How a competing narrative forms

Great moments in furniture

You might remember this moment. There was Clint Eastwood, iconic film star and hobbyist politician, appearing on the stage of the Republican National Convention, doing some performance art with an empty chair. It was less than a year ago and while the Republicans loved it, the moment made many people wonder if ol' Clint was, well, losing it, especially since his attempt at a one-sided conversation didn't exactly rise to the level of a Bob Newhart bit.

As I've thought about the past few weeks and the parade of scandals/outrages/nothingburgers that we've witnessed, I've gone back to this moment. It's striking that a president would be presented as so disengaged from things that happen around him. And when the New Yorker starts getting in on the action, you know that the meme is getting legs:

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.”

It's satire. Yeah, sure.

Surprisingly enough, some people don't believe it, and they tend to be people who have long memories. Here's Bob Schieffer of CBS, summing things up quite nicely:

On the news that the IRS targeted conservative groups for burdensome scrutiny during the 2012 election, Bob Schieffer says, "Surely no one could be dumb enough to think you could get away with that in an election year. But they were! So, welcome to dumb and dumber."

Meanwhile, Bob Woodward, who as I recall was something of a player in the events of 40 years ago, ended up sparring with David Gregory on Meet the Press and said some interesting things, too:

MR. WOODWARD: Well, I-- I think you have to kind of step back and say what’s the theory of governing here.
GREGORY: Mm-Hm.
MR. WOODWARD: And the theory is, it seems, oh, there are investigations of the IRS so we can’t interfere. There is this leak investigation of the AP, so we can’t get involved. Oh, there is an investigation of Benghazi, so we’re not responsible. The President and the executive branch need to govern on a daily basis and you can’t purchase immunity from governing.
GREGORY: But you can’t conflate all those things, Bob.
MR. WOODWARD: Yes, you can.

And this:

MR. WOODWARD: But some institutions have a no-surprise rule, which is you need to make sure the person at the top, who is the president in this case, he is constitutionally responsible for the whole executive branch, to be told about things that are going on that are bad. And you can’t kind of say, oh, that happened last year and they’re investigating. You need to stop the bad things right away.

Yep. And we're going to find out whether anyone made any effort to stop the bad things. And we're going to find out if crazy ol' Clint was just crazy, or if he had matters dialed in pretty well.

Happy birthday, Dad

My dad would have celebrated his 80th birthday today. I wrote a version of the following a few years back and I'm reposting it here today, with just a few edits here and there.



May, 1933 was a pretty grim time in our nation's history. The Great Depression was in full swing. On the 10th of the month, a monstrous tornado tore through the town of Beatty Swamps, Tennessee, killing 35 people. The World's Fair was about to begin in Chicago, promising a "Century of Progress." It was in this milieu, on May 19, 1933, my father was born in Appleton, Wisconsin.

Dad was the 4th child of Joe and Julia Heuring. He was to grow up in Kimberly, Wisconsin, a small town on the banks of the Fox River just to the east of Appleton. The fame of Kimberly rests with the paper industry and the village's name lives on in the name of Kimberly-Clark, which is most famous for Kleenex. Dad's father was a millwright and worked for the Institute of Paper Chemistry, which served as the training ground for many of the people who made the Fox River Valley the paper capital of the world. Dad had a fairly normal childhood in Kimberly and graduated from Kimberly High in 1952. After a few years of harmless young adult shenanigans, Dad went into the service and served in Europe during the late 1950s. He then came back and got his degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1963. In between all that, he managed to meet and marry my Mom in January, 1963; I arrived at the end of 1963.

 

Unfortunately, Dad isn't here to celebrate this milestone birthday, as he died in 1990. Dad's generation came of age at an interesting time in our nation's history - he came of age a few years before rock and roll arrived in earnest and his generation wasn't considered part of the "greatest generation." Like most people his age, Dad simply went about his business and tried to provide a good life for his family. For the most part, he was successful. It wasn't always easy, especially given the challenges that life put before him as the father of 7 children and the husband of a wife who struggled with mental illness, but he always approached his life with generosity and a sense of humor.

