Posted on May 20, 2013 by Scott Johnson in IRS, Obama Administration Scandals

Where was Obama?

The Wall Street Journal reports that the White House counsel was advised of the Inspector General’s audit findings weeks ago. Doug Ross has compiled a useful IRS scandal timeline into which this latest tidbit fits.

A friend with substantial experience as a chief executive officer looks back on what we have learned to date about the IRS harassment of Obama administration political opponents. He raises the issue of executive responsibility:

Someone needs to call out Obama on the phony claim that he was precluded from being alerted in 2012 because of the investigation. They are hiding behind the existence of the investigation to justify his failure to act. His staff has an obligation to bring to his attention any improper and illegal activities and he has the authority and obligation to act upon hearing of them. Once alerted, and the activities halted, the investigation could proceed unhindered. If Obama’s logic prevailed, the mere initiation of an IG investigation gives you a hall pass to do anything you want until it leaks.

In this case, there is no evidence that the targeting activities were stopped once the IG office began its inquiries. They got the best of all worlds — unhindered political malfeasance in an election year and claims they were powerless to do anything about it. We, of course, know they didn’t want the activities to stop, which explains why they are taking the position that it was “out of their hands.”

UPDATE: My friend writes to specify that he was referring to the June 2012 alert given by the IG to senior Treasury department officials:

Upon hearing of such potential improper activity, the administration had an obligation both to alert his superior and to take immediate action to get it stopped. A simple memo could have been written to halt the activity immediately: “We are concerned improper targeting may be taking place. Please alert us if you are aware of any activity like this occurring. If you have initiated such activity, halt it immediately.”

By neglecting to take action to halt the activity immediately, the administration is guilty of suborning it. Any business executive that caught a whiff of something in his or her business such as bribery, insider trading, or out-of-compliance quality, and delayed halting it, would face legal sanctions.

On a related note, a reader points out the dog that didn’t bark in Doug Ross’s timeline: “One obvious omission from the table of events is a stopped the targeting event, which is one key….Congress does not ask the critical question.”

Posted on by Steven Hayward in Barack Obama, Race and racial bias

Bill Cosby, Vindicated . . . By the Obamas?

Cast your mind back about ten years or so to a series of speeches that got Bill Cosby in a lot of trouble, especially his 2004 speech to the NAACP Awards dinner.  The Cos took aim at dysfunctions in the black community . . . and he was slammed for “blaming the victim” and taking focus away from white racism.  Here’s an extended excerpt:

Ladies and gentlemen, I really have to ask you to seriously consider what you’ve heard, and now this is the end of the evening so to speak. I heard a prize fight manager say to his fellow who was losing badly, “David, listen to me. It’s not what’s he’s doing to you. It’s what you’re not doing. (laughter).

Ladies and gentlemen, these people set, they opened the doors, they gave us the right, and today, ladies and gentlemen, in our cities and public schools we have fifty percent drop out. In our own neighborhood, we have men in prison. No longer is a person embarrassed because they’re pregnant without a husband. (clapping) No longer is a boy considered an embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the father of the unmarried child.

Ladies and gentlemen, the lower economic and lower middle economic people are not holding their end in this deal. In the neighborhood that most of us grew up in, parenting is not going on.  In the old days, you couldn’t hooky school because every drawn shade was an eye. And before your mother got off the bus and to the house, she knew exactly where you had gone, who had gone into the house, and where you got on whatever you had one and where you got it from. Parents don’t know that today.

I’m talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit. Where were you when he was two?  Where were you when he was twelve?  Where were you when he was eighteen, and how come you don’t know he had a pistol? And where is his father, and why don’t you know where he is? And why doesn’t the father show up to talk to this boy?

The Atlanticsummed up the backlash:

The playwright August Wilson commented, “A billionaire attacking poor people for being poor. Bill Cosby is a clown. What do you expect?” One of the gala’s hosts, Ted Shaw, the director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, called his comments “a harsh attack on poor black people in particular.” Dubbing Cosby an “Afristocrat in Winter,” the Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson came out with a book, Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?, that took issue with Cosby’s bleak assessment of black progress and belittled his transformation from vanilla humorist to social critic and moral arbiter. “While Cosby took full advantage of the civil rights struggle,” argued Dyson, “he resolutely denied it a seat at his artistic table.”

Cosby dutifully shut up after this.  So it is with considerable irony that I note both Obamas, in commencement speeches over the weekend, gingerly revisited some of the themes Cosby endorsed.  Here’s Michelle Obama at Bowie State on Saturday:

And as my husband has said often, please stand up and reject the slander that says a black child with a book is trying to act white. Reject that.

