Back to Basics

Where are these news stories from places other than Fox?  Isn’t it interesting to see the damage actually done to people’s lives?  Could it be that such news stories would increase anger against the IRS and the Obama administration?  From Fox News:

. . . While initially waiting for IRS approval, Devereaux dipped into his own bank account, maxed out credit cards and even borrowed money from friends so his group could put on a civic-engagement training session at the Omni Shoreham hotel in Washington. His goal was to eventually set up a steady stream of revenue for a tax-exempt nonprofit.

The next time Devereaux heard from the IRS, they had requested details and credentials on every single speaker and all the educational materials provided in the 78 classes held at the hotel. The IRS also wanted information on all 45 vendors, their credentials and a donor list.

Devereaux refused.

Five rounds of IRS letters later, and United in Action’s tax-exempt status is still in limbo.

If they are denied, Devereaux’s group would owe the federal government “somewhere in the neighborhood of $70,000 in back taxes,” he said, referring to money he would owe the government on donations.

“It’s more than we have in our bank account,” he said. . . .

Waco Tea Party President Toby Walker said her group applied for a 501(c)(4) status in July 2010. She’d call the IRS from time to time to check on the progress but was basically told, ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you,’ she said.

Then in February 2012, the IRS finally made contact.

Walker said she was asked questions that went well beyond the purview of the agency’s authority. They wanted to know everything about the Waco Tea Party group, their relationships with public officials, lists of volunteers and every single news story the group had ever been mentioned in.
Walker said the request was so lengthy and intrusive that had she complied with the demands, she “would have needed a U-haul truck of about 20 feet.”

While Walker’s group was finally granted tax-exempt status in March 2013, she said a lot of damage has already been done. She said people were afraid to support her group financially because they had not received the IRS-stamped status.

Others were afraid that they might be targeted by the IRS if they supported Walker’s group publicly. Having one of the most powerful government agencies angry at them wasn’t a risk many people were willing to take. And so the group suffered, she said.

“We spent thousands of our own dollars fighting this,” she said. “If this happens to one organization in America, we should all be outraged.” . . .

This is “what difference does it make” v2.0:

WALLACE: With due respect, you didn’t answer my question. What did the president do that night?

PFEIFFER: He was kept — he was in constant touch that night with his national security team and kept up-to-date as events were happening.

WALLACE: You say the national security team, but he didn’t talk to the Secretary of State, except for the one time when the first attack was over. He didn’t’ talk to the Secretary of Defense. He didn’t talk to the Chairman of the Joints Chiefs. Who was he talking to?

PFEIFFER: He was talking to his national security staff, his National Security Council, the people who keep him up-to-date about these things as they happen.

WALLACE: Was he in the Situation Room?

PFEIFFER: He was kept up-to-date throughout the day.

WALLACE: Do you not know if he was in the Situation Room?

PFEIFFER: I don’t know. I don’t remember what room the president was in on that night. That’s a largely irrelevant fact.

Maybe Obama was in the living room learning what happened on the news just like the rest of America. That seems to be the pattern.

Pfeiffer said questions about where Obama was and what he was doing during and after the attack are offensive. The White House didn’t seem to think Obama’s exact location was irrelevant during the Bin Laden raid.

Team Obama will dodge the “where was Obama in the hours and days after the Benghazi attack” question forever. The day after the attack he was in Las Vegas raising money. The day after that Obama was in Colorado raising money and looking forward to another opportunity to… you guessed it — raise money:

Certain questions among believers have been with us since the Lord’s departure and his promise to return. Some of the questions are why denominations and sects have arisen, but when they are not questions having to do with salvation through Christ’s finished work we must approach with caution.

The Rapture Controversy – Are We Asking the Wrong Question?

All three views of the rapture come with their own Biblical proof texts and separate arguments. When all the input is taken in to account one thing emerges beyond doubt; most Christians believe in a pre-tribulation rapture.

Those who think we will not be taken up by the Lord until halfway through the last seven year dispensation of the antichrist make up roughly a quarter of all believers. About three quarters are pre-tribulationists and a very small number are post trib. There is no scientific poll from which to be sure of these estimates, but few would argue against them.

