"Mistakes Were Made"

[3rdnlng]

http://sweetness-lig...-care-exchanges

 

 

IRS Employees Union: Keep Us Out Of Exchanges

By Loren Heal | May 17, 2013

 

The National Treasury Employees Union, NTEU, which represents the IRS employees who harassed and delayed tea party and conservative groups, has come out against the proposal to put federal workers into exchange-based health insurance.

 

Fancy that: the people in charge of deciding whether you go into an exchange, and who decided it doesn’t matter whether your state doesn’t want one, don’t want to be in one themselves…

 

The union has a handy way for its members to contact their representatives in Congress to lobby against the legislation.

 

See the graphic above, which is the NTEU’s online form to lobby Congress to let them out of the exchanges.

 

Meanwhile, lest we forget, the NTEU worked long and hard to get Obama elected, and re-elected. Here is their press release, after the 2012 elections:

 

NTEU Leader Applauds Obama Victory; Turns Immediate Focus to Upcoming Lame-Duck Session

Wednesday, November 7 2012

 

Washington, D.C.—The leader of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) today applauded the re-election of President Barack Obama.

 

“NTEU supported the re-election of President Obama as being in the best interests of our country and of the dedicated men and women of the federal workforce,” said NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley. “NTEU is also pleased that so many of our candidates for Senate seats and our staunchest supporters in the House won their races.”

 

All of whom were vehemently anti-Tea Party.

 

NTEU’s efforts on behalf of President Obama and key candidates spanned the country. “Our 2012 election plan has been in place since the beginning of the year,” said President Kelley. “Many chapters and members were actively involved educating and organizing various types of activities around the country including candidate nights and volunteering for campaigns.”

 

NTEU’s efforts focused on battleground states where races for the presidency, Senate and House seats were competitive and where the union has substantial numbers of NTEU members including Virginia, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana.

 

In the days before the election, NTEU members volunteered for phone-banking and canvassing, with a particular focus on contacting other NTEU members and urging them to vote for candidates who support federal employees and federal employee issues…

 

The NTEU is being far too modest here. They also helped to suppress Obama’s opposition, thanks to their workers tireless efforts at the IRS.

[B-Man]

From a former IRS employee;

 

 

The other thing I’d point out that is very odd about this is that IRS has been prohibited – by that same RRA98 – from using enforcement statistics to measure employee performance. Nobody’s allowed to rate you on how many cases you made, how many arrests, convictions, seizures, levies, taxes assessed, etc. Managers get in big trouble for that, but they still have to evaluate employee performance somehow, so the Service devised this whole scheme that revolves around time.

 

Elapsed time on a case is a huge issue. Agents get dinged if they’ve got too many hours or if a case drags on for too long. It’s all tracked in the computerized case management system, and managers get in trouble with their managers if their “inventory” (and yes, that is the term that is used to describe your case load) has overage cases. I can’t stress enough how important this is to the Service, and every employee knows it. Your performance report is going to be affected by overage cases, too many hours on a case, etc., but more importantly, the manager’s performance report is going to be affected, and her manager’s, and so on.

 

To have a statutory or Internal Revenue Manual deadline like 270 days to process something and to blow past without consequences is inconceivable to me. The day that thing went overage, the manager gets a report, and the employee gets asked why. The manager would keep getting reports until it was fixed, and if it wasn’t fixed soon, the SAC would be on the phone, because he or she is getting the same report, and his or her performance report (and bonuses) is on the line.

 

I obviously can’t speak for EO, but in CID, for an agent to have multiple overage cases like that would be impossible. This simply could not happen without dire consequences for everyone in the chain, and as a result, it never happened.

 

So, how do I explain a revenue agent in EO who has open cases that are 300 or even 700 days overdue? The only possible explanation is that management was okay with it, because it is absolutely impossible that they – and this includes everyone in the chain – didn’t know. Maybe they’ve got a good reason why they were okay with it, but the whole chain had to sign off on it. All the way to DC.

 

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/05/on-irc-section-1203.php

[DC Tom]

From a former IRS employee;

 

 

 

 

http://www.powerline...ection-1203.php

 

Two points:

1) By and large, the whole story is reasonably consistent with similar government processes I've either seen first-hand or read the procedures for.

