There are a lot of numbers out there. Some say tea party applications for tax-exempt status averaged 27 months for approval, while applications from liberal groups averaged nine. In one extreme case, according to The Washington Post, the IRS granted the Barack H. Obama Foundation tax-exempt status in a speedy one-month timeframe. Yet some conservative groups waited up to three years, and some still haven't received approval.

But there can be only  one  reason for the stalled-out approval process for conservative groups. The IRS was trying to put them out of business. Thus far, there's not one wit of contradictory evidence.

Think of this: If the IRS wasn't politically targeting conservative groups, why did its leading spokespeople lie? This was not even cognitive dissonance. It was outright lying before Congress. Lois Lerner, a key player in the IRS's tax-exempt division, is being accused by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee of no fewer than four lies. The inspector general's report shows that she knew about the targeting problem in June 2011, but wouldn't admit to it in correspondence with Congress over the next two years.

Then there's former IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman, a Bush appointee. He apparently knew about the targeting in May 2012, but told Congress in August 2012 that he didn't.

Or there's former IRS Acting Director Steve Miller, who was just pushed out. He also knew about the targeting in May 2012, but later refused to admit it to Congress during testimony.

In fact, the whole bloody agency may have known about it on Aug. 4, 2011. According to the Treasury Department IG report, various IRS bigwigs met that day to talk about the conservative-targeting problem. That meeting may have included the IRS's chief counsel; while the IG report says he was at the meeting, the IRS has denied that he was. But if one of his  minions  was at the meeting, the chief counsel would have known about the problem.

And it turns out the Treasury's inspector general, J. Russell George, told senior Treasury officials in June 2012 that he was auditing the IRS's political-organization screening. That means White House appointees in the Treasury, including Deputy Secretary Neal Wolin, were aware of the IRS scandal before the presidential election. According to The New York Times, IG George "did not tell the officials of his conclusions that the targeting had been improper."

No one knows the exact facts, which presumably will come out in the hearings. But this is  important  stuff. It is  conspiracy  stuff.  Criminal  stuff.

We already know that IRS employees gave heavily to Obama in 2008 and 2012, and very little to candidates McCain and Romney. But who was the quarterback in all this? Who was managing the targeting operation in the bowels of the IRS?

It could have been Sarah Hall Ingram. She served as commissioner of the IRS's tax-exempt division between 2009 and 2012. And she got a $100,000 bonus for her efforts. And now -- incredibly -- she's running the IRS's Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) office, leaving her successor Joseph Grant to take the fall. But he just turned tail and resigned.

And now get this: President Obama has named OMB Controller Daniel Werfel acting director of the IRS. And he's only going to serve between May 22 and the end of the fiscal year, which is  Sep. 30.  Are you kidding?

In four months, we're to believe Werfel is going to piece together the lies, finger the quarterback and replace everybody who was involved, not just in the now-infamous Cincinnati office, but in offices in Washington, D.C., two towns in California, and even Austin, Texas. (That's the latest count.) And this guy Werfel is also supposed to manage the agency that is adding Obamacare to its income-tax-collection responsibilities. In  four  months.

Nuts.

An independent special counsel with subpoena power is the only possible solution. This counsel must find out exactly what happened and who was involved, and then come up with a fix so it never happens again. Of course, Obama charged Treasury Secretary Jack Lew with straightening this out. But Lew's an Obama political operative.

By the way, a special counsel will have to do a special investigation, since we're already learning the inspector-general investigation was a very superficial operation. And an  independent  special counsel can investigate any possible White House connections with senior Treasury officials, connections that could lead to the Oval Office.

We may hate the IRS because of its taxing power. We may hate it more because of its new Obamacare power. But it is a massively important government agency. And now we know that it is fraught with corruption and a liberal-left political agenda.

Only an independent special counsel could possibly straighten this mess out.

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To find out more about Lawrence Kudlow and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2013 CREATORS.COM

President Roosevelt used the IRS to intimidate and exact revenge on political enemies. Richard Nixon, JFK and Clinton co-opted the agency into a partisan sledgehammer designed to ruin lives and crush honest political opposition.

John Andrew's 2002 book, "The Power to Destroy," unearths these dank political corpses, destroying whatever naive notions you may have of those storybook figures.

What's most heinous is that a President would use the IRS to intimidate and harass ordinary Americans who believe a smaller, more effective government is best for their country and legally enjoy their constitutional right to assembly, sharing knowledge and education with fellow citizens.

Apparently, that's a serious threat to Mr. Obama.

The idea that a small group of rogue Midwestern agents decided to ruin their careers by illegally targeting nonprofit organizations whose names include the words "Tea Party" or "Patriot" and had a mission of constitutional education is absurd. It's even more absurd when you know the history of former presidents who have misused the IRS combined with the history of President Obama.

Here are some examples of the President's previous duplicitous behavior:

Mr. Obama has often regaled supporters with an emotional delivery of his "Thanks for your vote; I wish I could close Guantanamo" monologue.

Constitutional lawyers have written gigabytes on how Obama can close Guantanamo.

The ways to do it include applying the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, giving the president power to wage war against al-Qaeda and its affiliates. The NDAA authorizes the president to detain enemy combatants and forbids him from transferring Guantanamo detainees to American soil.

