Cash on Hand

 

Glenn Reynolds, a/k/a Mr Instapundit reports on his recent experience in a market at a time when the computer network was down:

So, shopping at the fresh market tonight, we were among the very few to buy groceries, because their computer network was down and they couldn’t process credit or debit cards. They couldn’t even accept checks because those are run through an ACH payment system rather than deposited in the old way. We, however, were able to pay and get out, something only a couple of other customers could do. (One older guy, and a couple of teenaged girls who said “we rock it old school with cash,” which I thought was hilarious.) Most people didn’t carry enough cash for groceries.

Two lessons: (1) The “cashless society” is less robust than cash; and (2) Always carry enough cash to buy groceries, a meal out, and a tank of gas. Just in case.

Good advice.  But how will this work if/when the globalists impose a digital currency on us?

# # #

Irish Democracy = healthy non-compliance

 

Over at the NY Post, Glenn Reynolds, a/k/a Mr. Instapundit, expands on non-compliance:

If regular democracy isn’t doing so well, maybe it’s time to fall back on “Irish Democracy.”

That’s what Yale political scientist James Scott calls the passive resistance of a society that doesn’t like what its rulers are doing to it. In his book “Two Cheers for ­Anarchy,” he writes, “One need not have an actual conspiracy to achieve the practical effects of a conspiracy. More regimes have been brought, piecemeal, to their knees by what was once called ‘Irish Democracy,’ the silent, dogged resistance, withdrawal and truculence of millions of ordinary people, than by revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs.”

Irish Democracy is when the populace simply doesn’t cooperate with the agenda. Sometimes there is active sabotage, sometimes surreptitious monkey-wrenching, sometimes foot-dragging and sometimes outright noncompliance. Sometimes it’s all of those at once.

Right now, we are seeing some of that in response to vaccine mandates, mask rules and various other forms of population control that have been adopted since the pandemic struck. Go almost anywhere with a mask mandate, and you will see some people not wearing masks at all, daring anyone to do anything about it (often, they don’t).

You will also see a lot more with the mask pulled down below their noses, providing the vague suggestion of compliance without ­actually going along. These people will usually pull the mask up if asked, but then pull it right back down again as soon as the asker leaves the vicinity. (Hey, why take it seriously when our elites have made clear that the mask rules don’t apply to them and their gatherings?)

. . .

More of Instapundit’s article is here.

RELATED:  JD Rucker’s “Resistance Is Not Futile” at FreedomFirstNetwork. 

# # #

Media losing power?

 

Glenn Reynolds, a/k/a Mr. Instapundit, makes a good case:

Media’s censorious gatekeepers are mad —
because they’re losing power

With Donald Trump out of office and de-platformed, you’d think mainstream media gatekeepers would be happy. You’d think wrong.

Though the media-Big Tech regime is doing its best to silence opponents and seize control of the high ground, the news from within is grim. They aren’t happy with how things are going. 

That’s because they know they’re losing. Some are losing audiences and revenues. But more important, they’re losing control of the narrative.

And since control of the narrative, and the power and self-importance that accompany that control, is the most important thing in their lives, they can’t be happy.

Consider the cri de coeur of Washington Post public editor Hamilton Nolan, inspired by Tesla’s decision to scrap its media-relations department. How could that happen?

Nolan knows how, and that’s what bothers him: Tesla scrapped its media-relations department because the media don’t much matter to it. Tesla has plenty of ways to get its story out without relying on the media, and that makes the media much less important — and much less powerful. And it’s the power part that hurts the most.

. . .

I hope it’s true.  Read the rest here.

# # #

We're being played

Are you wearing a mask and practicing social distancing?  Via Instapundit:

# # #

Vote-by-mail and voter fraud

Glenn Reynolds posted this at Instapundit:

“Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.” That quote isn’t from President Trump, who criticized mail-in voting this week after Wisconsin Democrats tried and failed to change an election at the last minute into an exclusively mail-in affair. It’s the conclusion of the bipartisan 2005 report of the Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker III.

