By Beverly Bandler

Appropriate questions should be asked and answered about the controversies over the IRS screening of 501-c-4 applications, the subpoenas for AP phone calls, and the Benghazi attack. Abuse of power should be checked with vigor, but hysteria should be avoided. These issues require calm and reasoned perspective. Outrage should be reserved for real scandals of which there are plenty.

However, as some commentators rush to judgment especially about the IRS “scandal,” a review of some genuine scandals – past and present – may be in order:

A real scandal is the lying to the American people by George W. Bush and his administration about non-existent WMD that led us into the illegal and immoral Iraq War (and the related scandals of torture, Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and Afghanistan). Bush’s actions caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of horrific injuries and the destruction and destabilization of Iraq. The United States will pay for that scandal for generations, not only in money but in loss of respect.A real scandal is the complicity of Ronald Reagan in “grotesque human rights crimes including genocide in Central America, his tolerance of drug trafficking by his anticommunist clients, and his support for sophisticated propaganda operations to destroy troublesome journalists and other investigators,” as journalist Robert Parry reported after Reagan’s ally, ex-Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt, was found guilty of genocide in an extermination campaign backed by Reagan in the 1980s.

A real scandal is the extent to which radical right-wing conservatives have managed to corrupt, to some extent, every single agency in the Executive Branch, for instance: restrictions placed on the Center for Disease Control by the National Rifle Association, the constant right-wing threats against the Environmental Protection Agency, and the latest threat of the GOP to render the National Labor Relations Board inoperative. There’s also been the ideological corruption of the Judicial Branch.

A real scandal is the magnitude of air and water pollution across the nation along with worsening threat of global warming, while government efforts to address these problems are obstructed by GOP corporatists.

A real scandal is the conservatives’ use of one “study,” the Reinhart/Rogoff report to push for an austerity budget when the “study” has now been exposed as fraudulent – and the austerity theory itself revealed to be fraudulent – while the rich get richer and millions of Americans face long-term unemployment.

A real scandal is the extent of poverty in the United States with almost half of Americans dying close to penniless, in a nation in which the top one-hundredth of one percent average some $27 million per household while the average income for the bottom 90 percent is a little over $31,000.

A real scandal is how consistently the United States lags in international measurements for education (17th in the developed world) and for health care (37th out of 191 countries). Increasingly, ignorance shapes the national discourse with many Americans who rate the Benghazi case a major scandal not even knowing where it is.

A real scandal is the deliberate misinterpretation of the Second Amendment by the Right for political purposes and to serve the firearms industry, a distortion compounded the failure of the Left and centrist politicians to challenge the falsehoods. General citizens and corporate journalists apparently don’t read history and the Constitution – or are unfamiliar with the English language.

A real scandal is the continued takeover of the United States political and economic system by the military-industrial complex and by corporations, a power grab facilitated by five right-wing justices on the U.S. Supreme Court and their 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. That decision also laid the groundwork for the current IRS “scandal” because so many right-wing groups rushed to exploit the 501-c-4 tax-exempt “social welfare” category to carry out their political agendas.

The “social welfare” category was established for civic leagues or organizations not organized for profit but operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare. In 1959, under the administration of Dwight Eisenhower, the meaning of this section was changed dramatically when the IRS decided the word “exclusively” could, in effect, be read as “primarily.”

“For 54 years, the IRS has gotten away with the crime of changing the word ‘exclusively’ to ‘primarily,” said Lawrence O’Donnell on The Last Word Monday. “The IRS took a hard, clear word like ‘exclusively’ and changed it into a soft word ’primarily’ and then left it to the IRS agents to determine if your organization was primarily concerned with the promotion of social welfare.”

Thus, when the Supreme Court issued Citizens United in 2010 — prompting a flood of new 501-c-4 applications — some IRS bureaucrats sought ways to detect which of the applicants were likely exploiting the loophole. That led to the controversial use of word searches that were viewed as targeting Tea Party groups.

“The IRS does need some kind of test that helps them weed out political organizations attempting to register as tax-exempt 501(c)4 social welfare groups,” wrote Ezra Klein in the Wonkblog Monday. “But that test has to be studiously, unquestionably neutral.”

A real scandal is how the Bush administration and the Republican Party cratered the economy, giving the nation a full decade without net jobs growth and leaving behind a crippling depression. A real scandal is how the Republican Party held the debt ceiling hostage in 2011 and may well try it again.

A real scandal is how the GOP has been taken over by anti-democratic, anti-rational, anti-science, neo-confederate, nihilist, obstructionist, corporatist forces – becoming a political party unlike one ever seen in U.S. history. Conservatism is one thing, crazy is another.

Former Republican Mike Lofgren describes the GOP as “less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and … more like an apocalyptic cult,” one that is “ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, and ardently opposed to the established social and economic policy regime.”

It is also a party of liars and one ruthlessly determined to destroy a president because he’s a Democrat – along with the Democratic Party – to impose an authoritarian, neo-fascist regime on the United States.

A real scandal is how the right-wing propaganda juggernaut has manipulated the corporate media and exploited American naïveté, lack of information and fear, and how the listless Left with its “learned helplessness” has let right-wing extremists get away with it by failing to “step up to the plate” with an effective investment in public outreach.

Below, I have provided a list of links related to the IRS story. I don’t pretend to have them all, but have tried to provide a decent selection. ThinkProgress and Mother Jones are particularly informative and rational as usual. I hope they are helpful to you.

Oh, by the way, the Congressional Budget Office reports that the deficit “crisis” is solved for the next ten years. Now there’s a story.

