Lois Lerner: Lincoln Should’ve Let the South Go Instead of Civil War

Most Americans tend to agree that Abraham Lincoln was one of this country’s better presidents, having saved the nation from imploding on itself with the Civil War. Former IRS chief Lois Lerner, however, does not apparently have the same thoughts about keeping the South in the union.

“Look my view is that Lincoln was our worst president not our best,” Lerner wrote in 2014. “He should (have) let the south go. We really do seem to have 2 totally different mindsets.”

The Senate Finance Committee released a report yesterday that examined 1.5 million pages of IRS emails. A significant focus has gone to the fact that Lerner had a pattern of deriding conservatives as “crazies” and “assholes,” as well as the allegations that her leadership mismanaged the applications of Tea Party groups seeking tax-exempt status

“The report clearly shows that conservative groups were singled out because of their political beliefs, and gross mismanagement at the IRS allowed this practice to continue for years,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch.

Lerner is still reeling from renewed backlash after yesterday’s reports suggested that she once targeted an organization that once paid a fee to Bristol Palin.

Via: Mediaite

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[EDITORIAL] Jailtime For IRS' Political Hacks

IRS Scandal: When Are These People Going to Jail? 

Corruption: After a year's stalling by the IRS, the Senate Finance Committee has released its bipartisan report, denouncing the tax-collection agency's partisanship and incompetence. When are these people going to jail?

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The Senate report wasn't entirely satisfactory, given that its criticism was primarily in the compromise language of "gross mismanagement" to describe the agency's targeting of Tea Party dissident groups.

Using legal technicalities to silence and repress political dissent under the color of the nation's most feared enforcement agency isn't mismanagement. It's a crime.

It's incompatible with democracy and it shatters public confidence in the rule of law. It's the very crime the State Department is now condemning in Venezuela: the use of legal technicalities to halt popular opposition candidates from running for office. Until now, this kind of activity has had no precedent in our country, and it must be stopped before it becomes the standard.

This is far from mere incompetence or gross mismanagement. It was a highly competent operation to silence dissent. Yet no one has been sanctioned or punished, despite there being laws on the books dating back to the beginning of a professional civil service, that forbid and punish partisan motives in what should be impartial law. Already some observers believe the IRS swung the last election for the Democrats with these activities.

Not only did the IRS target Tea Party groups with unconscionable delays and intrusive questions, it went for their families, too. Young Bristol Palin learned yesterday that just being the daughter of former Alaska Gov. and Tea Party favorite Sarah Palin put her in the IRS' sights. Sarah Palin's father was targeted, too.

The agency also obstructed justice, first falsely claiming that its illegal targeting was only the work of rogue agents in its Cincinnati office. Then, as that lie fell apart, IRS moved to destroy evidence in the thousands of missing emails on IRS tax exempt organizations chief Lois Lerner's computer. Conveniently for them, it was declared lost forever in a hard drive crash — until it wasn't.

Now it's relying on its allies in the Senate and among anti-Tea Party Democrats in the House for cover, having them declare it incompetence, not a crime.

Allies? Yes. IRS top executive John Koskinen is a major financial contributor to Democrat campaigns, having donated nearly $100,000 to Democrats since 1979. And the National Treasury Employees Union, the IRS agents' union, is an even more notable donor to Democrats, with 94% of its members donating to leftists, and the 150,000-strong union itself endorsing Obama for president both in 2008 and 2012.

Lerner herself called Tea Party members "crazies" and spewed other anti-GOP insults in her emails.

To say that the IRS didn't have an interest in repressing dissent and was just unwittingly incompetent is ridiculous. IRS bureaucrats saw an illicit advantage for their Democrat friends — and wrongly took it.

That's illegal, and it demands a strong response from the law if the agency ever expects to recover public confidence. If it doesn't care enough about that, well, then what difference is there between the U.S. and a lawless banana republic?

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Via: Investors

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CMS’ Secretive Settlement $1.3 billion in improper hospital claims paid out

The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services secretly paid out over a billion dollars in improper hospital claims earlier last month, despite auditors labeling them unnecessary previously.

The payments, which were quietly announced on June 1 by CMS, totaled $1.3 billion and involved 1,900 hospitals and 300,000 claims that had been already denied by CMS auditors on two different levels as medically unnecessary.

