Posted on 05/13/2013 1:25:48 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Kevin Drum outlines what I take to be the emerging case for the defense of the IRS agents who applied special scrutiny to tax-exemption applications from Tea Party groups:
Roughly speaking, what seems to have happened is that three years ago the IRS was facing an explosion of newly formed 501(c)4 groups claiming tax exempt status, something that's legal only for groups that are primarily engaged in promoting education or social welfare, not electioneering. So some folks in the Cincinnati office tried to come up with a quick filter to flag groups that deserved extra scrutiny. But what should that flag be? Well, three years ago the explosion happened to be among tea party groups, so they began searching their database "for applications with 'Tea Party,' 'Patriots,' or '9/12' in the organization's name as well as other 'political sounding' names." This was dumb, and when senior leaders found out about it, they put a quick stop to it . . .
The problem is that the explosion of 501(c)4 groups is a genuine problem: they really have grown like kudzu, lots of them really are used primarily as electioneering vehicles, and the IRS has been either unwilling or unable to regulate them properly. So the fact that some of the folks responsible for processing these applications were looking for a way to flag potentially dubious groups is sort of understandable.
However, if I were accused of this thing, and this was my defense, I'd be looking forward to a guilty verdict from any semi-competent jury.
For one thing, though the IRS is claiming that they told employees to knock it off in 2011, they went back and came up with an almost equally troubling set of standards in January 2012...
(Excerpt) Read more at thedailybeast.com ...
It's OK though, because he's a fellow traveler.
They were targeted because, in the mind of a leftist, there is no other reason to attain power if you can’t reward your friends and punish your enemies with the power of the State.
The tax code is the swill that the pigs on K-Street and their fellow oinkers on hill all feed on....
Steve Forbes was soooooooooo right, get rid of this bloody mess...
One exemption, your health care purchase and or policies you by for those really in need...
Um....if ‘low level’ people can cause such havoc, what could they do with a ‘universal background check’ list?
This type of crap can only happen by stacking the IRS with leftists at the top. Leftists have destroyed journalism, education, healthcare, elections and our economy just to name a few. They won’t stop until they destroy all of our liberty and turn us into slaves to the state. People who can’t see this are just not paying much attention.
Senator Max Baucus is leading the investigation into the IRS ,but he also urged the IRS to target conservative groups on 2010
So, it now appears the media and administration will once again resort to a lie to try to justify their unjustifiable behavior.
Legitimate?
That doesn’t pass the Stinks-Like-Obama test.
If it was an honest effort to weed out overt political groups why were they concentrating on conservative groups?
Why weren’t they looking at communist groups, socialists, muslims, racist groups like La Raza, Black Panthers, etc.?
Blame the victims. That’s what they do in totalitarian societies.
The writer of the piece knows this but doesn't understand it. The objective was simply to limit the ability of the chapters involved to begin full operation.
This is probably what was going on with the Jewish groups that got flagged as well but I'm not sure. I'd need to know more about them.
A smart operator would have called up some of those friends to ask them to get somebody to submit a couple of applications so he could flag them and show he wasn't partial.
I recall the issue back then specifically with the Western Journalism Center and World Net Daily.
All the crap about Nixon is just that, B.S. I recall that he tried to use the IRS but they did not go along.
Megan McArdle
McArdle married Peter Suderman, an associate editor for the libertarian Reason magazine, in 2010. She was a vegan for a year in 2008, which she ended due to a soy allergy caused by Hashimoto's thyroiditis. She has written: "I must stand up for vegan or vegetarian 'chicken' nuggets. They are delicious. Even though I now eat meat again, I still prefer the vegetarian version to the 'real' thing, especially after seeing what chicken nuggets are made from."
If I do it to you, there MUST have been a legitimate reason.
If you do it to me, you may NEVER atone for your misdeed.
Leftists enjoy the Machiavellian advantage of a completely subjective system of ethics.
Clinton used IRS audits on opponents all the time.
Heck, I remember a man confronting him and he turned to an underling and ordered an audit of the guy.
Judicial Watch and Paula Jones were audited, among others.
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