What is the IRS scandal if not political?
Peggy Noonan makes this statement today:
What happened at the IRS is the government’s essential business. The IRS case deserves and calls out for an independent counsel, fully armed with all that position’s powers. Only then will stables that badly need to be cleaned, be cleaned. Everyone involved in this abuse of power should pay a price, because if they don’t, the politicization of the IRS will continue—forever. If it is not stopped now, it will never stop. And if it isn’t stopped, no one will ever respect or have even minimal faith in the revenue-gathering arm of the U.S. government again.
And it would be shameful and shallow for any Republican operative or operator to make this scandal into a commercial and turn it into a mere partisan arguing point and part of the game. It’s not part of the game. This is not about the usual partisan slugfest. This is about the integrity of our system of government and our ability to trust, which is to say our ability to function.
First paragraph … agree, for the most part. Where I don’t agree is that there is a “minimal faith” in the revenue gathering arm of the US government. There’s been little faith in it since it’s inception. Most people understand that the gun is pointed at them and the prison cell is open and waiting. They don’t pay taxes because of any “faith” or respect for the IRS or government. They do it out of fear.
As for the second paragraph, that’s total horse hockey. Total.
The entire point of the scandal was it targeted “political” organizations. How does one not politicize it? It took place under a Democratic administration and the opponents of that party were the target of the IRS.
Hello?
And what do we get from Noonan? “Hey, let’s take a knife to a gun fight”.
Noonan’s advice is, by far, the stupidest advice one could give.
Yes, this is about the integrity of the system. And, like it or not, that is directly linked to those who administer and govern.
Ms. Noonan, who is that right now? And how, if they were doing an effective job, would this have been going on for two years. Oh, and speaking of trust, how are you with the whole AP scandal? My guess is you’re wanting some heads over that.
Well, I want some heads of this. And Benghazi. And Fast and Furious.
Instead we get shrinking violets like you advising everyone to back off and not make this “political”.
BS.
~McQ
Worst. Political. Class. Ever.
Pretty much everybody knows Obamacare is a disaster. I mean, everybody who has an ounce of sense. Obviously, that excludes a lot of rank and file Lefty Democrats who think Obamacare is actually a fix or a cure for something, but most of those people are simple dolts anyway. But, apparently there’s plenty of agreement on both sides of the Congressional aisles that Obamacare is an unworkable albatross. How do we know this? Because Democrats and Republicans are negotiating some way to exempt Congress from Obamacare.
Congressional leaders in both parties are engaged in high-level, confidential talks about exempting lawmakers and Capitol Hill aides from the insurance exchanges they are mandated to join as part of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul, sources in both parties said.
The talks — which involve Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), the Obama administration and other top lawmakers — are extraordinarily sensitive, with both sides acutely aware of the potential for political fallout from giving carve-outs from the hugely controversial law to 535 lawmakers and thousands of their aides…
The problem stems from whether members and aides set to enter the exchanges would have their health insurance premiums subsidized by their employer — in this case, the federal government. If not, aides and lawmakers in both parties fear that staffers — especially low-paid junior aides — could be hit with thousands of dollars in new health care costs, prompting them to seek jobs elsewhere. Older, more senior staffers could also retire or jump to the private sector rather than face a big financial penalty.
Plus, lawmakers — especially those with long careers in public service and smaller bank accounts — are also concerned about the hit to their own wallets.
In other words, unless they can exempt themselves from Obamacare’s exchange requirements, health costs for the Congressional employees will rise so much that they won’t be able to afford it.
So, both Democrats and Republicans clearly realize that Obamacare, if implemented in Congress, will kill jobs and raise health insurance costs. Is their solution to repeal Obamacare and save the rest of the country that same burden? No. Of course not. Their solution is to see how they can exempt themselves from the law. The rest of us, who have to live with it? Tough cookies, proles. Health care costs money. Deal with it.
I guess my only question is, why are we not not dragging members of Congress—of both parties—naked and screaming from their offices for a good tar and feathering?
