Big Brother Obama Is Watching

By Phyllis Schlafly

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

It has become evident that Barack Obama's definition of "fundamentally transforming the United States" includes Big Brother harassing selected conservatives while monitoring everybody's email and telephone traffic. These seem to be among the surprising duties of the Internal Revenue Service and the National Security Agency (NSA), respectively.

It's clear that the IRS has been unfairly targeting and mistreating more than 500 conservative organizations, especially if they use such words as "tea party," "liberty" or "patriotic" on their tax returns or tax-exempt applications. IRS then bogs them down with years of delays and demands for nosy and unnecessary information.

A House Ways and Means Committee hearing on June 4 exposed some of the IRS's obnoxious behavior. The representative of an Iowa anti-abortion organization applying for tax-exempt status said the IRS asked her about the content of her organization's prayers.

Sue Martinek of Coalition for Life of Iowa testified that the IRS asked every board member to sign a letter pledging in writing that they would not picket Planned Parenthood.

John Eastman, chairman of the National Organization for Marriage, said that the IRS leaked the organization's list of its best donors (a page in the tax return titled "not for public inspection"). The list was then published on the website of the Human Rights Campaign, a pro-gay organization which is the victim organization's "principal political opponent" on the marriage issue.

It's clear that the leak came directly from the IRS because the leaked page showed "internal IRS stamps," which exist only within the IRS. In another example, Karen Kinney, representing the San Fernando Valley Patriots, said the IRS gave her only 20 days to answer 35 items divided into 80 "sub-points of inquiry."

Lois Lerner, head of the IRS unit on tax-exempt organizations, took the Fifth Amendment when the House Committee tried to interrogate her.

Cleta Mitchell, a preeminent expert on political tax law, is representing nine conservative organizations that have been subjected to unusual delays and unlawful demands for confidential information. One of her clients has been waiting for approval of its nonprofit status since 2009.

Another serious problem is the wholesale stealing of U.S. military and industrial secrets and intellectual property by organized cyber hackers operating from China, Russia and India. But Obama was too scared to challenge China's president at their meeting last week.

Obama ended his recent meeting with China's President Xi Jinping with a secret session (no notetakers present). That's dangerous! How do we know Obama didn't promise future concessions like he did to the Russians (when he didn't realize the mic was live) during his last meeting with Putin's representative?

As to the snooping by the Obama administration of Americans' Internet usage and calling patterns, at least NSA employees have taken an oath of loyalty to the United States of America, but we do not have that assurance about the employees of the giant computer companies that are playing ball with the NSA to gather this nosy information about Americans. The big companies have hired thousands of foreigners to do their computer work and successfully pressured the Gang of Eight to include in their amnesty legislation provisions to greatly increase the number of college-educated foreigners they can import.

Obama says that judges on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (known as the FISA Court) approved the current NSA surveillance activities. In 2012, out of 1,856 applications for warrants, this court rejected zero, which sounds like FISA just rubber-stamps what the administration wants.

Obama said, "If people can't trust" the government officials responsible for the NSA snooping, "we're going to have some problems." At least the president got that right; we do have problems, both about the personal information our security agencies are collecting and about information not discovered about real terrorists.

The Obama sycophants are trying to spin the narrative that this Big Brotherism is for the purpose of locating potential terrorists (even though Obama already proclaimed the "end" of the war on terrorism). But with all this massive effort, why wasn't the Obama network able to screen out the family of the Boston Marathon bombers despite many obvious clues?

It tells us a lot about the Obama administration when we compare the administration's gathering of Internet and phone records of hundreds of millions of Americans with the fact that it was incapable of doing a competent background check on Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev either before or after his trip to Russia, even after being alerted by the Russians that he was dangerous.

Nor could the Obama administration figure out the mortal danger from the killer Major Nidal Hasan even after he put "Soldier of Allah" on his business card and gave a PowerPoint presentation to his military friends on what he wanted to do to infidels.