I’m not exactly sure if the WSJ is actually surprised, here:
The Federal Reserve has aimed a seemingly nonstop spate of rules at the nation’s biggest banks as it tries to wring risk out of the U.S. financial system in the wake of the financial crisis.
Yet the central bank still lacks a Senate-confirmed official to formally oversee its continuing regulatory efforts.
OK, this just sounds like straight-up perjury:
[The House Oversight committee report] states that [former IRS overseer Lois] Lerner made false statements to committee staff on various occasions.
During a February 2012 briefing, Lerner told committee staff that the criteria for evaluating tax-exempt applications had not changed. According to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), however, Lerner directed in June 2011 that the criteria used to identify applications be changed.
Continue reading House Oversight Committee: IRS’s Lois Lerner lied to us, you know.
The wheels on the bus go round round round, round round round, round round rouBHWUDDUAH BHWUSDDUAH GREEEIIIIIICCCCHHHHH ERRNNNNNIIAANNCH HEUGUNNCH…
[PAUSE]
WHOOOSH.
The UK Telegraph sums up what happened yesterday with remarkable terseness: “The US state department has released a full account of what happened the night its ambassador to Libya was killed, rejecting its own earlier claims that the attack was a protest that had got out of hand. ” Short version: what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack; there was never any real question that it was a terrorist attack; there were no protests at the Benghazi consulate prior to the attack; and UN Ambassador Susan Rice* either didn’t know what she was talking about when she was blaming the whole thing on a video trailer, or else she lied through her teeth. In other words, forget about the Obama administration’s version of events being coherent. It’s barely recognizable as being in English.
As usual.
If you’re wondering why we’re seeing a sudden outbreak of candor breaking out over at State, well… a Congressional Oversight committee hearing tends to concentrate the mind. Especially these days, given that the career State Department officials are starting to suspect that the current crop of political appointees aren’t going to be around for much longer…
Moe Lane
*Don’t join your office’s holiday Secret Santa program, ma’am.
As represented by the growing use of iPads – and no, that’s not actually ridiculous. An iPad or iPad2 on a 3G network is a combination camera, scanner, and communications device that is independent of the White House’s servers; which means that anything written or transmitted by it is not going to be automatically recorded by those servers. And the problem with that? Well, the problem with that is called the Presidential Records Act, which defines and regulates a lot of the official communications and records of the Executive Branch.
Let me summarize the below video from House Oversight:
Continue reading Rep. Issa asking hard questions on WH message security.
Rep. Elijah Cummings* says that he’s “ready” to face down Rep. Darrell Issa when the latter takes over as House Oversight chair this week. For those who don’t know him, Rep. Cummings is a fundamentally uninteresting Congressman who has been taking full advantage of racial gerrymandering for the last fourteen years to do… nothing at all, really. His most noteworthy accomplishment in that time period, in fact, has been to yell at Mark McGwire over steroid use – which I am sure is all very nice, but it’s not exactly what I’d call consequential.
More importantly – and it’s the major reason for this post in the first place – I’d like to take this opportunity to remind the Democrats that they confidently announced that they were ‘ready’ for the 2010 elections, too. They didn’t do a blessed thing to slow the avalanche down, but by gum they were ‘ready’ for it…
Moe Lane
*Who has the good fortune to be my Congressman, alas.
