California's State Government

Ponzi game in full motion, rob Paul to pay Peter. Sure they cut stuff here in California but did you know we have 132 more governmental agencies than Texas? When companies experience funding/cash problems they wisely "streamline" by getting get rid of duplication and waste. Sacramento is so bloated with career department managers, etc. who have worked hard to create their niche and sustain that by making whatever policy/fiscal controls appear absolutely necessary... the keys to their programs will have to be ripped from their "cold dead hands"..... sorry Charlton.

Read what Mike has to say....

California's State Government

Something to chew on contributed by Mike Walker, Col. USMC (retired)

Joe,

You asked why California’s governmental fiscal mess is no longer in the headlines. This is why:

The get out of a fiscal hole you need to either cut spending or increase revenues. For Governments to grow revenue they basically follow two paths: grow the economy to collect more taxes and/or raise tax rates.

Here is what happened in California: We did everything.

First, Sacramento made deep cuts to spending.

For example, cuts to State public school funding during the recession exceeded those of the 1930s Great Depression (about three times the magnitude of the recent sequestration cuts to the Federal budget).

In November 2012, tax increases were voted in (higher income tax for big earners plus higher sales taxes that affect everyone).

Finally, the economy has started to pick up thus increasing State tax revenues.

That is the good news. Here is the bad news.

California had a mountain of debt that has to be repaid in the not-too-distant future.

It has $74B in GO bond debt that has to be repaid and voters authorized another $53B for more borrowing in the future.

Additionally, the State borrowed $27B during the recent budget crises to plug the holes then that have to be repaid now (a classic example of hobbling your fiscal future to “get through today”).

The State is also (1) raiding other Governmental funds at the rate of $500M a year that will have to be paid back, (2) it underfunded the retiree health care fund for government employees to the tune of $60B that is coming due as the Baby Boomers retire, and (3) the State Teacher’s Retirement Fund has a huge hole that is eating up $4.5B per year without end (although we were promised that the fund was self-sufficient and would never need a dime from the taxpayers).

Finally, the tax increases passed in November expire on 31 December 2016 cutting off those revenues.

What you are witnessing is the calm before the storm. 

Sacramento has a window of opportunity over the next few years to fix these problems before its fiscal house crashes and burns again.

Does anyone think Sacramento has gotten that smart? If the answer proves to be "no" then California will be in the headlines again in a few years

Mike

Snowden Hypocrisy

Snowden Hypocrisy

Mike Walker, Col. USMC (retired)

Whatever moral high ground Edward Snowden might have had has quickly turned into a shameful morass.

The clearest example of this decent into dishonor has to be the offer for asylum by Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega. One of the upsides of getting old is having had the time to gain knowledge and, unfortunately, that includes remembering the rein of Daniel Ortega in the 1980s.

Snowden claims to be a champion of those opposed to governmental oppression and domestic spying, really?

Then why is Ortega welcoming him?

Ortega is the living embodiment of everything Snowden’s supporters allege Snowden is against, except perhaps Snowden’s shared desire to hurt the United States in anyway possible.

Back in the 1980s, Ortega took over Nicaragua, decided to establish a national state police and went looking abroad for advisors. Ortega could have chosen Scotland Yard or Interpol or the RCMP or the Tokyo Metropolitan Police for help. Who did he choose?

The East German Ministry for State Security or Stasi was Ortega’s pick.

That is right, Ortega wanted help from the world’s most abusive domestic police force on the planet at the time; the guys who combined the worst of Hitler’s Gestapo with Stalin’s NKVD when being formed in the late 1940s.

The Stasi created an internal spying network that employed over one hundred thousand informants with the goal of infiltrating every level of society, suppressing free speech and dissent while imprisoning and torturing thousands during its reign of terror.

Here is another factoid from days gone by: Shortly afterwards, Nicaragua started to build the largest phone exchange in Central America. Why? If you thought it was improve telephonic communications for the citizens of Nicaragua you are wrong.

The building was not being constructed by ENITEL, the Nicaraguan National Telephone Company, it was being built by the state police under the direction of the Stasi so that the new Nicaraguan state police could monitor every call in the country 24-7.

The fact that a man like Daniel Ortega who wanted that type of pervasive and repressive police state is now welcoming Edward Snowden with open arms says it all:

This is not about a man who wanted to protect American civil liberties; this is all about a theatre of the absurd being choreographed by the international “Hate America First” crowd.

