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Seems like the media is slowly jumping ship
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He's a drone, one of the types that will defend the left no matter what they do, because it's not a big deal. The same that will scream from the rooftops about how wrong it is when the right does the exact same thing.Originally posted by Craizie View PostComment
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WaPo wonders: Was IRS revelation a Friday night dump?
Even wapo is gettin' on that ass.Comment
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That's just one case out of 10,000 others that are still suckling the Liberal teat. I believe they will go to their graves backing this administration.Originally posted by lo3oz View PostComment
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In other news, Obama tells students not to trust those crazies that say a government could be tyrannous.
Still, you’ll hear voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s the root of all our problems, even as they do their best to gum up the works; or that tyranny always lurks just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave, creative, unique experiment in self-rule is just a sham with which we can’t be trusted.
We have never been a people who place all our faith in government to solve our problems, nor do we want it to. But we don’t think the government is the source of all our problems, either. Because we understand that this democracy is ours. As citizens, we understand that America is not about what can be done for us. It’s about what can be done by us, together, through the hard and frustrating but absolutely necessary work of self-government.
[...]
The cynics may be the loudest voices—but they accomplish the least. It’s the silent disruptors—those who do the long, hard, committed work of change—that gradually push this country in the right direction, and make the most lasting difference. [Emphasis added]I wear a Fez. Fez-es are coolComment
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He is trying to lull the drones back to sleep before they realize what is happening.Comment
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ASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama sought on Monday to neutralize two crises that threatened his second term agenda, calling the apparent targeting of conservative groups by tax officials "outrageous" and an uproar over his response to American deaths in Libya a "sideshow."
At a news conference with visiting British Prime Minister David Cameron, Obama tried to put his stamp on the two issues, which are overshadowing other policy priorities just months after he took the oath of office.
The Benghazi, Libya, controversy has been simmering for months but flared up last week after internal emails were made public showing the administration trying to shape "talking points" to explain how four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were killed in an attack there.
Obama rejected claims of a cover-up on information about the attacks and said the assertions were made with political motivations aimed at him and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a potential 2016 presidential candidate.
"The whole issue of this - of talking points, frankly, throughout this process has been a sideshow," he said.
The IRS issue arose on Friday when an official of the agency revealed at a meeting of tax lawyers that it had singled out Tea Party and other conservative groups for extra scrutiny of their claims for tax-exempt status.
"If in fact IRS personnel engaged in the kind of practices that have been reported on, and were intentionally targeting conservative groups, then that's outrageous," Obama told reporters at the White House, noting he first heard about the allegations on Friday himself.
"There's no place for it. And they have to be held fully accountable. Because the IRS as an independent agency requires absolute integrity, and people have to have confidence that they're applying ... the laws in a nonpartisan way," he said.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, a Democrat, promised an investigation by his panel, which would join probes that Republicans announced in the House of Representatives last Friday after news of the IRS action first became public.
"Targeting groups based on their political views is not only inappropriate but it is intolerable," Baucus said in a statement issued by his committee, which oversees the IRS.
Two other Democratic senators, Tim Kaine of Virginia and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, seconded calls by Republicans for Obama to punish those responsible for the IRS targeting, which began in 2010 shortly after the emergence of the Tea Party movement that helped Republicans win the House that year.
"The administration should take swift action to get to the bottom of this to ensure those responsible for misconduct are held accountable," Kaine said.Comment
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Obama was hoping this would be his Lewinsky, the problem with that is that his media seems to be getting pissed off and running with the stories.Comment
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It could be because he's going on less and less news shows and not taking even softball questions.I wear a Fez. Fez-es are coolComment
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There was even a report on Yahoo about the afforadable health care penalties, that aren't taxes. People will come out with pitchforks when those start hitting.Comment
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And the income thresholds are bullshit. How is a single person making $10k a year going to afford insurance - PERIOD? That isn't even a sustainable wage if you're living at home.Originally posted by BP View PostComment
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Scandalous...
Breaking: IRS admits current Commissioner knew of targeting … a year ago; Update: ProPublica: Same office leaked files to us
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LOLZ. Normally you have to pay for this amount of entertainment.
