Bad actors at the IRS

The treasury secretary calls out ‘several bad actors’ at IRS, vows to make agency ‘behave fairly’. This should not come as a surprise to anyone outside of the leftist media bubble:

Waiting for Elizabeth Warren's head to explode

Elizabeth Warren's head will explode after hearing what DOGE's Elon Musk has in mind:

Is the IRS next?

Cummings and goings on - an ethics complaint

An ethics complaint has been filed with the IRS against Democrat Rep. Cummings and his wife. Via OAN:

While you were out, impeachment

You were thinking Obama?  Nope, impeachment at the IRS. Not exactly headline news, but worth mentioning in light of the Tea Party targeting scandal.

WASHINGTON—Today, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) and 18 members of the Committee introduced a resolution to begin proceedings in the U.S. House of Representatives to impeach Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Commissioner John Koskinen.

In introducing the resolution, Chairman Chaffetz said, “Commissioner Koskinen violated the public trust. He failed to comply with a congressionally issued subpoena, documents were destroyed on his watch, and the public was consistently misled. Impeachment is the appropriate tool to restore public confidence in the IRS and to protect the institutional interests of Congress. This action will demonstrate to the American people that the IRS is under repair, and signal that Executive Branch officials who violate the public trust will be held accountable.”

Hat Tip: Bluegrass Pundit.

Two Word Opinions - April 2014

I`m busy and with limited internet connectivity today, so just some quick thoughts on the topics of the day.  Very quick.  Two words.

Lois Lerner is  is facing charges of contempt regarding the IRS targeting of Tea Party Groups.  Meanwhile she's apparently looking to get a job with Democrat PAC Organizing for Action. - Not Over.

The crisis is the Ukraine isn't over, unless you happen to be part of the Obama administration or the mainstream media. - Face palm.

Stabbing spree by a student this morning n Pennsylvania didn't involve guns. - Bearing arms?

Obama is still pushing a gender gap agenda ahead of the 2014 midterm elections. - Pure politics.

The GOP is urging the White House to slow down on transferring control of the internet to countries around the world. - About time.

Lois Lerner. Obama administration. Transparency Gong Show

Remember the Gong Show?  This reminds me of that show.  Lois Lerner's refusal to testify about the IRS targeting the Tea Party is yet another example of the transparency of the Obama administration being negligible.

It set of a firestorm, for at least one Democrat Congressman:

Our FCC Overlords will tell you what the news will be.

Is this Childhood's End come to life?  Liberals took a run at the Second Amendment, and failed.  Now it seems, they want to go after the big prize: the First Amendment. Phrase by phrase if need be. This may be the biggest scandal of the Obama era - government overreach on the part of the FCC that if followed through on, will be the single biggest blow to liberty in the republic, ever. 

The First Amendment, in case you forget, goes something like this:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances

The FCC perhaps, hasn't read it.  If they did, they would probably want to tell the media how to report on it.

Via WSJ:

...But everyone should agree on this: The government has no place pressuring media organizations into covering certain stories.

Unfortunately, the Federal Communications Commission, where I am a commissioner, does not agree. Last May the FCC proposed an initiative to thrust the federal government into newsrooms across the country. With its "Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs," or CIN, the agency plans to send researchers to grill reporters, editors and station owners about how they decide which stories to run. A field test in Columbia, S.C., is scheduled to begin this spring.

The purpose of the CIN, according to the FCC, is to ferret out information from television and radio broadcasters about "the process by which stories are selected" and how often stations cover "critical information needs," along with "perceived station bias" and "perceived responsiveness to underserved populations."

How does the FCC plan to dig up all that information? First, the agency selected eight categories of "critical information" such as the "environment" and "economic opportunities," that it believes local newscasters should cover.

Piling on the IRS singling out Tea Party groups for special attention, this administration is not only not stopping government bureaucracies from exceeding their  mandates, it is actively encouraging them to do so.  Even if by omission, this is a terrible indictment of a government that is putting politics well ahead of the rights of citizens.

If ever an American government needed to be stopped in its tracks, now is the time.  It will be interesting to see if journalists and news media step up to this and tell it like it is or if they too will place political agendas ahead of their own interests. 

