Month: June 2014

John Conyers asks Obama to bail Detroiters out of their water bills

The latest from that Petri dish of left-wing ideas called Detroit:

U.S. Rep. John Conyers wants President Barack Obama to sanction use of an earlier multimillion-dollar award to Michigan to help pay delinquent water bills of low-income residents threatened by the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department’s most aggressive shutoff campaign ever.

“Assisting low-income residents with paying their water bills would help avert a public health crisis,” Conyers, D-Detroit, said in a letter to Obama Thursday. Separately, he asked Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell to declare a public health emergency, calling the shutoff campaign “draconian” and raising concerns about what it could mean to the young, sick or elderly.

Alternate headline: Liberal congressman asks liberal president to force everybody else to pay for inevitable effect of unchecked liberalism.

Pay attention, RNC: This is how to handle the Dems defending the IRS

This is such a good approach that there’s probably no way that the RNC will run with it:

Toss in some brief interviews from people whose lives have been left in ruins by the IRS for relatively trivial matters and then cut back to Dems apologizing to the agency and any Republican would have a great ad.

Oh, and you know how if you’ve been a really horrible person and when you die those creepy, moaning demons cloaked in black robes emerge to drag you down to hell for an eternity of suffering? I think they all look like John Koskinen, except they care more about what happened to Lois Lerner’s lost emails.

Bill Clinton honored to be among those who successfully fought to overturn law he signed

Bill Clinton’s entire political career in a single nutshell:

Former President Bill Clinton, in a video message to be broadcast this week, says he was “honored and grateful to be among the voices urging” the overturning of the Defense of Marriage Act, the measure he signed into law in 1996 that barred federal recognition of same-sex marriages.

Clinton fans are applauding his “growth” on the issue. Bull. The Clintons are corks on the high seas — they will go wherever the waves take them. Bill Clinton is against DOMA for the same reason he was for it in 1996: Pure politics. The Clintons have no actual “convictions,” if you don’t count the byproducts of Whitewater and illegal fundraising.

Kerry lands in Baghdad to preach inclusiveness

kerryshirt

In Iraq, Islamist militants are butchering people in droves with the intent of taking over the country and installing Sharia law. John Kerry blames a lack of government inclusiveness.

Progressivism in a nutshell:

US secretary of state John Kerry landed in Baghdad on Monday to press Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to form a more inclusive government in response to a Sunni insurgency that has swept much of northern and western Iraq.

Kerry’s visit came after Sunni militants took strongholds along Iraq’s western border at the weekend, strengthening supply routes from Syria where they have exploited a three-year-old rebellion to capture swathes of territory.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Sunday accused Washington of trying to regain control of the country it once occupied — a charge Kerry denied, saying the United States was committed to helping Iraq but wanted a more inclusive government.

Try giving ISIS a “reset button,” Mr. Kerry — it worked so well when Hillary gave one to Russia.

House GOPers looking for the “lost” Lois Lerner emails might want to check with these guys

Many Lois Lerner emails from 2009 to 2011 are “lost” according to the IRS. They say Lerner’s hard drive was “recycled” and the emails are unrecoverable.

Maybe the House GOP should check with these guys — check out this from October of 2009:

More from Reason:

The IRS had a contract with email backup service vendor Sonasoft starting in 2005, according to FedSpending.org, which lists the contract as being for “automatic data processing services.” Sonasoft’s motto is “email archiving done right,” and the company lists the IRS as a customer.
[…]
The extent and exact details of the service that Sonasoft provided to the IRS aren’t clear. But the company advertises its email archiving solution as “ideal for small and medium businesses, government agencies, school districts, nonprofit organizations using Microsoft’s Exchange Server.” And a document posted on its website describing its services says that its system “archives all email content and so reduces the risk of non-compliance with legal, regulatory and other obligations to preserve critical business content.”

In late 2011, Sonasoft’s website still listed the IRS as a customer, meaning the company was (presumably) backing up the IRS’ data the entire time the IRS and Dems insist the Lerner emails are “lost” forever.

The Republicans might want to give Sonasoft a call. Or a subpoena.

The IRS is required by law to archive emails, and if nobody can produce them heads should roll — but accountability isn’t exactly among the major concerns of this administration.

IRS commish: Yeah, Lois Lerner’s hard drive was destroyed — what’s the big deal?

Democrats offered a strong defense (for congressional Dems, criticism of the agency responsible for tax collection is akin to blasphemy) of the IRS and its commissioner at yesterday’s hearing.

The IRS commissioner admitted that Lois Lerner’s hard drive was trashed three years ago:

The IRS targeting happened before John Koskinen became the head of the IRS, but if you saw yesterday’s hearing, the guy’s either dangerously ignorant and incurious about what’s gone on at his own agency or he’s doing his best to help keep something from surfacing.

Electric Harley: Good idea or the end of America as we know it?

Let this meeting of the Ed Begley Jr. chapter of the Hell’s Angels come to order:

Rumor has it the ad slogan is going to be “For the man who has had everything… except a beating at Sturgis.”

I’ll take the loud, fossil fuel powered Harleys any day. A good Harley is one that you can hear from a half mile away and is proudly sporting an American flag while being ridden by a guy wearing a shirt that says “if you can read this the bitch fell off.”

Electric Harleys? Having trouble wrapping my head around that one. “Rolling Thunder” just would not be the same if it were called “Rolling Barely Perceptible Buzzing Sound.”

James Rosen sacks Psaki on Benghazi attacker excuse

It took the U.S. nearly two years to take into custody the “mastermind” of the Benghazi attack (how one can “mastermind” what was allegedly a spontaneous attack is anybody’s guess). The person in question lived relatively openly in Libya, and even conducted media interviews.

State Department spokes-hack Jen Psaki was grilled about it by Fox News’ James Rosen:

The answer as to why the Obama administration waited so long is that the wheels are coming off everything else and they need to reel in every piece of “good news” they possibly can.

Naturally the Obama administration will try the attacker in U.S. civil court. Nothing like affording constitutional protections to people who have dedicated their lives to loathing the U.S. Constitution.

Having solved all other problems at the VA…

Veterans died on secret waiting lists? We’d better clean up the oceans!

I’m more convinced than ever that the government and their accomplices invented the global warming scare as a way to distract from their own incompetence when necessary. And to get rich, of course.

Update:

John Kerry is also focused like a laser on the oceans during this time of crisis in Iraq.