The Republicans may make pleasant mouth noises about repealing Obamacare, but they will never do it. Even if they passed a bill, it’d die in the Senate or get vetoed by the President. So, knowing that, their fallback position is, "Well, let’s at least see if we can get ourselves exempted from it."
Both parties in Congress know Obamacare is an unworkable, unaffordable disaster, and their response is to just give a big "F you" to the American people. And, as far as I can see, the American people are just…gonna take it, tug their forelocks, and say, "As you wish, m’lud." As far as I can tell, the majority of Congress is composed of people so stupid it’s a wonder that they can think clearly enough to walk erect. And yet we keep electing them, and doing what they tell us to do. That idiot from Georgia, for example, who complained in a Congressional hearing that if we send too many marines to Guam the island will tip over and capsize…he got re-elected by his idiot constituency.
We really do deserve the total crapstorm that’s headed our way.
~
Dale Franks
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It’s tax day … sorry, I’m not in the mood
After considering the check being written by me to the scumbags that run this joint, I’m not in a particularly good mood. They’ll waste it as we all know. There are millions, if not billions of items or programs or, well you name it, that government has no business even being near that they’re up to their rear ends in. And, as we’ve said a million times, government’s have no money … they can only tax it or borrow it. At this very moment, while they’re taking an obscene percentage of what I worked very hard to make last year, they’re planning on borrowing even more to spend on crap like this and tell us it’s “necessary.”
Anyway, this is as good as it gets today.
See you tomorrow.
~McQ
Keystone XL pipeline: How long will Obama delay this time
In the wake of sequestration, an opportunity to do the right thing for this country arises. Unfortunately, it arises within an administration ideologically, and therefore adamantly, opposed to the idea of more fossil fuel:
Today the State Department released yet another positive environmental review for the northern portion of the Keystone XL pipeline project. The State Department approved the original pipeline route through Nebraska, which was supposedly less environmentally friendly, without any problems.
It is no surprise, then, that the State Department also seems to look favorably on this second iteration of the project in this fourth report—a report that should have been unnecessary. For the record, the pipeline also received a stamp of approval from Nebraskans.
Yes, that’s right, the Obama State Department has given the Keystone XL pipeline favorable reviews before. It has been the executive, in this case, arbitrarily overruling the reports, inserting himself in a process he really has no business in and delaying the project.
IER senior VP Daniel Kish sums it up pretty well:
"This is, as President Obama says, ‘a teachable moment.’ It teaches us why our government’s policies continue to stifle job creation, investment and new energy sources and instead spends valuable time and increasingly limited resources studying things to death.
"While we welcome this report, we also note this is the 4th such environmental report on the Keystone XL pipeline proposal and since it is only a “draft” there will be at least 5 federal environmental studies before a decision is made by our government on the pipeline. The Canadian government made a decision in 6 months; our government has taken 54 months so far. This is an abject lesson in why – when it comes to energy – no one wants to deal with our government. This is evident also by continuing falling production on federal lands at the same time U.S. oil and gas production on non-federal lands makes historic gains. It is time for our Leaders to make a decision….Canada’s did a long time ago. Too many are hurting and too much is at stake for any more time or money to be wasted on trivial matters and long addressed and re-addressed chimeras advanced by opponents of any and all affordable sources energy."
The project will accommodate up to 830,000 barrels of oil per day, create some 179,000 jobs on American soil, and continue good trade relations with a close ally. The benefits won’t stop with the oil sector, though—the Keystone project will have a positive ripple effect even in areas without the pipeline that will provide goods and services to support the pipeline.
Before any real decision is made, there will be a 45-day comment period and some time for the State Department to consider the comments. Then the notably anti-carbon Secretary of State, John Kerry, will give his recommendation and the final decision will lie with the President.
