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.

Apparently Patriotism and Common Decency Are Dead in Norwood, Colorado

Apparently Patriotism and Common Decency Are Dead in Norwood, Colorado

A small Colorado town’s response to a 13-year-old’s violent hazing and sexual assault has driven the victim out of his school and his father out of his job, according to a startling Bloomberg News profile of what happened in Norwood, Colorado.

Three high school students held down the 13-year-old boy with duct tape on a school bus and sodomized him with a pencil. When the superintendent and school board did not report the incident for a month, the victim’s father, who was the school principal, reported it to the police himself. Yet another aspect complicated the situation: The attack happened outside a wrestling match, and two of the perpetrators are the wrestling coach’s sons.

The boys eventually received a one-day, in-school suspension and varying sentences of probation and community service. However, the victim’s peers would continue to bully him online, asking him “What’s been stuck up your butt today?” and wearing T-shirts that supported the attackers. And parents in the community were on board with the harassment, as well:

    A dozen students wore the T-shirts to school one Friday, and someone posted a sign with the same wording on the locker of the victim’s brother, according to the police report, which was reviewed by Bloomberg. Students who wore the t-shirts told police they wanted to support their friends. The victim told investigators he didn’t understand why his friends would support people who attacked him.

    When police visited parents of students involved in the T-shirt incident to warn them against intimidating the 13-year-old, who would be testifying against his schoolmates in a criminal case, they found the parents instead focused on attacking the principal.

Eventually, the father was put on paid leave from his position. Today, the family lives 200 miles away from Norwood in a new school district, while the wrestling coach (who was the school board president, too) stayed with the Norwood team after a reprimand for leaving the students alone.

States are responsible for establishing their own anti-bullying policies in public schools, but enforcement across the states is uneven. Colorado has one of the nation’s most comprehensive anti-bullying laws, with protections against anti-LGBT bullying, but only 37 percent of school districts actually follow it. Hazing and harassment has also been a particular problem in the world of sports. At the college level, Alfred University found 80 percent of college athletes experience some form of hazing.

This is the culture of conservatism at work; either they deny a sexual assault has taken place, or blame the victims for doing something that deserved to be punished with sexual assault, and/or finding ways to punish the victim for daring to name those cowardly criminals who perpetrated the attack. Why isn't the town of Norwood  demanding justice for the victim. Why are the parents of the criminals who perpetrated the crime being prosecuted for aiding and abetting criminals - the cowardly criminals they raised. Why aren't the kids doing the harassing being shunned by decent kids who know better. This is what happens when Americans worship at the altar of conservative morality. Standards of basic decency get all twisted around. The town is acting like George Bush and Dick Cheney, deny and deny their responsibility for the lies they told and the gross immorality they are guilty of, while simultaneously attacking those seeking simple justice.

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.

Radical UnAmerican Conservatives on Supreme Court Protects Mega-Corporations From Responsibility For Their Actions

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Simple Truths message to Congress (April 29, 1938). "Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any other controlling private power.
The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living. Both lessons hit home. Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing." Radical UnAmerican Conservatives on Supreme Court Protects Mega-Corporations From Responsibility For Their Actions

In case it wasn’t clear already, the U.S. Supreme Court hammered home Thursday morning that it will protect the rights of corporations to force arbitration over the individuals’ access to the court system at any expense.

In a 5-3 ruling with Justice Sonia Sotomayor recused, Justice Antonin Scalia eviscerated almost any opportunity small merchants have to challenge alleged monopolistic practices by American Express in their credit card agreements.

Sound familiar? Earlier this term, the court turned back on procedural grounds a lawsuit alleging monopolistic practices by Comcast. A week after that, they turned back the claims of workers to challenge employer practices as a class. And in 2011, they issued one of the worst blows to consumer rights in years when they held that consumers challenging $30 fees could not sue together as a class. In each of these cases, the court’s procedural rulings mean the parties may never get to argue about whether these corporations actually violated the law. And as a consequence, these corporations may never be held accountable.