Mike

Liberal Apartheid

Liberal Apartheid 
The elite mostly lead a reactionary existence of talking one way and living another. 

By Victor Davis Hanson, National Review Online

One of the strangest things about the modern progression in liberal thought is its increasing comfort with elitism and high style. Over the last 30 years, the enjoyment of refined tastes, both material and psychological, has become a hallmark of liberalism — hand in glove with the art of professional altruism, so necessary to the guilt-free enjoyment of the good life. Take most any contemporary issue, and the theme of elite progressivism predominates.

Higher education? A visitor from Mars would note that the current system of universities and colleges is designed to promote the interests of an elite at the expense of the middle and lower-middle classes. UCLA, Yale, and even CSU Stanislaus run on premises far more reactionary and class-based than does Wal-Mart. The teaching loads and course responsibilities of tenured full professors have declined over the last half-century, while the percentage of units taught by graduate students and part-time faculty, with few benefits and low pay, has soared.

The number of administrators has likewise climbed — even as student indebtedness has skyrocketed, along with the unemployment rate among recent college graduates. A typical scenario embodying these bizarre trends would run something like the following: The UC assistant provost for diversity affairs, or the full professor of Italian literature, focusing on gender and the self, depend on lots of graduate and undergraduate students in the social sciences and humanities piling up debt without any guarantee of jobs, while part-time faculty subsidize the formers’ lifestyles by teaching, without grading assistants, the large introductory undergraduate courses, getting paid a third to half what those with tenure receive.

The conference and the academic book, with little if any readership, promote the career interest and income of the trendy administrator and the full professor, and are subsidized by either the taxpayers or the students or both. All of the above assumes that a nine-month teaching schedule, with tenure, grants, sabbaticals, and release time, are above reproach and justify yearly tuition hikes exceeding the rate of inflation. The beneficiaries of the system win exemption from criticism through loud support of the current progressive agenda, as if they were officers with swagger sticks in the culture wars who must have their own perks if they are to properly lead the less-well-informed troops out of the trenches.

Take illegal immigration. On the facts, it is elitist to the core. Big business, flush with cash, nevertheless wants continued access to cheap labor, and so favors amnesties for millions who arrived without English, education, or legality. On the other end of the scale, Jorge Hernandez, making $9 an hour mowing lawns, is not enthusiastic about an open border, which undercuts his meager bargaining power with his employer.

The state, not the employer, picks up the cost of subsidies to ensure that impoverished illegal-immigrant workers from Oaxaca have some semblance of parity with American citizens in health care, education, legal representation, and housing. The employers’ own privilege exempts them from worrying whether they would ever need to enroll their kids in the Arvin school system, or whether an illegal-alien driver will hit their daughter’s car on a rural road and leave the scene of the accident. In other words, no one in Atherton is in a trailer house cooking meth; the plastic harnesses of missing copper wire from streetlights are not strewn over the sidewalks in Palo Alto; and the Menlo schools do not have a Bulldog-gang problem.

Meanwhile, ethnic elites privately understand that the melting pot ensures eventual parity with the majority and thereby destroys the benefits of hyphenation. So it becomes essential that there remain always hundreds of thousands of poor, uneducated, and less-privileged immigrants entering the U.S. from Latin America. Only that way is the third-generation Latino professor, journalist, or politician seen as a leader of group rather than as an individual. Take away illegal immigration, and the Latino caucus and Chicano graduation ceremony disappear, and the beneficiaries become just ordinary politicians and academics, distinguished or ignored on the basis of their own individual performance.

Mexico? Beneath the thin veneer of Mexican elites suing Americans in U.S. courts is one of the most repressive political systems in the world. Mexican elites make the following cynical assumptions: Indigenous peoples are better off leaving Mexico and then scrimping to send billions of dollars home in remittances; that way, they do not agitate for missing social services back home; and once across the border, they act as an expatriate community to leverage concessions from the United States.

Nannies, gardeners, cooks, and personal attendants are increasingly recent arrivals from Latin America — even as the unemployment rates of Latino, African-American, and working-class white citizens remain high, with compensation relatively low. No wonder that loud protestations about “xenophobes, racists, and nativists” oil the entire machinery of elite privilege. Does the liberal congressman or the Washington public advocate mow his own lawn, clean his toilet, or help feed his 90-year-old mother? At what cost would he cease to pay others to do these things — $20, $25 an hour? And whom would he hire if there were no illegal immigrants? The unemployed African-American teenager in D.C.? The unemployed Appalachian in nearby West Virginia? I think not.

