Government by Liberals for Liberals

[4est_4est_Gump]

A good point was made over at NRO for those of us who know the Obama Political History of intimidation and getting private records unsealed, just like Islam takes its cues from the life of Mohammed, the IRS and all these other agencies, and there will be more shoes dropping, were merely taking the tack and direction of their captain.

President Obama and Co. are in full deniability mode, noting that the IRS is an "independent" agency and that they knew nothing about its abuse. The media and Congress are sleuthing for some hint that Mr. Obama picked up the phone and sicced the tax dogs on his enemies.

But that's not how things work in post-Watergate Washington. Mr. Obama didn't need to pick up the phone. All he needed to do was exactly what he did do, in full view, for three years: Publicly suggest that conservative political groups were engaged in nefarious deeds; publicly call out by name political opponents whom he'd like to see harassed; and publicly have his party pressure the IRS to take action.

Mr. Obama now professes shock and outrage that bureaucrats at the IRS did exactly what the president of the United States said was the right and honorable thing to do. "He put a target on our backs, and he's now going to blame the people who are shooting at us?" asks Idaho businessman and longtime Republican donor Frank VanderSloot.

Kimberley Strassel, WSJ
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324767004578487332636180800.html?mod=rss_opinion_main

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

The Autocrat Accountants
Mark Steyn, NRO
May 18, 2013

Speaking at Ohio State University earlier this month, Barack Obama urged students to pay no attention to those paranoid types who “incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity.” Oddly enough, in recent days the most compelling testimony for this view of government has come from the president himself, who insists with a straight face that he had no idea that the Internal Revenue Service had spent two years targeting his political enemies until he “learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this.” Like you, all he knows is what he reads in the papers. Which is odd, because his Justice Department is bugging those same papers, so you’d think he’d at least get a bit of a heads-up. But no doubt the fact that he’s wiretapping the Associated Press was also entirely unknown to him until he read about it in the Associated Press. There is a “president of the United States” and a “government of the United States,” but, despite a certain superficial similarity in their names, they are entirely unrelated, like Beyoncé Knowles and Admiral Sir Charles Knowles. One golfs, reads the prompter, parties with Jay-Z, and guests on the Pimp with a Limp show, and the other audits you, bugs your telephone line, and leaks your confidential tax records. But they’re two completely separate sinister entities. So it’s preposterous to describe Obama as Nixonian: Beyoncé wouldn’t have given Nixon the time of day.

If you believe this, there’s a shovel-ready infrastructure project in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you. In April last year, the Obama campaign identified by name eight Romney donors as “a group of wealthy individuals with less than reputable records. Quite a few have been on the wrong side of the law, others have made profits at the expense of so many Americans, and still others are donating to help ensure Romney puts beneficial policies in place for them.” That week, Kimberley Strassel began her Wall Street Journal column thus:

Try this thought experiment: You decide to donate money to Mitt Romney. You want change in the Oval Office, so you engage in your democratic right to send a check.

Several days later, President Barack Obama, the most powerful man on the planet, singles you out by name. . . . The message from the man who controls the Justice Department (which can indict you), the SEC (which can fine you), and the IRS (which can audit you), is clear: You made a mistake donating that money.

Miss Strassel wrote that on April 26, 2012. Five weeks later, one of the named individuals, Frank VanderSloot, was informed by the IRS that he and his wife were being audited. In July, he was told by the Department of Labor of an additional audit over the guest workers on his cattle ranch in Idaho. In September, he was notified that one of his other businesses was to be audited. Mr. VanderSloot, who had never previously been audited, attracted three in the four months after being publicly named by el Presidente. More to the point he attracted that triple audit even though Miss Strassel explicitly predicted in America’s biggest-selling newspaper that this was exactly what the Obama enforcers were going to do. The “separate, sinister entity” of the government of the United States went ahead anyway. What do they care? If some lippy broad in the papers won’t quit her yapping about it, they can always audit her, too — as they did to Miss Strassel’s sometime colleague Anne Hendershott, a sociology professor who got rather too interested in Obamacare and wrote about it in the Journal and various small Catholic publications. The IRS summoned Professor Hendershott to account for herself, and forbade her husband from accompanying her, even though they filed jointly. She ceased her political writing.

