President Obama: From his language suggesting targeting of enemies to his officials’ attempts to castigate Tea Partiers as economic terrorists, President Obama has presided over an administration that sees his political opponents as unworthy and nasty. Early in his administration, Obama threatened CEOs of banks, “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” The White House's regular meetings with non-profit hit group Media Matters are often designed to help target conservative media ranging from Fox News to Rush Limbaugh. Whether he’s urging supporters to bring guns to a fight or suggesting that his enemies are in thrall to the gun lobby at the expense of children, President Obama’s tactics of intimidation have become commonplace. The Obama campaign singled out Mitt Romney donors for special censure, suggesting that they were lawbreakers. Not coincidentally, many of those donors ended up on the wrong end of Obama administration legal scrutiny, including megadonors like Frank Vandersloot.

Department of Justice: Today’s report from the Department of Justice Inspector General, showing that former US Attorney for Arizona Dennis Burke leaked documents intended to smear a whistleblower in Fast and Furious, is only the latest revelation on misconduct from DOJ. The DOJ has also targeted: Fox News reporter James Rosen over leaks from State Department employee Stephen Jin-Woo Kim; according to Megyn Kelly, two other Fox News staffers; the Associated Press, over a story regarding CIA investigations into al-Qaeda; Gallup, shortly after the polling firm showed Mitt Romney with a substantial lead over Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential race; and True the Vote, an organization dedicated to stopping voter fraud. The Eric Holder Department of Justice has been the lead enforcement arm of the Obama agenda, going after Arizona’s immigration law and refusing to go after New Black Panther voter intimidation. The DOJ reportedly uses the non-profit group Media Matters to disseminate its talking points.

State Department: According to whistleblower Gregory Hicks, the second-in-command in Libya from the State Department during the Benghazi attacks of September 11, 2012, the Hillary Clinton State Department attempted to force a handler on him during a Congressional visit to Libya. He then received a dressing-down from his superiors at the State Department for being too forthcoming with Congresspeople.

Internal Revenue Service: The IRS’ discrimination against conservative non-profit groups has stunned Americans, but conservatives have known for years that the Obama IRS targets conservatives. The IRS allegedly leaked donor information of the National Organization for Marriage to Human Rights Campaign, then-headed by an Obama re-election co-chair. The IRS handed liberal group ProPublica confidential documents from conservative tax-exempt groups. Jewish and pro-Israel groups have received heightened IRS scrutiny. So have Catholic groups.

Department of Health and Human Services: Kathleen Sebelius’ Department of Health and Human Services has thugged its way through the Obamacare rollout. Sebelius revealed in January 2012 that Obamacare would force religious employers to provide health insurance including contraception to their employees; Catholic organizations have been fighting that mandate ever since. That came on the heels of the Obama administration agreeing to concessions to the pharmaceutical industry in return for the industry’s support for Obamacare. Big Pharma eventually agreed to finance millions worth of TV advertising for Obamacare in exchange for capping liability at $80 billion over ten years. More recently, Sebelius has allegedly been soliciting donations from non-profit groups to push Obamacare. Those non-profits are directly regulated by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Department of the Treasury: After the United Auto Workers contributed serious cash to President Obama’s 2008 election campaign, Obama’s Department of the Treasury worked closely with the union to ensure that its stake in the failing automobile companies trumped the stake of other stockholders and bondholders, including pension funds and victims of injury. And when it came to the bank bailouts the story of intimidation was similar: according to Bank of American Chairman and Chief Executive Ken Lewis, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson pressured him to shut up about losses at Merrill Lynch while picking up the troubled company.

Federal Bureau of Investigation: During an investigation of then-CIA Director David Petraeus, the FBI specifically checked out Petraeus’ sex life, ending in his resignation as director. The investigation reportedly began after Jill Kelly, a Tampa friend of the Petraeuses, asked an agent friend to look into Petraeus. Civil liberties advocates worry about the FBI’s reported practice of storing digital communications between private citizens (that, of course, has been a longtime worry not relegated strictly to the Obama administration).

Department of the Interior: As the Obama administration tried to foist all responsibility for the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico on the oil companies, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told the media, “our job basically is to keep the boot on the neck of British Petroleum.” The next day, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs used the same words.

Department of Homeland Security: When not relabeling the war on terrorism, the Department of Homeland Security warned about groups “antagonistic toward the new presidential administration,” including “those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely.” The 2009 report from DHS warned about “rightwing extremist chatter on the Internet continues to focus on the economy.”

Environmental Protection Agency: Whether it was former EPA head Lisa Jackson creating dual email accounts to avoid transparency or the agency allegedly requiring conservatives to pay up for their Freedom of Information Act requests while exempting liberals, the EPA is yet another wing of the Obama government that seems focused on intimidating its enemies.

