However, I suspect the administration will drag it out and hope the public will tire. I expect Obama will get very busy spell binding us with a host of distractions. (See 1 below.)
---
Noonan makes a cogent point when she writes 'the IRS cannot claim incompetency' because of the repetitive nature of their abuses. (See 2 below.)
---
Those who loved and voted for Obama and continue to express their contempt for GW, are a bit pressed these days to defend their own idol.
When questioned they either become silent, abusive or change the subject.
This is understandable because Obama was always more fluff and fury than substance. Yes, he made speeches that sounded good, particularly for those who made fun of GW's twang. Yes, he offered hope and change at a time when we were mired in controversy. Yes, Obama's proposals covered all the bases but when you pressed listeners how all he would change could be paid for, they cited GW's war deficits and ducked the question. Yes, many believed Obama's election would prove America had moved beyond its racial prejudices and thus, when Obama and his wife made charges which were racial against others they were given a pass.
I could go on and on but it should now be evident Obama has proven to be void of true leadership capabilities, employs Chicago thuggish tactics to impose his will and have his questionable ways go unchallenged and, worst of all, seems to have contempt for those who question his handling of our nation's affairs. His response is rooted in arrogant defiance and an emperor like stance.
By any objective measure, Obama is wanting in what is required of a great, even a good, president and now The New York Times has discovered they can no longer accord with him.
When The New York Times' editorial board, the liberal's bible, comes full circle it is tantamount to having a rug pulled out from under them.
The risk is liberals may have to start thinking for themselves . Yes, liberals and progressives have proven good at feeling and caring but thinking independently and sound reasoning has not been their forte.
I dare say, they will find doing so decidedly uncomfortable because they will be forced to leave the comfort of like minded others, forced to stand on their own two feet and wrestle with the problems to which there are difficult, if no, economic solutions if the dollar is to remain a viable currency and rabid inflation is to be kept from our doors.
They may be forced to conclude government cannot save everyone, give everyone what they want, feel they are entitled to and will have to compromise based on rational behaviour and sound economic reasoning which falls short of what we would like to do but cannot.
Conservatives are hard pressed when they have to face a tide of beliefs that everything is fixable and denial of entitlements connotes evilness and uncaring.
When the emotional playing field is made more level by reality, perhaps much can be accomplished but it will probably never be enough for the touchy, feely crowd who are dreamers and have no desire to live in the real world of seeking the best option knowing the economic blanket cannot cover everyone equally and fairly.
The problem of the have nots has been made worse because they were suckered into believing dependency upon government was their best option.
There are many overt disparities between the rich and poor that need addressing and if not they will fester and this condition will do great harm to our Republic's survival.
That said, solutions must be sought within realistic economic bounds and this means we must seek measures that grow the pie rather than resort to reallocating the pieces of a shrinking one.
Thus, we must demand a simpler tax system, eliminate most of the preference loop holes, diminish the clout of such overbearing agencies as the IRS, EPA, Health and Human Resources, NLRB etc. We must construct a freer market place where greater efficiencies are allowed to the rule and capital be allocated accordingly.
We are still a powerful nation and Americans remain capable of solving problems if allowed to do so.
What Obama has done to this nation is pit us against each other. He has made us distrustful of each other's motives. He has turned government against the citizens, something our Founding Fathers feared could happen and this is why they provided us with a Constitution that included measures to protect us from an Obama type presidency and administration.
The question we face and must resolve is how do we overcome the fact that we are too politically partisan to tackle our momentous problems.
I believe Obama understood creating a highly charged politically partisan environment would allow him more latitude to press forward with his hope and change agenda. Until we manage a solution to this matter of partisanship, I daresay, our situation will worsen and stature as a world leader, not only will be questioned but we will also continue to decline.
In the last election we were given two options and we chose to stay with what we had because Romney was tagged as a flip flopper, uncaring because he put his dog on top of the car, was a tax avoider, though he paid every penny rightfully due, had to go far to the right to get nominated and then come back to where he felt comfortable to have broad appeal.
He had to overcome the innate unfair advantage Conservatives meet from the liberal press and media as evidenced by Crowley's comments and questions among others.
We gave little credence to Romney's record of varied economic achievements , his personal decency, his charitableness,a family history of warmth and stability and a living caliber of life that seems to be part of the Mormon tradition.
