House Slaps IRS

[unregistered]

 

[RobDownSouth]

Republicans are helping people avoid taking personal responsibility for their own health care and that of their family.

I can see how this has tremendous appeal to the whackadoodle right.
:nods:

 

[jeninflorida]

Republicans are helping people avoid taking personal responsibility for their own health care and that of their family.

I can see how this has tremendous appeal to the whackadoodle right.
:nods:

Jesus, you are really a fucking asshat


did you know, if you wanted to give your self a dental exam, there is no need to put your head up your ass

 

[unregistered]

 

[Skiddles2014]

Serves them right:


House budget punishes IRS with 15% cut, halts Obamacare enforcement
BY PAUL BEDARD | JUNE 17, 2014 | 11:58 AM

The Internal Revenue Service is about to get slapped with a harsh payback for messing around with conservative groups, blowing wads of tax dollars on employee conferences and helping implement Obamacare.

The House Appropriations Committee is set to OK an IRS budget of $10.9 billion, $1.5 billion under President Obama's request for fiscal year 2015, reducing the agency's budget to 2008 levels.

The goal is to keep the tax agency focused on its “core duties,” and eliminate efforts to judge the political activities of tax-exempt groups and brake its implementation of Obamacare.

The funding is part of a larger $21 billion bill for several agencies including the IRS, Treasury Department and Securities and Exchange Commission. Noting that it cuts $2.3 billion from the president's overall request, Chairman Hal Rogers said, “the bill focuses cuts on lower-priority or poor-performing agencies, such as the scandal-plagued and inefficient Internal Revenue Service.”

The agency has always felt GOP fire, but the controversies over probing Tea Party and conservative groups, lavish spending on conventions and bonuses and a new push to re-evaluate the tax exempt status of political groups has the Republican-controlled House on the war path - one the Democratically-controlled Senate isn't expected to follow when it takes up the same spending bill next week.

Below are the bill highlights about the IRS:

Internal Revenue Service (IRS) – Included in the bill is $10.95 billion for the IRS – a cut of $341 million below the fiscal year 2014 enacted level and $1.5 billion below the President’s budget request. This will bring the agency’s budget below the sequester level and below the level that was in place in fiscal year 2008. This funding level is sufficient for the IRS to perform its core duties, including taxpayer services and the proper collection of funds, but will require the agency to streamline and make better use of its budget.

In addition, due to the inappropriate actions by the IRS in targeting groups that hold certain political beliefs, as well as its previous improper use of taxpayer funds, the bill includes the following provisions:

-- A prohibition on a proposed regulation related to political activities and the tax-exempt status of 501(c)(4) organizations. The proposed regulation could jeopardize the tax-exempt status of many non-profit organizations and inhibit citizens from exercising their right to freedom of speech, simply because they may be involved in political activity.

-- A prohibition on funds for bonuses or awards unless employee conduct and tax compliance is given consideration.

-- A prohibition on funds for the IRS to target groups for regulatory scrutiny based on their ideological beliefs.

-- A prohibition on funds for the IRS to target individuals for exercising their First Amendment rights.

-- A prohibition on funding for the production of inappropriate videos and conferences.

-- A prohibition on funding for the White House to order the IRS to determine the tax-exempt status of an organization.

-- A requirement for extensive reporting on IRS spending.

ObamaCare –The bill also includes provisions to stop the IRS from further implementing ObamaCare, including a prohibition on any transfers of funding from the Department of Health and Human Services to the IRS for ObamaCare uses, and a prohibition on funding for the IRS to implement an individual insurance mandate on the American people.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/house...t-halts-obamacare-enforcement/article/2549830

What retards!

 

[ms_ann_thrope]

How about take away all their bullets except one?

 

[phrodeau]

The paychecks for representatives will be curiously delayed.

 

[KingOrfeo]

From Salon:

Tuesday, Jun 17, 2014 03:58 PM EDT

GOP’s sad quest for an Obama scandal: No, the IRS flap is not like Watergate!

From Obamacare to IRS, the right is praying for a fatal Obama fall. But here's why there's still only one Watergate

Heather Digby Parton

Over the weekend, interspersed between hysterical shrieking over Obama “losing Iraq” and more hysterical screeching over Bowe Bergdahl the traitor, yet another scandal managed to obsess the right-wing pundits across the TV spectrum: the case of the “missing” IRS emails. For those who haven’t been closely following this one, the basic elements are that in the wake of a bundle of confusing new rules governing tax-exempt political groups — and the proliferation of political groups in general — the IRS set forth a clumsy set of rules meant to scrutinize these groups to determine if they were eligible for tax-exempt status.

They used such keywords as “Tea Party,” “Progressive” and “Occupy” to trigger a second look at the applications. In the end, the only group denied such status was progressive but that hasn’t stopped the right wing from fulminating daily about this alleged political repression of average citizens and repeatedly subpoenaing IRS documents in a quest to prove that the White House directed the IRS to harass and intimidate the Tea Party.