While a post-trib seems unlikely, those who hold to this view have perhaps the strongest proof text of all, to wit:

“Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken: And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.” (Mt 24: 29-32)

The sequence here is simple. First we see a tribulation period that comes and completely finishes. Second is a gathering of his people from every corner of the world. This one verse we may say does rings around any attempt to place the church in the book of Revelation as here, then gone, especially since silence about something has less of a chance to be properly interpreted than an actual statement made by the Lord Jesus Christ. To gather meanings from the silence of passages is called an ‘interpolation.’ Better exegesis is to interpret only what is said and not what is inferred by silence.

Just like not knowing the day or the hour of Christ’s return, knowing the time and sequence of the rapture in proximity to unfolding events remains a conjectural matter at best. This writer hopes the pre-tribs’ are right, but I will not teach nor hold close to my heart this viewpoint for reasons that are very easily understood.

I firmly believe that this view is too easily accepted for all the wrong reasons. Rather than arguing one proof text against another it is apparent that we are raising the wrong question entirely.

We should be asking this question, but leaving the actual timing of the event in the omniscient and loving hands of our Savior. The question is simply stated, and has but one answer.

A couple of weeks ago, as his Department of Justice was seizing Associated Press phone records, President Obama hailed “World Press Freedom Day”:

We pay special tribute to those journalists who have sacrificed their lives, freedom or personal well-being in pursuit of truth and justice.

Ironic, because those who risk sacrificing their freedom in the pursuit of truth are reporters covering the Obama administration. Here’s just the latest:

The Justice Department spied extensively on Fox News reporter James Rosen in 2010, collecting his telephone records, tracking his movements in and out of the State Department and seizing two days of Rosen’s personal emails, the Washington Post reported on Monday.

In a chilling move sure to rile defenders of civil liberties, an FBI agent also accused Rosen of breaking anti-espionage law with behavior that — as described in the agent’s own affidavit — falls well inside the bounds of traditional news reporting.

Fox News is now claiming that the Obama Justice Department targeted two of their reporters and one producer.

As John Nolte pointed out over at Breitbart, the things the government is accusing Rosen of doing happen almost every day in the world of journalism in a free nation — and the Obama administration wants to criminalize it while sending a “horse head in the bed” style message to every other reporter in the country.

In 2009 the Obama administration pretty much declared war on Fox News, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this story runs a lot wider and deeper and isn’t even isolated to alleged leak investigations.

The Washington Post apparently doesn’t care how ridiculous it looks as it embarks on the process of destroying Ken Cuccinelli and other Republican candidates for top statewide offices in Virginia.

After Cuccinelli won the gubernatorial nomination, the Post stories looked like press releases from the Democratic Party. The front-page online Washington Post headline proclaimed, “Virginia GOP leans far to the right, nominating staunch conservatives.” The summary of the story by Laura Vozzella said, “After election losses, state Republicans are largely resisting advice to move to the middle.”

“Democrats made it clear that they view the GOP ticket as too extreme,” the Post reported, in a follow-up story. This is the way the Post views the GOP ticket. And this is the way the Post wants readers to view it, too.

The extreme rhetoric apparently includes Cuccinelli’s statement, “Our country was founded on the belief that our rights don’t come from the government, they come from our Creator. The Constitution was set up to limit the size and scope of government, not the liberty of individuals.”

There is nothing new here, in terms of the paper’s coverage of politics. But despite losing readers and money, the paper still carries some clout among those unaware of how media bias works and how the paper demonizes conservative Republicans. It is important to document this bias as it is taking place so that the Post is aware that the public understands these media tricks.

Fortunately, the Cuccinelli campaign recognizes the problem and is fighting back. Cuccinelli campaign manager Dave Rexrode said, “…we need to break through the biased and unfair actions of Washington, D.C.’s largest newspaper.”

“Over the past few months,” he explained, “The Washington Post has launched numerous misleading and false editorials attacking Ken Cuccinelli. They are basically taking the Democrats’ talking points and turning them into editorials.”

The presumptive Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Terry McAuliffe, “appears to have The Washington Post in his back pocket,” Rexrode pointed out. He also talked in detail about a push-poll that was nothing more than the paper’s “next attempt to attack Ken and prop up Terry McAuliffe.”

In a column headlined, “Ken Cuccinelli must say whether he’d still pursue tea party agenda if elected governor,” Post columnist Robert McCartney demanded that the candidate accept the label of extremist, which is how the paper wants to depict him. He said Cuccinelli “is trying to distract voters from the very positions that made him famous,” insisting that “In his acceptance speech Saturday at the Richmond Coliseum, Cuccinelli made only brief, passing references to his antiabortion position and his unsuccessful fight as attorney general against health-care reform.”

