Jun 17

IRS keyword targets: Tea Party, Conservative, Patriot, Constitution

Law, Media No Comments »

Wait…what? Some of this slipped through the cracks as the fault lines continued to erupt over the past many weeks of rolling scandals out of the Obama administration. Even the willing media could only cover so much, and there has been so much. But startling and disturbing as it all is, this is an administration that targets ideological opponents. How did the Constitution get in there?

While this news was available in reports back in May, it hasn’t received much attention.

This should concern everyone. Let’s draw this out:

The IRS started targeting Tea Party members, “Patriots” and similar conservatives starting in 2010.

But the IRS’ harassment of conservatives expanded way beyond those groups.

As United Press International reports:

“U.S. Internal Revenue Service inquiry of conservative groups included those lobbying to “make America a better place to live,” new details emerging about the IRS investigation indicated. That lever goes beyond what the IRS admitted Friday, which was that it targeted groups with “Tea Party” or “patriot” in their names, several media outlets reported Monday, based on draft findings from disclosures to congressional investigators by the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration…

“At various points over the past two years, the Cincinnati IRS office, which is in charge of evaluating applications for tax-exempt status, focused on groups making statements that “criticize how the country is being run” and those involved in educating Americans “on the Constitution and Bill of Rights,” the draft report cited by The Washington Post indicated.

By June 2011 some IRS specialists were probing applications of groups focusing on “government spending, government debt or taxes [and] education of the public by advocacy/lobbying to ‘make America a better place to live,‘” the report cited by the Journal indicated.

What?!?! Yes, they targeted groups that simply criticized the government, a time-honored American right and tradition.

At various points over the past two years, Internal Revenue Service officials targeted nonprofit groups that criticized the government and sought to educate Americans about the U.S. Constitution, according to documents in an audit conducted by the agency’s inspector general.

What does this administration have against Americans or groups of citizens who want to educate and learn more about the U.S. Constitution? That’s a key question I haven’t heard anyone ask.

Some top notch journalists at least pointed it out. But it hasn’t been explored or exposed as fully as it should have been, or should be now. What is the thinking that targets “nonprofit groups that…sought to educate Americans about the U.S. Constitution”? By implication, that not only suggests but means that administration officials, who traditionally reflect the president’s ideology, see the U.S. Constitution as somehow in conflict with their goals, standards and/or practices.

That demands attention. That, and so much else.

For now, I’ll let Elizabeth Scalia’s vent speak for me. Especially where she gets to this point:

It’s worth noting that the press has already abandoned the IRS story, and it never even bothered with the Sebelius shakedown story which was, I grant you, nowhere near as scandalously corrosive to our trust in government as the IRS story. But dead is dead, you know; the PRISM story is currently being adjusted. The press still controls the national conversation, and these stories that would have them screaming bloody murder and rolling up their sleeves to investigate (and inviting layfolk in to crowdsource for them) if only this administration had an R after it? Poof! Gone the way a good magician makes anything disappear while misdirecting the audience’s attention.

I thought of one more question: Journalists got really, really mad at the administration when it was discovered that it was scouring phone records of the Associated Press, and that it was criminalizing reporters like James Rosen, for doing their jobs. They were so incredibly furious that they gave the story perhaps ten days of outraged-and-then-increasingly-perfunctory coverage…before dropping the whole matter altogether on the strength of the White House saying, “why of course we respect you! Of course we would never, never want to see you prosecuted! We don’t want you too intimidated to do your jobs! We love you! You’re vital to the nation, yessiree!.

My question is, will the mainstream media remain in their Stockholm Syndrome or will they actually get upset enough by the (Sharyl) Attkisson story…and begin to chase the administration?

Or — and this has to be considered, you know — will they pipe down, not to protect the president, not anymore, but to protect themselves?

It’s still, as they say, a breaking story. Stay tuned.

Tagged with: • • • • • • •
Jun 13

Obama administration scandals and public opinion polls

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Yet another ‘Breaking News!’ alert sounded on one of the several networks that resorts to them too frequently, and this time the breaking news was that ‘the public is losing trust in the Obama administration.’ Really? Really?

That could raise the debatable point about how much currency the administration still held in the public trust at any point you want to name post-election when apparently enough citizens trusted this president with the country to give his administration control of it for another four years. But that’s another discussion and one seriously outdated at the moment. We’ve moved into new territory in recent months, unchartered since the Revolution, as Senator Rand Paul frequently reminds reporters when he recalls that ‘soldiers went house to house for search and seizure’ but this government is scooping up private information about citizens’ lives without their awareness and therefore without their consent.

So about that ‘public trust’ business that broke into the news cycle, different news outlets and polling companies are continually taking the pulse of the public on everything that happens in American public life, and the results seemed to have reached a tipping point.

‘Most Americans disapprove of NSA phone-record collecting‘ reflected this set of polls. Here’s the CBS one:

Seventy-five percent of Americans approve of federal agencies collecting the phone records of people the government suspects of terrorist activity, but a 58 percent majority disapproves of this type of data collection in the case of ordinary Americans.

Majorities of Republicans and independents oppose the government collecting phone records of ordinary Americans; Democrats are divided.

A day later, polls changed again. If you’re wonkish, read the whole thing. It’s interesting to see how different polls ask questions.

Right — it doesn’t note the mind-boggling scope of the program or emphasize that millions of perfectly innocent Americans are having their data harvested. This question’s just vague enough, in fact, that some people might think it refers to collecting data specifically on terrorist suspects rather than the public at large. That’s why it shows mild approval of the program. Pollsters have to be more careful when asking about this. At a minimum, every question about it should note that the program’s (1) known to Congress and overseen by FISA judges yet also (2) incredibly vast and sophisticated, collecting digital fingerprints from virtually the entire population.

Get that? The entire population. And Obama first told Americans not to worry, it’s foreigners the program is after.

