the daily dan

President Obama is golfing today at Joint Base Andrews with HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, outgoing Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, and White House chef Sam Kass.

This amounts to something of a show of support for Sebelius, who is under fire for trying to end run Congress by demanding donations from health care companies to fund efforts to encourage people to enroll in Obamacare.

Obama’s usual golf crew of lower-ranking White House aides didn’t get the call today. They might be glad of it, it’s raining. Maybe the Marines are following the foursome around.

This is the twelfth time Obama has played this year and the 123rd time he has played as president.

Thanks to the least transparent administration in history, Americans still don’t know what the President did during the night of the terror attacks that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other heroes.

What did he order? What did he do? Did he take any steps to save the diplomats who were systematically slaughtered over the course of a 6-hour terrorist attack?

One little-mentioned aspect of the evening is a 10pm phone call to Hillary Clinton from Barack Obama.

…Benghazi is not a scandal because of Ambassador Susan Rice, State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland, and “talking points.” The scandal is about Rice and Nuland’s principals, and about what the talking points were intended to accomplish. Benghazi is about derelictions of duty by President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton before and during the massacre of our ambassador and three other American officials, as well as Obama and Clinton’s fraud on the public afterward.

…Fraud flows from the top down, not the mid-level up. Mid-level officials in the White House and the State Department do not call the shots — they carry out orders. They also were not running for reelection in 2012 or positioning themselves for a campaign in 2016. The people doing that were, respectively, President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton.

Obama and Clinton had been the architects of American foreign policy. As Election Day 2012 loomed, each of them had a powerful motive to promote the impressions (a) that al-Qaeda had been decimated; (b) that the administration’s deft handling of the Arab Spring — by empowering Islamists — had been a boon for democracy, regional stability, and American national security; and (c) that our real security problem was “Islamophobia” and the “violent extremism” it allegedly causes — which was why Obama and Clinton had worked for years with Islamists, both overseas and at home, to promote international resolutions that would make it illegal to incite hostility to Islam, the First Amendment be damned.

All of that being the case, I am puzzled why so little attention has been paid to the Obama-Clinton phone call at 10 p.m. on the night of September 11.

…There is good reason to believe that while Americans were still fighting for their lives in Benghazi, while no military efforts were being made to rescue them, and while those desperately trying to rescue them were being told to stand down, the president was busy shaping the “blame the video” narrative to which his administration clung in the aftermath.

We have heard almost nothing about what Obama was doing that night. Back in February, though, CNS News did manage to pry one grudging disclosure out of White House mendacity mogul Jay Carney: “At about 10 p.m., the president called Secretary Clinton to get an update on the situation.”

Obviously, it is not a detail Carney was anxious to share. Indeed, it contradicted an earlier White House account that claimed the president had not spoken with Clinton or other top administration officials that night.

…Carney’s hand was forced by then-secretary Clinton. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January, she recounted first learning at about 4 p.m. on September 11 that the State Department facility in Benghazi was under attack. That was very shortly after the siege started. Over the hours that followed, Clinton stated, “we were in continuous meetings and conversations, both within the department, with our team in Tripoli, with the interagency and internationally.” It was in the course of this “constant ongoing discussion and sets of meetings” that Clinton then recalled: “I spoke with President Obama later in the evening to, you know, bring him up to date, to hear his perspective.”

The 10pm phone call is a trap waiting to be sprung. It could be the lynchpin that holds together the last vestiges of the most inept and corrupt administration in modern American history.

Congress must demand Clinton testify under oath and send an interrogatory to the President.

The critical questions for both parties:

    a) What were the topics of the 10pm discussion?
    b) Were either a “protest” or an Internet video raised as a cause of the Benghazi attack?
    c) Who raised using a “protest” based upon an “Internet video” as a cover story for that attack?
    d) Who gave the order to use the video/protest pretense?
    e) Who gave the “stand down” order to prevent the rescue of Americans under attack?

Putting both Clinton and Obama under oath will raise an interesting dilemma for both. Which ever party answers first could be contradicted on any of these matters. If Clinton answers under oath to protect herself, Obama could easily throw her under the bus. Conversely, if Obama replies to an interrogatory first, Clinton could contradict any of his answers.

Benghazi is ultimately a conflict between the Clinton Democrats and the Chicago Machine. A wedge can be driven between these two destructive forces with some well thought-out subpoenas. Exploiting that wedge could light the fuse on the time-bomb and detonate the Obama administration once and for all.


