“That’s your problem: nobody believes you”
Paul Ryan goes off on IRS head John Koskinen—who is about as annoying a smug bureaucrat as you will find:
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
Paul Ryan goes off on IRS head John Koskinen—who is about as annoying a smug bureaucrat as you will find:
I don’t mean to differ with Mr. Ryan, but:
Some would say I’m kind of a nobody, and I don’t believe him either.
Benghazi, the IRS scandal, Hillary’s “laughing tape,” Iraq and Syria, Iran (and don’t forget about Fast & Furious). Diane Sawyer and Teri Gross take Hillary to task, Chuck Todd declares Obama’s presidency over.
Are we approaching a Progressive preference cascade?
Nobody believes this rash of HDs crashing.
One might be possible.
Six at once, and all major suspects in the investigation? NO!
Bulk destruction of evidence.
Cut the IRS funding.
Bar lateral transfers / rehiring with the Gov.
Reduce the pay scale to $2.00 an hour for the IRS, across the board.
Kill all expense accounts.
Take the working / retired IRS pensions away.
Discontinue all Federal Health Insurance for working / retired IRS.
Give it one month, and none of these schemers will hesitate to babel everything they know about this mess. They will even rat out everyone involved.
Pass this bill into law … PLEASE!
http://stockman.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/stockman-bill-allows-taxpayers-to-use-same-lame-excuses-as-irs
“The full text of the resolution follows:
The resolution may be cited as the “Dog Ate My Tax Receipts Resolution.”
Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) must allow taxpayers the same lame excuses for missing documentation that the IRS itself is currently proffering
Whereas, the IRS claims that convenient, unexplained, miscellaneous computer malfunction is sufficient justification not to produce specific, critical documentation; and,
Whereas, fairness and Due Process demand that the American taxpayer be granted no less latitude than we afford the bureaucrats employed presently at the IRS;
Now, therefore, be it resolved that it is the sense of the House of Representatives that unless and until the Internal Revenue Service produces all documentation demanded by subpoena or otherwise by the House of Representatives, or produces an excuse that passes the red face test,
All taxpayers shall be given the benefit of the doubt when not producing critical documentation, so long as the taxpayer’s excuse therefore falls into one of the following categories:
1. The dog ate my tax receipts
2. Convenient, unexplained, miscellaneous computer malfunction
3. Traded documents for five terrorists
4. Burned for warmth while lost in the Yukon
5. Left on table in Hillary’s Book Room
6. Received water damage in the trunk of Ted Kennedy’s car
7. Forgot in gun case sold to Mexican drug lords
8. Forced to recycle by municipal Green Czar
9. Was short on toilet paper while camping
10. At this point, what difference does it make?”
jack, it’s very bad of you to make me laugh like that when I’m at work.
He comes across as a smug two bit third rate bureaucrat hiding behind a title who would happily send his mother to the death camp for a moment of approval from the Fuehrer.
The irs is lying. Everyone know the irs is lying. The irs knows everyone knows they are lying, but they have elected to adopt this position.
One is forced to two conclusions: 1 — the irs holds outsiders in utter contempt and 2 (as someone else pointed out) if this is their position, think how much worse the email(s) must be.
assemblerhead … suggestion is better but i doubt it would pass supreme court approval.
Obama with Holder would simply ignore either if they would inacted into law.
He’s smug because he knows there’s likely nothing they can or will do to him.
Because Obama has his back, and the Republican leadership was no spine. I can’t think of one Obama person who has been prosecuted or even fired for any of his scandals. In fact, a lot of them have gotten promotions.
“Earlier this week, the White House said it found no relevant emails between the White House and Lerner during the relevant time period. Some have suggested the White House might have ordered Lerner to target the conservative political group.”
Read more: http://thehill.com/policy/finance/210092-white-house-denounces-irs-conspiracy-theories#ixzz35DO616Vl
Subpoena Obama’s email and let’s see if his computer crashes.
Lizzy
Agreed, else he would be among the first to beg for mercy and offer to sell out his betters
IRS head John Koskinen–who is about as annoying a smug bureaucrat as you will find
Yes!
And I thought Lois Lerner was bad, but this guy is a Hollywood casting director’s dream villain.
Once again . . . emails are NOT on personal hard drives. THEY ARE ON REMOTE SERVERS.
