Lerner to Plead the Fifth


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The director of the Internal Revenue Service’s Exempt Organizations division, Lois Lerner, is invoking the Fifth Amendment and will not appear before Congress to answer questions about the agency’s targeting of Tea Party and other conservative groups. 

Lerner was scheduled to appear before the House Oversight committee tomorrow to discuss the improper conduct of IRS employees who singled out conservative groups, and why she failed to bring that behavior to the attention of Congress. 

“She has not committed any crime or made any misrepresentation but under the circumstances she has no choice but to take this course,” said a letter from her defense attorney, William Taylor, to committee chairman Darrell Issa, according to the Los Angeles Times, which obtained a copy of the correspondence. Taylor asked that the committee excuse Lerner from testifying since she will not answer questions. 

In testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee last week, the outgoing commissioner of the IRS, Steven Miller, revealed that Lerner initially disclosed the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups by planting a question at a conference hosted by the American Bar Association. 

Lerner learned that conservative groups were receiving improper scrutiny in June of 2011 and ordered that her employees in the Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division put an end to the practice. She failed to inform Congress, however, despite several inquiries from lawmakers. 

Newsflash: Pro-Life Group Supports Pro-Life Candidates


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Today NARAL released a groundbreaking report on the activities of the pro-life group Susan B. Anthony List. The report contains shocking allegations and makes for fascinating reading – NARAL’s crack staff of researchers apparently worked tirelessly to uncover a treasure trove of new information. According to the report, Susan B. Anthony List 1) raises money for pro-life candidates, 2) supports pro-life laws, 3) hires pro-life people, and 4) receives grants from conservative foundations. Last spring the group even went so far as to hire a lobbyist to lobby against Planned Parenthood funding. Shocking!

In all seriousness, Susan B. Anthony List should welcome this report. Founded in 1992, the group has done a fine job both raising the profile of pro-life women and assisting pro-life women who are running for elected office. Twenty years ago, there were almost no pro-life women serving in Congress. Now there are two female pro-life senators and over 15 pro-life female members of the House. This is in no small part to the efforts of Susan B. Anthony List, and the fact that the group is receiving scrutiny from its opponents is a nice testament to its effectiveness.

— Michael J. New is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan – Dearborn, a fellow at the Witherspoon Institute, and an adjunct scholar at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the research and education arm of Susan B. Anthony List. Follow him on Twitter @Michael_J_New.

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Is There a Collision Between Free Speech and Religion?


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“I never thought that defending free speech would ever become a central calling of mine,” says Jacob Mchangama. But Mchangama, a Danish human-rights lawyer, is on the front lines of what he calls “the global battle of values over the relationship between free speech and religion.”

He addresses that relationship in a new 18-minute documentary, Collision!: Free Speech and Freedom of Religion, produced by the Free To Choose Network. “Free speech and freedom of religion are not contradictory, but complementary,” argues Mchangama. “We need one to have the other.” He takes as his ideal Chicago’s North Side, where an advertisement for Indo-Pak United Methodist Church can sit outside an Islamic bookstore. Such peaceful coexistence is in stark contrast to the many collisions between free speech and freedom of religion that his film highlights: the persecution of Baha’is in Iran, Westboro Baptist Church’s funeral protests, the 2006 Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed, and many more.

“In order to secure real tolerance and freedom, it is the right to offend that must be protected and the supposed right not to be offended that must be rejected,” he says. Mchangama makes a compelling case that “free speech and freedom of religion actually reinforce each other. They are two sides of the same coin. They allow the religious believer, the skeptic, and the atheist to live together in peace, and far from threatening religious minorities, they empower them.”

Watch Collision! in its entirety here.

 

Is Prayer Greek to Us?


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“No one confuses sessions of Congress with a church service.”

You can say that again.

Brett Harvey, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom makes this point to me in an interview for National Review Online, about the case of an upstate New York town’s desire to pray before town-council meetings. Yesterday the Supreme Court agreed to hear the town of Greece’s case after a Second Circuit Appeals Court ruling found that because the town has predominantly Christian clergy, it needs to import non-Christians to lead the town council in prayer so non-Christians do not “feel like outsiders.”


KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: Why aren’t there non-Christian prayers before the town council meetings in Greece, N.Y.? 

BRETT HARVEY: There have been non-Christian prayers. The prayer opportunity has been extended to people of many faiths, including Catholics, Protestants, Moravian, Universalist, Ba’hai, Islamic, Jewish, Mormon, Friends/Quaker, and Jehovah’s Witness. The Town of Greece does not control who volunteers to deliver the invocation. Any decision made about the nature of the prayers is determined by the citizens who volunteer, not the Town. The authors of the Bill of Rights sought God’s blessings on their public meetings. Americans today should be as free as the Founders were to pray.


LOPEZ: Are there no non-Christians who know any prayers in Greece? Is that why a court of appeals ruling suggested they find some out-of-towners to lead them in prayers? 

HARVEY: The prayer opportunity has been extended to people of all faiths, including atheists. The court of appeals punished the town because they didn’t bus in people from out of town to pray, but the town should not be forced to handpick out-of-towners to lead the Greeks in prayers. The citizens of the Town of Greece are capable of speaking for themselves.


LOPEZ: Is this an unusual circumstance Greece finds itself in, or have you seen this before?

HARVEY: Hundreds of towns throughout America find themselves under attack by groups seeking to stop the practice of opening legislative sessions with prayer. Since 2004 20 different federal lawsuits have been filed demanding that local governments censor or abandon this historic tradition. A few people should not be able to extinguish the traditions of our nation merely because they heard something they didn’t like


LOPEZ: Barry W. Lynn has said that, “A town council meeting isn’t a church service, and it shouldn’t seem like one.” Doesn’t he have a point?

