IRS Was Directed From D.C.

IRS Tea Party Targeting Was Directed From D.C.

Posted 06/18/2013 05:33 PM ET

Scandal: A D.C.-based supervisor in the IRS's tax-exempt status division has indicated during interviews with congressional investigators that the targeting was deliberate and not run by rogue agents in Cincinnati.

Holly Paz, who until recently was a top deputy in the IRS division that handles applications for tax-exempt status, told congressional investigators she was personally involved in reviewing Tea Party applications for tax-exempt status as far back as 2010, reviewing as many as 30.

The involvement of Paz thickens the plot considerably and shatters the theory that two rogue agents in Cincinnati got bored in their cubicles one day and decided to target for special scrutiny Tea Party and other conservative groups.

Paz's supervisor was Lois Lerner, who headed the tax-exempt division. It was on May 22, the day after Paz was interviewed by investigators, that Lerner refused to answer questions from lawmakers at a congressional hearing, citing her Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate herself.

Was Lerner worried about what Paz had told investigators and that her testimony would contradict Paz's?

The full transcript of Paz's interview has not been released. Democrats say that's because the full transcript would reveal no vast left-wing conspiracy, with Elijah Cummings, ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, proclaiming the investigation over.

But Chairman Darrell Issa says it's only just begun, with enough of the interview being released to demolish the big lie about Cincinnati without tipping off those being investigated.

By the fall of 2010, Carter Hull, an IRS legal expert also based in Washington, was working on about 40 Tea Party applications, Paz said. She added that for several months that year, Hull worked closely with Elizabeth Hofacre, one of the "rogue" agents in Cincinnati, to review the Tea Party cases.

In Hofacre's interview, she complained that Hull micromanaged her work. Rogue agents are rarely supervised.
Paz, who gave $2,000 to Barack Obama's presidential campaign in 2008, was allowed to sit in on 36 of 41 interviews that the Inspector General's office conducted with IRS employees — an arrangement brokered by Paz and Lerner.

"I can't remember if I made the request or Lois Lerner made the request," Paz told congressional investigators. "But we discussed that in order for the IRS to be able respond to the report, we had to understand what information TIGTA (Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration) had and what they were being told."

It is unseemly and unusual for potential targets of an investigation to sit in on the investigation. If Paz and Lerner were not only orchestrating the Tea Party scrutiny but also monitoring the investigation of that action, were these among the things discussed when former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman made 157 visits to the White House?

Paz insists that when agents were told to target "tea party" groups, it was intended to be a generic term for politically active groups of all stripes. Paz said "tea party" could mean any political group, just like Coke is used as a generic term for soda, or people refer to tissues as Kleenex.

Not so, says highly supervised "rogue" agent Hofacre, who told investigators she kicked out any liberal groups that other agents tried to put in with the Tea Party cases. She said she understood the term to mean conservative or Republican groups. "I was tasked to do Tea Parties, and I wasn't ... equipped or set up to do anything else."
Indeed, a USA Today analysis of IRS data shows that dozens of liberal groups received tax-exempt approval in the 27 months that Tea Party groups sat in limbo, even though the liberal groups were engaging in similar activity.

The targeting of Tea Party groups formed by their opposition to ObamaCare by an Internal Revenue Service with the task of enforcing it is no accident and was directed from high in Washington, D.C.

Do Progressives, Liberals And Racists Belong Together?

Do Progressives, Liberals And Racists Belong Together? (W. Williams)

Posted 06/18/2013 05:31 PM ET

Walter E. Williams

Grutter v. Bollinger was the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the University of Michigan Law School's racial admissions policy.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, writing for the majority, said the U.S. Constitution "does not prohibit the Law School's narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body."

But what are the educational benefits of a diverse student body?

Intellectuals argue that diversity is necessary for academic excellence, but what's the evidence? For example, Japan is a nation bereft of diversity in any activity. Close to 99% of its population is of one race. Whose students do you think have higher academic achievement — theirs or ours?

According to the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment, the academic performance of U.S. high-school students in reading, math and science pales in comparison with their diversity-starved counterparts in Japan.

Should companies be treated equally? According to Manhattan Institute energy expert Robert Bryce, Exxon Mobil pleaded guilty in federal court to killing 85 birds that had come into contact with its pollutants. The company paid $600,000 in fines and fees.