We dumped the chump for stardust and here we are some year or so later, mired in scandals and abusive behaviour by incompetent and arrogant public servants who thwart investigation of their actions and this goes all the way to the top.
Pogo was right when he said The Enemy is Us!
---
Jonathan Alter, is a former Newsweek hack and his book has not changed my view.
Alter is a gutless liberal lap dog. I once discussed with him, face to face, about an article he wrote that was slanted against Israel and he brushed me off as IRS bureaucrats do when asked questions by Congress. Alter belongs on MSNBC or maybe he could replace Carney! Like the proverbial fisherman truth escapes him but Alter is well named when it comes to changing truth. (See 3 below.)
---
Dick
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1)Cleta Mitchell: How to Investigate the IRS
Cleta Mitchell, the attorney who helped expose the tax agency's abuses, has a road map for identifying the culprits. It doesn't stop in Cincinnati.
By JAMES FREEMAN
The woman who helped expose IRS abuse of conservative activists has more news to share: The abuse continues, and she sees no evidence that the White House, the IRS or the Justice Department is doing anything to end it. "This is not in the past tense. This is still going on," says Cleta Mitchell, perhaps the country's pre-eminent expert on campaign-finance and political tax law.
In 2012, Ms. Mitchell worked to persuade members of Congress that reports of IRS harassment of conservative groups were credible. GOP lawmakers demanded information from the IRS and triggered the internal audit that finally forced the agency last month to acknowledge abuses it had previously denied. Now Ms. Mitchell is determined to end the abuse and identify the culprits.
Don't bet against her. A partner at elite international law firm Foley and Lardner, Ms. Mitchell is sketching out a road map to uncover the truth and force reform—whether or not the Obama administration cooperates.
So far it looks like the administration will not. Ms. Mitchell represents nine conservative organizations that, beginning around 2010, were subjected to unusual delays, in many cases unlawful demands for information, and in some cases unlawful releases of their confidential data. But she reports that despite filling out the paperwork required by law and regulation, only one of the nine has received the customary IRS approval letter to operate as a tax-exempt group. She says another client received a new letter from the IRS with "very bizarre questions" as recently as three weeks ago.
The Justice Department is allegedly conducting a criminal investigation of the IRS abuse. Has anyone from Justice contacted her or her clients to gather evidence? "Not about this. The FBI's contacted some tea party leaders about their meetings and who comes to their meetings," she says. "I guess they viewed the tea party as domestic terrorists." She is puzzled that the feds aren't asking about IRS targeting: "You'd think that they would, wouldn't you?"
They should, and perhaps the Securities and Exchange Commission ought to start a case file as well. Ms. Mitchell says she learned this week that the IRS even intervened in the business dealings of a donor to conservative causes. "There were two public companies that were in the process of trying to do a merger and somehow the IRS stepped in and demanded all this information and said, 'If you don't give it to us we'll stop this merger,' " she says. "But I cannot get [the donor] to come forward . . . 'Look I've been through this hassle with the IRS. I don't need any more.' People are really afraid and the donors are the most afraid."
She has heard "a number of reports" of conservative donors "having been audited or hassled," but she doesn't have a sense of how many cases there might be. "I hear about them all the time, but so far they've been the most reluctant of all to talk."
Ms. Mitchell, on the other hand, shows no fear as she talks strategy in Foley's Georgetown office overlooking the Potomac River. Maybe that's because this Oklahoma native has already overcome her share of daunting challenges.
"I was raised by a single mom. My dad was kind of a no-account," she says with a chuckle. "But my mother made up for it. She was a very strong woman. Raised six kids." And she demanded excellence from all of them. After Ms. Mitchell's first term at the University of Oklahoma, "I made one B and my mother went around telling everyone that I hadn't done very well but she hoped I'd do better the next semester." She graduated with high honors and a Phi Beta Kappa key.
Like many of her classmates, she also developed a love for the school's famed football team and proved to be as demanding about the Sooners as her mother had been about grades. Shortly after the team's current coach, Bob Stoops, was hired in 1999, she met him at a Washington reception. "You know, coach," she recalls telling him, "the good thing for you is you only need to win three games a year"—against powerhouses Nebraska, Oklahoma State and Texas. When Mr. Stoops responded that Nebraska wasn't on the schedule that year, she replied: "Well, lucky you, you only have to win two games."
