In the News

Wednesday, May 22, 2013 - 10:45am
Detroit
Joe Guillen

Four trustees of Detroit’s two public pension funds are heading to a Hawaiian beach resort this weekend with their $22,000 tab paid for by the funds, which are mired in claims of mismanagement and said to be at least $600 million underfunded.

Tuesday, May 21, 2013 - 6:00pm
Wall Street Journal
Peter Nicholas.

The White House's chief lawyer learned weeks ago that an audit of the Internal Revenue Service likely would show that agency employees inappropriately targeted conservative groups, a senior White House official said Sunday.That disclosure has prompted a debate over whether the president should have been notified at that time. In the week of April 22, the Office of the White House Counsel and its head, Kathryn Ruemmler, were told by Treasury Department attorneys that an inspector general's report was nearing completion, the White House official said. In that conversation, Ms. Ruemmler...

Tuesday, May 21, 2013 - 11:34am
Wall Street Journal
L. Gordon Crovitz

 What to make of the political scandals that are dominating the headlines and forcing the Obama administration into Nixonian damage control? Technology is finally doing to big government what it has done to big business, big media and other institutions that once could operate with nearly full control over information. The government is losing the ability to manipulate information to avoid accountability.Consider how the news broke that the Internal Revenue Service has been targeting conservative groups. The admission by IRS official Lois Lerner came in response to a question from the...

Friday, May 17, 2013 - 4:20pm
AP
Dina Cappiello

CONVERSE COUNTY, Wyo. (AP) — It happens about once a month here, on the barren foothills of one of America's green-energy boomtowns: A soaring golden eagle slams into a wind farm's spinning turbine and falls, mangled and lifeless, to the ground.

Friday, May 17, 2013 - 3:21pm
Wall Street Journal
Kimberly A. Strassel

 Was the White House involved in the IRS's targeting of conservatives? No investigation needed to answer that one. Of course it was.President Obama and Co. are in full deniability mode, noting that the IRS is an "independent" agency and that they knew nothing about its abuse. The media and Congress are sleuthing for some hint that Mr. Obama picked up the phone and sicked the tax dogs on his enemies.

Friday, May 17, 2013 - 3:14pm
Susan Combs

As tax collector for the nation’s second-largest state, I know it’s a necessary function — from the fire station to the space station, nothing government does is possible without taxes.

Wednesday, May 15, 2013 - 3:46pm
CNN
Matt Smith and Joe Johns

 The Justice Department secretly collected two months of telephone records for reporters and editors at The Associated Press, the news service disclosed Monday in an outraged letter to Attorney General Eric Holder.The records included calls from several AP bureaus and the personal phone lines of several staffers, AP President Gary Pruitt wrote. Pruitt called the subpoenas a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into its reporting.

Wednesday, May 15, 2013 - 3:35pm
Wall Street Journal

Even as the politicized tax enforcement scandal expands, the Internal Revenue Service continues to expand its political powers thanks to the Affordable Care Act. A larger government always creates more openings for abuse, as Americans will learn when the IRS starts auditing their health care in addition to their 1040 next year.

Wednesday, May 15, 2013 - 3:28pm
Wall Street Journal
James Bovard

Many Republicans are enraged over revelations in recent days that the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative nonprofit groups with a campaign of audits and harassment. But of all the troubles now dogging the Obama administration—including the Benghazi fiasco and the Justice Department's snooping on the Associated Press—the IRS episode, however alarming, is also the least surprising. As David Burnham noted in "A Law Unto Itself: The IRS and the Abuse of Power" (1990), "In almost every administration since the IRS's inception the information and power of the tax agency have been...

Wednesday, May 15, 2013 - 3:16pm
Washington Examiner
Michal Conger

Conservative groups seeking information from the Environmental Protection Agency have been routinely hindered by fees normally waived for media and watchdog groups, while fees for more than 90 percent of requests from green groups were waived, according to requests reviewed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Pages