Tag Archives: Scandal

News

New poll: 26% of Obama supporters think Tea Party is top terrorist threat

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Nile Gardiner writes about it in the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

Rasmussen has just published an extraordinary poll which highlights the deep-seated prejudice against the Tea Party among both US government workers and supporters of President Obama. According to the poll:

Half of all voters consider radical Muslims the bigger terrorist threat facing the nation, but supporters of President Obama consider the Tea Party to be as big a danger.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 51% of Likely U.S. Voters consider radical Muslims to be the bigger threat to the United States today. Thirteen percent (13%) view the Tea Party that way, and another 13% consider other political and religious extremists to be the larger danger. Six percent (6%) point to local militia groups. Two percent (2%) see the Occupy Wall Street movement as the bigger terrorist threat.

However, among those who approve of the president’s job performance, just 29% see radical Muslims as the bigger threat. Twenty-six percent (26%) say it’s the Tea Party that concerns them most. Among those who Strongly Approve of the president, more fear the Tea Party than radical Muslims.

As for those who disapprove of Obama’s performance, 75% consider radical Muslims to be the bigger terrorist threat. Just one percent (1%) name the Tea Party.

… Conservatives overwhelmingly see radical Muslims as the greater terror threat. Liberals are fairly evenly divided between radical Muslims and the Tea Party.

Twenty percent (20%) of government workers see the Tea Party as the nation’s bigger terror threat. Twelve percent (12%) of private sector workers hold that view.

[…]The extraordinary success of the Tea Party has led to it being demonised by the Left, culminating in an unprecedented campaign by the IRS against it, which has prompted a resurgence in public support for the movement – up 14 points since January, to 44 percent among likely US voters. Today’s Rasmussen poll illustrates the sheer depth of animosity towards the Tea Party within sections of the federal government and among President Obama’s strongest supporters (the two are usually interchangeable).

Some liberals have become so blinded by their hatred that they ludicrously see grassroots conservative groups defending the American Constitution as more dangerous than Islamist militants seeking to destroy the United States. Anyone opposed to their cause is a threat. This is irrational and deeply disturbing in a free society that has always cherished the cause of political freedom and open debate. It amply demonstrates just how extreme the American Left has become, and how out of touch it is with reality.

For a liberal in government, the problem is not adding a trillion plus to the national debt every year. That’s fine, and nothing to be concerned about. The trouble is that some people oppose running up these trillion dollar deficits – that’s terrorism. The Democrats believe that they are doing a good thing by using government to target Tea Party conservatives, because you would have to be a terrorist in order to oppose adding $8 trillion to the national debt. It’s not just the IRS that targeted the Tea Party, either. It’s the Department of Homeland Security, as well. Democrats aren’t serious about national security.

News

Obama’s deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter met with IRS chief at the White House

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Jake Tapper of the left-leaning CNN reports.

Excerpt: (links removed)

Comments made by former White House adviser and Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter on CNN’s “The Lead” last week about meetings at the White House attended by both her and the then-director of the Internal Revenue Service, Doug Shulman, have prompted some conservatives to question her role in those meetings.

The White House has acknowledged that IRS officials seem to have inappropriately focused on conservative groups when vetting whether the groups qualified for special tax exempt status. White House visitor logs suggest that Shulman was cleared to attend meetings in the White House or Eisenhower Executive Office Building 157 times, which has prompted questions from Republican officials as to whether the targeting of conservative groups was ever discussed. More than 50 of Douglas Shulman’s scheduled visits are described as “health care meetings” or “health care reform meetings,” according to the visitor logs.

On “The Lead’s” political roundtable discussion about Shulman’s visits on Friday, Cutter – now a CNN contributor – said that “many of those meetings were for health care implementation. I was in them with him. So there is nothing nefarious going on.”

[…]Many conservative outlets have seized upon Cutter’s presence in the meetings as reason for suspicion. “The president’s deputy campaign manager attended the ‘nonpolitical’ ObamaCare implementation meetings with the former IRS commissioner at the White House,” wrote an Investor’s Business Daily editorial. “She wasn’t there to discuss the Easter Egg Roll.”

Wrote Carol Platt Liebau at Townhall.com, “as everyone knows, Stephanie Cutter’s expertise is not primarily in the policy area; it is in the realm of politics: Political strategy and communications.  She has been described by the Daily Beast as a partisan ‘pit bull.’  Her job isn’t the nuts and bolts of governing.  She is a political fixer.  That’s why she was a Deputy Campaign manager for the President’s re-election.”