Concerns about vote-buying have a long history in the U.S. They helped drive the move to the secret ballot, which U.S. states adopted between 1888 and 1950. Secret ballots made it harder for vote buyers to monitor which candidates sellers actually voted for. Vote-buying had been pervasive; my research with Larry Kenny at the University of Florida has found that voter turnout fell by about 8% to 12% after states adopted the secret ballot.

You wouldn’t know any of this listening to the media outcry over Mr. Trump’s remarks. “There is a lot of dishonesty going on with mail-in voting,” the president said Tuesday. In response, a CNN “fact check” declares that Mr. Trump “opened a new front in his campaign of lies about voter fraud.” A New York Times headline asserts: “Trump Is Pushing a False Argument on Vote-by-Mail Fraud.” Both claim that voter fraud is essentially nonexistent. The Carter-Baker report found otherwise.

Intimidation and vote buying were key concerns of the commission: “Citizens who vote at home, at nursing homes, at the workplace, or in church are more susceptible to pressure, overt and subtle, or to intimidation. Vote buying schemes are far more difficult to detect when citizens vote by mail.” The report provides examples, such as the 1997 Miami mayoral election that resulted in 36 arrests for absentee-ballot fraud. The election had to be rerun, and the result was reversed.

There are more recent cases, too. In 2017 an investigation of a Dallas City Council election found some 700 fraudulent mail-in ballots signed by the same witness using a fake name. The discovery left two council races in limbo, and the fraud was much larger than the vote differential in one of those races. The case resulted in a criminal conviction. . . .

It is often claimed that impossibly large numbers of people live at the same address. In 2016, 83 registered voters in San Pedro, Calif., received absentee ballots at the same small two-bedroom apartment. Prosecutors rarely pursue this type of case.

Mail-in voting is a throwback to the dark old days of vote-buying and fraud. Because of this, many countries don’t allow absentee ballots for citizens living in their country, including Norway and Mexico. Americans deserve a more trustworthy system.

The above extract is via Instapundit; the original article in the WSJ is behind a paywall.

And here’s an article by a reporter who demonstrated how easy it is to game the system: “Mail-in Ballots Make Voter Fraud Easy. I Know Because I Did It”.

Ohio voters had their Election Day cancelled, and voters had nothing to say about it. The most recent Cleveland Tea Party blog on this is here.

# # #

Coronavirus and the CDC

Glenn Reynolds (Mr. Instapundit) had this blurb with link:

WELL, THAT’S BECAUSE THE CDC SUCKS. Sick People Across the U.S. Say They Are Being Denied the Coronavirus Test. It sucked with swine flu, it sucked with Ebola, and it’s sucking now.

The link is to a New York Times article, which is behind a paywall. So for a bit of background, you can go instead to Michelle Malkin’s fearless take on the history of the CDC.  A sampling:

I think I’m where most sane people are on the coronavirus outbreak:

—Concerned but not panicked.

—Calm but not apathetic.

—Taking reasonable precautions but remaining skeptical of what all the purportedly “best experts” here in the United States are telling us about every aspect of their belated crisis management and response (especially on their pimping of vaccine development to prevent the disease).

Here are some plain, non-hysterical facts: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control is a bloated federal government agency with a long history of incompetence, fraud, secrecy, mission creep and shady alliances with both social justice causes on the left and private corporations on the big business right. The “deep state” of entrenched bureaucrats embedded in the Beltway bowels is alive and thriving at the CDC. The un-elected elites who’ve occupied top offices at the public health-industrial complex are hostile to public scrutiny while clamoring for ever-ballooning budgets. Their recommendations have often been detrimental to citizens’ well-being and freedom.

Lots more here.

# # #

Twitter: a virus of the mind?