A year after he was named to the Obama Dishonor Roll, the feds have found nothing on Mr. VanderSloot, but they have caused him to rack up 80 grand in legal bills. This is what IRS defenders (of whom there are more than there ought to be) mean when they assure us that the system worked: Yes, some rich guy had to blow through the best part of six figures fending off the bureaucrats, but it’s not like his body was found in a trunk at the airport or anything, if you know what I mean, Kimmy baby.

...

A civil “civil service” requires small government. Once government is ensnared in every aspect of life a bureaucracy grows increasingly capricious. The U.S. tax code ought to be an abomination to any free society, but the American people have become reconciled to it because of a complex web of so-called exemptions that massively empower the vast shadow state of the permanent bureaucracy. Under a simple tax system, your income is a legitimate tax issue. Under the IRS, everything is a legitimate tax issue: The books you read, the friends you recommend them to. There are no correct answers, only approved answers. Drew Ryun applied for permanent non-profit status for a group called “Media Trackers” in July 2011. Fifteen months later, he’d heard nothing. So he applied again under the eco-friendly name of “Greenhouse Solutions,” and was approved in three weeks.

The president and the IRS commissioner are unable to name any individual who took the decision to target only conservative groups. It just kinda sorta happened, and, once it had, it growed like Topsy. But the lady who headed that office, Sarah Hall Ingram, is now in charge of the IRS office for Obamacare. Many countries around the world have introduced government health systems since 1945, but, as I wrote here last year, “only in America does ‘health’ ‘care’ ‘reform’ begin with the hiring of 16,500 new IRS agents tasked with determining whether your insurance policy merits a fine.” So now not only are your books and Facebook posts legitimate tax issues but so is your hernia, and your prostate, and your erectile dysfunction. Next time round, the IRS will be able to leak your incontinence pads to George Soros.

Big Government is erecting a panopticon state — one that sees everything, and regulates everything. It’s great “customer service,” except that you can never get out of the store.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

No Less Than a Special Counsel
It’s the only way to clean up the IRS rat’s nest.
Larry Kudlow, NRO
MAY 17, 2013

When you get right down to it, the political targeting and stalling of tax-exempt applications by the IRS was an effort to defund the Tea Party. Rick Santelli, one of the Tea Party founders and my CNBC colleague, was the first to make this point. I’ve taken it a step further: The IRS was taking the Tea Party out of play for the 2012 election, as it looked to avoid a repeat of 2010 and another Tea Party landslide.

There are a lot of numbers out there. Some say Tea Party applications for tax-exempt status averaged 27 months for approval, while applications from liberal groups averaged nine. In one extreme case, according to the Washington Post, the IRS granted the Barack H. Obama Foundation tax-exempt status in a speedy one-month timeframe. Yet some conservative groups waited up to three years, and some still haven’t received approval.

But there can be only one reason for the stalled-out approval process for conservative groups. The IRS was trying to put them out of business. Thus far, there’s not one wit of contradictory evidence.

Think of this: If the IRS wasn’t politically targeting conservative groups, why did its leading spokespeople lie? This was not even cognitive dissonance. It was outright lying before Congress. Lois Lerner, a key player in the IRS’s tax-exempt division, is being accused by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee of no fewer than four lies. The inspector general’s report shows that she knew about the targeting problem in June 2011, but wouldn’t admit to it in correspondence with Congress over the next two years.

Then there’s former IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman, a Bush appointee. He apparently knew about the targeting in May 2012, but told Congress in August 2012 that he didn’t.

Or there’s former IRS acting director Steve Miller, who was just pushed out. He also knew about the targeting in May 2012, but later refused to admit it to Congress during testimony.

In fact, the whole bloody agency may have known about it on August 4, 2011. According to the Treasury Department IG report, various IRS big wigs met that day to talk about the conservative-targeting problem. That meeting may have included the IRS’s chief counsel; while the IG report says he was at the meeting, the IRS has denied that he was. But if one of his minions was at the meeting, the chief counsel would have known about the problem.

And it turns out the Treasury’s inspector general, J. Russell George, told senior Treasury officials in June 2012 that he was auditing the IRS’s political-organization screening. That means White House appointees in the Treasury, including deputy secretary Neal Wolin, were aware of the IRS scandal before the presidential election. According to the New York Times, IG George “did not tell the officials of his conclusions that the targeting had been improper.”