Or take the green industry. At about the same time that statisticians readjusted the first-quarter GDP growth markedly downward — to a 1.8 percent annual rate, from the previously reported 2.4 percent — President Obama announced sweeping new regulations to curtail carbon emissions that will hamper the coal industry, further slow the economy — and delight his elite green base. Al Gore thought the speech historic. And why would he not? Gore has made hundreds of millions of dollars in the Marcus Licinius Crassus style of hyping a disaster and then profiting from its remedy. Gore hates carbon emissions. So much so that he dismisses those who live by them, such as coal-company executives, coal miners, and the rubes who mindlessly use coal-based electricity. But Gore also likes money and what money can do for him — SUVs, private jet travel, multiple residences. That’s why he just sold his interest in a failed cable-television network to a broadcasting network backed by a Middle Eastern authoritarian sheikhdom, known for both its anti-Semitism and its huge cash profits from the sale of fossil fuels. Take away the talk of polar bears and melting ice caps, and Gore becomes just another huckster, cashing in on oil profits from the Middle East, a region that is ensured continuance of its riches in part because of environmental restrictions that hamper fracking, horizontal drilling, and coal production on public lands in the United States.

Here in central California there are predictable themes to the new environmentalism: Land that could produce food and provide jobs will be idled to protect a bait fish in the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta. Rivers that are critical to irrigation and are anchors of the economy will be diverted to their 19th-century course in order to fulfill the dream of salmon runs through a desert-like San Joaquin Valley, and hundreds of billions of dollars worth of gas and oil that could be fracked and provide jobs for communities suffering 10-plus percent unemployment will be ignored. On one side, there are academics, lawyers, high government officials, those with inherited wealth, and those with enough capital to easily afford the higher taxes and higher costs of fuel, power, and food that are the inevitable wages of their own boutique ideology. On the other side, there are the apparent losers and clingers who are out of work, who pay over $4 a gallon for gas for their silly used Dodge Ram trucks, and who stupidly splurge by turning their air conditioners on for an hour or two a day in 108-degree Fresno.

In the real world, the tiny delta smelt is a good psychological totem for a well-paid Google exec in Mountain View, who doesn’t mind paying a little more for his arugula or paying higher sales taxes. But the worship of a bait fish is not shared by Manuel Lopez, a tractor driver in Bakersfield who has no more fields to disc this summer. Those in breezy, cool Malibu hate coal, and apparently believe those who mine it would be better off on food stamps and unemployment insurance, which the generous seaside denizens would so selflessly be willing to pay for.

Take gun control. What caused the latest round of furor over the Second Amendment was not gun-related deaths per se. In fact, they have been declining overall in the United States for some time. Nor is it the death toll in Chicago, where last year over 500 mostly African-American and Latino youths gunned each other down, almost exclusively with illegally obtained handguns in a city that has enacted among the tightest gun laws in the nation. Instead, the horrible tragedies of Columbine and Sandy Hook and Aurora suggest that the atypical shooter with a semi-automatic long gun will on rare occasions slaughter anywhere, from an upscale school to a cinema in a good neighborhood. Worse still, the most effective remedies for stopping these typically young, white, unhinged suburbanite shooters — detain the mentally ill far more frequently, curb the promiscuous use of psychotropic drugs, treat violent video games for our youth as we do pornography, jawbone Hollywood to show some restraint in its graphic and titillating portrays of gun carnage — rub up against liberal elite views on mental health, civil liberties, free expression, and the arts.

The result is that the elite find resonance in demonizing the largely white lower-middle-class gun crowd, who are not responsible for the vast majority of yearly gun deaths, but whose culture as the proverbial clingers is ripe for caricature and the fuel of elite outrage. No gun law that Barack Obama has supported would have stopped any of the recent suburban violence — given the millions of weapons that exist throughout the United States. To stop Sandy Hook — where the deranged Adam Lanza stole from his own mother firearms that she had legally purchased — the president would have had to confiscate privately owned semi-automatic rifles and larger clips, or made the possession of existing rifle ammunition illegal. No matter: Obama knew well that the liberal elites were outraged that savage violence had hit the suburbs; he knew too that there was nothing he could do to stop it that was acceptable to those elites, while there were lots of cultural targets that would at least allow the elites to vent. Thus followed the hysterical calls to ban all sorts of evil-looking black “assault weapons” and the demonization of the redneck beer-bellies who for some reason like to shoot them at their inane target ranges.