These days, winning for her clients doesn't necessarily mean collecting big damage awards. She says the harassed conservative groups are more focused on getting the truth out and ensuring that the IRS's appalling conduct is stopped and never repeated. But the lever of potential monetary penalties could be useful in persuading senior government officials to come clean. Ms. Mitchell is hopeful that, even if the Justice Department sits on its hands, a combination of private lawsuits and congressional investigations can help ascertain who gave the order to target conservatives.
She has filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of an organization called True the Vote that names the IRS as well as previous and current IRS officials as defendants. She promises more lawsuits, including one on behalf of the National Organization for Marriage that had its documents leaked to its antagonists at the Human Rights Campaign.
Ms. Mitchell credits attorney Jay Sekulow for his suit on behalf of other conservative organizations and is encouraged by the work of lawmakers like Sen. Orrin Hatch (R., Utah) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.). "They're just getting started to get to the answers. The first round is the IRS dissembling, denying, deflecting. And now hopefully we're beginning to get to some real information," she says.
Thus far, senior IRS officials in office when the abuses began have often provided untruthful answers, first by telling Congress in 2012 that the IRS wasn't targeting President Obama's ideological opponents and more recently by suggesting that low-level employees were to blame. Sometimes they've been unwilling to provide any answers at all, such as when Lois Lerner, the head of the IRS unit overseeing tax-exempt organizations, asserted her Fifth Amendment privilege to avoid self-incrimination, but not before proclaiming her innocence at a congressional hearing.
In the civil lawsuits, government defendants will still enjoy their Fifth Amendment rights, but the truth may come out anyway. Ms. Mitchell notes that "civil discovery is much broader and doesn't allow for as much opportunity to refuse to answer. There's a magistrate who is appointed to oversee" and resolve disputes on specific questions. And if a person is forced to answer a question during a deposition, "the perjury statutes apply."
But even if officials find ways to remain silent, they might not be able to contain the relevant information. Ms. Mitchell adds that "we are most interested in seeing documents," and that includes emails. Such documents have hardly been examined, because while the IRS's internal audit recently forced the agency to acknowledge abuses it had previously denied, the inquiry consisted mainly of interviews of staff with a supervisor present.
After denying for a year that IRS employees were targeting conservatives, IRS brass were forced by the imminent release of the audit last month to change their story. But they settled on another inaccurate claim: that the problems centered on a few misguided employees in a Cincinnati office. This was contradicted by a Wall Street Journal report this week that Cincinnati workers were being directed and even "micromanaged" by Washington, according to what one IRS employee told congressional investigators.
"I think the press has done a good job of exposing that it wasn't just in Cincinnati," Ms. Mitchell says. "I knew it wasn't." One of her clients has been waiting for approval for nonprofit status since 2009, she says, and for all that time the application was being considered in Washington. "I was told by the agent in Cincinnati, 'Oh well, you send this stuff to us, but we have to send it all to Washington.' " She says that some unusual information requests to conservative groups have also come from the IRS office in Ogden, Utah.
She adds: "I just want to know who did what and when, and I want them to issue the letters and I want them to stop targeting and go back to the process" that prevailed before the current era of abuse.
This current era appears to have begun sometime after the 2008 election of Barack Obama as president, though the Obama campaign itself offered something of a preview. As the Journal's Kimberley A. Strassel has noted, in the summer of 2008 Obama campaign General Counsel Bob Bauer urged the Justice Department's criminal division to investigate the officers and donors of a group called the American Issues Project after it ran a negative ad about Mr. Obama.
The organization was a client of Ms. Mitchell's, so she learned firsthand about the tactics of the Obama campaign and Mr. Bauer: "He would send a letter to the Justice Department demanding that my clients be criminally prosecuted for exercising their First Amendment rights. And then I would write a response, and then he'd write another letter, and I'd immediately write a response."
Mr. Bauer was named White House counsel in late 2009, shortly before the IRS appears to have begun its harassment of conservatives. Now in private practice, he seems like the kind of former official that conservatives might want to question under oath. Could it happen?
"We'd have to find that there was some communication between him and the IRS or something like that," says Ms. Mitchell. Though much may remain to be discovered, she says, the targeting of conservatives in recent years has been remarkably open: "The communications were all pretty public. That's one of the things that I don't think has gotten enough attention, is the use of the IRS as a political tool. There are 17 Democratic senators who will literally sign anything put in front of them going after conservative organizations."