2) This hadn't occurred to me until now (and should have), but there's a reasonable chance that for some of this case work the IRS uses contractors, not direct federal employees. I don't know for sure, and suspect it would have been reported by now if so...but I DO know for sure that other, similar federal investigative offices use contractors for the investigating. And it's a little bit easier for a contractor to "go rogue".

[Cinga]

Meanwhile, back at the bottom of the mud pit, former IRS Commissioner Shulman says he doesn't remember why he visited the White House 118 times, since 2010 other than to take his kids for the Easter Egg Roll... Hmmmmm

 

Do they still call it that? Isn't it a Spring Roll now?

 

http://washingtonexaminer.com/irs-official-i-discussed-obamacare-during-white-house-visits/article/2530262

[3rdnlng]

Meanwhile, back at the bottom of the mud pit, former IRS Commissioner Shulman says he doesn't remember why he visited the White House 118 times, since 2010 other than to take his kids for the Easter Egg Roll... Hmmmmm

 

Do they still call it that? Isn't it a Spring Roll now?

 

http://washingtonexaminer.com/irs-official-i-discussed-obamacare-during-white-house-visits/article/2530262

 

 

Seriously, he can't remember? Weekly visits and there is supposed to be a disconnect between the White House and the IRS? I think we can safely say he's lying.

[OCinBuffalo]

Heh.

 

It’s as if having to testify before Congress is just so beneath her.

 

 

Wonder where she gets that from?

 

 

 

 

 

 

How could the #IRS thing happen? Just look to Lois Lerner: a toxic mix of hubris and idiocy. -- Tom Anderson

 

Seeing this, the first image that popped into my head(STG):

 

 

And I thought I was all cool, with my original thought and everything....until I scrolled down...and found this:

 

 

 

So, somebody beat me too it!

[Chef Jim]

Seeing this, the first image that popped into my head(STG):

 

 

And I thought I was all cool, with my original thought and everything....until I scrolled down...and found this:

 

 

 

So, somebody beat me too it!

 

I've always hated that smug looking down his nose at his minions look.

[B-Man]

Lois ‘I’ve Done Nothing Wrong’ Lerner Signed IRS Letters Harassing Tea Party Groups.

 

[3rdnlng]

Lois ‘I’ve Done Nothing Wrong’ Lerner Signed IRS Letters Harassing Tea Party Groups.

 

 

She's been placed on leave.

[B-Man]

She's been placed on leave.Paid Vacation

 

updated.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

.

True The Vote Sues IRS Employees In Their Personal Capacity.

 

"True the Vote is not only suing the IRS, but also taking action against the IRS employees who participated in the harassment of the voter education and election monitoring organization. Those employees could personally be held liable to pay damages that would be established in litigation.”

 

 

"Punch back twice as hard" -- President Barack Obama.

 

 

 

 

 

.

Edited May 24, 2013 by B-Man

[B-Man]

 

 

[IDBillzFan]

One inconvenient truth of the government admitting it targeted and harassed opposing political views is that is has increasingly shut up every liberal dolt who yelled "conspiracy theory" when left without an actual response to the myriad administration discretions taking place over the past years.

 

Things like the casino owner (VanderSloot) being twice audited after being called out by the WH for donating a million dollars to Romney. How Harry Reid knew the details of Romney's taxes. The sporadic reporting of Tea Party groups having their tax exempt status overly scrutinized.

 

And another likely forgotten case in point, the multiple raids on Gibson guitars.

 

http://www.realclear...nse_100343.html

 

The inexplicable raid nearly two years ago on a guitar maker for using allegedly illegal wood that its competitors also used was another targeting by this administration of its political enemies.

 

On Aug. 24, 2011, federal agents executed four search warrants on Gibson Guitar Corp. facilities in Nashville and Memphis, Tenn., and seized several pallets of wood, electronic files and guitars. One of the top makers of acoustic and electric guitars, including the iconic Les Paul introduced in 1952, Gibson was accused of using wood illegally obtained in violation of the century-old Lacey Act, which outlaws trafficking in flora and fauna the harvesting of which had broken foreign laws.

 

In one raid, the feds hauled away ebony fingerboards, alleging they violated Madagascar law. Gibson responded by obtaining the sworn word of the African island's government that no law had been broken.

