It's not really clear how the groups were targeted and what was the basis for it and who ordered it so you've jumped the cart ahead of the horse and ridden off into the sunset already. Second, yes, it's perfectly fine for government to give special scrutiny to certain groups based on their beliefs, political or otherwise, especially when those beliefs are contrary to the law. For example, if there was a group that aggressively supported illegal immigration then why shouldn't they receive special scrutiny? Why is this any different? Do you think you can politically support abolishing the tax code, abolishing the IRS, and equating taxation with violence by the government and that's just okay? Ho hum, no big deal? Yeah, you can say it and they can't stop you from saying it but they can sure keep a damn good eye on you for saying it. Now, like I said, it's not clear why these groups were targeted, the basis for it, and who ordered it. If they were targeted because they have belligerent anti tax, anti government stances then I have no problem with the scrutiny. If this was a strictly partisan political thing ordered by someone in the White House to affect an election then that's an entirely different matter and yes, that is wrong. You have presumed the politics of it without any evidence. So why don't we get an actual investigation completed before we scream about Rome burning. Thanks bobbymar for completely trashing this forum. THAT takes a lot of work but you have done it.
You guys are really worried. Too bad none of you want to debate the points, and when you try, you rehash old arguments that have been debunked many times. -------------------------------------- Please discuss the points 1. Why did the IRS take so long to even go through the conservative applications and most of the liberal applications went straight through? If they were targeted, why is that ok but not ok for liberal groups? 2. Why did the IRS ask such inane and offensive questions to only conservative groups? Why did they not ask the liberal groups the same questions? Is it ok to ask for donor lists, social media accounts, wording of prayers? Why didn't the IRS ever ask such questions to liberal groups? 3. Do you think it is ok that the IRS is leaking sensitive donor information from an approved organization to a opposition group that uses the info to attack person on the lists? 4. The Supreme Court ruled that 501c4 can be up to 49% political, do you disagree with SCOTUS and why? 5. If you believe that no politcal groups should get exempt status do you think it ok that Obama's campaign organization should be able to become exempt? (They are in the process for exemption.) 6. Lack of funding and understaffing has been blamed for backlog of applications. Do you think that is still a valid excuse even after hearing the IRS spent about 50 million on conferences when they lied last year and only spent 600k? 7. Was it ethical for the IRS to withhold 125 million from the state of Virginia that they were awarded from a lawsuit on a pharmaceutical company that paid the amount, because of sequestration?
Why are people upset about this but not upset at all by the fact that we gerry-mander specifically with partisan politics in mind? That stands out to me as the most egregious use of partisanship to determine what should be a politically neutral process. It's a scandal to top all scandals. And gerry-mandering isn't some low level desk workers - that's state elected leaders who are discriminating against people on the basis of their political opinion in an effort to diminish the value of the vote. You would think that the right to have your vote count as much as any person is more fundamental and more deserving of protection than the right to get tax exempt status, but maybe it's not. Our odd priorities makes for a strange reality. Bobmarley, any thoughts?