Glenn Reynolds, a/k/a Mr. Instapundit, has a think-piece on the Spectator; his subject is about one of the Big Tech giants, in this case Twitter. Here’s a sample:

Twitter . . . is tightly coupled. The ‘retweet’, ‘comment’, and ‘like’ buttons are immediate. A retweet sends a posting, no matter how angry or misinformed, to all the retweeter’s followers, who can then do the same to their followers, and so on, in a runaway chain reaction. Unlike blogs, little to no thought is required, and in practice very few people even follow the link (if there is one) to ‘read the whole thing’. According to a study by computer scientists at Columbia University and the French National Institute, 59 percent of people who share a link on social media don’t read the underlying story. . . .

. . .

You can reject Twitter’s toxicity by leaving the platform, as I did in the fall of 2018. But . . . this doesn’t really solve the problem: ‘Absent large-scale collective action by the political/media class to reject the platform, simply logging off Twitter is merely a personal defensive mechanism — a sometimes necessary mental-health break that all too often correlates with diminished influence in the national political debate.’ With Twitter, you can participate and be driven crazy – or you can stay sane, and lose influence. That’s a bad trade-off.

. . .

Rather than focusing on the content of what individuals post on social media, regulators might better focus on breaking up these behemoths, policing anticompetitive collusion among them, and in general ensuring that their powers are not abused. This approach, rooted in antitrust law, would raise no First Amendment or free speech problems, and would address many of the most significant complaints about social media.

As Mr. Instapundit is wont to say, read the whole thing – here.

# # #

Andrew Sullivan on the Democrats’ Immigration Bubble

 photo credit: washingtontimes.com

I run hot and cold on Andrew Sullivan, but his analysis of U.S. immigration, refugee status, and asylum is worth the read. The full article is here. This extract is via Instapundit:

Take the tragic tale of Oscar Ramirez and his young daughter Valeria, the father and daughter captured in death in that heartbreaking photograph. Ramirez’s widow explained to the Washington Post why her husband wanted to move to America: He wanted “a better future for their girl.” This is an admirable goal, but it is classic economic immigration, and it would appear, based on what we know, that it has absolutely nothing to do with asylum. Here again is the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services definition: “Refugee status or asylum may be granted to people who have been persecuted or fear they will be persecuted on account of race, religion, nationality, and/or membership in a particular social group or political opinion.”

But somehow the courts have decided that you qualify for asylum if there is simply widespread crime or violence where you live, and Ramirez was also going to use that argument as well. A government need not persecute you; you just have to experience an unsafe environment that your government is failing to suppress. This so expands the idea of asylum, in my view, as to render it meaningless.

Courts have also expanded asylum to include domestic violence, determining that women in abusive relationships are a “particular social group” and thereby qualify. In other words, every woman on the planet who has experienced domestic abuse can now come to America and claim asylum. Also everyone on the planet who doesn’t live in a stable, orderly, low-crime society. Literally billions of human beings now have the right to asylum in America. . . .

This is in a new century when the U.S. is trying to absorb the largest wave of new immigrants in our entire history, and when the percentage of the population that is foreign-born is also near a historic peak. It is also a time when mass immigration from the developing world has destabilized liberal democracies across the West, is bringing illiberal, anti-immigration regimes to power across Europe, and was the single biggest reason why Donald Trump is president.

I’m told that, as a legal immigrant, I’m shutting the door behind me now that I’ve finally made it to citizenship. I’m not. I favor solid continuing legal immigration, but also a reduction in numbers and a new focus on skills in an economy where unskilled labor is increasingly a path to nowhere. It is not strange that legal immigrants — who have often spent years and thousands of dollars to play by the rules — might be opposed to others’ jumping the line. It is not strange that a hefty proportion of Latino legal immigrants oppose illegal immigration — they are often the most directly affected by new, illegal competition, which drives down their wages. . . .

