The more the evidence emerges, the more one has to wonder: Could Obamacare have been designed any more poorly? Even those who don’t mind Obamacare’s striking consolidation of power and money in Washington at the expense of Americans’ liberty, or who don’t mind the medical overhaul’s $2 trillion price-tag over its real first decade (2014 to 2023), must be starting to wonder at the sheer ineptitude of those who spearheaded its passage and penned its provisions.
The thoughtful Carl Cannon has written a piece, "Richard Milhous Obama," concluding that our current president has more in common with our 37th than President Obama's partisans would like to acknowledge. The estimable Victor Davis Hanson has weighed in, defending against liberal dissents the proposition that "Nixon Is a Fair Comparison" with Obama.
Perhaps no other IRS official is more intimately associated with the tax agency's growing scandal than Lois Lerner, director of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations Division. Since admitting the IRS harassed hundreds of conservative and Tea Party groups for over two years, Lerner has been criticized for a number of untruths—including the revelation that she apparently lied about planting a question at an American Bar Association conference where she first publicly acknowledged IRS misconduct.
The crusade to save the spotted owl continues. It began with limiting timber sales on federally managed lands in order to preserve the owl's preferred habitat. As a result, Teresa Platt writes:
White House spokesman Jay Carney said that questions about Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius for Obamacare fundraising are similar to questions about President Obama's birth certificate:
Texas senator John Cornyn asked former IRS chief Douglas Shulman to apologize to his constituents for the IRS's wrongdoings. Shulman refused. Here's the exchange:
"Mr. Shulman," said Cornyn, "I wonder if you have any words of apology for my constituents and others who feel like the public trust has been violated by IRS."
The inspector general who filed the report on the IRS targeting conservatives and former IRS commissioner agree: The law is relevant. The statements were made at a hearing today on Capitol Hill:
The statements are in response to Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer who said over the weekend that the "law is irrelevant":
President Barack Obama's former chief of staff, Jack Lew, the current treasury secretary, said today at a Capitol Hill hearing that he was aware "questions had been raised" about the IRS when he was at the White House:
"I was not aware of this audit until I met with the inspector general on March 15, 2013," Lew says.
A senator follows-up, "Had you heard of anything at the White House regarding -- "
Testifying today on Capitol Hill, Douglas Shulman, the former IRS commissioner, says he "can't say" how the targeting of conservatives by the agency he once led happened:
A senator asks, "If you could just very quickly, in a nutshell, bottom-line: How did this happen?"
"Mr. Chairman," Shulman says, "I can't say that I know that answer."
Texas senator John Cornyn has released this video, titled "A Culture of Intimidation," about the IRS's targeting of conservatives in his home state and across the nation:
Today, the Government Accountability Office issued a report of preliminary finding on the progress the Department of Homeland Security has made in its efforts to reduce the backlog of immigrant visas. Although almost 863,000 records were "closed" in the last two years, the backlog of potential overstays remains at more than one million [emphasis added]:
Ethan Epstein: "One Tough Nutter: Philadelphia’s Democratic mayor has cracked down on crime, reformed the city’s finances, and spoken frankly about black family breakdown."
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