A vote for Hillary is a vote to continue America's descent into a Banana Republic.

The IRS is still targeting conservatives: 

//A federal judge in Ohio has had it with the IRS foot-dragging on applications from conservative organizations for exempt status  and has ordered the agency to quit stalling.

The order was contained in a sealed filing that became public on Friday. What's clear in the judge's order is that three years after being assured by the IRS that they had stopped singling out conservative organizations for special scrutiny, the targeting continues.

Washington Times:

U.S. District Judge Michael R. Barrett said the IRS can still either approve or deny the Texas Patriots Tea Party’s application for nonprofit status, but the agency can no longer sit on its hands. And he said the IRS must give the application an honest evaluation without prejudice stemming from the yearslong targeting.
In a series of stark findings, Judge Barrett ruled that the IRS did in fact single tea party groups out for special scrutiny because of their political viewpoints in opposition to President Obama — undercutting congressional Democrats who said liberal groups faced the same level of targeting.

“The evidence strongly suggests that the IRS initiated the delay because TPTP’s application was perceived at the screening stage to be a Tea Party case,” Judge Barrett, whose courtroom is in Ohio, said in an opinion that was filed earlier under seal, and was only made public after parts of the 29-page ruling were redacted.

It’s the latest blow to the tax agency, which is facing a separate order from a judge in Washington, D.C., to process a handful of other cases the agency had delayed.

The TPTP applied for non-profit status in 2012 and quickly got caught up in the political targeting that snared hundreds of groups.

After the IRS admitted it was maltreating the groups in 2013, the agency began to process most of the applications — but some of the groups sued, and the IRS refused to process their cases. The IRS said its standard policy was to halt applications in litigation, and also said it was afraid that by beginning processing it would open its agents up to lawsuits against them individually.

Judge Barrett rejected each of those arguments, saying that the IRS itself admitted the litigation policy wasn’t absolute and saying that agents who take an honest look at the application aren’t likely to face a lawsuit.

Of course, it isn't just the IRS slow-walking applications through the system that's the problem. The targeting also included outrageous requests for information like donors' names and addresses, reading lists, and other private information the agency had no business trying to acquire.

Two federal judges have now ruled against the IRS, rejecting their arguments that they're not targeting conservative organizations. They're not going to stop until a judge holds a couple of IRS managers in contempt and lets them cool their heels in jail for a few days.//

The nice thing about having a Democrat inthe White House is that there is never any bad news...

...like scandals involving the "loss" of 2 years of Lois Lerner's emails.

//Writing yesterday about the IRS’s amazing loss of more than two years of Lois Lerner’s emails (“Where’d they go? They were here just a minute ago!”), I wondered in passing how the Extended White House Public Relations Office, e.g., the New York Times, MSNBC, et al. would handle the news. The Nixon White House, you’ll recall, found quite a lot of the morning’s scrambled on its collective countenance when 18 and 1/2 minutes of audio tape somehow—somehow!—went missing as the Watergate scandal unfolded around the president. 

What a godsend to the guardians of our “Right to Know” Watergate was! Day after day, week after week, month after month, the front pages and editorial pages of our former Paper of Record were full of stern admonitions about that egregious abuse of executive power. You could not look at the paper without a synesthetic shudder: Reading it, you could almost hear them licking their chops as their prey—the dastardly Richard Nixon—came ever closer to his doom.

So how does the New York Times handle this extraordinary loss of two years’ worth of Lois Lerner’s emails?  (“Really, they were here just a minute ago. We were just about to hand them over to Congress when, gosh darn, they just vanished.  Damndest thing.”)

This will amaze you, I know, but it is true: the New York Times  today devotes zero words to the story. Take a look at the front page here:  Nothing. There are a couple of articles about Iraq’s descent into chaos—Iraq, the country whose transformation Joe Biden, in 2010, called one of the “greatest achievements” of the Obama administration. “I’ve been there 17 times now,” the vice president told Larry King.  “I know every one of the major players in all of the segments of that society. It’s impressed me. I’ve been impressed how they have been deciding to use the political process rather than guns to settle their differences.” But I digress . . .