Beverly Bandler’s public affairs career spans some 40 years. Her credentials include serving as president of the state-level League of Women Voters of the Virgin Islands and extensive public education efforts in the Washington, D.C. area for 16 years. She writes from Mexico.

Beckel, Michael. “IRS Employees Back Obama. Democrats.” The Center for Public Integrity, 2013-05-15.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-center-for-public-integrity/irs-employees-back-obama_b_3278655.html
Bernstein, Jared. “Blame Citizens United for the IRS scandal. The real outrage is why these political groups have tax-exempt status in the first place. Salon, 2013-05-15. http://www.salon.com/2013/05/15/blame_citizens_united_for_the_irs_scandal_partner/
Bouie, Jamelle. “Is the IRS ‘Scandal’ Even a Scandal?” The IRS made a political blunder, but not a bureaucratic one. The American Prospect, 2013-05-15. http://prospect.org/article/irs-scandal-even-scandal
Dickerson, John. IRS, AP, EPA, President Obama is doing more to help the cause of conservatism than anyone since Reagan.”
2013-05-14. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2013/05/barack_obama_irs_and_associated_press_scandals_the_president_s_administration.html [I find Dickerson’s hyperbole ridiculous, but I’ll include it for reference.]
Figueroa, Alyssa. WATCH: “Stewart Ridicules Obama for Apparent Cluelessness on Administration’s Latest Scandals.” Obama on when he learned about IRS targeting conservative groups: “I think it was on Friday.” AlterNet, 2013-05-15. http://www.alternet.org/economy/watch-stewart-ridicules-obama-apparent-cluelessness-administrations-latest-scandals
Goodman, Peter S. “The IRS Was Dead Right to Scrutinize Tea Party.” The Huffington Post, 2013-05-15. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-s-goodman/irs-tea-party_b_3280063.html
Hartmann, Thom. “The Real IRS Scandal.” Campaign for America’s Future, 2013-05-15. http://blog.ourfuture.org/20130515/the-real-irs-scandal?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-real-irs-scandal
Klein, Ezra. “The IRS report: Insubordination and incompetence, but not much of a conspiracy.” Washington Post, 2013-05-14. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/14/the-irs-report-insubordination-and-incompetence-but-not-much-of-a-conspiracy/
_______ “CBO says deficit problem is solved for the next ten years.” Washington Post, 2013-05-14. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/14/cbo-says-deficit-problem-is-solved-for-the-next-10-years/
Kroll, Andy. “5 Things You Need to Know in the Inspector General’s IRS Tea Party Scandal Report.” How and why IRS staffers subjected conservative nonprofits to special scrutiny. MotherJones, 2012-05-15. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/05/irs-tea-party-ig-report-congress
_______“Ex-IRS Director: Tea Party Groups Deserved Scrutiny, But IRS Bungled the Job.” Mother Jones, 2013-05-15. http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/05/irs-director-marcus-owens-tea-party-scandal
_______“The IRS Tea Party Scandal, Explained.” It’s Washington’s new outrage. What exactly happened and who is responsible?MotherJones, 2013-05-14. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/05/irs-tea-party-scandal-congress-nonprofit-obama
Maddow, Rachel. VIDEO. IRS “scandal.” Rachel Maddow & Dan Rather discuss. 2013-05-15. http://americablog.com/2013/05/rachel-maddow-irs-scandal-dan-rather-video.html
Matthews, Dylan. “Everything you need to know about the IRS scandal in one FAQ.” Washington Post, 2012-05-14.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/14/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-irs-scandal-in-one-faq/
Nuzzi, Olivia. “Joe Scarborough and Other Republicans’ Complete Hypocrisy on the IRS and Political Speech.” ‘Morning Joe’ once demanded IRS investigate NAACP. AlterNet, 2013-05-15. http://www.alternet.org/joe-scarborough-and-other-republicans-complete-hypocrisy-irs-and-political-speech
Palmer, Brian. “Taxing One’s Enemies: A brief history of scandals at the IRS.” Slate, 2013-05-14. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2013/05/irs_targeting_the_tea_party_a_history_of_tax_agency_scandals.html
Parry, Robert. “The Right’s ‘Scandal’ Funhouse Mirror.” ConsortiumNews, 2013-05-14. http://consortiumnews.com/2013/05/14/the-rights-scandal-funhouse-mirror/
Rayfield, Jillian. “Holder: IRS probe to look at possible civil rights violations, false statements .” Salon, 2013-05-15. http://www.salon.com/2013/05/15/holder_irs_probe_to_look_at_possible_civil_rights_violations_false_statements
_______ IRS: Two “rogue” employees targeted the Tea Party. Acting IRS chief Steven Miller reportedly blamed two “overly aggressive” employees for the reviews. http://www.salon.com/2013/05/15/irs_two_rogue_employees_targeted_the_tea_party/
Rich, Frank. Frank Rich on the National Circus: “The IRS, Benghazi, and the Republicans Who Cried Wolf.” New York Magazine, 2013-05-13. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/05/frank-rich-gop-finds-a-new-watergate.html
Rosenfeld, Steven. “The Real Scandal: Official Washington Goes Nuts Over IRS Doing Its Job.” Voter intimidation groups say they were intimidated by the IRS. AlterNet, 2013-05-14. http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/real-scandal-official-washington-goes-nuts-over-irs-doing-its-job
Seitz-Wald, Alex. “When the IRS targeted liberals.” Under George W. Bush, it went after the NAACP, Greenpeace, and even a liberal church. Salon, 2013-05-14. http://www.salon.com/2013/05/14/when_the_irs_targeted_liberals/
Sirota, David. “Stop holding Democrats to a different standard.” The recent IRS flap shows an obvious double standard in Washington’s reactions to Bush era and Obama era misconduct. Salon, 2013-05-14. http://www.salon.com/2013/05/14/on_scandals_obama_held_to_higher_standard_than_bush/
Stein, Sam. “Obama on IRS Scandal: ‘I have No Patience’ for It.” The Huffington Post, 2013-05-13. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/13/obama-irs-scandal_n_3266577.html
Toobin, Jeffrey. “The Real I.R.S. Scandal.” The New Yorker, 2013-05-14. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/05/irs-scandal-tea-party-oversight.html
Walsh, Joan. “Meet the group the IRS actually denied: Democrats!” Although Tea Party applicants got unfair IRS scrutiny, only one known group had status revoked. They’re Democrats. Salon, 2013-05-15. http://www.salon.com/2013/05/15/meet_the_group_the_irs_actually_revoked_democrats/
Weigel, David. “Here’s the Troublesome Part of the IG Report That Rescues Top Democrats from the IRS Scandal.” Slate, 2013-05-15. http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2013/05/15/here_s_the_troublesome_part_of_the_ig_report_that_rescues_top_democrats.html
Weisman, Jonathan and Matthew L. Wald. “I.R.S. Focus on Conservatives Gives G.O.P. An Issue to Seize On.” New York Times, 2013-05-12. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/us/politics/republicans-call-for-irs-inquiry-after-disclosure.html?gwh=03147B1C5B13A21B8DD76700F48AA2E1