The politics – and failure – of going “green”
“Going green” and “climate change” certainly are interlinked parts of a political agenda that have nothing to do with public opinion or will. In fact:
Seventeen years of continuous surveys covering countries around the world show that people not only do not care about climate change today – understandably prioritising economic misery – they also did not care about climate change even back when times were good. The new information comes in a study released by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago – a large, long-standing and respected non-profit. The NORC spokespersons said that decades of climate alarmism have had basically no effect on people’s attitude around the world.
Part of that has to do with the fact that they’ve heard it all before. Dire predictions about population growth that have come to naught. Warnings about using up the earth’s resources which have proven to be false. Ozone holes. Melting icecaps. Yatta, yatta.
Climate change is just the latest among the apocalyptic prophesies and as the real science – not Al Gore “science” – comes out, fewer and fewer people are staying on the bandwagon.
Of course the promise was a “green economy” in which everyone would benefit. How’s that worked out? Well we know how it has worked out in Spain. Germany is now finding out how mistaken they were to go in that direction. In fact:
Energy, manufacturing and agriculture are playing a major role in the corridor states’ revival. The resurgence of fossil fuel–based energy, notably shale oil and natural gas, is especially important. Cheap U.S. natural gas has some envisioning the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge as an “American Ruhr.” Much of this growth, notes Eric Smith, associate director of the Tulane Energy Institute, will be financed by German and other European firms that are reeling from electricity costs now three times higher than in places like Louisiana.
Interesting. It is another reason why they’re also putting manufacturing plants in the US, mostly in Red States. Skilled labor, right to work and cheap energy. Obviously neither the “right to work” nor cheap energy are part of any Obama administration design.
And how is it going for green jobs more locally? Well, the usual state can be consulted for an update on what such a move has wrought and demonstrate for all to see why “going green” is a foolish road to travel – at least in the near future.
It was supposed to be the next big thing. California built decades of broad-based prosperity from the Gold Rush, then Hollywood, then aerospace, and later Silicon Valley. At the turn of the century, “green jobs” were supposed to be the wave of the future. How is that going for them? According to the best numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, fewer than 2,500 green jobs have been created in California since 2010.
Wow … bask in the success! Government again demonstrates how poorly it does picking winners and losers. Not that such failures ever hinder the central planners from using your dollars to try again. What’s Einstein’s definition of insanity?
Meanwhile, the “success” of green energy has brought California to a point where it will have to fish or cut bait very soon:
California is weighing how to avoid a looming electricity crisis that could be brought on by its growing reliance on wind and solar power. At Tuesday’s meeting, experts cautioned that the state could begin seeing problems with reliability as soon as 2015.
Of course, had we heeded the experience of others, we likely wouldn’t see California going through this nonsense:
The former chancellor Lord Lawson has urged the Government to keep Britain’s coal-fired power stations working for as long as was needed to avoid any short-term power shortages. In a House of Lords debate on energy policy and electricity generation Lord Lawson also called on ministers to give “every encouragement it can” to the quickest possible development of shale gas supplies. Lord Lawson urged energy and climate change minister Baroness Verma to assure the House that “if the need arises our coal-fired power stations will be kept open as long as is necessary, regardless of the European combustion plants directive”.
But our dauntless leaders never learn from others. Just as with healthcare, they seem bound and determined to recreate the failure of others.
We have abundant fossile fuel resources. They would generate both jobs and revenue for government. Wind and solar, while great in theory, have in practice been shown to be woefully inadequate to our needs. We even have communities wanting wind turbines taken down due to health concerns.
Yet our government and this administration continue to pursue an “energy policy” which is detrimental to the welfare of this nation despite a state that has done everything they want to do nationally and is a dismal failure because of it. They are bound and determined to make all 50 states Californias.
~McQ
How bad do you have to be NOT to be hired?
I wondered, when Barack Obama was re-elected, how bad you had to be to be fired. Apparently worse than Obama, if that’s possible.
Now, with the confirmation of Chuck Hagel – another politician who has never run a large or complex organization and who was abysmal in his confirmation hearings – I have to wonder how bad you have to be NOT to be hired.
