With Paranoid Conspiracies Dancing In Their Pointed Heads, Conservatives Create Kool Secret Organizations

 With Paranoid Conspiracies Dancing In Their Pointed Heads, Conservatives Create Kool Secret Organizations

Do you have Groundswell fever? I do! “Groundswell” is the secret organization run by cool right-wingers like Ginni Thomas and John Bolton, a group charged with winning the 30-front war on liberalism. Long story short: Mother Jones’ David Corn received another wonderful leak. This one is about a bunch of true-believing far-right clowns, and how hard they are all working at fighting a bunch of people who didn’t even know they were involved in an ideological war against Ginni Thomas.

So, this is a great and delightful scoop, and bless David Corn for reporting it. But let’s get real: While the people involved in this organization probably think that Corn has exposed a vast right-wing conspiracy, what he really exposed is the silliest corner of the vast right-wing conspiracy. Thomas and Bolton are both sort of “important” people, in terms of their familial or professional connections to people with actual power, but neither one of them has actual power or authority. John Bolton is a mustachioed parody of neoconservative foreign policy belligerence. Thomas is a true-believing weirdo. The media figures involved in this group are mostly marginal and widely disrespected even by conservatives. But that doesn’t mean the group is entirely unimportant.

The conservative movement has this recurring tendency to create institutions and organizations based on what they imagine, in their fevered minds, that The Left is doing. They believe liberal bias is an intentional conspiracy to delude Americans by publishing purposefully slanted stories, so most explicitly conservative “journalism” outlets publish purposefully slanted stories where facts are subordinate to political point-scoring. Sometimes they create entirely redundant institutions when this process laps itself. They believed Brookings was super liberal, so they created Heritage. The Left created CAP in response to Heritage, so the Right creates 10,000 useless nonprofits that exist solely to fundraise.

It is also the case that, generally, The Right thinks The Left is already doing whatever they’re doing, but more efficiently and better and also more viciously. As I’ve said before, there really is a right-wing talking points pipeline of sorts, and a great deal of “message coordination” among the various pillars of the movement, including conservative media figures. Because that’s the case, because the Right is sort of decent at message coordination, they imagine that liberals are great at it, and that our commentators all get their marching orders from on high and dutifully repeat them until the world is convinced of lies like “George Bush was a bad president” or “immigrants aren’t all drug-traffickers.”

So when JournoList happened, dumb (and less-dumb) members of the right-wing media machine looked at it and saw evidence of conspiracy, instead of a bunch of like-minded people debating and arguing and desperately begging for links from commentators with higher profiles. Where there was consensus, they saw “coordination.” They thought this because the Right sort of already did all that. And so now it only makes (tragic, hilarious) sense that some of the least intellectually impressive members of the conservative movement have banded together to create their own sad, weird parody of Grover Norquist’s “Wednesday meetings” combined with what they imagined JournoList to be. This is the result: Groundswell. A cracked-mirror imitation of an imaginary conspiracy.

But this group of clowns and idiots has attracted the attention and participation of members of Congress, and the staff of at least one senator.

If every patriotic Americans - that is most people who are not conservatives - stayed home and watched TV, never voted and just bought the crappy products and services conservatives hire wage slaves to produce for them, conservatives would still start secret weirdo organizations with freaks like Ginni Thomas and John Bolton because conservatism uses paranoia as a fuel. If the paranoia went away and REALITY set in, they would have next to nothing to complain get their false outrage fired up.

Sunday is the Day the Corporate Media Help Conservatives Spread Anti-American Propaganda

Sunday is the Day the Corporate Media Help Conservatives Spread Anti-American Propaganda

Conservative White Men Dominate The Broadcast Network Sunday Shows. Making up nearly one of every three guests on This Week, Face the Nation, Meet the Press, and Fox News Sunday, conservative white men represent a larger portion of guests than any other group.

Conservative White Men Dominate Solo Interviews On The Broadcast Network Sunday Shows. Conservative white men make up 37 percent of all one-on-one interviews on the broadcast shows, much more than any other group. In fact, the proportion of solo interviews conducted with conservative white men is a full 13 percentage points higher than white women and all other non-white groups combined.

Broadcast Networks Continue To Host A Majority Of Republicans And Conservatives Overall. Face the Nation, Meet the Press, and Fox News Sunday, each hosted more Republicans and conservatives than Democrats and progressives, continuing the trend from the first quarter. In contrast, This Week increased its proportion of Democrats and progressives, surpassing its proportion of Republicans and conservatives for the second quarter.

Panel Balance Still More Likely To Tilt Right Than Left. Despite improvement from all four broadcast networks, Republicans and conservatives are still more likely to outnumber Democrats and progressives when they sit in the same panel discussion segment. Fox News Sunday's notable shift toward a majority of balanced panels is worth pointing out; however, when panels do tilt on that program, they tilt right every single time.

Republican Elected And Administration Officials Again Outnumber Democrats Overall. Fox News Sunday hosted two Republicans for every one Democrat in the second quarter, which is the same as the show's numbers in the first quarter. Both Face the Nation and Meet the Press hosted more Republicans than Democrats, with Face the Nation seeing a 10 point increase in Republicans and an 8 point decrease in Democrats. This Week hosted significantly more Democrats than Republicans, a flip from last quarter.

Except For This Week, Republicans Receive More Time During Solo Interviews Than Democrats Overall. Face the Nation, Meet the Press, and Fox News Sunday all gave Republicans much more time during their one-on-one interviews than Democrats, with Face the Nation having flipped from the previous quarter. By contrast, This Week shifted to provide Democrats with significantly more time than Republicans in the second quarter.

Ideological Journalists Again More Likely To Be Conserative Than Progressive. Like this year's first quarter, journalists who self-identify ideologically tend to be conservative when hosted by the broadcast Sunday shows. Fox News Sunday is again the worst offender in this category, with nearly half of its hosted journalists being conservative.

