Usa Thread

[unit731]

The IRS thingy is important.

 

But nothing to do with Obama or White House. Though the right wingnuts wish to make it this way.

 

This is solely a management issue within the IRS.

 

The director of the IRS was appointed by . . . . wait for it . . . . GW Bush !!!

[unit731]

Ben Gazhi was a college friend of Barack Obama at Harvard College.

Ben Gazhi was a stated Communist. Obama attended communist meetings in a small cafe off Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts with Ben Gazhi while in college.

Ben Gazhi is currently a reporter for Associated Press. Ben Gazhi had his phone tapped by Obama in the White House. Ben Gazhi also has a 501 C D organization. Ben Gazhi's not for profit 501 C 4 organization has the name: The Progressive Tea Party 9/11 Freedom Conservative Communist Coalition. Obama from the Oval Office ordered the IRS to audit the tax exempt status of this 501 C 4.

It should be noted that Ben Gazhi was born in Kenya.

[cavanami]

[Flashermac]

I still say I want to vote for Steve. He has more brains than a convention hall full of politicians. I suppose why he would never be allowed to get anywhere in politics. Americans don't trust smart people.

[Plainsdrifter]

Ben Gazhi was a college friend of Barack Obama at Harvard College.

Ben Gazhi was a stated Communist. Obama attended communist meetings in a small cafe off Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts with Ben Gazhi while in college.

Ben Gazhi is currently a reporter for Associated Press. Ben Gazhi had his phone tapped by Obama in the White House. Ben Gazhi also has a 501 C D organization. Ben Gazhi's not for profit 501 C 4 organization has the name: The Progressive Tea Party 9/11 Freedom Conservative Communist Coalition. Obama from the Oval Office ordered the IRS to audit the tax exempt status of this 501 C 4.

It should be noted that Ben Gazhi was born in Kenya.

 

It's all coincidental.......isn't it?

[Steve]

I still say I want to vote for Steve. He has more brains than a convention hall full of politicians. I suppose why he would never be allowed to get anywhere in politics. Americans don't trust smart people.

 

God forbid. Any one of you guys with the others in the cabinet is more than good enough. Different ideologies but all with integrity.

 

The best hope for me lies in a few good pols still out there. Huntsman and Johnson would have been very good, the best of the lot running for President in the last election. Neward mayor Cory Booker is who Obama should have been but Obama is no where close. This guy is shockingly honest and good and cares. Christie from the same state is very good as well.

[Steve]

I changed my view on Ron Paul. I would love him to be head of a department, Secretary of something major. The changes he would make as President would be too much of a shock to the system over all aspects of the government. Too vast. We'd need time to change some things while some things would be okay to change immediately.

[Flashermac]

Integrity is something that has been removed from most politicians.

 

 

Obama’s trust-in-government deficit

 

 

By Dan Balz, Published: May 18

 

 

Whatever else happens as a result of the multiple controversies that have engulfed the administration, one thing is clear: President Obama has failed to meet one of the most important goals he set out when he was first elected, which was to demonstrate that activist government could also be smart government.

 

Six weeks after winning the presidency in 2008, Obama reflected on the meaning of the election. He was reluctant to claim, as some others were, that his victory marked the beginning of an era in which Americans would embrace bigger government. Suspicion of command-and-control, top-down government, he said, was “a lasting legacy†of Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

 

So rather than portraying his first election as the end of a long period of conservative ascendancy, Obama called it “a correction to the correction.†As he put it then: “I think what you saw in this election was people saying: ‘Yes, we don’t want some big, bureaucratic, ever-expanding state. On the other hand, we don’t want a state that’s dysfunctional, that doesn’t believe in its mission, that can’t carry out some of the basic functions of government and provide service to people and be there when they’re hurting.’ â€

 

He then described what that meant for the government he was beginning to assemble. “What we don’t know yet is whether my administration and this next generation of leadership is going to be able to hew to a new, more pragmatic approach that is less interested in whether we have big government or small government [but is] more interested in whether we have a smart, effective government.â€

 

What has happened since Obama laid down that challenge for his administration? More Americans favor smaller government over bigger government than when he was first elected, according to exit polls from last November. Public confidence in the federal government is as low as it has ever been, according to a Pew Research Center survey released this spring.

