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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: zax who wrote (916746)	1/24/2016 12:38:15 PM
From: longnshort	1 Recommendation Recommended By FJB Respond to of 1575175

Death by Delay – old Reds have become the new Greens JUL 2 Posted by cairnsnews *by Viv Forbes* “The difference between taking a part of my life, and taking my whole life, is just a matter of degree.” *Anon* There was a time, before the baby-boom generation took over, when we took pride in the achievements of our builders, producers and innovators. There was always great celebration when settler families got a phone, a tractor, a bitumen road or electric power. An oil strike or a gold discovery made headlines, and people welcomed new businesses, new railways and new inventions. Science and engineering were revered and the wealth delivered by these human achievements enabled the builders and their children to live more rewarding lives, with more leisure, more time for culture and crusades, and greater interest in taking more care of their environment. Then a green snake entered the Garden of Eden. Many of the genuine conservationists from the original environmental societies were replaced by political extremists who felt lost after the Comrade Societies collapsed and China joined the trading world. These zealots were mainly interested in promoting environmental alarms in order to push a consistent agenda of world control of production, distribution and exchange – a new global utopia run by unelected all-knowing people just like them. The old Reds became the new Greens. They used every credible-sounding scare to recruit support – peak resources, acid rain, ozone holes, global cooling, species extinction, food security, Barrier Reef threats, global warming or extreme weather to justify global controls, no-go areas and international taxes to limit all human activities. However the public became disenchanted with their politics of denial, and their opposition to human progress, so they have adopted a new tactic – death by delay. “We are not opposed to all development, but we want to ensure all environmental concerns are fully investigated before new developments get approval.” In fact, their goal is to kill projects with costly regulations, investigations and delay. Their technique is to grab control of bureaucratic bodies like the US EPA which, since 2009, has issued 2,827 new regulations totalling 24,915,000 words. A current example of death by delay is the Keystone Oil pipeline proposal which would have taken crude oil from Alberta in Canada to refineries on the US Gulf Coast – far better than sending it by rail tankers. It was first proposed in 2005, and immediately opposed by the anti-industry, anti-carbon zealots who control the EPA and other arms of the US federal government. The proposal was studied to death by US officials and green busybodies for nine long years. This week the Canadians lost patience and approved an alternative proposal to take a pipeline to the west coast of Canada, allowing more Albertan oil to be exported to Asia. Jobs and resources that would have benefitted Americans will now go to Asia. Naturally the Green delayers will also attempt to throttle this proposal. Over in Europe, shale gas exploration is also being subject to death by delay. In Britain, the pioneering company, Caudrilla, has been waiting for seven long years for approvals to explore. In France, all such exploration is banned. No wonder India recently accused Greenpeace and other delayers of being “a threat to national economic security”. Viv Forbes, Rosewood Qld Australia forbes

To: zax who wrote (916746)

1/24/2016 6:41:32 PM

From: jlallen

Respond to of 1575175

The dog keeps eating IRS hard drives

By WASHINGTON EXAMINER • 1/21/16 12:01 AM
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-dog-keeps-eating-irs-hard-drives/article/2581062

In Oscar Wilde's comedy, "The Importance of Being Earnest," Lady Bracknell is indignant to hear that Jack Worthing is an orphan. "To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness."

If only one could enjoy a similar belly laugh over President Obama's IRS repeatedly losing hard drives loaded with data related to scandals at the agency. To lose one might be regarded as suspicious happenstance; to lose two looks like conspiracy.

The most famous case is that of Lois Lerner, whose division became notorious for targeting conservative groups applying for nonprofit status. Her computer hard drive malfunctioned before that scandal broke, around the same time Congress was looking for information on a separate IRS targeting scheme aimed at conservative donors.

One of Lerner's emails to colleagues, which was finally retrieved from data tapes after roughly two years of congressional demands, stated, "No one will ever believe that both your hard drive and mine crashed within a week of each other."

The newest case of IRS hard drive trouble happened last April, but came to light only this month. Law 360, a subscription-based trade publication, reported this week that the IRS has notified the Justice Department that it erased a hard drive after being ordered not to do so by a federal judge.

In this case, the missing communications are those of a former IRS official named Samuel Maruca in the Large Business and International division. He is believed to have been among the senior IRS employees who made the unusual and possibly illegal decision in May 2014 to hire the outside law firm Quinn Emanuel to help conduct an audit of Microsoft Corporation.

As the House Ways and Means Committee noted last spring, the hiring of the firm was probably a violation of the statute protecting confidential taxpayer information.

"Hiring Quinn Emanuel may violate Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code," the committee report states, "which prohibits the sharing of confidential taxpayer return information. When the IRS hired Quinn Emanuel, it issued a temporary regulation to allow the law firm to see taxpayer return information and to take compelled testimony — in other words, interrogate Microsoft employees."

Another reason Congress is upset about this law firm's $2.2 million contract is that it came at the expense of IRS customer service. Ever since the Lerner scandal, IRS leadership has moaned incessantly about cuts to their budget. In an effort to gain public sympathy, they made a big deal of the fact that the cuts would diminish the agency's capacity to provide taxpayer assistance during spring 2015.

But at the same time, the IRS was using funds to pay executive bonuses and to hire this outside law firm, even though the agency has many qualified tax attorneys and auditors on staff capable of investigating Microsoft.

The heart of this matter has nothing to do with taxes or targeting, though. It's about Obama's overall commitment to transparency, or rather, to opacity. The IRS is one of several agencies, including also the EPA and State Department (where the top official secretly concealed work communications from public scrutiny and her own agency for five years), to suffer from the same problem. All over the federal bureaucracy, taxpayer-owned communications go missing whenever they seem likely to inculpate senior officials.

Government transparency is not a luxury or a concession of the bureaucracy; it is the law. Bureaucrats work for the public and owe it a complete account of their work. The next president must reinforce this point with tough new sanctions for violators, lest the IRS be forced to spend most of its future budget on new hard drives. One candidate for president has, of course, already shown she is not up to the task.