MUZZLED: House Republicans Kill Live Camera Feed Of Democratic Gun Reform Sit-In

Democratic congress members of the House of Representatives launched an unprecedented protest in the chamber by staging a sit-in. The purpose of the protest is to force Speaker Paul Ryan and the Republican leadership into scheduling a vote on gun safety reforms (video here).

CSPAN Blackout

Shortly after the protest began, the Republicans who control the House called a recess saying that the House is not in order, and then shut off the chamber’s cameras to prevent the American people from seeing their representatives actually doing something worthwhile and in agreement with the majority of the people. It is a brazen act of censorship intended to make the courageous demonstration disappear and to help the GOP in their efforts to kill reform at the behest of their NRA masters.

By taking the unprecedented step of shutting off the cameras, CSPAN went dark. They later had to resort to broadcasting video from mobile phones in the chamber, which continues as of the writing of this article. And as if that weren’t bad enough, Rep. John Yarmouth just tweeted that “The Sgt at Arms is asking us to stop taking photos and video from House floor. Republicans should turn the cameras back on.”

These GOP authoritarian tactics are nothing less than government suppression of free speech. This is the people’s house, not the private broadcast facility of the Republican Party. And despite the GOP’s tyrannical usurpation of power, Democrats are united in persisting with this protest. Participants include party leaders like John Lewis and Nancy Pelosi, and they have promised that everyone who wants to speak will be able to.

Republicans will have to shut down the building and evacuate everyone if they hope to end this. Which I wouldn’t put past them. Two years ago the GOP held a hearing on the alleged IRS targeting of Tea Party groups. Darrell Issa, the Republican chairman of the committee, delivered a five minute opening statement, asked a few leading questions, then gaveled the hearing adjourned without allowing anyone else to speak. The ranking Democratic member, Elijah Cummings, objected to the adjournment, but Issa cut off his microphone and stomped out of the room. Cummings continued without the mic calling Issa’s conduct “absolutely un-American.”

This is pretty much what we can expect from the Republican Party if it is allowed to remain in control of Congress, or worse gain the White House with a victory by Donald Trump (who has revoked the press credentials of several media organizations and whose camp has advocated revoking the broadcast license of CNN). Democrats have to be united in voting out Republicans in every jurisdiction if the nation hopes to preserve its constitutional freedoms.

Fox News Is So Terrified Of Hillary Clinton That They Invent Fake Email Scandal

For months there has been a concerted effort by Fox News to torpedo the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton. They have done it by relentlessly airing stories about alleged scandals that they have trumpeted with glee would end her White House aspirations. Those stories include everything from Benghazi to the Clinton Foundation, to her aide Huma Abedin’s alleged ties to Muslim extremists, to her private computer server. Never mind that there has never been a smidgen of actual evidence showing that she had engaged in anything unlawful or unethical. Just the wild accusations repeated ad nauseum on Fox News is enough to plant the notion in the mind of the public and drive down her poll numbers for trustworthiness.

Benghazi

The mission of Fox News is obviously to sabotage the campaign of the strongest Democratic candidate for the 2016 presidential election. They know that Clinton, even after the smear crusade, still manages to out poll every Republican challenger. Consequently, they need to persist in the propaganda blitz until they succeed in bringing her down.

While previous attempts focused heavily on Benghazi, the inability to make their false charges stick has driven Fox to elevate a different scandalette to the forefront. So now Benghazi has been at least temporarily sidelined in favor of the dreaded lost emails. What Fox is trying to turn into a political frenzy is the allegation that Clinton had sent or received classified email communications using a private computer server rather than one hosted by the feds at the Department of State. This, they imply, may have exposed sensitive information to unfriendly nations.

The first point that needs to be made is that recent reports have revealed that hackers have already trespassed into the official government servers that store data for millions of federal employees. However, there is no evidence whatsoever that Clinton’s server security was ever breached by anyone. So Clinton may have actually protected the information she was handling by segregating it on her server while the feds were being hacked. The second pertinent fact is that there is no evidence that any classified emails were sent or received through Clinton’s server.

However, what really makes this media farce so dishonest is that the so-called journalists at Fox News are fabricating a controversy that doesn’t exist in reality. They spend endless hour of valuable airtime yammering about missing emails and mysterious servers. Even though Clinton, in an unprecedented display of transparency, turned over 55,000 pages of emails. This was never done by other Secretaries of State who also used private servers. Nor was it done by her GOP opponents who as governors did the same thing.

To make matters worse, Fox News completely ignores previous incidents when emails went missing. For instance, when the Bush administration was under investigation for various improprieties, they suddenly announced that, not thousands, but millions of emails had mysteriously vanished. This scandal even included allegations that then-White House operative Karl Rove had been communicating with a private server located at the Republican National Committee.

