"Mistakes Were Made"

[IDBillzFan]

From the National Journal:

 

 

Obama's Outrage Focused on Republicans More Than IRS

 

If he's that outraged, I expect him to send Eric Holder to look into this with Trayvon Martin-like speed.

[Magox]

If he's that outraged, I expect him to send Eric Holder to look into this with Trayvon Martin-like speed.

 

Ya, on the Republicans.

[OCinBuffalo]

From the National Journal:

 

 

Obama's Outrage Focused on Republicans More Than IRS

Again Magox tries to deflect his guilt onto Obama

Ya, on the Republicans.

And nothing on you, huh Magox?

 

I wonder how you sleep at night.

[IDBillzFan]

Ya, on the Republicans.

 

As soon as he's done going through the AP phone logs.

[Magox]

 

 

I wonder how you sleep at night.

 

Usually laying down with my eyes closed.

[IDBillzFan]

Hey...we finally know who is to blame for all the president's problems.

 

http://www.theatlant...limbaugh/65187/

[keepthefaith]

Hey...we finally know who is to blame for all the president's problems.

 

http://www.theatlant...limbaugh/65187/

 

Fundraising still in full swing. Amazing.

[B-Man]

Fundraising still in full swing. Amazing.

 

THE CAMPAIGN THAT NEVER ENDS...

 

 

Lets see, IRS, State Dpt. coverup, Justice dpt/ AP phone records...............do I sense a pattern of abuse in this administration ?

 

naaaaaah.

 

 

.

Edited May 13, 2013 by B-Man

[IDBillzFan]

Fundraising still in full swing. Amazing.

 

Well, it's not like he can govern because, y'know, Limbaugh.

[B-Man]

It’s Not Just a Local IRS Scandal

By Jonah Goldberg

 

 

There’s an annoying spin on the IRS scandal that pops up all over the place. Nearly all of the accounts of the IRS’s policy of targeting conservative groups refer to the mistakes of ”a Cincinnati field office”. This makes it sound like it’s just one obscure branch out of many out there in the sticks that made an unfortunate mistake. Cincinnati IRS agents go rogue!

 

But here’s the thing. Cincinnati is where the Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division operates. In other words, when the IRS decides to single out certain groups, this is likely where that would happen.

 

It’s like saying a NASA field office in Merritt Island, Fla., made the decision to launch a rocket. Merritt Island is where the Kennedy Space Center is located.

 

It reminds me a little of the Washington Post reporter who dismissed the Gosnell case because it’s a “local crime story.” Well, since crime in the Platonic Realm of Ideas is remarkably rare, pretty much all crimes are committed in some actual physical location. Similarly, there’s no reason to keep saying a “Cincinnati field office” as if there are other field offices that could have decided to do this, but didn’t.

 

How high up or widespread knowledge of this practice was remains to be determined. But the fact that the people responsible work in Cincinnati is worse than meaningless — it affirmatively helps the IRS minimize the scandal.

[OCinBuffalo]

Usually laying down with my eyes closed.

Oh, of course, on a bed whose sheets are made out of dreams you've stolen from the children, that is supported on the backs of the middle class.

 

Hey...we finally know who is to blame for all the president's problems.

 

http://www.theatlant...limbaugh/65187/

 

Are you high? Didn't I already make that clear?

Edited May 14, 2013 by OCinBuffalo

[B-Man]

The Extent of IRS Malice

By David French

 

Let me begin with your IRS question of the day — presented to a Tennessee conservative group:

List each past or present board member, officer, key employee

and

members of their families

who:

a) Has served on the board of another organization.

b) Was, is or plans to be a candidate for public office. Indicate the nature of each candidacy.

c) Has previously conducted similar activities for another entitty.

d) Has previously submitted an application for tax exempt status.

 

 

Got that?............................................... Of course it’s irrelevant that key members of the MSM have spouses in the Obama administration, and the MSM presumes they can remain impartial, but the Internal Revenue Service must know if a tea-party leader’s daughter has filed an application for tax exemption for a local charity, and the IRS must know if his wife might want to run for city council. Unbelievable. And unconstitutional.

 

 

To be clear, these ridiculous questions were not just targeted at large, well-funded conservative groups but also at small, “mom and pop” style organizations that want to do things like rent space in the local public library or church fellowship hall to educate citizens about the Constitution and the history of our nation’s founding. We’re talking about groups that wanted to raise and spend just a few thousand dollars. But no group was too small to be spared the malice of the federal government.

