Category Archives: Journalism

WorldNetDaily’s 1997 Lawsuit Exposed The IRS’s Targeted Audits

Journalism, Media, Old Right, Paleoconservatism, Taxation, The State

A libertarian journalist once called him “ornery.” The truth is that Joseph Farah is a fearless and visionary newsman (he has published this writer uncensored for over a decade). I was reminded of the qualities that have made WND a media powerhouse, as I listened to the Mark Levin Show in my GTI, en route to a run.

Brian Sussman was filling in for Levin. Twice did Sussman excerpt this WND news item dated April 30, 1999. Sussman went on to laud Joseph Farah’s Western Journalism Center (a parent company of WorldNetDaily) for presaging the flaccid mainstream, to proceed boldly against the Internal Revenue Service, as early as 1997.

The IRS had “infringed [the journalists’] First and Fourth Amendment rights during the 1996 audit. The journalists further alleg[ed] that the audit was politically motivated and quot[ed] the IRS agent who was directing the audit, Thomas Cederquist, who said that the audit was a ‘political case’ and that ‘the decisions were being made at the national level.’”

There is nothing new about what the BHO-directed agency of thieves is doing these days.

Posted by Sussman, the article is entitled “JOURNALISTS FIGHT IRS IN NEW FOIA SUIT: Agency failed to produce requested documents, April 30, 1999.”

An excerpt:

On the heels of their civil lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, journalists for the Western Journalism Center, parent company of WorldNetDaily, filed another lawsuit against the agency after the agency refused to disclose all the documents requested by the journalists in their Freedom of Information
Act request.The journalists initially filed their FOIA request on July 18, 1997,
in an effort to obtain IRS documents concerning the audit of the Western
Journalism Center in 1996. On October 20, 1997, the IRS responded to the journalists’ request, but they failed to turn over all the documents
that were requested. The attorney for the journalists is Judicial Watch Chairman Larry Klayman. Klayman’s Judicial Watch is a legal watchdog that currently has five lawsuits against the White House for such affairs as Chinagate and Filegate. Klayman said that it is his intention to ask the Court to order the IRS to conduct an immediate turnover of the Center’s entire file to the journalists. He commented that the IRS has no legal authority to detain any of the Center’s files and believes that the journalists will get the files
that were requested. In a related lawsuit against the IRS, Landmark Legal Foundation and its president, Mark Levin, filed a FOIA suit against the IRS in their investigation of politically-motivated audits such as the audit of the Western Journalism Center. A survey done by the Western Journalism Center revealed that at least 20 non-profit organizations “unfriendly” to the Clinton administration had faced IRS audits since 1993. Although Landmark has been stonewalled in their efforts to obtain IRS files leading to the names of those individuals responsible for the political audits, Klayman said the Western Journalism Center case should go forward because the journalists are asking for information on behalf of themselves. They aren’t asking for third party information, as is the case in the Landmark suit. Once the journalists have possession of their files, Klayman said that he will be able to show that the audit the journalists endured is the worst-case scenario of all the people and entities that were audited for political reasons. Speaking about the new suit against the IRS, Klayman said, “This case goes hand-in-hand with the other case that the Western Journalism Center filed against the IRS for civil rights violations.” The “other case” that Klayman is referring to is the civil case filed against the IRS during May of last year in which the journalists allege
that the IRS infringed on their First and Fourth rights during the 1996 audit. The journalists further allege that the audit was politically motivated and quote the IRS agent who was directing the audit, Thomas Cederquist, who said that the audit was a “political case” and that “the decisions were being made at the national level.” The journalist’s civil case is currently in the process of appeals. Although the IRS has tried to conjure up various legal reasons as to why they can’t hand over all of the documents that the journalists are requesting in the FOIA suit, Klayman said that, in reality, they’re trying to cover something up.

MORE.

From Sexting To Snooping In Surveillance-State USA

Barack Obama, Intelligence, Journalism, Law, Technology, The State

“From Sexting To Snooping In Surveillance-State USA” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

“…A pesky detail has eluded all those invincibly stupid special interests who’re piping up for the privacy of the press, as opposed to fighting for the privacy of all Americans.

Have the various tele-lawyers, the director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and protesting members of the House Judiciary Committee forgotten the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, whose provisions were extended until December 31, 2017, by the people’s representatives?

There is nothing new about warrantless wiretapping—other than that the American people haven’t been particularly exercised about them. They’ve trusted Uncle Sam to go about this activity judiciously.

Peeping Sam had promised, after all, that covert surveillance would never be executed against ‘United States persons.’ Were a “United States person” to fall under suspicion, he or she would not be subjected to surveillance without ‘judicial and congressional oversight,’ puled the same perverts. …

…The incontinent coverage of the AP outrage has a delusional quality. Contra those whose job it is to feign indignation on TV—America is not a free country. Media convulsions notwithstanding, the government is reading over your shoulder—has been doing so for some time. It can spy on Americans without breaking the law.

It is perfectly permissible for the state to monitor you, me or The Other Guy, without a ‘perfunctory nod to due process and legal restraint.’ In other words, without a court order. …”

Read the complete column, “From Sexting To Snooping In Surveillance-State USA,” now on WND.

