Sen. Marco "Rube Goldberg" Rubio Thinks Fines On Illegals Will Pay For Border Security

Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

Quoted here:

“We need to register them as soon as possible, not just to keep the problem from getting worse, but we’re going to require them to pay a fine, and that’s the money that we are going to use to pay for the border security,” Rubio explained. “If we don’t get that fine money from the people that have violated our immigration laws, then the American taxpayer is going to have to pay for border security.”

Here's the most wildly optimistic estimate of total revenue from fees and fines on 11 million illegal aliens from The Christian Science Monitor: $2,000 per illegal over a decade. And good luck with that given all the work-arounds to fines and fees in the Senate bill. But, make the wild assumption you'll collect the full amount, and you get a paltry one time total of $22 billion.

The cost of security just on the Mexico border in 2012 was $11.7 billion according to BusinessWeek here. America is going to spend well north of $120 billion for border security over the next decade, and along comes Rubio telling us we need to flush the illegals out first before we secure the border in order to finance the security, otherwise the taxpayers will have to pay for it.

What a joke. We're going to pay for it anyway, big time.

In 2011 Republican Governor Rick Perry of Texas was quoted in The New York Times here saying a fence alone would cost $30 billion and a decade to build:

Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, claiming superior experience as the leader of the state with 1,200 miles of the border, advocated a more complex strategy, combining fencing and surveillance technology with “a lot of boots on the ground.” Mr. Perry said that building a border-length fence would take “10 to 15 years and $30 billion” and would not be cost-effective.

Whatever the answer is to illegal immigration, the Senate amnesty-first bill ain't it.

Lois Lerner: Sen. Dick Durbin's Government Attack Dog Since 1996

George Will, here:

In the fall of 1996, at the [IL Senate] campaign’s climax, Democrats filed with the Federal Election Commission charges against [Al] Salvi’s campaign alleging campaign finance violations. These charges dominated the campaign’s closing days. Salvi spoke by telephone with the head of the FEC’s Enforcement Division, who he remembers saying: “Promise me you will never run for office again, and we’ll drop this case.” He was speaking to Lois Lerner.

After losing to Durbin, Salvi spent four years and $100,000 fighting the FEC, on whose behalf FBI agents visited his elderly mother demanding to know, concerning her $2,000 contribution to her son’s campaign, where she got “that kind of money.” When the second of two federal courts held that the charges against Salvi were spurious, the lawyer arguing for the FEC was Lois Lerner.

More recently, she has been head of the IRS Exempt Organizations Division, which has used its powers of delay, harassment and extortion to suppress political participation. For example, it has told an Iowa right-to-life group that it would get tax-exempt status if it would promise not to picket Planned Parenthood clinics.

USA Today Might As Well Call Obama A Liar, Because He's All That, Every Day, 24/7

Here:

When news broke last week that the government has been collecting the phone records of millions of Americans, President Obama said he "welcome(s) the debate" over whether his administration has struck the right balance between national security and privacy.

That's questionable. If Obama really wanted this debate, he could have begun it when he first took office and learned in detail what has been going on in the name of keeping Americans safe from terrorists. Instead, the administration has worked to keep citizens in the dark for four-and-a-half years, and members of Congress have repeatedly killed proposals to let Americans know more. The only reason there's a debate now is because it was started by a leaker.

Hm. IRS Cancels Spy "Equiptment" Order For Some Reason.

Here.

Still can't spell, though.

DNI Clapper Lied To Congress And To Us And Pre-Meditated That Lie, Plain And Simple

The Clapper

The New York Times, here, which says Clapper is now in an awkward position (yeah, like being caught in flagrante delicto):

At the March Senate hearing, Mr. Wyden asked Mr. Clapper, “Does the N.S.A. collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”

“No, sir,” Mr. Clapper replied. “Not wittingly.”

