501(c)4 abuse and the IRS investigation

[Craig234]

If none of them had the status revoked, that is actually more suggestive of abuse of process. It certainly undercuts the argument that they were targeting these groups for a valid reason, or to be more efficient.

Under your logic, every possible outcome is good evidence of abuse of process.

A number of the applicants withdrew their applications once they had to answer questions.

What does that show - that the process was appropriate and effective, preventing some fraudulent applications? Or that it's government tyranny driving patriots from their rights?

So what was the motive, if not to actually disallow a single applicant?

 

[Craig234]

How high up in Cincinnati office does this go.

A few agents making the decision on their own or did they bump it up the chain.

How high up the chain did it go?

Get the confessors on the spot and shake the tree.

I expect that it cleared Cincinnati and made it into Washington for approval

Reports are that this group decided what red flags to use to review applications, with supervisor approval, and that some Washington IRS leadership was in a meeting where the processes they were using, including the search for these keywords, was discussed in 2011. I haven't seen any evidence of anyone above that IRS leadership being informed.

 

[Craig234]

just because none hasn't had the tax status revoked does not make it an abuse of power. Audits and such still cost money and stress.

I don't think this is going to be a huge scandal and not the OBAMA bullshit many are claiming. i don't think you can blame him on this at all.

It does make me wonder if we should give so much power to the IRS. in fact we are set to give even more power to them.

I haven't seen any report these were 'audits' - which is a much more involved process. Reports say these were 75 of the applications asked for some details on operations.

 

[Charles Kozierok]

Randomly gets a much lower rate of fraud detected. It's a tradeoff, do you want to have less selection at the price of more fraud not getting caught?

It's hard to get lower than zero. I can't imagine we could do much worse than a policy that is both biased and ineffective.

For example, taking a home office deduction has long increased the chances for an audit because the IRS knows someone taking that is much more likely to have wrong deductions.

That's a tax issue. Nobody has a problem with that. We do have a problem with politically-motivated actions.

I haven't seen solid information on that.

Then I don't know why you suggested that they were "skyrocketing". If that were really the case, it could be a red flag, but I don't see the evidence yet.

More to the point, I don't see the IRS themselves trying to defend their behavior here.

Random is easy - and far less effective at catching fraud ignoring the red flags.

I don't care. We have the rule of law in this country for a reason. There are lots of things we could do to reduce crime or fraud that we don't do because it's wrong, and this is one of them.

It's not wrong, and it doesn't make them loko bad.

You're entitled to your opinion. If they're not wrong, and they don't look bad, why did Obama call it "outrageous", and why is the IRS falling over itself to apologize and distance itself from the office where it was done?

However, like many legitimate govrnment activities, it can be made to look bad to less informed people by demagogues.

Are you calling me "less informed"? On what basis?

How about Lois Lerner, who heads the relevant IRS department? Was she "less informed" when she said this?

"That was wrong. That was absolutely incorrect, it was insensitive and it was inappropriate. That's not how we go about selecting cases for further review."

You miss the point of the analogy again.

I got the point just fine. I just consider the analogy a lousy one. "Money laundering and drug selling" are valid red flags. An increase in applications from one type of organization, by itself, is not.

I'm downplaying it if it's exaggerated or conclusions are rushed to, I'm upplaying it if it's downplayed too much. You're in the rushing group so it seems like downplaying.

If the IRS denied any wrongdoing, I'd give them the benefit of the doubt in the matter. But they have metaphorically pleaded guilty, which leaves your argument without any sort of a foundation. You're defending their behavior more than they are.

 

[Craig234]

It's hard to get lower than zero. I can't imagine we could do much worse than a policy that is both biased and ineffective.

It's not proven to be either.

That's a tax issue. Nobody has a problem with that. We do have a problem with politically-motivated actions.

And again you miss the point of the analogy, which is that red flags have a purpose over random. It has nothing to do with one being 'a tax issue' - and both are.

Then I don't know why you suggested that they were "skyrocketing". If that were really the case, it could be a red flag, but I don't see the evidence yet.

More to the point, I don't see the IRS themselves trying to defend their behavior here.

I explained that. Reports of the applications more than doubline after citizens united and reports of a big increase of the 'tea party' linked groups.