Related: DAMNING: The Complete Benghazi Timeline Spreadsheet - Updated With the Latest Testimony and Leaks

(Reuters) - More than 8,000 French households’ tax bills topped 100 percent of their income last year, the business newspaper Les Echos reported on Saturday, citing Finance Ministry data.

The newspaper said that the exceptionally high level of taxation was due to a one-off levy last year on 2011 incomes for households with assets of more than 1.3 million euros ($1.67 million).

President Francois Hollande’s Socialist government imposed the tax surcharge last year, shortly after taking office, to offset the impact of a rebate scheme created by its conservative predecessor to cap an individual’s overall taxation at 50 percent of income.

The government has been forced to redraft a proposed bill to levy a temporary 75 percent tax on earnings over 1 million euros, which had been one of Hollande’s campaign pledges.

The Constitutional Council has judged such a high rate of taxation to be unfair, leaving the government to rehash it to hit companies rather than individuals.

Since then, a top administrative court has determined that a marginal tax rate higher than 66.66 percent on a single household risked being considered as confiscatory by the council.

Les Echos reported that nearly 12,000 households paid taxes last year worth more than 75 percent of their 2011 revenues due to the exceptional levy. ($1 = 0.7798 euros)

From The People’s Cube:

If you didn’t buy our famous Obama “Hope” poster parody playing cards because you wanted to wait for the deck to be updated and improved, your wait has been rewarded!

Redesigned by popular demand, this deck contains new characters, revised captions, improved images, and - keeping pace with the government expansion - now contains 56 cards instead of the usual 52.

The back design has also changed: “To each according to his hyphen” has been replaced with a more proper name for this project: “American Agitprop in the Age of Obama: Heroes and Villains.”

This is a perfect Father’s Day gift.
Hurry - Sunday, June 16 is getting close!

***I’d file this in my SHOCKED file, but it’s all filled up.

WASHINGTON – Last week, Lois Lerner, head of the tax exempt division of the Internal Revenue Service dropped a bombshell: The IRS had been applying extra scrutiny to conservative groups claiming tax exempt status.

The revelation came seemingly out of the blue, in response to a question during a panel at an American Bar Association conference, leaving the audience baffled, according to reports.

As it turns out, it was not a spontaneous revelation. The question, said outgoing IRS Commissioner Steven Miller in testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee Friday, was planted, as part of a prepared strategy for the IRS to release this information to the public.

Under questioning from Republican Rep. Devin Nunes, Miller said it was a “prepared Q and A,” and the question, which came from tax lawyer Celia Roady had been discussed in advance as well.

Roady told U.S. News and World Report later Friday afternoon that Lerner had personally contacted her and requested she ask the specific question. Roady said she did not know at the time what Lerner’s answer would be.*

Later, Miller, questioned by Rep. Peter Roskam, explained that the disclosure had been made to coincide with the conclusion of the inspector general’s report.

Miller said he and Lerner discussed, in a what he believed was a phone conversation, whether “now that the TIGTA report was finalized, now that we knew all of the facts … did it make sense for us to start talking about this in public.”

Asked why he had not first reached out to the committee to tell them, Miller first said they had planned “to do that at the same time,” but that “did not happen.” He later said they “were reaching out to this committee at the same time,” and that they had “called to try to get on the calendar.”

“Is that all you got?” Roskam scoffed.

“It’s the truth,” Miller said.

Hearing Shows Obama Administration Officials Were Told in June 2012 of Probe Into Tea-Party Targeting

The Internal Revenue Service’s watchdog told top Treasury officials around June 2012 he was investigating the tax agency’s targeting of conservative groups, for the first time indicating that Obama administration officials were aware of the explosive matter in the midst of the president’s re-election campaign.

The disclosure to the Treasury general counsel and the deputy secretary was a cursory one, according to J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration. He said he didn’t reveal conclusions of the probe, which was in its early stages, and his disclosure came as part of a routine update to Treasury leaders. At the time, Republican lawmakers were complaining publicly about alleged IRS targeting of tea-party groups.

The revelation nonetheless raised a fresh set of questions about who was aware of the problem within the Obama administration. It was one of several new details that emerged during a contentious four-hour House committee hearing Friday, held one week after an IRS official revealed at a legal conference that the agency had taken “absolutely inappropriate” actions in targeting conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status for often heavy-handed scrutiny.

Among other disclosures: The conference revelation was itself stage-managed. Ousted IRS acting Commissioner Steven Miller testified he planned it with the director of the division in question. Republican lawmakers expressed amazement that IRS officials didn’t tell them first.

