Obama Regime Doubles Down On Using IRS To Silence Political Opponents

Kimberley Strassel for The Wall Street Journal, here:

Democrats are instead fully vested now in using the IRS to shut down criticism by outside groups of ObamaCare, overspending or (ironically) the IRS targeting. Even liberal groups are howling about the White House's use of the IRS to silence political speech, and the House on Wednesday passed a bill to delay the regulations. The White House's response? A veto threat.

Hey Rush Limbaugh, Maybe Mormons Stayed Home In 2012!

Alex Beam in "Did Mormons Want Romney To Win?" for The Boston Globe suggests Mormons weren't ready for a Mormon presidency, here:

“No one would ever come out and say it, but I suspect what you are thinking is probably true,” says Matthew Bowman, a Mormon professor of religion and author of “The Mormon People.” “The whole Romney campaign was a shock to the system for a church that generally wants to move very slowly and is used to hashing out things out [sic] internally over a long period of time.”

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Mormons in the US number about 6 million, but Kimberley Strassel has pointed out that Romney lost the election by fewer than 350,000 total votes in just four states: Florida, Virginia, Ohio and New Hampshire. 

Yikes, Now Laura Ingraham Repeats Stupid

Just now Laura Ingraham said on her radio program that 3 million Republicans stayed home on election day in 2012.

The story was debunked in late November 2012 already, by Kimberley Strassel for The Wall Street Journal.

She's starting to sound as dumb as Rush.

Get up to speed people!

Rush Limbaugh Must Be High Again: Now Blames Tea Party For Staying Home In 2012

Up until now I haven't heard Rush Limbaugh blame the Tea Party specifically for staying home in 2012. It's always been the Republican "base" which he's been blaming for staying home, first 3 million of them, then 4 million. 

But now he's saying specifically that it's the Tea Party which stayed home in 2012, here on Friday:

CALLER: Hi, Rush, thanks for taking my call. Hey, I was just wondering if the Tea Party is so strong, what the hell happened to us in 2012?

RUSH: Stayed home.

CALLER: I would have walked over broken glass to vote against Obama.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: Nothing could have kept me from it.

RUSH: Yeah, but four million of you didn't.

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Rush got this "stay home" meme in his head from some uncritical knee-jerk repetition of provisional reporting right after the election suggesting whites stayed home, based on admittedly incomplete exit polling data, which is kind of an irony since Rush used the same airtime on Friday to highlight how a false story about a country singer couldn't be erased no matter how hard she tried. Well this false story is well nigh impossible to erase from Rush's hard drive, and it's just getting worse now that he's singling out the Tea Party, which is probably more responsible for Romney's actual better performance than McCain's than people realize.

Within weeks of the election the whole idea that McCain got more Republican votes than Romney was decisively trashed by Kimberley Strassel for The Wall Street Journal here and by Ed Morrissey at Hot Air here. Strassel points out the only losing state where McCain bested Romney was Ohio.

In point of fact, Strassel's numbers show Romney could have won the election but for 334,000 votes in just four states:

In the end, it was 334,000 votes—in Florida, Virginia, Ohio and New Hampshire—that separated Mr. Romney from the presidency.

In McCain's loss to Obama in 2008, the election similarly turned on just 1.4 million votes in the swing states. And for all the close states Romney lost to Obama in 2012, not just those four, the election turned on half that many in total.

So actually Romney did much better than McCain, it's just that Obama deployed his resources on the ground very effectively in a targeted manner, especially in Ohio, while Romney can't be said to have deployed much at all. Turning out your peeps in contested territories is key even if you lose those. Peeling off votes even in small numbers can increase the value of your turnout elsewhere in the same state, which is the point of campaigning on the ground in Hispanic and other minority strongholds, as Strassel points out. You don't have to win them, just weaken them.

Why Rush Limbaugh just keeps phoning it in on this issue is anyone's guess. But it is clear from much of what he says on the show that he increasingly relies on others to do his show prep for him.

