Everyone is missing the point of this story.
From the AP:
“I just don’t buy that this was a couple of rogue IRS employees,” said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. “After all, groups with `progressive’ in their names were not targeted similarly.”
If it were just a small number of employees, she said, “then you would think that the high-level IRS supervisors would have rushed to make this public, fired the employees involved, apologized to the American people and informed Congress. None of that happened in a timely way.”
The IRS said Friday that it was sorry for what it called the “inappropriate” targeting of the conservative groups during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status. The agency blamed low-level employees, saying no high-level officials were aware.
Susan Collins has been a Senator for 17 years and she apparently has no idea how government works. Worse, she believes that government employees would be just as likely to target progressives as they would be to target conservatives and that they might actually be fired for working to help progressives!
In fairness, I should point out that the article goes on to note that some higher level officials may have known about this problem a couple years, but the officials are still a couple levels down from anyone that’s politically appointed.
Indeed, the most salient facts of the case are: 1) that the IRS was used to target Republican groups and no one directed the IRS employees to do this; 2) the employees’ managers may have known but probably agreed with their decisions and certainly didn’t object; 3) no one that is appointed to the IRS by the President knew or probably could have stopped it – in other words it doesn’t matter who wins any given election, this behavior is “above politics”; and 4) no one is likely to lose their job because of these actions.
Now ask yourself, given these facts, who’s in charge of whom?
Foseti 
Agree completely
How many divisions does susan collins have?
When I worked for the government progressive politics routinely trumped the law in egregious ways and corruption, both grand and petty, was rampant. This is no surprise.
But wait, there’s more:
“Along with targeting tea-party groups, the IRS may also have given extra-special attention to the tax-exempt status of some Jewish groups for political reasons.
From the Jewish Press:
The passionately pro-Israel organization Z STREET filed a lawsuit against the IRS, claiming it had been told by an IRS agent that because the organization was “connected to Israel,” its application for tax-exempt status would receive additional scrutiny. This admission was made in response to a query about the lengthy reveiw of Z STREET’s tax exempt status application.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/348013/irs-inquisition-update
Maybe now this story will go somewhere, lol
Nah, because they’re targeting (comparatively) reactionary Jews. If they went after the SPLC or ACLU the story would get attention. But that would never happen in a million years.
I like this one a lot, well done Foseti.
Too lazy to google and link, but I remember a few years back when some progressive leftist Christian churches “dared” the IRS to investigate them and suspend / revoke their tax-free status for “getting political” (as if they aren’t, essentially, and often predominantly, already overwhelmingly political on any given Sunday).
It seems the IRS didn’t take them up on that, not, apparently, because it lacked the authority or investigative resources. If you want to know why we’ll never “””fix”””” the tax code, or replace it with a VAT, removing this kind of abusable discretion is why.
Waking it occurs to me – I haven’t found in History an example of elites that decided to destroy their own country and hated their own people. This is snobbery and status seeking taken to insanity and evil.
Has anyone else?
Somebody *might* lose their job, now that its a national story.
I’m guessing that somebody’s getting some mandatory paid leave.
You can not fire a government employee. You do not get this.
When I was a bureaucrat for three years one government employee was fired. He was repeatedly napping in his cubicle and he was a white male.
I worked with a guy that fell asleep in meetings with outsiders, was senile, smelled from not showering, and nobody liked him. He got promoted.
One of the very few things I liked about the W administration was its attempt to improve the partisan balance of the DOJ. This showed some actual grasp of how important the composition of regulatory and law enforcement agencies is. The fact that the establishment went absolutely ape-shit over it is further proof of its goodness.
I wonder who, exactly, was to credit for that?
The conservative legal establishment has bee more aggressive about this sort of thing that other parts of the movement. So far, it’s had very limited success, but it’s better than nothing.
Good catch. This is cathedral in raw form, and it would be better for explaining it to potential recruits to the neoreaction if there is no connection to anyone higher up. The media and IRS tagteaming to smear the TP since inception is a pretty thorough example of how the prog cathedral works. Make them toxic in the spotlight while holding them back behind the scenes.
Justice Dept. vs. State Dept. in a proxy war with journalists in the crossfire just screams Foseti:
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/govt-obtains-wide-ap-phone-records-probe
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