The Woman Who Brought You The IRS Persecution Of The Tea Party Is Now Heading The IRS Enforcement Of Obamacare!

I kid you not.

ABC News is reporting:

The Internal Revenue Service official in charge of the tax-exempt organizations at the time when the unit targeted tea party groups now runs the IRS office responsible for the health care legislation.

Sarah Hall Ingram served as commissioner of the office responsible for tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012. But Ingram has since left that part of the IRS and is now the director of the IRS’ Affordable Care Act office, the IRS confirmed to ABC News today.

Unreal.

Barry Heard It Through The Grapevine

The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart is on a roll, this time skewering our absentee president’s primary method of keeping track of his outlaw administration:

Sounds like a riff off of a classic Marvin Gaye styling:

Sing it Barry!

I’ll bet you wonder how I knew,

About Issa’s plans to make me blue

With even more scandals than you knew before

Doesn’t the press cover for me anymore?

You Know Scandals Have Hit Critical Mass When…

They become very funny fodder for comedians.

The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart skewered the IRS’ stalling the tax exempt status of Tea Party and other conservative groups while questioning them and providing the answers to leftwing groups, including perhaps the Obama 2012 campaign. Then he comes to a surprisingly insightful conclusion as to the effect of this scandal:

Genesis of the Benghazi Big Lie

The Weekly Standard just published leaked copies of the State Department talking point memos changing its report of the al Qaeda terrorist attack sacking our consulate in Benghazi, Libya last year into the lie of a demonstration run amok which President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, Ambassador Rice and Press Secretary Carney repeated for weeks leading up to the 2012 election. Here are the memos:

In the next few days, the House Government Oversight Committee will be offering testimony of multiple whistleblowers who were on the ground in Benghazi during the attack blowing apart Obama and Clinton’s big lie.

How Government Makes Depressions

I have spent a great deal of time on this blog discussing how the government creation and subsidy of the subprime home mortgage market caused the mass default starting the 2008 recession and how Mr. Obama’s massive socialist and progressive interventions into the economy turned a one year recession into a depression which continues to deepen today.

On a related note in the video below, Lee Ohanian, Professor of Economics at UCLA, explains how FDR’s New Deal interventions into the economy similarly prolonged the Great Depression for years until Roosevelt reversed many of them:

I hold no particular hope that Mr. Obama will follow or is even capable of FDR’s reconsideration.

Saving The Planet With Poverty

On Friday, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) celebrated findings that the human emissions of green house gas carbon dioxide in America had fallen again:

Energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in 2012 were the lowest in the United States since 1994, at 5.3 billion metric tons of CO2 (see figure above). With the exception of 2010, emissions have declined every year since 2007.

While EIA primarily credited the replacement of coal power plants with natural gas for the drop in emissions, a quick glance at their chart suggests instead that the use of oil and coal is dropping precipitously while the use of natural gas only rose slightly. In other words, overall energy usage is falling.

On the same day of the EIA announcement, financial blog Zero Hedge took a closer look at the EIA data and discovered that the precipitous slide on the use of oil products was being driven by an complete collapse in gasoline retail sales since the start of our economic depression:

Our economy is fueled by energy usage. As Zero Hedge correctly notes, if energy usage is in fact falling at this rate, this suggests that poverty is more widespread (leaving little money to buy gas) and our economy deeper in depression than official government statistics disclose.

In sum, America is lowering its GHG emissions and (if you subscribe to the manmade global warming faith) saving the planet by crippling its economy and expanding poverty.

Another Day In Obama’s America

Three months into the second Obama administration and after five years of economic depression, the Associated Press discovers the faces of poverty in Obama’s America:

Cynthia Marriott gave up her job search after an interview in October for a position as a hotel concierge.

“They never said no,” she says. “They just never called me back.”

Her husband hasn’t worked full time since 2006. She cashed out her 401(k) after being laid off from a job at a Los Angeles entertainment publicity firm in 2009. The couple owes thousands in taxes for that withdrawal. They have no health insurance.

She got the maximum 99 weeks’ of unemployment benefits then allowed in California and then moved to Atlanta.

Now she is looking to receive federal disability benefits for a lung condition that she said leaves her weak and unable to work a full day. The application is pending a medical review.

“I feel like I have no choice,” says Marriott, 47. “It’s just really sad and frightening”

During the peak of her job search, Marriott was filling out 10 applications a day. She applied for jobs she felt overqualified for, such as those at Home Depot and Petco but never heard back. Eventually, the disappointment and fatigue got to her.

“I just wanted a job,” she says. “I couldn’t really go on anymore looking for a job.”