POTOMAC WATCHJune 6, 2013, 7:40 p.m. ET An IRS Political Timeline President Obama spent months in 2010 warning Americans about the 'threat' to democracy posed by conservative groups, right at the time the IRS began targeting these groups. By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL Perhaps the only useful part of the inspector general's audit of the IRS was its timeline. We know that it was August 2010 when the IRS issued its first "Be On the Lookout" list, flagging applications containing key conservative words and issues. The criteria would expand in the months to come. What else was happening in the summer and fall of 2010? The Obama administration and its allies continue to suggest the IRS was working in some political vacuum. What they'd rather everyone forget is that the IRS's first BOLO list coincided with their own attack against "shadowy" or "front" conservative groups that they claimed were rigging the electoral system. Below is a more relevant timeline, a political one, which seeks to remind readers of the context in which the IRS targeting happened. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images Barack Obama warns the country about conservative groups, Aug. 9, 2010 Aug. 9, 2010: In Texas, President Obama for the first time publicly names a group he is obsessed with—Americans for Prosperity (founded by the Koch Brothers)—and warns about conservative groups. Taking up a cry that had until then largely been confined to left-wing media and activists, he says: "Right now all around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads . . . And they don't have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don't know if it's a foreign-controlled corporation." Aug. 11: The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sends out a fundraising email warning about "Karl Rove-inspired shadow groups." Aug. 21: Mr. Obama devotes his weekly radio address to the threat of "attack ads run by shadowy groups with harmless-sounding names. We don't know who's behind these ads and we don't know who's paying for them. . . . You don't know if it's a foreign-controlled corporation. . . . The only people who don't want to disclose the truth are people with something to hide." Week of Aug. 23: The New Yorker's Jane Mayer authors a hit piece on the Koch brothers, entitled "Covert Operations," in which she accuses them of funding "political front groups." The piece repeats the White House theme, with Ms. Mayer claiming the Kochs have created "slippery organizations with generic-sounding names" that have "made it difficult to ascertain the extent of their influence in Washington." Aug. 27: White House economist Austan Goolsbee, in a background briefing with reporters, accuses Koch industries of being a pass-through entity that does "not pay corporate income tax." The Treasury inspector general investigates how it is that Mr. Goolsbee might have confidential tax information. The report has never been released. This same week, the Democratic Party files a complaint with the IRS claiming the Americans for Prosperity Foundation is violating its tax-exempt status. Sept. 2: The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee warns on its website that the Kochs have "funneled their money into right-wing shadow groups." Sept. 16: Mr. Obama, in Connecticut, repeats that a "foreign-controlled entity" might be funding "millions of dollars of attack ads." Four days later, in Philadelphia, he again says the problem is that "nobody knows" who is behind conservative groups. Sept. 21: Sam Stein, in his Huffington Post article "Obama, Dems Try to Make Shadowy Conservative Groups a Problem for Conservatives," writes that a "senior administration official" had "urged a small gathering of reporters to start writing on what he deemed 'the most insidious power grab that we have seen in a very long time.' " Sept. 22: In New York City, Mr. Obama warns that conservative groups "pose as non-for-profit, social welfare and trade groups," even though they are "guided by seasoned Republican political operatives" who might be funded by a "foreign-controlled corporation." Sept. 26: On ABC's "This Week," Obama senior adviser David Axelrod declares outright that the "benign-sounding Americans for Prosperity, the American Crossroads Fund" are "front groups for foreign-controlled companies." Sept. 28: The president, in Wisconsin, again warns about conservative organizations "posing as nonprofit groups." Sen. Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, writes to the IRS demanding it investigate nonprofits. The letter names conservative organizations. On Oct. 14, Mr. Obama calls these groups "a problem for democracy." On Oct. 22, he slams those who "hide behind these front groups." On Oct. 25, he upgrades them to a "threat to our democracy." On Oct. 26, he decries groups engaged in "unsupervised spending." These were not off-the-cuff remarks. They were repeated by the White House and echoed by its allies in campaign events, emails, social media and TV ads. The president of the United States spent months warning the country that "shadowy," conservative "front" groups—"posing" as tax-exempt entities and illegally controlled by "foreign" players—were engaged in "unsupervised" spending that posed a "threat" to democracy. Yet we are to believe that a few rogue IRS employees just happened during that time to begin systematically targeting conservative groups? A mere coincidence that among the things the IRS demanded of these groups were "copies of any contracts with and training materials provided by Americans for Prosperity"? This newspaper reported Thursday that Cincinnati IRS employees are now telling investigators that they took their orders from Washington. For anyone with a memory of 2010 politics, that was obvious from the start. Write to kim@wsj.com. A version of this article appeared June 7, 2013, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: An IRS Political Timeline. Copyright 2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323844804578529571309012846.html#printMode
That's an excellent example of how government targets people and it's actually much worse than this tax status delay issue.
I understand. Congress has passed numerous laws that have contradicted past laws. The drinking age was 18 then they passed a contradictory law that said it was 21. I don't think there was much concern about which law to follow. I hope you can follow something so vapid. When you have to resort to personal insults you've already lost. LOL!