A recent Associated Press story reported that "more than 573,000 birds are killed by the country's wind farms each year, including 83,000 hunting birds such as hawks, falcons and eagles, according to an estimate published in March in the peer-reviewed Wildlife Society Bulletin."

The Obama administration has never fined or prosecuted windmill farms, sometimes called bird Cuisinarts, for killing eagles and other protected bird species. In fact, AP reports that the Obama administration has shielded the industry from liability and has helped keep the scope of the deaths secret.

It's interesting that AP chose to report the story only after the news about its reporters being secretly investigated. That caused the Obama administration to fall a bit out of favor with them.

But what the heck, the 14th Amendment's requirement of "equal protection" before the law for everybody can be cast aside in the name of diversity, so why can't it be cast aside in the name of saving the planet? There are politically favored industries just as there are politically favored groups.

What's the difference between a progressive, a liberal and a racist? In some cases, not much.

President Woodrow Wilson was a leading progressive who believed in notions of racial superiority and inferiority. He was so enthralled with D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" movie, glorifying the Ku Klux Klan, that he invited various dignitaries to the White House to view it with him.

During one private screening, Wilson exclaimed:

"It's like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true."

When Wilson introduced racial segregation to the civil service, the NAACP and the National Independent Political League protested. Wilson vigorously defended it, arguing that segregation was in the interest of Negroes.

Dr. Thomas Sowell, in "Intellectuals and Race," documents other progressives who were advocates of theories of racial inferiority.

They included former presidents of Stanford University and MIT, among others.

Eventually, the views of progressives fell out of favor. They changed their name to liberals, but in the latter part of the 20th century, the name liberals fell into disrepute. Now they are back to calling themselves progressives.

I'm not arguing that today's progressives are racists like their predecessors, but they share a contempt for liberty, just as Wilson did. According to Hillsdale College history professor Paul A. Rahe — author of "Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift" — in his National Review Online (4/11/13) article "Progressive Racism," Wilson wanted to persuade his compatriots to get "beyond the Declaration of Independence."

Wilson said the document "did not mention the questions" of his day, adding, "It is of no consequence to us." My question is: Why haven't today's progressives disavowed their racist predecessors?

Freedom: The Unfolding Revolution: Jonah Goldberg

Freedom: The Unfolding Revolution

The libertarian idea is the only truly new political idea in the last couple thousand years.

By  Jonah Goldberg

‘Why are there no libertarian countries?”

In a much-discussed essay for Salon, Michael Lind asks: “If libertarians are correct in claiming that they understand how best to organize a modern society, how is it that not a single country in the world in the early twenty-first century is organized along libertarian lines?”

Such is the philosophical poverty of liberalism today that this stands as a profound question.

Definitions vary, but broadly speaking, libertarianism is the idea that people should be as free as possible from state coercion so long as they don’t harm anyone. The job of the state is limited to fighting crime, providing for the common defense, and protecting the rights and contracts of citizens. The individual is sovereign; he is the captain of himself.

It’s true, no ideal libertarian state has ever existed outside a table for one. And no such state will ever exist. But here’s an important caveat: No ideal state of any other kind will be created either. America’s great, but it ain’t perfect. Sweden’s social democracy is all right, but if it were perfect, I suspect fewer cars would be on fire over there.

Ideals are called ideals for a reason: They’re ideals. They’re goals, aspirations, abstract straight rules we use as measuring sticks against the crooked timber of humanity.
In the old Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and today’s North Korea, they tried to move toward the ideal Communist system. Combined, they killed about 100 million of their own people. That’s a hefty moral distinction right there: When freedom-lovers move society toward their ideal, mistakes may be made, but people tend to flourish. When the hard Left is given free rein, millions are murdered and enslaved. Which ideal would you like to move toward?

Lind sees it differently. “If socialism is discredited by the failure of communist regimes in the real world, why isn’t libertarianism discredited by the absence of any libertarian regimes in the real world? Communism was tried and failed. Libertarianism has never even been tried.”

What an odd standard. You know what else is a complete failure? Time travel. After all, it’s never succeeded anywhere!

What’s so striking about the Lind standard is how thoroughly conservative it is.

Pick a date in the past, and you can imagine someone asking similar questions. “Why should women have equal rights?” some court intellectual surely asked. “Show me anywhere in the world where that has been tried.” Before that, “Give the peasants the right to vote? Unheard of!”

