IRS to pay back-refunds to illegal immigrants who didn’t pay taxes

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told Congress on Wednesday that even illegal immigrants who didn’t pay taxes will be able to claim back-refunds once they get Social Security numbers under President Obama’s temporary deportation amnesty.

The revelation — which contradicts what he told Congress last week — comes as lawmakers also raised concerns Mr. Obama’s amnesty could open a window to illegal immigrants finding ways to vote, despite it being against the law.

“While we may disagree about whether your deferred action programs were lawfully created and implemented, we are confident that we can all agree that these programs cannot be permitted to impair the integrity of our elections,” Republican members of Congress from Ohio wrote in a letter to Mr. Obama Wednesday, ahead of a hearing on the issue in the House on Thursday.

Mr. Obama’s new deportation policies, which carve most illegal immigrants out of danger of being removed, and could proactively grant as many as 4 million illegal immigrants work permits and Social Security numbers, are increasingly under fire for ancillary consequences such as tax credits and competition for jobs.

Mr. Koskinen, testifying to the House oversight committee, said the White House never asked him or anyone else at the IRS about the potential tax effects of his amnesty policy.

“I haven’t talked to the White House about this at all,” he said.

Sure he didn't. This is the guy who thought Lois Lerner was Superman's girlfriend and uses Mr Clean on IRS hard drives.

No lie...he actually said this. 

He also clarified his testimony to the Senate last week, where he acknowledged illegal immigrants who had paid taxes using substitute Social Security numbers but who gain real Social Security numbers when they are approved for the amnesty can apply for back-refunds of the Earned Income Tax Credit.

On Wednesday, he said even illegal immigrants who didn’t pay taxes will be able to apply for back-credits once they get Social Security numbers.

The EITC is a refundable tax credit, which means those who don’t have any tax liability can still get money back from the government.

“Under the new program, if you get a Social Security number and you work, you’ll be eligible to apply for the Earned Income Tax Credit,” Mr. Koskinensaid.

He said that would apply even “if you did not file” taxes, as long as the illegal immigrant could demonstrate having worked off-the-books during those years.

That expands the universe of people eligible for the tax credit by millions. He said only about 700,000 illegal immigrants currently work and pay taxes using an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, but as many as 4 million illegal immigrants could get a stay of deportation and work permits under the temporary amnesty, which would mean they would be eligible to claim back-refunds if they worked those years.

Rep. Mick Mulvaney, the South Carolina Republican who grilled Mr. Koskinenon the tax credits, said he was stunned the White House never checked with the IRS on the tax implications of its move.

“That’s just outrageous,” he said. “If Congress had passed a law doing exactly what the president did, we would have had not only an estimate of the costs, but we would have also been required to propose ways to pay for the programs. This is just another example of the administration operating outside the rule of law.”

Mr. Koskinen said he didn’t know how much money the tax refunds would cost, and said the White House never checked with him before announcing the amnesty. He said the maximum annual credit is between $500 and $600 for an individual.

Meanwhile, the concerns over voting are beginning to bubble up.

Rep. Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican, will hold a hearing on the issue Thursday.

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, who has told Mr. Obama that illegal immigrants could find ways to vote thanks to his policy, is slated to testify.

That was the plan all along.

IRS to pay back-refunds to illegal immigrants who didn’t pay taxes

Climate Change a Greater Threat Than Terrorism, White House Says

In his interview with Vox, President Obama said the media “absolutely” overstates the threat of terrorism in comparison to the threat of climate change.

Vox asked Obama, "Do you think the media sometimes overstates the level of alarm people should have about terrorism and this kind of chaos, as opposed to a longer-term problem of climate change and epidemic disease?"

White House Asking Authorization for Military to Fight ISIS

The president responded in the interview released this week: "Absolutely. And I don't blame the media for that. What's the famous saying about local newscasts, right? If it bleeds, it leads, right? You show crime stories and you show fires, because that's what folks watch, and it's all about ratings. And, you know, the problems of terrorism and dysfunction and chaos, along with plane crashes and a few other things, that's the equivalent when it comes to covering international affairs. … And climate change is one that is happening at such a broad scale and at such a complex system, it's a hard story for the media to tell on a day-to-day basis."

In today’s White House briefing, Press Secretary Josh Earnest explained why the White House views climate change as a greater threat than terrorism.

KARL: [The president] was asked if the media overstate the level of alarm people should have about terrorism, as opposed to longer-term problems of climate change and epidemic disease. He said absolutely. So, let me just clarify. Is the president saying, as he seems to be implying here, that the threat of climate change is greater than the threat of terrorism?

EARNEST: I think, Jon, the point that the president is making is that there are many more people on -- on an annual basis who have to confront the impact -- the direct impact on their lives -- of climate change, or on the spread of a disease, than on terrorism.

KARL: So, the answer is yes? The president thinks that climate change...

EARNEST: Well...

KARL: ... is a greater threat than terrorism?

