IRSgate


Juan Williams: “This whole idea that we’re now to Watergate and burning tapes … I mean that … you’d have to … that’s quite a leap for me.”
George Will: “It’s a leap when six, not only Lois Lerner’s hard drive crashes 10 days after they get the letter from Dave Camp, the chairman of the appropriate committee, but SIX others do?!? Including those of the person who was the Chief of Staff to the IRS commission who was fired. And you know what the response to this is – Charles talks about the incompetence demonstrated here and that’s the default explanation of what government does a lot of the time – but the beauty of this – it’s almost an elegant thing – Commissioner Koskinen has said, as the perfect bureaucrat would, that all of this is evidence that the IRS needs a bigger appropriation so it can get better computers.”
Watching Juan Williams, one can’t help but remember this guy.
Update: Bill O’Reilly illustrates the rampant media coverup of this story.

“When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal”

Looks like she missed one.

Today, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) announced the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) targeting of conservative individuals includes a sitting United States Senator. According to emails reviewed by the Committee under its Section 6103 authority, which allows the Committee to review confidential taxpayer information, Lois Lerner sought to have Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) referred for IRS examination.
“We have seen a lot of unbelievable things in this investigation, but the fact that Lois Lerner attempted to initiate an apparently baseless IRS examination against a sitting Republican United States Senator is shocking,” said Camp.

Know The Enemy: Deep Green Resistance

Deep Green Resistance was founded by the authors of a book of the same name, a nasty set of activists named Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Aric McBay.
They advocate a method known as “decisive ecological warfare” designed to destabilize and ultimately overthrow capitalism, industry, agriculture and civilization itself. Their unambiguous aim is to return the earth to a more “sustainable” position. In caves, presumably.
DGR calls itself an “above ground” eco-activist movement and tries to associate with many fringe enviro or aboriginal activist organizations. However, the book and its authors also call for parallel “underground” operations, which include isolated and covert operative cells. Their above ground arm seeks to support activist movements publicly, but their underground arm may recruit from these same groups.
Unlike previous ecological terrorist movements, they advocate for destruction of property and, if need be, assassination of the purveyors of industry. They justify it in that industry proponents are killing people already and as such are potentially viable targets. If innocents are killed, their excuse is that industry caused the deaths, not them. Their valued targets are those critical ties to infrastructure which could cause cascading effects to industry if impacted. These include power substations, pipelines, lines of communication, transportation hubs or water control.
Brian Lilley interviewed McBay on Byline in 2011 and wrote a blog post on the book.

They are currently known to be operating in opposition to the Northern Gateway, but were also present during the Rexton, NB anti-fracking debacle.

Wife Of! Peter MacKay Sexist? Our National Broadcaster?

This morning CBC News Network is atwitter to the max over the federal justice minister’s Mother’s and Father’s Day e-mails to departmental staff:

Peter MacKay lauds moms for changing diapers, dads for moulding minds in holiday messages
Mother’s and Father’s Day emails from justice minister praise mothers as caregivers, fathers as role models

Meanwhile the scroll on the bottom of the screen has this news item:

Jim Flaherty’s widow set to announce bid to lead Ont. PCs

And who might that be? Does the woman (one must assume that is the gender, still these days…) have a, gasp, name?

Renegade Regulator

You see, the [Canadian Standards Association] had an informal policy in its testing facility that every new product should fail the first test, that way the CSA can charge twice for the same certification. So by this standard, the first test didn’t need any actual testing per se, the product was predetermined to fail for financial reasons.
Manufacturers are generally aware of these practices but there’s not much they can do about them. Its just a cost of doing business. Safety certification is mandatory, the CSA is unavoidable, so double charging is a sort of tax that everyone grumbles about but eventually it gets paid.

But wait! It gets better.

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