The intimidation comes from the top down in the Obama administration. And it is pervasive.

Editor's Note: We have reprinted the full text of "Culture of Intimidation" by Ben Shapiro from Breitbart.com. We encourage you to visit the original.

Enough with the canned rhetoric

Leaving aside the seriousness of lawlessness, and the corruption of our civic culture by the professionally pious, this past week has been amusing. There was the spectacle of advocates of an ever-larger regulatory government expressing shock about such government’s large capacity for misbehavior. And, entertainingly, the answer to the question “Will Barack Obama’s scandals derail his second-term agenda?” was a question: What agenda?

The scandals are interlocking and overlapping in ways that drain his authority. Everything he advocates requires Americans to lavish on government something his administration, and big government generally, undermines — trust.

Liberalism’s agenda has been constant since long before liberals, having given their name a bad name, stopped calling themselves liberals and resumed calling themselves progressives, which they will call themselves until they finish giving that name a bad name. The agenda always is: Concentrate more power in Washington, more Washington power in the executive branch and more executive power in agencies run by experts. Then trust the experts to be disinterested and prudent with their myriad intrusions into, and minute regulations of, Americans’ lives. Obama’s presidency may yet be, on balance, a net plus for the public good if it shatters American’s trust in the regulatory state’s motives.

Now, regarding Obama’s second-term agenda. His re-election theme — re-elect me because I am not Mitt Romney — yielded a meager mandate, and he used tactics that are now draining the legitimacy an election is supposed to confer.

One tactic was to misrepresent the Benghazi attack lest it undermine his narrative about taming terrorism. Does anyone think the administration’s purpose in manufacturing 12 iterations of the talking points was to make them more accurate?

Another tactic was using the “federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” The words are from a 1971 memo by the then-White House counsel, John Dean, whose spirit still resides where he worked prior to prison. Congress may contain some Democrats who owed their 2012 election to the IRS’ suppression of conservative political advocacy.

Obama’s supposed “trifecta” of scandals — Benghazi, the IRS, and the seizure of Associated Press phone records — neglects some. A fourth scandal is power being wielded by executive branch officials (at the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) illegally installed in office by presidential recess appointments made when the Senate was not in recess.

A fifth might be Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius soliciting, from corporations in industries HHS regulates, funds to replace some that Congress refused to appropriate. The money is to be spent by nonprofit — which does not mean nonpolitical — entities. The funds are to educate Americans about, which might mean (consider the administration’s Benghazi and IRS behaviors) propagandize in favor of, Obamacare and to enroll people in its provisions. The experienced (former governor, former secretary of education, 10 years in the Senate) and temperate Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., compares this to the Iran-contra scandal, wherein the Reagan administration raised private funds to do what Congress had refused to do — finance the insurgency against Nicaragua’s government.

Obama’s incredibly shrinking presidency is a reminder that politics is a transactional business, trust is the currency of the transactions, and the currency has been debased. For example:

Obama says: Trust me, I do not advocate universal preschool simply to swell the ranks of unionized, dues-paying, Democrat-funding teachers. Trust me, I know something not known by the social scientists who say the benefits of such preschool are small and evanescent.

Obama says: Trust me, the science of global warming is settled. And trust me that, although my plans to combat global warming, whenever the inexplicable 16-year pause of it ends, would vastly expand government’s regulatory powers, as chief executive I guarantee that these powers will be used justly.

Obama says: Trust me, although I am head of the executive branch, I am not responsible for the IRS portion of this branch.

Obama says: Trust me, my desire to overturn a Supreme Court opinion (Citizens United) that expanded First Amendment protection of political speech, and my desire to “seriously consider” amending the First Amendment to expand the government’s power to regulate the quantity, content and timing of political advocacy, should be untainted by what the IRS did to suppress advocacy by my opponents.

Because Obama’s entire agenda involves enlarging government’s role in allocating wealth and opportunity, the agenda now depends on convincing Americans to trust him, not their lying eyes. In the fourth month of his second term, it is already too late for that.

Editor's Note: We have reprinted the full text of "Loss of Trust" by George Will from Human Events. We encourage you to visit the original.

Official Statement Concerning Hawaii Republican Convention 2013

HONOLULU, HAWAII, May 18, 2013: The Hawaii Republican Assembly (HIRA) is pleased that the Hawaii Republican Party (HRP) completed their annual State Convention without major mishap. HRP elected the same officers; the same team that has been trying to erase the party debt since 2010, elected less legislators than in 2010, and deals with a House Caucus that partnered with the Democrat Progressive Wing.