Their delirium was stoked last Friday when the IRS revealed that despite the fact that they had located nearly 70,000 emails and would be turning them over to Congress, a computer crash had lost some of them from the period of 2009 to 2011. Chief IRS critic, Congressman Darrell Issa went ballistic. He said, “Do they really expect the American people to believe that, after having withheld these emails for a year, they’re just now realizing the most critical time period is missing? If there wasn’t nefarious conduct that went much higher than Lois Lerner in the IRS targeting scandal, why are they playing these games?”

But it was Fox News’ Charles Krauthammer’s comment that introduced the meme that resonated:

Nixon was missing only 18 minutes. Lerner is missing two years. Nixon is a piker compared to this administration when it comes to concealment, hiding or pretending that they can’t find stuff.

That’s right. These lost emails are worse than Nixon’s 18-minute gap. You remember that episode, right? And what the topic of the allegedly accidentally erased tape was?

The missing section of a 79-minute conversation between Mr Nixon and his Chief of Staff, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, was erased deliberately.

It recorded a meeting on June 20, 1972, three days after operatives connected to the White House broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex — a burglary that caused the scandal that destroyed Mr Nixon’s presidency.

The discovery of the gap was an explosive development during the Watergate investigations, convincing many that Mr Nixon or his aides had erased that portion of the tape because it incriminated the President in a cover-up.

As we know, subsequent tapes showed that he certainly was. And that wasn’t all, was it? There was the attempted use of the IRS to punish individual political enemies. Here’s how John Dean put it in a memo at the time:

This memorandum addresses the matter of how we can maximize the fact of our incumbency in dealing with persons known to be active in their opposition to our Administration; stated a bit more bluntly—how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.

The right has been praying for a Democratic Watergate for years and they keep coming up short. It must be intensely frustrating that it always seems just out of their reach. But it’s highly unlikely that anyone in that position will ever be crude enough to write something like that down –on email or anywhere else.

It’s also interesting how soon these conservative commentators forget a more recent “missing email” scandal. Remember that time when the Bush White House couldn’t provide years worth of emails from the office of the president and vice president involving Scooter Libby and kept it secret for years until it was finally forced to admit that the emails were destroyed and they hadn’t kept a backup? Apparently Krauthammer and company forgot about that. (You’d think his colleague at Fox would remind him — she was the presidential press secretary at the time and the official who finally admitted publicly that they didn’t have the missing emails.) They also forgot about that time when the Bush administration couldn’t turn over emails in the U.S. attorney scandal because they had failed to follow the law and conduct government business on government email servers and had instead used private RNC email addresses.

And then there was this:

A videotape showing Pentagon officials’ final interrogation of al-Qaeda suspect Jose Padilla is missing, raising questions about whether federal prosecutors have lost other recordings and evidence in the case…

Prosecutors and the Pentagon have said they cannot find the tape despite an intensive search.

But hey, that’s nothing to the horror of a Tea Partyer having to fill out some extra tax forms.

Meanwhile, as the right fulminates over some missing IRS emails, it’s clear that nobody is concerned about this:

At the time that the Central Intelligence Agency destroyed videotapes of the interrogations of operatives of Al Qaeda, a federal judge was still seeking information from Bush administration lawyers about the interrogation of one of those operatives, Abu Zubaydah, according to court documents made public on Wednesday.

The court documents, filed in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, appear to contradict a statement last December by Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director, that when the tapes were destroyed in November 2005 they had no relevance to any court proceeding, including Mr. Moussaoui’s criminal trial.

Which brings us back to Nixon, the alleged “piker” who all the amnesiacs on the right seem to think did nothing on the level of the Obama administration losing some emails. Let’s take one last trip down memory lane, shall we?

On December 22, 1974, with Nixon having resigned from the Watergate scandal, the New York Times’ Seymour Hersh published a front-page blockbuster, headlined: “HUGE C.I.A. OPERATIONS REPORTED IN U.S. AGAINST ANTIWAR FORCES.”

Hersh detailed how the CIA under Nixon hatched “an elaborate and secret domestic” spying operation built around illegal wiretapping and the reading of mail. Additionally, the Times confirmed “that intelligence files on at least 10,000 American citizens were maintained by a special unit of the CIA. ”

The report sparked the creation of the Church Committee in Congress, which soon uncovered years worth of intelligence abuse inside the CIA, FBI and IRS, among others. Many of the abuses came at the request of the Nixon White House.

Lo and behold, 30 years later, in the wake of the Snowden revelations of another massive domestic intelligence operation sanctioned and directed by presidents of both parties, we have GOP congressmen calling for the NSA to give over its collected metadata on Lois Lerner, the former IRS chief who is accused of making political groups prove their tax-exempt status.

Congressman Steve Stockman said over the weekend, “I have asked NSA Director Rogers to send me all metadata his agency has collected on Lois Lerner’s email accounts for the period which the House sought records. The metadata will establish who Lerner contacted and when, which helps investigators determine the extent of illegal activity by the IRS.”

How convenient that it’s all there in one place.

 

[ms_ann_thrope]

If the IRS wasn't working on orders from above then it went rogue. Not sure which is worse.