 

 

And these groups got hit with questions that were not only blatantly unconstitutional — like the question above — but with document requests so voluminous they required an entire legal team to respond. We did the work pro bono for our clients (we estimate we’ve spent 2,000 hours on the cases already), but those groups that didn’t have the benefit of pro bono counsel had to choose between abandoning their application, struggling to answer on their own (sometimes inadvertently providing information they didn’t have to provide), or spending money they didn’t have on competent counsel.

 

 

Barney Frank is reputed to have said “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.” It’s looking more like government is the thing you inflict on your opponents.

Edited May 14, 2013 by B-Man

[3rdnlng]

Oh, of course, on a bed whose sheets are made out of dreams you've stolen from the children, that is supported on the backs of the middle class.

 

 

 

Are you high? Didn't I already make that clear?

 

Clarity isn't one of your strong points.

[birdog1960]

great discussion on PBs on this: http://www.pbs.org/n...irs2_05-13.html about the group's purpose: political 527 (political) or 501 cX4 (social welfare) status. as the duke law prof points out, ask 100 random americans on the street that question and most would very likely answer political, it's therefore not a stretch for the irs to ask the question. the major difference of course between the 2 categories is the need to disclose donors. why wouldn't the tea party want to do this?

Edited May 14, 2013 by birdog1960

[DC Tom]

great discussion on PBs on this: http://www.pbs.org/n...irs2_05-13.html about the group's purpose: political 527 (political) or 501 cX4 (social welfare) status. as the duke law prof points out, ask 100 random americans on the street that question and most would very likely answer political, it's therefore not a stretch for the irs to ask the question.

 

As I already said. The general nature of the questions isn't out of line, though the level of detail requested is pretty ridiculous.

 

And the issue isn't the questions themselves as much as it is the targeting of specific groups.

 

the major difference of course between the 2 categories is the need to disclose donors. why wouldn't the tea party want to do this?

 

Why would they? Is it a requirement of any tax law to disclose donors to a non-profit?

[birdog1960]

 

Why would they? Is it a requirement of any tax law to disclose donors to a non-profit?

not a law expert but the duke guy is. 527's need to disclose donors. if he's incorrect, i'm sure we'll hear about it soon.

[DC Tom]

not a law expert but the duke guy is. 527's need to disclose donors. if he's incorrect, i'm sure we'll hear about it soon.

 

So the real question is: are they 527's, or 503's, or 501©'s...or should they be? The facts seem to be that a great many of these organizations filed as 501's, thus the question was well out of scope for the filing. As your link stated.

 

Now, it could be that the IRS was just stupid...they had a bunch of organizations that may or may not have been political organizations filing as social organizations, and needed to ask "Should you be a 527, or a 501?" And they !@#$ed up the asking of the question. I actually think that's a little more likely than not - a lot of the "Tea Party," "Patriot," or "Constitutional" movements are less an overt "political" platform than they are a "government philosophy" platform (so to speak), and in many cases could be considered a 501. But the borderline nature of a lot of them and the glut of filings the IRS no doubt received after the 2010 mid-terms required some extra scrutiny to be paid to them (in the bureaucratic "hey, these are sorta ambiguous, so we should take a little more care in evaluating them") which snowballed into a "flag anything with 'Tea Party' in the name and harass the **** out of them" cluster!@#$.

 

Quite frankly, it happens all the time...ask any Muslim trying to get a security clearance, or any black woman trying to get a mortgage.

 

 

(And getting back to your previous post...ask 100 Americans about tax law? The majority answer is likely to be wrong, as !@#$ed as the tax code is.)

[OCinBuffalo]

Clarity isn't one of your strong points.

Yes, but inebriation is. And, that's all that matters. I can drink you under the table, then do posts here, and largely get away with it.

great discussion on PBs on this: http://www.pbs.org/n...irs2_05-13.html about the group's purpose: political 527 (political) or 501 cX4 (social welfare) status. as the duke law prof points out, ask 100 random americans on the street that question and most would very likely answer political, it's therefore not a stretch for the irs to ask the question. the major difference of course between the 2 categories is the need to disclose donors. why wouldn't the tea party want to do this?

Oh look birdog following the lead of his PBS heroes, and trying to make this into a process story....

 

...in the vain hope that this will distract from the content story.

 

[B-Man]

Anti-conservative effort was directed from Washington, D.C., and was not a rogue operation as the administration has claimed.

 

 

IRS Scandal About to Blow Wide Open?