(Originally posted at Consortium News)

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A hall of mirrors. (Photo credit: ŠJů)

By Robert Parry

The modern American news media operates like a giant right-wing funhouse mirror reflecting back some large things as small and some small things as large. The Right gets to decide which items will be misshapen in which ways – and the mainstream press then reinforces the distortions.

Though not very funny, this funhouse mirror has been in operation since at least the 1980s and is now so well established that most mainstream journalists and many politicians assume the exaggerations and minimizations are the way things really are.

This funhouse effect was first noticeable during the scandals of Ronald Reagan, when it didn’t seem to matter how much evidence was compiled about his complicity in grotesque human rights crimes including genocide in Central America, his tolerance of drug trafficking by his anticommunist clients, and his support for sophisticated propaganda operations to destroy troublesome journalists and other investigators.

The Right, as it built this hall of mirrors during those years, was determined to transform Reagan’s shocking crimes into something insignificant. Meanwhile, careerists in the mainstream news media learned to behave as if these distortions were just normal, the way things should be seen. If you insisted the funhouse reflections weren’t real, you quickly became an outcast.

For instance, the New York Times’ Raymond Bonner detected politically motivated massacres in El Salvador, including the extermination of entire villages in the area of El Mozote, but the Reagan administration and its right-wing allies simply explained that there had been no massacres and that Bonner was just a biased reporter who needed to be removed, which he soon was.

You might think that a cover-up of mass murder in El Salvador – as also was occurring in nearby Guatemala – would be a big scandal, especially since President Reagan was facilitating the slaughters by providing modern equipment to the killers and by discrediting brave journalists who tried to reveal the truth. But that was not how things appeared in the funhouse mirrors of Official Washington. The troublesome reporters were just getting what they deserved.

Similarly, Reagan’s Nicaraguan Contra rebels appeared – to human rights investigators and other independent observers – to be thugs who swept through Nicaraguan towns killing peasants, torturing prisoners, raping women and engaging in a variety of practices that one might, in other circumstances, call terrorism. But reflected in the funhouse mirror, these ugly images were made to disappear, along with well-documented evidence of Contra cocaine smuggling.

Even when reality occasionally intruded on Official Washington with outside disclosures about Reagan’s White House illegally shipping weapons to the Contras (because one of the U.S. planes was shot down over Nicaragua) and about Reagan’s team paying for some of those weapons by secretly selling missiles to Iran (as revealed by a Lebanese newspaper), the Iran-Contra scandal was quickly downsized into a legalistic dispute over whether it was ever okay to lie to Congress.

Trashing Gary Webb

The mainstream Washington news media became so accustomed to the funhouse mirrors that when Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News revived the Contra-cocaine story in 1996, the big newspapers – the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times – knew exactly what to do: reshape Webb from a respected investigative journalist into a conspiracy nut.

That distortion remained in place despite a CIA inspector general’s report that not only confirmed that the Nicaraguan Contras were deeply involved in the cocaine trade but that the Reagan administration knew about the problem and systematically covered it up. But Webb lost his job at the Mercury News, could not find a decent-paying position anywhere in journalism and, in 2004, committed suicide. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Warning in Gary Webb’s Death.”]

The funhouse mirror even affects how Official Washington understands historic scandals like the two October Surprise operations – the one in 1968 when Richard Nixon’s campaign sabotaged President Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks to give Nixon an edge in that tight election and the one in 1980 when Ronald Reagan’s campaign used similar tactics to frustrate President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to free 52 American hostages then held in Iran.

Again, no matter how much proof is piled up, Official Washington won’t see what’s lying there in front of it – even though the two October Surprise cases also appear to have been the starting points for the Watergate scandal for Nixon and the Iran-Contra scandal for Reagan, respectively. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Rethinking Watergate/Iran-Contra” or Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative.]