No one knows the exact facts, which presumably will come out in the hearings. But this is important stuff. It is conspiracy stuff. Criminal stuff.

We already know that IRS employees gave heavily to Obama in 2008 and 2012, and very little to candidates McCain and Romney. But who was the quarterback in all this? Who was managing the targeting operation in the bowels of the IRS?

For the U.S. Senate:
Total to Democrats: $156,750
Total to Republicans: $1,000

For the U.S. House:
Total to Democrats: $391,062
Total to Republicans: $23,000
Jeffrey Lord, American Spectator
http://spectator.org/archives/2013/05/16/the-liberal-union-behind-the-i

It could have been Sarah Hall Ingram. She served as commissioner of the IRS’s tax-exempt division between 2009 and 2012. And she got a $100,000 bonus for her efforts. And now — incredibly — she’s running the IRS’s Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) office, leaving her successor Joseph Grant to take the fall. But he just turned tail and resigned.

And now get this: President Obama has named OMB controller Daniel Werfel acting director of the IRS. And he’s only going to serve between May 22 and the end of the fiscal year, which is September 30. Are you kidding?

In four months, we’re to believe Mr. Werfel is going to piece together the lies, finger the quarterback, and replace everybody who was involved, not just in the now-infamous Cincinnati office, but in offices in Washington, D.C., two towns in California, and even Austin, Texas. (That’s the latest count.) And this guy Werfel is also supposed to manage the agency which is adding Obamacare to its income-tax-collection responsibilities. In four months.

Nuts.

An independent special counsel with subpoena power is the only possible solution. This counsel must find out exactly what happened and who was involved, and then come up with a fix so it never happens again. Of course, Obama charged Treasury secretary Jack Lew with straightening this out. But Lew’s an Obama political operative.

By the way, a special counsel will have to do a special investigation, since we’re already learning the inspector-general investigation was a very superficial operation. And an independent special counsel can investigate any possible White House connections with senior Treasury officials, connections that could lead to the Oval Office.

We may hate the IRS because of its taxing power. We may hate it more because of its new Obamacare power. But it is a massively important government agency. And now we know that it is fraught with corruption and a liberal-left political agenda.

Only an independent special counsel could possibly straighten this mess out.

 

[RobDownSouth]

Kimberley Strassel, WSJ
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324767004578487332636180800.html?mod=rss_opinion_main

Those POOR partisan Wingnut groups were denied tax-exempt status (in effect, government-provided tax benefits) because, well, FREEDOM!

 

[RobDownSouth]

You seem grumpier than usual today, Chief.

The plummeting price of gold has really pissed you off, hasn't it?

 

[RobDownSouth]

A peek inside the fever swamp called AJ's Brain

The Scandal Machine

When politicians want to turn scandals into metaphors, actual details of wrongdoing or incompetence no longer matter. In fact, the details of the troubles swirling around the White House this week are bluntly contradicting Republicans who want to combine them into a seamless narrative of "tyrannical government on the rampage".

The Internal Revenue Service, according to an inspector general’s report, was not reacting to political pressure or ideology when it singled out conservative groups for special scrutiny in evaluating requests for tax exemptions. It acted inappropriately because employees couldn’t understand inadequate guidelines.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/17/opinion/the-republicans-scandal-machine.html

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Perhaps the answer lies in the modern practice of progressivism. Progressivism as played out in the last fifty years in America is the belief system of deeply unserious people. It exists to indulge a complete and utter lack of maturity and responsibility in large enough numbers that it is assured of getting its way. It celebrates vices. It must be imposed coercively. Overt fraud and deceit are admired skills. Its practitioners wallow in behaviors and beliefs that prior generations recognized as embarrassing character flaws. It is the belief system of spoiled, antisocial children and misguided enablers, rather than responsible grownups.

Mature adults disapprove of outright deception. It is a violation of the social code. Progressives, however, need it like air.

Indeed, no vice is quite so highly prized and honored in progressivism as lying. Every achievement attributed to progressivism is a product of pure dishonesty. Welfare, illegal immigration, gun control, socialized medicine, energy policy, our present concepts of diplomacy and foreign policy -- all are based on lies, as to both the original object and the ultimate progressive claims of success. They spring from modern liberal concepts of charity, fairness, safety, respect, and cooperation, but those concepts have themselves been redefined to conceal the progressive's immoral interpretation of them from the casual observer.

