The Campaign Spot

Election-driven news and views . . . by Jim Geraghty.

The Mighty Quin

By  Jim Geraghty
May 24, 2013 11:09 AM
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Quin Hillyer, the very best kind of crazy, is departing the American Spectator to run for Congress in Alabama. Incumbent representative Jo Bonner, a Republican, announced Thursday that he is resigning from Congress effective in August to take a post with the University of Alabama system. If Quin wins the primary, he’ll have to hope for the best in the general election of this district that scores R+15 in the Cook Partisan Voting Index.

Tags: Quin Hillyer

Digging Deep into the Reports of Stingers and Benghazi

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May 24, 2013 8:39 AM
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Earlier this week I read a stunning article from Roger Simon of PJ Media contending that slain U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens was in Benghazi on September 11 to buy back Stinger missiles from al-Qaeda groups that had originally been provided to them by the U.S. State Department. Simon quoted two unidentified former diplomats who asserted that Hillary Clinton and the State Department, not the CIA, were the driving forces behind the effort to arm the Libyan rebels.

Earlier this week I completed an exhaustive review of open-source U.S. and foreign media reports going back to 2011, and was able to corroborate some elements of the diplomats’ version of events, and contradict others.

Some Libyan rebel leaders, including at least one who had spent time in a training camp in Afghanistan and who was in that country in September 2001, specifically asked Western countries to send Stinger missiles.

Qaddafi’s intelligence services believed that the rebels were having the missiles smuggled in over the country’s southern border — but they believed the French were supplying the missiles.

There is no evidence that the U.S. supplied the weapons, but it appears they gave their blessing to a secret Qatari effort to ship arms across Libya’s southern border in violation of a United Nations arms embargo.

Anti-Qaddafi forces also obtained a significant number of anti-aircraft missiles from the regime’s bunkers early in the conflict.

Enough Stinger missiles disappeared from regime stockpiles during the civil war to become a high priority and serious worry for the administration.

    The U.S. is now covertly monitoring, and perhaps assisting, the transfer of arms from Libyans to rebel forces in Syria through Turkey.

    Before its civil war, Libya had an estimated 20,000 “man-portable air-defense systems” or MANPADS, like these held by insurgents in Iraq.

    Tags: Benghazi , State Department , Weapons

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    Reporters Should Just CC Eric Holder on
    All E-Mails From Now On

    By  Jim Geraghty
    May 24, 2013 7:23 AM
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    The last Morning Jolt of the week features a look at Lois Lerner, and the cowboy hero that President Obama seeks to emulate, and . . . 

    Eric Holder: Sure, I’m Cool With Snooping Around in James Rosen’s E-Mails

    Remember how Attorney General Eric Holder recused himself from the decision to seize the phone records of more than 20 office, home and cell phone lines of Associated Press reporters? (Holder never wrote down his formal recusal, of course, so we have to take his word for it.) The recusal was because the Attorney General was conceivably a suspect of leaking the classified information and was at one point interviewed by the FBI.

    His recusal also seemed to suggest he realized the Justice Department looking through reporters’ phone records represented a dramatic expansion of government investigation into how reporters do their work, and that maybe some political survival instinct wanted to keep that controversial move a degree separated from him.

    Thursday we learned that Holder doesn’t really have any objection to the government looking around in a reporter’s phone records or e-mails.

    Michael Isikoff: “Attorney General Eric Holder signed off on a controversial search warrant that identified Fox News reporter James Rosen as a ‘possible co-conspirator’ in violations of the Espionage Act and authorized seizure of his private emails, a law enforcement official told NBC News on Thursday.”

    Lest you think this controversy just represents privileged members of the national news media thinking of themselves as special, a quick refresher: Of course it is often wrong to leak classified information. (I say “often” because our government considers a lot of information “classified,” and one way government officials can keep embarrassing information away from a public that has a right to know is to declare it classified.) But even going back to the Pentagon Papers, the crime was committed by the leaker, not by the reporter who received the information and published it. Judges have put injunctions on publishing information, but there has never been an implication that a reporter commits a crime by publishing classified information.

    Until now, with Rosen. And while the DOJ hasn’t pursued charges yet, by naming James Rosen a co-conspirator in their affidavit, Eric Holder and company are leaving the door open to charge Rosen with conspiracy, a federal crime with a penalty of up to five years in jail and $250,000 fine. This is why it’s a big deal — even if Rosen never faces charges, the door has now been opened for some future prosecutor to charge reporters with a fairly serious crime, just for reporting information to the public. This is why most journalists you know are freaking out.

    Kristina Ribali: “Will Holder punish Holder with administrative leave?”

    John Stanton, the DC bureau chief of BuzzFeed: “So Eric Holder, who signed off on spying on media outfits, is going to head up the Obama administration’s review of its media spying rules.”

    Eric Holder, second from left, at a ceremony earlier this year formally burying the traditional legal understanding of the First Amendment.

    Tags: Eric Holder , Department of Justice , James Rosen , Fox News

    A Delayed Public Reaction to Obama Scandals? Or No Reaction at All?

    By  Jim Geraghty
    May 23, 2013 7:23 AM
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    The Thursday edition of the Morning Jolt looks at what it will take for the media to stop giving President Obama the benefit of the doubt on the recent scandals, more egregious behavior at the IRS, and then these thoughts on recent polling:

    A Delayed Reaction to Obama Scandals? Or No Reaction at All?

    Will the scandals hurt President Obama’s approval rating? National Journal’s Michael Catalini looks at polling history and suggests we may see a delayed reaction within a few months:

    A CNN/ORC poll showed that 53 percent of Americans approve of the job he’s doing. That is about where he stood in April, when the same poll found he had a 51 percent approval rating. A Gallup poll showed 49 percent approved of the job he’s doing, and a Washington Post/ABC survey had his approval rating at 51 percent, nearly the same as his 50 percent rating in April . . . 

    The break-in at the Watergate occurred in June 1972, five months before Nixon rode to a landslide reelection, but the scandal did not damage his approval ratings until after two aides were convicted of conspiracy in January 1973. Between January and August, his approval rating dropped from 67 percent to 31 percent after the resignation of his top staffers, attorney general and deputy attorney general . . . 

    Ronald Reagan’s approval rating dipped from 63 percent in October of 1986 to 47 percent in December 1986, a month after Reagan organized the special commission to investigate whether arms were traded for hostages as part of the Iran-Contra affair.

    I’d note that I’m not sure we can or should compare the media environments of 1974 or 1986 to today. At first glance, you would point out that we’re no longer in an era where the Big Three evening newscasts and the Associated Press wire service dominate the news coverage. Newsweekies had much bigger influence; Newsweek isn’t even around today.

    So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that it took two months for Watergate or Iran-Contra to be “digested” by the electorate.

    Now there are millions of outlets, ranging from 24-7 cable news channels to talk radio to a million sites and blogs on the Internet. This means that news events and developments are brought to the public’s attention faster, but those events also get overridden and overshadowed by new developments and other news quickly. (The Boston bombings were five weeks ago; doesn’t it feel like it was a long time ago?)

    The news cycle moves so quickly, The Flash has trouble keeping up. The argument under the Faster-Feiler theory is that the public is getting better at processing the information quickly. But perhaps that assessment is mistaken. Perhaps the decline of the 1970s and 1980s-era dominant media institutions, and the explosion of other media, haven’t resulted in a uniformly better-informed public. We now seem to be in an era of at least three tiers of news consumption.

    News junkies — which probably includes you and me — are aware of what Mickey Kaus called “undernews” — stories that never quite break out of the blogs. John Edwards’ scandal was well-known to most in the political press, but a lot of mainstream media institutions averted their eyes for a long time from the evidence. (Working in the news-gathering profession does not necessarily expose one to undernews, as shown by the woman who didn’t understand why President Obama was joking about eating a dog in his 2012 White House Correspondent’s Dinner speech.)

    Somewhere in the middle you’ve got the folks who follow the big headlines, but don’t search out alternative media to get this “undernews.” And then there’s the completely oblivious citizen, who follows no news at all, and ends up spectacularly uninformed, or ill-informed, about what’s going on in his country:

    A new survey’s findings show many of the people who say they haven’t decided who to vote for in the race for president are either uninformed or uninterested.

    A study by YouGov.com has found only 40 percent of undecided voters know that John Boehner is the Speaker of the House.

    A whopping 31 percent don’t know who Vice President Joe Biden is.

    In one focus group, one undecided voter said he thought President Obama made a mistake not visiting New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, when in fact President George Bush was president at the time.

