The Internal Revenue Service is about to pay $70 million in employee bonuses despite an Obama administration directive to cancel discretionary bonuses because of automatic spending cuts enacted this year, according to a GOP senator.

Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa says his office has learned that the IRS is executing an agreement with the employees’ union on Wednesday to pay the bonuses. Grassley says the bonuses should be canceled under an April directive from the White House budget office.

The directive was written by Danny Werfel, a former budget official who has since been appointed acting IRS commissioner.

“The IRS always claims to be short on resources,” Grassley said. “But it appears to have $70 million for union bonuses. And it appears to be making an extra effort to give the bonuses despite opportunities to renegotiate with the union and federal instruction to cease discretionary bonuses during sequestration.”

The IRS said it is negotiating with the union over the matter but did not dispute Grassley’s claim that the bonuses are imminent. (Read More)

Sequester? What sequester?

Here is Louisiana State Senator Elbert Guillory explaining why he switched his political affiliation from Democrat to Republican. He talks about the history of the Republican Party, self reliance, and the dangers of big government. I just wish that long time Republicans were this articulate in explaining conservative principles, and how living by those principles brings about prosperity for the most people.

“To be truly free is to be reliant on noone other than the author of our destiny.”

Do take take the time to watch the whole video, you won’t be disappointed.

H/T Michael A.

Via Ken Gardner

Well here’s some not-so-shocking news. The Obamacare exchanges are falling behind schedule. Is there anyone out there who thought this multi-thousand page law would go well? If so, I’ve got something to sell you.

Government officials have missed several deadlines in setting up new health-insurance exchanges for small businesses and consumers—a key part of the federal health overhaul—and there is a risk they won’t be ready to open on time in October, Congress’s watchdog arm said.

The Government Accountability Office said federal and state health officials still have major work to complete, offering its most cautious comments to date about theObama administration’s ability to bring the centerpiece of its signature law to fruition.

“Whether [the government's] contingency planning will assure the timely and smooth implementation of the exchanges by October 2013 cannot yet be determined,” said the GAO in twin reports to be released Wednesday.

The 2010 Affordable Care Act created two exchanges, seeking to provide coverage for many Americans who now go without health insurance. President Barack Obama has said the exchanges will be ready on schedule in October, offering coverage to take effect Jan. 1, 2014, but he has cautioned that “glitches and bumps” are likely.

Yeah, get ready for those “glitches and bumps.” Fasten up, it’s going to be a wild ride.

In case you missed it, the Senate voted down an amendment requiring a secure border fence. What a shock.

Senators on Tuesday rejected building the 700 miles of double-tier border fencing Congress authorized just seven years ago, with a majority of the Senate saying they didn’t want to delay granting illegal immigrants legal status while the fence was being built.

The 54-39 vote to reject the fence shows the core of the immigration deal is holding. The vote broke mostly along party lines, though five Republicans, including Sen. Marco Rubio and the rest of the bill’s authors, voted against the fence, and two Democrats voted for it.

Republicans had offered the fence as a way to build the confidence of voters skeptical that the government will enforce its laws, but opponents said building more fencing is costly, would take too long, and shouldn’t be dictated by Washington.

“I think we should leave that to the best judgment of the Border Patrol,” said Sen. John McCain, one of the eight senators who wrote the immigration bill.

Don’t they mean one of the eight senators, plus President Obama?

We should probably stop paying attention to what the Senate is doing. They say it’s going to pass, and I would (seriously) be surprised if it didn’t pass the Senate. Watch the House and what John Boehner does. He promises not to bring a bill forward without a majority of Republicans in favor of it. What he doesn’t mention is that he can bring something forward, they can vote on it, and then the good can be stripped and the bad added back in during conference with the Senate.

Find out how to contact your congresscritter here, and the main phone number is (202)225-3121. It’s time to light up those phone lines.

… And that you had heard it all comes this little bit of news.

One of the largest public charter high schools in the nation allows a boy who identifies as female to use the girls locker room and bathrooms – despite protests from a female student who says she feels uncomfortable and vulnerable by his presence.

