Tag Archives: Internal Revenue Service

May 20, 2013 · 9:03 PM

Stop Calling Obama Aloof!

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President Barack Obama cracks a smile at a ceremony earlier this year. (Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images)

It’s ironic that they call the president arrogant, aloof, out of touch, etc.  What they forget is that they made him that way by forcing him to wear an allegorical a protective shield of sorts.  The RWNJs have been throwing everything but the kitchen sink at the POTUS (and I’m certain that sink will be tossed at him shortly.)  To them, any and everything he does is either wrong or suspect.

So what I’m saying is that the press, GOP politicians, Tea Partyers, and others of their ilk need to step back and take a look at what came first, his “aloofness” or their barrage of attacks?

I love the sarcasm in Begalia’s following piece…

The Daily Beast - Paul Begalia

So the Beltway media (of which I am a card-carrying member) has decided President Obama is too aloof. And as a card-carrying member, I, of course, agree.

I mean, how could a president not know the level of scrutiny the Cincinnati branch of the IRS was applying to conservative social-welfare organizations that sought tax-exempt status under Section 501c(4) of the Internal Revenue Act? How detached. How arrogant. How disengaged.

Believe me, George Washington knew exactly what the Tea Party was doing back in his day, and even though Cincinnati was just being settled as Washington became president, you can be sure the Father of Our Country knew what the Cincinnati branch of the IRS was up to.

And don’t get me started on the Associated Press subpoenas. A year ago, 31 congressional Republicans sent a letter to President Obama demanding a tough, unsparing investigation. The GOP lambasted the president for being too aloof and casual about leaks that endanger national security. “Where is the outrage in this administration?” Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker asked. “Where is there any indication that within the Obama administration officials are outraged at the criminal leaks of classified information that put our agents and our friends at risk?” And so, the Obama administration went bananas, firing off subpoenas for the phone records of Associated Press reporters. Amazingly, President Obama was too aloof to know. This is aloofness (aloofosity? alooficity?) of an extraordinary nature. It’s not easy to both be too detached to investigate leaks and then also be too detached to care about an overzealous investigation of those leaks. But our president pulled it off.

This much we know: Barack Obama is no Ronald Reagan. The Gipper wasn’t aloof and detached, no siree. The fact that he called his Housing Secretary “Mr. Mayor”—that showed he was engaged in what the American people cared about, not Washington arcana like the names of the people he had appointed to his cabinet. Of course, the Gipper was also so deeply and properly engaged that he had to say he did not recall no fewer than 124 times in eight hours of testimony on the Iran-Contra affair.

Barack Obama is also far more aloof and disengaged than George W. Bush. Bush and his vice president, Darth Vader, were veritable paragons of engagement. That’s how their aides ended up leaking the identity of an undercover CIA operative. President Bush and Vice President Strangelove were so busy supervising the conduct of the IRS that they didn’t know what Karl Rove and Scooter Libby were up to. Of course, back then the IRS was accused of unfairly scrutinizing the NAACP, but you can bet your life President Bush and Vice President Goldfinger were knee-deep in the operation of the IRS’s Cincinnati branch. You betcha.

Continue reading after the video…

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· 11:34 AM

Obama Approval Rating Not Hurt By Scandals: CNN/ORC International Poll

Pic of the Moment

H/t: Democratic Underground

Liberaland

A new CNN/ORC poll show recent controversies have not hurt President Obama’s standing.

Fifty-three percent of Americans said they approve of the job the president is doing, while 45 percent said they disapprove. That’s virtually unchanged from an early April survey in which Obama’s approval/disapproval split was 51 percent to 47 percent.

The poll is one of the earliest indicators of how Obama’s image has been affected during one of the worst weeks of his presidency. As questions about the deadly attack in Benghazi, Libya, revelations that the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative groups, and news that the Justice Department secretly obtained journalists’ phone records have fueled Republican attacks, the president has been put very much on defense.

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May 19, 2013 · 6:22 PM

The Week in Wingnuts

Wingnuts

The Daily Beast

Legalized abortion causes school shootings, Obamacare will lead to conservatives being denied health services, and other wacky assertions from our political leaders.

