What are these men thinking? Tweet me your caption & use #greta! pic.twitter.com/P7DofEFhB9

— Greta Van Susteren (@gretawire) June 18, 2013

IT IS SHOWTIME!!

Show Questions and Comments??? Post them right here about ON THE RECORD!!

The President  - as the LEADER of our nation – should speak to the American people about:

1/ Syria (and what we are doing or not doing — he should not outsource the job to an aide as he has done.  He is the commander in chief and that job should not be passed on to someone else.)

and 2/ NSA spying.  The “trust your government’ line for this vast spying on Americans just doesn’t work for most Americans.  How do you trust the government? 

We have a government in which the IRS targets groups and Congressional oversight is pathetic.  Why else would the GSA, IRS, and Soc Security get away with spending millions and millions on silly conferences – really parties?  Even Federal Judges party on our dime at a fancy Hawaii resort and call it work and no Congressional oversight stepped in and said no!  Trust them?  They aren’t even looking!

Political leaders – both parties and the President – can’t figure out the stewardship of the economy and we are drowning in debt that threatens our national security.  So …trust them?  Are you kidding?  The rest of us can balance a check book…why can’t they?  So why should any of us trust them?  Because they are so good at their jobs? 

The political leaders can’t figure out a budget throwing us into sequestration while they go home to recess….and come back and act like, ‘what sequestration?’  They come back and they don’t immediately roll of the shirt sleeves and solve it …they just let it go on and on and on.  We can’t even trust them to try!   They just give up!

Meanwhile the President thinks it is OK to spend 60-100 million dollars on a trip through Africa with his family while White House tours for kids – something that is hugely exciting and educational -  have been cancelled.  Tone deaf?  Trust a guy who is tone deaf?

I could go on and on (eg the Department of Interior conflict of interest scandal with the companies they are supposed to regulate!  Who provided the oversight so THAT did not happen?  If your answer is ‘no one’ – you are correct.  Or my other “favorite” was the SEC lawyers downloading porn from SEC computers while at work….yes, Congress wasn’t watching…but those SEC lawyers sure were watching….porn, that is.)  

So…are you kidding? We are supposed to accept ‘trust us’ with the NSA spying?  Both President Obama and Congress are peddling that ‘trust us’ business and it is very unconvincing without more info.

It is time for our leader, President Obama, to lead — and tell us what is going on with Syria and NSA spying.

PS: When he finishes his speech, he should take questions from the White House Press Corp. 

AM I WRONG?

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“…an online chat Monday by Edward Snowden, the man who leaked documents revealing the scope of the two programs to The Guardian and The Washington Post newspapers. He accused members of Congress and administration officials of exaggerating their claims about the success of the data gathering programs, including pointing to the arrest of would-be New York subway bomber Najibullah Zazi in 2009.

Snowden said Zazi could have been caught with narrower, targeted surveillance programs — a point Obama conceded in his Monday interview without mentioning Snowden.

 ”We might have caught him some other way,” Obama said. “We might have disrupted it because a New York cop saw he was suspicious. Maybe he turned out to be incompetent and the bomb didn’t go off. But at the margins we are increasing our chances of preventing a catastrophe like that through these programs,” he said…”

CLICK HERE

Woman charged in 2nd buttocks-enhancement death

By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS

— Jun. 17

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — A Mississippi woman has been charged in a second death related to giving buttocks-enhancing injections without being trained or licensed.

The state attorney general’s office says 53-year-old Tracey Lynn Garner of Jackson, formerly known as Morris Garner, was arrested Thursday and charged with one count of depraved heart murder. Conviction carries a potential life sentence.

The release says Garner injected “a silicone substance” into Marilyn Hale of Selma, Ala., on Jan. 13, 2010, and Hale later died.

Records show Garner was in the Hinds County Detention Center on Monday. Her attorney, John Colette, was not immediately available.

Garner had been on house arrest awaiting trial in a similar case in the 2012 death of an Atlanta woman.

Subject: Fox First: General Carter Ham to testify on Benghazi for first time next week

Fox News has learned that the House Armed Services Committee will hold a classified briefing next Weds June 26 at 9:00 on Benghazi.

Briefers will include:

Gen. Carter Ham (ret.) He was head of AFRICOM during Benghazi attack.

LTC Gibson

RADM Brian Losey – Special Operations Command Africa

This is being coordinated by the Oversight and Investigations subcommittee of the HASC. It will be closed door but will be the first time Ham has been questioned by Congress about his oversight of military assets that were available and why they weren’t sent to Benghazi last Sept 11/12. Ham was in the Pentagon at the time and oversaw the military response.

LTC Gibson is the Army Lieutenant Colonel who Greg Hicks said was told to stand down with his 3 other Special Forces when they wanted to go to Benghazi on the morning of Sept 12. We have not heard from him or Admiral Loissy, who was the head of Special Ops in Africa. He was in Europe coordinating from his base in Germany. He can speak to where the Special operations teams or CIF (Commander’s in extremis force) was based and when it was told to deploy and why it wasn’t sent to Libya.

Again this will be closed door.

Justin Fishel

Fox News Channel

Pentagon /State Dept. Producer

But…it just got worse, it wasn’t just Lois Lerner plotting….it turns out that the plotting (strategizing) went high up at the IRS – to the IRS DIRECTOR Miller!  