HARVEY: The Supreme Court acknowledged 30 years ago that seeking divine guidance and blessing on public proceedings is a part of the “history and tradition of this country.” Congress has done it for more than 220 years. No one confuses sessions of Congress with a church service.


LOPEZ: Why is legislative prayer important? Could it be a relic that is just asking for trouble today? 

HARVEY: Because the authors of the Constitution invoked God’s blessing on public proceedings, this tradition should not suddenly be deemed unconstitutional. The Declaration of Independence notes that our Creator has granted inalienable rights, it is perfectly constitutional to allow citizens to petition the Creator for blessing and guidance according to their own conscience. It not only protects the rights of citizens, it also solemnizes public meetings.


LOPEZ: What is Marsh v. Chambers and why is it important to Greece?

HARVEY: It is a decision of the United States Supreme Court where the Court upheld the historic practice of legislative prayer. The practice of the Greece board is consistent with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Marsh.


LOPEZ: What would be a helpful ruling from the Court, for the sake of future challenges like this one? For the sake of freedom of religion? 

HARVEY: A decision by the Court reaffirming the practice of legislative prayer and making clear that prayer givers are allowed to pray according to their own faith and traditions.


LOPEZ: Is there a danger that we are crying “religious freedom!” a little too often to be believable? 

HARVEY: Religious freedom is our first liberty set out in the Constitution and the cornerstone our nation was founded upon. It must be vigilantly protected. Americans today should be as free as the Founders were to pray. 

True the Vote Files Suit Against the IRS


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True the Vote, a Houston-based nonprofit dedicated to fighting voter fraud, has filed suit in federal court against the IRS, asking the court to grant its tax-exempt status (three years after applying) and seeking damages for unlawful actions taken by the IRS against the organization.

Catherine Engelbrecht, a member of the Harris County, Texas, tea-party organization King Street Patriots, founded True the Vote after serving as a poll worker during the 2008 elections. Observing how understaffed polling places seemed to encourage voter fraud, she established True the Vote to train poll workers to “true” the vote: “to research the voter rolls in their home districts and to report inaccuracies to their County and State, to identify instances of vote fraud, and to be able to serve as observers at the polls to assure the integrity of the vote.”

“We’ve been waiting for three years to receive a decision from the IRS about our tax exempt status,” says Engelbrecht in a True the Vote press release. “After answering hundreds of questions and producing thousands of documents, we’re done waiting. The IRS does not have the power to pocket veto our application. Federal law empowers groups like True the Vote to force a decision in court — which is precisely what we aim to do.”

After filing with the IRS, Engelbrecht and her family’s small manufacturing business was audited by the IRS — and received unexpected scrutiny from OSHA, the ATF, and the FBI.

True the Vote’s lawsuit consists of three counts:

Count One:  Seeks recognition of True the Vote as a 501(c)3 tax exempt organization pursuant to  26 USC § 7428.

Count Two:  Seeks damages and injunctive relief from the IRS and IRS employees and agents, pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1331 and Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 403 U.S. 388 (1971), for violation of True the Vote’s constitutional rights by virtue of the actions of the government in unlawfully targeting and delaying recognition of True the Vote’s exempt status.

Count Three:   Seeks damages and injunctive relief against the IRS and IRS employees, pursuant to 26 USC § 7431, for their unlawful intrusions into True the Vote’s activities by requiring the filing of voluminous materials with the IRS, then unlawfully inspecting and potentially disseminating the information.

Says Cleta Mitchell, attorney for True the Vote: “We are not going to allow the IRS to claim, as it has been doing in the past week, that the targeting of conservative groups is over and ‘everything has been fixed.’ It is not yet fixed and this litigation is a vital step both to resolve True the Vote’s status and to learn exactly what happened inside the IRS.”

Carney Compares Questions about Scandals to Birther Inquiries


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Jay Carney tried to avoid questions about the series of scandals surrounding the Obama administration by comparing them to questions about the president’s birth certificate.

At today’s White House press briefing, CBS’s Major Garrett asked Carney if the White House thought Republican inquiries about recent scandals were “legitimate.” (Reporters mentioned the Benghazi attack, the IRS scandal, the Department of Justice’s investigations of reporters, and the Department Health and Human Service’s efforts to raise funds from private companies to promote Obamacare.)

“We could go down the list of questions — we could say, ‘What about the president’s birth certificate? Was that legitimate?’” Carney said.

Do Androids Stay Up All Night Eating Food?


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This is the future . . . of food:

NASA is funding research into 3D-printed food. Mechanical engineer Anjan Contractor received a $125,000 grant from the agency to build a prototype 3D printer with the aim of automating food creation. It’s hoped the system could provide astronauts food during long-distance space travel, but its creator has the loftier aim of solving the increasing food shortages around the world by cutting down on waste. The software for the printer will be open-source, while the hardware is based on the open-source RepRap Mendel 3D printer.

The concept is to use basic “building blocks” of food in replaceable powder cartridges. By combining each block, a wide range of foods should be able to be created by the printer. The cartridges will have a lifespan of 30 years, more than long enough to enable long-distance space travel. After proving his system works on a basic level by printing chocolate, Contractor will start his project within the next few weeks by attempting to print a pizza.

Here it is, in all of its glory:
via qzprod.files.wordpress.com
Soon, we won’t even have to microwave our dinners. We’ll just print them.

Correlation Is Not Causation


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In its latest survey of attitudes toward moral issues, Gallup reports dramatic swings in opinion on only two of 19 issues it asks about: the morality of gay sex and unwed childbearing. Around six in ten Americans now say both are morally acceptable (59 percent gay sex, 60 percent unwed childbearing). Both experienced large swings in the last decade (19 points for gay sex, 15 points for unwed childbearing).