I got all exercised over the government trying to control and regulate property rights on the internet through  SOPA and PIPA. How silly, given the government’s control over that as a minimum.

As for Snowden himself, the picture’s mixed. Reuters finds 31 percent who say he’s a “patriot” and 23 percent who say he’s a “traitor,” with 46 percent following the Rand Paul path of prudence and reserving judgment for the time being. Thirty-five percent say he shouldn’t face charges while 25 percent say he should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Gallup has 44 percent saying Snowden did the right thing versus 42 percent who said he did wrong, with ye olde familiar partisan split: The GOP breaks 49/38 in favor of “right,” Democrats break 39/49 in favor of “wrong.” Time magazine’s numbers in favor of Snowden are more robust, but also more complicated: 54 percent say he did a “good thing,” but 53 percent want him prosecuted for leaking anyway.

Sufficiently confused? Yes. This doesn’t follow any lines, any prototype, people aren’t yet sure. But they – we – are certainly uneasy. We haven’t had a healthy trust of government for a long time. Less so now.

In the little that President Obama has said publicly about his administration’s recently exposed domestic surveillance programs he has returned to the overall motif of his presidency: warning against excessive distrust of the federal government.

Of course. Now he’s the government and controls most of it.

While hawks wait anxiously to see if Obama can summon the political courage to defend the programs he has expanded despite his onetime opposition, the president has so far used the occasion to preach against what he seems to believe is a virus of anti-government sentiment in the nation.

It’s not a virus. It’s a healthy immune system.

The end of human confidence in a zone of individual privacy from the government, plus the very real presence of a system that can harm, harass or invade the everyday liberties of Americans. This is a recipe for democratic disaster.

If—again, if—what Snowden says is substantially true, the surveillance state will in time encourage an air of subtle oppression, and encourage too a sense of paranoia that may in time—not next week, but in time, as the years unfold—loosen and disrupt the ties the people of America feel to our country. “They spy on you here and will abuse the information they get from spying on you here. I don’t like ‘here.’”

Trust in government, historically, ebbs and flows, and currently, because of the Internal Revenue Service, the Justice Department, Benghazi, etc.—and the growing evidence the executive agencies have been reduced to mere political tools—is at an ebb that may not be fully reversible anytime soon. It is a great irony, and history will marvel at it, that the president most committed to expanding the centrality, power, prerogatives and controls of the federal government is also the president who, through lack of care, arrogance, and an absence of any sense of prudential political boundaries, has done the most in our time to damage trust in government.

And don’t forget his promise of the most transparent government Americans have known, which Americans eagerly sought. We’re getting it now. Through serial leaks.

Tagged with: • • • •
Jun 10

Leaks and allegiances: The line between hero and traitor

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Identifying the ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad guys’ used to be a function of political alignment with the left or right back in the days of, oh, about a month or two ago. Then the leaks and scandals that had been building out of sight for months and years seemed to suddenly erupt. Practically all at once. Skipping past Benghazi, the IRS, the Justice Department and the initial NSA revelations, we’re now at a point where Edward Snowden and Julian Assange and Bradley Manning are being talked about in the same sentence with an odd sense of disorientation.

What the heck has happened in America lately?

That’s too difficult and tricky to answer, and it requires defining ‘lately’ and maybe even ‘happened’ and it’s not confined just to America, after all.

So, to reset. Bradley Manning was in the US military and smuggled secret national security documents to Julian Assange who posted them on WikiLeaks and has been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for about a year, because public revelation of classified documents compromising national security is criminal.

Now, National Security Agency program details have been leaked by a contractor who believed they posed an abuse of power and a hazard to citizens’ privacy rights, and he has willingly identified himself through international media, accepted the consequences, and - though that action is illegal and therefore criminal – he is considered a hero by many people but a traitor by others. And this time, the lines have blurred, and both camps contain Democrats and Republicans, the left and the right, conservatives and liberals.

Edward Snowden revealed himself and what he did and why on Sunday, in an interview with the Guardian and exchanges with the Washington Post.

In an interview Sunday, Snowden said he is willing to face the consequences of exposure.

“I’m not going to hide,” Snowden told The Post from Hong Kong, where he has been staying. “Allowing the U.S. government to intimidate its people with threats of retaliation for revealing wrongdoing is contrary to the public interest.”

Asked whether he believes that his disclosures will change anything, he said: “I think they already have. Everyone everywhere now understands how bad things have gotten — and they’re talking about it. They have the power to decide for themselves whether they are willing to sacrifice their privacy to the surveillance state.”

At the same time many Americans were hailing him as a hero for standing up to a tyrant state power, Julian Assange joined them, in an odd day of reactions.

The WikiLeaks founder said the question of surveillance abuses by states and tech companies was “something that I and many other journalists and civil libertarians have been campaigning about for a long time. It is very pleasing to see such clear and concrete proof presented to the public.”

Assange told Sky News that Snowden was “in a very, very serious position, because we can see the kind of rhetoric that occurred against me and Bradley Manning back in 2010, 2011, applied to Snowden”.

Following the Cablegate exposures in 2010 there were calls from some US politicians for Assange to be tried for treason and even assassinated. Manning, who has admitted leaking classified US military secrets to WikiLeaks, is on trial facing 21 charges, including “aiding the enemy”.

Now, news talk shows are filled with analyses of what damage has been done, and what abuses exposed by all this. Like the existence of the Prism program and the facility in Utah to house all the data collection and storage. Der Spiegel says it has “implications for the world.”

South of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, the National Security Agency (NSA), a United States foreign intelligence service, keeps watch over one of its most expensive secrets. Here, on 100,000 square meters (1,100,000 square feet) near the US military’s Camp Williams, the NSA is constructing enormous buildings to house superfast computers. All together, the project will cost around $2 billion (€1.5 billion) and the computers will be capable of storing a gigantic volume of data, at least 5 billion gigabytes. The energy needed to power the cooling system for the servers alone will cost $40 million a year.

