May 22, 2013
For Immediate Release: Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Contact: Mandy Fletcher Fraher (515) 720-5250
DES MOINES, IA – The American Future Fund (AFF) calls on President Obama to fire Internal Revenue Service (IRS) official Lois Lerner for her role in the erupting IRS scandal where conservative organizations were singled out and unfairly scrutinized based solely on their beliefs rather than the non-profit standards under law. Lerner currently directs the exempt organizations division of the IRS.
Lerner is scheduled to testify before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform; however, it has been reported that she will exercise her Fifth Amendment right at today’s hearing rather than answering questions fully and truthfully.
Nick Ryan, Founder of AFF, said: “Ms. Lerner’s decision to refuse congressional questions regarding this appalling breach of trust in government should be the final straw. If Ms. Lerner is unable or unwilling to provide answers to what she knew, when she knew it, and why this scandal was ever allowed to occur, then she does not deserve to hold a position of public trust.”
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Paid for by American Future Fund.
www.AmericanFutureFund.com
May 21, 2013
by Kevin Bogardus, The Hill
Labor unions are breaking with President Obama on ObamaCare.
Months after the president’s reelection, a variety of unions are publicly balking at how the administration plans to implement the landmark law. They warn that unless there are changes, the results could be catastrophic.
The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) — a 1.3 million-member labor group that twice endorsed Obama for president — is very worried about how the reform law will affect its members’ healthcare plans.
May 20, 2013
For Immediate Release: Monday, May 20, 2013
Contact: Mandy Fletcher Fraher (515) 720-5250
American Future Fund is calling on Congressman Bruce Braley to return the $7,000 in donations he received from the National Treasury Employees Union. The Union represents employees of the Internal Revenue Service, now embroiled in scandal over revelations they have been targeting conservative groups and threatening their constitutional rights. In Cedar Rapids, part of Braley’s own district, the Coalition for Life of Iowa was harassed for months, even being asked to detail the content of their members prayers.
A Congressional investigation is finally revealing the alarming and unfair IRS fixation on conservative groups. Part of the blame lies with Braley’s Democrat colleagues who pressured the IRS to closely monitor conservative tax-exempt organizations. Not only were the IRS targets politically motivated, reports last week claim that the IRS Commissioner knew about this activity for at least a year but chose to deny it until after the election.
Nick Ryan, founder of AFF said “These actions by the IRS to target conservative groups are highly inappropriate and unacceptable. It is equally unacceptable for Braley to publicly condemn them while also cashing in from the tainted organization. With donors like the IRS, it makes sense why Braley has been such a fan of tax increases. He should return those donations or give them to charity immediately.”
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Paid for by American Future Fund.
May 18, 2013
This Is No Ordinary Scandal
Political abuse of the IRS threatens the basic integrity of our government.
by Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal
We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate. The reputation of the Obama White House has, among conservatives, gone from sketchy to sinister, and, among liberals, from unsatisfying to dangerous. No one likes what they’re seeing. The Justice Department assault on the Associated Press and the ugly politicization of the Internal Revenue Service have left the administration’s credibility deeply, probably irretrievably damaged. They don’t look jerky now, they look dirty. The patina of high-mindedness the president enjoyed is gone.
Something big has shifted. The standing of the administration has changed.
As always it comes down to trust. Do you trust the president’s answers when he’s pressed on an uncomfortable story? Do you trust his people to be sober and fair-minded as they go about their work? Do you trust the IRS and the Justice Department? You do not.
The president, as usual, acts as if all of this is totally unconnected to him. He’s shocked, it’s unacceptable, he’ll get to the bottom of it. He read about it in the papers, just like you.
But he is not unconnected, he is not a bystander. This is his administration. Those are his executive agencies. He runs the IRS and the Justice Department.
A president sets a mood, a tone. He establishes an atmosphere. If he is arrogant, arrogance spreads. If he is too partisan, too disrespecting of political adversaries, that spreads too. Presidents always undo themselves and then blame it on the third guy in the last row in the sleepy agency across town.