 

In another raid, the feds found materials imported from India, claiming they too moved across the globe in violation of Indian law. Gibson's response was that the feds had simply misinterpreted Indian law.

 

Interestingly, one of Gibson's leading competitors is C.F. Martin & Co. According to C.F. Martin's catalog, several of their guitars contain "East Indian Rosewood," which is the exact same wood in at least 10 of Gibson's guitars. So why were they not also raided and their inventory of foreign wood seized?

 

Grossly underreported at the time was the fact that Gibson's chief executive, Henry Juszkiewicz, contributed to Republican politicians. Recent donations have included $2,000 to Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and $1,500 to Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn.

 

By contrast, Chris Martin IV, the Martin & Co. CEO, is a long-time Democratic supporter, with $35,400 in contributions to Democratic candidates and the Democratic National Committee over the past couple of election cycles.

 

Even the die-hard knob-gobbing Obamafans are having a rough time supporting this administration these days.

[B-Man]

 

Lawmakers zero in on IRS meetings at White House

 

Top IRS officials, whose agency was under investigation for targeting conservative groups, visited the Obama White House more than 100 times over two years while the probe was going on, far more often than in previous administrations and frequently enough that Republicans suspect White House officials knew about the targeting.

 

Lawmakers now investigating the Internal Revenue Service practice zeroed in on those nearly weekly White House meetings to determine whether an IRS official — or someone higher up in the administration — had approved the targeting and whether it was politically motivated.

The frequent meetings also raised questions about the White House's claims that it couldn't have instigated the targeting of conservative groups because it took a hands-off approach to the tax agency, going so far as to describe it as independent of the administration even though it's part of the Treasury Department.

 

Former Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Doug Shulman visited the White House 118 times between 2010 and 2011. Acting Director Steven Miller, who took over at the IRS in November, also made numerous visits to the White House, though variations in the spelling of his name in White House visitor logs makes it difficult to determine exactly how many times.

 

The frequent trips to the White House under Obama far outnumbered the times other administrations felt the need to meet with the IRS, according to Mark Everson, who led the IRS under former President George W. Bush. Everson said he remembers making only one trip to the White House between 2003 and 2007 and said he felt like he'd "moved to Siberia" because of the isolation.

 

"I fear the IRS is on a slippery slope as regards its traditional independence due to being so intertwined with a major domestic policy initiative like health care reform," Everson said.

 

Shulman said he couldn't remember why he went to the White House so frequently, though some of the visits were probably about the IRS' role in implementing Obama's health care reforms, he told a congressional committee. Logs show Shulman met with two West Wing officials working on health care.

 

"The IRS has a major role in the money flow," Shulman explained to Congress.

 

But while the health care-related visits were explained in the logs, many others included no explanation.

 

http://washingtonexaminer.com/lawmakers-zero-in-on-irs-meetings-at-white-house/article/2530439

[3rdnlng]

http://openchannel.n...tters-show?lite

 

 

Additional scrutiny of conservative organizations’ activities by the IRS did not solely originate in the agency’s Cincinnati office, with requests for information coming from other offices and often bearing the signatures of higher-ups at the agency, according to attorneys representing some of the targeted groups. At least one letter requesting information about one of the groups bears the signature of Lois Lerner, the suspended director of the IRS Exempt Organizations department in Washington.

Jay Sekulow, an attorney representing 27 conservative political advocacy organizations that applied to the Internal Revenue Service for tax-exempt status, provided some of the letters to NBC News. He said the groups’ contacts with the IRS prove that the practices went beyond a few “front line” employees in the Cincinnati office, as the IRS has maintained.

 

 

“We've dealt with 15 agents, including tax law specialists -- that's lawyers -- from four different offices, including (the) Treasury (Department) in Washington, D.C.,” Sekulow said. “So the idea that this is a couple of rogue agents in Cincinnati is not correct.”

Edited May 29, 2013 by 3rdnlng

[OCinBuffalo]

You heard it here first: The O/U on Jay Sekulow becoming the new liberal bogey man is 2 weeks.