“Once again . . . emails are NOT on personal hard drives. THEY ARE ON REMOTE SERVERS.”
That is not necessarily true. It depends on the email client and the settings.
In my case, using Outlook Exchange on a very large corporate email system – a very common setup – my settings are such that the headers and contents are downloaded to my local PC whenever I open Outlook. I can then access anything even when I am offline. I can also back up all of my email by simply copying the Outlook .pst file to other storage media.
Mrs Whatzit it’s very bad of you to be reading neoneocon at work. Back to your Petri dish.
Nothing will be done to combat the usurpers in the WH until a member of the house knocks the microphone aside, rushes up, grabs a sycophant bureaucrat by the throat, and slams him/her up against the wall, and announces he/she will have the truth now or watch the sycophant’s blood splatter upon the floor of the house chambers.
I guess those congressmen don’t know who they’re dealing with when they accuse me of being corrupt. They’ll be singing a different tune when we start running some audits.
To refer to him as a “Bureaucrat” lends a certain dignity to this odious mobster that he does not deserve.
What he deserves is a public flogging, followed by a choice of exile or imprisonment for life.
He is a traitor to his Country. He and the the entire IRS should be held to strict justice for their actions.
Loved Mr.Ryan’s pissed-off, aggressive performance today. That’s the Real Paul Ryan. Only wish he’d shown the country that Ryan during the VP Debate with the horrendous Joe Biden and his Infantile Behavior.
Nothing will be done to combat the usurpers in the WH until a member of the house knocks the microphone aside, rushes up, grabs a sycophant bureaucrat by the throat, and slams him/her up against the wall, and announces he/she will have the truth now or watch the sycophant’s blood splatter upon the floor of the house chambers……..
Maybe they could sell tickets!
Over at Powerline, there’s a post by someone inside the IRS, William Henck, who “has worked inside the IRS Office of the Chief Counsel as an attorney for over 26 years”. Excerpt:
As a 26-year veteran of the IRS, I am saddened by Commissioner Koskinen’s refusal to apologize to the House Ways and Means Committee or admit to any mistake or error on the part of the agency. One thing I am not, however, is surprised.
In order to understand the 501(c)(4) scandal or how the IRS operates, people must understand that IRS and chief counsel executives are insulated and unaccountable to anyone. They have not been accountable for a long period of time. This has led to a sense of entitlement and extraordinary levels of arrogance and misconduct.
and
The manner in which the IRS operates is not about Republicans or Democrats or jokes about conspiracy theories. It is about basic accountability on the part of our government.
and
When an organization and people’s positions within that organization become more important than anything else, people within that organization will inflict gratuitous levels of pain on others. That is where the IRS is right now. To IRS executives, the organization and their positions in it are more important than honor or integrity or even simple human decency. I wish Congress good luck. They are going to need it.
Here’s the link.
Ann,
Why should anyone click on the link??? Its lies all the way down. Its not a matter of finally realizing that “When an organization and people’s positions within that organization become more important than anything else, people within that organization will inflict gratuitous levels of pain on others.” Its been that way for many, many decades. WAKE UP!
So fuck them with a rusty shovel and then put a a 357 magnum 180 grain semi-jacketed flat point bullet in the back of their heads. The only cure, and unfortunately it will come down to this if the ballot box does not work, is death.
Once they realize we will slaughter, yes slaughter, their children and grandchildren (as they now prepare to slaughter mine); only then will they perhaps suddendly see the light.
These are people who decades ago would have signed up to support the 1,000 year Reich. They, if it all comes down to dust, deserve death.
If you’re wearing skirts, lift them up to avoid the stain of blood and gore you must wade through.
Koskinen has the smug, impervious demeanor of a guy who’s In with the Mafia and looking at a civilian.
BTW, it was … interesting … that Mr. Ryan did not once use the word LIE or LIAR to this outrageous liar.
Why is that? The time for politesse is long gone, man.
I don’t believe Paul ‘Shamnesty’ Ryan, so there’s that.
As to the question of a preference cascade . . .
see David Bernstein:
http://pjmedia.com/blog/what-is-liberty-island/
The problem is, of course, that it doesn’t matter how many people recognize the problem. The problem will remain until groups start doing something about it.
The House of Representatives has one effective way to respond. They can defund or substantially defund the IRS in the next budget cycle. If they do not have the fortitude to do so, then we will know that Paul Ryan was just throwing out boob bait for bubba. I am not optimistic.
