Tag: scandal

Categories
crime and punishment insider corruption

IRS Case Closed! The End! Letsmoveon!

Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings says it’s time to stop investigating the latest IRS shenanigans. According to him, closed-​door interviews with IRS staffers prove that no White House or other Washington officials were involved in targeting the applications for tax-​exempt status of conservative groups for special obstructionist attention.

Whew! Crisis over.

But the congressman is ignoring a few things.

For example, history. Everything we are now learning (visit TaxProf Blog for the latest news roundups) indicates that this latest shocking scandal only confirms what we already knew about the Internal Revenue Service. The outfit does not play nice. It is not animated by unwavering concern for truth, justice, and even-​handed enforcement of its welter of wretched regulations.

More immediately, the congressman is ignoring the fact that the IRS’s ideological targeting is not resolvable into the actions of one or two frazzled clerks in Cincinnati. (Even if some reporters have valiantly striven to show, in the words of the San Francisco Chronicle, “How One Overworked IRS Worker Ignited the Tea-​Party Targeting Scandal.”)

We know that many DC-​based officials linked to the targeting of conservative groups quit, were transferred, or were put on administrative leave right after the scandal broke. We know that IRS employees in Cincinnati have testified that the DC office especially requested Tea Party files. We know that DC lawyers both reviewed the intrusive questionnaires sent to Tea Party groups and drafted many of the questions. Etc. All irrelevant?

Come on, Cummings.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
tax policy

End the IRS?

Every day: more revelations, more questions.

Was the IRS’s repressive targeting of Tea Party and similar groups seeking tax-​exempt status “accidental”? Were only a few rogue or harried clerks responsible for the repressive targeting? Did anybody in the White House know about the repressive targeting as it happened? What does the frequency of IRS commissioners’ visits to the Obama White House tell us? What about the IRS union chief’s visit with Obama just before the repressive targeting began?

And that’s not all. How similar is the latest IRS repressive targeting of the enemies of those in power to previous IRS repressive targeting of the enemies of those in power? What about all the other forms of riding roughshod over individuals’ rights that the IRS routinely perpetrates?

And then there’s the practical question: What do we do about the mess?

Well, we could try to curtail the allegedly “unusual” abuses of government power and rights violations.

But what if the problem runs deeper?

Former presidential candidate Ron Paul argues that the problem lies “in the extraordinary power the tax system grants the IRS.” He very plausibly puts the current scandals in the context of the bureau’s central mandate: “The very purpose of the IRS is to transfer wealth from one group to another while violating our liberties in the process. Thus the only way Congress can protect our freedoms is to repeal the income tax and shutter the doors of the IRS once and for all.”

Hard? Yes. Doable? Yes — but only if such ideas catch on with more leaders than just the indefatigable Ron Paul.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
folly media and media people

A Brief Against Weiner

Congressman Anthony Weiner: Insert joke here.

Perhaps because I pronounced his name as “whiner” rather than “wiener,” I didn’t titter as much as the rest of America did upon the Twitter release of his notorious underpants photo.

Weiner stonewalled for as long as he could. Was the photo in question of his own dear, downstairs corporality? He couldn’t “say with certitude.”

Yesterday’s overdue confession that he’d fouled up a direct message on Twitter, sending it publicly, instead — and then lied about it — confirmed nearly everybody’s suspicions. (Everyone it seems except too many slanted lame-​stream media folks, who instead attacked the now magnificently vindicated Andrew Breitbart.) Weiner admits to having sent inappropriate messages and photos to attractive, younger women.

But, alas, Weiner’s mea culpa was accompanied by his insistence that he would not resign.

For lying about his accounts being “hacked” — and thus cry-​wolfishly raising national security issues — and for proving himself an utter idiot at a simple messaging system, he should. That is, he should resign for falsely reporting a crime (and it is a crime to hack someone else’s online accounts), and for utter, bumbling incompetence.

Demonstrating humiliating incompetence at Twitter should remain a prerogative of private citizens, not politicians.

And it’s not as if he couldn’t land on his, er, feet. He could join one of the newer news comment shows, become Eliot Spitzer’s new partner on, perhaps, Weiner/​Spitzer.

It has a ring to it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.