Sympathetic critics of Rush Limbaugh are embarrassed for him, and Tea Partiers in particular can't be too happy. 

Obama's Tea Party Attack Dog Bob Bauer Is A Maoist Like His Wife, Anita Dunn

"struggle session"

From Investor's Business Daily, here, which thinks the dots connect to Obama:

But as the Wall Street Journal's Kimberly Strassel reminds us, Obama's 2008 campaign was demanding the Justice Department criminally prosecute conservative groups with 501(c)4 tax-exempt status. Then, last year, President Obama's re-election campaign "targeted private citizens who had donated to Romney groups."

The chief operative? Longtime Democratic Party lawyer Robert Bauer, general counsel for Obama's presidential campaigns, White House general counsel during Obama's first term, Democratic National Committee general counsel, and the Democrats' counsel in President Bill Clinton's Senate impeachment trial. And, not least, husband of Democratic political strategist Anita Dunn, White House communications director in Obama's first term, and now an MSNBC contributor.

Actually, the dots connect beyond Obama to Mao.

Maggie's Notebook prominently showcased Bauer and Dunn as a couple already in 2009, here. We should have understood better what this implied. While Anita Dunn is on record stating her admiration for Mao, Bauer actually has been busy echoing Maoism in his capacity as Obama's personal lawyer and as general counsel for the White House and the Obama political campaigns.

One of the main techniques of Mao's Great Leap Forward in China was for local communist parties to target landowners for public intimidation in "struggle sessions" in order to break the grip of counterrevolutionary power in the countryside. They ended up executing an estimated 2 million of them during the 1950s. As a feature of the permanent revolution, the struggle sessions eventually made it to the cities where counterrevolutionary rival communists were frequently targeted and persecuted.

These struggle sessions have been adapted to the new revolutionary environment by the Obama Left. Whether it's Acorn cadres occupying bank lobbies, or using the Justice Department, the IRS, and individual US Representatives and Senators to single out private citizens, businesses and nonprofits on political grounds, targeting one's political and class enemies with whatever means are available comes straight from the dark ages of 20th century communism, brought to you by ObaMao and Company.

China was ready to welcome one of their own.

The new Great Leap Forward

IRS Scandal Under Democrat Shulman Is The Bipartisan Gift That Keeps On Giving

Rush Limbaugh, here:

"By the way, everybody is making a big deal out of the fact that Shulman was a Bush appointee. All right, let me deal with that. We must. Yeah, he was a Bush appointee, but he's a Democrat. Douglas Shulman is a Democrat. He gave the Democrat National Committee $250 a month before Bush appointed him to his job. Do you know what Shulman is? Shulman is one of countless Bush appointees who were put there by Bush -- Democrats -- in order to show bipartisanship.

"Remember he had that Florida aftermath -- all this acrimony, hatred and partisanship -- and Bush put a lot of Democrats in positions, and he left a lot of Democrats in positions -- as a show of good faith, in an attempt to show compassionate conservatism, in an attempt to mend fences with the Democrats. It didn't matter. It never will work that way. It never does matter. But that's what Bush was trying to do. Shulman's a Democrat. He's a lifelong Democrat. He's a Democrat partisan."

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President George W. Bush appointed Douglas Shulman to run the IRS in November 2007 as the political wheels were coming off the Bush administration bus after the Democrats took over the US House in the November 2006 elections, and as the economic wheels began coming off the country as the housing bubble popped and banks began to fail in 2007.

Meanwhile we have now learned from Kim Strassel of The Wall Street Journal here that the general counsel of the 2008 Obama campaign and later also the general counsel in the White House, Bob Bauer, was part of a new and broad attempt by Obama's leftists to suppress conservatives precisely on their own nonprofit turf:

'Bob Bauer, general counsel for the campaign (and later general counsel for the White House), on the same day [August 21, 2008] wrote to the criminal division of the Justice Department, demanding an investigation into AIP [American Issues Project], "its officers and directors," and its "anonymous donors." Mr. Bauer claimed that the nonprofit, as a 501(c)(4), was committing a "knowing and willful violation" of election law, and wanted "action to enforce against criminal violations."