The Right’s funhouse mirror also means that tiny or fabricated scandals implicating Democrats and progressives are turned into something huge. When Bill Clinton was in office, it was Whitewater and “Clinton’s Mysterious Deaths.” After Barack Obama took office, it was “Fast and Furious,” the Benghazi talking points and now the Internal Revenue Service asking extra questions to Tea Party groups that wanted to get tax-exempt status.

Yet, even as the Republicans insist that the IRS asking Tea Party groups some extra questions is equal to or worse than Watergate, it’s been noted that Republican voiced no such protests in 2004 when George W. Bush’s IRS – responding to Republican demands – instigated a two-year audit of the NAACP and threatened to take away the historic civil rights group’s tax-exempt status because NAACP chairman Julian Bond had criticized Bush’s Iraq War and his trampling of the Constitution.

In other words, even in parallel cases (although asking a couple of dozen extra questions isn’t nearly as intrusive or expensive as a two-year audit), the funhouse mirror makes right-wing political groups the victims of “tyranny” under President Obama while the NAACP was just getting its comeuppance under President Bush.

But the larger question is: Can a democratic Republic long survive with such systematic distortions of reality. What will happen if one side of America’s political equation – the Right – continues to possess a vast and sophisticated media apparatus, a vertically integrated structure meshing newspapers, newsmagazine and books with radio, TV and the Internet in a synergy that spreads the right-wing message and maximizes profits, while the other side – the Left – has nothing comparable, just scattered and underfunded outlets that have to fend for themselves?

Compounding this situation is the fact that the careerist mainstream media knows that there’s no risk – and a great benefit – to leap onto the Right’s “scandal” bandwagons when they roll by and there’s virtually no upside and a big downside to report on real scandals that get in the Right’s way.

There have been too many good reporters, like Raymond Bonner and Gary Webb, crushed under the wheels of the right-wing juggernaut. For average Americans, the only advice is that they must realize that they are inside a media funhouse and that the mirrors don’t reflect the real story.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

(Originally posted at Consortium News)

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Call me a hopeless dreamer, but there ought to be a rule in politics banning anyone who caused a crisis from later bitching about the crisis. For the last four years, we’ve witnessed the Republicans, who voted for every Bush-era spending bill and irresponsible tax cut, crapping their cages over the size of the resulting deficit and debt — again, a deficit and debt that they themselves created without uttering even a shrug of protest during eight years in which a surplus transformed into a record deficit. Not a word — except to condemn the Democratic president who was unfortunate enough to inherit the chaos.

Likewise, as we observe the mayhem surrounding the dueling “scandals” of Benghazi, the IRS and the Associated Press phone records subpoena, the Republicans, true to form, are tripping over each other in a mad dash to scream “Impeach!” into the next nearest cable news video camera. There’s only one problem: when it comes to the IRS situation and the AP phone debacle, the Republicans created the chain-reactions that led to these scandals.

Let’s begin with the IRS scandal first.

While it looks really, really bad for one of the most feared agencies within the Democratically-controlled executive branch to have been exclusively scrutinizing conservative groups, we only need to rewind to the Supreme Court’s reprehensible Citizens United decision to figure out why all of this is going on. The conservative Roberts court not only opened the floodgates allowing unlimited and unregulated corporate money to flow into campaigns, but it also blurred the line between independent 527 political groups and non-profit social welfare groups, which are classified with the designation 501(c)(4). These social welfare groups can also apply for tax-exempt status from the IRS, a designation that used to be the strict privilege of groups that didn’t engage in political speech. But since Citizens United, it’s much more challenging to determine which social welfare groups are dealing in predominantly political speech.

So the IRS is faced with the unenviable challenge of filtering out groups that are stepping over the line and flagrantly abusing the social welfare moniker.

Now, yes, I get it. The IRS staffers shouldn’t have used exclusively right-wing search terms to weed through the applications. They should’ve broadened the criteria to include terms across the political spectrum. But without the conservative, pro-Republican movie created by the infamous Citizens United group in 2008, not to mention the conservative, Republican-affiliated Supreme Court deciding in its favor, we might not be talking about this right now. Furthermore, the Republican-created deficit and the subsequent histrionic demand for austerity led to government cut-backs, including at the IRS where, within the Exempt Organizations Division, the staff has been significantly reduced, thus increasing workloads. Toss into the mix a considerable rise in tax exempt applications and there it is: a formula for negligence. Thanks, Republicans.

On to the AP scandal.

Right off the bat, it might surprise you to learn that it was a cabal of 31 Republican senators who demanded the investigation that eventually led to the subpoena of the AP’s phone records. So there’s that.

In a broader sense, however, I can’t help but to laugh whenever I hear a Republican scream about government overreach on national security and civil liberties. For eight years, the Republicans established an infrastructure under the banner of fighting evildoers at home and abroad — an infrastructure that included a wide variety of trespasses against civil liberties.

They seized phone records from reporters without subpoenas, they spied on liberal groups, they established the usage of body scanners and heightened security measures at airports, they loudly and in some cases tearfully demanded the ability to wiretap American citizens without warrants, they passed the USA PATRIOT Act and ultimately created the modern American surveillance state. The Bush era gave us this counter-terrorism Frankenstein, and now they’re suddenly alarmed about it.

But now that they’re not longer in charge, they melodramatically collapse onto their group fainting couch every time the Justice Department or the president ventures into the same territory — or, ironically enough, whenever the president doesn’t do enough along those lines. Whatever the Obama administration does, they’re against it. And so it is with the AP phone records situation. Once again, as with the IRS scandal, the cries for investigations and even impeachment are loud and plentiful.