Former NSA employees Thomas Drake and Bill Binney told SPIEGEL in March that the facility would soon store personal data on people from all over the world and keep it for decades. This includes emails, Skype conversations, Google searches, YouTube videos, Facebook posts, bank transfers — electronic data of every kind.

(They told Spiegel this in March. This is June. Was there follow up? Anybody ask any questions? This may have just erupted, but clearly people knew a lot before now.)

“They have everything about you in Utah,” Drake says. “Who decides whether they look at that data? Who decides what they do with it?” Binney, a mathematician who was previously an influential analyst at the NSA, calculates that the servers are large enough to store the entirety of humanity’s electronic communications for the next 100 years — and that, of course, gives his former colleagues plenty of opportunity to read along and listen in.

This is only beginning to break open across the media. And they’ve grown sadly and notoriously slow to do their job of investigative journalism and asking the right questions and reporting details accurately and without bias.

For now, it’s interesting to see the hand-wringing consternation over what Snowden did and whether he’s a hero or traitor (a question which has already become cliche by Monday). More will come out, investigations will follow.

But for now, the good I take from this is that people are wrestling with the difference between right and wrong, and ends justifying means, and human rights deprived, and the abuse of power and authority and the rule of law. Those questions transcend politics. And ultimately pre-date the State. The sooner we work this out the better.

Tagged with: • • • • • •
Jun 06

Obama administration is losing credibility

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Or as the New York Times put it, at least briefly, “the administration has now lost all credibility.” Before they moderated their criticism. Though even moderated, it was still criticism of the obvious egregious abuse of power.

Here’s the report on the story on the abuse. Which was actually an editorial by the NYT board on ‘President Obama’s Dragnet,’ the text of which Frank Weathers provides in part.

Within hours of the disclosure that the federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.

Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability. The administration has now lost all credibility. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the 9/11 attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.

Based on an article in The Guardian published Wednesday night, we now know the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency used the Patriot Act to obtain a secret warrant to compel Verizon’s business services division to turn over data on every single call that went through its system. We know that this particular order was a routine extension of surveillance that has been going on for years, and it seems very likely that it extends beyond Verizon’s business division. There is every reason to believe the federal government has been collecting every bit of information about every American’s phone calls except the words actually exchanged in those calls.

A senior administration official quoted in The Times offered the lame observation that the information does not include the name of any caller, as though there would be the slightest difficulty in matching numbers to names. He said the information “has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats,” because it allows the government “to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States.”

That is a vital goal, but how is it served by collecting everyone’s call data? The government can easily collect phone records (including the actual content of those calls) on “known or suspected terrorists” without logging every call made. In fact, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was expanded in 2008 for that very purpose. Essentially, the administration is saying that without any individual suspicion of wrongdoing, the government is allowed to know who Americans are calling every time they make a phone call, for how long they talk and from where.

This sort of tracking can reveal a lot of personal and intimate information about an individual. To casually permit this surveillance — with the American public having no idea that the executive branch is now exercising this power — fundamentally shifts power between the individual and the state, and repudiates constitutional principles governing search, seizure and privacy.

The defense of this practice offered by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is supposed to be preventing this sort of overreaching, was absurd. She said today that the authorities need this information in case someone might become a terrorist in the future. Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the vice chairman of the committee, said the surveillance has “proved meritorious, because we have gathered significant information on bad guys and only on bad guys over the years.”

But what assurance do we have of that, especially since Ms. Feinstein went on to say that she actually did not know how the data being collected was used? The senior administration official quoted in The Times said the executive branch internally reviews surveillance programs to ensure that they “comply with the Constitution and laws of the United States and appropriately protect privacy and civil liberties.”

That’s no longer good enough.

Frank’s Patheos blog post has the links and commentary, and it’s about time this is all said. That the Times is saying it is a sign of, well, the times. Daily Beast columnist and USA Today contributor Kirsten Powers has been a bellwether. She posted this on her Facebook page Thursday:

Why is it that it seems like almost every important thing we learn about the Most Transparent Administration in History is because of leaks?

Liberal commentators are now calling out the administration. It’s about time.

Tagged with: • • •
May 30

Gosnell forced recalculation of missing children

Abortion, Law, Media, Society No Comments »

Among other things the trial of notorious abortionist Kermit Gosnell did to jolt cultural awareness of what abortion is and does, it gave us a whole new sense of how we count children who have gone missing in America.

Just after the three young women abducted a decade ago by Ariel Castro were rescued, without neighbors ever realizing they were there and experts not seeing enough evidence to trace their existence, I interviewed International Child Legal Counsel Liz Yore on the topic of missing children and ways to protect our children better. Since then, she’s posted some searing insights on her blog, namely ‘The Other Missing Children.’

In the early 1980s, child advocates jumped on the missing children bandwagon mobilizing the country to search for abducted children. The spate of missing children cases began with the Etan Patz disappearance, and then the Adam Walsh abduction and murder.  The missing children movement mobilized a nation to look for missing children and demand tougher state and federal laws.

Liz does us a favor recalling our history on this, the urgent need and the response.

As a nation, we rejoiced over the recovery and return of missing children and mourned over the death of a missing child. With every high profile case, a new federal law was named after a missing child. First came the Adam Walsh Act, then the Jacob Wetterling Act, and Jessica’s Law, and the Amber Alert, to name just a few…The technology age ushered in new inventions to assist in finding missing children. The Amber Alert flashed missing child alerts on electronic highway billboards along with mobile phone alerts warning the public of an abduction in progress…

The world watched with admiration as America demonstrated that it takes missing children seriously and the statistics proved it. Since the days of milk cartons, the recovery rate of missing children rose from 62% to 97%. But there are millions more missing children, who went missing without a trace or even a mention. They weren’t seen on flyers or on Amber Alerts. They simply disappeared. They had no name. We never saw their faces. Until Now.

