IRS and Internal Emails

Like a lot folks, I’m skeptical about the…accuracy…of the IRS’ lately claim that they can’t find Lois Lerner’s emails from before 2011.

My skepticism flows from a number of sources:

  • Why are they only now discovering the loss, a year after all that documentation was subpoenaed by House oversight committees?
  • The IRS claims a hard drive crash is at the heart of the loss—on what basis are we to believe that a single hard drive held all those documents?
  • The IRS’ hard drives—actually, the material stored on them—like all government hard drives/data, and like all such materials in the private, competitive sector, are backed up nightly: what are we to believe happened to all those backups?
  • Are we expected to believe that a professional IT crew would be so careless as to leave a single hard drive at the core of such a critical system? That they would leave all those backups at mercy of a single point of failure?

Note to those of you who believe the IRS’ claim: perhaps I can interest you in some beachfront property north of Santa Fe.

Do Liberals Object to Our Constitution Being Taught?

It seems so, even if the fix to a problem might be a bit much.

The South Carolina legislature has rankled liberal groups after requiring that a pair of public schools use state funds to teach the U.S. Constitution and other founding documents….

…amount be spent “for instruction in the provisions and principles of the United States Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Federalist Papers, including the study of and devotion to American institutions and ideals.”

Of course, this has angrified the Liberals.

The National Coalition Against Censorship, ACLU of South Carolina, and other groups said in a statement earlier this week that the new bill is a “symbolic penalty….”

“It represents unwarranted political interference with academic freedom and undermines the integrity of the higher education system in South Carolina,” the groups said.

Never mind that not teaching our founding documents, the core documents of our social compact, the documents of our debate over them (aside: the Anti-Federalist Papers should have been on that list, too) doesn’t at all undermine the integrity of South Carolina’s higher education system. Not teaching these doesn’t at all politicize the classrooms.

Not a bit of it.