Former White House press secretary for George W. Bush, Scott McClellan wrote in his tell-all book that the Bush administration used propaganda to sell the invasion of Iraq to the American people. Conservatives, as standard operating procedure, use propaganda constantly. This is why you can have some fun debating a conservative, but ultimately they are fully entrenched in their cognitive dissonance from a fact based world. And of course arguments based on the common good and morality usually fail with conservatives because they are dogmatists, like the Taliban, they're not going to let real morality and the consequences of their radical anti-American views get in the way of their agenda. So it goes with the ever so high minded Sunday talk shows. They're just another opportunity for conservatives and the corporate media to sell America on conservative zealotry.

UnAmerican Culture of Conservatism Exposed at Morally Corrupt Bank of America

UnAmerican Culture of Conservatism Exposed at Morally Corrupt Bank of America

Just when we thought the big banks couldn’t hit a new low, they did.

Six former employees of Bank of America have come forward, alleging that the big bank intentionally denied eligible homeowners mortgage loan modifications, and lied to those homeowners about the status of their mortgage payments and documents.

Bank of America allegedly used these dirty tactics to lead homeowners into foreclosures and in-house loan modifications, both of which helped reap massive profits for BOA’s bottom-line.

The employees who have come forward have also said that the big bank rewarded customer service representatives with hefty cash bonuses and gift cards to popular stores when they foreclosed on homes.

According to a lawsuit filed in federal court, a Bank of America employee who placed ten or more mortgage accounts into foreclosure a month could get up to a $500 bonus.

The lawsuit also alleges that the bank punished representatives who did not hit foreclosure target numbers or who objected to the bank’s tactics. In some cases, those employees who didn’t foreclose on enough people were fired.

This latest jaw-dropper out of Bank of America comes just days after it was revealed that the bank was also using deceptive mailers and sales pitches to sell consumers on mortgage refinancing plans that could actually add tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of a borrower’s loan.

Despite these latest revelations about foreclosure targets, lies and dirty tactics, nobody at Bank of America is worried about going to jail.

That’s because our elected lawmakers in Washington, particularly Republican lawmakers, are scared straight by the idea of going after the big banks and going after corporate America.

Yet, these same lawmakers are just fine going after the big bad government, especially when it comes to things like the IRS controversy.

But, let’s look at the parallels between the IRS controversy and the latest news coming out of Bank of America.

With the IRS controversy, IRS agents deliberately went after and applied higher scrutiny towards potentially political organizations, liberal and conservative, applying for 501c3 tax-exempt status.

At Bank of America, employees allegedly intentionally denied eligible homeowners loan modifications, and pushed them into foreclosure to get a bonus.

With the IRS scandal, one IRS official took the fifth when testifying before Congress, but is the subject of both a criminal and an internal investigation.

At Bank of America, it’s alleged that customer service representatives were rewarded for lying to homeowners about the status of their mortgage payments and documents.

Despite the obvious similarities between these two scenarios, only one is being investigated loudly and publicly by Congress; The IRS controversy.

So, why is Congress willing to go to the ends of the earth to get to the bottom of the IRS scandal, but refusing to lift a finger when it comes to investigating America’s big banks?

Could it be that employees of the IRS do not make multimillion dollar campaign contributions to members of Congress?

Could it be that employees of the IRS don’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying?

And even the media, which is supposed to be an impartial and unbiased source of news and information, is afraid to go after big banks when they commit crimes.

The media would rather drag on ad nauseum about manufactured witch hunts like the IRS controversy, than discuss how the big banks, which American taxpayers have already saved once, are back up to their same old dirty tricks, and threatening to bring down the entire American economy once again.

 One of the reasons the banks are likely to get off is that to do so would appear to be anti-business. Ever hear the word pro-business from conservative Republicans and conservative Democrats. That is code for letting big business do whatever it wants. If you are pro regulation that protects consumers, tax payers and small investors - in this conservative culture you are defined as a raging commie. How did that framing of issues happen. Most of the media is owned by big corporations. The media gets it's revenue from big corporations. So the media never or at least seldom ever holds a politicians accountable for what they mean when they claim that regulations which protect ordinary Americans is somehow anti-business.

Why Doesn't Anti-American Fox News Report That IRS Did Not Target Conservatives

Why Doesn't Anti-American Fox News Report That IRS Did Not Target Conservatives

For weeks, Fox News has promoted selective clips of interview transcripts leaked by House Republicans to promote their baseless claim that the White House engineered the Internal Revenue Service's improper screening of conservative groups seeking non-profit status.

Such claims were always speculative. The IRS' inspector general has said that while employees used "improper criteria" to scrutinize conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status, that behavior was "not politically biased" and was not driven by the White House. Subsequent testimony leaked by House Republicans has suggested that high-ranking IRS officials in Washington were at first unaware of the improper behavior and stopped it when they learned of it. 

The House Oversight Committee's Democrats have now released the full transcript of an interview with another IRS witness which further undermines claims that the White House was at the center of the process. According to the interview subject, a self-described conservative Republican who worked in the IRS' Cincinnati office, an agent he supervised flagged the first Tea Party application that came under scrutiny, asking for guidance on the case.The interview subject denied having had contact with senior IRS officials or the White House about the targeting. According to The Washington Post's Greg Sargent:

    In the testimony, the screening manager says that he first became aware of the initial Tea Party application when an "agent who worked for me" asked for "guidance concerning a case for him." The manager testified that in this case he agreed with the agent that "there was not enough information" to figure out whether to grant the group tax exempt status.

    "I told him at that point in time I agreed with his thinking," the manager testified, adding that he informed the agent that he would "elevate that issue to my area manager."

    "This was the first case that came in that was brought to my attention," the manager continued.