Here’s what Carol Platt Liebau said in that Townhall article.

Excerpt: (links removed)

An interesting fact emerges from a look at a transcript of last Friday’s edition of “The Lead With Jake Tapper” — Stephanie Cutter was in on the White House meetings that IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman attended.

Cutter insists that Shulman was simply meeting about implementation of ObamaCare — and in fairness, one of her responsibilities was managing communications strategy for the unpopular law.  But as everyone knows, Stephanie Cutter’s expertise is not primarily in the policy area; it is in the realm of politics: Political strategy and communications.  She has been described by theDaily Beast as a partisan “pit bull.”  Her job isn’t the nuts and bolts of governing.  She is a political fixer.  That’s why she was a Deputy Campaign manager for the President’s re-election.

Given that’s the case, it’s far from clear why she would have been in meetings with Doug Shulman at all.  The whole point of the IRS’ supposed “independence” is to insulate the agency from the influence and machinations of people exactly like Stephanie Cutter.

So whether or not the stated purpose of the meetings was about ObamaCare — unless Shulman’s politics are very different from the lefty leanings of his wife — it isn’t hard to imagine Shulman and Cutter exchanging some congruent views.  That’s particularly true given that foremost in political discussion at the time was the Citizens United case (holding it unconstitutional for the government to restrict speech by corporations, associations and unions), which had recently been handed down by the Supreme Court — and which scared President Obama to death.  Is it really a stretch to think that Cutter and Shulman might have commiserated, bemoaned the supposed threat to democracy, and wished that something could be done, oh so subtly? . . . Consider the following timeline:

  • May 2009 – Cutter moves to White House from Treasury Department
  • January 2010 – Citizens United is handed down; Democrats are hysterical
  • March 2010 – IRS begins targeting Tea Party and other conservative groups
  • April 2010 – Cutter assigned to sell health care reform; if meetings with Shulman didn’t occur before, presumably they did so afterwards.

Indeed, this time line and Cutter’s presence in the IRS meetings makes it more likely than ever that subtle political influence was wielded.  Did anyone explicitly order Shulman to target conservatives?  Probably not . . . because given the extent and type of contact he had with White House politicos, no explicit directive was needed.

It seems likely that everyone understood each other just fine, and the IRS operated accordingly.

Do you think it’s possible that the Obama campaign worked with the IRS to delay and deny applications from conservative groups in order to influence the 2012 election? Why would the deputy campaign manager need to be in meetings with the head of the IRS at the White House?

Videos

MUST-SEE: Founder of Tea Party group testifies in Congress about IRS fascism

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Fox News reports on the testimony of Becky Gerritson.

Excerpt:

Becky Gerritson, President of Wetumpka Tea Party in Alabama, gave emotional and powerful testimony this morning during a hearing on how the IRS allegedly targeted her organization.

Gerritson spoke of demands asked of her ‘tiny group’ by the agency, including detailed contents of every speech ever given by someone involved in the Tea Party branch, copies of any communication sent to any member of a legislative body, including her own representatives, and the list goes on.

Gerritson fought back tears as she pointed her finger at the members of Congress sitting before her, saying of her group, “[we] had no party affiliation … It didn’t matter … the only notion expressed was that our representative government had failed us.”

“In Wetumpka, we are patriotic Americans; we peacefully assemble; we petition our government; we exercise our right to free speech. We don’t understand why the government tried to stop us. I’m not here as a serf or a vassal. I’m not begging my lord for mercy. I’m a born-free American woman, wife, mother, and citizen, and I’m telling my government that you’ve forgotten your place.”

She called the IRS’ demands a “willful act of intimidation to discourage a point of view” and “un-American.”

Gerritson again became choked up as she concluded her statement, saying, “I’m not interested in scoring political points. I want to preserve and protect the America that I grew up in. The America that people crossed oceans and risked their lives to become a part of, and I’m terrified it’s slipping away. Thank you very much.”

And more: here’s law professor John Eastman at the IRS hearings telling the truth:

It’s very sad for me to see that so many American people could vote for a regime that is essentially Stalinist in nature. We fought wars against tyrannical regimes, and now we’ve changed – now we vote them into power. We are too busy entertaining ourselves instead of informing ourselves enough to make the right decisions about our future.