The Department of Health and Human Services Office of Medicare Hearings and Appeals settled hundreds of thousands of appeals for 68 cents on the dollar. The money used to cover the claims will be taken from the Medicare Trust Fund. The hospitals that received the settlements were also not announced by CMS.

Citizens Against Government Waste, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to eliminating waste, fraud, mismanagement, and abuse in government, first noticed the payments.

The group says the process has been questionable from the beginning, with a majority of the claims related to short impatient stays—an area considered extremely vulnerable to improper payments.

“The settlement process was murky from its inception. On August 29, 2014, CMS announced the global financial settlement for hundreds of thousands of Medicare fee-for-service claims that had been denied twice and then appealed by providers to the third level of appeals, the administrative law judges (ALJ),” CAGW wrote. “The vast majority of these claims were related to short inpatient hospital stays (an area that had been identified by CMS as highly vulnerable to improper payments), and had been denied at two lower levels, including by Recovery Audit Contractors (RACs).”

Office of Medicare Hearings and Appeals Chief ALJ Nancy Griswold testified in April before Congress about the drastic jump in OMHA’s workload.

During the testimony before the Senate Finance Committee, Griswold said between fiscal year 2009 and fiscal year 2014, the workload within the office increased by 543 percent. Additionally, the number of appeals OMHA received jumped from 384,000 in fiscal year 2013 to 474,000 appeals during fiscal year 2014.

Via: Free Beacon

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IRS Hires $1,000-An-Hour Lawyers And It Might Have Violated Federal Law

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is paying a Washington law firm $1,000 an hour in taxpayer money to perform a corporate audit, despite its claim of being severely underfunded.

The IRS’ $2.2 million contract with big-money firm Quinn Emanuel has sparked a Senate Finance Committee investigation, with the committee’s chairman saying that the IRS “appears to violate federal law.”

Senate Finance Committee chairman Sen. Orrin Hatch wrote a letter this month to IRS commissioner John Koskinen stating his concerns relating to the contact, which pays Quinn Emanuel $1,000 an hour to perform an audit of Microsoft.

Hatch said that the contract appears to violate laws against the IRS sharing confidential taxpayer information with third parties. (RELATED: Lois Lerner Sent The White House Confidential Taxpayer Info).

“Despite these statutory prohibitions against the outsourcing of certain revenue functions or sharing of confidential taxpayer information, in May of last year the IRS hired a litigation law firm to assist in the income tax audit and investigation of a corporate taxpayer, including the conduct of sworn interviews,” Hatch’s letter stated.

“The IRS’s hiring of a private contractor to conduct an examination of a taxpayer raises concerns because the action: 1) appears to violate federal law and the express will of the Congress; 2) removes taxpayer protections by allowing the performance of inherently governmental functions by private contractors; and 3) calls into question the IRS’s use of its limited resources.”

But the Obama administration quickly re-wrote the rules shortly after hiring Quinn Emanuel.

Via: Daily Caller

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'OUTRAGEOUS': Senator rebukes IRS for reinstating 2013 employee bonuses

The IRS' announcement Monday that it will pay cancelled 2013 bonuses has infuriated Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch, who wants to know why an agency with employees who “inappropriately” targeted conservative political groups would reinstate the rewards.

“The IRS is accused of targeting conservative groups, with many of its employees having conducted themselves in a manner inappropriate for government officials, and the agency decides to reinstate employee bonuses?” asked Hatch, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee. “This is outrageous.”

The announcement was made by new IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, who said the performance bonuses were reinstated after agency employees repeatedly asked him about them during his first weeks on the job and after reaching a deal with the Union for Federal Employees.

The targeting scandal broke in spring 2013 when the agency revealed it had targeted for closer scrutiny Tea Party groups and other politically conservative organizations that were applying for tax-exempt status.

The revelations resulted in an inspector general report as well as FBI and congressional investigations. Though agency officials said originally the targeting was limited to a Cincinnati, Ohio field office, the probes revealed that higher-ranking officials at the agency’s Washington headquarters knew about the situation and that liberal groups also were targeted but to a lesser extent.

Via: Fox News

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Mary Landrieu expected for Energy chair, #Keystone approval, defeat in re-election.

Some people might think that this news might disappoint me, given that I am of course a partisan hack.

Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana will probably become the chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee early next year, giving the gavel to a lawmaker with deep ties to home-state oil producers and refiners. The shift stems from President Barack Obama’s nomination of Democratic Senator Max Baucus of Montana to be U.S. ambassador to China, and the likelihood that the current energy panel chairman, Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, will replace Baucus at the head of the Senate Finance Committee.

