TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 277.
Archive for 2014
February 10, 2014
MARC CAPUTO: Hillary Clinton’s Univision ties met with near-silence in media. “The Spanish-language network, which broadcasts from Doral, has remarkably close ties with Clinton — from the way the media giant covers immigration to the financial backing of its top leader to a new initiative between the network and the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation. Barely a peep from the press, though. . . . Clinton’s face is featured in five of seven slides on the Univision website promoting the partnership with the foundation’s ‘Too Small to Fail’ initiative. Taking no press questions at the event, Clinton was featured in the type of feel-good classroom setting that politicians on the campaign trail crave.”
TRAIN WRECK UPDATE: AIDS patients in Obamacare limbo as insurers reject checks.
MICKEY KAUS: Schumer’s Latest Immigration Scheme. “You have to watch that guy like a hawk. I don’t trust him either. Maybe we could postpone legalization until Sen. Schumer leaves office. I see common ground!”
“SMART DIPLOMACY” UPDATE: Is Syria Now a Direct Threat to the United States? The militancy nurtured by the civil war appears to be spreading—just as diplomacy falters. “Over the last two weeks, Obama administration officials have signaled—sometimes intentionally, sometimes not—that a worst-case scenario is emerging in Syria. Peace talks are at a virtual standstill. An emboldened President Bashar al-Assad has missed two deadlines to turn over his deadliest chemical weapons. And radical extremists who have fought in Syria are carrying out attacks in Egypt and allegedly aspire to strike the United States as well.” As I’ve noted before, John Kerry’s role is to make Hillary Clinton’s unimpressive tenure at State look better by comparison. So far, he’s fulfilling it perfectly.
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HUNGER GAMES UPDATE: Gallup: Only “State” With A Positive Economic Confidence Score Was Washington, D.C.
CLAUDIA ROSETT ON THE HYPOCRISY OF THE UNITED NATIONS CONDEMNING THE CATHOLIC CHURCH OVER SEX ABUSE:
That’s rich coming from the U.N., which has still not solved its own festering problems of peacekeeper sex abuse, including the rape of minors. Exposing abusers and holding them to account is a great idea. The Vatican has spent years addressing the scandal of its own past handling of such cases. But the U.N. hardly engages in the transparency it is now promoting.
The U.N. releases only generic statistics on violations committed by personnel working under its flag. The U.N. doesn’t share with the public such basic information as the names of the accused or the details of what they did to people the U.N. dispatched them to protect. Blue berets accused of sex crimes are simply sent back to their home countries, where in the majority of cases they drop off the radar.
Though the U.N. has been recording a drop in sex-abuse cases since it began releasing numbers in 2007, the number of alleged instances of rape and exploitation each year still runs into the dozens. (This may understate the realities, given the hurdles to victims coming forward, often in societies in tumult or at war.) From 2007-13, the U.N. reported more than 600 allegations of rape or sexual exploitation, with 354 substantiated—many of them involving minors. The numbers do not convey how ugly some of these cases get. Details can occasionally be gleaned when an incident seeps past the U.N. wall of omerta and makes it into the news, as with the peacekeeper gang rape in 2011 of a Haitian teenager, whose agony was caught on video.
If it weren’t for double standards, the U.N. would have no standards at all.
HEMORRHAGING SUPPORT: 15% of Michael Bloomberg’s anti-gun mayors leave. The issue is enough of a political loser that even the big bucks won’t keep them around.
WHY DOES RAND PAUL KEEP ATTACKING BILL CLINTON ABOUT SEX?
1. He believes in the principle of workplace equality and is dismayed at how predatory individuals seeking personal sexual pleasure have disrupted the meritocracy that should prevail.
2. Someone on the Republican side needs to be able to counter the “war on women” propaganda of the Democrats, and no one else seems to have the guts or skill to do it properly.
3. He dislikes the idea that the distinction of first female President should go to a woman who leveraged her power through a male who she knew was taking advantage of women.
4. He knows that if the Democrats had material like this to use against a Republican candidate, they would have no mercy.
I’m sure you can help me lengthen this list.
More at the link.
ANGELO CODEVILLA: Live Not By Lies.
Being human, politicians lie. Even in the best regimes. The distinguishing feature of totalitarian regimes however, is that they are built on words that the rulers know to be false, and on somehow constraining the people to speak and act as if the lies were true. Thus the people hold up the regime by partnering in its lies. Thus, when we use language that is “politically correct” – when we speak words acceptable to the regime even if unfaithful to reality – or when we don’t call out politicians who lie to our faces, we take part in degrading America.