    Good to know that every once in a while, the dolts end up preferring our guy, huh?

    So the “undernews” crowd may use these recent scandals in deciding what they think of the president, but the other two groups may not be connecting these stories to the president yet.

    When pollsters ask the “how closely are you following [X story]?” question, I find myself thinking of Jimmy Kimmel’s recurring feature when he gets people on the street to answer questions about news events that never occurred. (Admittedly, he’s asking people on Hollywood Boulevard.) His staff found people with strong views about who won the First Lady Debate between Michelle Obama and Ann Romney, people who claimed to have witnessed an asteroid that didn’t reach earth yet, and people giving their opinion on Obama’s decision to appoint Judge Judy to the Supreme Court. (All of those people are presumably eligible to vote.)

    Tags: Barack Obama , Polling

    Original CIA Talking Points Never Explicitly Referred to Benghazi Demonstration

    By  Jim Geraghty
    May 22, 2013 10:23 AM
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    The Washington Post has a front-page story on the formulation of the Benghazi talking points, concluding that:

    a close reading of recently released government e-mails that were sent during the editing process, and interviews with senior officials from several government agencies, reveal [then–CIA Director David] Petraeus’ early role and ambitions in going well beyond the [House Intelligence] Committee’s request, apparently to produce a set of talking points favorable to his image and agency.

    The story certainly reads like a hit on Petraeus — who, of course, did not respond to the Post’s requests for comment.

    A funny, widely overlooked point, though: If you look at the first version of the talking points offered by the CIA Office of Public Affairs, you will see that the summary never actually refers to a protest or demonstration outside the annex or diplomatic facility in Benghazi:

    We believe based on currently available information that the attacks in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the U.S. Consulate and subsequently its annex.

    The “attacks” were inspired by the Cairo protests, and “evolved” into a direct assault. But what did the attacks “evolve” from? The noun “protest” is never used in reference to Benghazi, nor “demonstration.” There is a reference to a “crowd.”

    By the time U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice is speaking on CBS’s Face the Nation, she’s declaring that a “spontaneous protest began outside of our consulate in Benghazi.”

    Tags: Benghazi

    Can Anthony Weiner Get Voters to See Beyond His Scandals?

    By  Jim Geraghty
    May 22, 2013 8:28 AM
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    The only thing holding back Anthony Weiner’s mayoral campaign is the fact that the candidate is Anthony Weiner.

    The intriguing thing about Weiner’s video announcing his mayoral candidacy is that if it weren’t from Anthony Weiner, almost everyone would concur with his assessment of what ails the city: a cost of living that crushes the middle class, “regulations that nickel and dime small businesses to death,” schools that can’t provide a good education for every child, “the people who put everything they had into this city are getting priced right out of it.” But voters — and certainly the media — may not hear any of that; they’ve got a mental picture in their heads that just won’t go away.

    It will be interesting if we see a similar dynamic as in Mark Sanford’s recent successful comeback bid in South Carolina: Everyone outside of the locality knows the politician for his scandal and finds his return to office unthinkable, while those within the locality have known the politician since the beginning of his career — and evaluate him on more than the scandal.

    Tags: Anthony Weiner , Mark Sanford

    Benghazi's Perpetrators, Still Running Free

    By  Jim Geraghty
    May 22, 2013 7:30 AM
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    Today’s Morning Jolt features a look at Lois Lerner pleading the Fifth, Anthony Bourdain’s recent trip to Libya, some transactional journalism at the White House, and then this development . . . 

    Benghazi: The Story the Obama Administration Would Prefer We Forgot About

    Sorry, families of Benghazi victims. We know who killed your loved ones, but we just don’t have enough to prosecute yet:

    The U.S. has identified five men who might be responsible for the attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, last year, and has enough evidence to justify seizing them by military force as suspected terrorists, officials say. But there isn’t enough proof to try them in a U.S. civilian court as the Obama administration prefers.

    The men remain at large while the FBI gathers evidence. But the investigation has been slowed by the reduced U.S. intelligence presence in the region since the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks, and by the limited ability to assist by Libya’s post-revolutionary law enforcement and intelligence agencies, which are still in their infancy since the overthrow of dictator Col. Moammar Gadhafi.

    The decision not to seize the men militarily underscores the White House aim to move away from hunting terrorists as enemy combatants and holding them at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The preference is toward a process in which most are apprehended and tried by the countries where they are living or arrested by the U.S. with the host country’s cooperation and tried in the U.S. criminal justice system. Using military force to detain the men might also harm fledgling relations with Libya and other post-Arab-Spring governments with whom the U.S. is trying to build partnerships to hunt al-Qaida as the organization expands throughout the region.

    Hey, you know what else harmed fledgling relations with Libya? Susan Rice going on the Sunday shows and contradicting the other big guest on the shows that week, Libyan president Mohamed Yousef El-Magariaf, who was telling anyone who would listen that weekend he had “no doubt” the attack was pre-planned by individuals from outside Libya. You’ll recall Gregory Hicks’s testimony that Rice’s contradiction of their president infuriated the Libyan government and impeded further cooperation on the investigation for more than two weeks.

    Hey, President El-Magariaf, sorry about that.

    Anyway . . . now Obama gets gun-shy on droning bad guys who kill Americans? Now?

    The Heritage Foundation has a good Ben Howe-produced video that points out how Obama’s claim that “we have been very clear about, throughout, that immediately after this event happened, we were not clear who exactly had it carried out, how had been, how it had occurred, and what the motivations were” just doesn’t match the facts at all.

    For perspective, in Pakistan and Yemen alone, experts estimate that the U.S. launched about 450 drone strikes, killing 2,300 to 3,700 militants and hundreds of others, some determined to be civilians, others whose combatant status is unclear.

    Tags: Benghazi , Barack Obama

    All of Obama's Scandals Are Ultimately About Information Control

    By  Jim Geraghty
    May 21, 2013 1:26 PM
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    There’s really no reason for the press to suggest that the recent slew of scandals involving the Obama administration — Benghazi, the AP phone-record seizure, the snooping in James Rosen’s e-mail, the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups, and so on — are a confusing jumble. There is a very clear thread running through all of the administration’s actions:

    * The U.S. deputy chief of mission in Libya, Gregory Hicks, says that he was told not to speak to a member of Congress about Benghazi without a State Department lawyer present, that he received a phone call from Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff disapproving of his discussion with Representative Jason Chaffetz, and that he was “effectively demoted” afterwards.

    * The controversy over the editing of the “talking points” revolves around the steady deletion of factual information from the explanation to the American people, leading to the emphasis of a protest that the U.S. personnel on the ground did not report.

    * In an effort to ferret out leaks, the Department of Justice secretly reviewed the phone records of at least 20 phone lines of Associated Press reporters — their work, home, and cell-phone lines. The move is unprecedented and has journalists up in arms because it means that a journalist can no longer guarantee the confidentiality of any phone conversation with a source that wishes to not be publicly identified.

    * The Department of Justice went before a judge and alleged that Fox News reporter James Rosen was a criminal “co-conspirator” in leaking classified information, in order to access his personal e-mail accounts. No reporter has ever been prosecuted as a co-conspirator under the Espionage Act; in all previous cases, it has been used to prosecute the leaker of classified information, not the recipient. The classified information in question was an analyst’s assessment that North Korea would respond to new U.N. sanctions with another nuclear test.

    * In another bit of punishment for whistleblowers, the Department of Justice Inspector General determined that former Arizona U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke leaked a document smearing Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent John Dodson, an Operation Fast and Furious whistle-blower. The IG concluded that “his explanations for why he did not believe his actions were improper were not credible.”

    * Despite all these ruthless efforts to stop leaks elsewhere in government, the Cincinnati office of the IRS leaked unapproved applications for nine conservative groups to the media web site ProPublica. The IRS separately released confidential information about the National Organization for Marriage. The IRS asserted, and the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration concluded, the releases were “inadvertent.” The problem with the “inadvertent” explanation is that the Human Rights Campaign said they were sent the private IRS filing from NOM via a “whistleblower.”

    * The Environmental Protection Agency waived their fees for Freedom of Information Act requests from “green” or environmental groups while keeping them in place for conservative groups.

    All of these actions involve an effort to control information.

    Some parts of this administration focus on preventing information that is contrary to the administration’s agenda from getting out, or hindering its distribution, and making sure that the only information that goes out supports the perspective of the administration. Other parts leak confidential information designed to attack the reputations of those holding perspectives the administration opposes (NOM, the nine conservative groups) or other whistleblowers (ATF agent Dodson).

