Quote:The Internal Revenue Service is under fire for inappropriately targeting conservative groups that sought tax-exempt status. As I wrote earlier this week, the revelation has the potential to motivate conservative turnout in the 2014 elections, perhaps costing Democrats as they seek to gain seats in the House and retain control of the Senate.

Some conservatives, however, are alleging that there is another component to the scandal. They accuse the I.R.S. of targeting not just conservative groups that sought 501©(4) status, but also individual taxpayers who oppose President Obama or have supported conservative causes. “The second part of the scandal is the auditing of political activists who have opposed the administration,” the Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan wrote on Thursday, describing the I.R.S.’s actions as the “worst Washington scandal since Watergate.”

What evidence does Ms. Noonan present for this second allegation? She reports on four cases of conservatives who she says were targeted for audits, and infers that there were undoubtedly many more:

The Journal’s Kim Strassel reported an Idaho businessman named Frank VanderSloot, who’d donated more than a million dollars to groups supporting Mitt Romney. He found himself last June, for the first time in 30 years, the target of I.R.S. auditors. His wife and his business were also soon audited. Hal Scherz, a Georgia physician, also came to the government’s attention. He told ABC News: “It is odd that nothing changed on my tax return and I was never audited until I publicly criticized Obamacare.” Franklin Graham, son of Billy, told Politico he believes his father was targeted. A conservative Catholic academic who has written for these pages faced questions about her meager freelance writing income. Many of these stories will come out, but not as many as there are.

Ms. Noonan is surely correct that many conservative taxpayers were audited. In fact, based on some simple math that I’ll present in a moment, it’s likely that hundreds of thousands of Mitt Romney voters were selected for an audit in 2012.

However, it’s also likely that hundreds of thousands of Mr. Obama’s supporters were audited. Although the percentage of taxpayers who are audited is relatively low — about 1 percent — the number of taxpayers in the United States is so large that this still yields well more than a million audits every year, across the political spectrum.

The I.R.S. publishes data each year on the number of taxpayers it audits. In 2012, it conducted just shy of 1.5 million audits out of 144 million individual income tax returns.

The probability of being audited is highest for high-income taxpayers — about 12 percent of individuals who made more than $1 million were audited in 2012 — although taxpayers who report little to no income are audited at higher rates than those with average incomes. In fact, about one-third of audits pertained to people who claimed the Earned Income Tax Credit, a benefit for low-income taxpayers.

In the table below, I’ve estimated the number of taxpayers in each income group who were audited in 2012, as derived from statistics in the I.R.S.’s 2012 Data Book. It is also possible to estimate how many Mitt Romney and Barack Obama voters would have been audited last year. The calculation assumes that an individual’s chance of being audited was related to their income, but not to their political views.

I estimate the number of voters in each income bracket from the 2012 Current Population Survey. I then estimate the share of the vote in each income bracket that went to Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama based on last year’s national exit poll. (Note that the income brackets used in the exit poll and the Current Population Survey do not exactly match the income brackets listed in the I.R.S.’s audit data, so I use the closest available approximations.)

This results in an estimate that about 380,000 of Mr. Romney’s voters were audited last year, as were about 480,000 of Mr. Obama’s voters.

To be clear, this calculation assumes that individuals’ risk of being audited is independent of their political views. In fact, there is no way to know exactly how many supporters of each candidate were chosen for an audit — nor could there be, since individual-level voting records and audit records are private.

The point is, however, that even with no political targeting at all, hundreds of thousands of conservative voters would have been chosen for audits in the I.R.S.’s normal course of business. Among these hundreds of thousands of voters, thousands would undoubtedly have gone beyond merely voting to become political activists.

The fact that Ms. Noonan has identified four conservatives from that group of thousands provides no evidence at all toward her hypothesis. Nor would it tell us very much if dozens or even hundreds of conservative activists disclosed that they had been audited. This is exactly what you would expect in a country where there are 1.5 million audits every year.

None of this ought to take away from the major part of the I.R.S. scandal — the targeting of conservative groups that applied for 501©(4) status, which the I.R.S. has admitted to and for which the statistical evidence is very clear. And evidence could yet emerge that there was targeting of politically active individual taxpayers.

But the principle is important: a handful of anecdotal data points are not worth very much in a country of more than 300 million people. Ms. Noonan, and many other commentators, made a similar mistake last year in their analysis of the presidential election, when they cited evidence like the number of Mitt Romney yard signs in certain neighborhoods as an indication that he was likely to win, while dismissing polls that collectively surveyed hundreds of thousands of voters in swing states and largely showed Mr. Obama ahead.