With apologies to Neo, for my lack of training in the field of Psychology, I offer Stanley Milgram and Phillip Zimbardo’s experiments to explain the recent scandals by government employees in the VA, the IRS, the NSA, as well as the behavior and subsequent responses by the guilty parties.
Of Milgram’s experiment where he had subject believe they were inflicting 450V shocks on people who weren’t learning quickly enough, he concluded:
“The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants’] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants’] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority. ” Stanley Milgram ,1974
When you compare government employees abusing their power and positions to harm the rest of us, and assume the authority encouraging them to act this case are the occupants of the White House, there’s no limit to what ordinary people will do when “following orders”, or just being encouraged to do so from the White House.
The Zimbardo Prison Experiment, and Milgram’s Teacher-Learner experiments always come to mind when I see people like Koskinen and Lois Lerner, and realize they are the test subjects who not only obeyed the authority, they are the ones who are happy to take advantage of the authority figure to harm others.
As Parker says, they’d happily sign up for the Nazi Gestapo and celebrate leadership positions.
@ Tom from Virginia
I agree.
For anyone suggesting that “Congress should pass a law,” remember that Reid still controls the Senate and even if a bill somehow got through, Obama can still veto.
There aren’t going to be any laws passed that address this.
But apart from the ritual of complaining to the group “look how bad things are!”, here are some suggestions:
1) Lawfare. Draft the judicial branch into the fight. One would think there must be *some* democrats that still respect what judges say.
2) Civil Disobedience. The actions I have in mind would be taken by governors (a la Texas and Rick Perry), but they need the support of the citizens. They must be drafted into the process, whether willingly or not.
I suggest putting nominally illegal referenda up for a vote in your state. Something like “The governor should not enforce federal policy X.” Or “Should the governor secure the border from illegal immigration, despite Supreme Court rulings to the contrary?”
Two sub-points:
1) If the presence of these illegal referenda are challenged on the ballot, then the first act of defiance will be their inclusion.
2) The referenda could lose…that’s (kinda) OK. Because if the people were given a way out, didn’t take it, then the problem gets worse, they will always have the option of revisiting the referenda in future votes. (That’s how the left does it!)
The important thing is to get the people off the sidelines; no self-pitying here, with cries of “*Somebody* do something!”
We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
At the end of all this, no meaningful reform will take place. This man will retire with his gold plated Government Pension, join a lobbying firm or become a “consultant” for too much money. The sun will come up in the east and taxes will continue to rise, Congress will spend too much money…
About a year ago something weird happened on my Dell laptop. The date on my computer read 2006. The day, date and clock were sent back in time. As I set about resetting all this stuff, my email, in updating, went back to 2006 and hundreds upon hundreds of old emails that I had deleted long ago, all came back. My computer’s hard drive has no control over my emails. I may have deleted them but that does not make them go away. My server had them all the way back to at least 2006 and I was on a new laptop since 2006 with a different hard drive but at the same email addy. Nothing is destroyed in cyberspace and nothing is private. The server can retrieve the IRS emails.
Judicial Watch will probably track down the server and use the Freedom of Information Act to get them. They are vigilant and deserve support.
Congress better not think because Lerner put a nail through her hard drive that this SCANDAL leading right up to obama is gone.
Btw, you’re not a “gentleman” until you can see evil and kill it. So far, that includes everyone in Congress, with some rather interesting exceptions.
They can order it done using henchmen, push a button on a drone control interface to kill, but doing it themselves, that is out of their league. Even HRC gets it done via proxy, as a lawyer.
The server can retrieve the IRS emails.
If they did as I would, when deleting data, it is not recoverable.
Simply hitting “delete” is a software function, it does not hit the HD, or hard physical device itself to scramble the data.
The physical HDs have been run through a supermagnet and dissolved via heat or acid by now. The disks are gone. If they aren’t gone, they are permanently erased. What people see on tv with HD recovering is physical recovery of data sectors, it cannot unscramble data that has been purposefully randomly formatted or deleted.
The backups automatically deleted the data after six months, for mails. So unless there was a backup to the backup, it’s gone. The people in the IRS that got CC or forwards of the mails, had their HDs erased the same. The people in DC, will now be erasing their HDs or physically destroying them now as we speak.