Modern liberalism, among other things, is a psychological state, in which very-well-off Americans find ways through their income and privilege to be exempt from the ramifications of their own ideologies, while adopting causes and pets that exempt them from guilt over their own status and limitless opportunities. Judging by their concrete actions, they are indifferent to the poor whom they romanticize at a safe distance. In short, voting for larger government and subsidies is seen as a necessary cost of being a reactionary, liberal elite.

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Cash to burn...

State Department admits Kerry was lounging

State Department admits Kerry was lounging on private yacht during Egypt crisis...

Tim Cavanaugh
Executive Editor, Daily Caller

The State Department admitted Friday that Secretary of State John Kerry was lounging on his private yacht off Cape Cod during the military coup in Egypt.

The admission reverses earlier claims by a State representative that Kerry was hard at work on the Egypt portfolio throughout the crisis that led to the ouster of democratically elected president Mohammed Morsi. It also raises uncomfortable comparisons with the Obama administration’s less-than-forthcoming response to the terrorist attacks on the U.S. embassy in Libya last fall.

State Department spokeswoman Jen  Psaki issued a statement Friday acknowledging that Kerry was “briefly on his boat on Wednesday” but claiming that the Kennedyesque pleasure outing in Nantucket Boat Basin was merely a respite from the secretary’s response to the Egypt crisis.

“Secretary Kerry worked around the clock all day,” Psaki wrote, “including participating in the President’s meeting with his national security council, and calls with Norwegian Foreign Minister Eade, Qatari Foreign Minister al-Attiyah, Turkish Foreign Minister Davutoglu, Egyptian Constitution Party President ElBaradei and five calls Ambassador Patterson on that day alone and since then he continued to make calls to leaders including Emirati Foreign Minister bin Zayed, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr.”

But all that verbiage stands in stark contrast to Psaki’s earlier claim about Kerry’s activities over the extended Fourth of July holiday.

“Since his plane touched down in Washington at 4 am, Secretary Kerry was working all day and on the phone dealing with the crisis in Egypt,” Psaki said in a statement Wednesday. That comment was in response to questions about why Kerry was absent from a White House photo that showed President Obama meeting with members of his national security team during an emergency meeting about the coup in Egypt.

According to Psaki, Kerry dialed in on a secure phone line for that meeting. “He participated in the White House meeting with the President by secure phone and was and is in non-stop contact with foreign leaders, and his senior team in Washington and Cairo,” she said.

At the time of that statement, CBS This Morning senior producer Mosheh Oinounou had tweeted a photo of the “Isabel” and reported that a producer had spotted Kerry on board. The State Department denied those claims.
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However, the State Department had to backpedal after the New York Daily News published pictures showing Kerry on his yacht Isabel, and getting in some kayaking during his Nantucket getaway.

Kerry recently returned from a Middle East trip during which he confounded area experts by ignoring the violent crises in Egypt, Libya, Syria and Turkey in order to focus on the Israeli-Palestinian troubles, a longstanding but at the moment relatively inactive problem. 

The ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood leader Morsi is a serious setback for the Obama administration, which had expended considerable political capital trying to build warmer relations with Morsi’s anti-American, anti-Israeli extremist government, even as it suspended human rights norms, rewrote Egypt’s constitution, expanded sharia rule and drove the country’s already weak economy into the ground.

Obama’s murky response to the Egyptian revolution has been called a “stunning diplomatic failure” by Republicans and “muted” by the president’s own media allies. In a 450-word statement Wednesday, the president avoided specifics about Egypt’s increasingly violent and volatile situation, saying only that the United States is “committed to the democratic process and respect for the rule of law” and calling on “all parties” to cooperate.

“The United States is monitoring the very fluid situation in Egypt, and we believe that ultimately the future of Egypt can only be determined by the Egyptian people,” Obama said. “Nevertheless, we are deeply concerned by the decision of the Egyptian Armed Forces to remove President Morsy and suspend the Egyptian constitution. I now call on the Egyptian military to move quickly and responsibly to return full authority back to a democratically elected civilian government as soon as possible through an inclusive and transparent process, and to avoid any arbitrary arrests of President Morsy and his supporters.”

Egypt’s military rulers flouted that appeal, temporarily placing Morsi under house arrest and hauling in many of his followers. Although it is not clear whether the former president is still in custody, Egyptian military forces continued to crack down on his supporters during Kerry’s Bay State idyll, and reportedly opened fire on Morsi followers Friday.

