Scandal Mania! Getting hard to keep up with all this criminality

[Soul Crusher]

The scandals of the Obama administration seem to be hurting not just the White House but MSNBC as well while Fox News Channel scored its second-best week of the year. After double-digit gains during last year’s presidential election, May 13-17 saw the progressive-aligned “Lean Forward” news network hit new lows as the IRS scandal erupted and revelations that the Justice Department secretly obtained AP records became public. With 350,000 viewers on average and 94,000 among the adults 25-54 demo, MSNBC had its least-watched and lowest-rated total-day results of the year last week. That was also the lowest total-day demo result the network has had since the week of June 26-July 2, 2006, when MSNBC pulled in just 83,000 viewers among adults 25-54, according to Nielsen data.
 
Related: Fox News Tops 2012 Cable News Network Ratings; MSNBC Up
 
Last week’s total day results were down 17% in viewers and 22% among the demo from the comparable May 14 to May 18 week of last year. In primetime, the numbers were even worse for MSNBC as a steady decline from the beginning of the year continued. The network had 570,000 total viewers and 159,000 in the demo from 8 PM to 11 PM from May 13 to May 17, 2013. That’s the lowest rated week of the year so far for MSNBC in terms of viewers and the third lowest of 2013 in the demo. The week of May 6 to May 12 was worst in the demo with 148,000 viewers when the network had 604,000 viewers on average. These latest results come as the news network’s recently launched and struggling All In With Chris Hayes hit a new viewership of 396,000 and its second lowest demo audience of just 88,000 on May 14. It also comes on the heels of MSNBC falling in April ratings from its second place ranking of the year before.
 
Related: Fox Tops April Cable News Ratings While CNN Posts Big Gains
 
Looking at last week’s numbers, MSNBC is down 27% in both viewership and among adults 25-54 in primetime next to the comparable week in 2012. In comparison, No. 1 cable news network Fox News Channel had 1.491 million total day viewers and 283,000 in the demo last week. That’s FNC’s second most watched week of the year after the week of the Boston Marathon bombings. FNC had 2.396 million total viewers and 356,000 among adults 25-54 in primetime from May 13 to May 17. That’s a 1% demo drop in total day and a 10% drop in primetime compared to the same frame last year. However it is a 31% total day viewership rise for FNC and a 17% primetime audience lift over the comparable week of May 14 to May 18, 2012. Boasting about his network’s victory over CNN last year and in February, MSNBC’s president Phil Griffin said earlier this year that he aimed to beat FNC by 2014. The Comcast-owned network did actually top FNC a couple of nights last year during the heat for the Presidential election. With that in mind, Griffin’s effort fell short last week. In total day, MSNBC was fourth after Fox News Channel, CNN and HLN in both viewers and among adults 25-54 last week. In primetime last week, MSNBC beat CNN’s 544,000 total viewers to snag third place but came fourth in the demo after FNC, HLN and CNN.

Deadline's Dominic Patten - tip him here.

http://www.deadline.com/2013/05/obama-msnbc-fox-news-scandals

[Soul Crusher]

How the white hat got stained
 
Like every administration, the Obamites let ends justify means
 
By Jim Geraghty / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Monday, May 20, 2013, 4:00 AM.
 






































































































































































































































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Carolyn Kaster/AP
 
President Obama this month.
 



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Don’t let anyone fool you: Everyone in politics is tempted to believe that their noble ends could justify unethical and illegal means.
 
Those who had hoped that President Obama would usher in a new era of higher standards in Washington must be shell-shocked by last week’s revelations:
 
-The Internal Revenue Service admitted to delaying conservative organizations’ tax-exempt status while quickly approving groups that had liberal or progressive orientations. The IRS asked these groups all sorts of invasive questions, including what kind of books they read, and leaked some information to the media.
 
-The Department of Justice secretly obtained two months worth of telephone records of Associated Press journalists, more than 20 separate phone lines — a stunning amount of snooping into the interactions between reporters and their sources.
 
-The Environmental Protection Agency has reportedly been waiving fees for Freedom of Information Act requests from environmental groups while keeping them in place for conservative groups.
 
-Gregory Hicks, a career State Department employee whose account of events in Benghazi contradicted the administration’s initial claims that it was tied to a YouTube video, said he was harangued and demoted for not toeing the line.
 
While there are still chapters to be written in the story of how this administration went astray, one element appears clear: Obama’s crew in Washington, and those who worked under him in the federal bureaucracy, have bent, broken and ignored the rules — all quite certain that they were acting for the greater good. (At this point, it is not clear whether Obama turned a blind eye to all this or obliviously presided over the federal bureaucracy’s transformation into a partisan cudgel.)
 