For example, Bush’s former attorney general Michael Mukasey described the AP phone records situation by saying, “It’s reprehensible conduct.” This is the same attorney general who took over a Justice Department that had seized phone records from four journalists — without subpoenas — without even flinching. Mukasey was also directly involved with warrantless wiretapping of Americans citizens. And when it appeared as if Congress might pass legislation preventing this egregious activity from continuing, Mukasey literally burst into tears during a speech in which he demanded the power to continue the eavesdropping program or else there would surely be another 9/11. I’m not making that up.

It’s not a stretch to suggest that the post-9/11 fear-mongering and massively exaggerated counter-terrorism hysteria manufactured an atmosphere of capitulation and resignation to flagrant government overreach and violations of privacy and personal dignity.

And who’s to blame for the fear-mongering? People like Matt Drudge, of course, who aided in the effort to scare the crapola out of us about the so-called “terrorist threat” and yet ran a screamer headline on his front page in which he cleverly conflated the AP story with wiretapping: “GOVT TAPS PRESS PHONE RECORDS FOR MONTHS.”

But during the Bush years, Drudge, along with Rush Limbaugh, Fox News Channel and the highest ranking Republican officials in Congress, demanded that all of Washington buy into the notion that you can’t have a Constitution if you’re dead. How do we know this? Well, because they actually said it. Over and over. A few examples for the record:

“You have no civil liberties if you are dead.” Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS)

“Over 3,000 Americans have no civil rights because they are no longer with us.” Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL)

“None of your civil liberties matter much after you’re dead.” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX)

“Our civil liberties are worthless if we are dead! If you are dead and pushing up daisies, if you’re sucking dirt inside a casket, do you know what your civil liberties are worth? Zilch, zero, nada.” Rush Limbaugh

Now, years later, these very same Republicans insist that “Big Sis” (Drudge’s nickname for Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano) and the “little black man-child” are forcing us to “grab the ankles” and submit to fascist authoritarian policies. Never mind that all of these policies were invented by Republicans and ballyhooed by Drudge in an atmosphere of manufactured fear during conservative control of, well, everything.

Throughout the duration of the Bush years, any and all opponents of these policies were shouted down as being with the terrorists — undermining American security and endangering the troops, while evildoers were lurking under our beds ready to spring forth and crash airplanes into everything. In those years, patriotism was defined by the speed and vigor by which we gave up our civil liberties in lieu of a lot of extra security. This mantra was defined, branded and codified by the Republican Party.

The post-9/11 maxim “either you’re with us, or you are with the terrorists” wasn’t the concoction of Michael Moore or Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or Janet Napolitano. It was entirely the purview of the Drudge-ruled authoritarian universe of fear and cowardice. And make no mistake: cowardice is precisely what it was — cry-baby cowardice masked by flag-waving machismo in support of a military-industrial-security complex that earned billions in profits on investments ranging from the invasion and occupation of Iraq to the production and deployment of body scanners. Rather than standing firm and upholding American values, the far-right embraced cowardice and set us on a course that’s become so deeply embedded into our political culture that it’s going to take many more years to unravel.

So as you observe the coming months and years of brain-melting scandal coverage surrounding these topics, blame a Republican. It’s okay. They deserve it.

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By Kim Barker and Justin Elliott

The same IRS office that deliberately targeted conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status in the run-up to the 2012 election released nine pending confidential applications of conservative groups to ProPublica late last year.

The IRS did not respond to requests Monday following up about that release, and whether it had determined how the applications were sent to ProPublica.

In response to a request for the applications for 67 different nonprofits last November, the Cincinnati office of the IRS sent ProPublica applications or documentation for 31 groups. Nine of those applications had not yet been approved—meaning they were not supposed to be made public. (We made six of those public, after redacting their financial information, deeming that they were newsworthy.)

On Friday, Lois Lerner, the head of the division on tax-exempt organizations, apologized to Tea Party and other conservative groups because the IRS’ Cincinnati office had unfairly targeted them. Tea Party groups had complained in early 2012 that they were being sent overly intrusive questionnaires in response to their applications.

That scrutiny appears to have gone beyond Tea Party groups to applicants saying they wanted to educate the public to “make America a better place to live” or that criticized how the country was being run, according to a draft audit cited by many outlets. The full audit, by the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration, will reportedly be released this week. (ProPublica was not contacted by the inspector general’s office.)  

Before the 2012 election, ProPublica devoted months to showing how dozens of social-welfare nonprofits had misled the IRS about their political activity on their applications and tax returns. Social-welfare nonprofits are allowed to spend money to influence elections, as long as their primary purpose is improving social welfare. Unlike super PACs and regular political action committees, they do not have to identify their donors.

In 2012, nonprofits that didn’t have to report their donors poured an unprecedented $322 million into the election. Much of that money — 84 percent — came from conservative groups. 

As part of its reporting, ProPublica regularly requested applications from the IRS’s Cincinnati office, which is responsible for reviewing applications from nonprofits.

Social welfare nonprofits are not required to apply to the IRS to operate. Many politically active new conservative groups apply anyway. Getting IRS approval can help with donations and help insulate groups from further scrutiny. Many politically active new liberal nonprofits have not applied.  

Applications become public only after the IRS approves a group’s tax-exempt status.