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The energy committee’s top Republican, Lisa Murkowski, hails from another oil and gas producing state, Alaska. That may improve chances for bipartisan alliances around industry priorities such as expanded exports of natural gas sought by Cheniere Energy Inc. (LNG:US) and Dominion Resources (D:US) Inc., as well as TransCanada Corp. (TRP)’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline.

Actually, it pleases me greatly. Senator Landrieu’s weakness this election cycle is not due to her energy policy positions; it’s because she’s a Democrat who provided the crucial 60th vote on Obamacare. Trying to get out of the way of that rapidly-approaching career-killer – and trust me: Obamacare is hurting Democrats most wonderfully dreadfully – by embracing the Keystone Pipeline will be very useful to the GOP, without noticeably changing the electoral calculus.  The truth of the matter is, Barack Obama rather badly wants to sign off on that stupid pipeline; the only reason that he hasn’t yet is because if Obama does then radical Greenies will rant and rave at the perceived slight to their religion.  Better by far if the Senate gives him a fait accompli. The President can blame the Senate, and Senate Democrats can shrug and piously claim that none of the environmentalist faithful voted for the pipeline.  Everybody wins.  Well, except for Landrieu in the long term.

And radical Greenies, of course.  And the best part?  There’s no reasonable chance that the radical Green movement can actually stop Landrieu from becoming Energy chair in the first place.  All bark, no bite from those guys.

Via: Red State

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Sebelius: If We Delay Obamacare People Will Die of Cancer or Diabetes…

Lead author of Obamacare law criticizes administration over rollout

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A senior Democratic senator who served as a lead author of President Barack Obama's healthcare law criticized the administration on Wednesday for failing to alert lawmakers to problems that led to the program's troubled rollout.

Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, who worried openly in April that the rollout could become "a train wreck" said he has been disappointed to hear administration officials say they didn't see problems with the federal healthcare website HealthCare.gov coming.

"When we asked for updates on the marketplaces, the responses we got were totally unsatisfactory. We heard multiple times that everything was on track. We now know that was not the case," he told U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius at an oversight hearing.

But Baucus also sounded a conciliatory note, saying he wanted to avoid assigning blame. "That's in the past," Baucus said. "Now it's time to move forward and figure out how to fix it."

Under the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, it is mandatory for everyone to have health insurance or pay a fine. Republicans oppose the plan on the grounds that it is an unwarranted expansion of the federal government.

The administration is working around-the-clock with the help of outside tech advisers to resolve problems that have plagued HealthCare.gov since it opened on October 1 and reduced an expected flood of new enrollees to a trickle.

Via: Chicago Tribune

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Psst, taxes go up in 2013 for 163 million workers

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama isn't talking about it and neither is Mitt Romney. But come January, 163 million workers can expect to feel the pinch of a big tax increase regardless of who wins the election.

A temporary reduction in Social Security payroll taxes is due to expire at the end of the year and hardly anyone in Washington is pushing to extend it. Neither Obama nor Romney has proposed an extension, and it probably wouldn't get through Congress anyway, with lawmakers in both parties down on the idea.

Even Republicans who have sworn off tax increases have little appetite to prevent one that will cost a typical worker about $1,000 a year, and two-earner family with six-figure incomes as much as $4,500.

Why are so many politicians sour on continuing the payroll tax break?

(AP) Chart shows increase in Social Security tax in 2013 for various income levels Full Image

Republicans question whether reducing the tax two years ago has done much to stimulate the sluggish economy. Politicians from both parties say they are concerned that it threatens the independent revenue stream that funds Social Security.

They are backed by powerful advocates for seniors, including AARP, who adamantly oppose any extension.

"The payroll tax holiday was intended to be temporary and there is strong bipartisan support to let that tax provision expire," said Sen. Orrin of Utah, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee. "The continued extension of a temporary payroll tax holiday has serious long-term implications for Social Security and, frankly, it's not even clear that it has helped to boost our ailing economy."

The question of renewing the payroll tax cut has been overshadowed by the expiration of a much bigger package of tax cuts first enacted under President George W. Bush. The Bush-era tax cuts also expire at the end of the year, and Congress is expected to try to address them after the election, in a lame-duck session.

The payroll tax cut could become part of the mix in negotiations that could go in many directions. But lawmakers in both political parties say they doubt it.

Via: MyWay

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