At the time, Bush’s Press Secretary Dana Perino (now a host on Fox News), insisted it was an unfortunate but innocent computer glitch. This is the same Perino who now calls Clinton’s email situation a criminal offense. And at a congressional investigation of the Bush matter, the GOP’s Clinton inquisitionist, Darrell Issa, also tried to dismiss the Bush debacle as a glitch. Furthermore, then-CNN reporter Ed Henry (now also on Fox News) speculated that the Bush affair might be a violation of the Federal Presidential Records Act.

As if that weren’t enough, the Fox News family has another email scandal in its past. When Rupert Murdoch’s British newspapers were caught hacking into the phone and email accounts of private citizens, celebrities, politicians, and royals, they tried to cover it up by making millions of emails disappear. This destruction of evidence was not merely alluded to, but was proven with internal, News Corp. memos describing their policy of destroying emails “that could be unhelpful in the context of future litigation”.

So you have to wonder what moral authority anyone at Fox News has to complain about Clinton’s emails, which have never been proven to contain anything untoward. Clearly Fox isn’t interested in compliance with the law or good government. They are deploying a well-coordinated attack on a political rival whom they desperately fear. And they wonder why no one regards them as a reputable news network.

The “Damn, These People Are Stupid” Awards For 2014

In a year that was filled to the brim with monumental idiocies, the competition for King of the Dumfux is stiffer than usual. Narrowing down the list of those deserving of special recognition was particularly difficult, but the collection below is a pretty good indication that DEVO was right and that civilization is taking huge leaps backwards. So fasten your neck bolts and let your eyes glaze over as we journey back through a year of hilarious (and frightening) intellectual vacancy.

2014 Stupid People Awards

The “Is Our Children Learning” Award

Leading off the ceremony is a Hall of Famer dolt, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, who laments that “the problem with American schools is just that kids are…learning too much.” That’s the sort of thinking that makes every other item on this list possible. It is also a recipe for growing new Fox News viewers who appreciate the stupidity of people like Carlson.

An let’s also give Carlson an honorary mention for his screed on “The Wussification Of Popeye.”


The “Speak For Yourself, Douchebag” Award

Former CIA “intelligence” officer, Michael Scheuer, is a regular guest on Fox News. He is famous for telling Glenn Beck that “the only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States.” But earlier this year in an interview with Neil Cavuto, Scheuer made a surprising distinction between America and the terrorist ISIS operation saying that the Islamists “are not dumb people. They may be brutal, but they are not dumb. We’re the dumb ones.”

Well then, that settles it. The problem we’ve been having all along is that we’re just not as smart as our adversaries. And Cavuto, notably, did not challenge that assessment. After all, how can a bunch of hillbillies who are hypnotized by reality television, designer jeans, and flame-broiled Whoppers supposed to be able to compete intellectually with such sophisticated and sociologically advanced opponents? Why did we not see this deficiency before Scheuer brought it to our attention? Oh yeah, because we’re stupid.


The “Pimp My Ride: Welfare Edition” Award

The lazy-brained right-wing media pounced on a scandalous story about President Obama’s bill to give welfare recipients free cars. And except for the fact that the story was the product of a satirical website, it would have been a great scoop. What makes it worse is that they did same thing the year before and were mercilessly shamed for their idiocy, but that didn’t prevent them from doing it again this year.


The “E Pluribus Ooh Numb” Award

After complaining about a Coca Cola ad that celebrated the diversity of the nation by singing the anthem “America the Beautiful” in several languages, the wingnuts at Breitbart News declared victory when Coke modified the ad by placing the motto “E Pluribus Unum” at the beginning. So let’s get this straight. Coke, they said, “bowed to conservative critics” who insist on English-only by inserting a short phrase in — Latin. Uhhh, OK.


The “Your Wife Is A Fat Fatty” Award

No list of stupidity would be complete without the ravings of Fox’s “psycho” analyst Keith Ablow. There are numerous entries under his name for recognition, but we’ll just settle on one that is both dumb and insulting. While visiting with the women of Fox’s Outnumbered, Ablow dispensed his routine Obama-hating rhetoric, but then added a bit of spice just for this program. As a slap at First Lady Michele Obama, who has been a devoted advocate of healthy diets, Ablow questioned her sincerity by smugly barking “How well can she be eating. She needs to drop a few.” This bit of misogyny even elicited gasps from the conservative ladies of Fox.


The “Republicans Are People Too” Award

In 2014 the Republican Party took on a public relations task that dwarfs all other efforts at opinion-making. They boldly aimed to convince the American people that Republicans are people too. And the method used to achieve this goal was to produce a video that consisted of a montage of stock photos labeled as “average” American Republicans. So the video produced in order to convince everyone that Republicans are real people is populated by fakes. Brilliant.