When I’m told only white racists favor restrictionism, I note how the Mexican people are more opposed to illegal immigration than Americans: In a new poll, 61.5 percent of Mexicans oppose the entry of undocumented migrants, period; 44 percent believe that Mexico should remove any undocumented alien immediately. Are Mexicans now white supremacists too? That hostility to illegal immigration may even explain why Trump’s threat to put tariffs on Mexico if it didn’t crack down may well have worked. Since Trump’s bluster, the numbers have measurably declined — and the crackdown is popular in Mexico. I can also note that most countries outside Western Europe have strict immigration control and feel no need to apologize for it. Are the Japanese and Chinese “white supremacists”? Please. Do they want to sustain their own culture and national identity? Sure. Is that now the equivalent of the KKK?

# # #

Why Mr. Instapundit cancelled his Twitter account

I’ve posted earlier links on this subject here. Glenn Reynolds’s (Mr. Instapundit) USA column today expands on why he cancelled his Twitter account. His opener:

I deactivated my Twitter account about a week ago. I was partly acting on impulse, because the social media site had just, for no obvious reason, “permanently banned” someone I follow, something that seems to be happening more and more. 

But I was also acting on my growing belief that Twitter is, well, horrible.

All social media have their issues. The “walled garden” character they create is the antithesis of the traditional Internet philosophy of openness. They are actually consciously designed to be addictive to their users — one company that consults on such issues is actually called Dopamine Labs — and they tend to soak up a huge amount of time in largely profitless strivings for likes and shares. They promote bad feelings and bad behavior: I saw a cartoon listing social media by deadly sins, with Facebook promoting envy, Instagram promoting pride, Twitter promoting wrath, Tinder promoting lust and so on. It seemed about right.

But as someone who spends a lot of time on the internet and whose social media experience goes all the way back to the original Orkut and Friendster, I think that Twitter is the worst.  

In fact, if you set out to design a platform that would poison America’s discourse and its politics, you’d be hard pressed to come up with something more destructive than Twitter. Twitter has the flaws of the old Usenet newsgroups, but on a much bigger scale.

The full column is here.

# # #

Twitter, Facebook, and The Thought Police

art credit: thebiganswer.info

Boris Zelkin at American Greatness cancelled his Twitter account:

This had been building for some time for two primary reasons. First, Twitter, like Facebook (which I had given up a few months ago), is a hate machine. Second, Twitter’s ever-changing terms of service and curiously selective enforcement of said terms via shadow and outright bans made it increasingly obvious that Twitter is less interested in real conversation than it is in kabuki theater conversation—censored one-sided shadow-boxing—replacing freedom of speech with speech at the pleasure of one’s betters.

As such, Twitter has became a platform I can no longer support with my participation.

From my perspective, participation on a platform that actively censors political speech, even when that participation consists of criticism the platform, is a tacit approval. Remember how you felt when you saw those “Occupy Wall Street” folks using iPhones to bemoan capitalism? That’s how I began seeing giving Twitter my voice, a voice that they could choose to either allow or silence if it became pesky or popular enough.

Richard Fernandez at PJ Media reports that Mr. Instapundit dropped his Twitter account:

Glenn Reynolds has deactivated his Twitter account, citing the banning of Jesse Kelly for no apparent reason as the immediate cause of his disillusionment with the platform. Explaining his decision, he wrote:

Why should I provide free content to people I don’t like, who hate me? I’m currently working on a book on social media, and I keep coming back to the point that Twitter is far and away the most socially destructive of the various platforms. So I decided to suspend them, as they are suspending others. At least I’m giving my reasons, which is more than they’ve done usually.

He may have beaten the digital bouncers to the door by only a little. The Thought Police are rushing to ensure that everyone toes the line. 

I found several supposed alternatives to Facebook here, but I had not heard of any of them. Any Tea Party people identifying any good alternatives?

# # #

Voter fraud in the millons

art credit: omnithought.org

At least 3.5 million more people are on U.S. election rolls

 than are eligible to vote. 

Investors Business Daily reports:

Elections: American democracy has a problem — a voting problem. According to a new study of U.S. Census data, America has more registered voters than actual live voters. It's a troubling fact that puts our nation's future in peril.

