The Necropolitan Sentinel

Comes with Bryan Preston's seal of approval:

He nails it. RT @vermontaigne: @texasbryanp Any response to the latest @stephenfhayes piece on Benghazi talking points?

— Bryan Preston (@texasbryanp) May 17, 2013

I could except, but I think you're best off reading the whole thing.

if she was aware of IRS scandal, didn't inform President:

With all due respect to someone who has impeccable legal credentials, if she did have such foreknowledge and didn’t inform the president immediately, I respectfully suggest Ms. [Kathryn] Ruemmler is in the wrong job and that she should resign.

The White House counsel to the president, one of the two or three most important positions on the White House staff, must be more than a great lawyer, which Ms. Ruemmler reportedly is. The White House counsel must also have a sensitive political and media ear — in other words, must be a first-rate crisis manager who understands the fundamental need to get the president out in front of the facts, and not be reactive or overly legalistic in determining crisis management strategy. 
 
If Ms. Ruemmler did know about this IRS story and didn’t inform the president immediately, then, respectfully, that must mean she didn’t appreciate fully the mammoth legal and political implications for the U.S. government as well as the American people of a story involving IRS officials abusing power and possibly violating criminal laws. 

He also lambastes the press:

It is also hard to understand why some people in the media who apparently knew about this foreknowledge by the White House counsel and her failure to tell the president missed this story and its significance.

There's nothing in his assessment that I disagree with, but the chief importance of this piece is to signal to the White House and the Dems just how serious this scandal is. It's a wake up call. White House Counsel is, in Davis's view, about the level of administration sacrifice that's required to appease the political gods for this form of abuse. 

The question is, of course, did the President really not know? It appears that in Scandalpalooza, the IRS one is the first to have risen to the point of an all-out panic. UPDATEx2: The claim he didn't is looking shakier, now that we know senior Treasury officials knew 5 months before the election.

Related: More weaselparsing by the Parseltongue Administration.

UPDATE: Go see Wikipedia's entry for 2013 IRS Scandal, targeted for deletion, while you still can. I've saved it as it stands as a screenshot, 5-17-13 2:45 Eastern. (I was trying to find more background on Sarah Hall Ingram after reading this ViralRead piece).

UPDATEx3: That Mr. G Guy on the 'plethora' of scandals, with some good links. I think that the group noun is actually 'clusterscrog,' though. I'm also not sure there's a 'c' in 'schmandal.'

UPDATEx4: IRS lied about existence of TEA Party-linked docs in 2010 FOIA request response.

UPDATEx5: Jeff G. via Bob Belvedere on how the left handles scandals, and their Republican enablers.

Yesterday, I pointed to an important article about their union and its political donations. Here's another aspect to the story:

The last of these [four] audits [by different governmental divisions] was only concluded in recent weeks. Not one resulted in a fine or penalty. But [major Romney donor] Mr. VanderSloot has been waiting more than 20 months for a sizable refund and estimates his legal bills are $80,000. That figure doesn't account for what the president's vilification has done to his business and reputation.

The Obama call for scrutiny wasn't a mistake; it was the president's strategy—one pursued throughout 2012. The way to limit Romney money was to intimidate donors from giving. Donate, and the president would at best tie you to Big Oil or Wall Street, at worst put your name in bold, and flag you as "less than reputable" to everyone who worked for him: the IRS, the SEC, the Justice Department. The president didn't need a telephone; he had a megaphone.

The same threat was made to conservative groups that might dare play in the election. As early as January 2010, Mr. Obama would, in his state of the union address, cast aspersions on the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, claiming that it "reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests" (read conservative groups).

The president derided "tea baggers." Vice President Joe Biden compared them to "terrorists." In more than a dozen speeches Mr. Obama raised the specter that these groups represented nefarious interests that were perverting elections. "Nobody knows who's paying for these ads," he warned. "We don't know where this money is coming from," he intoned.

In case the IRS missed his point, he raised the threat of illegality: "All around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates . . . And they don't have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don't know if it's a foreign-controlled corporation."

Short of directly asking federal agencies to investigate these groups, this is as close as it gets.

The politics of demonization.

