DPGI | Doubleplusgood Infotainment (DPGI) is an observation and rant blog

3 More Reasons to Fear the IRS

As if there were not enough already…

2013: 05/22
CATEGORY: Archives
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Obama’s War on Journalism: ‘An Unconstitutional Act’

The press-punishing, speech-chilling, and unabashedly overreaching actions by the Obama administration against the Associated Press and Fox News Channel’s James Rosen lay bare the essential dynamic between any president and a press that is always more prone to being lapdogs than watchdogs: the president feeds or punishes them as he sees fit, while chanting a bogus rosary about “national security.”

In the case of the AP, the Obama administration secretly subpoenaed phone-call logs and other information from an office where over 100 journalists worked. Officials were on the hunt for the sources that cooperated with the AP on a story about a failed terrorist plot in Yemen. As AP head Gary Pruitt has put it, the administration’s subpoena was “so secretly, so abusively and harassingly and over-broad … that it is an unconstitutional act.” As important, Pruitt says that the subpoena revelation has already chilled even routine news gathering, as government officials have become paranoid—with reason, perhaps—about sharing even banal sorts of information.

To make matters worse in terms of press freedom, there are many reasons to assume the Obama administration is secretly spying on many other journalists and organizations….

2013: 05/22
CATEGORY: Archives
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Democrat raises prospect of special prosecutor for IRS

Abuse of power should be fought in a bi-partisan manner:

A Democrat on the House’s investigative committee raised the specter of a special prosecutor on Wednesday to investigate political targeting of conservative groups at the IRS from 2012.

Rep. Stephen Lynch, Massachusetts Democrat, warned IRS and Treasury Department witnesses before the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform not to stonewall congressional efforts to get to the bottom of the scandal.

“We know where that will lead, it will lead to a special prosecutor. … There will be hell to pay if that’s the route that we choose to go down,” he said.

The Democrat’s reference to a special prosecutor was noteworthy, since the most vocal criticism for the IRS has come from GOP ranks in recent weeks.

Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, California Republican, said Wednesday that the IRS intentionally misled Congress by failing to sound the alarm over political targeting in its tax-exempt division from2012.

He said his committee recently interviewed Holly Paz, a senior IRS official, who said the agency completed an internal review in earlysame thing that an inspector general’s report publicly revealed only this month.

Everyinappropriate criteria used to single out tea party and conservative groups for extra scrutiny “could have and should been a whistle-blower,” Mr. Issa said.

He also accused the Obama administration of placing a “higher priority on deniability than addressing blatant wrongdoing.”

via Washington Times

2013: 05/22
CATEGORY: Archives
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Progressives for Sale: Businesses that donated to CAP benefitted from its research

A liberal think tank with close ties to the Obama administration took money from General Motors and other businesses it did not disclose while campaigning for policies benefiting those companies, according to The Nation magazine.

Members of the “Business Alliance” of the Center for American Progress (CAP) include bailed out car company GM, unsafe Bangladeshi factory utilizer Walmart, and embattled solar energy company First Solar, according to a membership list obtained by the liberal magazine.

via Washington Free Beacon