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Posted by William A. Jacobson on June 29, 2014 41 Comments
If Hillary Clinton runs for President, she's still the odds-on favorite because she has the Democratic machine behind her. The conventional wisdom is that the nomination is Hillary's to lose. If Hillary's disastrous book rollout and tone-deafness about her wealth are any indication, Hillary might just accomplish the unthinkable of imploding a second time as presumptive nominee. Hillary's worst enemy is Hillary. There's only so long you can pretend to be something you are not. Enter Elizabeth Warren. We have been arguing for years that Warren is a unique political talent, someone who can demagogue the national victim narrative better than anyone in recent memory. Do not underestimate the power of a politician whose entire reason to be is to convince people that the problems in their lives are not of their own doing, but of a rigged system in which they are abused by powerful, if unseen, forces. Put aside all the hypocrisy's of Warren's own life. There are many people willing to overlook how Warren tried to rig the system to her own advantage if that is what is needed to believe in their own victimhood. In a nation suffering from an unending decline in workforce participation rates, in which every month hundreds of thousands of people give up hope of finding a job and drop out, blaming a rigged system is a powerful message. Jonah Goldberg calls Warren The Obama of 2016:

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Posted by William A. Jacobson on June 29, 2014 28 Comments
This video does not appear to be a Pallywood production. The Times of Israel reports, Gaza surveillance cameras pick up Israeli strike on terrorists:
Unverified footage posted to YouTube on Saturday appears to show the Israeli air strike carried out Friday afternoon on a car carrying two operatives belonging to the Popular Resistance Committees, a coalition of armed groups in Gaza. The footage shows a vehicle driving along a coastal road before being struck. Passersby remain seemingly unharmed. Israel confirmed carrying out the targeted killing of Osama Has​sumi, 29, and Mohammad Fatzih, 24, on Friday, charging that they were involved in a cell responsible for repeated rocket fire on Israel’s southern cities over the past several weeks and were planning terror attacks on Israeli civilians.
Interesting comment at YouTube:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on June 29, 2014 15 Comments

Spotted on Saturday on Route 88 West in Upstate New York, on a vehicle with Georgia plates....

Posted by Mandy Nagy on June 28, 2014 31 Comments
The attorney for Lois Lerner is speaking out, saying that his client doesn't have any records of the emails that were lost in a hard drive crash in 2011. From Politico:
Lois Lerner has no records of two years of missing emails and Republican claims that she’s hiding something are “silly,” her lawyer said in his first interview since the controversy around the former IRS official erupted two weeks ago. “She doesn’t know what happened,” lawyer William Taylor III said of the 2011 computer crash that erased two years worth of Lerner’s correspondence. “It’s a little brazen to think she did this on purpose.”
Taylor indicated that Lerner “requested that IT use every possible resource” to try and recover the contents of her hard drive. Regardless of the misfortune of Lerner’s unrecoverable hard drive, many have asked if the emails were printed in hard copy anywhere as a backup. IRS rules specify in part that agency emails “created or received in the transaction of agency business” are to be printed and kept on file. IRS commissioner John Koskinen has said that not all emails are necessarily considered an “official record.”

Posted by Bruce Carroll on June 28, 2014 20 Comments
In all of this past week's flurry IRS news: Lois Lerner and other IRS' officials hard drives crashing, emails showing Lerner targeted Sen. Chuck Grassley, and the IRS Commissioner telling Congress they've done nothing wrong -- some news got lost in the shuffle. The IRS did do something very wrong, admitted it and paid a significant fine to resolve it.
Two years after activists for same-sex marriage obtained the confidential tax return and donor list of a national group opposed to redefining marriage, the Internal Revenue Service has admitted wrongdoing and agreed to settle the resulting lawsuit. The Daily Signal has learned that, under a consent judgment today, the IRS agreed to pay $50,000 in damages to the National Organization for Marriage as a result of the unlawful release of the confidential information to a gay rights group, the Human Rights Campaign, that is NOM’s chief political rival. “Congress made the disclosure of confidential tax return information a serious matter for a reason,” NOM Chairman John D. Eastman told The Daily Signal. “We’re delighted that the IRS has now been held accountable for the illegal disclosure of our list of major donors from our tax return.”
This admission by the IRS goes back to the vicious fight over the Prop 8 vote in California where HRC and its allies resorted to releasing donation information of individuals and harassing those traditional marriage supporters at their homes and businesses.