Saul Alinsky, the activist whose writings influenced Obama in his community organizing days, scoffed at those who spent a lot of time worrying about whether the ends justify the means. In his most famous book, “Rules for Radicals,” Alinsky wrote, “One has to remember means and ends. It’s true that I might have trouble getting to sleep because it takes time to tuck those big, angelic, moral wings under the covers. To me, that would be utter immorality.”
 
But you don’t need to be a devotee of Alinsky to conclude that making an omelet requires cracking some eggs.
 
Undoubtedly, the men and women who made up the highest ranks of the Bush administration believed in a noble end of a free Iraq: dictator Saddam Hussein deposed, weapons of mass destruction eliminated and a functioning, secular democracy in the middle of the Arab world.
 
It is indeed a lovely vision, one that drove that administration to overlook questions about the Iraqi WMD programs and whether there were enough troops to keep order after the invasion.
 
Once the war began, one misdeed after another had to be excused or dismissed as a distraction from that noble end: military contractor profiteering, Abu Ghraib prison, an environment of runaway sectarian violence and so on.
 
Obama debuted on the political scene with an atmosphere of messianic excitement. A July 2008 column by Mark Morford in the San Francisco Chronicle asked, with no detectable sarcasm, whether Obama was a “Lightworker” — described as “that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet.”
 
These moments, when self-righteousness shines from every pore, are probably when politicians should be most careful — and since they rarely are, these are the moments when the public should be most vigilant. For almost every scandal is rooted in the belief that what you and your allies are doing is so good, so noble and so necessary that it can justify some moral shortcuts.
 
The Contras really needed those arms. A President is entitled to a little canoodling with an intern, and it’s acceptable to lie under oath about it. To quote Nixon, “When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
 
Good screenwriters know every villain believes he is the hero of his own story. The human capacity for self-justification can be pretty epic even outside a highly charged political atmosphere in which each side sees itself as the living embodiment of everything that makes America great — and the other side as a motley amalgamation of petty, corrupt, selfish special interests.
 
And now, we see what happens when an administration and the ranks of the federal bureaucracy become filled with folks who are convinced they can cut some corners because they’re doing the Lord’s work. Or, perhaps, the Lightworker’s work.
 
Geraghty, a contributing editor at National Review, writes the ‘Campaign Spot’ blog for the magazine's web site.


Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/white-hat-stained-article-1.1347507#ixzz2Tvhhl4Vi

[Soul Crusher]

The President Won — Sort Of

The administration spent the last six months of the campaign in cover-up mode.

 By  Victor Davis Hanson


On September 11, 2012, Barack Obama was 1 point ahead of Mitt Romney in the ABC and Washington Post polls. He was scheduled to meet Romney in three weeks for the first debate. The president was increasingly anxious. Unemployment was still at 7.8 percent, and the Solyndra and Fast and Furious scandals had only recently disappeared from the news — and they had done so only thanks to the use of executive privilege.

But the Tea Party seemed to have lost its 2010 momentum, despite its renewed warnings that Obamacare would be a disaster if not repealed in 2013. The president was running on the slogan that GM was alive and bin Laden was dead — the implications being that massive influxes of borrowed federal money had allowed GM’s work force to survive, and that with the death of bin Laden came the unraveling of the “core” of al-Qaeda. Libya, of course, was cited as an overseas success — a sort of implied un-Iraq.

The contours of the campaign, in other words, were well drawn. Obama claimed that he had brought peace overseas and restoration at home, while Romney claimed that we were less secure on President Obama’s watch and that the economy was ossified because of too much debt and government spending.

And the race was neck and neck. In a few days the secretly taped “47 percent” Romney video would emerge and tar with Romney with the charge of social insensitivity. And in the second debate, in mid-October, the moderator, CNN’s Candy Crowley, in utterly unprofessional fashion, would interrupt Romney’s reference to Benghazi and cite a transcript in such a way as to falsely turn Obama’s generic reference to terrorism into an explicit presidential condemnation of the Benghazi attacks as a terrorist action, and swing the momentum of the debate back to a stumbling Barack Obama.


Again, as of September 11, the race was dead even.

Beneath Obama’s calm veneer that September there were lots of things the public did not know, and from the administration’s point of view apparently should not know until after the election. Just three months earlier, the Treasury Department’s inspector general had reported to top Treasury officials that the Internal Revenue Service had been inordinately targeting conservative groups that were seeking tax-exempt status. Such political corruption of the IRS was a Nixonian bombshell, with enormous implications for the election, especially given that during the campaign Obama’s economic adviser Austan Goolsbee had claimed that he had knowledge about the Koch brothers’ tax returns, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was lauding himself as a “wrecking crew” as he swore he had the inside dope on Mitt Romney’s taxes. Note that while Nixon talked tough about using the IRS, the agency resisted his efforts; in Obama’s case, the more the administration has denied political pressure, the more the evidence has come out that politics had long ago corrupted the agency — whose reputation has been ruined under this administration for the foreseeable future.

