





The Determinations Unit developed and used inappropriate criteria to identify applications from organizations with the words Tea Party in their names. These applications (hereafter referred to as potential political cases)13 were forwarded to a team of specialists14 for review. Subsequently, the Determinations Unit expanded the criteria to inappropriately include organizations with other specific names (Patriots and 9/12) or policy positions. While the criteria used by the Determinations Unit specified particular organization names, the team of specialists was also processing applications from groups with names other than those identified in the criteria. The inappropriate and changing criteria may have led to inconsistent treatment of organizations applying for tax-exempt status...
...in May 2010, the Determinations Unit began developing a spreadsheet that would become known as the “Be On the Look Out” listing (hereafter referred to as the BOLO listing),15 which included the emerging issue of Tea Party applications. In June 2010, the Determinations Unit began training its specialists on issues to be aware of, including Tea Party cases. By July 2010, Determinations Unit management stated that it had requested its specialists to be on the lookout for Tea Party applications...
QFE: “Obama has to get on top of this [ #Scandalpalooza ] if he wants to save his presidency.” - @jonathanalter ~ twitter.com/adamsbaldwin/s…
— Adam Baldwin (@adamsbaldwin) May 14, 2013
Wayne Dupree -- you may know him as News Ninja -- drew the loudest applause with a plea to win. "I'm sick of losing elections," he said, "We need to unite on core principles to win elections. Stop focusing on how we are divided."You can be libertarian based on the issues and still vote for conservative/Republican candidates. Not mutually exclusive... #blogcon2013
— Laura(@GOPrincess) May 13, 2013
DOJ Seized Associated Press Telephone Records: DossierQOTD: "The problem with telling a lie, or even a succession of lies, is that a very small dose of the truth can sometimes make the whole thing collapse like a house of cards. The State Department's own foreign service officer Gregory Hicks was in Libya during the attack, so he knew the truth. When threats were not enough to silence him, it was then necessary to try to discredit him.
After years of getting glowing job evaluations, and awards of honors from the State Department for his work in various parts of the world, Mr. Hicks suddenly began to get bad job evaluations and was demoted to a desk job in Washington after he spoke with a Congressman about what he knew. The truth is dangerous to liars." --Thomas Sowell
Here's something important to consider : As people lose confidence in law enforcement and judges, the civil society decays.
So here's the deal no one talks about with the border. The oil business and the cartels are intimately linked together. How "official" that linkage is up for debate. How high up the cartels and the oil companies are linked is up for debate.
Here's something crazy: the border patrol is not authorized to operate on oil company infrastructure, ostensibly for reasons of safety. So you've got heavy trucks, loaders, cranes moving heaven knows what.
We have major private prisons in our area. Here's how the private prison scam works.
All this money is being spent and it's having the consequence of just robbing legitimate citizens of their freedoms -- like no search and seizure. All of this homeland security stuff just means I am stripping down to get on an airplane - the immigrants and drug smugglers don't go through the checkpoint - they just walk around it or drive around it because it's an oilfield with roads.Hillary, Then and Now. ~ (Via @benjibacker) ~ #Benghazi twitter.com/BenjiBacker/st…
— Adam Baldwin (@adamsbaldwin) May 12, 2013
The lies pile up and the president goes silent: BaehrQOTD: "The Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade has been the target of criticism virtually from the time the ink started to dry on the paper it was printed on. From the right, the decision is seen as the primary example of what is often referred to as “legislating from the bench,”a situation in which judges stray away from their proper role as interpreters of the law and the Constitution and begin using their decisions to set social policy.
In the case of Roe,... the Supreme Court created a right to abortion nationwide out of whole cloth with little regard for what the Constitution actually did or didn’t say on the topic. In the end, Roe is looked at with derision by judicial conservatives both because of this and because of the outcome of the case itself. There have also been criticisms of Roe from the left, most of them similar to what Ginsburg said regarding the matter. Some advocates of abortion rights have argued that Roe has actually hurt their movement more than it has helped because, for more than 40 years now, it has served as a rallying cry for the Pro-Life movement, a fact that can be seen every year on the anniversary of the decision itself when tens of thousands of people rally in Washington for the March for Life.
Indeed, many political analysts have pointed to Roe as the catalyst for the politicization of Evangelicals and the development of groups such as Moral Majority (which has since disbanded but not before leading to the formation of countless other Evangelical political organizations , which have played an important role in American politics since the 1980s. Arguably, a more limited legal ruling from the Court in 1972 would have had a far less sweeping political impact." --Doug Mataconis
Democrats at both the state and federal level keep pushing for taxes on gun purchases and registration. Democrats claim that they really aren't interested in reducing gun ownership or confiscating guns, but then you have statements such as this. From the New Jersey Star-Ledger:
As a committee hearing on new gun-control legislation began winding down Thursday, three state senators started chatting amongst themselves... What they didn't realize was the microphone was still on.