    This administration prefers to keep the inconvenient parts of the story obscured in darkness.

    Tags: Barack Obama , IRS , Benghazi , Department of Justice

    61 Percent Say the Sequester Has Had No Impact on Them So Far

    By  Jim Geraghty
    May 21, 2013 9:29 AM
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    This morning’s big polling news focuses on the public’s reaction to the recent scandals . . . 

    Majorities of Americans believe that the Internal Revenue Service deliberately harassed conservative groups by targeting them for special scrutiny and say that the Obama administration is trying to cover up important details about the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans last year.

    But a new Washington Post-ABC News poll also finds that allegations of impropriety related to the controversies have yet to affect President Obama’s political standing.

    But buried in the Post’s survey is a look at whether the American people feel the sequester is affecting them. They asked, “Have you personally felt any negative impact of these [Sequester] budget cuts, or not? Has it been a major effect or minor?”

    The survey found 37 percent said they had felt its effects; 18 percent said major, and 19 percent said minor. The majority, 61 percent, said they felt no effects.

    Two other numbers worth keeping an eye on: approval of how Hillary Clinton handled her Secretary of State duties is down from 68 percent in December to 62 percent today. The survey found 38 percent say the federal government is doing more to protect the rights of average Americans, while 54 percent think it’s doing more to threaten those rights.

    Tags: Sequester , Polling

    Washington Post Forced to Begin Using Its Strategic Pinocchio Reserve

    By  Jim Geraghty
    May 21, 2013 9:02 AM
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    The Washington Post ’s Glenn Kessler examines White House spokesman Dan Pfeiffer’s claim that the GOP manipulated ABC’s Jonathan Karl by releasing “doctored” versions of the Benghazi talking points:  “Despite Pfeiffer’s claim of political skullduggery, we see little evidence that much was at play here besides imprecise wordsmithing or editing errors by journalists.” Kessler gives Pfeiffer “three Pinocchios.”

    To quote Jeff Dobbs, attempting to lay out the cosmological structure of the Obama worldview, “it’s Pinocchios all the way down.”

     

     

     

    Tags: Barack Obama

    'The Loop' Never Extends All the Way to the Oval Office

    By  Jim Geraghty
    May 21, 2013 7:20 AM
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    The “worst tornado in the history of the world” hit the Oklahoma City suburbs yesterday. You know what to do: American Red Cross. Salvation Army. Recovers.org. Mercury One is organizing two truckloads from the Dallas area.

    The Tuesday edition of the Morning Jolt begins . . . 

    Hey, I’m Just the President, Nobody Ever Tells Me Anything Around Here.

    Let me get this straight: To hear Jay Carney tell it, the president is pleased that no one in his senior staff told him that the IRS was targeting his political enemies?

    Senior White House officials, including Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, learned last month about a review by the Treasury Department’s inspector general into whether the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, but they did not inform President Obama, the White House said Monday.

    The acknowledgement is the White House’s latest disclosure in a piecemeal, sometimes confusing release of details concerning the extent to which White House officials knew of the IG’s findings that IRS officials engaged in the “inappropriate” targeting of conservative non-profits for heightened scrutiny. Previously, the White House said counsel Kathryn Ruemmler did not learn about the final results of the investigation until the week of April 22nd, and had not disclosed that McDonough and other aides had also been told about the investigation. On Monday, White House Spokesman Jay Carney said a member of Ruemmler’s staff learned of the probe the week of April 16; Ruemmler learned of the investigation on April 24th; and after that point she informed the chief of staff and other aides about the probe’s findings.

    The White House has said President Obama did not learn of the IRS’s actions until he saw news reports on the matter earlier this month.

    Carney’s spiel included the explanation, “No one in this building intervened in an ongoing independent investigation or did anything that could be seen as intervening.” But a desire to not interfere with the investigation doesn’t quite explain why no one thought that the president ought to be informed about a major scandal of the IRS targeting his political enemies.

    Doesn’t it bother Obama to learn about these things from the press? Doesn’t he chew anybody out?

    Gabe Malor: “I want to know the names of the folks who get to decide what Obama doesn’t need to know. What are their credentials? Who elected them?”

    We’ve seen the “senior administrative staff never mentions major, controversial problem to man in charge of the organization until it blows up on the front pages” playbook before. This is precisely the explanation that we were handed for “Fast and Furious” and how Eric Holder never learned about what was going on until Customs and Border Protection Agent Brian Terry was murdered with a weapon from that program.

    Time and again, information and warnings about the operation’s enormous risks flow from Arizona to Washington . . . and suddenly, mysteriously, stop just short of Holder.

    The inspector general’s report concludes that they can find no evidence Holder knew about Fast and Furious until well after Terry’s death, but . . . well, the circumstances of Holder being so out of the loop, so in the dark about a major operation certainly appear unusual, perhaps to the point of straining credulity. The report states:

    “We found it troubling that a case of this magnitude and that affected Mexico so significantly was not directly briefed to the Attorney General. We would usually expect such information to come to the Attorney General through the Office of the Deputy Attorney General . . . [Holder] was not told in December 2010 about the connection between the firearms found at the scene of the shooting and Operation Fast and Furious. Both Acting Deputy Attorney General Grindler and Counsel to the Attorney General and Deputy Chief of Staff Wilkinson were aware of this significant and troubling information by December 17, 2010, but did not believe the information was sufficiently important to alert the Attorney General about it or to make any further inquiry regarding this development.”

    Not “sufficiently important”? Baffling. Maddening. Some might even say, “implausible” . . . 

    The report continues:

    “We found it troubling that a case of this magnitude and that affected Mexico so significantly was not directly briefed to the Attorney General. We would usually expect such information to come to the Attorney General through the Office of the Deputy Attorney General . . . [Holder] was not told in December 2010 about the connection between the firearms found at the scene of the shooting and Operation Fast and Furious. Both Acting Deputy Attorney General Grindler and Counsel to the Attorney General and Deputy Chief of Staff Wilkinson were aware of this significant and troubling information by December 17, 2010, but did not believe the information was sufficiently important to alert the Attorney General about it or to make any further inquiry regarding this development.”

    Perhaps “Preserve the boss’s plausible deniability” is stitched on the throw pillows on the Oval Office couches.

    Obama didn’t know the IRS was targeting conservatives until he read it in the papers. He didn’t know about “Fast and Furious” until he read it in the papers, too. He has “complete confidence” in Holder, and didn’t know about the decision to collect the phone records of reporters.  He didn’t know about the investigation into CIA director David Petraeus’s affair.  He told Letterman during the election he didn’t know what the national debt was. He didn’t know about the AIG bonuses in the TARP legislation. He said he didn’t know how bad the economic crisis was when he took office.

    That “empty chair” metaphor from the Republican Convention was so out of line, huh?

    I just picture a phone ringing here, going unanswered…

    UPDATE: Sunshine State Sarah Rumpf looks at the rules of the District of Columbia Bar and concludes the White House Counsel’s office likely violated ethics by not promptly informing the president of the IRS abuses.

    Tags: Barack Obama , IRS Abuses , Eric Holder , Fast and Furious

    Chopra: Someone Has to Help the Middle Class in this Awful Economy!

    By  Jim Geraghty
    May 20, 2013 3:45 PM
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    Aneesh Chopra, who spent May 2009 to February 2012 as the chief technology officer in the Obama administration, is running for the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor in Virginia. His first campaign ad emphasizes that it’s gotten so hard for middle-class families to keep up in recent years:

    It’s not often that you find a veteran of the Obama administration running against the Obama economy.

    For what it’s worth, the unemployment rate in Virginia is currently 5.2 percent (the tenth-lowest in the country, down from 7.2 percent in January 2010) and the median household income in Virginia in 2011 was $62,616, the fifth-highest in the country.

    Tags: Aneesh Chopra

    Ken Cuccinelli Ad Spotlights Slain Police-Officer Friend

    By  Jim Geraghty
    May 20, 2013 1:30 PM
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    Ken Cuccinelli’s campaign is releasing a new ad that focuses upon his response to the shooting death of Fairfax County Police Department officer Michael Garbarino.

    Cuccinelli’s campaign stated that the candidate and Garbarino were “longtime friends,” living in the same neighborhood in Fairfax; in 2005, Cuccinelli, then a state senator, did a ride-along in Garabino’s car. Cuccinelli consulted with the officer on legislation that dealt with law enforcement.

    In 2006, a mentally ill teenager stole his parents’ foot locker and removed two high-powered rifles, five handguns, and 300 rounds of ammunition; he proceeded to the Fairfax Police’s Sully police station and began firing. He fatally shot Detective Vicky O. Armel, 40, and Garbarino, 53, before being shot dead by other officers.