The IRS scandal has two parts. The first is the obviously deliberate and targeted abuse, harassment and attempted suppression of conservative groups. The second is the auditing of the taxes of political activists.
In order to suppress conservative groups—at first those with words like “Tea Party” and “Patriot” in their names, then including those that opposed ObamaCare or advanced the Second Amendment—the IRS demanded donor rolls, membership lists, data on all contributions, names of volunteers, the contents of all speeches made by members, Facebook posts, minutes of all meetings, and copies of all materials handed out at gatherings. Among its questions: What are you thinking about? Did you ever think of running for office? Do you ever contact political figures? What are you reading? One group sent what it was reading: the U.S. Constitution.
The second part of the scandal is the auditing of political activists who have opposed the administration. The Journal’s Kim Strassel reported an Idaho businessman named Frank VanderSloot, who’d donated more than a million dollars to groups supporting Mitt Romney. He found himself last June, for the first time in 30 years, the target of IRS auditors. His wife and his business were also soon audited. Hal Scherz, a Georgia physician, also came to the government’s attention. He told ABC News: “It is odd that nothing changed on my tax return and I was never audited until I publicly criticized ObamaCare.”
Franklin Graham, son of Billy, told Politico he believes his father was targeted. A conservative Catholic academic who has written for these pages faced questions about her meager freelance writing income. Many of these stories will come out, but not as many as there are. People are not only afraid of being audited, they’re afraid of saying they were audited.
All of these IRS actions took place in the years leading up to the 2012 election. They constitute the use of governmental power to intrude on the privacy and shackle the political freedom of American citizens. The purpose, obviously, was to overwhelm and intimidate—to kill the opposition, question by question and audit by audit.
It is not even remotely possible that all this was an accident, a mistake. Again, only conservative groups were targeted, not liberal. It is not even remotely possible that only one IRS office was involved.
Lois Lerner, who oversees tax-exempt groups for the IRS, was the person who finally acknowledged, under pressure of a looming investigative report, some of what the IRS was doing. She told reporters the actions were the work of “frontline people” in Cincinnati. But other offices were involved, including Washington. It is not even remotely possible the actions were the work of just a few agents. This was more systemic. It was an operation. The word was out: Get the Democratic Party’s foes. It is not remotely possible nobody in the IRS knew what was going on until very recently. The Washington Post reported efforts to target the conservative groups reached the highest levels of the agency by May 2012—far earlier than the agency had acknowledged. Reuters reported high-level IRS officials, including its chief counsel, knew in August 2011 about the targeting.
The White House is reported to be shellshocked at public reaction to the scandal. But why? Were they so highhanded, so essentially ignorant, that they didn’t understand what it would mean to the American people when their IRS—the revenue-collecting arm of the U.S. government—is revealed as a low, ugly and bullying tool of the reigning powers? If they didn’t know how Americans would react to that, what did they know? I mean beyond Harvey Weinstein‘s cellphone number.
And why—in the matters of the Associated Press and Benghazi too—does no one in this administration ever take responsibility? Attorney General Eric Holder doesn’t know what happened, exactly who did what. The president speaks in the passive voice. He attempts to act out indignation, but he always seems indignant at only one thing: that he’s being questioned at all. That he has to address this. That fate put it on his plate.
We all have our biases. Mine is for a federal government that, for all the partisan shootouts on the streets of Washington, is allowed to go about its work. That it not be distracted by scandal, that political disagreement be, in the end, subsumed to the common good. It is a dangerous world: Calculating people wish to do us harm. In this world no draining, unproductive scandals should dominate the government’s life. Independent counsels should not often come in and distract the U.S. government from its essential business.
But that bias does not fit these circumstances.
What happened at the IRS is the government’s essential business. The IRS case deserves and calls out for an independent counsel, fully armed with all that position’s powers. Only then will stables that badly need to be cleaned, be cleaned. Everyone involved in this abuse of power should pay a price, because if they don’t, the politicization of the IRS will continue—forever. If it is not stopped now, it will never stop. And if it isn’t stopped, no one will ever respect or have even minimal faith in the revenue-gathering arm of the U.S. government again.