The data come from Judicial Watch's Election Integrity Project. The group looked at data from 2011 to 2015 produced by the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey, along with data from the federal Election Assistance Commission.

As reported by the National Review's Deroy Murdock, who did some numbers-crunching of his own, "some 3.5 million more people are registered to vote in the U.S. than are alive among America's adult citizens. Such staggering inaccuracy is an engraved invitation to voter fraud."

. . .

In his spread sheet, he listed Delaware county as the Ohio county with the largest number of “ghost” voters. Delaware County includes heavily red Columbus. His chart did not list Cuyahoga County, so I did a little search of my own and found the following at a blog called End of The American Dream, by a blogger named Michael Snyder, reporting on the 2012 election:

Barack Obama received more than 99% of the vote in more than 100 precincts in Cuyahoga County, Ohio on election day.  In fact, there were a substantial number of precincts where Mitt Romney got exactly zero votes.  So how in the world did this happen?  Third world dictators don’t even get 99% of the vote.  Overall, Mitt Romney received 30.12% of the vote in Cuyahoga County.  There were even a bunch of precincts in Cuyahoga County that Romney actually won.  But everyone certainly expected that Cuyahoga County would be Obama territory.  And in most of the precincts that is exactly what we saw – large numbers of votes for both candidates but a definite edge for Obama. 

However, there are more than 100 precincts in Cuyahoga County where the voting results can only be described as truly bizarre.  Yes, we always knew that urban areas would lean very heavily toward Obama, but are we actually expected to believe that Obama got over 99% of the votes in those areas?  In more than 50 different precincts, Romney received 2 votes or less.  Considering how important the swing state of Ohio was to the national election, one would think that such improbable results would get the attention of somebody out there.  Could we be looking at evidence of election fraud hidden in plain sight?

Perhaps if there were just one or two precincts where Obama got more than 99% of the vote we could dismiss the results as “statistical anomalies” and ignore them.

But there were more than 100 precincts where this happened in the most important swing state in the nation.

Maybe there is some rational explanation for the numbers that you are about to see.  If there is, I would really love to hear it.

What makes all of this even more alarming is that there were reports of voting machine problems during early voting in Ohio.  It was being reported that some voters were claiming that they tried to vote for Romney but that the voting machines kept recording their votes as votes for Obama…

Lots more here, including specific data on precincts in Cuyahoga County.

Some Cleveland Tea Party readers often volunteer at the polls as observers. Glenn Reynolds has argued for a return to paper ballots. I wish.

# # #

E-Censorship

 art credit: 2012patriot.wordpress.com

Most days I visit several news aggregators to find reports, analyses, and commentary. A couple of weeks ago, one of the aggregators, Lucianne.com, was down for several days. It wasn’t the first time it went down, and I wonder about why it happened. For the last two days, another aggregator, Politipage, has gone blank. Hmm. Maybe these were just technical crashes. Both these aggregators lean conservative.

In what are probably related developments, some prominent conservative voices have been demonetized or blocked from Facebook or other platforms. Among them are Diamond and Silk, Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, and Avi Yemini.

Glenn Reynolds (Mr. Instapundit) has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today titled “When Digital Platforms Become Censors: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other tech giants say that they’re open forums. What happens when they start to shut down voices they consider beyond the pale?”:

Call 2018 the “Year of Deplatforming.” The internet was once celebrated for allowing fresh new voices to escape the control of gatekeepers. But this year, the internet giants decided to slam the gates on a number of people and ideas they don’t like. If you rely on someone else’s platform to express unpopular ideas, especially ideas on the right, you’re now at risk. This raises troubling questions, not only for free speech but for the future of American politics and media.

That’s his opener. The rest of his commentary is here.