EARNEST: ... I think the -- the point that the president is making is that when you're talking about the direct daily impact of these kind of challenges on the daily lives of Americans, particularly Americans living in this country, that that direct impact is more -- that more people are directly affected by those things than by terrorism.

KARL: So -- so, climate change is more of a clear and present danger to the United States than terrorism?

EARNEST: Well, I think even the Department of Defense has spoken to the significant threat that climate change poses to our national securityinterests. Principally because of the impact that it can have on countries with less well developed infrastructure than we have.

KARL: I'm not asking if it's a significant, but I'm asking if it's a greater threat.

EARNEST: Well, again, I -- I wouldn't have a whole lot more to say about what the president has said in that interview.

Climate Change a Greater Threat Than Terrorism, White House Says

Rev. Wright's Star Pupil

Pat Buchanan brought up some good points in the article below especially about slavery and Barry tip-toeing around the name Muhammad. I can't imagine, nor have I heard, any other president come up with this garbage. Barry's a very complex guy. He has Muslim blood flowing through his veins, calls waterboarding torture, wants to close Gitmo which now appears by attrition… but occasionally he drones a terrorist. I suggest the latter is to keep up appearances. His record speaks for itself.

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula The Egyptian-born Coptic Christian who shot a video was to blame for Benghazi not the Muslims who actually perpetrated it.

Nadal Hasan the Ft. Hood admitted terrorist killed 13 people shouting Allah Akbar. The atrocity was quickly rebranded by this administration as Workplace Violence.

Not long ago a Muslim cut off a woman's head in Oklahoma and again they called it Workplace Violence.

(Good thing the Tsarnaev brothers didn't have jobs)

Recently this administration tried to downplay the Taliban as terrorists preferring to call them armed insurgents.

Wasn't it Barry who supported the overthrow of Mubarak so the Muslim Brotherhood could rise to power in Egypt?

Barry does a 5 for 1 trade exchanging 5 top Taliban operatives for a worthless deserter... and does it behind the back of Congress.

As the rest of the world stood with France over the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Barry didn't attend and sent no one.

This administration goes berserk and threatens to boycott our only ally in the Middle East Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu from speaking before Congress. This is after Barry said they should go back to the 1967 borders.

Ask yourself this. Has he done more to help or hinder the onslaught of Islam?

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On a tip from Ed Kilbane

Rev. Wright’s Star Pupil

By Pat Buchanan

“A steady patriot of the world alone, The friend of every country — but his own.”

George Canning’s couplet about the Englishmen who professed love for all the world except their own native land comes to mind on reading Obama’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast.

After listing the horrors of ISIS, al-Qaida and Boko Haram, the president decided his recital of crimes committed in the name of Islam would be unbalanced, if he did not backhand those smug Christians sitting right in front of him.

“And lest we get on our high horse … remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

Why did he do it? He had to know that dredging up and dragging in real or imagined crimes of Christianity from centuries ago would anger Christians and obliterate whatever else he had to say.

Was it Edgar Allen Poe’s “Imp of the Perverse” prodding him to stick it to the Christians? Was it the voice of his old pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah “God damn America!” Wright muttering in his ear?

I believe this betrays something deeper. Obama revels in reciting the sins of Christianity and the West because he does not see himself as a loyal son of the civilization Christianity produced.

He sees himself as a citizen of the world who rejects the idea that our cradle faith Christianity is superior or that our civilization is superior. For he seems to seize every opportunity to point up the sins of Christianity and the West and the contributions of other faiths and civilizations.

Consider the bill of particulars in Obama’s indictment of crimes committed “in the name of Christ.”

Slavery was not invented by Christians. It existed when Christ was born. Fifth century Athens and the Roman republic had slaves. African slaves were brought not only to the New World in the 17th and 18th centuries but to Arabia and the Islamic world. Black African chieftains produced the captives for the slave trade.

Why then does Obama single out Christianity for indictment, when it was Christians and their teachings about human dignity, and Christian moral leaders and Christian nations that abolished the slave trade and slavery itself, which endured in the Islamic world into the 20th century?

Though he brought up crimes committed “in the name of Christ,” Obama did not mention the name of Muhammad. An oversight?

As for the Crusades, there were indeed atrocities on both sides during these expeditions and wars from the end of the 11th to the end of the 13th century, with the fall of Acre in 1291.

But were the Crusades, military expeditions by Christian knights to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslims who had overrun these lands where Jesus had walked, preached, and died, unjust wars?

Obama seems to see the Crusades from the Saracen point of view.

But does he really believe that when Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade at Clermont in 1095 to have Christian knights relieve the siege of Byzantium and liberate the Holy Land, this was the moral equivalent of Bin Laden declaring war to rid the Islamic Middle East of Americans?

Not long go, our popular culture portrayed Crusaders as heroes, their cause as noble. Among the most famous was Richard the Lionhearted who led the Third Crusade. Gen. Eisenhower entitled his war memoirs “Crusade in Europe.”

Like his derisive remarks about Middle Pennsylvanians, that they cling with bitterness to their bibles, guns and antipathy to immigrants, Obama’s Prayer Breakfast digression reveals much more about who the man is.

