Let's start today's newsbiting with a front-page newsbite!
A few moments ago I sent the link to "He Whose Name
Dare Not Be Mentioned," but "he" is a very busy man. Since my
buddy gets automatic updates each time I add a new post to Usually Right, by
posting Mike Needham's commentary here, I'm actually upping the odds that he'll
read it!
You should all read it. Those of you who don't consider
yourselves fans of the "Tea Party" might find yourselves at least
reexamining your own internal intellectual consistency. Certainly the "Tea
Party" Republicans are the ones standing against crony capitalism.
Anyway... here goes...
Legendary computer scientist Alan Kay once said “The best
way to create the future is to invent it.” It’s an ethos that has animated
every great American entrepreneur and driven our nation’s economy since its
founding.
Will that attitude survive the times we live in?
Today, two competing impulses vie for the soul of our
nation’s economy. The first is that great American impulse: See a problem,
start a company and solve the problem. The second is the advice of our nation’s
crony Capitol: Hire a lobbyist to get politicians, regulators and bureaucrats
to enact policies that protect you from competition.
Nowhere has the spirit of entrepreneurship been greater
in the world than Silicon Valley. It is a bastion of free enterprise and proof
the American Dream remains a reality. Yet, ever since Sen. Orrin Hatch,
R-Utah, famously told Bill Gates in 2000
“If you want to get involved in business, then get involved in Washington,” the
Valley’s relationship with Washington has changed.
The evolution of Big Tech has been well-documented. Once
adverse to the ways of Washington, the industry has embraced the capital’s
pay-to-influence culture, and headlines this week paint a startling picture:
The Hill:
McCarthy’s rise could be boon for tech
Politico: Tech riding high with expected McCarthy
ascension
In article after article, Kevin McCarthy, the [now]
third-ranking House Republican, is portrayed as the “unofficial ambassador to
Silicon Valley for House Republicans.” Facebook’s vice president of U.S. public
policy told one Washington publication that McCarthy “intuitively understands
the industry’s culture of innovation and knows what’s needed to protect it.”
Protect it?
Facebook didn’t grow into a $168 billion company because
Washington took steps to protect it. The same is true for tech giants Amazon,
Apple, eBay, Google, Intel and Microsoft.
Nonetheless, companies and industries increasingly see
their future tied to various actors in Washington. Take Dave Brat’s stunning
victory last week. It sent shockwaves through the business community.
Again, the headlines said it all:
Politico: Wall Street loses ally with Eric Cantor loss
KC Business Journal: How Eric Cantor’s loss is bad for
business — big business, that is
Boeing’s stock dropped 2.3% the day after Brat’s victory
on fears the Export-Import Bank would not be reauthorized. The taxpayer-backed
export agency is predicted to “support” $10 billion in Boeing sales this year
even though the company stated less than a year ago it could find its own
financing.
On Fox News Sunday last week, George Will explained the
significance of the Ex-Im Bank, which he said played “a larger role” than
amnesty in Brat’s victory:
“I’ll tell you something that may get done now because of
this, and that is de- authorizing, refusing to reauthorize the Export-Import
Bank, which is known in Washington for very good reason as Boeing’s bank, and
has become a symbol to people like David Brat of crony capitalism, not without
reason.”
Even if you set aside the merits of this particular
government intervention or that particular program, the degree to which
businesses rely on the U.S. government and the ability a single member of
Congress has to affect an industry is alarming.
8 comments:
http://miami.cbslocal.com/2014/06/18/children-immigrants-an-impending-issue-for-miami-dade-schools/
The crisis of children crossing the border without their parents and filling up shelters in Miami-Dade county is becoming an impending issue in Florida’s public school system.
“We have received about 300 students from Honduras over the past few months so recognizing the challenge, that crisis, we’re asking federal got to intervene,” said Miami-Dade Superintendent Alberto Carvalho.