The IRS hasn't agreed to the broader attacks; the inspector general revealed the activity.

Here's a recent article of what the IRS is actually saying:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The IRS acting chief acknowledged Tuesday that the agency demonstrated "a lack of sensitivity" in its screenings of political groups seeking tax-exempt status, but he said those mistakes won't be repeated.

In his first public comment on the case, Steven Miller said there was "a shortcut taken in our processes" for determining which groups needed special screening.

Miller has emerged as a key figure in the controversy over the IRS' singling out of conservative groups for extra scrutiny. President Barack Obama said Monday that if the agency intentionally targeted such groups, "that's outrageous and there's no place for it."

In an opinion piece in Tuesday's editions of USA Today, Miller said conceded that the agency demonstrated "a lack of sensitivity to the implications of some of the decisions that were made." He said screening of advocacy groups is "factually complex, and it's challenging to separate out political issues from those involving education or social welfare."

"The mistakes we made were due to the absence of a sufficient process for working the increase in cases and a lack of sensitivity to the implications of some of the decisions that were made," Miller wrote.

Miller said the agency has implemented new procedures that will "ensure the mistakes won't be repeated."

We'll get to Obama in a minute. But the IRS has pled guilty to the terrible crime of "a lack of sensitivity".

Of course they're not defending themselves from the wilder attacks in the same release where they're apologizing for what did happen, the "lack of sensitivity".

You're trying to milk 'the IRS admits' for a lot more than the milk that's there, which is that "lack of sensitivity".

But now the politics come in. With the right and left joining the criticism, the politics are for 'heads to roll', not to defend the IRS from exaggerated attacks.

Obama has a history of surrendering immediately and badly to exaggerated right-wing attacks on liberals. Remember the woman the right trumped up attacks on? Almost immediately fired for no good reason. Was Obama out defending ACORN from outrageous false right-wing attacks? Not that I remember. A rare exception is Susan Rice, who seems to be a personal favorite - assuming he didn't can her nomination as secretary of state over exaggerated right-wing attacks on Benghazi.

So, we might see a consensus develop of many Democrats and Republicans alike joining in an exaggerated attack on the IRS here. In terms of a politicians' popularity, attacking the IRS, not defending it, is pretty much always the politically helpful move to make. Right or wrong.

I don't care. We have the rule of law in this country for a reason. There are lots of things we could do to reduce crime or fraud that we don't do because it's wrong, and this is one of them.

Except you haven't shown it's wrong other than the IRS admission of "lack of sensitivity".

Whatever wrong has been shown now is of the 'looks bad' type - not that there was anything more substantive, more partisan, at this point.

You don't care about the effectiveness in enforcing the law in this case, you say. It's your right to have that opinion but you haven't justified it.

And you did not respond to my suggestion we review 100% of applications.

You're entitled to your opinion. If they're not wrong, and they don't look bad, why did Obama call it "outrageous", and why is the IRS falling over itself to apologize and distance itself from the office where it was done?

Fair questions I answered earlier in this post.

The IRS isn't 'falling all over itself' - but the politically effective thing for IT to do now is to not defend the practice at all. That would make it look more partisan, which is bad for it.

I explained why politician Obama called it 'outrageous' - he knows the politics would be very damaging to him to let Republicans run against him as an apologist for the IRS.

He hasn't show the qualities that would get him to challenge such false attacks - and politically, he has a point. This is mostly about the 2014 elections IMO on both sides.

Are you calling me "less informed"? On what basis?

I'm saying that any general citizen who claims now to know that this red flag approach was a partisan-driven abuse of power is not well informed about the issue, making assumptions.

How about Lois Lerner, who heads the relevant IRS department? Was she "less informed" when she said this?[/quote]

I don't take any issue with saying it has the sort of problem the IRS has admitted, that it's "insentive" when they want to ensure what they do is understood not to be partisan.

I got the point just fine... "Money laundering and drug selling" are valid red flags. An increase in applications from one type of organization, by itself, is not.

I didn't have money laundering and drug selling in my analogy. I had the SUSPICION of them - which for the analogy is no different than the SUSPICION of disallowed political activity or any other thing that a group might be looking for, as I said, whether it's more or less serious, even if it's baking cookies, the point is the same.

