Irs Explodes Into A Huge Scandal Now
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And only the ignorant fools will sit by and cheerlead for IRS workers to be exonerated when we have written testimonies that there has been a hit list against pro life and tea party groups.
Your tax dollars at work on bullshit videos.
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Maybe we can get some dance lessons for free?
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Heck Translation:
"Dammit, even I can't tap dance around that..."
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I couldn't even begin to give a shit.
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Josh Green at Bloomberg Businessweek:
Darrell Issa's IRS Investigation Is Falling ApartBy Joshua GreenWhen Republicans won control of the House of Representatives in 2010, Representative Darrell Issa of California was supposed to become a star. Issa, who made no secret of his ambition, took over the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, vowing to use the power of his chairmanship to stage hundreds of hearingsand hold the Obama administration to account. Anticipating what he promised would be “constant battle,” the White House hired extra lawyers and braced for the onslaught.
But Issa wasn’t the force people expected him to be. His biggest investigation, into the botched anti-gun smuggling operation that left a Border Patrol agent dead, incited right-wing talk radio listeners. Beyond that, though, it barely registered. After two years in power, Issa seemed more bark than bite.
Then came last month’s revelation that IRS agents had singled out Tea Party groups for special scrutiny. Here was an issue that seized public attention and posed a legitimate threat to Obama. Since then, nobody in Congress has pushed harder than Issa to pin the scandal on the White House.
But after a burst of attention, Issa’s investigation appears to have stalled. Although he turned up embarrassing material—has any government official been humiliated quite like the IRS commissioner in the dorky video dressed up as Spock?—Issa hasn’t made the all-important connection to the White House. And he may not be able to. The news this week that he won’t release the full transcripts of his interviews with IRS officials—interviews he selectively quoted from to imply White House complicity—suggests that what they contain may in fact exonerate the administration of the very charge Issa is laboring so hard to prosecute.
“Your push to release entire transcripts from witness interviews while the investigation remains active was reckless and threatened to undermine the integrity of the committee’s investigation,” Issa wrote in response to a letter from his Democratic counterpart, Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland, who himself had selectively quoted the transcripts and then called on Issa to publicize the whole thing.
In theory, Issa could be building a case against the White House to rival Watergate that he just isn’t quite ready to unveil. But that’s highly unlikely. Cummings has seen the transcripts and wouldn’t call for their release if they contained information that would fell his party’s president. Issa’s weak-tea defense of why he won’t comply—witnesses might be demoted or fired, he says—only buttresses this suspicion. So does the effort by Issa’s colleague, Representative Dave Camp of Michigan, to broaden the investigation’s scope to include donor audits. You don’t broaden an investigation if you’ve found the smoking gun and nailed the culprit.
“We’re not anywhere near being able to jump to conclusions,” Camp told reporters, includingBloomberg’s Richard Rubin, on Wednesday. So the IRS investigations will continue. But it’s getting harder to imagine that they’ll turn up evidence of a Nixonian plot, and if they don’t, Issa will have failed again.
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[Thy] tongue outvenoms all the worms of Nile.
and now.... Jeff Duncan questions IRS gun usage
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/jeff-duncan-irs-rifle-training-92662.html?hp=f2
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Now that we've learned that this started with a conservative Republican who worked at the IRS, and not Obama, and not someone in the White House, and it wasn't even directed out of the Washington office of the IRS, and that progressive groups were also targeted, and there seems to be no political motive here ...does someone want to explain to me what the scandal is?
What did the IRS do to one side and not the other? What's political about it? They seem to be guilty of not being able to process these applications in a timely manner.
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Issa’s claim is right on. Many organizations are still awaiting an IRS response regarding their status. A Washington, D.C. law firm that represents some of these groups says that the IRS’s claim that the system was streamlined after 2010 is demonstrably false in light of a massive increase in the amount of information the agency required of the firm’s clients. Like Fox, the firm debunk the “low-level employee” excuse because two of its clients’ applications had been referred to a “special task force” in Washington, DC.