“It is unsustainable and unless the feds step in, we are going to find ourselves in a very big crisis,” said State Representative Jose Felix Diaz
In the past nine months 50,000 unaccompanied children immigrants have crossed our borders with smugglers who know they can cash in on kids who receive much more lenient consideration at the border. The children are in Texas, California, Arizona and in three local South Florida shelters.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/the-irs-memory-hole-1403219814
So which IRS divisions are still functional, apart from those responsible for collecting tax dollars and targeting conservative groups? The IT department is supposedly to blame for more than two years of missing emails, and the congressional relations team seems to entertain delusions of competence, even as it misleads a sympathetic Senate committee. The list of, er, "coincidences," lengthens.
On Monday IRS Commissioner John Koskinen met with Finance Chairman Ron Wyden and ranking Republican Orrin Hatch to explain the apparent hard-drive meltdowns that erased the communications to the rest of the executive branch from Lois Lerner and six IRS colleagues. The bipartisan duo learned that the IRS discovered the gap late in February, though by then the investigation had been underway for nearly a year.
In early April the IRS relayed the information to the Treasury, and the Treasury informed the White House the same month. But for some reason Congress and the public were left out of this information daisy chain until last Friday.
The IRS has no explanation for the two-month blackout period.
* ONE MORE TIME...
The IRS has no explanation for the two-month blackout period.
At the Monday meeting with Senate Finance, Mr. Koskinen also neglected to mention the detail of the six other IRS employees whose computers also [supposedly] crashed at the same time as Ms. Lerner's, though he must have known.
(*PURSED LIPS*)
IRS staff didn't tell Senate staff in a meeting the same day either.
Mr. Hatch revealed in a letter Thursday that he found out about this in a press release from the HouseWays and Means Committee.
This turn of events is all the more remarkable because Messrs. Wyden and Hatch were about to close a Senate investigation that involved 700,000 pages of documents and 30 interviews. They had agreed on consensus findings of fact that were being drafted, but Mr. Hatch asked for Mr. Koskinen to formally attest that all relevant communications had been produced to Congress. Forcing the IRS chief to go on legal record may help explain why the email gap was finally disclosed after two months, instead of even later or never.
* ONE... MORE... TIME...
Forcing the IRS chief to go on legal record may help explain why the email gap was finally disclosed after two months, instead of even later or never.
Mr. Koskinen's lack of candor is either evidence of ineptitude or deliberate abuse, and the Senate committee has reopened its probe. To recover the emails, Congress will need to expand its inquiry beyond the IRS proper to the Treasury, Justice Department and even the White House.
* KOSKINEN SHOULD BE IN JAIL... PERIOD.
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://online.wsj.com/articles/kim-strassel-about-those-missing-emails-1403220814
A year into congressional investigations of IRS targeting, we know two things beyond a doubt:
1) We know from the public record that starting in 2010 the most powerful leaders of the Democratic Party — President Obama, Senate chairmen, House Democrats — ran a ceaseless campaign pressuring the IRS to silence conservative groups.
2) We also know from internal IRS emails that Ms. Lerner, the former head of exempt organizations, was at the epicenter of an agency effort to silence those very groups, in the precise same time frame.
What we don't know is the interaction between the two.
The IRS's deliberate withholding for a year of Lerner emails allowed the press and liberals to crow that there was no "there" there — zero evidence of Lerner collusion with anybody in the Democratic Party.
But...
* BUT...!!!
...the alleged disappearance of Ms. Lerner's hard drive — and the fact that the missing conversations are those the former IRS director had with people outside the IRS — has suddenly resurrected, with force, the explosive possibility that she was chatting with Democrats who mattered.
* PROBABILITY... PROBABILITY...
There's plenty of reason to believe she was. Just last week Congress discovered (via a subpoena to the Justice Department) emails showing that Ms. Lerner had conversations with Justice prosecutors about investigating conservative non-profits.
(Or consider the extraordinary interaction between congressional Democrats and the IRS. Some of it was in a recent complaint filed to the Senate Ethics Committee by the Center for Competitive Politics against nine Democratic senators. It details their many letters and statements - that we know of - demanding the IRS shut down specific organizations that posed a threat to their Democratic House and Senate majority in the 2010 election.)
Sen. Carl Levin, the head of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, exchanged at least 12 letters (that we know about) with the IRS in 2012 alone.