From the Unbelievable Government files

Unbelievable government in action - the IRS is targeting the American Legion. getting a slight rap on the knuckles and a culprit promoted for targeting the Tea Party and other conservative groups unexpectedly did not deter such behavior at the IRS.

Via The Daily Caller;

The Internal Revenue Service is targeting the veterans’ organization the American Legion, and a U.S. senator believes that Lois Lerner — a key figure in the IRS scandal – is to blame.

“The IRS now requires American Legion posts to maintain dates of service and character of service records for all members… The penalty for not having the required proof of eligibility is, apparently, $1,000 per day,” the American Legion stated...

“On the heels of Americans’ anger over revelations that the IRS intentionally targeted certain groups, it has been brought to my attention that the IRS is now turning their sights toward our nation’s veterans,” Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran said. “The IRS seems to be auditing veteran service organizations by requiring private member military service forms.”

The scariest thing about this is that  an expanding IRS targeting scandal means that eventually, everybody could be in their sites.  Talk about control.

Quick Post: IRS scandal #2

Shady IRS logo for the record company.  Maybe they should switch with the other IRS

I'm behind on blogging and as a result, behind on this new story of more IRS malfeasance.  Or foolishness.  Either way, this is unacceptable.

Via the National Journal:

Another day, another slip up by the Internal Revenue Service.

The incident involves the unwitting exposure of "tens of thousands" of Social Security numbers, according to a recent audit by the independent transparency and public-domain group Public.Resource.org. The identifying numbers were on the Internet for less than 24 hours after being discovered, but the damage was done. And unfortunately, the data-breach concerns some of the most sensitive types of transactions: Those made by nonprofit political groups known as 527s.

Every so often, 527s have to file tax forms to the IRS, which then get added to a database. The database itself is hardly a secret; the IRS has been sending updated records routinely to Public.Resource.org and other public-interest groups, and it's a favorite among political reporters. But when the IRS told the group's founder, Carl Malamud, to disregard the Form 990-Ts included in the agency's January release, he took a closer look at the files in question.

After analyzing the breach, Malamud wrote a letter to the IRS pointing out 10 instances where a social security number was accidentally revealed on the government's website—just a small sample of the larger breach.

So here's the obvious question - were these Tea Party groups?  I have issues with the IRS either way - either it's more persecution of conservative groups, or it's a way to intimate that the IRS is broken but not deliberately working against conservative groups and this is a diversion of anger against the first complaint against the IRS.   There is a third possibility - that the IRS is horribly screwed up and this information came out coincidentally with the other scandal.

More information needs to come out before we can be certain;

(1) Whose info was exposed?

(2) Did it happen after the first scandal, before, or is it part of an on-going pattern of mistakes of this type?

(3) How did the information come to light?

(4) How were those affected by it, affected?

Waiting seems to be the best course of action before making pronouncements on this.

Leaker Snowden crossed a line

Prior to today, Edward Snowden who leaked a lot of details about the government's secret collection of vast amounts of electronic data of citizens without a warrant or probable cause, has crossed a line.  Previously it could be argued that he was putting liberty ahead of national security. After all, what does national security matter if the principles the nation was founded on and which were enshrined in the Constitution, aren't being protected? Is the nation worth defending at that point?

The debate over those questions has gone away, the debate over whether Snowden himself was a patriot or a traitor, just went south.  There's no doubt he's a traitor now, after this:

Via the decidedly liberal partisan Washington Post, it turns out, that Snowden has started to reveal details about U.S. spying on China.  That's aiding and abetting a rival (if not adversary).

HONG KONG — Edward Snowden, the self-confessed leaker of secret surveillance documents, claimed Wednesday that the United States has mounted massive hacking operations against hundreds of Chinese targets since 2009.

The former contractor, whose work at the National Security Agency gave him access to highly classified U.S. intelligence, made the assertions in an interview with the South China Morning Post. The newspaper said he showed it “unverified documents” describing an extensive U.S. campaign to obtain information from computers in Hong Kong and mainland China.

