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Eliana Johnson of National Review says it is time to stop blaming the IRS scandals on “rogue” agents.
We can officially dispense with the notion that the targeting of tea-party groups began when a couple of rogue agents in the Internal Revenue Service’s Cincinnati office set out to streamline their work.
The heart of the effort to target tea-party and other conservative groups, we are learning, occurred in Washington, and that is likely why five D.C.-based IRS officials who are connected to the targeting have retired, resigned, been replaced, or been put on administrative leave, since news of the scandal broke in mid May. They include Holly Paz, who last week, according to an IRS source, was replaced as director of Rulings and Agreements, the division that oversaw the targeting of conservative groups; Washington lawyer Carter Hull, who is accused of micromanaging the processing of tea-party cases, and who, according to IRS sources, requested his retirement package on March 12; the commissioner of the agency’s Tax Exempt and Government Entities division, Joseph Grant, who retired on June 3; former IRS commissioner Steven Miller, who resigned days after news of the scandal broke; and the director of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations division, Lois Lerner, who was placed on administrative leave only after refusing to tender her resignation, according to Iowa’s Chuck Grassley. All five are or were based in the IRS’s headquarters on Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C.
The testimony of Cincinnati-based IRS employees released last week by the House Oversight Committee helps explain why so many employees in D.C. who are associated with the current scandal are quietly departing the scene. We have learned that the controversial and inappropriate “lookout” list created in the Cincinnati office was probably compiled as a response to requests from Washington for tea-party files. One Cincinnati employee, Gary Muthert, told the committee that he began singling out tea-party applications at the request of a supervisor who told him that “Washington, D.C., wanted some cases.” Muthert, sources say, was a member of the group that screened all applications for tax exemptions and passed those identified as tea-party applications along to specialists for extra scrutiny. He sent seven tea-party applications to Washington in May 2010, according to interview transcripts, because his manager told him that “Washington, D.C., wanted seven.”
Thus, it was IRS employees in Washington, according to Muthert, who ordered agents in the Cincinnati office to focus their attention on the applications of tea-party groups. …
Johnson’s IRS contacts want us to know Lois Lerner is still logging on to the IRS computer system.
Lois Lerner, the Internal Revenue Service’s director of Exempt Organizations currently on paid leave, has not had any of her computer access restricted since she abdicated her responsibilities, according to an IRS source with knowledge of the situation.
Lerner was placed on administrative leave on May 21 after refusing to tender her resignation, and logged into the IRS’s computer system using her agency computer as recently as June 4, the source tells me. She has the ability to access the same information that was available to her before she was placed on leave. …
Ann Coulter provides tips on following the IRS probe.
Instead of showing endless loops of IRS employees wasting taxpayer dollars line-dancing — Breaking news: Government employees waste millions of your dollars every single day! — I think it would be more useful for the public to hear a few crucial facts about the exploding scandal at the Internal Revenue Service.
At Tuesday’s congressional hearings on the IRS, witnesses provided shocking details about the agency’s abuse of conservative groups.
The IRS leaked the donor list of The National Organization for Marriage to their political opponents, the pro-gay-marriage Human Rights Campaign. This is not idle speculation: The documents had an internal IRS stamp on them. The list of names was then published on a number of liberal websites and NOW’s donors were harassed.
The IRS demanded that all members of the Coalition for Life of Iowa swear under penalty of perjury that they wouldn’t pray, picket or protest outside of Planned Parenthood. They were also asked to provide details of their prayer meetings. …
Slate contributor says the real NSA scandal is how the randomly educated, poorly qualified, Snowden was given top-secret access.
Edward Snowden sounds like a thoughtful, patriotic young man, and I’m sure glad he blew the whistle on the NSA’s surveillance programs. But the more I learned about him this afternoon, the angrier I became. Wait, him? The NSA trusted its most sensitive documents to this guy? And now, after it has just proven itself so inept at handling its own information, the agency still wants us to believe that it can securely hold on to all of our data? Oy vey!
According to the Guardian, Snowden is a 29-year-old high school dropout who trained for the Army Special Forces before an injury forced him to leave the military. His IT credentials are apparently limited to a few “computer” classes he took at a community college in order to get his high school equivalency degree—courses that he did not complete. His first job at the NSA was as a security guard. Then, amazingly, he moved up the ranks of the United States’ national security infrastructure: …
Just to remind us how corrupt our elected representatives are, George Will writes on sugar subsidies.
The steamboat conveying Andrew Jackson up the Ohio River toward his tumultuous 1829 inauguration had brooms lashed to its bow, symbolizing Old Hickory’s vow to clean up Washington. But sweeping out Washington’s Augean stables, like painting the Golden GateBridge, is steady work, so steady it never ends. Neither do the policies that cosset sugar producers.