What else do we have on the front page?  Warnings about a connection between obesity and liver disease. Something about the tea party in the aftermath of David Brat’s upset victory in Virginia and a story about restauranteurs upset by apps bypassing maitre d’s in securing good tables at posh eateries. The public has a right to know these things. There is also advance word about a coming article about the entertainer “Beyoncé the Boundless” (they teach alliteration in J school), the soccer games in Brazil, and sundry other topics.

What about the missing emails?  Nary a word on the front page. Or the next page. Or the next or the next.  The editorial page has a stern piece about “The Soros Cycle of Endless Cash”—oh, wait, no, it’s not about the left-wing billionaire George Soros. My mistake. What he does with his money is his business. It’s about—can you guess?—yes! The Koch brothers, the men the Times just loves to hate. But about the missing emails in one of the most disgusting political scandals in recent times, the deployment of the IRS with its virtually unlimited powers, against political opponents of the administration? Nothing. Nada. Rien.//

If we believe that they are not crooks, then we should fairly conclude that they are too incompetent to handle foreign policy or health care or the border or the government.

Banana Republic

George Will writes:

The most intrusive and potentially most punitive federal agency has been politicized; the IRS has become an appendage of Barack Obama’s party. Furthermore, congruent with exhortations from some congressional Democrats, it is intensifying its efforts to suffocate groups critical of progressives, by delaying what once was the swift, routine granting of tax-exempt status.

So, the IRS, far from repenting of its abusive behavior, is trying to codify the abuses. It hopes to nullify with new rules the existing legal right of 501(c)(4) groups, many of which are conservative, to participate in politics. The proposed rules have drawn more than 140,000 comments, most of them complaints, some from liberals wary of IRS attempts to broadly define “candidate-related political activity” and to narrow the permissible amount of this.

Lerner is, so far, the face of this use of government to punish political adversaries. She knows what her IRS unit did and how it intersects with the law, and for a second time she has exercised her constitutional right to remain silent rather than risk self-incrimination. The public has a right to make reasonable inferences from her behavior.

And from Obama’s. After calling the IRS behavior “outrageous,” he now says there is not a “smidgen” of evidence of anything to be outraged about. He knows this even though the supposed investigation of the IRS behavior has not been completed, or perhaps even begun. The person he chose to investigate his administration is an administration employee and a generous donor to his campaigns. . . .

Speaking of questions: Can anyone identify a Democratic Senate candidate whose tax records were leaked, as Christine O’Donnell’s were when she was the Republican candidate in Delaware in 2010? Is it a coincidence that in January 2011, after Catherine Engelbrecht requested tax-exempt status for two conservative groups she founded in Texas — King Street Patriots and True the Vote — the Engelbrecht family business was notified of its first IRS audit? Does James Comey wonder why (this was before he became FBI director), five months after Engelbrecht’s tax-exemption request, FBI agents appeared seeking information about attendees at the King Street Patriots meetings? Were five subsequent FBI contacts “checking in” for “updates” on the group’s activities really necessary? Why did the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives show a sudden intrusive interest in the Engelbrechts’ business, which has nothing to do with alcohol or tobacco or firearms or explosives?

American - Now with More Hope and Change - Banana Republic Edition

Amazing....simply an amazing....coincidence.

Surprised?: All 501(C)(4)'s Audited By IRS Were Conservative

Less than two weeks after President Obama insisted that there wasn't even a "smidgen of corruption" involved in the IRS targeting scandal, it appears that the scope of that scandal is widening.

Dave Camp, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, revealed yesterday that the committee's investigation had found that it wasn't only conservative groups applying for 501(c)(4) status that came in for IRS targeting and harassment. Existing 501(c)(4)'s were targeted, as well. In fact, Camp stated,

At Washington, DC’s direction, dozens of groups operating as 501(c)(4)s were flagged for IRS surveillance, including monitoring of the groups’ activities, websites and any other publicly available information. Of these groups, 83% were right-leaning. And of the groups the IRS selected for audit, 100% were right-leaning.

That's right -- "somehow," every single 501(c)(4) that the IRS selected to endure the time, expense, distraction and stress of an audit just happened to be conservative.