Mr. Wyden said on Tuesday that he had sent his question to Mr. Clapper’s office a day before the hearing, and had given his office a chance to correct the misstatement after the hearing, but to no avail.

In an interview on Sunday with NBC News, Mr. Clapper acknowledged that his answer had been problematic, calling it “the least untruthful” answer he could give.

Immigration Bill To Give Employers Cheap Labor Not Covered By ObamaCare

We don't get no stinkin' ObamaCare

So Philip Klein, here:

[I]f the immigration bill becomes law, some employers could effectively face incentives of hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire newly legalized immigrants over American citizens, because the immigrant workers would not qualify for Obamacare benefits.

As the implementation of Obamacare approaches, there have been many news reports about companies considering cutting back full-time workers to part-time, or taking other actions to get around the mandate penalties. The immigration bill would offer employers another way out – hiring fewer American citizens and more immigrants with provisional legal status.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Naw, that's not intentional. Just an unfortunate unintended consequence.

In This Case, I'll Take The 29-Year-Old Stubble Over The 72-Year-Old Toilet Brush

Don't Talk To Me About The Rule Of Law

Millions of illegal aliens are about to get a pass for breaking the law, thanks to Marco Rubio and his fellow Republicans in the US Senate, while Edward Snowden is vilified as a traitor and has gone into hiding for blowing the lid on the spying tyrants those politicians are and hope to remain.

Don't forget. Paul Revere and company were considered traitors, too.

In 1776, NSA Metadata Could Have Isolated The Tea Party And Paul Revere

Tea Party center right, London Enemies list center left, Paul Revere in the middle

Story here.

IRS Wants 4 Coffee Trays With Concealed Cameras, Among Other Spy Items

Here's the link, see for yourself.

(Damn fools can't spell "equipment").

I imagine all that spy equipment comes in real handy right before they call in the boyz 'n girlz with the (illegal for the public) 14" barreled Remington 12-gauge shotguns they ordered in February 2010, here:

"The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) intends to purchase sixty Remington Model 870 Police RAMAC #24587 12 gauge pump-action shotguns for the Criminal Investigation Division. The Remington parkerized shotguns, with fourteen inch barrel, modified choke, Wilson Combat Ghost Ring rear sight and XS4 Contour Bead front sight, Knoxx Reduced Recoil Adjustable Stock, and Speedfeed ribbed black forend, are designated as the only shotguns authorized for IRS duty based on compatibility with IRS existing shotgun inventory, certified armorer and combat training and protocol, maintenance, and parts."

And Now A Message From Operation Troll The NSA Dot Com

Hey! How’s it going? I’m all right. 

My job is so shitty I wish could overthrow my boss. It’s like this oppressive regime where only true believers in his management techniques will stay around. I work marathon-length hours and he’s made all these changes that have made it the worst architecture firm to work at in Manhattan. Like he moved the office to the Financial District and fired my assistant. She was the only one who knew where the blueprints were! I need access to those blueprints to complete my job! F my life, right? And he keeps trying to start all these new initiatives to boost revenue, but seriously we just need to stick to what we do best. There’s only one true profit center. I seriously feel ready to go on strike at any second.

I just read this article about how these free radical particles can cause the downfall of good health and accelerate aging. These could actually cause death to millions of Americans. If these particles are flying around undetected everywhere, does that mean we’re all radicalized?

Have you seen the second season of Breaking Bad? I just finished it. I couldn’t believe that episode where they poison the guy with ricin! That was the bomb! I won’t say any more because I don’t want to reveal the earth-shattering events to come.

Oh! So I’ve been planning a big trip for the summer. I’m thinking of visiting all of the most famous suspension bridges in the United States. So probably like the Golden Gate Bridge, The Brooklyn Bridge, and the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. I’m gonna bring my younger brother and I know he’ll want to go to bars, so I’m thinking of getting him a fake drivers license, but I hope that doesn’t blow up in my face.