The hearing left numerous other fundamental questions unanswered, however, including who ordered the targeting and why it continued so long, pointing to a protracted investigation ahead. Mr. Miller conceded the agency likely disciplined the wrong employee in one effort to address the problem. Another was reassigned in the agency’s Cincinnati office, but he couldn’t provide the employee’s name.

Following the hearing, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R., Mich.), who led the proceedings, expressed frustration and left open the possibility of issuing subpoenas to the IRS. “I think the most interesting revelation was the overall arrogance of the IRS and the lack of information from somebody who was in charge,” Mr. Camp said.

The Treasury Department, in a statement, confirmed officials were notified in June 2012 that an audit had begun. It added an underlined sentence, “Treasury strongly supports the independent oversight of its three Inspectors General, and it does not interfere in ongoing IG audits.”

Treasury also said Neal Wolin, the deputy secretary, didn’t notify anyone outside of Treasury that the audit was under way and that Mr. Wolin and Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew “learned about [the inspector general’s] findings when they were reported publicly last week.” A White House aide said Friday that Treasury officials didn’t share the information with White House officials.

White House officials say they learned about the targeting of conservative groups from the report, and not before. President Barack Obama on Thursday said, “I can assure you that I certainly did not know anything about the IG report before the IG report had been leaked through the press.”

At the hearing, lawmakers of both parties expressed anger that IRS officials didn’t reveal the problems to them in 2012. GOP lawmakers, after receiving complaints from tea-party groups about IRS scrutiny, asked then-commissioner Douglas Shulman about that in March 2012. He testified before the Ways and Means committee then that there was “absolutely no targeting,” but he didn’t correct his testimony after learning of the problems in May, according to congressional investigators. Mr. Shulman couldn’t be reached for comment.

Several other IRS officials, including Mr. Miller, didn’t disclose the problems to lawmakers in letters and testimony. Mr. Miller Friday cited the continuing inspector-general investigation, even though he obtained an internal IRS investigation in May 2012 that came to some of the same conclusions as the inspector general report.

“I was not going to go there because I did not have full possession of the facts, sir,” Mr. Miller said at one point.

In sometimes combative testimony, Mr. Miller also took exception to the idea that the IRS had engaged in targeting conservative groups, pointing out that groups representing other ideologies also were caught up in the extra review.

The inspector general’s report said that based on a statistical sample, “all cases with Tea Party, Patriots or 9/12 in their names were forwarded” for extra scrutiny. Many of the cases were delayed for years.

Lawmakers of both parties questioned his response.

“Throughout this time, the IRS leadership has demonstrated a total disregard for the oversight role of the Congress and this committee,” said Rep. Sander Levin (D., Mich.), the committee’s top Democrat. Mr. Shulman “had an obligation to return to this committee and set this record straight. So did Mr. Miller.”

“How was that not misleading this committee?” said Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) to Mr. Miller. “How can we not conclude that you misled this committee?”

“I did not mislead the committee,” Mr. Miller responded, adding later, “I answered the question truthfully.”

Messrs. Miller and George, the inspector general, said so far they had discovered no evidence that the targeting was politically motivated, and Mr. Miller described it as a bungled way to try and screen applicants.

Later Friday, the woman who posed the question at a conference to IRS official Lois Lerner—the moment last week that first revealed the problems at the IRS—said Ms. Lerner planted the query. Washington lawyer Celia Roady said in a statement that Ms. Lerner provided her the question to ask. She added that Ms. Lerner “did not tell me, and I did not know, how she would answer the question.”

The IRS didn’t respond to requests for comment from Ms. Lerner, who runs the exempt-organizations unit at the agency.

Mr. Miller said the IRS, meanwhile, had “called to get on the calendar” to also brief the Ways and Means committee—a statement Republicans met with barely disguised disbelief.

Mr. Camp and other GOP lawmakers suggested a pattern of efforts to use the IRS to attack conservatives. Those include a White House official’s discussion in mid-2010, during a briefing with reporters, of the purported tax-filing status of Koch Industries. Its owners are big donors to conservative causes. The tax-filing status of businesses is often confidential. The White House said in 2010 that the official’s statement “was not based on any review of tax filings.” It promised not to use the example in the future.

In an interview, Mr. Levin said the IG’s report to Treasury officials constituted only “a brief reference,” that he doubted was communicated up the chain.

The White House East Room continues to be a sequester-free zone, as President and Mrs. Obama will be given yet another command performance there Wednesday, this one honoring the music of one of their major political supporters, Carole King.

King campaigned for Obama in 2008 and again in 2012. In October 2012 she was the feature attraction at a fundraiser for the president in Massachusetts, with tickets running from $2,500-$5,000.