This is the “passing reference” to abortion: “It also means defending those at both ends of life—protecting the elderly from abuse as well as the unborn. We should encourage a deep and abiding respect for all human life.”

Rather than duck the issue, this is an unmistakable addressing of the abortion problem.

On the matter of “health-care reform,” which is what the Post calls socialized medicine, the fact is that Cuccinelli led a successful legal fight against Obamacare and a federal judge ruled in his favor. However, the Supreme Court ultimately decided on spurious grounds in favor of the law. Hence, the battle to repeal it rests with Congress.

Sen. Al Franken,D-Minn., Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and five other Democratic Party U.S. Senators sent a secret memorandum to former Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Doug Schulman in February 2012, to learns if his investigators planned to probe social welfare organizations that participated in political causes and issues-based campaigns.

“We urge the IRS to take these steps immediately to prevent abuse of the tax code by political groups focused on federal election activities. But if the IRS is unable to issue administrative guidance in this area then we plan to introduce legislation to accomplish these important changes,” according to the signatories.

The letter sent to Schulman in March had a more stern tone and recommendations for cracking down on “questionable practices.”

The senators stated that certain groups should have to disclose up front, on all written and online solicitations that get sent to potential contributors, how much of their activities could be considered political.

The Franken, Schumer and the other senators said this would make it clear to potential donors how much of a tax deduction, if any, they could claim on their tax returns.

In the aftermath of the IRS scandal hitting the nation’s newsrooms — that the IRS targeted numerous tea party and conservative groups for extra scrutiny during the tax-exempt status application process — a probe of the IRS has been met with stiff resistance by Democrats in Washington, D.C., who have tried everything including attempts to pin blame on former-President George W. Bush.

“It’s almost comical to hear the lies and half-truths coming out of the mouths of Democrat lawmakers and the Obama White House,” said Norman LaCross, a tax attorney in New Jersey.

On Thursday, Sen. Julianne Ortman, R-Minn., said that Franken’s comments have contributed to a culture within the Beltway that allowed such targeting.

During an appearance on CNN on Monday, Sen. Franken called for a “non-partisan” inquiry into all 501(c)(4) groups.

Franken spoke out at a press conference on March 21, 2012, where he told the media: “I think that there hasn’t been enforcement by the FEC and the IRS… That’s pretty hinky. I mean, they really aren’t doing that, and that I think there needs to be a look at that..,” according to the Conservative Campaign Committee.

Last year’s letters — signed by Al Franken, Chuck Schumer of New York and several others — do not request that the IRS specifically target tea party or conservative groups. It was also sent more than a year after the IRS began targeting the groups.

However, they did stress that the IRS should already possess the authority to issue immediate guidance on this matter. We urge the IRS to take these steps immediately to prevent abuse of the tax code by political groups focused on federal election activities. But if the IRS is unable to issue administrative guidance in this area then we plan to introduce legislation to accomplish these important changes.

The radical-moderate continuum that has defined the dialogue on Islam in the War on Terror is not an authentic perspective, it is an observer perspective.

To the Western observer, a suicide bomber is radical, a Muslim Imam willing to perform gay weddings is moderate and the Muslim Brotherhood leader who supports some acts of terror, but not others, is moderately radical or radically moderate.

These descriptions tell us nothing about Islam or about what Muslims believe, but do tell us a great deal about its observers and what they believe. They turn Islam into inkblots that reveal more about the interpreter than the splotch of ink being interpreted.

Muslims are not radical or moderate. The radical-moderate continuum is how liberal countries rate individuals and countries to decide how well they will harmonize with the national and international consensus. Even if that consensus only exists in their own mind. The label of moderate does not mean a rejection of violence. Otherwise it could hardly be applied to the Muslim Brotherhood. What it means is a willingness to collaborate with Western governments and progressive organizations.

The radical-moderate labels are useful for liberals, but useless for anyone who wants to asses reality. It is tied into a number of false notions that are necessary for maintaining the status quo of liberal democracies. Notions such as the equal moral stature and interchangeability of all religions and peoples are key to running a liberal democracy, but they make it impossible to have a rational conservative about Islam.

In liberal democracies, no one really discusses Islam as a religion. That discussion is preemptively aborted by the defense of the general category of religion. To criticize Islam is to challenge the category of protection for all religions, much as to attack Communism during the Cold War was to attack the First Amendment.