The “Blind Leading the Old and Stale” Award

Once known as “Bush’s Brain,” Karl Rove has deteriorated into a mentally deficient spewer of rancid rightist partisanship. In an attempt to bash Hillary Clinton, Rove’s wild pitch beaned every senior citizen in the country when he said that “In American politics, there’s a sense you want to be new, you don’t want to be too familiar, you want to be something fresh, you don’t want to be something old and stale.” Never mind that almost every Republican Rove backed for the past thirty years was older or staler than Clinton. The real numbskullery of Rove is that he is insulting the nation’s most reliable voting bloc by implying that they are not fit for public service.


The “Hate Of The Union Address” Award

There is boomlet of commentary on the right that thinks it would be a good idea to prohibit President Obama from delivering the annual State of the Union address to members of Congress. This is a proposal that reeks of personal animosity and is wholly inconsistent with the mission of Congress. What’s more, it certainly doesn’t advance the spirit of cooperation that the GOP pretended to embrace following the midterm election. Speaker Boehner has already nixed this notion, but merely considering it hangs an “i’m a stupid baby” sign around the necks of these cretins.


The “Boobs On The Air” Award

Following reports of a female fighter pilot from the United Arab Emirates who led the UAE’s forces in attacks on ISIL, Fox News host Eric Bolling made what he must have thought was a hilarious joke by referring to her as “Boobs on the ground.” Bolling not only insulted the courageous pilot, but his associates at Fox News as well. He later apologized to his wife and Fox viewers, but egregiously left out the pilot and all other women in the armed services.


The “Flakes On A Plane” Award

Allen West, a disgraced veteran and one-term Tea Party congressman, supplied Fox News with an “exclusive” report about what really happened on the ground in Benghazi. West’s source for his exclusive was an anonymous stranger that happened to be sitting next to him on a plane who said that he knew some other anonymous dude who had the real skinny on the scandal. This is what passes for an “exclusive” news report on Fox News? A third-hand tale of conspiracy theories and previously debunked allegations?


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As special salute at the conclusion of a year of monumentally asinine behavior, News Corpse is presenting its first “Dumfux Award for Achievements in Stupidy.” Candidates for this honor were many and included Ben Carson, Elizabeth Hasselbeck, Rush Limbaugh, and Keith Ablow. Sarah Palin was eliminated from the competition because her inclusion would have swamped the field. But emerging from the pack was a wholly deserving moron who proved himself through a year of failure and foolishness. So without further ado, here is the 2014 Dumfux Award for Achievements in Stupidity winner:

Darrell Issa

Congressman Darrell Issa of California

Rep. Issa chaired the House Oversight Committee through a maze of fake scandals, including Benghazi, the IRS/Tea Party affair, and ObamaCare. And in none of his persecutions did he manage to prove any of his preconceived allegations. But he sealed his victory for this award on the last day of the last hearing that he will attend as chairman. Having subpoenaed Jonathan Gruber, the economic advisor who inartfully described the American People as stupid, Issa must have believed that he was in a position to embarrass Gruber and, by association, all Democrats and supporters of ObamaCare. But Issa led off his inquisition with this idiotic question:

“Mr. Gruber, I’ve been accused that I’m going to berate you or something and I hope that you won’t feel that way when I get done. But the night before last I was at the Kennedy Center Honors where they honored Tom Hanks, famously ‘Forrest Gump,’ the ultimate in successful stupid man. Are you stupid?”

Gee…I wonder where Issa might have gotten the impression that people thought he would berate Gruber? This may be the single stupidest question Issa has ever asked anyone. What did he expect Gruber to say? And how did he think this line of questioning would benefit whatever investigation he was pretending to conduct? As usual, Issa’s motives were purely hostile and aimed at creating political theater. But by the end he once again demonstrated his impotence as even conservative colleagues and pundits criticized him for scheduling the pointless hearing in the first place. So congratulations Mr. Issa, and best wishes for a new year as a flunky who no one respects.

Are You Stupid? The Question Darrell Issa Should Ask Himself, Not Jonathan Gruber

The House oversight Committee held its last hearing with Darrell Issa as chairman today. Next year they will convene with ultra-rightist Jason Chaffetz taking over.The Issa Era has been fraught with partisanship, deceit, arrogance, and bullying. There were incidents where Issa badgered witnesses, insulted colleagues, leaked damaging testimony, and even refused to allow anyone but himself to speak at hearing that he abruptly gaveled to a close after he said his piece.

Darrell Issa

The final Issa melodrama featured an appearance by Jonathan Gruber, the MIT economist who so unartfully described the American people as stupid. The hearing had no discernible purpose other than to rake Gruber over the coals for a couple of hours. His contribution to the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) was strictly limited to the formation of economic modeling as a tool for members of Congress to draft their legislation. And he was effusively remorseful for his “glib, thoughtless, and sometimes downright insulting comments,” as one might expect. You can read his opening statement here (pdf).

That, however, didn’t stop Issa from laying into Gruber from the get-go. Issa began his questioning with a wholly insincere attempt to set aside his well-known vicious streak. He failed before he even came to the end of his first sentence.

