HoodaThunk?

You know, you would expect someone who’s supposed to be advising the President to have a little better precision of language than this:

This morning on “This Week,” White House Senior Adviser Dan Pfeiffer told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on “This Week” that the legality surrounding the targeting of conservative groups by the Internal Revenue service is “irrelevant,” but called the behavior “inexcusable.”

“I can’t speak to the law here. The law is irrelevant. The activity was outrageous and inexcusable, and it was stopped and it needs to be fixed so we ensure it never happens again,” Pfeiffer said.

“The law is irrelevant”? OK, regardless of how he meant that to sound, it sounds like a chief advisor to the White House doesn’t care about the law or about the IRS’s following it. That is, however, not at all what he meant. What he meant was that, completely aside from the legality issue, the activity was “outrageous and inexcusable” and could not be permitted to occur again. To his credit, Pfeiffer said as much to a follow-up question by Stephanopoulos, who clearly sensed the bad connotations to how Pfieffer worded his initial answer. ABC certainly likes to give this Administration every chance to make their answer look and sound as good as possible.

Still, it’s nice to see that someone in the White House gets it that what the IRS did was categorically wrong and that people on both sides of the aisle should be of one voice that it’s behavior that won’t be tolerated, regardless of who benefits, as I said earlier this week. The question, of course, is what’s the President going to do about this? My question is what’s taking so damned long to publicly make a move. It’s not like we’re waiting for a court verdict to decide whether or not someone acted wrongly. The IRS admitted it. (OK, so they “admitted” it in a staged question at a press conference, making that “spontaneous” admission more of a deliberate piece of theater, and the story they originally told of just a couple of rogue agents was downplaying the truth so much is also constitutes a lie, but admit the wrongdoing they did.) There should be a White House press release – which should have been done already, but it should go out now, regardless – detailing how Obama has sent over to Treasury a directive that clearly states such activity is explicitly illegal, promising that anyone involved in doing such a thing will go to jail, and directing the immediate mandatory remedial training of all IRS agents involved in this kind of work as to what their responsibilities are. Every single person that was involved in this fiasco should be suspended immediately from all duties until a full investigation is completed to determine whether they knew or should have known their actions were in violation of the law. Anyone found to have violated the law should be prosecuted and permanently banned from federal service at any level. Finally, each and every group that met with this kind of illegal obstruction should have their applications or waivers immediately approved, no further questions asked.

That would be a good start. And he could do that today. If he was really interested in correcting the matter and earning back the public trust.

There have been several manufacturers who have responded to the raft of knee-jerk, wrong-headed gun laws getting rammed through state legislatures that restrict law-abiding gun-owners’ ability to exercise their civil rights by publicly stating their intention to move out of the states that pass these restrictions. The ridiculous restrictions on magazine size and the laughably impotent so called “assault weapons” bans have infringed on the rights of their employees, put impossible restrictions on their businesses, and just generally been offensive to their continued presence. MagPul in Colorado was the first to start packing up and move to another state but we have just such a situation playing out here in the east, too. Beretta, the makers of several well-known firearms including the current (?) official sidearm of the US Army and Navy, the M9 pistol, has announced their intention to begin evaluation of making any future expansions in some state other than Maryland which has been their home for decades.

Prior to introduction of this legislation the three Beretta Holding companies located in Maryland were experiencing growth in revenues and jobs and had begun expansion plans in factory and other operations.  The idea now of investing additional funds in Maryland and thus rewarding a Government that has insulted our customers and our products is offensive to us so we will take steps to evaluate such investments in other States.

While that’s a more tepid response than many were hoping for it’s clear enough that they are sending a pointing message to Gov. O’Malley up there north of the Potomac. My real question for Beretta is in 2 parts. First, do they really think, at this point, that the Governor is going to listen to them and suddenly instruct his law enforcement agencies to ignore the law that he just signed? I mean, Beretta says, explicitly, in their announcement that they worked to get the infringing components of that law changed or removed and, while successful on a few counts, their efforts overall failed. It’s not like they didn’t make it clear before the Governor signed the bill into law. He knew what they were saying, he just doesn’t care if they leave. Not enough to not sign laws that punish the law-abiding, anyway. So, what’s the point of this little mince-stepping maneuver? MagPul made the same efforts in Colorado but when their Governor signed off on the law, they didn’t issue a veiled threat. They started leasing buildings in other states and started loading shit on moving trucks. My recommendation to Beretta is to make good on the threat. Start packing.