The general category makes it necessary to subdivide the specific religion or ideology into a moderate majority and a tiny minority of extremists. This categorization tells us nothing about Islam and everything about the political and intellectual classes that refuse to rationally discuss it.

Islam is neither moderate nor extreme. It simply is. Extremism and moderate are an observer perspective. That does not mean that Islam is all one thing, an impermeable block. But the one thing that it is not, is liberal.

Liberal Islam is secular Islam, in the same way that liberal Christianity and liberal Judaism are both secularized in their subservience to liberal values. There are indeed secular Muslims out there, but they are a tiny minority of secularists even in the secular West. Their influence is minimal. And it likely would be minimal even if the Saudis weren’t spending fortunes in oil money to control the expressions of Islam in the West.

Even these secular Muslims are not necessarily non-violent. What they lack is the broader worldview of Islamic nationalism, that some label Islamism. They will support Arab Nationalist terrorism, which defines peoples by nation, rather than the Islamic Nationalism, which defines them by religion.

Islamic nationalism is not a religion. Nor is it a separate branch of Islam. It is influenced by movements within Islam, but those movements are largely reformist efforts aimed at returning to a more uncompromised Islam. And it is not limited to these movements.

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. . . .
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. . . .

PHOTOS.COM

The Internal Revenue Service was formed in 1913 following the adoption (it was never properly ratified) of the 16^th Amendment to fund the Federal Reserve and enrich the bankster elites by stealing and redistributing the wealth of American citizens.

The income tax is one of the greatest frauds ever perpetrated upon the American people. It was enacted even though the U.S. Supreme Court had only recently ruled in Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Co. that certain taxes on direct income were unConstitutionally unapportioned direct taxes and violated Article I, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution. Not covered in Pollock is the fact that the income tax also violates the 5^th Amendment: No person shall… be deprived of life, liberty or property… nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.

A heavy progressive or graduated income tax is the second plank of the Communist Manifesto. The central bank (aka the Federal Reserve) is the fifth plank. The United States has essentially adopted all 10 planks of Marxism. For its part, the Federal Reserve was formed during a wave of bipartisan progressive legislation passed during the early 1900s that transformed the American economy and society from one of roughly laissez-faire to one of centralized statism, as Murray Rothbard writes in A History of Money and Banking in the United States. The Fed was also fraudulently promoted, as those who were working behind the scenes to pass the legislation were acting in public as if they opposed it.

The U.S. government had functioned without an income tax for more than 100 years, except during the time of the War of Northern Aggression, when Abraham Lincoln passed an unConstitutional tax on income to fund his war machine.

During the run-up to the 16^th Amendment, President Woodrow Wilson promised Americans that only those earning more than $10,000 (about $100,000 in today’s dollars) per year would even pay taxes and the tax rate would never exceed 3 percent (now 36.9 percent). In the beginning, that was so; but within four years families were taxed on all income above $1,000 and the top rate had risen to 76 percent, demonstrating how the elected class lies without compunction.

The government began tax withholding in 1943. By withholding a portion of a worker’s paycheck, government is able steal the wealth of its citizens slowly over the course of a year, silently and with little outrage. This is vile treachery, even if the worker receives his money back when he files his “income taxes.” It means that for a year the government has had an interest-free loan on the backs of the citizenry. When the government returns that money, it is viewed as a benevolent master by the ignorant citizenry who assume the government is giving them some kind of gift, never realizing how poorly they have been used.

The income tax is not used to fund Federal government. I am not the first or only one to ever say this, but few understand it. As far as I can tell, it was first uttered publicly by a government functionary during the last year of World War II.

Americans are paying hundreds billions of dollars each year to fund a corrupt, biased, lying gaggle of unaccountable accountants and bean counters whose sole mission in life is intimidate and harm American citizens.

That would, of course, be the IRS, the American version of the Gestapo and KGB morphed into one dysfunctional arm of the White House and Democrat Party.

Even more appalling is the fact that ObamaCare, 2,000 pages of gibberish and taxes originally promised to make health care easier to secure and more affordable to get, will add 16,000 IRS agents to the already-bloated government work force.

Because of the Obama-Reid-Pelosi conspiracy against American citizens, ObamaCare cannot be implemented without the brutal presence of the IRS.

What to do?

Let’s abolish the IRS, and Obamacare will melt away like an unprotected scoop of ice cream in July.

Send the IRS into oblivion, leaving millions of Americans free from the tyranny of the tax man!

Kill two birds with one stone!