The fact that existing 501(c)(4)'s were targeted along with applicants is important. First, though it isn't conclusive, it does provide further evidence (as if any were needed!) that the scrutiny endured by conservative 501(c)(4) applicants had less to do with "confusion" over the (c)(4) rules than with efforts at political suppression. Second, it suggests that the targeting was part of a deliberate, widespread agency policy rather than restricted to "bad apples" in just one narrow area.

There are still plenty of documents that haven't been turned over to investigators yet, and plenty of witnesses who haven't yet been interviewed. Given how damaging the evidence already is, Democrats eager to defend the IRS and push through formalized rules to suppress (c)(4)'s might be well-advised to hold off until the facts are out -- because the scandal is only broadening, and the IRS is looking worse by the day.

Surprise!

IRS harasses the only conservative group in Hollywood.

The IRS used for political purpose?

Big scandal in May....

BFD in December.

Democrats trying to get to the bottom of IRS scandal...

...by blaming the Inspector General.

The government watchdog who issued the report that found the IRS was targeting conservative groups was turned into a punching bag by Democrats in the second half of a tense hearing Thursday, leading Inspector General J. Russell George to chide lawmakers for their attacks on his office.

“This is unprecedented,” he said of his treatment before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee at the end of the hearing.

The first half of the hearing was devoted to testimony from IRS officials who claimed higher-ups in Washington, D.C., were involved in applying additional scrutiny to Tea Party and other groups.

But the second half featured George and his associates, and ended up becoming a forum for Democratic lawmakers to accuse him of effectively ignoring potential signs that liberal groups may have been targeted as well. They pointed in part to IRS documents that suggest “progressive” groups may have been singled out.

George, though, said he didn’t see one of those packets until last week. He said he was “disturbed” it took so long for the IRS to produce the documents.

But George has also said all along that the evidence mostly pointed to conservative groups receiving the most scrutiny. He bristled at the tough questioning from Democrats which repeatedly second-guessed his office’s audit of the IRS’ practices.

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news.

Networks fail to cover IRS scandal.

The Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) networks have essentially censored the latest IRS scandal news. Not a single network reported on the bombshell coming out of Thursday’s congressional hearing that IRS employees were ordered to send Tea Party tax-exemption applications to the office of the IRS’s Chief Counsel, which was headed by William Wilkins, who at that time was the only Obama political appointee at the IRS.

The Big Three networks have also ignored this week’s news that tax records of political candidates (including one-time GOP Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell) and certain donors were improperly accessed by  government officials, and that the Justice Department has, so far, refused to prosecute the offenders.

The lack of IRS scandal coverage this week continues a disturbing trend of the broadcast networks cooling to what is perhaps the most damaging of the Obama administration scandals.    

In fact the last mention of any IRS scandal came almost three weeks ago, on the June 28 CBS This Morning.

Hmmm....remember when Harry Reid claimed to know what was in Mitt Romney's tax returns....

...well, I guess, the law is for little people.

IRS admits that Republican's tax records may have been leaked:

More than two years after her upstart Senate campaign rocked the Delaware political world, Christine O'Donnell got an unexpected contact from a U.S. Treasury Department agent warning that her private tax records may have been breached.

The phone message earlier this year shocked the battled-scarred candidate, a tea party favorite who knocked off Republican mainstay Michael Castle in the primary before losing in a bid to win Vice President Joseph R. Biden’s former seat.

“Ms. O'Donnell, this is Dennis Martel, special agent with the U.S. Department of Treasury in Baltimore, Md. … We received information that your personal federal tax info may have been compromised and may have been misused by an individual,” he said in the January message left on her cellphone.

For Ms. O'Donnell, the message immediately raised red flags.

On March 9, 2010, the day she revealed her plan to run for the Senate in a press release, a tax lien was placed on a house purported to be hers and publicized. The problem was she no longer owned the house. The IRS eventually blamed the lien on a computer glitch and withdrew it.

Now Mr. Martel, a criminal investigator for the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration, was telling her that an official in Delaware state government had improperly accessed her records on that very same day.