It’s already done. Every physical copy has been destroyed that they can find. Every digital copy has been reformatted and deleted.
This is called a fait accompli. And only if they were retardedly “incompetent”, would anyone be able to recover the data mails. Or if they had a intel leak or a mole.
southpaw, thanks for the reminder of the Zimbardo Prison Experiment, and Milgram’s Teacher-Learner experiments. Another point here is that most of the bureaucracy is left leaning. It is much easier to get obedience when the commands align with the person’s thinking.
I’m convinced that the dems were very concerned about the TEA Party and other conservative groups for the 2012 election. After all, the TEA Party efforts had swung the House from dem to Repub in 2010. They were looking for a way, any way, to blunt that influence. The motive was there. The means was there. It jus t took some coordination.
The IRS maneuver seemed to work. Before the election there was talk of the Repubs getting a majority in the Senate. Didn’t happen. Also, the conservative vote seems to have been suppressed in the Presidential race. (That may not have had anything to do with the IRS pressure on conservative groups. But who knows?)
kit:
As I understand it, the way your email or my email works is not the way the IRS’s email works. They have their own email system with a server of their own, and it wipes everything in 6 months.
Which is preposterous. A sort of built-in coverup, if I understand it correctly. Which I may not, since I’m not good at the technical end of computers.
Neo and Ymarsakar, this is unsettling.
Okay, let’s try again? Is there not one honest hearted worker in the IRS with knowledge of these emails that will come forward?
I used to think there was always an American on hand to do the right thing. Now, I am a stranger in the land of my birth.
Ymarsakar, who are the few “gentleman” in Congress who will see evil and kill it. If you do not want to say, I understand but I hope they continue.
We are being overcome with evil from sea to shining sea.
I have to remember Psalm 37, especially 10 to 13.
Happy first day of summer, everyone. In spite of everything, I wish all a warm and wonderful summer full of daisies and lazy days. They cannot ruin that for us.
Neo, their backup system seems almost purposefully designed to make recovery of deleted data impossible. Why? Because they are constantly, every six months, rewriting the data sectors with new mails after deletion. While that’s not as good as software reformats that permanently delete data with 1000-5000 reformations on the same data cluster, it’s certainly not going to make “data recovery” feasible in any time limited fashion.
A rewritten data sector “cannot be recovered” without extensive reconstruction, using pattern analysis or other voodoo maths and algorithms. A deleted data sector is merely nullified with 0s and 1s. A rewritten data sector is rewritten with a random assembly of 0s and 1s. It’s why taking a hammer to a HD, doesn’t destroy the data. The FBI can individually microscope the data sectors, put them together, and reconstruct the data that way, though it is painfully time intensive especially if we’re dealing with thousands of shattered parts and not just 4 shattered pieces of HDisc.
http://fas.org/irp/doddir/army/ar380-19/appendix_e.htm
The methodology I would use would be triplicated in nature.
1. Rewrite the data, reformat. 1000-5000 times, software timing.
2. Supermagnetize the hard drive.
3. Disassemble hard drive, physically destroy data sectors via acid, fire, etc.
4. Destroy physical hard drive using white hot fire, White Phos, or burying it somewhere people cannot find, like the ocean or a volcano.
These methods have been known at least 10 years ago. It’s not something IT geeks can claim ignorance of, unless they work with very lax security.
Generally people get lucky because people are lazy. They don’t go through the FULL guarantee. But the IRS, with their jobs on the line, would have done something very close to what I consider FULL Guarantee.
Ymarsakar, who are the few “gentleman” in Congress who will see evil and kill it.
I can’t name any off the top of my head. But in any organization, there’s always 3% that hit their limits and do something about it.
Ryan looks very stressed in the video. The person being questioned looks cool and calm because he knows what I know. Ryan hasn’t a clue about how to recover the data or even how it was sanitized.
Is there not one honest hearted worker in the IRS with knowledge of these emails that will come forward?
Since no accidents have occurred with IRS personnel (like mysteriously fatal car crashes), I assume they exist, such as the owners of the HDs.
However, unless they are put in an underground bunker with someone like me or someone that uses enhanced interrogation protocols, for a few 24 hours, they’re not generally going to talk.
The National Park Service had a similar set of incidents where they were ordered to put the rod to American citizens and WWII veterans, because Hussein told them American land were “offlimits” and “shutdown”.