 

I don't know about the rest of you, but Jay Sekulow is handling this quite well. I guarantee that this repeating pattern:

1. Release a tidbit of bad info to the press.

2. Have the WH deny part of it, or try to compartmentalize it, and then have their media lap dogs run and post it online

3. Release a little more, but not too much, that refutes the denial, breaks the story open again, and forces the lapdogs to eat their own schit

that we have been seeing since the beginning, is no accident, and while he many not have created it, he is executing it brilliantly.

 

The hilarious part is: you look at RCP, and every day you see these lame attempts by the liberals to put a cover in this thing:

1. "Ok, it's bad, but here's what we can learn..."

2. "It's not like the higher mangers, or the campaign was involved"

3. "This is not an indictment of the big government/liberal agenda"(Take heed: These are the Ds that have seen the very real danger here, clearly, and are setting up to blame Holder, then Obama if necessary, to preserve the party)

4. "This is not a real scandal, this is a controversy, and it's a lesson about fixing government" (These are the other Dems, who will gladly destroy the party for 2 elections in a row at least, to save Obama. They foolishly are playing right into what is coming soon)

5. "I have nothing useful to add, other than I wish this story would just go away, because I'm tired of being laughed at in the comments section"

 

If somebody besides Sekulow was running this show, these covers would start to gain traction. But, every day, another detail leeks out, that is news, whether they like it or not, and it blows their cover right off. It's like watching people run and wipe out/run into something on youtube. I am never going to tire of it.

 

It's really cracking me up. Each "Ok already, we know what we know, this is the full extent of it, it's bad, but it's time to move on" story is , because they are like Qadafi's "line of death": they move backwards every day.

 

And then, NBC finds out that signatures from higher ups are on the letters...that they go from Sekulow. Now, the extent of "what we know", from yesterday: isn't. There goes the premise for the cover, and the columnist, right into the wall, squish.

 

Frank Luntz is done(and I still don't know how the hell he achieved Karl Rove status). No, Jay Sekulow's face is going to be on MSNBC et al...so that the hater, I mean host, can spew loud incoherence at his picture, as if that's going to help. Will it be..cathartic?

 

No, it will be even more hilarious, for me. Given that MSNBC's ratings are now the lowest they have been since 2006, I am probably 1 of 10 people for miles around who watches them, and I only do if for the humor value.

[B-Man]

Obama’s ‘Chicago Way’ :The administration’s political tactics are straight out of the Daley playbook.

 

By John Fund

 

The scandals swirling around the Obama administration have many journalists scratching their heads as to how “hope and change” seem to have been supplanted by “arrogance and fear.” Perhaps it’s time they revisit one of their original premises about Barack Obama: that he wasn’t influenced by the Chicago Daley machine. You know: the machine that boosted his career and whose protégés — including Valerie Jarrett, David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, and his wife, Michelle — he brought to Washington with him.

 

The liberal take on the president was best summed up by Slate magazine’s Jacob Weisberg, who wrote last year that Obama “somehow passed through Chicago politics without ever developing any real connection to it.” It’s true that Obama initially kept some distance from the machine. But by the time he ran for the Senate in 2004, his main political Sherpas were Axelrod, who was then the chief consultant to Mayor Richard M. Daley, and Jarrett, the mayor’s former deputy chief of staff. As Scott Simon of NPR noted: “While calling for historic change globally, [Obama] has never professed to be a reformer locally.” The Daley machine, which evolved over 60 years from a patronage-rich army of worker bees into a corporate state in which political pull and public-employee unions dominate, has left its imprint on Obama. The machine’s core principle, laid out in an illuminating Chicago Independent Examiner primer on “the Chicago Way,” is that at all times elections are too important to be left to chance. John Kass, the muckraking columnist for the Chicago Tribune who for years has warned that Obama was bringing “the Chicago way” to Washington, sums up his city like this: “Once there were old bosses. Now there are new bosses. And shopkeepers still keep their mouths shut. Tavern owners still keep their mouths shut. Even billionaires keep their mouths shut.”

 

“We have a sick political culture, and that’s the environment Barack Obama came from,” Jay Stewart, the executive director of the Chicago Better Government Association, warned ABC News when Obama ran in 2008. He noted that Obama had “been noticeably silent on the issue of corruption here in his home state.”

