Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/12/2015 23:45 -0400
Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Samuel Hersh claimed yesterday that the Obama administration lied to the American peopleabout certain aspects aspects of the 2011 raid that killed Osama Bin Laden. According to Hersh, the United States did not act alone when Navy SEALs were sent to capture or kill the world’s most wanted terrorist. The real story, according to the report, is that members of Pakistani intelligence services were privy to the raid months before it happened and that it was a “walk-in” Pakistani intelligence officer who gave up the location of Bin Laden rather than a CIA operation that tracked him down by following various couriers. Further, it has been claimed that Bin Laden was not buried at sea the way the Obama administration said, but rather, his limbs were simply thrown from the helicopter after the mission (suggesting that some portion of his body, perhaps his head, were retained for posterity’s sake).
It’s a markedly different story than the one President Obama told on the night he announced Bin Laden’s death. In that nationally televised speech the President took credit for ordering the raid and made it clear it was a unilateral action involving only American assets.
The Obama administration has spent the last 24 hours working to discredit the story. Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren said the report from Hersh was “largely a fabrication” with “too many inaccuracies.” The White House says the Hersh’s investigation is riddled with inaccuracies.
But according to NBC News, which has reportedly been conducting their own investigation for the last several years, Hersh’s claims aren’t that inaccurate after all.
Two intelligence sources tell NBC News that the year before the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden, a “walk in” asset from Pakistani intelligence told the CIA where the most wanted man in the world was hiding – and these two sources plus a third say that the Pakistani government knew where bin Laden was hiding all along.
The U.S. government has always characterized the heroic raid by Seal Team Six that killed bin Laden as a unilateral U.S. operation, and has maintained that the CIA found him by tracking couriers to his walled complex in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
The new revelations do not necessarily cast doubt on the overall narrative that the White House began circulating within hours of the May 2011 operation. The official story about how bin Laden was found was constructed in a way that protected the identity and existence of the asset, who also knew who inside the Pakistani government was aware of the Pakistani intelligence agency’s operation to hide bin Laden, according to a special operations officer with prior knowledge of the bin Laden mission. The official story focused on a long hunt for bin Laden’s presumed courier, Ahmed al-Kuwaiti.
The NBC News sources who confirm that a Pakistani intelligence official became a “walk in” asset include the special operations officer and a CIA officer who had served in Pakistan. These two sources and a third source, a very senior former U.S. intelligence official, also say that elements of the ISI were aware of bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad. The former official was emphatic about the ISI’s awareness, saying twice, “They knew.”
Source: NBC News
The one thing that President Obama could hail as a success during his tenure as President has now been exposed as an outright lie.
It looks like all those ‘conspiracy nuts’ who took issue with the “official” story following the President’s original announcement of bin Laden’s death were not so crazy after all. There’s a reason millions of Americans have lost trust in their government, and especially with the sitting President of the United States. It’s because we have been consistently lied to about anything and everything of any significance.
Before the dead were counted and the facts known, the craven, partisan ghouls in our mainstream media were already using a terrible domestic tragedy to call for more government spending.
The media’s politically-loaded word of the day is “infrastructure.” This comes as absolutely no surprise when you understand that the foundation of all media bias is to increase the size and power of our centralized government. And what better way to do that than to feast off the fresh corpses of those killed on a passenger train run by our bloated, incompetent federal government.
And what better way to distract from the fact that 6 innocent people died on a passenger train run by our bloated, incompetent federal government than to blame-shift to the selfish taxpayers and the evil Republican Party.
You see, Amtrak is like Baltimore: although government has had its fingers in everything for decades, the only solution is more government.
Heads up! This is the media’s game-plan for the rest of the week: At least through the Sunday shows, the media will exploit the Amtrak tragedy to call for more government spending and blame Republicans.
That makes this a perfect time to arm yourselves with the facts:
The Federal Government Owns and Operates Amtrak
Amtrak Loses Hundreds of Millions of Dollars a Year
American Taxpayers Subsidize a Service They Don’t Use
Very Small Percentage of the Population Use a Government Service We All Pay For
Amtrak Has Already Been Subsidized to the Tune of a Whopping $45 billion
Amtrak Is Set to Receive Another $7 Billion Over the Next 5 years
Amtrak Is Not Under-Funded, It Is Criminally Mismanaged
American People Subsidize $60 of Every Amtrak Ticket Sold
Taxpayers Subsidize Passengers Who Can Afford to Make Amtrak Profitable
There Is No Good Reason for The Government To Own Amtrak
The Amtrak Derailment Might Be Yet Another Failure of the Federal Government
Transportation funding could hit a dead-end at the end of the month. On May 31, the Highway Trust Fund’s authorization to pay for the nation’s highway and mass transit projects will expire.