Actually I’m not sure how often her husband does say that, but I know that early on in Obama’s presidency I and many others suggested that if he really wanted to make a mark as president, he and Michelle would engage a sustained campaign, along the lines of Nancy Reagan’s “just say no” campaign, to affect the status of the black family in America. President Obama came close to Cosby territory in his commencement speech yesterdayat Morehouse College, Martin Luther King Jr’s alma mater.  A lot of the speech was boilerplate liberal rot as you’d expect, but there was this:

We know that too many young men in our community continue to make bad choices.  And I have to say, growing up, I made quite a few myself.  Sometimes I wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down.  I had a tendency sometimes to make excuses for me not doing the right thing. . .

Nobody cares how tough your upbringing was.  Nobody cares if you suffered some discrimination.  And moreover, you have to remember that whatever you’ve gone through, it pales in comparison to the hardships previous generations endured — and they overcame them.  And if they overcame them, you can overcome them, too.

You now hail from a lineage and legacy of immeasurably strong men — men who bore tremendous burdens and still laid the stones for the path on which we now walk.  You wear the mantle of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, and Ralph Bunche and Langston Hughes, and George Washington Carver and Ralph Abernathy and Thurgood Marshall, and, yes, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

These men were many things to many people.  And they knew full well the role that racism played in their lives.  But when it came to their own accomplishments and sense of purpose, they had no time for excuses.

I wonder whether Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington are really taught well at Morehouse (or at any university these days), and I wish Obama would do more of this kind of thing.  But this is a good start.

Posted on by Scott Johnson in Benghazigate

What about the video?

What is the provenance of the Muhammad video in the Benghazi talking points? Our inability to answer the question is in itself a clue. Steve Hayes follows the paper trail and reconstructs what his reporting has revealed to date in the Weekly Standard article “What about the video?” Steve characterizes the attribution of causal effect to the video a “quadruple bank shot,” but leaves open the question of who was holding the cue. Steve concludes with the questions he started out to answer: “As the top U.S. officials discussed what to include in the talking points that would shape their case to the country on the attacks in Benghazi, the video was absent. Whose idea was it to make it the centerpiece? The Obama administration still has a lot of explaining to do.”

In Steve’s reconstruction, White House national security adviser Ben Rhodes and then-NSC spokesman Tommy Vietor are found in the thick of the relevant deliberations over the talking points emails released last week. On the Panel Plus segment of Fox News Sunday yesterday — found via Brit Hume’s Twitter feed — Karl Rove follows up with his own pointed reading of the talking points emails.

Posted on May 19, 2013 by Paul Mirengoff in Media, soccer

No tears for Piers

In early March, I wrote a post called “Tears for Piers” about the meltdown of Piers Morgan on Fox Soccer Channel as he watched Arsenal, the soccer team he supports, lose to Tottenham Hotspur, the club’s North London rival. In a tirade the sophistication of which failed to meet the standards of a 3:00 a.m. sports call-in show, Morgan castigated Arsenal’s long-time, hugely-successful manager, Arsene Wenger. He concluded by advising the legendary manager to look at himself and admit that he’s no longer the man for the job.

How, you may be wondering, has Arsenal fared under Wenger since Morgan’s ridiculous rant? Quite well, actually.

Since the loss to Spurs, the Gunners have played 11 matches. They have won 9, drawn 2, and lost none, outscoring the opposition 21-5 in the process.

The two draws came against Everton (0-0) and EPL champions Manchester United (1-1). Arsenal had the better of it in both matches. Indeed, Arsenal outshot Man U by a 19-12 and had a majority of ball possession.

But Arsenal’s most impressive result came in the very next match after Morgan’s rant — a 2-0 victory over Bayern Munich in Munich. Bayern is hands down the best team in Europe this year. For example, they thrashed mighty Barcelona by 4-0 in Germany and 3-0 in Spain. Bayern’s only other home loss this season in Bundesliga and European Champions League competition came last October against a strong Bayer Leverkusen team (1-2).

Today, Arsenal capped off its fabulous run by defeating Newcastle United away from home. With that win, Arsenal edged out Tottenham for a place in next year’s Champions League. Wenger has guided the Gunners into that prestigious and obscenely lucrative competition in each of his 16 seasons in charge of the club.

So tonight, his misanalysis of the situation at Arsenal notwithstanding, Piers Morgan must be smiling. And not just because he has been able to parlay his British accent, knee-jerk liberalism, modest intellect, and poor judgment into a prime-time CNN gig with clownish soccer commentary on the side.

Posted on by John Hinderaker in Obama Administration Scandals

How Much Are Obama’s Scandals Hurting Him?

Is Obama being hurt by the scandals that have engulfed his administration? That sounds like a silly question: of course the scandals have damaged his image, thrown his administration off message, weakened his ability to get anything through Congress. Haven’t they?

If you believe the Gallup Poll, the scandals might be a boon to Obama. Currently he sits at 51%/42%, as measured from May 15 through May 17. This represents an improvement. You can see the trend in this graph:

So the great mass of television watchers and supermarket magazine readers are not yet shocked by the depths of the administration’s depravity. To put it mildly.