HIRA President Tito Montes stated "We are all members of the Republican Party. We hope HRP changes their policies to become inclusive, transparent and honest. Where HRP refuses to speak for its party members, HIRA will fill the void with conservative solutions. HIRA's intent is to assist the election of conservatives to public office in Hawaii."

That candidates for party office who were not on the 'approved party slate' fared as well as they did reflects the disenchantment with current Republican Party policy and politics. Each of three challengers had little opportunity to campaign and yet scored decent numbers from the small crowd.

With only 174 of a possible 2,000 delegates or alternates attending this year's half-day convention, the HRP message conveyed by convention speakers seemed to be more about the HRP's intolerance to differing opinions within the party, calling for unity, and less on how we are going to defeat Democrats. However, HIRA was pleased to assist party members in changing their position and allow members to hear resolutions during Convention.

HIRA intends to boost conservative and liberty movement participation in the Republican effort to gain relevancy. HIRA believes that bold conservative solutions are the keys to helping Hawaii and to improving Republican success at the polls.

The potential of our islands will only be realized when conservative solutions are embraced by our state and county and federal governments. These conservative values are shared by the vast majority of Republicans in Hawaii and elsewhere, according to Montes.

The Hawaii Republican Assembly (HIRA), an affiliated chapter of
the National Federation of Republican Assemblies
is the conservative standard-bearer of the Republican Party of Hawaii
and the leading advocate for conservative solutions in the islands.

 We are not an official arm of the Republican Party of Hawaii (RPH).
We are the conservative base of the Republican Party.

# # #

Contact

Tito Montes
President –
president@hawaiirepublicanassembly.com

Hawaii Republican Assembly
P.O. Box 2805
Honolulu, HI 96803
alerts@hawaiirepublicanassembly.com
www.HawaiiRepublicanAssembly.com

CHAP. LXXV. —An Act to secure Homesteads to actual Settlers on the Public Domain.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That any person who is the head of a family, or who has arrived at the age of twenty-one years, and is a citizen of the United States, or who shall have filed his declaration of intention to become such, as required by the naturalization laws of the United States, and who has never borne arms against the United States Government or given aid and comfort to its enemies, shall, from and after the first January, eighteen hundred and sixty-three, be entitled to enter one quarter section or a less quantity of unappropriated public lands, upon which said person may have filed a preemption claim, or which may, at the time the application is made, be subject to preemption at one dollar and twenty-five cents, or less, per acre; or eighty acres or less of such unappropriated lands, at two dollars and fifty cents per acre, to be located in a body, in conformity to the legal subdivisions of the public lands, and after the same shall have been surveyed: Provided, That any person owning and residing on land may, under the provisions of this act, enter other land lying contiguous to his or her said land, which shall not, with the land so already owned and occupied, exceed in the aggregate one hundred and sixty acres.

SEC. 2. And be it further enacted, That the person applying for the benefit of this act shall, upon application to the register of the land office in which he or she is about to make such entry, make affidavit before the said register or receiver that he or she is the head of a family, or is twenty-one years or more of age, or shall have performed service in the army or navy of the United States, and that he has never borne arms against the Government of the United States or given aid and comfort to its enemies, and that such application is made for his or her exclusive use and benefit, and that said entry is made for the purpose of actual settlement and cultivation, and not either directly or indirectly for the use or benefit of any other person or persons whomsoever; and upon filing the said affidavit with the register or receiver, and on payment of ten dollars, he or she shall thereupon be permitted to enter the quantity of land specified: Provided, however, That no certificate shall be given or patent issued therefor until the expiration of five years from the date of such entry ; and if, at the expiration of such time, or at any time within two years thereafter, the person making such entry; or, if he be dead, his widow; or in case of her death, his heirs or devisee; or in case of a widow making such entry, her heirs or devisee, in case of her death; shall prove by two credible witnesses that he, she, or they have resided upon or cultivated the same for the term of five years immediately succeeding the time of filing the affidavit aforesaid, and shall make affidavit that no part of said land has been alienated, and that he has borne rue allegiance to the Government of the United States; then, in such case, he, she, or they, if at that time a citizen of the United States, shall be entitled to a patent, as in other cases provided for by law: And provided, further, That in case of the death of both father and mother, leaving an Infant child, or children, under twenty-one years of age, the right and fee shall ensure to the benefit of said infant child or children; and the executor, administrator, or guardian may, at any time within two years after the death of the surviving parent, and in accordance with the laws of the State in which such children for the time being have their domicil, sell said land for the benefit of said infants, but for no other purpose; and the purchaser shall acquire the absolute title by the purchase, and be en- titled to a patent from the United States, on payment of the office fees and sum of money herein specified.