When you're looking at applications from groups trying to find a certain disallowed activity, and there's a reasonable suspicion that a name linked to that activity is being used and makes that application have a higher chance of being the type you're trying to catch, then having a red flag for it is not unreasonable.

But it can be "insensitive" given that you have the IRS under a Democrat singling out political opponents' applications, however valid the reason for doing so.

If the IRS denied any wrongdoing, I'd give them the benefit of the doubt in the matter. But they have metaphorically pleaded guilty, which leaves your argument without any sort of a foundation. You're defending their behavior more than they are.

I'll defend that woman Obama fired more than she did at the time, and I'm right.

But actually I'm 'defending' the IRS about the same amount as they've actually said.

Like I said, I expect they, Democrats and Republicans are all likely to increase the criticisms coming up for political reasons.

I'll increase my criticisms if the evidence shows up to justify it. If these were partisan motivated activities, people should be fired at least, to be determined.

And in that case, I'd like to see another commission to recommend additional safeguards.

The inspector general seems to have done ok at catching this, but not very timely.

 

[Charles Kozierok]

We'll get to Obama in a minute. But the IRS has pled guilty to the terrible crime of "a lack of sensitivity".

That's a distortion of the quote I provided from the IRS official. Here it is again:

"That was wrong. That was absolutely incorrect, it was insensitive and it was inappropriate. That's not how we go about selecting cases for further review."

I've bolded the important parts that you omitted.

Of course they're not defending themselves from the wilder attacks in the same release where they're apologizing for what did happen, the "lack of sensitivity".

They aren't defending themselves from wrongdoing either.

You're trying to milk 'the IRS admits' for a lot more than the milk that's there, which is that "lack of sensitivity".

It is not just a "lack of sensitivity".

When someone says something is "wrong", "absolutely incorrect", "insensitive" and "inappropriate", it is intellectually dishonest to cherry-pick one of those terms and ignore all of the others.

Before I waste my time responding further, I'll give you an opportunity to revise your comments about the IRS statement.

 

[EagleKeeper]

Has any information come out indicating this?

I do not recall hearing if anyone other than the IRS bigshots have testified.

Congress needs to get the agents in house and get them to start testifying as to who id what and with what knowledge/approval



Shake that tree

 

[Craig234]

That's a distortion of the quote I provided from the IRS official. Here it is again:

No, it's not. Your comments are a distortion of what I posted, which was commentary on the IRS statements I was discussing.

Let's get to the official you are referring to, Lois Lerner - a very relevant person. From my article:

On June 29, 2011, Lois G. Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt organizations, learned at a meeting that groups were being targeted, according to a draft of the report by the Treasury inspector general for tax administration.

At the meeting, Lerner was told that groups with "Tea Party," ''Patriot" or "9/12 Project" in their names were being flagged for additional and often burdensome scrutiny, the report says. Lerner instructed agents to change the criteria for flagging groups "immediately."

However, when Lerner responded to inquiries from the House oversight committee, she didn't mention the fact that tea party groups had ever been targeted. Her responses included 45-page letters in May 2012 to Issa and to Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who chairs a subcommittee.

Lerner also met twice with staff from the House Ways and Means oversight subcommittee to discuss the issue, in March and in May 2012, according to a timeline constructed by committee staff. She didn't mention at either meeting that conservative groups had been targeted, according to the timeline.

None of this really contradicts anything I said. Her comments are stronger than Miller's, but I think in terms of discussing what the IRS has officially said, the commissioner has the most weight. I already commented that there is political pressure for people including the IRS to make stronger criticisms.

The main difference seems to be over the word 'wrong'. There's wrong in the sense of 'that's not how we do this' and 'insensitivity' and similar things, and there's wrong in the sense of 'intentionally targeted the groups for partisan reasons'. I've been using wrong in that second stronger sense.

The woman you quoted seems to have some history of having taken corrective action but not been very forthcoming at all about what had happened in earlier communications.

It would not be in her career interest to understate the problem now, though her statements aren't admitting worse things being alleged like partisan motivation.

I've quoted people saying things I agree with about the processes being mistakes for reasons of not meeting the standard for appearing to be non-partisan.

