Tag: scandal

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folly media and media people responsibility too much government

The Missing Links?

president, presidential, golf, leisure, media, controversy, scandal

Is giving presidents a hard time for playing too much golf itself a pastime?

In Fahrenheit 911, filmmaker Michael Moore portrayed then-​President George W. Bush, as more golfer than president — as if W. had secured the nation’s top job as a ruse to convince his wife to let him golf more.

Likewise, Republicans attacked President Barack Obama for incessantly hitting the links. In 2014, when ISIS came frighteningly close to Baghdad, Obama went golfing, causing Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank to bemoan the fact that “Obama’s golf habit needlessly hands his critics a gimme.”

An amusing website documented all of Obama’s golf outings … and plays audio of him pledging not to rest “until the dream of healthcare reform is finally achieved” and “until every American who is able and ready and willing to work can find a job,” etc.

Note: Obama never promised not to tee off.*

“Between 2011 and 2016,” SB-​Nation reports, Donald Trump “tweeted at least 26 complaints, jokes, or scoldings about Barack Obama playing golf while president.”

Now, President Trump is getting the backswing scrutiny. While Obama didn’t golf during his first four months in office, Politico informs that Trump went golfing after two weeks and, in nine weeks, has already played a dozen rounds of golf. 

Good. I wish all the politicians in Washington spent more time on the course and less “governing.”

Even more so as Republicans consider taking a mulligan on healthcare …  and Mr. Trump invited Sen. Rand Paul to join him on the fairway. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* In the closing days of the Obama administration, Golf Digest published a story lauding Obama’s “deep commitment to supporting the golf industry.” However, the publication informed readers that, while Obama golfed more than his immediate predecessors, Presidents Clinton and Bush 43, he didn’t hit the links nearly as much as Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Woodrow Wilson.

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Categories
crime and punishment First Amendment rights media and media people national politics & policies political challengers

A Suit of a Different Color

Melania, Donald, Trump, daily mail, scandal, sex worker, illustration

Donald Trump has threatened to use lawsuits against people he says are lying about him. Even if elected President.

Well, enter the third Mrs. Donald Trump, Melania. She is suing Britain’s Daily Mail* for suggesting that she may have worked as a “part time escort in New York,” explains the BBC, “and met husband Donald Trump, who is now running for the White House, earlier than previously reported.”

We know from published nude photographs that she was in the U.S. before the time specified by her presidential-​hopeful husband. And for some, those nude photographs lend credence to a rumor about escort service work. (She’s made money for being photographed in sexual congress before.)

The Daily Mail has withdrawn its article, insisting that it had not “suggested the sex work claims were true but said that, even if false, they could affect the US presidential campaign.” Sounds like a defense to me.

Earlier this week I confessed to my lack of accounting expertise. Now I should do the same regarding law. Yet, the claim by the Trumps’ lawyer, Charles Harder, seems hard to take seriously — that is, that the defendants’ statements were “so egregious, malicious and harmful to Mrs. Trump that her damages are estimated at $150 million dollars.”

Really? That much?

Besides, it’s her husband’s career on the line. And a sex morals rumor about Mrs. Trump wilts next to the long list of rumors and established fact in the scandal department of actual candidate (and former First Lady) Mrs. Bill Clinton.

Seems with either major party candidate, we’re guaranteed a soap opera … and full employment for lawyers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* She is also suing an American blogger.

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Melania, Donald, Trump, daily mail, scandal, sex worker, illustration

 

Categories
crime and punishment government transparency ideological culture insider corruption media and media people national politics & policies

The Dog-​Ate List

It’s hard to keep track of things. It helps to make a list.

I’m trying to follow all the IRS-​scandal stonewalling, the latest example of which is how emails inculpating Lois Lerner and others have mysteriously disappeared; with, allegedly, no server backups (see my latest Townhall column, “The Dog Ate My Country”).

How many ways have fedgov officials fudged, fabricated, prevaricated, and otherwise non-​cooperated with investigators after news broke that IRS had targeted for special harassment sundry conservative groups applying for tax-​exempt status?

  • When the head of IRS’s department overseeing nonprofit applications, Lois Lerner, felt compelled to admit that IRS had specially targeted right-​leaning organizations applying for nonprofit status, she and others put the main blame on a few low-​level clerks.
  • Lerner twice formally refused to testify to Congress about the doings of her own department. Yet she also asserted, formally, that “I have not done anything wrong.”
  • IRS says it’ll take many years to comply with congressional requests for relevant documents. IRS was prompter when it handed abundant confidential information on conservative nonprofits to the Justice Department so that they could be selectively prosecuted.
  • DOJ selected an “avowed political supporter”  of President Obama to lead a meaningless “investigation” of the targeting of Obama’s critics. No prosecutions of wrongdoers are in the works.
  • Initially professing outrage at the IRS’s “inexcusable” targeting, Obama later airily dismissed the affair as a “phony scandal.” On which occasion was he lying? (Hint: both.)
  • Major media outlets do all they can to abet the stonewalling.