SEC. 3. And be it further enacted, That the register of the land office shall note all such applications on the tract books and plats of, his office, and keep a register of all such entries, and make return thereof to the General Land Office, together with the proof upon which they have been founded.

SEC. 4. And be it further enacted, That no lands acquired under the provisions of this act shall in any event become liable to the satisfaction of any debt or debts contracted prior to the issuing of the patent therefor.

SEC. 5. And be it further enacted, That if, at any time after the filing of the affidavit, as required in the second section of this act, and before the expiration of the five years aforesaid, it shall be proven, after due notice to the settler, to the satisfaction of the register of the land office, that the person having filed such affidavit shall have actually changed his or her residence, or abandoned the said land for more than six months at any time, then and in that event the land so entered shall revert to the government.

SEC. 6. And be it further enacted, That no individual shall be permit- ted to acquire title to more than one quarter section under the provisions of this act; and that the Commissioner of the General Land Office is hereby required to prepare and issue such rules and regulations, consistent with this act, as shall be necessary and proper to carry its provisions into effect; and that the registers and receivers of the several land offices shall be entitled to receive the same compensation for any lands entered under the provisions of this act that they are now entitled to receive when the same quantity of land is entered with money, one half to be paid by the person making the application at the time of so doing, and the other half on the issue of the certificate by the person to whom it may be issued; but this shall not be construed to enlarge the maximum of compensation now prescribed by law for any register or receiver: Provided, That nothing contained in this act shall be so construed as to impair or interfere in any manner whatever with existing preemption rights : And provided, further, That all persons who may have filed their applications for a preemption right prior to the passage of this act, shall be entitled to all privileges of this act: Provided, further, That no person who has served, or may hereafter serve, for a period of not less than fourteen days in the army or navy of the United States, either regular or volunteer, under the laws thereof, during the existence of an actual war, domestic or foreign, shall be deprived of the benefits of this act on account of not having attained the age of twenty-one years.

SEC. 7. And be it further enacted, That the fifth section of the act en- titled" An act in addition to an act more effectually to provide for the punishment of certain crimes against the United States, and for other purposes," approved the third of March, in the year eighteen hundred and fifty-seven, shall extend to all oaths, affirmations, and affidavits, required or authorized by this act.

SEC. 8. And be it further enacted, That nothing in this act shall be 80 construed as to prevent any person who has availed him or herself of the benefits of the fir8t section of this act, from paying the minimum price, or the price to which the same may have graduated, for the quantity of land so entered at any time before the expiration of the five years, and obtain- ing a patent therefor from the government, as in other cases provided by law, on making proof of settlement and cultivation as provided by exist- ing laws granting preemption rights.

APPROVED, May 20, 1862.

Editor's Note: We have reproduced the full transcript of the 1862 Homestead Act from OurDocuments.gov. We encourage you to visit the original. 

Unprepared, you are somehow surprised when your office in Benghazi gets torched and overrun by terrorists on the anniversary of 9/11.

They kill your ambassador and three others. Yet, you are so clueless that you actually think it is a spontaneous protest of a YouTube video that nobody has seen. Or, at least, that is what you tell people.

Talking points are drawn up. They are vetted by various agencies and departments with special intelligence and expertise. And days later after everyone says it was a coordinated terror attack, one of your most trusted and influential advisors goes out and insists it was just a political demonstration that got out of hand. (This, by the way, is also known as a "lie," or, during campaign season, a "political coverup.")

All this ignorance and deceit, despite the fact that you have 50,000 employees stationed around the world to project America's image abroad and keep tabs on basic on-the-ground intelligence.

Yet nobody gets fired. The closest thing to trouble comes down on a handful of dedicated and loyal service officers on the ground who were horrified over the ineptitude and deceit that followed the avoidable murders of their close friends and colleagues. They get bullied, threatened and — reportedly — demoted for speaking honestly about what happened.

Operations back home are no better.

The agency charged with the most sensitive, serious and invasive responsibilities of our government — collecting taxes from us and punishing those who cheat the system — has been turned into a political machine carrying out vendettas against opponents and those who simply disagree with the current administration.

Gee, why would those crazy, right-wing tea party nutjobs be distrustful of the federal government? Why would they hold animus toward the agency charged with collecting taxes from their hard-fought earnings?

Why would they be worried about Big Sis stockpiling so much ammunition that common hunting ammo has to be rationed at their local sporting goods store?

Now the White House admits they had heard reports that the IRS was targeting conservatives and political opponents. But, who cares? They're conservatives and they deserve it. In addition, it turns out that the IRS was also leaking private info about conservatives to liberals in the media.

Administration officials are trying to say this was isolated to a handful of lower-level employees in the IRS. But it is a reflection of the agency and administration at the highest levels. The most prominent heads should roll. (I know, I know, here comes an audit by the IRS.)