They aren't defending themselves from wrongdoing either.

What wrongdoing, exactly? They have not admitted the practices had partisan motivations - they admitted that the processes were mistakes that were incorrect for the standards they have to avoid any partisan activitiy, so they can keep the trust of reasonable people that they do not engage in partisan practices.

Look at the vague words in the quote you listed: "inappropriate", "incorrect", "insensitive".

You haven't answered my questions, what harm was actually done to these groups, not one of which was disualifed, much less disqualified wrongly?

To repeat, I'm not saying there's not a problem even without harm if they were targeted for partisan reasons, but what is the actual harm done to them?

It is not just a "lack of sensitivity".

When someone says something is "wrong", "absolutely incorrect", "insensitive" and "inappropriate", it is intellectually dishonest to cherry-pick one of those terms and ignore all of the others.

When someone is commenting on the statement of the IRS Commissioner, it's nintellectually dishonest to make accusations claiming he was talking about something else.

I was using Miller's statement (I haven't seen any other official statement from the IRS) to represent the official IRS position. You may have used hers. I wasn't. You're welcome to do it, her comments are certainly worth discussing - as I made a couple comments in this post - but your comments are incorrect about mine. Wrong. Totally incorrect. Inappropriate.

Before I waste my time responding further, I'll give you an opportunity to revise your comments about the IRS statement.

A mid-level IRS official's statement is not an "IRS statement". She is credible, she is worth discussing, she is not speaking for the IRS.

This is an innocent issue we approached differently that should simply be resolved now with these comments, and not escalated with more (or previous) insulting comments.

It's getting very nit-picky again.

Bottom line: Class one offense: targeting that's against IRS guidelines/standards/appearance of non-partisan. Guilty.

Class two offense: acting in a partisan manner, targeting opponents of the administration for partisan reasons, to harm them for partisan reasons: not yet proven.

Transparency offense: not hiding, not failing to disclose when approproate, the activities going on. Pretty strong evidence this offense occured, as documented in the article I linked.

 

[Craig234]

I do not recall hearing if anyone other than the IRS bigshots have testified.

Congress needs to get the agents in house and get them to start testifying as to who id what and with what knowledge/approval



Shake that tree

There's more to investigate but the article I linked gives a pretty good idea at this point.

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

Lerner actually was speaking for the IRS at the event she made the comments at, which is probably the most baffling thing about all this:
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/05/lois_lerner_irs_scandal.php?ref=fpb
This was not a graceful way to drop a bombshell like this, and a planned report was being released this week about it anyway.

 

[Craig234]

Lerner actually was speaking for the IRS at the event she made the comments at, which is probably the most baffling thing about all this:
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/05/lois_lerner_irs_scandal.php?ref=fpb
This was not a graceful way to drop a bombshell like this.

The crosshairs must be centered on her as the official in charge of those operations...

 

[Craig234]

Update: there are news reports that Washington and other offices' agents also did these searches.

 

[Charles Kozierok]

Lerner actually was speaking for the IRS at the event she made the comments at, which is probably the most baffling thing about all this:
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/05/lois_lerner_irs_scandal.php?ref=fpb
This was not a graceful way to drop a bombshell like this, and a planned report was being released this week about it anyway.

From the article:

“Instead of referring to the cases as advocacy cases, they actually used case names on this list,” Lerner said, according to a transcript of the meeting. “They used names like Tea Party or Patriots and they selected cases simply because the applications had those names in the title. That was wrong, that was absolutely incorrect, insensitive, and inappropriate — that’s not how we go about selecting cases for further review.”

That seems pretty cut-and-dried to me. I hope she has bus collision insurance -- she's going to need it. Honesty is not something we can tolerate from our public servants.

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

Here's the Inspector General's full report:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/141504367...o-Identify-Tax-Exempt-Applications-for-Review

 

[Craig234]

Here's the Inspector General's full report:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/141504367...o-Identify-Tax-Exempt-Applications-for-Review

Thanks, interesting information.

It notes the limited periods these searches were done, that they have been changed for some time.

It also notes they've already had the inspector make 9 recommendations with 7 accepted.