Correlation is not causation. In fact “cause” is probably the wrong word here; it’s more like an underlying cultural logic causing both trends. A society in which Dan Savage is a mainstream advice columnist (which he is) and it’s considered scandalous for ESPN reporters and pediatric neurosurgeons to hold Christian views of sex would sort of look like this.

I personally still cherish the hope that we can as a society eliminate cruel homophobia without jettisoning heteronormativity — which is the need for social norms and institutions to be oriented strongly around the problem and the blessing that sex between men and women makes babies.

But so far, the disconnect between sex, marriage, and babies proceeds rapidly apace. Hat Tip Christian Post.

Sharyl Attkisson's Computers 'Compromised'


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Or so Politico is reporting. She and Jonathan Karl have been among the very few non-conservative journalists to follow the Benghazi story aggressively, and Attkisonson was also dogged on the Fast and Furious story. We don’t yet know who hacked her computer, but if it’s any branch of the federal government, the hair on the back of your neck ought to be tingling.

Treasury IG: ‘The Law Is Always Relevant’


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The Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration J. Russell George said that the IRS’s leak of confidential tax information to the left-leaning group ProPublica could be a violation of the law, in response to questions from Senator John Thune (R., S.D.) at this morning’s Senate Finance Committee hearing on the IRS scandal.

When asked to respond to Obama spokesperson Dan Pfeiffer’s recent comment on ABC’s This Week that the law is “irrelevant” because the IRS’s behavior was wrong regardless, Russell, one of the authors of the recently released report on the scandal, responded, “I believe the law is always relevant.”

Former IRS Chief Refuses to Apologize for Targeting


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Former IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman stopped short of apologizing for the agency’s targeting of conservative groups under his watch, despite repeated attempts by Senator John Cornyn to get him to do so. Shulman would only go so far as to say that he was “deeply, deeply saddened by this whole set of events.”

“I certainly am not personally responsible for creating a list that had inappropriate criteria on it,” Shulman said today at a Senate Finance Committee hearing. “With that said, this happened on my watch, and I very much regret that it happened on my watch.”

“Well, I don’t think that qualifies as an apology, it qualifies as an expression of regret,” Cornyn said before moving on.

Dana Milbank’s Subtlety


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Today in the Washington Post, he writes:

Not since George Wallace, perhaps, has an Alabamian taken as passionate a stand for a lost cause as the one Jeff Sessions is taking now.

Bipartisan immigration legislation is making its way inexorably through the Senate Judiciary Committee. Although its ultimate fate is unclear, its passage by the committee is assured, and conservatives on the panel such as ranking Republican Chuck Grassley (Iowa) and Orrin Hatch (Utah) are doing what they can to improve the bill. Even firebrands such as Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Mike Lee (Utah) are holding fire.

Then there’s Sessions. The wiry Southerner is on a one-man crusade to undo the compromise drafted by the Gang of Eight (four of whom, two Democrats and two Republicans, are colleagues on the committee). . . .

His most prominent defeat: a 17-1 vote last week against his proposal to restrict legal immigration. Before that bipartisan rebuke, he spent one hour and 11 minutes arguing his case.

Look, he said “perhaps” . . . But Milbank obviously believes that it’s clear Sessions’s proposals, because he finds little support for them among his colleagues in the Senate, are beyond the pale. That’s why, just to properly secure that pale, he italicized the fact that Sessions proposed “to restrict legal immigration” — reminding us how a position consistently supported by at least as many Americans as not (lower levels of legal immigration) is an antediluvian, unimaginable one.

Doubling Down on Swarthmore Madness


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A week ago, in “Swarthmore Spinning Out of Control,” and “Swarthmore’s President Chopp Replies to My Queries,” I reported on an egregious case of campus political correctness at Swarthmore College. Since then, the story has taken off. Danielle Charette, the conservative student “clapped down” by radical protesters who took over a Board of Managers meeting, published her own version of events in the Wall Street Journal. Thomas Sowell has a piece on Swarthmore today at NRO, and there’s a story today here as well. Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars and co-author of the Bowdoin Report, weighed in yesterday.

Now, a story by Joy Resmovits at the Huffington Post on the Swarthmore fiasco breaks new ground. Although it may not be surprising, it’s fascinating to see key figures in this incident, contacted by Resmovits, doubling down on their behavior, notorious though it may now be.

Kate Aronoff, the fossil-fuel-divestment activist who wrote, “F*** your constructive dialogue,” openly rejecting the principle of tolerance, and indeed the “liberal project” itself, seems not to have changed her mind. “This idea that we have the luxury to sit back and have long, drawn-out conversations is false to me,” she told Resmovits when asked about the meeting takeover.

Rebecca Chopp, Swarthmore’s president, whom I criticized for inaction at the takeover and afterwards, continues to treat what happened as “robust civic discourse,” rather than intimidation. Although radical students seized control of a public meeting from Swarthmore’s Board of Managers and clapped down conservatives, Chopp tells Resmovits, “The board has a firm policy of not trying to shout down students. So long as it’s fairly orderly — and this one was fairly orderly . . .”

So Chopp now defines preventing radicals from silencing conservatives as refusing to “shout students down.” That is an Orwellian reversal. Openly intolerant students who silence others are themselves granted total deference. Chopp’s public abdication of responsibility, even after having had time to consider the matter, means that campus radicals have nothing fear next year. Conservatives at Swarthmore, on the other hand, have been all but officially abandoned.

Resmovits also contacted Bill McKibben, the leader of the national fossil-fuel-divestment movement. On the day Swarthmore student activists took over the Board meeting, McKibben cheered them on. Have details of the incident made him think twice about his followers’ tactics? Apparently not. “I think they’re doing a great job,” McKibben told Resmovits, when asked about the behavior of divestment activists at the Swarthmore protest.

