Working for the Democratic Party: There is now evidence that the IRS illegally leaked the tax records of conservative groups to their liberal opponents.
Mickey Kaus notes that this abuse did not have to be ordered by the big bosses in the Democratic Party. The people at the IRS are mostly Democrats, and will do it naturally if they simply feel that their bosses will look the other way.
Remember Romney supporter and businessman Frank VanderSloot? First attacked by the Obama campaign, he was then subjected to two audits, from the IRS and Labor.
Gee, I wonder why?
And here’s a story describing five other examples of the IRS being used to punish opponents of the Democratic Party.
A report to be released this week says that senior IRS officials knew that agents were targeting tea party groups in 2011, even as they were denying that this was happening.
Increasingly it appears the Obama administration used the IRS as a tool for harassing its opponents.
Ten crazy and unconstitutional demands made by the IRS to conservative organizations in its effort to harass opponents of the Democratic Party.
All of the examples above are taken from actual IRS correspondence received by ACLJ’s 27 clients. There were many versions of the in-depth questionnaire sent to different organizations, suggesting there was more than one agent or one office involved. Though IRS officials blamed “low-level” employees in the Cincinnati office, which is the central IRS office in charge of tax exemptions, French said the abuse was far more widespread. ACLJ’s clients dealt with inquiries from IRS offices from “coast to coast.” Of ACLJ’s 27 clients, 15 finally had their status approved after 6-7 months with legal help. There are 12 groups whose status remains in limbo.
What could possibly go wrong? The immigration reform measure the Senate began debating yesterday would create a national biometric database of virtually every adult in the U.S.
The IRS admitted today that it targeted conservative political organizations during the 2012 election campaign.
Organizations were singled out because they included the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their applications for tax-exempt status, said Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups. In some cases, groups were asked for their list of donors, which violates IRS policy in most cases, she said.
The IRS also claimed that this action was “initiated by low-level workers in Cincinnati and was not motivated by political bias.” And I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell them.
The words of those who falsely blamed the Benghazi terrorist attack on an obscure YouTube trailer, and were then willing to abandon the First Amendment to defend their lies.
Yesterday’s dramatic congressional testimony about the deadly Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attacks on U.S. interests in Benghazi, Libya convincingly corroborated what was widely reported within days of the attack: that senior American officials on the ground knew immediately, despite the Obama administration’s storyline to the contrary, that the assault did not arise out of a “spontaneous” demonstration outside the U.S. Consulate in protest of an obscure YouTube trailer of a homemade anti-Islam movie called Innocence of Muslims.
Falsely assessing partial blame for the violence on a piece of artistic expression inflicted damage not just on the California resident who made it—Nakoula Basseley Nakoula is currently serving out a one-year sentence for parole violations committed in the process of producing Innocence—but also on the entire American culture of free speech. In the days and weeks after the attacks, academics and foreign policy thinkers fell over themselves dreaming up new ways to either disproportionately punish Nakoula or scale back the very notion of constitutionally protected expression.
The article then shows us who in American politics was willing to abandon freedom of speech for political reasons. If we have any courage, we should throw these words back in their face again and again and again and again.
House Republicans have refused to recommend anyone to the Obamacare Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), labeled “the death panel” by some.
“We believe Congress should repeal IPAB, just as we believe we ought to repeal the entire health care law,” the Boehner and McConnell letter reads.
I personally don’t bother with this new term. I just call them racists and bigots, for that is what they are.
The sad, strange, and ineffective story of the Canadian Firearms Registry.
Heh: A new research study finds that every time someone imagines socialism working, it does so, as much as 98 percent of the time!
“There’s no ambiguity about our findings,” said Dr. Halbert Thursday, “we have proved beyond a doubt: every time someone imagines the economic system of Socialism working, it does. Regardless of what time in history, too,” continued Halbert, “if someone imagined that Socialism has worked in the past, it did. If someone imagined it working currently, it does. And if a person imagined it will work in the future, it will. It’s the most amazing thing…Truly remarkable.”
The study consisted of interviewing 5000 economists and ordinary citizens around the world, from socialist and non-socialist countries alike. No matter where in the world, people realized the repeatedly attempted 200-plus-year-old social and economic system operated fairly, efficiently, and humanely nearly every time they fantasized it would. Said Dr. Halbert, “The people in North Korea we were allowed to interview were the most enthusiastic. They not only declared their economic system the best in the world, but the best ever in the solar system.”
Two reports released today show that gun homicides have dropped steeply in the United States since their peak in 1993.
The drop has coincided perfectly with a comparably steep rise in gun ownership nationwide. What does that tell us?