You don't get to choose the circumstances of your birth and while Dad came around at a tough time, he was a tough person in part because of it. Happy birthday, Dad.

Road Rage

Another reason to look askance at those who would bring Chicago politics to the rest of us:

Less than half the money exacted from Illinois taxpayers to pay for roads is actually used to pay for roads. The Illinois Auditor General has found that, of the $5.7 billion in the state’s road fund over the past two years, $2.7 billion went to cover salaries at the Illinois Department of Transportation, bond debt payment, and other “nondirect costs.”

Three observations:

• Spending 47 cents on the dollar for things other than the services provided is not a sustainable way to operate over the long term.
• The image that will always stay with me about the highway system in Illinois is this: back in the early '80s, we were on a family trip to a wedding in Ohio. We were stuck in an enormous traffic jam on the Tri-State and things where essentially stopped. As we went through a construction zone at about 2 MPH, there was a guy in a safety vest standing on the road holding a sign that said "SLOW." As we crawled past him, my brother rolled down his window and yelled "I can't believe you're getting paid for that." The guy in the vest flashed my brother a big grin. I'd bet dollars to donuts that the guy was a ward committeeman.
• We were in western Illinois (on I-74 from the Quad Cities to Galesburg) about two months back and the roads there were pretty good. For that price, they'd better be.

Damn

We have higher gas prices in the Twin Cities than just about anyplace else in the country right now:

Brutal

Even in 2008, it didn't get much above $4.00 here. It's $4.39 in my neighborhood. Yeah, we're a little cranky about it. What are you paying where you live?

Scandals

It's tough to suss out all of the scandalous behavior that we're hearing about, but of the big three issues at play, the one that really matters the most is the behavior of the IRS. Peggy Noonan, apparently fully recovered from her 2008 swooning over the dreamboat candidate, zeros in:

All of these IRS actions took place in the years leading up to the 2012 election. They constitute the use of governmental power to intrude on the privacy and shackle the political freedom of American citizens. The purpose, obviously, was to overwhelm and intimidate—to kill the opposition, question by question and audit by audit.

It is not even remotely possible that all this was an accident, a mistake. Again, only conservative groups were targeted, not liberal. It is not even remotely possible that only one IRS office was involved. Lois Lerner, who oversees tax-exempt groups for the IRS, was the person who finally acknowledged, under pressure of a looming investigative report, some of what the IRS was doing. She told reporters the actions were the work of "frontline people" in Cincinnati. But other offices were involved, including Washington. It is not even remotely possible the actions were the work of just a few agents. This was more systemic. It was an operation. The word was out: Get the Democratic Party's foes. It is not remotely possible nobody in the IRS knew what was going on until very recently. The Washington Post reported efforts to target the conservative groups reached the highest levels of the agency by May 2012—far earlier than the agency had acknowledged. Reuters reported high-level IRS officials, including its chief counsel, knew in August 2011 about the targeting.

You just can't have this sort of thing going on. I'm not a Tea Party person, but I'm largely in agreement with the concerns that the various Tea Party organizations raised, especially when they were successful in changing the national conversation in 2010. I never did understand why it seemed that the Tea Partiers seemed to go silent after the 2010 election. It makes a lot more sense now. Noonan details some of the tactics:

In order to suppress conservative groups—at first those with words like "Tea Party" and "Patriot" in their names, then including those that opposed ObamaCare or advanced the second amendment—the IRS demanded donor rolls, membership lists, data on all contributions, names of volunteers, the contents of all speeches made by members, Facebook posts, minutes of all meetings, and copies of all materials handed out at gatherings. Among its questions: What are you thinking about? Did you ever think of running for office? Do you ever contact political figures? What are you reading? One group sent what it was reading: the U.S. Constitution.

