Where Are My Keys?

Good for you, Rush..

The radio giant threatens to sue the DCCC:

Radio host Rush Limbaugh has threatened to sue the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) for defamation, The Daily Caller has learned.

Limbaugh retained the services of lawyer Patty Glaser and demanded that the DCCC “preserve all records in anticipation of a lawsuit for defamation and interference” after the Democratic Party group led a campaign against Limbaugh based on out-of-context statements the host made about sexual assault. Limbaugh’s legal team delivered a letter to DCCC representatives Monday informing them of the legal threat. Limbaugh has also demanded a public retraction and apology.

The Limbaugh team is currently proceeding from the standpoint of litigating and has not yet made a decision as to whether the DCCC could make any concessions at this point to prevent the lawsuit.

The DCCC “has intentionally disseminated demonstrably false statements concerning Rush Limbaugh in a concerted effort to harm Mr. Limbaugh, and with reckless disregard for the resulting impact to small businesses across America that choose to advertise on his radio program” according to the GlaserWeil law firm’s letter to the DCCC, which was obtained by TheDC. “Mr. Limbaugh clearly, unambiguously, and emphatically condemned the notion that ‘no’ means ‘yes.’”

“Let’s be clear: Rush Limbaugh is advocating for the tolerance of rape” the DCCC stated in a September fundraising email after Limbaugh mocked Ohio State’s new mandatory sexual consent guidelines.

A Liberal hero suggest one "punch back twice as hard".  Limbaugh seems to be doing just that.  He has deep pockets, time, and what appears to be a winnable case, so why not file suit?

There's the added side bonus of the DCCC having to toss money that could otherwise be put to better use (maybe helping to find better candidates than the ones they offered up in the last election) than having to defend themselves.

A win-win for Republicans.

Stick with the "Two-Buck Chuck"?

Dude gets popped for making fake wine in his kitchen, and then selling it to collectors:

An international wine dealer has been jailed for 10 years for fraud after selling fake vintages and cheating fellow connoisseurs out of tens of millions of dollars.

Rudy Kurniawan, 37, an Indonesian-born businessman, had been considered one of the top wine collectors in the world, becoming famed for his palate and ability to identify fine wines.

But it emerged he had been blending the contents of cheap bottles in the kitchen of the home he shared with his mother.

He then placed the blends in old bottles, stuck fake labels on them and claimed they were rare vintages, selling them for vast sums.

I'm suuuuuure this will never be abused..

Google is ratting out potential criminals.

Technology giant Google has developed state of the art software which proactively scours hundreds of millions of email accounts for images of child abuse.

The breakthrough means paedophiles around the world will no longer be able to store and send vile images via email without the risk of their crimes becoming known to the authorities.

Details of the software emerged after a 41-year-old convicted sex offender was arrested in Texas for possession of child abuse images.

Police in the United States revealed that Google’s sophisticated search system had identified suspect material in an email sent by a man in Houston.

Child protection experts were automatically tipped off and were then able to alert the police, who swooped after requesting the user’s personal information from Google.

I'm all for catching the creeps, but who decides who and what is a "creep" in the future?  Slippery slope. 

Does she not see the irony here?

My State begins to issue driver licenses to illegal immigrants, and some are angry over the amount of time it takes to get one:

When the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles started accepting appointments from foreign nationals online July 1, it received as many as 107,500 page views an hour, crashing the system for several days. The DMV expects to process 9,551 applicants through September.

“We are disappointed the department will only give licenses to those who are here unlawfully at five offices and by appointment only,” said Denise Maes, public policy director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado. “They can only take appointments 90 days in advance and all of those are booked.”

Here's the part that made me do a double take:

The bill’s passage capped a multiyear effort by immigrant rights advocates in Colorado to secure a law that would allow those in the country illegally to apply for a drivers license.

“We’ve been working on this for more than three years now,” said Tania Valenzuela, a 24-year-old housekeeper who served on a committee that failed in 2011 to collect enough signatures to put a measure on the ballot allowing immigrants to obtain licenses.

“We thought it would roll out well but that hasn’t been the case,” said Valenzuela, who immigrated to Colorado illegally from Chihuahua, Mexico, 16 years ago and drives without a license. “It will take a few years for everybody to secure an appointment and that’s not acceptable -- it’s the law.”

Catch that?  The person who came to this Country 16 years ago - breaking the law in the process, and breaks the law every day when she drives her car - is upset that the law isn't being followed.

Incredible.

If these are the emails we can actual see..

..imagine what they are hiding.  You can find the newly released docs here.

Good thoing this woman wasn't partisan, and didn't have an axe to grind.  Is there any question as to why she took the Fifth?

Our friends on the Left continue to say there's no scandal there.

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.”

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..

Lying liars.

The story at the IRS continues to get more stinky:

A growing number of computer professionals are stepping forward to say that none of this makes sense. Norman Cillo, a former program manager at Microsoft, told The Blaze: “I don’t know of any e-mail administrator [who] doesn’t have at least three ways of getting that mail back. It’s either on the disks or it’s on a TAPE backup someplace on an archive server.” Bruce Webster, an IT expert with 30 years of experience consulting with dozens of private companies, seconds this opinion: “It would take a catastrophic mechanical failure for Lerner’s drive to suffer actual physical damage, but in any case, the FBI should be able to recover something. And the FBI and the Justice Department know it.”