The organization True the Vote, which applied for tax-exempt status in 2010, is still waiting for approval. They have endured three years of delays, during which time they have dealt with four different IRS agents, been subjected to six FBI inquiries, and have submitted thousands of pages of documentation to the agency, all to no avail.
As the afternoon wore on, another Democrat attempted to rescue the IRS, albeit indirectly. Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) used his time to denounce the “absurd decision” by the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case. He claimed it has brought so much money into the political system that it threatens the ability of Congress to do its job. This absurd notion picks up where former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) left off ten days ago, when she contended broader amounts of political activity — also known as freedom of speech — made it harder for the IRS to do its job. However, it is in fact left-wing groups that dominate the non-profit sector, long before Citizens United, while their highly politicized work is rarely interfered with.
Another key moment in the hearings occurred when Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) told George that Holly Paz was present during 36 of 41 interviews conducted during the IRS audit. George contended he was unaware of the total, noting that many of the IRS auditors who produced that information are based outside Washington. This lack of knowledge, coupled with the aforementioned omission of targeted pro-life groups, and the failure to question anyone about possible White House involvement in the scandal, calls the thoroughness of the IG’s investigation into question.
After the hearing, Issa hardened his position with regard to Lerner. “When I asked her her questions from the very beginning, I did so so she could assert her rights prior to any statement,” Issa told Politico. “She chose not to do so–so she waived.” Stan Brand, general counsel for the House of Representatives from 1976 to 1983 disagreed. “I don’t think a brief introductory preface to her formal invocation of the privilege is a waiver,” he said. But Brand introduced the possibility that Lerner’s previous appearances before Congress may constitute a waiver of her Fifth Amendment rights. “Bottom line,” he warned, “I think we will hear no more from Ms. Lerner” unless she is provided immunity.
Thus, Lerner remains in the eye of the storm, which may be precisely the way the Obama administration wants it. As PJ Media’s Brian Preston notes, “several lefty bloggers known to be very close to the Obama White House were in fact meeting in the White House” on Tuesday, after Lerner’s attorney had announced she would be taking the Fifth. Two of them were Journolist veterans Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, and Josh Marshal of Talking Points Memorandum (TPM). In previous columns, Klein contended the IRS scandal was “a mess. But it’s not a mess that implicates the White House, or even senior IRS leadership.” Marshal insisted the scandal was a way for Republicans to reconnect with their base, now that the “touch points” of immigration and gays are no longer as effective as they used to be.
Yesterday, within 30 minutes of each other, Klein released a piece contending ”heads should roll at the IRS,” while Marshal insisted Lerner “has to go.” Preston notes the “synchronicity,” of getting “reliably friendly bloggers and columnists on board with a story that focuses attention away from the White House.”
It is more than that. It is also Rule Number 12 in Saul Alinksy’s “Rules for Radicals”: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy.”
As of now, Lois Lerner is the unsympathetic target of the IRS scandal. It behooves Darrell Issa to grant her some sort of immunity for the simplest of reasons: the American public deserves to know how deep the corruption goes within the most powerful agency of government they deal with — and how far it may extend beyond it.
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A conservative rep at the IRS ordered Ms. Lerner to tell a pro life group that
if they would promise to not picket abortion clinics, etc, ?
Or heckbunker thinks Ms lerner is a Conservative rep at the IRS? Really ???
Seriously? No. Just a really ignorant spin to see what works with stupid people.
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You mean this?
"Please explain how all of your activities, including the prayer meetings held outside of Planned Parenthood are considered educational as defined under 501
(3)." -
Thou art wither'd like an old apple-john.
It does not matter what or which political party these IRS workers support. The fact remain the same. These IRS peoples acted above the law and are being protected by the same political party that has brought us communist care and death panels.
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I find that cartoon very ironic being posted here
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Yeah, that was a classic Browns Board moment.
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So Cummings released the entirety of the IRS interview transcripts.