And it would be shameful and shallow for any Republican operative or operator to make this scandal into a commercial and turn it into a mere partisan arguing point and part of the game. It’s not part of the game. This is not about the usual partisan slugfest. This is about the integrity of our system of government and our ability to trust, which is to say our ability to function.
May 17, 2013
by Josh Kraushaar, Capitol Hill Insiders
The list of mea culpas by Obama administration officials involved in the Benghazi response and aftermath include: standing down the counterterrorism Foreign Emergency Support Team, failing to convene the Counterterrorism Security Group, failing to release the disputed Benghazi “talking points” when Congress asked for them, and using the word “spontaneous” while avoiding the word “terrorism.”
The emergency response: “I wish we’d sent FEST”
The Foreign Emergency Support Team known as “FEST” is described as “the US Government’s only interagency, on-call, short-notice team poised to respond to terrorist incidents worldwide.” It even boasts hostage-negotiating expertise. With U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens reported missing shortly after the Benghazi attacks began, Washington officials were operating under a possible hostage scenario at the outset. Yet deployment of the counterterrorism experts on the FEST was ruled out from the start. That decision became a source of great internal dissent and the cause of puzzlement to some outsiders.
Thursday, an administration official who was part of the Benghazi response told CBS News: “I wish we’d sent it.”
May 16, 2013
Mark Tapscott, Washington Examiner
Sarah Hall Ingram, the IRS executive in charge of the tax exempt division in 2010 when it began targeting conservative Tea Party, evangelical and pro-Israel groups for harrassment, got more than $100,000 in bonuses between 2009 and 2012.
More recently, Ingram was promoted to serve as director of the tax agency’s Obamacare program office, a position that put her in charge of the vast expansion of the IRS’ regulatory power and staffing in connection with federal health care, ABC reported earlier today.
Full article here.
May 16, 2013
For Immediate Release: Thursday, May 16, 2013
Contact: Mandy Fletcher Fraher (515) 720-5250
Des Moines – American Future Fund (AFF) was disappointed to learn that once again, Congressman Bruce Braley has voted for ObamaCare and against the best interest of Iowans. Braley’s own website claims that he is an “Iowa Problem Solver” but when it comes to one of the biggest challenges America is currently facing – affordable health care – Braley is making the problem worse.
AFF Founder Nick Ryan said, “What more will it take for Congressman Braley to realize ObamaCare will be disastrous for Iowa families and small businesses? He has coined himself a problem solver but all his vote today did was create new problems for his own constituents by continuing to support an irresponsible and reckless plan. A trillion dollar government take-over doesn’t work for Iowa, doesn’t solve any problems for Iowa and certainly isn’t the kind of common sense leadership Iowans are looking for.”
Many of Braley’s own democratic colleagues in Congress are back-tracking on ObamaCare. Key architects and former supporters of the plan have expressed deep concern, some have called it a “train wreck” and others are trying to exempt themselves from the very plan they created.
Small businesses in particular will feel the pain of this trillion-dollar plan. It will increase our national debt, increase our personal taxes, cuts $500 billion from Medicare, forces job cuts and threatens the very quality of our healthcare.
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Paid for by American Future Fund.
www.AmericanFutureFund.com
May 16, 2013
Well, well, well…
By Eliana Johnson, National Review
The director of the Office of Rulings and Agreements, which oversees the determinatons of tax-exempt organizations, is a donor to Barack Obama. Holly Paz donated $2,000 to Obama’s 2008 campaign, according to Open Secrets, which maintains a database of individual political donations.
May 15, 2013
by Jason L. Riley, Wall Street Journal
Gina McCarthy, President Obama‘s pick to replace Lisa Jackson as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, is awaiting Senate confirmation. And Republicans have taken heat for asking Ms. McCarthy too many questions about her plans for the EPA. My concern is that they haven’t asked her enough questions.