    Cuccinelli handled the civil suits for the families, ultimately winning each family $300,000 in damages:

    Their spouses sued [the teenager’s parents] Brian and Margaret Kennedy for negligence and wrongful death, claiming the parents should not have allowed their weapons to be accessible to a son with mental illness and a history of violence. Three days before the shooting, Michael Kennedy had seen a mental health therapist, one of many he had visited in the previous year. He had allegedly committed a carjacking and shot the family dog in recent months.

    Brian Kennedy was prosecuted by federal authorities for criminal gun violations related to the case, pleaded guilty and was sentenced last year to 40 months in prison, which he is serving.

    The civil suit was defended by Liberty Mutual Insurance, which provided homeowners insurance for the Kennedys. The policy had a maximum $300,000 of personal liability for “each occurrence” at the home. Liberty Mutual argued that Michael Kennedy’s taking of the guns was a single occurrence and asked the Fairfax Circuit Court to limit the case to one event. Cuccinelli argued that two people were killed and so two events occurred. Fairfax Circuit Court Judge Marcus D. Williams ruled in favor of the Armel and Garbarino families in April.

    Liberty Mutual at first moved to appeal the judge’s ruling but then withdrew the claim in July and moved toward settlement. Then another hurdle arose in the case.

    Fairfax County’s attorneys filed liens on both lawsuits in July, saying the county was entitled to recover medical costs and death benefits it had paid. The county said it had paid Garbarino or his family $287,375 and Armel’s family $284,431. The liens, if enforced, would have taken nearly all the $300,000 available from the Liberty Mutual policy.

    Cuccinelli approached the Fairfax Board of Supervisors in August and asked whether the county would consider waiving the lien. “They were pretty accommodating,” Cuccinelli said. “I just had to present the case to them. They were not very reluctant.”

    The liens were formally waived in court last month, and Liberty Mutual paid each family at the end of September, court records show.

    The ad is undoubtedly an effort to emphasize Cuccinelli’s compassionate side early in what is likely to be a thoroughly negative campaign.

    Tags: Ken Cuccinelli

    Unnamed IRS Employee: 'There Has to Be a Directive.'

    By  Jim Geraghty
    May 20, 2013 10:37 AM
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    Sean Higgins notices a quote from a Washington Post article about the IRS office in Cincinnati:

    “We’re not political,” said one determinations staffer in khakis as he left work late Tuesday afternoon. “We people on the local level are doing what we are supposed to do. . . . That’s why there are so many people here who are flustered. Everything comes from the top. We don’t have any authority to make those decisions without someone signing off on them. There has to be a directive.”

    The big guys blaming the underlings is an old, old story in Washington. And everywhere else, come to think of it.

     

    Tags: IRS Abuses

    The Vast Conspiracy Within Terry McAuliffe's Mind

    By  Jim Geraghty
    May 20, 2013 8:35 AM
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    Democrat Terry McAuliffe’s campaign looks at the results of the Virginia state GOP convention and sees an opportunity; they feel that they can portray lieutenant-governor nominee E. W. Jackson, the Harvard Law graduate, Baptist minister, law professor, and former Marine, as an unhinged, know-nothing radical, and use him to drag down the Republican candidate for governor, Ken Cuccinelli.

    Virginia Republicans, however, note that if the McAuliffe campaign wants to make this race about who’s made the more outlandish statement or who has views further from the mainstream, they’re fine with that. They have the option of pointing to any one of McAuliffe’s views, including . . . 

    There’s always a conspiracy around every corner, huh?

    Tags: Terry McAuliffe , E.W. Jackson , Ken Cuccinelli

    Obama's Team, Concluding the Ends Justify Their Means

    By  Jim Geraghty
    May 20, 2013 7:39 AM
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    Today in the New York Daily News, I have an op-ed laying out that this administration became overwhelmed by scandal the way all others preceding it did: concluding that their noble ends justified corner-cutting means:

    While there are still chapters to be written in the story of how this administration went astray, one element appears clear: Obama’s crew in Washington, and those who worked under him in the federal bureaucracy, have bent, broken and ignored the rules — all quite certain that they were acting for the greater good. (At this point, it is not clear whether Obama turned a blind eye to all this or obliviously presided over the federal bureaucracy’s transformation into a partisan cudgel.)

    Saul Alinsky, the activist whose writings influenced Obama in his community organizing days, scoffed at those who spent a lot of time worrying about whether the ends justify the means. In his most famous book, “Rules for Radicals,” Alinsky wrote, “One has to remember means and ends. It’s true that I might have trouble getting to sleep because it takes time to tuck those big, angelic, moral wings under the covers. To me, that would be utter immorality.”

    Read the whole thing . . .

    Tags: Barack Obama

    Why Do Virginia Republicans Still Use Nominating Conventions?

    By  Jim Geraghty
    May 20, 2013 7:34 AM
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    The first Morning Jolt of the week features a look at how the Obama administration is claiming that if you look too closely at the scandals, you’re on a witch hunt; a surprising Washington figure who is already “Going Bulworth”; a new hitch for the immigration bill; and then this development down in Virginia . . . 

    No, Virginia, This Isn’t the Best Way to Pick a Party Nominee.

    How should state parties select their nominees for high office? Let me offer a simple criterion: get as many members of the party involved as possible – but limit the decision to registered members of that party. Sorry, independents and unaffiliated voters. If you want some say in who the Republicans nominate, then join the party, and the same goes for the Democrats and their nominations.

    My home state of Virginia doesn’t meet this criterion; the state doesn’t register voters by party, and this weekend the state GOP selected their lieutenant gubernatorial candidate by convention.

    Brian Schoeneman, writing at Bearing Drift, lays out the consequences of this approach:

    I cannot, for the life of me, understand why anybody still thinks that nominating by convention is a good idea.

    Let’s look at the numbers.

    8,094 – The total number of registered delegates who showed up, out of over 12,000 who registered.
    255,826 – The number of Republicans casting a ballot in the 2012 U.S. Senate primary.

    Just from those numbers you can see that the majority of well-motivated Republicans interested in participating in our nominating processes were disenfranchised by the State Convention.

    Here’s another number: $25.  As my colleague Melissa Kenney noted the other day, that’s the cost for children to attend the convention.  For a family as large as hers, or as large as Ken Cuccinelli’s, it would cost almost $200 for them to attend the convention.  That doesn’t include meals, transportation, and hotel costs for those who didn’t come from Richmond or the surrounding suburbs and don’t want to risk a 5+ hour drive home after a grueling hurry-up-and-wait style convention.  Not everybody can afford the poll tax conventions effectively levy.

    And despite the miracles of modern communication, cell phones, Bearing Drift and our livestream, John Frederick’s live broadcast, email, Facebook and Twitter, the convention floor was still rife with rumors and nonsense, including the fake/rescinded endorsement controversy between Corey Stewart and Pete Snyder on the final ballot. Conventioneers were treated like fungi – kept in the dark and fed crap – and that inevitably had an impact on the final selection of E. W. Jackson as our Lt. Governor nominee.  Information trickled out of the counting area, and it was left to bloggers and social media to keep convention goers in the know.  And given the length of the convention, cell phones were dying or dead far before the convention was gaveled closed at 10:30 Saturday night.

    We’ve all heard the arguments over the years about disenfranchisement of military members, parents with small children who can’t afford the cost of childcare, small business owners who can’t afford to give up a spring Saturday to the convention, the elderly who can’t go for 16 hours at a time, and the rest.  That was clearly in evidence yesterday, given that by the time the fourth ballot rolled around, over a third of the conventioneers who had showed up had left.  The final ballot saw fewer that 5,000 votes cast.

    Is that what we really want?

    Meet E. W. Jackson, the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor:

    E. W. Jackson served three years and was honorably discharged from the United States Marine Corps. He then graduated with a Bachelor of Arts Degree (BA), Summa Cum Laude with a Phi Beta Kappa Key from the University of Massachusetts at Boston. Three years later he graduated from Harvard Law School with a Juris Doctor (JD). While in law school, he was accepted into the Baptist ministry and studied theology at Harvard Divinity School.

    Jackson practiced small business law for 15 years in Boston, and taught Regulatory Law as an Adjunct Professor at the Graduate level at Northeastern University in Boston. Since returning to his ancestral home of Virginia, he has also taught graduate courses in Business and Commercial Law at Strayer University in Virginia Beach and Chesapeake.