Issa: Mr. Gruber, I’ve been accused that I’m going to berate you or something and I hope that you won’t feel that way when I get done. But the night before last I was at the Kennedy Center Honors where they honored Tom Hanks, famously ‘Forrest Gump,’ the ultimate in successful stupid man. Are you stupid?

Gee…I wonder where Issa might have gotten the impression that people thought he would berate Gruber? This may be the single stupidest question Issa has ever asked anyone. What did he expect Gruber to say? And how did he think this line of questioning would benefit whatever investigation he was pretending to conduct? As usual, Issa’s motives were purely hostile and aimed at creating political theater. But he failed utterly to produce anything of value from his boorish inquiry. In fact, no one on the Republican side achieved anything useful either politically or, more importantly, for advancing the interests of Americans seeking better options for maintaining their health and that of their families.

In another exchange, Issa sought to establish that insurance premiums were generally higher under ObamaCare, but Gruber maintained that on average premiums were reduced. So Issa countered saying that “I’m a taxpayer. Trust me. People are not paying less. People like me are paying more.” It should be noted that Issa is the wealthiest member of congress and, therefore, there aren’t many other people like him. Consequently, he inadvertently made Gruber’s point that most people are paying less.

Even Fox’s Eric Bolling was disappointed with the Gruber hearing, but for a particularly dickish reason. He said that Republicans should not have called him to testify “because he was such a villain before.” In other words, Bolling is upset that Gruber was given an opportunity to explain himself, apologize, and be seen as a real human being, flaws and all, rather than a mustache-twirling cartoon villain. Yet this was the inevitable result that anyone but Issa could have foreseen.

Much of the reporting from Fox News on this hearing repeated the same false allegations they have been spewing for weeks. The Gruber episode has reached a near Benghazi-level of saturation on the network. An analysis last month by PolitiFact revealed that in about a week Fox News had mentioned it 779 times. That comes to a reference once every fifteen minutes, 24 hours a day, for eight straight days. That’s a pretty hefty dose of obsession.

Fox News Gruber Brainwashing

This issue is so important to Fox that they spent much of the day complaining that a Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture was released today in order to knock Gruber out of the headlines. That isn’t a joke. Wingnuts on Fox like Andrea Tantaros and Jesse Watters were joined by Rush Limbaugh in promoting that conspiracy theory. They actually regard Gruber’s gaffes as being more important than violations of international and domestic law, as well as all civilized standards of humane behavior.

This conspiracy, however, was shot to hell since Fox News itself was leading every hour with segments on the torture report. So if there was a clandestine plot to suppress news about Gruber’s testimony, then Fox was in on it. And for those pundits who still think the scheme is real, they need to ask themselves why it is so critical that the media cover Gruber’s answer to the question, “Are you stupid?” It would be far more enlightening to ask that question of Issa and the fruitcakes at Fox who seem to be caught up in a world of their own nightmares.

Scandal Monger Darrell Issa Returns To Fox News To Pitch New IRS E-Mail Lies

Since there is nothing else going on in the world, like terrorist armies marching through Syria and Iraq, or Russian convoys crossing into Ukraine, and since domestically the nation isn’t embroiled in controversies over unarmed black teenagers murdered by the police, or thousands of immigrant children suffering harsh conditions along the southern border, Fox News has found the free time time to entertain yet another fable about non-existent IRS emails that allegedly expose massive government corruption.

Darrell Issa Witch Hunter

Darrell Issa, chairman of the Laughing Stock Committee (aka the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform), ventured into dangerously friendly territory last night when he was interviewed by Greta Van Susteren of Fox News. Van Susteren introduced Issa and before she could even ask a question he said:

“Good evening, Greta, and thank you for covering what’s emerging to be just an amazing sequence of cover-up, delay, denial, even what now appears to be a false statement from the new IRS commissioner in which he said he moved ‘heaven and Earth’ to get us Lois Lerner’s lost emails. And now we find out from the Judicial Watch that in fact they exist, but they simply haven’t been asked for. They’re too burdensome. They do exist. And we look forward to finding how the commissioner can say they don’t exist, when, in fact, they do.”

That was Issa’s opening remarks after Van Susteren said nothing more than “Good evening, sir.” Clearly Issa feels comfortable commandeering the program and delivering unchallenged monologues. Just as clearly he isn’t reticent about deliberately lying in order to advance a phony scandal that he has been hustling for years without producing any scrap of evidence. And as for his insistence that the emails do, in fact, exist – no Darrell, in fact they do not.