This is interesting also:

To determine if cases without indications of significant political campaign intervention weresent to the team of specialists, we reviewed all of the applications identified as potential political cases as of May 31, 2012.



Applications That the IRS Determined Should Be Processed by the Team of Specialists

– We reviewed all 298 applications that had been identified as potential political cases as of May 31, 2012. In the majority of cases, we agreed that theapplications submitted included indications of significant political campaign intervention.However, we did not identify any indications of significant political campaignintervention for 91 (31 percent) of the 296 applications that had complete documentation.


We discussed our results with EO function officials, who disagreed with our findings.Although EO function officials provided explanations about why the applications should have been identified as potential political cases, the case files did not include the specificreason(s) the applications were selected. EO function officials also stated thatapplications may not literally include statements indicating significant political campaign intervention.


According to EO function officials, organizations may not understand what constitutes political campaign intervention or may provide vague descriptions of certain activities that the EO function knows from past experience potentially involve political campaign intervention. In these cases, the EO function believes it is importantto review the applications to ensure that political campaign intervention is not theorganizations’ primary activity. To provide further assurance that Determinations Unitemployees are handling tax matters in an impartial manner, it would be helpful todocument specifically why applications are chosen for further review.

That shows how tricky trying to do this well without partisanship can be for making the formal rules for red flags.

 

[ivwshane]

Basically it was poor management and it was identified early on and the lower level employees were told not to do it but they found it hard to decipher what qualified. It was then addressed again and it sounds like they stopped profiling and found a better solution.

 

[Craig234]

Basically it was poor management and it was identified early on and the lower level employees were told not to do it but they found it hard to decipher what qualified. It was then addressed again and it sounds like they stopped profiling and found a better solution.

Yes. Two problems are emerging.

One is incompetence at the low levels - the IG alleging that this team specializing in these exemption applicaitons, who came up with these searches, did not understand the laws.

Second is that the IRS leadership misled Congress in response to congressiona inquiries about this.

I'll say that I'm not that impressed with a lot of the congressional letters on things like this. They're often complete pandering to interests. For exampe, remember five Senators including John McCain got in political trouble for a letter on behalf of Lincoln Savings & Loan
in the middle of the S&L scandal to bank regulators because the crook Charles Keating asked them to; or remember, well I forgot a more recent example while writing.

It's not just on behalf of special interests; to obstruct a recent presidential nominess, a Republican Senator sent over 600 questions in writing to the nominee, and got answers to every question - and then said they won't vote for the nominee because of non-responsivness to their questions. You can't respect that political nonsense.

But how bad these letters are doesn't change the fact that Congress are the representitives elected, and that it is very inappropriate for agency officials to be misleading Congress. I think that's a big problem regardless of party. I think that has likely legitimate legs as a scandal, justifying the removal of the misleaders, including the acting head of the IRS who misled.

You can easily imagine these Republican Congressmen writing letters on behalf of the tea party groups they're terrified of whining about having to justify their tax-exempt status - but any problem with that does not begin to justify the IRS misleading them on the answer to the situation. If the IRS wants to announce and defend the practice, fine. If they want to say they made a mistake and announce it happened and the corrective actions, fine. Lying and hiding the truth, not fine at all.

There's no there there evidenced yet about this being a partisan-motivated practice - but it a problematic one. And the misleading of Congress makes it a lot worse.

 

[Craig234]

This smells like amateurish agents saying 'we need to catch applications trying to sneak in political activity, so let's look for the political names we can think of - there are a ton of these right-wing groups filing applications, so let's look at them, what are the common words they use we can think of to pick them out'. Nothing to do with 'partisan' motives, but a partisan result.

Thing is, the Washington blame game multiplies the evil motives hugely - they're villains.

It reminds me a little of when a patrolling police officer has to resolve idealistic principles written by politicians in the face of a gang banger he suspect might have contraband. He wants to respect all the fancy ideals, but gets sick of the impracticalities it forces on him. New York seems to be going through this on 'stop and frisk' - ya, it hugely more likely to violate the right from unreasonable searches for poor minorities, but you know, it seems like it would help with crime, so we just don't care that much.

It's not that the police necessarily are some racists who love to harrass minorities, it's more that they hate crime and unfortunate circumstances concentrate some crimes more in some races, and that runs head on into the same rules that restrict them from racist activities, and it's messy.