With Thursday’s ruling, the court added small businesses to the list of aggrieved parties whose access to the courthouse has been foreclosed by boilerplate contracts that prohibit parties from filing their challenge as a class, or from otherwise alleviating the immense cost of filing their claims individually. This time, the litigants were small businesses taking on American Express, and their lawyer was none other than conservative powerhouse Paul Clement. Clement has argued many of the major conservative court wins of the past few years, and his argument on the side of the plaintiffs was probably the last best shot at curbing the Roberts Court’s total perversion of the Federal Arbitration Act.

As in the AT&T case, the plaintiffs here argued that the only way they could challenge the policy of mega-corporation American Express was by banding together as a class and pooling their resources. But consumers’ claims in AT&T were struck down on a different rationale, that their state law claims were preempted by the Federal Arbitration Act. This time, the plaintiffs argued that because their antitrust claims are federal , they are protected by the principle of “effective vindication,” meaning that where an arbitration clause effectively immunizes otherwise meritorious federal claims, plaintiffs are entitled to vindication of their actual rights. To show that that the arbitration clause would make any challenge prohibitively expensive, they deployed formal affidavits by economists attesting to the immense cost of these claims — “’at least several hundred thousand dollars, and might exceed $1 million’,” while the maximum recovery for an individual plaintiff would be $12,850, or $38,549 when trebled,” meaning they could not afford to launch their claims without the ability to file them together.

No matter, said the majority. In AT&T, “[w]e specifically rejected the argument that class arbitration was necessary to prosecute claims ‘that might otherwise slip through the legal system’.” This case is about federal law vindication and AT&T was about state law preemption, but as Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent, “to a hammer everything looks like a nail.” Joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, Kagan explains the case this way:

    Here is the nutshell version of this case, unfortunately obscured in the Court’s decision. The owner of a small restaurant (Italian Colors) thinks that American Express (Amex) has used its monopoly power to force merchants to accept a form contract violating the antitrust laws. The restaurateur wants to challenge the allegedly unlawful provision (imposing a tying arrangement), but the same contract’s arbitration clause prevents him from doing so.

    That term imposes a variety of procedural bars that would make pursuit of the antitrust claim a fool’s errand. So if the arbitration clause is enforceable, Amex has insulated itself from antitrust liability—even if it has in fact violated the law. The monopolist gets to use its monopoly power to insist on a contract effectively depriving its victims of all legal recourse.

    And here is the nutshell version of today’s opinion, admirably flaunted rather than camouflaged: Too darn bad.

    That answer is a betrayal of our precedents, and of federal statutes like the antitrust laws.

Today’s ruling was yet another point in the Chamber of Commerce’s remarkable tally of wins before the Roberts Court, and another chance for the most business-friendly justices in 65 years to side with their friends.

It is neither hyperbole or name calling to say that American Express and the Chamber of Commerce are simply proto-fascists. Their mission is not good old business - competing to see who can sell good and services for a fair price. No, their agenda is to take as much power away from the people, individual Americans as they can.

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.

Why Does Florida’s Criminal Governor Rick Scott (R) Hate America and American Workers

Why Does Florida’s Criminal Governor Rick Scott (R) Hate America and American Workers

Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) signed a bill on Friday that blocks local governments from implementing paid sick leave legislation, the Orlando Sentinel reports. He made his decision quickly, only taking four of the 15 days he legally had to review the bill before he signed it.

In signing the bill, Scott sided with big business interests including Disney World, Darden Restaurants (owner of Olive Garden and Red Lobster), and the Florida Chamber of Commerce. The bill is part of a national effort to pass so-called “preemption bills” that would block paid sick leave legislation that is backed by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a right-wing group that coordinates conservative laws across states. The state’s House Majority Leader, Steve Precourt (R), who was instrumental in putting forward the preemption bill, is an active ALEC member.

The bill has made moot a 2014 referendum in Orange County that would have decided whether to require paid sick leave. More than 50,000 voters had tried to get the measure on the November 6 ballot but the County Commission voted it off. It made it on the ballot in 2014 thanks to a three-judge panel.

Florida follows a rash of preemption bills in the states, which cropped up in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Mississippi. These bills are part of ALEC’s efforts to weaken wage and labor standards: Since 2011, 67 such ALEC-affiliated bills have been introduced in state legislatures, 11 of which had been signed into law before Scott signed this bill.

