It may not be news in principle, but its still disheartening to learn the details of political corruption, rather like walking in on someone you knew was having in affair in theory before seeing them in flagrante delicto. Peter Schweizer lays out gory excerpts from his book, Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes and Line Their Own Pockets in the New York Times. It makes depressing reading, but it is also very illuminating.
Schweizer describes John Boehners Tollbooth, by which the Speaker of the House extracts money by soliciting political donations before he holds crucial votes on the House floor. He details the Obama Protection Money racket, where the Administration targets industries for criminal investigation but passes over the lintels of those who are key political donors. Doubtless Schweizer regales us with many other forms of this activity, but they boil down to the same thing.
Schweizers expose makes it easy to understand why the showdown over Obamacare and the debt ceiling was in many respects an act. It wasnt about yes or no but always about how much.
Money, or rather the lack of it, is the root of all evil. And often the public, fatted on the narrative, is the last to know. We now learn that Federal Workers are going to get backpay for the days they missed and collect unemployment insurance for those same days to boot. That the Senate budget deal which ended the shutdown actually provided backpay as part of the bipartisan settlement. It turns out that nobody lost a dime in the crisis that was billed as the End of the World, unless of course you count the taxpayers. And they dont count.
#1
We now learn that Federal Workers are going to get backpay for the days they missed and collect unemployment insurance for those same days to boot.
We knew that. We just didn't know how long it would be until they went back to work and collecting regular paychecks again... and neither did anyone else. Hence the anxiety.
Read the whole thing. It is classic 1st Amendment stuff, but our vaunted press won't touch it.
Bastards.
Its past time for the media to begin asking President Obama tough questions about the IRS conservative targeting scandal. After all he was involved, publicly, from the beginning.
Last Friday, the American Center for Law and Justice (where I serve as Chief Counsel) filed its Second Amended Complaint against the United States, the IRS, and a legion of IRS officials. This Complaint, in which we represent 41 organizations in 22 states, presents perhaps the most complete story yet of the IRS conservative targeting scandal.
Posted by: Unusonter Lover of the Hatfields6496 ||
10/22/2013 11:07 Comments ||
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#8
As I've said elsewhere, I would be much less concerned about the NSA revelations if it were not for the near-simultaneous IRS revelations. The fact that the NSA is spying on American citizens, coupled with the fact that the IRS is targeting regime "enemies", and that NSA shares its data is truly frightening.
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia ||
10/22/2013 13:16 Comments ||
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#9
How is it the Left don't understand precidents and how bad things would be if the Evil Republicans were allowed to sick the IRS on their enemies.
Heck they probably believe they eat babies so that would be an improvement.
#11
rj, if a Repub president tried to sic the IRS on some Dems, the whistleblowing would be deafening in a millisecond, and the bureaucracy at the IRS would be most uncooperative.
Besides, they are hoping and planning for no more Republican presidents for the foreseeable future.
#12
...and the bureaucracy at the IRS would be most uncooperative.
Yes, the usefulness of the Civil Service Act has long passed. Might as well be open patronage given the 'us vs them' that the civil service culture has devolved into.
#4
NSA can build a computer system that snoops on all Americans and some foreigners in real-time but HHS can't build a healthcare website that works? Maybe people don't want or trust Obamacare (or Obama) is the reason why Americans are not signing up en masse?
For a country often portrayed as isolated and alone in the international arena, Israel sure does seem to have a lot of thriving friendships.
Indeed, notwithstanding efforts by the media and the Left to paint a picture of the Jewish state as solitary and ostracized, Israels popularity appears to be on the upswing.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