Until the 2010 Philadelphia Grand Jury issued its 261 page report on the Kermit Gosnell Abortion Mill on Lancaster Avenue replete with photos of the carnage of aborted babies.

For the first time, the nation saw some of the missing children from an abortion; the babies that survived the extraction and abduction by the abortionist’s instruments and toxic solutions. The photos showed the faces of babies inconveniently born alive from failed abortions. Children born breathing, squirming, crying, and moaning. The photos showed the babies whose spines were snipped so that they would stop breathing and go missing forever. A recent 2010 report found that 1200 babies are born alive from a botched abortions and are left to die or killed in the clinic. Finally, a Grand jury displayed the photos of fully formed babies with their faces were clearly displayed in the Gosnell clinic. The Grand Jury took another step; they named these babies; Baby A, through Baby G.

The Grand Jury performed a noble feat. They showed the photos of the babies born alive. The evidence required that they named the victim babies, Baby A-Baby G. To charge a crime, you must name the victim. The profound, but simple act of showing the photo of the face of a born alive baby and naming the newborn acknowledged its existence, its dignity and its humanity.

Every child aborted had a face, a body, a unique set of characteristics, an identity. Seeing the faces and bodies of babies killed in late term abortions forced us to consider what abortion does in any stage of pregnancy. The Gosnell trial forced us to face their humanity.

The grim and staggering statistics of the missing babies from abortions point to an unimaginable failure to protect and recover over 1 million missing children per year and over 54 million gone missing since the Roe decision. Some survive but seldom are they recovered and rescued. So much for America’s missing child success rate.

The curtain has finally been pulled back after 40 long years…

Elie Wiesel, the holocaust survivor understands the power of photos to breakdown the denial of a slaughter. When Wiesel visited the D.C. Holocaust Museum and looked at the photos of the dead bodies of the children piled up in mounds in the concentration camps, he said, “ So many children, I now see the pictures of the children. Why the children? My God, why the children?”

Yes, so many children gone missing from our nation. Surely, 54 million missing from abortion will shock the conscience? They are gone forever. No missing children posters will help find them. No Amber Alert will flash on the highway that they are missing.

Will America pass a law to protect Baby A, like it did in honor of Adam Walsh? Will we honor them on May 25th, Missing Children’s Day? Or will we keep pretending that these babies aren’t missing?

My sense is that this watershed moment won’t allow us, collectively, to go back. Liz told me “it’s time for a paradigm shift.” It’s time to be honest about what abortion is and does. Gosnell’s conviction of killing babies only begins to tell that truth, finally using honest language. Babies have been killed. Gosnell got life. His victims never had that chance.

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May 23

What is ‘wrong’ at the IRS?

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It’s like asking congressional interrogators to define the meaning of ‘is’. In the growing IRS scandal under congressional investigation, the IRS chief who has the most to say refuses to say anything other than that she did nothing wrong.

Which made me wonder if she really believes that, in the increasingly hostile political climate in which, for some, the end justifies the means, and the end is to advance an agenda by means of targeting and crushing opponents of it. The question of what behaviors are ‘wrong’ in this culture is certainly treated with aggression because relativism prevails. But saying something is not wrong doesn’t make it right, it’s just a denial of a truth.

Congressional investigators are trying to get at the truth of the IRS targeting scandal, and they’re growing increasingly frustrated.

As the House Oversight Committee commenced its hearing on the IRS Scandal Wednesday, it was clear that Democrats, visibly angered by the decision of IRS Exempt Organizations director Lois Lerner to answer questions, turned on the agency. Lerner invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

In a fiery statement, Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-MA), cited the State Department’s annual human rights report, and the practice of tyrannical regimes that enact human rights on paper but fail to honor them in practice. He compared the conduct of the IRS in singling out Tea Party and conservative groups to those regimes.

The witnesses were then sworn in. Lerner read an opening statement in which she denied providing false information to the committee or any other body: “I have not done anything wrong,” she said defiantly.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) demanded that Lerner be made to testify, arguing that she had waived her Fifth Amendment rights by telling her side of the story. In a courtroom, he said, she would have been regarded as having waived her rights–and, he pointed out, Ranking Member Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) had said he wished to conduct the hearings like court proceedings.

Actually, Lerner showed some of her sense of right and wrong by starting to tell her side of things in that opening statement, and then claiming the Fifth so as not to have to tell more. Which means she not only likely waived her Fifth Amendment rights as Gowdy and others claim, but she may have exposed herself to contempt charges, says noted legal expert Alan Dershowitz.

Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz said Wednesday that Lois Lerner, the IRS official who oversaw exempt organizations during the admitted targeting of conservative political groups, could be held in contempt and even go to jail after her appearance at a congressional hearing earlier in the day.

Lerner made a brief opening statement — insisting she had “done nothing wrong” — before invoking her Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate herself. Some legal scholars, including Dershowitz, have said that in giving the opening statement, Lerner may have waived her Fifth Amendment protections.

“She’s in trouble. She can be held in contempt,” Dershowitz told “the Steve Malzberg Show” on Newsmax TV. “Congress … can actually hold you in contempt and put you in the Congressional jail.”

Dershowitz, who helped advise O.J. Simpson’s defense team, said Lerner “should never have been allowed” to make her opening statement.

“You can’t simply make statements about a subject and then plead the Fifth in response to questions about the very same subject,” Dershowitz said. “Once you open the door to an area of inquiry, you have waived your Fifth Amendment right… you’ve waived your self-incrimination right on that subject matter.”

That’s clear to someone who knows right from wrong.

Tagged with: • • • •
May 16

IRS targeting scandal grows, among others

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There is bi-partisan outrage over the widening scope of the revelation that the powerful Internal Revenue Service has been targeting groups said to be conservative for the past couple of years. But the IRS target list was much wider than that, and the agency’s treatment of these groups and citizens is both shocking and disturbing.