What did I miss?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability crime and punishment insider corruption

The Colluders

Inadvertent? Un-​partisan? No direction from above?

Such were many of the early claims in response to the scandal over IRS’s targeting of Tea Party and conservative groups applying for tax-​exempt status.

The characterization was not vindicated when Lois Lerner — who ran the agency’s division dealing with exempt organizations until she resigned in semi-​disgrace —a sserted her Fifth Amendment rights rather than tell us what she knows. Sundry revelations since the scandal broke have further exploded the claim that lowly functionaries acted independently of high officials.

Now Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer for True the Vote, which combats voter fraud, is being vindicated in charges of collusion between Lerner and congressional Democrats.From THE KELLY FILE

“[T]he only difference between what happened in Watergate when Richard Nixon asked the IRS to go after his political enemies was when Richard Nixon asked, they refused,” according to Mitchell. “When these Democratic politicians said, ‘Go do something about these conservative groups because they’re challenging us.…’ the IRS [did] their bidding to try and silence these groups.”

Mitchell appeared on The Kelly File to discuss recently released IRS email implying coordination between Democrat Elijah Cummings of the House Oversight Committee (of “nothing to see here” fame) and the IRS. After applying for tax-​exempt status, True the Vote received sets of nearly identical questions — on widely separate occasions — from both the IRS and Cummings. That’s not only collusion, it’s guileful sharing of taxpayer information that is supposed to remain confidential.

Disturbing, but not surprising.

This is Common Sense. This is Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability

Words Without Meaning

“I promise you that we hold everybody up and down the line accountable,” President Barack Obama told Bill O’Reilly of Fox News during last Sunday’s Super Bowl interview.

When studies show one in 20 food stamp transactions to be fraudulent; when the GAO finds $120 million a year spent paying federal workers who are deceased; when, well, “name your own favorite absurdly wasteful program here,” how does the word “accountable” pass through the president’s lips without a respondent clap of thunder followed by the sizzle and pop of a lightning bolt?

Yet, Obama claims — no, promises! — that this omnipresent accountability reaches absolutely “everybody” in the federal government.

President O was responding specifically to O’Reilly’s charge that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the official responsible for the disastrous Obamacare rollout, has faced no consequences.

She’s not alone. Only by replacing the word “everybody” with the phrase “virtually no one” would Mr. Obama’s statement be made accurate.

Yesterday, I detailed several different ways the IRS has violated people’s most important and basic political rights — from blocking citizens trying to form non-​profit groups for communicating their ideas to trashing privacy rights by handing personal tax information to one’s political opponents to harassing donors to “the other” candidate with multiple unwarranted audits. No one in any of these scandals has been disciplined, let go or in any meaningful way held accountable.

“Political language is designed,” as George Orwell warned, “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Up and down the line.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
government transparency

The Tax Agency and the Tortoise

We are indebted to a publisher of tax information called Tax Analysts for its efforts to make the Internal Revenue Service slightly more accountable.

The IRS finds itself beleaguered, sort of, by scandal — the fallout from their practice of impeding applications for tax-​exempt status of Tea Party and other “patriot” and “constitutionalist” groups. But the agency doesn’t always cooperate with investigations of its conduct.

Using the Freedom of Information Act, Tax Analysts has sued the IRS to obtain all materials used since 2009 to train Cincinnati personnel in the art of handling applications for tax-​exempt status.

Folks at the IRS had at first “agreed” to comply with the FOIA request for these instructions ─ which will shed light on what, exactly, employees have been told at various times about how to deal with applicants of various ideological hue. But the agency kept dithering, first telling Tax Analysts that it would supply the stuff pronto, then saying it needed more time; then saying the same when the next-​named comply-​by date arrived; etc., ad infinitum.

Like the ever-​slowing competitor to Zeno’s tortoise, the IRS found it impossible to ever cross the finish line or actually supply any documents.

Yet these guys slap us with penalties if we’re late with the taxes.…

Well, Tax Analysts has seen the IRS’s delaying tactics before. So now the matter is in court. Sooner or later we shall learn whether the agency’s own written instructions counsel ideological discrimination, or these instructions are untainted by such but have been flouted by IRS officers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.