via Liberal Media Gearing Up to Spin Obamacare Failures

Here is the wonderful ObamaCare ‘solution’ to the health insurance problem. Six feet tall & still growing!

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“Some” in the White House want Eric Holder, the embattled attorney general, to step down, according to a report.

“Over the course of four and a half years, no other member of President Obama’s cabinet has been at the center of so many polarizing episodes or the target of so much criticism,” reports the New York Times. “While the White House publicly backed Mr. Holder as he tried to smooth over the latest uproar amid new speculation about his future, some in the West Wing privately tell associates they wish he would step down, viewing him as politically maladroit. But the latest attacks may stiffen the administration’s resistance in the near term to a change for fear of emboldening critics.”

And unnamed Democrats are telling the Times that “The White House is apoplectic about him, and has been for a long time.”

But that does not mitigate the frustration of some presidential aides. “The White House is apoplectic about him, and has been for a long time,” said a Democratic former government official who did not want to be identified while talking about friends.

Some advisers to Mr. Obama believe that Mr. Holder does not manage or foresee problems, the former official said. “How hard would it be to anticipate that The A.P. would be unhappy?” the former official said. “And then they haven’t defended their position.”

via Report: ‘Some’ in WH Want Holder to Resign–Viewed ‘as Politically Maladroit’ | The Weekly Standard.

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Interviews with an IRS field agent involved in the agency targeting Tea Party groups for additional vetting appear to contradict the White House assertion that rogue agents, not the administration, were behind the effort, according to partial transcripts released Sunday by the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee.

The agent in the Cincinnati office, in which the targeting took place, told congressional investigators that he or she was told in March 2010 by a supervisor to search for Tea Party groups applying for tax-exempt status and that “Washington, D.C., wanted some cases.”

The agent said that by April the office had held up roughly 40 cases and at least seven were sent to Washington. In addition, the agent said, a second IRS employee asked for information on two other specific applicants in which Washington was interested.

When asked by congressional investigators about allegations and press reports about two agents in Cincinnati essentially being responsible for the targeting, the agent responded:

“It’s impossible. As an agent we are controlled by many, many people. We have to submit many, many reports. So the chance of two agents being rogue and doing things like that could never happen. … They were basically throwing us underneath the bus.”

The administration has denied involvement in the scandal, repeatedly saying it was limited to the Cincinnati office.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney has appeared to give conflicting statements on the scandal including whether top White House officials knew only of the inspector general’s probe into the targeting of politically conservative groups or if they were told about the bombshell findings when briefed in late April.

Carney also said the top officials decided not to tell President Obama to avoid any possibility of the White House interfering in the investigation.

On Sunday, California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Affair Committee, accused Carney of being untruthful about the scandal.

“Their paid liar, their spokesperson … he’s still making up things about what happened and calling this a local rogue,” Issa said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

The congressman also provided the network with a copy of the transcript in which the agent said he or she followed directions from Washington. However, when asked if the Tea Party scrutiny came directly from Washington the agency said “I believe so.”

via Interviews with IRS agent suggest Tea Party targeting came from Washington | Fox News.

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North Carolina’s Civitas Institute has revealed that the North Carolina State Board of Elections and the Obama campaign conspired to register at least 11,000 people via the internet in violation of state law. This has been confirmed through records requests filed with all of North Carolina’s 100 counties. The counting is not yet complete.

North Carolina does not allow online voting, but according to Civitas, SBE staff authorized an Obama campaign website, Gottaregister.com, to use a web-based registration program. The SBE’s chief lawyer responded to the charge with a plainly disingenuous 1984-newspeak answer:

Wright repeatedly denied that the SBE allowed online voter registration, insisting that it was “web-based voter registration”[ii] instead, as if there could be a “web-based” process that wasn’t online.

The technology from Allpoint Voter Services uses remote-control pens to transmit “signatures” over the Internet, according to techpresident.com[iii]. After entering voter information in an online form, the citizen “signs” it with a stylus or a finger. The Allpoint technology records the signature and then transmits it to one of two autopens – one in California, the other in Nevada[iv]. One of the pens transcribes the signature on to a paper voter registration form. Allpoint then mails the documents to local election boards – or is supposed to, a point we’ll come back to.