And then, just when you think it cannot get any worse, we learn that the Department of Justice has been spying on reporters from the Associated Press.

Somewhere, Richard Nixon is blushing and fanning himself.

Yet, nobody gets fired. If anything a fraction as serious as this happened on the watch of the director of the shoe department at Macy's, he would be immediately fired — frogmarched out of the shoe department under armed escort and told to never return to the store.

But this is the federal government run by an administration utterly devoted to the blind and deaf leviathan.

It reminds me of something a friend who worked at the White House once told me about how in Washington no one is ever fired for incompetence or malfeasance. They merely get recycled from one scandal to the next.

"You will always eat lunch in this town again," he said, over lunch in a popular D.C. restaurant.

Editor's Note: We have reprinted the full text of "Washington -- the Town Where Nobody Gets Fired and Everyone Eats Lunch" by Charles Hurt from The Washington Times. We encourage you to visit the original.

Only when the fingers on it poke people too obviously in the eye, as in the case of this new IRS scandal, does Obama apologize. Otherwise, he likes its extension.

It was the White House’s far left hand that doctored up Susan Rice’s preposterous presentation on Benghazi. Indifferent to the problem of radical Islam, desperate to win an election on the claim that Obama had routed terrorists, and eager to throw a critic of their favorite religion into jail for a YouTube video they deemed hate speech, his aides spun what happened in Libya according to these biases.

Hillary Clinton was stomping around, raging about how that video had hurt the feelings of Muslims and how its creator deserved jail time. For two weeks, Obama treated a national humiliation at the hands of Islamic terrorists as an occasion to muse about the need for greater “civility” in the world.

Obama is still struggling to line up his lies. If he knew, as he now claims, that it was premeditated terrorism from the beginning, why did he spend two weeks on that ludicrous “civility” tour, bouncing from show to show and speech to speech to denounce a video? Gregory Hicks, America’s number two man in Libya, called the YouTube protests a “non-event” there. Yet Obama was happy to leave the impression that Western provocation lay at its root, as that absolved him of responsibility and fit with his far-left ideology of a peaceful Islam that poses no threat to America as long as odious people aren’t antagonizing it.

It is rich that journalists who didn’t mind seeing the creator of the YouTube video thrown into jail (on conveniently “unrelated” charges to his alleged abuse of artistic freedom) now discover their own First Amendment freedom violated. The Obama administration has been snooping on the phone records of reporters. Now that the far left hand of the White House is wiretapping them, it is suddenly okay to talk about tyranny.

This is only shocking to those who haven’t been paying attention. This is perfectly consistent behavior for an administration that deems itself an authority on what constitutes acceptable speech or even what constitutes a news organization. Recall that former White House communications director Anita Dunn, when not sharing with high school students self-help tips from Chairman Mao, decreed that Obama officials boycott Fox News, as it wasn’t a real “news network the way CNN is.”

The far left hand of the White House also pushed propaganda that cast constitutional conservatives as “extremists.” The repeated refrain was that these hopelessly irrational Americans posed a danger to the common good. The Department of Homeland Security even wrote up a report about them. Is it any wonder that IRS officials, operating under this rhetoric, gave heightened scrutiny to conservative groups with Tea Party, patriot, and other terms deemed subversive by this administration in their names?

What annoys Obama about the IRS’s harassment of conservative groups is not that the agents did it but that they got caught. He wants his revolution advanced more subtly. These clumsy disciples interpreted his frequent denunciations of the Tea Party too zealously.

This isn’t the first time that his disciples have listened to his words too attentively. Last summer , for example, they tried to delete any mention of God in the Democratic Party platform, thinking that that comported with his secularism. To mollify public opinion, Obama made a show of rebuking these DNC delegates.

But once the bad publicity passes after a moment of liberal excess the revolution begins anew. The FDA’s recent authorization of over-the-counter abortifacients for 15-year-olds provides a recent example of how that works: when that was first proposed in 2011, Obama opposed it, distancing himself from the FDA; now he is “comfortable” with the FDA’s decision. What changed? Nothing, except the political climate. He has more “flexibility” in his second term. So it might go with the IRS: what he calls “unacceptable” today may pass muster in the future under another Democratic president.

For Obama, who likes to turn the temperature up on the frogs gradually so that they don’t jump out of the pot, whether he approves or apologizes for a moment of liberal excess depends upon public reaction and media feeling. Joe Biden got out “ahead of his skis” on gay marriage, Obama said in 2012, but that was okay because Obama concluded that that wouldn’t hurt him politically and he had the media on his side.