Quote:Payback time in the hen house
By Wes Pruden

The noise in the hen house this morning is the flutter and cackle of the chickens from Benghazi, scuttling home to roost. The House committee opening hearings Wednesday on what happened there is likely to serve up chicken surprise.

The four whistleblowing witnesses scheduled to testify to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee are said to be eager to tell a story far different from the various accounts, all confused and all contradictory, peddled by the Obama administration. Someone at the White House should have remembered that old Washington chestnut, as true now as ever, that “it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.” Smarter men than even Barack Obama, wiser women than even Hillary Clinton, have paid dearly for lapses of convenient memory. (The crime was bad, too.)

Mark Thompson, the ex-Marine who is now the deputy co-ordinator for operations in the State Department’s counterterrorism bureau, is expected to testify that Mrs. Clinton tried to cut the bureau out of the loop when Ambassador Chris Stevens was pleading for help from Benghazi. The administration was preoccupied in the midst of a presidential re-election campaign and cries for help at a consulate surrounded by radical Islamic killers was not something the White House thought was fit to hear. The war on terror was over.

Mr. Thompson’s lawyer, the pugnacious Joe diGenova, says his client has been subjected to threats and intimidation from his superiors at the State Department, but they all deny that and insist that everything everybody else says are fibs, stretchers and “full growed lies.” That’s what superiors always say (and once in a while they’re right). Mrs. Clinton convened an internal review board to look into such allegations and several coats of whitewash were duly applied, but the facts are still showing through. “You should have seen what [Mrs. Clinton] tried to do to us that night,” a second official in the State Department’s counterterrorism bureau told his colleagues in October.

Emails and documents from the State Department, the CIA and the National Security Administration, published in the current edition of the Weekly Standard magazine, reveal that officials of those agencies tried to delete all references to the involvement of al Qaeda in the talking points, and identify Victoria Nuland, spokeswoman for the State Department, as complaining that the revisions did not go far enough to satisfy “my building’s leadership.” The leadership of the “building,” and no doubt the people in it, wanted all evidence of al Qaeda involvement, not only in the attack on Americans in Benghazi, but in attacks on other Western target, removed from the “talking points.”

Rep. Darrell Issa of California, the Republican who will chair this week’s hearings, told “Face the Nation” interviewers Sunday that both the CIA and Gregory Hicks, the deputy chief of mission in Libya when the ambassador and three colleagues were slain, knew at once that the Americans were under attack, not under protest.

Mr. Hicks watched the Sunday talk shows after the attacks on the consulate in September and was astonished by the claims of Susan Rice, the ambassador to the U.N., in five appearances, contradicting the emphatic assertion of the president of Libya that he had “no doubt” that the attacks were the work of terrorists, not mere community activists. “The net impact of what has transpired is that the spokeswoman of the most powerful country in the world has basically said the president of Libya is either a liar or doesn’t know what he’s talking about. My jaw hit the floor as I watched this,” he told investigators for the House committee. “I’ve never been as embarrassed in my life, in my career, [as I was] on that day.” He is expected to repeat that to the committee this week.

All politicians are interested most in what happens to them. It’s the bipartisan reality of how things work. But the Obama White House, perhaps unique in our times, plays partisan politics 24/7. Bubba, for all his sins, frequently interrupted politics for a roll in the White House hay and gave us a little comic relief. If Hillary isn’t paying attention to the politics of 2016 she isn’t the player we all think she is.

It was easy for her to take the long view when Chris Stevens was pleading for his life, but she may pay yet for forgetting the Bard’s warning in Hamlet (Act 2, Scene 2) that “murder, though it have no tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ.”

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

Quote:Israel’s Rise to Energy Superpower Under Way

By Peter C Glover and Michael J. Economides

Israel’s transformation from a land of milk and honey into a land awash with oil and gas money is under way. When the country’s offshore Tamar field finally started pumping domestic natural gas to Ashdod on the last day of March 2013, it meant that Israel was no longer in the thrall of its Arab neighbors for gas imports. And it also signaled the beginning of what could be an Israeli energy superpower status.