At the same time, there are allegations that Lois "Slo" Lerner may have slow-walked an investigation into how the US Humane Society spends their charitable dollars:

Lerner — the suddenly infamous IRS Exempt Organizations Division director — “is an active member of the Humane Society of the United States where her efforts in performing pet rescues necessitated by the 2005 Gulf Coast hurricanes were widely acknowledged,” according to her biography.

The HSUS has been accused of sending less than one percent of its funds to animal shelters, a charge that a spokesman in 2012 would not deny. According to IRS filings, the group took in $148,703,820 in revenue in 2010.

On May 12, 2010, Republican Missouri Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer wrote a letter to Lerner, expressing his concerns about the tax-exempt status of the HSUS, which is listed as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit group.

“The attached information unquestionably demonstrates that [the] HSUS invests a substantial amount of time and money in political campaigns and attempts to influence specific legislation, a clear and direct violation of section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code,” Luetkemeyer wrote in the letter.

Some of the questions we still don't have answers to regarding the IRS scandal are laid out in this Politico piece. Some of the cover stories are starting to fall apart:

Ever since the tax scandal broke, top IRS officials have insisted that the reason it started singling out conservative groups for extra review was because the agency was getting a flood of tax-exempt applications.

In an op-ed for USA Today, for example, Steven Miller, who until this week was the acting IRS commissioner, claimed that "our office of Exempt Organizations observed a sharp increase in the number of (tax-exempt) applications coming from groups potentially engaged in political campaign intervention."

Lois Lerner, who runs the office overseeing tax exempt organizations, said last Friday that: "We saw a big increase in these kinds of applications."

So, too, did Joseph Grant, a top IRS official who said in response to the inspector general report that the agency experienced a "significant increase … starting in 2010."

Given the flood of new applications, these officials claim, the IRS simply tried to improve "efficiency and consistency" by automatically screening some for extra review, and in doing so, they inadvertently targeted conservative groups.

There's just one problem with this excuse. It's not true.

So, read the rest of that, if you're interested in the story, and make sure to read this on Lerner's lies, too.

As we saw yesterday, the administration's sacrifice of two officials, one of whom was to resign shortly, and another who had just joined the IRS a couple months ago, was meant to appease the press in order that the official in charge during the TEA Party pogrom, who has moved to an important management position for the implementation of ObamaCare, be protected. Her name is Sarah Hall Ingram.

The Administrative Procedure Act protects bureaucratic wrongdoers:

Victims of bureaucratic lawbreaking are deprived of real due process of law.  Under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), victims must exhaust “administrative remedies” before they can get before the courts.  But even when they do get to court, judges defer to the evidentiary findings of the bureaucratic agencies. _ (Emphasis added)

The costs to deal with government lawbreaking can bankrupt individuals and businesses even before they get their chance at due process through the courts.  Bureaucrats know this, which can make them contemptuous of following the law.

One of the lines of questioning to which AG Holder did not respond in testimony yesterday (and there were many), regarded his office's duty to exhaust all lines of negotiation with the AP for the information they wanted on the so-called leak regarding Underwear Bomber II, which the DoJ seems not to have done. Chuck Todd, of all people, harangued Carney a couple days ago regarding the administration's failure to pass a shield law for journalists, but the most recent version of such a law might in fact make it easier for government investigators to drub their sources out of them.

Meanwhile, the FBI is looking into who started the story about Bob Menendez and the underaged Dominican hookers. 

The New York Times breaks the news that Huma Abedin, wife of NY Mayor hopeful Anthony Weiner (D-ick), did not disclose consulting work on her financial statements.

The State Department, under Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, created an arrangement for her longtime aide and confidante Huma Abedin to work for private clients as a consultant while serving as a top adviser in the department.
Connect with NYTMetro

Ms. Abedin did not disclose the arrangement — or reveal how much income she earned — on her financial report. It requires officials to make public any positions held outside of government and any sources of income of more than $5,000.

I have no idea how someone who works for Hillary might get the idea that such legal niceties are for the little people, but most interesting to me in this regard is the possibility that Weiner's not well favored at the Times.