Even worse, the fund is running a $13 billion cash flow deficit this year and is expected to exhaust all its money sometime in July unless lawmakers take action.
Here’s a snapshot from Heritage’s latest Backgrounder on what you need to know about the Highway Trust Fund:
What is the Highway Trust Fund?
The Highway Trust Fund was established in 1956 to pay for the construction of the Interstate Highway System. Although it was intended to be temporary, it is now the primary federal mechanism to finance transportation projects across the country.
The fund is financed mostly by the gas tax—an 18.3 cent tax on gasoline and a 24.3 cent tax on diesel fuels. It spends over $50 billion every year on roads and mass transit, which includes rail, buses, streetcars and other forms of public transportation.
What’s the problem?
Like most federal programs, the Highway Trust Fund consistently spends more than it receives in revenues. Congress has constantly had to bailout the fund with money from the Treasury in order to keep its balance in the black, and has spent $62 billion covering the fund’s shortfalls since 2008.
This year, the Congressional Budget Office projected the Highway Trust Fund’s spending will top its revenues by $13 billion.
Why is the fund in such bad shape?
Unable to relinquish the taxing and spending authority that should have expired when the Interstate Highway System was completed in the 1980s, Congress has expanded the Highway Trust Fund far beyond its intended scope.
The fund now spends more than ever and diverts billions from roadways to projects that should be left to states and localities. These boondoggles not only include unnecessary mass transit projects, but things like sidewalks, roadside landscaping and bike paths.
And spending increases have vastly outpaced fuel tax revenues, which have flattened as cars have become more fuel efficient. The result is a meandering, unsustainable fund that is plagued by special interests and unreliable for state transportation planning.
What should Congress do about it?
Some members of Congress are saying that they should just provide more money to the trust fund, either through a bailout or a gas tax hike, so that it can continue its profligate spending.
This is the wrong approach.
Congress needs to examine the inherent flaws in the way the nation invests in transportation infrastructure. The current system of taxing drivers and then redistributing their money through the federal government to projects unrelated to highways no longer makes sense.
Instead, Congress should end the top-down approach that breeds inefficiency and special interest handouts at the expense of prudent infrastructure investment.
The right approach would be to let states and localities—which are more in touch with the needs of their citizens—make their own decisions on transportation. Allowing them to tax and spend on infrastructure as they see fit without the interference of Washington would inject a much-needed degree of accountability and reliability into transportation investment.
For more information on the Highway Trust Fund and the upcoming deadline, see Highway Trust Fund Basics: A Primer on Federal Surface Transportation Spending.
Moynihan was an interesting character. He grew up in East Harlem and Hell’s Kitchen and worked as a longshoreman before becoming a Harvard intellectual and liberal icon. The Moynihan Report made him a pariah to the liberal Democrats and should have ended his career, The report was too honest and undermined the liberal agenda of the day. He found an odd bedfellow in Richard Nixon who recruited him to his White House staff in 1968. Another Republican, Gerry Ford, made him Ambassador to the UN. After restoring credibility on the international stage, the Democrats accepted him back and he had a successful run as a Senator from NY–still a liberal but also still an independent thinker. He often took stances at odds with the liberal agenda, such as his opposition to Hillary’s original health care scheme.
Moynihan was one of the last of a dying breed…a real New York character… he ascended from a tough start in life and became an icon as well as a forward thinker…and he loved his little drink now and then… I would see him hoist a few at Langans on occasion and he was funny as hell… my 3 favorite quotes from him were 1) when a reporter asked him if he had a drinking problem, he responded “Madame, I do not have a problem drinking” , 2) as UN ambassador, when the UN passed a resolution equating Zionism with racism, in front of the whole assembly, put his arm around the Israeli ambassador and loudly said to him “F_ck them!”… and 3) when he referred to hillarycare as “boob bait for bubbas”…
This undated photo provided by the National Security Agency (NSA) shows its headquarters in Fort Meade, Md.
Sen. Rand Paul @SenRandPaul
May 7, 2015
Paul is the junior U.S. Senator for Kentucky.