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Posted by Mike LaChance on June 28, 2014 10 Comments
Obama made a public appearance in Minnesota on Friday which Neil Munro of the Daily Caller has described as a pity party:
President Barack Obama’s June 27 effort to boost the flagging morale of his supporters quickly devolved into a demoralizing pity party. Republicans “don’t do anything except block me and call me names,” he told supporters, only a few days after it was revealed that his economy shrank 2.9 percent in the first three months of 2014. “If we make some basic changes, we can create more jobs and lift more incomes and strengthen the middle class… I know it drives you nuts that Washington isn’t doing it,” he said. “It drives me nuts.”
The president also went back to dismissing the many scandals engulfing his presidency as phony. Susan Jones of CNS News:
President Obama warned people in Minnesota Friday not to believe what they hear on television: "They're fabricated issues, they're phony scandals that are generated. It's all geared towards the next election or ginning up a base. It's not on the level," the president insisted.
Here's the video: CNS News provided the full transcript of Obama's remarks:

Posted by New Neo on June 28, 2014 11 Comments
Why has the mainstream media been so silent about the scandals in which the Obama administration has become embroiled? From Roger L. Simon at Pajamas Media:
Obama is beside the point. They [the liberal media] don’t even like Obama anymore. Nothing could be more obvious. Almost nobody does. But they won’t say so in public because that would mean that they would be revealed as fools who believed the most banal tripe imaginable. It would also mean admitting Barack Obama never really existed, that they invented him. He was their projection. Barack Obama is the creation of the New York Times, et al. Without them he would never have happened and they know it. So the media are left in an untenable position. If you say Barack Obama is a mistake, then you yourself are a mistake. Who wants that? No wonder they won’t investigate the scandals. No wonder they won’t report any of this. They are too ashamed of themselves to speak.
I agree that the MSM is deeply disappointed in Obama, and deeply reluctant to say so. But I doubt they're as deeply disappointed as all that, not deeply enough to question their own role in the whole thing, or their belief system. That takes a great deal of courage and integrity, particularly for people with entrenched and vested interests---such as the Times editors and their ilk, as Simon points out---who would therefore be extremely reluctant to do it.

Posted by Mandy Nagy on June 27, 2014 5 Comments

Some links from around the web for your Friday evening reading. "I didn't do it for attention for myself. I did it for attention for the troops"...

Posted by Amy Miller on June 27, 2014 7 Comments
It's time for Republicans to step up their ground game. In 2010, nobody doubted that the key to victory was the enormous amount of grassroots support given to candidates like Ted Cruz, who came from behind to whollop well-funded incumbents in important statewide races. In 2012, enthusiasm waned in the wake of the Romney nomination, and may conservatives doubted how successful Republicans would be, given the apparent weakness of the top-ticket candidate. In 2014, enthusiasm for a true, election-winning ground game has all but waned. Not because of any one candidate in particular, but because of the realization that using old tactics on the same audience is no longer a winning strategy. In Texas, we're seeing a groundswell of support for groups like Battleground Texas, who are quickly filling their ranks with OFA and Obama campaign veterans--and these people know what they're doing. They're playing the long game, and they're not just focusing on devoted liberals like the people we saw supporting Wendy Davis during last year's abortion rights spectacle.

Posted by Bruce Carroll on June 27, 2014 13 Comments
The Daily Mail has obtained three racially-charged radio ads placed by organizations that worked to help incumbent U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS) stage his come from behind run-off victory this week.
[The ads] claimed that supporters of conservative McDaniel had connections to the Ku Klux Klan and that McDaniel had a 'racist agenda.' They also warned that black Democrats 'could lose food stamps, housing assistance, student loans, early breakfast and lunch programs and disaster assistance' if he were to become the Republican U.S. Senate nominee. 'Vote against the tea party. Vote Thad Cochran,' one ad said. 'If the tea party, with their racist ideas, win, we will be sent back to the '50s and '60s.'

