IRS targeted conservative groups

The only thing I've seen on the other side that actually made laugh is this:

But once again it shows how much of a shrug off people have been making this.

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I think the line could be drawn, as I said before. For instance, you could have a blanket policy that these organizations could not get involved in political campaigns at all. For example, 501c3 organizations are not allowed to get involved in campaigns, even if those campaigns are issue oriented. When I worked for the Lung Association as a volunteer helping to pass a ballot initiative to increase funds for cancer research and smoking cessation programs, employees were not allowed to lobby on behalf of that initiative. In order to do so, they had to conduct their lobbying efforts before or after work or on the weekend. They could not do so during normal working hours because they were a 501c3 organization.

As for the IRS targeting of conservative groups, I've already condemned that. I think that there needs to be a full investigation, but I am hesitant to throw my full support behind a Congressional investigation because I am wary that it will become a circus and that those running it will turn it into a witch hunt against President Obama. I don't want an investigation to do anything other than find out the truth and hold those accountable responsible.

Hey, more bad news: not only did conservative groups get more scrutiny, but their donors were targeted, too:

If this is true, than it seems to provide evidence that this targeting started before the Obama administration, which would suggest that it likely wasn't his administration that originated these policies. Of course, it's premature to read too much into this without knowing more, but if that is true, that's pretty huge, and a fairly big blow to the goal of some conservatives to use this issue to damage his administration.

The group was formed in 2007; that's not when it was targeted. The donor targeting took place at the same time as the conservative group targeting.

The whole sorted mess is probably just the tip of a mostly submerged berg.

Ah, okay! That is disappointing then! Unfortunately all I could read was the blurb that you posted, which didn't specify when the targeting started, since I'm not a subscriber of the Wall Street Journal.

Think it can't get worse? Somehow, it does: the wife of the IRS Commissioner, on Twitter:



She also visited the White House fifteen times, and visited President Obama twice. She also worked for his campaign's GOTV effort.

She stopped tweeting on May 9th. The IRS apology was May 10th.

More: it appears the IRS leaked tax documents from a conservative advocacy group...directly to an opposition liberal group. During the campaign.

This is really getting messed up.

I think we've established that this is a legitimate story that deserves to be investigated. We already know that the IRS targeted conservative groups. The White House could be involved with this, but I doubt that they are because the IRS Commissioner was a Bush appointee. If Obama intended to target conservative groups unfairly, qit makes little to no sense to retain Bush's guy to run the IRS. It is entirely consistent with the facts that some low level official or officials in the Cincinnati office decided to target conservative groups. I'm not sure what is to really be gained by posting multiple stories about this that don't really add much to what we already know. I really think that conservatives are making a huge mistake by blowing this out of proportion. What was done was bad. It doesn't need to be exaggerated for political purposes. The type of overreach that is going on, which is being driven by Republican officials and their interest groups, is counterproductive to finding out the truth and holding those accountable responsible because conservatives run the risk of being seen as motivated by politics and not a sincere desire to find out what happened. If they are seen by large swaths of the American people as being motivated by politics, then they will lose a lot of credibility if they ever do seek to bring evidence to light that this was a concerted effort on the part of the White House.

I also think it's worth pointing out that although what was done was inappropriate, the amount of harm done appears to be pretty small. There is as of now no credible evidence that conservative groups were denied 501c4 status on a political basis. The only evidence that has been presented is that they were asked more intrusive questions to justify receiving that status. I think a pretty good case can be made that all organizations seeking this status should have been receiving this type of scrutiny.

On a personal level, I would be shocked if President Obama had anything to do with this, not just because there's nothing in his background that suggests that he would do something like this, but also because engaging in this type of behavior would be a huge threat to his Presidency, and President Obama is far too intelligent not to know that.

In the end it does not matter who knew - it matters who should have known. Incompetence in this case is worse than bias imo.

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“The gladdest moment in human life, methinks, is a departure into unknown lands.” – Sir Richard Burton

If that is the issue everyone but the partisans will yawn.

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It reminds me of a toilet paper on the trees
- Paula

I do not really care who yawns - do you?

I'll yawn if this doesn't turn into into something more than lack of oversight by Obama..

To me it is way more than oversight sans Obama - as long as those responsible are held accountable then I can live with it but they will not be.