    In 1997, he retired from his private law practice in order to devote full time to ministry. However, he still taught law and maintained both his avid interest in – and commitment to — civic and political responsibility. His first book, “Ten Commandments to an Extraordinary Life,” was published in 2008. His second book, “America the Beautiful – Reflections of a Patriot Descended from Slaves” is scheduled for release in 2012.

    Jackson’s family history in Virginia dates back to the time of the Revolutionary War. According to the 1880 census, his great grandparents (Gabriel and Eliza) were a sharecropper family in Orange County, Virginia. His grandfather, Frank Jackson, moved to Richmond and then to Pennsylvania, where Jackson was born.

    Expect every Republican running for office in the next two years to run on the theme that government, particularly the federal government, has abused the trust of the American people:

    Vance Wilkins Jr., the first-ever Republican speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates and now active in the tea party movement, was asked to handicap the Cuccinelli-McAuliffe contest.

    Wilkins flashed his knowing jack-o’-lantern grin: “That depends on what happens with those congressional hearings” — a reference to House and Senate inquiries of the controversies roiling the Obama administration — “They will flavor it.”

    Tags: Virginia , Republicans , E.W. Jackson

    Lew: IRS Investigation Was on Inspector General Web Site in Fall 2012

    By  Jim Geraghty
    May 17, 2013 4:29 PM
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    Well.

    AL HUNT, HOST, BLOOMBERG NEWS: We’re going to get to larger economic questions in a little bit, but first the IRS, which reports to Treasury. When were you first notified that IRS agents were targeting conservative groups like the Tea Party?

    JACK LEW, TREASURY SECRETARY, U.S. GOVERNMENT: Al, I learned the substance of this report last Friday when it became a matter of public knowledge. Before that, in mid March, I had had a conversation, just a getting-to-know-you conversation, with the inspector general right after I started, and he went through a number of items that were matters they were working on. And the topic of a project on the 501c3 issue was one of the things he briefed me was ongoing.

    I didn’t know any of the details of it until last Friday. When I learned about it — from the moment I learned about it, I was outraged. The Secretary of the Treasury, as a citizen, it is a matter of the highest priority that the IRS be beyond suspicion in terms of its (inaudible).

    HUNT: Did Tim Geithner or Neal Wolin or the general counsel know about it before him?

    LEW: I think that there was — the heads-up that I got was something that was a matter of public knowledge. It was posted on the IG’s website in the Fall of 2012. I believe that other is typically the practice that an inspector general notify the agencies when matters are opened. I was not aware of any details. My deputy was not aware of any details until it became a matter of public knowledge.

    J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration, today told members of the House Ways and Means Committee that he informed the Treasury’s general counsel of his audit on June 4, and deputy Treasury secretary Neal Wolin “shortly thereafter.”

    While the inspector general’s report was still ongoing, anyone at the highest level of the Treasury Department could see that the IG had been investigating the topic for several months. And yet no one in the entire Treasury Department felt the president should be notified?

    Tags: IRS , Jack Lew

    IRS: 'Please Detail the Content of Your Members' Prayers.'

    By  Jim Geraghty
    May 17, 2013 2:10 PM
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    Today’s hearing on IRS abuses had a lot of “are you kidding me?” moments, but this one stands out:

    “It would surprise me that that question was asked,” acting commissioner Steven Miller tells Representative Aaron Schock, Republican of Illinois.

    UPDATE: Chris Moody at Yahoo has the IRS letter and responses that began this line of inquiry: “Please explain how all of your activities, including the prayer meetings held outside of Planned Parenthood, are considered educational as defined under 501(c)(3).”

    Among the other questions the IRS posed to the Iowa Coalition for Life: “You stated that you sponsored a Forum on Stem Cells, End of Life Decisions and a possible forum on Contraception. Please describe in detail the information provided at each of these forums.”

     

    Tags: IRS Abuses , Aaron Schock

    Why Every American Can Understand the IRS Scandal

    By  Jim Geraghty
    May 17, 2013 10:02 AM
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    On a podcast with Andrew Malcolm of Investor’s Business Daily and Melissa Clouthier, they asked which scandal will prove most damaging to the Obama administration. I think it will be the IRS, even though it probably ought to be Benghazi, considering how lives were lost in that event.

    Almost every American deals with the IRS. Even those who pay no net federal income taxes still have to fill out all of their forms in April. Almost everyone has heard some story about getting audited, and what a nightmarish process that is. I suspect most taxpayers feel like they filled out their tax forms right, but they’re not entirely sure, considering how ludicrously complicated the U.S. tax code is. I suspect everyone fears that someday there will be a knock at your door, and some guy who looks like Agent Smith from The Matrix will be there, demanding your financial records for the past ten years, and if anything is out of order, you’ll go to jail for the rest of your life.

    So unlike Benghazi or the Department of Justice looking through the phone records of Associated Press reporters, everybody feels in their guts what the IRS scandal is about: a person with enormous power over you having an unjustified, arbitrary grudge against you, and abusing that authority.

    The Internal Revenue Service has been a cultural villain for quite some time. Just ask Rockwell, back in the 1980s.

    Tags: IRS , Barack Obama

    A Spoonful of Sugar Won't Help Obamacare Go Down

    By  Jim Geraghty
    May 17, 2013 9:40 AM
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    Also in today’s Jolt, courtesy my brother: “Here we see Obama with Corporal Poppins.”

    There’s some evidence that having the Marine hold the umbrella broke protocol.

     

    Tags: Barack Obama

    The 'Truther' Element That Sours 'Iron Man 3'

    By  Jim Geraghty
    May 17, 2013 7:33 AM
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    The final Morning Jolt of the week includes plenty of scandal roundup from this busy week, but I try to close out the week on lighter topics . . . 

    A Spoiler-Filled Assessment of the Latest ‘Iron Man’ Sequel

    It’s late enough for a spoiler-filled look at Iron Man 3, right?

    ‘Iron Man 3’ is a wildly uneven movie. When it works, it really works; when it doesn’t work, it falls flat on its iron faceplate.

    The first part that I liked, and thought was a strong screenwriting decision, was the choice to have Tony Stark suffering from panic and anxiety attacks because of his near-death experience in “The Avengers.”

    A couple of recent movies and television shows have irked me recently when their characters go through major, dramatic, often life-threatening or certainly outlook-altering events . . . and then return just fine afterwards. I can hear it now: “Come on, Jim, that’s just the magic of the movies,” but plot holes and slipshod characterization aren’t actually what’s supposed to be “magic” about the movies. If a character goes through an experience that should be consequential and significant, then we need some signs that it actually was consequential and significant. If the actions of the characters have no real consequence, why should the audience get involved in the show?

    I can believe, for the sake of the story, that aliens exist, that superheroes exist, robots, magic, whatever you want — so long as the fictional universe I’m seeing has a certain internal consistency to the whole thing. A recent example of the writers botching this came a few months ago on “Castle,” when the protagonist’s daughter was kidnapped, taken overseas, her life threatened . . . and the next episode everything was fine, no mention made of it. In fact, I don’t think any character made any reference to it until this week’s season finale. What I watch in a fictional television series may not have to be realistic, but it does have to be believable.

    I had high hopes for Ben Kingsley’s portrayal of the Mandarin, and as a result, the “twist” revealed halfway through the movie struck me as a nearly insurmountable hurdle.

    First, the makers of Iron Man 3 decided that the Mandarin’s propaganda videos would make the villain really, really resemble and echo Osama bin Laden. I don’t think that’s necessarily offensive or exploitative; I think that’s hitting the notes that stir fear in our subconscious in a very effective way. (Ben Kingsley talks a bit about it here.) He hates the United States of America for reasons that seem unclear, he’s determined to teach us a lesson, and he launches random, explosive terror attacks at various targets.

    But making the Mandarin a ‘fake’ figure, created by a greedy Pentagon contractor who seeks to “control supply and demand of the War on Terror” . . . well, it’s one step away from joining the 9/11 Truthers. Director Shane Black more or less made this point explicitly:

    I would say that we struggled to find a way to present a mythic terrorist that had something about him that registered after the movie’s over as having been a unique take, or a clever idea, or a way to say something of use. And what was of use about the Mandarin’s portrayal in this movie, to me, is that it offers up a way that you can sort of show how people are complicit in being frightened. They buy into things in the way that the audience for this movie buys into it. And hopefully, by the end you’re like, “Yeah, we were really frightened of the Mandarin, but in the end he really wasn’t that bad after all.” In fact, the whole thing was just a product of this anonymous, behind-the-scenes guy. I think that’s a message that’s more interesting for the modern world because I think there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes, a lot of fear, that’s generated toward very available and obvious targets, which could perhaps be directed more intelligently at what’s behind them.