Even the president said so. That NBC News article asks five very good questions, most of which are as yet unanswered.

The president’s claims of not knowing what the IRS was doing until he heard it in the news was surreal, but so is this whole drama. By the time he addressed it, the president said “if this is true…” when it was actually admitted to by the IRS the previous Friday. He’s got some catching up to do. Like what the IRS was putting these groups through in information gathering, such as records of all direct and indirect communications that group had made.

“‘Direct and indirect communications’ is profoundly chilling of First Amendment rights, ” said David French, senior counsel for American Center for Law & Justice, which has been representing 27 conservative organizations met with IRS inquisitions. “It’s so vague as to be impossible to comply with.”

They wanted to know everything about all members of the organization, present and past employees and their relationships. They wanted documentation of any interaction with the press, any, whether interviews, press releases or letters to the editor, among others. Read the whole post itemizing only some of the unbelievable and harassing demands of the federal agency, with screen shots of their menacing forms.

At first, it was allegedly Tea Party and other conservative groups singled out for this harsh treatment. Then others started coming to light. This pro-life group claimed they were targeted.

Shinn launched Cherish Life Ministries, a separate organization, to offer help to a coalition of churches that supports mothers struggling with unexpected pregnancies, promotes abstinence and advocates for an end to abortion in the community, state and nation.

“Our goal is to assist churches, organize and support a life ministry in defense of life and help function as an outreach to people struggling with unwanted pregnancies in the local community,” the site states.

Education materials are offered.

But Shinn said the IRS contacted him regarding his application for nonprofit status, and was told he didn’t qualify.

“The representative was telling me I had to provide information on all aspects of abortion, I couldn’t just educate the church from the pro-life perspective,” he said. “Every time I pressed her on this issue and asked her to clarify her position, she would state that it wasn’t what she was saying, and then, she would repeat it almost the same way.”

And it went on.

On to a prominent Catholic professor who was afraid to share her experience publicly until now.

In the midst of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) scandal, individuals and groups, alike, are continuing to come forward with ever-startling allegations. On Wednesday, Dr. Anne Hendershott, a devout Catholic and a noted sociologist, professor and author, exclusively told TheBlaze that she believes she may have been one of the IRS’s targets.

According to Hendershott, the IRS audited her in 2010 and demanded to know who was paying her. While they did not ask directly it seemed as though the agent wanted to know about the leanings of these particular organizations.

It all started with a phone call she received at her home in May of that year — a call during which Hendershott was told she would be audited. A letter that followed on May 19, 2010 solidified the IRS’s request to meet her in person two months later in July. While IRS investigations are certainly not uncommon occurrences, the professor believes that the situation surrounding hers was more-than-curious.

“The IRS calls my house and says … ‘I just wanted to let you know that we’re going to be auditing your business’ and I said ‘My businesses?’ and he said, ‘You know the expenses you take off for writing,” the academic recalls.

Her story gets more and more bizarre as it goes, but that call should have been a flag. The IRS does not call to notify people of their scrutiny. It comes in a letter. But that’s a small detail in such an onslaught of information coming to light about what that agency has been doing to people for years.

This all came out, by the way, just after the congressional hearing on Benghazi, another growing scandal for this administration. Former senator Fred Thompson is one of many voices calling for a special committee to investigate. Attention on that hasn’t gone away, but it has certainly been diverted by that IRS revelation.

As this breaking news continued getting breaking updates, other breaking news broke in on it to reveal more scandals. Like the Justice Department seizing phone records from the Associated Press, without the AP knowing about it.

The Associated Press on Monday said the U.S. government secretly seized telephone records of AP offices and reporters for a two-month period in 2012, describing the acts as a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into news-gathering operations.

AP Chief Executive Gary Pruitt, in a letter posted on the agency’s website, said the AP was informed last Friday that the Justice Department gathered records for more than 20 phone lines assigned to the agency and its reporters.

“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters,” Pruitt said in the letter, which was addressed to Attorney General Eric Holder.

And this has all continued to grow.

There’s so much to say about this breach of public trust, the breach of federal powers and authority and of constitutional rights. There’s much to say about responsibility and transparency, which the American people were promised in this administration. And about its odd habit of disclaiming any knowledge of these things until they hear it from the press.

But sometimes comedians find a pithier way to say things, like The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart did here.

And citizens who take to the Facebook forum to express their concerns. Like this man, after hearing enough about the abortionist’s ‘house of horrors’ and the government scandals rolling out on the heels of that abortion trial verdict.

I don’t want revenge, I want justice. Justice in the Benghazi case, justice for SEAL Team 6, justice in the IRS scandal, justice in the Gosnell case, justice for all the babies killed in their mother’s womb. I want the truth to prevail. I am so tired of the lying, cheating and stealing. What has happened to our humanity? I know who wins in the end, but how bad does the battle have to become before we get there?

It seems pretty bad right now to a lot of people. But the good news is, it’s coming to light.

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May 13

Gosnell convicted, Castro charged: murder of babies

Abortion, Culture, Law, Society No Comments »

Mother’s Day just passed with fair weather and loving celebrations in much of the country. But it was surrounded by a perfect storm.

I was already saying that about the five week trial of notorious abortionist Kermit Gosnell and the grisly details of his ‘house of horrors’ revealed in the grand jury report, along with the Live Action undercover videos of other abortion clinics doing late-term abortions, together with the president’s untimely and ill-advised address embracing Planned Parenthood and pledging his fidelity to the abortion giant.

But that was before the three young women held captive for a decade were discovered and rescued, and the horrific details of their captivity became known. So while the Gosnell jury was in the second week of deliberation over such inhumane treatment of women and their babies, the facts about Cleveland abductor/captor Ariel Castro and his own house of horrors started coming out and we learned about his inhumane treatment of young women and the babies they conceived by him, and it was all more than any civilized person could get their mind around.