The sacrifice of our personal liberty for security is and will forever be a false choice
I’ve long said what you discuss on your phone is none of the government’s business, and the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit agrees.
Today, the federal court struck down the government’s sweeping, undefined, and illegal war on civil liberties, ruling that it is unlawful for the National Security Agency to collect the bulk phone records of American citizens.
The three judge panel slams the overreach of the NSA’s limitless metadata collection and privacy intrusion, writing in the opinion that the program was an “unprecedented contraction of the privacy expectations of all Americans.” The court judges the program’s premise as ineffectual, stating “the records demanded are all-encompassing; the government does not even suggest that all of the records sought, or even necessarily any of them, are relevant.”
A federal court has decided that the National Security Agency’s (NSA) bulk, warrantless collection of millions of Americans’ phone records is illegal.
The decision from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday represents the second major court victory for opponents of the NSA, after a lower court decision called the program nearly unconstitutional six months ago.
The phone records program “exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized,” Judge Gerard Lynch wrote on behalf of the three-judge panel. The court did not examine the constitutionality of the surveillance program.
The city got the full brunt of state coercion, decade after decade
JEFFREY A. TUCKER
April 29, 2015
If you have seen The Wire, you know the score. There are consequences to state management of any social order. Baltimore is a paradigmatic case. How long can people continue to evade the obvious lessons?
It began more than 100 years ago with the imposition of state segregation. This was the original sin that created a second-class of citizenship and racial ghettos for the first time since the end of the Civil War. Every policy response follows from there, with one coercive mistake following another. This town became the backyard playground for the ruling-class planners in Washington, DC. The intellectuals and lawmakers behind these policies cannot reasonably claim to escape responsibility.
Baltimore blew up in riots and fires in the days following the astonishinglycruel death of Freddie Gray (and the stonewalling of the police department about how and why he was killed). But it is a mistake to focus the blame on this incident alone.
What happened in Baltimore is the product of the drug war, a racially punitive policing system, failed public services, segregated public housing, urban renewal, endless rounds of progressive education reform, a highly regulated labor market that cuts off economic opportunity, occupational licensure, gun control, and permanent martial law that makes everyone feel like prisoners.
Baltimore got the full brunt of it all, at every stage, decade after decade.
What do all these policies have in common? They represent the fatal error, common for the better part of a century, of believing that policy elites can manage the social order better than the social order can manage itself. Only the ruling class can decide where and how people should live, how they will be educated, what they can buy and sell, the terms of labor contracts, what businesses come and go, and who gets to enter into certain occupations and the terms under which they may do so. The government would do it all: build and maintain the housing, provide the education, make the jobs, set the pay, enable the security, and administer the justice.
The Homeland Security Department is a bloated bureaucracy, too large and disparate to effectively manage as one entity.
Such was the takeaway from a report on 60 Minutes, the famed news magazine program on CBS. The report focused on a series of interviews with DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson, who defended the department and the progress it has made to better coordinate its 240,000-person workforce and its array of components.
“Johnson’s department has never been more central to the War on Terror,” 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl said. “But it has come under almost constant criticism for, over the years, weak management and low morale.”
She added Johnson faces a “management nightmare,” as DHS agencies and sub-agencies have no clear common functionality binding them together.
“This department is a disparate amalgam of things that don’t fit together very well,” said Clark Ervin, the former DHS inspector general. “Making the department work, making it more effective and efficient, economical, is a security issue. To the extent the department isn’t optimally performing, that is a security deficiency.”
The report spent little time explaining how DHS came together in its current form. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, the George W. Bush administration and lawmakers determined domestic security efforts were spread too far apart in the sprawling federal bureaucracy, and bringing them together would improve coordination of protection efforts. No matter the origins, 60 Minutespostulated DHS’ structure was unsustainable.
Apr 25, 1:38 PM EDT
BY NEDRA PICKLER
ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON (AP) — With debate gearing up over the coming expiration of the Patriot Act surveillance law, the Obama administration on Saturday unveiled a 6-year-old report examining the once-secret program to collect information on Americans’ calls and emails.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence publicly released the redacted report following a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the New York Times. The basics of the National Security Agency program had already been declassified, but the lengthy report includes some new details about the secrecy surrounding it.
