Kim Strassel: Republicans should claw back $80 billion IRS infusion in wake of IRS targeting of Taibbi and Shapley

 IRS Needs a Cage, Not More Cash

The cases of the whistleblower Gary Shapley and journalist Matt Taibbi show why the GOP should claw back that $80 billion infusion.

As House Republicans and the White House wrangle over a debt-ceiling deal, one GOP demand ought to be nonnegotiable. A politicized Internal Revenue Service has no business keeping its untrustworthy fingers on last year’s $80 billion cash infusion.

More.

Matt Taibbi: Hillary is guilty this time, and the press won't cover it

Shouldn't Hillary Clinton Be Banned From Twitter Now?

WAPo calls Chicom propaganda that coronavirus came from Fort Detrick, Maryland, "baseless"

 I don't think so.

This is the same WAPo which highlighted an unexplained outbreak of a respiratory virus in Virginia, just across the border from the Fort Detrick biodefense facility, in June-July 2019, which killed 3 and hospitalized and sickened dozens more. The CDC concluded in late July 2019 that a "common cold" virus was to blame in the outbreak.

Hm, imagine that. But don't think about it too long. The investigative reporting on the right wants us to concentrate on a possible outbreak at the Wuhan lab, which, by the way, wasn't a Wall Street Journal scoop. An Australian journalist had the story already in March.

Meanwhile the CDC temporarily shut down the US Army part of the Fort Detrick operation in August 2019, just a month after the Virginia outbreak, for numerous safety and other violations, not the least of which was an incomplete inventory of agents. The latter problem seems to be chronic at Fort Detrick. The place was similarly cited way back in 2009.

And Congress was deliberately kept out of the loop.

What else is Fort Detrick famous for, besides bioweapons research long ago supposedly abandoned by the US government? 

In 2001 a bunch of people were killed by anthrax mailed in letters shortly after the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. The anthrax was traced to Fort Detrick.

Robert Mueller and James Comey infamously fingered the wrong guy for those anthrax attacks, who was later compensated millions and exonerated. The true culprit was a senior scientist at United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland, Bruce Ivins, who committed suicide in 2008 before our incompetent FBI could arrest him, seven years after the crimes.

What other nutjobs are still working in sensitive positions in our government? 

In light of recent testimony by Anthony Fauci to Congress that he couldn't guarantee that NIH funds awarded to the Wuhan Institute of Virology through a third party were not used for gain of function research to weaponize viruses, you have to open your eyes to the fact of long-standing and intimate cooperation of US researchers with their Chinese counterparts. Chinese "scientists" are all over the place at American universities and research institutions, including at Fort Detrick, where their American counterparts seem all too often unruffled by the security implications. They are all also all dependent on US government, including military, funding for their livelihoods, as well as on funding from what President Eisenhower once warned us about, the military-industrial complex.

I don't believe any of these people as far as I can throw them.

We know the Chicoms were working on coronavirus. But it's not outside the realm of possibility that one of the inventory lacunae at Fort Detrick was the coronavirus, too. Was it just a coincidence that there was an outbreak of coronavirus-like disease in Virginia in the summer of 2019? CDC should be forced to reveal more.

The American elites who work on this stuff have all the same incentives to keep it all secret as the Chinese do. American scientists are thick as thieves with the Chinese. The fact is they are in this together, and we are the helpless bystanders on the outside. My estimation is they have too much to lose to tell the truth to the American people. Money trumps patriotism. 

As U.S. calls for focus on covid origins, China repeats speculation about U.S. military base:

Zhao, one of the country’s most notoriously hawkish diplomats, referenced a U.S. military location that has been baselessly linked to the coronavirus outbreak by Chinese media.

Bernie gets his bounce predicted by Matt Taibbi, but it's partly on the strength of that outlier CNN poll

Matt Taibbi: Bernie Sanders "poised to receive the same kind of bump Trump got in 2016 from media stupidity"

Here in Rolling Stone.

I don't think so.

Biden's lead today over Sanders is 8 points, higher than it was in March 2019 when Sanders peaked at 24.0 in the polls. Sanders is at 20.4 now.

No one has been able to dirty up Biden enough to bring him down. Meanwhile both Bernie and Warren have brought themselves down by their own radicalism.

And now the revenge of Nancy Pelosi's impeachment will sideline the radicals for a while, just as Iowa prepares to vote.

The radicals' only hope is a quick trial from Cocaine Mitch.

Everyone on the Democrat side who wants to drag out this impeachment is on the side of sidelining the radicals.

Matt Taibbi: Hillary is nuts and Election 2016 was almost entirely a domestic story

Well, not quite: Ukraine did help the Democrats get rid of Manafort.

That's not nothing.

But yeah, she's nuts all right, along with a lot of other people.

Story.

Matt Taibbi: "The people pushing hardest for Trump’s early removal are more dangerous than Trump"

My discomfort in the last few years, first with Russiagate and now with Ukrainegate and impeachment, stems from the belief that the people pushing hardest for Trump’s early removal are more dangerous than Trump. Many Americans don’t see this because they’re not used to waking up in a country where you’re not sure who the president will be by nightfall. They don’t understand that this predicament is worse than having a bad president.

Read it all here.

Matt Taibbi spends 35 minutes talking about Trump's appeal in 2016 with Bernie leftist R. J. Eskow, never once mentioning illegal immigration

These guys are clueless.

The enthusiasm for Trump from the time he announced in mid-2015 until August 2016 revolved around the illegal immigration issue, and these guys want it to be about anything but.

If Democrats had any brains they'd run on Trump's Issue Numero Uno because Trump has miserably failed to deliver on it, but Democrats have no brains.

Replacing that enthusiasm has been Trump's biggest problem, and its absence will spell the difference between victory and defeat in Election 2020.