The “amazing sequence of cover-up” to which Issa is referring was fed to him by the right-wing Judicial Watch, who claimed to have received a “jaw-dropping” revelation in a conversation with an administration official. Judicial Watch president, Tom Fitton, alleged that “The Obama administration had been lying to the American people about Lois Lerner’s missing emails.” However, when contacted for a response the administration flatly denied the charge saying that Judicial Watch’s statement was “off-base” and that Judicial Watch was “mischaracterizing what the government had said.” They continued…

“There is no newly divulged back-up system that was not previously known about,” the official said. “Government lawyers were simply referring to the back-up system at the IRS that Commissioner Koskinen had already disclosed.”

In other words, Judicial Watch failed to understand, or purposefully misconstrued, what they were told by the government official. Never mind that the White House had previously spoken to this issue and laid to rest any discrepancies. But that didn’t stop Judicial Watch from funneling their falsehoods to Issa, a willing participant in the Wingnut Deceit Brigade. Issa then hightails it to Fox News to insure that this lie gets the broadest distribution possible. And to make certain that it is widely dispersed, Fox also aired similar segments on at least two other programs, including their signature nightly news show with Bret Baier.

This is how the Conservative Media Circus whips up manufactured hysteria over phony scandals. The fake story is then blasted across the right-wing mediasphere with help from their partisan partners like Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze, Newsmax, National Review, Breitbart News, Townhall, NewsBusters, and the Koch brothers affiliated Washington Free Beacon. Before long a nation of gullible Tea Party waifs are refueled with high octane bullshit, destroying any hopes for intelligent, fact-based debate. Welcome to Rupert Murdoch’s America.

How Inept Is This Republican Congress? More Inept Than You Ever Imagined

If it seems to you that that President Obama has been under an investigative microscope since the moment he took office, it’s only because that’s pretty much true. Republicans were determined to foil anything positive that this president placed on his agenda, and their primary method of achieving that end has been perpetual investigations of trumped up scandals.

Benghazi

But even with their single-minded devotion to destroying this presidency, the House GOP has not produce any evidence of wrongdoing that implicated the White House. Of course, if their purpose was merely to keep the nation from enjoying the benefits of a productive government, Republicans can claim some success. They have certainly obstructed the creation of millions of jobs; progress on environmental protection; reforms of health care and immigration and tax policies; and numerous other initiatives that might have advanced the country’s well being. But any actual manifestations of scandal have been nonexistent.

To illustrate the level of incompetence attributable to these Tea Party hacks, it is useful to put their job performance into historical perspective. One way to do this is to compare their progress with that of prior congressional sessions working on similarly lofty projects. And since there has been so much talk of impeachment of late, it seemed like that would make a good model for comparison.

So get this: From the date that the U.S. Senate voted to establish a select committee to investigate Watergate, until the resignation of President Nixon, it took about 15 months. To reiterate, that’s from the date that the committee was approved, through the maze of contested hearings, the presentation of evidence, the White House defense, and all the way through the conclusion with a disgraced (and obviously guilty) president stepping down, only a little more than a year transpired.

Compare that to the current House Committee on Oversight’s investigation of whether the IRS discriminated against conservative organizations. Those hearings began 16 months ago. So they have already exceeded the time allotted to impeaching Nixon. However, there has not been a single shred of incriminating evidence uncovered. Plus, if you count from the time the Ways and Means Committee began their inquiries, it has been over 38 months. And these hearings are still continuing.

Let’s also compare the House hearings on Fast and Furious, the botched gun trafficking sting that actually began in the Bush Administration. But limiting this to just the Obama era, Congress has been investigating this since June 2011 – 38 months and counting. And nothing of substance has come from it.

The granddaddy of the Obama era pseudo-scandals has to be Benghazi. Over at Fox News they are suffering from a rare form of Benghazi Tourettes, spitting out the word every few seconds for no apparent reason other than to stir up their dimwitted viewers. So far, the congressional investigations into this have been ongoing for 23 months, with nothing to show for it. And on this issue they have been the most insistent that there is a correlation to Watergate. In fact, the Watergate angle has been an obsession that they tie to their wet dreams of impeachment.

Even the impeach-happy congress of the Clinton era took far less time to conduct hearings and actually try the President for high crimes and misdemeanors, than it has taken for any of the current Congress to even find a crumb of presidential misbehavior. From the inception of the House proceedings to impeach Clinton, until his acquittal in the Senate, it took all of four and a half months. If you count from the date that the Drudge Report posted its tabloid article identifying the Monica Lewinsky affair, it was still only 13 months.

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To sum up, every one of the current phony scandals, that are wastefully consuming time and taxpayer dollars, are exceeding that spent on the Nixon and Clinton impeachments. And none of these scandals have produced any hint of wrongdoing. That’s fairly conclusive proof that the Republicans serving in Congress now are profoundly incompetent. There are really only three possible explanations for this. Either 1) There is no evidence and they are wasting everyone’s time, or 2) There is evidence, but these blockheads are too stupid to stumble over it, or 3) They don’t give a damn about evidence, they are only trying to smear the President.