The State Department’s feckless response to questions about Kerry’s whereabouts during the Egypt crisis recall the Benghazi attack, for which then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton received harsh criticism over her failure to provide adequate security and President Obama was questioned about his decision to attend a Las Vegas fundraiser during the crisis.

The State Department was also lambasted for its disingenuous explanation that the well-planned terrorist attack had been a spontaneous popular reaction to an obscure trailer for an unseen internet film. The filmmaker was subsequently imprisoned on an unrelated charge. Four Americans died in the Benghazi attack, including the United States ambassador to Libya. The Obama administration eventually retreated from its claim that the film had provoked the Benghazi attack.

The Mood of 1980

By  Victor Davis Hanson, National Review Online

Next year could be a frightening one, in the fashion of 1979–80.

The developing circumstances of our withdrawal from Afghanistan conjure up Vietnam 1975, with all the refugees, reprisals, humiliation, and emboldened enemies on the horizon, though this time there is no coastline for a flotilla of boat people to launch from. The Obama administration is debating no-fly zones over Syria; more likely, it will have the same discussion over Afghanistan soon, once the Taliban drops the diplomatic veneer and comes back into town.

Because of the failure to negotiate a single residual base in Iraq, Iran has appropriated a vast air corridor to the Middle East. John Kerry speaks sonorously to Russia and China, but apparently assumes that diplomacy follows gentlemanly New England yacht protocols, the right of way given to the more sober, judicious, and pontificating.

When Obamacare comes on line full bore, I think the American people could be quite depressed over the strange things they encounter. The economy offers only marginal encouragement, given that unemployment is still high and growth low; printing money at a record pace is not sustainable. Only gas and oil production is encouraging — and that is despite, not because of, administration efforts.

The Snowden extradition affair in and of itself could be small potatoes, but it takes on enormous iconic importance when the Chinese and Russians feel no compunction about publicly snubbing the administration — with North Korea, Iran, and many in the Middle East watching and drawing the conclusion that there are no consequences to getting on the bad side of the United States. Or perhaps they no longer see a bad side at all and consider us complacent neutral observers. Red lines, deadlines, ultimatums, “make no mistake about it,” “let me be perfectly clear,” the Nobel Peace Prize — all that is the stuff of yesteryear, its currency depleted by the years of speaking quite loudly while carrying a tiny stick.

All of the above take place while the Benghazi, IRS, AP/Fox, and NSA scandals are thought to be best handled by simple neglect, media lethargy, and amnesia on the part of the people.

We are back to the future, with the same old, same old sort of Carteresque engineered malaise.

The EPA Plants a Story - Agenda Science

EPA Agenda Science = IRS Targeting... winning by any means!

The EPA Plants a Story 

And in the process poisons the public debate about fracking.

By Jillian Kay Melchior, National Review

Far be it from the Environmental Protection Agency to admit it was wrong — but late last week, it subtly withdrew from a once-flashy investigation regarding whether hydraulic fracturing contaminated groundwater in the tiny town of Pavillion, Wyo. Never has backpedaling been such an effective form of transportation.

In December 2011, the EPA released a draft report of a study it conducted in Wyoming, eliciting a furor of media attention. The New York Times reported that “chemicals used to hydraulically fracture rocks in drilling for natural gas in a remote valley in central Wyoming are the likely cause of contaminated local water supplies, federal regulators said.” The Financial Times ran a story headlined “EPA blames fracking for Wyoming pollution.” National Public Radio announced that “for the first time, federal environmental regulators have made a direct link between the controversial drilling practice known as hydraulic fracturing and groundwater contamination.” And the Salt Lake Tribune ran an editorial subtitled “EPA report shows water poisoned.”

In reality, the study conclusively proved no such thing. The research was fundamentally flawed, with the conclusion being derived less from science than from politics.

For starters, the EPA’s study was released in preliminary form, and it was never peer-reviewed. In fact, the EPA went out of its way to ensure that Wyoming’s governor and state agencies didn’t have a chance to look it over before it became publicly available. And when the study was released, the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality and the Wyoming Bureau of Land Management both expressed significant concerns about the EPA’s conclusions.

Had professional scientists had a chance to review the EPA’s preliminary study before it hit the headlines, they doubtless would have complained that only four samples were examined — not nearly enough to be scientifically definitive.