 

This weekend, four of the government’s most important agencies are beset by political controversy, management breakdowns or both: State (what happened in Benghazi, Libya), Treasury (targeting of conservative groups by the Internal Revenue Service), Justice (leak-related investigation of the Association Press) and Defense (rising numbers of sexual assaults).

 

Add to that the questions about Health and Human Services and its implementation of the Affordable Care Act, and it is little wonder confidence has eroded.

 

Enough blame to share

 

There are many reasons for the public’s diminished confidence in the federal government, reflecting general disapproval with the way Washington has worked during the Obama years. The president’s advisers blame Republicans for much of the gridlock and partisan infighting, and they are quick to note that Obama’s approval ratings are far higher than those of the Republicans.

 

Republicans do bear a considerable share of the responsibility for overall attitudes about Washington and government. Their dismal ratings are a measure of public dissatisfaction with the party generally and with House Republican efforts to thwart the president.

 

But Obama bears a particular responsibility for failing to do what he said he had to do, which was to convince the public that he could make the part of government that he directly controls — the executive branch — smarter, more effective and more deserving of trust.

 

Early in his presidency, Obama convened a meeting with a group of historians. The topic he put on the table was: What does it take to be a transformational president? Obama’s ambition to be such a figure could be seen in his first-term agenda, which included a major economic stimulus package, a bailout of the auto industry, a major financial regulatory reform package and, biggest of all, the law that is transforming the nation’s health-care industry.

 

But public skepticism about government put an extra burden on Obama, as it has on all activist Democratic politicians over the past three decades. To do what he wanted to do through government required building greater confidence in government. Long before the current controversies materialized, he had not been able to do that.

 

Defenders of his stimulus package say it prevented another depression and helped initiate a turnaround in the economy. But as the recovery sputtered and calls grew for additional stimulus, Obama did not have the political support to launch another round of government intervention because of criticisms that he had already added enormously to the deficit.

 

Most controversial has been his health-care initiative. Throughout the long battle to enact and then begin to implement the law, Obama’s White House has been unable to win broad public support for it, even though individual pieces are popular. Obama is still fighting to overcome distrust of government as he proceeds with the most complex change in social welfare policy since the 1960s.

 

Now the president is dealing with unexpected problems, each of which threatens to make the trust-in-government deficit even bigger.

 

Damaged, but how much?

 

The most corrosive of the controversies is what happened at the IRS, which singled out tea party and other conservative groups for special scrutiny in their applications for tax-exempt status. That Obama knew nothing about it does little to quell concerns that one of the most-feared units in government was operating out of control.

 

The multiple failures at the IRS speak of an agency that, at worst, was politically motivated in going after opponents of the president’s agenda and that, at best, showed terrible judgment, lacked vigorous oversight by its managers and misled members of Congress about what was happening.

 

There is much about the Justice Department’s leak investigation that isn’t known and may not be known, given that it involves national security issues and classified information. But on its face, the collection of telephone records from the Associated Press appears to be so broad that it cannot easily be explained. Because the president, rightly, cannot interfere, he is left mostly helpless in the face of this controversy.

 

The argument over what happened in Benghazi last Sept. 11 is mired in politics and probably will continue to be. Obama sees the investigation led by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, as a politically inspired sideshow. Republicans see the administration’s response as a political coverup designed to protect the president and former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton.

 

Putting aside the controversy over what happened to the administration’s original talking points as they evolved amid bureaucratic wrangling, what actually happened in Benghazi was a breakdown in security that reflected badly on the administration. Wherever the congressional investigation leads, the findings of the State Department’s internal investigation, which cited “systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies,†stand as harsh criticism of what happened on Obama’s and Clinton’s watch.

 

The full political impact of what is unfolding now may not be clear until closer to the 2014 elections. Obama has been damaged, but how much? Republicans are on the offensive but risk overplaying their hand out of deep dislike for this president. But no matter how the electoral politics turn out, Obama’s goal of creating confidence in bigger government has taken a big hit.

