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Two years after activists for same-sex marriage obtained the confidential tax return and donor list of a national group opposed to redefining marriage, the Internal Revenue Service has admitted wrongdoing and agreed to settle the resulting lawsuit. The Daily Signal has learned that, under a consent judgment today, the IRS agreed to pay $50,000 in damages to the National Organization for Marriage as a result of the unlawful release of the confidential information to a gay rights group, the Human Rights Campaign, that is NOM’s chief political rival. “Congress made the disclosure of confidential tax return information a serious matter...

I run a data center. Disk drives that are left running continuously last between two and three years. Three years is about 36 months. The odds of a disk failing in any given month are roughly one in 36. The odds of two different drives failing in the same month are roughly one in 36 squared, or 1 in about 1,300. The odds of three drives failing in the same month is 36 cubed or 1 in 46,656. The odds of seven different drives failing in the same month is 37 to the 7th power = 1 in 78,664,164,096.

What a grand day for the Democratic Party Monday turned out to be. Their soon-to-be supreme empress, Hillary Rodham Clinton, began the day with a print interview given to the Guardian that Ed talked about, where she tried to say no, really, we’re not rich, trust us. Even the Morning Joe panel on MSNBC recognized it was tone deaf. The CNN crew laughed spontaneously at her claim of poverty.The Middle East continued to devolve into chaos as the day progressed, while President Obama simultaneously tried to make the story of the day something about too many pregnant women get fired for...

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (WREG) — A disabled veteran and father is living out of his car, because he said the Memphis VA will not help him. Lonnie Whitfield was living with a friend, but ran out of options when that person decided to move. The VA sent WREG a statement explaining the programs they have in place to help people like Whitfield. They have vouchers for the Department of Housing and Urban Development and VA Supportive Housing Program, or HUD-VASH as it is called. However, they only had 380 vouchers for the Memphis and Jackson areas, and said they are currently...

According to most of the Morning Joe panel on Monday, the media is not doing its job covering the IRS scandal. As Mark Halperin opined, "I think with a different administration, one that was a Republican administration, this story would be a national obsession, and, instead, it's getting coverage here and a few other places. But it deserves a lot more questions."

MARQUETTE, MI -- Marquette’s Catholic bishop, John Doerfler, is standing behind St. Michael’s Catholic Church after it disallowed an openly homosexual man to serve at liturgies and exercise a leadership role. "One of the qualifications for the public ministry within the Catholic Church is willingness to give witness to the Gospel and the Church's teachings." Last Saturday, Bob Brown participated in a "commitment ceremony" with his partner of 31 years. The next day, he was told that he would not be allowed to serve at the Mass in any of several roles he had previously fulfilled, nor could he sit...

The IRS claims they can recover Lois Lerner's email from 2011 and earlier because Lerner's hard drive crashed and they only backed up for 6 months and then reused the data tapes. That seems to be a stupid explanation, but for the sake of this discussion, let's stretch credibility and assume the IRS and Lerner are completely truthful. The IRS claims they only have 6 months of email back up at anytime.  Prior to the eruption of the IRS controversy last spring, the IRS had a policy of backing up the data on its email server (which runs Microsoft...

[SNIP]...This section of Discover The Networks provides a timeline of this illegal, blatantly partisan practice by the IRS.

The Lois Lerner email flap isn't the only problem the administration has with record keeping. Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute has filed a lawsuit against the NSA in response to the agency's refusal to comply with two FOIA requests concerning EPA correspondence. Horner is seeking  “metadata” from EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy’s "phone communications, email and text messages," according to this article in Heritage Foundation's Daily Signal: In advance of her Senate confirmation, McCarthy told lawmakers she was uncomfortable with instant messaging and thus did not use EPA’s “IM” system. But text messaging, Horner said, is something her phone bills...

It’s great to have Uncle Sam looking out for the little guy, isn’t it? That’s why it was such a super-duper, nifty idea for Washington to summon into being the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It was created as part of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act back in 2010, but was originally the brainstorm of now Senator Elizabeth Warren. (You may recall she was initially slated to head the agency, but that was derailed by Congress.) So now that they are on the job, keeping citizens safe from big banking fat cats and ensuring financial responsibility...

On Friday, Mac Slavo reported on Congressman Darrell Issa's (R-CA) statement in which he called the Internal Revenue Service's claim that Lois Lerner's hard drive crash resulted in a loss of emails "ridiculous." Most of us know that information from crashed hard drives can be recovered, though it costs a lot of money. However, as Mac pointed out, we could simply obtain a copy from the National Security Agency since they are collecting this kind of information. But something more telling has come to light: The IRS uses as an email archiving company to back up its emails. That's right,...