Apparently, worse than Chuck Hagel, if that’s possible:
Republicans siding with Democrats, the U.S. Senate voted Tuesday to confirm Chuck Hagel as President Obama’s secretary of defense, a nomination that drew strong opposition within the Republican former senator’s own party, with some troubled by past statements on Israel and Iran.
GOP Sens. Rand Paul (Ky.), Thad Cochran (Miss.), Mike Johanns, (Nebr.) and Richard Shelby (Ala.) supported Hagel in the 58-41 vote. No Democrats opposed him.
Again, let down by the GOP (the ‘good old boy club’ just couldn’t say no to a former member).
Anyone seeing a pattern here?
~McQ
Why won’t this administration look at this revenue source?
Because of their false agenda, that’s why. They’re still convinced that, despite 17 years of no warming (as recently admitted by the head of the IPCC), oil is bad and “green” is good and that they’re doing something to save the world. Disregard the fact that green is still unviable. Disregard the fact that everywhere it has or is being pushed, energy costs are skyrocketing. Nevermind the fact that we are sitting on a sea of fossile fuel products that we only need to access. Screw the fact that science can find no discernable warming. Their minds are made up.
That said, there’s also the fiscal side of the house. The debt. The deficit. And the demand by Democrats to raise more revenue.
Unfortunately, because of their agenda, they’re likely to completely screw up a golden opportunity to bring in much more revenue and drive energy prices down, because their agenda is against fossile fuel. And we all know the party agenda comes before what is best for the country.
Enter the administration with a renewed plan to tax oil companies instead of opening access to the vast natural riches we enjoy. The result? Well this chart will help you comprehend the vast differences in the two policy choices (full size here):
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So the either/or is “tax ‘em or open access”. The difference:
According to a 2011 study by Wood Mackenzie, increased oil and natural gas activity underpro-access policies would generate an additional $800 billion in cumulative revenue for government by 2030. The chart puts into perspective the size of these accumulating revenues – enough to fund entire federal departments at various points along the timeline. By contrast, Wood Mackenize also found that hiking taxes on oil and natural gas companies would, by 2030, result in $223 billion in cumulative lost revenue to government.
It only proves the old saw -”If you want more of it, reward it and if you want less, tax it”. Think about it – money to help run government and pay down the debt (not to mention the thousands, if not millions of jobs created) being passed up in the name of false science and agenda politics.
Meanwhile, we’ll be left in the cold and the dark, thanks to agenda driven policies with no foundation in reality.
~McQ
What does this headline tell you?
Seen today on an MSN newsfeed:
“Gingrich, Rove and the right for the Republican Party”
What does it say? It says the GOP is more screwed than we ever understood.
The “old ladies” are still predominant and now are fighting among themselves and attacking the Tea Party, which should, if you believe GOP propaganda, be a natural ally.
As long as that condition prevails, the GOP will remain a minority party in national politics. And yes, I know, there are some new faces attempting to emerge. But between the left, the media and the old ladies, their chances of emerging anytime soon without having their character assassinated are likely slim and none.
~McQ
How Republicans will lead again
What will the Republican Party look like when it retakes the lead in governing? I’d bet it will be a coalition that identifies more with what Alex Castellanos is laying out at NewRepublican.org.
Some of it is new messaging for old ideas. Castellanos rebrands spontaneous order and subsidiarity as “open,” “natural,” “organic,” and “bottom-up.” He tags statism, command economies and federal control as “closed,” “artificial,” and “top-down.” Those are elegant ways to tell Whole Foods shoppers and Silicon Valley what we’re about without assigning them F.A. Hayek or a history of the Soviets.
Castellanos also stresses the superiority of private compassion over state welfare, but instead of getting trapped by placing charity in a bidding war with the welfare state, or quibbling over the definition of charity, he casts the state welfare agencies as “machine-like” or “factory-like” and “archaic,” and more importantly labeling them as “social mercenaries” that allow Americans to “distance ourselves from our responsibilities as human beings,” which involve “person-to-person” compassion.