On Nov. 15, 2012, ProPublica requested the applications of 67 nonprofits, all of which had spent money on the 2012 elections. (Because no social welfare groups with Tea Party in their names spent money on the election, ProPublica did not at that point request their applications. We had requested the Tea Party applications earlier, after the groups first complained about being singled out by the IRS. In response, the IRS said it could find no record of the tax-exempt status of those groups — typically how it responds to requests for unapproved applications.)

Just 13 days after ProPublica sent in its request, the IRS responded with the documents on 31 social welfare groups.

One of the applications the IRS released to ProPublica was from Crossroads GPS, the largest social-welfare nonprofit involved in the 2012 election. The group, started in part by GOP consultant Karl Rove, promised the IRS that any effort to influence elections would be “limited.” The group spent more than $70 million from anonymous donors in 2012.

Applications were sent to ProPublica from five other social welfare groups that had told the IRS that they wouldn’t spend money to sway elections.  The other groups ended up spending more than $5 million related to the election, mainly to support Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Much of that money was spent by the Arizona group Americans for Responsible Leadership. The remaining four groups that told the IRS they wouldn’t engage in political spending were Freedom Path, Rightchange.com II, America Is Not Stupid and A Better America Now. 

The IRS also sent ProPublica the applications of three small conservative groups that told the agency that they would spend some money on politics: Citizen Awareness Project, the YG Network and SecureAmericaNow.org. (No unapproved applications from liberal groups were sent to ProPublica.)

The IRS cover letter sent with the documents was from the Cincinnati office, and signed by Cindy Thomas, listed as the manager for Exempt Organizations Determinations, whom a biography for a Cincinnati Bar Association meeting in January says has worked for the IRS for 35 years. (Thomas often signed the cover letters of responses to ProPublica requests.) The cover letter listed an IRS employee named Sophia Brown as the person to contact for more information about the records. We tried to contact both Thomas and Brown today but were unable to reach them.

After receiving the unapproved applications, ProPublica tried to determine why they had been sent. In emails, IRS spokespeople said ProPublica shouldn’t have received them.

“It has come to our attention that you are in receipt of application materials of organizations that have not been recognized by the IRS as tax-exempt,” wrote one spokeswoman, Michelle Eldridge. She cited a law saying that publishing unauthorized returns or return information was a felony punishable by a fine of up to $5,000 and imprisonment of up to five years, or both.

In response, ProPublica’s then-general manager and now president, Richard Tofel, said, “ProPublica believes that the information we are publishing is not barred by the statute cited by the IRS, and it is clear to us that there is a strong First Amendment interest in its publication.”

ProPublica also redacted parts of the application to omit financial information.

Jonathan Collegio, a spokesman for Crossroads GPS, declined to comment today on whether he thought the IRS’s release of the group’s application could have been linked to recent news that the Cincinnati office was targeting conservative groups.

Last December, Collegio wrote in an email: “As far as we know, the Crossroads application is still pending, in which case it seems that either you obtained whatever document you have illegally, or that it has been approved.”

This year, the IRS appears to have changed the office that responds to requests for nonprofits’ applications. Previously, the IRS asked journalists to fax requests to a number with a 513 area code — which includes Cincinnati. ProPublica sent a request by fax on Feb. 5 to the Ohio area code. On March 13, that request was answered by David Fish, a director of Exempt Organizations Guidance, in Washington, D.C. 

In early April, a ProPublica reporter’s request to the Ohio fax number bounced back. An IRS spokesman said at the time the number had changed “recently.” The new fax number begins with 202, the area code for Washington, D.C. 

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They say two wrongs don’t make a right, but ignoring one of those wrongs while vilifying the other is intellectually dishonest and violently hypocritical, among other things. And certainly that’s the case surrounding news that the IRS targeted tea party groups as a means of determining and verifying their tax-exempt status has resurrected a familiar debate about government overreach and abuse of power.

As of right now, it’s unknown whether the IRS was acting on the behalf of the Obama campaign or the Democratic Party. What we do know, however, is that it’s not the first time something like this has happened. We also know that the Democrats have almost universally condemned the actions of the IRS, as they’ve done when the congressional Republicans and, naturally, the Bush administration used the nearly unlimited might of the government to engage in similar investigations — or worse. And we know that the lock-step party, the Republicans, spent eight years defending, applauding and enabling Bush abuses on this front, while subsequently cheerleading the congressional Republicans as they carry forward the politics of intimidation and government overreach into the Obama era.

Let’s begin there. The congressional Republicans are outraged by the IRS story, but they haven’t been able to scramble to the floor of the House quickly enough to target left-leaning groups.

1. Planned Parenthood. After a hoax video was produced by James O’Keefe and released by a professional clown-wrangler, the late Andrew Breitbart, the Republican Party has engaged in a years-long effort to strip the organization, which offers cancer screenings and other affordable medical services for women, of critical funding from the government. The votes in the House as well as in state legislatures from Arizona to New Jersey to Texas and New Hampshire — to the tune of at least $60 million — are nothing more than assault against a political enemy.

2. ACORN. The government attack on ACORN, traditionally a left-leaning organization, might be hilarious if it wasn’t so tragic. As with Planned Parenthood, the Republican inquisition against ACORN was nothing more than a politically-motivated witch hunt based on, once again, a selectively-edited prank video by a scam artist, O’Keefe, who’s been convicted of wiretapping a sitting U.S. Senator and forced in court to pay $100,000 in restitution to a fired ACORN employee. Yet the entire Republican congressional delegation lined up behind Breitbart and O’Keefe and destroyed ACORN, which entirely shut down in 2010. But that hasn’t stopped the Republicans from continuing to vote on at least several occasions to defund the nonexistent group. In fact, last week the chairman House Appropriations Committee Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) introduced a section into a spending bill that reads: “None of the funds made available in this Act may be distributed to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) or its subsidiaries or successors.”