In other words, there’s a first time for everything.

It’s a little bizarre how the Left has always conflated statism with modernity and progress. The idea that rulers — be they chieftains, kings, priests, politburos, or wonkish bureaucrats — are enlightened or smart enough to tell others how to live is older than the written word. And the idea that someone stronger, with better weapons, has the right to take what is yours predates man’s discovery of fire by millennia. And yet, we’re always told that the latest rationalization for increased state power is the “wave of the future.”

That phrase, “the wave of the future,” became famous thanks to a 1940 essay by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. She argued that the time of liberal democratic capitalism was drawing to a close and the smart money was on statism of one flavor or another — fascism,

Communism, socialism, etc. What was lost on her, and millions of others, was that this wasn’t progress toward the new, but regression to the past. These “waves of the future” were simply gussied-up tribalisms, anachronisms made gaudy with the trappings of modernity, like a gibbon in a spacesuit.

The only truly new political idea in the last couple thousand years is this libertarian idea, broadly understood. The revolution wrought by John Locke, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, and the Founding Fathers is the only real revolution going. And it’s still unfolding.

Indeed, what’s remarkable about all of the states Lind identifies as proof that libertarianism doesn’t work is that they are in fact proof that it does. What made the American experiment new were its libertarian innovations, broadly speaking. Moreover, those innovations made us prosper. Even Sweden — the liberal Best in Show — owes its successes to its libertarian concessions.

I’m actually not a full-blown libertarian myself, but it’s an ideal I’d like America to move closer to, not further away from as we’ve been doing of late — bizarrely in the name of “progress,” of all things.

— Jonah Goldberg is the author of The Tyranny of Clichés, now on sale in paperback. You can write to him at goldbergcolumn@gmail.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2013 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Immigration:Illegal Immigration: Elite Illiberality

June 17, 2013 4:00 AM

Illegal Immigration: Elite Illiberality 

 

The elite charm of comprehensive immigration reform

By  Victor Davis Hanson

The divide over immigration reform is not primarily a Left/Right or Democratic/Republican divide; instead, it cuts, and sharply so, across class lines. Elites blur the distinction between legal and illegal immigration to ensure that the opponents of the latter appear to be against the former. They talk grandly of making legal immigration meritocratic, but fall silent when asked to what degree. They talk darkly of racist subtexts in the arguments of their opponents, but skip over the overt ethnic chauvinism of proponents of amnesty; they decry conservative paranoia over a new demography, but never liberal euphoria over just such a planned reset. They talk deprecatingly of rubes who do not understand the new global realties, but never of their own parochialism ensconced in New York or Washington or San Francisco. They talk of reactionaries who do not fathom the ins and outs of the debate; never of their own willful ignorance of the 
realities on the ground in East L.A. or southwest Fresno.

The elites favor de facto amnesty for a variety of self-interested reasons. For the corporate echelon, creating a guest-worker program and granting amnesty — without worrying about securing the border first — ensures continued access to millions of cheap laborers from Latin America. The United States may be suffering the most persistent unemployment since the Great Depression. There may be an unemployment rate of over 15 percent in many small towns in the American Southwest. American businesses may be flush with record amounts of cash, and farm prices may be at record levels. But we are still lectured that without cheap labor from south of the border, businesses simply cannot profit.

Unmentioned is the exploitation of illegal labor. Hard-working young Latin Americans, most of them from the interior of Mexico, cross the border illegally, usually to find jobs that pay over five times more per hour than anything they could find in Mexico, yet still less than the employer would have to pay an American. Between the ages of 18 and 40, illegal immigrants are among the hardest-working laborers in the world. However, the traditional entry-level jobs — picking peaches, nailing shingles, mowing lawns, changing diapers, cooking, making beds — for those without legality, education, or English often become a permanent dead end.