Finally, Resmovits checked in with Hannah Borowsky, one of Harvard’s divestment activists. (I covered Harvard’s fossil-fuel divestment campaign here.) Borowsky gently hints that Swarthmore-style takeover tactics may be coming to Harvard next year.

So let it be recorded that the fossil-fuel-divestment movement, from Bill McKibben on down to the campus grassroots, has embraced and endorsed the conduct of its activists at the Swarthmore board-meeting takeover. That amounts to a great big “F*** your constructive dialogue” to divestment opponents, moderates, and liberals throughout the academy. Implicitly, and in Aronoff’s case, explicitly, this is a rejection of the foundational principles of liberal education itself. If administrators out there are anything like Swarthmore’s president Rebecca Chopp, the “liberal” in liberal education may not have much of a future anyway.

Two Prayers Answered


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A little good news from Moore. 

 

‘Rosen’s in the Wind!’


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John Podhoretz has a good column today on the Obama administration’s travails. I did not know this bit until I read the column:

Even more startling, the search warrant makes clear that the FBI already had everything it needed on the leaker, as the request for a search warrant features quotes from an interview that were tantamount to a confession. It asked that the warrant be sealed — in other words, that Rosen not be told — because knowledge might “cause subjects to flee”! Imagine it: Rosen, an on-air reporter on a national news channel with a wife and two small kids in DC, seeking refuge in Cuba . . .

Full disclosure: I’m friends with James and I have a lot of respect for him. He’s a dogged and professional reporter, extremely knowledgeable, and a very funny guy. But he’s also a bit intense and passionate about a few subjects. In fact, one of the ironies of this story is that of anyone under the age of 50, Rosen is probably the most obsessive student of Watergate I know. Given that, that he’d be targeted by a White House for doing his job is astounding. I am confident he will come out of all of this fine, his reputation intact if not further enhanced. I can’t imagine Fox News will do anything but back him to the hilt for as long as it takes. Still, I’m sure it’s also stressful.

All of that said, I think it’s hilarious that DOJ argued he’s a flight risk. Forget the fact that, as John notes, he’s been an on-air reporter for years. Forget that he wouldn’t leave his family. Forget the fact that he doesn’t think (I assume) he did anything wrong and it wouldn’t occur to him to flee. 

The idea of James Rosen “going to ground” just gives me the giggles. As does the image of some DOJ hack yelling, “we got a gopher!” as James made his escape via some storm drain in the D.C. metro system. Maybe once he outran the hounds, he could become a lumberjack and dazzle his colleagues with his William F. Buckley impersonation. Or perhaps James could grow a ZZ-Top beard and work as a short-order cook, regaling diners about what Haldeman knew and when he knew it. When finally caught by the Marshals, his motel neighbor could tell local reporters how she thought it was odd how he kept listening to Rubber Soul day and night. “Other than that, he was such a sweet man. He never seemed to use contractions when he talked. He reminded me of a character from that TV show Mad Men.”

How Dare a Woman Be Encouraged to Let Her Child Live


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Gosnell is an outlier. And those religious people are a menace when they take those sermons seriously. These are the messages I get from the majority of the governing class in Washington.

I’ve been delaying noting this in the hope that it would go away — that, perhaps, I had imagined it. But of course it won’t and I didn’t.

Via the Hill:

Democrats in the House and Senate are looking to stop what they say are deceptive advertising practices by anti-abortion health clinics that imply they offer abortion services, but instead encourage birth and promote adoption.

The legislation is aimed at crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs), which are clinics often set up by a church or other anti-abortion groups. Democrats in Congress and other pro-abortion groups say these clinics are known to indicate they can perform abortions in order to attract pregnant women patients, and then try to convince them to carry their babies to term.

I’m pro-honesty, for the record. And I’ve met a good share of crisis-pregnancy-center owners and workers in my time. Most of them are honest, and overflowing with love. They offer support that all too often a scared woman can’t find elsewhere, leading her to the ubiquitous pink of Planned Parenthood or the abortion clinic that turns up as the top search on Google when she looks for help to make a “choice,” the only one she thinks she has, the one she thinks is expected of her.

Did we all really just live through the Kermit Gosnell trial, look at the faces of late-term abortion, and walk away thinking the menace in our society is people who offer women the choice to choose life? Crisis-pregnancy centers are lighthouses in a miserable culture that deludes women into thinking that happiness is life on a chemically altered island, pretending to be satisfied with the preferences of the sexual revolution, now enshrined in policy and regulation. 

If your business is death, there are to be no additional questions asked, or that’s waging a war on women. If it’s offering life, you’re suspect. That’s America in 2013? 

 

The President, Businesses for ‘Broader Purposes,’ and Religious Freedom


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In his commencement speech at Morehouse College on Sunday, President Obama urged future business leaders to avoid the pure pursuit of profit and instead to think about “what broader purpose your business might serve, in putting people to work, or transforming a neighborhood.” The president acknowledged that many successful CEOs “didn’t start out intent just on making money — rather, they had a vision of how their product or service would change things, and the money followed.” These lines echoed similar comments Obama made last year about how “we can’t leave our values at the door. If we leave our values at the door, we abandon much of the moral glue that has held our nation together for centuries.”

The president should be commended for recognizing that people often approach their jobs with purposes other than mere profit-seeking. But his comments will come as a total shock for anyone who has read the legal briefs his administration has filed in the cases challenging the HHS mandate — several of which will be argued in federal courts of appeal this week. For at the same time the president is urging graduates to use businesses to pursue “broader purposes,” his lawyers are telling judges across the country that businesses are categorically incapable of acting for such broader purposes, at least if those purposes are religious. If you run a business, the government’s litigation position is not that you “can’t leave your values at the door” — it is that you must leave them at the door (again, at least if they are religious values).