President George W. Bush authorized the “President’s Surveillance Program” in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. The review was completed in July 2009 by inspectors general from the Justice Department, Pentagon, CIA, NSA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
They found that while many senior intelligence officials believe the program filled a gap by increasing access to international communications, others including FBI agents, CIA analysts and managers “had difficulty evaluating the precise contribution of the PSP to counterterrorism efforts because it was most often viewed as one source among many available analytic and intelligence-gathering tools in these efforts.”
Critics of the phone records program, which allows the NSA to hunt for communications between terrorists abroad and U.S. residents, argue it has not proven to be an effective counterterrorism tool. They also say an intelligence agency has no business possessing the deeply personal records of Americans. Many favor a system under which the NSA can obtain court orders to query records held by the phone companies.
The Patriot Act expires on June 1, and Senate Republicans have introduced a bill that would allow continued collection of call records of nearly every American. The legislation would reauthorize sections of the Patriot Act, including the provision under which the NSA requires phone companies to turn over the “to and from” records of most domestic landline calls.
by DAVID FRENCH April 20, 2015 4:00 AM From the May 4, 2015, issue of NR ‘
THEY CAME WITH A BATTERING RAM.” Cindy Archer, one of the lead architects of Wisconsin’s Act 10 — also called the “Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill,” it limited public-employee benefits and altered collective-bargaining rules for public-employee unions — was jolted awake by yelling, loud pounding at the door, and her dogs’ frantic barking. The entire house — the windows and walls — was shaking. She looked outside to see up to a dozen police officers, yelling to open the door. They were carrying a battering ram.She wasn’t dressed, but she started to run toward the door, her body in full view of the police. Some yelled at her to grab some clothes, others yelled for her to open the door. “I was so afraid,” she says. “I did not know what to do.” She grabbed some clothes, opened the door, and dressed right in front of the police. The dogs were still frantic. “I begged and begged, ‘Please don’t shoot my dogs, please don’t shoot my dogs, just don’t shoot my dogs.’ I couldn’t get them to stop barking, and I couldn’t get them outside quick enough. I saw a gun and barking dogs. I was scared and knew this was a bad mix.”Read more at: https://www.nationalreview.com/article/417155/wisconsins-shame-i-thought-it-was-home-invasion-david-french
If you tried to contact the IRS with a question about your taxes this year, chances are you didn’t get a response. The IRS estimated that it would only answer 17 million of the 49 million calls received this filing season. Taxpayers lucky enough to have the IRS answer their calls waited an average of 34.4 minutes for assistance–nearly double the wait time last year (18.7 minutes).
IRS Commissioner John Koskinen has blamed the IRS’s “abysmal” customer service on congressional budget cuts–funding is down $1.2 billion from its 2010 peak–but a new congressional report points the finger back at the IRS. While congressional funding for the IRS remained flat from 2014 to 2015, the IRS diverted $134 million away from customer service to other activities.
In addition to the $11 billion appropriated by Congress, the IRS takes in more than $400 million in user fees and may allocate that money as it sees fit. In 2014, the IRS allocated $183 million in user fees to its customer service budget, but allocated just $49 million in 2015–a 76 percent cut.
Commissioner Koskinen will appear before the House Ways and Means Committee this morning, one week after the federal tax filing deadline, and he can expect to be asked why the IRS cut its own customer service budget and continues to spend money on other questionable activities.
The report notes that Koskinen reinstated bonuses weeks after his appointment, has allowed IRS employees to spend roughly 500,000 work hours on union activities, and failed to collect delinquent taxes owed by federal employees. The tax agency has also been strained by Obamacare. According to the report, the IRS has spent “over $1.2 billion on the President’s health care law to date, with a planned expenditure this year of an additional $500 million.”
EAST ROCKAWAY, N.Y.—For Frances Healy, a 90-year-old widow known as “Muzzy,” home is just a tease.
Muzzy lives so close to her gutted, molded home—an unhealed victim of a hurricane that hit nearly two-and-half years ago—that she can see it.
But she can’t live in it.
From her vantage point through a window in the trailer here in East Rockaway on Long Island in New York, she can see a home that, from the outside, looks the same before it met Hurricane Sandy.
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It’s the same home that Muzzy and her late husband, Jimmy, built in 1947, transforming it from a “dump” to “heaven on Earth.”
But from the window of the trailer where she now lives, or from anywhere, what she can’t see is a way back into the home.
“It’s heartbreaking because there’s so many memories there,” said Muzzy, whose quiet, cracking voice belies a feistiness that showed itself when she playfully heckled a Daily Signal filmmaker for being too slow to get his equipment ready.
