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njlauren -> RE: DOJ / IRS coordinated policy to investigate Tea Party groups. (4/28/2014 9:39:18 PM)
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It would be really nice if phydeaux actually talked about facts, rather than throwing around the BS he does. The biggest lie I keep hearing from conservatives is how the IRS illegally targeted conservative groups, as if they were starting criminal investigations, kind of like the dirty tricks ole Tricky Dick pulled back in his day. Some facts, though as they say on Fox News, don't let facts stop you from having a good rant.....
1)The issue here are groups filing for tax exempt status under 501c4 status (not 03, significant). 501c4 are for groups advocating for issues, they are not supposed to be political, they are forbidden from actively supporting candidates and parties. When congress in its infinite wisdom created the category, that came out of Supreme Court decisions, they gave the IRS the right to give or not give 501c4 status to a group.
So what the IRS agents did, if anything, was to move tea party groups and such to the head of the line, they targeted them in terms of looking at their applications. By law, the iRS is supposed to review each application for worthiness, so at best, what they did was in effect take on groups they saw as likely offenders first, which does't quite reach the standard of 'targeting' groups for criminal investigation.
2)Something like 85% of the groups that applied for this designation were conservative groups (and probably 75% of them were funded by the Koch Brothers and their various groups), so the fact that a lot more conservative groups were targeted for further scrutiny is not surprising, given the ratio of applications.
In the end, all groups have to have their filing approved, so what seems to have happened here is they may have done extra diligence with groups they thought likely to get political, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that tea party groups tend to be very political and would be more likely to try and skirt the rules, and as to whether it constituted criminal activity, there were enough tea party groups caught violating various laws that they could argue for this profiling.
Put it this way, with all of Issa's grandstanding, it is like everything the man touches, it goes nowhere, the man has wasted more money and time on political vendettas and has found so far, nothing. He tried it with Benghazi, tried it with a variety of other things, and like the people who elect him, he is dumber than a mud fence and about as effective as a mud fence in a hurricane.
The reality is, most people don't care, the rednecks who do care will vote GOP anyway, and most other people don't care, the way they don't care about Bengazi or other republican fantasies.
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