It is hard to believe that anyone really wants the amoral and valueless corporate culture this approach suggests. Indeed, businesses of all political stripes can be observed acting for all sorts of moral and ethical reasons other than mere profit-seeking. Some businesses won’t sell meat because they believe it is morally wrong to kill animals. Some stores won’t partner with the Boy Scouts because they think there should be gay Scout leaders. Some businesses cut off their relationship with Chick-Fil-A because they disliked its owners’ statements about gay marriage. No one ever questions whether profit-making businesses are capable of making these moral and ethical judgments, or similar judgments about environmentalism, or the importance of diversity, or behaving ethically. We can all observe this happening around us every day, in the places we shop and in our own businesses.

So perhaps the real question raised by the president’s comments and the HHS-mandate cases is this: In a world where we accept and promote the idea of businesses pursuing “broader purposes” based on moral, ethical, and philosophical principles, can the government really prohibit businesses from acting based on religious principles? Given the protections for religion in both the Constitution and federal law, it is hard to see how the government could justify the special targeting of religious activities for adverse treatment that they’ve fought for with the HHS mandate. The far more logical approach — indeed, the only approach permissible under federal law — is to recognize that people and organizations are allowed to exercise religion any way they please. Including while earning a living.

Cuomo to Sheriffs on Gun Control: Please Exercise Your Right to Remain Silent


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New York county sheriffs have been urged by Governor Andrew Cuomo to not voice their opposition to the state’s new gun-control laws. The governor reportedly threatened to remove them from their posts if they spoke out against the laws.

The bill was hastily passed by a Democrat-controlled legislature and signed by Cuomo earlier this year in response to the Newtown school shooting. Parts of the bill have needed modification because they were unclear or impossible to comply with. The new law put strict limits on the size of magazines in addition to broadening the definition of an assault weapon, a class which is banned.​

Shortly after the bill passed in January, the New York State Sheriffs’ Association sent Cuomo an analysis of the law that included suggested changes. According to Albany’s Times Union newspaper, Cuomo then invited representatives of the assoication to the Capitol last month and had a “heated” meeting with them, in which he told them to refrain from commenting on the bill.

“The governor was of the opinion that the sheriffs around the state should not be interjecting their personal opinions in reference to the law,” said Chemung County sheriff Christopher Moss. Another person briefed on the meeting said Cuomo threatened to remove the sheriffs from their positions, but Moss would not confirm this.

Moss also said that Cuomo never read their analysis.

Last week, the sheriffs’ association filed an amicus curiae brief in support of a federal challenge to the new laws. “The laws appear willfully blind to legitimate safety interests, and instead are tailored to impact, and negatively impact, law-abiding firearm owners,” the brief reads.

When asked about the court brief, Cuomo said, “They’re free to litigate — God bless America.”

Coburn’s Right: Disaster Relief Bills Often a Fiasco for Taxpayers


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Senator Tom Coburn’s announcement last night that he would seek to offset any funds sent to Oklahoma for disaster relief has generated  him plenty of heat.

MSNBC’s Steve Benen noted Coburn’s position was consistent, but added that “it doesn’t change the questions about unnecessary callousness.” At America Blog, John Aravosis writes, “In the face of a major tornado disaster in his home state, that has taken the lives of over 90 Oklahomans, including at least 24 children in a devastated elementary school, Coburn says he won’t support disaster relief for his home state unless the budget is cut elsewhere,” and then adds, “Yes, Coburn is taking his own constituents hostage as budget-cutting human shields.”

(Glad we’re all on the same page about assuming the best motivations from our ideological opponents.)

What Coburn critics are missing is that, perhaps precisely because of the emotional effect disasters have, relief bills tend to be laden with spending that doesn’t have sufficient oversight or that is completely unrelated to the disaster.  In December, Coburn objected to the $60.4 billion Hurricane Sandy bill that was being rushed through, telling CNN that “this is a stimulus bill, not an emergency bill.” According to a Congressional Budget Office analysis, two-thirds of the funds allocated weren’t to be spent until fiscal year 2015.

Furthermore, ABC News’ Jon Karl reported in December that the Sandy package included “some surprising items” such as “$2 million to repair roof damage at Smithsonian buildings in Washington that pre-dates the storm” and “$4 million to repair sand berms and dunes at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.” It’s very easy for disaster relief packages to become pork-laden.

But how many Americans were aware of the bill’s delayed spending or non-Sandy-related projects? Casual news observers may well have assumed that fiscal conservatives were blocking funds needed right now for the Sandy victims they had seen suffering while watching TV news footage.

It’s also possible for disaster relief to be distributed with little or no accountability. A March report by the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of the Inspector General found that $940.5 million had been given to Louisiana homeowners (who received an average of about $29,000 apiece) to elevate their homes so as to be better prepared should flooding occur again, as it had during Hurricane Katrina. (Coburn’s office highlighted the report’s findings.) There was one condition: If three years passed, and home owners weren’t in compliance, they had to return the money.

Well, three years later, a whopping 15 percent of home owners who had received the money had raised their homes.

Fifty-three percent weren’t in compliance and 30 percent couldn’t be bothered to let the government know one way or another.  But don’t think taxpayers were getting their dollars back: As of March, a mere $200,000 had been recouped from homeowners who weren’t in compliance.

Admittedly, Coburn’s position is that even if the bill avoids pork, spending far in the future, and lack of accountability, it should still be offset by cuts elsewhere.  But there’s no reason that can’t be done – and that for once, a disaster relief bill be done in a way that smartly targets those who need help from the disaster, and not just throw around taxpayer money for the heck of it. 

Kerry Meets with Father of Gaza Flotilla ‘Martyr’


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A month after comparing the “activists” who died in the 2010 Gaza-flotilla raid to Americans killed in the Boston Marathon bombing, Secretary of State John Kerry reportedly met with Ahmet Dogan, whose son, Furkan Dogan, a Turkish-American dual citizen, was among those killed aboard the MV Mavi Marmara in 2010.