Big business stood in opposition to the Orange County effort on paid sick leave because it claimed such a bill would drive up costs. Yet a study of San Francisco, which enacted a paid sick leave policy in 2007, showed that a majority of businesses saw either no impact or a positive one on profitability. Other research has shown such policies to be good for business and job growth.

Like the a majority of conservatives Rick Scott believes that evil is a positive value. He thinks it is a good to steal billions, yet wrong to have paid sick leave - a benefit that workers earn by making lazy millionaires like him very wealthy. Scott's policies are not new, they are the policies of feudal lords and fascists.

Patriotic Americans Wander Why Congress is Not Investigating Snowden Employer Booz Allen Hamilton

Patriotic Americans Wander Why Congress is Not Investigating Snowden Employer Booz Allen Hamilton

Military contractor Booz Allen Hamilton of McLean, Virginia, has shot into the news recently over two of its former employees: Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who has just revealed the extent of US global spying on electronic data of ordinary citizens around the world, and James Clapper, US director of national intelligence.

Clapper worked as vice-president at Booz Allen from 1997 to 1998, while Snowden did a three-month stint at their offices in Hawaii in spring 2013 as a low-level contract employee. Both worked on intelligence contracts, which are estimated to make up almost a quarter of the company's $5.86bn in annual income. ....

.....Core values? Let's examine Booz Allen Hamilton's track record.

In February 2012, the US air force suspended Booz Allen from seeking government contracts after it discovered that Joselito Meneses, a former deputy chief of information technology for the air force, had given Booz Allen a hard drive with confidential information about a competitor's contracting on the first day that he went to work for the company in San Antonio, Texas. US air force legal counsel concluded (pdf):

"Booz Allen did not uncover indications and signals of broader systemic ethical issues within the firm. These events caused the air force to have serious concerns regarding the responsibility of Booz Allen, specifically, its San Antonio office, including its business integrity and honesty, compliance with government contracting requirements, and the adequacy of its ethics program."

It should be noted that Booz Allen reacted swiftly to the government investigation of the conflict of interest. In April that year, the air force lifted the suspension – but only after Booz Allen had accepted responsibility for the incident and fired Meneses, as well as agreeing to pay the air force $65,000 and reinforce the firm's ethics policy.

Not everybody was convinced about the new regime. "Unethical behavior brought on by the revolving door created problems for Booz Allen, but now the revolving door may have come to the rescue," wrote Scott Amey of the Project on Government Oversight, noting that Meneses was not the only former air force officer who had subsequently become an executive in Booz Allen's San Antonio office.

"It couldn't hurt having [former AF people]. Booz is likely exhaling a sigh of relief as it has received billions of dollars in air force contracts over the years."

Booz Allen has also admitted to overbilling the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) "employees at higher job categories than would have been justified by their experience, inflating their monthly hours and submitting excessive billing at their off-site rate." The company repaid the government $325,000 in May 2009 to settle the charges (pdf). Incidentally, both the Nasa and the air force incidents were brought to light by a company whistleblower who informed the government.

Nor was this the first time Booz Allen had been caught overbilling. In 2006, the company was one of four consulting firms that settled with the Justice Department for fiddling expenses on an industrial scale. Booz Allen's share of the $15m settlement of a lawsuit under the False Claims Act was more than $3.3m.

The incidents described above could be dismissed as aberrations. What is worthy of note, however, is that Ralph Shrader, the chairman, CEO and president of Booz Allen, came to the company in 1974 after working at two telecommunications companies – Western Union, where he was national director of advanced systems planning, and RCA, where he served in the company's government communications system division.

Today, those names may not ring a bell, but these two companies took part in a secret surveillance program known as Minaret in the 1970s when they agreed to hand over to the National Security Agency (NSA) all incoming and outgoing US telephone calls and telegrams. In an interview with the Financial Times in 1998, Shrader noted that the most relevant background for his new position of chief executive at Booz Allen was his experience working for telecommunications clients and doing classified military work for the US government.

          ....Finally, Congress would also do well to investigate Clapper, Booz Allen's other famous former employee, for possible perjury when he replied: "No, sir" to Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon in March, when asked:

"Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?"

 This is not about any of those mythical compromises to supposedly keep us safe, it is the massive abuse of power. They can do it so they do. Is everyone who thinks they "have nothing to hide" absolute sure these obviously corrupt private contractors will not use that information to hurt you.