Again, hate to break it to you, fellas, but there's nothing here. Nothing at all. You've got pages of a conservative Republican saying, "I did this." And why? Because he thought grouping all of the Tea Party groups together would allow them to be treated equally instead of letting them go to different IRS offices.
There's your scandal, folks.
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So let's recap:
Benghazi was supposedly about how the White House, in order to help their re-election campaign, scrubbed the talking points Susan Rice then recited on the Sunday morning shows in order to obscure the reality and the embarrassment of a clear terrorist attack.
The reality: The White House had nothing to do with the talking points, which were drafted through the normal inter-agency process and then delivered by Susan Rice almost verbatim. The person who had the largest hand in the drafts was a career State Department official who last worked for Dick Cheney and is married to Robert Kagan.
The IRS scandal was supposedly about how the White House, through the political office or some other avenue, directed the IRS to target Right-wing 501c4 groups for special scrutiny in order to slow walk their applications and keep them from participating in the political process.
The reality: There is zero proof of political direction from the White House. All of these targeting mechanisms seems to have originated with the IRS itself and had no political motivation. Progressive groups were also targeted. And the man who owned up to devising the process is a self-described "conservative Republican" who believes to this day that he was just doing his job.
Will anyone in here own up to either of these realities? Of course not. And neither will the Republican base.
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I know, I know. It's very disappointing. So shoot the messenger and all that. Or tell me where I have my facts wrong.
But don't worry. This is the modern day Republican Party. You'll just continue on believing your bullshit anyway.
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Republican and Democratic committee staffers interviewed IRS official John Shafer on June 6 about the agency's decision to scrutinize a tea party group's application for tax-exempt 501
(4) status. Shafer, who identified himself as "a conservative Republican" and said he'd worked for the IRS since 1992, said that he and a fellow screener initially flagged a tea party group and continued to do so with subsequent applications in order to maintain consistency in the process.
Throughout much of the interview, Shafer describes the mundane bureaucratic challenges of dealing with incoming applications for nonprofit status. He said his team flagged the first tea party application because it appeared to be a high-profile case, and he wanted to make sure all high-profile cases received similar attention.
"What I'm talking here is that if we end up with four applications coming into the group that are pretty similar, and we assign them to four different agents, we don't want four different determinations," he said. "It's just not good business. It's not good customer service."
Asked plainly, "do you have any reason to believe that anyone in the White House was involved in the decision to screen Tea Party cases?" Shafer replied, "I have no reason to believe that."
"Do you have any reason to believe that anyone in the White House was involved in the decisions to centralize the review of Tea Party cases?" he was asked. "I have no reason to believe that," he replied.
Asked if he had "ever communicated with [then IRS] Commissioner Shulman about the screening of Tea Party cases?" he replied, "I have not."
Interviewers also asked Shafer if he told his screeners to specifically pull Tea Party cases.
"Again, I was not asking them for those kind of cases," he said. "f I would have directed them to pull our Tea Party cases, little Susie's Tea Party would have been pulled and it wasn't."
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So again, ladies, tell me: what's the scandal now?
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It's in the testimony BEFORE CONGRESS that you conveniently won't admit was very, very powerful in proving political harrassment and "profiling by group" was most certainly happening.
This "conservative" doesn't know anything about the testimony before Congress, ....eh? I call BS. I don't believe he is a conservative just because he's making himself out to be.
And, he is just one character who is either lying, or completely out of the political harrassment operation.
Heck translation: "Goshdarn it, why can't I be the only one with information on issues? Things would be
so convincing with my cherry picking"
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Issa's staff said Shafer played an early role in the Tea Party screening activities, so he was not aware of what happened once interaction with Washington began.A Cincinnati official in another unit, Liz Hofacre, initially created a "Be on the Lookout" (BOLO) list containing the terms "Tea Party," "Patriot" and others. She said she was asked to do that by another Cincinnati superior, according to her transcript, also reviewed by Reuters. (Editing by Peter Cooney)
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