Tag Archives: Intolerance

News

IRS gave confidential documents from conservative groups to liberal group ProPublica

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The IRS also held up tax-exemption applications of conservative groups.

Excerpt:

A newly obtained watchdog report described how the “inappropriate” IRS program that flagged conservative groups for extra scrutiny led to massive delays, with some organizations stuck waiting years to find out about their applications.

The findings were contained in a highly anticipated and highly critical inspector general’s report, obtained by Fox News, on a practice that IRS officials first acknowledged on Friday.

The report revealed that the program began as far back as 2010. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration concluded that it was the result of “ineffective management” and “inappropriate criteria” which must be corrected.

Describing the impact of the IRS program, the report said the flawed criteria led to Tea Party and other groups being singled out and subjected to “substantial delays.” More than 80 percent of the cases it reviewed were left open more than one year, and some were left in limbo for more than three years.

[…]The internal investigation found that the “inappropriate criteria” — which led to the IRS asking Tea Party and other groups about their donors and making other intrusive requests — was allowed to stay in place for more than 18 months. During that time, conservative groups had their applications put on hold for months, even years. 

What did the IRS do with these applications and donor lists?

Breitbart.com explains what happened next:

The progressive-leaning investigative journalism group ProPublica says the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) office that targeted and harassed conservative tax-exempt groups during the 2012 election cycle gave the progressive group nine confidential applications of conservative groups whose tax-exempt status was pending.

The commendable admission lends further evidence to the lengths the IRS went during an election cycle to silence tea party and limited government voices.

ProPublica says the documents the IRS gave them were “not supposed to be made public”:

The same IRS office that deliberately targeted conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status in the run-up to the 2012 election released nine pending confidential applications of conservative groups to ProPublica late last year… In response to a request for the applications for 67 different nonprofits last November, the Cincinnati office of the IRS sent ProPublica applications or documentation for 31 groups. Nine of those applications had not yet been approved—meaning they were not supposed to be made public. (We made six of those public, after redacting their financial information, deeming that they were newsworthy.)

The group says that “no unapproved applications from liberal groups were sent to ProPublica.”

The National Organization for Marriage had their donor list leaked by someone in the IRS.

Excerpt:

The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) today released documents showing that their confidential U.S. tax return containing private donor information came directly from the Internal Revenue Service and was provided to NOM’s political opponents, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). Joe Solmonese, president of the HRC, is a national co-chair of President Obama’s reelection campaign.

“The American people are entitled to know how a confidential tax return containing private donor information filed exclusively with the Internal Revenue Service has been given to our political opponents whose leader also happens to be co-chairing President Obama’s reelection committee,” said NOM President Brian Brown. “It is shocking that a political ally of President Obama’s would come to possess and then publicly release a confidential tax return that came directly from the Internal Revenue Service. We demand to know who is responsible for this criminal act and what the Administration is going to do to get to the bottom of it.”

On March 30, 2012, the Huffington Post published NOM’s confidential 2008 tax return filed with the IRS, which it said came from the Human Rights Campaign. The HRC has said on its own site the documents came from a “whistleblower.” However, NOM has determined that the documents came directly from the Internal Revenue Service.

The Human Rights Campaign was one of the groups that denounced the Family Research Council as a “hate group”. This is the same Family Research Council that was attacked by a gun-wielding gay activist named Floyd Lee Corkins II. The crime was prosecuted as  an act of domestic terrorism, and Corkins was convicted. The Human Rights Campaign has gotten people fired for disagreeing with same-sex marriage.

Remember that everything that the IRS was doing was not paid for with money that they themselves earned themselves by providing useful products and services. The IRS gets money by culling it from profitable private sector businesses and their employees, through compulsory confiscation of earned income. Should we be paying them to do this? Is this good value for the money?

News

Which Bible verse is used most frequently by non-Christians to attack Christianity?

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J. Warner Wallace has posted about it on his Cold Case Christianity blog.

Excerpt:

As a Christian, I’m often at odds with the culture around me. As our society embraces a growing number of unbiblical behaviors and attitudes, I find myself becoming more and more vocal in my opposition. I’m not alone; many other conservative Christians are also taking a stand for what the Bible teaches, particularly when it comes to moral behavior. Maybe that’s why I seem to hear Matthew 7:1 tossed around so frequently by those who want Christians to quiet down:

“Do not judge so that you will not be judged.”

Whenever we, as Christians, speak out against something in the culture, one of two labels is immediately employed in an effort to silence us: we are either branded “intolerant” or “judgmental”. To make matters worse, the second label is often attached to the teaching of Jesus Himself. Are we Christians defying the words of our Master when we speak against the behaviors, attitudes or worldviews affirmed by others? Did Jesus command us to be silently non-judgmental?

This selective use of scripture by the opposition is perhaps the finest example of what we at Stand to Reason are addressing when we caution people to “never read a Bible verse.” Matthew 7:1, when read in isolation from the larger context of the Sermon on the Mount, may seem to command a form of silent acceptance and tolerance advocated by the culture, but a closer examination of the verse reveals Jesus’ true intent.

Click it to read the response to the challenge.

It sure would be nice if people who think that Jesus’ opinion matters would do a better job of looking at what he actually taught. The four gospels are the best records for the life of Jesus. What he did and what he said are known.