Either way, they need to be relieved of their duties at the earliest opportunity, which would be this November. That makes it the responsibility of American voters to step up and do their duty. All you have to do is vote. And rest assured, if you do not, this GOP idiocy will continue for the next two years and will likely be escalated into a full-blown impeachment of Obama. For God’s sake, don’t let that happen.

Darrell Issa Discovers More Emails He Can Brazenly Lie About On Fox News

In an entirely unsurprising development, rabidly partisan congressman, and recidivist criminal, Darrell Issa, has popped up again on Fox News to peddle his dishonest allegations concerning the trumped up IRS controversy.

Darrell Issa

The latest wrinkle in Issa’s permanently furrowed brow is an email exchange that he selectively leaked that he alleges is the long-lost smoking gun that proves – well, whatever it is that has his panties in a twist that day. The emails are a discussion between the former IRS Tax-Exempt Organizations division director, Lois Lerner, and Maria Hooke from the IT department, wherein Lerner seeks information regarding document storage. Here are excerpts from the emails:

Lerner: I had a question today about OCS [instant messages]. I was cautioning folks about email and how we have had several occasions where Congress has asked for emails and there has been an electronic search for responsive emails–so we need to be cautious about what we say in emails.
Hooke: OCS messages are not set to automatically save as the standard; however the functionality exits within the software. […] My general recommendation is to treat the conversation as if it could/is being saved somewhere, as it is possible for either party of the conversation to retain the information and have it turn up as part of an electronic search. Make sense?
Lerner: Perfect.

From this rather innocuous exchange, Issa managed to extract something nefarious. His interpretation points to a deliberate attempt to conceal information from congressional investigators. Here is his analysis as adoringly received by Brian Kilmeade on Fox News:

Kilmeade: What do you get from this correspondence?
Issa: What we get is, perhaps what CNN was asking me for a couple weeks ago – a smoking gun. This is Lois Lerner clearly cautioning people not to say things on email. […] Why? She didn’t want an audit trail for what they were doing, and they were targeting conservatives for their views. No question at all.
Kilmeade: As so many others are choosing not to follow you, we will.

If Issa gets a smoking gun from this, you have to ask what he’s smoking. First of all, Lerner is merely articulating a common business instruction to keep all communications professional. Cautioning her staff about what they say in emails that might later be made public is prudent advice. Not because they are engaging in a cover up, but because people often lapse into inappropriately casual conversations in routine work life. They certainly would not want to have accounts of last night’s party, or off-color jokes, turning up in official investigations.

Issa’s laughably absurd assertion that Lerner is ordering a cover up of emails requires one to accept that she would do such a thing in an email. That would be like calling a criminal accomplice on the phone to tell him not to talk about the crime they just committed because the phone might be tapped. And Issa went further to answer his own question as to why Lerner would issue her cautionary advice. He said it was because she “didn’t want an audit trail for what they were doing.” Of course, the only evidence he has of that is his supernatural ability to read minds.

Perhaps the most blatant distortion Issa whips up refers to Lerner’s response to the IT rep’s explanation of instant message storage. Lerner said simply “Perfect.” Issa contorted that into her being “delighted” that instant messaging wasn’t being tracked. However, that isn’t what the IT rep said. In fact, she said quite the opposite, advising that the messages be treated as if they were saved because either party could do so.

But the worst mangling of this portion of the exchange is that Lerner’s response came immediately following the IT rep signing off her last email by asking “Make sense?” That is what Lerner was responding to when she said “Perfect,” as in “it makes perfect sense.” She was simply acknowledging that she understood the explanation.

This is typical of Issa’s unethical practice of cherry-picking documents from his committee’s hearings that he can spin negatively. It is something that he gets away with because far too many so-called journalists allow themselves to be manipulated by his intentionally deceptive leaks. And, of course, Fox News is all to happy to cooperate with the charade. Already Bill O’Reilly has featured a segment on this subject wherein he referred to these new emails as “hard evidence” of a cover up. Someone needs to give these cretins a remedial course on the meaning of “evidence.”

Sunday Morning Republicans Gone Wild: Boehner, Issa, Krauthammer, And Gohmert

This week has been a festival of Republican derangement on a scale that is impressive for its magnitude and breadth. A party that is notorious for inane policies and political stunts has really knuckled down and exceeded its previous masterworks of idiocy. And it starts at the top with GOP House Speaker John Boehner.

Obama Mic Drop

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This week John Boehner leaped to the front of the pack by announcing the Tea Party’s wet dream of a lawsuit against President Obama for abuse of power and political overreach. However, when asked precisely what actions by the President were going to be the basis for the litigation, Boehner responded “When I make that decision, I’ll let you know.”

Brilliant! Boehner has invented the “Mad-Libs” lawsuit. Just fill in the blanks as you go along. For instance: Whereas the President has violated the ________ Act by issuing an order to _________ citizens, he is guilty of _________ing the _________. Case closed.