 

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obamas-trust-in-government-deficit/2013/05/18/5c0bb23a-bf21-11e2-97d4-a479289a31f9_print.html

[Flashermac]

American Way: don't impose Watergate on the scandals facing Obama - they stand on their own

 

 

By John Avlon

 

 

Somewhere Richard Nixon is smiling. Four decades after Watergate and two decades after his death, we still can't stop talking about the dark anti-hero of American politics. His five-o'clock shadowy visage remains too convenient a metaphor for lazy critics looking to lacerate a president from the opposing party.

 

The latest non-Watergate to be labelled its second coming is actually a combination of three separate scandals afflicting the Barack Obama administration.

 

The collective weight of this scandalabra threatens to derail the president's ambitious legislative agenda, dragging him to premature lame duck status. But it doesn't represent outright criminality emanating from the Oval Office or promise to provoke a constitutional crisis, however fervently Obama's critics might wish it.

 

In fact the ritualistic invocation has the opposite to the desired effect, making the scandals look smaller than they are by comparison with Nixon's. So, partisan projections aside, how do these scandals really stack up?

 

The IRS scandal is the most serious, and the most likely to bring back a genuine whiff of Tricky Dick. In this case, IRS workers were filtering a wave of applications for tax-exempt status by political organisations during the run-up to the 2012 election - casting an unacceptable and possibly illegal eye towards whether they had the phrases like "Tea Party" or "Patriot" in their name. While none of the conservative applicants were ultimately denied tax-exempt status, the intrusive inquiries delayed their advocacy and cast a chill on the political process.

 

After the scandal broke last week, President Obama denounced the actions as "outrageous" and fired the acting IRS director along with a top deputy.

 

Congressional hearings will help determine how widespread this blatantly biased practice was, but the initial investigation report found no orders coming from outside the agency. New regulations need to be put in place to ensure this abuse cannot happen again while also ensuring that explosive growth of partisan groups pretending to be non-partisan non-profits is properly policed.

 

More people should be fired to show zero tolerance for this bureaucratic bullying tactic. But it's a long way from Nixon (like LBJ before him) ordering the IRS to audit individuals on his political enemies list.

 

The second scandal came when the Associated Press was told by the Justice Department that reporters' phone records had been secretly subpoenaed as part of an investigation into a leak concerning national security, most likely related to a story that compromised a field agent's identity.

 

All of a sudden privacy issues and concerns over the excesses of the Patriot Act became personal to the press corps and they reacted with understandable outrage in a series of brutal press conferences.

 

Here too Republicans invoked Nixon against Obama. But ironically it was Republicans who had first called for the leak investigation, during the presidential campaign.

 

On the surface, this new version of the old struggle between freedom and security might recall Nixon-era fights over the Pentagon Papers. But the ugliness of this particular inquiry is really a reminder of how far technology has outpaced our laws, putting privacy under assault for individuals and the press.

 

The administration again took up the passage of a media shield law as part of its public penance. We'll see whether the bipartisan outrage over this unethical but unfortunately legal investigation translates into votes in Congress.

 

Finally, there is the continuing inquiry into the killing of four Americans in Benghazi. After damning congressional testimony from former deputy chief Libya diplomat Greg Hicks, the White House belatedly released a barrage of emails - which showed that the editing of the now-infamous "talking points" used by officials in television interviews was largely the product of a bureaucratic turf war between the CIA and the State Department.

 

This cast cold water on conservative conspiracy theorists, but Karl Rove's group American Crossroads has still launched online advertisements about Benghazi which seem to be aimed more at stopping a 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign than at expressing genuine moral outrage.

 

Facts are the best way to stop a feeding frenzy and the Obama administration finally seems to be taking these scandals seriously. The breaches of public trust not only threaten the bipartisan votes necessary to pass key second term legislation like immigration reform, they undercut the president's ability to make his larger legacy case that progressive governance can be efficient and effective.

 

The inquiries will continue, but we already see how reflexive partisan projections distort and discredit the search for truth. That is only compounded by the impulse to impose old narratives about "Nixon" and "Watergate" on current events. These scandals can stand on their own.

 

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/10065801/American-Way-dont-impose-Watergate-on-the-scandals-facing-Obama-they-stand-on-their-own.html

[Flashermac]

TIME Exclusive: President Obama’s 1979 Prom Photos

 

 

 

 

http://swampland.time.com/2013/05/23/time-exclusive-obamas-1979-prom-photos/