Obama Spokesman Says White House Notified of IRS Investigation in April – So How Did Obama Not Know Until Last Week?
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The same IRS office that deliberately targeted conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status in the run-up to the 2012 election released nine pending confidential applications of conservative groups to ProPublica late last year.
The IRS did not respond to requests Monday following up about that release, and whether it had determined how the applications were sent to ProPublica.
In response to a request for the applications for 67 different nonprofits last November, the Cincinnati office of the IRS sent ProPublica applications or documentation for 31 groups. Nine of those applications had not yet been approved—meaning they were not supposed to be made public. (We made six of those public, after redacting their financial information, deeming that they were newsworthy.)
On Friday, Lois Lerner, the head of the division on tax-exempt organizations, apologized to Tea Party and other conservative groups because the IRS’ Cincinnati office had unfairly targeted them. Tea Party groups had complained in early 2012 that they were being sent overly intrusive questionnaires in response to their applications.
That scrutiny appears to have gone beyond Tea Party groups to applicants saying they wanted to educate the public to “make America a better place to live” or that criticized how the country was being run, according to a draft audit cited by many outlets. The full audit, by the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration, will reportedly be released this week. (ProPublica was not contacted by the inspector general’s office.)
Before the 2012 election, ProPublica devoted months to showing how dozens of social-welfare nonprofits had misled the IRS about their political activity on their applications and tax returns. Social-welfare nonprofits are allowed to spend money to influence elections, as long as their primary purpose is improving social welfare. Unlike super PACs and regular political action committees, they do not have to identify their donors.
In 2012, nonprofits that didn’t have to report their donors poured an unprecedented $322 million into the election. Much of that money — 84 percent — came from conservative groups.
As part of its reporting, ProPublica regularly requested applications from the IRS’s Cincinnati office, which is responsible for reviewing applications from nonprofits.
Social welfare nonprofits are not required to apply to the IRS to operate. Many politically active new conservative groups apply anyway. Getting IRS approval can help with donations and help insulate groups from further scrutiny. Many politically active new liberal nonprofits have not applied.
Applications become public only after the IRS approves a group’s tax-exempt status.
On Nov. 15, 2012, ProPublica requested the applications of 67 nonprofits, all of which had spent money on the 2012 elections. (Because no social welfare groups with Tea Party in their names spent money on the election, ProPublica did not at that point request their applications. We had requested the Tea Party applications earlier, after the groups first complained about being singled out by the IRS. In response, the IRS said it could find no record of the tax-exempt status of those groups — typically how it responds to requests for unapproved applications.)
Just 13 days after ProPublica sent in its request, the IRS responded with the documents on 31 social welfare groups.
One of the applications the IRS released to ProPublica was from Crossroads GPS, the largest social-welfare nonprofit involved in the 2012 election. The group, started in part by GOP consultant Karl Rove, promised the IRS that any effort to influence elections would be “limited.” The group spent more than $70 million from anonymous donors in 2012.
Applications were sent to ProPublica from five other social welfare groups that had told the IRS that they wouldn’t spend money to sway elections. The other groups ended up spending more than $5 million related to the election, mainly to support Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Much of that money was spent by the Arizona group Americans for Responsible Leadership. The remaining four groups that told the IRS they wouldn’t engage in political spending were Freedom Path, Rightchange.com II, America Is Not Stupid and A Better America Now.
The IRS also sent ProPublica the applications of three small conservative groups that told the agency that they would spend some money on politics: Citizen Awareness Project, the YG Network and SecureAmericaNow.org. (No unapproved applications from liberal groups were sent to ProPublica.)
The IRS cover letter sent with the documents was from the Cincinnati office, and signed by Cindy Thomas, listed as the manager for Exempt Organizations Determinations, whom a biography for a Cincinnati Bar Association meeting in January says has worked for the IRS for 35 years. (Thomas often signed the cover letters of responses to ProPublica requests.) The cover letter listed an IRS employee named Sophia Brown as the person to contact for more information about the records. We tried to contact both Thomas and Brown today but were unable to reach them.
After receiving the unapproved applications, ProPublica tried to determine why they had been sent. In emails, IRS spokespeople said ProPublica shouldn’t have received them.