What’s more, the female student – who just finished her sophomore year at the Los Angeles-based Granada Hills Charter High School – claims the boy in question harassed her, touched her hair, stared strangely at her, and also peeked at girls over the stalls while they used the toilet.

“It’s amazing to me that a public school who is responsible to protect the rights of all students will blatantly ignore the Constitutional right to privacy of young female students within the locker rooms and restrooms of the school,” Robert Tyler, the girl’s attorney, told The College Fix. …

You should read the whole thing. The article goes on to note that the school in question said that they provide a “a safe environment, free from discrimination and harassment for all of its students.”  Of course, they failed to mention the normal reaction of young girls being subjected to having a boy in the locker room, staring at them, harassing them and creeping them out.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but it’s almost like the powers-that-be want to traumatize the normal people so much that they become abnormal like the few they claim to want to protect. Who are they really protecting anyway? Do they think that doing this is going to help that child gain acceptance among his peers?

H/T JR

Wow! National Public Radio has some nice new digs. They showed off the new 400,000 square foot facility to the press this week. It looks beautiful, they even had a house chef preparing breakfast.

NPR recently moved from Chinatown into its new 400,000 square-foot home on North Capitol, and they’re excited about it. Eager to show off the new facility, the organization offered a tour to members of the media Tuesday morning, starting with breakfast from their in-house chefs, along with some talking points from CEOGary Knell, who outlined some impressive features of the space.

The goal in the new building was to have plenty of open space to promote collaboration, something that was difficult in the smaller, closed-office building NPR used to operate out of. The newsroom is a good example of this. Spreading 100,000 square feet over two floors, the entire room is open, with the second floor operating more like a balcony around the lower level.

Gee, I wonder who they’re collaborating with. Anyway, everyone really loves the new building, and the gong ads a nice touch. Oh, and unlike the White House, the new NPR space is open to public tours!

The tour continued through the wellness center, which is capable of simple medical procedures, the fitness center, which is staffed by a trainer, and the cafe, which utilizes the same catering company as Google. The cafe was named by a contest in which employees submitted more than 200 ideas. The winning name, Sound Bites, was entered by Stamberg, further marking her legacy at NPR and the new facility.

Overall, the impressive space was focused on integration of staff and utilization of digital media, which its old building was ill-equipped to do. The space is also open to public tours and events in its 2400 square-foot Studio One, which can seat up to 250 people.

We’re still not sure the tour wasn’t meant, maybe a little, to make other journalists jealous of the new space, but it definitely had that effect on at least us here at FBDC.

Well, a little jealousy is only normal. Who wouldn’t be jealous of working in such a lavish space, especially when one’s tax dollars help to fund the $201 million structure.

My twelve year old made the All Stars baseball team again this year. We’re very proud of him. Even though he’s not one of the most powerful players in the league he works hard, he’s smart and he knows the game. All Stars is different than the local Little League because they play other districts and could wind up playing at the state championship or even beyond that. The league wants to make sure coaches don’t cheat and try to recruit better players so they’re really strict about verifying age and residency. This is the documentation we needed to show for our son to play:

1. Your son’s original birth certificate

2. A copy of your son’s birth certificate

3. 4 documents to prove residency:

                Copy of your valid driver license

                Copy of your vehicle registration, dated between 2/1/2012 and 2/1/2013

                Copy of your NY State Insurance ID Card, dated between 2/1/2012 and 2/1/2013

                Copy of either your tax bill, cable bill or pay stub, dated between 2/1/2012 and 2/1/2013

 

4. Completed and signed Tournament Player Verification form (attached), fill out:

                Player name

                Address of parent or legal guardian

                Name (printed) of Parent/Guardian, Signature of Parent/Guardian and Date

 

5. Fully competed medical release form (attached)

Every time I wonder if Democrat Representative Dan Maffei could stoop any lower he comes out and shows his rotten face and proves that yes, he can stoop lower. This takes the cake. He blamed the brutal, horrific murder of a mother, and the rape of that woman’s young daughter, on the sequester. The man is an embarrassment to his district and the entire state of New York, but of course, so many voters buy into this garbage and actually believe it. The local news ran his impassioned plea to restore funding to the federal court system, as if that would have saved Lori Bresnahan’s life, or her daughter from being brutalized by a dangerous criminal named David Renz.