IRS Agent Accidentally Sent Email To “Everyone In DC” Alerting Them Tea Party Targeting Was Going On In 2010… Every excuse the IRS higher ups have given has been debunked. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/07/us-usa-irs-scrutiny-idUSBRE95605X20130607 (Reuters) – A misfired email from a U.S. Internal Revenue Service employee in Cincinnati alerted a number of Washington IRS officials that extra scrutiny was being placed on conservative groups in July 2010, a year earlier than previously acknowledged, according to interviews with IRS workers by congressional investigators. Transcripts of the interviews, reviewed by Reuters on Thursday, provided new details about Washington managers’ awareness of the heightened scrutiny applied by front-line IRS agents in Cincinnati to applications for tax-exempt status from conservative groups with words like “Tea Party” in their names. A political furor over the practice has engulfed the tax agency for nearly a month since a senior IRS official publicly apologized for it at a conference. Since then, the IRS’ chief has been fired by President Barack Obama, the FBI has mounted an investigation and Congress has held numerous hearings. The transcripts show that in July 2010, Elizabeth Hofacre, an IRS official in Cincinnati who was coordinating “emerging issues” for the agency’s tax-exempt unit, was corresponding with Washington-based IRS tax attorney Carter Hull. In April 2010 Hofacre had been put in charge of handling tax-exempt status applications from conservative groups by her Cincinnati supervisor. “Everybody in DC got it by mistake,” Hofacre said in the transcripts. She later clarified that she did not mean all officials but those in the IRS Exempt Organizations Rulings and Agreements unit. The Cincinnati office, where IRS reviews of applications for tax-exempt status were centralized, used a “be-on-the-lookout” (BOLO) list that included the words “Tea Party” and “Patriot” for flagging applications for extra review.
Chuck Schumer Stands Up For Illegal Aliens Who Steal Americans’ Identities http://cnsnews.com/blog/terence-p-jeffrey/schumer-put-aliens-who-forged-documents-path-citizenship As usual, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is on the wrong side of an issue. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) introduced an amendement to the rotten immigration bill working its way through the Senate that would require illegal aliens seeking amnesty to disclose all aliases and Social Security numbers they have used while living in the United States. The amendment wouldn’t even make the identity thieves ineligible for legal status. But of course, Schumer stood up for the identity thieves, because they couldn’t possibly remember all of the identities they may have stolen from American citizens. In other news, there has been talk about Marco Rubio possibly walking away from the Gang of Eight and voting against his own bill. While that would be nice, don’t hold your breath waiting for it to happen. But it may not matter, as immigration talks in the House are “near collapse” according to ABC News because the Democrats want the illegal-turned-legal immigrants to be eligible to enroll in Obamacare.
EPA confesses to handing out farmers’ personal information to activist-lawyers. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/201...-request-that-included-data-on/#ixzz2Q0X7tK5g The EPA just admitted that, yeah, it gave out a bunch of personal information about farmers and ranchers – including phone numbers, email addresses, regular addresses, and whatnot – to various environmental groups. The EPA also is kind of admitting that, yeah, maybe it shouldn’t have given out that information, which is why they’ve asked those groups to give that information back (note that the EPA apparently didn’t even bother to ask that the groups give back the information without making copies first). This is not amusing Senator John Thune, because a) the damage is done; b) apparently nobody in the EPA talks to Agriculture & Homeland Security, which both decided not to make this particular information available in a database; and c) there’s a question about whether or not all of this violates the Privacy Act of 1974. Before we go into the specific point about this situation that I wish to highlight, let me make a general observation to people who like big government; there are a lot of stories like this out there, just waiting to be found. There always are. But right now, we have a combination of factors that will bring these stories to the surface: there is an existing pattern of consistent government overreach, an administration that is increasingly being associated with heavy-handed, somewhat incompetent use of policy as a weapon, and a media that has just internalized the revelation that the government is reading their mail, too. This could go on all summer, and probably will. But back to the EPA! Please, pay close attention to this part: …because this is where it gets interesting. Earthjustice’s basic reason for existence is to try to sue into oblivion any industrial development that they don’t like; and a large part of their strategy is to find someone to target, then find something that they can target them with (like, for example, the Clean Water Act). But you’re saying Moe, the family farmers aren’t subject to the CWA! …And perhaps that is true. But there’s a whole bunch of regulations that those farmers are subject to – and their personal information has just been given to a bunch of hardcore progressive lawyers who capitalize the word ‘people.’ In other words; if you don’t think that the EPA has put small farmers and ranchers at increased risk of punitive lawfare by partisan activists, well. I would almost envy you that private world of yours, except that I suspect that there isn’t quite enough oxygen in it. And, oh yeah: the EPA routinely waives Earthjustice’s filing fees (H/T: the appropriately named Watts Up With That?). So the federal government essentially gave this information to them for free.