    The manager further testified that the Tea Party groups were deliberately grouped together so that they would receive consistent treatment. "There was a lot of concerns about making sure that any cases that had, you know, similar-type activities or items included, that they would be worked by the same agent or same group," the manager testified.

    In the testimony, the screening manager also flatly stated he had no reason to believe there was White House involvement.

    [...]

    The screening manager also testifies that he never had any conversation with Lois Lerner, the former director of the Exempt Organizations Division, or former IRS commissioner Douglas Schulmanm about the "screening of Tea Party cases."

It remains to be seen how Fox News will react to statements that so strongly undermine their conclusion. But we have some precedent - on June 9, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, released excerpts from this interview, and said that it showed that "the case is solved" and that the White House had not been involved in the improper behavior. Fox responded by airing his conclusion that "the case is solved" and hosting conservatives to criticize that claim, without laying out Cummings' evidence.

Fox News and their sheeple viewers need not worry, conservatives love playing victim so much they will invent or exaggerate another faux-scandal so they can whine themselves to sleep at night. Fox News seems to lack the fundamentals of American values like truth and fairness. Thus they are contributing to the degradation of American society as conservatism has done throughout history.

Beyond Rebates, How Much Are Consumers Saving from Obamacare Medical Loss Ratio Provision?

Beyond Rebates, How Much Are Consumers Saving from Obamacare Medical Loss Ratio Provision?

Most of the conversation around the Affordable Care Act’s Medical Loss Ratio (MLR) provision has centered on the requirement that insurers issue consumer rebates when they fall short of spending a certain portion of premium dollars on health care and quality improvement expenses.  This makes sense as rebates are one of the more tangible ways consumers have benefited from the law so far, and it likely contributes to the MLR provision being among the more popular aspects of the health reform law.

However, as we’ve written before, rebates represent only a portion, albeit the most concrete portion, of the MLR rule’s savings to consumers.  The primary role of an MLR threshold is to encourage insurers to spend a certain percentage of premium dollars on health care and quality improvement expenses (80 percent in the individual and small group market and 85 percent in the large group market).  The MLR rebate requirement operates as a backstop if insurers do not set premiums at a level where they would be paying out the minimally acceptable share of premiums back as benefits.  Only if those thresholds are not met are insurers required to provide rebates to consumers or businesses. (You can read more about the MLR rule here).

Consumers and businesses, therefore, can realize savings in two ways as a result of the MLR requirement: by paying lower premiums than they would have been charged otherwise (as a result of lower administrative costs and profits), or by receiving rebates after the fact. So while insurers paid out considerable amounts for rebates – last year’s rebates totaled $1.1 billion – this is not the whole story for consumers.

Of course, it is hard to know with certainty what premiums would have been if the MLR rules were not in place: we cannot know for sure how insurers would have priced their products or what rates regulators would have allowed (to the extent that they reviewed rates prior to the ACA). It is also difficult to separate out the direct effects of the MLR provision from other aspects of the health reform law, particularly rate review, which works to moderate unreasonable premium increases and thus increase loss ratios.  There are also data limitations. For example, prior to new reporting requirements put in place to enforce the MLR provision, there were not good data sources that break out premiums and claims on a consistent basis for major medical coverage by all types of carriers. In the initial years this data became available (2010 and 2011), there were some issues with the quality of the data, particularly regarding expenses for quality improvement and other new categories of administrative expenses that are reported on the exhibit.

Within these limitations, we constructed an analysis that looks at the basic proportion of premiums that health plans paid out as claims for medical care over the three years since the ACA was passed, both before and after the MLR requirement went into effect for coverage in 2011.  These proportions do not include adjustments for quality improvement expenses, taxes or other factors that are used when determining whether or not rebates need to be paid; they simply represent the total payments for medical care as a proportion of premiums.  This is the traditional way medical loss ratios have been calculated.  Generally, if the proportion is rising, that means insurers are paying out more of each dollar they receive on enrollee health care, which in most cases would mean that enrollees are getting better value for the premiums they pay. We then quantify what the change in the traditional MLR means to enrollees by estimating how much they would have paid in premium if the observed MLR for 2010 (before the MLR requirement went into effect) were held constant for 2011 and 2012.1 This approach addresses the following question: If insurers had targeted the same claims to premium ratio for 2011 and 2012 as they achieved in 2010, would premiums have been higher or lower, and by how much?  In other words, it addresses how much consumers may have saved in lower premiums as a result of the MLR threshold in addition to receiving rebates.

Our analysis uses insurer data filed to state regulators and compiled by Mark Farrah Associates. These data (filed on the Supplemental Health Care Exhibit) suggest that the main beneficiaries of the MLR rule’s upfront premium savings are people who purchase insurance on their own.  The majority of plans sold to small and large businesses were already in compliance with their respective MLR thresholds before the law went into effect, and our analysis shows that traditional MLRs (claims divided by premiums) for group plans have stayed relatively flat over the past three years.  In the individual market, by contrast, fewer than half of plans were in compliance with the ACA’s MLR thresholds in 2010, and the average traditional MLRs in this market have been steadily increasing since the requirement went into effect. This means that individual market insurers are devoting a greater portion of premium dollars to health care claims and less to administrative costs and profits compared to before the ACA’s MLR rule went into effect.

This pattern is consistent with the idea that some insurers needed to improve their MLRs to comply with the new rebate requirements.  We know that the individual market MLR requirements in the ACA are higher than those that were in effect in many states, and there have been numerous reports that insurers worked to reduce their commissions and other administrative expenses to become more efficient.

So how might these changes have affected premiums?  As noted above, one way to address this question is to compute what these consumers would have paid in premiums in 2011 and 2012 had traditional individual market MLRs stayed at 2010 levels (the year before the provision went into effect). Looked at this way, premiums would have been $856 million higher in 2011, and premiums would have been $1.9 billion higher in 2012.