3. Voter ID Laws and Voter Purges. Whether it’s Governor Rick Scott of Florida purging voter rolls of minority voters who are likely to vote for Democratic candidates or states like Georgia, Indiana, Kansas and Tennessee passing restrictive Voter ID laws, the Republicans are making sure that fewer and fewer Democrats will be able to freely cast a ballot — our most sacred right as citizens in a representative democracy.

What about the Bush years?

4. The Bush Justice Department Targeted Democrats for Prosecution. Back in 2007, the House Judiciary Committee investigated charges that attorney general Alberto Gonzales singled out prominent Democrats for prosecution, specifically Pennsylvania Democrats — an assertion that was backed up by Dick Thornburgh, the attorney general under Reagan and Bush 41.

5. The Attorney Firing Scandal. Of course there was the attorney firing scandal in which the Bush Justice Department fired a slate of U.S. attorneys for strictly partisan reasons, either because the attorneys were prosecuting too many Republicans or because they weren’t prosecuting enough Democrats.

6. The Bush IRS Audited Greenpeace and the NAACP. Not only was the NAACP suspiciously audited during Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign, but high profile Republicans like Joe Scarborough had previously supported an audit of the organization even though he’s suddenly shocked by the current IRS audit story. Also in 2004, the Wall Street Journal reported that the IRS audited the hyper-liberal group Greenpeace at the request of Public Interest Watch, a group that’s funded by Exxon-Mobil.

7. The Bush IRS Collected Political Affiliation Data on Taxpayers. In 2006, a contractor hired by the IRS collected party affiliation via a search of voter registration roles in a laundry list of states: Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and Wisconsin. This begs the obvious question: why? Why would the IRS need voter registration and party affiliation information?

8. The Bush FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force Targeted Civil Rights / Anti-war Activists. In 2005, an ACLU investigation revealed that both the FBI and the JTTF surveilled and gathered intelligence about a variety of liberal groups including PETA and the Catholic Workers, along with other groups that it hyperbolically referred to as having “semi-communistic ideology.”

9. The Bush Pentagon Spied on Dozens of Anti-war Meetings. Also in 2005, the Department of Defense tracked 1,500 “suspicious incidents” and spied on four-dozen meetings involving, for example, anti-war Quaker groups and the like. Yes, really. The Bush administration actually kept track of who was attending these meetings down to descriptions of the vehicles used by the attendees, calling to mind the pre-Watergate era when the government investigated 100,000 Americans during the Vietnam War.

10. The Bush FBI Targeted Journalists with the New York Times and the Washington Post. Yesterday, it was learned that a U.S. attorney, Ronald Machen, subpoenaed and confiscated phone records from the Associated Press as part of a leak investigation regarding an article about a CIA operation that took place in Yemen to thwart a terrorist attack on the anniversary of Bin Laden’s death. Well, this story pales in comparison with the Bush administration’s inquisition against the reporters who broke the story about the NSA wiretapping program. In fact, the Justice Department considered invoking the Espionage Act of 1917, the archaic sequel to the John Adams-era Alien and Sedition Acts. The Bush FBI seized phone records — without subpoena — from four American journalists, including Raymond Bonner and Jane Perlez. How do we know this for sure? Former FBI Director Robert Mueller apologized to the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Adding… Bush White House Warns Bill Maher After 9/11. Congressional Republicans Condemn Moveon.org. I’ve coupled these two instances into one simply because they each underscore the Republican penchant for bullying dissenters. Shortly after 9/11, Bill Maher committed the mortal sin of suggesting that terrorists weren’t “cowards” (he was merely agreeing with conservative fire-eater Dinesh D’Souza). White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, speaking from the White House, warned Maher: “people have to watch what they say and watch what they do.” Maher’s show at the time, Politically Incorrect, was cancelled shortly thereafter. Years later, Moveon.org criticized conservative superhero David Petraeus with a full-page ad featuring the awkward play-on-words “General Betray Us.” George W. Bush himself pilloried Moveon and the Senate voted to condemn the ad while lionizing Petraeus (a love affair that came to an end last year).

With the IRS and AP stories, any cursory glimpse at the news will prove that Democrats — even liberal bloggers — have been critical of the Obama administration’s actions, just as they had been with the actions of the Bush White House and the Republican Party. But Republicans? No such fairness or honesty. Of course. And it’s also important to note the distinction between these recent stories and what’s obviously a Republican textbook strategy of employing any means necessary in suppressing its opposition — from the ballot box to the pages of our top-shelf newspapers. This is what they do: they intimidate, bully, prosecute and silence their critics as a matter of routine. And they rarely apologize or accept responsibility for it.

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Shocking revelations from the ACLU on the Internal Revenue Service’s violation of personal privacy:

IRS documents released Wednesday suggest that the tax collection agency believes it can read American citizens’ emails without a warrant.

The files were released to the American Civil Liberties Union under a Freedom of Information Act request. The organization is working to determine just how broadly federal law enforcement agencies like the FBI or the IRS’ Criminal Tax Division interpret their authority to snoop through inboxes.

The IRS apparently interprets that authority very broadly, the documents show: as long as you’ve stored your email in a cloud service like Google Mail, and as long as those emails haven’t been deleted after a few months, the agency thinks it doesn’t need a warrant to read them.