The timing is not merely suspicious, it is damning. [T]he alleged disappearance of Ms. Lerner's hard drive—and the fact that the missing conversations are those the former IRS director had with people outside the IRS—has suddenly resurrected, with force, the explosive possibility that she was chatting with Democrats who mattered. There's plenty of reason to believe she was. Just last week Congress discovered (via a subpoena to the Justice Department) emails showing that Ms. Lerner had conversations with Justice prosecutors about investigating conservative nonprofits. Who else in the Obama administration was Ms. Lerner talking to? I'm omitting all of the...

We have been told Lois Lerner lost 2 years worth of emails due to a crash of her hard drive. We were told the disc had bad sectors and the data could not be recovered.  According to documents provided by the IRS, Lerner was archiving her e-mails on her local hard drive, which developed fatal problems (bad sectors) in the middle of June 2011. The data proved unrecoverable despite heroic efforts on the part of the IT staff.  Let's delve into this a little deeper. Exactly what is a hard disc sector? In computer disk storage, a sector is a subdivision of...

Top GOP officials are concerned that missing among the IRS’s internal emails are communications with Sen. Mark Udall and a dozen other Democrats who received campaign contributions from the federal agency’s union. The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) first issued Freedom of Information Act requests to the IRS last year seeking all electronic and written documents between top officials there and the Democrats who received the campaign funding, but the attempts have been repeatedly stonewalled. Udall has accepted $13,000 in donations from the National Treasury Employees Union that represents IRS employees ... This is just another instance of Mark Udall...

The unfolding sectarian violence in Iraq is just the latest crisis where the Obama administration seemingly has been caught off guard. From the Veterans Affairs scandal to Russia's swift annexation of Crimea, news of the world somehow keeps taking the commander-in-chief and his team by surprise. The following is a refresher of major domestic and foreign policy developments that, apparently, were news to the White House. 1. Islamist militants gaining in Iraq. 2. Russia's intervention in Ukraine. 3. NSA spying on foreign leaders. 4. VA waiting list scandal. 5. IRS targeting scandal. 6. HealthCare.gov failing. 7. DOJ obtaining AP phone...

A statement released from the office of Rep. Steve Stockman, R-Texas, says what’s good for the government should be good for taxpayers. So there might come a time in the future when a letter starting out, “Dear IRS, The dog ate my tax receipts,” would be a perfectly acceptable response to a government inquiry about those “health cost” deductions for a hot tub and the trips to the Bahamas. The word came from Stockman’s office on Friday after a contentious hearing in Congress where the chief of the IRS said there was no apology due for the agency’s loss of...

Americans' approval falls eight percentage points since August by Justin McCarthy WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Americans' approval of President Barack Obama's handling of immigration has dropped to 31%, one of the lowest readings since 2010, when Gallup began polling on his handling of the issue. Meanwhile, two in three Americans (65%) disapprove of his handling of immigration. These data are from a June 5-8 Gallup poll. Disapproval of the president's handling of immigration has climbed 10 points since August 2013, when more than half of Americans (55%) disapproved.

When the Internal Revenue Service announced late Friday that, somehow, it lost two years worth of emails to and from Lois Lerner, the former IRS official at the center of the agency’s unfair placement of Tea Party and other conservative groups on its secret “Be on the Lookout List,” our thoughts turned to, well, “Saturday Night Live.” We imagined IRS commissioner John Koskinen explaining to the Church Lady, a character played by the actor Dana Carvey, that a computer crash caused the emails to disappear. That almost certainly would prompt the Church Lady to reply, skeptically, “Well, isn’t that convenient,”...

‘Congressional investigators are fuming over revelations that the Internal Revenue Service has lost a trove of emails to and from a central figure in the agency’s tea-party controversy.” That’s the opening sentence of the Associated Press story on the IRS’s claim that it lost an unknown number of e-mails over two years relating to the agency’s alleged targeting of political groups hostile to the president. But note how the AP casts the story: The investigators — Republican lawmakers — are outraged. Is it really so hard to imagine that if this were a Republican administration, the story wouldn’t be the...

The embattled Phoenix branch of the Department of Veterans Affairs apparently has paid out $10 million in bonuses during the past three years, far more than previously reported. The Arizona Republic obtained and published the bonus records after seeking them from the VA for months. The documents showed 4,188 bonuses were paid in that period to more than 2,150 employees.