Adding to the premium savings the amount individual market consumers received in rebates yields a total savings of $1.2 billion for 2011. This year, individual market insurers are expecting to issue $241 million in rebates (based on our analysis of early estimates from insurers filed with state insurance departments), bringing the total estimated savings for 2012 to $2.1 billion.

There are some potential limitations to this approach. While the pattern of increasing MLRs over the three years makes sense given the incentives under the ACA and reports of insurer behavior, we do not have comparable data from earlier years to tell us whether or not the 2010 MLR was typical for the pre-ACA period (though the available evidence suggests that it was).2 Also, MLRs in 2011 and 2012 might be overstated because insurers simply underestimated how much health care expenses would rise following the recession, though increasing MLRs still means that consumers have been getting better value for their premium dollars. Finally, rebate amounts for 2012 are based on preliminary estimates filed on the Supplemental Health Care Exhibit to state insurance departments, and actual rebate amounts will be based on insurer filings with the Department of Health and Human Services, which were due June 1.

If insurers’ preliminary estimates hold true, this year’s rebates (at a total of $571 million across all markets) are expected to be about half the amount of last year’s $1.1 billion in insurer rebates. Smaller rebates, however, are not an indication that consumers are now saving less money as a result of the MLR provision, but rather that insurers are coming closer to meeting the ACA’s MLR requirements and that this provision is having its intended effect of consumers getting more value for the money they spend on premiums. In fact, in the individual market, the $241 million consumers are expected to receive in rebates for 2012 represents roughly one tenth of our estimate of the overall savings from the provision in that year. Perhaps ironically, when the MLR provision is working as intended and insurers set premiums to meet the thresholds, consumers save money but are less likely to get a check in the mail as tangible demonstration of those savings.

A bit wonky, insurance lingo combined with statistics, but it clearly shows that ordinary working Americans are already saving money and getting better insurance for their dollar because of the ACA (Affordable care Act) or Obamacare. Perhaps 11% of self insured will probably see their premiums go up a little. Though those people will also be entitled to rebates and tax credits to offset the expense. Of course conservative lie about "rate shock". Conservatives cannot have an honest debate because they lack the common decency required to have such a debate.

New York Post Columnist and Conservative Arthur Herman Hates Women and American Values

NY Post Columnist Calls Increase In Military Sexual Assaults A "Bogus Epidemic"

New York Post columnist Arthur Herman called the reported increase in military sexual assaults a "bogus epidemic" because the survey on sexual assaults included all "unwanted sexual contact." But experts have found that any sexual harassment can degrade military readiness and the survey results are consistent with widely used survey methodology.

The Department of Defense released its "Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military" which determined that up to 26,000 service members may have been the victim of some form of sexual assault. In a March 31 column published by The New York Post, columnist Herman claimed the report highlighted a "bogus epidemic." After acknowledging that sexual assault and rape are serious crimes, Herman attacked the parameters of the report, saying "no real solution to any problem can be built around flawed data":

    Yet that's precisely what's really going on here -- starting with that report. First off, it's far from comprehensive or authoritative. It's based entirely on a voluntary survey -- and it's wildly anti-scientific to extrapolate from a self-selected group. And only 22,792 service members opted to respond -- roughly 2.2 percent of a military that's 1 million strong.

    Even more amazing, the survey never actually asked about sexual assault. Its questions centered on "unwanted sexual contact" -- which can include any number of behaviors, including trying to slap someone on the buttocks, which may be vulgar or inappropriate but hardly rape.

But the survey didn't measure rape, it measured sexual assault, a term that is given a broad definition by the military. For example, the Army Sexual Assault Prevention & Response Program answers the question "What is sexual assault" by including, among other things, "unwanted and inappropriate sexual conduct or fondling":

    Sexual Assault is a crime. Sexual assault is defined as intentional sexual contact, characterized by use of force, physical threat or abuse of authority, or when the victim does not or cannot consent. Consent should not be deemed or construed to mean the failure by the victim to offer physical resistance. Additionally, consent is not given when a person uses force, threat of force, coercion or when the victim is asleep, incapacitated, or unconscious.

    Sexual assault includes rape, nonconsensual sodomy (oral or anal sex), indecent assault (e.g., unwanted and inappropriate sexual contact or fondling), or attempts to commits these acts. Sexual assault can occur without regard to gender, spousal relationship, or age of victim.

This kind of sexual assault is having a significant effect not only on the victims, but on the military as a whole. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel called the assaults "a despicable crime" that is "a threat to the safety and the welfare of our people." General Martin Dempsey added that sexual assaults constitute a "crisis" in the military.  In a speech to U.S. Naval Academy graduates President Obama addressed the assaults, commenting that the "misconduct of some can have effects that ripple far and wide:

    "Those who commit sexual assault are not only committing a crime, they threaten the trust and discipline that makes our military strong," Obama said. "That's why we have to be determined to stop these crimes, because they've got no place in the greatest military on Earth."

Herman also criticized the survey methodology, claiming that having 22,792 service members respond was inadequate. However, the survey noted that the findings are consistent with a study prepared for the Air Force by Gallup, which had a significantly higher response rate. In fact, the report's research supervisor, Dr. David Lisak, worked with Gallup and the Air Force on the earlier study.

NOTE: Thomas Bishop is a current military officer who has served as an Equal Opportunity Leader in the Army Reserves.

Conservative Arthur Herman  must have never heard of statistical sampling. During elections pollsters do not ask every single individual who they are going to vote for, yet they are generally close ( within a few percentage points) of picking winners. So even if the survey is off by a little that still means a substantial number of sexual assaults are occurring. frequently with the perpetrator going unpunished. Herman hates women. Technically that is his right, but he is using a very large media platform to use his hate to persuade public opinion in a way that is harmful to women serving their country and a disgrace to patriotic values.

