I'm a little surprised at myself, then, that I did not catch the revelation that the report of the Treasury IG that made it appear that solely conservative groups were being looked at--had everything to do with the request of House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa to "narrowly focus" on just those groups.
Given that Democratic House members Rep. Elijah Cummings and Rep. Gerald Connolly are now very interested in single-party (that would be Republican party) meetings held with Treasury IG J. Russell George, I wonder if there isn't more to the story. I am very interested in why House Republicans are mystifyingly still on this one when it never looked like there was a "there" there.
Is it something they heard in those Republican-only meetings? I sit on my heels and I wonder.
4 comments:
Amazing, huh? I can't believe I didn't even notice. But I blame the Lamestream M. Raw Story picked it up, and my tweep Anomaly, but search of the Times archive reveals not one word (and just one story on the hearing in question).
As to why Republicans would keep harping on it, I'd guess their main motivation for everything they're doing at the moment is getting the jowls to quiver on the guys who write the checks. But it's also apparently the case that IRS has tightened up the regulations on 501(C)4s, so maybe they're preparing the ground, through the tireless repetition technique, for the coming protest season.
Vixen, if you would like to know what's going on, I recommend a book by Dr. Martha Stout called The Sociopath Next Door. I have also heard that there are some liberal groups among the many conservative groups being targeted.
It wouldn't matter if they were all liberal groups. It is corruption at the highest level.
What we should be targeting is the corruption and the implementation of that corruption in these federal bureaucracies.
Today we would be better off if Democrats spent most of their time trying to police their own party activities, and Republicans would be better off policing their own party activities.
The bigger the government, the bigger the corruption. And regrettably, the mainstream Republican Party wants as big a government as the left does -- they just want to enfranchise a different group. There are a significant number of us on the right who would like a smaller government but we are not in the majority.
We spend all of our time demonizing and mischaracterizing the other party when our own parties are full of misdeeds that can lead to disaster.
In football perhaps "winning is the only thing." However, in politics that attitude of the end justifying the means results in wholesale corruption that in turn results in individuals being crushed by the impersonal will of the state.
Plutocracy and totalitarianism are battling for control of government. If either wins, it is all over.
--Formerly Amherst
It kind of doesn't look like corruption to me so much as trying to be sure that organizations aren't setting up dark money slush funds to circumvent tax & campaign finance laws. That the investigation of these apps is "bipartisan" is the tip-off that it isn't about discouraging participation--just ensuring that it's lawful.
I'm not sure that parties policing themselves would work ideally. It's like the Mafia policing themselves, or turning over an asylum to the patients. People get up to some peculiar ideas of what is permissible behavior in the face of their own goals.
I'm not sure, Vixen. I was struck by the way the IRS attempted to set this up covertly and illicitly before they were caught. After they were caught they began to construct a legal way to try and accomplish the same thing.
I believe we will discover the truth, because, if I understand correctly, there are no less than 6 investigations into this matter, including one by the FBI.
Oh, Vixen! If only our parties had the internal discipline of La Cosa Nostra!
A friend of mine was joking and said, "The reason people like all these mob movies is because you can trust the mafia. If they say they're gonna kill you, they kill you. There's a kind of security in that."
--Formerly Amherst
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