The IRS and wiretapping scandals are a different matter. He knows that the media is upset, so he will have to fake up an appropriate level of anger. On Benghazi, he still has enough of the media to gut that out and is confident that he can continue to snow the public by calling it a “sideshow” and old news.

Obama is the revolutionary who leads from behind, who orders liberals “forward” and then feigns anger when they hear him too clearly and sprint ahead.

Editor's Note: We have reprinted the full text of "Obama's Far Left Hand" by George Neumayr from the American Spectator. We encourage you to visit the original.

Logo of the Internal Revenue Service

The progressive-leaning investigative journalism group ProPublica says the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) office that targeted and harassed conservative tax-exempt groups during the 2012 election cycle gave the progressive group nine confidential applications of conservative groups whose tax-exempt status was pending.

The commendable admission lends further evidence to the lengths the IRS went during an election cycle to silence tea party and limited government voices.

ProPublica says the documents the IRS gave them were “not supposed to be made public”:

The same IRS office that deliberately targeted conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status in the run-up to the 2012 election released nine pending confidential applications of conservative groups to ProPublica late last year... In response to a request for the applications for 67 different nonprofits last November, the Cincinnati office of the IRS sent ProPublica applications or documentation for 31 groups. Nine of those applications had not yet been approved—meaning they were not supposed to be made public. (We made six of those public, after redacting their financial information, deeming that they were newsworthy.)

The group says that "no unapproved applications from liberal groups were sent to ProPublica.”

According to Media Research Center Vice President for Business and Culture Dan Gainor, ProPublica’s financial backers include top progressive donors:

ProPublica, which recently won its second Pulitzer Prize, initially was given millions of dollars from the Sandler Foundation to “strengthen the progressive infrastructure”–“progressive” being the code word for very liberal. In 2010, it also received a two-year contribution of $125,000 each year from the Open Society Foundations. In case you wonder where that money comes from, the OSF website is www.soros.org. It is a network of more than 30 international foundations, mostly funded by Soros, who has contributed more than $8 billion to those efforts.

On Friday, the House Ways and Means Committee is scheduled to hold a formal hearing on the IRS conservative targeting scandal. IRS Commissioner Steve Miller and Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George are slated to testify.

Editor's Note: We have reprinted the full text of "Progressive Group: IRS Gave Us Conservative Groups' Confidential Docs" by Wynton Hall from Breitbart.com. We encourage you to visit the original.

The interview never aired, so I assume I had more than held my own. Recently, after reading that the last American tanks had left Germany, I had cause to recall that interview. Think about what our tanks’ departing Germany means. After a grueling and bloody war to destroy what was arguably history’s must malevolent regime (although Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China can make a good run at the title), the United States set out not to punish a prostrate Germany, but to rebuild it. And then, for nearly 50 years, we kept a huge part of our military power in that nation, so as to protect it from the massed armored formations of an evil Soviet Empire. When that job was done, we started bringing our troops and equipment home.

Similarly, despite the fact that Japan had launched an unprovoked attack upon our territory, and then waged a vicious and brutal war throughout the Pacific, we stayed to rebuild and protect that nation. Today, only a token force remains on Okinawa. But even that would pick up and leave if the Japanese government asked it to.

We did as much in the Philippines when we gave up the huge naval base at Subic Bay and closed down Clark Air Base, at the request of that nation’s government, playing to nationalist sympathies. Now, with a more assertive China making increasingly bellicose moves, there is a strong movement within the Philippines to invite us back. How many nations are so trusted by the rest of the world that other states will invite them to place huge military establishments within their borders? In all of history, how many nations have abandoned such bases in response to a simple request?

In historical terms, such events make America a most unusual country. When we have had the power to assert our will or dominate nations we have not used it. I know some historians will quibble. They will point, for instance, to our war with Mexico in the 1840s. True, we were then an expanding nation, as was Mexico, and we ran roughshod over it. Men as great as Abraham Lincoln considered our actions unjust. Still, there can be little doubt that if Mexico had had the power it would have seized everything up to the Mississippi and all the way to the Canadian border as its own.

Others might point to the small empire we built in the wake of the Spanish-American War. Of course, we did free Cuba from tyranny, and we dissolved the rest of that empire in what amounts to an historical twinkling of an eye. Moreover, we did it not because we were forced to, but because it seemed the right thing to do. We do, of course, still own Puerto Rico. But despite a separatist movement, that island’s association with us persists only because its residents have freely voted to maintain it. I am sure folks can point to other examples, but they stand as aberrations in what is truly a remarkable story of restraint.