The NDAA does not ban the President from releasing detainees. Lawyers have written that section 1028 authorizes him to release them to foreign countries that will accept them. That's all he has to do. It may not be a very bright thing to do, but he can do it.

The President also has the power to end the hostilities with al-Qaeda by declaring our War on Terror with al-Qaeda is over. Ended. Done.

Such a declaration would result in the release of all the Guantanamo prisoners.

Do you think he really believes in the green energy schemes and was tricked by really smart campaign bundlers, or, rather, that he knew all along from government accountants and analysts that these companies were going bankrupt and he just wanted their millions of campaign dollars?

Report after report shows the Obama administration knew these companies were going bankrupt and that some of their technologies would not work. Still, the millions of dollars in bundled campaign contributions from their executives and commissioned venture capital firms flowed into Democratic bank accounts.

Billions of taxpayer dollars then flowed into the green scheme accounts of companies like bankrupt Solyndra, Abound Solar, SpectraWatt and Evergreen Solar.

He has used his executive power to obstruct the investigation into ATF gun-running to Mexican drug lords and is blocking the testimony of a Benghazi whistleblower.

His marketing group, Organizing for America, is engaged in a smear campaign of another Benghazi whistleblower, veteran diplomat Gregory Hicks.

President Obama and Eric Holder have also been caught spying on Associated Press reporters, stealing records of outgoing calls for both the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery.

If you can ignore these behaviors and many more, then perhaps the idea that our President was unaware of his IRS illegally intimidating and harassing innocent fellow Americans is possible.

Perhaps you can also believe he wasn't behind this illegal harassment and intimidation of innocent fellow Americans that just happened to occur during the last Presidential election cycle.

Perhaps.

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© Copyright 2013 Rick Jensen, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Rick Jensen is Delaware's Award-Winning Conservative Talk Show Host on 1150AM WDEL and 93.7FM HD3, Streaming live on WDEL.Com from 1pm — 4pm EST. Contact Rick at rick@wdel.com, or follow him on Twitter@JensenVoiceover.

In the idealistic constitutional fantasies of those who harbor high hopes and short memories, the accumulating effect of the scandals piling up like rotting garbage at the front door of the White House will result in the impeachment and removal from office of Barack Hussein Obama, 44th President of the United States. Despite the dog and pony show Congress will inevitably put on, no such scenario will ever play itself out.

Like Bill Clinton, Obama will never relinquish control of the empire the American people have allowed him to create for himself. And unless the United States Senate magically becomes populated with 67 clones of Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, there will never exist a quorum of statesmen willing to remove the modern day equivalent of what Nixon aide John Dean called “a cancer growing on the presidency.”

While Benghazi-gate is the scandal that could most easily be laid directly at Obama’s feet, the atmosphere created by a huge, out-of-control, left-leaning government (and a president who likes it that way) is symptomatic of why we are experiencing such rapid erosion of our freedom. To utilize the tortured term for political scandal even further, this atmosphere is how we ended up with IRS-gate, AP-gate and who knows what other gates?

Obama was right about one thing: what is needed is fundamental change — and it must start with our federal tax code. The 16th Amendment to the United States Constitution states: “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration.” To those 30 words, over the last century, Congress has added so many thousands of pages of rules, restrictions, regulations, exemptions and officious gobbledygook that we now have a government entity that no one trusts and everyone fears.

Complete and total repeal of the 16th Amendment is the only way to forever drive a stake through the heart of the liberty-sucking vampire known as the Internal Revenue Service. Tinkering around the edges will not suffice. A flat tax will not do it, because the IRS remains behind as the most powerful and odious collection agency on the planet.

America needs the Fair Tax — a national sales tax that replaces all federal taxes on income, including payroll taxes that support Social Security and Medicare.

Space does not permit me to detail the benefits of the Fair Tax. If you are truly interested in it, look it up at www.fairtax.org. Bold, conservative members of Congress like Steve King of Iowa and John Linder of Georgia (the original sponsor of the legislation in the House of Representatives) have been elected repeatedly on its merits.

The Fair Tax would allow each of us to keep every dime we earn. We would then pay a federal sales tax on all new consumer items. You, not your congressman, would decide how much tax you paid. What could you do with the extra funds if you were taking home that gross figure every payday rather than the so-called “net,” which is nothing more than what the federal government allows you to keep?

Picture a trillion dollar anchor being dragged through our economy every year, with half the population having no skin in the game. And we wonder why we are sliding toward banana republic welfare-state status.

Imagine no more April 15th. No more receipts. No more endless forms. No more manipulating your income or outgo to reflect what the feds want you to do. No more undeclared hidden income from shadowy activities. No more playing favorites, deciding who receives or who is denied tax exempt status. No more abuse of a powerful agency by bureaucrats trying to please their tyrannical bosses to punish their political enemies. Imagine not having to tell the government how much you earn, because it is none of their business!

So don’t bother imagining no more Obama. Imagine instead no more IRS. Study the issue and then call your congressman. The will of the people could make this happen.