The second part of the scandal is the auditing of political activists who have opposed the administration. The Journal's Kim Strassel reported an Idaho businessman named Frank VanderSloot, who'd donated more than a million dollars to groups supporting Mitt Romney. He found himself last June, for the first time in 30 years, the target of IRS auditors. His wife and his business were also soon audited. Hal Scherz, a Georgia physician, also came to the government's attention. He told ABC News: "It is odd that nothing changed on my tax return and I was never audited until I publicly criticized ObamaCare." Franklin Graham, son of Billy, told Politico he believes his father was targeted. A conservative Catholic academic who has written for these pages faced questions about her meager freelance writing income. Many of these stories will come out, but not as many as there are. People are not only afraid of being audited, they're afraid of saying they were audited.

All of this will come out over the summer. The demands to see names and even Facebook postings represent intimidation on a grand scale. As the details become public, it won't be possible to pretend that this was just the unfortunate result of some rogue operation in Cincinnati.

Cartoon of the Year

The great Michael Ramirez, getting to the nub of the matter:

Smokescreen

So the supersecret, amazingly clever plan that Mark Dayton has to pay for the Vaseline Dome/Glass Menagerie is to add a little more pain to the smokers:

Gov. Mark Dayton wants to rely on new revenues from cigarette and corporate income taxes to help pay the state's share of a new Vikings stadium.

Myron Frans, commissioner of revenue, explained Dayton's plan to the Tax Conference Committee Thursday.

It would include two funding sources: approximately $24.5 million in one-time revenues from tax on the current cigarette inventory once the tax is increased. Dayton is proposing an increase from the current tax of $1.23 per pack to $2.52 per pack.

As Bob Casey always reminded us, there's no smoking in the Metrodome, but smokers better get a puffin' to pay for the new building.

So, do you honestly believe that the state is only going to get "one-time revenues" for coffin nails? Not a chance. Why?

The second source would be to end what Frans called a "tax avoidance" strategy that corporations with sales in Minnesota and elsewhere take advantage of under current law. Currently, he said, some businesses are able to avoid Minnesota corporate income taxes by attributing Minnesota sales to affiliates in other states.

The change, known as Minnesota Unitary Sales, would require reporting all those revenues in Minnesota, increasing a company's income taxes and revenues to the state.

Those revenues would be approximately $26 million in the first year and $20 million per year after that. The revenue would be used as the first backup plan for stadium financing, Frans said.

The money would be collected and deposited into the general fund, but would not be used for the stadium unless needed, Frans said.

Frans can say he'll close the loophole, but in truth he'll only be playing whack-a-mole with corporations who have the resources to hire clever finance people. The money he anticipates won't materialize, certainly not in the amounts he envisions. And then it'll be back to the smokers, assuming they don't start buying their smokes online, on the reservation or from smugglers.

Nope, darn the luck, the money is going to come out of the general fund. Dayton and the gang can deny it until the cows come home, but that's how it's going to be. But on the bright side, you have three years to save up the coin to pay for a personal seat license in the People's Stadium.

One Year Later, Still in Your Wallet

Yeah, it's getting a little spendy

Not what we need right now:

Gas prices jumped by nearly 40 cents a gallon overnight on Wednesday, shocking Minnesotans who likely will feel the sting of higher fuel prices well into summer.

Relief from four-buck gas could come by the Fourth of July, provided two major Midwest oil refineries are back on line by mid-June and the price of crude oil doesn’t continue to rise, according to AAA officials who monitor gas prices.

The average price of gas in the Twin Cities was about $3.85 on Tuesday, just slightly below the record average of $3.99 recorded in June 2008. By Wednesday morning, some pump prices hit $4 a gallon and higher, said Gail Weinholzer, a spokeswoman for AAA Minnesota/Iowa. A lot of callers complained about having to shell out $4.19 a gallon, she said. The lowest price reported to her was $3.99; the highest was $4.30 in the west metro.

I saw $4.19 everywhere I usually travel yesterday. On the other hand, good luck passing that gas tax increase about now, Minnesota Lege.