To say this is not “online” registration but “web-based” is like saying a certain vehicle is not a car, it’s an automobile. The point of having a “wet signature” – one in ink – is to provide a universally accepted way proving that a prospective voter is affirming in person all the facts on the form. To have an auto pen inserted at one point in this long computerized process is a far different thing. Even the Obama campaign called it online voter registration. Because, no matter how you twist words around, that’s what it is.

via Breaking: Obama campaign caught in major NC vote fraud scheme.

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Former IRS head visited Obama White House a staggering 157 times

Even though we know at least two Senators pushed the IRS to target the left’s political enemies, and despite the fact that White House council knew about it weeks – maybe months – before it appeared in the papers, the official line is that Obama learned of the IRS scandal only when it appeared in the media.  He’s a busy guy and, since the agents involved were just “low-level rogues,” it was impossible for the President to hear about the targeted auditing of Tea Party groups.

It’s not like he’s being directly briefed by the head of the IRS on a regular basis.  He has no time for that.  Except, for some reason, former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman was spending a staggering amount of time at the White House. According to a Daily Caller analysis of public records, he visited at least a whopping 157 times.

To put that in perspective, he enjoyed more White House visits than Secretaries of State Clinton and Kerry combined.  He was there three
times as often as Kathleen Sebelius, the HHS secretary who’s been instrumental in the Obamacare fiasco.  Heck, it’s more than twice the number of appearances made by our resident gun-runner, Eric Holder.

For some idea of how truly extraordinary this is, during the last four years of George W. Bush’s Presidency, IRS Commissioner Mark Everson visited precisely once.  Perhaps Obama was having trouble filling out his 1040EZ.  Or maybe, just maybe, they were discussing something else.

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Yesterday we discovered that Attorney General Eric Holder personally signed the search warrants targeting Fox News reporter James Rosen.  That was very bad news, because President Obama is supposed to be deeply “troubled” about the whole affair, and deeply believes that “journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs.”  The President loves freedom of the press very, very, very much.  He’s so troubled that he assigned the Attorney General to get to the bottom of it, a grueling search that lasted until Holder wandered into the men’s room and caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror.

But this is more than just a profound embarrassment for Holder and his boss, because a compelling case can be made that Eric Holder once again lied to Congress – and, unlike the Fast and Furious imbroglio, he’s not going to get out of it by claiming that he doesn’t read his email, doesn’t know what his subordinates are doing, and can only find the Justice Department because his driver and Siri know where it is.

Because Holder, in sworn testimony before Congress, said this: “In regard to potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material, this is not something I’ve ever been involved in, heard of, or would think would be wise policy.”

(Hat tip: Gateway Pundit.)  Now, I may just be a simple tea-partying hobbit, not a fancy high-powered lawyer, but that seems like a rather blatantly false statement – the sort of thing we dangerously cynical tyranny-fearing government-hating don’t-tread-on-me types refer to as a “lie.”

It’s not a misstatement or a slip of the tongue.  Holder has not only been “involved in” the “potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material,” but there are breaking news reports as I write this post that he not only signed the search warrants, but vetted them.  Which means he can’t use the “Colonel Blake” maneuver and claim he just signed a stack of paperwork without reading it.

via End of the line for Eric Holder? | Human Events.

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If you can’t trust your friends, who can you trust?

An indication of just how extensive was the Justice Department leak investigations, it appears that even the New York Times was not immune from this administration’s mania to track down reporters who broke stories they didn’t like:

Even before the F.B.I. conducted 550 interviews of officials and seized the phone records of Associated Press reporters in a leak investigation connected to a 2012 article about a Yemen bomb plot, agents had sought the same reporters’ sources for two other articles about terrorism.

In a separate case last year, F.B.I. agents asked the White House, the Defense Department and intelligence agencies for phone and e-mail logs showing exchanges with a New York Times reporter writing about computer attacks on Iran. Agents grilled officials about their contacts with him, two people familiar with the investigation said.

And agents tracing the leak of a highly classified C.I.A. report on North Korea to a Fox News reporter pulled electronic archives showing which officials had gained access to the report and had contact with the reporter on the day of the leak.

The emerging details of these and other cases show just how wide a net the Obama administration has cast in its investigations into disclosures of government secrets, querying hundreds of officials across the federal government and even some of their foreign counterparts.