    Except that the terrorists we see in the real world are not in fact driven by “anonymous behind the scenes guys” like shady defense contractors. The Boston bombers were not secretly being manipulated by Halliburton. The guys who killed our ambassador in Benghazi were not being paid by somebody who wanted a fat contract to provide embassy security in the future. This is conspiracy-theory thinking, and not only does it not fit in well in an Iron Man movie . . . it takes what had been this movie series’ most thoroughly menacing, frightening figure and turns him into a quick, cheap joke, and refocuses us on Guy Pearce’s Killian villain. Meh.

    Killian’s grand plot to “control supply and demand in the war on terror,” by the way, makes little or no sense. Is the notion that as he does it, he’ll get rich? He’s already rich. He wants to humiliate Tony Stark, to get revenge for ditching him back in 1999? But he has many opportunities to kill him, and fails to do so.

    Oh, and while the president played by William Sadler seems like a good guy who wants to protect the country (although there’s a throwaway reference to failing to prosecute anyone over an oil spill), we get the tired trope of the evil, or at least supremely morally compromised, vice president.

    With all this complaining, what worked? Well, the movie’s theme, emphasized explicitly by its closing line, is that our hero is really Tony Stark, not “Iron Man.” The creators decided that Tony would spend a large chunk of this movie torn down to his core, without all of his wealth and high-tech toys, forced to improvise creative new solutions in life-and-death circumstances.

    If indeed this is the last Iron Man movie, we’re left with a relentlessly enjoyable character . . . who never quite had a plot or villahat matched what he brought to the screen.

    Tags: Something Lighter

    Lisa Jackson's Official Portrait: I'm Guessing That's a Watercolor?

    By  Jim Geraghty
    May 16, 2013 3:04 PM
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    Courtesy Sean Hackbarth, here is the official portrait of former EPA administrator Lisa Jackson.

    Let your comments meander, flow and rage like . . . like . . . well, I’m sure some metaphor will come to you.

    Some are complaining that the $40,000 fee for the portrait is too much, but I would contend that this is the only official government portrait that has come even close to providing $40,000 in entertainment value.

    Tags: Lisa Jackson , Something Lighter

    Four Key Details in the Released Benghazi E-Mails

    By  Jim Geraghty
    May 16, 2013 8:44 AM
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    On “Morning Joe” at the moment, the roundtable seems convinced that yesterday’s release of 100 pages of internal e-mails relating to the Benghazi talking points exonerates the White House and all of the senior-level officials. This suggests that most in the press have not looked at these e-mails all that closely.

    There were at least four lines in the Benghazi e-mails that jumped out at me.

    Page 4: NE (Near East Desk/Bureau/Division) will add material about warning we gave to Cairo prior to the demonstrations, as well as warnings we issued prior to 9/11 anniversary

    We don’t know whether this reference to warnings was a particularly specific one, i.e., beware of anti-American groups trying to stir up trouble outside our embassy in Cairo, or whether it was generic, i.e., beware of groups trying to stir up trouble on September 11 in the Middle East. But I believe this is the first time we’ve heard that the CIA gave warnings to Cairo — either to the Egyptian government or to our diplomatic security in that city — about a potential threat or danger to our diplomatic staff there. This information does not help the “no one could have seen this coming” excuse, particularly when coupled with the requests for additional security from staff in Libya.

    Page 61: Fyi FBI says AQ (not AQIM) was involved and they are pursuing that theory.

    “AQ” is a reference to al-Qaeda; “AQIM” refers to “al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb,” the Algerian/North African franchise. This means that by Friday evening, the FBI’s focus was on al-Qaeda, the main international portion, not the groups aiming to overthrow the Algerian government.

    If the FBI investigation was focusing al-Qaeda as early as Friday, that doesn’t help explain Ambassador Susan Rice’s emphasis of the protests of the YouTube video on Sunday.

    Also on Page 61: “The State Department had major reservations with much or most of the document. We revised with their concerns in mind.”

    The first version of the talking points mentioned, “Since April, there have been at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi by unidentified assailants, including the June attack against the British Ambassador’s convoy. We cannot rule out that individuals had previously surveilled the US facilities, also contributing to the effacy of the attacks” — which would undoubtedly raise questions about what precautions the State Department was making in the weeks and months preceding the attack. The references to the earlier attacks against foreign interests were one of the details edited out.

    The evidence that the talking points turned into uninformative, inaccurate mush because of the State Department’s involvement does not help Hillary Clinton.

    CIA Office of Congressional Affairs, 9/15: “No mention of the cable to Cairo, either? Frankly, I’d just as soon not use this, then.”

    My understanding is that this comment refers to or echoes the assessment of then–CIA director David Petraeus. This comment indicates that at least one party in this complicated process understood that they were losing sight of what they were supposed to be doing — informing Congress and the public of what happened — and generating meaningless, detail-free pabulum.

    UPDATE: Ed Morrissey notices that almost everyone who is reporting on this has failed to mention to the reference to the FBI.

    Tags: Benghazi , Hillary Clinton , Susan Rice , Barack Obama

    Who Still Has Faith in Eric Holder?

    By  Jim Geraghty
    May 16, 2013 7:44 AM
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    From the Thursday edition of the Morning Jolt:

    Holder Melts Down

    Can anyone, with a straight face, argue that Eric Holder should remain as Attorney General, and the country can have faith in his abilities and judgment in the coming months and years? I mean, apparently he doesn’t even write things down anymore:

    Lawmakers skewered Attorney General Eric Holder yesterday over the Justice Department’s sweeping effort to snoop on Associated Press reporters and editors — while the embattled Cabinet secretary kicked responsibility down the chain of command.

    Holder was in the hot seat for hours of testimony before the House Judiciary Committee just days after the scandal broke, telling lawmakers that his deputy, James Cole, was the one who authorized the sweeping subpoena that caused an uproar in both parties.

    “It’s an ongoing matter and an ongoing matter in which I know nothing,” Holder said.

    Holder says he recused himself from the matter completely — but in an embarrassing admission, he said he hasn’t found a written record of that action.

    Dana Milbank rips Holder to shreds:

    As the nation’s top law enforcement official, Eric Holder is privy to all kinds of sensitive information. But he seems to be proud of how little he knows.

    Why didn’t his Justice Department inform the Associated Press, as the law requires, before pawing through reporters’ phone records?

    “I do not know,” the attorney general told the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday afternoon, “why that was or was not done. I simply don’t have a factual basis to answer that question.”

    Why didn’t the DOJ seek the AP’s cooperation, as the law also requires, before issuing subpoenas?

    “I don’t know what happened there,” Holder replied. “I was recused from the case.”

    Why, asked the committee’s chairman, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), was the whole matter handled in a manner that appears “contrary to the law and standard procedure”?

    “I don’t have a factual basis to answer the questions that you have asked, because I was recused,” the attorney general said.

    On and on Holder went: “I don’t know. I don’t know. .  .  . I would not want to reveal what I know. .  .  . I don’t know why that didn’t happen. .  .  . I know nothing, so I’m not in a position really to answer.”

    What do you know that Eric Holder doesn’t know? A lot, apparently.

    Tags: Eric Holder , Department of Justice

    Chris Christie's Primary Campaign Funds: Spend 'Em if You've Got 'Em!

    By  Jim Geraghty
    May 15, 2013 1:02 PM
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    You may look at incumbent Republican governor Chris Christie’s gigantic, 30-percentage-point lead in polling for this year’s race in New Jersey and ask yourself, “If he’s so far ahead, why is he spending so much on television advertising?”

    Christie spent $1.5 million on the first ad of his reelection bid, and recently dropped another $850,000 to run radio and television versions of a negative attack ad against his likely Democratic rival, state senator Barbara Buono.

    Obviously, New Jersey is one of the most expensive states for campaigning, as it is covered by the most expensive television market in the country (New York) and the fourth-most-expensive (Philadelphia). But a big factor is that a significant portion of Christie’s current campaign cash was raised for his primary race (Christie faces nominal opposition from Seth Grossman), so all of that money must be spent by the state’s June 4 primary.

    Second, while Buono’s fundraising has been pretty anemic, a liberal group headed by Buono’s former spokesman spent tons of cash on attack ads hitting Christie:

    A liberal advocacy group — One New Jersey — has sunk another $700,000 into purchasing airtime for advertisements opposing Gov. Chris Christie, PolitickerNJ.com reports. That brings the group’s total purchases to $1.8 million for television and another $100,00 on radio, the report said.