Okay, I gotta run! I’m late for flight school. I missed the last class where we learn how to land, so I really can’t miss another one. Talk to you later!

Hillary's Reign Of Mayhem At State Besides Benghazi Deaths: Sexual Assault, Prostitution, Drug Dealing, And . . . Cover-Ups

Cover-ups? WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE?!

CBS News, here:

'CBS News' John Miller reports that according to an internal State Department Inspector General's memo, several recent investigations were influenced, manipulated, or simply called off. The memo obtained by CBS News cited eight specific examples. Among them: allegations that a State Department security official in Beirut "engaged in sexual assaults" on foreign nationals hired as embassy guards and the charge and that members of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's security detail "engaged prostitutes while on official trips in foreign countries" -- a problem the report says was "endemic."'

If Anyone's Guilty Of Treason, It's Obama's DNI James Clapper And Senator Feinstein

Liar! Liar!

These two hypocrites work hand in glove lying to the American people, here:

'Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the national intelligence committee, has ordered the NSA to review how it limits the exposure of Americans to government surveillance. But she made clear her disapproval of Snowden. "What he did was an act of treason," she said. ... The director of national intelligence, James Clapper, said in an NBC interview that he had responded in the "least untruthful manner" possible when he denied in congressional hearings last year that the NSA collected data on millions of Americans.'

Meanwhile America is full of servile bastards who are fine with being spied upon, and it is they who enable creeps like Clapper and Dianne Goldman Berman Feinstein Blum:

'[A] poll by the Pew Research Center, asking a more general question, said 56% respondents approved of the NSA surveillance program.' 

Pants on fire!

Drudge's Latest Headline Writer Can Has Cheezburger

No S#^t, Sherlock! TrimTabs Says Every Asset Class Is Overpriced.

Well, welcome to the party, but we've all got hangovers since like yesterday:

"We think investors with a longer-term outlook should tread carefully in financial markets," TrimTabs said in its widely followed weekly market analysis. "The Federal Reserve and its fellow central banks have succeeded in making almost every major asset class in the world overpriced."

Adios Hombre: Republican Sen. Marco Rubio Should Join The Democrat Party

Adios, Hombre!

Because that's where he belongs with his now unconditional amnesty for illegal aliens:

"In most of his public appeals for the Gang of Eight bill, Rubio has stressed its enforcement provisions, saying that border security must come before immigrants are granted legal permanent resident status. What he has not stressed so much is the fact that the bill would legalize the 11 million almost immediately, after they have passed background checks and paid some sort of fine. That would happen before any new security measures are completed, or even begun."

Obama Calls His Eavesdropping On 100 Million Americans "Modest"

Making 47 million people on food stamps just chopped liver, huh?

Here:

"And the modest encroachments on privacy that are involved in getting phone numbers or duration without a name attached and not looking at content, that on net, it was worth us doing." 

"National Review Used To Be A Conservative Magazine"

So said Rush Limbaugh just now.

Progress.

This Piece Of Paper Isn't The Threat . . .

a partial transcription of the original Bill of Rights

. . . but this one sure as hell is:

Mohamed Atta's 5-Year US Visa

Gas Prices Are Red Hot In Michigan,Though Temperatures Are Not

Why Edward Snowden Is In Hong Kong Instead Of Hawaii

Steve Clemons, Editor At Large, The Atlantic

TARP Bailout Funds To Be Used To Throw Out Vacant Michigan Homes

At a cost of about $25,000 each, the $100 million would demolish just 4,000 of Michigan's roughly 50,000 vacant properties. That doesn't make any sense.

Story here.

Author Of Patriot Act Says Obama Is Abusing It

Rep. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin in the UK Guardian, here:

The administration claims authority to sift through details of our private lives because the Patriot Act says that it can. I disagree. I authored the Patriot Act, and this is an abuse of that law. ... In his press conference on Friday, President Obama described the massive collection of phone and digital records as "two programs that were originally authorized by Congress, have been repeatedly authorized by Congress". But Congress has never specifically authorized these programs, and the Patriot Act was never intended to allow the daily spying the Obama administration is conducting. ... The president should immediately direct his administration to stop abusing the US constitution.