Remembering Sen. Frank Lautenberg's (D-NJ) Progressive Legacy

IRS Audited Democratic Groups Under Bush, No Outrage from Wacko Republicans

IRS Audited Democratic Groups Under Bush, No Outrage from Wacko Republicans

While Republicans attack the Obama administration over some IRS agents auditing conservative groups with the words "Tea Party" and "patriot" in their names, they weren't particularly outraged when the IRS targeted liberal groups during President George W. Bush's presidency, noted Salon.com.

“I wish there was more GOP interest when I raised the same issue during the Bush administration, where they audited a progressive church in my district in what look liked a very selective way,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) told MSNBC on Monday (video below).

One of the liberal groups targeted by the IRS under the Bush administration was All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California, reported the Los Angeles Times.

The IRS actually threatened to revoke the church's tax-emption because Pastor George Regas said: ‘Mr. President, your doctrine of preemptive war is a failed doctrine," on the Sunday before the 2004 election.

Ironically, conservative churches that actively campaigned for President Bush in 2004 were not audited by the IRS, reported the New York Times.

According to the Baltimore Sun, the IRS also went after the NAACP after they said Bush was the first president since Herbert Hoover not to address the organization.

In 2006, the IRS investigated the liberal environmental group Greenpeace after a conservative group called "Public Interest Watch," which had financial ties to Exxon, pushed for an investigation, reported Democracy Now.

While a few low level bureaucrats seemed to have misbehaved, let's also remember that some of these conservative groups may have been up to some political shenanigans, thus abusing their 501 status.

Republicans have no sense of shame or irony. Comparing Obama to Nixon is more LSD fueled fantasy than reality.

Poor, poor Sarah. They should have named her failed reality show, The Ridiculous Things Palin says, Did Sarah Palin have her own Umbrellagate?

The Real IRS Scandal - Conservative Groups Were Using Non-Profit Status to Promote radical Political Agenda

The Real IRS Scandal - Conservative Groups Were Using Non-Profit Status to Promote radical Political Agenda

It’s important to review why the Tea Party groups were petitioning the I.R.S. anyway. They were seeking approval to operate under section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code. This would require them to be “social welfare,” not political, operations. There are significant advantages to being a 501(c)(4). These groups don’t pay taxes; they don’t have to disclose their donors—unlike traditional political organizations, such as political-action committees. In return for the tax advantage and the secrecy, the 501(c)(4) organizations must refrain from traditional partisan political activity, like endorsing candidates.

If that definition sounds murky—that is, if it’s unclear what 501(c)(4) organizations are allowed to do—that’s because it is murky. Particularly leading up to the 2012 elections, many conservative organizations, nominally 501(c)(4)s, were all but explicitly political in their work. For example, Americans for Prosperity, which was funded in part by the Koch Brothers, was an instrumental force in helping the Republicans hold the House of Representatives. In every meaningful sense, groups like Americans for Prosperity were operating as units of the Republican Party. Democrats organized similar operations, but on a much smaller scale. (They undoubtedly would have done more, but they lacked the Republican base for funding such efforts.)

So the scandal—the real scandal—is that 501(c)(4) groups have been engaged in political activity in such a sustained and open way. As Fred Wertheimer, the President of Democracy 21, a government-ethics watchdog group, put it, “it is clear that a number of groups have improperly claimed tax-exempt status as section 501(c)(4) ‘social welfare’ organizations in order to hide the donors who financed their campaign activities in the 2010 and 2012 federal elections.”

Some people in the I.R.S. field office in Cincinnati took the names of certain groups—names that included the terms “Tea Party” and “patriot,” among others, which tend to signal conservatism—as signals that they might not be engaged in “social welfare” operations. Rather, the I.R.S. employees thought that these groups might be doing explicit politics—which would disqualify them for 501(c)(4) status, and set them aside for closer examination. This appears to have been a pretty reasonable assumption on the part of the I.R.S. employees: having “Tea Party” in your name is at least a slight clue about partisanship. When the inspector-general report becomes public, we’ll surely learn the identity of these organizations. How many will look like “social welfare” organizations—and how many will look like political activists looking for anonymity and tax breaks? My guess is a lot more of the latter than the former.

Not to worry. The anti-American tea bagger political groups which were basically operating as a charity, will get away with it, as conservatives always do by way of political intimidation and whining like the little plastic patriots they are. Certainly everyone, regardless of their politics should not be breaking the law, and they should all be prosecuted. Don't hold your breath waiting for that.

How Conservative Republicans Are Giving The USA The Shaft This Week

How Conservative Republicans Are Giving The USA The Shaft This Week

Corporate Cowards Divert Shareholder Funds into “Dark Money”

But don't front groups have to report (at least to election authorities) who's really behind their ads, so voters can make informed decisions? No. Thanks to the Supreme Court's infamous Citizen United edict in 2010, such groups can now pour unlimited sums of corporate cash into elections without ever disclosing the names of their funders. This "dark money" channel has essentially established secret political campaigning in America.

REPORT: Republican Senate Nominee Gabriel Gomez Claimed $281,500 Tax Deduction Under What IRS Called A ‘Tax Scam’

GOP cabinet boycott reaffirms Senate is archaic embarrassment

This Is How the NRA Lies to Gun Owners About Obama's Agenda

The survey, provided to Mother Jones by a reader, claims that "President Obama has supported a national gun registration system allowing federal government officials to keep track of all your firearm purchases." This is an all-too-common NRA talking point. NRA honcho Wayne LaPierre echoed it in January, saying that Obama "wants to put every private, personal transaction under the thumb of the federal government, and he wants to keep all those names in a massive federal registry."

That's not true.

Federal law has long banned a national gun registry. And the recent gun control bill that died in Congress, which was cosponsored by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Penn.) and fully supported by Obama, did not create a national gun registry. In fact, the bill expressly prohibited such a registry. Obama emphasized this point repeatedly, and award-winning mainstream media fact-checkers backed him up.