Many employers appreciate the myriad advantages of hiring illegal immigrants. Although supporters of amnesty are bold in leveling charges of illiberality against their critics, the unspoken truth is that insistence on access to cheap labor is about as reactionary and unethical as one can imagine. Off the record, employers will admit they are reluctant to hire jobless African-American youths, although the black community is suffering historic levels of unemployment. They are not even eager to hire second-generation Hispanics, who, according to the employers’ creed, have lost the firsthand memory of crushing Mexican poverty and thus their parents’ desperate work ethic.
Instead, employers want a continuing influx of young workers who will undercut the wages of American citizens. That the bargaining power of other minorities, Latino- and African-American citizens especially, is undercut by illegal labor matters little. How odd that elite Republicans pander to Latino grandees to win perhaps 35 percent of the Latino vote; that the party garners no more than 5 percent of the much larger African-American vote is never discussed. In the bizarre logic of the Republican elite, you must cater to the Hispanic elite in order to siphon votes from the liberal Latino bloc, while the much more important black demographic is simply written off. Is there one Republican politician who is more worried about the plight of unemployed African-American citizens than he is about granting amnesty to foreign nationals who broke U.S. laws to come here?

Employers do not care that the presence of 11 million illegal aliens has driven down entry-level wages. They are not concerned about the depressing cycle of illegal-immigrant labor: The young male from Latin America works extraordinarily hard for 20 years. But by the time he’s 40, he is married with children, and discovering that without education, English, or skill sets, he has no way forward.

Arms and backs that were near superhuman at 25 are often shot at 50. When the 45-year-old illegal alien can no longer pick, or cook, or rake as he once did, the employer loses interest, and the state steps in to provide him with rough parity through subsidies for housing, health care, food, and legal assistance, and meanwhile it has been educating his children. Because second-generation immigrants are deemed less industrious than their worn-out fathers and mothers — and Hispanic males in California graduate from high school at little more than a 60 percent rate — the need arises for another round of young hardy workers from Latin America.

In past times, this depressing cycle of exploitation was justified by low unemployment or ongoing wars that siphoned off American manpower. But why the need for imported labor in times of near-record joblessness, relative peace, and often-record profits? The elites simply turn a blind eye to out-of-work Americans, the low wages of illegal laborers, and the cynicism of using up human capital and letting the state pick up the subsequent social costs. How odd that profit-making from cheap labor is considered liberal, while concern for low-paid American workers is written off as xenophobia.

Most elites talk of nativism and racism as being what fuels opposition to their brand of comprehensive immigration reform. Yet I doubt that the wealthy Silicon Valley residents who clamor for “reform” send their children to public schools. Indeed, in the fashion of the
Southern academies that popped up in the 1960s during court-ordered busing, Silicon Valley is currently experiencing an explosion in private schools.

Apple, Google, and Facebook 1-percenters are much too sophisticated to call these booming apartheid prep schools “academies,” but they are burgeoning in reaction to worries that the flood of illegal service workers from Latin America has finally lapped up to the outskirts of Palo Alto and Menlo Park. Once-topnotch public schools like Menlo-Atherton are now whispered about as “problematic,” given the growing enrollment of the children of illegal aliens.

In truth, do not expect Washington politicians, La Raza leaders, or agribusiness owners to send their children to the Sanger school system in the outskirts of Fresno, or to enroll them in Cal State Bakersfield. Their elite status mostly exempts them from the ramifications of their own ideology in a myriad of ways. If taxes must rise in California to pay for one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients, or to prop up public schools that have descended to 48th in the nation in math and English test scores, or to bring some parity to the nation’s highest percentage of people below the poverty line, most of the elite can afford the increases. For some, the higher taxes even become a sort of penance — a kind of abstract generosity necessary to expiate their unwillingness to assimilate, integrate, and intermarry in the concrete.

Meanwhile, forget the tire-store owner and the electrical contractor who have no such margin of error, and are written off as mean-spirited for resenting rising taxes to pay for soaring subsidies to the growing immigrant underclass. That the caricatured Neanderthal followers of Sarah Palin resent the social costs of illegal immigration and the fact that their children’s education is directly affected by the entry of millions of new non-English-speakers is, well, their own fault. Almost every aspect of illegal immigration is illiberal to the core. Respect for the law? The elite decides that for a particular political constituency, the law is now fluid. If you are a Bulgarian M.D. and overstay your visa, beware. A Korean engineer wouldn’t dare to fly to Mexico City and cross illegally into Arizona. Without ethnic bosses and millions of compatriots within our borders, all others are lawbreakers subject to deportation.
That well over $30 billion in remittances leaves the U.S. economy each year to prop up the Mexican and other Latin American economies is an afterthought. Indeed, Mexico is romanticized as an aggrieved partner, not excoriated as cynically opportunist for printing comic books to instruct its own citizens how to break U.S. law. How liberal is it to assist citizens to leave their own homeland, while assuming that they are almost certainly illiterate and thus need pictorial instruction?
To suggest that Mexico exports human capital in lieu of engaging in social reform, to suggest that indigenous peoples are the most likely to want to leave Mexico’s often racist social stratification, to suggest that Mexico does not care that its own expatriates suffer and scrimp to send back billions of dollars in cash to those ignored by the Mexican government, to suggest that Mexico appreciates that its citizens are more likely to cheer their homeland the longer they are away from it — all of this is considered reactionary and perhaps racist or at least culturally biased. But it is also absolutely true: Mexico, not the U.S., is the illiberal player in this entire sordid trafficking in human capital.

