Polygamy Next?

via Instapundit:

MATT K. LEWIS: The Case For Polygamy. “This is not some straw man argument. As BuzzFeed’s McKay Coppins pointed out, polygamists are, in fact, celebrating the court’s decision. And they have every reason to do so. After all, why shouldn’t marriage equality apply to them, too? . . . What’s magical about the number two? . . . As a man, I can only imagine how much more efficient it would be to have one wife in the workforce and another wife at home with the kids. This would be much better for the children than shipping them off to some nursery school. And having three parents is a lot better than having just one … or none.”

Heritage Graphic: 10 Problems with Immigration Bill

Source: Heritage Foundation

$46 Million in Refunds to 23,994 Illegals at 1 Atlanta Address

"The Internal Revenue Service sent 23,994 tax refunds worth a combined $46,378,040 to 'unauthorized' alien workers who all used the same address in Atlanta, Ga., in 2011, according to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA)," reports CNSNews. "That was not the only Atlanta address theoretically used by thousands of 'unauthorized' alien workers receiving millions in federal tax refunds in 2011. In fact, according to a TIGTA audit report published last year, four of the top ten addresses to which the IRS sent thousands of tax refunds to 'unauthorized' aliens were in Atlanta."

Here's the list of the top ten 'singular' tax refund addresses identified by the IG:

• $46,378,040 in 23,994 tax refunds to a single Atlanta GA address
• $10,395,874 in 2,507 refunds to a single Oxnard CA address
• $7,284,212 in 2,408 refunds to a Raleigh NC address
• $5,558,608 in 2,047 refunds to a Phoenix AZ address
• $5,091,027 in 1,942 refunds to a San Jose CA address
• $3,298,877 in 1,846 refunds to an Arvin CA address
• $2,691,448 in 3,608 refunds to a second Atlanta address
• $2,256,302 in 1,972 refunds to a Palm Beach Gardens FL address
• $2,164,976 in 11,284 refunds to a third Atlanta address
• $1,231,943 in 2,386 refunds to a fourth Atlanta address

Grand total: $86,352,307 in tax refunds sent to 10 addresses. It gets worse.

They're Listening Now (Polls)

Voters, that is. Recent polls suggest government scandals are penetrating the minds of even low-information voters.

From Rasmussen Reports:

• 35% have a favorable impression of the federal government, while 60% hold an unfavorable view (6/18/13)
• 82% of voters nationwide are now following the IRS targeting story, including 44% who are following "very closely" (6/18/13)
• 57% believe it's likely the NSA data will be used by other government agencies to harass political opponents (6/14/13)
• 56% view the Feds as a threat to individual rights (6/5/13)

Women and young voters have consistently had the greatest faith in President Obama, but a CNN/ORC poll taken June 11-13, 2013, shows a significant erosion of that faith.

Responses of 18-34 year olds:

• job as president: 48% approve; 50% disapprove
• economy: 40% approve; 57% disapprove
• foreign affairs: 43% approve; 55% disapprove
• federal budget deficit: 30% approve; 67% disapprove
• terrorism: 55% approve; 41% disapprove
• illegal immigration: 48% approve; 48% disapprove
• government surveillance of citizens: 33% approve; 62% disapprove

Responses of women:

• job as president: 49% approve; 50% disapprove
• economy: 42% approve; 58% disapprove
• foreign affairs: 46% approve; 51% disapprove
• federal budget deficit: 38% approve; 60% disapprove
• terrorism: 52% approve; 45% disapprove
• illegal immigration: 41% approve; 54% disapprove
• government surveillance of citizens: 38% approve; 58% disapprove

President Obama's rating as "honest and trustworthy" is down in this poll as well.  He's still above water with women (53% give him thumbs up; 46% thumbs down), but he's below water with 18-34 year olds (49% trust him; 51% don't).

UPDATE—ConservativeIntel adds this:

[Obama] has dedicated much of his rhetorical firepower to debunking the message of the Reagan presidency — that government is too big, and that big government often creates bigger problems than it solves. And if he wins over young supporters to such a philosophy, he will have created a generation of believers in a more robust federal government, who, like those who came of age in the Reagan era, will age and to some degree retain those beliefs. This poll suggests he is losing that argument."

