Fake scandal No. 1: IRS and the Tea Party 501(c)4 groups

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Selective IRS scrutiny based on political beliefs, associations, or activities is (supposed to be) unlawful. Best I can tell is that the Cincinnati IRS people were using a certain criterion to flag new 501(c)4 applications to review. They exercised poor administrative judgment (I see that occasionally from my den in the woodwork of a government agency), and were ordered to stop by upper management. The Inspector General found no evidence of political motivation.

Still, it shouldn't happen. Clear rules for flagging potentially suspicious paperwork should be developed by IRS executives with participation from field offices. Also, the law needs to make it crystal clear that improper IRS scrutiny is unlawful not only when it affects the Tea Party, but also when it affects groups whose names contain words like occupy, environmental, progressive, peace, and so on. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out what I might be talking about.

Are Democrats using this occasion to point out (for once) that Both Sides Do It? To make sure that all Americans are protected from IRS harassment rooted in political criteria? No. They have been busy all week stepping on their own dicks, acting like Democrats invented the weaponization of the IRS. They should bring heinous examples of Republican abuse of IRS powers into the public record... not to excuse the Cincinnati field office, but to insist on a "bipartisan effort" to prevent the IRS from chilling political activity irrespective of which wing of The Property Party holds the presidency.

Even more dangerous than laissez-faire capitalism: Satire

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Texas Governor Rick Perry was disgusted by this political cartoon back in April. Too fucking bad. I recommend Pepto Bismol, an Ambien, and 5 years in a US Civics re-education camp for what ails him.

Wall Street Democrats

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This detestable specimen of politician, starting Hillary Clinton's peckerwood husband and including herself, Harry Reid, Dick Durbin, and about everybody short of Alan Grayson and Elizabeth Warren (so far as I know thus far), are the real drivers of ruination.

Despite what R.J. Eskow says in the article above, though I believe that President Obama knows exactly what he's doing when he drives liberals to distraction by "negotiating with himself" on promoting long-term rot of the safety net. The bait and switch method begins with bait---

According to The Narrative, he believes that conservatives will play nice with him on Capitol Hill if he shows that he's serious about "deficit reduction" at the expense of no one who works Capitol Hill.

No, President North Star is not naive. And neither are the politicians who I used to refer to as "spineless Democrats." Whether this is what Obama wanted when he was running for the office or he has just surrendered to the inevitability of global hegemony by a transnational military/industrial/banking/infotainment complex, he and his party are intentionally giving radical conservatives all the fertilizer they need to infest our polity like a tropical fungus.

Thanks to President North Star, the "left" position on safety net programs is that they must be "gradually" trimmed back because they are unsustainable. Pretending that he represents the adult faction within the monkey house, the President tells us that the way forward is for Republican thought leaders to erect a so-called permission structure (i.e., comfort zone) that will enable lunatics to fall in line... and endorse a policy that they've been drooling over for 50 years. Note the denial of the author of that linked post, though, and the denial evident at the top of the comments thread: they seem to think this is all the work of "centrist" Democrats. Well, other than the two I mentioned above, I'd be interested for someone to show me a Democrat national officeholder who isn't a centrist. That is, a Wall Street Democrat.

It is these despicable people, posing as traditional liberals, who are willing to accept cuts to a legacy of political genius that is not theirs to bargain away. They're not "naive," and they could turn it around in 6 months if they wanted to. But they don't.

Backlog

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I have lots of backlogged tabs to post about (or discard). Writing has been sparse because of some considerable but harmless pain---both elective and unbeckoned---that I've been enduring. Just distracting; not organic. But it does interfere with the focus.