At this point I stand by my earlier post, politicians of both parties are likely to go with the politically easy response of big condemnations for the IRS, fire lots of people, it's over.

Not that it might not be appropriate to fire some people for things like misleading Congress but likely false allegations of partisan motivations will go mostly unchallenged.

 

[Craig234]

Without getting too much into comparisons, it's worth remembering that by comparison, under Bush hundreds of the heads of government regulatory bodies appointed were lobbyists and exectuvies from the indutries they were appointed to regulate. It wa a complete and corrupt sellout of the public interests and regulatory funtion unprecedented in American history. The peopl who support that are the one declaring this a historic scandal. It's worth remembering the comparison and hypocrisy.

That doesn't mean that there isn't a legitimate set of issues with this that should be investigated and corrected. But remember the difference.

 

[Charles Kozierok]

Basically it was poor management and it was identified early on and the lower level employees were told not to do it but they found it hard to decipher what qualified. It was then addressed again and it sounds like they stopped profiling and found a better solution.

I think "poor management" is a serious understatement of what happened here. Pretty much anything any organization that does that's wrong could be called "poor management".

Every scandal, every messed up war, every prisoner sent to jail incorrectly -- pretty much everything boils down to poor management, which means it's nothing more than a euphemism.

That's not cover for what happened here, and not a reason to not hold the people involved responsible for what they did.

This smells like amateurish agents saying 'we need to catch applications trying to sneak in political activity, so let's look for the political names we can think of - there are a ton of these right-wing groups filing applications, so let's look at them, what are the common words they use we can think of to pick them out'. Nothing to do with 'partisan' motives, but a partisan result.

You wrote this yesterday, objecting to my belief that there was wrongdoing here: "I'm downplaying it if it's exaggerated or conclusions are rushed to, I'm upplaying it if it's downplayed too much. You're in the rushing group so it seems like downplaying."

So it's a problem for me to "rush", but it's okay for you to conclude that this was not based on partisanship? Based on what? You say there's no evidence that it was based on partisanship, but that's not true. There is actually a lot of circumstantial evidence that it was. Now, circumstantial evidence can be wrong, but given circumstantial evidence pointing towards something and no evidence indicating clearly that it is wrong, it strikes me as unreasonable to flatly conclude that it had "nothing to do with partisan motives".

These groups were specifically targeted by name. That is prima facie evidence of partisan wrongdoing, and I for one will not believe otherwise absent very strong contrary evidence. Just as I wouldn't believe it if this were 2006 and I found out the IRS was specifically targeting for review groups with the word "Progressive" in them.

And I am 100% certain that if this latter scenario had played out, you would be screaming about it louder than everyone else in this room combined.

 

[Craig234]

You wrote this yesterday, objecting to my belief that there was wrongdoing here: "I'm downplaying it if it's exaggerated or conclusions are rushed to, I'm upplaying it if it's downplayed too much. You're in the rushing group so it seems like downplaying."

So it's a problem for me to "rush", but it's okay for you to conclude that this was not based on partisanship? Based on what? You say there's no evidence that it was based on partisanship, but that's not true. There is actually a lot of circumstantial evidence that it was. Now, circumstantial evidence can be wrong, but given circumstantial evidence pointing towards something and no evidence indicating clearly that it is wrong, it strikes me as unreasonable to flatly conclude that it had "nothing to do with partisan motives".

These groups were specifically targeted by name. That is prima facie evidence of partisan wrongdoing, and I for one will not believe otherwise absent very strong contrary evidence. Just as I wouldn't believe it if this were 2006 and I found out the IRS was specifically targeting for review groups with the word "Progressive" in them.

And I am 100% certain that if this latter scenario had played out, you would be screaming about it louder than everyone else in this room combined.

I have said repeatedly that it's not determined whether it was partisan and investigation is needed. It's in that context as more information comes in about what happened, including the Inspector's report today, that I'm saying what I think the most plausible scenario is, and there is no evidence to suggest otherwise. That's compltely different - my leaivng the possibility of other results open and going by the evidence we now have in speculating - than the people who are making baseless accusations without supportig facts.