Progressives have thus brought us Socialism, economic paralysis, rampant unemployment, social division, officially endorsed discrimination, rejection of God and traditional morality, the hyper-sexualization of children, devaluation of all human life, and absolutely no hope of improvement. Despite their successes in this effort, and do not doubt that they consider these outcomes successes, they lie to Herculean heights to conceal them. They lie even about their victories lest we see them clearly in time to reverse them.

...

We have never had a more dishonest president than we do at this time in our history. He is the embodiment of progressivism. He lies effortlessly. It is not merely second nature to such a man. It is his essence. Every public statement he makes is the perfect opposite of truth.

Thus, however implausibly, we are assured he knows nothing of his own actions. He has never done anything, approved anything, or been informed of anything that can be held against him. He is not merely Teflon -- he is invisible. Those working for the most powerful man in the world also know nothing. Those in his Cabinet know nothing. They do nothing. They see nothing. They sign nothing. They produce nothing. They are responsible for nothing. And yet, somehow, enormous things keep happening that required someone to do something, and know something, and produce something.

Everything is the fault of someone else. When the progressive errs, others are to blame. Those bad straw people made the progressive do what he did. It's not his fault. It is never his fault. Thus, the unserious child, the one who is never to blame and who is always a victim, emerges to offer his excuses. His enablers do the same, possessed of the same lack of seriousness and integrity, at least for as long as they can do so without worrying that they are becoming obviously foolish. That some of them seem to know where that line is speaks volumes about the lies they tell before seeing that it is in their best interests to stop.

One of the problems with this system, however, is that to eventually overwhelm its precursor, the deceptions must be carried out constantly and on a very grand scale, and some of us who have read books know that while there are still serious people contributing to the country, something will eventually give. It appears that we may finally have reached such a tipping point.

Jeffrey T. Brown, American Thinker

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/05/a_liberalprogressive_epiphany.html#ixzz2Tdq7zhJz

 

[Adre]

Long on opinions...short on facts.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Liberal and progressive societies fare no better than socialist/communist ones. All fail for one simple reason: Once everyone climbs aboard the wagon no one is left to pull it. Printing more money is no solution, because money is useless without pussy, crack, and Twinkies to spend money on.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

I visited DC last week and was astounded at the booming economy, the endless new construction, the astronomical prices, and garish displays of wealth everywhere -- not to mention the haughty attitudes of every pissant assistant to the whatever. That’s what Other People’s Money buys you. When Ronald Reagan talked about the Shining City on the Hill he was speaking metaphorically about America, but the new shining city is DC -- funded on the backs of all those Americans who blithely vote for people who promise to solve their problems.

That’s the main lesson from this latest mess: the federal government is an untamable beast. These superficial scandals are nothing compared to the things we will never learn -- i.e., the way the CIA conducts its business overseas.

Still, there are so many things to savor as President Obama circles the drain. Obama has always exuded an intellectual arrogance. Yet if he’s so smart, why would his Justice Department target reporters? The national media has fawned over the president, but the quickest way to end that love affair is to go after their personal records.

Unfortunately, many people insist on seeing every scandal in terms of partisanship. Conservatives are aghast, as they should be, at the thought of an IRS auditing groups based on their political views. That is eerily totalitarian. But where would they have been had a Republican administration done the same thing to liberal critics? I doubt the activist groups would be sending out the alarmist direct-mail pieces if the latest Bush were still president.

The best news from the ongoing drama is that people on the left and right see problems here. Let’s use that as a foundation for a renewed civil-liberties coalition that understands that there are many bright red lines in which the government -- regardless of who nominally is at the head of it -- does not cross. That’s easier to do when one realizes that our supposedly limited government is so limitless in its size, power, and taxing ability that no president can control it.

When pundits complain about excess partisanship, what they usually are really saying is they are tired of all the political fighting. Yet political fighting is good -- it’s a sign of differences of opinion and assures that important issues get debated, however clumsily, in the public.

Steven Greenhut, Reason.com (Libertarian)
http://reason.com/archives/2013/05/17/obamas-scandals-reveal-the-true-face-of

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Long on opinions...short on facts.