Last summer, she starred in this campaign video for the Obama campaign, seeking to woo rural voters.

White House tours are canceled because of the sequester and White House aides are having their pay docked, but the music never stops. Just last month, the Obamas grooved to a concert celebrating the sounds of Memphis Soul.

This time, the show will include performances by King, as well as Gloria Estefan, Billy Joel, Jesse McCartney, Emeli Sandé, James Taylor and Trisha Yearwood. Even as scandals rage around them, it’s still party time.

King is being awarded the 2013 Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. It’s the Obamas’ eleventh “command performance.”

A man in Tampa, Florida, is being accused of secretly slipping his girlfriend an abortion drug, an act that killed the couple’s unborn baby. The alleged details of the troubling story are ghastly.

Prosecutors claim that John Andrew Welden, 28, switched the label on an abortion pill bottle to make it look like Amoxicillin, a common antibiotic. After the woman, identified as 26-year-old Remee Lee, took the drug, she purportedly miscarried, reports The Tampa Tribune.

In March, Welden apparently found out that the woman was pregnant. While he purportedly wanted her to have an abortion, Lee decided to keep the baby and allegedly said that she would care for the child on her own.

Since she didn’t have medical insurance, Welden sent her to his father, Dr. Stephen Welden, an OB/GYN physician. Lee was told that the baby was healthy, Assistant U.S. Attorney W. Stephen Muldrow said during a hearing on Wednesday.

But, according to prosecutors, Welden decided to step in to prevent the pregnancy from coming to term.

“In my years as a prosecutor, this case is one of the most shocking and premeditated cases I’ve seen,” Muldrow told Judge Anthony Porcelli.

Authorities believe that Weldon forged his father’s name in an effort to obtain Misoprostol (Cytotec), an abortion drug that is used for termination purposes. WebMD describes the drug as, “a prostaglandin medicine used to terminate a pregnancy by starting labor.”

Remee Lee and John Andrew Welden (Photo Credit: YouTube)

It is alleged that Welden told the woman she had a bacterial infection and then gave her the drug. Lee later took the pill, subsequently had stomach pain and bleeding and, upon going to the hospital, realized that the baby had died, Muldgrow claims.

Here’s how WPTV-TV recaps the story:

Lee said when she learned she was pregnant, Welden took her to see his father, who is an obstetrician in Lutz.  A sonogram and blood test confirmed Lee was six-weeks pregnant.

The next day, Welden called his girlfriend with bad news.  Her blood test apparently showed she had a bacterial infection and she would need to take Amoxicillin to clear it up.

On Good Friday, Lee said Welden showed up at her Tampa home with a care package that included the bottle of antibiotics.  The label said the pills were A moxycillin .

“He told me to keep taking them.  I was supposed to take three a day for days,” she recalled of Welden’s instructions.

Welden could face life behind bars without parole if he is found guilty of murder under the “Protection of Unborn Children Act,” a federal statute. He also faces ramifications for tampering with a prescription, the Tribune reports.

The prosecution claims that Welden admitted to giving the woman cytotec during a phone call that authorities recorded. The Tribune adds more accusations, as highlighted by Muldrow on Wednesday:

“He admits throughout the recording that he knew the pills were going to cause contractions,” Muldrow said. He also “confesses to the premeditated nature of the crime.”

Muldrow said Welden “confesses that he had tampered with the pill bottle, that he put a fake label on the bottle.” Muldrow said Welden said he used a label maker to make the bogus label.

Muldrow said Welden at some point tried to retrieve the bottle, claiming there was a problem with the medicine and he wanted to get his money back. Muldrow said this was an attempt by Welden to tamper with evidence.

In addition to the criminal charges against him, Lee is also seeking at least $15,000 in damages. The prosecutor told the judge that the case “shocks the conscience.”

#ObamacareInThreeWords is trending right now on Twitter, led by the National Republican Senatorial Committee:

NRSC        ✔ @NRSC

The White House        ✔ @whitehouse

It’s. The. Law. #ObamaCareInThreeWords, pic.twitter.com/yCHSmuxkKj

11:47 AM - 16 May 2013 

Right Scoop @trscoop So. Was. Slavery. RT @whitehouse It’s. The. Law. #ObamaCareInThreeWords

It seems like the American people have become disenchanted with the President as scandal after scandal continue to plague his administration.

President Obama’s approval rating has dropped three percent just over the past two weeks, bringing his overall approval rating down to 47 percent, according to the latest Gallup approval ratings.