The Washington Examiner reported Tuesday that the EPA under Ms. Jackson has a history of favoring groups that share the agency’s political agenda. “Conservative groups seeking information from the Environmental Protection Agency have been routinely hindered by fees normally waived for media and watchdog groups, while fees for more than 90 percent of requests from green groups were waived,” according to the report.
Government agencies like the EPA typically waive so-called Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request fees for groups disseminating information for public benefit, but it’s up to the agency to decide whether a fee-waiver is justified. At the EPA, fees were waived for liberal environmental groups like Greenpeace and EarthJustice almost always. Meanwhile, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank, “had its requests denied 93 percent of the time. One request was denied because CEI failed to express its intent to disseminate the information to the general public. The rest were denied because the agency said CEI ‘failed to demonstrate that the release of the information requested significantly increases the public understanding of government operations or activities.’”
This is important because the White House and Democrats have increasingly used regulators at the EPA to advance a green agenda that they can’t get through Congress. The Examiner story suggests that the administration is also using agency regulators to tamp down criticism, the kind of activity that’s at the heart of the IRS scandal. If the fee waiver is denied, that is usually the end of the FOIA request, since many groups don’t have the resources to pay for the documents they are requesting.
“Appointing Ms. Jackson’s successor is among the most important personnel moves for President Barack Obama in his second term because the top environmental regulator has broad executive powers in an era of legislative gridlock,” wrote The Wall Street Journal in December after Ms. Jackson announced that she was stepping down. “The next EPA leader is likely to write and enforce regulations affecting power plants, factories, and oil and natural-gas drilling rigs across the country. The EPA could look at regulating hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and is already moving ahead with limits on greenhouse-gas emissions from coal-fired power plants.”
Ms. McCarthy worked under Ms. Jackson at the EPA as an assistant administrator, and Republicans have sent her more than 650 questions as part of the confirmation process. Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana, who has led the GOP opposition to her nomination, says that Ms. McCarthy has not been asked specifically about the agency’s uneven handling of FOIA requests but that he plans to do so.
“We know the Obama EPA has completely mismanaged FOIA, but granting fee waivers for their friends in the far-left environmental community, while simultaneously blocking conservative-leaning groups from gaining access to information, is really no different than the IRS disaster,” Mr. Vitter told me in an email Tuesday.
May 14, 2013
For Immediate Release: Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Contact: Mandy Fletcher Fraher (515) 720-5250
Des Moines – American Future Fund (AFF) is releasing today a web ad titled “Benghazi” which highlights numerous questions and alarming new evidence surrounding the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack on our embassy.
Last fall America was stunned and saddened when a terrorist attack on our US Embassy in Benghazi resulted in the brutal murder of our American ambassador and three other Americans. Equally stunning was the Obama Administration’s deliberate and misleading public blame on a YouTube video regardless of private acknowledgement it was a terrorist attack. Despite claims otherwise, we are now learning the Embassy had made a security request four months before the attack and there were multiple intelligence reports to support the request. Those requests were denied. Additionally, testimony has revealed the Obama administration has attempted to intimidate officials into silence about the details of who knew what and when.
Testimony from State Department officials and the release of emails between White House, State Department and CIA officials show carefully edited talking points misrepresenting the attack were prepared and distributed, perhaps politically motivated with an eye on the November election. Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) said of the emails, “if had we received this, we would have recognized immediately that there was a progression from truth to lie in twelve changes.” Outraged by the cover-up and conflicting testimony, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said, “somebody needs to be held accountable for manipulating the American people regarding what actually happened seven weeks before the election.”
“It is difficult to understand why the Obama Administration would deny security requests to Americans serving our country on unstable land overseas,” stated AFF Founder Nick Ryan. “As more evidence comes to light, more questions are being raised. Americans deserve to know what really happened, why there is a need to cover-up the truth and what else is the Obama Administration hiding.”
To view the ad, click here.
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Paid for by American Future Fund.
www.AmericanFutureFund.com
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