North Dakota: Legalized Abortions Cause School Shootings

U.S. Representative Kevin Cramer knows the answer to why there have been so many school shootings in the U.S. over the past few years, and it’s not easy access to guns or inadequate treatment of the mentally ill. No, the Republican from North Dakota insists, the rise in school shootings is directly connected to the legalization of abortion and a supposed decline in Christian values. “We learned this week that the Pentagon is vetting its guide on religious tolerance with a group that compared Christian evangelism to rape, and advocated that military personnel and colluding chaplains who proselytize should be court martialed,” Cramer said during a commencement speech at the Catholic University of Mary that, miraculously, went unnoticed by the national media until this week. “Forty years ago, the United States Supreme Court sanctioned abortion on demand. And we wonder why our culture sees school shootings so often.” Cramer’s link between “normalized perversion” and mass murders rings eerily similar to Michele Bachmann’s argument that the September 11 terror attacks in 2001 and 2012 were God’s way of passing judgement (sic) on our country’s moral demise.

Missouri: The Gays Killed the Bullying Bill

Missouri’s Republican Representative Sue Allen has called on her constituents to contact openly gay lawmakers Jolie Justice and Mike Colona and blame them for the death of her anti-bullying bill. The key difference between Allen’s bill and other, more successful anti-bullying legislation is that it bans enumerated lists of specific groups of people that need protection–such as gay and transgender students–because she believes they are too partisan. “I typically try to keep partisanship out of my message, but this is an issue for the Democrats who wish for certain students (LGBT-gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender) to be ‘enumerated’ within school policies…What they [Justus and Colona] don’t seem to understand is that stronger policies help ALL students, even those they would have characterized.” The problem with Allen’s argument is that enumerating specific groups does not, as she suggests, negate protection for anyone else, it simply ensures that any bullying of people who identify with these particularly at-risk groups is reported.

Kansas: Let’s Rise Above the N-Word

Kansas State Board of Education member Steve Roberts stood his ground Tuesdayin the face of offended fellow board members, defending his use of the N-word during last month’s meeting “100 percent.” In response to a comment from Topeka’s former NAACP president about the need for more African-American history in schools, Roberts launched into his own monologue about pushing “the frontiers of political correctness” with regards to the N-word–using it in full. When the board reconvened this week, Roberts was confronted about his use of the word, and how it offended people in the room, but he was remorseless. “I did my best to say the ‘N-word’ clinically. I’m willing to be considered politically incorrect, I don’t think that’s a bad thing,” Roberts said, suggesting that his critics were simply seeking media attention.

MInnesota: What’s Next, Political Bias for Health Care?

Michele Bachmann wouldn’t say she was happy to find out that the IRS had, in fact, been targeting conservative groups seeking nonprofit status, but the revelation did bring her some satisfaction. The Representative from Minnesota jumped at the chance to use the IRS scandal as evidence that the overreaching of big government has gotten out of control, suggesting that if non-profit organizations were targeted for their political beliefs, who’s to say they same system of discrimination won’t be used for other programs, such as health care. “Knowing it’s the IRS who will be the enforcing mechanism for this new entitlement program of Obamacare, it is very important to ask–and now it is reasonable to ask–could there be potential political implications of access to health care, denial of health care? Will that happen based on a person’s political beliefs or their religiously held beliefs?” Bachmann asked at a Capitol Hill rally on Thursday. “Those questions would have been considered out of bounds a week ago. Today those questions are considered more than reasonable, and more than fair for the American people.”

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May 18, 2013 · 2:49 PM

Nate Silver Debunks Peggy Noonan’s Claim IRS Also Went After Individuals Opposing Obama

Mediaite

2012 electoral polling star, the New York Times’s Nate Silver, who was lauded for being right on all things 2012 election, is back crunching the numbers, this time on the IRS political targeting scandal, specifically firing back at WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan’s claim that the Obama IRS went after wealthy Republican individuals in addition to Tea Party groups in his FiveThirtyEight blog Friday.

Noonan had wrote, “The second part of the scandal is the auditing of political activists who have opposed the administration,” espousing the IRS scandal as the “worst Washington scandal since Watergate.” She went on to point out specific wealthy individuals in Idaho and Georgia that had never been audited until going against President Obama.