After the case made headlines, a woman told reporters that she was molested as a child by Renz. She said that in 1999, when she was 9 years old and he was 15, Renz sexually assaulted her. That case was handled in family court and the records were sealed, but at the January hearing on the child pornography case against Renz, court documents indicate, the federal magistrate mentioned Renz’s criminal history as a juvenile before authorizing the suspect’s release.

Monday, the congressman who represents the upstate New York district blamed federal spending cuts for the crime, saying that ending the curent budget sequester — implemented to reduce the federal deficit — is an obligation Congress owes to Renz’s victims. “We owe them a guarantee that this cannot happen again,” Maffei said in his House floor speech. “We owe them an end to sequester cuts affecting our federal probation system.”

Maffei had written to Hogan and Attorney General Eric Holder last month asking them to investigate the federal probation office in charge of monitoring Renz’s pre-trial release. Chief Probation Officer Matthew Brown and others in the Syracuse office have denied that the failures in supervising Renz were a result of personnel shortages or other consequences of budget cuts. Hogan’s letter to Maffei did not name the employees who were fired or demoted, but the Post-Standard had previously reported that the Steven Acquilano, the probation officer responsible for monitoring Renz, was no longer employed at the U.S. Probation Office for the Northern District of New York.

This case has been in the local news since it happened in the middle of March. Bresnehan was a school librarian in the Liverpool school district, so it’s been the topic of conversation among many of us in the community. This is the first I’ve heard of anyone blaming the the sequester for this hideous crime.

Here’s the local news report giving credence to Maffei’s allegation that this was the result of budget cuts.

Maffei was right in one sense, this guy should have been monitored more closely while he was awaiting trial for child pornography, but to blame it on the sequester is downright shameful. What did that have to do with the policy in this probation office to routinely ignore alarms set off by these monitoring bracelets? Budget cuts or not, if the probation officers involved had been doing the jobs we pay them to do this might have been prevented.

Oh, and if Maffei really does believe this crime was due to the sequester, why isn’t he going after President Obama for refusing to make targeted cuts to the federal budget? Why isn’t he going after Obama for proposing the sequester in the first place? You’ll never hear him do that because he’s a Democrat. They are nothing if not consistently dishonest and always willing to use every crisis and every horrific crime to score political points.

My apologies to those who are unfamiliar with the details of this crime. Local readers are well aware of it, but for more background read the whole piece at Viral Read and The American Spectator.

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) has a new radio spot called “Freedom Minute” and this week’s is about the Internal Revenue Service. Cruz says to abolish it.

Hi, I’m Ted Cruz and this is the Freedom Minute.

The IRS scandal revealed the targeting of conservative groups, tea party groups, pro-life groups, and pro-Israel groups for intrusive questions and harassing.

This is the consequence of an agency that is too big and has too much power.

And now, the IRS is supposed to be put in charge of administering Obamacare.

Enough is enough.

We need to abolish the IRS, eliminate the intrusive agents, and replace the IRS and the tax code with a simple flat tax where every American can file his or her taxes on a postcard.

Every year we spend about $500 billion on tax compliance – which is dead weight loss and it doesn’t produce even a single truck or tortilla.

A flat tax would produce economic growth and create jobs.

Thanks for listening. This is Ted Cruz with the Freedom Minute.

You can listen to the audio message here.

So what if the use and funding of food stamps has exploded over the past few years. President Obama doesn’t care. Scratch that, he does care, and he’ll do everything possible to keep that funding flowing, including threatening a veto of the Farm bill which includes itty bitty little cuts to the program.

The White House is threatening to veto the House version of a massive, five-year farm bill, saying food stamp cuts included in the legislation could leave some Americans hungry.