Ever since Monroe’s presidency, the United States, even though it was initially only a fledgling nation, has used whatever power was at its disposal to protect our weaker southern neighbors and keep them from falling under the control of outside powers. Early on, we were assisted by the Royal Navy, but as we grew in power so did our ability to protect the hemisphere. Big brother may, from time to time, have been a bit overbearing. But, in the final analysis, freedom in Latin America was maintained only because it stood behind America’s shield.

The post–Civil War era was another instance of restraint. At the war’s end there was no more powerful force on the North American continent than the Union Army. Everything was within our grasp. All we had to do to make Canada the next ten states was reach out and take it. Instead we rapidly demobilized, to the point where our army by the start of World War I was an international joke. Still, before we demobilized, Lincoln told the French government to pull its troops out of Mexico or be prepared to meet General Grant with several corps of infantry at his back. The French left.

In World War I we came in our millions to prop up Allied armies that were falling prostrate under German hammer blows. When it was over, we rapidly reduced our forces — far beyond what turned out to be prudent — and tried to settle the conflict around Wilson’s 14 Points. That effort failed, but the terms on which we tried to build a lasting peace established a noble ideal that, in many ways, took root after the Second World War.

Notably, the only territorial gain America sought at the end of the World War I was enough land to bury our dead. We asked for no more after World War II.

Then in 1991 the Soviet Empire collapsed. We stood alone as the world’s only superpower. America was so strong, compared to the rest of the world, that a new word was needed. We became a “hyperpower.” So, what was our first use of such massive power? We freed Kuwait after it was invaded by a brutal dictator.

A decade later our military freed Iraq itself from Saddam’s brutal tyranny. Some insist on seeing sinister motives behind this invasion, and it probably was not a result of pure altruism. Still, a murderous regime was removed, and Iraqis, and for that matter Afghanis, were given an opportunity for freedom and prosperity. How they use it is now up to them, for, when Iraq’s government voted for us to leave, unlike any other power, we left. Similarly, we will soon depart from Afghanistan.

It is worth noting that our problems crushing insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan were not a result of insufficient American power to do the job. Rather, they were the consequences of that almost uniquely American trait of rarely using all the power at our disposal. First off, we fought both wars with only a fraction of our latent power. More importantly, we fought them in a manner that few armies have ever shown a willingness to do.

There is a formula for winning against insurgents. It is harsh, brutal, and often immoral. For examples, look at how civilized countries conducted earlier wars — how Britain won the Boer War, or how Belgium crushed rebels in the Congo, or what France attempted in Algeria. America eschewed those methods in favor of treating the population humanely, rebuilding nations and societies, and doing everything possible to keep our military power squarely focused on armed enemies. Were mistakes made? Yes; war is never as clean, as simple, or as antiseptic as we would like. Still, when the final histories of our involvement in the Middle East are written I am certain they will demonstrate levels of restraint and morality no other power would have troubled itself with.

In this brief interlude, while the United States remains a global hyperpower, no one in the world goes to bed fearful that America will misuse its power to dictate to other nations. More often the opposite is true. We live in a world where small pariah regimes (North Korea, Iran) feel free to continuously threaten the global peace, sure in the knowledge that our ire is slow to rise.

America has made mistakes. It will make more. But, in the totality, no nation has ever sacrificed so much for the welfare and protection of others. Further, no nation, possessed of such vast power, has ever applied it with such restraint for so long a period of time. The world does not fear American power because for two centuries we have demonstrated that America prefers the sheathed sword to bare steel.

I truly pity those Americans, such as my interviewer, who have so myopic a vision that their view of America sees only our occasional errors. America is so much more.

Almost 200 years ago, Stephen Decatur toasted: “Our Country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but right or wrong, our country!” For 200 years America has not always been right, but if Decatur were with us today our record would make him a proud man — a remarkable record, a remarkable military, and a remarkable nation.

Editor's NOte: We have reprinted here in full "American Power" by Jim Lacey from the National Review Online. We encourage you to visit the original.

– Article 2, Section 1, Articles of Impeachment

– Adopted by the House Judiciary Committee, July 29, 1974

WASHINGTON — The burglary occurred in 1972, the climax came in 1974, but 40 years ago this week — May 17, 1973 — the Senate Watergate hearings began exploring the nature of Richard Nixon’s administration. Now the nature of Barack Obama’s administration is being clarified as revelations about IRS targeting of conservative groups merge with myriad Benghazi mendacities.

This administration aggressively hawked the fiction that the Benghazi attack was just an excessively boisterous movie review. Now we are told that a few wayward souls in Cincinnati, with nary a trace of political purpose, targeted for harassment political groups with “tea party” and “patriot” in their titles. The Washington Post reported Monday that the IRS also targeted groups that “criticized the government and sought to educate Americans about the U.S. Constitution.” Credit the IRS operatives with understanding who and what threatens the current regime.