Hurriyet Daily News, a Turkish news agency, previously reported that Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, arranged to include Ahmet Dogan among the official members of the Turkish delegation that recently visited the White House. While Dogan apparently did not visit the White House, Turkey’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, tweeted news of the private meeting with the secretary of state, as well as a photograph of the three (Dogan is in the middle):

Hurriyet reports that Dogan gave Kerry a letter requesting that the U.S. launch an investigation into the 2010 raid, and Davutoglu wrote on Twitter that Kerry said he would personally give the letter to President Obama.

According to the Jerusalem Post, Furkan Dogan was one of seven killed in the raid who belonged to the IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation, a Turkish nonprofit that has ties to Hamas and al-Qaeda. Shortly before the raid, Dogan wrote in his diary, “These are the last hours before I join the sweet experience of being a shahid [martyr]. Is there anything more beautiful than this?”

The meeting between Kerry and Dogan was not announced on the State Department’s daily schedule.

 

Reap What You Sow


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In the next few weeks, we will probably hear more stories about journalists whose correspondence was monitored, and more creepy details about the corruption of the IRS. The fault, however, is not Obama’s alone; he is what he is — a take-no-prisoners tough Chicago politician who came to power in Illinois by suing to remove opponents from the ballot and leaking the sealed divorce records of his primary and general-election senatorial opponents. Such things worked there, and they work on the national level as well.

Instead, the problem has been the press, which for a variety of reasons invested in Obama to the point that it gave up its integrity and for the last five years essentially surrendered its vital watchdog role in a free society. The road to where we are now was not just marked by the embarrassing exclamations from journalists about tingling legs, perfectly creased pants, the smartest president we have ever seen, and Obama as a “god,” or by Candy Crawley ruining her reputation by becoming a partisan instead of a moderator in a presidential debate.

In addition, the purpose of Obama-campaign websites such as AttackWatch and Truth Team was to go after anyone thought to be antithetical to the president’s agenda, in ad hominem fashion, thereby creating a sort of deterrence — donors would not wish to have their taxes audited or their personal lives scrutinized, and opinion journalists would not wish to be on lists and defamed, and thereby would pull their punches. 

It worked well enough; Obama was elected President twice, and now for some reason we are shocked that, without another election to worry about, and the collective madness of 2008 wearing off a bit, we suddenly learn that all along the agencies of government — especially the powers of Justice and Treasury — have been used in unconstitutional fashion to go after individual Americans for the crime of exercising their First Amendment rights.

Obama, in that regard, is a symptom of a far deeper ends-justifying-the-means pathology among far too many journalists who gave up their independence in exchange for a shared egalitarian vision. In the last few years, I think most columnists who wrote things critical of the administration or its congressional or state allies expected either to get a letter of inquiry from the IRS, or an angry call or public putdown from a liberal public official, or back-channel advice about the selection of topics for columns, or weird storms of hostile e-mails and postings that were almost identical in their pro forma boilerplate talking points, or all that and more. I know I did—and was not disappointed.

As an endnote, I wrote this about Obama’s strange creation, AttackWatch, back in September 2011:

Yet go onto the new (“Paid for by Obama for America”) AttackWatch.com website. It reads and looks like some sort of Stasi file (“file” is their vocabulary, not mine). It asks readers to inform them of criticism of Obama. The format is, I guess by intent, supposed to resemble a government intelligence dossier (“Attack files”), with its blaring black and red headers: “Attack” /”Attackers” (followed by names and pictures of the supposed bad guys)/”Attack Type” /(“public statements”) followed by check off boxes like “Have you seen or heard this attack?” “Yes/No”. It reminds me of living in 1973 dictatorial Greece, when we all kept silent about the Colonels upon entering the apartment building, lest the government-paid concierge write down something not nice in her black book.

NYT vs. WaPo on IRS, Still Worlds Apart


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Today’s print version of the Washington Post features a front-page, above-the-fold article that stresses the White House’s shifting claims on its knowledge of the IRS scandal. The Post’s front-page headline reads, “On IRS probe, a revised timetable.” The equivalent New York Times story is buried on the bottom of page 16, and the shifting nature of the White House’s account is downplayed. The print headline in the Times reads, “White House Says Obama Was Not Told of I.R.S. Investigation as It Unfolded.” Only five paragraphs into the story does the Times note: “The details released by Mr. Carney on Monday went beyond a previous White House account, and may provide more fodder for critics pressing to understand what and when the president and his team knew about the misconduct.” So even when the Times finally gets around to the changing White House story, the issue is posed as an opportunity for Republicans, rather than as a genuine problem. Short of the Times not even printing a story, that’s about as far apart as coverage can get. It’s also par for the course, as you can see here and here.

 

Salon Writer: OK Tornado May Have Resulted From Sequester


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In a piece titled, “Anyone regret slashing National Weather Service budget now?” Salon writer David Sirota links the tornado in Oklahoma to the sequester, arguing that we should be as prepared as possible for severe weather events, “but there’s an increasing chance that we will not be thanks to the manufactured crisis known as sequestration.”

It is a now familiar pattern. A tragedy occurs, a few hours pass, and then Salon’s resident absurdist David Sirota writes something absurd. After Newtown, Sirota wrote about a racial angle that didn’t exist. After the Boston bombings, Sirota publicly hoped that the perpetrator was “white.” Today, this: 

With GOP-backed cuts to forecasting agency, experts warn future storms will go undetected and more lives lost.

As the Federal Times recently reported, sequestration includes an 8.2 percent cut to the National Weather Service. According to the organization representing weather service employees, that means there is “no way for the agency to maintain around-the-clock operations at its 122 forecasting offices” and also means “people are going to be overworked, they’re going to be tired, they’re going to miss warnings.”