The case in point is Television personality Bill O’Reilly who, in his pre-Super Bowl interview with Barack Obama, suffered the President to tell him – and his audience of millions – that the IRS’ targeting of conservative groups had been a minor “bonehead” mistake in the Cincinnati office, because there is “not even a smidgen of corruption” in that agency. O’ Reilly knew but did not say that both he and the President know this to be a lie, that the key official in the affair, Lois Lerner, had made sure that the IRS’s decision on how to treat the Tea Party matter would be made in Washington by writing: that the matter was “very dangerous” and that “Cincy should probably NOT have these cases.”
O’ Reilly did not call out the lie. Nor did he just remain silent. Rather, he said of Obama that: “his heart is in the right place.”
I have written in this space: “Obama’s premeditated, repeated, nationally televised lies… are integral, indeed essential, to his presidency and to the workings of the US government.” They are neither innocent opinions nor mistakes. Rather, they grab for power by daring the listener to call them what they are. Failure to do so, never mind gratuitously granting them bona fides, is redefining our regime.
Nasty, brutish – and false – as was the Progressive assault on George W. Bush: e.g. “Bush lied, people died,” Michael Moore’s “Farenheit 9/11,” etc., was very much part of a free society, in which people freely contest each other’ view of reality. Alas, the Progressive ruling class is instituting a regime in which no one may contest what it knows full well to be false without suffering consequences.
How, for example, is one to react to the White House’s explanation for the Congressional Budget Office’s projection that Obamacare will reduce the number of full-time workers in America by some 2.5 million over the next decade?
With scorn, mockery, and contempt.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Benjamin Ginsberg: Can We Halt Administrative Bloat? “Increases in administrative staffing drove a 28 percent expansion of the higher education work force from 2000 to 2012. This period, of course, includes several years of severe recession when colleges saw their revenues decline and many found themselves forced to make hard choices about spending. The character of these choices is evident from the data reported by Carlson. Colleges reined in spending on instruction and faculty salaries, hired more part-time adjunct faculty and fewer full-time professors and, yet, found the money to employ more and more administrators and staffers.”
ANOTHER THIRD AMENDMENT CASE: SWAT Uses Woman’s Home without Permission. ‘You all need to leave, you can’t be in your house.’
Some related thoughts here.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: An Immigration Morality Tale. “One of the strangest things about illegal immigration is that a nation that is monitored, taped, videoed, and bugged, that is struggling now with the AP, IRS, and NSA scandals whose common theme is excessive government intrusions in our private lives, knows absolutely nothing about those who arrive illegally into the U.S.”
NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: The Hill: Administration weighs drone strike against American citizen.
LEGAL EDUCATION UPDATE: 8th Circuit to Hear Appeal by Unsuccessful Republican Faculty Candidate Against Iowa Law School Dean. “The legal question at the heart of the original case has potentially far-reaching implications for public and private legal education. To wit, whether a candidate for a faculty position at a state law school could provide sufficient evidence that, in violation of her constitutional rights, she had been denied employment because of her political beliefs.”
JOHN FUND: Duel In The Sun: Why San Diego’s Tuesday mayoral election matters nationally. “It’s astounding the amount of money that’s being poured into this race from government unions.”
SHOCKER: Obamacare’s Restaurant Calorie-Label Mandate Is A Complete Mess.
After the flawed rollout of the Affordable Care Act, most of Washington focused on repairing and delaying the law’s most obvious problems. However, a handful of lawmakers have finally noticed one of the law’s hidden regulations: a strict calorie labeling requirement for chain restaurants, vending machines, and other food distributors. What at first appeared to be more bureaucratic but harmless government do-gooding is now proving a verifiable nightmare for small business owners and federal regulators alike. . . .
FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg admitted that she “actually thought [calorie labeling] would be one of the more straightforward tasks…but little did I know how complicated it would be.” Hamburg’s concerns are hardly unfounded, but it’s small business owners and franchisees—not FDA bureaucrats—that will feel the most pain under the new law.
Although the law is designed to target corporate fast-food giants, in practice it will largely affect individual franchises that effectively operate as independent small businesses. For example, over 80 percent of McDonald’s locations are owned and operated by franchisees. Each of these franchisees will now be tasked with complying with the mandate–paying for new signage, removing profit-generating advertisements to make room for the calorie data, updating menus every time recipies change, and accommodating inspectors.