Eric Holder, Emersonian -- UPDATE, Wrong Man of Letters, Sir

UPDATE:  Oops -- I got confused. It was Emerson, but rather poet Thomas Gray who offered the lines "where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise." Shouldn't really blog before I've had my coffee.

The great 19th Century American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson offered many brilliant observations, including this one, which is sometimes misunderstood, "where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise."

As it turns out, "where" turns out to be the Justice Department, where ignorance is a growth industry, as newly minted skeptic Dana Milbank notes:

As the nation’s top law enforcement official, Eric Holder is privy to all kinds of sensitive information. But he seems to be proud of how little he knows.

Why didn’t his Justice Department inform the Associated Press, as the law requires, before pawing through reporters’ phone records?

“I do not know,” the attorney general told the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday afternoon, “why that was or was not done. I simply don’t have a factual basis to answer that question.”

Why didn’t the DOJ seek the AP’s cooperation, as the law also requires, before issuing subpoenas?

“I don’t know what happened there,” Holder replied. “I was recused from the case.”

Why, asked the committee’s chairman, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), was the whole matter handled in a manner that appears “contrary to the law and standard procedure”?

“I don’t have a factual basis to answer the questions that you have asked, because I was recused,” the attorney general said.

This didn't pass Milbank's smell test:

In a sense, the two topics that dogged Holder most on Wednesday — the AP phone records and the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups — were one and the same. In both cases, Americans are being punished and intimidated for exercising their right of free expression — by the taxing authorities, in the conservatives’ case, and by federal prosecutors, in the reporters’ case.

I believe the term we're looking for here is "abuse of power."

Now it's hard to blame Holder for taking the Emersonian Gray stance here. Given what we already know about how things go in the Justice Department, it would be better for Holder not to have first-hand knowledge of how his underlings are behaving.

The Value of Superior Forecasting

Everyone agrees that plans work better if you have an accurate forecast of what to expect before it actually happens. I have to assume that it was brilliant forecasting that led to this plan of action:

Top IRS officials have been saying that a “significant increase”in applications from advocacy groups seeking tax-exempt status spurred its Cincinnati office in 2010 to filter those requests by using such politically loaded phrases as “Tea Party,” “patriots,”and “9/12.”

Both Steven Miller, the agency’s acting commissioner until he stepped down Wednesday, and Lois Lerner, director of the agency’s exempt-organization division, have said over the past week that IRS officials started the scrutiny after observing a surge in applications for status as 501(c)(4) “social welfare” groups. Both officials cited an increase from about 1,500 applications in 2010 and to nearly 3,500 in 2012. President Obama ask Mr. Miller to resign on Wednesday.

The scrutiny began, however, in March 2010, before an uptick could have been observed, according to data contained in the audit released Tuesday from the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration.

Emphasis mine. Yep, it had to be forecasting.

The Glass Menagerie

Go, then! Go to the moon-you selfish dreamer!

“Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.”

-- Tennessee Williams, "The Glass Menagerie"

So we got a look at the plans for the new Vikings stadium the other day and it's very,well, glassy:

The nearly billion-dollar Viking stadium that will rise from the ruins of the old Metrodome will be big and bold, and it will put fans closer to the action than any other venue in professional football.

It’ll have giant pivoting glass doors that open to the downtown Minneapolis skyline and a roof that, while not retractable, will let in so much sunlight come game days, fans will feel as though they’re sitting outdoors.

I don't know why, but that level of hype always makes me think of this song:

We're supposed to be wowed by the nifty artists' renderings and whatnot and not think too much about the cost and that we still don't have a way to pay for this thing. We can choose to live with our illusions, but that reality doesn't go away just because we have cool looking pictures.

And about that paying for it part:

First, e-pulltabs virtually collapsed as a revenue source for the state’s share of the new Vikings stadium.Now the sports memorabilia tax, once thought to be a fallback plan, may also be doomed.

The deuce you say? Why would that be?

With only six days left in the legislative session, Senate leaders on Tuesday declared the idea of taxing sports memorabilia nearly dead, because of the effect it might have on a single corporation: Target.

