Paul L. Caron
Dean





Monday, October 27, 2014

The IRS Scandal, Day 536

IRS Logo 2The Atlantic:  The House GOP's New War on Incompetence: The Republicans Want to Overhaul Scandal-Plagued Federal Agencies in 2015, the Majority Leader Says:

House Republicans haven't officially locked down their majority for next year, but they're already sketching out a legislative agenda for when they do.

In a memo to lawmakers on Wednesday, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said the party would target the federal bureaucracy with an eye toward restoring "competence" across a range of scandal-plagued departments and agencies. He cited the well-documented problems at the Veterans Administration, the Secret Service, the IRS, last year's launch of the federal health insurance exchanges, and the more recent response to Ebola, along with several other missteps that haven't garnered as much attention.

Real Time with Bill Maher Blog:  Tax the Charities:

Obama’s IRS "scandal” comes down to whether Tea Party groups should pay taxes or not, and the angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin distinction between an organization that raises money for politicians and one that “promotes social welfare.” (… by raising money for politicians.) One has to pay taxes and one doesn’t. ...

The simple solution is to stop asking the IRS to make value judgments about what’s a legitimate charity called “Patriots for the Violent Overthrow of the Negro Usurper” and what’s just a family sex party, like the kind the Palins would crash. Make them all pay taxes.

Washington Post:  Obama, The Bewildered Bystander, by Charles Krauthammer:

The president is upset. Very upset. Frustrated and angry. Seething about the government's handling of Ebola, said the front-page headline in The New York Times last Saturday.

There's only one problem with this pose, so obligingly transcribed for him by the Times. It's his government. He's president. Has been for six years. Yet Barack Obama reflexively insists on playing the shocked outsider when something goes wrong within his own administration.

IRS? “It's inexcusable, and Americans are right to be angry about it, and I am angry about it,” he thundered in May 2013 when the story broke of the agency targeting conservative groups. “I will not tolerate this kind of behavior in any agency, but especially in the IRS.”

Except that within nine months, Obama had grown far more tolerant, retroactively declaring this to be a phony scandal without “a smidgen of corruption.”

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2014/10/the--4.html

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