To Republicans Like Mike Rogers, These Are Just Words

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

Republican Mike Rogers Doesn't Have A Clue How We Feel About The 4th Amendment

Republican Mike Rogers is completely alienated from the original spirit of the Fourth Amendment animating the Tea Party in Michigan and across the country, here this morning:

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) had harsh words for the still-unnamed leaker and for the journalist who first reported the NSA’s collection of phone records, the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald.

“He doesn’t have a clue how this thing works; ne[i]ther did the person who released just enough information to literally be dangerous,” Rogers said, adding, “I absolutely think [the leaker] should be prosecuted.”

Nolan Finley Of The Detroit News Wants To Junk The IRS, And The Income Tax

THIS IS NOT NOLAN FINLEY

Here:

"[R]eplace the income tax with a national sales tax. You’d pay tax on the money you spend instead of the money you earn. That would eliminate the need for an IRS that audits tax returns, hands out non-profit status and enforces a tax code that is egregiously complex and unfair. If the national sales tax isn’t the answer, then a similar outcome might be achieved by drastically lowering current income tax rates in exchange for eliminating all deductions and credits. With no reason to examine returns, the IRS could be much smaller. Without auditing power, it’d be less intimidating."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Why not do both? A low flat sales tax and a low flat income tax? We already have one flat tax, called Social Security. And we already pay an average state sales tax of 5+% everywhere. Just abolish the income tax and augment the current flat Payroll Tax with the new one. Business everywhere is already set up to collect that and withhold, so dovetailing that with a corporate flat tax should also be easy to do. Presto. No IRS needed for America's 151 million wage earners and the millions of businesses who employ them.

Herman Cain's more or less revenue neutral 999 plan looks better and better with every passing day of the IRS scandal targeting Obama's political enemies: a flat 9% federal sales tax, a flat 9% tax on all income, and a flat 9% corporate income tax.

A man before his time.

Food Stamp Households Up, Not Persons, Can Only Mean One Thing

Smaller households.

Food stamp recipient numbers surged up again in March 2013 to 47.727 million Americans, but this did not break the record as claimed by Drudge and Zero Hedge headlines.

The record was reached in December 2012 at 47.792 million.

Zero Hedge is making the claim based on the number of households, not the number of persons. The only thing the former statistic might prove is that as the country becomes more single it becomes more poor. Marriage and family is the economic engine of capitalism, and Obama aims to destroy them both. He's succeeding, which is why Rush Limbaugh famously hoped Obama would fail.

Persons on SNAP have been at the 47 million level since August 2012.

Data here.

Obama Biographies Deliberately Omitted That His Mentor Was A Flaming Communist

Including for the Associated Press, and both biographies by John Meacham and David Remnick.

Herbert Meyer, here:

For example, during the 2008 presidential campaign, the Associated Press ran two articles about Obama's life in Hawaii, one specifically about Frank [Marshall Davis]. The AP described him to voters desperate for insight about the Democratic candidate merely as an advocate of "civil rights amid segregation" and a crusader for the U.S. Constitution. The only Frank quote the AP offered its readers -- chosen from decades of vicious, anti-American newspaper columns Frank wrote in Hawaii -- was this: "I refuse to settle for anything less than all the rights which are due me under the Constitution."

Newsweek's John Meacham told readers only that Frank wrote about "civil rights and labor issues." David Remnick, who wrote for The Washington Post, who now is editor of The New Yorker, and who authored The Bridge, which to date is perhaps the most comprehensive biography of our president, managed to completely ignore Frank's communist ideology and told readers only that Frank "wrote fierce columns about the suppression of unions, conditions on the plantation, the power of oligarchic Hawaiian families, race relations." Somehow, this Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist failed to notice -- or chose to ignore -- Frank's incendiary, near-treasonous columns blasting Harry Truman and the Marshall Plan, accusing the U.S. of trying to re-Nazify Germany, and defending the Soviet Union at every turn.