One shot for every . . .

🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫

David Axelrod still pretends that the Russian hack of the DNC servers is a solid fact when it's not

Matt Taibbi knows better ("Russiagate is WMD times a million" is the original html), Axelrod's the hack:

I didn’t really address the case that Russia hacked the DNC, content to stipulate it for now. I was told early on that this piece of the story seemed “solid,” but even that assertion has remained un-bolstered since then, still based on an “assessment” by those same intelligence services that always had issues, including the use of things like RT’s “anti-American” coverage of fracking as part of its case. The government didn’t even examine the DNC’s server, the kind of detail that used to make reporters nervous.

LOL, John Brennan reads from Matt Taibbi's script verbatim: Well, I think I suspected there was more WMD there than there actually was

C'mon Steve, take what you can get, Taibbi's an Elizabeth Warren supporter, you can't have it all

Matt Taibbi: The press has now handed Trump the mother of campaign issues heading into 2020

It's official: Russiagate is this generation's WMD:

Nothing Trump is accused of from now on by the press will be believed by huge chunks of the population, a group that (perhaps thanks to this story) is now larger than his original base. As [Peter] Baker notes [in the New York Times], a full 50.3% of respondents in a poll conducted this month said they agree with Trump the Mueller probe is a “witch hunt.” ...

The biggest thing this affair has uncovered so far is Donald Trump paying off a porn star. That’s a hell of a long way from what this business was supposedly about at the beginning, and shame on any reporter who tries to pretend this isn’t so. ...

CNN told us Trump officials had been in “constant contact” with “Russians known to U.S. intelligence,” and the former director of the CIA ["former" communist John Brennan], who’d helped kick-start the investigation that led to Mueller’s probe, said the President was guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” committing acts “nothing short of treasonous.” ...

[N]ews outlets once again swallowed a massive disinformation campaign, only this error is many orders of magnitude more stupid than any in the recent past, WMD included. Honest reporters like ABC’s Terry Moran understand: Mueller coming back empty-handed on collusion means a “reckoning for the media.” Of course, there won’t be such a reckoning. (There never is). But there should be. We broke every written and unwritten rule in pursuit of this story, starting with the prohibition on reporting things we can’t confirm. ...

The Russiagate era has so degraded journalism that even once “reputable” outlets are now only about as right as politicians, which is to say barely ever, and then only by accident. Early on, I was so amazed by the sheer quantity of Russia “bombshells” being walked back, I started to keep a list. It’s well above 50 stories now. As has been noted by Glenn Greenwald of the Intercept and others, if the mistakes were random, you’d expect them in both directions, but Russiagate errors uniformly go the same way. ...

We’ve become sides-choosers, obliterating the concept of the press as an independent institution whose primary role is sorting fact and fiction.

Freedom of speech, yes even for these two crackpots, but hey, it's Facebook: We decide who speaks

Matt Taibbi laments the first successful revolt in ages against one of the two major parties

Here:

But choosing a dangerous race-baiting lunatic as the vehicle for the first successful revolt in ages against one of the two major parties will have many profound negative consequences for voters. The most serious will surely be this burgeoning movement to describe voting and democracy as inherently dangerous. 

Yeah, don't anger the jailers too much or you won't get any bread with your soup.

Obama's Gangster Government Of, By And For The Banks

Matt Taibbi provides a pretty thorough look at the recent history of the bailout alliance between the federal government and the big banks for Rolling Stone, here, from which this excerpt:

All of this – the willingness to call dying banks healthy, the sham stress tests, the failure to enforce bonus rules, the seeming indifference to public disclosure, not to mention the shocking­ lack of criminal investigations into fraud committed by bailout recipients before the crash – comprised the largest and most valuable bailout of all. Brick by brick, statement by reassuring statement, bailout officials have spent years building the government's great Implicit Guarantee to the biggest companies on Wall Street: We will be there for you, always, no matter how much you screw up. We will lie for you and let you get away with just about anything. We will make this ongoing bailout a pervasive and permanent part of the financial system. And most important of all, we will publicly commit to this policy, being so obvious about it that the markets will be able to put an exact price tag on the value of our preferential treatment.

But Taibbi goes pretty easy on Obama's role in all of this, who has profited handsomely from it with reelection, focusing instead mostly on underlings like Geithner and Summers. Taibbi seems to hate only the big bankers for their profiteering, not the administration responsible for the continuing massive bailouts. He never connects Obama's admiration for dictatorship in China with our gangster government's stick up of the American people, and even gives Obama credit for some success with HAMP. It's as if the imperial president is merely an accessory to the crime, which Taibbi calls right up front "one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people."

By the way, Taibbi endorsed Elizabeth Talking Bull for president.

Matt Taibbi: Elizabeth Warren For President in 2012

Just a little humor to start the day.

Matt Taibbi, already deeply dissatisfied with Obama in October 2009, said that here:

"Warren to me makes the most sense for the simple reason that it will be virtually impossible for the Democratic Party hacks to dismiss her as a fringe character, given that they themselves gave her such a big public position as chief of the Congressional Oversight Panel.

"This is a woman who understands the finance issues as well as we can hope to expect from any politician . . .."

You know Elizabeth Warren. She's the one who repeatedly said here "the rest of us paid for" everything which the rich used to get wealthy, so they owe us, as if the rich hadn't already paid one red cent in taxes for any of those things, too.

Yep, that's the best reasoning we can hope to expect from the Democrats.

The Answer: For The Same Reason Government Isn't in Jail

The Question: "Why isn't Wall Street in Jail?", asked here by Matt Taibbi, one more time.

It's hard to make Americans hate DC, lower Manhattan and the banksters as much as the terrorists do, but he keeps trying.