There are good reasons to question its validity.
No kidding.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Bottom line:
Nixon knew what had to be done to ensure a credible investigation. Obama should follow his example. Reaching Nixon’s ethical bar shouldn’t be that difficult.
It is when you’re more corrupt than Richard Nixon.
“There is no problem with the IRS! The IRS is the Pretorian Guard of a caring compassionate state! Only paranoid liberty-addicts think there is an IRS problem! And if there is, it doesn’t matter anyway–just shut up and pay your taxes, serfs, and praise Dear Leader!”–Baghdad Jim.
Any investigation that clears the IRS of violations of law now will rightly be called illegitimate.
“Now”? The right was never going to accept the results of an investigation that cleared the IRS, just as they won’t accept the results of investigations into Fast & Furious and Benghazi. Where Obama “scandals” are concerned, the GOP is the Red Queen: “Sentence first! Verdict afterwards.”
In what kind of “investigation” are the people affected not interviewed by the investigators, in a year?
What can the people affected tell us about the motives of IRS employees?
They can tell us how the interactions went, from which it might be inferred. No one investigates a possible crime without interviewing the victim(s). Are you really this stupid?
If you bothered to read the link…
In this and some of the other cases where individuals were targeted, the victims claim the IRS agents were quite explicit about why they were there. Is it surprising when we have the IRS on record using extortion?
If you bothered to read the link…
I did. It’s about a 501c3 (not a 501c4) who was audited (not one who had his application delayed). So it’s relevant only in the sense that you consider any conservative with a bad experience with the IRS to be evidence of a vast conspiracy. He writes:
There’s nothing wrong with what we wrote, but our opinion was nonetheless the basis of a full field audit? That’s harassment; that’s intimidation.
Anyone who’s audited feels harassed and intimidated. How does this guy’s testimony help you determine whether the process that selected him for an audit was politically motivated? He doesn’t actually know anything about that process, all he can offer are his suspicions and hurt feelings.
“My organization was hit with an exhaustive IRS audit in 2012 that lasted 15 months and the agent assigned to conduct it indicated it was political.
It was prompted by one of our publications being critical of administration policy.
The IRS agent said he saw nothing wrong with the publication and lamented, “I don’t know what they expect me to find.””
Seems there is a pattern of people getting audited right after saying something critical of the President. I mean from your POV, it is just coincidence after coincidence coincidence after coincidence coincidence after coincidence coincidence after coincidence coincidence after coincidence coincidence after coincidence coincidence after coincidence coincidence after coincidence coincidence after coincidence.
The guy is running a 501c3, which isn’t allowed to be involved in electoral politics at all, and yet if you visit his website it’s obvious that he’s running it to help conservatives get elected. He should be audited, not because he’s a conservative, but because he’s abusing his special tax status. A liberal 501c3 working to elect liberals should get audited too.
““Now”? The right was never going to accept the results of an investigation that cleared the IRS”
Obama knew the results of the “investigation” before it even started.
“Sentence first! Verdict afterwards.”
I’m sure Mark Youssef agrees whole heartedly. I certainly didn’t see Jim complaining about his imprisonment.
And I’m sure Jim will have a reasonable solution as to why it took 3 years for this conservative group to get their non-profit status.
http://variety.com/2014/biz/news/irs-grants-non-profit-status-to-hollywood-conservative-group-friends-of-abe-1201135576/
Is this business as usual?: At one point, the IRS asked for access to a password-protected portion of the Friends of Abe website that included a list of members, according to sources familiar with the review. The group did not provide the access, but it did face a substantial delay in obtaining the status as the IRS sent queries about its events and activities.
But don’t you see? The IRS had to do this because of Democrat’s concerns about Citizen’s United. There was nothing political at all.
(Ya, I know there is some major cognitive dissonance going on there.)
The same reason it took 18 months for the Coffee Party to get their 501c4 status — bureaucracies are slow, and more so when dealing with politically sensitive decisions. Nobody wants to get in trouble for making the wrong decision, so everything gets checked and re-checked, they ask for more information, bounce the problem back and forth, ask higher-ups for more guidance, etc. There’s no evidence that the process is slow because the applicants are conservative, and plenty of evidence that the process is slow because the groups are operating close to the legal lines.
it did face a substantial delay in obtaining the status as the IRS sent queries about its events and activities.
Exactly. The IRS can’t make a decision without that sort of information, and collecting and evaluating that information takes time.
If the process has a bias it’s against groups that want to get 501c4 status as a social welfare organization while spending the absolute maximum time and energy on electoral politics allowed by law. Such an application takes more work and care, and therefore takes more time. And it may very well be that there are more conservative groups than liberal groups pushing those limits, and thereby incurring delays, but that doesn’t mean that an application is delayed because of the groups’ ideology.
To use another example: I suspect it’s the case that if you polled the U.S. prison population you’d find that Democrats are imprisoned at rates much higher than their proportion of the total population. Does that mean that they were imprisoned because of their political views? Of course not.
The easiest way to substantiate this claim of “these things take time” would be to view all of the communications that went back and forth between the IRS and the Coffee Party. It’s been my experience in dealing with large governmental entities that an e-mail sent to a government takes 1-4 weeks to get a response, and the private citizen then turns the government’s request around within 1-2 business days.
If there is a significant lag on the part of the applicant, then that’s the applicant’s fault. If there is a significant lag on the part of the government on this application but not others, that indicates a targeting issue. If there is a significant lag on the part of the government on ALL applications, regardless of party affiliation, then that’s a systemic issue with government that needs to be addressed.