We know the fact that we are being systemically lied to. The IRS basically gave Congress the finger yesterday. People who should be in jail are being promoted. Is it your intention, then, to suport this cover-up in purely partisan fashion?

Liberal and progressive societies fare no better than socialist/communist ones. All fail for one simple reason: Once everyone climbs aboard the wagon no one is left to pull it. Printing more money is no solution, because money is useless without pussy, crack, and Twinkies to spend money on.

They are peas in a pod for their underlying philosophies are basically the same and purely based upon fallacious assumptions.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

A few "facts..."

Long before the extensive questionnaires and document requests levied on conservative applicants fell under the scrutiny of Congress, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) asked IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman, a Democrat appointed by George W. Bush who served through President Obama’s first term, “to examine the purpose and primary activities of several 501 (c)(4) organizations that appear to be in violation of the law.”

At the House Ways and Means Committee hearing on the IRS scandal today, Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) led the bandwagon of members on the panel who claimed the root cause of the problem was the Supreme Court’s Citizens United campaign finance decision in 2010.

“Applications for secret money political organizations increased by fourfold after that. This small group of people in the Cincinnati office screwed up. Nobody’s going to deny that. They simply screwed up,” McDermott said. “But the Congress, this committee messed up by not giving any clear criteria for what a real charitable organization is.”

“Even with the egregious actions that have been acknowledged by the IRS, there’s still an underlying problem here, and that’s 501(c)(4)s being engaged in politics,” said Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.). “After Citizens United, the IRS was flooded with applications… seeking 501(c)(4) status. And why was that? In large part because super-PACs must disclose their donors while 501(c)(4)s do not.”

Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) slipped when he referred to the landmark ruling as “Citizens Union.” When corrected by a colleague, Rangel quipped “whatever.”

“It’s almost an invitation as the law is written for abuse in terms of political activities for corporations that primarily are supposed to be doing social service work,” he said.

“It is something that we have to look at closely, yes, sir,” said acting IRS Commissioner Steve Miller. “…I think it’s an area ripe for a redefinition and reform.”

House Republicans were investigating heavy-handed treatment of the Tea Party and other groups by the IRS last year, and Miller told a subcommittee in July that certain applicants weren’t being targeted because of ideology.

But Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) noted the IRS-supplied list of approved tax exempt applications for advocacy organizations through May 2009. “Some of these that were approved were Chattanooga Organized for Action, the Progressive Leadership Alliance, and the Progressive USA,” Ryan said. “If you were concerned about political activity, did you have targeting lists that contained words like ‘progressive’ or ‘organizing’ in their names?”

Miller conceded that these weren’t buzzwords used for targeting, like “tea party” and “patriots,” but maintained that more applications were received from the Tea Party movement, which began in 2009.

Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George testified that “the organizations experiencing these delays included tea party organizations, patriot organizations, 9/12 organizations, among other organizations.”

“The status of December 2012 for 296 cases that we reviewed was 108 cases have been approved, 28 cases were withdrawn, and 160 cases were still open. Zero cases have been denied,” said George. “Of the cases still open, some had been in progress for over three years and crossed two election cycles without resolution. Of the 108 cases approved, 31 were tea party, 9/12, or patriot organizations.”

The IG’s report found that 98 of 170 cases that received follow-up requests for information from the IRS had unnecessary questions, he said.

“The IRS later determined these questions were unneeded but not until after media accounts and questions by members of Congress arose in March of 2012,” George testified.

Durbin singled out not the Tea Party in his Oct. 11, 2010, letter to Shulman, but Karl Rove’s group.

“One organization whose activities appear to be inconsistent with its tax status is Crossroads GPS, organized as a (c)(4) entity in June. The group has spent nearly $20 million on television advertising specific to Senate campaigns this year. If this political activity is indeed the primary activity of the organization, it raises serious questions about the organization’s compliance with the Internal Revenue Code,” the senator wrote.

Bridget Johnson, PJMedia
http://pjmedia.com/blog/durbin-asked-irs-shulman-to-probe-several-conservative-501c4-groups-in-2010/


But nobody knows nothing. It was just "poor customer service," because Democrats are the good guys and would never do the kinds of things in power that Republicans would do...

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

We would never give special treatment to our cronies...