The idea of IRS agents poking through your email account might sound at the very least creepy, and maybe unconstitutional. But the IRS does have a legal leg to stand on: the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 allows government agencies to in many cases obtain emails older than 180 days without a warrant.

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David Gill answers a question during a debate with Rodney Davis for the 13th Congressional District in Normal, Ill., in October 2012. Gill, who lost that election, joined forces with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington to challenge IRS oversight of social welfare nonprofits. (Carlos T. Miranda, The Pantagraph/AP Photo)

by Kim Barker ProPublica, Feb. 20, 2013, 11 a.m.

A former Illinois congressional candidate and a government watchdog organization have teamed up to sue the Internal Revenue Service, claiming the agency should bar dark money groups from funding political ads.

The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday by David Gill, his campaign committee and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, is the first to challenge how the IRS regulates political spending by social welfare nonprofits, campaign-finance experts say.

As ProPublica has reported, these nonprofits, often called dark money groups because they don’t have to identify their donors, have increasingly become major players in politics since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling in early 2010.

Gill, an emergency room doctor who has advocated for health-care reform, including a single-payer plan, was the Democratic candidate for the 13th district in Illinois last year. After a tight race, Gill ended up losing to the Republican candidate by 1,002 votes — a loss the lawsuit blames “largely, if not exclusively,” on spending by the American Action Network, a social welfare nonprofit.

It’s impossible to say for certain why Gill lost. He had lost three earlier races for a congressional seat.

But the American Action Network, launched in 2010 by former Minnesota Republican Sen. Norm Coleman, played a role. It reported spending almost $1.5 million on three TV commercials and Internet ads opposing Gill, mainly in the weeks right before the election. That was more than any other outside group spent on the race, and more than Gill’s principal campaign committee spent on the entire election, according to Federal Election Commission records.

Though Gill had never held public office, the American Action Network ads described him as “a mad scientist” who supported sending jobs to China, channeling money to the failed green-energy company Solyndra, and making a mess out of health care and Medicare.

Gill said he ran into people every day who said they weren’t voting for him because of claims he would destroy Medicare.

“I think that certainly the money put forward — they saw that they could have an impact here,” Gill said of the American Action Network. “They wanted to put their money where it could make a difference between victory and defeat.”

Dan Conston, spokesman for the American Action Network, described CREW as a “left-wing front group” in an email. He said Gill was a “failed candidate with an extreme ideology, looking to blame anyone but himself for losing his fourth-straight congressional election.”

Nonprofits like the American Action Network have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into political ads in the last two election cycles. Like super PACs, these groups can accept unlimited donations. But super PACs must identify their donors, allowing voters to see who is behind their messages.

The Gill lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, alleges the IRS failed to properly regulate the American Action Network, citing seemingly contradictory definitions the agency has applied to such groups for years.

The statute governing social welfare nonprofits says they should be operated “exclusively” for promoting social welfare. But the IRS paved the way for political spending by these groups by interpreting “exclusively” as meaning the groups had to only be “primarily” engaged in promoting the public good. Some groups have taken this to mean they can spend up to 49 percent of their money on election ads.

The lawsuit claims the IRS’ interpretation of the law “is arbitrary, capricious, and contrary to law,” and asks for an injunction prohibiting the agency from using it.

Melanie Sloan, CREW’s executive director, blamed the IRS for sitting on its hands as social welfare nonprofits have been formed specifically to run negative ads paid for by anonymous donors.

“Now the IRS can explain its deplorable inaction in federal court,” she said.

The IRS didn’t respond to requests for comment Tuesday. It typically doesn’t comment on issues related to individual taxpayers.

The American Action Network has been one of the more controversial dark money groups active in politics. Conston said the American Action Network’s primary focus was on non-electoral activities and called the dispute over the group’s election spending a “tired long-since settled argument.”

In filings to the IRS, the group said it spent $25.7 million in its 2010 tax year. In separate filings to the Federal Election Commission, it reported spending about $19.4 million over the same period on political ads, or about 76 percent of the total expenditures reported to the IRS.

If the group stays on its current schedule, American Action Network won’t file its taxes covering the 2012 election until May 2014.

(Originally posted at Pro Publica)

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Occupy Wall St movement has largely disappeared from the public’s eye, not because it has diminished in ambition or desire to spark a social revolution, but because it has been working on the next phase of it’s agenda – taking the economy back from Wall St and giving to the people. In a fascinating new project that could deliver some serious results if it catches on, “The Rolling Jubilee,” Occupy Wall Street-affiliated operatives at Strike Debt have been coordinating with the IRS, and debt-brokers world to buy up distressed debt from lenders at rock bottom prices in order to forgive it. From their site:

A bailout of the people by the people.

We buy debt for pennies on the dollar, but instead of collecting it, we abolish it. We cannot buy specific individuals’ debt – instead, we help liberate debtors at random through a campaign of mutual support, good will, and collective refusal.

---

The Jubilee begins November 15
with “The People’s Bailout,” a variety show and telethon in NYC.
All proceeds will go directly to buying people’s debt and cancelling it.

Here’s their official video explaining the concept and process in greater detail:

It’s important that projects like this gain mass support, otherwise Wall St will find a way to smash it to pieces. The financial industry makes billions of dollars buying and trading debt – there’s a fortune to be made hiking interest rates on poor people and forcing them into a life time of loan repayments and abject poverty, and they won’t give up the market without a fight. So please raise awareness about this project in the hope that it captures the public’s imagination and takes off.

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