Who inside the IRS hatched the plan to target conservatives and what, if any, connections do they, their associates, or superiors have to the Obama White House, campaign team, or other political organizations? Who at the IRS leaked confidential tax documents to the progressive-leaning journalism group ProPublica, an action which the IRS official manual says can result in up to five years in prison and fines of up to $5,000? Who are the two “rogue” individuals disgraced former IRS Commissioner Stevens said went “off the reservation” and acted “overly aggressive” and what, if any, connections do they have politically? If, as the Inspector General report alleges, political motivations were not driving the targeting of conservatives, then what was? Also, what “discipline” did the two rogue agents receive? Did IRS agents coordinate with Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) or his staff to “go after them [conservative groups],” as he told the New York Times, following Levin’s letters to then-IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman and Director Lois Lerner? Did Sen. Max Baucus (D-MO) or his staff communicate or coordinate with IRS agents after Baucus wrote this September 28, 2010 letter instructing then-Commissioner Douglas Shulman to have his “agency survey major 401(c)(4), (c)(5) and (c)(6) organizations to determine whether they are acting as conduits for major donors advancing their own private interests”? What communications took place between IRS agents and the following senators and their staffs following the delivery of this jointly written letter demanding the IRS crack down on “abuse of the tax code by political groups focused on federal election activities”: Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO ), Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM), Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), and Sen. Al Franken (D-MN)? What communications existed between Obama reelection campaign co-chair Joe Solomonese, whom the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) alleges received its confidential tax returns, and IRS agents? What portion of Obama’s 79% increase in audits of charities were of conservative groups? If political motivations were not driving the selective targeting of 500 conservative organizations, then why were a similar number of liberal groups not harassed? What role did IRS Rulings and Agreements Division Director Holly Paz, who in 2008 donated $2,000 to Obama, play in ratcheting up IRS investigations, as she promised she would in June 2012?
Five more questions, also from Breitbart: 1. Who is buried in Grant’s tomb? 2. What time is dinner… I am hungry? 3. If a woodchuck could chuck wood, how much wood could a woodchuck chuck? 4. Where is Obama’s transcripts? 5. What is the secret to the universe?
1. Nobody. You don't bury people in a tomb. 2. An hour ago...you missed it. 3. Hey woodchuck...quit chucking my wood. 4. In his baby book, with his birth certificate and his fifth grad class picture. 5. 42
Cincinnati IRS Staffer Tells Congressional Investigators: Washington Showed “Unusual” Interest In Tea Party Cases, “Was Over The Top”… Via The Hill: http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-mon...on-showed-unusual-interest-in-tea-party-cases An IRS staffer in Cincinnati told congressional investigators that a Washington official was the driving force behind the targeting of Tea Party organizations in 2010, and showed unprecedented interest in those groups’ tax-exempt applications. Elizabeth Hofacre, the Cincinnati staffer, said that she started receiving applications from Tea Party groups to sift through in April, 2010. Hofacre’s handling of those cases, she said, was highly influenced by Carter Hull, an IRS lawyer in Washington. Hofacre said that she integrated questions from Hull into her follow-ups with Tea Party groups, and that Hull had to approve the letters seeking more information that she sent out to those organizations. That process, she said, was both unusual and “demeaning.” “One of the criteria is to work independently and do research and make decisions based on your experience and education,” Hofacre said, according to transcripts reviewed by The Hill. “Whereas in this case, I had no autonomy at all through the process.” “I thought it was over the top,” she added, in interviews held by investigators in both parties from the House Oversight and Ways and Means committees. “I am not sure where it came from, but it was a bit unusual.”