Top Secret FISA Order Revealed By Glenn Greenwald Was 80th THIS YEAR

According to William Binney, quoted here:

The National Security Agency’s collection of phone data from all of Verizon’s U.S. customers is just the “tip of the iceberg,” says a former NSA official who estimates the agency has data on as many as 20 trillion phone calls and emails by U.S. citizens. ...

Britain’s Guardian newspaper posted online late Wednesday a copy of the “Top Secret” FISA court order directing telecommunications giant Verizon to hand over “metadata” about every call made or received by all of its customers in the United States. Such metadata include the calling and receiving phone numbers, the time of day and length of the call, and the whereabouts of the two parties.

Mr. Binney noted the order’s serial number, which indicates it is the 80th issued by the FISA court so far this year. The court likely has approved similar orders for the other major U.S. telecom providers, he said, “and they have to be renewed every 90 days.”

NSA Copies Everything Off AT&T Fiberoptic Network In Switching Centers Nationwide

Recounted here:

In 2003, according to sworn testimony by a former AT&T engineer, the NSA began building a special room at the company’s switching center in San Francisco and at other AT&T switching centers around the country. Equipment in the room enabled NSA to siphon off a copy of every byte of data running through AT&T’s fiber-optic cable network, according to privacy advocates.

Glenn Greenwald Channels The Utopian Edward Bellamy

From his latest in the UK Guardian, here:

"We followed Wednesday's story about the NSA's bulk telephone record-gathering with one yesterday about the agency's direct access to the servers of the world's largest internet companies. I don't have time at the moment to address all of the fallout because - to borrow someone else's phrase - I'm Looking Forward to future revelations that are coming (and coming shortly), not Looking Backward to ones that have already come."

"With a tear for the dark past, turn we then to the dazzling future, and, veiling our eyes, press forward. The long and weary winter of the race is ended. Its summer has begun. Humanity has burst the chrysalis. The heavens are before it."

The US Dollar Has Tanked Since Bernanke Spoke Before Congress On May 22nd

THE US DOLLAR BREAKOUT ABOVE 84 HAS FAILED FOR NOW.

The dollar has fallen 3.15% since May 22nd when Bernanke opened his big yap and went off-script in front of Congress, hinting at a tapering off of QE in the near future.

The dollar closed at 84.35 on May 22nd and closed yesterday at 81.69.

When just words can tank fiat bonds and fiat dollars, isn't it time to pay our respects once again to Article 1, Section 10?

"No state shall . . . make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts;"

Still Think You Can Predict Bond Market Sell-Off? You're Already A Month Late.

NAV of total bond market is already down almost 2% in a month.

So says James B. Stewart here in The New York Times, who notes Bill Gross of PIMCO fame manages a corporate bond/MBS fund which is already down well over 10%:

The sell-off in fixed income began slowly on May 10, an otherwise uneventful day with no obvious catalyst for any change in sentiment. It picked up steam when Fed sources didn’t step forward to calm markets. Then, in comments to Congress on May 22, Mr. Bernanke said, “We could in the next few meetings take a step down in our pace of purchases.”

That set off alarm bells, in contrast with his prepared text, which gave no suggestion that the Fed’s policy would change so soon. And then, the minutes of the Fed’s May meeting suggested that some Fed governors were prepared to start tapering off bond purchases as soon as the Fed’s next meeting, which will be June 18 and 19. Near-panic selling in some markets ensued.

. . . the simplest and safest approach [may be] simply to park funds in a low-volatility money market fund and accept near-zero returns.