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UPDATED: The Fox Is Guarding The Chicken Scoop [Sic] (On Other Crypto-Leftist Conservatives)

Bush, Conservatism, Critique, Ethics, IMMIGRATION, Intelligence, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Journalism, Media, Propaganda, Republicans

Last week, the once relatively forthright Jim Pinkerton cheerily informed Fox News Watch viewers that the media did a bang-up job in covering the Boston bombing, when the truth was exactly the opposite.

This week, Mr. Pinkerton belatedly changed his story, recounting the embarrassment of April 17, which Barely A Blog reported well before Big, Dishonest Media did:

Over the course of a few hours today (April 17), the hysterical and histrionic US media—front men and women for CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and the rest—have gone from asserting the arrest of a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings, to screening amateur images of their fantasy felon, to decamping to the courthouse in expectation of an arraignment, to confessing without a smidgen of shame that nothing of the sort had transpired.
We lied. OK, we fibbed. Let’s move on. Quick. There is to be no meta reporting about the misreporting.

Pinkerton went on to shill for Fox News, incorrectly crediting Megyn Kelly (I don’t care if I’ve misspelled her ridiculous name) with breaking the story about the brothers Tsarnaev as welfare recipients. Nonsense. As I chronicled in this week’s WND column, The Boston Herald did that shoe-leather reporting, not whatshername Kelly.

And as for the oozing over the odious George Bush: The entire Fox News Watch panel partook.

They call themselves “Fox News Watch”! It’s more like the Fox guarding the chicken scoop [sic].

Fox News mediated another magic meeting of the minds when it sent ditz Dana Perino to interview her ex-boss George Bush, who, sadly, has seen fit to emerge from hiding.

That chick is dumb.

Good for Tom Brokaw for refusing to attend the Annual White House Sycophants’ Dinner, held tonight. “It’s a sickening specter: Some of the most pretentious, worthless people in the country—in politics, journalism and entertainment—get together to revel in their ability to petition and curry favor with one another, usually to the detriment of the rest of us.”

UPDATE (4/27): MORE CONSERVATIVE CRYPTO-LEFTISM.

Mr. Pinkerton, who used to be a straight shooter, is an editor at The American Conservative. Recently, a prominent leader on the Old Right commented that TAC “has moved far to the left of The Nation.”

Yeah, Leon Hadar sounds as boring, redundant and ridiculous as Joan Walsh of Salon, when he suggests ever so subtly that Republicans “are hostile toward immigrants and toward Americans who are non-white and non-Christian.” (For a correction, read “The D-Bomb Has Dropped,” for example.)

You can locate a non sequitur in almost every one of Noah Millman’s lightweight, bloodless blogs. The eyes glance over the stuff in speed-read mode, savoring not a thing—not a turn of phrase or an original insight—as the mouth opens in a yawn.

Never boring, Larry Auster, RIP, was nevertheless not the rigorous “thinker” that a leaderless, desperate, dumbed-down traditionalist movement is casting him as, posthumously. But boy!, was Larry 100% perceptive in assessing, to quote Auster, the “founding editor of The American Conservative (known here as The Paleostinian Conservative), Scott McConnell, who has twice endorsed Obama for president yet continues to call himself a conservative.”

On this front, the 2006 “Final Solution to the Jewish State” preceded Larry in deconstructing the dissembling manner in which “TAC’s editor and publisher “introduc[ed his] readers to ‘Palestinian Liberation Theology.'”

UPDATE II: The Mad, Moronic, Unapologetic Showmen & Women Of Mainstream Media (The Bombing Suspects & The Know-Nothings Of Big Media)

Celebrity, Intelligence, Journalism, Media, Objectivism, Propaganda, Terrorism

Over the course of a few hours today (April 17), the hysterical and histrionic US media—front men and women for CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and the rest—have gone from asserting the arrest of a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings, to screening amateur images of their fantasy felon, to decamping to the courthouse in expectation of an arraignment, to confessing without a smidgen of shame that nothing of the sort had transpired.

We lied. OK, we fibbed. Let’s move on. Quick. There is to be no meta reporting about the misreporting.

“No arrests in Boston bombing.”

How ironic, then, that readers have demanded that I justify, even atone, for my assessment of the sum-total of one coequal (female) branch of the media-military-congressional complex:

“Big hair, an overbite, botox and mind-numbing banalities.”

UPDATE I: “FBI scolds media…” Justifiably. Still, pot, kettle, black.

UPDATE II (April 18): BEATING JON STEWART TO CALLING THE MEDIA’S BLUFF. You’d have saved time—and spared yourself the confusion generated on the Colosseum of cretins that is American mainstream media—had you, my reader, come straight to Barely A Blog for news and commentary served up straight. Think about it: Jon Stewart, a comedian who cleaves to fact (if not to liberty’s principles), only aired the truth later that evening.

Barely a Blog beat Jon Stewart to it. BAB called the media’s bluff @ 11:20 am on that day (April 17).

Show your appreciation.

UPDATE III: THE SUSPECTS & THE KNOW-NOTHINGS OF BIG MEDIA. “Arrogant, blasé, completely casual, brazen”: These are some of the adjectives the big mouths of big media are using to describe the demeanor of the 2 Boston bombing suspects in the footage released by the FBI.

These security and counter-intelligence loudmouths festooning cable and news networks and carrying forth on TV know nothing; they know no more than you do. They are just moving their giant gobs, performing as the compulsive exhibitionists that they are.