IRS officials, including Ms. Lerner, met with Sen. Levin's staff in 2013.
And former IRS Acting Commissioner Stephen Miller testified that the IRS acted in part because Sen. Levin was "complaining bitterly" to the agency.
(Were email conversations also taking place, behind the scenes, between the Levin office and Ms. Lerner and other IRS officials?)
We do know that email conversations were common. A new and comprehensive House Oversight Committee report this week — about how politics drove the IRS affair — reveals fascinating details about just how chummy Democratic staff was with the IRS. We find a staffer for Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin in October 2010 emailing no less than the IRS chief of staff, Jonathan Davis (who he addresses in familiar terms), with a "heads up" about a Durbin letter to the IRS commissioner demanding an investigation of Crossroads GPS, a conservative group. "We're not the first to ask, of course," the staffer acknowledges in the email. A few months later, Ms. Lerner asked her staff why it hadn't taken action against Crossroads.
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
Here we also find staff from Sen. Chuck Schumer in March 2012 tipping off an IRS employee to a coming New York Times article about non-profits, a tip that was passed to Ms. Lerner. This is the same Sen. Schumer who has been open in public speeches about the need for Democrats to use the IRS to crack down on the "extraordinary influence" of Tea Party groups (as he was quoted as saying in January 2014). When did he first start looking to use the IRS this way, and who did he talk to there?
We have emails suggesting that IRS staff aided Sen. Levin in putting together his letters of complaint to the IRS.
We have staff for House Democrat Elijah Cummings asking the IRS for information to use in Mr. Cummings's campaign against a specific conservative organization, True the Vote. (Ms. Lerner got involved in that one — querying her staff as to whether they'd helped Mr. Cummings.)
As to Ms. Lerner's behavior, consider that House Ways & Means Chairman Dave Camp first sent a letter asking if the IRS was engaged in targeting in June, 2011. Ms. Lerner denied it.
* SHE LIED...
* AND THEN...
She engineered a plant in an audience at a tax conference in May 2013 to drop the bombshell news about targeting (maybe hoping nobody would notice?).
(*PURSED LIPS*)
She has subsequently asserted a Fifth Amendment right to silence in front of the only people actually investigating the affair - Congress.
* WHERE... IS... HOLDER...?!
Now we learn that Lerner's hard drive supposedly defied modernity and suffered total annihilation... about 10 days after the Camp letter arrived.
* NO BACK-UPS. NOTHING "IN THE CLOUD."
Is there something in those lost emails? The fact that they are "lost" at all probably answers that question.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/dinesh-dsouzas-america-banished-from-new-york-times-best-seller-list/article/2549991
The New York Times bestseller list hasn't waited a millisecond to put Hillary Clinton's book atop its influential chart after just a week of sales, but has totally ignored another top-10 hardcover from noted conservative and critic of President Obama, Dinesh D'Souza.
His new book, on sale for three weeks, isn’t just absent from the top 10 lists already set for the next two Sundays, but totally missing from the list of the nation’s top 25 nonfiction hardcovers despite having sales higher than 13 on the latest Times chart.
According to sales reports provided to Secrets, D'Souza's new book America: Imagine a World Without Her, sold 4,915 in the first week and 5,592 in the second week.
Had it been included on the upcoming June 22 Times hardcover nonfiction list, it would have ranked No. 8, and then No. 11 on the June 29 list that puts Clinton's sales at 85,721.
In America, D’Sousa slams Obama’s agenda and targets Clinton too — maybe one reason the Times hasn’t recognized it.
“They are part of the propaganda arm of the Obama administration,” D'Souza told Secrets from Philadelphia, where his book and movie bus tour had stopped before traveling to Washington on Friday. His Obama's America was a Times No. 1 best-seller.
“It’s their newspaper, and they have a right to rig their list anyway they want, but if they are doing it, people should know,” he said.
D'Souza...said the list is important to boosting sales. “It matters to be on it,” he said. But to ignore his latest best seller, he said, “the Times is falling short of its journalistic and editorial responsibilities in a much a bigger way than keeping me off the list.”