“It has come to our attention that you are in receipt of application materials of organizations that have not been recognized by the IRS as tax-exempt,” wrote one spokeswoman, Michelle Eldridge. She cited a law saying that publishing unauthorized returns or return information was a felony punishable by a fine of up to $5,000 and imprisonment of up to five years, or both.
In response, ProPublica’s then-general manager and now president, Richard Tofel, said, "ProPublica believes that the information we are publishing is not barred by the statute cited by the IRS, and it is clear to us that there is a strong First Amendment interest in its publication.”
ProPublica also redacted parts of the application to omit financial information.
Jonathan Collegio, a spokesman for Crossroads GPS, declined to comment today on whether he thought the IRS’s release of the group’s application could have been linked to recent news that the Cincinnati office was targeting conservative groups.
Last December, Collegio wrote in an email: “As far as we know, the Crossroads application is still pending, in which case it seems that either you obtained whatever document you have illegally, or that it has been approved.”
This year, the IRS appears to have changed the office that responds to requests for nonprofits’ applications. Previously, the IRS asked journalists to fax requests to a number with a 513 area code — which includes Cincinnati. ProPublica sent a request by fax on Feb. 5 to the Ohio area code. On March 13, that request was answered by David Fish, a director of Exempt Organizations Guidance, in Washington, D.C.
In early April, a ProPublica reporter’s request to the Ohio fax number bounced back. An IRS spokesman said at the time the number had changed “recently.” The new fax number begins with 202, the area code for Washington, D.C.
I wear a Fez. Fez-es are coolComment
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Well it turns out that senior officials knew about it since 2011, possibly earlier, but the first part is true.Originally posted by Obama Admin (paraphrased)
Oh. Wait.
WaPo: IRS targeting of Tea Party, conservative groups also in Washington office
The story told by Lois Lerner in Friday’s IRS apology continues to fall apart faster than Al Capone’s audit defense. Last night, the Washington Post revealed that the effort to target opponents of the Obama administration was not limited to just one office in Cincinnati, but encompassed three other offices as well — one of which was IRS headquarters in Washington DC.
How convenient:
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 that the effort reached well beyond the branch in Cincinnati that was initially blamed, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.
The search terms turned out to be even more broad than first thought. Guess what another one was? “Voter fraud,” apparently: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, the documents show.
By the way, does anyone remember what the Obama administration thinks about the effort to fight voter fraud? And now we have evidence that the IRS targeted groups that want to pursue more stringent processes to prevent voter fraud. What a coincidence this must be. How … convenient.In one instance, however, Ron Bell, an IRS employee, informed a lawyer representing a conservative group focused on voter fraud that the application was under review in Washington. On several other occasions, IRS officials in Washington and California sent conservative groups detailed questionnaires 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.
The Post also catches up with the who-knew-what-and-when of the story:
Let’s raise a red flag on the Shulman claim. It’s very convenient for Shulman to claim now that he was briefed in May 2012, because he testified twice in March 2012 that nothing of this sort was happening at the IRS. However, the IRS chief counsel — the top attorney in the organization — was informed in August 2011 of this targeting. Just how likely would it have been that Shulman’s chief lawyer would have failed to mention this for nine months, and waited to brief him on it until Shulman was almost out the door? I’d call that extremely unlikely, and even putting that aside, it still leaves the question of why Shulman never bothered to let anyone know about it, even as a private citizen.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 General for Tax Administration *(TIGTA) on the details of their reviews.
Then-Commissioner Douglas Shulman, a George W. Bush appointee who stepped down in November, received a briefing from the TIGTA about what was happening in the Cincinnati office in May 2012, the aides said. His deputy and the agency’s current acting commissioner, Steven T. Miller, also learned about the matter that month, the aides said.
Clearly, this strategy was no isolated incident. Four separate offices spread far across the country worked to put this targeting in place against the political opponents of the White House. That alone smacks of higher-level coordination, at either the IRS Commissioner level or above. The fact that it took place in the IRS’ Washington headquarters also shows that it was no rogue effort that ran wild due to lack of supervision. This was purposeful.
Cui bono? To whose benefit was this done? The buck stops at the White House — because that’s where the benefits of political harassment would start.Last edited by sc281; 05-14-2013, 06:40 AM.Comment
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