Jay Carney, whose unenviable job is not to explain but to explain away what his employers say, calls the IRS’ behavior “inappropriate.” No, using the salad fork for the entree is inappropriate. Using the IRS for political purposes is a criminal offense.

It remains to be discovered whether the chief executive is guilty of more than an amazingly convenient failure to superintend the excesses of some executive branch employees beyond the Allegheny Mountains. Meanwhile, file this under “What a tangled web we weave”:

The IRS official in charge of the division that makes politically sensitive allocations of tax-exempt status said last Friday that she learned of the targeting of conservatives from news reports. But a draft report by the IRS inspector general says this official was briefed on the matter two years ago.

An emerging liberal narrative is that this tempest is all the Supreme Court’s fault: The Citizens United decision — that corporations, particularly nonprofit advocacy groups, have First Amendment rights — so burdened the IRS with making determinations about who deserves tax exempt status that some political innocents in Cincinnati inexplicably decided to begin by rummaging through the affairs of conservatives. Ere long, presumably, they would have gotten around to groups with “progressive” in their titles.

Remember, all campaign “reform” proposals regulate political speech. And all involve the IRS in allocating speech rights.

Liberals, whose unvarying agenda is enlargement of government, suggest, with no sense of cognitive dissonance, that this IRS scandal is nothing more sinister than typical government incompetence. Five days before the IRS story broke, Obama, sermonizing 109 miles northeast of Cincinnati, warned Ohio State graduates about “creeping cynicism” and “voices” that “warn that tyranny is . . . around the corner.” Well.

He stigmatizes as the vice of cynicism what actually is the virtue of skepticism about the myth that the tentacles of the regulatory state are administered by disinterested operatives. And the voices that annoy him are those of the Founders.

Time was, progressives like the president 100 years ago, Woodrow Wilson, had the virtue of candor: He explicitly rejected the Founders’ fears of government. Modern enlightenment, he said, made it safe to concentrate power in Washington, and especially in disinterested executive branch agencies run by autonomous, high-minded experts. Today, however, progressivism’s unambiguous insinuation is that Americans must be minutely regulated because they are so dimwitted they will swallow nonsense. Such as: There was no political motive in the IRS targeting political conservatives.

Episodes like this separate the meritorious liberals from the meretricious. When the IRS story broke, The Washington Post led the paper with it, and, with an institutional memory of Watergate, published a blistering editorial demanding an Obama apology. The New York Times consigned the story to page 11 (its Page One lead was the umpteenth story about the end of the world being nigh because of global warming). Through Monday, the Times had expressed no editorial thoughts about the IRS. The Times’ Monday headline on the matter was: “IRS Focus on Conservatives Gives GOP an Issue to Seize On.” So that is the danger.

If Republicans had controlled both houses of Congress in 1973, Nixon would have completed his term. If Democrats controlled both today, the Obama administration’s lawlessness would go uninvestigated. Not even divided government is safe government, but it beats the alternative.

Editor's Note: We have reprinted the full text of "Forgetting Watergate's Lesson" by George Will from Human Events. We encourage you to visit the original.

The documents, obtained by The Washington Post from a congressional aide with knowledge of the findings, show that on June 29, 2011, IRS staffers held a briefing with senior agency official Lois G. Lerner in which they described giving special attention to instances where “statements in the case file criticize how the country is being run.” Lerner, who oversees tax-exempt groups for the agency, raised objections and the agency revised its criteria a week later.

But six months later, the IRS applied a new political test to groups that applied for tax-exempt status as “social welfare” groups, the document says. On Jan. 15, 2012 the agency decided to target “political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding Government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform movement.,” according to the appendix in the IG report, which was requested by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and has yet to be released.

The new revelations are likely to intensify criticism of the IRS, which has been under fire since agency officials acknowledged they had deliberately targeted groups with “tea party” or “patriot” in their name for heightened scrutiny.

During an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) described the practice as “absolutely chilling” and called on President Obama to condemn the effort.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa told NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday he’s not satisfied with the Obama administration’s handling of the controversy. The IG report was “leaked by the IRS. to try to spin the output,” Issa said, and lawmakers now need to go through the full report so they can “see what the instituted changes need to be to make this not happen again.

The agency did not appear to adopt a more neutral test for social welfare groups — which file for tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code — until May 17, 2012, according to the timeline in the inspector general’s report.

At that point, the IRS again updated its criteria to focus on “organizations with indicators of significant amounts of political campaign intervention (raising questions as to exempt purpose and/or excess private benefit.)”

Editor's Note: We have reprinted the full text of "IRS Targeted Groups that Criticized the Government" by Juliet Eilperin from The Washington Post. We encourage you to visit the original.