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Doug Patton describes himself as a recovering political speechwriter who agrees with himself more often than not. His weekly columns are syndicated by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Readers are encouraged to email him at dpatton@cagle.com and/or to follow him on Twitter at @Doug_Patton.

While White House press secretary Jay Carney sneers at the GOP's "obsession" with what went wrong at the besieged Libyan consulate, Obama continues to ply his emptiest talking point. On May 13, 2013, more than eight months after the bloody disaster, Obama snippily reminded reporters that he had told us all back in September that "we would find out what happened, we would make sure that it did not happen again, and we would make sure that we held accountable those who had perpetrated this terrible crime."

Woulda, coulda, shoulda. Justice delayed is justice denied.

A little more "obsession" from this administration with hunting down the jihadist killers would be a good thing. How about a little more anger directed at the perpetrators and a little less rage aimed at the conservative press? Nah. Team Obama seems more singularly focused on blaming its opponents, smearing whistleblowers and deriding those who are trying to hold the president to his words, words, words.

Perhaps with their newfound skepticism toward the lying liars of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the former lapdogs of the White House press corps will start asking questions like this: Where the hell is Sufyan Ben Qumu a.k.a. Abu Sufian bin Qumu?

Qumu, a suspected Libyan Islamic Fighting Group militant with ties to the financiers of the 9/11/01 attacks, was held at Guantanamo Bay for six years. The Bush administration foolishly handed him over to the Gadhafi regime on the promise that he would remain imprisoned. In 2010, Qumu was granted amnesty and released.

Contrary to the delusions of the International Gitmo Bleeding Hearts Fan Club, the supposedly poor and oppressed Qumu did not content himself with writing poetry or farming potatoes. A week after the 9/11/12 attack, the Ansar al-Sharia leader was named a possible chief plotter in the deadly terrorist assault on our consulate personnel, staff and private security contractors in Benghazi. In April, international media outlets reported widely that Qumu had survived an assassination bid.

Two weeks ago, the FBI finally got around to publicizing photos of three individuals at the Benghazi murder scene who are wanted for questioning. Congressional and intelligence sources have said the probe has moved at a snail's pace. There's been a "near total lack of progress," House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers said in December.

It's all par for this administration's foot-dragging course. Remember: The FBI conducted a drive-by investigation last fall, flying in and out of Libya after a paltry 12 hours on the ground. What difference did the phony YouTube narrative plied by U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton and President Obama make? As former deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Tripoli, Greg Hicks testified last week that the damage done was "immeasurable" because it delayed the FBI probe. Classified documents were left unsecured at the compound. Critical time and evidence were squandered.

As Hicks explained, the YouTube fable publicly contradicted Libyan President Mohammed Magariaf, who had immediately reported after the 9/11/12 Benghazi attack that "this was an attack by Islamic extremists." The nonsense YouTube talking points "affected cooperation with the Libyans," Hicks said. "I firmly believe that the reason it took us so long to get the FBI to Benghazi is because of those Sunday talk shows." Meanwhile, the Washington Free Beacon's Bill Gertz reports, Qumu's Ansar al-Sharia goons "continue to operate freely" in Benghazi and spread jihadist ideology.

Instead of keeping as many terror operatives as possible off the streets and out of commission, the Obama administration is once again vowing to shut down Guantanamo Bay. Attorney General Eric Holder, whose former law firm Covington and Burling represented 18 Gitmo detainees demanding freedom, announced "a renewed effort to close Guantanamo" this week. This despite the chilling disclosure by the office of the director of national intelligence that 27.9 percent of the 599 former detainees released from Guantanamo were either confirmed or suspected of later engaging in jihadist attacks. That's a "2.9 percent rise over a 25 percent aggregate recidivism rate reported by the intelligence czar's office in December 2010," according to Reuters.

Closing Gitmo, you should note, just happens to be the top policy goal of the left-wing Center for Constitutional Rights. CCR is the U.S. group of jihadi-sympathizing lawyers who helped spring none other than Benghazi terror plotter Abu Sufian bin Qumu from Gitmo.

Social justice for Qumu and the Gitmo Goon Squad. No justice for the Benghazi Four. When it comes to Obama's vow to hold the killers accountable, there is no there there.

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Michelle Malkin is the author of "Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks and Cronies" (Regnery 2010). Her e-mail address is malkinblog@gmail.com.

COPYRIGHT 2013 CREATORS.COM

While all the so-called “Republican strategists” and conservative pundits debate the depth of the Obama Administration’s “evil deeds,” and while everyone in the conservative blogosphere is screeching “impeachment” at the top of their cyber-lungs, we who possess level heads; who deal in facts and realism instead of emotion and appearance, understand that the probability of impeachment is next to zero. This is because for all the misdeeds and ethical lapses of this administration; with the very serious issues they have exploited for political gain – including those that took place at the expense of American lives and the sanctity of constitutional rights, “high crimes and misdemeanors” have not been executed by Mr. Obama, personally, that anyone can prove.

Additionally, there are two reasons why impeachment would never result in the removal of President Obama from office.

First, we have a Democrat majority in the US Senate. And while impeachment happens in the US House of Representatives, the trial conducted due to impeachment is held in the Senate, presided over by the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. In the end, anyone who believes that a Democrat controlled Senate would vote to convict, thus executing Mr. Obama’s removal from office, is smoking something that is now legal in Colorado.

