What’s interesting in the news today?
1. Ted Cruz and the definitive list of Obama’s 76 lawless actions. Not surprising. As today’s news shows, everything this administration does has an element of fraud involved.
From TheDailyCaller “Republican Sen. Ted Cruz released a definitive list Wednesday of 76 “lawless” Obama administration actions and abuses of power.
Cruz’s “The Legal Limit Report No. 4,” obtained by The Daily Caller, delves into little-known and little-reported details of President Obama’s executive actions. Cruz was set to discuss his report at the Federalist Society in the Promenade Ballroom of the Mayflower Hotel in Washington at 2:15 PM Wednesday.
“Of all the troubling aspects of the Obama presidency, none is more dangerous than the President’s persistent pattern of lawlessness, his willingness to disregard the written law and instead enforce his own policies via executive fiat,” Cruz stated in the report’s introductory remarks.
“President Obama has openly defied [rule of law] by repeatedly suspending, delaying, and waiving portions of the laws that he is charged to enforce. When President Obama disagreed with federal immigration laws, he instructed the Justice Department to cease enforcing the laws. He did the same thing with federal welfare law, drug laws, and the federal Defense of Marriage Act,” Cruz wrote. “In the more than two centuries of our nation’s history, there is simply no precedent for the White House wantonly ignoring federal law and asking others to do the same.”
You can read the entire list at the link. It speaks for itself, and he more than makes his case.
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2. Will they lock her up if that’s what it takes to get answers from her?
From RollCall “Deep in the recesses of congressional power — and in precedent stretching back to the 18th century — is the ability to pursue “inherent contempt” against individuals, including the right to imprison a person in the Capitol to compel compliance with lawmakers’ authority.
Congress hasn’t exercised inherent contempt power since 1935 and there’s no suggestion that lawmakers are actively considering the option in Lerner’s case.
But House attorneys, and lawyers for the former Internal Revenue Service official, are looking at the potential legal paths as House leaders consider first whether to take a contempt citation to the floor and, if it passes, whether the Justice Department will pursue prosecution.
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform voted on party lines to recommend the full House hold Lerner in contempt and refer her to the Justice Department for refusing to testify before the committee on allegations of political targeting at the IRS of conservative political groups seeking tax-exempt status. The GOP members said Lerner, who resigned from the IRS last year under fire for her role as the head of the office at the heart of the controversy, waived her Fifth Amendment privilege by delivering an opening statement declaring her innocence before the panel last year.”
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3. Of course they are. After all, nobody’s been held responsible for the IRS scandal, so why would they fear scrutiny of yet another potential scandal blatantly targeting their political enemies?
From TheWashingtonExaminer “Government officials, reacting to the growing voice of conservative news outlets, especially on the internet, are angling to curtail the media’s exemption from federal election laws governing political organizations, a potentially chilling intervention that the chairman of the Federal Election Commission is vowing to fight.
“I think that there are impulses in the government every day to second guess and look into the editorial decisions of conservative publishers,” warned Federal Election Commission Chairman Lee E. Goodman in an interview.
“The right has begun to break the left’s media monopoly, particularly through new media outlets like the internet, and I sense that some on the left are starting to rethink the breadth of the media exemption and internet communications,” he added.
Noting the success of sites like the Drudge Report, Goodman said that protecting conservative media, especially those on the internet, “matters to me because I see the future going to the democratization of media largely through the internet. They can compete with the big boys now, and I have seen storm clouds that the second you start to regulate them, there is at least the possibility or indeed proclivity for selective enforcement, so we need to keep the media free and the internet free.”
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4. Told you the ObamaCare numbers were just more fuzzy math. And fraud. Lots of fraud.
From Rare.US “In a House Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigations subcommittee hearing this morning, a major health insurance trade association representative testified that the administration is reporting inflated enrollment numbers.”
According to their testimony:
“Duplicate enrollments: Because of the challenges that surfaced with the launch of the Exchanges in October 2013, some consumers were advised to create a new account and enroll again. As a result, insurers have many duplicate enrollments in their system for which they never received any payment. In cases where an insurer has a new enrollment for a consumer who previously enrolled, they are not expecting that original policy to be effectuated – even though that data is still reported.”
In other words, due to website glitches, some individuals may have enrolled multiple times. In these cases, the government may count all of these enrollments toward the total enrollment number. The insurer, knowing that the individual enrolled multiple times, will count that individual as having paid.”
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5. I guess this is to replace the operation they had running in Benghazi. They’re goin’ legit this time.
From TheLongWarJournal “While the opposition Syrian National Coalition, headed by Ahmad Jarba, has been meeting with US officials this week in Washington in an effort to secure further support, including more funding and additional antitank and antiaircraft weapons, news from Syria indicates that some advanced US-made weapons are already being used in various Syrian provinces by rebel fighters.