Bob Woodward says, "I wouldn't dismiss Benghazi." I love the smell of Mika mourning.

Stacy has the latest on Meg Lanker-Simons, who seems to have hate-f*cked herself into an uncomfortable corner.

UPDATE: Aaron Walker marks one year since dropping a very long-form blog bomb on (domestic terrorist Brett) Kimberlin.

UPDATEx2: Here's a good example of what gets demonized by this administration, and what is shielded from criticism:

The Department of Homeland Security, which under Secretary Janet Napolitano has shown a keen interest in monitoring and warning about outspoken conservatives, takes a very different approach in monitoring political Islamists, according to a 2011 memo on protecting the free speech rights of pro-Shariah Muslim supremacists.

In a checklist obtained by The Daily Caller entitled “Countering Violent Extremism Dos and Don’ts” the DHS’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties notifies local and national law enforcement officials that it is Obama administration policy to consider specifically Islamic criticism of the American system of government legitimate.

This policy stands in stark contrast to the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis’ 2009 memo “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment” [pdf], which warned of the dangers posed by pro-life advocates, critics of same-sex marriage and groups concerned with abiding by the U.S. Constitution, among others.

So, how's that working out?

UPDATEx3: Neo-Neocon on Obama, Alinsky, Hope and Change, quoting Horowitz:

The demagogic banner of Alinsky’s revolution is “democracy”…But it is not democracy as Americans understand it. Instead it is a radical democracy in which earned hierarchies based on achievement and merit are targeted for destruction…

“[The] failure of many of our younger activists to understand the art of communication has been disastrous,” Alinksy wrote. What he really meant was their honesty was disastrous—their failure to understand the art of mis-communication. This is the art he taught to radicals trying to impose socialism on a country whose people understand that socialism destroys freedom. Don’t sell it as socialism. Sell it as “progressivism,” economic democracy,” “fairness,” and “social justice.”

UPDATEx4: Via Jonathan Adler at Volokh:

Not only is the IRS not an “independent” agency, but it appears that the substantial bonuses received by the head of the IRS tax-exempt division when the targeting of conservative groups occurred would have been approved by the White House because they exceeded $25,000. This official is now in charge of the IRS’ Affordable Care Act office.

UPDATEx5: The Jawas do a bit of statistical comparison between Progressive groups waved through by IRS and TEA Party groups stomped over the past couple election cycles.

UPDATEx6: Seems criticizing Obama on Benghazi might have been enough to get spurned, too.

UPDATEx7: John Yoo on leaks and the Obama AP records scandal:

The former deputy AG also noted that during Bush’s days when leak after leak was seen in Washington, neither the media nor the government seemed to care much about “protecting national security and preventing the media from publishing classified information”

“But now President Obama has to live in the leak-happy world that he and his colleagues created to undermine the last administration. And they don’t like it. Unlike the Bush administration, however, they are willing to go to lengths that threaten the freedom of the press to stop it–this administration has conducted far more investigations and prosecutions for leaking than its predecessors. And, for the most part, this administration has gotten away with it from the press, which has given them a pass on civil liberties compared to how they treated Republicans.”

Yoo went on to say that he has no sympathy for the caterwauling from the AP. “But I have no sympathy for the AP or the mainstream media, because this is how you get treated when you are in a politician’s pocket,” he said sharply.

“If the AP’s editors and reporters and their colleagues at other newspapers had been more adversarial toward this President, as they were with President Bush, they would been treated with far more respect. The AP should wish for a return of the days of a Republican administration, which considered the press a worthy adversary, rather than a servant to be mistreated at will.”

You reap what you sow, as it were.

Also in that vein, the AP leak investigation might be motivated by administration's own screw-up regarding targeted terrorist. Mistakes were made, but "without malice." Moar better no malice.

Thomas More Society defends Christian voices from IRS, who asked whether they planned to present both sides of issues, the way MMfA does. 

UPDATEx8: Sharyl Attkisson reports Under Secretary Patrick Kennedy put kibosh on mobilizing FEST rapid response team to Benghazi from the start.

UPDATEx9: Thanks to Stacy for the link.