• "Fifty-seven percent of those questioned say they disagree with the president's views on the size and power of the federal government."
• 62 percent now believe that "government is so large and powerful that it threatens the rights and freedoms of ordinary Americans."

Supreme Court Voter Decision Not So Bad

"Election-integrity proponents and the states ... don’t realize they really won" in yesterday's citizen-verification decision, writes voting-rights attorney J. Christian Adams.

After re-reading the case and reflecting a bit more, it’s clear that the decision was a disaster for the Left and their victory cackles are hollow — and they know it.

The Left essentially believes that anyone who fills out a federal Election Assistance Commission registration form should be allowed on the rolls, no questions asked. There were complex fights over the “citizen check-off box” issues, with the Left wanting the box rendered meaningless, and conservatives and election-integrity proponents believing a registration cannot be processed until a registrant affirms on the box that he or she is a citizen.

Before the decision today, here is what the Left wanted:

● Invalidation of Arizona’s requirement that those submitting a federal form provide proof of citizenship with their federal form. Mind you, the citizenship-proof requirement is NOT part of federal law and the Election Assistance Commission does NOT require it in the form they drafted.

● Invalidation of state citizenship-verification requirements when a state voter registration form is used (yes, such forms exist separate from the federal requirement) on the basis of federal preemption. They wanted the Arizona case to invalidate all state citizenship-verification requirements.

● Automatic registration if a registrant submits a completed federal EAC approved registration form, no questions asked.

● Federal preemption on the ability for states to have customized federal EAC-approved forms that differed from the default EAC form.

● Federal preemption over states, like Florida and Kansas, looking for independent information on citizenship to root out noncitizens from the voter rolls. Again, the Left wanted the federal EAC form to be the no-questions-asked ticket to the voter rolls.

So what is the score on these five goals after Justice Scalia’s opinion today? Election-integrity advocates are batting .800; left wing groups, .200. And the most insignificant issue of the five is the one issue the Left won. Justice Scalia foiled 4 of 5 of their goals, and the 4 biggest ones.

Read his full analysis at PJMedia.

A 1984-meets-Twilight-Zone World

Victor Davis Hanson has a way of cutting through the BS to the heart of a matter. In The New American Enemies List, he summarizes the 1984-meets-Twilight-Zone state of our union. Here are a few teasers:

• The CIA and FBI knew of the suspicious activity of the Boston bombers, of Major Hasan, and of Anwar al-Awlaki. And they did nothing to preempt their violence. The FBI is said to be carefully avoiding monitoring mosques, although all of the above terrorists were known by many fellow Muslim worshipers to be either disturbed or extremist or both.  In contrast, the NSA monitors, we are told, nearly everyone’s communications rather than focusing on Middle Eastern male Muslims, even though Middle Eastern male Muslims have been involved in the vast majority of post-9/11 terrorist plots.
• The vast majority of the annual shooting homicides are committed by inner-city and minority youths below the age of 30. Handguns are involved in 80% of all murders. Rifles and shotguns account for less than 10% of homicides. No matter; the National Rifle Association is now blamed for generic gun violence, especially the mass shootings at schools...
• Sometime around 2009 success was deemed failure, and failure success — at least if we collate the president fat-cat rhetoric with the vast expansion in the disability, food-stamp, and unemployment-insurance rolls.
• The IRS is not worried at all about 47% of the nation who pay no federal income taxes. The vast majority of those whom it focuses on are instead the 10% who pay over 70% of all taxes.
• Millions of Americans are terrified of the IRS, the Department of Justice, the EPA, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and even perhaps the FBI, CIA, and State Department. ... Citizens fear them for understandable reasons: those who do nothing wrong, whether in filing tax forms or trying to buy a rifle, are considered suspect and deserving to be the target of either federal scrutiny or presidential slurs.  But those who do a great deal of wrong, either by illegally entering the country, disrupting polling, trafficking in weapons in Mexico, eavesdropping on American citizens, pulling tax information for partisan purposes, subverting a government agency, or lying to the public about government activity, seem exempt from punishment ...

Worth the full read.

Silicon Valley Built NSA's Surveillance State

"Some of America's biggest social media and tech companies have been denying in recent days that they were aware of the National Security Agency's recently-exposed "PRISM" and telephone monitoring programs. But these denials obscure a larger truth: The government's massive data collection and surveillance system was largely built not by professional spies or Washington bureaucrats but by Silicon Valley and private defense contractors."

