Is 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton being funny, or is she this clueless? From the Washington Times:
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Monday that she will soon tour the nation and deliver a series of speeches to promote more trust in government. She made her remarks at an annual American Bar Association meeting in San Francisco.
More specifically, Mrs. Clinton said she was launching a series of speeches on foreign policy. And as part of those addresses, she planned to speak about the need to restore faith in government, Breitbart reported.
I look forward to hearing her ideas, since her party and her husband’s administration (Bill and Hillary are still married, right? How can you tell?) have done so much to erode people’s trust in government (which they should never have in the first place). For starters, pick your favorite scandal.
But what about now? Let’s hear Hillary defend this, reported by the Washington Amazon.com Post:
The Internal Revenue Service has sent letters to thousands of small business owners questioning whether they shorted the coffers this past year, sparking criticism from some lawmakers who believe the agency is bullying mom-and-pop companies.
Under the heading “Notification of Possible Income Underreporting,” the letters started going out to small employers this summer demanding they review and confirm that they accurately reported their income on last year’s tax returns. …
“This gives the impression that the IRS is looking for more than just additional information,” House Small Business Committee Chairman Sam Graves (R-Mo.) wrote in a letter to the agency officials, noting that the first line states “your gross receipts may have been underreported,” which he says “implies that this is a serious matter that could lead to assessments of additional tax, penalties and interest.” …
The agency’s audit screening process has been under the microscope since officials admitted to unfairly targeting conservative groups earlier this summer. In response, Graves has started digging deeper into the methods the agency uses to select which small business tax returns are given a second look.
During a congressional hearing last month, IRS Acting Commissioner Daniel Werfel assured lawmakers that “we don’t have any particular evidence at this time” that the political criteria used to screen nonprofits was ever used for private companies.
At the time, however, Werfel said the agency also does not take into account a company’s location or industry for review — yet the new letter states that employers who received them stood out from “businesses of your type in comparable locations.”
I eagerly await Hillary’s comments on this from her home state senator, as the Chicago Tribune reports:
Free speech isn’t always free. It gets downright cumbersome when Dick Durbin has you on his enemies list. Consider:
We were surprised in the early days of this spring’s Internal Revenue Service scandal to see Durbin voice indignation with the IRS for apparently behaving just as he had urged it to: In an Oct. 12, 2010, letter to then-IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman — we have Durbin’s press release, including his letter — the senator urged an investigation of “several 501(c)(4) organizations that appear to be in violation of the law.” But Durbin’s letter only cited one group by name: Crossroads GPS, a conservative group that has spent heavily on advertising to promote fiscal responsibility, limits to government regulation and national security.
Durbin said this year on Fox News that he hadn’t sicced the IRS on any liberal groups because … an investigation of Crossroads would put them, too, on notice. Crossroads says it scrupulously obeys the federal laws that regulate all such groups. We’ve seen no evidence that Durbin’s accusation of crimes was accurate, but he surely achieved one goal: He made potential donors think twice about contributing to a group a U.S. senator had publicly named as an illegal operation.
Now, though, Durbin has changed tactics. Rather than accusing political enemies of flouting federal law, he’s suggesting that he may publicly expose them to public outrage over the killing of Trayvon Martin. The editorial page of Thursday’s Wall Street Journal reported that the senator has sent letters to corporate and nonprofit supporters of the American Legislative Exchange Council, asking them to disclose their positions on “stand-your-ground” legislation that ALEC supported in Florida in 2005. …
Durbin’s communications director, Max Gleischman, told us Thursday afternoon that the senator’s goal isn’t to silence groups he opposes, but “to find out if groups that support (ALEC) financially agree with (ALEC’s) position on ‘stand your ground’ laws. Simple as that.”
If only thinly coded letters from senators with as much clout as Durbin were that benign. Because it would be more than wrong for a U.S. senator to use the power of his high federal office as a cudgel against his enemies. We’ll give the last word on that to Durbin himself:
“It is absolutely unacceptable to single out any political group — right, left or center — and say we’re going to target them. That is unthinkable. That goes back to some of the worst days of the Richard Nixon administration.”
The Nixon administration and its Watergate scandal brought Hillary Clinton to Washington. At the time, a popular anti-Nixon question was: “Would you buy a used car from this man?” Would you buy anything Hillary Clinton says?
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 
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