Friday, July 19, 2013

(3 articles) AMERICA - WE HAVE A PROBLEM! (many of them)

Submitted by: Debbie Beatty

Hillary Gets 'Liberty Medal' After Lying About Benghazi

Ann Kane
What do you receive for getting four Americans killed in Benghazi, including our ambassador? Just ask Hillary Clinton.

On September 10--exactly a day short of one year after she and Obama allowed their own officials to die in real time--Clinton will be awarded the National Constitution Center's Liberty Medal.


"The Liberty Medal recognizes individuals who have furthered the ideals of freedom, democracy, and equality, often against great odds," said National Constitution Center President and CEO Jeffrey Rosen. "Hillary Clinton has devoted her life to expanding opportunities for 'We the People' not just in this country but around the globe."
As the 67th Secretary of State, Clinton broke national and global barriers. She was the first First Lady to serve in a presidential Cabinet...As Secretary of State, Clinton advocated for "smart power" in foreign policy, elevating diplomacy and development and repositioning them for the 21st century--with new tools, technologies, and partners, including the private sector and civil society around the world.

Here's "smart power" in action. During a Senate hearing, after the 2012 election, Senators asked the Secretary of State whether she had read cables coming from Benghazi requesting security; Clinton drew a blank. She replied, "With specific security requests, they didn't come to me; I had no knowledge of them."

If anyone is still wondering how a woman who lied to Congress and left four Americans dead can be honored with a liberty award look no further than the Chairman of the National Constitution Center, Jeb Bush.

Former Secretary Clinton has dedicated her life to serving and engaging people across the world in democracy...These efforts as a citizen, an activist, and a leader have earned Secretary Clinton this year's Liberty Medal.

Tell me, Governor Bush, what does Ambassador Stevens get for making the ultimate sacrifice? How about Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty? Will the families of the dead be present for Hillary's award? I am sure they will have a few words about Hillary's skill, courage, and dedication in supporting those who serve our country and put their lives on the line.

Since when does letting Americans die and then lying about it deserve a medal?

In the cesspool where corrupt politicians like Hillary and Jeb hang out, the more you mess up, the more you get rewarded! Recently, sex addict Bill Clinton received the Father of the Year award and a President who proved he gets off on drone strikes managed to pick up a Nobel Peace Prize before anyone realized he was a hawk.

So just ignore Hillary's terrible record as Secretary of State and ignore the ambassador and staff she failed to protect. Remember, that "Hillary Clinton has devoted her life to expanding opportunities for 'We the People' not just in this country but around the globe."



Read more M. Catharine Evans at Potter Williams Report
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
 

Former GOP Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell told her tax records were breached

Errant lien on house placed, publicized

 
 
