Author Archives: R.D. Walker

He is right. The federal government can do anything to anybody and there isn’t a damned thing you can do about it. Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA) got a standing ovation in the chamber for this.

I don’t know much about the good congressman, but right now I want him to be the next president.

I think I will watch it again.

Huh? Scandals? What scandals?

The public’s interest in the ongoing controversies surrounding the IRS and Benghazi is lower than comparable major news stories in the past, according to a Gallup survey released Friday.

According to the poll, slim majorities say they’re closely following the twin controversies, with 54 percent tracking the IRS’s singling out of conservative groups and 53 percent watching the Benghazi hearings. The levels of interest for both are below the 60 percent average Gallup says comparable news stories tend to generate, based on a 200 story spanning decades.
Twenty-two percent said they’re not following either story very closely, and 24 percent said they’re not following either story at all.

“The amount of attention Americans are paying to the IRS and the Benghazi situations is well below the average for news stories Gallup has tracked over the years,” Gallup Editor in Chief Frank Newport wrote in his analysis of the data. “This overall lack of attention is due in part to Democrats’ and, to a lesser degree, independents’ lack of interest, which stands in sharp contrast to the significantly above-average attention among Republicans.”

Here is a short, sweet recap for the low info types.

That’s right kids. She will be watching you.

The Internal Revenue Service official in charge of the tax-exempt organizations at the time when the unit targeted tea party groups now runs the IRS office responsible for the health care legislation.

Sarah Hall Ingram served as commissioner of the office responsible for tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012. But Ingram has since left that part of the IRS and is now the director of the IRS’ Affordable Care Act office, the IRS confirmed to ABC News today.

She hasn’t been asked to resign. Her successor who had nothing to with it, however, was.

You know, this is a validation of every damned right wing conspiracy theory there is. It is getting increasingly difficult to believe that Obama isn’t literally using its power harass and intimidate his political enemies. I wonder if we are paranoid enough.

As I said before, evidently the only government entity that Obama is in charge of is Seal Team Six.

Late Monday came the breathtaking news of a full-frontal assault on the First Amendment by his administration: word that the Justice Department had gone on a fishing expedition through months of phone records of Associated Press reporters.

And yet President Obama reacted much as he did to the equally astonishing revelation on Friday that the IRS had targeted conservative groups based on their ideology: He responded as though he were just some bloke on a bar stool, getting his information from the evening news.

In the phone-snooping case, Obama didn’t even stir from his stool. Instead, he had his press secretary, former Time magazine journalist Jay Carney, go before an incensed press corps Tuesday afternoon and explain why the president will not be involving himself in his Justice Department’s trampling of press freedoms.

More here.