Also, the EPA had failed to find contamination in the existing water sources in Pavillion, so it drilled its own wells — but went far deeper into the earth, into natural hydrocarbon-bearing foundations. As Encana, the developer, wrote at the time, “Natural gas developers didn’t put the natural gas at the bottom of the EPA’s deep monitoring wells, nature did.” So when the test results showed hydrocarbons, that said nothing about fracking and much about the EPA’s scientific sloppiness.

Furthermore, the methods and materials used to drill the EPA’s sample wells may well have introduced chemical contaminates.

And different labs reached contradictory conclusions about the small samples the EPA collected. One lab even reported that the “blank” sample used solely for comparison purposes was tainted.

But the details of how recklessly the EPA conducted its study were omitted in many of the sensational reports that followed the draft report’s release.

And the few journalistic accounts that acknowledged the study’s problems were dismayed about the implications of its very public debut. Wyoming’s Casper Tribune wrote in an editorial: “You think Pavillion water is a mess? Try setting the record straight if the EPA’s report is eventually changed or discredited after scientific review. . . . The EPA may have poisoned the public debate by releasing its [preliminary] report.”

That assessment is proving prophetic. EPA reps said this week that although the agency “stands behind its work and data,” the study won’t be finalized, and the Obama administration won’t rest on the report’s conclusions. That’s a nice talking point, but if the Pavillion study could actually stand up to scrutiny, you can bet the EPA would be using it to act — and to act boldly.

But in the end, it didn’t matter much whether fracking had actually contaminated Wyoming’s water; having the public think it did sufficed for the EPA. So go the cynical politics of an agency with an agenda.

— Jillian Kay Melchior is a Thomas L. Rhodes Fellow for the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity.

Lies Subvert Democracy

Lies Subvert Democracy

Victor Davis Hanson, National Review

Truth is the lifeblood of democracy. Without honesty, the foundations of consensual government crumble.

If the Internal Revenue Service acts unlawfully, our system of citizens’ computing their own taxes implodes.

Yet Lois Lerner, one of the IRS’s top officials, would not answer simple questions about her agency’s conduct during congressional testimony, instead pleading the Fifth Amendment. Any taxpayer who tried that with an IRS auditor would end up fined, if not in jail.

Almost everything that IRS officials have reported about the agency’s unlawful targeting of conservative groups has proven false. IRS malfeasance was not limited only to the Cincinnati office, as alleged, but followed directives sent from higher-ups in Washington. Lois Lerner confessed to the scandal only through a rigged public query by a planted questioner, designed to preempt an upcoming critical inspector general’s report. There is legitimate dispute over both the number and the purpose of former IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman’s visits to the White House and nearby executive office buildings, but he did his credibility no good by snidely remarking to Congress that at least one of those visits was to take his kids to the White House Easter Egg Roll.

Attorney General Eric Holder — who had already been held in contempt by the House of Representatives for declining to turn over internal Justice Department documents in the earlier Fast and Furious scandal — swore to Congress that he had no knowledge of any effort to go after individual reporters. But according to an official Justice Department statement, Holder had in fact signed off on the search warrant to monitor the communications of Fox News reporter James Rosen. In other words, the attorney general of the United States under oath misled — or lied to — Congress.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was recently asked by Senator Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) whether the National Security Agency collected the phone and e-mail records of millions of ordinary Americans. Clapper said that it did not. That, too, was an untruth. Clapper’s supporters argued that Wyden should not have asked in public a sensitive question that threatened the needed secrecy of the program. But Clapper did not demur or request a closed session. He instead found it easier to deceive, later dubbing his response the “least untruthful” answer possible.

Washington reporters and spin doctors argue whether newly appointed national-security adviser Susan Rice knowingly lied when she wove a yarn about a single video maker’s being responsible for spontaneous violence that led to the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi. Yet no one disputes that her televised accounts — as well as those of both President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton — were untrue, and demonstrably so at the time. Yet Rice was promoted, not censured, following her performance.

Last November, White House press secretary Jay Carney was asked point-blank whether the administration had altered CIA-produced intelligence memos to fit its narrative of a spontaneous riot in Benghazi. Carney answered unequivocally that the administration had made only one stylistic change. That, too, was not accurate. In fact, there were at least twelve different drafts that reflected substantial ongoing changes by the administration of the original CIA talking points.

