it will never stop. Because every four years you can get yourself a new president and a new White House, but you won’t easily get yourself a whole new administrative state. It’s there, it’s not going away, not anytime soon. If it isn’t forced back into its cage now, and definitively, it will prowl the land hungrily forever.
Looking at the IRS scandal from Tom’s perspective, let’s face it, those mom and pop Tea Party types certainly had it coming to them with their Gadsden flags, tri-corner hats, support for the Second Amendment (which Brokaw really loathes), and calls for less taxes (ditto), one man blogs (again, ditto), and smaller government. Presumbably, so did James Rosen when Holder targeted him, if only for being employed by Fox News. Perhaps when Brokaw criticized the elitism of the White House Correspondents Dinner in late April by quipping that the MSM is “Versailles. The rest of you eat cake,” he was projecting his own thoughts about his viewers, and anyone who refuses to toe the Beltway Leftist Elite Orthodoxy as well.
Read on — there’s much more…
Jeffrey Lord: The IRS and FBI: Breach of Faith:
Two more unlikely people it would be hard to imagine.
One consorts with a man who heads a country the State Departmentdescribes as having “repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism.” This man is also the half brother of….the President of the United States.
The other? The other is a woman who with her husband built a small manufacturing business in Houston and decided to start a couple of local Tea Parties.
And whom does the IRS target? Whom does the FBI Domestic Terrorist Unit target?
That’s right, the woman in Houston. The woman who is not related to the President of the United States. The woman who has zero connections to terrorists.
John Hayward, Red State: The paranoid style of Obama politics:
The Obama years have been all about conjuring demons from the ether, for various cultural and political purposes. We keep hearing about these weird government publications that classify everyone the Southern Poverty Law Center doesn’t like as a potential terrorist threat. As far back as April 2009, we had Janet Napolitano cranking out her landmark report, “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.” You can pretty much draw a straight line from that, through Barack Obama and his allies relentlessly demonizing the Tea Party, to the massive IRS abuses of power against everyone on Obama’s enemies list. A right-wing boogeyman hides beneath every bed and lurks behind every closet door.
The relatively benign explanation for the IRS scandal – fervently promoted by liberals scared out of their wits that we’ll turn up evidence of White House involvement – is that all of these agents, supervisors, and high-ranking officials spontaneously volunteered for duty as opposition researchers and vote-suppression specialists for the Obama 2012 campaign. (We’re way past the laughable early “rogue low-level employees” theory.) The President and top congressional Democrats pointed at these dissident groups and scowled; eager bureaucrats took it from there, guided by both a desire to curry favor with the ruling Party and their own personal prejudices.
Let’s entertain that explanation for a moment. The obvious follow-up question is: Why didn’t this ever happen before? The phenomenon of bureaucratic hounds lunging from their cages to attack the President’s designated enemies is unique to the Obama years. His predecessors from both parties have grumbled about their opponents before – Bill Clinton famously blamed the Oklahoma City bombing on Rush Limbaugh and talk radio – but no bolts of bureaucratic lightning struck down the designated sinners. There have been sporadic complaints of discriminatory treatment, but never programmed oppression of this scope and cohesion.
This is an age of official paranoia, in which the President and his apologists routinely declare dissenters beyond the pale, claiming they have no legitimate motivations beyond greed and racism. One of Obama’s most notorious speeches involved laughing at the supposed arrogance of “smart guy” business owners who think they’re responsible for their own success, when in his view they stole their riches by exploiting the Little People and stealing public resources – “You didn’t build that! Someone else made that happen!”
Read it all.
Ace of Spades HQ: IRS Targeted Republican Donors, Too; Witnesses Say Effort Was Led From Washington, DC:
Get in their faces.
Former officials of Freedom’s Watch say they believe all five of the IRS audits involved donors to their group, based on conversations with IRS agents and donors at the time of the audits in 2011.***
In February 2010, the same month the tea-party targeting started, according to a recent inspector general’s report, Freedom’s Watch was subjected to an IRS audit that focused largely on its political activities, an uncommon but not unprecedented action, election lawyers say. The probe broadened into other areas, including executive compensation.
Weasel Zippers: GOP Congressman To Holder: We’ll Subpoena Your Ass If You Don’t Comply With Requests For Records In Reporter Spying Scandal…
Via NRO:
Republican Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin is warning Eric Holder that the House Judiciary Committee may be forced to subpoena him if the Department of Justice ignores its deadlines. The committee has given Holder and the department a number of deadlines for explaining its involvement in monitoring reporters’ phone records and e-mails.
Seton Motley, Red State: Latest Big Government Data Grab: Justice Sues to Get It Without a Warrant:
The Big Government Barack Obama Administration is nothing if not thorough.
Justice Department Tries to Force Google to Hand Over User Data
Secret lawsuit in Manhattan filed last month asks judge to force Google to cough up user data without a search warrant. A different court has already ruled that the process is unconstitutional.
When the Obama Administration wants information on We the Peasants, they keep kicking down doors until they get it.
(Justice’s Eric) Holder Went Judge Shopping to Obtain Fox News Subpoena
The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza, a bulldog on the DOJ/Fox News secret subpoena story, reports that the effort by the Justice Department to obtain the controversial court order was arduous, contentious and unsuccessful until finally a third judge acquiesced.
The Obama Administration applies the By-Any-Means-Necessary approach.
Kurt Schlichter, Townhall: Is There Hope for Hollywood?