It depends what was going on. Was the targeting directed at the top? And if so, how high does it go? That is the issue, not Obama didn't do something about something he never knew about until it became public knowledge. If he found out about it before he says he did that is an issue. But right now all we have is a lot of smoke and no gun attached to it. This stuff about how many times somebody went to the White House, ho-ho hum. Real damning stuff (not). Maybe more dots will be connected to make a White House conspiracy compelling. But it will require a lot more connected dots.

It makes perfect sense if Bush took the independence of the IRS seriously and thus didn't know or care what his politics were. The "it's Bush's guy" thing doesn't have the weight behind it that it does if we're talking about, say, a member of his Cabinet. The whole point of the position is that individual administrations don't have their "guys" in there.

Actually, it appears this may not be consistent with the facts, as I pointed out earlier.

Yeah, the "Overreach" narrative is probably the most predictable part of every Democratic scandal. It comes right after Denial and It-Was-Isolated.

There's not much to say to this, except that the tendency to try to label something as overreach is always every bit as overtly political as the thing it's usually describing.

This isn't true, either; many organizations went years without those tax benefits. Some were still waiting for approval when they testified the other day! And many more simply stopped trying. So there's no serious question of tangible harm. And this is without getting into leaking a conservative group's information to a liberal group in direct opposition to them, which is mind-boggling and shows serious malice aforethought.

Sure there is. During the campaign, Obama's general counsel called for a targeted investigation into a conservative ad group. He became the general counsel for the White House after the election. He ended up writing three letters in total to the Justice Dept. about it, even after they explained to him that no law had been violated. And it just kept going; more details at the link above. Really has to be read to be believed.

In 2010 Obama accused the Chamber of Commerce--a group he's been at odds with, politically--of taking money from foreign corporations. I'll bet if I look more, I'll find more.

Not to mention talking very publicly and very often about how dangerous it was to have these groups spending money trying to influence the election.

And you're far too intelligent to think this is a good defense. Bill Clinton was brilliant, and he did some pretty stupid things. Most Presidents do. The kind of things that get people in power in trouble tend to have to do with moral and character failings, not intellectual ones. It's usually hubris that does it, and the correlation between humility and intelligence is inverted.

I think I've made it clear that I think this is serious, and that I think a full investigation into this is warranted. At the same time, I do see a lot of overreach on the part of some on this issue. I am not seeking to defend the administration, but I also don't see any evidence that President Obama knew about any of this, or that he was involved with it in any way. It could be that individual officials working for President Obama were involved with this, but unless it involves the President, I don't see this as a huge scandal that undermines his Presidency. I think his handling of this has been poor, and I have said so.

If Lois Lerner or the IRS Commissioner were involved with this, they should be fired, and prosecuted if a crime was committed. I think this investigation should be focused narrowly on rooting out what happened and why. That's not what is going on here. Republicans are using this issue to block President Obama from being able to govern. They are always doing this. Democrats did it to Bush, and I was against it then just as much as I'm against it now. Cabinet appointments remain unfilled. Judicial nominations are blocked, leaving the courts without the judges to do their job. This is unconscionable. This shouldn't be happening, regardless of which party is in office, and now these investigations are being used to continue the obstructionism. Darrell Issa has said that he plans on holding a few investigations every week into the Obama administration. Instead of governing, he plans on engaging in potentially hundreds of partisan investigations. If that's not overreach, I don't know what is!!

Rather than being focused on talking points, Benghazi became one of the worst cover-ups in history and a symbol of one of the most incompetent administrations in history. Rather than being focused on who targeted conservative groups and why, this IRS situation becomes evidence of corruption and incompetence at the highest levels. This kind of language isn't warranted by the facts that have come out, and the harms of these so-called scandals are being exaggerated. The rhetoric should match the facts. In these cases, it doesn't.

As I said, this is the standard playbook: take the focus off the scandal by talking about whether or not people are reacting the right way to the scandal, which is relatively trivial in comparison and usually involves an inordinate amount of focus on whichever individual says the stupidest or most presumptive thing in the course of the process.

In the post before this we were talking about the facts of the situation. Now we're not. This is not a coincidence; it's the intended result.

I'm not sure what you are saying is always true. Do you think that the intended result of my participation in this conversation is to distract from this scandal for political purposes?