Senate Taxes Committee Chairman Rod Skoe, DFL-Clearwater, said Tuesday that because the tax would be levied at the wholesale level, it would have a disparate impact on Target, which warehouses the sports memorabilia for its more than 1,700 U.S. stores in Minnesota.

Yeah, I suppose slapping a wholesale tax on gear that Target would ordinarily sell in Colma, California or McAllen, Texas, might be a wee bit of a problem. So now what?

“We’re hearing there’s this supersecret plan to fund the shortfall in the Vikings stadium. The governor hasn’t said what it is,” said Sen. Julianne Ortman, R-Chanhassen, the ranking minority member on the Taxes Committee. “We don’t know what their plans are. It seems, six days out, they would have a better framework at least for the close of session here.”

Senate Majority Leader Tom Bakk, DFL-Cook, said he’s not worried. “I think they can find $25 million or whatever it takes” to fill in the gambling shortfall, he said.Legislators are looking at a wide range of other solutions, including corporate taxes, income taxes or even cigarette taxes to help fund the stadium.

Bakk can't "find" $25 million. But he can take it out of our wallets. And that's what's going to happen.

Wake Up And Smell the Chicago -- The Thread of Narrative

Taken individually, the trio of scandals that are now bedeviling the Obama administration don't make a whole lot of sense. Why would anyone serving the President think it would be possible to get by with:

• Running with a cock and bull story about a YouTube video being the cause of an obvious terrorist attack in Benghazi; or
• Using the power of the IRS to audit and otherwise harass Tea Party organizations; or
• Using the power of the Justice Department to seize phone records of the Associated Press?

The answer is narrative. It has long been evident that the Obama administration is all about maintaining a narrative and winning the news cycle. My suspicion is that the one true thing that Obama and his people know is how to mount a campaign. Successful campaigns are able to manage the flow of information and establish a narrative about the candidate. To a certain extent, all organizations try to do such things.

In each instance, gaining control of the narrative must have seemed quite important. In the case of Benghazi, it's important to remember that Obama's campaign had just spent a lot of time bragging about how al-Qaida was on the run. What happened in Benghazi made those boasts seem pretty hollow, so it was important to establish a story that made it less about the usual proclivities of terrorists and more about provocations by others.

Similarly, the Tea Party certainly has been a threat to the Obama agenda and in 2010, it was certainly making significant progress in motivating people to get involved in the political process, in many cases people who were in opposition to what Team Obama was trying to do. The temptation must have been quite great for people in the administration to rid themselves of these meddling priests.

While it's early, the reporting on the AP case indicates a similar pattern. The reason that Justice went after telephone records is that it was trying to figure out who was leaking information. Establishing who was contacting AP reporters would be key in stopping the leaks.

All of these moves are understandable. If your goal is to maintain your power base, adverse publicity is a real problem. And let's face it, damage control is no fun -- it's always better to be on offense, so the temptation to use available power to hamper your opponents is always tough to resist. Unfortunately for the president and his team, taken together these moves look pretty Nixonian. And members of Obama's own party are starting to notice:

Outraged Bay State Democrats are blasting President Obama for exhibiting a Nixonian abuse of power after the stunning news that the Department of Justice secretly obtained Associated Press phone records and the IRS targeted conservative groups — new scandals emerging against the backdrop of heightened Benghazi criticism.

“There’s no way in the world I’m going to defend that. Hell, I spent my youth vilifying the Nixon administration for doing the same thing. If they did that, there should be hell to pay,” U.S. Rep. Michael E. Capuano (D-Somerville) said about the IRS scandal. “Not only is it bad government and bad to society, it is horrendous politics. The worst thing you can do is give your opponent an easy hammer with which to hit you.”

“It doesn’t seem to be a couple rogue employees. This appeared to be a systemic issue,” said U.S. Rep. Stephen F. Lynch (D-South Boston), who wants to investigate the matter as a member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The committee already has scheduled a hearing on the issue for this week, Lynch said, adding, “No American should find themselves the target of the IRS or any other federal organization because of their political beliefs.”