That leads into a much more substantive change: redirecting social conservative energy to where it can actually accomplish something for itself and for the party, namely local and fulfilling private action instead of trying to seize the top and push down, which outsources to politicians and bureaucrats the promotion of our values.
Several items on the list of 67 beliefs of New Republicans (67!) deal with this:
4. We believe in freedom nationally and values locally.
6. We believe that when we allow big-government to enforce our values, we legitimize it to enforce other values, as well.
7. We believe in natural and organic ways of addressing social challenges, not political and artificial controls directed by Washington.
12. We believe Washington should stay out of our wallets, and out of our bedrooms.
39. We believe we are Republican for Everybody, and Republicans Everywhere. We believe our principles are an indispensable force for good, needed now to alleviate poverty, misery, dependency, and family breakdown destroying American lives in our inner cities.
Social conservatives lost the battle to use federal levers to enforce family and religious values, and damaged the good reputation of those values in the attempt, but those beliefs are still popular in many states, towns, and households. They can still gather a majority coalition with libertarians and moderates to carve out the space to practice their values and their faith without interference from the state, with more confidence and optimism than Paul Weyrich had in the late ’90s; if they revert to using top-down power, those potential allies will be embarrassed of their association with social conservatives. That’s coalition politics.
The New Republicans will avoid being associated with Big Everything, including Big Business. What saps the Republican Party’s entrepreneurial spirit and daring to cut government and promote free markets is its reliance on forces that want the state to protect them against change and competition; Milton Friedman repeatedly observed that this makes business community a frequent enemy of free enterprise. But the GOP need not be anti-business, just suspicious to the extent of keeping anything Big at arm’s length.
Chris Sansenbach / Flickr
Finally, Castellanos does stress a couple of times that New Republicans believe in “campaign[ing] for our solutions in the most benighted parts of America, from the barrio to the inner city.” I’ve heard noises to that effect from Republicans for years, but that will only succeed if it’s a major, sustained effort; if we have nothing to say about urban problems beyond school choice, and we don’t learn how to assertively persuade people that we are absolutely superior at addressing poverty, we’re cooked. These things require practice, trials and errors, and personal experience with the poor and with urban life. We have to be able to win at least sometimes, electing mayors and city councils in major metro areas, to show that our way of governing works for the growing portion of the country living in cities.
I said at the beginning that this is how Republicans will think when they regain the lead in governing, and I chose those words instead of “winning elections” because it’s possible the GOP can temporarily get over 50% here and there by other means, but it won’t have the initiative until it accepts the challenge to persuade all of America that its principles are relevant to them. The party could and should also make gains by modernizing the way it learns and reorganizes itself, how it encourages and channels activism, its campaign tactics and strategy, and more. But those things go naturally with a mindset that’s reflexively entrepreneurial and not only open to change but so hungry for it that we’re unafraid to stop doing what isn’t working.
Benghazi: McCain essentially says “what does it matter now?”
If it weren’t for the old ladies of the GOP, you might get some answers to some very compelling and yet unanswered questions as well as force this administration to be transparant.
But then there’s McCain and the continued capitulation of the GOP:
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said Thursday that the White House’s response to his and other Republican senators’ questions on the September attack in Benghazi, Libya was satisfactory. The senior Arizona senator said he is now ready to find a way to end the filibuster that is holding up the confirmation vote for defense secretary nominee Chuck Hagel, CNN reported.
“I think it was an adequate response, yes,” McCain said. “We are working on and having negotiations now trying to smooth this thing out and get it done.”
Yes, that’s right, nothing to see here, move along now, move along.
The Great and Powerful John McCain (I will celebrate when this yahoo shuffles off to retirement) has decided that Beghazi is over and we must, must have an incompetent buffoon for Sec. of Defense.
Must!
Parodies that write themselves come in the guise of our politicians.
~McQ