After conceding that some conservative Romney supporters were targeted, Silver explains those high income earners supporting President Obama were also targeted based on simple math. Silver displays a chart that estimates the amount of high-income earners that were audited in 2012 by way of the IRS’s Data Book. He estimates the share of the vote that went to Romney versus Obama in each income bracket based on exit polling.

His results seem to debunk Ms. Noonan’s argument that only wealthy conservative individuals supporting Mitt Romney yielded an IRS audit, with an estimated 380,000 Romney voters being audited compared to 480,00 Obama voters.

Silver makes the larger point that even without intentional political targeting, hundreds of thousands of conservative voted would have beens selected for audits as part of their normal process. He goes on to suggest Noonan cherry picked few examples in a pool of thousands:

The fact that Ms. Noonan has identified four conservatives from that group of thousands provides no evidence at all toward her hypothesis. Nor would it tell us very much if dozens or even hundreds of conservative activists disclosed that they had been audited. This is exactly what you would expect in a country where there are 1.5 million audits every year.

He concludes that a handful of “anecdotal” data points aren’t worth much in a country of over 300 million people.

h/t FiveThirtyEight

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· 9:51 AM

Glenn Beck: NAACP Is A ‘Joke’, White People Were Lynched And Other Topics Of His Latest Rant

Let’s be clear here, Glenn Beck wants to replace his  former Fox News colleagues as the most outrageous commentator in the media.  His brand of manufactured outrage sells and believe me he’s selling and his audience is buying: his books, lectures, rallies and so on.   Having said that, what blows my mind is that millions of people listen to this clown and believes every word he utters.  To that, I say: Yikes!

The Huffington Post

Although President Obama condemned the Internal Revenue Service for singling out conservative groups in the months leading up to the 2012 election, former NAACP Chairman Julian Bond called the organization’s actions “completely legitimate.” And it was that sentiment that set conservative radio host Glenn Beck off, calling the entire organization a “joke” and an “affront” to what former black civil rights leaders stood for.

“They are a joke, and an affront to everything that Martin Luther King and anybody who ever… Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, you are an affront to their memory,” Beck said.

While discussing the IRS scandal, Beck hurled insults at the Obama administration and the NAACP, saying the White House was concentrating on revenge and that the century-old African-American organization was illegitimate.

Beck went on to try to drive his point home with an even stranger defense, asserting that 20 percent of lynchings performed by the Ku Klux Klan were of white people–a point he apparently “hates to keep bringing up.” He then went on to compare those white people who were lynched to members of the Tea Party.

“You know what, I contend the white people that were lynched are exactly the kind of people that would be in the Tea Party today,” he said.

Beck’s sentiments have us scratching our heads a bit, but then again what else is new? From calling the president a girl, to saying African American is not a race we can’t say we’re all that surprised by his latest rant.

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May 17, 2013 · 12:15 PM

5 Major Scandals The Media Isn’t Obsessing About

If it looks like Obama might have caused the scandal, then it’s NEWS…if not, it falls by the wayside.

Think Progress

This week, the national media has focused on the three different scandals surrounding the White House, devoting hours of coverage to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) improperly targeting conservative groups applying for tax exempt status, the talking points Susan Rice used in the aftermath of the attacks in Benghazi, and the Justice Department’s subpoena of phone records from the Associated Press as part of an investigation into a national security leak. The around-the-clock coverage comes even as a new Gallup poll finds that interest in the ongoing controversies is “lower comparable to major news stores in the past.”

And while these stories raise serious concerns about money in politics, embassy security, and freedom of the press, they aren’t the only problems impacting the American people. Here are five big stories the media isn’t obsessing about:

1. Carbon pollution reaches historic highs, threatening human existence. The concentration of climate warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere “has passed the milestone level of 400 parts per million (ppm),” scientists estimate. “At the beginning of industrialisation the concentration of CO2 was just 280ppm,” said Prof Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “We must hope that the world crossing this milestone will bring about awareness of the scientific reality of climate change and how human society should deal with the challenge.” The last time the Earth saw carbon dioxide levels that high, humans did not exist. The West Antarctic ice sheet also did not exist, and sea levels were as much as 82 feet higher than they are today. During an earlier period when CO2 levels were this high, temperatures were 5° to 10°F warmer globally.