Hard to argue with any of that. If politicians in deep blue Massachusetts are worried about these things and willing to issue full-on blasts of this sort, there's likely more revelations to come.

One last thing -- the AP scandal is the one that Team Obama is most likely to regret, because the MSM has been willing to accept and promulgate the Team Obama message all along. It's one thing to use your power against your enemies, but when you mess with your friends, you are asking for trouble. I suspect that the AP is going to be a lot less amenable to helping out Team Obama going forward. Don't spit in the face of your water carriers, kids.

Justice in Philadelphia

Kermit Gosnell is going away:

Former Philadelphia abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell has been found guilty of first-degree murder in the deaths of three babies authorities said were born alive before having their necks cut with scissors. A jury found Gosnell not guilty of first-degree murder in a fourth baby’s death.

In addition to the murder charges, the 72-year-old was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the overdose death of former patient Karnamaya Mongar.

Gosnell was also found guilty of several other crimes including one count of infanticide, two counts of conspiracy, 21 of 24 counts of abortion of an unborn child of 24 weeks or more and 208 of 227 counts of violation of informed consent of an abortion.

In all, Gosnell was found guilty of 237 crimes. He will now face the death penalty in the sentencing phase, which will begin a week from Tuesday.

No matter what you think about abortion, or Roe v. Wade, or anything else, there was no defending this guy, who is a straight up monster. I have come to oppose the death penalty but it's cases like this that make it tough to maintain that stance.

The link, which comes from NBC News in Philadelphia, provides a very good synopsis of the particulars of Gosnell's many, many crimes. You should read it all, although I think most people would find the particulars horrifying.

Wake Up and Smell The Chicago -- Associated Press Edition

So you don't think Benghazi is much, and maybe you're not sure that siccing the IRS on Tea Party groups rises to the level of something or other. How about grabbing two months of phone records from the Associated Press? Mind-boggling:

The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative's top executive called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather the news.

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for 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, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of the calls.

In all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown, but more than 100 journalists work in the offices where phone records were targeted, on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.

There's a lot more at the link, which I'd excerpt, except that AP doesn't like it if you do that very much. Go read it in full.

Answering a Question That Isn't Being Asked

This is called framing the argument:

But this is my point: utter madness is what today’s Republicans do. You can present to me every logical argument you desire. Benghazi at the end of the day was a terrible tragedy in which mistakes, bad mistakes, were certainly made, and in which confusion and the CYA reflex led to some bad information going out to the public initially, but none of this remotely rises to the level of high crime. The IRS cock-up was just that, a mistake by a regional office.

That's the voice of Michael Tomasky, an ace purveyor of conventional wisdom, emoting about the possibility that Republicans are gonna try to impeach Barack Obama. It's almost nostalgic, the "doesn't rise to the level high crime" stuff that we heard over and over again, 15 years ago now, when ol' Bill Clinton was in office. Those rat bastard Republicans are at it again!

Ann Althouse makes the salient point:

Why do people say "logic" when they are obviously not talking about logic? He's talking about what the facts are, how to characterize the facts, and what the standard for impeachment is. None of that is pinned down. We always only have evidence of what the facts are, and currently we don't even have all the evidence of the facts. Whether the facts say "tragedy" and "confusion" and "mistakes" or something more nefarious hasn't been resolved.

I suppose there's someone, somewhere, calling for Obama to be impeached. There's no reason to believe it would ever happen, because:

• Harry Reid would stop any effort in the Senate cold; and
• If Obama were removed from office, Joe Biden would be president, and that would hardly be an improvement

My interest in Benghazi and whatever happened with the IRS is actually pretty simple -- I want to find out the truth. There are any number of questions that we haven't even approached yet. With respect to Benghazi, we need to find out (a) why Ambassador Stevens was there, especially since he had to know that he wasn't going to be protected; and (b) who decided to make the Nakoula video the key talking point that Susan Rice offered on the Sunday talk shows, and why. I have my guesses on both questions, but they are only guesses. It would be better to know the truth.