And by the way, what’s with the tax lawyer Celia Roady (see story below)?  She reminds me of Ambassador Susan Rice — she got used but she let it happen! 

See my FNC colleague Chad Pergram’s note below:

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Urgent: Fox First: IRS official says Former IRS Chief Miller knew Lerner would address targeting ahead of May 10 ABA meeting

Per Pergram-Capitol Hill

Transcripts of interviews by Congressional investigators with a top IRS official in Washington reveal that the IRS’s upper management strategized beforehand how Lois Lerner, the Director of the IRS Exempt Organizations division, would publicly address the scrutiny of tea party and conservative organizations during a question and answer session before the American Bar Association (ABA) at a Washington, DC Hotel May 10.

 Holly Paz had been a Washington supervisor in the IRS’s tax exempt unit and tells the House Overisght Committee that Lerner informed her that she would address the targeting of organizations. Lerner told Paz that then-IRS Commissioner Steve Miller had contrived an approach but did not go in detail during her interview behind closed doors with House lawyers.

 Paz told the House panel that Lerner informed her that “she and (Miller) had discussed her addressing it and decided what she would say about it.”

House investigators asked Paz if Miller specifically requested Lerner to bring up the issue at the ABA meeting.

“I don’t recall if she said that he asked or that they agreed,” said Paz.

House lawyers then asked Paz if Lerner spoke willingly to the ABA about how the IRS handled the applications of conservative organizations.

“She did it. I don’t know if she was directed,” replied Paz. “She didn’t say no.”

At the ABA event, tax lawyer Celia Roady asked Lerner about concerns over tea party applications for tax exempt status. At that point, Lerner said that they saw an “uptick” in those sorts of applications and that they “used names like tea party and patriots and they selected cases simply because the applications had those names in the title. That was wrong, that was absolutely incorrect, insensitive and inappropriate. That’s not how we go about selecting cases for further review.” She added that the “tea party” classification was “far too broad.”

Paz told the House Oversight Committee that employees at the IRS’s Cincinnati office were not “political” and did not make their judgments based on partisanship.

“They were not even aware of you know, politics. Being outside of Washington, it was not something that they followed or had interest in,” Paz said. Because they are so apolitical, they are not as sensitive as we would like them to be as to how things might appear.”

 Paz also told the panel that the rubric crafted to reflect “Tea Party” applications was not partisan.

 “It was really just an efficient way to refer to this issue. They all understand the real issue was campaign intervention,” Paz said. “Just sort of a shorthand reference. You know, I think they may have referenced, you know, it’s like calling soda ‘Coke’ or, you know, tissue ‘Kleenex.’ They knew what they meant and the issue was campaign intervention.”

Paz says that the Cincinnati team was “short-staffed” and “they’re always looking for efficiencies and they thought that using the BOLO list as a way to sort of track things that they needed to be aware of was an efficient way to do that, and in their minds, they knew what this, the criteria they used meant.”

BOLO was an acronym the IRS created for “Be on the Lookout” as they adjudicated these types of requests for tax exempt status.

Paz also says that Cindy Thomas, who headed the Determinations Unit in the Cincinnati Office, asked Paz and other officials to focus on new organizations which were eligible to apply for tax exempt status. These groups are commonly referred to as “501(c)(4)’s.”

“Political campaign intervention in 501(c)(4)s was not something we had previously dealt with much. The vast majority of applications we get are from 501(c)(3) organizations,” Paz said. “Political campaign intervention for (c)(3)s is a more straightforward analysis, it’s completely forbidden, which you know, narrows the issue a great deal. So 501(c)(4), you know, having to decide first what is political campaign intervention and how much of it, you know, can an organization do before its primary activity is not social welfare was an issue that they had not dealt with much in EO Determinations to that point.”

Paz adds that she knows Cincinnati adjudicators “were waiting for guidance” on how to handle the influx of 501(c)(4) applications and how to judge them. But she didn’t know they were creating a delay by not being reviewed in Cincinnati.

“I did not know they were not working the cases because what had been done previously was, they were working the cases in consultation with Washington. And I was under the impression that was continuing,” Paz said.

The transcripts also show that about ten tax exempt applications were released inappropriately from the Cincinnati office to a reporter from ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning news organization. Information regarding tax exempt organizations is public. But denials and the applications themselves while in the pipeline are not. The transcript redacted the name of the Cincinnati employee who improperly released the applications. Paz said the Cincinnati employee was “issued a formal admonishment” for releasing the applications.

It is not known which applications were released or why ProPublica took interest in those particular organizations.

Chad Pergram

Senior Producer for Capitol Hill

FOX News

Fox News Poll

President Obama’s Job Performance

Now    May 2013        Jan 2013

Approve          44%     45%                 47%

Disapprove      50%     51%                 47%

June 9-11, 2013

Registered Voters ± 3% Pts.

In May, 49% of voters said Obama was honest, and 51% said so last year (July 2012).  His highest honesty rating was 73% in April 2009.

Fox News Poll

Is Barack Obama Honest & Trustworthy?

Yes      No

June 2013        48%     48%

May 2013        49%     48%

June 2012        51%     46%

April 2009       73%     22%

June 9-11, 2013

Registered Voters ± 3% Pts.