Which is a nice segue into my next question: why not consider a very short move to the south and set up here in Virginia? We know how to respect the civil rights of your employees, we’re business- and gun-friendly, we have a motivated and skilled workforce and we’ve got a tax structure that makes Maryland look like… well… Maryland.

In any case, these people who cram these useless, feel-good-and-do-nothing laws are not going to be moved and they think you’re either bluffing or that we’d be better off if you didn’t exist anyway. Waste no more time. Get packing.

I like seeing things like this:

Do nuclear power plants need a redesign? Critics of nuclear energy seem to think so, and so does nuclear energy advocate, Taylor Wilson. A physics wunderkind, Wilson became the youngest person to ever create fusion at age 14. And since graduating from high school last year, he’s devoted himself to finding innovative solutions to the world’s biggest problems.

The now nineteen-year-old Wilson recently spoke to a TED audience about his design for a small, modular fission reactor that is both less expensive and much safer to operate than today’s nuclear reactors.

Wilson’s design is for a “molten salt reactor” or an MSR. MSR’s, unlike our typical water-cooled reactors in use today, use a molten salt for a coolant instead of highly-pressurized water. I am a huge advocate for this kind of technology because it’s inherently safe – meaning that it fails to a safe state as opposed to melting down – and offers efficiencies that water-cooled designs can’t match. The MSR isn’t something new that Wilson came up with in his garage. The US tested the concept back in the 1950’s. That doesn’t diminish Wilson’s achievement, not at all, and I’m glad to see him come up with the design independently. He stops a wee bit short of the full solutions, though, in that he basically doesn’t really address the fuel used in the reactor. He offers up the notion that we could use our stockpiled nuclear weapon material as fuel and he’s right. But there’s a better way, as highlighted in Richard Martin’s book, SuperFuel: Thorium, the Green Energy Source for the Future . Thorium has a number of advantages and I’ve spoken about them before in this blog.

Martin’s source for his information is Kirk Sorenson and this Ted talk lets you hear his findings straight from the horse’s mouth. It’s only 10 minutes and I guarantee you it will light your interest.

The IRS reportedly also held up conservative pro-life groups in their little unbalanced application of US tax laws over the past three years and what they were demanding in order to allow people the same treatment as the Administration’s friends was no less than their freedom of speech:

IRS officials refused to grant tax exempt status to two pro-life organizations because of their position on the abortion issue, according to a non-profit law firm, which said that one group was pressured not to protest a pro-choice organization that endorsed President Obama during the last election.

“In one case, the IRS withheld approval of an application for tax exempt status for Coalition for Life of Iowa. In a phone call to Coalition for Life of Iowa leaders on June 6, 2009, the IRS agent ‘Ms. Richards’ told the group to send a letter to the IRS with the entire board’s signatures stating that, under perjury of the law, they do not picket/protest or organize groups to picket or protest outside of Planned Parenthood,” the Thomas More Society announced today. “Once the IRS received this letter, their application would be approved.”

So, sign this paper that says under penalty of perjury that you won’t protest the President’s friends or we’ll deny you equal treatment under the law. That, ladies and gentlemen, isn’t just “increased scrutiny.” That is, hands-down, civil-rights violations and someone needs to go to jail over it if it’s proven true.

Someone on the Left said to me years ago when they were railing against the Bush Administration that we conservatives should be careful to denounce behavior like this when our side was in control of the government because we wouldn’t always be. What’s good for the goose, and all that… I am hoping that I can hear some of those voices being as loud about this clear civil rights violation as they were about the ones they allege happened back in 2004 and 2005. Might be nice.

In case you’ve missed it, the IRS has admitted that its agents have deliberately targeted for increased scrutiny, outright harassment, and unjustified delay conservative groups with real or imagined connections to the Tea Party and the like. In short, they have explicitly come out as being precisely the dangerous, civil-rights-trampling, overreaching governmental power abuser that these groups have been saying they’ve been all along.