"Americans For A Conservative Direction" Isn't Conservative: It's A Mark Zuckerberg/Jeb Bush BiPartisan Front Group Trying To Ram Immigration Reform Down Our Throats

Breitbart had the story on May 7th, here, and the radio ads from "Americans For A Conservative Direction", which run incessantly during Rush Limbaugh's program, have gone through at least one major makeover which removes the recorded voices of Sen. Rubio and Rep. Ryan.

Wake up people: "Republican" does not mean "conservative", and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame and fan of Barack Obama is the last person on earth I would think of when I'm asked to name a conservative.

You are being manipulated and lulled to sleep in order to pass a bill which will only favor Democrats and hurt Americans looking for jobs.

Republicans who are bipartisan are selling us down the river.

Unemployment Ticks Up To 7.6% In May

Average jobs added per month ticks up to 172,000 from 169,000 in last month's report.

The latest from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is here.

Unemployment in America has been above 7% since December 2008: 54 months. If Obama keeps this up he can beat the original Teflon president's string of 61 months of unemployment at 7% or above from December 1980 through December 1985.

Hey Obama! You Can't Stop What We're Thinking!

Hey Obama! Guess Where I'm Callin' From!

Lying ObamaCare Lies And The Liberals Who Tell Them

ObamaCare will force you to buy more expensive coverage than you willingly do now, according to this Wall Street Journal op-ed, here:

Liberals have spent years claiming that "rate shock" under the Affordable Care Act—the 20% to 30% average spike in insurance premiums that every independent analyst projects—is merely the political imagination of Republicans and the insurance industry. So they immediately claimed victory when California reported last month that the plans that will be available on the state's new insurance exchange next year would be cheaper than they are today.

Except now it emerges that California goosed the data to make it appear as if ObamaCare won't send costs aloft as the law's regulations and mandates kick in. It will, by a lot. And now liberals have suddenly switched to arguing that, sure, insurance will be more expensive but the new costs are justified. Needless to say that was not how Democrats sold health-care reform.

California reported that the rates would range from 2% above to 29% below the current market. "This is a home run for consumers in every region of California," said Peter Lee, the director of the state exchange. "These rates are way below the worst-case gloom-and-doom scenarios we have heard."

The Things You See On Wordpress

Here.

"It's not a recovery. It's not even normal growth. It's bad."

So says Edward Leamer, Director of the UCLA Anderson Forecast, here in The Los Angeles Times:

The country's tepid growth in its gross domestic product isn't creating enough good jobs to build a strong middle class, according to a UCLA report released Wednesday. ...

Real GDP growth — the value of goods and services produced after adjusting for inflation — is 15.4% below the 3% growth trend of past recoveries, wrote Edward Leamer . . ..

"It's not a recovery," he wrote. "It's not even normal growth. It's bad." ...

Young adults are facing staggering student loan debt that will force them to put off buying homes until later in life, said senior economist David Shulman.

Outstanding student loans have tripled since 2004, according to Federal Reserve Bank figures. In 2012, public and private student loan levels reached $966 billion.

"Never before have so many young people been saddled with so much non-mortgage debt, and that burden will keep them out of the home buying market for years to come," Shulman wrote.

Honest Liberal Calls This The Worst Consumer Recession In Modern History

Stephen Roach of Yale University, here, points out that the rate of growth in personal consumption is just 25% of what it used to be:

Over the 21 quarters since the beginning of 2008, real (inflation-adjusted) personal consumption has risen at an average annual rate of just 0.9%. That is by far the most protracted period of weakness in real US consumer demand since the end of World War II – and a massive slowdown from the pre-crisis pace of 3.6% annual real consumption growth from 1996 to 2007. ...

[T]he release of pent-up demand in the current cycle amounted to just 3% annualized growth in the five quarters from early 2010 to early 2011. Moreover, the strongest quarterly gain was a 4.1% increase in the fourth quarter of 2010.