And as for those who are squawking about this being an effort to "get" Hillary Clinton, I'd say this: I don't much care about her, or her ambitions. If she's implicated in something that destroys her chance to run for president in 2016, too bad. One would think that the Democrats would have little difficulty finding another candidate to be their standard bearer.

Mother's Little Helpers

Most people spend Mother's Day by spending a little quality time with their mothers. Maybe they take Mom out to lunch, or buy her some flowers or a nice gift.

That's not what happened on Mother's Day in St. Paul:

DFL Gov. Mark Dayton and Democratic legislative leaders reached a budget agreement Sunday that calls for $2 billion in new taxes and boosts spending for schools and property tax relief.

The Democrats are relying on a tobacco tax hike and the governor’s long-sought income tax increase on high earners to pay for the new spending. The budget outline scraps a proposed sales tax on clothing, but lawmakers continue to consider resurrecting at least part of a heavily criticized plan to tax businesses services.

We've been through this enough times to dispense with the arguments. All that needs to be said was said by Dayton himself:

“It’s a budget that is going to work for Minnesota. It’s going to put Minnesota to work,” Dayton said Sunday afternoon. “It’s going to fulfill our promises to invest in education and infrastructure. We’re going to see a better Minnesota as a result of this budget.”

Fortunately, we're only about 18 months away from having a chance to weigh in on whether or not taxing and spending more actually delivers a "better Minnesota."

"Wake up and smell the Chicago."

That's the apt summation given by Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds as he offered links to a number of stories concerning the news that the IRS was targeting Tea Party-affiliated groups for additional scrutiny.

As alert readers of this feature know, I spent five years in Chicago, from 1987 through 1992. When I first came to Chicago, Harold Washington was the mayor. By the time I left, the Daley restoration had taken place. While it would be an overstatement to say that Washington was a reformer, he had made some efforts to change the long-standing system of spoils, patronage and intimidation that is the hallmark of Chicago politics. By the end of 1992, the spoils system was back in high gear.

It was in this time frame that Barack Obama came to Chicago and began his political ascent. We have heard that somehow Obama wasn't really part of all the usual corruption and self-dealing, that somehow he rose through the system without becoming tainted by it in any way. We saw a variation of this claim from Ace Commenter Rich earlier this week:

First off, let me thank you for printing the litany of failed Conservative Talking points you guys have been peddling for 5 or 6 years now. It's quite amusing, and gives me a warm fuzzy when I go down the list: TUCC-fail!, Bill Ayers-fail!, Khalidi-fail!, Daley-fail!, Blagojevich-fail!, Wright-fail!, Pfleger-fail!, Jackson-fail! and now, we can add Benghazi! Almost chronological too.

Yeah, it's all warm and fuzzy stuff -- all those nasty Republicans stepping on rakes. Since "The Great Gatsby" is on our minds again because of Baz Luhrmann's movie version being out in the theaters now, I'm reminded of this exchange from the book:

Who is he anyhow, an actor?" 

"No." 

"A dentist?"

"...No, he's a gambler." Gatsby hesitated, then added coolly: "He's the man who fixed the World Series back in 1919."

"Fixed the World Series?" I repeated. 

The idea staggered me. I remembered, of course, that the World Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as something that merely happened, the end of an inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people--with the singlemindedness of a burglar blowing a safe. 

"How did he happen to do that?" I asked after a minute.

"He just saw the opportunity." 

"Why isn't he in jail?" 

"They can't get him, old sport. He's a smart man."

For a long time now, that's been the conceit. They can't get him, old sport. There's nothing to all these stories. It all happened a long time ago. What difference does it make? Forward. Yeah, it's easy to see why that would make people feel all warm and fuzzy.

It's never occurred to a lot of people that one man could play with the faith of a lot more than fifty million people. And it's taken a lot of enabling to get to this point. We've seen assertions like this:

President Barack Obama goes into the 2012 with a weak economy that may doom his reelection. But he has one asset that hasn’t received much attention: He’s honest.

