Subj : Democrat Fra.. Criminals To : ALL From : TIM RICHARDSON Date : Sat May 18 2013 04:45:00 On 05-06-13, BOB KLAHN said Couldn't sleep so I got up, put on the coffee and powered up the computer to see whats on the early news pages. Almost immediately I found a column by Peggy Noonan on the Drudge Page. She is addressing the IRS scandal, and she hits the nail on the head. Noonan is one of my favorite columnists. She's a very smart woman, and usually when she goes after a news story in her column something worth while comes of it. This time was no exception. Her way of talking about this scandal puts it in a real harsh light. She gets to the fact that, with the bending of a government department with the power of the IRS, into a `political' tool that serves the partisan purpose of going after the party *in* the White House, we have lost the integrity and basic decency we should have a right to expect from those who run our country's highest departments. But more than that, she exposes the absolute lie perpetrated by those at the top, and not just in the IRS itself, but the two top people who, in front of cameras, act astounded...and un-knowing; Hussein Obama and Holder. Holder got his nose open and acted all indignant to Issa the other day, demanding he was entitled to be treated with more respect. That from a guy who came into his appointed position five years ago, and immediately shut down an investigation into an intimidation incident where members of the so-called New Black Panther Party had stood on a porch outside a polling place and waved weapons at people and verbally intimidated people. `Oh....nothing to see here, folks....nothing to see. Move along, move along.' And Hussein comes out on camera the other day when this IRS scandal broke out in the news, and faked up blank-faced outrage. As if he wasn't aware of any of this! Noonan calls for people to get prosecuted over this. And not just low-level people either. My hope is this leads to the entire Hussein Obama family packin' their bags and movin' out of America's house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue a whole lot sooner than 2016: Updated May 17, 2013, 6:43 p.m. ET This Is No Ordinary Scandal WSJ Political abuse of the IRS threatens the basic integrity of our government.By PEGGY NOONAN We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate. The reputation of the Obama White House has, among conservatives, gone from sketchy to sinister, and, among liberals, from unsatisfying to dangerous. No one likes what they're seeing. The Justice Department assault on the Associated Press and the ugly politicization of the Internal Revenue Service have left the administration's credibility deeply, probably irretrievably damaged. They don't look jerky now, they look dirty. The patina of high- mindedness the president enjoyed is gone. Something big has shifted. The standing of the administration has changed. As always it comes down to trust. Do you trust the president's answers when he's pressed on an uncomfortable story? Do you trust his people to be sober and fair-minded as they go about their work? Do you trust the IRS and the Justice Department? You do not. The president, as usual, acts as if all of this is totally unconnected to him. He's shocked, it's unacceptable, he'll get to the bottom of it. He read about it in the papers, just like you. But he is not unconnected, he is not a bystander. This is his administration. Those are his executive agencies. He runs the IRS and the Justice Department. A president sets a mood, a tone. He establishes an atmosphere. If he is arrogant, arrogance spreads. If he is too partisan, too disrespecting of political adversaries, that spreads too. Presidents always undo themselves and then blame it on the third guy in the last row in the sleepy agency across town. The IRS scandal has two parts. The first is the obviously deliberate and targeted abuse, harassment and attempted suppression of conservative groups. The second is the auditing of the taxes of political activists. In order to suppress conservative groups - at first those with words like "Tea Party" and "Patriot" in their names, then including those that opposed ObamaCare or advanced the Second Amendment - the IRS demanded donor rolls, membership lists, data on all contributions, names of volunteers, the contents of all speeches made by members, Facebook FB +0.46%posts, minutes of all meetings, and copies of all materials handed out at gatherings. Among its questions: What are you thinking about? Did you ever think of running for office? Do you ever contact political figures? What are you reading? One group sent what it was reading: the U.S. Constitution. The second part of the scandal is the auditing of political activists who have opposed the administration. The Journal's Kim Strassel reported an Idaho businessman named Frank VanderSloot, who'd donated more than a million dollars to groups supporting Mitt Romney. He found himself last June, for the first time in 30 years, the target of IRS auditors. His wife and his business were also soon audited. Hal Scherz, a Georgia physician, also came to the government's attention. He told ABC News: "It is odd that nothing changed on my tax return and I was never audited until I publicly criticized ObamaCare." Franklin Graham, son of Billy, told Politico he believes his father was targeted. A conservative Catholic academic who has written for these pages faced questions about her meager freelance writing income. Many of these stories will come out, but not as many as there are. People are not only afraid of being audited, they're afraid of saying they were audited. All of these IRS actions took place in the years leading up to the 2012 election. They constitute the use of governmental power to intrude on the privacy and shackle the political freedom of American citizens. The purpose, obviously, was to overwhelm and intimidate - to kill the opposition, question by question and audit by audit. It is not even remotely possible that all this was an accident, a mistake. Again, only conservative groups were targeted, not liberal. It is not even remotely possible that only one IRS office was involved. Lois Lerner, who oversees tax-exempt groups for the IRS, was the person who finally acknowledged, under pressure of a looming investigative report, some of what the IRS was doing. She told reporters the actions were the work of "frontline people" in Cincinnati. But other offices were involved, including Washington. It is not even remotely possible the actions were the work of just a few agents. This was more systemic. It was an operation. The word was out: Get the Democratic Party's foes. It is not remotely possible nobody in the IRS knew what was going on until very recently. The Washington Post reported efforts to target the conservative groups reached the highest levels of the agency by May 2012 - far earlier than the agency had acknowledged. Reuters reported high-level IRS officials, including its chief counsel, knew in August 2011 about the targeting. The White House is reported to be shellshocked at public reaction to the scandal. But why? Were they so highhanded, so essentially ignorant, that they didn't understand what it would mean to the American people when their IRS - the revenue-collecting arm of the U.S. government - is revealed as a low, ugly and bullying tool of the reigning powers? If they didn't know how Americans would react to that, what did they know? I mean beyond Harvey Weinstein's cellphone number. And why - in the matters of the Associated Press and Benghazi too - does no one in this administration ever take responsibility? Attorney General Eric Holder doesn't know what happened, exactly who did what. The president speaks in the passive voice. He attempts to act out indignation, but he always seems indignant at only one thing: that he's being questioned at all. That he has to address this. That fate put it on his plate. We all have our biases. Mine is for a federal government that, for all the partisan shootouts on the streets of Washington, is allowed to go about its work. That it not be distracted by scandal, that political disagreement be, in the end, subsumed to the common good. It is a dangerous world: Calculating people wish to do us harm. In this world no draining, unproductive scandals should dominate the government's life. Independent counsels should not often come in and distract the U.S. government from its essential business. But that bias does not fit these circumstances. Daily declarations from the Wall Street Journal columnist.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. --- *Durango b301 #PE* * Origin: Fidonet Since 1991 Join Us: www.DocsPlace.org (1:123/140) .