This is a stunning result. The worst consumer recession in modern history, featuring a record collapse in durable-goods expenditures in 2008-2009, should have triggered an outsize surge of pent-up demand. Yet it did anything but that. Instead, the release of pent-up consumer demand was literally half that of previous business cycles.

How To Become Fat Like The Government

h/t Scott

Obama The Marxist Thinks The Middle Class Is His Greatest And Most Dangerous Enemy

"The most dangerous enemies of the dictatorship of the proletariat."

"The greatest internal enemy of the proletariat and the proletarian revolution."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Impose a dearth of ammo for their guns, mediocritize their healthcare, impoverish them with unemployment, make them servile with food stamps and disability payments, destroy their incentive to save with artificially low interest rates, spy on them with cameras, wire taps, drones and email intercepts, make it too expensive to travel, or too humiliating, dumb them down with inadequate public school educations, reduce them to the level of the gutter in their speech and morals through ridicule of all standards of public discourse and thinking, and destroy all traditional conceptions in institutions from the Boy Scouts to the US military. Politicize everything, but threaten the wrong politics with the power of the State. Anesthetize with drugs. Make them hate the rich so they stop trying to be so. Meanwhile, party, and spend their money like it's never been spent before.

IRS Casts Wide Net Full Of 88 Employees In Scandal, One Claiming DC In Charge

CNN had the stories here on Friday:

The Internal Revenue Service has told House GOP investigators they have identified 88 IRS employees who may have documents relevant to the congressional investigation into targeting of conservative groups, according to a congressional source familiar with the investigation.

And here on Sunday:

One Cincinnati IRS employee interviewed by the Oversight Committee rejects the White House assertion (that the Cincinnati office was responsible) and points to Washington as being responsible for targeting effort (from 5/30 interview):

Q In early 2010, was there a time when you became aware of applications that referenced Tea Party or other conservative groups?

A In March of 2010, I was made aware.

******

Q Okay. Now, was there a point around this time period when [your supervisor] asked you to do a search for similar applications?

A Yes.

Q To the best of your recollection, when was this request made?

A Sometime in early March of 2010.

******

Q Did [your supervisor] give you any indication of the need for the search, any more context?

A He told me that Washington, D.C., wanted some cases.

******

Q So as of April 2010, these 40 cases were held at that moment in your group; is that right?

A Some were.

Q How many were held there?

A Less than 40. Some went to Washington, D.C.

Q Okay. How many went to Washington, D.C.?

A I sent seven.

******

Q So you prepared seven hard copy versions of the applications to go to Washington, D.C.?

A Correct.

******

Q Did he give you any sort of indication as to why he requested you to do that?

[…]

A He said Washington, D.C. wanted seven. Because at one point I believe I heard they were thinking 10, but it came down to seven. I said okay, seven.

Q How did you decide which seven were sent?

A Just the first seven.

Q The first seven to come into the system?

A Yes.

*****

Think Of It As 501(c)(4) For Recreational Purposes, Minus The 501

IRS' Lois Lerner Speedily Approved Obama's Brother's Charity, Retroactively 3 Years

Story here:

The National Legal and Policy Center filed an official complaint with the IRS in May 2011 asking why the foundation was being allowed to solicit tax-deductible contributions when it had not even applied for an IRS determination. In a New York Post article dated May 8, 2011, an officer of the foundation admitted, “We haven’t been able to find someone with the expertise” to apply for tax-exempt status.

Nevertheless, a month later, the Barack H. Obama Foundation had flown through the grueling application process. Lerner granted the organization a 501(c) determination and even gave it a retroactive tax exemption dating back to December 2008.

The group’s available paperwork suggests an extremely hurried application and approval process. For example, the group’s 990 filings for 2008 and 2009 were submitted to the IRS on May 30, 2011, and its 2010 filing was submitted on May 23, 2011.

Lerner signed the group’s approval on June 26, 2011.