2. The devastating impact of sequestration on kids, cancer patients and first responders. On Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the budget deficit will shrink to its smallest level since before the Great Recession in 2013, and it will continue to decrease through 2015. But despite the smaller deficits, Republicans remain focused on spending reductions — even as the most recent round of cuts has kicked children out of preschool, left cancer patients without needed screenings, undermined public health and fire safety, and gutted programs that help low-income Americans in a variety of ways. Those cuts have also threatened to derail the economic recovery, which has sputtered along despite the headwinds created by a consistent focus on deficit reduction.

3. Massive cuts to food stamps for the most vulnerable Americans. The House Agriculture Committee approved a farm bill late Wednesday night that would cut federal food stamps by $20.5 billion — more steeply than any legislation since the welfare reforms of the 1990s. Earlier this week, the Senate Agriculture Committee also agreed to a $4.1 billion reduction. The program keeps hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Americans out of the deepest pits of poverty, and even as the Great Recession swelled SNAP rolls, the program continued to push its erroneous payments rates to record lows.

4. 1100 workers die in garment factory collapse in Bangladesh and most American retailers plan business as usual. Since a factory collapsed in Bangladesh, killing 1,100 clothing industry workers, American retailers have been hesitant to adopt safety plans that could prevent similar tragedies. Abercrombie & Fitch announced it would sign a safety upgrade plan that has been approved by six major European retailers and one other American company, but many other manufacturers — including Walmart and Gap — are holding out. Although some retailers fear the costs of upgrades, they could pass them on entirely to consumers and only raise prices by 10 cents per garment.

5. 4,000 gun deaths due to gun violence since Newtown. A crowdsourced effort to count every person killed by a gun in the United States since the Newtown tragedy is currently being hosted by Slate. As of this writing, the count is 4,150. The Senate rejected gun safety legislation in April and has not yet set a date for reconsidering the measure.

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· 8:30 AM

Rachel Maddow Reveals More Scandalous Details About IRS Tea Party Targeting

Mediaite

Rachel Maddow tonight highlighted another potential problem in the growing IRS targeting scandal plaguing the Obama administration this week. The tax-collecting agency provided private tax information about several conservative groups, including ones whose applications had not been fully processed yet, to the website ProPublica. Maddow said that strictly speaking, this was illegal, and will only make things worse for the IRS.

Maddow claimed that the Tea Party now suddenly “wants to be back on the wings of the IRS scandal,” and said that things are awkward politically because essentially everyone else agrees with them on this scandal. She acknowledged the “improper scrutiny” being given to conservatives groups that seemingly eluded their liberal counterparts.

Maddow highlighted how the same IRS Cincinnati office involved in the targeting scandal released documents to ProPublica for the site’s series of posts on groups misleading the IRS about their political activities. Documents were provided for a number of conservative groups, even from nine that were not approved yet by the IRS, which is technically illegal because “it’s supposed to be secret” if an application has not been approved.

When ProPublica attempted to find out why exactly they were given the documents, Maddow said the IRS’s response was basically “We shouldn’t have done that!” She admitted that the agency “screwed up here” and could end up making its level of scrutiny worse after this week.

Watch the video below, courtesy of MSNBC:

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· 8:13 AM

Friday Blog Roundup – 5-17-2013

‘It’s. The. Law.’

Many Not Following Scandal Coverage

‘Star Trek’s’ Most Memorable Moments

House votes to repeal Obamacare for 37th time

Congressional Hearings on I.R.S. Scandal to Start

Obama To Give Jobs Speech In Baltimore At 1:20 P.M. ET

N.Y. attorney general investigating fast food industry wage theft

Gallup: Republicans Far More Interested In IRS Scandal, Benghazi

Cause of Texas plant blast still uncertain, criminality is possibility

On MSNBC’s All In , Eric Boehlert Exposes The Talking Points Sideshow

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May 16, 2013 · 3:24 PM

Former NAACP Chair Says The IRS Was Right To Target Tea Party Groups (VIDEO)

Julian Bond; photo: Nikki Khan, The Washington Post;@PBS

I absolutely agree with former NAACP Chair, Julian Bond.  This entire faux outrage fiasco is designed to make the president look bad.  That has been the objective of the GOP since Tuesday, January 20th, 2009.