Despite the Washington Post's political bent, it's hard to argue that Snowden is clearly sharing information with the Chinese after that South China Morning Post interview.  Snowden is no hero, he's a traitor.  China does not need to know that we are spying on them (or how).  I mean, we know it, they know it but he has damaged both the details and the deniability for America.  But that does not one thing to undercut the information he has shared about government spying on its own citizens.  That is a scandal with serious implications and needs to be investigated, and explained and discussed with all of the seriousness it deserves.  Liberty versus security deserves a lot more than a two minute drill and not to be derailed by the actions of Snowden.  After all, the spying on citizens (the AP scandal, the Prism scandal and the Verizon scandal) and the enemies list (the IRS scandal), are reminiscent of a past president who faced impeachment and ultimately resigned.  

Democrat Jim McDermott blames victims in IRS scandal

The worst thing a defense attorney can do is blame the victim.  "You were sexually assaulted?  You shouldn't have worn that provocative dress."  Make no mistake, at the Ways and Means Committee hearings on the IRS scandal, Democrat commission members are acting like defense attorneys.  Congressman McDermott is clearly blaming the victim.

I don't want to show the video because it is frankly offensive. But here's the pertinent details via Breitbart;

Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) offered a bizarre defense of the IRS's behavior at a House Ways and Means hearing on Tuesday morning, amounting to an attack on the Tea Party and conservative organizations present as potential money-launderers seeking a tax break from the government, not the exercise of their basic rights.

If the IRS scandal lacked a bully figure, it has one now. McDermott repeated the same attacks on 501(c)4 organizations that other Democrats have recycled in their talking points since the scandal began. But he made the mistake of attacking the witnesses--and misrepresenting the testimony of at least one in particular. All of them, he said, were before Congress because they had been seeking tax subsidies; but as Dr. John Eastman of the National Organization for Marriage--already a tax-exempt organization--had just testified, his specific complaint was about the apparently criminal leak of their donors' names to a liberal organization.

On the other hand, there have been some spirited calling-to-task reprimands from  Republicans in the way the Democrats on the committee are in damage control mode and not their to solve the problem.

IRS files - Alinsky said pick the target, freeze it...

Yeah, what if?

A few years ago, I made a list of counter-tactics to Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals because the left was almost constantly engaged in using these tactics to defeat conservatives repeatedly and often.  It's time to revisit those rules and counter-rules because there's a lot going on with the current IRS scandal that Alinsky's manifesto is playing a role in shaping.

In fact  Saul Alinsky (who is connected at least spiritually to president Obama) in his manifesto Rules for Radicals, said the following;

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.

There are some interesting points in this that relate to the IRS unjust (and most certainly illegal) persecution of Tea Party and other conservative organizations, aside from the obvious ones but lets start with those.

How the IRS used Alinsky tactics on multiple conservative organizations

Firstly, the IRS has clearly picked the target (and perhaps it was picked for them) - conservative organizations were targeted for tax exempted status denial.  But it goes deeper.  Having picked the target they not only denied those organizations that status while granting liberal organizations status, they used that denial and delay to demand significant amounts of member details, and personal information.  That can be viewed as intimidation and unfair treatment, and it certainly was that, but it also means that they are able to collect more information about their political opposites.  They even shared some of that information about those conservative organizations with liberal ones.  That is clearly political.  The point is there is multiple political benefits to the big government left in these IRS actions.  They stalled many of these organizations from being as effective as possible during the 2012 elections.  They also collected opposition information.  It's like a football team getting to see their opponents' playbook before game day.  

In pressing those conservative organizations, the IRS clearly personalized the attacks.  They demanded personal information. 

And one of the most confounding impacts for these groups was how they were persecuted in isolation.  While this was apparently happening to hundreds of these groups, they all were handled as if they were alone in their difficulties.  More organizations are bound to come forward as they realize what was happening to them was not happening to just them.

You think the targeting is bad now?

And there's one other way that Alinsky tactics were used on conservatives across the country, not just these groups.  These IRS issues came out the same week as the Benghazi scandal was ramping up and the Justice Department was outed for spying on the media.  It's hard as conservatives to nail down a scandal, especially in the publics' mind if there are three going on at once.  You can't isolate it.  Conversely if you focus on one of these scandals, the other two might slide by unchallenged or unprosecuted. Why did three scandals hit the news cycle at the same time? Two of them may be a diversion for the most egregious one of the bunch.

Notice that Susan Rice is being promoted National Security Advisor today?  Why?  She was flat out wrong on Benghazi where four Americans were killed by a terrorist attack.  Was this the worst of the scandals?  It was certainly fatal.  So perhaps the mea culpa on the IRS scandal is entirely a diversion that the left hopes the right will get wrong on prosecuting anyway.