    Russ Schriefer, a veteran of Christie’s 2009 campaign, is advising him again. He and his longtime business partner, Stuart Stevens, the campaign manager for Mitt Romney in 2012, visited National Review’s Washington offices today. Schriefer said that while the outlook for Christie is good right now, he has little doubt that at some point polling in the governor’s race will tighten, at least slightly, as Democrats who are not currently paying much attention to the race drift back into the Buono camp.

    Schriefer’s comment about the primary funds echoed one of Stevens’ comments about an unforeseen challenge for the Romney camp in the late spring of 2012. Romney had effectively won the Republican nomination but could not spend money raised for the general election until he was officially named the GOP nominee at the convention in Tampa. Romney and his team were left trying to get people to donate, but only to the primary fund.

    “It’s very tough to raise money for a primary campaign that everybody thinks you’ve already won,” Stevens said.

    At first glance, this would be an argument for moving conventions to much earlier in the year. Or perhaps the distinction between primary- and general-election campaign donations should be eliminated entirely.


     

    Tags: Chris Christie , Barbara Buono , Mitt Romney , Stu Stevens

    Gibbs, Matthews — Who Will Criticize Obama Next, Joe Biden?

    By  Jim Geraghty
    May 15, 2013 7:08 AM
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    The midweek edition of the Morning Jolt features a big roundup of the coming storm of Obamacare, further evidence that the IRS isn’t good at math, and this point about what happens when a very comfortable administration suddenly finds that its old spin and excuses don’t work anymore:

    BOOM: The Implosion of the Obama Excuses for the Scandal Parade

    Just how bad has it gotten for the Obama administration?

    Not even his old spokesman Robert Gibbs can say his boss is handling this stuff well.

    Former Obama White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs — now an MSNBC contributor — explained to Andrea Mitchell this afternoon that President Obama made White House Press Secretary Jay Carney’s job more difficult due to his passive response to the scandals surrounding his administration

    Carney would have had an easier time defending the president, suggested Gibbs, if the President had spoken out on the IRS scandal over the weekend.

    “The problem is this — the tenor of this briefing would be different if the president had spoken about this on Saturday or Sunday and not on Monday,” Gibbs explained shortly after Carney struggled to answer reporters questions in the White House Press Briefing.

    Gibbs added that President Obama sounded like he was “losing patience” with the issue “which is what I do with my 9-year-old.”

    Gibbs explained that Obama should have used “more vivid” language and proposed a tough commission to look at the issue while waiting for the Inspector General to release his report on the scandal.

    Well, at least Obama still has Mr. Leg-Tingle himself, Chris Matthews, who — wait, what?

    Matthews: President Obama has got to stop taking advice from sycophants who keep telling him he’s right and only they can be trusted. He needs to act. He needs to fire people. He needs to grab control of his presidency. He needs to surround himself with people who are ready to fight on every front, because the three problems he faces now, Benghazi, the IRS and the FBI are less likely to be two problems by this time next week than there are to be four and counting. Why? Because, as I said, it’s not just that he’s under attack. It’s that he’s vulnerable. And that is obvious to everyone this side of the White House gates.

    Who’s going to denounce the president next, Joe Biden?

    What we saw in Tuesday’s White House press briefing, where the press corps appeared ready to break out the pitchforks and torches and go French Revolution on Jay Carney’s dishonest tush, is what happens when a very comfortable, very confident administration suddenly finds that none of the traditional scandal defenses work.

    Dennis Miller: “Carney blows more smoke than a Rastafarian’s death rattle.”

    Tuesday afternoon, Ace of Spades came up with the idea of a scandal-excuse prediction game in the form of an NFL-style draft, and Twitchy collected some of the best.

    Ace began with, “low level employees”, took “Obama gives a historic speech” in the second round (overrated, I would argue that player peaked a few years ago and has really seen less playing time in recent years) and concluded the third round with a very versatile selection who gets a lot of playing time, “Some procedures may need review/Procedures have let us down again.” My first-round selection was the offspring of the Hall of Famer that everyone remembers from the breakout 1998 season, “The real story here is the shadowy network behind our critics making these baseless accusations.” In the second round I went with a player who has been on the field almost constantly since the start of the 2009 season, “If you look back to the Bush administration . . .”

    It’s easy to predict these because anyone who has followed the news during more than one scandal has seen them before. There is a playbook in these sorts of matters: It wasn’t me, it was that other figure/local office over there. I was out of the loop. I was in the loop, but the concerns were never adequately communicated, in violation of established procedures. I knew about it, but I didn’t approve of it. There’s an ongoing review, I can’t comment. All of this happened a long time ago, you’re obsessed with ancient history. This is a distraction from the real business of the country. Finally, don’t you understand that my political enemies are behind this?

    All of the above lines are meant to get you to focus on something besides what happened, who’s responsible, and who should be held accountable. All of this is mean to persuade us that their decisions and actions aren’t the problem; the problem is with us, for asking questions about it.

    To hell with that.

    “In my defense, you guys always swallowed these lines before.”

    Tags: Barack Obama , Robert Gibbs , Chris Matthews , Scandals , Jay Carney

    The Mask Is Ripped Off of 'Hope and Change'

    By  Jim Geraghty
    May 14, 2013 6:58 AM
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    Today’s Morning Jolt is jam-packed, as it is a special ALL-SCANDAL edition!

    SCANDAL ONE: Dear Media: Obama’s Indignant Benghazi Response Revealed a Lot Yesterday!

    Dear friends in the media.

    Come on.

    I mean, come on.

    You and I know what’s going with the Benghazi thing. Let me share something that I first put into play during the “was Anthony Weiner’s Twitter account hacked” debate, but that comes from watching the Lewinsky scandal, the where-did –Mark-Sanford-go scandal, the why-is-David-Wu-dressed-in-a-tiger-suit scandal, and a wide variety of wrongdoing committed by politicians:

    When there is evidence of scandalous or bizarre behavior on the part of a political figure, and no reasonable explanation is revealed within 24 to 48 hours, then the truth is probably as bad as everyone suspects.

    Nobody withholds exculpatory information. Nobody who’s been accused of something wrong waits for “just the right moment” to unveil information that proves the charge baseless. Political figures never choose to deliberately let themselves twist in the wind. It’s not the instinctive psychological reaction to being falsely accused, it’s not what any public communications professional would recommend, and to use one of our president’s favorite justifications, it’s just common sense.

    So . . .

    You and I both know, in our guts, and based upon everything we’ve seen in Washington since we started our careers, that there’s no innocent explanation for the Obama administration’s actions before, during, and after the Benghazi attacks.

    If there were good reasons for why the requests for additional security from staff in Libya didn’t generate any serious response in the halls of the State Department, we would have heard it by now. If there were evidence that everyone within the State Department, military, and White House were doing everything they could to rescue our guys on that awful night, we would have heard about it long ago. If there was a good reason for the “talking points” to get edited down from a false premise (a demonstration) but at least serious information (previous CIA warnings about terrorist activity) to false pabulum, we would have heard it by now; the latest lame excuse is that the fourteen edits merely reflect “bureaucratic infighting between the CIA and State.” And if there was a good reason for State Department lawyers to call up Deputy Chief of Mission Gregory Hicks and tell him not to allow the RSO, the acting Deputy Chief of Mission, and himself to be interviewed by Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, we would have heard that by now, too.

    Come on, guys. What do we think is going on when Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff calls up the acting ambassador, and harangues him about the lack of a State Department lawyer for his conversation with Congress? Does anybody really believe it’s just her checking up to make sure protocol was followed?

    You can see what’s going on here. You may not want to see it, or believe it, but you can see it. The federal government made awful, unforgivable wrong decisions about the security for its people in Benghazi. They compounded the error by failing to put together even the beginning of a rescue mission during the seven-hour assault. Perhaps those responsible for making the call had a fear of  a “Black Hawk Down” scenario, in which the rescuers find themselves needing rescue, but whatever the reasoning, the net effect was the same: our people were under fire, fighting for their lives, and nobody was coming to help. The decisions made that night make a mockery of the unofficial, but widespread motto of our armed forces: “Nobody gets left behind.”

    The decisions made up until this point may or may not have involved the president or then-Secretary of State Clinton, but they sure as hell were involved in the decisions that came afterwards.  The morning after the attack, the administration tried to offer the excuse that it was a completely unforeseeable event, randomly triggered by some YouTube video. And they sought to intimidate and punish anyone who would contradict their storyline.