He dragged in the Inquisition. Yet, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn noted, Vladimir Lenin ordered more people executed in his first days in power than did the Spanish Inquisition in 300 years.

In drawing parallels between Christianity and Islam, Obama misses a basic point. Unlike Islam, which, in one century, conquered Arabia, the Middle and Near East, the Holy Land, North Africa and Spain, until the Muslim advance was halted by Charles Martel at Poitiers in France, Christianity did not conquer with the sword, but with the Word.

Only after 300 years of persecution and martyrdom were the Christians, through the Edict of Milan, allowed to practice their faith.

Christianity was not imposed on the Old World, but embraced.

America’s problem: With Islamic fanaticism surging, with ISIS using the term “Crusader” as a curse word equivalent to “Nazi,” we have as leader of the West a man who partly shares the enemy’s views about the Christian Crusades, and who seems at best ambivalent about the superiority of the civilization that he leads.

Again, Canning’s words come to mind:

“No narrow bigot he; — his reason’d view Thy interests, England, ranks with thine, Peru!

France at our doors, he sees no danger nigh, But heaves for Turkey’s woes the impartial sigh;

A steady patriot of the world alone, The friend of every country — but his own.”

Rev. Wright's Star Pupil

Oh No...We just killed an "armed insurgent"

Taliban commander who returned to Afghanistan as recruiter for ISIS after he was freed from Guantánamo Bay is killed in drone strike

Initially I thought this was one of the Taliban 5… it's not. But I guarantee you one day you'll be reading about them. This guy was captured during the Bush administration and turned over to Afghan authorities where he later escaped "house arrest".

 Over the years we listened to Lib's bitch and moan about waterboarding and how cruel it is... while infidels are beheaded and set afire in the Muslim world. We don't have the balls to try them in a military tribunal which would in all likelihood end with the death penalty. So what to do? Release them so ultimately they can be killed by a drone. As you can see a lot of planning went into this. 

BTW...they should have checked with Eric Shultz to find out if you pledge allegiance to ISIS if you're still considered an "armed insurgent".

---------------------------------------------------------

Mullah Abdul Rauf, 33, killed by NATO drone strike along with son-in-law

The former Guantánamo Bay detainee recently pledged allegiance to ISIS

The ex-Taliban commander claimed to be recruiting fighters for ISIS

By Thomas Burrows for MailOnline

Published: 07:57 EST, 9 February 2015 | Updated: 18:09 EST, 9 February 2015

Mullah Abdul Rauf, 33, was killed by a NATO drone

A former Guantánamo Bay detainee who recently pledged allegiance to ISIS has been killed in Afghanistan.

Mullah Abdul Rauf, 33, was killed by a NATO drone strike along with his son-in-law and six others as they drove through Kajaki district in the volatile southern province of Helmand, Afghan officials said. 

Rauf, an ex-Taliban commander, declared allegiance to Isis in January, and claimed to be recruiting fighters on behalf of the group which holds large swaths of Syria and Iraq.

He was branded by the Washington Post last month as 'the shadowy figure recruiting for the Islamic State in Afghanistan.'

A Pakistani militant commander said Rauf had been an important liaison between various factions which have broken away from the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban movements in recent months. 

His defection had caused deadly infighting and raised fears the movement was gaining footholds in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

A statement from Resolute Support, the new name for the NATO mission in Afghanistan, said 'coalition forces conducted a precision strike in Helmand province today, resulting in the death of eight individuals threatening the force'. 

Mohammad Jan Rasulyar, the deputy governor of Helmand, said the strike hit the militants' vehicle at around 10am.

Mullah Abdul Rauf, 33, was killed by a NATO drone strike along with his son-in-law and six others as they drove through Kajaki district in the volatile southern province of Helmand

Rauf was detained by the US in 2001 and spent six years in Guantánamo Bay, in Cuba (pictured) 

Rauf, also known as Abdul Rauf Aliza, had a long history of insurgency. 

He was detained by the US in 2001 and spent six years in Guantánamo, where he claimed he was nothing more than a bread delivery man for the Taliban.

According to a document released by WikiLeaks, American interrogators suspected at the time Rauf had more influence than he claimed. 

But he was released to Afghanistan for further detention in 2007. 

In Kabul, he managed to escape from house arrest and in 2011 acted as the Taliban's shadow governor in Uruzgan province

Rauf then formed a splinter group of fighters after falling out with the leader of the Taliban, Mullah Omar, and recently clashed with a Taliban unit in Helmand's Sangin district.

Locals say Rauf's men, numbering around 300, were often in conflict with Taliban officials in Helmand. 

There have been fears of ISIS making inroads in Afghanistan since US-led NATO forces ended their combat mission in late December, after 13 years of fighting.

Oh No...We just killed an "armed insurgent"

He never had any credibility to begin with

If you listened to NBC Nightly News you would have thought Ben Ghazi was closer to a character in the Sopranos then a terrorist attack.

Not to worry NBC has Lester Holt warming up on the bench.

He never had any credibility to begin with