The Demi-God of Conservatism, Foreigner Rupert Murdoch: Journalism's Jack the Ripper

Another conservative lie bites the dust, Fox-Promoted Claim That Benghazi Witness Was Threatened Falls Apart

Proto-Fasicst Corporations whine that Obama's a Socialist even as business profits skyrocket to all-time record high

Obama's been called an anti-business president and a socialist, yet corporate profits are at all time record highs and the share of the nation's output that goes to corporate profits has never been higher. If Obama were truly a socialist, wouldn't you see more for workers? That has not been the case. Obama can be blamed for many things, but being anti-business is not one of them.

The National Right To Murder Association NRA's New President Jim Porter is a Confederate Sympathizer

The NRA's New President Jim Porter is a Confederate Sympathizer

Alabama lawyer Jim Porter will replace current NRA President David Keene, whose two-year term is expiring.

Here's what the media should know about Porter, a conspiracy theorist who calls the Civil War the "War of Northern Aggression" and represents more of the same for the organization:

....2.     Porter Believes "Un-American" Eric Holder And Hillary Clinton Tried To "Kill The Second Amendment At The United Nations." Porter said during a June 2012 speech at the New York Rifle & Pistol Association's Annual Meeting that Attorney General Eric Holder, who he termed "rabidly un-American," was "trying to kill the Second Amendment at the United Nations" with the help of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He attributed this to the proposed United Nations Arms Trade Treaty, which he claimed would "make it illegal for individuals all over the world to own firearms." This is a blatant misrepresentation of the treaty, which deals with the international arms trade, not private ownership. ( Someone should ask Porter where he gets his drugs. They seem to be string enough to turn anyone who takes them into Glenn UnAmerican Beck).

3.       Porter Calls The Civil War The "War Of Northern Aggression." Explaining the NRA's roots during the same June 2012 speech, Porter said, "NRA was started 1871 right here in New York state. It was started by some Yankee generals who didn't like the way my Southern boys had the ability to shoot in what we call the 'War of Northern Aggression.' Now y'all might call it the Civil War, but we call it the 'War of Northern Aggression' down south." ( Corporate profits are higher than ever and wages for working class Americans are lower - just the kind of plantation economy conservatives dream of)

4.     Porter Thinks President Obama Wants European-Style Socialism. In a February 2011 interview with NRA News, Porter said: "I think everybody had a wake-up call after the Democrats took over Congress in 2006, and I think they had a huge shock when President Obama was elected in 2008. Most folks never would believe that there would be a run on our rights, our individual rights like there's been in this country. And people are so concerned that where this government wants to take us is to a European socialistic, bureaucratic type of government. And it's been a wake-up call." ( being a drug addict, a racist, a mentally deranged UnAmerican fruitbar, Porter is trying to deflect from the FACT that it is conservatives who are trying to do to the American economy, what European leaders are doing to Europe.

So the NRA has another anti-American proto fascist mentally deranged assclown as its president. Gee, what a surprise. Too bad his parents never warned him about sniffing the polish when he shines up his jack-boots.

American Patriots Know That Federal Income Taxes on Middle-Income Americans Near Historic Lows

American Patriots Know That Federal Income Taxes on Middle-Income Americans Near Historic Lows

Federal taxes on middle-income Americans are near historic lows, our updated report explains, and that’s true whether you’re talking about federal income taxes or all federal taxes.

When it comes to income taxes, a family of four in the exact middle of the income spectrum will pay only 5.3 percent of its 2013 income in federal income taxes next year, according to a new analysis by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

Average income tax rates for these typical families have been lower during the Bush and Obama Administrations than at any time since the 1950s (see graph).  Taxes were particularly low from 2008 to 2010 because of the Recovery Rebate Credit and the Making Work Pay Tax Credit, which have since expired.

When it comes to overall federal taxes, households in the middle fifth of the income spectrum paid an average of 11.1 percent of their income in taxes in 2009, the latest year for which data are available, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).  This is the lowest on record in data that go back to 1979.
When CBO publishes data for more recent years (such as 2013), overall federal average tax rates on this middle group will likely be higher — though still low historically — because they will reflect the expiration of Making Work Pay and other temporary tax cuts, including the payroll tax cut that expired at the end of last year.

The expiration of the payroll tax cut is the biggest tax change for most people in 2013.  As this table shows, the tax cut helped workers in a wide range of income groups, and its expiration is a key contributor to the slowdown in economic growth that CBO forecasts for 2013.

Yet those wacky conservatives keep claiming that we have to keep large tax cuts for wealthy corporations and billionaires to stimulate economic growth, or have new tax cuts. There is no relationship between low taxes for those skimming huge profits off the backs of American workers. Why are cons lying about taxes. They want to starve thew government safety net - Medicare, Social Security, workmen's comp, unemployment insurance  - pretty much anything that does not fire a missile. The reason we safety net is because history shows us that markets are often good and create wealth, but they are not perfect - as any adult who was around in 2007 will know. The U.S. and it's imperfect markets have a long history. Patriots learn from history, conservatives either rewrite it or pretend it didn't happen.

Patriots Don't Lie About The Number of Americans Receiving Disability

Patriots Don't Lie About The Number of Americans Receiving Disability

Unpatriotic Conservative Media Hype NPR's Myth-Filled Disability Report

A misleading NPR report has become fodder for a right-wing media campaign to scapegoat federal disability benefits, despite the fact that the rise in disability claims can be attributed to the economic recession and demographic shifts, and that instances of fraud are minimal.

NPR reported that the rise in the number of federal disability beneficiaries was "startling" and claimed it was explained by unemployed workers with "squishy" claims of disability choosing to receive federal benefits rather than work. Right-wing media called the report "brilliant," and used it to further the myth that the increase in the number of individuals receiving disability benefits reveals fraud in the system.

