What’s interesting in the news today?
1. Nope, not even a “hint of scandal.” 🙄
From WaysAndMeansHouse.gov “Washington, DC – Today, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) announced the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) targeting of conservative individuals includes a sitting United States Senator. According to emails reviewed by the Committee under its Section 6103 authority, which allows the Committee to review confidential taxpayer information, Lois Lerner sought to have Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) referred for IRS examination.
“We have seen a lot of unbelievable things in this investigation, but the fact that Lois Lerner attempted to initiate an apparently baseless IRS examination against a sitting Republican United States Senator is shocking,” said Camp. “At every turn, Lerner was using the IRS as a tool for political purposes in defiance of taxpayer rights. We may never know the full extent of the abuse since the IRS conveniently lost two years of Lerner emails, not to mention those of other key figures in this scandal. The fact that DOJ refuses to investigate the IRS’s abuses or appoint a special counsel demonstrates, yet again, this Administration’s unwillingness to uphold the rule of law.”
And now we’re starting to see why Lois took the 5th.
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2. Destroying evidence is a criminal offense too. Anyone else noticing a pattern?
From TheHill “The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the IRS share a problem: officials say they cannot provide the emails a congressional committee has requested because an employee’s hard drive crashed.
EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy confirmed to the House Oversight Committee Wednesday that her staff is unable to provide lawmakers all of the documents they have requested on the proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska, because of a 2010 computer crash.
“We’re having trouble getting the data off of it and we’re trying other sources to actually supplement that,” McCarthy said. “We’re challenged in figuring out where those small failures might have occurred and what caused them occur, but we’ve produced a lot of information.”
I’m sure they did, just nothing incriminating.
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3. Boehner is finally doing something about Obama’s many abuses of power.
From FoxNews “House Speaker John Boehner announced Wednesday he plans to file suit against President Obama over his alleged abuse of executive power.
“This is not about impeachment — it’s about him faithfully executing the laws of this country,” Boehner said.
The speaker alleged that the president not only has ignored the law but “brags about it,” decrying what he described as “arrogance and incompetence.”
Boehner had been weighing such a lawsuit in recent days, over concerns that Obama exceeded his constitutional authority with executive actions. Republicans have voiced frustration with Obama’s second-term “pen and phone” strategy of pursuing policy changes without Congress — particularly environmental rules via the Environmental Protection Agency. Republicans also complained about numerous unilateral changes to the implementation of ObamaCare. “
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4. As is always the case with this administrations numbers, they’re worse than first reported. And as always, NBC does it’s best to put on a good face for the admin.
From CNBC “The U.S. economy contracted at a much steeper pace than previously estimated in the first quarter, but there are indications that growth has since rebounded strongly.
The Commerce Department said on Wednesday gross domestic product fell at a 2.9 percent annual rate, the economy’s worst performance in five years, instead of the 1.0 percent pace it had reported last month.
While the economy’s woes have been largely blamed on an unusually cold winter, the magnitude of the revisions suggest other factors at play beyond the weather. Growth has now been revised down by a total of 3.0 percentage points since the government’s first estimate was published in April, which had the economy expanding at a 0.1 percent rate.
The difference between the second and third estimates was the largest on records going back to 1976, the Commerce Department said. Economists had expected growth to be revised to show it contracting at a 1.7 percent rate. Sharp revisions to GDP numbers are not unusual as the government does not have complete data when it makes its initial and preliminary estimates.”
The only ones blaming the weather are those looking to provide cover for the admin. Only the sycophants at NBC could claim these horrible numbers are a sign of a rebounding economy.
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5. The Supreme Court has banned warrantless cell phone searches by police.
From TheWashingtonTimes “The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that police must obtain warrants before snooping through people’s cellphones, delivering a unanimous decision that begins to update legal understanding of privacy rules to accommodate 21st-century technology.
Police agencies argued that searching through data on cellphones was no different from asking someone to turn out his pockets, but the justices rejected that, saying a cellphone holds the most personal and intimate details of someone’s life and falls squarely within the Fourth Amendment’s privacy protections.
“The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in the unanimous opinion. “Our answer to the question of what police must do before searching a cell phone seized incident to an arrest is accordingly simple — get a warrant.”
The justices even said police cannot check a cellphone’s call log because it could contain more information than phone numbers, and perusing the call log is a violation of privacy that can be justified only with a court-issued warrant.”
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Wandering Views 
2. Anybody who knows even the slightest bit about I.T. knows that “e-mails being lost due to an employee’s hard-drive crashing” is totally ridiculous.
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Kudos to Google:
http://www.thepointradio.org/listen/entry/38/25513
“For years, Google’s official corporate motto has been ‘Don’t be evil.’ And the company’s latest decisions show how they are living up to it. … Relevant Magazine reports two major moves by Google; one, to refuse all advertising for pornographic websites, and the other to ban pornographic apps from its store. … “
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Suing Obama for abuse of executive power; mostly as an attempt to defund the white house, is quite ridiculous and diverts attention from the Congress’s own inaction.
http://iacknowledge.net/this-fox-news-host-literally-cant-handle-michele-bachmanns-idiocy/
Within this link is a clip of FOX news interviewing Bachman over this action — and if FOX news thinks its a waste of time than the Republicans have definitely jumped the shark.
Even more importantly Obama has used executive orders less than any president since Grover Cleveland. If Bachmann and Boehner are upset with Obama, imagine how they would feel under FDR. See the graph under the video clip, every president since Cleveland has used executive orders more frequently than Obama.
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Dear Anonymous,
You may be correct but Obama’s “recovery” has been a flop. His borrowing is reckless. He lies about too many things (You can keep your health care plan! You can keep your doctor!). His foreign policy is childishly naive. He spends way too much time on the golf course. He has others do his dirty work so he can keep his hands clean. (Fast and Furious, Lois Lerner and the IRS, oh who can remember them all…)
He breaks the law with impunity. (Recess appointments when the Senate is not in recess.)
I suppose you can have your view, this is still a free country…for a while…
But to answer Hillary’s question (What does it matter at this time?), the cover-up of Benghazi shows that President Obama does not deserve the Presidency. Nor does Hillary. His/Their inaction could be construed as treasonous. It certainly could have changed the course of the 2012 Presidential election. It could be decisive in 2016.
But then “Man proposes, God disposes>”
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🙂 939 days until the presidential Inauguration. Friday January 20, 2017 (1/20/2017) 🙂
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The lies have started about Scott Walker.
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I agree about the lawsuits. Obama is President, We need to suffer through it. That doesn’t mean we don’t try to root out corruption, but any attempts at legal action are fruitless.
Will do more harm than good.
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