Summarizing the problem, the American Institute of Physics put it bluntly: “The government runs the risk of significantly increasing forecast error and, the government’s ability to warn Americans across the country about high impact weather events, such as hurricanes and tornadoes, will be compromised.”

This didn’t actually happen, of course, as Sirota is forced to concede:

The good news is that the National Weather Service station in Norman, Oklahoma had a warning in effect for 16 minutes before the most recent Oklahoma City tornado hit. That’s better than the 13 minute average, so thankfully, more people probably had more time than usual to evacuate or find safe shelter.

Still, Sirota is asking those difficult open questions favored by people with no evidence to back up their insinuations:

But what about the next time around? Will we be as ready as we can and should be? The answer is maybe not.

The Left’s ‘Ecuador’ Chevron Suit in Tatters


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How sweet it is to see this crazed liberal plot to bilk Chevron, with the cahoots and participation of Ecuador’s executive and judicial branches, continue to come apart at its seamy seams.

This caper (which I have written about before) goes like this: Take a scheming trial lawyer (Steven Donziger), a hell-bent leftist group (Amazon Defense Front), bucks from a venture capitalist (Burford Capital), political juice from a huge D.C. lobbying firm (Patton Boggs), a concocted story about poorly remediated long-ago oil drilling by a rich-company target, a handful of poor “indigenous” people with bogus medical claims, set the entire shebang in a country hostile to U.S. corporations and open to complicity in a corporate shakedown, complete with buyable judges and court-appointed “experts,” and you’ve got what has been happening the past 20 years to Chevron.

They’re not exactly a sympathetic defendant. Who would feel sorry for the oil giant? What would stand in the way of its fleecing?

Turns out, the truth.

The latest wheel to fall off the plaintiff’s bus concerns the Ecuadoran judge, Nicolas Lozada, who once granted a $19 billion judgment against Chevron. Seems like his decision may have had a pricetag on it. And that it was written by the plaintiffs. Forbes has a major report here. A taste of it:

Based on evidence Chevron has introduced in a civil Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) case in federal court in Manhattan, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan held in March that there was probable cause to believe that the judgment, which the Amazon Defense Front is currently trying to enforce against the oil giant in the courts of Canada, Argentina, and Brazil, was in fact secretly written by the Front’s own lawyers, who were allegedly given that opportunity by the then presiding Ecuadorian judge, Nicolás Zambrano Lozada, in exchange for a promise of $500,000 from the recovery.

Last month, lawyers for the Front filed in Manhattan federal court a six-page written declaration signed by Zambrano asserting that he had, in fact, written the ruling himself and denying acceptance of any proffered bribes. But Zambrano’s failure to defend his assertions in person and under cross-examination yesterday make it likely that his declaration will be stricken from the record and accorded no evidentiary weight. (Judge Kaplan ordered that depositions of Ecuadorian witnesses in the Manhattan RICO case be held in Lima, Peru, rather than Ecuador, in the face of evidence that Chevron lawyers would face reprisals and possible criminal prosecution if they set foot in Ecuador.)

Meanwhile, a Canadian judge has told Amazon Defense Front to pound sand in its multi-national attempt to claim Chevron assets. It comes as another big legal blow to the lefties (in the U.S., eight federal courts have found the Ecuador trial tainted by fraud), as Fortune reports.

And then there are these other setbacks and events:

  • Chevron has filed fraud and deceit counterclaims against Patton Boggs, based upon mounting evidence of misconduct by the Washington lobbyist monolith
  • Stratus Consulting, the lead environmental consultants to the Ecuadorian plaintiffs’ lawyers, provided sworn declarations (here and here), highlighting the lack of scientific merit to the plaintiffs’ damage claims.  
  • Litigation hedge fund Burford Capital has provided a sworn declaration outlining the firm’s knowledge of the plaintiffs’ lawyers’ misconduct, testifying that the proceeding is irredeemably tainted by fraud. David Russell, the original scientific expert used by the plaintiffs to club Chevron, has just filed a powerful and damaging affidavit in U.S. court charging monkey business, baldly stating “I have personal knowledge that [Donzinger] and the plaintiffs’ representatives have tainted the legal process in Ecuador and are lying about the environmental conditions there.”

So the plaintiffs and their henchmen are at each others’ throats. Beautiful. And richly deserved.

That’s Incredible


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Impromptus today, Part IV of an Oslo Journal, is full of the usual horror and heroism. (The journal is about this year’s Oslo Freedom Forum, the world’s preeminent human-rights conference. Possibly the only genuine one, I’m not sure.) Horror and heroism aside, I sneak in a little language note today. Here it is:

Words go in and out of fashion, and “amazing” is now enjoying a run. Everything and everyone is “amazing.” Everyone and everything is “incredible” too.

The original meaning of “incredible” is pretty much lost, I think. Luckily, we have “unbelievable,” to convey that meaning. But “unbelievable” can mean “amazing” too, if you follow me . . .

(Not long ago, Charles Moore — I think it was Moore — told a story about a young person who very much enjoyed reading a “Credo.” “It’s incredible!” he exclaimed, in admiration.)

I have an e-mail from a golf-historian friend of mine. He writes, “Alister MacKenzie, the great architect, knew very well that to criticize a man’s home golf course was tantamount to calling his child ugly. So, when asked his opinion of a golf course he did not like, he would respond, ‘It’s just . . . incredible.’ And that seemed to satisfy everyone equally.”

Do you know that my little old home course in my little hometown of Ann Arbor is a MacKenzie course? Wish I were pegging it up there today. Why I haven’t been asked to join Winged Foot, Maidstone, or another of the New York-area courses, I can’t tell you. I’m a muni rat all the way.

Poll: Independents Think Obama Administration Involved in Cover-up of Benghazi, IRS


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In the wake of the scandals over Benghazi and the IRS targeting tea partiers, independent voters are distrustful of the Obama administration.