Second, the Republican establishment and elected leadership would never agree to move on impeachment for fear of losing a messaging battle with the Progressive machine that would leave them with the scarlet letter of “racist” around their organizational neck. Moving on the impeachment of Mr. Obama on charges of “high crimes and misdemeanors” would energize the Progressive base, motivate the race-baiter activists and give the Progressive-sympathetic mainstream media a reason to re-champion Mr. Obama, thus destroying any advantage the GOP may have thought they gleaned from the Obama-induced “scandals.”

And while there are some in this administration that very well should don orange jumpsuits for a period of time, the responsibility of prosecuting these people to conviction is predicated one of two events.

There can be an appointment of a special prosecutor – which requires an appointment of one by...wait for it...US Attorney General Eric Holder. With Mr. Holder’s contempt for Congress and anything not Progressive or “social justice,” and with his track record of biased prosecutions and non-prosecutions, pigs will fly before we see a special prosecutor appointed by Mr. Holder.

Then there is the option of the Department of Justice taking up the prosecution. Again, this would require action on behalf of Attorney General Holder. And again, because he would be – in at least one if not two of the “scandals” – implicated as a “wrong-doer,” well, pigs...wings...you get the picture.

I know, it sounds as if conservatives can’t win for losing. But that’s not the case. There are two opportunities that could not only seal Mr. Obama’s fate, but that could save the United States from one-hundred-plus years of Progressive incremental victories.

First, in light of the fact that the IRS is at the center of a scandal of mammoth proportions, a scandal that reeks of Progressive and/or Chicago-Progressive thug politics, the forces that champion comprehensive and radical tax reform could combine forces to affect true and real reforms in the tax code in either a flat tax, with absolutely no deductions, loopholes or exceptions; or a consumption tax. Either could completely replace the existing Progressive tax code (have you figured out why they call it that yet?) and literally neuter the IRS completely. Truly, it would be just desserts for an agency that has moved from the honest collection of taxes under a dysfunctional and politically charged tax code to a tyrant agency that routinely attacks the innocent, striking fear into the hearts of the law abiding.

But second, and frankly I believe more important, is the opportunity to spotlight the Progressive Movement for the tyrannical, oligarchical elitist, Fabian socialists that they really are; to educate the no- and low-information voters – in real time and with “in-the-news” issues that directly affect them – on how the Progressives actually despise the masses, even as they say they champion the worker (if they really champion the worker how come their signature achievement in Mr. Obama’s tenure – Obamacare – is set to raise the taxes on union health insurance plans in 2018 by 40%?).

If, by the grace of God Almighty, conservatives can dispose of the egos and join in an effort to communicate, if establishment Republicans can lose their penchant for “know-it-all,” “my-way” inside-the-beltway arrogance to provide the national apparatus by which to communicate, and if the TEA Parties can enjoin cohesively with both of the aforementioned to move the message; to educate; to inform the no- and low-information voters, in a non-aggressive and non-inflammatory way – if conservatives of all stripes can craft and move a message that defines the Progressive Movement for exactly who they are and exactly what their goal is for our country, then we have an opportunity to send their movement into a thousand years of darkness.

Imagine.

Of course, to do this would require conservatives to – at least for the moment – work together, something the “too-many-chiefs-and-not-enough-Indians” Conservative Movement does very poorly.

So, Conservatives of all stripes, establishment Republicans and TEA Partiers, it’s the bottom of the ninth and the score is tied. We’re at bat, their pitcher is tired and they have exhausted their bullpen.

How about it?...

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Frank Salvato is the Executive Director for BasicsProject.org. Mr. Salvato is available for public speaking engagements. He can be contacted at contact@newmediajournal.us.

Who would have believed that the continent of Europe, which had not had a major war in nearly a hundred years since Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, would set off two World Wars that were incomparably worse than any wars before, anywhere in the world?

Who would have believed that an authoritarian and militaristic regime in Germany, and a centuries-old despotic dynasty in Russia, would both be toppled -- and later replaced by governments even worse, deliberately slaughtering their own people by the millions?

Even harder to believe would have been a prediction that totalitarian communism, having mismanaged some of the richest natural resources in the world in the Soviet Union, leaving its people with a standard of living far lower than that in Western Europe, would be seen as a model to follow by other nations.

These nations included China, where the rhetoric of Mao's "great leap forward" masked the reality of people literally starving to death by the tens of millions. Meanwhile, Mao was greatly admired by many leading intellectuals around the world, including in Western democracies such as the United States.

What is the relevance of all this today? Few people think that we face dangers of comparable magnitudes. Even with a sluggish world economy, we are still far more prosperous than the people of a hundred years ago. And there has been no major war, anywhere in the world, since World War II.

Yet things looked pretty rosy back in 1913 as well. Europe had an even longer period without a major war than we have had. No one expected an isolated assassination in Sarajevo a year later to set off a chain reaction whose repercussions would reach around the world, with historic consequences.