Yesterday, the administration released a hundred pages of communications regarding the Inter-Agency Deliberative Process that took intelligence talking points, stripped them of all relevant information, and replaced them with a lie about a protest over a video of Innocence of Muslims. As Ace pointed out, the important thing about these communications is that they begin on the afternoon of 9-14-12, after the administration has already decided that it will run with the cockamamie story about the protest and video. This has already been decided. They have weighed the equities, and discovered that the State Department must be protected from criticism, which is convenient to the White House, because Obama has already been on the campaign trail claiming that he has al Qaeda on the run.

CIA head Petraeus wasn't happy with the results of this inter-agency deliberative process, in which Deputy Michael Morrell permitted himself to be browbeaten into signing off on the BS produced by the process, but apparently felt that there was nothing he could do, and he specifically said that the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence would be upset with the finished product . . .  spam. In other words, he didn't believe that the story would hold up to scrutiny.

In order to protect their lie, Tommy Vietor and Victoria Nuland cooked up a story regarding the motives behind the story. They held that resorting to the lie would ensure that the FBI's investigation, which the former Deputy Head of Mission Gregory Hicks said was delayed in consequence of the lies, would not be prejudiced if they trotted the protest story out. There would have been nothing prejudicial in the administration's announcing, in accordance with their best information, that the attack had been pre-planned, conceived and executed by a terrorist organization. It is much more likely that the FBI investigation into who was responsible would be hamstrung by the administration's lie, their presumed task then being to discover who was responsible for a non-existent protest. One of the reasons that might have been a reasonable assumption was that Ansar al-Sharia claimed it was so on Twitter. Ansar al-Sharia then went on to say that they were not the only organization involved, which Jay Carney then tried to turn into a 'withdrawal' by them of the earlier claim that they had participated in the operation. Ansar al-Sharia would have assumed that they would be a target of investigation.

As I've mentioned here before, Bryan Preston has been reminding us that the day before the Benghazi mission was overrun and the safe house CIA annex attacked, intelligence from Cairo indicated that the protests over the video that were occurring there were a cover for extremists who were probing the security at that embassy. As Gregory Hicks recounted in his testimony last week before the Oversight Committee, murdered Ambassador Stevens received a heads up from Cairo that their compound was under attack on 9-11. The pretext used for cover by terrorists probing the Cairo Embassy was then instrumentalized by the administration to deflect criticism from itself.

The meetings and communications between State and Intelligence have been characterized in some quarters as a knife fight. If it was a knife fight, the released communications make it clear that National Security Council spokesmouth Tommy Vietor was making sure that Intelligence agencies were fighting with both hands tied behind their back, a procedure that Victoria Nuland and Jay Carney like to characterize as 'balancing equities.' Petraeus's resignation to the White House refashioning the talking points to create a lie by suppressing important intelligence that would somehow advance the agenda of the intelligence community reveals thorough demoralization at the CIA. As Stephen Hayes notes, in one of the above links, the bullet points passed on by the CIA that were then systematically and deliberately stripped to leave only the fairy tale regarding the video protest were the finalized product of their internal review of the available intelligence, contrary to Hillary Clinton's testimony, which was then warped out of any recognition in the course of the further 'inter-agency deliberative process' under the purview of State and the White House.

Preston states that the talking point regarding protests, which then became the seed of the administration's deliberate lies to Congress, the American people, and the UN was not in the first two iterations of the CIA's intelligence community product. How it got in there is the most pressing issue in Issa's investigation. Carney and others in the administration are claiming that that material was present from the start, but it does not appear to have been. It was introduced prior to the communications outlining the so-called deliberative process released so far. The administration is deliberately hiding that information under the cloak [Hot Air correction to 'cloak room tapping' story] of transparency by releasing these after-the-fact communications, and there are many in the media who are helping them do so by fawning over their being so falsely forthcoming.

On the IRS front, Michael Barone outlines the issues briefly here, but the most important shoe to drop this morning, in my estimation, regards the union to which all of the 'low-level' IRS employees accused of wrongdoing in regard to TEA Party and other groups belong. If you're looking for more evidence that public service employees unions are contrary to the proper function of government, it is here. Related and also related.