Mexico and American employers are not the only cynics in this drama. The La Raza elite understands well that only yearly massive infusions of the impoverished across the perpetually open border ensure a changed demography, anchored by a permanent Spanish-speaking underclass and periodically recharged by new illegal immigrants. Without massive immigration, the Latino population goes the way of the Italian or Greek community. Intermarriage, assimilation, and integration would gradually make the Chicano Studies department about as relevant as the Italian Studies department, La Raza about as catchy as La Razza, and the third-generation Hispanic with the accented last name about as much a minority in need of diversity favoritism as Rudy Giuliani’s son. How odd that illegal immigration is fueled by ethnic chauvinism, while those who criticize it are called ethnically biased. How could a Chicano Studies professor cite endemic poverty as a reason for federal attention if Mexican-Americans followed the Armenian- or Polish-American paradigm — and, of course, they soon would without the regular infusions of additional illegal immigrants.

Somehow, we have created an absurd situation in which a resident of Oaxaca, often fleeing racial and class oppression in Mexico, becomes defined as a victim of American pathologies the nanosecond he crosses the border. In turn, America, the generous host, is reinvented as a culpable oppressor that has treated the illegal alien so badly that his children deserve job and college-admission preference. Mexico likewise must be reinvented, from the exporter of superfluous human beings to the liberal champion of its stolen human assets.

Finally, there is the elite of the American Southwest, who believe that they are new 17th-century French aristocracy, entitled to $8-to-$10-an-hour nannies, gardeners, housekeepers, maids, and occasional day laborers. There are millions of white, Asian, Latino-American, and African-American youths out of work. We are simply told publicly that most of them would not do such work, and apparently if they did, they would not be trustworthy.

Indeed, the tragedy of illegal immigration is that it becomes the cornerstone for hundreds of agendas: those of the self-interested Mexican government, exploitative American employers, the new ethnic chauvinists, the upper middle classes who deem themselves lords of the manor, and, yes, the elite whose professions are as noble as their deeds are not.

Most Americans do not object to providing a green card to those who came to work, stayed off public assistance, did not commit crimes, and did not recently arrive in search of amnesty. They do not even object to offering a pathway to eventual citizenship to immigrants who pay a fine for their illegal entry, learned English, and go to the back of the legal-immigration line. But all this is a hypothetical if the border is not first secured — if we cannot guarantee that 2013 does not become another 1986, meaning that some future date will be a replay of 2013.

If we are to offer a second chance to the majority of illegal immigrants who, apart from their illegal entry, otherwise played by the rules, there must not be a second chance for the minority who broke all of them.

In the meantime, for those who profit both materially and psychologically from something that largely benefits the elite and hurts the mass, at least spare us the hypocritical aspersions and bottled pieties.

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His The Savior Generals is just out from Bloomsbury Books.

China Joins Climate Skeptics

CHINA JOINS THE CLIMATE SKEPTICS?

Let’s review the climate diplomacy story so far.  The elephant in the room
at the UN negotiations has always been China, India, and other developing
nations who have steadfastly refused to agree to future limits on their use
of affordable hydrocarbon energy, which they rightly see as the path to
becoming fully middle class nations as we and Europe did.  The Chinese
told Al Gore in Kyoto in 1997 when Gore was begging them to agree to
future limits at some point: “We don’t understand you Americans; do you
expect us to be poor forever?”  The Indians were equally direct, telling

Gore: “You people in the West got rich on fossil fuels, and now it is our
turn.  When we are as rich as you, then we’ll talk about emissions limits.”  (I
heard these accounts off the record from career State Department people
who were present in Kyoto, and who were harshly critical of Gore’s role there.)