What can we take away from all this? First of all, the fact that things seem to be going along pretty well does not mean that we can ignore storm clouds on the horizon -- of which there are more today than there were in 1913. Second, the crucial question is whether our leaders have the wisdom, integrity and commitment to avoid being overwhelmed by events.

The key leader in the events that led to the First World War was a man who was chosen -- if that is the word -- by the accident of birth, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. He was a vain and headstrong man pursuing his own vision, heedless of the consequences for the people whose lives were in his hand.

Today, our leader is a man chosen by rhetoric, charisma and symbolism to be President of the United States, who is also vain, headstrong and pursuing his own vision, heedless of the consequences for the people whose lives are in his hand.

Events have already overwhelmed President Obama's foreign policies, most obviously in the Middle East, especially in Libya, Egypt and Syria. But the biggest test is yet to come, as Iran continues to get closer and closer to having a nuclear bomb.

Whatever Barack Obama's words, his deeds have been directed less toward stopping Iran from going nuclear than they have been toward stopping Israel from stopping Iran from going nuclear. Now that this has bought Iran enough time to put some of its nuclear facilities deeper underground, there is a serious question whether Israel is militarily capable of destroying those facilities.

No one can know with certainty why Obama has chosen the path he has chosen. But what seems much more certain is that a nuclear Iran -- the world's foremost terrorist nation -- is a danger that dwarfs the danger from Kaiser Wilhelm II in the First World War or Adolf Hitler in the Second World War.

It took only two nuclear bombs to force Japan to surrender, and the Japanese in 1945 were a lot tougher than Americans are in 2013. It may seem to be unthinkable that the United States would ever surrender, but we have not yet seen New York and/or Los Angeles in radioactive ruins. If fanatics are willing to die in a nuclear war but we are not, what is left except surrender?

Alarmist? Some dangers are worth being alarmed over. Politicians' tendency to kick problems down the road is all the more reason for the rest of us to look ahead before it is too late.

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Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His website is www.tsowell.com. To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2013 CREATORS.COM

Unfortunately, a significant portion of America’s populace was willing to take a chance on the Obama platitudes of collectivism and wealth redistribution. Worse yet, despite the glaring disaster that ensued as a direct result of his policies, at reelection time in 2012, America tacitly chose to accept another four years of the same.

In many ways, it seemed that he had become immune to any consequences for his words and actions. His two nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court, Sonya Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, sailed through the confirmation process with relative ease despite their liberal agenda-driven “credentials,” buoyed only by the contemptible forces of ethnic and gender politics. He has never been held accountable for squandering the nation’s finances in a misbegotten and fraud laden pursuit of a green energy socialist utopia, leaving a trail of billion dollar abuses such as the failed Solyndra enterprise. And the list goes on.

Given these circumstances, it is entirely understandable that conservatives and patriots might be anticipating an Obama day of reckoning from the recent convergence of three major recent scandals, Benghazi, Internal Revenue Service abuses, and Obama Justice Department wiretaps of Associated Press reporters. However, it is far too soon to presume that the game has changed and conditions are now right for justice to prevail over an administration that has flaunted its lawlessness during the past four years with total impunity.

Admittedly, the Benghazi episode vastly eclipses every aspect of Watergate. This is a scandal in which the “cover up” actually began before the main event, and in many ways directly contributed to it. Fears by White House political strategists that the deteriorating situation in Libya might redound negatively to Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, a decision was made to deny the necessary security reinforcements fervently and repeatedly requested by Ambassador Chris Stevens. At the risk of Stevens’ safety, Obama sought to maintain a facade of diplomatic success in the Middle East.

Ever since the September 11, 2012 Benghazi attacks, and continuing to this day, the entire focus of Obama and his underlings, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, has been to deceive the American people and evade culpability for what actually happened and what might have been done to prevent it. Hillary’s now infamous “What difference does it make?” response in last January’s Senate hearing was the most flagrant attempt to make the case that a thorough review of the Administration’s misdeeds is both unnecessary and unproductive.

Yet the reality is quite the opposite. With each passing day, new evidence is uncovered which reveals an abhorrent Administration negligence and indifference to the imminent peril faced by Stevens. With total disregard for him, the White House and State Department were willing to gamble that nothing major would happen which might undercut Obama’s assertions of diplomatic prowess in the Arab world. Even after the Al Qaeda attacks blew that fabrication apart, the sole focus of the Administration has remained on “damage control.”

Each new inquiry results in strangely disconnected stories of what happened on that night and why critically flawed decisions were made. In the most telling contradiction the Administration was ostensibly befuddled for weeks as to actual motivation for the attacks, steadfastly blaming an anti-Muslim video on YouTube as the catalyst of Muslim hostilities until that absurd story fell completely apart. In stark contrast however, those same officials instantly knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that a vigorous United States military response would be futile and therefore ordered American security forces to “stand down” (refuse assistance) despite pleas from the doomed Consulate.

At what seemed the most inopportune moment for Obama, another scandal suddenly erupted. Reports have surfaced from Ohio that various conservative organizations were targeted for harassment and prejudicial treatment by the Internal Revenue Service. Shortly after this news broke, IRS officials made a ridiculous effort to diffuse the controversy by offering an “apology.” Aside from being a tantamount admission of guilt, as a remedy for criminal wrongdoing this effort was obscene. One need only imagine private citizens offering the IRS “apologies” in lieu of tax payments to properly gauge the absurdity of this ploy.