Moreover, the regulation itself is so poorly constructed that it presents unforeseen hurdles for franchisees. Pizzas, sandwiches, and burritos, among other common fast-food meals, can be custom-ordered in hundreds of combinations, and the law arguably requires restaurants to provide customers with calorie data for each. It’s also unclear whether non-traditional food retailers—for example, bookstore cafes, hotel minibars, and food trucks—will be subject to the labeling requirements. Furthermore, it’s unclear what penalties restaurateurs will face if they inadvertently fail to comply.
Sounds like the whole thing should be found void for vagueness. Of course, if we actually struck down laws that were so unclear that a person of ordinary intelligence must guess at their meaning, we’d be striking down a lot of laws. Which would be fine.
COMMON GROUND: Rand Paul is pitching libertarian ideas to social conservatives. And they’re listening. Well, without taking anything away from Rand Paul, it’s also the case that Barack Obama is selling a lot of people on the virtues of libertarianism.
THEY HAVE LEARNED NOTHING AND FORGOTTEN NOTHING: Clintons Still Hate Obama-Supporting Democrats.
Forgive and forget? Not Bill and Hillary.
A system of political rewards and punishments devised by the political power couple set aside “a special circle of Clinton hell . . . for people who had endorsed [President] Obama,” according to “HRC,” a new book by Politico former White House bureau chief Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes of The Hill.
The most helpful Clintonistas were rated “1” under the Clintons’ rating system, while turncoat former allies, such as John Kerry, received “7’s.”
The Clinton camp would later “joke about the fates of the folks they felt had betrayed them,” the book said.
“Bill Richardson: investigated; John Edwards: disgraced by scandal; Chris Dodd: stepped down; . . . Ted Kennedy: dead,” an aide quipped, according to the book.
Ready for Hillary?
ANDREW MCCARTHY: The GOP Should Use the Power of the Purse: The way to cure the rogue behavior of Obama’s agencies is not to pay for it.
In truth, there appears to be no smidgen of the IRS case that is not tainted by corruption: from the years-long conspiracy to undermine the free-speech rights of Obama opponents, through the Justice Department’s strategic selection of a heavy Obama-campaign donor to conduct an “investigation” in which there was little apparent interest in questioning witnesses, on up to the current effort to institutionalize the very misconduct that the president and his redoubtable attorney general once told us was “intolerable,” “inexcusable,” “outrageous,” and “unacceptable.”
As the Journal’s editors point out, the existing rules governing non-profit organizations that are tax-exempt under Section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code have been in effect unchanged since 1959. But after President Obama took office in 2009, tea-party groups, many of which organize themselves under 501(c)(4) for fundraising purposes (just as left-leaning groups do), rose up in protest against his governance. The Tea Party led a rout of congressional Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections. With Obama’s own reelection bid on the horizon, suddenly the purportedly non-partisan IRS began fretting over its 501(c)(4) guidelines.
To read them, NR’s Eliana Johnson observes, is to find “guidance that is more subjective than objective.” But that is why the guidance is not read in a vacuum. What a “social welfare organization” is, and the degree to which it may engage in “political activities” so long as doing so does not constitute the organization’s “primary activity,” are matters determined by the application of a half-century’s experience and practice.
Under that extensive precedent, no one at IRS seemed to have any problem with tax-exempt status for, to take just one example, MoveOn.org — an organization the IRS decided was not overly “political” notwithstanding its history of in-your-face political activism and its website’s proclamation of a mission “to lead, participate in, and win campaigns for progressive change.” No, it was only when conservatives became a threat to a second term of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” that the IRS decided its guidance needed clarification.
The IRS scandal, though egregious, is only one in a series of gross Obama-administration abuses of power — and if you expected the Obama Justice Department, at the urging of the Obama White House, to get to the bottom of what the Obama IRS was doing to Obama’s political opposition, then you probably also expected you’d be able to keep a smidgen of your health insurance. So the question on every conservative’s tongue has become, “How can we stop this?”
Simple: We stop paying for it.
Also zero out their conference budget. They seem to care about that a lot, and so do the other agencies that are misbehaving. You can’t fire bureaucrats, but they’re exquisitely sensitive to things that affect their quality of life.
SO, I’D SAY THAT today’s feminists are a bunch of shrinking violets like the Victorian spinsters they affect to disdain, but actually, those Victorian spinsters were okay with seminude statuary. And remember when Democrats made fun of John Ashcroft for draping a statue? “The episode was quickly seized upon by pundits and satirists as a symbol of Ashcroft’s allegedly puritanical and censorious bearing.” Perhaps Wellesley can change its name to John Ashcroft University.