NPS=National Praetorian Security
IRS=Internal Republic Security
Over the decades, several people resigned from the NPS. I suspect that one of the reasons was that they were unable to stomach what was really going on. The story that they knew were true, but that the American people refused to believe. Take it to the media? The media will bury it, they knew it, but the people the voters did not.
So the same thing happened in the IRS, I suspect. By 2012, the IRS had already internally purged anyone that failed the loyalty tests. So the email would have gone out to the True Believers first and foremost, not the interns or shaky ones.
thank you Ymarsakar.
I am understanding how deep evil goes.
Ymarsakar:
I just saw your comment. Right before that, I mentioned my suspicions about the 6-month-and-destroy policy-with-no-backup at the IRS here:
It is a system that’s suspicious on the face of it. Six months’ savings is absurd.
Kit, I estimate that we’ve only seen 10% of the Left’s strategic assets deployed to kill/enslave humans on this planet and nation, right now.
In 2007, I estimated that only about 1-2% had been deployed, for why else would it have been so difficult to make people face the Left and destroy it?
In 2012, I estimate less than 10%, or 5%, had been deployed. That’s why the refrain “you ain’t seen nothing yet” in response to Benghazi, 2012 elections, this, that, the other Hussein Regime antics, felt fitting to me.
It takes 100 WACOs for Americans to wake up. After all, I only researched what “really” happened at WACO, and not just the Democrat propaganda, after 2006. It took one WACO, one Ruby Ridge to wake me up, to make me realize there’s “something deeper here”. But for average Americans, they need a better “push”.
This is only the stuff they let us see, what’s on the surface, like the border invasion. The stuff they can’t hide anymore. If so, what about the stuff they are doing that they are hiding? How much of that have they deployed?
That’s why extreme measures make sense. That’s why desperate measures in desperate situations are fitting. But it’s been a long time now since it would have been cheap. As the years pass by, the solution gets harder and harder to implement, since the resistance grows and grows.
I’m not estimating strategic status based upon PR or how much anti Hussein opinion there is. That would be stupid. I have my own priorities, my own set of requirements that are proceeding along as predicted. And by my standards of analysis, the Left has only this year deployed more than 10% of their total strategic assets. WMDs, Weapons of Mass Deception included.
Neo, I suspect Lerner was stalling for time. Perhaps she needed six months until the backups were gone, or perhaps she was trying to divert Congressional notice for something else.
But as far as I know, only amateurs try to delete their data “after” they feel the heat coming on. Pros delete it right after they read it. Actually, pros wouldn’t have to delete it to begin with, because nothing in the data says who the masterminds are.
Yeah, I doubt there’s anything left to recover. Lois Lerner’s hard drive was “lost” just 10 days after receiving the first inquiry letter from the House back in June 2011. Since then, they have had 3 years to hunt down and wipe every backup, including server backups and recipients’ copies. It’s not that difficult when you have ample time and the will to flaut the law, and when everyone involved has the same will and motivation to “lose” their data too. Random overlooked emails may turn up here or there, but any troves of emails probably have been thoroughly wiped.
Now, people have suggested getting IT people to testify, but having read a long Slashdot thread on this, it seems probable to me that the IT people may not have known what they were destroying. The hard drives of interest may have been thrown in with many other HD’s for routine recycling. The Document Retention Policy of retaining server backups for only 6 months, if such a policy did exist, was likely devised as a Document Destruction Policy to allow sensitive data to be routinely destroyed so that no IT personnel would have a clue as to having done anything out of the ordinary.
Data from HD crashes are often recoverable. The explanation that the hard drives of 6 other people of interest were similarly “lost” and unrecoverable moves this story, in my mind from statistical improbability, to statistical impossibility.
http://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com/2014/02/an-open-letter-to-men-and-women-of.html
That’s just one front of the coming war, civil in nature but ruthless in application.
Down the rabbit hole we go.
As far as I know, it may be possible to generate an intentional HD crash. If, in the process of normal use, one did something to the HD. This crash may then be used as the excuse for IT people to “recycle” or sanitize the drive.
If Lerner used software to reformat her drive, then rewrite it and then reformat it again, taking a few days, she could merely have run a supermagnet over the external casing of the HD as it was doing the last reformat, “crashing it”. Even if the IT guys could “recover” that crashed HD, there wouldn’t be any data of worth on it. Just random 1s and 0s.