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/11004507-disability-beneficiaries-top-11-million-first-time
The total number of disability "beneficiaries" in the United States topped 11 million for the first time last month...
The number of Americans receiving disability benefits continues to exceed the population of Greece, Tunisia and Portugal and is drawing closer to Cuba, whose population of 11,047,251 (as reported by the CIA) is just 42,477 more than the 11,004,507 Americans receiving disability benefits.
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jun/20/bruceraising-a-police-state-army/
* BY TAMMY BRUCE
With so much happening internationally and the number of scandals, crises and general screw-ups of the Obama administration here at home, it’s worth noting a disturbing development here on the domestic front: a rapidly expanding police state.
On my radio program last week I had the pleasure of speaking with Cheryl Chumley, a reporter for The Washington Times, about her new book, “Police State USA: How George Orwell’s Nightmare is Becoming our Reality.” The title says it all, and aptly describes the shocking transformation of what had been our free society.
We all know about the scope of National Security Agency (NSA) spying. It’s fair to say at this point in our lives that the notion of privacy is all but dead and gone.
However, it didn’t start there. In her book, Mrs. Chumley takes us on a ride through history, reminding us of the original intentions of the Founding Fathers versus the assault on the original design by “21st century realities.”
Keep in mind, people in the political class constantly reveal their contempt for regular citizens. That contempt is the inevitable result of a group of people who have convinced themselves that big government is necessary because the little people can’t control their own lives.
These same politicians and bureaucrats then begin to see themselves a genuinely better than everyone else. After all, if they were just like us, then they’d be part of the rabble, and they can’t have that. The solution to their dilemma is a police state.
Mrs. Chumley’s chapters in “Police State USA” provide a treatise on all the elements of society that are under attack as big government seeks to sustain itself through a police state, including aspects of an expanding and increasingly paranoid bureaucratic system that has decided the individual is the problem.
Regarding our nation being under attack by thugs intent on creating a police state, Mrs. Chumley notes:
“The Founding Fathers wouldn’t recognize America today. The God-given freedoms they championed in the Bill of Rights have been chipped away over the years by an ever-intrusive government bent on controlling all aspects of our lives in the name of safety and security. NSA wire-tapping and data collection is Orwellian in its scope. The TSA, BLM, and IRS are all jockeying for control of our lives. Warrantless searches are on the rise and even encouraged in some communities. Free speech, the right to bear arms, private property, and freedom of religion all are under attack. The Constitution has been tossed on the same trash pile as the Bible.”
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
Spying is one thing, but control is, in fact, key. During the Obama administration, most of us have grown concerned about the massive buy-up of ammunition of various federal agencies. The U.S. Postal Service, the Department of Agriculture, the Commerce Department and even the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, among so many other agencies, have acquired billions of rounds of ammunition.
In an article for Newsmax, Mrs. Chumley spoke with Philip Van Cleave, president of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, who asked the telling question, “Why exactly does a weather service need ammunition?" “NOAA — really? They have a need? One just doesn’t know why they’re doing this,” he said. “The problem is, all these agencies have their own SWAT teams, their own police departments, which is crazy. In theory, it was supposed to be the U.S. marshals that was the armed branch for the federal government.”
(*NOD*)
In addition to mini-police forces attached to federal agencies, Mrs. Chumley addresses the “acquisition by police departments of major battlefield equipment emboldens officials to strong-arm those they should be protecting.” The New York Times reports, “During the Obama administration, according to Pentagon data, police departments have received tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft.”
Silencers? Machine guns? Now why would local law enforcement need that sort of gear?
They do if they’re conditioning everyone, including local law enforcement itself, to believe that a police state is necessary and inevitable. The good news is, that’s a lie. It doesn’t have to be either. Speaking to a solution, Cheryl Chumley’s book concludes with a call to “Throw the bums out — why virtue, accountability are key.”
It’s one thing to have this unfold, and quite another to allow it to continue. One of the first things necessary to take back this nation is becoming informed. “Police State USA” is the book that will get you there and inspire you to defend this nation from big government zealots who believe you won’t notice what they’re up to.
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