:nods:

It seems Ms. Abedin, accurately described by the New York Times as Hillary Rodham Clinton’s ”longtime aide and confidante,” spent her last months at the State Department not really at the State Department. Despite maintaining her title as Secretary of State Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, she was permitted, upon returning to government service from maternity leave in mid-2012, to remain at home in New York with her newborn child and her husband, the disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner — he of the notorious Weiner all aTwitter photos. While the State Department was paying her $135,000 as a “special government employee,” Abedin was also permitted to moonlight as a “strategic consultant” for Teneo, a firm founded by Doug Band, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton. (Teneo, the Times informs us, advises such firms as MF Global, the brokerage firm whose investors were broken by Jon Corzine — the former New Jersey governor and Obama campaign bundler.) In addition, Abedin found time in her busy “special government employee” schedule to do consultant work for the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation.

With that familiar Clinton flare, Abedin did not disclose her consultant income on government financial disclosure forms. According to the State Department, you see, her new “part-time” position as “special government employee” meant the usual disclosure requirements did not apply to her … notwithstanding that, the Atlantic Wire reports, Abedin continued to be referred to in official documents as deputy chief of staff to the United States secretary of state. The arrangement finally came to an end in March when Ms. Abedin officially left the State Department to head up Mrs. Clinton’s six-person “transition office” — i.e., the transition from secretary of state to what the tongue-in-cheeky Atlantic calls Mrs. Clinton’s “version of private life.”

Apparently not to the great delight of the Clintons, Weiner, as part of his effort to come back from his virtual sex scandal and maybe make a run for New York City mayor, decided to release the couple’s 2012 tax returns. They show that these dedicated public servants made just shy of a half-million dollars last year. Turns out Weiner’s been “consulting” too, but the couple is not saying how much of the haul comes from Abedin’s extracurricular activities while she was still on the government payroll.

This story is getting some attention — sure to be fleeting — from the reliably Clinton-adoring press and some “good government” types. But that has more to do with a potential Weiner political campaign than with the tangled web of government policy-making and Clinton cronies (like the Saudis and Qataris — multi-million dollar donors to the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation who do mega-business with the State Department). There has to date been scant media interest in Abedin’s earlier part-time job.

Andrew C. McCarthy
http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2...ention-her-crescent-lighting/?singlepage=true

 

[Wat_Tyler]

Egregious effrontery, Comanchero brand thinking, and words of used snot-rags.


Have some iron and tits:

 

[Adre]

We know the fact that we are being systemically lied to. The IRS basically gave Congress the finger yesterday. People who should be in jail are being promoted. Is it your intention, then, to suport this cover-up in purely partisan fashion?

The article I commented upon never mentioned this IRS business. It was purely an opinion piece about Progressivism or Liberalism. It stated that every public pronouncement by Obama is an outright lie. Which should provide no small comfort to the bin Laden family, among other things.

 

[RobDownSouth]

Lots and lots of opinions for the Chief to regurgitate today.

 

[Wat_Tyler]

 

[mercury14]

The Scandal Machine

When politicians want to turn scandals into metaphors, actual details of wrongdoing or incompetence no longer matter. In fact, the details of the troubles swirling around the White House this week are bluntly contradicting Republicans who want to combine them into a seamless narrative of "tyrannical government on the rampage".

The Internal Revenue Service, according to an inspector general’s report, was not reacting to political pressure or ideology when it singled out conservative groups for special scrutiny in evaluating requests for tax exemptions. It acted inappropriately because employees couldn’t understand inadequate guidelines.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/17/opinion/the-republicans-scandal-machine.html

And this is exactly right. For conservatives it's all about the narrative, not reality. Things like facts will be filtered out or denied if they threaten the story they want to hear. It's about affirmation, not information.

 

[Adre]

Yes, to a hammer everything looks like a nail.

 

[zipman]

And this is exactly right. For conservatives it's all about the narrative, not reality. Things like facts will be filtered out or denied if they threaten the story they want to hear. It's about affirmation, not information.

Yes, to a hammer everything looks like a nail.

Exactly. But you have to give them credit for how determined they are to create an "Obama scandal."

 

[Sean]

I see your "liberal" house of representatives voted to end overtime payments for ordinary working people. Plain to see whose side they're on, and it aint the people.

 

[unregistered]

 

[unregistered]