# # #

The popular vote and the Electoral College

graphic credit: XaniaTube

Mr. Instapundit comments:  

THE NARRATIVE CHANGES TO FIT THE NEEDS OF THE MOMENT: “I am already seeing Democrats blaming the Electoral College, which until a few hours ago was hailed as the great protector of Democratic virtue for decades to come, and Republicans were silly for not understanding how to crack the blue ‘wall.'”

Dems were praising the Electoral College just before the 2000 election, too, back when they thought Al Gore might win the electoral vote but lose the popular vote. They turned on a dime when the reverse happened, of course.

Not all the votes are tabulated, and not all of them will be, but even if Hillary does win the popular vote, Trump won by a yuge margin in the Electoral College. I was interested to find something of a refresher course in a column (“Hillary wins the Popular Vote – Not”) at American Thinker, by Steve Feinstein. Here are some extracts:

Okay, let’s address this “Hillary might win the popular vote, isn’t that Electoral College situation just awful” thing head on.

No, it’s not awful.  It’s great, and it protects the importance of your vote.  It’s also uniquely American and demonstrates yet again the once-in-creation brilliance of the Founding Fathers.

First of all, she’s probably not going to win the actual number of votes cast.  She may win the number of votes counted, but not the votes cast.

States don’t count their absentee ballots unless the number of outstanding absentee ballots is larger than the state margin of difference.  If there is a margin of 1,000 votes counted and there are 1,300 absentee ballots outstanding, then the state tabulates those.  If the number of outstanding absentee ballots wouldn’t influence the election results, then the absentee ballots aren’t counted. [UPDATE 11/12: this paragraph proves to be incorrect. Absentee ballots ARE counted, but often not until after the Election is called. IOW, the popular vote totals will change.] 

. . .

Getting back to the “win the popular vote/lose the Electoral College” scenario: Thank G-d we have that, or else California and N.Y. would determine every election.  Every time.

. . .

That means that the vast majority of 48 states and their populations will be subject to the whim and desire of just two states.  If those two states have similar demographics and voting preferences at any particular point in time (which they do now), then those two states call the shots for the entire country.

But the Electoral College brilliantly smooths out the variances in the voting proclivities among states and regions.  Farmers in the middle of the country and importers and exporters on the shore get roughly equal say, as do Madison Ave. execs and factory workers in Tennessee.

Shortcomings?  Sure.  The E.C. can make an R vote meaningless in a very few heavily D states or vice versa.  But without the Electoral College, the country’s entire population is subject to the disproportionate voting preferences of the few most populous states.

The entire article is here.

# # #

Can federal agencies protect Cleveland?

photo credit: cleveland.com

Security and safety measures for downtown Cleveland during the Republican National Convention are planned and implemented by local, state, and federal agencies. Personnel from Cleveland Police Dept., Cleveland Fire Dept., Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Dept., state troopers from Michigan and Wisconsin, etc, are working with the Secret Service, the FBI, and FEMA, among other agencies. (Background reports are here and here.)

Just how effective are the federal agencies? Mr. Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds, published a few sobering thoughts in his USA article “FBI's reputation crumbles with Clinton email fumble.” An excerpt:

the FBI is just one of many federal agencies whose reputation for professionalism has taken a hit during the Obama years. The IRS, complicit in targeting Tea Party groups for their political views, is one. The Secret Service, which has figured in numerous sexual scandals and failures to protect, is another. And, in fact, the notion of a “non-partisan” and competent civil service has taken quite a knock, as one agency after another has seemed ready, willing and able to be compromised by politics.

Politicians have a short-term focus, seldom looking past the next election. But for those of us with a longer view, this is a serious problem. As The Atlantic recently noted, trust in government is collapsing around the world. The reason for this, I’m afraid, is that government isn’t trustworthy. 

I will be going to the meeting next week at Cleveland Public Auditorium to hear the updates from law enforcement and other personnel. My list of questions already includes: does CPD intend to deputize, say, any Oath Keepers? Has there been any communication with the Ohio National Guard? Is Gov. Kasich prepared to activate the compact to request National Guard troops from other states?