The president and his administration have been busy with damage control after three major scandals broke within a few days of each other: the Benghazi email revisions, the Internal Revenue Service improperly targeting conservative organizations and the Associated Press phone records seizure.

As history shows, however, the drop in the president’s approval rating as a result of scandals is often short-lived.

“When the arms-for-hostages Iran-Contra scandal emerged in late 1986, Ronald Reagan’s approval rating in the Gallup poll quickly plummeted from 63 percent to 47 percent and stayed relatively low throughout 1987,” The Rockford Register Star’s Pat Cunningham wrote in his column Wednesday. “But his numbers jumped back to the upper 50s and lower 60s in the following year.”

Perhaps Obama can look forward to a rise in his approval ratings at some point in the future, granted that his scandal trifecta doesn’t become larger over the next few days.

Courtesy of Sean Hackbarth, who writes:

The EPA spent 40,000 of our tax dollars on this oil painting…

Begin…

Matt offers: “Thanks to Climosil, I feel fresher than ever.”

The whole point of Holder’s presser on Tuesday, I thought, was to stress that the DOJ had to take extraordinary action in subpoenaing the AP’s phone records because the leak itself was so extraordinary. The clear impression was that the AP’s story had put the public in danger by compromising operations in Yemen, therefore the DOJ had to go the extra mile in finding out which national-security official had blabbed. Direct quote from Holder:

“I’ve been a prosecutor since 1976, and I have to say that this is among, if not the most serious – it’s in the top two or three – most serious leaks that I’ve ever seen,” Holder added. “It put the American people at risk. And that is not hyperbole.”

Fast-forward to today. Was the public ever actually at risk? Why, no, says WaPo. In fact, the AP held the story for days so as not to jeopardize U.S. counterterror ops, and only went ahead and published after the CIA assured them that there was no longer a risk. Nothing was compromised. Maybe Holder simply meant that the leak could have put the public at risk had the AP published right away, but WaPo seems to have another theory about why the White House was so angry afterward:

For five days, reporters at the Associated Press had been sitting on a big scoop about a foiled al-Qaeda plot at the request of CIA officials. Then, in a hastily scheduled Monday morning meeting, the journalists were asked by agency officials to hold off on publishing the story for just one more day.

The CIA officials, who had initially cited national security concerns in an attempt to delay publication, no longer had those worries, according to individuals familiar with the exchange. Instead, the Obama administration was planning to announce the successful counterterrorism operation that Tuesday…

Now, some members of Congress and media advocates are questioning why the administration viewed the leak that led to the May 7 AP story as so grave.

The AP was prepared to publish on May 2, 2012, the one-year anniversary of the Bin Laden killing, but held off at the CIA’s request for security reasons. A few days later, there were no more security reasons — but there was a political reason:

When the journalists rejected a plea to hold off longer, the CIA then offered a compromise. Would they wait a day if AP could have the story exclusively for an hour, with no government officials confirming it for that time?

The reporters left the meeting to discuss the idea with their editors. Within an hour, an administration official was on the line to AP’s offices.

The White House had quashed the one-hour offer as impossible. AP could have the story exclusively for five minutes before the White House made its own announcement. AP then rejected the request to postpone publication any longer.

Am I understanding that correctly? The CIA went on bargaining with the AP after the security worries had evaporated, purely in the interest of preventing the administration from being scooped on its glorious “plot foiled” announcement the next day? (John Brennan ended up on “Good Morning, America” the next morning to crow about the intel victory.) And when the AP didn’t comply — even though it had been, apparently, entirely cooperative up to that point — the DOJ went hunting for its phone records without so much as a polite request first? Also, who was the “administration official” in the White House that couldn’t wait more than five whole minutes after the news broke for Team Obama to take credit, six months out from an election?

The Right Sphere, writing about this same story, comments, “Stealing the Obama administration’s thunder is now grounds for secret subpoenas on the press.” What’s going on here?

Update: To repeat a point made above, and needless to say, it’s perfectly defensible to pursue a leaker even if the leak didn’t end up jeopardizing national security. No harm was done this time thanks to the AP’s discretion, but the same leaker might come back to bite U.S. intelligence in the future. The real questions here are (1) why was the CIA bargaining for more time with the AP after the national-security threat had passed, (2) why was the mysterious White House official so determined not to give the AP a scoop of more than five minutes, despite their cooperation in holding the story, and (3) why wasn’t the AP asked for its phone records first before a subpoena was filed? I understand why the DOJ might not want to tip them off, but they’d been agreeable to the CIA in not publishing on May 2. There was no accommodation at all that could be made with them, even in the form of prompt notice?