The result has been an unprecedented six prosecutions and many more inquiries using aggressive legal and technical tactics. A vast majority of those questioned were cleared of any leaking.

via Blog: Even a NY Times reporter was investigated for leaks by DoJ.

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Many places with unpronouncable names. One constant: American soldiers give what it takes.

Why should we remember places with strange names, inhabited by tribes whose languages and religions and customs are unfamiliar, most of whom hate us? Why should we remember valleys called the Gowardesh or the Khien Phuong, towns and hamlets with names we can scarcely pronounce, Karabilah, Chonghyon, Cam Lo, Sokkogae, Hangnyong? Even when the words are more recognizable or carry ancient connections to better known locales, they seem exotic: Bois-de-Consenvoye, Chatel-Chehery, Rouge Bouquet, Chemin des Dames.

We remember. These names are carved into the American soul, as are ones we know almost as nearby neighborhoods—Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, Antietam—names to inspire awe and terror and pride and admiration and astonishment all at once, mixed into a feeling that defies rational explanation.

Perhaps this is because what happened at these places, on these hallowed grounds, touches within us the deepest reflexes of reverence and piety—yes, for if there are no atheists in the foxholes, neither are there any on the grounds where men fought and fell so that we could live.

You could say that we live in a free country, and that is so, of course. At these places, on these grounds and so many more, men fought for the freedoms on which our nation stands, thrives, endures. But while it is well to think there is some long-range and overarching purpose to the wars Americans have waged over more than two centuries, and that this purpose is a decent and even a noble one, a tin sound inevitably accompanies the formal words that mark the deeds entrusted to our remembrance. It is not the fault of the language: conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity, and upheld the highest traditions, and inspiring valor, selfless devotion. The words used in citations for military valor are not hollow if we remember the persons and actions to which they refer.

We must remember men caught by surprise who threw themselves on grenades to absorb the force of explosions that would have killed their buddies. We must remember ambushed men who ran out of bullets and kept fighting with bayonets against hordes of savages so their brothers could retreat to defensive positions to regroup and fight again. We must remember young noncoms and ordinary infantrymen scarcely out of adolescence racing up muddy hills in the face of machine gun fire to save the lives of wounded comrades.

via The American Spectator : We Will Remember.

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via Food Stamp program up from 35 to $80 billion on Obama’s Watch

Nearly 47 million people – one in seven Americans – rely on food stamps for some or all of their daily sustenance, according to the Department of Agriculture, a number that has grown nearly 70 percent since the financial collapse of 2008.

The increased enrollment has caused costs to soar from $35 billion in 2007 to $80 billion last year, and now lawmakers in both the House and the Senate are targeting program for cuts even as advocates cry foul.

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(CNSNews.com) – The federal government is spending $146,944 in taxpayer funds to research sending automated text messages to people with depression to remind them to take their medication and monitor their mood and thoughts.

The text messages will “prompt patients to monitor mood, thoughts and behaviors.” It will also “provide medication and appointment reminders,” and send personalized cognitive behavioral therapy based tips.

“Poor adherence to depression treatments (psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy) limits their effectiveness in community settings. Problems with adherence are especially pronounced in low-income settings. Innovative and cost-effective methods are needed to improve adherence to treatments and maximize mental health resources,” the project description said.

“Mobile phone based text messaging (or short messaging service: SMS) is a ubiquitous technology that has been used in various health applications across socioeconomic status. This technology has the potential to increase the fidelity of mental health treatments via increased adherence,” it said.

“The proposed research project will test whether adding an automated SMS adjunct to group cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for depression can increase adherence (homework adherence, attendance, medication adherence) and further reduce depression symptoms,” it added.

The $146,944 grant given to the University of California Berkeley is made up of $136,059 in direct cost and $10,885 in indirect costs and is administered by the National Institute of Mental Health.

The project starts on May 23, 2012 and ends on Feb. 28, 2017. The budget start date was March 1, 2013, and the budget end date is Feb. 28, 2014.

Phone calls to project leader Adrian Aguilera, assistant professor for the School of Social Welfare/Work at UC Berkeley, were not returned by press time.

via Government to Spend $146,944 Texting Low-Income People with Depression | CNS News.

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