Early in this morning’s IRS hearing, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., warned against turning the IRS hearings into a partisan affair. Immediately afterward, Rep. Steve Lynch, D-Mass., obliged him, delivering 

Lynch, a moderate Democrat representing South Boston, began by comparing the IRS’s treatment of conservative non-profit applicants to the behavior of foreign regimes notorious for their human rights abuses — Communist China and Belarus. After running through a few of the Inspector General’s findings, he wrapped up by threatening the IRS witnesses, warning that there would be “hell to pay” if they didn’t start producing some useful information — which, as he noted, they had failed to do in recent hearings with other committees.

Here’s the video:

Who’s to blame? No idea. “I did ask,” is Miller’s plaintive reply.” 

They ask a very simple question — who made a particular decision to do something completely wrong — only to find that there was, at best, a half-hearted effort to figure it out a year ago. And even that effort was just dropped and forgotten when the answer wasn’t immediately obvious.

A couple of weeks ago, President Obama warned college grads about crazy people (like John Adams, for example) who warn about the constant threat of tyranny in government:

“[Y]ou’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems…They’ll warn that tyranny’s always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices.

He might have to give that speech to a few more groups, because a new poll suggests that Americans are going with John Adams:

[A] new Fox News poll finds disapproval of President Obama’s job performance is above 50 percent for the first time in a year, his honesty rating is at a new low and half of voters already think he’s a lame-duck.

More than two-thirds of voters — 68 percent — feel the government is out of control and threatening their civil liberties.   About one quarter disagree (26 percent).  

It’s hard to get sixty-eight percent of Americans to agree on anything, but there you have it. And when you’re a president whose philosophy turns on the idea of more robust government involvement in Americans’ lives — and who hopes people will bear with initial problems with Obamacare and keep an open mind — this is not a good sign.

Aside from looking really insensitive, those who jumped immediately on the “it’s-global-warming-what-done-it” bandwagon (looking at you, Senator Boxer) after Monday’s tornado in Oklahoma are also short a few real facts about tornadoes in Oklahoma:

Between 1954 and 2012, there has been a downward trend in the frequency of strong to violent tornadoes in the US, and that decline is statistically significant at the 1% level (see red line in chart). On average, there has been a decline of almost 0.40 violent hurricanes every year since 1954, or a decline of almost 4 violent tornadoes very decade.

What’s striking is that purported believers in science have so little respect for it that they start displaying such deeply unscientific thinking every time there’s a stiff wind outside. Christians — especially the ones who believe in and respect science — must feel the same way about Pat Robertson every time he shoots his mouth off. 

If you can believe that President Obama doesn’t know anything about his own administration, then I’m sure it isn’t hard to believe this:

Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has apologized for remarks Monday in which he linked Oklahoma “cyclones” to climate change while berating Republicans for their stance on the issue — around the time a massive tornado killed dozens in that state. 

A Whitehouse spokesman said Tuesday the politically charged remarks were pre-written as part of the senator’s weekly Senate floor speech on climate change.

“Tragically and unbeknownst to the senator at the time, a series of tornadoes were hitting Oklahoma at the same moment he gave his remarks,” the spokesman said.

Of course, believe him or don’t believe him, would it have really mattered whether Whitehouse knew about this particular tornado? Would he have refrained from blaming his own state’s lack of economic competitiveness and occasional natural disasters on politically conservative Oklahomans, or would he have waited a day or two out of respect?

When cyclones tear up Oklahoma, and hurricanes swamp Alabama, and wildfires scorch Texas, you come to us — the rest of the country — for billions of dollars to recover. And the damage that your polluters and deniers are doing doesn’t just hit Oklahoma and Alabama and Texas. It hits Rhode Island with floods and storms. It hits Oregon with acidified seas. It hits Montana with dying forests…You drag America with you to your fate.

 

UPDATE: Looks like there’s an awful lot Sheldon Whitehouse doesn’t know.

Today was supposed to be a fun one for liberals on the Investigations subcommittee for the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. They were going to haul in Apple’s CEO, CFO, and head of Tax Operations to browbeat them over their lack of — what, patriotism? Dumbness? — for having avoided tax liability last year.

This was supposed to provide a little diversion from a week of wall-to-wall Obama administration scandals. Instead, Sen. Rand Paul rained on everyone’s parade, providing an exemplary rebuttal of the brain-dead populism that politicians so often engage in when it comes to corporate America.  

“Frankly, I’m offended by the tone and tenor of this hearing,” Paul began.

“I’m offended by a $4 trillion government bullying, berating and badgering one of America’s greatest success stories. Tell me one of these politicians up here who doesn’t minimize their taxes. Tell me a chief financial officer you would hire if he didn’t try to minimize your taxes legally. Tell me what Apple’s done that’s illegal.

I’m offended by a government that uses the IRS to bully Tea Parties, but I’m also offended by a government that convenes a hearing to bully one of America’s greatest success stories. I’m offended by the spectacle of dragging in executives from an American company that is not doing anything illegal.