However, don’t take my word for it. Take the words of Russia’s Vladimir Putin or, much more significant, his recent actions. Shaken by the success of the US shale gas revolution and the threat to Russia’s stranglehold on European gas supplies that a prospective eastern Mediterranean supply carries, Putin’s Kremlin has, in recent months, feted Israel as never before. In February this culminated in Russia’s Gazprom signing a landmark deal giving Russia a major stake in the future distribution of massive Israeli gas resources. It is also likely to be just an entree deal now that Moscow has a place at the Israeli energy table.

In early 2012, Noble Energy, the US partner of the major Israeli energy companies, announced a new find of 1.2 to 1.3 trillion cubic feet of gas in the Tamar prospect. Noble is confident that there may be up to a dozen more such gas discoveries to be made in the Tamar field. Yet the Tamar and Dalit offshore Israeli gas fields are just the beginning. Others are showing signs of significant quantities of gas, including the Aphrodite 2 field, 100 miles from Haifa. But the enormous Leviathan gas field overshadows them all. Leviathan is estimated to have twice the amount of gas of Tamar and should come online between 2016 and 2018. But Leviathan and Tamar also hold out the further tantalizing prospect of significant amounts of oil.



Then there is Israel’s eastern Mediterranean partner, Cyprus. In February 2013, the Israeli energy companies Delek and Avner signed an agreement to acquire a 30 percent stake in exploration rights off the southern coast of Cyprus. With equally large gas prospects around Cyprus, the eastern Mediterranean basin is on the path to becoming a major player in global energy production, and soon. All this has not been lost of the energy giants as the Russia Gazprom deal, which includes a commitment to build a floating LNG terminal off Cyprus, makes clear. That hub will convert Israeli and Cypriot gas for onward transmission to Europe or Asia.

For all its mounting gas and oil discoveries, Israel has been having trouble in attracting the investment of the energy majors who fear the threat of their energy investments in Arab states. But that is changing. Recently the French energy major Total signed an exploration contract to explore two blocks of southern Cyprus. In February, Woodside Petroleum, Australia’s second largest oil and gas producer announced it would pay as much as $2.3 billion for a stake in Israel’s giant Leviathan field. All of this is highly significant as it signals a very real change in the geopolitics of the region.

But it’s not just enormous reserves of natural gas that is set to see the Star of David rising to global energy prominence offshore. Israel has oil too – and a world class amount of it. Most importantly, as well as the great potential for oil finds in its deep offshore reservoirs, Israel is set to develop a major shale oil prospect the Shefla Basin, south-east of Jerusalem.



It’s where David slew Goliath. The Valley of Elah lies thirty miles to the south-west of Jerusalem. The World Energy Council estimates that Israel’s Shefla Basin shale oil deposits could yield a cool 250 billion barrels. To put that in perspective, it’s a figure that would catapult Israel into the elite with the world’s third-largest proven oil reserves, just behind Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. Such is the significance of the amount of oil in the Shefla Basin that it didn’t take long for big hitting private investors, including Jacob Rothschild and Rupert Murdoch, to take a major stake in Genie Oil and Gas, the parent company of Israel Energy Initiatives who are running the project.

In February, the state owned Israel Natural Gas Lines announced that it was seeking $1 billion to fund new pipelines. Whilst developing a vital energy infrastructure has become a priority for Israel, the security implications are only too well understood. But if OPEC’s members, already feeling the heat of the US shale gas and oil revolution, feel inclined to consider military action it could only be in the form of utilizing proxy terrorist groups. Anything else would mean taking on a possible grand alliance of Israel, Russia, Greece and Cyprus. Equally, the rise of an energy-driven non-Muslim alternative powerbase in the Middle East offers a serious counterpoint to help offset the growing Islamist threat posed by the growing instability in North Africa.

Neither do the ramifications of the Israeli-led energy developments end there. Some Arab states are already breaking ranks. The fledgling state of South Sudan, which sits on top of around 80 percent of Sudan’s oil reserves, signed a new deal in January to keep Israel supplied with oil while developing its own reserves. Jordan too is reportedly in secret talks to buy some of Israel’s Tamar gas to power a potash plant on the Jordanian side of the Dead Sea. The State Oil Company of Azerbijan (SOCAR) has also turned to Israel as a “proving ground” to help its own development as a major energy producer. Last Autumn, the Caspian Drilling Company, a subsidiary of SOCAR, bought a five percent stake in Israel’s small Med Ashdod oil field. It proposes to utilize the deal to draw on growing Israeli technical expertise. Israeli’s reputation for high-tech expertise is already a recognized phenomenon. As one of Israel’s oil pioneers, Tovia Luskin, has pointed out, Israeli tech could “solve the world’s energy crisis if red tape doesn’t tie it up”. Luskin wants to use some of the revenue to fund a university as a global center of excellence able to train engineers in oil exploration and energy management. Until the bureaucratic issues – how much does the Government take in revenues – are resolved in Israel that vision remains on hold however. But the point is nevertheless well made: Israel is in prime position to give a lead in a new era of Middle East energy developments.