The President seems to be on the verge of losing Jay Leno just like Lyndon Johnson famously “lost Walter Cronkite” after the Tet Offensive. The pointy-chinned funny man’s monologues have started picking at the administration’s scabs over Benghazi, the IRS and its general incompetence. After five years of Obama-fawning, a little comic accountability is certainly welcome. But the big question is whether there is any chance of disenchantment with the antics of the liberal establishment translating into a more conservative popular culture.
Sure, the usual suspects are still acting out with their usual cluelessness. Voice-of-her generation Lena Dunham – and God help any generation she’s the voice of – started off the week with a tweet announcing how she recognized Memorial Day by urinating in two different Starbucks stores. I know the guys who stormed Normandy are proud of her achievement – those that lived. She proceeded to shift into “V” for victim the moment folks tweeted back their disapproval. Hilarity ensured as Dan Savage, the slavering anti-Christian poster child of the left, joined in to defend her Gaia-given right to disrespect millions of veterans without anyone calling her on it.
Dunham managed to make a second splash this week when she got publicly fussy because some adult video outfit is making a porno parody of her show Girls, apparently unaware that Girls itself is already a porno parody of Girls.
Then Adam Levine, another Obamabot, was caught on a hot mic muttering, “I hate this country.” For those of us who are so thick-headed that we failed to comprehend his sly, subtle brand of repartee, Levine helpfully tweeted a dictionary definition of “joke.” He forgot to mention that, traditionally, jokes are funny.
Glenn Foden cartoon via Townhall.
Elizabeth Sheld, The Conversation: Gibbs Says Issa Should Apologize for Calling Carney a ‘Paid Liar’:
On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Former press secretary Robert Gibbs stated that Congressman “Darrell Issa should call Jay Carney and apologize this morning.”
Gibbs went on to say that Issa as Chairman of the House Oversight Committee was the “biggest joke in all of Washington.”
The Conversation: Don’t Apologize, Issa!:
What my ears hear Baghdad Bob saying, is Issa must apologize or the Regime will make him the biggest joke in Washington.
In other words, the attack dogs are about to be unleashed unless Issa back-peddles and says he chose his words poorly.
This Administration increasingly sees itself as above the law #Benghazi #IRS #AP twitter.com/DarrellIssa/st…
— Darrell Issa (@DarrellIssa) May 14, 2013
RS McCain, Viral Read: Doubts Emerge on Senate’s ‘Gang of Eight’ Immigration Bill:
The Senate is scheduled to begin debate next week on the so-called “Gang of Eight” bipartisan proposal for comprehensive immigration reform, and New York Democrat Sen. Charles Schumerpredicted Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press that the bill would pass by July 4 with as many as 70 votes. However, House Speaker John Boehner has said the GOP majority in the House won’t be “steamrolled” by the Democrat-led Senate, and doubts about the legislation are beginning to be heard.
Liberals have begun to criticize key elements of the proposal, Mickey Kaus of the Daily Caller observes, citing a lengthy critique by John B. Judis of the New Republic. The Gang of Eight plan “denies health insurance coverage to the eleven million undocumented workers,” Judis wrote last week. “Only after immigrants become permanent residents, which in the case of the eleven million undocumented will take a minimum of ten years and as long as 15 years, will they become eligible for Obamacare.” Judis explained that the Obama administration is trapped by the political calculus that was necessary to pass its health-insurance program. “[F]acing charges from Republicans that the health care bill secretly funded ‘illegal immigrants,’ [the White House] urged Senate Democrats to bar the undocumented from coverage. The administration, fearful of political trouble, reflexively carried this over to its own immigration-reform proposals.”
Meanwhile, Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, a key GOP member of the Gang of Eight, has raised concerns about border security that could scuttle the entire bill.
Mike Flynn, Big Government: EVANGELICAL GROUP PUSHING IMMIGRATION REFORM DOESN’T LEGALLY EXIST:
Late last week, The Huffington Post reported that the Evangelical Immigration Table, a coalition of evangelicals supporting the Senate immigration bill, had announced a $250,000 ad buy in support of the legislation. It was part of the Table’s 92-day Pray for Reform campaign that also included newspaper and radio ads. Curiously, however, the Evangelical Immigration Table doesn’t legally exist as an incorporated political entity or non-profit organization.
AP: HOUSE PANEL: REPORT FINDS $50M FOR IRS CONFERENCES:
A government watchdog has found that the Internal Revenue Service spent about $50 million to hold at least 220 conferences for employees between 2010 and 2012, a House committee said Sunday.
The chairman of that committee, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., also released excerpts of congressional investigators’ interviews with employees of the IRS office in Cincinnati. Issa said the interviews indicated the employees were directed by Washington to subject tea party and other conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status to tough scrutiny.
The closest the excerpts came to direct evidence that Washington had ordered the screening was one employee saying that “all my direction” came from an official who the excerpt said was in Washington. The top Democrat on that panel, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, contested Issa’s claim, saying none of the employees interviewed have so far identified any IRS officials in Washington as ordering that targeting.
Republican Women’s Policy Committee unveiled the committee’s new website and social media platforms, today.
WASHINGTON – Republican Women’s Policy Committee Chairwoman Renee Ellmers released the following statement from her office in Washington this morning:
“Today I’m proud to announce the new website and social media platforms for the Republican Women’s Policy Committee for the 113th Congress. Since being entrusted to lead the RWPC in January, my staff and I have been reenergizing a new operation from the ground up in order to expand the committee’s presence and highlight the important issues our members are working on in Washington.”
Below are links to the website, social media.
RWPC Website: rwpc.ellmers.house.gov
Nice Deb 