Next up we have Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Phony Scandals Committee. This week he appeared on Megyn Kelly’s Fox News program to discuss the IRS and said of Lois Lerner, without qualification, that “Of course she broke laws and of course she broke regulations and we need to hold her accountable.”

That is a remarkably irresponsible position to take for someone who is ostensibly undertaking an investigation with the pretense of relying solely on the facts. But when Issa was challenged Sunday by CNN’s Candy Crowley as to whether he had any proof of wrongdoing by Lerner, the IRS, or the White House, Darrell Issa said “I don’t play the game of ‘no evidence.'” Just let that one sink in for a while.

Enter Fox News super-pundit Charles Krauthammer. Old Chuckie Sleaze visited with his Fox colleague Greta Van Susteren this week to pontificate over the Supreme Court decision on presidential recess appointments. Krauthammer opined that the court’s rebuke was proof that Obama is a lawless tyrant who rules by fiat. And then he introduced the “I” word saying that “If this were a Republican president, he’d be impeached now over all of these abuses.”

The problem with Krauthammer’s analysis is that Republican presidents have been far more generous with their recess appointments than Obama. Since 1981, Ronald Reagan led the field with 232. He was followed by Bush, Jr (171), Clinton (139), Bush, Sr. (78), and then Obama trailing with a mere 32 recess appointments. So Krauthammer’s speculation about what would happen to a Republican couldn’t be more wrong.

And saving the best for last, GOP Reps. Bill Flores and Louis Gohmert (aka Flo-Mert) have drafted legislation that would pay a million dollars to anyone who can provide the emails that were allegedly lost by Lois Lerner. Setting aside the fact that there may not be any lost emails at all because they may have been retrieved from servers or files residing with the recipients, Flo-Mert’s bill is epically idiotic.

First of all, they are essentially outsourcing their duties to unknown persons who they are enticing, via greed, to produce evidence of crime. That can result in unscrupulous individuals manufacturing evidence or breaking the law to acquire it. Secondly, they are proposing to spend taxpayer money on a purely partisan activity. Thirdly, they are conceding that they are too incompetent to do their own jobs. Fourthly, they are implying that there is a conspiracy to conceal the emails that can only be broken by cold, hard cash. And lastly, they included a provision in the bill to cut the salaries of all IRS employees by 20% until the possibly non-existent emails are turned over to Congress. That would punish people who have nothing to do with the matter, not to mention everyone in perpetuity if, in fact, there are no lost emails to recover.

This brief collection of Republican stupidity demonstrates how seriously devolved the GOP (Greedy One Percent) have become. They appear to have entirely stopped trying to be a reputable political enterprise and are competing to see who can be the imbecile of the week (although it will be hard to beat the inimitable Fox News “Psycho” analyst, Keith Ablow). But stay tuned as the contest continues and new aspirants arise to challenge the old hands. This is entertainment at its best.

ISSA HYPOCRISY: Lost IRS Emails vs. Lost Bush White House Emails – Part 2

Last week News Corpse published a story detailing the hypocrisy of Fox News for hyperventilating over allegations of lost emails by the IRS when they said nothing about millions of lost emails by the Bush White House during investigations of improper firings of U.S. Attorneys and the outing of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame. Even worse, one of those bashing the the Obama administration was Fox News host Dana Perino who, at the time of the Bush email affair, was Bush’s press secretary and personally defended losing the emails.

Now the web of hypocrisy is growing even wider. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Fake Scandal Committee, has been leading the attack on President Obama over the missing IRS emails, despite the fact that there is not a shred of evidence that the President was in any way involved with the email or the broader IRS controversy over the scrutiny given to political groups applying for tax-exempt status. Issa recently convened a hearing specifically to investigate the lost emails and declaring that the administration has “some ‘splainin’ to do.”

Darrell Issa Hypocrisy

It’s rather amusing that Issa is taking such a hard-line stance on the matter since it is such a distant position from the one he held in 2008, when he sought to dismiss any notion of scandal by blaming the computer software used to archive the email. Mother Jones reported at the time that Issa…

“…did his best to play down the extent of the Bush administration’s now well-documented email archiving problems. Defending the White House’s decision to switch from the Lotus Notes-based archiving system used by the Clinton administration, Issa compared the the software to “using wooden wagon wheels” and Sony Betamax tapes.”

Issa accused then-committee chair Henry Waxman of leading a “fishing expedition” and telling Waxman that “You have no mandate to go Peeping Tom into every piece of information.” Considering Issa’s multiple investigations into the IRS, ObamaCare, immigration, and, of course, Benghazi, if Waxman was a Peeping Tom, then Issa is an acutely perverted stalker with dangerously sociopathic tendencies.