[B-Man]

'The Lois Lerner State'

By Rich Lowry

 

For Politico today, I wrote about the broader implications of the IRS scandal:

It is appropriate that the worst scandal of the Obama administration – the IRS targeting of conservatives –

is a scandal of administrators and bureaucrats, of otherwise faceless people endowed with immense power over their fellow citizens and running free of serious oversight from elected officials

.

 

They are the shock troops of the vast bureaucratic apparatus of the federal government. Its growth has been one of President Obama’s chief goals, and the one he has had the most success in achieving. He has greatly enhanced the reach and power of regulatory agencies that are an inherent offense against self-government, even when they aren’t enforcing the law in a biased way.

 

The administration’s corruption isn’t bags of cash or lies about interns;

it is the distortion of our form of government by sidestepping democratic procedures and accountability and vesting authority in bureaucrats. The administrative state is, fundamentally, the Lois Lerner state.

Edited May 30, 2013 by B-Man

[DC Tom]

'The Lois Lerner State'

 

That's a pretty damned accurate synopsis of what's wrong with the government.

[OCinBuffalo]

That's also a pretty damned accurate synopsis(dammit, it took my 5 times to type that right) of what you are going to hear for both the 2014 and 16 election.

 

As I said above, as of now there are only 3 kinds of Democrats:

 

1. Those that want to protect the agenda, and will sacrifice anybody to do it.

2. Those that want to protect Obama, and will sacrifice the agenda to do it, and anybody as well.

3. Dipshits who are going about their business believing that this is all "no big deal", because that's what they read at Slate, or heard from some celebrity at TMZ, and are in for the shock of their idiot lives over the next 4 years.

Edited May 31, 2013 by OCinBuffalo

[B-Man]

 

IRS idea of “a few” turns out to be … 88

 

 

by Ed Morrissey

 

How many IRS employees were involved in targeting conservative groups for “extra scrutiny,” delays, and harassment? The IRS insisted that the issue was limited to “a few low-level employees” in one office. When it came time to secure computers and lock down files for investigators, though, the IRS concept of “few” seems a little … bloated:

The Internal Revenue Service has told House GOP investigators they have identified 88 IRS employees who may have documents relevant to the congressional investigation into targeting of conservative groups, according to a congressional source familiar with the investigation.

The IRS asked these employees to preserve all the “responsive documents” on their computers, and it has been in the process of collecting it all to comply with congressional requests for information. The IRS missed its May 21st deadline to turn over documents to the House Ways and Means Committee. …

The request for documents was a bipartisan one, but Republicans are privately preparing to seize on the fact that if nearly 90 IRS employees may have been somehow involved in this targeting, it is evidence that the controversy extends well beyond the mistakes by a few low level employees.

 

You think?......................... The IRS says that the number simply reflects their desire to be responsive, which would be a first, but that doesn’t pass the laugh test. If the practice was contained to just “a few” people working on their own without orders, there is no way that you’d have eighty-eight people connected to it. Unless the IRS wants to argue that it’s supervision is so poor and ineffective that 88 employees can conspire to target people for their political beliefs and no one in authority would have the first clue about it, that’s an absurd posture to take. Don’t bet against that argument getting rolled out at some point, though.

 

In related news, the IRS has also stiffed the Senate Finance Committee’s demand for documentation:

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) declined Friday afternoon to meet a Senate Finance Committee deadline for answering detailed questions about the origins of the IRS scandal. The questions had been submitted jointly nearly

two weeks ago

by Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) and Ranking Member Orrin Hatch (R-UT).

In a joint statement to Breitbart News, Baucus and Hatch said:

“It’s disappointing that the IRS failed to produce any of the documents requested by the Committee.

“This is an agency that revolves around making the American taxpayer meet hard deadlines each and every year when they file their taxes, oftentimes penalizing those that are late.

“The IRS needs to do much better.”

 

 

It’s one thing to stiff the House, where Republicans control the Ways and Means Committee and the optics are a little (but not a lot) more partisan. Baucus and Hatch took pains to make the Senate committee request bipartisan and reasonable, and yet … the IRS couldn’t bring itself to comply here, either. If they want to leave the impression that they’re haughty and unaccountable — or more accurately, even more so than normally thought — they’re doing a bang-up job this month.

 

 

We may start seeing a few subpoenas from both chambers of Congress soon … and by “a few,” I could mean 88 or more.