She is referring to letters sent during the last election cycle by various Democrats urging IRS investigations, some of the letters even referencing specific conservative organizations. But Ms. Mitchell might just as easily mention the many speeches in which Mr. Obama has vilified groups opposing his policies and denounced them as threats to democracy or foreign-backed front groups.
All of this history inspires skepticism that the Obama Justice Department will make the abuse of conservatives a high priority for prosecution. So the job may fall to private attorneys like Cleta Mitchell. If she is intimidated at the prospect of taking on the IRS, she is showing no signs of it. "Where I come from in Oklahoma," she says, "the wide open spaces are not just geography. It's a mentality. You can be whatever you're hoss enough to be."
Maybe it's the IRS's turn to worry.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2)The IRS Can't Plead Incompetence
If the agency didn't know what it was doing, it wouldn't have done it so well.
By Peggy Noonan
Quickly: Everyone agrees the Internal Revenue Service is, under current governmental structures, the proper agency to determine the legitimacy of applications for tax-exempt status. Everyone agrees the IRS has the duty to scrutinize each request, making sure that the organization meets relevant criteria. Everyone agrees groups requesting tax-exempt status must back up their requests with truthful answers and honest information.
Some ask, "Don't conservatives know they have to be questioned like anyone else?" Yes, they do. Their grievance centers on the fact they have not been. They were targeted, and their rights violated.
The most compelling evidence of that is what happened to the National Organization for Marriage. Its chairman, John Eastman, testified before the House Ways and Means Committee, and the tale he told was different from the now-familiar stories of harassment and abuse.
In March 2012, the organization, which argues the case for traditional marriage, found out its confidential tax information had been obtained by the Human Rights Campaign, one of its primary opponents in the marriage debate. The HRC put the leaked information on its website—including the names of NOM donors. The NOM not only has the legal right to keep its donors' names private, it has to, because when contributors' names have been revealed in the past they have been harassed, boycotted and threatened. This is a free speech right, one the Supreme Court upheld in 1958 after the state of Alabama tried to compel the NAACP to surrender its membership list.
The NOM did a computer forensic investigation and determined that its leaked IRS information had come from within the IRS itself. If it was leaked by a worker or workers within the IRS it would be a federal crime, with penalties including up to five years in prison.
In April 2012, the NOM asked the IRS for an investigation. The inspector general's office gave them a complaint number. Soon they were in touch. Even though the leaked document bore internal IRS markings, the inspector general decided that maybe the document came from within the NOM. The NOM demonstrated that was not true.
For the next 14 months they heard nothing about an investigation. By August 2012, the NOM was filing Freedom of Information Act requests trying to find out if there was one. The IRS stonewalled. Their "latest nonresponse response," said Mr. Eastman, claimed that the law prohibiting the disclosure of confidential tax returns also prevents disclosure of information about who disclosed them. Mr. Eastman called this "Orwellian." He said that what the NOM experienced "suggests that problems at the IRS are potentially far more serious" than the targeting of conservative organizations for scrutiny.
In hearings Thursday, Rep. Elijah Cummings, a Maryland Democrat who disagrees with the basic stand of the NOM, said that what had happened to the organization was nonetheless particularly offensive to him. The new IRS director agreed he would look into it.
Almost a month after the IRS story broke—a month after the high-profile scandal started to unravel after a botched spin operation that was meant to make the story go away—no one has been able to produce a liberal or progressive group that was targeted and thwarted by the agency's tax-exemption arm in the years leading up to the 2012 election. The House Ways and Means Committee this week held hearings featuring witnesses from six of the targeted groups. Before the hearing, Republicans invited Democrats to include witnesses from the other side. The Democrats didn't produce one. The McClatchy news service also looked for nonconservative targets. "Virtually no organizations perceived to be liberal or nonpartisan have come forward to say they were unfairly targeted," it reported. Liberal groups told McClatchy "they thought the scrutiny they got was fair."
Some sophisticated Democrats who've worked in executive agencies have suggested to me that the story is simpler than it seems—that the targeting wasn't a political operation, an expression of political preference enforced by an increasingly partisan agency, its union and assorted higher-ups. A former senior White House official, and a very bright man, said this week he didn't believe it was mischief but incompetence. But why did all the incompetent workers misunderstand their jobs and their mission in exactly the same way? Wouldn't general incompetence suggest both liberal and conservative groups would be abused more or less equally, or in proportion to the number of their applications? Wouldn't a lot of left-wing groups have been caught in the incompetence net? Wouldn't we now be hearing honest and aggrieved statements from indignant progressives who expected better from their government?