Once again, all official responses have sought to deflect attention from the upper levels of government. And once again, with each new bit of evidence the situation becomes more incriminating to high office holders. Though early accounts described the abuses as occurring at “low levels” of the organization, further investigation has already connected the dots back to Washington. Predictably, those ultimately responsible are in full “cover up” mode.

To the amazement of many, a third scandal has since erupted. It seems that the Justice Department has been spying on members of the Associated Press. As a grotesque violation of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of “unreasonable search and seizure,” this revelation of wrongdoing might seem to thoroughly eclipse all of the others. After all, media complicity is crucial to Obama’s ruse of avoiding accountability for previous assertions, while making new promises that he has no intention of keeping. Without a thoroughly compliant and supportive press, his house of cards would quickly collapse in on itself.

So is this latest disclosure the final straw for his media allies? Or is it something even more sinister. When the Benghazi attack occurred, all media efforts were in complete concert with the White House strategy, which was to suppress any news of the event. Eventually, that effort failed, and in this week’s turbulent congressional hearings, the lid blew off of the Benghazi cover-up. Immediately, attention has been deflected to the IRS scandal, but even before any responsible party could be identified, the entire focus again shifted to the AP. Americans should remember how successfully Hillary Clinton was able to generate a “scandal overload” and by constantly changing the subject, managed to protect the thoroughly compromised administration of her husband, Bill Clinton, from any repercussions for his malfeasance and innumerable violations of the law.

It is not likely that the recent inexplicable chain of events has been completely orchestrated by the Obama White House in order to navigate the gauntlet it currently faces. But neither is it even remotely plausible that media minions and former accomplices in governing agencies are honestly and sincerely “coming clean” at Obama’s expense. In any case, it is dangerously naive to presume that these entities will diligently pursue truth and demand justice. The responsibility to stay on target in the face of Democrat scandal and media bias remains as it has always been, with grassroots organizations and conservatives in the alternative media.

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Christopher G. Adamo is a resident of southeastern Wyoming and has been involved in state and local politics for many years. He writes for several prominent conservative websites, as has written for regional and national magazines. His contact information and article archives can be found at www.chrisadamo.com, and he can be followed on Twitter @CGAdamo.

Now that Tea Party, Patriot, and other conservative groups know that they aren’t alone in receiving prejudicial treatment by the IRS, they are coming forward and providing more details about the reprehensible conduct of this agency. Conservative groups have told the media that the IRS asked for donor lists, Facebook conversations, copies of minutes and notes, and even lists of meeting participants.

“A Politico review of documents from 11 tea party and conservative groups that the IRS scrutinized in 2012 shows the agency wanted to know everything—in some cases, it even seemed curious what members were thinking,” write David Nather, Tarini Parti, and Byron Tau for Politico. “The review included interviews with groups or their representatives from Hawaii, New Mexico, Ohio, Texas and elsewhere.”

“Several of the groups were asked for résumés of top officers and descriptions of interviews with the media. One group was asked to provide ‘minutes of all board meetings since your creation’” (emphasis added). For small groups, such data may not even exist.

“When a Tennessee lawyer asked the IRS for tax-exempt status for a mentoring group that trained high school and college students about conservative political philosophy, the agency responded with a list of 95 questions in 31 parts, including an ultimatum for a list of everyone the group had trained, or planned to train,” reports David Martosko for the UK Daily Mail.

“It ‘should send chills through your spine that the government would ask me to identify those I teach, and to provide details of what I teach them,’” the Founder of Linchpins of Liberty, Kevin Kookogey, told the Daily Mail.

Asking for such comprehensive data from small groups such as Linchpins for Liberty accomplishes several political goals: it discourages donors, it discourages organizations, and ultimately, may cause the organization in question to fold. “Some groups even gave up in the face of the IRS questions,” reports Martosko.

“… Kookogey said a $30,000 grant was canceled as a result of the IRS’s months-long radio silence, when he couldn’t tell his donor that Linchpins had earned its 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status,” writes Martosko. “That money would have made a significant difference to the group, judging from its public filings in Tennessee. In 2011, Linchpins of Liberty reported collecting just $3,460 in contributions, and spending $7,328 on its programs.” Even for larger, established groups, $30,000 in donations can make a significant difference.

Kookogey doesn’t even consider his group a Tea Party or Patriot group. “‘I’m not a Tea Party group. I’m not a Patriot group by name,’ he told NewsChannel 5 in Nashville.”

“One reason that [the IRS is] apologizing right now is that they know the investigative arm is about to take them to task—and there are whistleblowers, too, who know that this has been wrong,” Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) asserted in an interview for Newsmax.

The IRS’ abuses are far reaching and extensive. USA Today reporter Gregory Korte went so far as to state that a “Tea Party moratorium” was in effect for 27 months. “In February 2010, the Champaign Tea Party in Illinois received approval of its tax-exempt status from the IRS in 90 days, no questions asked,” writes Korte. “That was the month before the Internal Revenue Service started singling out Tea Party groups for special treatment. There wouldn’t be another Tea Party application approved for 27 months.”