Like the man says, it ain’t paranoia if they’re really out to get ya. And “out to get” them, the IRS definitely was. Perhaps still are.

It’s not a matter of “alleged” and it’s not a matter for all the lovely weasel words people like to use to try to throw some doubt on things that look bad for their team. The IRS broke the law, broke the public trust, and absolutely, undeniably violated the civil rights of conservative groups for at least the last 3 years. Even when they were caught and figured they had to get out in front of the story, breaking the news themselves the Friday before a Treasury Department Inspector General (IG) report came out, they couldn’t bring themselves to be honest and up front. They tried to pawn it off as a matter of a couple of rogue agents in some midwest office doing stuff outside of procedure. But the reports, when actually read, detail a lot more than just a couple of yahoo’s getting their MoveOn on. Forced into actually addressing the matter than his own administration is guilty of this scandal – and we’re still looking into that pesky little matter of an Ambassador being attacked and simply abandoned to his fate in Benghazi, by the way – Obama got on the TV and announced that the acting IRS Commissioner was resigning, supposedly over this breach of the public’s trust. Of course, he didn’t mention that said Commissioner was already resigning and was going to be gone in 30-45 days anyway.

A lot more than this needs to happen and it needs to happen both swiftly and very, very publicly. The GOP in Congress aren’t going to let it go, of course, but I have to ask: where’s the outrage on the Left? Are there no Democrats or supporters of Obama that are willing to stand up and loudly call this outrage an outrage? Are there none over there that see that this kind of governmental abuse is the kind of civil rights violations they’ve been complaining about for years?

Faced with this, the White House promises action. White House Press Mouthpiece Secretary Jay Carney, speaking of the President:

"He wants to see that the actions taken, as revealed by the Treasury report, that are inappropriate, are met with consequences," Carney said. "He will make clear to Treasury Department leaders that he expects action."

Carney said Obama wants the public to "understand and believe that the IRS applies our tax laws in a neutral and fair way to everyone."

Yeah, we’d like to understand and believe that, too. Except that it isn’t so it’s not unreasonable to not believe that. If the White House would like the public to feel this way, then the White House needs to demonstrate that the IRS is absolutely going to apply our tax laws in a neutral and fair way and the people responsible for it not doing so cannot be left in a position where they could do this again.

Honestly, all Americans should be up in arms about this, not just Republicans. And we should all be making sure we say that loudly enough that our representatives can hear.

In Virginia, the GOP is heading into their 2013 Convention for the purpose of deciding their nominees for State offices, specifically the Governor, Lt. Governor, and Attorney General. I managed to make it to the last one in 2009 but will not be going to this year’s. That prospect is a bit disappointing to me and it’s raised the matter of how we Virginia Republicans nominate our candidates. Being that I’m “outside looking in” this year, I thought it would be helpful to examine the pro’s and con’s of the methods available.

A timely find has been a pair of posts over at Virginia Politics, one written by Adam Frost advocating the use of primaries in all cases, and one by Andrew Schwartz asserting that conventions are not only perfectly fine, but are more in keeping with overall fairness and stated Republican values than are primaries. Both are excellent reads and offer intelligent arguments in both directions.

I’ve generally been friendly to the concept of conventions, especially here in Virginia, largely due to unmitigated flaws in the whole concept of running a primary where the membership in a given party by a specific voter cannot be established. It is against our constitution here in the Commonwealth, I’m told, for the government to ask for or record details pertaining to membership in political parties. Unlike, say, Ohio, we in the Old Dominion register to vote but do not declare membership in a party when we do. The state government, therefore, knows who’s registered to vote but not their affiliation. This, of course, makes it hard to determine who is and is not a member of the Republican Party when they show up at the poles. What that means, in practical terms, is that the pole workers have to ask you on primary day which ballot you want and take your word for it that you’re going to support the winner of that ballot. This, in my view, has a fatal flaw. The nominee for the Republican Party should be decided by members of that party. It should not be influenced by members of other parties who simply show up and cast a ballot nor should it be influenced by people who are merely interested in the Party’s decisions but who do not commit to membership. Open primaries such as the ones they hold here in Virginia do not address this fatal flaw and, in my opinion, should not be used.