If anyone should be on trial here, it should be Congress. I frankly think the committee should apologize to Apple. I think that the Congress should be on trial here for creating a bizarre and byzantine tax code that runs into the tens of thousands of pages; for creating a tax code that simply doesn’t compete with the rest of the world. This committee will admit that Apple hasn’t broken any laws, yet we’re forced to sit, and Apple is forced to sit through a show-trial at the whims of politicians, when in fact Congress should be on trial for chasing the profits of great American companies overseas.

We haul before this committee one of America’s greatest success stories, and you want applause? I say instead of Apple executives, we should have brought in here today a giant mirror, okay, so we could look at the reflection of Congress, because this problem is solely and completely created by the awful tax code. If you want to assign blame, the committee needs to look in this mirror and see who created this mess. Look in the mirror and see who created this tax code that is chasing American companies overseas…

Paul goes on from there, and ultimately concludes, “Money goes where it’s welcome. Currently, our tax code makes money not welcome in this country.” 

Seriously, be sure to watch the video. The fact is, yes, as offensive as you might find it that Apple avoided paying taxes, it’s far more offensive that the same idiots who have been making the tax code less and less efficient and more irrational and harder to work under for decades would sit there and lecture a company that merely followed their own irrational rules in order to minimize tax liability.

A bit of a diversion for this evening: The New York Times quotes the creator of the GIF, Steve Wilhite, stating: that everyone was wrong about how to pronounce it:

“The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations,” Mr. Wilhite said. “They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.”

Is it really the end, or just bejinning?

Republican Gabriel Gomez is up with a new ad that intends to make his opponent in next month’s special Senate election, Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., pay as high a price as possible for his negative advertising so far. It’s a way of arousing sympathy while sneaking in a negative ad yourself.

Speaking of Americans losing faith in government, here’s another example. Three weeks ago, there’s no way anyone would have taken this story seriously — and frankly, no way Sharyl Attkisson would have come forward with a hunch like this:

Sharyl Attkisson, the Emmy-award winning CBS News investigative reporter, says that her personal and work computers have been compromised and are under investigation.

“I can confirm that an intrusion of my computers has been under some investigation on my end for some months but I’m not prepared to make an allegation against a specific entity today as I’ve been patient and methodical about this matter,” Attkisson told POLITICO on Tuesday. “I need to check with my attorney and CBS to get their recommendations on info we make public.”

This strikes me as a mistake on Attkisson’s part — to reveal this now — but it doesn’t sound so crazy after what happened to James Rosen. It’s perfectly believable, isn’t it? 

Unfortunately, far crazier conspiracy theorists have to be feeling pretty good about themselves right now, when all they should feel is shame from the Infowars debacle that occurred after the Boston bombings.

Should we all start worrying about government buying up all the ammunition to disarm us, or even worse, to shoot us all? I don’t believe any of this stuff, but of course until recently I didn’t believe the IRS would target conservative groups or that the Obama Justice Department would claim that reporting is a crime in a warrant application. So what do I know? 

Yesterday’s and today’s press conferences by White House press secretary Jay Carney provide ammunition to the thesis proposed this week even by a few mainstream journalists. By Carney’s account, Obama knows little or nothing about several really awful things happening in his own administration. He is (as Carney claimed) deliberately kept in the dark by senior staff regarding matters you’d expect a president would really want to know about, such as a major scandal about to erupt regarding the IRS targeting Tea Party groups, which began just as his health care bill was running into difficulty.

The long and the short of it is that Obama is doing more than any conservative could possibly do to undermine the public’s faith in government. 

National Journal’s Ron Fournier put it thus yesterday:

While denying involvement in high crimes and misdemeanors, the Obama administration appears to be pleading guilty to lesser crimes of bureaucratic incompetence.  But that is an unsustainable position for a president who wants Americans to believe again in the power and grace of good government, particularly as it relates to the implementation of Obamacare.

The Washington Post’s Dan Balz made a similar point in suggesting that Obama has a “trust-in-government deficit.”

…Obama bears a particular responsibility for failing to do what he said he had to do, which was to convince the public that he could make the part of government that he directly controls — the executive branch — smarter, more effective and more deserving of trust.

In fact, you’ll recall that during the 2008 campaign, the Bush administration’s poor stewardship of government was at last a small part of Obama’s pitch. Obama was there to restore competence after an era of government run by flat-earthers.

Turns out it really doesn’t matter so much who the president is. How can it, if no one is responsible when the president’s nominal employees engage in systemic abuses and he’s always the last person to find out about it? 

There are two separate points to be made here. The first is in regard to Obama’s culpability. There’s no need to establish that Obama picked up the phone and demanded the targeting of his political enemies, just when they were causing him the most pain. No one expects a president to know everything that’s going on a federal government that employs millions. But would Obama and Carney seriously maintain that a long-term project systematically targeting conservative groups for extra IRS abuse could have succeeded when George W. Bush was president, and when his appointees occupied the political positions in the bureaucracy? Would no one have spoken up?

The second point applies whether or not you accept the first. Obama’s inability to administer the government bolsters the argument that the federal government is simply too large and unwieldy. America existed, survived, thrived, and became great without the massive bureaucracy that exists today. It all happened in the absence of any national industrial or small business policy — in fact, it probably happened because those things did not exist. And when we talk about the American dream dying, we should wonder just how much of that is happening precisely because we waste so much money today on government tinkering in the economy and on the world stage.