“We raised 10 children in this house,” Muzzy said. “We had so many memories in this house.”
This wasn’t supposed to be so hard—recovery.
“I know what I’m getting into living on the water,” says @krainsbo.
People who live on the water know the risks and insure themselves against them.
“I know what I’m getting into living on the water,” says Kathleen Besedin, whose dream home in Baldwin Harbour, N.Y., was severely damaged in Hurricane Sandy.
“I am not a stupid person. I know it can flood and that’s why I did everything right.”
When Hurricane Sandy barreled toward the East Coast in the fall of 2012, many, like Muzzy, who had to be dragged away by her family, didn’t think they’d even have to leave their homes.
No one could have expected how devastating Hurricane Sandy turned out to be: 117 deaths, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and more than $60 billion in damage, second only to Hurricane Katrina.
And no one could have guessed how the mechanisms set up to protect homeowners, and to refurbish them against future storms, would fail.
Responding to accusations that damage assessment reports were fraudulently changed to minimize claims, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has agreed to review every flood insurance claim filed by homeowners affected by Hurricane Sandy.
Those actions came in the wake of law enforcement inquiries and reports by the New York Times and CBS News program “60 Minutes” on widespread fraud by engineering companies supervised by FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program.
During a visit last month to Long Island, among the areas hardest hit by the storm, homeowners also spoke of problems related to a New York’s grant recovery program set up to fill the funding gaps left by their flood insurance and other forms of aid.
Launched in April 2013, New York Rising uses $4.4 billion in federal funding allocated to the state to help people rebuild their homes.
New York Rising is similar to other grant programs in New York city and New Jersey.
The programs were set up carefully.
After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, widespread corruption and fraudulent claims marred the recovery.
To avoid similar problems in New York, the state created a program with a complicated application process.
Though New York Rising has distributed more than $600 million for home repairs so far, some homeowners complain the program has moved too slowly, plagued by heavy-handed bureaucracy, excessive paperwork and constantly changing policies.
“Thank God for the grant program,” said Mary Shaw, a resident of Long Beach, N.Y., who decided to knock her home down and is waiting on money from New York Rising to rebuild.
“But it is a waiting game. It’s been longer than we ever expected to wait for help. You don’t want to complain. It’s a grant program. I just wish it were run better.”
Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., represents a district in eastern Long Island. He works with New York Rising to make sure the program is helping people come home.
“It would be foolish not to revisit lessons learned to get it right the next time,” says @RepLeeZeldin.
“I think expectations from the get go—some people just assumed, as soon as Congress passed money, they would see a check, they would barely have to put in paperwork,” Zeldin told The Daily Signal.
“As far as efficiency goes, some of the policies … unnecessarily lingered too long. If another storm, God forbid, happened, it would be reckless, it would be foolish, not to revisit those lessons learned to get it right the next time.”
New York Rising officials say the program is working as well as could be expected.
They say they’re beholden to stringent guidelines required by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the federal agency that governs the distribution of grant money.
And they say they’ve made changes to the program in order to meet evolving homeowner needs.
For example, New York Rising recently adjusted its award payment formula for some people who are reconstructing their homes.
Instead of paying 50 percent of repairs upfront, and the other half upon completion of repairs, New York Rising will pay 50 percent at the outset, 25 percent after a “substantial” amount of work has been finished and the final 25 percent upon completion.
“I don’t want to sound like a bureaucrat, but I do think that there’s a responsibility here and a management of expectations,” said Barbara Brancaccio, a New York Rising spokeswoman, in an interview with The Daily Signal.
“It’s the responsible monitoring of taxpayer dollars. You want to protect the funds. When you make changes like this, it’s to get more money to the homeowner, not to make it more difficult. It’s very hard when you’re in the situation to see the big picture. We work very hard to get as much money as absolutely possible into the hands of the people who need it.”
A walk through a Lindenhurst neighborhood shows how recovery does not look the same for everybody.
Ellen Huggins, the secretary of Adopt a House, a nonprofit founded to help rebuild Long Island communities after Hurricane Sandy, is leading the tour.
Huggins was fortunate enough to rebuild her home.
But visible through her front window is a grassy patch of land where a home once stood.
As part of New York Rising, residents have the option to participate in a buyout program, allowing the state to purchase the damaged property to raze the home and return the area to nature.