On the AP phone record front, AG Holder recused himself by mentioning he was recusing himself to somebody at some unspecified time, and is unsure whether his department has ever once prosecuted under the Born Alive Infant Protection Act.

UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt is excellent on the absurd deficiencies of the IRS scandal investigation report and whitewash. When asked on May 15 whether he would appoint a Special  Counsel to investigate, Holder replied no.

Ed Driscoll thinks the bloom may be off the Obama rose for the media. I am skeptical.

UPDATEx2: Obama says we don't need a special counsel regarding this 'leaked' IG IRS report. Let's find out how it was 'leaked,' hmmm? Holder?

UPDATEx3: Count John Brennan in with Nuland and Vietor, making sure all the valid stuff got excised.

UPDATEx4: Allah Pundit on Sharyl Attkisson, Benghazi, and the strangely incurious MSM. USA Today asks some of the questions raised by yesterday's very partial Benghazi docs dump. Thomas Joscelyn with more on the video protest persiflage.

Sorry I haven't posted in a few days. I've been busy, and honestly it's been all I can do to keep up with reading about Scandalpalooza. I'm just going to dump a whole bunch of good reading on the various scandals listed by Mary Pat in the post below for the moment, so that I can clear the tabs.

Michelle Malkin reminds us with details that all of these administration abuses of power have precedents.

Mike Ciandella at CNS shows that Soros is the big funder behind a lot of the proggie organizations that were pressuring lawmakers and the IRS to investigate their conservative counterparts, and Carl Levin of Michigan is one of the members of Congress who duly passed along their concerns.

Catholic-in-name liberal front groups that received Soros funds may have been instigated IRS harassment of Catholic Professor Anne Hendershott, who wrote about the links among those groups and their funders. It's a common trope among leftists that someone pushing the TEA Party/patriot/small government line must be in the pay of the Brothers Koch (who seem to have had their IRS information leaked) or some other deep-pocketed conservative 1%er, because that's their own model, and they assume it's ours. This causes Jimmie Bise to lament.

The IRS somehow ended up with medical records pertaining to 60 million citizens (correction per Starless in comments: 60 million records pertaining to 10 million citizens), many of them in California, without subpoenaing them. Gabe Malor from Ace of Spades cautions on Twitter that the suit some of those people have initiated isn't against the IRS generally, but against 15 of its employees, and urges caution because this is a civil suit and because he thinks that the lawyer representing them is given to overreaching. An Obama Campaign Chairman also managed somehow to get ahold of Romney tax records. Hmmm.

The IRS also finally sought to bring its Determinations Unit under control when it began to be concerned about possible media blowback. Meanwhile, they want you to share everything. When everything is about redistribution, an agency such as the IRS becomes the most important investigative agency in the country, Citizen.

In that vein, Da Techguy cautions not to run into a liberal ambush by calling for Obama's impeachment before all the investigations have run their course. It's more important to get the information and get it before the public at the moment.

Not that you weren't aware of the close relations between the administration and tax-exempt cronies in Media Matters, but here it is demonstrated that MMfA has been used by the Justice Department to put their spin on issues out there. Not a new story, but one of many flashbacks that people are now connecting up to present scandals. That kind of collaboration ought to get their tax exemption yanked, but instead MMfA are trying to justify the IRS's little pogrom against TEA Party and other organizations.

Here's a good treatment of the problem with Sebelius leaning on insurers to get the ObamaCare ramp up funded, a practice generally referred to by the name extortion. It also flies in the face of a little law known as the Anti-Deficiency Act, which was one of the troubles with Iran-Contra. But since Sebelius has apparently faced no consequences from having violated the Hatch Act, that's only to be expected, I suppose.

Then there are a class of treatments we might classify as zeitgeisty that point out that none of these scandals ought to surprise us at all, because the Obama administration is essentially Chicago on the Potomac, deriving its sense of good governance from the Windy City where His Imperial Lawlessness cut his political teeth.

As I'm sure you already know, the administration gets reports regarding its own lawlessness news agencies, just like you and me.

UPDATE: IRS harasses pro-life organizations, protects Planned Parenthood.