Am I overly concerned? Well, I was living in Cleveland during the race riots of 1968 and passed armed National Guard troops in jeeps or on foot on just about every street corner heading into downtown. I remember feeling safer because of their presence. Maybe I am overly worried about everyone’s safety during RNC week, but some of the reports and the list of organizations sending in paid protesters make me think that, to paraphrase Miss Piggy, too much preparation is never enough.

# # #

Brexit, snowflakes, and younger generations

cartoon by Ramirez via jewishworldreview.com

Glenn Reynolds, Mr. Instapundit, is one of my daily stops online for news and links. He ran a quote about British students (a/k/a snowflakes) complaining about the Brexit vote. And he posted Richard Fernandez’s (Mr. Belmont Club’s) response.

UK STUDENTS COMPLAIN ABOUT BREXIT: “A really important decision was made for us by the older generation” . . . “Essentially people much, much older than us — and who won’t be around for the consequences — are giving us a future we don’t want.”

On Facebook, Richard Fernandez’s response is brutal:

Essentially people much older than you gave you what you now take for granted. They won World War 2, fueled the great boom, walked through the valley of the shadow of nuclear death — and had you.

You didn’t make the present, nor as you now complain, are you making the future. No children, no national defense, no love of God or country.

But that’s just it. You’ve brainwashed yourselves into thinking someone else: the old, the older, the government, the dead would always do things for you.

If you learn anything from Brexit, learn that nobody got anywhere expecting someone to do things for him.

I wish I had thought to make such points when I was discussing the Brexit vote with one of my liberal friends (who was shocked when I said that my husband and I were planning to pop a special cork that evening to celebrate the vote).

# # #

IRS Scandal is 1000 days old

Cartoon credit: teachufr.org

A few days ago, Glenn Reynolds (Mr. Instapundit) published a column in USA Today about the IRS scandal and Tea Party groups:

Last week saw the passage of a grim milestone in government corruption: Pepperdine University Law Professor Paul Caron’s TaxProf blog marked the 1000th day of the scandal involving the IRS’s deliberate political targeting of conservative “Tea Party” groups. 

. . .

But what happened in the IRS scandal wasn’t a case of bureaucrats slow-walking ideas they think are dumb. It was, instead, a case of bureaucrats targeting people because of their political views.

Ohio Tea Party activist Justin Binik-Thomas noticed in 2012 that the IRS was asking Tea Party organizations if they knew him. The IRS denied that it was targeting people based on their political views, then admitted that it was doing so but blamed low-level employees in the Cincinnati office.

Then it turned out that, as the Treasury Inspector General found, there was much more going on. The next day, the acting IRS commissioner resigned.

There was much talk about accountability, even from President Obama, but, in the end, we got something that looked more like a whitewash. 

As Caron wrote:

"On May 22, 2013, the IRS director (of exempt organizations) asserted her Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and refused to testify before a House committee. She was placed on administrative leave. The following month, it was revealed that she received a $42,000 bonus. She retired in September.

"On Jan. 9, 2014, it was revealed that the Department of Justice attorney leading the investigation was a donor to the president's campaigns. A week later, the Justice Department revealed it would not bring any criminal charges. Attorneys for many of the targeted political groups complained that they had never been contacted in the investigation.

"On Feb. 2, 2014, the president stated in a televised interview before the Super Bowl that although there 'were some bone-headed decisions out of a local (IRS) office ... (there was) not even a smidgen of corruption.'

"On May 7, 2014, the House voted 231-187 to hold the former IRS director in contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate in its investigation (six members of the president's party voted with the majority). The House also voted 250-168 to request the attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate (26 members of the president's party voted with the majority)."

Of course, nothing happened. Obama Administration Attorney General Loretta Lynch said that the U.S. Attorney was using "prosecutorial discretion.” That discretion protected [former IRS director Lois] Lerner from the grand jury.

Read the rest here. 

# # #