And this:

You can't even say it's election-year politics because the Republicans have been pounding this thing for over a year now. And not just the Republicans in Congress, the entire right-wing media propaganda empire has really seized on this because President Obama, his administration, has been remarkably scandal free. Really.

And this:

But I do think there are a couple of things that are character-logical that will guard against some of the common flaws of second terms. First, he’s a man of high integrity who has run a very clean administration. You can argue with this or that or behavior. There have been signs of insularity and arrogance, but there have been no scandals. And the rate of scandals plaguing second terms is extremely high. I think he’s less prone to that.

Did you believe those assertions? Or have you received this message?

Maybe Ace Commenter Rich's triumphalism will prove out and he'll be able to add this week's revelations to the list of "fail!" that makes him feel so warm and fuzzy. I'm not so sure, though, when you have the Washington Post weighing in with this level of outrage:

One line of questioning should focus on how the IRS’s procedures failed to catch this “shortcut” before its employees began using it. Another should center on how this misguided practice came to light, and on what the IRS planned and plans to do about it. Ms. Lerner was responding to a question when the news first came out; it’s not clear whether the government intended otherwise to disclose what had happened. Nor have officials been clear whether disciplinary measures have been taken.

Did some officials hope never to reveal this wrongdoing? Did others hope it could quickly get lost in the weekend news cycle? Misguided, if so. We hope to hear Democratic leaders as well as Republican ones loudly saying so.

Democrats holding this administration to account? Now that would be a reason to feel warm and fuzzy.

Reassuring

A happy reminder from National Journal:

The Internal Revenue Service’s admission that it inappropriately targeted conservative political groups for special scrutiny during the 2012 presidential election only gives congressional Republicans more ammunition as they try to defund and weaken the agency.

For the past few years, Republican lawmakers have sought to slash the funding of the IRS. Reducing the agency’s budget makes it more difficult for it to collect taxes and audit individuals. (Score one for Republicans who dislike high taxes).

But, more importantly, the IRS is also one of the key agencies that will implement the Affordable Care Act. Much of the funding stream for the incoming health care law, arguably the president’s signature legislative achievement, comes from two tax increases: a 3.8 percent hike on investment income for wealthy individuals, estates, and trusts, as well as an additional Medicare tax.

Don't you feel better now?

Just a suggestion

Maybe the Lege could go back to the gay marriage thing instead of doing things like this:

Defying the wishes of the governor, DFL senators Friday afternoon amended a transportation finance bill to include increases to gasoline and sales taxes for state highways and metro transit.

The move, if it survives further Senate and House action and resistance by Gov. Mark Dayton, would raise the gasoline tax by 5 cents a gallon and increase the metro sales tax for transit by a half-cent.

When **Mark Dayton** thinks you're raising taxes too much, it's like the comparison that Triumph the Insult Comic Dog makes at about 3:20 in this clip, which is needless to say NSFW:

Seriously, folks -- go work on that gay marriage stuff instead. Really.

Nice work, kids

That second term thing isn't going so well for President Obama. The Benghazi situation is not going away soon and this story looks to be a very big deal:

Lois Lerner, the director of the I.R.S. division that oversees tax-exempt groups, acknowledged that the agency had singled out nonprofit applicants with the terms “Tea Party” or “patriots” in their titles in an effort to respond to a surge in applications for tax-exempt status between 2010 and 2012.

She insisted that the move was not driven by politics, but she added, “We made some mistakes; some people didn’t use good judgment.”

And how! Yep, mistakes were made, all right. If you're going to tell folks that the IRS "singled out" Tea Party organizations and then in the same breath insist the moves aren't driven by politics, you're going to be hooted off the stage.

Someone decided that auditing Tea Party groups was a good idea. I think we can safely assume that we'll find out precisely who that someone is. And it won't go well for them. There's a lot more at the link and it's worth your time.