According to a new Washington Post/ABC News poll, 60 percent of independent voters think the Obama administration is “trying to cover up the facts” about what occurred in Benghazi, while 47 percent think the administration is scrambling to cover up the IRS scandal.

Independents are also wary of the IRS: 59 percent believe the IRS was involved in “a deliberate effort to harass these [Tea Party] groups.”

Howard Dean: ‘Benghazi is a Laughable Joke’


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Former Democratic National committee chairman Howard Dean considers the controversy over Benghazi a “joke” and “silly.”

“Benghazi is a laughable joke,” Dean proclaimed twice in a discussion with Republican National Committee communications chairman Sean Spicer last week.

“With all due respect, governor, when four Americans die serving this country, that’s not a joke, sir,” Spicer responded.

“Oh, stop it,” said Dean.

The former Democratic presidential candidate also said that there were “no serious questions being asked about Benghazi” and brushed it off as an effort by Republicans to score political points. ”It’s very clear what happened with Benghazi, this is ridiculous,” he said.

A Safe Time to Tell Your Story


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Two years ago in May 2010, when Michael Iannotti, an IRS agent with the New Haven IRS office, called my home to notify me that I was being audited, I was not terribly surprised. While my husband and I had never been audited throughout our 39-year marriage, I knew that the Obama administration had greatly expanded the offices of the IRS, hiring thousands of agents. I just assumed that we were among the many more audits the agency was doing that year.

But, when the agent insisted that I meet with him without my husband, and refused my request to have the CPA who has done our family’s taxes for 20 years meet with him as my representative, I began to wonder why I was being singled out. I make a small fraction of our family income. And, when the agent informed me that it was my business income and expenses — my writing income — that was being investigated, I began to worry that I may have published something that triggered this audit. 

After all, I had been critical in my publications of the public funding for abortion that was very much a part of the Affordable Care Act. In March 2010, I had published a piece in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Health Care Reform and the President’s Faithful Helpers,” which identified progressive Catholic groups such as Catholics United and its sister organization, Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, that were helping to pass the health-care law — replete with funding for abortion. I pointed out that George Soros was supporting these Catholic groups. I also published articles describing these groups in Catholic World Report and in the online publication Catholic Advocate

Chris Korzen, president of Catholics United, and formerly an organizer with SEIU, was especially angry about the articles I was publishing. In late March, he called into a radio station (Al Kresta’s program on Ave Maria Radio) while I was being interviewed on the air to say that I was “lying” about the fact that Soros was supporting him. Fortunately, I had the IRS 990 forms from Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and Catholics United in front of me during my interview with Korzen and pointed out that during the same year he was working full-time for Catholics United, he was being paid $84,900 from Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, a Soros-supported organization.

In May, when the call from the IRS came, I didn’t make a possible connection to my publications — until the requests for documents began. Almost all of the requests focused on deposits into our banking accounts — payments for articles or speaking engagements.

The actual audit occurred in the federal offices in New Haven. I was allowed to have my tax accountant on speaker phone (he is out of state) to help. The process was not onerous but again, it was focused primarily on deposits into our bank accounts — most of them very small deposits. He demanded to know the source of one larger deposit (a $12,000 deposit) but it turned out that the deposit was actually a refund check from the IRS itself.

The agent continued to ask for documentation for additional deposits for several months in 2010. And, when it was over, I began to wonder if I had been chosen by the IRS for a reason. I never made my concerns public — except with family, friends, and a few of my colleagues and students at King’s College. I did tell the staff at the Catholic Advocate because I decided that it would be best for my family if I did not write for them anymore.  It seemed like a more political site than I usually write for, and I decided to stop writing for them because of the audit.

Since that time, I have learned of others — many of them pro-life advocates — who have been similarly chosen by the IRS. It seemed to me to be related to activities related to   the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Most recently, Bill Donohue, the president of the Catholic League, was notified by the IRS that he had been selected for an audit. But, unlike me, Bill Donohue has proof that it was Chris Korzen of Catholics United — the same Chris Korzen who called in to that radio station to call me a liar — who triggered the audit.

According to an article he published on Newsmax last week, Donohue got this proof from CNN. CNN had received a copy of the letter Korzen’s lawyers had written to the IRS that Donahue believes triggered the audit of his organization. CNN got the letter from Korzen himself because Korzen was attempting to stop CNN from interviewing Donohue after he had published several articles revealing the role that Catholics United was taking to promote the Affordable Care Act. According to Donohue, Korzen claimed that Donohue was not “an authentic Catholic commentator and representative of the Catholic Church” and said “that they should either drop me altogether or put me on with Alexia Kelley of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good” — the sister organization to Catholics United. According to Donahue, Korzen’s lawyers at Catholics United asked the IRS to question the source of funding that the Catholic League was receiving. 

It was courageous of Bill Donohue to come forward to describe the targeting of his organization by the IRS. Unlike Mr. Donohue, I have no proof that my audit was politically motivated. I am describing the process not because I want the publicity; rather, I am hoping that now that Bill Donohue has led the way, others from the pro-life community who have been targeted by the IRS will come forward. It seems like a safe time now.

— Anne Hendershott is a professor of sociology at Franciscan University. She is the author of The Politics of Abortion.

Wolverine


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A new trailer:

 

The End


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Ray Manzarek, keyboardist for The Doors, has died. Who among us cannot instantly recall the melody of “Light My Fire”? From an obituary:

He took classical piano lessons as a child which later contributed to the fusion style of The Doors’ music.

“The introduction to Light My Fire was my little Bach study. I had a good time with that,” he said.

“The whole point of The Doors was a fusion of rock and roll but with some jazz, a little bit of classical, Robbie Krieger’s flamenco guitar, and my classical background.”

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