    My friends in media, you know what is going on when you see President Obama say this:

    The whole issue of talking points, frankly, throughout this process has been a sideshow.  What we have been very clear about throughout was that immediately after this event happened we were not clear who exactly had carried it out, how it had occurred, what the motivations were.

    You know what this is: Stop looking at what I did, and start looking at the people accusing me of wrongdoing. We’ve seen this tactic before: “The vast right-wing conspiracy.”

    We know the president’s claim that there was confusion is false, because everyone on the ground was clearly telling their bosses that this was a terror attack from the beginning. No one in Benghazi or Libya was saying this was a protest as a result of a YouTube video. Where did that idea come from? Who within the administration decided to take accurate information and start inserting inaccurate information?

    The president continues:

     It happened at the same time as we had seen attacks on U.S. embassies in Cairo as a consequence of this film.  And nobody understood exactly what was taking place during the course of those first few days. 

    No, the folks on the ground understood what was taking place. They just said so before Congress and a lot of television cameras. Why is the president confused about this?

    Obama continues:

    And the fact that this keeps on getting churned out, frankly, has a lot to do with political motivations.  We’ve had folks who have challenged Hillary Clinton’s integrity, Susan Rice’s integrity, Mike Mullen and Tom Pickering’s integrity.  It’s a given that mine gets challenged by these same folks.  They’ve used it for fundraising. 

    The motivations and/fundraising of those who disagree with you are irrelevant to whether or not you’re telling the truth, Mr. President.

    SCANDAL TWO: Hey, Why Does the IRS Have to Tell the Truth to Congress, Anyway?

    NBC News points out that the IRS appears to have directly lied to Congress when asked about the targeting of conservative groups:

    Lois Lerner, head of the IRS division on tax-exempt organizations, learned in June 2011 that agents had targeted groups with names including “Tea Party” and “Patriots,” according to the draft obtained by NBC News.

    She “instructed that the criteria immediately be revised,” according to the draft. Ten months later, in March 2012, the IRS commissioner at the time, Douglas Shulman, testified to Congress that the IRS was not targeting tax-exempt groups based on their politics.

    The IRS said over the weekend that senior executives were not aware of the targeting, but it remains unclear who knew what and when. [Then IRS Commissioner] Shulman, who left the agency last fall, has not spoken publicly about the scandal and did not answer a request for comment Monday from NBC News.

    Members of Congress had sent letters to Shulman as early as June 2011 asking specifically about targeting of conservative groups, according to a House Ways and Means Committee summary obtained by NBC News.

    The IRS responded at least six times but made no mention of targeting conservatives, according to the committee’s summary.

    “Oh, you mean that effort to conservative groups, we thought you meant a different one.”

    Remember the explanation that this was just some runaway low-level employees in one office? Yeah, that was bull: “Internal Revenue Service officials in Washington and at least two other offices were involved in the targeting of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, making clear the effort reached well beyond the branch in Cincinnati that was initially blamed, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.”

    SCANDAL THREE: Of Course Eric Holder Is Allowed to Secretly Eavesdrop on Journalists!

    You know a scandal is bad when I can point you to the Huffington Post’s summary, because it can’t collect any more outrage than I can:

    Journalists reacted with shock and outrage at the news that the Justice Department had secretly obtained months of phone records of Associated Press journalists.

    The AP broke the news on Monday about what it called an “unprecedented intrusion” into its operation. It said that the DOJ had obtained detailed phone records from over 20 different lines, potentially monitoring hundreds of different journalists without notifying the organization. The wire service’s president, Gary Pruitt, wrote a blistering letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, accusing the DOJ of violating the AP’s constitutional rights.

    Reporters and commentators outside the AP professed themselves to be equally angered. “The Nixon comparisons write themselves,” BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith tweeted. Margaret Sullivan, the public editor for the New York Times, called the story “disturbing.” Washington Post editor Martin Baron called it “shocking.” CNN’s John King described it as “very chilling.”

    Speaking to the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple, a lawyer for the AP called the DOJ’s actions “outrageous,” saying they were “a dagger to the heart of AP’s newsgathering activity.”

    BuzzFeed’s Kate Nocera was perhaps more pithy, writing simply, “what in the f–k.”

    You “Hope and Change” true believers were a bunch of chumps.

    As this illustration over at Ace of Spades reveals . . .

    Tags: Barack Obama , Eric Holder , Benghazi , IRS , Scandals

    Should Gabriel Gomez Be a Priority for National GOP Groups?

    By  Jim Geraghty
    May 13, 2013 10:45 AM
    Comments
    10

    Text  

    How much should national Republicans invest in the effort to elect Gabriel Gomez in Massachusetts’s special Senate election June 25?

    Some evidence — such as this poll commissioned by the Gomez campaign — points to an extremely competitive race:

    The May 5–7 poll of 800 likely special-election voters by OnMessage, Inc., a Republican political consulting firm, found [Democrat Ed] Markey leading [Republican Gabriel] Gomez 46 percent to 43 percent, with 11 percent undecided. According to an OnMessage polling memo, respondents “were stratified by county based on previous election results to reflect historic voter trends.”

    On the other hand, WBUR had Markey up by 8 among likely voters with leaners (46 percent to 38 percent) and Suffolk put Markey up 52 percent to 35 percent.

    Even an incompetent Markey campaign will still enjoy the advantage of running in a heavily Democratic state, and Gomez’s task will be supremely difficult if he doesn’t get significant financial support from national Republicans and conservatives. Right now, national Republican and conservative groups are weighing that decision.

    The NRSC is debuting a new web video, pointing out that Markey was caught up in the notorious House Bank scandal 20 years ago and consistently voted to increase his own salary.

    As a Massachusetts Republican, Gomez is not a down-the-line conservative by any stretch. Massachusetts talk-radio host Michael Graham deems Gomez unsupportable because of the candidate’s past support for Barack Obama. Gomez says he wants to close “the gun-show loophole” and also says he’s pro-life but “Roe v Wade is settled law. Politicians spend way too much time on divisive issues that are already decided and far too little time on fixing our economy.” He supports same-sex marriage. He backs a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants with no criminal record.

    On the other hand, Gomez says he backs a secure border, supports the Keystone pipeline, and says Obamacare is “ignoring or compounding the underlying costs of health care.” Plus he has a sterling background for a senator: graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, platoon leader in the Navy SEALs, MBA from Harvard Business School and successful entrepreneur and Little League coach. He’ll be a vote for Mitch McConnell to be Senate majority leader instead of Harry Reid. And if the party wants to do better among Hispanics, why not make a solid effort to elect the third Latino Republican senator, as Gomez is a son of Colombian immigrants?

    The new revelations of the Benghazi hearings and the IRS scandal probably energized the GOP base. The coming months or year may feel a lot like the political environment of 2009 and 2010.

    Finally, if Markey were to win narrowly, would even that result reinforce the notion that the political environment has tilted in favor of the GOP? Republicans shocked the opposition by winning in South Carolina’s special election, and should have a breeze in a Missouri House special election. The New Jersey governor’s race doesn’t look competitive, and Cuccinelli is off to the better start in Virginia. Undoubtedly, the GOP’s campaign committees would love to enter 2014 having swept every competitive special election.

    Tags: Gabriel Gomez , Ed Markey , Special Elections

    Scarborough, Todd Wonder Why Democrats Are Shrugging at IRS Scandal

    By  Jim Geraghty
    May 13, 2013 9:01 AM
    Comments
    5

    Text  

    On MSNBC this morning, Chuck Todd and Joe Scarborough dance around the obvious conclusion:

    TODD: Why aren’t there more Democrats jumping on this? This is outrageous no matter what political party you are, that an arm of the government, maybe it’s a set of people just in one office but, mind you, that one office was put in charge of dealing with these 501c4s and things like that.

    SCARBOROUGH: Why didn’t the president say something on Friday afternoon?

    TODD: I don’t know. Maybe they were distracted by Benghazi. Maybe they made the decision they didn’t want it to be about healthcare. I raised this question — where is the sense of outrage? And the only pushback was, Jay Carney spoke about this at the press briefing and he was pretty strong. I have to say it didn’t sound very strong to me. I don’t know if the White House realizes. I think this story has more legs politically in 2014 than Benghazi.

    The obvious conclusion: President Obama, the past and current secretaries of the Treasury, and Democrats on Capitol Hill don’t really care! To them, the use of government resources to harass and impede their political opponents is just how the game is played.

    When Obama came to Washington, he brought the Chicago rules with him.

    Tags: IRS , Barack Obama , Congressional Democrats

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