Here in this country it has always been obvious that an asymmetrical treaty that imposed higher costs on the U.S.
than our trading partners would be economically disastrous.  Bill Clinton’s economists told him this in 1998, which
is why Clinton never lifted a finger to promote the Kyoto Protocol, and also why ratification of Kyoto was quietly
dropped from the Democratic National Platform starting in 2004.

I’ve always thought the cynical play for China would be to come out with an offer to agree to bilateral emissions
limits with the United States, which would remove the “China won’t go along” objection to emissions limits here.

The Chinese would surely treat it as the Soviet Union treated arms control treaties—as a massive opportunity to
cheat and gain further advantage over the U.S.  Think we’d be any more effective with Chinese emissions violations
that we are with their intellectual property theft and currency manipulation?  (Brief aside: At the various UN climate
negotiations, China has from time to time playfully suggested they might agree to some kind of emissions limits
provided they were given tradable emission reduction credits for the results of the population control programs
going back several decades.  This always causes discomfort for the diplomats, most of whom privately approve of
China’s one-child policy, but know that, as a matter of human rights, they can’t admit this publicly, though in these
days of moral relativism and multiculturalism they would be hard pressed to give a coherent reason why.)

This is why my eyes perked up last weekend when I awoke to blazing headlines that Obama had reached a climate
deal with the Chinese at his snap summit out in California.  “First of Its Kind Climate Deal Reached by US and
China,” said the headline in the Japan Times.  “US-China Climate Deal Was Long in the Works, Reflects Shifting

Incentive for Developing Nation,” the AP proclaimed.  Had the Chinese finally gotten clever and decided to pick
Obama’s pockets clean?


Turns out it is a very modest agreement, totally incommensurate with the headlines, that won’t touch energy use at
all: The U.S. and China merely agreed to lower the use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which ironically are the
replacement chemicals for the CFCs that were phased out in the Montreal Protocol of 1987.  HFCs are a potent
greenhouse gas, but relatively easy pickings as these things go.  In other words, this agreement hardly ranks as a
“major” breakthrough from any point of view.  But so desperate is the climate campaign and its media cheerleaders
that any agreement, no matter how small, is heralded as a breakthrough.

Much more significant but contrarian, and hence naturally drawing no media attention at
all, was the announcement from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (their version of our
NAS) that it has translated into Chinese the Climate Change Reconsidered and Climate
Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report, products of the Heartland Institute’s
Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC—heh).  These reports
comprise over 1,200 pages of material that takes a sharply different view of the matter
than the U.S. scientific establishment.  Sounds like the Chinese scientific establishment
has decided to sign up with the climate skeptics, or at least give their point of view a fair
hearing instead of just resorting to name-calling.  It’s enough to give any self-respecting
member of the NAS here an embolism.

If you want to understand quickly and simply why China is never going to agree to any serious impediments on its
energy use, check out this 24-second video I made a couple of years back of comparing coal use history and IEA
projections for the United States and China through the year 2035.

What's Right & What's Wrong

The ability to know everything, except right from wrong
By Mark Steyn
  
 A few years ago, after one corruption scandal too many, the then Liberal government in Canada announced that, to prevent further outbreaks of malfeasance, it would be hiring 300 new federal auditors plus a bunch of ethics czars, and mandating "integrity provisions" in government contracts, including "prohibitions against paying, offering, demanding or accepting bribes."

There were already plenty of laws against bribery, but one small additional sign on the desk should do the trick: "Please do not attempt to bribe the Minister of the Crown as a refusal may offend. Also: he's not allowed to bribe you, whatever he says."

A government that requires "integrity provisions" is by definition past the stage where they will do any good.

I thought of those Canadian Liberal "integrity provisions" passing a TV screen the other day and catching hack bureaucrats from the IRS Small Business/Self-Employed Division reassuring Congress that systems had now been put in place to prevent them succumbing to the urge to put on Spock ears and moob-hugging blue polyester for the purposes of starring in a "Star Trek" government training video.

The Small Business/Self-Employed Division had boldly gone where no IRS man had gone before — to a conference in Anaheim, where they were put up in $3,500-a-night hotel rooms and entertained by a man who was paid $27,500 to fly in and paint on stage a portrait of Bono.