Beyond that, Ms. O'Donnell and Senate investigators who have tried to help her have run into a wall of silence, leaving more questions than answers about whether abuses of the IRS system extend to private individuals and not just the tax-exempt groups already identified as victims.

IRS Scandal - Mens Rea

"Mens rea" means basically "guilty mind," and here is the evidence of Lois Lerner's mens rea:

Perhaps a quote from Lois Lerner might explain the necessity. Blogger Patrick Frey found this potent advice from the woman at the center of the targeting scandal from a November 2011 interview with Bloomberg Business Week http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/the-irs-takes-a-closer-look-at-colleges-11172011.html  that could explain quite a bit about the IRS’ motivations.

Lerner, interviewed at the time in regard to an investigation into not-for-profit colleges and universities, underscored the importance of aggressive interrogatories to discourage organizations from pursuing tax-exempt status. Business Week reported Lerner’s response: “Receiving a thick questionnaire from the IRS, she says, is a ‘behavior changer.’”

Not wanting to sound all paranoid...

...but isn't it odd that the IRS harassment of conservatives started after the Citizens United decision made it impractical for the Obama administration to ue the FEC to harass conservatives?

Even better, Citizens United hamstrung an Obama reelection strategy of wielding the FEC's regulatory power to stifle "enemy" speech, by delay and intimidation where possible, and with litigation where necessary. Thanks to the Supreme Court, the FEC was no longer available to play the role of crooked referee. 

So, enter the Internal Revenue Service stage left armed with 157 White House visits, a BOLO, and the standard Chicago strategy of uncertainty, intimidation, and delay.Oh, yes... and Lois Lerner, who broke the IRS scandal with a planted question at an American Bar Association meeting. Lerner, formerly of FEC enforcement, where she is known to have harassed the Christian Coalition and Illinois Republican Senate candidate Al Salvi. It doesn't get much better than this. 

Who needs a smoking gun, anyway?

Liberals try to defuse IRS scandal by claiming "me too"...

..except they are lying.

Audit CONFIRMS IRS Targeted 292 Conservative Groups – Just 6 Liberal Groups:

The Obama IRS Scandal involves:

** At least 292 conservative groups targeted

** At least 5 pro-Israel groups targeted

** Constitutional groups targeted

** Groups that criticized Obama administration were targeted

** At least two pro-life groups targeted

** A Texas voting-rights group was targeted

** Conservative activists and businesses were targeted.

** At least 88 IRS agents were involved in the targeting scandal

** At least one conservative Hispanic group was targeted

Today the Inspector General confirmed that 292 conservative groups were targeted by the IRS. Only 6 liberal groups were targeted.

The Washington Examiner reported:

Refuting Democratic suggestions that progressive groups were also swept up in the IRS probe of the tax status of Tea Party organizations, the Treasury Department’s inspector general has revealed that just six progressive groups were targeted compared to 292 conservative groups.

In a letter to congressional Democrats, the inspector general also said that 100 percent of Tea Party groups seeking special tax status were put under IRS review, while only 30 percent of the progressive groups felt the same pressure.

The Wednesday letter to the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee punched a huge hole in Democratic claims that progressive groups were targeted as much as the Tea Party groups from May 2010-May 2012, the height of the Tea Party movement.

The letter from the Treasury Department Inspector General for Tax Administration revealed that there just weren’t many progressive groups who even sought special tax exempt status. A total of 20 sought it, and six were probed. All 292 Tea Party groups, meanwhile, were part of the IRS witchhunt.

The little people can't be trusted with free speech.

Tea Party non-profits are dangerous, but Blue Cross can set up a $3 Billion non-profit to promote Obamacare and that's hunky-dory with the IRS.

There's a tear-off postpaid card with an already-checked check box alongside the attestation "I believe everyone should have access to affordable, preventive health care" and room for the recipient to fill in his personal information. At the bottom of the card--a nice touch--is a line of seven faces: six young people and one old dude. The group is so ethnically diverse, it even includes a kid from Cheron.

The return address identifies the sender as "The California Endowment." What is the California Endowment? At its website, one can glean the answer from an overview of its history and activities, as well as its 428-page tax filing for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2012.