A recording of the exchange — which appears to be between Democrats Loretta Weinberg, Sandra Cunningham and Linda Greenstein — ended up on YouTube, and gun supporters said today they were upset by the remarks.
The recording opens with what sounds like a senator or staff member saying, "We needed a bill that was going to confiscate, confiscate, confiscate"...
Some of the new laws that will be voted on Monday in New Jersey will substantially raise the cost of obtaining a gun.
• Reinstating a seven-day "cooling-off" period. When someone qualifies for a permit, they would have to wait seven days before buying the gun — an effort to prevent domestic violence and suicide. The original package of bills would have removed the seven-day waiting period. "Someone who is heated and angry can’t just go out to the store and buy a gun right away," said Nicola Bocour, the project director of anti-gun violence group Ceasefire New Jersey.
• Currently, New Jersey residents have 90 days to buy a gun after getting a permit. Under the bill, they would have four years, but changes were made to make it easier for law enforcement to yank the permit.
• Residents who apply for permits would have to undergo training.
• All sales of ammunition online would be electronically sent to the State Police...
Waiting periods are associated with increased crime rates against women. The costs of mandated training will make it so that poor people who live in high crime urban areas will be disarmed.

The IRS admits to targeting conservative groups for additional review and laughably claims the witch hunt wasn’t “motivated by political bias.” What will its math-challenged spokeswoman Lois Lerner say about allegations that the IRS gave “extra-special attention to the tax-exempt status of some Jewish groups for political reason"?
When Obamacare’s individual mandate takes effect in 2014, all Americans who file income tax returns must complete an additional IRS tax form... The new form will require disclosure of a taxpayer’s personal identifying health information in order to determine compliance with the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate.
As confirmed by IRS testimony to the tax-writing House Committee on Ways and Means, “taxpayers will file their tax returns reporting their health insurance coverage, and/or making a payment”.
...Simply put, there is no way for the IRS to enforce Obamacare’s individual mandate without such an invasive reporting scheme... As a service to the public, Americans for Tax Reform has released a projected version of this tax form to help families and tax specialists prepare for this additional filing requirement. Taxpayers may view the projected IRS form at www.ObamacareTaxForm.com. On the form, lines 3-4 show where taxpayers will disclose their personal health ID information.

The Benghazi Lie: SteynQOTD: "Congresswoman and former United States Ambassador to Luxembourg Ann Wagner (R-MO) appeared on The Dana Loesch show and placed the blame, of the stand down order to those that could have offered assistance to Americans under attack, on none other than Barack Obama.
Loesch asked Wagner, “Because you have been an ambassador, you have been overseas with similar responsibilities and similar missions – who gives such an order to stand down? Where does that come from?”
“The President of the United States,” the Missouri congresswoman affirmed." --Freedom Outpost
You knew the mainstream media was biased, but this is incredible. It was revealed today that CBS News President David Rhodes' brother is Obama Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, who was instrumental in rewriting the Benghazi talking points. But it gets worse. It is now learned that ABC President Ben Sherwood's sister, Dr. Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, is a Special Assistant to Barack Obama on national security affairs. But even this isn't it! CNN's deputy bureau chief, Virginia Moseley, is the wife of Tom Nides, who until February was Hillary Clinton's deputy.
Ben Rhodes is a top NSC advisor with absolutely no foreign policy or military experience. None! This idiot has advocated intervention both in Libya and now Syria. How has that worked out for us? He is responsible for helping to massage the Benghazi talking points to watered down drivel. His greatest accomplishment appears to be a Master's Degree in fiction writing received from New York University. So perhaps we should call him Obama's fiction writer!
In what may be a belated effort to salvage its reputation, or perhaps an effort to get the best scoop now that keeping quiet is out of the question, ABC published a story revealing that there were twelve revisions of the Benghazi memo. The final version eradicated all references to terrorists and al Qaeda. Nice work, Mr. Fiction Writer!
...The only mainstream media reporter really doing her job is CBS's Sharyl Attkison. Attkison has also done a heroic job on the Fast N' Furious Eric Holder gun running scandal. Now it appears CBS is pressuring her to leave. Gee, wonder why?
Whatever shred of credibility existed among the network news organizations has now been utterly obliterated.
