How many times have Republicans pulled this shit? It's obvious they cannot win on merits because they just keep on creating fake scandal after fake scandal.
What does it say about our "democracy" when one of the two major parties uses every tool of deception it can find to fabricate lies and distractions? They just cannot play fair at all. Bastards! (They are probably proud of this behavior. After all, we keep falling for it.)
Read the snips below and read the entire story here.
by Dave Johnson
The corporate media is blasting out the story that the IRS “targeted conservative groups.” Some in the media say there was “IRS harassment of conservative groups.” Some of the media are going so far as claiming that conservative groups were “audited.”
This story that is being repeated and treated as “true” is just not what happened at all. It is one more right-wing victimization fable, repeated endlessly until the public has no choice except t believe it.
Conservative Groups Were Not “Targeted,” “Singled Out” Or Anything Else
You are hearing that conservative groups were “targeted.” What you are not hearing is that progressive groups were also “targeted.” So were groups that are not progressive or conservative.
All that happened here is that groups applying to the IRS for special tax status were checked to see if they were engaged in political activity. They were checked, not targeted. Only 1/3 of the groups checked were conservative groups.
Once again: Only 1/3 of the groups checked were conservative groups.
Conservative groups were not “singled out,” were not “targeted” and in the end none were denied special tax status — even though many obviously should have been.
From last week’s House hearings on this:
Rep. Peter Roskam, R-IL: “How come only conservative groups got snagged?”
Outgoing acting IRS commissioner Steve Miller: “They didn’t sir. Organizations of all walks and all persuasions were pulled in. That’s shown by the fact that only 70 of the 300 organizations were tea party organizations, of the ones that were looked at by TIGTA [Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration].”
Bet you didn’t see that blasted all over your TV news that night.
Click here to watch the video clip of this. It’s worth it..
snip
What Did Happen?
Here’s the story. After the “Citizen’s United” decision allowed unlimited corporate money into elections there was a flood of applications to get special tax status that allowed an organization to hide its donors from the public, and in some cases even be tax-exempt. But the rules say that political groups can’t get this special tax status. The IRS has to check out applications for tax status to see if it is really a political group trying to sneak in to a special tax status.
Because they were flooded and couldn’t check out every applying organization, the IRS group looked for things in the applications that “flagged” an organization as a possibly a political group. These flagged applications were then passed along to specialists to look deeper and determine if they were legit or not.
snip
So What Was The “Wrongdoing”?
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) has issued a full report:Inappropriate Criteria Were Used to Identify Tax-Exempt Applications for Review that looked into the accusation that the IRS “targeted” tea party groups that were applying for special tax status for extra scrutiny. The report is not all that long. You should read it. (Apparently most the people you are hearing from in the media haven’t read it.)
According to the report, the swamped IRS group involved in this came up with ways — “criteria” — to identify groups that really needed to be checked further because it was possible they might be engaged in the kind of political activity that would exclude them from getting the special tax status. (The rules for what constitutes political activity that would keep a group for getting special tax status are, to say the least, not clear. See the PS below.)Some groups were chosen to receive the required scrutiny because they had “political-sounding” names. Some of the “political-sounding names” included the words “tea party.”Others included “We the People” and “Take Back the Country.” (The IG report does not disclose if or which other “political sounding names” were also used as criteria.)
And the other problem was that the scrutiny these groups received involved some “unnecessary, burdensome questions.”
That was the extent of the wrongdoing.
snip
This is not the first time the Obama administration was taken in by false stories originating at right-wing propaganda outlets before the real facts were known. Van Jones had to leave the Obama administration after Glenn Beck accused him of being a “communist” and other right-wing sites accused him of being a “9/11 Truther.” Shirley Sherrod was fired from the Department of Agriculture after the Breitbart (the same website that had showed the doctored ACORN videos) posted doctored video that made it appear she had made racist remarks — even though the full video later showed the opposite to be true.
The great Brad Blog tells these stories, in IRS ‘Scandal’ Appears Nearly as Phony as Shirley Sherrod, Van Jones, ACORN ‘Scandals’,
… if you listened only to the corporate media, you — like the Obama Administration — also probably thought that the phony, trumped-up “scandals” that led to the inappropriate firing of USDA official Shirley Sherrod, the cowardly firing of White House green jobs adviser Van Jones and the outrageous federal defunding of ACORN were also the unhappy result of an endemic culture of corruption by the Obama Administration, the Democratic Party and its insidious political apparatchiks.
Those fake scandals, however, all three of them, were shams. They were eventually identified as such, though only after a great deal of harm to Sherrod, Jones and ACORN had already been done by the Democrats who fell for them and acted out of knee-jerk and cowardly fear to try and contain the perception of “scandal” which was, naturally, helped along by the very loud misreporting of “the nightly news”.
Original.
One wonders what the next orchestrated lying scheme these bastards will employ?
This kind of crap makes me skeptical of ANYTHING that comes from Republicans. But that's why it worked in this case; everyone is sensitive to IRS abuses, and we are sensitive to IRS over-reach. Of course, in this case, like so many others, it's the GOP, not the IRS, that is playing fast and loose with the facts and abusing the public trust.
No comments:
Post a Comment