Bono is the veteran Irish rocker knighted by the Queen for his tireless campaign on behalf of debt forgiveness, which doesn't sound like the IRS' bag at all.

But don't worry, debt forgiveness-wise Bono has Africa in mind, not New Jersey.

And, as Matthew Cowart Tweeted me the other day, he did have a big hit with "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," which I believe is now the official anthem of the IRS Cincinnati office.

It took Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina to get to the heart of the matter: "With all due respect, this is not a training issue," he said. "This cannot be solved with another webinar ... We can adopt all the recommendations you can possibly conceive of. I just say it strikes me — and maybe it's just me — but it strikes me as a cultural, systemic, character, moral issue."

He's right. If you don't instinctively know it's wrong to stay in $3,500-a-night hotel rooms at public expense, a revised conference accommodations guidelines manual isn't going to fix the real problem.

So we know the IRS is corrupt. What happens then when an ambitious government understands it can yoke that corruption to its political needs?

What's striking as the revelations multiply and metastasize is that at no point does any IRS official appear to have raised objections. If any of them understood that what they were doing was wrong, they kept it to themselves.

When Nixon tried to sic the IRS on a few powerful political enemies, the IRS told him to take a hike. When Obama's courtiers tried to sic the IRS on thousands of ordinary American citizens, the agency went along, and very enthusiastically.

This is a scale of depravity hitherto unknown to the tax authorities of the United States, and for that reason alone they should be disarmed and disbanded — and rebuilt from scratch with far more circumscribed powers.

Here's another congressional subcommittee transcript highlight of the week. Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois asks the attorney general if he's spying on members of Congress and thereby giving the executive branch leverage over the legislative branch.

Eric Holder answers: "With all due respect, senator, I don't think this is an appropriate setting for me to discuss that issue."
Kirk responded that "the correct answer would be, 'No, we stayed within our lane and I'm assuring you we did not spy on members of Congress.'"

For some reason, the attorney general felt unable to say that. So I think we all know what the answer to the original question really is.

Holder had another great contribution to the epitaph of the Republic this week. He went on TV to explain that he didn't really regard Fox News' James Rosen as a "co-conspirator" but had to pretend he did to the judge in order to get the judge to cough up the warrant.

So rest easy, America! Your chief law officer was telling the truth when he said he hadn't lied to Congress because in fact he'd been lying when he said he told the truth to the judge.
If you lie to one of Holder's minions, you go to jail: they tossed Martha Stewart in the slammer for being insufficiently truthful to a low-level employee of the attorney general.

But the attorney general can apparently lie willy-nilly to judges and/or Congress.

This, incidentally, is at the heart of the revelation (in a non-U.S. newspaper, naturally) that hundreds of millions of

Americans' phone records have been subpoenaed by the United States government.

In 2011, Holder's Assistant Attorney General Todd Hinen testified to the House Judiciary Committee that "on average, we seek and obtain Section 215 orders less than 40 times per year."

Forty times per year doesn't sound very high, does it? What is that — the cell phones of a few Massachusetts Chechens and some Yemeni pen pals? No. The Verizon order will eventually be included as just another individual Section 215 order, even though it covers over 100 million Americans.

Ongoing universal monitoring of mass populations is being passed off to Congress and the public as a few dozen narrowly targeted surveillance operations.

Mr. Hinen chose his words more carefully than his boss, but both men are in the business of deceiving the citizenry, their elected representatives, and maybe the judges, too.
  
Perhaps this is just the way it is in the panopticon state. Tocqueville foresaw this, as he did most things. Although absolute monarchy "clothed kings with a power almost without limits," in practice "the details of social life and of individual existence ordinarily escaped his control."

What would happen, Tocqueville wondered, if administrative capability were to evolve to bring "the details of social life and of individual existence" within the King's oversight?

Holder and Lois Lerner now have that power. My comrade John Podhoretz, doughty warrior of the New York Post, says, relax, there's nothing to worry about.

But how do I know he's not just saying that because Eric Holder's monitoring his OnStar account and knows that when he lost his car keys last Tuesday he was in the parking lot of Madam Whiplash's Bondage Dungeon?

When the state has the power to know everything about everyone, the integrity of the civil service is the only bulwark against men like Holder. Instead, the ruling party and the non-partisan bureaucracy seem to be converging.