The endowment is a nonprofit corporation, exempt from taxation under Section 501(c)(3) of the tax code. That means that its contributions as well as most of its operations are untaxed. But if you'd like to make a contribution, you're out of luck: "Thank you for the generous offer, but we do not accept donations," the website announces.

They hardly need to. The tax filing lists the endowment's total assets as of the end of the fiscal year as $3,660,548,295. Its net investment income for the year was more than $160 million. If you took in that kind of money, you'd pay a federal income tax of 15% (20% effective this year), or $24 million ($32 million), and lefties would scream that you should be paying more like 40%. As a 501(c)(3), the endowment paid an excise tax of 1%, or around $1.7 million.

Where did all that money come from? "The California Endowment was established in 1996 as a result of Blue Cross of California's creation of its for-profit subsidiary, WellPoint Health Networks," the website explains. In other words, it's a tax-free arm of the health-insurance industry. Although the endowment is, according to its website, "independently governed and operated," it's not hard to see how WellPoint and other private insurers have an interest in promoting more government insurance subsidies.

The reader who forwarded us the brochure commented: "Maybe the IRS should look at these folks." We doubt it would do much good. When you have billions of dollars, you can easily afford to pay lawyers to look over something like this and make sure it won't run afoul of the regulatory restrictions that govern political activity by nonprofits.

How do they get away with it? The Obama picture looks like something from a totalitarian cult of personality, but now that he is safely re-elected, he is not a candidate for office. Neither, it turns out, is Speaker Perez, who is currently serving his third term in the Assembly, is prohibited by California law from seeking another term, and has not launched a campaign for another office in 2014. Further, the brochure makes no reference to any specific legislation, only to the general goal of providing "everyone" with "access" to "affordable health care."

This column does not think the Internal Revenue Service should take a punitive approach to the endowment's propagandizing for semi-socialized medicine. (Similarly, our colleagues on The Wall Street Journal editorial page were critical of the IRS's 2004 investigation of the NAACP.)

But it does underscore why the IRS's abuse of grassroots conservative groups is so galling. ObamaCare was enacted in 2010 against overwhelming public opposition. This energized the Tea Party, which helped turn the 2010 elections into a referendum in which ObamaCare was resoundingly defeated.

Obama's re-election was another referendum on ObamaCare. That one he narrowly won--but as it turns out, the IRS was cheating on his behalf. The California Endowment's pro-ObamaCare propaganda may be unobjectionable in itself, but the government's systematic suppression of dissent lends another layer of illegitimacy to this monstrous law.

Hey! Here's a great idea! 

Why don't we turn over our medical information to the same people who targeted people for their religious and political beliefs and gave away confidential information to their political opponents.

What could go wrong?

"House committee looks into IRS seizure of 60 million medical records."

"When everything is a crime, government data mining matters"

Professor William A. Jacobson writes:

The threat, oddly enough, is proven by the leaks which (allegedly) exposed the programs and were provided to Glenn Greenwald.  If some government employee who has sworn to keep information secret is willing to leak the information to Glenn Greenwald for (allegedly) good purposes, what’s to stop that person from violating his or her oath by leaking data-mined information to Glenn Greenwald or Media Matters or the Human Rights Campaign for other than good reasons about a Tea Party group, religious figure or conservative politician?

 In the age of Obama and the unique mainstream media disinterest in anything that damages Obama, this already has resulted in a flourishing culture of intimidation directed at the Tea Party, traditional marriage supporters, conservatives, and other opponents of Obama and the Obama agenda.

A point discussed here many times is the criminalization of life, particularly with regard to gun laws.  Professor Glenn Reynolds has made the point more generally in his paper Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime.

Prosecutors have become kings, with the ability to find a crime committed by just about anyone.  Data mining and access to internet activity can help find terrorists, but it also can be used to find crimes which were not previously known to have been committed by political opponents.

A “find the target first, then find the crime” political approach requires access to information of an unprecedented level.  Which is exactly what is happening.

The issue goes beyond the NSA programs.  Obamacare is a form of data mining.