News

Five terrorist attacks succeeded under Obama, but none succeeded under Bush after 9/11

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The Weekly Standard reports.

Excerpt:

Congressman Tom Cotton took to the House floor “to express grave doubts about the Obama Administration’s counterterrorism policies and programs”.

“I rise today to express grave doubts about the Obama Administration’s counterterrorism policies and programs,” said the freshman congressman from Arkansas. “Counterterrorism is often shrouded in secrecy, as it should be, so let us judge by the results. In barely four years in office, five jihadists have reached their targets in the United States under Barack Obama: the Boston Marathon bomber, the underwear bomber, the Times Square Bomber, the Fort Hood shooter, and in my own state—the Little Rock recruiting office shooter. In the over seven years after 9/11 under George W. Bush, how many terrorists reached their target in the United States? Zero! We need to ask, ‘Why is the Obama Administration failing in its mission to stop terrorism before it reaches its targets in the United States?’

FIVE terrorist attacks linked to Islamic fundamentalism under Obama, but ZERO such attacks once Bush got serious after the 9/11 attack.

This accusation comes on the heels of a new Congressional report that shows that the Obama administration did indeed lie to cover up their failures on the Benghazi debacle.

The Washington Times summarized what’s in the report:

The report says the State Department quickly notified the White House that the attack was taking place in Benghazi, and that within two hours of the start of the attack the department was telling the White House that al Qaeda-linked Ansar al-Sharia was claiming responsibility for it.

“In an ‘Ops Alert’ issued shortly after the attack began, the State Department Operations Center notified senior Department officials, the White House Situation Room, and others, that the Benghazi compound was under attack and that ‘approximately 20 armed people fired shots; explosions have been heard as well,’” said the report.

“Two hours later, the Operations Center issued an alert that al-Qa’ida linked Ansar al-Sharia (AAS) claimed responsibility for the attack and had called for an attack on Embassy Tripoli,” said the report. “Neither alert mentioned that there had been a protest at the location of the attacks. Further, Administration documents provided to the Committees show that there was ample evidence that the attack was planned and intentional. The coordinated, complex, and deadly attack on the [CIA’s] Annex [down the road from the State Department mission]–that included sophisticated weapons–is perhaps the strongest evidence that the attacks were not spontaneous. “

“The U.S. government knew immediately that the attacks constituted an act of terror,” says the report.

The report says that the Obama administration purged references to al Qaeda from the talking points that U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice used when she appeared on Sept. 16 on five Sunday talks shows to discuss the Benghazi attacks.

“After the attacks, the Administration perpetuated a deliberately misleading and incomplete narrative that the violence grew out of a demonstration caused by a YouTube video,” says the report. “The Administration consciously decided not to discuss extremist involvement or previous attacks against Western interests in Benghazi.”

“To protect the State Department, the Administration deliberately removed references to al Qaeda-linked groups and previous attacks in Benghazi in the talking points used by Ambassador Rice, thereby perpetuating the deliberately misleading and incomplete narrative that the attacks evolved from a demonstration caused by a YouTube video,” says the report.

The reports criticizes the administration for responding to the attack as a criminal event requiring an FBI investigation rather than as an act of terrorism against the United States requiring a military response.

Investors Business Daily is flat out saying that Hillary Clinton lied to cover up the Benghazi attack. (H/T Doug Ross)

The Obama administration ignored warnings from Russia

A third point to consider is this article from the Boston Globe. (H/T Hot Air)

Excerpt:

Russian authorities contacted the US government with concerns about Tamerlan Tsarnaev not once but “multiple’’ times, including an alert it sent after he was first investigated by FBI agents in Boston, raising new questions about whether the FBI should have paid more attention to the suspected Boston Marathon bomber, US senators briefed on the inves­tigation said Tuesday.

The FBI has previously said it interviewed Tsarnaev in early 2011 after it was initially contacted by the ­Russians. In their review, completed in summer 2011, the bureau found no ­evidence that Tsarnaev was a threat. “The FBI requested but did not receive more specific or additional information from” Russia, the agency said last week.

Following a closed briefing of the Senate Intelligence Committee Tuesday, Senator Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican, said he believed that Russia alerted the United States about Tsarnaev in “multiple contacts,” including at least once since October 2011.

So, in view of these three points, why do you think it is that the Obama administration cannot keep us safe from attacks in the way that Bush could? Well, the first reason is that Bush was willing to go to war with states that harbored terrorists in order to deter future attacks. Obama pulls out of the places that are known to train and harbor terrorists. Terrorists interpret Obama’s retreats as weakness, and that’s why terrorist-sponsoring states feel confident about not cracking down within their own borders. Terrorists feared that Bush would do nasty things to them – like sanction strikes by Israel, or invading Syria, or blockading Iran – if they did not crack down on terrorism themselves and give up their WMDs (as Libya did).

The second reason is because Democrats can’t believe in their heart of hearts that evil could be caused by anyone other than America and conservative Americans. I’ve written before about how the Obama administration considers their political enemies to be the real terrorists. People who are pro-life, or want smaller government. That’s who this administration is focused on. So, we should not be surprised that the real terrorists are slipping by. Heck, we are even supplying terrorists with welfare to fund their attacks on us. Why shouldn’t we expect attacks to increase? We elected people who aren’t serious about dealing with our real enemies.