Your last sentence is compltely baseless personal attack and false. You can't beging to support it with any evidence - you are just throwing out insult.

But I'm 100% certain that if this was 2006 about pro-government groups you oppose, you would be screaming your support of the IRS misbehavior.

No, actually, I'm not saying that, but that's the same asinine comment you made.

 

[Charles Kozierok]

Sorry, Craig, but pointing out the elephant in the room that is your very obvious partisanship is not a "personal attack".

You are doing everything possible to find any and all excuses to give all of the people involved in this the maximum possible benefit of the doubt, going so far as to ignore evidence that is staring you in the face. I doubt you could find many people here who would believe you'd be exerting this amount of effort to whitewash this sort of incident if it were a Republican administration.

And no, it's not possible to just ignore this, because you are utterly monopolizing this thread with your transparent hand-waving and excuse-making.

As for your attempt to turn your blindingly obvious bias around on me, well, good luck with that.

 

[Craig234]

These groups were specifically targeted by name. That is prima facie evidence of partisan wrongdoing, and I for one will not believe otherwise absent very strong contrary evidence.

To respond to this point in particular, no it's not.

If the ONLY information we had were that, it would be much more strongly suggestive of a partisan agenda.

But it's not. This was a group specifically targeted at finding groups participating in political activity and that creates a far increased likelihood they were looking for that political activity and that that search, while it was looking specifically for the fast growing tea party type groups filing applications, that the motivation was not partisan.

Not only is that very plausible, it's even more likely in the absence of any indication or evidence so far the motivations were partisan rather than simply identifying the biggest target around, that it was an more than incompetence not to be more neutral in how they approached the issue, the fact not one of these targeted applicaions was denied, that there has been zero connection to any White House figure, further increase the likelihood that the mistakes were not motivated by partisan attacks.

You're demanding a negative be proved - and it can't be. Are you expecting there to be some email among the group where each person states to the others, 'for the record, I support these searches for totally non-partisan reasons and I'm not just saying that to have a good looking paper trail'? And if there WAS such an e-mail you wouldn't believe it (and THEN you would have a shred of evidence, unlike now).

 

[Charles Kozierok]

I'm sure there was nothing partisan involved here either: IRS Office That Targeted Tea Party Also Disclosed Confidential Docs From Conservative Groups.

 

[Craig234]

Sorry, Craig, but pointing out the elephant in the room that is your very obvious partisanship is not a "personal attack".

There is absolutely zero partisanship involved, and it is a personal attack.

You are doing everything possible to find any and all excuses to give all of the people involved in this the maximum possible benefit of the doubt, going so far as to ignore evidence that is staring you in the face. I doubt you could find many people here who would believe you'd be exerting this amount of effort to whitewash this sort of incident if it were a Republican administration.

No, I'm not, and I can point to any number of areas this incident lends itself to some criticisms, which I have endorsed. Just a few posts back my "two problems are emerging" puts the lie to your wrong statement for just one example. My post follows the truth - which sometimes is on one side more than the other. Deal with it, don't lie about it.

Don't make your attacks with evidence-free personal attacks, stick to the evidence and a decent argument.

If you have evidence not only of the wrongs I agree with but that the attacks were motivated as partisan attacks, which I say we don't have evidence, post your evidence.

I don't need to show one example of having backed Bush to make this point - maybe the evidence didn't just one. But in fact - something you weren't around to see about the period which you make up insults to attack with - there were cases where I defended Bush against what I feel are excessive attacks. It happens.

Stick to the facts and stop your own bias in attacks.

And no, it's not possible to just ignore this, because you are utterly monopolizing this thread with your transparent hand-waving and excuse-making.

I'd disagree and the only person being pushed not to post about it is me, but I've made my point and don't think I need to repeat it soon unless responding to more false attacks.

As for your attempt to turn your blindingly obvious bias around on me, well, good luck with that.

Don't need luck to tell the truth. You're the one making baseless attacks - you haven't proven one point yet.

I'm waiting for your proof the motivation was to make partisan attacks, rather than simply taking a wrong approach to find political activity which they're supposed to to with a partisan appearing *result* of their actions. I'm sure you have evidence of White House direction of their activities, confessions of people involved it was partisan, right?