Republicans sweep House and Senate, and suddenly the IRS finds the "lost" Lois Lerner emails

Hm, funny how that happens.

From the story here:

Up to 30,000 missing emails sent by former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner have been recovered by the IRS inspector general, five months after they were deemed lost forever.

The U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) informed congressional staffers from several committees on Friday that the [Lois Lerner] emails were found among hundreds of “disaster recovery tapes” that were used to back up the IRS email system. ...

In June [IRS Commissioner] Koskinen told Congress the emails were probably lost for good because the disaster recovery tape holds onto the data for only six months. He said even if the IRS had sought the emails within the six-month period, it would have been a complicated and difficult process to produce them from the tapes. ...

There are 250 million emails on the tapes that will be reviewed. Officials said it is likely they will find missing emails from other IRS officials who worked under Lerner and who said they suffered computer crashes [too].

Another suggested opening line for Obama's State of the Union Address

Hands up don't shoot!

And while we're at it, it's the president's job to enforce the immigration law

In case you missed it in Obama's Constitutional Law 101, the Congress not the president sets the rules on naturalization

Oh, the teacher skipped that part?

November isn't over and already Grand Rapids, Michigan, has more snow than the old record in 1895

Last chance for Democrats to prove they are patriots ...

... by repudiating Obama's executive action, 8PM tonight.

More ObamaCare Lies: Enrollments inflated by a million by adding in dental plans

Lying is the modus operandi of Democrats under Obama, as in: You can keep your health insurance, you can keep your doctor, and you will save, save!, on average $2,500 per year! All lies of course, but now this, just a minor detail really, but indicative of the fraud at the heart of the Obama presidency from the beginning.

From the story here:

Blending dental and medical plans let the administration assert that enrollment was more than 7 million. The move also partly obscured the attrition of more than 1 million in the number of people enrolled in medical insurance.

News networks to help Obama by not broadcasting his unconstitutional plan to break the immigration law

There's no sense in riling up the people unnecessarily over such a trivial issue, after all. Note that this blackout includes so-called conservative Fox News Network, which is co-opted by its open-borders libertarian owner, Rupert Murdoch (Australian-American naturalized in 1985).  

"If anyone assumes the government by fraud [hello ObamaCare] this is a tyranny. ... To preserve a tyranny ... guard against everything that gives rise to high spirits." -- Aristotle

I've had so many facelifts you are actually kissing my ass

h/t Theo

Obama to throw strapped Americans under the bus and help illegals instead: Too bad what's going to happen in Vegas isn't going to stay in Vegas

"Keep the people poor!"

"The guards of a tyrant are foreigners!"

S&P500 Milestone: Closes today above all-time inflation-adjusted high set in August 2000

The all-time inflation-adjusted high occurred way back in August 2000 at 2046.21. Today's close was 2051.80.

Yippee, the bear market is officially . . . dead for a day.

Some Adviser Gruber who Obama said "never worked on our staff" visited White House and Obama 21 times since 2009

The Hill, here, placing Gruber multiple times at the scene of the crime:

MIT professor Jonathan Gruber held a series of high-level meetings with administration officials beginning in 2009 and extending through June of this year.

During the height of 2009’s ObamaCare debate, Gruber met repeatedly with former Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag, National Economic Council Director Larry Summers, and Jeanne Lambrew, the deputy director of the White House Office of Health Reform, among other officials. He also participated in a meeting of economists with President Obama.

In subsequent trips, Gruber received tours of the West Wing and the residence, and had breakfast at the White House mess, an exclusive West Wing cafeteria. He also met with Jason Furman, who now chairs the Council of Economic Advisers, and Nancy-Ann DeParle, the White House's point person on ObamaCare’s implementation.

The visitor logs, which are publicly available but were first reported by The Wall Street Journal, show Gruber has visited the White House 21 times during the Obama presidency. Some of the records are incomplete — missing details about when Gruber entered or exited the complex — so it’s possible that some of those visits did not occur.

A precise tally of America's stupid: 65,918,507

Liberal contributor from The New Republic advocates for tyranny as all Lincoln lovers must

Here:

[T]here will be situations in which the common good demands and requires that the executive go beyond the letter and even the spirit of the law. In these extreme or emergency situations — situations in which an existential threat poses a grave danger, with the survival of the political community itself at stake — the executive's extralegal decisions effectively become the community's higher law.

Probably the clearest example from American history is Abraham Lincoln's 1861 suspension of habeas corpus, defiance of the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (who denounced Lincoln's actions as unconstitutional), and subsequent arrest (without charge) of pro-secessionist Maryland state legislators who appeared poised to condemn the suspension and vote to join the Confederacy.

Was Lincoln acting like a tyrant, as Maryland native John Wilkes Booth and many other critics of the time contended? You bet he was. And it's a good thing, too. Had Maryland seceded, Washington would have been surrounded by enemy armies and the South almost certainly would have won the Civil War quickly and decisively. Extralegal action was required to keep that from happening.

Obama throws Jonathan Gruber under the bus in 2014 after stealing liberally from his ideas in 2006

Twitchy is all over it, with video of Obama proudly naming Jon Gruber as one of the academics from whom he has "stolen ideas liberally". Jon Gruber is now just "some adviser who never worked on our staff".

J. Bradford DeLong says Jonathan Gruber is a pioneering intellectual and empiricist

UC Berkeley Professor DeLong served under Summers at Treasury

Seen here:

"[P]eople like ... Jon Gruber ... are not ideologues. They are not only at the top of the profession. These are pioneers in the fields of public finance and health services research who in many ways provided the intellectual groundwork and the empirical research on which current health policy debate is based."

Jonathan Gruber was paid to develop RomneyCare in Massachusetts!

#ilovedarrenwilson

There's the poverty level, and then there's "the working poor": United Way releases ALICE data

Key to ALICE calculations is assessing when more than a third of income goes to rent/housing, which usually happens when a good job goes away and is replaced by a lower-paying one, making the mortgage or the rent suddenly unaffordable. Rents have risen and become less affordable at the same time as the housing market has recovered from the 2011 lows. In the summer it was reported here that 52% of Americans have had trouble in the last three years covering either the rent or the mortgage. 

The Florida data is discussed here, where fully 45% of the households are in rough shape:

While 15 percent of Florida households are below the poverty level, another 30 percent are financially insecure — a figure that also applies to Sarasota and Manatee counties — based on a new measurement developed by the United Way. ... Florida's large number of financially fragile households is rooted in a number of economic trends, including housing affordability and other cost-of-living concerns. But the main driver is the dearth of middle-class jobs.

The Connecticut data is discussed here, where 35% of the households are struggling:

In Connecticut, the new report said, 10 percent of all households fall under the poverty level, and 25 percent are between the poverty level and the ALICE [asset-limited, income-constrained, employed] threshold. ... Similar ALICE reports have been done in a limited number of other states by their United Way organizations. Northern New Jersey was the first to shine a light on the ALICE population, and this year, for the first time, Connecticut, California, Florida, Indiana and Michigan United Ways have commissioned their own studies. Connecticut has the lowest proportion of residents below the federal poverty level and the lowest combined total in the ALICE category and below the poverty line of any of the states.

How to kneel before your rulers

h/t Theo