I'm Back

      I know I have been gone for a long time and for that please accept my most sincere apologizes. A few of the reasons why I have been away for so long is I recently decided to leave my job of 16 years and I have been placing most of my energy in finishing up my master’s degree, and developing new skill sets.

But boy have I missed a lot of things in the news lately; we missed the entire fiasco with the government shutdown. Did the Repubs, and the TEA Party shut down the government or was it due to the fact that the President refused to negotiate on any of his policies.  We are now having record cold snaps here in the United States and I know that this has renewed the talk of global warming and that no matter how cold it is it is because the earth is warming by man made carbon usage, this is one topic that I do not want to get into on this blog.

I chose today to come back, and I have been debating it for a very long time, I needed to find a good point in which to come back. The State of the Union seems to me to be the most logical spot to start writing again; a new political year and a new year on the blog.

Things that I am looking for tonight:

1.     Will the president tout the withdraw of troops from Afghanistan as a victory or is he just sticking with his own timeline. Are we abandoning the citizens of Afghanistan and improving the conditions for the Taliban to take back control of the country? How is the state of the female in Afghanistan?

2.     As we have seen in the last few weeks, there is going to be a big push to talk about income inequality and how everyone should all get the same results from the same amount of efforts. This is what he calls “leveling the playing filed.”

3.     The third big issue he will cover is his actions that he took today, because that is the only reason he would sign and executive order on the day of the SOTU, the raising of the federal minimum wage for federal employees. I believe he will try to explain why he took this action and blaming it on the Republicans in the House. ( I will have much more to say about this in the future.)

So please watch and enjoy the SOTU address and it will surely bring about many new topics of discussion for the year to come.

Fun Times Friday, IRS Drops a Bombshell.

WOW is all that I can say.

An enforcement branch of the United States government, admitting that it was persecuting citizens and organizations based solely on their political beliefs. This is very unsettling news that just so happened to come out on a Friday, anyone out there think that was an accident? The IRS admits it was targeting conservative groups who had used the names of “tea party” or “patriot” in their applicants for tax-exempt status.

This does not come as a shock to me, and I would assume that it wouldn’t to anyone else either. I would imagine that the IRS would use its abilities to find out dirt on people and give that information then to the ruling party. Oh wait that should never happen in a free country. The federal government is listening to your phone calls, reading your emails (don’t mention Jihad, Muslim, terrorist, Christian, God, tea party or patriot, Benghazi cover-up, NRA, or that you may be a combat veteran), but now the government actually admitted to applying undue pressure to groups who are opposed to the sitting Administration. WOW

However, what should anger everyone is the response that we received today (Friday). The head of the IRS branch that deals with tax exempt status-Really we couldn’t bring someone with a little more prestige out in front of the media like the HEAD of the IRS??- tells everyone that it was an isolated incident from the Cincinnati IRS branch office. Low level career officials were the ones who made the decisions to use the terms “tea party” and “patriot” to request more information on applications that contained those terms. How can a few low level employees have that much power? And here is the kicker, the use of those two terms was not considered to have a political motive.  I understand that “high level” officials don’t have a whole lot of respect for the American people, or apparently the Constitution, and laws of the land, but how dumb do they think we are, this was 100% percent politically motivated.  Cause a few less ads, to come out against your political views and you may stop a few votes here or there. Was this enough to change the outcome of the election; probably not but there is no way of proving either side of that argument. This is a story you would think you would see come out of China or the former Soviet Union the not United States. I can’t wait to see what comes out of this during the congressional investigations. Do these emails and communications fall under executive privilege, like the ones from Fast and Furious? There should be some lengthy prison time in the future for someone.

Also in an organization as large as the IRS isn’t the head of the Tax Exempt Branch considered a low level employee? Just saying.

The head of the IRS Tax Exempt Branch??