(TheBlaze.com) TheBlaze’s S.E. Cupp battled liberal filmmaker Michael Moore on the gun issue Friday, arguing against gun restrictions and schooling him on basic statistics on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher.”
Cupp, contending with boos from the “Real Time” audience, said the problem with a gun registry is that “it treats law-abiding citizens as if they are guilty until proven innocent.”
She went on, “The problem with background checks, five-day waiting periods, they assume that I have criminal intent to use my gun to pursue my Second Amendment rights…I go to get a background check, ‘Prove to me you’re not a criminal.’ I go to get a gun, ‘Prove to me you don’t want to use it in the heat of passion right now, wait five days, you need to cool off.’ That’s not fair — the government is not in the business of intimidating me away from my Second Amendment rights. It’s an abuse of power, and it seeps into the culture — it’s why newspapers think they can publish gun owners’ addresses, as if they are pariahs. It’s not appropriate.”
(FoxNews.com) For the first time in years, the IRS was knocked down a peg or two.
In a hearing that escalated into a boisterous public shaming of one of the country’s most-feared government agencies, lawmakers took turns Friday calling outgoing IRS Commissioner Steven Miller on the carpet for his department’s scandalous practice of targeting conservative groups.
Miller rebuffed attempts to extract the names of those responsible, saying he did not know. But lawmakers vowed that the tense hearing would mark only the start of a series of investigations, in which criminal activity could be probed.
(Newsmax.com) Sen. Marco Rubio says the mushrooming controversies surrounding the Obama administration reflect a “culture of intimidation” created by President Barack Obama.
In an exclusive interview Thursday with Newsmax TV, the Florida Republican explained: “You have a president and an administration and a political apparatus around him that has decided the way to win the political battles of the day is to destroy your political opponents, to basically impugn their motives, to talk bad about them, to convince people that they’re bad people, and that they’re doing things for bad reasons.”
That take-no-prisoners attitude, he said, “permeates throughout their entire organization.”
(HotAir.com) The Inspector General of the Treasury reported this week that the IRS began applying extra scrutiny and conducting harassment of Obama administration opponents as early as March 2010. However, for at least two pro-life groups, that scrutiny appears to have started a year earlier. Joel Gehrke reports that one group was told its tax-exempt application depended not on promising to stay out of electoral politics, but on pledging not to protest Planned Parenthood — a prominent supporter of Barack Obama:
IRS officials refused to grant tax exempt status two pro-life organizations because of their position on the abortion issue, according to a non-profit law firm, which said that one group was pressured not to protest a pro-choice organization that endorsed President Obama during the last election.
“In one case, the IRS withheld approval of an application for tax exempt status for Coalition for Life of Iowa. In a phone call to Coalition for Life of Iowa leaders on June 6, 2009, the IRS agent ‘Ms. Richards’ told the group to send a letter to the IRS with the entire board’s signatures stating that, under perjury of the law, they do not picket/protest or organize groups to picket or protest outside of Planned Parenthood,” the Thomas More Society announced today. “Once the IRS received this letter, their application would be approved.”
(InfoWars.com) Associated Press reporters are outraged over recent revelations that the Obama administration engaged in a “sweeping seizure” of the private phone records of AP reporters as part of a Justice Department investigation. No probable cause was given to anyone, and hundreds of AP reporters were simply deemed guilty by the government as their phone call records were confiscated without explanation.
Politico is now reporting:
The behind-the-scenes anger — and heads-down determination of the AP staff members to keep doing their jobs amid the extraordinary public flap — comes as top executives from the wire service have mounted an aggressive public pushback against DOJ, calling its snooping a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” in a letter fired off to Attorney General Eric Holder. And yet something of a bunkerlike atmosphere has taken hold at the AP in Washington with no bureau-wide meetings or announcements about the DOJ’s action, AP sources told POLITICO.
But what’s not being reported is that the Associated Press helped create the very police state it now condemns for violating its freedoms and privacy. (Click to Read More…)