The state has bought about 1,200 properties as of mid-March.
Another home near Huggins’, a couple streets away, has seen no work. It looks, as if frozen in time, the same as it did after the storm—like a skeleton.
The walls of the back of the home have been blown off, to where you can see inside.
A swivel chair, probably an item that belonged to a former office space, and a trash basket, lay strewn in the melting snow.
“We want the neighborhood back,” says Ellen Huggins of @AdoptAHouse.
“My neighbors are gone,” Huggins said. “There are people who just left. There are people who are still struggling. And we want them to come back. We want the neighborhood back. I want my neighbors back. We’d like to see [New York Rising] be successful. We’d like to see the program achieve the goals it is setting out to achieve. We’d like it to assist people: to elevate, to reconstruct, to rebuild, to be safer —so that the neighborhood can continue to thrive.”
Muzzy won’t leave her neighborhood. It’s where she goes to church. It’s where her husband, Jimmy, hand-made the furniture that came to decorate her home, and then, be destroyed—erasing one of their enduring links.
“She’s lived in this town since she was 2. It’s where she wants to die,” says Kate Hughes, Muzzy’s daughter.
For Muzzy, home, so close but so far, is where the heartache is.
Asked where she wants to live, she points through the trailer window, “In that house.”
CNSNews.com) – The federal government has set an all-time record for the amount of inflation-adjusted tax revenue brought into the federal Treasury from the beginning of the fiscal year through the April 15 tax-filing deadline.
As of the close of business on April 14, the Treasury had brought in a record $1,477,901,000,000 since fiscal 2015 started on Oct. 1, 2014, according the Daily Treasury Statement released this afternoon.
We won’t know how much additional tax revenue the Treasury hauled in today until it releases its next daily statement tomorrow at 4:00 p.m. But every dollar of it will add to the new record.
Now that they control both chambers of Congress, Republicans are wasting no time advancing pent-up bills intended to crack down on alleged political bias at the Internal Revenue Service, moving a batch of bills out of the Ways and Means Committee on Wednesday for coming floor action.
Though the most visible policy-oriented legislation would repeal the estate tax, the narrower set of bills was aimed at the tax agency’s Exempt Organizations division, where the imbroglio over mishandled applications from largely conservative groups revealed in 2013 set the course of the Republican bid to rein in the tax agency.
Designed to pressure IRS employees toward more transparency, the bills do not address the issue of how to define a social welfare organization that is not political—for which the IRS is working on revised regulations—and none appear to acknowledge the staffing, procedural and policy changes made at the Exempt Organizations division over the past two years.
Bills reported out Wednesday included:
H.R. 1058 by Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill., to “ensure that IRS employees are familiar with and act in accordance with taxpayer rights, including the right to be informed, to be assisted, to be heard, to pay no more than the correct amount of tax, to an appeal, to certainty, to privacy, to confidentiality, to representation, and to a fair and just tax system;” H.R. 1152 by Rep. Kenny Marchant, R-Texas, to prohibit IRS employees from conducting official business using personal email; H.R. 1026, by Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., to “stop the IRS’ misuse of a provision designed to protect taxpayers to instead protect government employees who improperly look at or reveal taxpayer information;” H.R. 1314, by Rep. Patrick Meehan, R-Pa., to codify the right for organizations denied tax exempt status to file an administrative appeal; H.R. 1295, by Rep. George Holding, R-N.C., to streamline the “burdensome IRS process by allowing groups to declare their tax-exempt status rather than wait for endless amounts of time to gain approval;” and H.R. 709 by Rep. James Renacci, R-Ohio, to authorize the IRS to terminate employees who target individuals based on their political beliefs.
“Though it’s been nearly two years since we learned of the IRS’ abuse of power, the American people’s distrust in the agency remains,” Renacci said. “If someone at the IRS targets taxpayers based on their political beliefs, he or she should be held accountable. It’s that simple.”
The co-founder of the world’s sixth most popular website thinks that the National Security Agency’s Internet spying is not only illegal but violates core provisions of the Constitution.
While explaining the rationale behind Wikipedia’s lawsuit against the spy agency on Friday, Jimmy Wales hoped that the legal action would lead to a landmark ruling declaring new limits on government’s spying powers.
The “minimum acceptable” result of the case, Wales said in a conversation on Reddit, would be to find that the NSA’s massive collection of data on the Internet’s backbone was illegal.
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