In March of this year, John Koskinen, the new IRS commissioner, testified before Congress that all the e-mails of IRS employees are “stored in servers.” The agency’s own manual specifies that it “provides for backup and recovery of records to protect against information loss or corruption.” The reason is simple. It is well known in legal and IT circles that failure to preserve e-mails can lead to a court ruling of “spoliation of evidence.” That means a judge or jury is then instructed to treat deletions as if they were deliberate destruction of incriminating evidence.

Why is the loss of the Lerner e-mails particularly important? Last year’s report by the IRS inspector general set out a timeline of the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups. A full 16 of the 26 non-redacted events in the inspector general’s timeline took place during the period for which all of Lerner’s e-mails were “lost,” and these 16 instances refer to “e-mail” as the source for information on that event. As tax expert Alan Joel points out, much of the context about how the IRS scandal developed and who may have known about it is now “lost” in the black hole the Lerner e-mails are supposed to have been sucked into.

Since the IG report, we have learned that Lerner was engaged in highly suspect activity. As the Wall Street Journal editorial page noted on Saturday:

She shipped a database of 12,000 nonprofit tax returns to the FBI, the investigating agency for Justice’s Criminal Division. The IRS, in other words, was inviting Justice to engage in a fishing expedition, and inviting people not even licensed to fish in that pond. The Criminal Division (rather than the Tax Division) investigates and prosecutes under the Internal Revenue Code only when the crimes involve IRS personnel.

If there is an ongoing cover-up of the IRS scandal, it’s obvious why some folks would be desperate to continue it. Last year, Time magazine’s liberal columnist Joe Klein wrote that the IRS scandal placed President Obama “on the same page as Richard Nixon.” Article II of the Articles of Impeachment by the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 included a charge that Nixon had caused, “in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.” The Judiciary Committee was also deeply disturbed by the Nixon administration’s apparent efforts to conceal evidence. When investigators found a crucial “18-and-a-half-minute gap” from a Watergate break-in conversation involving Nixon and his aides, the administration implausibly claimed that Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s longtime secretary, had accidentally erased that portion of the tape. Later, Woods herself said she could have been responsible for no more than five minutes of the gap.

Now we have the “IRS server ate the e-mails” excuse. “Barack Obama has brought us Jimmy Carter’s economy and Richard Nixon’s excuses,” Steve Stockman (R., Texas) waggishly observed Friday. At a minimum, the House committees investigating the IRS scandal should demand that everyone involved in the search for the Lerner e-mails appear before them and testify under oath. I strongly suspect that if anything is amiss, one or more employees will not want to commit perjury to protect political higher-ups.

The President and his AG have indicated it is okay to ignore laws they don't like, so citizens can do that as well, right?

It's happening in New York:

With some tearing up gun registration forms in public protest on Tuesday, some 1 million New York gun owners shrugged off an April 15 deadline to register assault-style weapons under a tough post-Sandy Hook gun control law.

The rebellious stance is being taken by a subgroup of Americans who often make a show of being “law-abiding.” But it’s now set off a possible standoff with the New York State Police over registering assault-style weapons – a sore subject in a country simmering with gun-confiscation fears after myriad high-profile shootings.

For now, gun rights experts say, the outcome in New York is uncertain. Will the state take the initiative to seize unregistered weapons? If it doesn’t, will the new gun controls be exposed as toothless, even meaningless?

“The line in the sand has been drawn, and if Gov. Andrew Cuomo wants to send state police out on house-to-house searches and put hundreds of thousands of people in prison, they can do that,” says Dave Kopel, research director at the Independence Institute, a free-market think tank in Denver.

Tuesday’s protests were another sign of New York emerging as a battleground on gun issues. In late 2012, The Journal News in White Plains, N.Y., drew heavy criticism after publishing addresses of pistol permit holders in the county. Just this week, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg pledged $50 million toward a national effort called Everytown for Gun Safety, focused on improving background checks.

As for the legislation in question, the SAFE Act, it bans semiautomatic rifles that can take detachable magazines and those with military features like pistol grips, folding stocks, second hand grips, bayonet mounts, and flash suppressors.

New York residents who already own those guns can legally keep them so long as they register them with the state – the failure of which is punishable as a misdemeanor and, possibly, a felony.

Your move, Mr. Governor.  Are you going to issues warrants, and arrest a million of your taxpaying citizens, or are you going to do nothing?

Dissent is patriotic.  Right?

 

Criminals in the Administration..

Lerner and Cummings broke the law:

“These new emails show that the day before she broke the news of the IRS scandal, Lois Lerner was talking to a top Obama Justice Department official about whether the DOJ could prosecute the very same organizations that the IRS had already improperly targeted,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement. “The IRS emails show Eric Holder’s Department of Justice is now implicated and conflicted in the IRS scandal. No wonder we had to sue in federal court to get these documents.”