'The Bauer onslaught was a big part of a new liberal strategy to thwart the rise of conservative groups. In early August 2008, the New York Times trumpeted the creation of a left-wing group (a 501(c)4) called Accountable America. Founded by Obama supporter and liberal activist Tom Mattzie, the group—as the story explained—would start by sending "warning" letters to 10,000 GOP donors, "hoping to create a chilling effect that will dry up contributions." The letters would alert "right-wing groups to a variety of potential dangers, including legal trouble, public exposure and watchdog groups digging through their lives." As Mr. Mattzie told Mother Jones: "We're going to put them at risk."'

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Someone at the IRS embarked on the exact same strategy of creating a chilling effect at least from March 2010, perhaps in the wake of Citizens United in January 2010, but the strategy, and the practice, predates it.

How Shulman could not have known about it is hard to believe.

  

In The Realm Of Domestic Policy, Obama Has Arrogated To Himself Unprecedented Power

So observes the very clever Kimberley Strassel, for The Wall Street Journal, here, where you will find a veritable litany of President Obama's imperial transgressions, in contrast to Pres. Bush's somewhat more muted sins, which were restricted for the most part to constitutionally prescribed executive functions:

Ah, yes. The "imperial presidency" of George W. Bush was a favorite judgment of the left about our 43rd president's conduct in war, wiretapping and detentions. Yet say this about Mr. Bush: His aggressive reading of executive authority was limited to the area where presidents are at their core power—the commander-in-chief function.

Ah, no. Ms. Strassel provides no accounting of Bush's penchant for an excessive number of signing statements on legislative points with which he disagreed. Well, yeah, at least Bush didn't go around the Congress as Obama has done, but still he laid the groundwork, the ethos, in the Executive Branch to do what Obama has done.

There it hangs, suspended in space, that trimming suggestion of "core power". It's not as if, on any objective reading of the constitution, that the executive should be the subject of ruminations about its core powers vs. its peripheral powers. All the branches have well-defined powers. The problem has been, perhaps now more so than heretofore, that the executive's imperial tendencies have occupied center stage in competition with a judiciary wont to legislate from the bench. Left hopelessly behind and co-opted have been the people, whose representatives are too few and too divided to present a true image of the country in the halls of power.

The US House has become more of a cheering section than a countervailing weight in the government, mostly because one of the unintended consequences of stopping its enlargement according to population growth in the 1920s meant that it inevitably became the creature of other interests, usually executive interests in the age of the worship of the blended strongman. Hence America's almost insane preoccupation with who will be the next president while no one knows the name of their Congressman.

The way forward to remedy some, but by no means all, of America's most acute problems is to let the people have their say for a change. We must enlarge the US House of Representatives and make the other branches compete for power and influence once again, not simply take it while so few people are watching.

As A Dog Returneth To His Vomit

Kimberley A. Strassel updated the Alexi Giannoulias affair in mid-July for The Wall Street Journal, highlighting the source of the Senate hopeful's personal fortunes, which ended up a bank failure in April:

Then in April federal regulators seized Broadway Bank. Records showed the bank's lending profile changed sharply after Mr. Giannoulias came on full-time in 2002. His lending department doubled down on the risky real estate loans that helped shred the housing market; Broadway piled up losses. Mr. Giannoulias prospered.

No doubt Mr. Obama can't wait to arrive on Aug. 5 to raise money for one of those, ahem, "fat cat bankers." And he'll be landing in Chicago just as the Blagojevich trial is raising uncomfortable questions about Mr. Obama's Chicago connections and his role pushing his friend Valerie Jarrett for the Senate seat. The state Democratic establishment is dutifully holding "Vote Alexi" signs, but many are bitter that the White House landed them with this guy. It won't be a pleasant visit.

Read the complete story, here.