Now the counter-tactic

The counter is pretty straight forward and quick. User the Alinsky tactics on the IRS.  Isolate the IRS, and hammer it and keep digging and keep them back on their heels.  There is more information bound to come out. This house of cards will crumble and somewhere in an effort to save their own bureaucratic jobs, someone will eventually give up where this directive came from.

Meanwhile, as the scandal unfolds, the other two scandals can't be ignored.  Digging into the Justice Department and the State Department screw ups has to continue.  The only caveat is that it doesn't make sense to have the scandals compete for headlines. They should be brought forward sequentially because that will hold the public's attention about corruption, malfeasance and lack of qualified leadership for a longer time period leading up to 2014 and 2016.  The side benefit of that is that it allows those investigating the other two scandals time to get their details together and to present a much stronger case before bringing the details forward.  As with the IRS scandal the final point is to never let up.

Government Without Brakes

Forget for a moment about the Orwellian Big Brother aspects of government agencies that feel nothing is wrong with targeting certain groups for harassment (for example the IRS, Justice, and even the EPA though there's no headline scandal right now). Instead, let's focus on what the underlying problem is - that which enables the government agency to feel they are insulated from having to answer to anyone about anything.

There are three reason I can think of that might account for that type of behavior - political motivations aside.  These reasons are not meant to be collectively exhaustive but they likely explain a significant percentage of why agencies think this sort of behavior is acceptable. 

Firstly, these agencies may feel that they are the government's equivalent of too big to fail, i.e. they are too big to answer to anyone because of the sheer titanic mass behind them. That's distressing from the perspective that they are relying on their size to intimidate or to squash any potential resistance.  That sounds a lot like tyranny.

Another possible reason is that because these agencies have become so large, there is no sufficient locus of responsibility.  In other words, no one answers directly to anyone that can be tied back to anyone in an administration.  That seems suspiciously convenient.  Those in charge of the executive branch can speak some ideology and have it obeyed without any accountability on their part or the part of their subordinates.  Either that means a structure prone to abuse due to that lack of specific responsibilities, or a structure prone to abuse because it can be blamed on the expanse of the government and it being beyond manageable.

That's the type of thinking that led to Nazi Germany's death camps. "I was just following orders" is a way to abdicate personal responsibility;

Large-scale evil requires surrender of autonomy, coercion by a central authority and a willingness to follow orders.

With no personal responsibility to stand up and say no to unfair policies and processes, government agencies become especially subject to misguided actions.  It's always someone else's fault.  It's always above everyone's pay grade.

That does nothing of course, to excuse inexcusable behavior.  Nor does that lack of locus of responsibility preclude the "too big to answer to anyone" mentality either.

Another possible motivating factor is that a government department's mandate, by being expanded and growing, continues the justification for that department's continued existence.  In other words, job security is a factor.  

As Oscar Wilde said, “The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.”  

Government departments are genetically encoded to expand - to propel forward, and find new reasons to justify their own existence.  That leads to massive spending requirements to support these departments and continually diluted and expanded mandates that go well beyond common sense.

Some of the lessons of history still have not been learned.  Governments are still designed without brakes.  And anything unable to stop, eventually crashes into something.

Omnipotence as impotence

The infrastructure's fixed now, right?

The IRS scandal seems to be the top headline today. While the distraction from Benghazi has traction, the IRS scandal does merit a full accounting.  Here are some thoughts on the Obama defense.

The current liberal defense of this incompetent, self-serving and dishonest administration (from no less than David Axelrod himself, for example) is that the government is so big, it is impossible to self-police every corner of it.  If you are conservative and hear that argument used you think "of course it is!". If you are liberal you hear it and think"we need more laws and more people in government to police the government. "

Liberal folly is evident only to those not caught up in its circular logic.  Big government that doesn't work should not lead to bigger government.  When the government has grown to have near omnipotent power to act at will, it becomes impotent to be able to act cohesively or correctly. Local interpretation of directives is subject to a myriad of staff. And that's just one problem with big government.