Frost’s problems with conventions override that concern even if he does acknowledge it later in his article:

Nominations by convention disenfranchise the vast majority of the party’s members:

They disenfranchise people who are out of state on the day of the convention.

Specifically, they disenfranchise the very military personnel that put their lives on the line in foreign lands to defend our republic.

Conventions also disenfranchise people who are home but who very understandably don’t want to take the time and expense to go to a city potentially hundreds of miles away to spend an entire weekend being bombarded with political candidates, tactics, messages, signs, speeches, etc. ad nauseam.

Some of us are political junkies who enjoy that sort of thing; most people aren’t.  And rank-and-file members of a party should not have to spend a weekend at a convention in order to have a voice in selecting their party’s candidates.

Ah, the “conventions disenfranchise party members who don’t/can’t go to the convention” argument. Well, I can dispense with the one part of that argument immediately: if the price of having a direct say in the party’s decision is to spend a weekend in Richmond and someone doesn’t think having that say is worth the time and travel, whose fault is it that they don’t get to have the say? They made a cost/benefit decision and came up with the notion that having their vote count in the decision was worth less to them than whatever they planned to do instead. That’s their call but it’s hardly incumbent upon all the rest of the membership to open themselves up to the issues with open primaries to accommodate people who don’t value their vote as highly as others do. This is in marked contrast to the people who can’t go for reasons of work schedule, health issues, transportation matters, etc. These are the people who would certainly be willing to spend the time, but they have other obligations that supersede the convention. Regrettable, yes. I, myself, and in that group this year. But, again, is that a significant enough concern of the party in general to change the format to an open primary and incur the issues in doing so?

Schwartz raises an interesting question, though: Is this really disenfranchisement?

Opponents complain of disfranchisement in a convention, but there cannot be disfranchisement if there is no election. There can be no disfranchisement when there is no right to disfranchise. Contrary to the impression of primary advocates, selecting a candidate to run for office on behalf of a corporate party is not, nor has it ever been, a civil right. It is a privilege granted by the corporation to its members in accordance with its constitution and bylaws. To disfranchise is to deprive an individual “the right of voting in public elections,” and an election is “the selection of one person from a specified class to discharge certain duties in a state, corporation, or society” (Black’s Law Dictionary, emphasis mine).

A primary is not an civil election — it is a nomination. The nominee holds no authority or office over any portion of the population of the state in that capacity, and though the current primary system is funded publicly, the results have no legal effect upon the public.

Here is the crux of the situation overlooked by many who oppose conventions. Unlike voting in civil elections, there is absolutely no right to a vote within a political party. Parties are, as Schwartz points out early in his article, private corporations. The ability of members to vote on any concern of the party at all is a matter of a privilege bestowed by the corporation’s rules, not some inherent natural right. This highlights even more the problem with using a decision method that allows people who are not members of the party to cast ballots.

A far more interesting point Schwartz brings up is the inherent unfairness in primaries at all because of who’s paying for the primary:

The merits of a convention — under current law – are not about that. They’re about the influence of the state over a private corporation, and the state’s subsidization of that corporation at the taxpayer’s expense.

In case you didn’t know, the Republican Party of Virginia (and the Democratic Party of Virginia) are private corporations. They have a charter, they have a business plan, they have office holders within the corporation, they have to keep track of their finances just like any other business.

They are a private club, and if you want to be a part of their club, you play by their rules.

However, what we see today is these private clubs being treated as entities of the state — protected and shielded to some extent from the political market forces. It’s not the primary process that does this. It’s the state PAYING for the primary process that does this. Republicans and Democrats hold a huge advantage over other parties in that they are all but guaranteed that every taxpayer in Virginia will finance the selection of their corporate ambassadors.

Emphasis mine. Primaries are run and paid for by the State Board of Elections, which effectively means they’re paid for by the taxpayers. So, the Republicans get a primary and the Democrats get a primary. When’s the last time you heard about the Green Party getting one? Or, for that matter, the Socialist or Communist parties? Certainly not the Tea Party. So why would we Republicans, the party of smaller government and lower taxes, advocate a method of handling our internal business that puts the burden on the taxpayers and hands over the control of the process to the state government?