“For the 296 total political campaign intervention applications TIGTA [Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration] reviewed as of December 17, 2012, 108 had been approved, 28 were withdrawn by the applicant, none had been denied, and 160 were open from 206 to 1,138 calendar days (some for more than three years and crossing two election cycles),” states the IRS report issued Tuesday.

During this time period, IRS official Lois Lerner approved the tax-exempt status for Barack Obama’s half-brother’s Barack H. Obama Foundation in a single month. “Lerner granted the organization a 501(c) determination and even gave it a retroactive tax exemption dating back to December 2008,” reports the Daily Caller.

This is not an outlier. “In that time, the IRS approved perhaps dozens of applications from similar liberal and progressive groups, a USA Today review of IRS data shows,” writes Korte.

Yet the Administration maintains that their actions were not politically motivated. “The selection of these cases where they used the names was not a partisan selection,” said Lois Lerner, director of exempt organizations, reports USA Today. “She said progressive groups were also selected for greater scrutiny based on their names, but did not provide details.”

While the media have found at least three such groups targeted for extra scrutiny, this does not offset the purposeful targeting of conservative groups. As Accuracy in Media earlier reported, 85 of the original 300 such groups contained the words “Tea Party,” “Patriot,” or “9/12” in their names. Those numbers will change now that the total number of such groups is up to 471.

Korte writes that groups such as the following were granted 501c(4) status during the “moratorium:” Bus for Progress, Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, and Progress Florida.

So what exactly happens to this intrusive data once it is collected? This is the same IRS that gave investigative journalism ProPublica access to nine confidential applications of conservative groups still waiting for the exempt status to be approved. “The commendable admission [by ProPublica] lends further evidence to the lengths the IRS went to during an election cycle to silence tea party and limited government voices,” writes Wynton Hall for Breitbart.com.

Attorney General Eric Holder has asked the FBI to investigate this matter. “A federal official who has been briefed on the matter said the investigation could focus on potential violations of civil rights law, including targeting groups based on political affiliation and infringing free speech,” writes Korte for USA Today. “The official, who is not authorized to comment publicly, said authorities could consider possible violations of the Hatch Act, which restricts political activities of government workers.”

“At a bare minimum, those involved with this deeply offensive use of government power have committed a violation of the public trust that has already had a profoundly chilling effect on free speech,” wrote Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) in a letter to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. Rubio had called for Commissioner Miller to lose his job.

It seems that for this scandal, there is bipartisan outrage. Vernon Jordan, a close adviser to President Bill Clinton, said that “He [President Obama] needs to fire somebody. He needs action, not conversation.” Obama was apparently listening to Rubio and Jordan when he fired the commissioner, but it may not be enough.

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Roger Aronoff is the Editor of Accuracy in Media. He can be contacted at roger.aronoff@aim.org. 

Until now.

This past week, we learned that the IRS has targeted for additional scrutiny the tax exemption applications of groups with whose messages it disagrees. We also learned that the Department of Justice obtained the personal telephone records of hundreds of reporters and editors employed by the Associated Press without a search warrant issued by a judge. And during this past week we learned that the White House, the Department of State and the CIA all engaged in a conspiracy of disinformation so that the official version of events of what caused the murders of four Americans at our consulate in Benghazi, Libya, would not impair Obama's re-election campaign in 2012.

The common threads in all of this government secrecy and lying are a general rejection of government's moral obligation to tell the truth, a disturbing yet brazen willingness to evade and avoid the restrictions the Constitution has deliberately built around government, and a glib admission that the government can do as it pleases so long as it can politically get away with it.

The Constitution's Equal Protection Clause requires that the government treat all similarly situated entities in a similar manner. The Constitution's First Amendment prohibits the government from using the speech and expressive activities of persons in America as a basis for the disparate treatment of them.

Thus, on its face -- that is, on the basis of what the IRS has admitted and without any further investigation -- we have violations of these constitutional principles. If the IRS were to examine the applications for tax exemption of Media Matters with the same level of scrutiny as it does with Tea Party Patriots, it would not run afoul of these principles. But Congress has given the IRS broad latitude to scrutinize the behavior of the taxpayers it chooses to scrutinize, and the IRS has given itself authority to probe, prod and plunder wherever it wishes. I say "given itself," because the IRS has rule-making power, which when overlooked by Congress (as is almost always the case) actually serves to enhance IRS powers beyond what Congress permits.

Short of criminal behavior such as bribery or conspiracy, the IRS employees who have singled out applications for tax exempt status for more scrutiny based on anticipated political expression are subject to removal from office, but they cannot be prosecuted or sued. Here again, Congress is to blame, as both Republicans and Democrats have used and abused the IRS to their advantage, and neither party inwardly wants laws that will prevent it from doing so in the future. Is this what you expect of our tax collectors?

The First Amendment also assures the right of professional journalists to seek and protect their sources, and it gives them immunity from government prosecution or retribution for truthfully publishing matters of material public interest, even when it involves information stolen from the government. The Supreme Court taught us this in the Pentagon Papers case.