And yet this is the liberal defense of Obama in some quarters in a nutshell.  Yep, blame. Again.  Blame the lack of government synergy.  Blame local potentates within the bureaucracy. Just be sure the president is untouched.  The media and liberal pundits are the president's secret service.  The irony is that those defenders of Obama are making an argument against his objective of bigger government in order to keep him in power to continue to grow government.

They are making our case for us but they will fail to see it that way. They see it as an end (bigger government) that the means (blaming big government)  justifies. In fact, they may not even realize the irony. They just want to ride out this storm.

What Obama would have you believe

The president is about to speak about the IRS scandal.  After releasing a bunch of email documents on the Benghazi scandal.  The president will focus in prime news time on the IRS scandal.

Classic misdirection.

There's likely no major smoking gun in the Benghazi declassified emails.  But if the president wants eyes on the IRS - a scandal brought to light by the IRS in the midst of a Benghazi whistle blower probe - TV still trumps an email dump.

He will likely pump up the importance of the IRS scandal and then deflate the issue by announcing firings.  He would have you believe he's above board on this and therefore also the Benghazi stuff, which he will play later as a witch hunt.

Scandals happening faster than they can be reported

While this week has been a bad week for the president, one has to wonder if the IRS scandal was deliberately released in order to distract attention from the Benghazi scandal.  It would seem, that either there has been a nefarious plot by the White House to flood the scandals from the Executive Branch across the land now in order to avoid political impacts in the 2014 and 2016 elections.  But if that's the case then we could be in for a bumpy ride, as yet another new scandal is hitting the media today.

This one should be big based on the target.  You know if this was a Bush initiative it would have been thermonuclear.  Let's see what happens.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative's top executive called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather the news.

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of the calls.

In all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown, but more than 100 journalists work in the offices where phone records were targeted, on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.

In a letter of protest sent to Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday, AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt said the government sought and obtained information far beyond anything that could be justified by any specific investigation. He demanded the return of the phone records and destruction of all copies.

By every logic this should be a big deal for the media.  They were the ones being looked at by the administration.  I'm doubtful it will be, but time will tell.

President calms no one with assurances

President Obama indicates how high the scandals are piling up.

President Obama held a press conference today with British Prime Minister Cameron to make a joint statement.  While I half-expected a declaration of ear on Syria a la Wag the Dog or Bill Clinton, the statement was clearly a set up for a question period for Obama.  The first two questions were exactly as expected.

The two question focused on the expanding scandals of IRS targeting of conservative groups (beyond just Tea Party groups now) and the cover-up of a failure of leadership in the Benghazi embassy attacks.

IRS - targeting the Tea Party since 2011

Yesterday the scandal - one of a few in the headlines of late - broke. The IRS, an arm of the government, was targeting conservative Tea Party groups leading up to the 2012 election.  While the IRS apologized, it was too late - the election is long over now.   In it's apology the IRS tried to minimize and isolate the scope of the unconscionable infraction. But was that a fair assessment they built into their apology?

Well, there's this:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Senior Internal Revenue Service officials knew agents were targeting tea party groups as early as 2011, according to a draft of an inspector general's report obtained by The Associated Press that seemingly contradicts public statements by the IRS commissioner.

The IRS apologized Friday for what it acknowledged was "inappropriate" targeting of conservative political groups during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status. The agency blamed low-level employees, saying no high-level officials were aware.

But on June 29, 2011, Lois G. Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt organizations, learned at a meeting that groups were being targeted, according to the watchdog's report. At the meeting, she was told that groups with "Tea Party," ''Patriot" or "9/12 Project" in their names were being flagged for additional and often burdensome scrutiny, the report says.

The 9-12 Project is a group started by conservative TV personality Glenn Beck.

Lerner instructed agents to change the criteria for flagging groups "immediately," the report says.

So it seems the answer is "no - the IRS was not fair in their assessment of the problem that they built into their apology.

Scandal - IRS goes after Tea Party groups and then apologizes

The problem, they targeted the groups in 2012 before the election.  The apology came today - almost a year after the problem probably started and long after it could make a difference in the election.  This is a major scandal and a huge abuse of power.  Not only that, this truly is the actions of George Orwell's Big Brother for pure partisan purposes.

I am officially disgusted.  This has to be as a big a deal as the Benghazi-gate story.  It had better get the attention it deserves from both the left and the right or else the country is truly lost.