Which pushed the idea of brutality against innocent human life to the front of our minds and the front page of the news. It’s about time. And especially timely in the week leading up to the celebration of Motherhood.

The CNN report that Ariel Castro repeatedly punched one of his pregnant victims in the stomach to force the miscarriage of an ’aborted fetus’, and that this happened over several different pregnancies, was breathtakingly shocking. That it would lead to murder charges was jaw-dropping. Such a charge meant the declaration, much less recognition, that  ‘terminating a fetus’ is murder. Even though it hinged on the will of the mother, or maybe especially so. Because it focused the attention on what it means to end a human life, and it was a watershed moment.

As we awaited the jury’s verdict in the Gosnell trial, the newly incarcerated Castro faced aggravated murder charges for terminating pregnancies.

Based on the facts of the case, authorities said they intend to seek charges not only for the sexual assaults endured by the victims, but also “each act of aggravated murder he committed by terminating pregnancies.”

That alone is a startling statement. Think about what “each act of aggravated murder he committed by terminating pregnancies” means.

We were already thinking about the idea of murdering babies in the Gosnell trial before this news broke. Monday, the Gosnell trial jury returned their verdict.  Guilty, of murdering babies.

A 72-year-old doctor whose abortion clinic was described by prosecutors as a “house of horrors” was convicted of first-degree murder in the deaths of three babies born alive.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell was acquitted of killing a fourth baby during a late-term abortion in a dirty clinic that served mostly low-income women and teens, and went years without a state inspection.

There’s a saga contained within those two sentences. The horribly filthy clinic required that the grand jury visiting it prior to the trial wear Hazmat suits. How was it not shut down by authorities a long time ago? Because a long time ago state authorities stopped inspecting it, a nationwide problem with abortion clinics. And note that this ‘house of horrors’ served mostly low-income women, minorities and minors. It was far worse than despicable.

Prosecutors said Gosnell delivered the babies alive and killed them by cutting their spines with scissors.

He was also convicted of manslaughter for the death of one of the women who suffered terribly at the hands of this abortionist.

The verdict does not satisfy all critics. Some time before the decision was announced, Pastor Luke Robinson, who was keynote speaker at the 2012 March for Life, told The Washington Times, “The whole health department of Pennsylvania should be on trial for allowing these atrocities.”

Law enforcement officials raided Gosnell’s abortion business in 2010, believing he merely ran a “pill mill,” dispensing prescriptions for narcotics to make a quick buck. What they found shocked and nauseated them.

Inside his “house or horrors,”…they found unsanitized equipment that transmitted STDs between patients, urine- and blood-soaked recliners for post-abortion “recovery,” and dismembered fetal body parts…

The violations filled a 250-page Grand Jury Report.

During his closing argument, Cameron dramatically asked Gosnell, “Are you human?”

The atrocities unfolded with the tacit permission of numerous levels of authority in the government, as well as within the health care and abortion industries.

It has caused some prominent or high-profile ‘pro-choice’ advocates to reconsider their beliefs, starting from their very premise, and the idea of what abortion is.

And then there are entrenched abortion defenders, as this CNN piece reveals. They admit the Gosnell case is terrible…

But that doesn’t mean it sets a precedent, CNN legal analyst Paul Callan said.

“The testimony in this case was so graphic and so horrific. It was described literally as a house of horrors taking place in this Philadelphia clinic,” Callan said. “So I think that most objective observers will say that ultimately this will be an isolated case, hopefully, and that it’s simply a case where prosecutors had to act. It had nothing to do with being pro- or anti-abortion.”

Yes, it did. And no, it wasn’t an isolated case. The two are related, as the recent Live Action undercover videos from several abortion clinics reveal. Gosnell was no aberration.

We have arrived at a point where we’re not only reconsidering the reality and terminology of abortion, but the realities of human life itself. And the importance of maternity to a woman’s identity.

Some mothers have become used to apologizing for “just” being stay-at-home moms. At social gatherings, a woman can be introduced as a mother only to receive the stunningly obtuse follow-up question, “Do you work?”

Women representing different strands of feminist thought, including those who distance themselves from any type of feminism, struggle with this tension. I had a unique experience of this several years ago, attending a conference on maternal feminism at Barnard College in New York. Participants were challenged to see if they could agree that, for many women, maternity is a defining part of their identity.

We are at a defining moment. The civil rights movement has extended into today’s pro-life movement and it just gained more ground by fate or providence than it could have by addresses and marches and witnesses, as much as they have continued to advance the cause of human life and dignity. That it happened by horrible high profile crimes against humanity was astonishing and unforeseen. But not unimaginable after forty years of experiencing the logic of abortion carried out, and what it really was all along.

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May 06

Gosnell uncovers what Roe wrought

Abortion, Culture, Law, Media, Politics, Society No Comments »

And undercover videos show Gosnell is no ‘aberration.’ Some honest advocates of ‘choice’ are seriously reconsidering their whole premise and belief system in light of recent news. While some ‘abortion rights’ activists are coming unglued over these revelations.

Here’s the latter case in point. Watch the video. Listen to the video exchange, and the studio exchange, which isn’t really an exchange at all. There’s no disputing what the Gosnell trial reveals about the logic of abortion. There’s no disputing what the Live Action video reveals. But Tamara Holder disputes alright, though not with reason and logic and the art of debate.

Over the past few years, I’ve seen Tamara Holder on television news shows many, many times engage in lively and sometimes heated panel discussions of politics and policy, and she tends to be very committed to liberal causes and positions. Which is fine. Let there be reasoned debate of each position.

But in this video with Lila Rose of Live Action, Holder comes undone in every way, visibly in her demeanor and body language  and verbally in the language she used to flail at the revelations coming out about abortion clinics and a more- widely-prevailing-than-we-knew attitude toward babies who survive abortion attempts as something less than human life worthy of rights and protection.