Over the past few weeks, media reports have stressed that US officials have begun a “pilot program” of providing small quantities of advanced weapons, including TOW missiles, to vetted “moderate” groups, and specifically the Harakat Hazm, which fights in a newly formed coalition called the Southern Front. [See Threat Matrix, The shadowy flow of US weapons into Syria.]
As we at LWJ have pointed out, however, alliances and accommodations between the so-called ‘moderate’ rebel groups and the Islamists have made it very difficult for outside backers of the Syrian opposition to ensure that weapons and other aid provided does not end up in the hands of the Islamists, who dominate the battlefields. [See Threat Matrix, Southern Front tries to disassociate itself from Al Nusrah, which illustrates that an increasing number of reports from ‘moderate’ commanders claiming independence from Islamist groups such as Al Nusrah appear to be concocted in order to secure the provision of more weapons and funding from the West.]
Yesterday the opposition activist group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported that the Islamic Front, a large coalition of mainly Islamist fighting groups, was using US TOW missiles in clashes in Aleppo against the forces of President Bashar al Assad and allies. According to SOHR, the Islamic Front (which it refers to as “Islamic battalions”) employed the weapons in Aleppo’s Al Sheik Najjar area and near Al Brej, and possibly near the air force intelligence building in Al Zahraa district as well.”
What could possibly go wrong? I’m sure it’s OK, they vetted ’em and they’re all like totally moderate, or something. 🙄
As if such a simple Jedi mind trick will make us forget we’re arming the bad guys.
These aren’t the droids Al-Qaeda you’re looking for. 🙄
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6. Not shocking. And remember, they’re independent and they’re like totally unbiased professionals. It’s true, I think they were vetted by the same people as the “moderates” above, so you know you can trust ’em. 🙄
From TheWashPost “A majority of American journalists identify themselves as political independents although among those who choose a side Democrats outnumber Republicans four to one, according to a new study of the media conducted by two Indiana University professors.
Write Lars Wilnat and David Weaver, professors of journalism at Indiana, of their findings:
Compared with 2002, the percentage of full-time U.S. journalists who claim to be Democrats has dropped 8 percentage points in 2013 to about 28 percent, moving this figure closer to the overall population percentage of 30 percent, according to a December 12-15, 2013, ABC News/Washington Post national poll of 1,005 adults. This is the lowest percentage of journalists saying they are Democrats since 1971. An even larger drop was observed among journalists who said they were Republicans in 2013 (7.1 percent) than in 2002 (18 percent), but the 2013 figure is still notably lower than the percentage of U.S. adults who identified with the Republican Party (24 percent according to the poll mentioned above).”
“Over the last several decades, three things have happened: 1) The number of Democratic-identifying reporters increased steadily prior to a significant drop in the latest survey 2) The number of Republicans has steadily shrunk with that number dipping into single digits for the first time ever in the new survey c) more and more reporters are identifying as independents. What seems to be happening — at least in the last decade – is that journalists are leaving both parties, finding themselves more comfortable as unaffiliateds.”
Independent. Sure. 🙄
Regardless of self identified party label, liberal is more accurate. Just like the college professors teaching at most of today’s journalism schools.
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Wandering Views 
Re: Lois Lerner. She knows that the Obama Justice Department is not going to imprison her.
They don’t want her to speak more than she doesn’t want to speak.
She may, in fact, want to tell all.
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They don’t need Holder or the DoJ. The Sgt at Arms can do it. I also think it’s the only way she’ll talk.
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I suspect the journalist study reflects, in part, younger journalists (who, like younger people in general) are gravitating less toward identifying with either of the 2 parties. Some journalists also feel it’s best to register as “decline to state” at least for the appearance of public neutrality (and I’ve known some who personally even refuse to vote for the same reason).
Journalists, I think, have pretty much always (in recent times anyway) leaned left in a strong way. Someone suggested the field seems to attract people who want to shake things up and challenge the norms, which could be part of it I suppose.
What’s somewhat ironic is that now the left is pretty much in charge, they are the new status quo, they’ve established what are now society’s norms — culturally and politically. They’ve become “The Man.”
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1. Be careful what you wish for. Cheney wanted a strong executive. I suspect some partisan hyperbole on Cruz’s part and Obama’s offenses are probably similar to Bush jrs signing statements.
5. One day they are friends, the next they are enemies. Not much different than Reagan’s arming of Afghan rebels against the Soviets. Obama’s arming of the rebels to take Assad in a larger context does make sense as Syria is the last navy base the Russians have outside of the ex USSR and their only Mediterranean base.
6. The majority of the independents are probably young and probably not only reflect the non-party alignment of the young but also are indicative of their embrace of libertarianism — of both the left and right varieties. Thus the new dominant ideology of the media may embrace some “liberal” social values but also embraces free market economics. The dominant economic ideology is definitely not the left.
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