because of the bias of the OP if it wasn't blindingly obvious

Quality thread

...developments over the weekend have revealed that the targeting of right wing non-profits by the IRS goes all the way back to the spring of 2010 and that senior officials were aware of it sometime in 2011 .




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This post was edited by WidowMaKer_MK on May 13 2013 06:08am

Maybe this will make people forget about Benghazi.

Obama distancing himself from this...

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/05/obama-irs-news-91263.html

...he actually had the balls to say " if this in fact happened " . The IRS has already admitted it happened and that it was wrong

Because predictably everyone that's unaware of how government entities operate will conflate this event and turn it into "Hurr durr, Obama and his Chicago allies made the IRS target the Tea Party, hurr hurr hurr" when there's no reason to believe that's the case. It'll follow the same model used during the lowering of the unemployment rate at the end of the election last year: "Hurr durr, it's got to be Chicago politics!"

The IG report will be important. The real problem with this coming out as it did is because even though no one deserves to be targeted due to their political views, the IRS does actually need to start targeting the shills that claim tax-exempt status but are really just standard political actors that are funneling dark money into elections. The IRS was behind the 527 blowup that targeted George W. Bush in 2004, and they are hilariously behind the 501c4 blowup that has attacked Obama as well. Karl Rove isn't promoting "social welfare" with his constant attack ads that are financed by a handful of unknown billionaires and none of the other groups are either. The groups are propped up by moronic tax law, that was created by a moronic Supreme Court decision.

The Tea Party is really a victim of circumstance in this, we'll find out to what degree they were unfairly targeted in addition to that. Citizens United opened the floodgates and allowed for the number of 501c4's to more than double, and that happened to coincide with the Tea Party fever front and center from 2009 on. I do think it's amusing that even though we know the IRS made revisions after this discovery and broadened the criteria to a neutral "expanding/limiting the size of government" data point, all the whining is still about the Tea Party. The real story is the ridiculousness of campaign finance, and hopefully that's where the focus will shift to eventually, probably after some people are fired.



Not likely. 70% of Republicans actually think that it's "a worse political scandal than Watergate" (pause for laughter), 74% think it's worse than Teapot Dome, and 70% think it's worse than Iran-Contra.

Benghazi isn't going away, it's become the Congressional Republican's chosen distraction from actually having to do their job.

This post was edited by JayKwik on May 14 2013 04:59am

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-denounces-reported-irs-targeting-of-conservative-groups/2013/05/13/a0185644-bbdf-11e2-97d4-a479289a31f9_print.html

According to the WaPo, the extent of this is well beyond the office in Cincinnati.

What's left to discover is whether or not the two Washington offices also targeted groups unfairly like the Cincinnati office. The IG report will hopefully clarify that. It's possible that "leftist" groups were targeted too before the criteria revisions. There's also another element that is being overlooked now but will no doubt come up during an endless parade of hearings: many of these groups are legitimately guilty of tax fraud due to these status claims. Unfortunately that'll get overlooked because of the appearance of unfair practices, but that could end up flipping the entire issue around. Up to this point the only thing that's happened is the investigation of those unfairly flagged 501c4's, delaying their applications when they didn't provide the adequate paperwork, and then eventually granting the applications when they did. But from the looks of it we're going to have another problem go unfixed because it's going to be drowned out by fact-free drama whoring.

Rubio calling for a nonexistent IRS commissioner to resign isn't starting us off on the right path.

This post was edited by JayKwik on May 14 2013 07:40am