Some person or persons made the decision to target, harass, delay and abuse. Some person or persons communicated the decision. Some persons executed them. Maybe we're getting closer. John McKinnon and Dionne Searcey of The Wall Street Journal reported this week that IRS employees in the Cincinnati office—those are the ones that tax-exempt unit chief Lois Lerner accused of going rogue and attempted to throw under the bus—have told congressional investigators that agency officials in Washington helped direct the probe of the tea-party groups. Mr. McKinnon and Ms. Searcey reported that one of the workers told investigators an IRS lawyer in Washington, Carter Hull, "closely oversaw her work and suggested some of the questions asked applicants."
"The IRS didn't respond to a request for comment," they wrote. There really is an air about the IRS that they think they are The Untouchables.
Some have said the IRS didn't have enough money to do its job well. But a lack of money isn't what makes you target political groups—a directive is what makes you do that. In any case, this week's bombshell makes it clear the IRS, from 2010 to 2012, the years of prime targeting, did have money to improve its processes. During those years they spent $49 million on themselves—on conferences and gatherings, on $1,500 hotel rooms and self-esteem presentations. "Maliciously self-indulgent," said Chairman Darrell Issa at Thursday's House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearings.
What a culture of entitlement, and what confusion it reveals about what motivates people. You want to increase the morale, cohesion and self-respect of IRS workers? Allow them to work in an agency that is famous for integrity, fairness and professionalism. That gives people spirit and guts, not "Star Trek" parody videos.
Finally, this week Russell George, the inspector general whose audit confirmed the targeting of conservative groups, mentioned, as we all do these days, Richard Nixon's attempt to use the agency to target his enemies. But part of that Watergate story is that Nixon failed. Last week David Dykes of the Greenville (S.C.) News wrote of meeting with 93-year-old Johnnie Mac Walters, head of the IRS almost 40 years ago, in the Nixon era. Mr. Dykes quoted Tim Naftali, former director of the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, who told him the IRS wouldn't do what Nixon asked: "It didn't happen, not because the White House didn't want it to happen, but because people like Johnnie Walters said 'no.' "
That was the IRS doing its job—attempting to be above politics, refusing to act as the muscle for a political agenda.
Man—those were the days.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3)Ailes Slams Alter's Book Allegations as False
By Todd Beamon
Fox News President Roger Ailes on Friday blasted author Jonathan Alter’s new book about the 2012 presidential campaign as “patently, provably false.”“Jonathan Alter got 3 out of 13 items within a range of being at least partially correct,” Ailes told Politico in an email regarding the book, “The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies.”
Ailes is one of the Obama enemies mentioned in the book.
“The rest are patently, provably false and Alter either needs to check into a first-year journalism program at Columbia or a rage counseling center immediately,” Ailes said.
Many of the allegations in Alter’s book are from a 2011 Rolling Stone piece by Tim Dickinson, Politico reports.
Here are some of the assertions put forth in the book and Alies’ response to Politico:
Allegation: One Monday, Rupert Murdoch, chairman and CEO of News Corp., which owns Fox, “snickered to senior staff that Alies was convinced that the whole News Corp. building was bugged: ‘Roger came in over the weekend to work in the only room that he thought was secure — a supply closet.’ ”
Ailes: “He claims I once worked out of a supply closet because I was convinced the building was bugged. It’s completely false and silly. In fact, I had no idea we have a supply closet.”
Allegation: “Ailes had a television monitor on his desk that showed video of the empty hall outside his office so that he would have warning if terrorists were coming to kill him.”
Ailes: “After the last NYC blackout our chief engineer asked if I wanted a monitor in my office to see the exits of the building. We had people piled up in the stairwells and the front lobby was jammed. Since I’m part of the team that volunteered to stay behind in an emergency, that would be my responsibility to help evacuate the building safely. So yes, I can see exits and that would be helpful assisting during evacuations. Alter claims the monitor shoots the hall outside my office to see if terrorists are coming to kill me. No such monitor exists and no such fear exists.”
Allegation: “[A]fter Murdoch pushed him to moderate Fox’s coverage of Obama, Ailes threatened to quit.”
Ailes: “Rupert Murdoch never asked me to ease up on Obama and I never threatened to resign.”
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment