-By Warner Todd Huston
Last month many were questioning why Internal Revenue Service chief Douglas Shulman had visited the White House so often. Now, despite claims that there was no coordination between the White House and the IRS, a new report indicates that Shulman’s top aide visited the President’s residence perhaps as often as 300 times.
In May after news broke that the IRS had intimidated conservative and Tea Party groups trying to obtain an official tax status, reporters began to look into the activities of IRS chief Douglas Shulman. It wasn’t long before news emerged that Shulman appears on the White House visitor logs nearly 200 times.
This high number of visits occurred despite that the fact that both Shulman and President Obama claimed to have no knowledge of the IRS intimidation tactics. Both also said there was no coordination between the IRS and the White House.
Officials at the IRS and President Obama still maintain that there was no coordination between the White House and the IRS, of course, but this latest revelation makes that still harder to believe.
Continue reading “
Report: Top IRS Aides Visited White House 300 Times”
Lyndon LaRouche and his followers have never been welcomed into the Tea Party movement but his followers shadow nearly every Washington-based protest that occurs, whether left, center, or right. But in its coverage of Wednesday’s D.C.-based IRS rallies, U.S. News featured a follower of LaRouche as if he were a legitimate part of the Tea Party protest.
It is one of the dangers of the Internet age and Buzzfeed is only the latest website to find itself being taken to court, sued for $3.67 million for using a photograph without the permission of the original owner of the image.
Everyone is talking about the bloated, money-wasting farm bill that failed to pass the House last week. But Dale Moore, one interested party, is all about the discussion being the “penultimate”… something or the other.
A new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) warns that the Internal Revenue Service should do more to warn taxpayers that they could have some tax liability over their holdings in Internet-based “virtual currencies” like Linden Dollars or Bitcoins.
For Politico, the news about the hundreds of Tea Party protestors in Washington DC on Wednesday, June 19, wasn’t so much about why the protesters were upset, but how it affected the “bipartisan approach” to the House IRS probe. And Politico seemed to blame Glenn Beck for the strain.
A new poll on newspapers and television news shows that Americans’ confidence in the news industry continues to erode in this era of mass communications, reaching a low not seen since 2007.
In a recent interview, CBS Evening News host Scott Pelley said that he thinks that Fox News really doesn’t have very many viewers–underestimating the network’s actual ratings by about 90 percent.
Apparently the Big Three TV networks have decided that the IRS intimidation scandal is over and it seems that reporting on the issue has disappeared from the airwaves.
After questions arose over the $100 million price tag of the President’s trip to Africa, the White House defended the costs claiming that the expenditure offers the nation “great bang for our buck.”
During a recent fundraiser, President Obama told an audience that he and the Democrats don’t want to tax all business out of business. He also said he doesn’t believe in “top down” government.
The police department in Antioch, California is so short handed it has taken the unusual step of asking mail carriers and garbage men to help them fight crime by becoming their eyes and ears on the street.
Democrat State Senator Kevin De Leon has introduced a plan to hike cigarette taxes (
Calls have been coming from all across the political spectrum for President Obama to fire U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. But some reports now are presuming that Obama simply won’t do it and that AG Holder will weather yet another firestorm of controversy.
The hand-in-hand nature of this White House and some of the nation’s biggest corporations is seen in yet another incident as Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign data team is now moving from team Obama to team Google.
One can’t be surprised that Obama’s home state of Illinois is one of the worst five states in the nation–like it is for most other things–in the Mercatus Center’s study of the level of freedom in each state. Naturally Illinois ranks close to the bottom of the most free states.
President Obama’s home state of Illinois has gained a new distinction: it tops the nation in the growth of the number of its citizens on food stamps.
President Obama chose former Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius to head the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency most involved in implementing the Affordable Care Act. But Sebelius is under heavy criticism for her efforts thus far to break out the “train wreck” that is Obamacare.
For the extreme left, hydraulic fracturing (known as colloquially as fracking) is the newest bugbear. There are all sorts of false claims about what it “does” to our water and our environment. So, with this anti-fracking crusade crackling along the Internet tubes, most left-wing states are lining up against allowing the natural gas drilling practice to be used within their borders. But Illinois is bucking that left-wing trend.
Troubles are growing for New York City’s venerable “alternative” weekly newspaper, The Village Voice. With multiple layoffs, ad revenue at an all time low, and resignations by key staffers over the paper’s management, the 58-year-old publication is coming to what one commenter is calling “the end times.”
In yet another example of the retrenching in the national media landscape, the Chicago Sun-Times has laid off its entire photography staff and plans to replace them with freelancers.
The New York Times is exasperated with the lack of progress in Congress of “fixes” to the massive and far reaching Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. This exasperation has evinced itself in an odd way as the Times seems to be expressing sympathy for lobbyists and businesses trying to make changes to the law.