Posted by Bruce Carroll on June 27, 2014 12 Comments
Reports from the United States' southern border continue to worsen as thousands of illegal, unaccompanied minors are flooding through from Mexico.
More than 52,000 children have entered the country illegally in recent months, many of them coming into the U.S. through South Texas. Former Zapata County Sheriff Gonzales, who now works as a consult with law enforcement agencies along the Texas border, says space is running out to house the children and adults that are coming across.
As feared, the flood of Central American children and adults has begun to spread disease into the U.S. Border patrol agents are reportedly getting sickened from the refugees. Kenneth Wolfe, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, says the unaccompanied child was recently hospitalized after being diagnosed with swine flu, or H1N1. Wolfe says officials believe this is an isolated incident but are closely monitoring all children at Lackland and other similar shelters the agency is operating around the country. “That tells you that when you’ve got kids coming in from some of these countries where they don’t have great health systems, we gotta watch out,” says Cuellar. “I’ve talked to border patrol down in McAllen. They’ve seen TB; they’ve seen chicken pox; they’ve seen scabies. And according to Border Patrol, 4 or 5 of their agents have tested positive for those diseases.”

Posted by Andrew Branca on June 27, 2014 8 Comments
A couple of days ago I posted up a piece re: Florida's passage of its "warning shot" bill and the prospects for that bill helping the case of Marissa Alexander.

Florida’s just-signed “warning shot” law unlikely to help Marissa Alexander

I neglected, however, to point out one particular facet of Florida's new law that could potentially--not reasonably, but potentially--provide some benefit to Alexander.  So, I'll cover that here. Before I do, however, the enormous volume of misinformation that continues to be promulgated about this case obliges me to first point out all the ways the "warning shot" bill does not help Alexander.

Guilty On Retrial Seems Highly Likely, Despite "Warning Shot" Bill

The "warning shot" bill does not legitimize Alexander's conduct as the deadly force aggressor, and does not turn that conduct into lawful self-defense. Leaving a non-deadly force fight and returning armed is not self-defense, particularly when the person you shoot at is lawfully in their own home (a different argument could be made in the case of an intruder, but not under the facts of this case).  The "warning shot" bill does not modify Florida self-defense law to allow one to act as the deadly force aggressor and justify that conduct as self-defense.

Posted by Mandy Nagy on June 27, 2014 24 Comments
IRS commissioner John Koskinen appeared on CNN Thursday with Wolf Blitzer, where he answered questions about the ongoing IRS scandal. From CNN:
The embattled head of the Internal Revenue Service blames faulty technology for what he called serious problems under investigation by Congress, the Justice Department and the Treasury inspector general. John Koskinen told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Thursday that he apologized to anyone who had their application for tax-exempt status held up by IRS targeting of political labels. "The improper criteria used to highlight organizations for investigation just by their name was a mistake," Koskinen said. "I apologize to anybody who ever had their applications held up needlessly. Everybody needs to be confident that the IRS is going to treat them fairly no matter who they are. Republicans, Democrats, whatever organization they belong to. So it's a serious matter." However, he maintained that evidence uncovered so far by six investigations found no involvement by the White House, as alleged by some Republicans:
Koskinen has been under fire in recent days, after congressional hearings on Monday and last Friday, both of which were filled with some quite contentious exchanges. When asked by Blitzer whether someone should be blamed for the “antiquated, awful system” that was the cause of emails lost in Lerner’s hard drive crash having been unrecoverable, Koskinen shifted away from the controversy at hand and focused instead on moving forward. “Well, I think somebody, the IG, is investigating all of the issues about the hard drive crash.” Koskinen went on to explain, “My approach when I parachute into these things is to try to fix the problems rather than try to figure out who to blame, and sometime ago I asked for us to review exactly how the email system runs and whether we couldn’t convert to a more searchable, more retainable email system. I’ve also said we need to respond to the concerns of the archivist, who came out with a very interesting suggestion recently that for agencies struggling, moving forward into an electronic system, they should take the senior people and make sure all of those records and emails are preserved. I should emphasize that all emails are not official records, so if an email is lost, it doesn’t mean we’ve lost an official record.”
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