It is illegal to operate for longer than 27 months without an IRS determination and solicit tax-deductible contributions.

If You Can't Pronounce "Apoplectic", Raise Your Hand

How To Destroy The Bourgeoisie: Swell The Proletariat, One Latino At A Time

“If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, ‘We’re going to punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,’ if they don’t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it’s going to be harder and that’s why I think it’s so important that people focus on voting on November 2.”

-- President Obama, quoted here October 25, 2010

Obama Is Eliminating The Middle Class, But Do You Know Why?

Based on how thorough-going are Obama's attacks on the middle class, I'd say it's all intentional, something the professor would not dare say if he wants to keep his career, so I'll say it for him since I don't have a career to save.

Summarized from an op-ed by Peter Morici, University of Maryland, here:

His immigration policy swells the ranks of visa-holders in skill-short areas like engineering as well as the ranks of semi-skilled immigrant workers, frustrating the middle-class aspirations of the working poor born in this country.

His massive expansion of student loans permits universities to jack up tuition . . . Students are graduating encumbered by massive debt and too few marketable skills. Broke and unemployed, they are not marrying and starting families—that shrinks the middle class. 

Despite the availability of loans, skyrocketing tuition mandates ever greater family contributions to finance college. This puts higher education further out of reach for many working class families, and fewer low income children are pursuing post-secondary education than in the past—that shrinks the middle class too.

The President has jacked up taxes on families earning more than $250,000. Unfortunately, most businesses in America are either proprietorships or pass through corporations that pay those higher individual, as opposed to corporate, tax rates, raising the cost of investing and expanding businesses—that spells fewer jobs for the middle class and those that aspire to its ranks.

Unable to push through Congress limits on CO2 emissions, President Obama has used executive orders and the EPA to impose limits by fiat. Unfortunately, those raise manufacturing costs, China has no such limits, and all this encourages business to outsource in China—again fewer jobs for the middle class and aspiring middle class.

Free trade agreements that permit trading partners to undervalue their currencies, subsidize exports and artificially under price their products on U.S. store shelves, health care mandates that raise the price of insuring employees instead of controlling costs, unnecessarily cumbersome regulations to run factories, mindless limits on developing U.S. oil reserves, and exporting abundant natural gas to countries that shut out U.S. products with high tariffs all encourage outsourcing, not just in manufacturing but for many supporting services too—yet again, fewer jobs for middle class Americans.

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“The lower middle-class,” in Marx’s words, “has no special class interests. Its liberation does not entail a break with the system of private property. Being unfitted for an independent part in the class struggle, it considers every decisive class struggle a blow at the community. The conditions of his own personal freedom, which do not entail a departure from the system of private property, are, in the eyes of the member of the lower middle-class, those under which the whole of society can be saved.”

And this is the very reason why the lower middle-class masses are the most dangerous enemies of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They represent a very strong section of society. Their special interests are absolutely incompatible with the economic disturbances which are the inevitable accompaniment of transitional periods.

The disturbance of credit cuts the ground from under their feet. They begin shouting for order, for the strengthening of credit, in such a way that every concession to them leads in effect to a complete restoration of the old order. ...

[Marx] wished to separate the Labour movement from all lower middle class elements, because the lower middle class attitude — attachment to the idea of private property, more or less open striving to uphold credit, terror of every fundamental social disturbance — is in practice the greatest internal enemy of the proletariat and the proletarian revolution.

-- Bela Kun, Pravda, May 4, 1918 (Marxists Internet Archive, here)

By 2008, IRS' 40ish Shulman No Longer Considered Himself Much Of A Midwesterner

Mlive.com had the story in 2008, here, capturing the Ohioan's distance from the heartland after years spent at Williams, Harvard and Georgetown, and in New York City:

Shulman, who grew up in Ohio, said Kalamazoo has a "neat downtown. Kalamazoo is a great town," he said. "I like the Midwest. I like down-to-earth people."