Former EPA director Lisa Jackson created a fake e-mail identity — “Richard Windsor” — to conduct official business off the record. But Jackson did not stop with that ruse. She turned Richard Windsor into an entire mythical persona, who supposedly took online tests and was given awards by the EPA — a veritable Jackson doppelgänger who was certified as “a scholar of ethical behavior” by no less than the agency that the unethical Jackson oversaw.

Deception is now institutionalized in the Obama administration. It infects almost every corner of the executive branch, eroding the trust necessary for the IRS, the Department of Justice, our security agencies, and the president’s official spokesman — sabotaging the public trust required for democracy itself.

What went wrong with the Obama administration?

For one thing, there is no longer a traditional adversarial media in Washington. Spouses and siblings of executives at the major television networks are embedded within the administration. Unlike with Watergate, the media now hold back, believing that any hard-hitting reporting of ongoing scandals would only weaken Obama, whose vision of America the vast majority of reporters share. But that understood exemption only encourages greater lack of candor.

There is also utopian arrogance in Washington that justifies any means necessary to achieve exalted ends of supposed fairness and egalitarianism. If one has to tell a lie to stop the Tea Party or Fox News, then it is not seen by this administration as a lie.

Barack Obama swept up an entire nation in 2008 with his hope-and-change promises of a new honesty and transparency. That dream is now in shambles, destroyed by the most untruthful cast since Richard Nixon, H. R. Haldeman, Ron Ziegler, and John Dean left Washington in disgrace almost 40 years ago — after likewise subverting the very government they had pledged to serve.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His new book, The Savior Generals, is just out from Bloomsbury Press. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com. © 2013 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Free stuff...

Isn't this the "game" that this version of big government plays, get the "mopes" hooked on free stuff. Then they'll naturally shy away from making tough personal decisions and taking responsibility. They don't care how big or how intrusive government can be as long as the conveyer belt is running... besides, you can always "game" big government because of how big, inefficient and staffed by "mopes" it becomes and is.

Anyone notice that this is the second SoCal islamic kid to go  on a rampage this year. The first in Orange County killed a kid (among others) raised in Morongo Valley on his way to work... and now we have the Santa Monica killer... channeling the Boston Bros... Why aren't we hearing anything? There is no need to over-react, but lets talk about it!

I don't agree with much of what Eric Holder says... but this one thing, we are cowards.

Consolidation...

What is the end-game?

It's not American exceptionalism... but it is about world order!

We're not done...

We're just seeing the beginning of all of this... there'll be more whistleblowers coming forward.

BIG GOVERNMENT

is the problem and a nightmare when coupled with abuse and vengeance ....

Trust in the IRS, RIP

Trust in the IRS, RIP

Contributed by Mike Walker, Col. USMC (retired)

All,

Few abuses of governmental power can match those of today’s IRS. The chillingly illegal targeting of Americans exercising their right to free speech and assembly certainly harkens to earlier examples of terrible abuse by our Government.

J. Edgar Hoover’s secret FBI spying on political opponents immediately comes to mind, as do the attempts to silence Daniel Ellsberg during the Pentagon Papers affair. The heartless disregard for the rights and welfare of largely powerless American by the IRS also reminds us of the CIA mindset when it used American GIs as Guinea pigs during their LSD experiments a half century ago.

But the IRS abuses are worse for at least two reasons. The first is that the scope of the targeting was far beyond anything seen before: it was truly a systemic nation-wide assault. Let there be no mistake, it was a police action designed to suppress dissent as the IRS punitively defined it.

The second shocking characteristic of these crimes is the victims. I cannot recall another case where the Government clandestinely attacked Main Street America. These victims were not power players like Hoover’s enemies, or a small number of brave outspoken individuals like Ellsberg and his followers, this was going after your neighbor, your coworker, a friend or family member who posed no undue threat to anyone or anything. They were targeted because those with power wanted to silence their political voice. The actions by the IRS were despicable.

That this disease in the IRS starts at the very top of the organization is abundantly clear by simply reviewing a few short facts:

 Shakespeare wrote that, “The truth will out.” When the IRS knew a bad report was going to be made public, it decided to deceive the American people by not forthrightly issuing a statement. Instead, in a fitting example of its sick organizational culture, it decided to manipulate the facts.

It wrote both a question and answer on the issue intentionally designed to make the IRS “look good” and then found a fawning member of the Washington media to play out the Q&A charade in public. The IRS then created the “rogue agent” myth to avert any blame. How sick is that?

Next, simply look to the “Three (non-) Talking Heads” of the IRS.