Even so, the impact of the coming rise of Israel as a regional energy superpower plainly heralds significant and imminent changes in the Middle East, and beyond. First, for the fast-diminishing tyranny that is OPEC. Second, in the geopolitical re-alignment the new eastern Mediterranean energy alliance represents. Third, the literal shift of power away from the world’s oil and gas ‘tyrannies’ that the new energy realities – including Israel’s rise to energy superpower status – represents for the democratic world

Quote:How I Discovered The Hidden Side of History

1981: I was looking through some old books that somehow ended up at my parents’ house. Among them, I found a set of history books from the 1930s. With an innate interest in the topic, I began reading them, and was absolutely shocked by what I found.

The last book of the series covered what were then modern times, and to my horror, I found lavish praise for – of all people – Benito Mussolini.

These were American books, by the way, beautifully produced by a respected publisher. And there, in authoritative tones, was the story of the great Mussolini, the savior of Italy. Given that I was taught precisely the opposite, a mere 30-odd years later, you can imagine my surprise.

Just to establish my point, here are a few quotes from that time about Mussolini:

Quote:What a man! I have lost my heart!
- Winston Churchill

The greatest genius of the modern age.
- Thomas Edison

I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished and by his evidenced honest purpose of restoring Italy.
- Franklin Roosevelt

Obviously, these quotes are no longer mentioned in ‘respectable’ circles. And that’s my point: What is inconvenient to the current ruling establishment is dropped from the books.

When I was young, the USSR was famous for horribly twisting history to make themselves look like the great and mighty ones. They even made jokes about it on the original Star Trek. But here was clear evidence that history – in America – had been altered. In this case, parts had not been added, but they most certainly had been taken away. That rather shook my view of history, as it had been taught to me at school.

A few years later I came across an even more troubling instance of history being pulled out of the books:

I had been writing a few books for a major publisher, and one of my editors asked me to meet him for dinner, which, of course, I did. We discussed projects that we might pursue and generally had a pleasant evening. At some point we left off discussing our projects and talked about history. Somehow, we ended up at the Armenian genocide. He was surprised that I knew about it (many still don’t), but I had known quite a few Armenian kids growing up, and I had heard their stories.

Then, my editor took a deep breath and said, “then I want to tell you something.” He explained that a few years before, he had been working for one of the big three textbook publishers, and happened to be editing a high school history book. One day, he got a phone call from the US State Department. He was shocked, and asked them why they would be calling him. “It’s about the history book you’re editing,” the man said.

My friend had been raised in about the same way I had, so the idea of censoring a textbook was astonishing to him. “We need you to cut back the section on the Armenian genocide,” the man from the State Department said. My friend was horrified, and complained that it was the true history. “Yes,” said the man, “but we need to keep the Turks happy.” My friend’s 2-3 pages on the Armenian genocide was reduced to 2-3 paragraphs, and it was a victory that he got that much space.

According to all I learned in school, such things did not happen in America. According to all that is self-promoted about academia, they are the sworn enemies of such things. But they do happen – a lot.

I’ve encountered the same thing on museum walls: descriptions that are clearly misleading, but which glorify the rulership of our time.

There is much more to this, but I’ll let the point stand as I’ve made it thus far: History is manipulated. You can find the truth if you dig through old books and artifact records, or from some specialists, but not from schoolbooks. The books aren’t filled with lies, they just remove the facts that don’t make their bosses look good.

And this is not a trivial thing; it affects a lot more than school children. As Adolf Hitler was starting his aggression against the Poles, the London Times quoted him as saying: Go, kill without mercy. After all, who remembers the Armenians?

What is deleted from history can teach us nothing, and those who have this power use it to glorify themselves. This is a very dangerous thing, and it rules the schoolbooks of America and the Western world in general.

I’ll close with a line from Paul Simon’s song, Kodachrome:

Quote:When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school,
it’s a wonder I can think at all.

What you learned in school was a partial, cartoon version of history. You learned what made the big bosses look good, and no more.

Paul Rosenberg
FreemansPerspective.com