Obamacare will put into the hands of the IRS medical and health information of an unprecedented level.  As bad as leaks as to which websites you visit would be, the threat of leakage of your medical information could be equally devastating to freedom of speech and the political process.  It would take a mere nod and a wink to convince someone that participation in the political process was not worth it if the result was the exposure of sensitive medical issues.

You can’t separate the data mining, the culture of intimidation, and criminalization of daily life.

 In the same vein, notice that the leaker of the NSA data mining program did so because he was "disappointed" that Obama was maintaining Bush-era programs.

Who is to say that a rogue ideologue doesn't do the same with our medical information?  

Hey! Here is a good idea! Let's let the IRS have our medical information ...

...and decide which religious groups get exempted from political persecution.

What could go wrong?

Faced with the public outcry, the government did allow nonexempt religious organizations​—​hospitals, universities, charities, and so on​—​a year to get over their scruples and figure out how to comply. That year ends on August 1, when another 30 or so lawsuits filed by objecting nonprofits will be activated. But now, enter stage left: the IRS.

The way the regulation is written, it is the IRS that determines whether an organization qualifies for full exemption from the HHS mandate. To qualify, an organization must be a nonprofit as described in section 6033(a)(1) and section 6033(a)(3)(A)(i) or (iii) (oh, my!) of the amended Internal Revenue Code of 1986 and therefore exempt from filing Form 990, which most nonprofits must file annually.

Religious entities that do not qualify for the 990 exemption may seek alleged relief from the mandate by certifying to their insurance company that they cannot provide the objectionable services and products. The insurance company is then required to issue to each covered employee a separate policy covering contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients free of charge. So the employer is still in the position of facilitating the flow of objectionable services to his employees.

What’s more, these employers must maintain their “self-certification” in their records for each plan year and make it available for examination upon request by “regulators, issuers, third party administrators, and plan participants and beneficiaries.” The IRS may investigate and challenge any self-certification.

So the very enforcers at the IRS whose own inspector general admits they systematically targeted conservative and religious groups will now get to decide who is entitled to ladle soup into a bowl for a homeless person without violating his or her conscience. 

Hey!  Why don't we let these people have our medical information!

The IRS leaked the confidential information of conservative donors to liberal groups.

And on July 13, 1789, the French Aristocracy attended a glittering costume party...

Trey Gowdy's comments are compelling.  I understand that conferences are important for maintaining the spirit and cohesion of any institution, but at some point someone needs to say "this is not right. I'ts just too self-indulgent, inasmuch as we are spending the public's money at a time when people are losing their jobs or being furloughed because of the economy or are taking home less because of the taxes we are collecting."

This is the mentality of "government is a good thing" and the "highest and best use of your money is to pay for government."

Definitely watch this video.

Ruh-roh!

Ignore the Obama 2012 Campaign Manager behind the curtain at the White House meetings with the IRS commissioner.

The president's deputy campaign manager attended the "nonpolitical" ObamaCare implementation meetings with the former IRS commissioner at the White House. She wasn't there to discuss the Easter Egg Roll.

A clue as to whether the targeting by the IRS of Tea Party and other conservative groups was discussed at the 157 meetings that former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman had at the White House may be found in remarks by Stephanie Cutter, deputy manager for President Obama's 2012 reelection campaign, in a recent appearance on Jake Tapper's show "The Lead" on CNN.

As reported by Gateway Pundit, Cutter attempted to dismiss charges they were political meetings but admitted she had attended meetings with Shulman at the White House. "I was in them with him," Cutter said. "So there was nothing nefarious going on."
Well, if they were not political meetings, why was she there at all? Was she there to offer her health care or tax code expertise?

"I am not here as a serf or vassal. I am not begging my lords for mercy."

Becky Gerritson of the Wetumpka Tea Party, testifying today before the House Ways and Means Committee about abuse by the IRS.

"I’m a born free American woman, wife, mother and citizen. And I’m telling my government that you’ve forgotten your place. It’s not your responsibility to look out for my well-being, and to monitor my speech. It’s not your right to assert an agenda. Your post, the post that you occupy, exists to preserve American liberty. You’ve sworn to perform that duty. And you have faltered."