 

 

 

To no one’s surprise, it is already evident that the Obama administration has been lying about the scope of the IRS’s harassment of conservative-leaning non-profits. The Washington Post has obtained documents that show the anti-conservative effort was directed from Washington, D.C., and was not a rogue operation out of the agency’s Cincinnati office, as the administration has claimed:

Internal Revenue Service officials in Washington and at least two other offices were involved in the targeting of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, making clear the effort reached well beyond the branch in Cincinnati that was initially blamed, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

 

IRS officials at the agency’s Washington headquarters sent queries to conservative groups asking about their donors and other aspects of their operations, while officials in the El Monte and Laguna Niguel offices in California sent similar questionnaires to tea party-affiliated groups.

 

IRS employees in Cincinnati also told conservatives seeking the status of “social welfare” groups that a task force in Washington was overseeing their applications, according to interviews with the activists. …

 

In one instance, … Ron Bell, an IRS employee, informed an attorney representing a conservative group focused on voter fraud that the application was under review in Washington. On several other occasions, IRS officials in D.C. and California sent detailed questionaires to conservative groups asking more than a dozen questions about their voter outreach and other activities, according to the documents.

 

“For the IRS to say it was some low-level group in Cincinnati is simply false,” said Cleta Mitchell, a partner in the law firm Foley & Lardner LLP who sought to communicate with IRS headquarters about the delay in granting tax-exempt status to True the Vote.

 

Moreover, details of the IRS’s efforts to target conservative groups reached the highest levels of the agency in May 2012, far earlier than has been disclosed, according to Republican congressional aides briefed by the IRS and the Treasury Inspector for Tax Administration on the details of their reviews.

 

 

None of this comes as a surprise to conservatives. I had lunch today with two conservative donors who have a great deal more money than I do, both of whom were targeted years ago by the Democrat-controlled IRS. One of my friends had wrapped up an audit, and then, the following year, was identified as a major Republican donor in the New York Times. A week after the Times article appeared, he got a call from the IRS, saying they were going to audit him. He expressed surprise, telling the IRS agent that he had a letter from the agency to the effect that he should be fine for the next three years. Which was greeted with silence; he didn’t hear from the IRS again. My other friend, also a significant Republican donor, was the subject of an audit that seemed patently unreasonable. In the course of it, the IRS agent explained apologetically that he was just following orders from Washington.

 

 

.http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/05/irs-scandal-about-to-blow-wide-open.php

[IDBillzFan]

Now a KMOV Channel 4 (St. Louis) reporter says IRS immediately came after him following his interview with Obama.

 

http://www.redstate....bama-interview/

 

St. Louis Reporter Larry Conners revealed via Facebook yesterday that he has been “hammered” by the IRS since his much-discussed interview with President Obama. Conners, a veteran reporter, asked tough, but fair question during the interview which was slammed by progressives in media. Conners says:

Shortly after I did my April 2012 interview with President Obama, my wife, friends and some viewers suggested that I might need to watch out for the IRS.

I don’t accept “conspiracy theories”, but I do know that almost immediately after the interview, the IRS started hammering me.

 

At the time, I dismissed the “co-incidence”, but now, I have concerns … after revelations about the IRS targeting various groups and their members.

 

Originally, the IRS apologized for red-flagging conservative groups and their members if they had “Tea Party” or “patriot” in their name.

 

Today, there are allegations that the IRS focused on various groups and/or individuals questioning or criticizing government spending, taxes, debt or how the government is run … any involved in limiting/expanding government, educating on the constitution and bill of rights, or social economic reform/movement.

 

In that April 2012 interview, I questioned President Obama on several topics: the Buffet Rule, his public remarks about the Supreme Court before the ruling on the Affordable Care Act. I also asked why he wasn’t doing more to help Sen. Claire McCaskill who at that time was expected to lose. The Obama interview caught fire and got wide-spread attention because I questioned his spending.

 

I said some viewers expressed concern, saying they think he’s “out of touch” because of his personal and family trips in the midst of our economic crisis. The President’s face clearly showed his anger; afterwards, his staff which had been so polite … suddenly went cold. That’s to be expected, and I can deal with that just as I did with President George H. Bush’s staff when he didn’t like my questions. Journalistic integrity is of the utmost importance to me. My job is to ask the hard questions, because I believe viewers have a right to be well-informed. I cannot and will not promote anyone’s agenda – political or otherwise – at the expense of the reporting the truth.

 

What I don’t like to even consider … is that because of the Obama interview … the IRS put a target on me.

Can I prove it? At this time, no.

 

But it is a fact that since that April 2012 interview … the IRS has been pressuring me.