So begins Michael Hirsh's fascinating piece, based on an interview with former CIA Director Michael Hayden, in this week's Atlantic, "Silicon Valley Doesn't Just Help the Surveillance State — It Built It." Among Hirsh's points:

• NSA contracted with America's social media and tech companies to set up and administer these surveillance programs.
• "There isn't a phone or a computer at Fort Meade [NSA headquarters] that the government owns" today.
• "For the tech industry, especially the social-media companies, the controversy over the extent of NSA's domestic data gathering has become an acute embarrassment," with heads of two of the biggest, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Google co-founder Larry Page, issuing "near-identical statements late last week saying neither of them had ever heard 'of a program called PRISM' until the press reports."
• "Yet for Hayden, who was one of the longest-serving NSA directors ever, remaking the stodgy Cold Ward spy agency into a private-tech-sector enterprise was a logical outgrowth of dramatic changes in the nature of both threats and technology."

By the time 9/11 arrived, the American tech industry was building the best stuff and had the best minds, so the NSA no longer had any choice but to enlist Silicon Valley's help. Signals intelligence "has to look like its target. We have to master whatever technology the target is using to turn his beeps and squeaks into something humanly intelligible," Hayden says. Not only was much of this traffic being routed through the United States, but the tech sector knew how to penetrate and "mine" it. He concludes: "Why would we not turn the most powerful telecommunications and computing management structure on the planet to our use?"

The NSA did. But now some of these companies may come to regret what is emerging as a public relations disaster.

Welcome to the 21st Century's military-intelligence complex.

Are You a Feminist?

Most American women don't want to be associated with the term or the movement, says Christina Hoff Sommers. She offered background, insight and data that will surprise many women during her May Conservative Women's Network luncheon presentation in Washington DC. Her full speech can be viewed on YouTube (http://youtu.be/VRzrT0H-T-4). 

Thank you, Cleta Mitchell!

One of the heroes in identifying and exposing IRS abuses is attorney Cleta Mitchell, who is also a featured speaker at our How to Excel at Your DC Internship seminar on June 14.

In a piece entitled "Cleta Mitchell: How to Investigate the IRS," WSJ editorial page editor James Freeman writes:

The woman who helped expose IRS abuse of conservative activists has more news to share: The abuse continues, and she sees no evidence that the White House, the IRS or the Justice Department is doing anything to end it. "This is not in the past tense. This is still going on," says Cleta Mitchell, perhaps the country's pre-eminent expert on campaign-finance and political tax law.

In 2012, Ms. Mitchell worked to persuade members of Congress that reports of IRS harassment of conservative groups were credible. GOP lawmakers demanded information from the IRS and triggered the internal audit that finally forced the agency last month to acknowledge abuses it had previously denied. Now Ms. Mitchell is determined to end the abuse and identify the culprits.

Don't bet against her. A partner at elite international law firm Foley and Lardner, Ms. Mitchell is sketching out a road map to uncover the truth and force reform—whether or not the Obama administration cooperates...

Among Ms. Mitchell's IRS-abused clients is True the Vote (more here).

Catherine Engelbrecht Has Had Enough

"True the Vote is not only suing the IRS, but also taking action against the IRS employees who participated in the harassment of the voter education and election monitoring organization. Those employees could personally be held liable to pay damages that would be established in litigation," reports Caroline May at the Daily Caller. "Founder and president of True the Vote Catherine Engelbrecht explained in a conference call Thursday morning that in July of 2010 her organization filed an application for tax exemption. The request has been in limbo since then."

But government hasn't been idle in the intervening 34 months. In addition to being subjected to hundreds of questions and requests for thousands of documents by IRS, Engelbrecht and her family have been "audited by the IRS twice, subject to two unscheduled audits by ATF, one by OSHA, and the Texas-branch of the EPA."

UPDATE: Ms. Engelbrecht's organization is being represented by attorney Cleta Mitchell (more here).

Obama's Psych-Ops on Americans

Psychiatrist Dr. Keith Ablow asserts "that this administration is engaged in a coordinated attempt to dispirit, disarm and disenfranchise large portions of the American population and to weak our founding principles through what is best understood as psychological warfare."

It began with Obama's apology tour overseas and continues through the current scandals.  But it can be overcome by acknowledging what is really happening to us and remembering who we are.