The inspector general of the Treasury recently testified before Congress that he had told Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin of the IRS’s shenanigans in June 2012, five months before the election. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who had been grilled during confirmation hearings about his own improper tax deductions, must at some point have been told of the IRS mess, but somehow all these disturbing developments were kept under wraps for the duration of the campaign. Are we to believe that, each time Geithner met with the president between June and November, he did not mention the scandal brewing in his department because his own deputy had never told him?

In other words, in cynical fashion, the Obama team won on two counts: The IRS had intimidated conservative organizations for months and had very possibly helped to prevent them from repeating their successes of 2010, while keeping the illegal activity from the press and the public.

As of September 11, 2012, the American people also did not know that the attorney general’s office had four months earlier been conducting secret monitoring of two months’ worth of records of calls made from private and work phone lines of Associated Press reporters — this surveillance supposedly due to suspicions that administration sources were leaking classified information to these reporters.

But something was awry here too. First, the administration did not start by apprising AP that it wished to talk to their suspect reporters, as is normal protocol. Stranger still, the administration itself apparently had leaked classified information about the Stuxnet cyber-war virus, the drone protocols, and the Seal Team 6 raid that killed bin Laden (remember Defense Secretary Bob Gates’s “Shut the f*** up!”) — all in efforts to persuade the voting public that their president was far more engaged in the War on Terror than his critics had alleged.

These efforts to squelch any mention of the monitoring of journalists worked as well. Reporters were outraged when they eventually learned that some of their brethren had been subjected to stealthy government surveillance — but they learned this a year after the fact and only following the reelection of Barack Obama.

On September 11, 2012, of course, there was the violent attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead, and a host of unanswered questions in the heat of the campaign: What was such a large CIA operation doing in Benghazi? Why was our ambassador left so vulnerable both before and during the attack? Why had the much-praised “lead from behind” campaign to remove Qaddafi earned us a dead ambassador and a nation full of anti-American terrorists, some of them perhaps al-Qaeda–related?



 

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We know now from a flurry of e-mails, public talking points, and public statements from staffers that when the president himself, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, and Press Secretary Jay Carney insisted that the attack grew out of a spontaneous demonstration over an Internet video, they knew in reality that the video had nothing to do with the attack.
 Yet coming clean before the American people apparently might have involved explaining why no one in Washington was willing to beef up security in answer to Ambassador Stevens’s requests. And during the attack, worry over a Mogadishu-like firefight two months before the election may have been why the administration ordered available units to stand down rather than sending in help by any means necessary. The truth was clear: Libya was not quiet, nor was al-Qaeda leaderless.

Instead, blaming the violence on a petty crook and supposed “Islamophobe” squared the circle: A right-wing bigot had caused the problem; he could be summarily jailed; and the president could both be absolved from blame for the unexpected violence and praised for his multicultural bona fides in condemning such a hateful voice on our soil. Again, the cover-up worked perfectly in accordance with the September campaign narrative. The American people did not find out the truth of what happened in Benghazi — the “consulate” was never attacked by “spontaneous” demonstrators enraged by a video emanating from the United States — until eight months after the attack.

In the matters of the Associated Press surveillance, the IRS scandal, and Benghazi, the White House prevailed — keeping from the public embarrassing and possibly illegal behavior until the president was safely reelected. As in the mysteries surrounding David Petraeus’s post-election resignation, and the revelation about the “train wreck” of Obamacare, what the voters knew prior to November about what their government was up to proved far different than what they are just beginning to know now. And so Obama won the election, even as he is insidiously losing half the country.

Because breaking the law and telling untruths eventually surface, we will come to learn that Obama was reelected into oblivion.

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His The Savior Generals is just out from Bloomsbury Books.

Â

[andreisdaman]

Can you guys chill on all this personal crap already? 

are you new here???

[Soul Crusher]

are you new here???

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/21/us-usa-healthcare-scandals-analysis-idUSBRE94K08420130521


(Reuters) - With the White House already reeling from three major controversies, some Republican lawmakers are zeroing in on what they perceive is another possible scandal tied to President Barack Obama's landmark health reform law just as it nears implementation.

On top of the troubles the administration is facing over its handling of the attack on the Benghazi mission, the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of conservative groups, and the Justice Department's seizure of Associated Press phone records, Republicans hope to target Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

They are questioning her soliciting of funds on behalf of a non-profit group, called Enroll America, from two private entities, a practice which if not unprecedented is at the very least unusual. Federal law bars officials from soliciting any organization or individual with whom they do business or regulate.

Enroll America is run by the president's former campaign backers to do something Congress refused to fund: sell "Obamacare" to the public.

An HHS statement last week said that since March Sebelius solicited financial donations for Enroll America from H&R Block Inc, the tax preparation company, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a philanthropic entity devoted to public health issues. Asked Monday for a list of all solicitations before or after March, an HHS spokesman referred Reuters to the department's original statement.