The House is preparing to consider the bill this week. The legislation would cut $2 billion annually, or around 3 percent, from food stamps and make it harder for some people to qualify for the program. Food stamps, now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, cost almost $80 billion last year, twice the amount it cost five years ago.

I hope he does veto this rotten bill that’s filled with all sorts of pork and special interest carve outs, but little for the hard working family farmers of America. Unfortunately, if he does it will be for all the wrong reasons.

CBS News investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson is one of the few journalists in the main stream media to investigate Operation Fast and Furious or to probe what really happened in Benghazi, Libya on the night of September 11, 2012 when four Americans, including an Ambassador, were killed by terrorists. For her troubles, her home and work computers were hacked into. CBS News won’t disclose whether they know who did the hacking, but Attkisson told Bill O’Reilly that she knows who did it. She’s not ready to release that information on advice of counsel, but she may have dropped a clue. [emphasis added]

I think I know. But I’m just not prepared to go into that. We’re continuing our investigations. There are multifaceted looks at what to do next… Let me just say, whoever did it, to come into a private citizen’s home, whether I’m a journalist or not, and look in my family’s computer and look into my work computer… Well, it’s outrageous.

She also said it was determined that the hacking didn’t have anything to do with phishing, or malware, or even an old boyfriend looking into her personal life.

Here’s the video.

James O’Keefe went to Philadelphia to investigate the ObamaPhone scam. He found workers at Stand Up Wireless tents encouraging people to sign up for their free ObamaPhones. Yes, they called them ObamaPhones. When asked by “customers” if they could turn around and sell the phones to buy drugs or expensive handbags, the salespeople didn’t exactly discourage them. Remember, the rest of us pay for this program through a tax on our own cell phone bills, and an Obama donor is getting rich selling these phones.

The Daily Mail has much more, and you can find the raw footage of O’Keefe’s investigation here.

Okay, sorry, I know, it’s crazy Rep. Alan Grayson questioning Federal Reserve Investigator Vickie Coleman about trillions in losses by the Federal Reserve. He repeatedly asked her about off balance sheet losses, totaling $9 trillion, by the Fed and she said she had no clue. He also asked about a trillion dollar Fed expansion and who the money went to. Again, no clue. She explained that the IG role is to oversee Fed programs, and that they do not have jurisdiction to monitor the Feds activities.

H/T Maggie’s Notebook

Governor Andrew Cuomo’s bill guaranteeing abortion rights that would align New York and U.S. law was killed in the senate after a group of breakaway Democrats co-leading the chamber dropped it.

The Independent Democratic Conference, a group of four breakaway Democrats who run the senate with Republicans, introduced nine of Cuomo’s 10 Women’s Equality Agenda measures yesterday, including enhanced penalties for human traffickers and increased legal damages for women who aren’t paid equally. They left out the governor’s abortion plank.

The measure would have decriminalized abortions after 24 weeks when a woman’s health — not just her life — were at risk. Cuomo, a 55-year-old Democrat and potential presidential candidate in 2016, said it would protect women if the U.S. Supreme Court rolls back its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the right.

“I think it’s a mistake for the IDC, who are theoretically Democrats,” Cuomo said today in a radio interview. “This is going to be an electoral decision, and it’s going to be in the re-election campaigns of these senators.”

Jeff Klein, the Bronx Democrat who leads the breakaway Democrats, said his group supports abortion rights but didn’t want to allow a vote on a bill that would fail.

Life News adds:

In 2009, 119,996 of New York’s children lost their lives to induced abortion. Approximately 40% of pregnancies in New York City end in abortion. Among African Americans in New York City, that number climbs to 60%.

Governor Andrew Cuomo’s abortion legislation was getting the third degree from pro-life groups, upset because it is so extreme it would allow abortions on viable unborn babies.

“The governor’s Women’s Equality Act is nothing more than a Trojan Horse— a beautifully gift-wrapped package of death and destruction,” says Lori Kehoe of the New York State Right to Life Committee. (Read More)