Scott Rasmussen shows Obama taking a bit of a hit over the last week or so, with his approval/disapproval among likely voters at 49%/49%. (I assume Rasmussen has tweaked his definition of likely voter, now that the Democrats have shown they can turn out non-taxpayers just as though they had a legitimate interest in the proceedings.) Of interest, as always, is Rasmussen’s Presidential Approval Index, calculated by subtracting the number who strongly disapprove of the president’s performance from those who strongly approve. This chart shows Obama’s history with that index:

These data suggest that Obama may have been hurt somewhat by the scandals, but for the most part, the long-term pattern seems to be dominant. Since very early in his administration, a plurality of Americans have strongly disapproved of Obama’s job performance. For almost his term in office, 40% to 45% of likely voters have not just disapproved of Obama, but disapproved of him strongly. That has almost always exceeded, by a considerable margin, the number who strongly approve. But as the 2012 campaign wore on, the number of strong approvers began to rise. This was entirely foreseeable: it represented Democrats coming home to their party’s candidate in the midst of a hotly contested campaign. Those who were willing to tell pollsters that they were strong approvers never did come close to catching up, but it didn’t matter. The lukewarm approvers, loyal Democrats who realized, I suspect, that Obama is a lousy president, but still didn’t want to vote for a Republican, gave Obama his winning margin.

Once the election was past, Republicans, in their usual spirit of generosity, gave Obama a second honeymoon. You can see the sudden (but temporary) drop in strong disapproval immediately after November’s election. Since the election, as one might expect, everyone has been returning to form. The Republicans and independents who disagree with Obama about nearly everything are expressing ever stronger disapproval of his policies, while the Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents who never thought much of Obama, or who are underemployed as a result of his policies, have rapidly fallen away from the “strong approval” category. It seems obvious that before long, the Approval Index will be more or less where it has been for nearly all of Obama’s term in office. In that context, the current scandals certainly could hurt Obama, but at the moment they are being swamped by larger trends–trends, however, that they are likely to reinforce.

It may be futile to look for the effects of any scandal in the first few days or weeks. Certainly Watergate, to take one obvious example, did not hurt Nixon significantly until long after the fact. It is the drip-drip of headlines and revelations over the course of months that makes a scandal debilitating, not the initial revelations. More important, it is the long-term impact in how voters view an administration that matters. For example, Fast and Furious deserved to be a major scandal. But it didn’t resonate with most voters because it didn’t jibe with their image of Barack Obama, and it wasn’t enough, in itself, to change that image significantly. This is why multiple, reinforcing scandals can be so hurtful: they have a better chance of reorienting perceptions of an administration.

So the Benghazi/IRS/AP scandals haven’t had much effect, yet, on the standing of President Obama or his administration with voters. But their potential to do so is clear. A great deal depends on whether the national news media, normally stalwart supporters of the Democratic Party, keep the scandals in the news over the next few months. Right now, I would rate that prospect at even money, at best. Likely as not, news coverage of the scandals will be dominated by speculation about whether Republicans have “overreached,” an obsession that has never been manifested in connection with any Republican scandal.

Posted on by John Hinderaker in History, Photography

Electrifying California

Over a period of decades, Edison Electric Company documented the electrification of southern California in approximately 70,000 photographs. Recently Edison donated or loaned these images to the Huntington Museum, which has now put some of them online. They are historically interesting and, in many instances, aesthetically beautiful. They remind us of the romance of southern California in the 30s, 40s and 50s. Click to enlarge:

I like the sign at this gas station: “Serv-ur-self, we serv Ladies.” Not to mention. of course, the price of the gasoline:

Los Angeles in 1915:

There are plenty of diners in evidence, naturally. This one was taken in 1956:

There are lots of interior photos, too, showing the effects of electrification on the home. Would my wife like this 1935 powder room? Yes:

If you like this kind of thing–and who doesn’t?–there are many more at the link.

Posted on by Paul Mirengoff in Obama Administration Scandals

Obama denies role in government

Andy Borowitz of the The New Yorker provides this somewhat fictitious account of our president’s reaction to the current series of scandals:

President Obama used his weekly radio address on Saturday to reassure the American people that he has “played no role whatsoever” in the U.S. government over the past four years.

“Right now, many of you are angry at the government, and no one is angrier than I am,” he said. “Quite frankly, I am glad that I have had no involvement in such an organization.”

The President’s outrage only increased, he said, when he “recently became aware of a part of that government called the Department of Justice.”

“The more I learn about the activities of these individuals, the more certain I am that I would not want to be associated with them,” he said. “They sound like bad news.”

Mr. Obama closed his address by indicating that beginning next week he would enforce what he called a “zero tolerance policy on governing.”

“If I find that any members of my Administration have had any intimate knowledge of, or involvement in, the workings of the United States government, they will be dealt with accordingly,” he said.