Neither H&R Block nor the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation are regulated by HHS, the department's spokesman said, so there was nothing improper or illegal about soliciting them.

Enroll America is intended to serve as the private sector flagship for a massive public outreach campaign intended to get millions of uninsured Americans to sign up for subsidized insurance coverage through new online marketplaces, or exchanges, that will begin open enrollment on October 1.

NO COMMITMENT

H&R Block said it has made no commitment to Enroll America. "We received a phone call from the Secretary during which the Secretary discussed supporting Enroll America," the company said in a statement. "While we took her suggestion under consideration, we have made no commitment," it said.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation said in a statement that it had "recently approved new funding" for Enroll America, bringing its total contributions to the group to nearly $14 million since 2010. It did not say how much of that, if any, came in response to Sebelius' solicitation.

It's the second controversy over the novel method used by the Obama administration to promote its agenda: using campaign-style organizations staffed with loyalists and former campaign or White House aides to mobilize grassroots support for government policies. The first involved Organizing for Action, an independent non-profit group seeking to harness both the energy and personnel from Obama's re-election campaign in support of the president's legislative agenda.

The Enroll America issue is complicated by the fact that Republicans in Congress have succeeded in blocking proposed government spending that otherwise could have been used to achieve the ends pursued by the independent group.

That has given lawmakers, such as Republican U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander, an opening to allege a violation of the federal "anti-deficiency" act, which bars agencies from accepting "voluntary" services except when authorized by law.

In defense of the help the department is getting from Enroll America, an HHS spokesman said it is permitted by a section of the Public Health Service Act that allows the secretary to encourage support for new and innovative health programs.

Some conservative legal experts say finding a clear-cut violation of the law is a long shot. "I would be skeptical of the claim that it's illegal, unless someone made a really compelling case. However, the appearance is such that it at least raises questions," said Jonathan Adler, a law professor at Case Western University who opposes healthcare reform.

But legal issues may be the least of the concerns for supporters of the healthcare law.

They worry that a political storm over Obamacare, with congressional hearings likely, could discourage private donors to Enroll America and jeopardize the administration's ability to find the funds needed to reach a public that is already largely unaware of the healthcare reforms.

One of the biggest concerns is that younger, healthier people will not sign up for health plans on the exchanges, driving the costs up for coverage of the people who do sign up.

"The danger" to the health program, said former Obama healthcare adviser Nancy-Ann DeParle, "is that people don't come and enroll and get insured. That leaves the health plans in the exchanges trying to cover people without any young, healthy people, and it drives the price up."

REPUBLICANS PROMISE PROBES

Republicans certainly see an opportunity.

"Our guys on the Hill think this is the fourth scandal," said Republican strategist Matt Mackowiak. "It fits into that narrative Republicans are building not only about incompetence in the executive branch but also dishonesty."

"This is a good issue for Republicans," Mackowiak added. "We want to maximize it."

The Republican-controlled House Energy and Commerce Committee has launched an investigation into the fundraising to determine whether it involved regulated companies and has asked nearly a dozen healthcare firms including major insurers such as Aetna Inc, a member of Enroll America's advisory council, to say whether they have received solicitations.

Republicans in the House and Senate have also called on the non-partisan Government Accountability Office to investigate.

"People are watching it very closely. We're hearing about it from constituents, people who are incredibly concerned," said Republican Representative Marsha Blackburn.

Enroll America was launched in September 2011 in part by leaders of Families USA, a key backer of the healthcare reform effort as it moved through Congress in 2009 and 2010. It is led by Anne Filipic, who worked on public engagement projects in the Obama White House. It's managing director, Chris Wyant, directed Obama's eastern Ohio field operation during the 2012 election campaign.

It includes on its boards of directors and advisers, executives of Teva Pharmaceuticals USA, Blue Shield of California, Kaiser Permanente, and CVS Caremark as well as officials of major health-related trade associations, such as the American Hospital Association and the National Association of Health Underwriters.

Filipic said she is confident that Enroll America will get the funds it needs for the outreach campaign. "We feel really good that we'll have the resources we need," she said.

(Reporting by David Morgan; Additional reporting by David Ingram and Fred Barbash; Editing by Fred Barbash, Martin Howell and Eric Beech)

[dario73]

HEHEHEHEEEE!!!!

So much for the messiah riding on a white horse to save America.

That is one useless "constitutional scholar".

[Soul Crusher]

HEHEHEHEEEE!!!!

So much for the messiah riding on a white horse to save America.

That is one useless "constitutional scholar".

They never imagined that the messiah would turn out to be such a disastrous failure. 

[dario73]

The American people voted in 2008 hopint to avoid, supposedly, a third Bush term. They ended up getting Bush x 1000.