Moreover, the Fourth Amendment requires that if the government wants private information about who stole its secrets, it needs a search warrant from a judge. But the Patriot Act, which was celebrated by some in the media whose telephone records have since been seized, permits federal agents to write their own search warrants when they seek records from a third party like a telephone company and can claim that pursuit of terrorists is at stake. The Patriot Act makes a mockery of the Fourth Amendment, and the government knows that. When the government chills free speech, we all suffer. Thomas Jefferson preferred newspapers without government to government without newspapers. Whose personal records will the government authorize itself to seize next?

The lesson of Benghazi is that we had no lawful right to interfere in the domestic affairs of the Libyan government. It was unlawful for Obama to bomb Col. Gadhafi without a congressional declaration of war. The organized assault on our consulate was the unintended consequence of us using force to infuse American-style democracy on a people whose culture is unable and unwilling to accept it.

But the president's people were terrified that the murder of our ambassador to Libya during the 2012 presidential campaign might impair Obama's re-election chances. So they and he tried to rewrite history, and the more they and he lied the more they and he needed to lie to cover up their original lies. Would you retain an employee who lied to you about the deaths of innocents and lied more to cover up the original lies?

Now, back to Bush and Obama and the president's job. According to the Constitution, the president's first job obligation is to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. According to the Constitution, that means preserving Americans' freedom first and safety second. Freedom is our natural state and is the ultimate natural right. Safety is a need that we ourselves can provide when unimpeded by the government. If the president keeps us safe but not free, he is not doing his job. Do you know anyone who feels freer or even any safer because the government trampled personal freedoms and so far has gotten away with it?

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Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Judge Napolitano has written seven books on the U.S. Constitution. The most recent is "Theodore and Woodrow: How Two American Presidents Destroyed Constitutional Freedom." To find out more about Judge Napolitano and to read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2013 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO

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Winning elections, after all, is something Barack Obama is good at. He obviously loves campaigning and delivering grand orations to enormous adoring crowds.

He loves it so much that he flew off to Las Vegas to campaign the day after the first murder of a U.S. ambassador in 33 years.

What actually happened in Benghazi was out of sync with the Obama campaign line. Osama bin Laden was dead. Al-Qaida was on the run. The global war on terror -- well, don't call it that anymore.

A deliberate effort to mislead the voters was launched. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, White House press secretary Jay Carney and the president himself talked about a spontaneous protest of an anti-Muslim video -- even though no evidence of that came from Benghazi.

The White House and the State Department altered the CIA's talking points -- not just in one minor particular, as Carney claimed, but through 12 separate versions. The Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice, armed with the talking points, spoke sternly about a spontaneous protest and an anti-Muslim video on five Sunday interview shows.

The campaign trail press grilled Mitt Romney for his (impolitic) statement immediately after the attacks. Obama went on talk shows and peddled his line about an anti-Muslim video.

Debate moderator Candy Crowley came to Obama's defense when he claimed that he had immediately stated that Benghazi was a terrorist attack -- a claim Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler has awarded four Pinocchios.

Mitt Romney, perhaps worried that Team Obama might wheel out the-then-publicly-silent CIA Director David Petraeus in its defense, didn't press the point.

This attempt to mislead the electorate worked. It seems a stretch to say that it determined the outcome of the election. But it certainly helped the Obama campaign.

And what about the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of conservative 501(c)(4) groups? Starting in March 2010, it questioned the tax-free status of one group after another with "tea party" or "patriot" in their names.

That's reminiscent of the Department of Homeland Security memo warning of the potential of such groups to engage in terrorist-type violence -- which of course hasn't happened.

An IRS official acknowledged and apologized for this misuse of government power last Friday. She attributed it to low-level IRS employees in Cincinnati. She said she had been informed about it in May 2011. Later news came out that tea party groups received letters of inquiry from Washington and IRS offices in California, as well.

The IRS pressed some groups for very detailed information. Has a family member been a member of another organization or planned to run for political office?

The targeting continued into 2012, when the criteria were changed to "political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding Government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform/movement." We can't have people educating people about the Constitution, can we?

The acting IRS director, who assured Congress that no group was targeted because of its beliefs, was informed of the targeting of conservative groups in May 2012. Jay Carney has said that the White House had no knowledge of it until a few weeks ago. Maybe. We'll see.

Top Obama political aide David Plouffe told National Journal's Ron Fournier that the IRS misdeeds did not really matter because Obama opponents were able to spend plenty of money.

But they would have been able to spend more absent the IRS misconduct. Some tea partiers decided to fold up shop rather than face an extended IRS inquiry. Others ran up big legal bills.

The fact is that the targeting of tea party groups by the IRS helped Democrats win elections. It's hard not to believe that at least some IRS employees intended it to have that effect. Those who leaked confidential information certainly did so.

The president has denounced the IRS misconduct in strong terms "if" it happened. He acknowledged that any targeting of one point of view by a government agency is wrong.

But in 2009 at Arizona State University's commencement, he noted that he had not been given an honorary degree and added that the school's president and board of regents "will soon learn all about being audited by the IRS."

That doesn't sound so funny now.

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Michael Barone, senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner (www.washingtonexaminer.com), is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor and a co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. To find out more about Michael Barone, and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2013 THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

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