In August 2010, President Obama began railing publicly against "groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for
Prosperity" (Aug. 9, a speech in Texas) and "shadowy groups with harmless-sounding names" (Aug. 21, radio address).
And whaddayaknow, that self-same month the IRS obligingly issued its first BOLO (Be On the Look-Out) for groups with harmless-sounding names, like "Tea Party," "patriot" and "constitution."

It may be that the strange synchronicity between the president and the permanent bureaucracy is mere happenstance and not, as it might sound to the casual ear, the sinister merging of party and state.

Either way, they need to be pried apart. When the state has the capability to know everything except the difference between right and wrong, it won't end well.

Consequences of lost Trust

Jewish World Review June 14, 2013 / 6 Tammuz, 5773 The consequences of Obama forfeiting our trust By Charles Krauthammer    Thirty-five years ago in United States v. Choate, the courts ruled that the Postal Service   may record "mail cover," i.e., what's written on the outside of an envelope — the addresses of sender and receiver. The National Security Agency's recording of U.S. phone data does basically that with the telephone. It records who is calling whom — the outside of the envelope, as it were. The content of the conversation, however, is like the letter inside the envelope. It may not be opened without a court order. The constitutional basis for this is simple: The Fourth Amendment protects against "unreasonable searches and seizures" and there is no reasonable expectation of privacy for what's written on an envelope. It's dropped in a public mailbox, read by workers at the collection center and read once again by the letter carrier. It's already openly been shared, much as your phone records are shared with, recorded by, and (e)mailed back to you by a third party, namely the phone company. Indeed, in 1979 the Supreme Court (Smith v. Maryland) made the point directly regarding the telephone: The expectation of privacy applies to the content of a call, not its record. There is therefore nothing constitutionally offensive about the newly revealed NSA data-mining program that seeks to identify terrorist networks through telephone-log pattern recognition. But doesn't the other NSA program — the spooky-sounding James Bond-evoking Prism — give you the willies? Well, what we know thus far is that Prism is designed to read the emails of non-U.S. citizens outside the U.S. If an al-Qaida operative in Yemen is emailing a potential recruit, it would be folly not to intercept it. As former Attorney General Michael Mukasey explains, the Constitution is not a treaty with the rest of the world; it's an instrument for the protection of the American citizenry. And reading other people's mail is something countries do to protect themselves. It's called spying. Is that really shocking? The problem here is not constitutionality. It's practicality. Legally this is fairly straightforward. But between intent and execution lies a shadow — the human factor, the possibility of abuse. And because of the scope and power of the NSA, any abuse would have major consequences for civil liberties. The real issue is safeguards. We could start by asking how an Edward Snowden, undereducated, newly employed, rootless and grandiose, could have been given such access and power. We need a toughening of both congressional oversight and judicial review, perhaps even some independent outside scrutiny. Plus periodic legislative revision — say, reauthorization every four years — in the light of efficacy of the safeguards and the nature of the external threat. The object is not to abolish these vital programs. It's to fix them. Not exactly easy to do amid the current state of national agitation — provoked largely because such intrusive programs require a measure of trust in government and this administration has forfeited that trust amid an unfolding series of scandals and a basic problem with truth-telling. There are nonetheless two other reasons these revelations have sparked such anxiety. Every spying program is a compromise between liberty and security. Yet here is a president who campaigned on the proposition that he would transcend such pedestrian considerations. "We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals," he declared in his first inaugural address, no less. When caught with his hand on your phone data, however, President Obama offered this defense: "You can't have 100% security and also then have 100% privacy. ... We're going to have to make some choices as a society." So it wasn't such a false choice after all, was it, Mr. President? Nor does it help that just three weeks ago the president issued a major foreign-policy manifesto whose essential theme was that the War on Terror is drawing to a close and its very legal underpinning, the September 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, should be not just reformed but repealed to prevent "keeping America on a perpetual wartime footing." Now it turns out that Obama's government was simultaneously running a massive, secret anti-terror intelligence operation. But if the tide of war is receding, why this vast, ever expanding NSA dragnet whose only justification is an outside threat — that you assure us is ever receding? Which is it, Mr. President? Tell it straight. We are a nation of grown-ups. We can make choices. Even one it took you four years to admit is not "false."