Today's Links For Patriots

The IRS "Scandal" Was A Scam

Monday's revelation that progressive as well as conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status had been singled out for review by the Internal Revenue Service left one pressing question: Why [[then]] did the inspector general's report detailing improper scrutiny only mention conservative groups?

Last night we got the answer: The IG only reported on conservative groups because that's what Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), the notoriously partisan chairman of the House Oversight Committee, told him to do.

The Pay of Corporate Executives and Financial Professionals is Evidence of Rent Seeking in Top 1 Percent Incomes. Rent seeking is a kind of modern conservative form of feudalism.

This decision didn't make the headlines, Conservatives on Supreme Court Serve A Legal Blow to Sustainable Development

Conservatives On Supreme Court Steal Voting Rights From Millions of Americans

Wendy Davis Showed Texas' GOP Boys How to Respect Women

Conservative Ohio Thugs Are Using Their State Budget To Try To Restrict Abortion And Redefine Pregnancy. As soon as Ohio governor Kasich grows a uterus he can have dictatorial control of women's bodies.

Anti-American Conservative Freaks at Fox News Ignore Fact That IRS Scrutinized All Political Groups

Anti-American Conservative Freaks at Fox News Ignore Fact That IRS Scrutinized All Political Groups

Fox News selectively covered new reports on the IRS' targeting of political groups, raising questions about how the network will handle the new revelations in future reports.

According to an internal IRS document obtained by The Associated Press, the IRS targeted groups seeking tax exempt status by screening for terms that are not unique to tea party and conservative groups. Terms such as "Israel," "progressive" and "occupy" were also used by the agency to further scrutinize certain organizations.

On the June 24 edition of Fox News' Special Report with Bret Baier, host Bret Baier failed to mention the memo obtained by the Associated Press and instead suggested that the new information extended targeting to only religious groups, saying, "You can add Jewish and other religious groups to the agency's hit list." Fox's chief political correspondent Carl Cameron pointed out that "other religious groups" were targeted, and acknowledged that "as for those conservative groups that were targeted, they weren't just tea partiers and they included other type of policy groups." However, both Baier and Cameron neglected to mention that the words associated with left-leaning groups like "occupy" or "progressive" were also used in targeting.

On Fox Business' Lou Dobbs Tonight, Dobbs also reported on new revelations in the IRS story but did not comment on the the Associated Press memo or the fact that left-leaning groups were also subject to improper scrutiny.

The Fox affiliated FoxNation.com also included an Associated Press story about the IRS' overreach, but focused on a conference call IRS commissioner Danny Werfel held with reporters in which he did not specify which terms were on the list of targeted words.

What day was it that evil became part of journalism. That was something that Fox News, which is nothing more than a fax machine for conservative propaganda, decided that journalism was to be. It is simple, you ut a lot of people in business attire, make them look like they might pass for respectable journalists, and use them to propel lies, half truths and rumors as news. Evil doesn't wear a red suit, have horns and pointed tail, it looks like the clowns in make-up at Fox News. They wrap their evil in the flag and the Bible, and pass their garbage out as patriotism.

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.

Real Patriots Would Not Tolerate This - The Walmart Family Are The Biggest Welfare Cheats in America

 Real Patriots Would Not Tolerate This - The Walmart Family Are The Biggest Welfare Cheats in America

Walmart wages are so low that many of its workers rely on food stamps and other government aid programs to fulfill their basic needs, a reality that could cost taxpayers as much as $900,000 at just one Walmart Supercenter in Wisconsin, according to a study released by Congressional Democrats on Thursday.

Though the study assumes that most workers who qualify for the public assistance programs do take advantage of them, it injects a potent data point into a national debate about the minimum wage at a time when many Walmart and fast food workers are mounting strikes in pursuit of higher wages.

The study uses Medicaid data released in Wisconsin to piece together the annual cost to taxpayers for providing a host of social safety net programs, including food stamps and publicly subsidized health care, to workers at one Supercenter in the state.

According to the report, Walmart had more workers enrolled in the state’s public health care program in the last quarter of last year than any other employer, with 3,216 people enrolled. When the dependents of those workers were factored in, the number of enrollees came to 9,207.

"When low wages leave Walmart workers unable to afford the necessities of life, taxpayers pick up the tab," the report says.

After accounting for the total number of Walmart stores and employees across the state and the per-person costs of BadgerCare, as the state’s health care program is known, the report's authors estimated that the cost of publicly funded health care comes to $251,706 per year for a 300-employee Supercenter.

The authors then added up the projected costs of other public-assistance programs available to families on BadgerCare, such as reduced-price school meals, Section 8 housing assistance, the earned income tax credit and energy assistance. Assuming all those workers avail themselves of those additional programs -- granted, an unlikely scenario -- the report extrapolates that the final tab would top $900,000.

In response to the report, Walmart spokeswoman Brooke Buchanan said the company was proud of the opportunities it provides for employees.