In other IRS email related news, Ed Henry of Fox News raised the issue at a White House press briefing when he asked outgoing press secretary Jay Carney “What happened to Lois Lerner’s email?” Carney’s answer should be the benchmark for any further inquiries by Issa or any other agent of the Republican inquisition. Carney said

“IT professionals worked to restore Lerner’s hard drive but were unable to do so. Nonetheless, the IRS has or will produce 24,000 Lerner e-mails from this 2009-2011 time period largely from the files of the other 82 individuals. So I think that answers your question that they are engaging in an effort to find e-mails in the absence of being able to restore the hard drive. […]

“Chairman Camp, as you know, requested e-mails to and from the White House. We were asked if we would produce them; we did, in fact, do a search for all communications between Lois Lerner and any person within the Executive Office of the President for this period. We found zero e-mails — sorry to disappoint — between Lois Lerner and anyone within the EOP during this period. We found three e-mails where a third party e-mailed both Lois Lerner and officials within the EOP. One was a spam e-mail and two others were from a person seeking tax assistance. Each of these e-mails has been produced to Congress.”

So the administration has taken extraordinary measures to retrieve the missing emails. They have searched servers and the computers of possible recipients. They have done everything that the harpies on the right have been badgering them to do. And they have had some measure of success in that they recovered and delivered tens of thousands of emails from the time period requested. What more is expected of them?

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Obviously, the critics in congress and the press don’t really care about results. They only care about stirring up controversy and fake outrage. That’s how Dana Perino can defend her boss, George Bush, for losing millions of emails and then hammer the IRS for a similar problem. And that’s how Darrell Issa can dismiss Bush’s email disappearances as a computer glitch, but accuse Obama of engaging in a criminal cover up. And the only reason they get away with it is because the media doesn’t do their homework and inform the public in a fair and thorough manner. And making it worse is that some in the media (e.g. Fox News) deliberately misinform the public to advance their partisan agenda.

You’ll Never See This IRS/Tea Party Story On Fox News

Ever since recidivist criminal Darrell Issa (R-Mouthbreather) began his inquisition against President Obama, he has repeatedly tried to poison public opinion by selectively releasing information intended to cast a negative pall on the President and his administration. As chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Issa led partisan witch hunts into an array of phony scandals including Fast and Furious, Benghazi, ObamaCare, and the alleged targeting of Tea Party groups by the IRS.

With regard to the IRS matter, a report published this morning by USA Today revealed yet another case that demonstrates just how deceitful the Issa panel has been. The article states that “39 IRS and Treasury officials deny White House targeting.”

Darrell Issa Witch Hunter

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To be clear, this story is disclosing the testimony of 39 witnesses who were interviewed in closed sessions, all of whom told the committee that there was never any effort by the White House, or anyone else, to influence them in the conduct of their official duties to insure that organizations seeking tax-exempt status were entitled to the designation. Every single one of the witnesses called before the committee said the same thing. Yet Issa withheld the testimony of these witnesses from the public until Rep. Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the committee, made them available today.

This is typical of the way Issa manages his charge as a committee chair. When he isn’t tyrannically censoring his congressional colleagues, he is releasing snippets of data that make the President or Democrats look bad. Then when the full transcript is released it becomes apparent that Issa lied. In the meantime Fox News has already plastered their air with the falsely abridged reports, which they never bother to correct when the truth eventually comes out. This makes the response by Issa’s deputy staff director for the Oversight panel all the more ludicrous as he accuses Rep. Cummings of “cherry-picking” the evidence.

All of this is happening as the GOP led House is getting ready to vote on holding IRS official Lois Lerner in contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before Issa’s dishonest and disreputable committee. Even as the pseudo-patriots on Fox pretend to be devoted to the Constitution, they lambaste Lerner for exercising her rights and suggest that it implies guilt on her part. But those more familiar with the Constitution than the rightist hypocrites at Fox recognize that Issa’s committee is what is known as a “perjury trap,” wherein the innocent are tricked into saying things for which they are later threatened with indictment. If Lerner’s attorney permitted her to testify before a committee as corrupt as Issa’s, he should be disbarred.

Now that the testimony of these witnesses, that was taken in secret, has finally been released, you might expect that the network that has been most obsessed with the IRS/Tea Party affair would report on these statements that are so critical to the investigation. But don’t hold your breath waiting for Fox News to air anything about this. Since it essentially proves that the whole scandal mongering on the part of the Republicans and Fox News was a sham, they certainly aren’t going to blow the whistle on themselves. That would require having journalistic principles and personal integrity, commodities that are in short supply in either the GOP or Fox News.

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[Update 1] On Wednesday, May 7, the House of Representatives voted 231 to 187 to hold Lerner in contempt of Congress. And that’s about as far as this charade will go because the Department of Justice is unlikely to proceed with a prosecution.

[Update 2] As of Thursday, May 8, Fox News, as predicted, has not reported the fact that all 39 witnesses who testified before Issa’s Committee affirmed that the White House put no pressure on them and that their activities were not political.