The Benghazi Scandal Grows: HayesQOTD: "Good morning to you, Josh. As you know, when this attack happened, the White House initially said it arose out of a spontaneous protest over an anti-Muslim video. That turned out not to be true and the White House said they relied entirely on CIA talking points. But I have obtained 12 different versions of those talking points that shows that they were dramatically edited by the administration. Take a look at two of them. On the left, a draft initially written by the CIA. On the right, one that was used by the White House, the final version. What was taken out? All references to al Qaeda and all references to CIA warnings before the attack about the terror threat in Benghazi." --ABC News' Jonathan Karl
The astonishing thing about the administration's Benghazi cover-up is that it actually thought it could get away with it. But each lie has been successfully peeled away, from the protest that never happened, to the irrelevant filmmaker who was blamed, to the intelligence community whose talking points were used as a cover for incompetence and malfeasance.
In an email to White House officials and the intelligence agencies, State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland took issue with including that information, saying it "could be abused by members (of Congress) to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either?" The paragraph was entirely deleted.
So as we've noted, we have Hillary Clinton's chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, trying to intimidate Gregory Hicks from telling the truth that they knew it was a terrorist attack from the "get-go," that there was no "protest" or mention of one from anyone on the ground and that the infamous YouTube video was "a non-event" in Libya.Suspects involved in a drug trafficking operation opened fire on investigating Miami-Dade Police detectives in a deadly gunfight captured by the video surveillance cameras of a marijuana grow house.
The dramatic footage, which was played Thursday at a court hearing, shows the rapidly unfolding gunfight at the west Miami home. Plainclothes detectives had visited the home on July 31 for a "knock and talk" during their investigation.
After arriving, they began to question Luis Estevanell, 60. Estevanell's cohort, Gerardo Delgado, emerges from a parked BMW and opened fire at the officers while attempting to take cover behind a tree.
The officers returned fire striking Delgado several times as the suspect continued firing. Three rounds from Delgado struck John Saavedra, who can be seen falling outside the screen.
It's safe to say that behind the scenes Democrats are in full-blown panic mode.
NBC's Lisa Myers, in a panel discussion on MSNBC, revealed: "There is something called Benghazi going on, and I think the Democrats now are starting to worry about it. It's started. I got calls from a number of Democrats yesterday trying to undermine Greg Hicks’s testimony, saying he wasn’t demoted. So I think they feel that some damage was done by those three witnesses on Wednesday."
• Why was the State Department unwilling to provide the requested level of security to Benghazi?
• Were there really no military assets available to provide relief during the seven hours of the attacks? If so, why not? During the attacks, were any military assets ordered to stand down?
• If the Secretary of Defense thought there was “no question” this was a coordinated terrorist attack, why did Ambassador Susan Rice, Secretary Clinton, and President Obama all tell the American people that the cause was a “spontaneous demonstration” about an Internet video?
• Why did the State Department and/or the White House edit the intelligence talking points to delete the references to “Islamic extremists” and “al Qa’ida”?
• Why did the FBI release pictures of militants taken the day of the attack only eight months after the fact? Why not immediately, as proved so effective in the Boston bombing?
• Why have none of the survivors testified to Congress?
• Why is the administration apparently unaware of the whistle-blowers who have been attempting to tell their stories? Is it true that these career civil servants have been threatened with retaliation?
• Did President Obama sleep the night of September 11, 2012? Did Secretary Clinton?
• When was President Obama told about the murder of our ambassador? About the murder of all four Americans? What did he do in response?
• What role, if any, did the State Department’s own counterterrorism office play during the attacks and in their immediate aftermath?
• Why was Secretary Clinton not interviewed for the ARB report?
• And why, if all relevant questions were answered in the ARB report, has the State Department’s own inspector-general office opened a probe into the methods of that very report?
Benghazi hearings in the Mirror Universe: RSQOTD: "I defended the administration during the election from some attacks I saw as unfair. Well, today's testimony deeply disturbed me. It is impossible at this point to argue that only the Republicans are 'playing politics' with Benghazi. 1) Claims the witnesses' cooperation in investigation was impeded. 2) Claims the Rice talking points hurt relations with Libya. 3) Explanation of why the Rice talking point[s] were obviously implausible to those on the scene." --Daveed Gartenstein Ross of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Remember The Pet Goat? That was the book that President George W. Bush read for seven (7) minutes to an elementary school class after he received word of the attacks on the World Trade Center.
The mother of a fallen soldier during the Iraq War, Cindy Sheehan became a poster child for the Democrat-media complex. No less a vintage media star than Maureen Dowd stated unequivocally that "the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute".
Remember what all of the hullabaloo about Valerie Plame was about? Cheryl Mills is no run-of-the-mill State Department apparatchik, even among the top tier. She’s been one of the Clintons’ right-hand men for decades. She worked in Bill’s White House legal office, then as counsel to Hillary’s presidential campaign, then became chief of staff at State when Hillary was appointed secretary. If she’s the right-hand man, what other conclusion is there than that Hillary’s the one who wanted Hicks to keep his mouth shut when meeting with Chaffetz?