Even when Rose simplifies it to the fundamental question of whether they couldn’t find common ground agreement on protecting tiny infants who emerge still squirming and struggling for life, Holder devolves to the angry ad hominem attack on Rose and not her argument, nor on the content of her undercover video. It was ugly, and revealing.

That was after the second video was released. There’s a new one since then, and some call it more shocking. How can we measure such degrees of inhumanity?

For weeks now, during and after the Gosnell trial, ‘Democratic strategist’ and ‘liberal news contributor’ Kirsten Powers has been writing about the trial in USA Today and The Daily Beast agonizing over what we have allowed in social policy on abortion and facilitated by the language of choice, and covered up by a complicit media unwilling to report on any news story that runs counter to the narrative that abortion on demand at all times is what women want, need and deserve.

Thank God Kirsten Powers was noticed by some big media people who were willing to start paying attention earlier than the rest, and follow an idea through to its logical conclusions. Here’s her latest column.

Abortion rights advocates have argued that there is nothing to see here. Move along. This is what illegal abortion looks like, they say.

But Gosnell’s clinic was not illegal. It was a licensed medical facility. The state of his clinic was well known: there were repeated complaints to government officials and even the local Planned Parenthood. He wasn’t operating under the radar but in plain sight, and he received referrals from abortion clinics up and down the East Coast. Gosnell performed plenty of abortions within the 24-week limit in Pennsylvania and worked part time for a National Abortion Federation–accredited clinic in Delaware.

The woman Gosnell is on trial for allegedly killing, Karnamaya Mongar, perished during a legal abortion while she was 19 weeks pregnant. Gosnell was not forced to operate in the dark because of anti–abortion rights regulations. It’s the opposite: he was able to flourish—pulling in $1.8 million a year—because multiple abortion rights administrations decided that to inspect his clinic might mean limiting access to abortion. It’s all in the grand jury report, if you don’t believe me.

I’ve linked to that grand jury report multiple times, and hope people will confront it, especially people who consider themselves pro-choice.

One of the bodies discovered in the raid of the clinic was of a 22-week-old baby with a surgical incision on the back of her neck, which penetrated the first and second vertebrae. The only thing that would make her death illegal would be if Gosnell failed to finish her off in her mother’s womb.

Does that statement make you uncomfortable? Good.

What we need to learn from the Gosnell case is that late-term abortion is infanticide. Legal infanticide. That so many people in the media seem untroubled by the idea that 12 inches in one direction is a “private medical decision” and 12 inches in the other direction causes people to react in horror, should be troubling. Indeed, Gosnell’s defense attorney Jack J. McMahon has relied on the argument that Gosnell killed the babies prior to delivering them, therefore he is not guilty of murder. His exact words were: “Every one of those babies died in utero.”

Gosnell is accused of aborting infants past the 24-week limit in Pennsylvania. But those same deaths – if done in utero – would have been perfectly legal in many states with sometimes abused health exceptions, which can include the elastic category of “mental distress.

The New York Times reported that MacMahon argued: “Because the women were given injections of the drug digoxin, which causes ‘fetal demise,’ any postdelivery movements were involuntary spasms.” The Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney, who attended the trial, reported that McMahon argued: “The purpose of the shot…is to kill the baby so that it will not be a live birth.”

This is, finally, where the rubber meets the road. Keep going.

I cannot legitimately say I am a person who cherishes human rights and remain silent about our country legally endorsing infanticide.

Which, listeners of mine on radi have pointed out to me in emails, is too remote a name for what it is, the murder of an infant. True.

We live in a country where if a six-months-pregnant woman started downing shots of vodka in a bar or lit up a cigarette, people might want her arrested. But that same woman could walk into an abortion clinic, no questions asked, and be injected with a drug that would stop her baby’s heart.

Just watch those Live Action undercover videos to see what drugs are injected into a pregnant woman to stop her baby’s heart. And other ways they do procedures that assure ‘fetal demise.’

I’ll put my cards on the table: I think life begins at conception and would love to live in a world where no women ever felt she needed to get an abortion. However, I know enough people who are pro-abortion rights—indeed, I was one of them for most of my life—to know that reasonable and sincere people can disagree about when meaningful life begins.

I will, respectfully, take issue here with Kirsten Powers on the subject off “when meaningful life begins,” starting with ‘who decides?’ and ‘what do you mean by “meaningful life”, much less the question of when that begins.

They also can disagree about how to weigh that moral uncertainty against a woman’s right to control her body—and her own life.

I take exception to this as well, since the woman’s body is one thing, but when she is pregnant the doctor has two patients, and she is carrying within her womb a separate, unique, whole and complete human being with her or his own DNA, already fully in existence. So a woman can do with her body what she morally decides is best, but another human being is present by design of human procreaction, and her decision over her body affect the well-being of that other human body and her or his own life.

I have only ever voted for Democrats, so overturning Roe v. Wade is not one of my priorities. I never want to return to the days of gruesome back-alley abortions.

In case you missed this in an earlier post, Kermit Gosnell was a back-alley abortionist, who Roe ensconced in his own clinic. The clinic Pennsylvania authorities dubbed a ‘house of horrors.’

So this gets down to the anguish of reasoning through the obvious which forces confrontation with accepted beliefs.

But medical advances since Roe v. Wade have made it clear to me that late-term abortion is not a moral gray area, and we need to stop pretending it is. No six-months-pregnant woman is picking out names for her “fetus.” It’s a baby. Let’s stop playing Orwellian word games. We are talking about human beings here.

Finally. The awareness comes. Prof. Robert George helps focus that reasoning process.

I just finished watching the Fox News special “See No Evil” on abortionist Kermit Gosnell, who is on trial in Philadelphia for multiple murders and other crimes. Gosnell can’t understand how it can be that he is facing prison and possibly even the death penalty for killing the babies whose necks he snipped after they “precipitated” (i.e., emerged from the womb.) The women who came into his clinic came in to have the babies they were carrying killed. That was the point of the exercise. “Terminating” the babies’ lives was the service he offered and performed. Had he killed the babies while they were still in their mothers’ bodies (by, for example, inserting a needle to inject a poison into their tiny hearts) that would not have been a crime. He merely would have been assisting his patients in exercising what the Supreme Court deems a constitutional right. So why, he would like to know, is he being prosecuted for killing the same babies moments later after they precipitated?

