Honey, I Finished The Internet
3-D Scans Reveal Caterpillars Turning Into Butterflies
This Is Awkward
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.
“When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal”
According to the White House Visitors Log, provided here in searchable form by U.S. News and World Report, the president of the anti-Tea Party National Treasury Employees Union, Colleen Kelley, visited the White House at 12:30pm that Wednesday noon time of March 31st.
The White House lists the IRS union leader’s visit this way:Kelley, Colleen Potus 03/31/2010 12:30
In White House language, “POTUS” stands for “President of the United States.”
The very next day after her White House meeting with the President, according to the Treasury Department’s Inspector General’s Report, IRS employees — the same employees who belong to the NTEU — set to work in earnest targeting the Tea Party and conservative groups around America.
h/t EBD
The Sound Of Settled Science
Christopher Monckton of Brenchley;
“I am an expert reviewer for the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I wrote to you two weeks ago to report a serious error in the Fourth Assessment Report. I have had no reply. My letter of two weeks ago is attached, together with a copy of a letter I have sent to the Inter-Academy Council asking it to use its good offices to persuade you to reply. I have also sent a letter, for information only at this stage, to the police in Geneva, since it appears that a fraud may have been committed by the IPCC.”
h/t Maz2
The Tolerant Left
‘Daily Show’ co-creator tweets that OK tornado was meant to ‘target conservatives’
Unrelated.
Bin Laden is Dead And Ambassador Stephens Is Dead
Stevens’ mission in Benghazi, they will say, was to buy back Stinger missiles from al-Qaeda groups issued to them by the State Department, not by the CIA. Such a mission would usually be a CIA effort, but the intelligence agency had opposed the idea because of the high risk involved in arming “insurgents” with powerful weapons that endanger civilian aircraft.
Hillary Clinton still wanted to proceed because, in part, as one of the diplomats said, she wanted “to overthrow Gaddafi on the cheap.”
This left Stevens in the position of having to clean up the scandalous enterprise when it became clear that the “insurgents” actually were al-Qaeda – indeed, in the view of one of the diplomats, the same group that attacked the consulate and ended up killing Stevens.
The former diplomat who spoke with PJ Media regarded the whole enterprise as totally amateurish and likened it to the Mike Nichols film Charlie Wilson’s War about a clueless congressman who supplies Stingers to the Afghan guerrillas. “It’s as if Hillary and the others just watched that movie and said ‘Hey, let’s do that!'” the diplomat said.
He added that he and his colleagues think the leaking of General David Petraeus’ affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell was timed to silence the former CIA chief on these matters.
Related: The Only Person In State Department Bureau That Oversaw Libya Who Has Been Punished For Benghazi Had Nothing To Do With It
I Was Sitting By The Phone, Mr. Harper
And I would have been the first Senator ever to pay my own damned living expenses out of my salary – like people living in the real world do. (Open thread.)
Your Moral And Intellectual Superiors
In 1973, the press was almost uniformly adversarial; today it has shamefully functioned from 2009 onwards as a Ministry of Truth, a sort of force multiplier of the West Wing. Everything Nixon did was suspect, often with good cause, and seen through the prism of his excesses; in the case of Obama, from Fast and Furious to Solyndra to the EPA and NLRB freelancing to the selective enforcement of the law, the press has more often been an enabler, working to explain why a scandal or an excess is really some sort of right-wing obsession, emanating from suspect or even racist motives. Something very scary started in 2009-10 — and that this new way of doing business was supposedly done for the proverbial “people” to ensure “fairness” has made it even more insidious and far more difficult to come to terms with.
Reader Tips
Honey, I Finished The Internet
Worlds tiniest monkey eats a noodle.
This Is Not Your Grandma’s Humane Society
Forward!
O Admin achieves the impossible. Causes MSM to rally around Fox News. And it’s only Monday.
— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) May 20, 2013
Court documents in the Kim case reveal how deeply investigators explored the private communications of a working journalist — and raise the question of how often journalists have been investigated as closely as Rosen was in 2010. The case also raises new concerns among critics of government secrecy about the possible stifling effect of these investigations on a critical element of press freedom: the exchange of information between reporters and their sources.
More: FBI affidavit alleging criminal reporting.
Reason: Obama’s War Against the Free Press Gets Creepier
Update: Three Fox News Staffers Targeted By Justice Department
“When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal”
The Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General published a new report Monday that confirms former U.S. Attorney for Arizona Dennis Burke leaked a document intended to smear Operation Fast and Furious scandal whistleblower John Dodson.
How To Become A Dictator
“If you decide you want to leave journalism,” Nadim Shehadi said to me over coffee at a café on Beirut’s old waterfront, “if you feel like you’ve been there and done that and would like to become a dictator, you should hire me as an advisor. I’m expensive, but I’m worth it.”
The Sound Of Settled Science
Via No Tricks Zone;
‘Unfortunately in climate science there is a tendency to proclaim absolute truths and to link these immediately to instructions on actions to take,’ [IPCC lead author Hans von Storch] said. ‘The climate pope tells us what has to be done, and for the people it’s: keep your mouths shut. Scientists have been taking over the roles of medicine men and priests. That’s not the job of scientists. Science is supposed to help understand problems, show the possibilities that exist in dealing with them. The best is to show many possibilities. Then the political process has to decide the path to take.’
But some of his colleagues in science like to use ‘stories that point to a catastrophe,’ said the professor of meteorology. One example was the assumption that our region would see ‘murderous violent storms’. But there was no data showing this. ‘It all has a cultural, anthropological background’ . ‘If you sin, then you will be punished. And the punishment always takes on an environmental dimension which also included storms in the past. In former times it was God’s punishment. Today it’s punishment by Nature. Nature is to keep man in check. And for this we see idiotic films like ‘The Day After Tomorrow.”
With ‘snappy’ and short statements like ‘snow will be a thing of the past’, the loud speakers among the scientists are putting the credibility of science at stake.'”
And every time an actress gets a boob job, a polar bear dies.
Reader Tips
Tonight, a visibly emotional Mark Knopfler performs a song that he wrote with Emmylou Harris after reading a newspaper column by English novelist Ian McEwan a few days after 9/11. Inspired by the phone calls of those who found themselves trapped in the Twin Towers and on United Airlines Flight 93, here’s If This Is Goodbye.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
“When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal”
Honey, I Finished The 8 Second Ride
And that’s when things got interesting.