“These things take time” is an attempt at an excuse for incompetence or laziness, not a legitimate reason for a delay. There is no legitimate reason for “the wheels of government” to “grind slowly and finely.”
The easiest way to substantiate this claim of “these things take time” would be to view all of the communications that went back and forth between the IRS and the Coffee Party
Of course IRS communications with applicants are private; to do this analysis would require the cooperation of all the applicants. I’m not aware of any group allowing the publication of all their IRS communication.
If there is a significant lag on the part of the government on this application but not others, that indicates a targeting issue.
Not necessarily — this one application may present different questions than others. You need to know more about the specifics of the delays, and whether there’s a reasonable justification.
If there is a significant lag on the part of the government on ALL applications, regardless of party affiliation, then that’s a systemic issue with government that needs to be addressed.
We know that there have been significant lags with groups from both the right and left, while other groups on both the right and left have sailed through quickly.
3 years? I cry foul. There’s slow and there’s obstruction.
Your one example of the Coffee Party carries little weight considering not only the much larger number of conservative groups targeted, then persecuted, but also the favorable treatment received by other Democrat activist groups. OFA received their tax exempt status with in days, so clearly delays were not universal even for groups who’s purpose was explicitly political.
“To use another example: I suspect it’s the case that if you polled the U.S. prison population you’d find that Democrats are imprisoned at rates much higher than their proportion of the total population.”
Democrats say this is because of racism, that the law and the system itself is racist because of the outcome that black people make up such a larger percentage of the prison population. So by Democrat standards, the IRS and Obama are guilty.
Your one example of the Coffee Party carries little weight considering not only the much larger number of conservative groups targeted
It only takes one counter-example to disprove a false generalization.
OFA received their tax exempt status with in days
As did Crossroads GPS. Some right wing groups were delayed, and some left wing groups were delayed. Some right wing groups sailed through, and some left wing groups sailed through. It’s as if the delays weren’t a simple function of group ideology….
It only takes one counter-example to disprove a false generalization.
If you’ve ever taken a course in logic, you should ask for your money back.
So you admit that delays were not universal as you claimed previously. Let’s see the investigation into which groups got preferential treatment, like OFA and Obamas brother’s group, and see which party benefited.
Why wouldn’t the IRS let a couple groups like Crossroads pass through to provide cover for preferential treatment just as a couple progressive groups were delayed to provide cover for political targeting? And why is it that a group with the money and manpower to fight the IRS was left alone while small local grassroots groups without the money and manpower were targeted?
I want to see a real and independent investigation so we don’t have to rely on information from the Obama administration to determine what happened. They have shown themselves to be untrustworthy and have zero credibility.
So you admit that delays were not universal as you claimed previously
You do love to invent my past claims.
Why wouldn’t the IRS let a couple groups like Crossroads pass through to provide cover for preferential treatment just as a couple progressive groups were delayed to provide cover for political targeting?
Clearly we don’t need an investigation — you’ve got it all figured out.
I want to see a real and independent investigation so we don’t have to rely on information from the Obama administration to determine what happened.
And if that investigation concluded that there was no effort by the administration to abuse the IRS’s power for political purposes? You’d dismiss it as a whitewash. Where the right is concerned, the IRS scandal hypothesis is unfalsifiable.
Lois Lerner: “We need to have a plan. We need to be caution so it isn’t a per se political project.”
Nothing going on.
“And if that investigation concluded that there was no effort by the administration to abuse the IRS’s power for political purposes? ”
And when the conclusion of the investigation is written prior to the investigation being complete, Jim says, “Double plus good work. Nothing to see here. The government is beyond question. Maybe there are some flaws in the system but not with the Obama administration and really, these groups brought it on themselves. While what the IRS started off doing may have been wrong, we really need to continue on until that effort is finished. We can’t let these shadowy groups controlled by foreign interests contribute unlimited sums of money to political campaigns because of Citizen’s United.”
It isn’t any wonder why Democrats are so silent on what Maduro is doing in Venezuela. Too many direct parallels to their own party.
By Jim’s logic, if we found one Christian in a German concentration camp it proves the Nazis weren’t targeting Jews.
Obama is not corrupt. That is, he is not an American who believe in freedom who hates America and has converted to alien, totalitarian ideologies. That would be his mother and countless other Baby Boomers who admire Mao, Chavez, Castro, etc.
Obama is to his core an alien. He is anti-American because he is not American.
The American people have spent nearly a hundred years erecting an undemocratic, illiberal, inhuman state. They will now be governed by it. No American could govern using such a state, so the America people choose this alien.
It is really hard to claim the IRS wasn’t being political considering they delayed the release of the IG report for a year and that year was an election year. That clearly shows that politics were the cause of some IRS actions. That the targeting and harassment continued after the results were known internally also shows deliberate intent.
It is really hard to claim the IRS wasn’t being political
The claim isn’t that they were “being political”, it’s that they were abusing their power in order to help one political party. Of course the IRS (like any big government organization) would want to avoid negative publicity in an election year, simply for institutional self-protection. They’d do that no matter which party was in office.
“They’d do that no matter which party was in office.”
Lol, bless your heart.
Now you are all, “Why of course they were political. What’s the big deal here?”
“Lol, bless your heart.”
wodun, I’m guessing you’re using “bless your heart” the way Southerners use it. I. e., as a polite euphemism for “woo-dogies, you’re an idiot.”
Yep. And he’s so slow he couldn’t hurt himself falling out of a tree.