These immortal measures just received the Senate’s benediction because they illustrate the only law Washington can be counted on to respect. It is the law of dispersed costs but concentrated benefits.
The provisions by which Washington transfers wealth from 316 million American consumers to a few thousand sugar producers are part of a “temporary” commodity support program created during the Great Depression. Not even the New Deal could prolong the Depression forever. It ended. But sugar protectionism is forever. The Senate recently voted 54 to 45 against even mild reforms of the baroque architecture of protections for producers of sugar cane and sugar beets. …
It is not a big thing, but Volokh Conspiracy has a post illustrating the same thing.
I noticed two anecdotes about the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg, both of which were meant to be complimentary but in fact speak volumes about the petty corruption of our political class and how inured to it we’ve become. The first was told by a friend of his who was at a conference of Jewish philanthropists in Israel with Lautenberg on 9/11. Lautenberg “used his pull as a former senator” to get everyone an early flight back to the U.S. so they could rejoin their families. The second, told by Vice-President Biden at Lautenberg’s funeral, related how Biden was once hustling to make an Amtrak train to Delaware, but was told by Amtrak staff, “don’t worry we’re holding the train for Sen. Lautenberg” (who was a big political supporter of Amtrak).
Now, as corruption goes, this is minor stuff. But I’m more disturbed that rather than the rich and powerful (Lautenberg’s friends in Israel and Biden) being embarrassed that Lautenberg (mis)used his influence to inconvenience others on behalf of himself and his friends, they tout these stories in eulogizing them, as if we should all be glad that a (former!) Senator has the “clout” to help his friends at the expense of those less connected. Bleh!
UPDATE: How much more I would have admired Lautenberg if his friends could relate that “we begged him to use his clout as a former Senator to get us back to our families, but Frank was adamant that his friends and acquaintances were no more important than anyone else trying to get back home, and that he wouldn’t abuse his status as former senator on our behalf.”
There is some good news around. Money writes on the increase of known reserves of gas and oil. Or course, our governments will find a way to create problems there.
The Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration has upgraded its estimates of global oil reserves by 11% after scouring 41 countries and finding a lot more “technically recoverable” shale oil and shale gas than it did the last time it filed a similar report, in 2011.
Since then, the EIA’s shale gas estimates alone have jumped by 10% and its estimate of gas reserves has soared by 47%. The U.S., China and Argentina are all largely responsible for the upticks in shale oil and gas numbers, while Russia’s shale oil stockpile and Algeria’s shale gas resources also place them among the EIA’s top four potential producers in each category. …
A change of pace with a report in the NY Times about the expanded range of mountain lions.
The great migration began perhaps 40 years ago. From strongholds in the Rocky Mountains and Texas, young males headed east, seeking female companionship and new places to settle.
The emigrants were about seven feet long, nose to tail, and weighed up to 160 pounds. Given a dietary choice, they preferred deer, but would eat almost anything that moved: elk, bighorn sheep, wild horses, beaver, even porcupines. Left free for an evening, they were capable of killing a dozen domestic sheep before dawn, eating their fill and leaving the rest for the buzzards. They were also known to attack humans on occasion.
Long ago the Inca called them puma, but today — though they belong to only one species — they have many names. In Arizona they are known as mountain lions; in Florida they are panthers, and elsewhere in the South they are called painters. When they roamed New England, they were called catamounts. In much of the Midwest they are known as cougars, and that is the name everyone understands.
Until relatively recently, they were mainly a memory. All but exterminated east of the Rockies by 1900, they were treated as “varmints” in most Western states until the late ’60s and could be shot on sight. In Maine, the last catamount was killed in 1938.
But today Puma concolor is back on the prowl. That is one of the great success stories in wildlife conservation, but also a source of concern among biologists and other advocates, for their increasing numbers make them harder to manage — and harder for people to tolerate. No reliable estimate exists for the cougar population at its lowest point, before the 1970s, but there are now believed to be more than 30,000 in North America. They have recolonized the Black Hills of South Dakota, the North Dakota Badlands and the Pine Ridge country of northwestern Nebraska. …
Andrew Malcolm tops off our week with his recap of late night humor.
Fallon: Celebrity chef Paula Deen just released her own line of butter. When asked what you should put it on, Deen said, “Who said you have to put it on anything?”
Leno: Russian President Putin and his wife are divorcing. He gets the house in Moscow. She gets to live in Siberia.
Fallon: That Florida Powerball winner is 84 years old. Other people in Florida were like, “Figures it would go to some kid.”