Psychological warfare has been described as a set of techniques aimed at influencing a target audience’s value systems or beliefs and inducing confessions of wrongdoing or attitudes favorable to the group proffering the techniques.

Sommers: Quick Fix for Gender Wage Gap

"If today’s young women want to close the wage gap, they should change their college majors," writes Christina Hoff Sommers at AEI-Ideas. Women earned 58% of college degrees this year, but too many of them are choosing majors that pay less. She explains:

Here is a list of the ten most remunerative majors compiled by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. Note that men overwhelmingly outnumber women in all but one major.

1. Petroleum Engineering: 87% Male
2. Pharmacy Pharmaceutical Sciences and Administration: 48% Male
3. Mathematics and Computer Science: 67% Male
4. Aerospace Engineering: 88% Male
5. Chemical Engineering: 72% Male
6. Electrical Engineering: 89% Male
7. Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering: 97% Male
8. Mechanical Engineering: 90% Male
9. Metallurgical Engineering: 83% Male
10. Mining and Mineral Engineering: 90% Male

And here are the 10 least remunerative majors. This time it is women who prevail in nine out of ten majors.

1. Counseling Psychology: 74% Female
2. Early Childhood Education: 97% Female
3. Theology and Religious Vocations: 34% Female
4. Human Services and Community Organization: 81% Female
5. Social Work: 88% Female
6. Drama and Theater Arts: 60% Female
7. Studio Arts: 66% Female
8. Communication Disorders Sciences and Services: 94% Female
9. Visual and Performing Arts: 77% Female
10. Health and Medical Preparatory Programs: 55% Female

Sommers argues that the gender wage gap is a consequence of women's choices — "beginning with their college majors."

UPDATE: Ms. Sommers spoke at the Conservative Women's Network on May 31, 2013. You can watch the video here.

No, Individualism isn't Selfish

"Individualism is not an ideology of selfishness; it started out as and remains a social thing, a response to the anti-social unrestrained ego," writes Christopher Chantrill at the American Thinker.

Conservatives argue individualism is good, collectivism is bad. Liberal/progressives argue the opposite, Chantrill writes, because they know neither history nor biology. He explains:

Strassel: Double-Trouble Scandal for Obama

Of the three major Obama administration scandals, polling shows the public cares most about the IRS scandal. "What this verdict misses, however, is two important realities," argues Kimberly Strassel in the Wall Street Journal.

Reuters White House Press Secty Jay Carney

The first is that—unlike the IRS and Benghazi scandals—the facts of the DOJ's press intrusions are clear and uncontested. We know Justice has seized records of reporters, that Attorney General Eric Holder himself signed onto a warrant that suggested a journalist was a "co-conspirator" in a national-security leak. We also know that government has violated its own guidelines on probing journalists.

So this is a scandal that can't be ignored or dismissed as a Republican witch hunt. Moreover, it is a scandal that has, for once, outraged two groups that Mr. Obama deeply depends on for his political success: the press and liberal activists. [snip]

Then there are the White House's left-wing allies. Justice's press mess is particularly toxic in this regard, since it riles up liberals regarding both press freedom and transparency, while reigniting their long-simmering fury over Mr. Obama's national security policies. [snip]

Congressional Democrats have shown little appetite for defending the White House on the press issue. The risk to the administration is that Democrats begin to sense it is in their political interest (given the outcry from the left) to actively join in the criticism. Mr. Holder has survived past controversies because they were viewed as Republican attacks. Can he withstand a bipartisan barrage? 

The White House's success in last year's election hinged in part on its liberal activists, who played a big role in getting the base out to vote. That's the model Mr. Obama and his Organizing for America political-support group are betting on for the 2014 midterms, too. So you can bet the White House is concerned about the fury coming from these allies now.

That's why, of all the scandals, the White House is pouring the most effort into damage control on Justice. The administration has revived its media-shield legislation. It has been summoning the press to the White House for sweet-talking sessions with the president. The president's speech last week at the National Defense University was a convenient platform for Mr. Obama to reassure liberals he was restarting his drive to close Guantanamo and addressing their concerns on drone strikes.

The left and the press have always been with Mr. Obama when it really mattered, and that may well remain the case. The particular significance of Justice's press scandal is that it has deprived Mr. Obama of support at a time when he is vulnerable on so much else. Who knows what will come of that?