If we want to have primaries, then we should step up and pay for them ourselves, run them ourselves, and secure them ourselves. We handle the membership roles, so we can most certainly permit or deny any specific individual participation if they’re not a member in good standing. This also frees us up to use other methods of vote collection, even handling the primary online and leaving the polling open for longer than 10 or 16 hours. If we’re paying the freight, we get to decide how big the trucks are and where they drive.

Whatever issues conventions have, they have advantages over open primaries that, in aggregate, outweigh the problems. I don’t get to have a direct say in who wins the nomination, yes. But I’m willing to accept that this year in order to maintain our process integrity and our values’ expression.

It’s taken several months, but now that the 2012 elections are well over and in the rearview mirror, the media can’t avoid covering the scandalous actions the Obama Administration has taken with regard to the September 11, 2012 attack on the US embassy in Benghazi. Not that they didn’t try to avoid it, but the truth is coming out and they simply can’t keep a lid on information the way they used to be able to do.

I know there are people out there who would oppose Obama even if it meant denying he was right when he said the sky was blue. There are as many people who are absolutely blind supporters of the President no matter what nonsense he spouts. Here’s what I also know: the President and his Secretary of State knew full well that our embassy in Benghazi was attacked by Islamist terrorists with the intent to destroy it and to kill Americans, particularly our ambassador. They knew that almost as soon as it happened. Ambassador Stevens, killed in that that attack, had made repeated requests for more security forces in the days before the attack because intel received – and known by both the President and the Secretary – indicated an attack was likely. His requests were denied, the attack happened, and now he and 3 others are dead as a result.

In response (when they responded), the Administration deliberately put out the story that the attack was a spontaneous violent uprising brought on by a YouTube video created by an American resident, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, that has apparently infuriated Muslims across the Middle East and Africa. Nakoula was arrested at his residence by a virtual battalion of police officers and federal agents in the dead of night and incarcerated. Probation violations that had not risen to the level of concern by local law enforcement to that point suddenly became serious dangers to the community and Nakoula was charged with 4 counts, to which he plead guilty in what was apparently a plea bargain. He remains in jail to this day, in case you’re wondering.

The White House Press Secretary, US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice, Secretary Hillary Clinton, and President Obama all made references to that video being the cause of the attack for days after the attack and now we know that they were flat-out lying. That’s right, and I’m speaking specifically to those people who support this President vehemently and who as vehemently screamed “Bush Lied!” over and over during the previous Presidency: Obama lied. He and his administration knew completely that the attack was a terrorist attack and they deliberately moved to deceive you… to deceive us all. They have said for months, now, that the talking points about the attack were written by the intelligence community, and now we know that this was simply false. The White House was deeply involved in crafting this fairy tale, with administration officials pressuring members of the intelligence community to remove any reference to terrorist activity from their reports.

In short, they deliberately withheld security measures from one of our embassies and then, when it was predictably attacked and American citizens and officials were killed, they hid the truth from you. They are still trying to hide that truth. To coin a phrase, “Obama lied, people died.” You can insert “Clinton” into that one, too, if you like.

I don’t care which side of this political chasm we’ve developed here in America you’re on, the concept that the Administration would act in this way isn’t something that should be tolerated. The people who did this should be held to account and, frankly, a lot of them should be removed from their positions. We can’t trust them and we shouldn’t feel comfortable relying on them to look after our political interests around the world, to say nothing about the safety of our officials and military. They listened to experts tell them that more security was needed and they denied it. Then, when the situation proves them wrong in that decision, they seek to cover it over and blame the whole mess on, basically, freedom of speech.

We need to get to the bottom of it and we need the people responsible to be called out and dealt with. I don’t care how high that goes and I don’t care what political party they belong to. Nor, my fellow Americans, should you.

A trial is underway in South Bend, IN, regarding charges filed against 2 Democrat operatives from St. Joseph County alleging that these 2 were involved in forging dozens of signatures on the ballot petitions supporting Barak Obama in the 2008 Presidential primaries. The petitions were required to allow Obama to be included on the ballots.