First you had former-IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman who, when asked about his hundred plus trips to the White House over three years, gave a flippant answer that he recalled going to an Easter egg hunt. The message seemed clear: Shulman had nothing but contempt for the Congress and they were going to have to hunt for the truth without his help.

Next, you had Shulman’s replacement, Steven Miller, who told Congress on 3 May 2012 that, “There’s absolutely no targeting” even though senior IRS managers were aware of the targeting as early as June 2011 and, when caught, Miller had the gall to aver on 17 May 2013 that, “I answered all questions truthfully.” 

Again, this displayed the incompetence and arrogance of an IRS leadership that feels that when it intentionally deceived the Congress and the American people it was being truthful. That is pathetic.

Finally you have Lois Learner who stated that she did nothing wrong and then invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid possibly incriminating herself in some wrongdoing. Good grief!

No wonder a low-level IRS officer in Cincinnati recently stated that the superiors are trying to blame them and throw the little IRS guys “under the bus.”

The IRS in its current form is a cancer eating away at American body politic.

Tweaking and shuffling the internal “card decks” inside the IRS cannot cure this illness. In times of emergency, it sometimes necessary to figuratively “tear down the walls with an axe” and that time is now.

While Congress needs to clean up the tax law, the only comprehensive solution is to eradicate the IRS culture of unaccountable elitism in the senior leadership and the callous and apparently criminal targeting of American citizens by its employees.

The IRS – like the FBI, CIA and Pentagon in the past – needs to be thoroughly shaken up and cleaned up and the first step in cutting out the cancer is to immediately and completely dismantle the IRS non-profit department and assign its work elsewhere until a new healthy organization can be formed.

Mike

If it looks like a rotten dead fish and if it smells like a rotten dead fish... it might be a rotten dead fish!

Almost as good as the real thing?

Fake flowers and the pretend White House press corps

posted by Hugh Hewitt

Here is what Attorney General Eric Holder testified to when, while under oath, he was asked about the Department of Justice’s investigations of journalists and national security leaks:

“In regard to potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material: This is not something I’ve ever been involved in, heard of, or would think would be a wise policy.”

NBC investigative reporter Michael Issikof has reported that the attorney general signed the application for the warrant authorizing surveillance of Fox News reporter James Rosen and that the warrant application included an affidavit from an FBI agent who asserted “[t]here is probable cause to believe that the reporter has committed a violation” of the Espionage Act “at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator of Mr. Kim.”

The warrant application also requested secrecy as it asserted that Rosen was a flight risk.

Aiders, abettors, and co-conspirators of spies, especially those who might flee, are definitely the subjects of potential prosecution. So Holder either lied to Congress, lied to the judge, or doesn’t read what he signs.

Last week we also heard from the president on the subject of the press. Toward the end of a long and generally uninteresting rehash of his standard talking points on the war on terror, delivered at the National Defense University, the president said that “[j]ournalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs.”

“Our focus must be on those who break the law,” he continued. “And that’s why I’ve called on Congress to pass a media shield law to guard against government overreach.”

And who will guard us against overreach? “I’ve raised these issues with the attorney general,” the president declared, “who shares my concerns.”

Memo to the White House press corps: At the next semiannual, six-question press conference, someone should ask the president if, when he “raised these issues with the attorney general,” the president already knew the details of the Rosen case, whether the AG told him then and there, or if the AG kept him in the dark.

It has to be one of those three circumstances. None of the three reflects well on the president, but one of them adds to Holder’s long list of sins against the office of AG that of purposefully deceiving the president about the substance of a matter the president “has raised.”

None of this hangs together, and what my radio pal Mark Steyn calls the poodle press is still not even yapping at the obvious “issues raised” by Holder’s conduct. They are all “outraged,” of course, and want the public to share the outrage.

But why should the public get riled up? The First Amendment is supposed to protect a vigilant, pressing press, not a cheerleading squad for the president they love. There are exceptions of course, but most of the Beltway-Manhattan media elite have been pulling for Obama from the first day of his presidency.

You don’t water fake flowers, and you don’t get outraged over assaults on pretend reporters. The handful of reporters who have pressed Team Obama on its various scandals — from Fast and Furious to the Environmental Protection Agency’s scam emails, the Obamacare shakedown and now the IRS shocker — have the respect and support of the public, but the vast majority of Manhattan-Beltway media bigs are seen as extensions of the White House Press Office.

When the mainstream media start doing their job again, the public will defend them. Until then, not so much.