Breitbart.com's Wynton Hall wrote that NPR's "eye-opening" piece uncovered a disability program "fraught with fraud." Fox Nation promoted the piece with the headline, "Every Month, 14 Million People Get a Disability Check from the Government..." The National Review Online's blog called the piece "brilliant," while the Washington Examiner's editorial offered it as evidence that disability benefits provide "a voluntary life sentence to idle poverty." The Drudge Report linked to the NPR story and to the Breitbart.com article:

But as Media Matters previously noted, these reports failed to include crucial facts that explain the rise in disability benefits. The recent financial crisis and the rising rate of child poverty have made more children eligible to receive benefits through the Supplemental Security program, while the growth in the number of adults receiving benefits through Social Security Disability Insurance since the 1970s is largely explained by increases in the number of women qualifying for benefits. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explained, as women have joined the workforce in greater numbers over the past few decades, more women are eligible for disability benefits, resulting in higher numbers of beneficiaries.

Furthermore, in a report published in March 2012, the Government Accountability Office found that improper payments of disability benefits are not a widespread problem, and accounted for less than four percent of total improper payments made by federal agencies in fiscal year 2011.

Why would any intelligent American believe anything that Neo-Nazi sites like Brietbart have to say. They, Drudge and Fox want to transform the USA into an authoritarian cult run by plutocrats and religious fanatics who are similar to the Taliban. 

Real Patriots Do Not Lie About Food Stamps

Real Patriots Do Not Lie About Food Stamps

As you probably know, complaints about the size and cost of the food stamp program (now known as SNAP, for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) has become an ever-more-prominent part of the conservative argument that America is awash in redistributive "welfare" spending (they can't much make that case about cash assistance any more). It was no accident that during his 2012 presidential campaign, Newt Gingrich called Barack Obama the "food stamp president." That's now a quasi-racial appeal along the lines of the old "welfare queen" smear.

Just today, the Wall Street Journal had a report [2] on rising SNAP costs, with the provocative title, "Use of Food Stamps Swells Even as Economy Improves," with the planted axiom being that there should be an inverse relationship between food stamps and the unemployment rate.

But as Jordan Weissmann points out [3] at The Atlantic, that's a false premise:

    [R]epeat after me: There are record numbers of Americans on food stamps today because there are record numbers of Americans in poverty (records begin in 1959.)

    As of 2011, there were 46.2 million men, women, and children living below the U.S. poverty line. There isn't much reason to believe that the last year of mediocre job growth has dented that number. And until it plunges, the food stamp rolls are going to stay full -- plain and simple.

One might add that it's more than a bit hypocritical for Republicans to deride reductions in the unemployment rate as meaningless while simultaneously complaining that counter-cyclical assistance programs should be shedding beneficiaries. But it's all kinda beside the point:

    Of all the social welfare programs the U.S. has, we should probably be worrying about food stamps the least. Its beneficiaries are overwhelmingly needy. In 2010, about 87 percent were at or below the poverty line and almost half were children. Only 3.5 percent had incomes higher than 130 percent of the poverty line. Meanwhile, the program arguably encourages more work by letting unemployed parents take the first job they can find, even if it won't pay enough to feed their family on its own. It's also hyper-efficient stimulus. The money has to be spent instead of saved, meaning it cycles quickly back into the economy.

    Our food stamp rolls are eye popping, but they're not the problem. Poverty is.

This won't be much of an answer to those conservatives who claim that helping poor people is why they are poor in the first place. But that's another issue.

[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/ed-kilgore-0
[2] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323699704578328601204933288.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read
[3] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/the-most-important-thing-to-remember-about-americas-food-stamp-boom/274443/
[4] http://www.alternet.org/tags/food-stamps
[5] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

Conservatives live in a bubble of lies. It is the only way they can win an argument. That bubble is the world of fake patriotism they must keep going by lying to America and to themselves. It is beyond pathetic. One of the fastest ways to get people off food stamps is to pay them a living wage. Yet the plastic patriots fight increase in wages. America is subsidizing Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, grocery store chains with millionaire owners - because they pay their workers so little for an honest day's work, the workers have to get food stamps or Medicaid to eck out an existence. America needs to stand up and tell these blood sucking conservative leeches to start paying back the American workers who made their wealth possible.

Proto-fascist John Hinderaker of PowerLine Should Stop Foisting Economic Lies On a Country He Claims To Love

Proto-fascist John Hinderaker of PowerLine Should Stop Foisting Economic Lies On a Country he Claims To Love

Via Mark Thoma, Hale Stewart is bemused by John Hinderaker of PowerLine. As Stewart notes, Hinderaker begins by asserting that everyone knows that an economic crisis is coming — which apparently means everyone he talks to — then rolls out just about every one of the myths that have been proved wrong again and again by events, from the looming debt crisis to the imminent takeoff of inflation.

What Stewart may not know is that this reign of error goes way back — at least to Hinderaker’s ridiculing of yours truly, back in 2005, for suggesting that we had a huge housing bubble that posed an economic threat. He knew that this was nonsense, because the authors of Dow 36,000 said so. It’s actually kind of a nice symmetry: the man who sneered at warnings about a real crisis is now utterly convinced by claims about a fake crisis.

All of which raises an interesting question: why don’t people like Hinderaker who have been wrong about everything for years and years — demonstrably wrong, in ways that would have lost anyone who believed them a lot of money — ever reconsider? Shouldn’t the thought at least enter their minds that maybe economic analysis is not their strong point? Shouldn’t they at least entertain the notion that they are talking to the wrong “experts”?

So why doesn’t this happen? Part of it, surely, is the Dunning-Kruger effect: the truly incompetent are too incompetent to realize that they’re incompetent. Part of it, also, is the Madoff “affinity fraud” effect: people trust someone they perceive as part of their tribe — in this case the tribe of liberal-haters — and are blind to evidence that they are being taken for a ride.