The two face charges of orchestrating an illegal scheme to fake the petitions that enabled then-candidates Obama, and Hillary Clinton, to qualify for the race in Indiana.

Former longtime St. Joseph County Democratic Party Chairman Butch Morgan Jr. faces multiple felony conspiracy counts to commit petition fraud, and former county Board of Elections worker Dustin Blythe is charged with nine felony forgery counts and one felony count of falsely making a petition of nomination. The proceedings began Monday in South Bend.

Morgan is accused of being the mastermind behind the plot, by allegedly ordering Democratic officials and workers to fake the names and signatures that Obama and Clinton needed to qualify for the presidential race. Blythe, then a Board of Elections employee and Democratic Party volunteer, has been accused of carrying out those orders by forging signatures on Obama’s petitions.

Morgan and Blythe are 2 of 4 such operatives that were investigated and charged. The other 2 have already plead guilty. Remember that the next time someone claims there’s no evidence that voter fraud is actualy occurring. Yes, it most certainly is.

What makes this case more interesting on a national level – and should also be a launching point for a serious overall discussion on the matter of holding office – is that Indiana law specifies a certain minimum number of signatures being require from a minimum number of separate localities. In this case, you need 500 signatures from 9 counties, minimum, to get on the ballot. The issue, here is that in one of the counties in question, Obama managed to only file 534 signatures. According to the investigation, roughly 9 pages containing up to 90 signatures appear to have been forged. If you take those 90 away from the total, that’s significantly less than 500 signatures, which means that Obama would not have qualified to be on the ballot. So, if he wasn’t on the primary ballot, was he eligible to be on the general ballot? I think not which then makes his victory in that state… what? Invalid?

Now, before anyone jumps on the “fictitious President” bandwagon let’s get the numbers out of the way. In 2008, Obama/Biden got 365 electoral votes, 11 of which came from Indiana. Even if you subtract IN from the picture, that’s still way more than the 270-vote threshold, so I’m not suggesting that the outcome of this trial would render the Obama presidency invalid, at least electorally. It should raise the concern that more of this happened elsewhere that we just haven’t detected, yet, and that our election system is vulnerable to this kind of fraud. If we can stay focused on fixing the process without continuing the “stolen election” feud begun in the 2000 elections then we can discuss how to secure our voting system while still getting every eligible citizen the vote they deserve.

To a larger question, what happens should a circumstance arise where an individual who is currently seated in office is suddenly discovered to have been ineligible to be elected in the first place? I’m unaware of any mechanism in our current system that would address that. Let’s just say that for the sake of this argument that Indiana turned out to be critical to Obama’s election – that without it he wouldn’t have been elected. Now, his being eligible to be on the ballot is discovered to have been based on fraudulent filings, so his presence on the ballot was invalid. If he shouldn’t have been on the ballot, then wouldn’t the election be also invalid? And if his overall victory was only made possible by this state’s victory, then his overall victory would also be invalid. Now what? We… have a do-over? And what about all of the decisions and laws he’s made since his election? I know that if a judge is suddenly discovered to have been ineligible to hear a given trial, the decision made in that trial is rendered invalid and the consequences applied are reversed until a new trial is completed. Would the same apply to a President? Do we even have laws that speak to this?

Interesting thought and I’ll see if I can find anything about it.

With the capture of the second bomber we are now in a position to be far more deliberate and thorough in moving the investigation forward. We know a lot more now than we did just 3 days ago but there’s more we need. There’s also some stuff we don’t need.

This may sound premature but I don’t need to know, courtroom-style, whether he and his brother performed the attack. I am completely confident that they did, so you won’t see me continuing to use the term “alleged”when referring to them. We also already know that both of them were Chechen Muslims and that they drew upon their Islamic doctrine when planning this attack.

Were they operating alone? Did they have other targets or attacks planned? Were they receiving assistance from abroad? Domestically?

So, contests to the Boston PD and to the watchful citizen who called it in. Now, let’s remain patient and complete the investigation.

So, we’re going to take up a hardwood floor that’s been damaged beyond reasonable repair and replace it. The replacing part will likely go easier than the removal part so I won’t be here in front of my computer much over the next day or so. Be back soon, folks.