Where Are My Keys?

Remember how Obama "saved GM"?..

It was announced today that an additional 7.6 million U.S. vehicles are being recalled.  GM stock is trading around $37 today (you'll recall it needed to hit around $55 a share for the taxpayers to break even on their "investment").

GM has been getting hammered with recalls, as evidenced by a simple search on Google.

At what point will GM encourage consumers to buy a different brand of vehicle?

GM is number one in one category: number of vehicles recalled in a single year!

Remind me again of why we didn't let this company go bankrupt?  I wonder if GM will need a taxpayer bailout to finance the over $2.5 billion in claims it will have to pay out?

As I wrote this post, I went back to see what effect the news was having on GM stock.  It's dropped to just over $36, and trading has been halted. 

Create a crisis, then fix it..

The President is seeking $2 billion to pay for an "aggressive deterrence strategy". 

I wonder if some of those "shovel ready jobs" from 6+ years ago could have been utilized building a wall in the desert.  What kind of "aggressive deterrence strategy" would that have been?

Obama lets the borders become more porous than ever before, deports no one, and then decides to step up and "fix" the very problem he created.

How magnanimous of him.

Gettin' ready for the Fourth?

Make sure you get "the good stuff"..

 

If you do have enough of the little stuff, you can still get a good show:

 

Ginsberg says Obama "has ventured into a minefield"...

The Supreme Court voted 5-4 to allow certain companies to opt out of certain requirements of Obamacare.  Justice Ginsberg took issue with the ruling:

But in a blistering dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Justice Sotomayor, lambasted the majority opinion—delivered by five male justices—as "a decision of startling breadth" that would allow corporations to "opt out of any law … they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs."

The majority view "demands accommodation of a for-profit corporation's religious beliefs no matter the impact that accommodation may have on third parties who do not share the corporation owners' religious faith—in these cases, thousands of women employed by Hobby Lobby and Conestoga or dependents of persons those corporations employ" wrote Ginsburg, a stalwart member of the Court's liberal wing.

Didn't President Obama allow certain segments of the population to "opt out" of the law?  Didn't his decisions to allow those groups to opt out have "impact" on "third parties"?  Hasn't the President also applied his decisions on who must follow, and who is exempt with "startling breadth"?

Isn't Obama "guilty" of doing the exact same thing that Ginsberg is mad at Hobby Lobby for doing?  And if so, shouldn't he be held to the same level of disgust she is leveling at Hobby Lobby?

Hobby Lobby is merely following the example that the President of the United States has set (multiple times, in fact).  In this instance, Hobby Lobby even has a better reason than Mr. Obama.

Have any heads rolled?

VA scandal, veterans died.  No one has been fired.

IRS scandal, emails "lost", Conservative groups targeted.  No one has been fired.

Benghazi scandal, 4 Americans dead, security lapses.  No one has been fired.

Obamacare website rollout a fiasco, enrollment/paid premiums lower than expected.  No one has been fired.

What does it take to lose your job in this Administration?

Finally, someone in DC grows some balls..

The Supreme Court rejects President Obama's recess appointments.  Maybe Congress can grow a pair, and start acting the same way.

It's worth noting the decision was unanimous with the Justices, reminding the President that the Senate makes Senate rules, not the White House; and that Obama's appointments were unnecessarily extreme.

Isn't it interesting..

That the same guy who tells us that a few players don't speak for an entire group, then tells us a few players speak for a whole group?

To be fair, the two positions were offered a whole 3 minutes apart, so there was clearly time for him to evolve his position.

I'm confused..

If there wasn't even a "smidgen" of corruption at the IRS (according to the President), then why did the IRS just pay a $50,000 settlement to a Conservative group?

Two years after activists for same-sex marriage obtained the confidential tax return and donor list of a national group opposed to redefining marriage, the Internal Revenue Service has admitted wrongdoing and agreed to settle the resulting lawsuit.

The Daily Signal has learned that, under a consent judgment today, the IRS agreed to pay $50,000 in damages to the National Organization for Marriage as a result of the unlawful release of the confidential information to a gay rights group, the Human Rights Campaign, that is NOM’s chief political rival.

“Congress made the disclosure of confidential tax return information a serious matter for a reason,” NOM Chairman John D. Eastman told The Daily Signal. “We’re delighted that the IRS has now been held accountable for the illegal disclosure of our list of major donors from our tax return.”

"Le Deluge"..

 

The lies at the IRS continue to grow..

Sheryl Attkisson has a few interesting observations:

“These emails are not stored on a signal server or a single computer, so if there were a crash of a hard drive or some sort of system failure, they would still be retrievable. According to [John] Koskinen, the IRS Commissioner at the time, he told Congress that emails were stored offsite. That jives with people who said emails were backed up daily. There is a responsibility on the part of government officials to retain the data, make sure that is and can’t be lost in the system. If it’s true that the emails are lost, that’s quite a story in itself,” she said.

She thinks Congress should act fast to investigate if anyone inside the IRS is attempting to hide or destroy the emails.

“I would call in certain officials. Let’s assume there could have been some mischief committed — before they have time to get their stories straight and fix things up, I would get them in there under oath and start digging down and getting the timeline and getting people on the record about this. The only people that I see than can do this are members of Congress. The question is, do they have the will to do that?” Attkisson stated.

Attkisson said that regardless of whether the emails were lost accidentally or improperly, the individuals responsible should be held accountable.

“One official wrote me…to say this is entirely implausible, and he said there are criminal penalties for destroying federal records, which makes sense, including liability for negligence for not taking the necessary steps to protect files, including a federal requirement to backup data. This doesn’t happen. He said … all email servers are backed up with something called ‘RAID’ (Redundant Array Of Independent Disks), and it’s nearly impossible for something to delete the files, and that even if that were to happen they would not be gone forever,” she said.

“One final comment that this particular guy made, he said if there was a cover-up here — let’s just assume for the sake of argument that maybe something went wrong — he said laws have been broken during an alleged coverup that are much easier to prove than the original act, some poor IT schmuck, if you get him under oath, he will fold like a cheap suit, and I do feel like there is some truth to that. So if you call in the IT professionals who supposedly reported the crash and went after the irretrievable material and found they couldn’t be found I think you’d probably get the truth; and maybe the truth is nothing more than what the IRS says, but it’s just strange that they kept the subpoena and official request from Congress for 7-10 months without mentioning it that the emails don’t exist or are that they were gone. And it also then would be exposing a huge vulnerability in our federal computers if indeed data has been irretrievably lost by this. Remember, but the IRS is part of Healthcare.gov, if the IRS system can indeed be so vulnerable that some sort of crash can lose all kind of important data like this, what does t say about the federal system?”

Over at Powerline, more great questions:

1. What steps did each of you, as counsel for the Defendants, each of them, take to ensure that any and all documents as described in the litigation hold letter and as required by federal law were, in fact, preserved?

2. When did you learn that the destruction, loss or spoliation of emails of Defendant Lois Lerner had occurred?

3. What steps have you, each of you, taken to restore Ms. Lerner’s “lost” emails?

4. Were the “lost” emails from Ms. Lerner’s computer at the IRS or her home computer?

5. Are there documents or records, as described in the Litigation Hold letter or the subpoenas issued to the IRS from any of the Committees, belonging to other defendants that have been “lost”?

Time to find out who the IT guys were that tried to recover the "lost" emails, and get them under oath..