The surprise, I’d say, is just how strong the Dunning-Kruger-Madoff effect has proved in the face of economic crisis. Year after year in which the predictions of their crowd have gone totally astray haven’t shaken their faith at all. They still believe that reading the WSJ editorial page and watching Fox are the way to know what’s going to happen to the economy, and nothing will change their minds.

For those who are  unfamiliar with it, the Dunning-Kruger-Madoff effect is named after a psychological-neuroscience study that looked at the conundrum of how the incompetent fail to see how incompetent they are, precisely because of their incompetence. If you have have family or friends who were killed or maimed in Iraq, Assrocket ( his well deserved internet nickname) is one of the people responsible. he was one of the circle jerk of conservative pundits who tried to sell the nation on that mulch-trillion dollar debacle. He either has the brains of a tree stump or is malevolent to the core. That he thinks of himself as a patriot would be laughable if he were not so pathetic. This is what he wrote about one of, if not the worse president in U.S. history,

"It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can't get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another . . ."

Assrocket and other conservative "intellectuals" are the kind of cancerous growth in America that have been and obviously still are, giving patriotism a bad name. 

How Do You Know The Washington Post is a Conservative Rag. Because They Will Not Fire Jennifer Rubin For Libel

How Do You Know The Washington Post is a Conservative Rag. Because They Will Not Fire Jennifer Rubin For Libel

Since the summer of 2010, the right-wing media has been obsessively promoting the absurd non-scandal involving the New Black Panther Party, in which the Obama Justice Department was alleged to have dropped voter intimidation charges against the fringe group owing to racial and political solidarity. One of the primary movers of this farce has been Jennifer Rubin, who authored one of the first reports on the story for The Weekly Standard and continued to write at length about DOJ's alleged perfidy at her Washington Post blog.

This month, the Justice Department's inspector general released the results of their investigation into the New Black Panthers affair and confirmed what everyone already knew to be true: the allegations against DOJ were bunk. Rubin is excitedly waving this report around, claiming it reflects poorly on President Obama's reported Labor Secretary nominee, and determinedly ignoring the parts that show pretty much every word she wrote about the New Black Panther story was rooted in falsehood.

Since the DOJ's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released its report, Rubin has written two Washington Post blog posts touting its findings to attack Perez. In a March 12 post, she wrote: "I won't revisit all the behavior of the Obama Justice Department but a nearly-300 page report has been released by the administration's own inspector general. The IG went out of the way to be even-handed, even when there was substantial evidence of politicization." The next day, she briefly referenced the OIG report's findings on the New Black Panther case, writing:

    The IG declined to find a racial or political motive for dismissing the New Black Panther case but found actions surrounding that action "risked undermining confidence in the non-ideological enforcement of the voting rights laws." In other words, it sure looked partisan.

Rubin's twisted construction of the IG "declin[ing] to find a racial or political motive" is fairly comical, given how invested Rubin was in the existence of those motives. Again, she was one of the main drivers of this story. She wrote a lengthy Weekly Standard article in June 2010 (before J. Christian Adams resigned from DOJ claiming racially charged "corruption" in the case, which blew up the story) alleging that the "Obama Justice Department went to bat for the New Black Panther party -- and then covered it up." As the story slowly fell to pieces, Rubin held firm, insisting the critics were wrong. "The issue is whether a meritorious claim of voter intimidation was dismissed under pressure from left-leaning civil rights groups," she wrote in January 2011, "and whether there is reason to believe there is a sentiment against a color-blind application of civil rights laws."

By March 2011, we knew affirmatively that the allegations of racial preference at DOJ were false. The department's Office of Professional Responsibility investigated the matter and released their findings. According to the report, OPR "found no evidence that the decision to dismiss the case against three of the four defendants was predicated on political considerations," and "no evidence that political considerations were a motivating factor in authorizing the civil action against the four defendants."

Rubin, however, was undeterred. She lashed out at OPR, calling it "as unprofessional as it is biased," and insisted that the report was wrong:

    Frankly, in reporting in my pre-Post days and in subsequent reporting by The Post, there is ample evidence that voting section attorneys objected to enforcing civil rights laws against minority defendants("my people," as Eric Holder infamously put it). Yet the crack team at OPR apparently didn't find any evidence of this. (Do they subscribe to The Post?) [Right Turn, 4/3/2011]

The OIG report, however, not only confirms OPR's finding, it flatly debunks Rubin:

    The OIG received allegations that Division leadership between 2009 and 2012 was hostile to "race neutral" enforcement of the voting rights laws and that the Voting Section would enforce Sections 2 and 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act only in "traditional" circumstances -- namely, to protect minorities as historical victims of discrimination -- and not against minority defendants or to protect White victims. We found insufficient evidence to conclude that Division leadership during this period had such a policy, or that the laws were enforced in a discriminatory manner to achieve that result.
The New Black Panthers case was a gigantic distraction, a manufactured controversy meant to stoke outrage and damage the Obama administration politically. We're only still talking about it because of adetermined effort on the part of conservative media figures, like Rubin, to force it into the news cycle. It's been debunked more times than should have been necessary, and the fact that Rubin is gingerly tip-toeing around the most recent dismantling of the fake story she helped will into existence is perhaps an indication that we're finally nearing the point of putting this nonsense to bed once and for all.

Conservative Republican Rubin has a long and dubious history of trying to convince the reading public that her wacko delusions are facts.

I don't understand why Paul Ryan (R-WI) hates America so much. He has a cushy job ($179k per year) where he doesn't do anything - because he wants to do his part to make sure government doesn't work - Paul Ryan's $5.7 Trillion Magic Trick - yet here he is trying to take money from seniors, the working poor and the middle-class to pay for tax cuts for wealthy moochers who keep complaining about how hard they have it.