I must admit that I am no less puzzled by that question than Gosnell is. How can it be that killing a baby inside the womb is perfectly acceptable while killing the very same baby (or even a baby that is a few days or even weeks younger) outside the womb is first degree murder? Of course, in my view we should not permit the killing of babies inside or outside the womb. A baby’s status as a precious member of the human family, possessing profound, inherent, and equal dignity, does not depend on something as morally arbitrary as his or her location. But if we permit the Gosnells of the world to kill babies inside the womb, it seems odd to charge them with murder for killing them outside the womb. This is especially true in view of the fact that inducing delivery and then killing babies marked for “termination” eliminates the risk to women involved in the common abortion practice of dismembering babies inside the womb and removing their severed body parts.

The whole state of abortion and reality of what Roe wrought becomes clearer with the Gosnell trial revelations, and those coming out of the Live Action video series from abortion clinics around the US.

We’re finally talking about abortion, what we’ve legalized, what we’ve accepted, what we’ve told ourselves and come to believe as a society. Let’s be honest, for crying out loud.

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May 01

Big Abortion gets exposed

Abortion, Culture, Law, Media, Politics, Society No Comments »

Revelations about the abortion industry are coming out at a new pace now and in greater detail than ever. It’s forcing a very public confrontation with the truth about abortion and getting people talking as some never have before. The cover-ups are getting uncovered, and Big Abortion is getting unprecedented exposure.

They got plenty of that at the Democratic National Convention last summer, which celebrated abortion as we’ve never seen in American politics. But that’s the kind of exposure the industry wants. What’s going on now is new for them and the American public and the connected global universe tuned in, and nearly 40 years after Roe, we’re finally talking about and looking at abortion in its raw reality.

It’s been sort of a perfect storm, what’s happened in the past few weeks to precipitate an unprecedented public and even media confrontation with the whole issue of abortion. The trial of infamous abortionist Kermit Gosnell finally made the news when Kirsten Powers, a “Democratic strategist” and liberal commentator started calling out the media on it, and savvy pro-life people launched a grassroots social networking campaign to shame the media into paying attention to crimes against humanity they’d known about for years now on full display in court.

This case took years to come to trial. To call that a travesty is a ridiculous understatement. The authorities in the state of Pennsylvania passed off on checking this and other abortion clinics for years and years. This Atlantic article details it all, from the grand jury report.

Members of Congress heard from their constituents about why Congress was doing nothing to address the abortion scandals and horrors, and a coalition of those members acted on it.

A Planned Parenthood lobbyist testified that the fate of a baby born alive after an abortion attempt is still at the mercy of the woman and doctor who started the process, which is admitting acceptance of de facto infanticide.

The president of the United States addressed Planned Parenthood’s national conference, promised them his fidelity, micharacterized women’s healthcare, and and ended by invoking God’s blessing on the abortion giant.

And then the amazing Live Action investigative team began releasing their new series of undercover videos showing the practice of late term abortion in some clinics, and their inhumane attitude towards what an abortion terminates and what happens if a baby survives still alive. We’re talking about abortion alright, and we need to keep talking about it.

One of the things the Live Action videos showed is that Gosnell is not the exception the abortion industry claimed when they finally couldn’t avoid addressing the horrors of his particular clinic. He’s not an outlier as Planned Parenthood claimed.

Abortion rights advocates have asserted that Gosnell was an “extreme outlier” and opposed legislation to increase regulation of Pennsylvania abortion clinics as they have in other states. But how could they possibly know that this is an aberration?

Last week, Ohio officials shut down an abortion clinic after inspectors found that a medical assistant administered narcotics to five patients, that narcotics and powerful sedatives weren’t properly accounted for, that pharmacy licenses had expired and that four staff members hadn’t been screened for a communicable disease.

This month, a Delaware TV station reported that two Planned Parenthood nurses resigned in protest over conditions at a clinic there. One nurse, Jayne Mitchell-Werbrich, said, “It was just unsafe. I couldn’t tell you how ridiculously unsafe it was.”…

Last month, Maryland officials shut down three abortion clinics, two for failings in their equipment and training to deal with life-threatening complications.

Last year, an Associated Press investigation found that Illinois hadn’t inspected some abortion clinics for 10 to 15 years. After state health officials reinvigorated their clinic inspections in the wake of Gosnell, inspectors closed two clinics, including one fined for “failure to perform CPR on a patient who died after a procedure,” according to AP.

Such problems wouldn’t be a shock to Pennsylvania state Rep. Margo Davidson, the only member of the Democratic black caucus to vote for the abortion-regulation bill passed there. She told me, “We don’t know how many (Gosnells) there are. I’m not trying to overturn Roe v. Wade, but if a woman makes this difficult choice, she should at least be afforded the highest level of care.” She said the choice community knew what was going on and did nothing.

Take note of that. The so-called “choice community knew what was going on and did nothing.” That shouldn’t slip by too easily.

Indeed, the grand jury found that the National Abortion Federation inspected Gosnell’s clinic, refused to certify him, but didn’t tell anyone. Pennsylvania Planned Parenthood representative Dayle Steinberg has admitted that its officials knew the clinic was unsafe after women complained. What did they do? “We would always encourage them to report it to the Department of Health.”

Davidson concluded that for the choice community, “the institution was more important than the individual lives.” Davidson knows firsthand what can happen when people choose to look the other way: Her 22-year-old cousin died after an abortion at Gosnell’s clinic. (emphasis added)

What can happen “when people choose to look the other way.” Choice has consequences. They have to be reckoned with at some point.

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