 

[RobDownSouth]

If the IRS wasn't working on orders from above then it went rogue. Not sure which is worse.

You picked a turrible week to stop drinking, bert.

 

[Lorilei]

If those groups had nothing to hide, and, more importantly, suffered no ill consequences, what the fuck are they bitching and moaning about?

 

[ms_ann_thrope]

Everybody has something to hide.

 

[RobDownSouth]

Everybody has something to hide.

Messrs. Lennon and McCartney politely disagree.

 

[InJest]

If those groups had nothing to hide, and, more importantly, suffered no ill consequences, what the fuck are they bitching and moaning about?

And if the IRS has nothing to hide, why have they stonewalled congress for over a year and why have they now apparently destroyed 2 years of email records for Lerner and 6 other upstanding IRS partisans???

 

[SgtSpiderMan]

And if the IRS has nothing to hide, why have they stonewalled congress for over a year and why have they now apparently destroyed 2 years of email records for Lerner and 6 other upstanding IRS partisans???

They haven't stonewalled anyone.

 

[Lorilei]

And if the IRS has nothing to hide, why have they stonewalled congress for over a year and why have they now apparently destroyed 2 years of email records for Lerner and 6 other upstanding IRS partisans???

*shrug* Because the IRS is nothing if not inefficient. That's hardly a recnt development.

 

[InJest]

They haven't stonewalled anyone.

Yeah... Msnbc may not be reporting it. You should try another source.

 

[InJest]

*shrug* Because the IRS is nothing if not inefficient. That's hardly a recnt development.

Good point. Nothing really to see here. I mean what do you expect, right?

Interesting how Nixon was almost impeached for 18 minutes of missing recordings. But two years of missing emails *shrug* that's just inefficiency.

 

[SgtSpiderMan]

Yeah... Msnbc may not be reporting it. You should try another source.

I took your advice and even FoxNews says they aren't stonewalling anyone. Which source did you find that says the IRS isn't making any attempt to find the e-mails?

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/201...hs-lost-lerner-emails-more-documents-missing/

"The lawmakers noted that during this period, newly appointed Commissioner John Koskinen nevertheless assured Congress the agency would produce the documents, which are considered critical to their efforts to probe the targeting of Tea Party and other groups."

"The IRS was able to recover 24,000 Lerner emails from 2009 to 2011 because Lerner had copied in other IRS employees. The agency said it pieced together the emails from the computers of 83 other IRS employees. "

 

[cowslinger64]

Yeah... Msnbc may not be reporting it. You should try another source.

No one else really wants to go up your ass to find where you get your info.

 

[Que]

From Salon:

For those who haven’t been closely following this one, That would be head-in the sand 16.8%ers like the author

They used such keywords as “Tea Party,” “Progressive” and “Occupy” to harass and intimidate the Tea Party.

a computer crash cough, cough bullshit.

lost some of them from the period of 2009 to 2011. actually ALL of the ones that would show a link between her and the White house.

That’s right. These lost emails are worse than Nixon’s 18-minute gap. You remember that episode, right? And what the topic of the allegedly accidentally erased tape was?

As we know, subsequent tapes showed that he certainly was. And that wasn’t all, was it? There was the attempted use of the IRS to punish individual political enemies. Here’s how John Dean put it in a memo at the time:

So, the fact that this effort was to use the IRS to intimidate an entire class of "enemies' makes it, somehow, better?!?? Really?

The right has been praying for a Democratic Watergate for years and they keep coming up short. It must be intensely frustrating that it always seems just out of their reach. But it’s highly unlikely that anyone in that position will ever be crude enough to write something like that down –on email or anywhere else.

And of course if they do, they will either claim "Executive Privlege' like in Fast and Furious or simply withhold the relevent ones like in Benghazi, or ERASE THEM ALL like they did here.

It’s also interesting how soon these conservative commentators forget a more recent “missing email” scandal. Remember that time when the Bush White House couldn’t provide years worth of emails from the office of the president and vice president involving Scooter Libby and kept it secret for years until it was finally forced to admit that the emails were destroyed and they hadn’t kept a backup? Apparently Krauthammer and company forgot about that. (You’d think his colleague at Fox would remind him — she was the presidential press secretary at the time and the official who finally admitted publicly that they didn’t have the missing emails.) They also forgot about that time when the Bush administration couldn’t turn over emails in the U.S. attorney scandal because they had failed to follow the law and conduct government business on government email servers and had instead used private RNC email addresses.

Bush did it excuse.

Pathetically partisan. While claiming that this is all partisan.

 

[ms_ann_thrope]

I guess deleting legal documents, (ie. emails) could possibly be confused as stonewalling, when in fact, it's something much worse.

 

[SgtSpiderMan]

I guess deleting legal documents, (ie. emails) could possibly be confused as stonewalling, when in fact, it's something much worse.

So what was Lerner supposed to do?

 

[ms_ann_thrope]

So what was Lerner supposed to do?

Do about what?

 

[SgtSpiderMan]

Do about what?

You tell me.