Addicting Info

As my colleague Egberto Willies wrote on Tuesday, this whole tempest in a teacup over the IRS scrutiny of groups who used “tea party” or “patriot” in their names is foolish. He is correct in stating that the IRS was well within its boundaries and, indeed, was doing exactly what it should have been doing. The granting of a 501(c) status is a very big deal. When I was on the staff of the one of the largest Pagan churches in the country, it took us years to be approved for that tax-free status. The IRS doesn’t hand those exemptions out like candy: you must prove that you fit the qualifications. Most of the Tea Party groups most certainly did not, not if they were engaged in politics.

We are not the only ones who think that the IRS was doing its job, either. Former NAACP Chairman, Julian Bond, told Thomas Roberts of MSNBC:

 

“I think it’s entirely legitimate to look at the tea party. Here are a group of people who are admittedly racist, who are overtly political, who’ve tried as best they can to harm President Obama in every way they can.”

Mr. Bond found himself in a similar situation back in 2004 when, after a speech he’d given criticizing then-President George Bush, he received a letter from the IRS advising him that the NAACP was being investigated because of what he said. He thought that he was exercising his right to free speech but, as some of us know, criticism of Bush was not covered by that right.

But criticism of Obama? Well, that’s an entirely different matter. We’ve seen it time and again: Tea Party “patriots” with outrageous signs saying horrible things about a duly elected president. And these are most definitely not non-political groups. As Mr. Bond noted:

“They are the Taliban wing of American politics. We all ought to be a little worried about them.”

When Roberts asked Bond if that wasn’t a bit harsh – calling the TP the “Taliban wing” of American politics – Bond replied that it wasn’t at all too harsh and that we should all be concerned about their influence. He did say that it was wrong of the IRS to be so heavy-handed and chided them for not explaining their actions better. But Bond was adamant that this situation has no parallel to the targeting of the NAACP in 2004.

Now a liberal group called Progress Texas has come forward saying that they received the same level of scrutiny that the Tea Party groups did. Their executive director, Ed Espinoza, said in a statement:

“Progress Texas and the Tea Party strongly disagree on the role of government. Yet, when we applied for tax-exempt status, Progress Texas received the same type of additional scrutiny that Tea Party groups are complaining about. The similar treatment indicates the IRS was likely addressing a flood of 501(c)4 applications after Citizens United, and undermines the paranoid notion that Tea Party groups were singled out.”

Exactly. This entire “scandal” is being blown up out of all proportion. The IRS, the agency that collects the taxes for the American people to run our government, should be wary of groups that apply for 501(c) status. Even more so when the applicants have been so brazen about its involvement in politics. This faux outrage is silly. The IRS was just doing its job and the Tea Party groups are doing what they do: blame the government and whine about taxes. Same as it ever was.

Here’s the video of Bond’s appearance:

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· 8:21 AM

In Two Hours Obama Destroys the GOP’s Benghazi and IRS Scandals

obama-irs

So, there you have it…

PoliticusUSA

Just as Republicans and their media lackeys were getting their Obama scandal machine fired up, President Obama killed both the Benghazi and IRS “scandals” in a couple of hours.

The president put a stake through the heart of the GOP’s attempts to revive Benghazi by releasing 100 pages of emails. (Now, the world can see how badly Jon Karl and ABC News got played when they used the summaries of someone else’s notes.) The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent published an email from Tommy Vietor, who until recently was the spokesperson for the National Security Council. Vietor wrote, “Regarding the talking points, it’s not surprising that the entire government would want the chance to look at and edit that language. This was a dynamic situation and new information was constantly flowing in, and different agencies had important concerns that had to be addressed – the State Department had security concerns, the FBI was worried about its investigation, and the CIA had a major, yet still undisclosed, role.”

Republicans are putting out vague statements about contradictions, but Benghazi is pretty much finished as a scandal. It is difficult to accuse the White House of a cover up, when they’ve released all the emails.

The second part of the one-two punch was Obama speaking about the IRS scandal.

Video:

Transcript

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