More than two years after her upstart Senate campaign rocked the Delaware political world, Christine O'Donnell got an unexpected contact from a U.S. Treasury Department agent warning that her private tax records may have been breached.
The phone message earlier this year shocked the battled-scarred candidate, a tea party favorite who knocked off Republican mainstay Michael Castle in the primary before losing in a bid to win Vice President Joseph R. Biden’s former seat.
“Ms. O'Donnell, this is Dennis Martel, special agent with the U.S. Department of Treasury in Baltimore, Md. … We received information that your personal federal tax info may have been compromised and may have been misused by an individual,” he said in the January message left on her cellphone.
For Ms. O'Donnell, the message immediately raised red flags.
On March 9, 2010, the day she revealed her plan to run for the Senate in a press release, a tax lien was placed on a house purported to be hers and publicized. The problem was she no longer owned the house. The IRS eventually blamed the lien on a computer glitch and withdrew it.
Now Mr. Martel, a criminal investigator for the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration, was telling her that an official in Delaware state government had improperly accessed her records on that very same day.
Beyond that, Ms. O'Donnell and Senate investigators who have tried to help her have run into a wall of silence, leaving more questions than answers about whether abuses of the IRS system extend to private individuals and not just the tax-exempt groups already identified as victims.
“I don’t know. And I’d like to know,” Ms. O’Donnell told The Washington Times in her first interview about the case. “Because whether it’s one, eight or 80 [cases], it’s an abuse of power at the IRS. It’s using the IRS as a political weapon, and that shouldn’t be done.”
Investigators for Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, an influential Republican who serves on the Finance and Judiciary committees, have uncovered one key issue: a backdoor system in which state officials can access Americans’ private tax records in the name of investigating with little oversight or accountability.
The Treasury Department’s tax watchdog has informed Mr. Grassley that at least four politicians or political donors have had their personal tax records improperly accessed through that system since 2006, including one case in which a willful violation of federal law was identified.
But the Justice Department has declined to prosecute any of the offenders. Treasury officials have refused to give Mr. Grassley any specifics on the cases or to describe the disposition of Ms. O'Donnell’s case, claiming even people who improperly access tax records have an assumption of privacy under federal tax laws.
Mr. Grassley scoffs at that explanation and is demanding answers from the Treasury and Justice departments.
“Taxpayer confidentiality laws are important. The purpose of those laws is to prevent and deter inappropriate uses of taxpayer information, not to prevent public scrutiny when that confidentiality has been breached or keep the victim in the dark,” Mr. Grassley told The Times.
“A taxpayer should be able to know whether someone breached his or her confidentiality, whether any investigation resulted, and the outcome of that investigation. … I look forward to whether the Justice Department sheds any light on its decision not to prosecute what the inspector general called inappropriate and in one case willfully inappropriate access to taxpayer records.”
All the IRS will say is that the one person believed to have willfully misused the tax record system worked outside the agency.
Ms. O'Donnell has spent the past six months trying to find out more about what happened to her personally, with little success.
Investigators have told her the probe has been closed, without offering an explanation. Ms. O'Donnell’s attempts to get records about the possible misuse of her tax files through Freedom of Information Act requests have been delayed or denied.
Mr. Martel did not return calls seeking comment, and Senate investigators have been unable to get permission to interview him about Ms. O'Donnell’s case.
The mystery aside, the incident has shined a spotlight on the access non-IRS employees have to Americans’ personal tax records.
Ms. O'Donnell and congressional aides have been told that criminal investigators in states have the ability to dial into the IRS database.
There is little public knowledge of such inquiries, and whether they are legally justified or if they’re being abused by those with political axes to grind.
In April, Ms. O'Donnell was told the investigation into her case was closed, though she was given few details about the findings.
During a one-hour interview with Mr. Martel this year, she was given the name of the man believed to have accessed her records and shown his photo. The man had also friended her on her personal Facebook page, she said.
Beyond that, all Mr. Martel told Ms. O'Donnell was that the man had no legitimate reason to access her records and that investigators had seen other instances like hers in which tax privacy had been breached.
Even before she got the message, the IRS was a sore subject for Ms. O'Donnell and her family.
She fought through a three-year audit into her personal finances that ended with her repaying $1,100 to the federal government. Family and friends also were subjected to audits, though they were cleared, she said.
She had been warned that such events were possible.
As she was considering a Senate run, Ms. O'Donnell said she was told by a prominent political figure in Delaware that if she challenged Mr. Castle, the IRS and others would “F with her head.”
Ms. O'Donnell said she has reason to believe her political opponents were behind the scheme.
“An official with this investigation told me that there was evidence linking this inappropriate use of my tax records with the Delaware political leadership, Delaware political leaders on both sides of the aisle,” she said, though she declined to identify the official with whom she spoke.
In the midst of the 2010 campaign, long before it was revealed that her tax information had been accessed, Ms. O'Donnell’s financial life was a subject of intense media scrutiny and was used repeatedly by her enemies.
Republican Party heavyweight Karl Rove, who was an adviser to President George W. Bush, was among the critics who blasted Ms. O'Donnell for, among other things, falling behind on her mortgage.
She acknowledged that she had missed payments but vehemently disputed reports about foreclosure of her home.
Ms. O'Donnell sold the home in 2008, and financial documents from her lender show that her debts were satisfied in July of that year — long before the IRS slapped the erroneous lien on the property, which she no longer owned. She continues to fight to get the lien removed from her credit records.
~~~~~~~~~~
 

Is This Still America?

Thomas Sowell | Jul 16, 2013
There are no winners in the trial of George Zimmerman. The only question is whether the damage that has been done has been transient or irreparable.
Legally speaking, Zimmerman has won his freedom. But he can still be sued in a civil case, and he will probably never be safe to live his life in peace, as he could have before this case made him the focus of national attention and orchestrated hate.
More important than the fate of George Zimmerman, however, is the fate of the American justice system and of the public's faith in that system and their country. People who have increasingly asked, during the lawlessness of the Obama administration, "Is this still America?" may feel some measure of relief.
But the very fact that this case was brought in the first place, in an absence of serious evidence -- which became painfully more obvious as the prosecution strained to try to come up with anything worthy of a murder trial -- will be of limited encouragement as to how long this will remain America.
The political perversion of the criminal justice system began early and at the top, with the President of the United States. Unlike other public officials who decline to comment on criminal cases that have not yet been tried in court, Barack Obama chose to say, "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon."
It was a clever way to play the race card, as he had done before, when Professor Henry Louis Gates of Harvard was arrested.
But it did not stop there. After the local police in Florida found insufficient evidence to ask for Zimmerman to be prosecuted, the Obama administration sent Justice Department investigators to Sanford, Florida, and also used the taxpayers' money to finance local activists who agitated for Zimmerman to be arrested.
Political intervention did not end with the federal government. The city manager in Sanford intervened to prevent the usual police procedures from being followed.
When the question arose of identifying the voice of whoever was calling for help during the confrontation between Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, the normal police procedure would have been to let individuals hear the recording separately, rather than have a whole family hear it together.
If you want to get each individual's honest opinion, you don't want that opinion to be influenced by others who are present, much less allow a group to coordinate what they are going to say.
When the city manager took this out of the hands of the police, and had Trayvon Martin's family, plus Rachel Jeantel, all hear the recording together, that's politics, not law.
This was just one of the ways that this case looked like something out of "Alice in Wonderland." Both in the courtroom and in the media, educated and apparently intelligent people repeatedly said things that they seemed sincerely, and even fervently, to believe, but which were unprovable and often even unknowable.
In addition, the testimonies of the prosecution's witness after witness undermined its own case. Some critics faulted the attorneys. But the prosecutors had to work with what they had, and they had no hard evidence that would back up a murder charge or even a manslaughter charge.
You don't send people to prison on the basis of what other people imagine, or on the basis of media sound bites like "shooting an unarmed child," when that "child" was beating him bloody.
The jury indicated, early on as their deliberations began, that they wanted to compare hard evidence, when they asked for a complete list of the testimony on both sides.
Once the issue boiled down to hard, provable facts, the prosecutors' loud histrionic assertions and sweeping innuendos were just not going to cut it.
Nor was repeatedly calling Zimmerman a liar effective, especially when the prosecution misquoted what Zimmerman said, as an examination of the record would show.
The only real heroes in this trial were the jurors. They showed that this is still America -- at least for now -- despite politicians who try to cheapen or corrupt the law, as if this were some banana republic. Some are already calling for a federal indictment of George Zimmerman, after he has been acquitted.
Will this still be America then?
Posted by at
Labels: , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)