"Unfortunately there are some people who base their opinions on misconceptions rather than the facts," Buchanan said, noting that 75 percent of Walmart managers started as hourly employees. "Every month more than 60 percent of Americans shop at Walmart and we are proud to help them save money on what they want and need to build better lives for themselves and their families. We provide a range of jobs -- from people starting out stocking shelves to Ph.D.’s in engineering and finance. We provide education assistance and skill training and, most of all, a chance to move up in the ranks."

The report, entitled "The Low-Wage Drag on Our Economy," was produced by Democrats with the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, which is chaired by Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.). The committee says it chose Wisconsin because the state's data "appears to be the most recent and comprehensive." The paper is an updated version of an earlier report by the same committee in 2004, which at the time estimated that a 200-employee Walmart store could account for $400,000 in public assistance for workers.

"The labor policies of Walmart, and those of companies that emulate its low-road approach, end up leaving taxpayers holding the bag," Miller said in a statement.

Critics have long denounced Walmart for paying such low wages that many workers are forced to take advantage of public-assistance programs like food stamps or Medicaid. (Notably, many Democrats who lament this scenario are strong backers of such programs.)

In fact, many workers throughout the retail industry take advantage of these programs, though a 2004 study of Walmart workers in California estimated the chain's workers availed themselves of 38 percent more non-health, public-assistance money than workers at competing stores. (That report, by the University of California, Berkeley, had findings similar to the committee's 2004 study.)

many of Walmart's employees probably don't apply for those assistance programs just because there is such a stigma attached to receiving any help. So whether they collect those benefits or not, Walmart should be ashamed that most of its employees do not make a living wage, Walmart Heirs Have As Much Wealth As Bottom 40 Percent Of Americans Combined. One family hauls in as much income as 30 million American workers. This is why the economy cannot seem to fully recover and there is low demand for products and services. The people who are working are spending their money on the basic necessities like food, shelter and utilities. While Walmart continues to import over half its products.

Republican Erick Erickson ( who works for CNN and other media outlets) Believes the same things about women as a Fundamentalist Iranian Mullah. Conservatives and Iranian religious zealots have always had a lot in common.

Latest Fox Benghazi Conspiracy Crumbles. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condelezza Rice lied over 4,000 Americans to their deaths. They got another 20,000 maimed or wounded. But shameless, immoral conservative freaks are going to get to the bottom of this non-scandal.

Nope, the IRS doesn't need to keep an eye on radical anti-American conservative groups, Cigarette Maker Funded Dark-Money Conservative Groups

What Patriots Should Know About The IRS "Scandal"

What Patriots Should Know About The IRS "Scandal"

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.


And from Bloomberg reporting: IRS Sent Same Letter to Democrats That Fed Tea Party Row, (emphasis added, for emphasis)

    One of those groups, Emerge America, saw its tax-exempt status denied, forcing it to disclose its donors and pay some taxes. None of the Republican groups have said their applications were rejected. Progress Texas … faced the same lines of questioning as the Tea Party groups from the same IRS office that issued letters to the Republican-friendly applicants. A third group, Clean Elections Texas, which supports public funding of campaigns, also received IRS inquiries.

    In a statement late yesterday, the tax agency said it had pooled together the politically active nonpartisan applicants — including a “minority” that were identified because of their names. “It is also important to understand that the group of centralized cases included organizations of all political views,” the IRS said in its statement.

Again, for emphasis: “It is also important to understand that the group of centralized cases included organizations of all political views,” the IRS said in its statement.”

.....A Few Facts

Fact: The IRS is required to determine whether organizations applying for special tax status are “social welfare” groups or are instead engaged in political activity. Political groups cannot get the special tax status these groups were applying for.

Fact: Only 1/3 of the groups that were passed to specialists for a closer look were “conservative.” Lots of other organizations were also checked, including progressive organizations.

Fact: No groups were audited or harassed or “targeted” or “singled out”. This was about applications for special tax status being forwarded to specialists for a closer look to see if they were engaged in political activity that would disqualify them for the special tax status. This closer look is the kind of review all organization should get, but the IRS was swamped because of the flood of groups applying for a status that let them mask their donors, after Citizens United.

Fact: No groups were harmed. There were delays while the groups were checked to see if they should have special tax status. That’s it. But the rules are that they are allowed to operate as if they had that status while they waited for official approval.

Fact: The only groups actually denied special tax status were progressive groups, not conservative groups. In 2011, during the period that “conservative groups were targeted” the NY Times carried the story, 3 Groups Denied Break by I.R.S. Are Named . The three groups? Drum roll … “The I.R.S. denied tax exemption to the groups — Emerge Nevada, Emerge Maine and Emerge Massachusetts — because, the agency wrote in denial letters, they were set up specifically to cultivate Democratic candidates.”

Fact: The IRS commissioner in charge at the IRS at the time this happened was appointed President George W. Bush.

Fact: According to the IG Report (p. 10) in the “majority of cases, we agreed that the applications submitted included indications of significant political campaign intervention.” 

The pdf of the Inspector's report is here. There is no real scandal, certainly not a scandal that justifies all the whining and victim playing we are hearing from conservatives. Conservatives see themselves as poor little victims because the sun comes up and shines on them. As we all know, zombies prefer the night.

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.