How the White House Scandals have altered the gun control debate

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Stewart: Well, congratulations, President Barack Obama.  Conspiracy theorists, who generally can survive in anaerobic environments, have just had an algae bloom dropped on their fucking heads.  Thus removing the last arrow in your pro-governance quiver.  Skepticism about your opponents.  'Gun control. Why can’t we have background checks?' 

Roll tape. 

Cruz: “I believe it would put us inexorably on the path to a national gun registry." 

Stewart: “Oh, right, a national gun registry. And the government is going to overreach and there’s going to be a registry. And the government’s even capable of that kind of overreach. And they’re going to take your guns away from you.” 

CBS news report: “The Internal Revenue Service admitted today that some of its employees targeted conservative political groups.” 

Stewart: “Mother****ers!  This has, in one seismic moment, shifted the burden of proof from the tin-foil-behatted [conservatives] to the government.”

Joe Scarborough:  “I have been saying for months now, and everybody knows this, that I believe in background checks.  I believe that after Newtown, after Chicago, after . . . , we need background checks.  My argument has been: don't worry the government will never create a national registry.  The government is never going to create a national registry. . . .  My argument is less persuasive today because of these scandals.  Because People will say, ‘Hey, if they do this with the IRS, asking people what books you read, then how can I trust them with information about my Second Amendment rights?’  This is devastating, this IRS scandal is devastating.”

Piers Morgan: "I have had some of the pro-gun lobbyists on here saying to me, the reason that we have to be armed is because of tyranny from our own government.  I have always laughed at them.  I have always said don't be ridiculous, your own government won't turn itself on you.  But actually when you look at this, it has nothing to do with guns, it is vaguely tyrannical behavior by the American government.  I think that what the IRS did is bordering on tyrannical behavior.  I think that what the Department of Justice to the AP bordering on tyrannical behavior."

I personally don't make the tyranny argument.  I am not saying that the argument is wrong, but just that I don't feel comfortable arguing about issues that I can't measure and test empirically.  My argument has been that background checks, as they are actually working, would be counterproductive.  Well, it appears that argument has actually be very persuasive to people who I probably could never reach with the type of empirical arguments that I would normally raise.

UPDATE: Democrats in congress are admitting the obvious here, that these scandals might prevent new laws that Obama is pushing.  From The Hill newspaper:

Speaking Monday on MSNBC, Rep. Sandy Levin (D-Mich.) said the multiple inquiries into the conduct of IRS employees could undermine the push for immigration reform if the oversight effort becomes politicized.  

"The difficulty of turning this into too much of a political effort will be, it will undermine other efforts like tax reform, like immigration action, like work on gun violence issues," said Levin, who is the ranking member on the tax writing House Ways and Means Committee. . . .

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The cracks in Obama's story on the IRS scandal are adding up

From the WSJ:

The White House's chief lawyer learned weeks ago that an audit of the Internal Revenue Service likely would show that agency employees inappropriately targeted conservative groups, a senior White House official said Sunday.
That disclosure has prompted a debate over whether the president should have been notified at that time.
In the week of April 22, the Office of the White House Counsel and its head, Kathryn Ruemmler, were told by Treasury Department attorneys that an inspector general's report was nearing completion, the White House official said. In that conversation, Ms. Ruemmler learned that "a small number of line IRS employees had improperly scrutinized certain…organizations by using words like 'tea party' and 'patriot,' " the official said. . . .

Possibly the WSJ should have asked not "whether the president should have been notified at that time" but "if the president was notified at that time."  Of course, Jack Lew, Obama's chief of staff at the time, knew about this last fall.  How many people right next to Obama have to know about this before it can be assumed that Obama also knew before he claims that he found out from the media reports.  This is hardly the first time that I felt that the media was covering on this for Obama.  Now we have this amazing statement from someone working in Internal Revenue Service’s Cincinnati office: 

“We people on the local level are doing what we are supposed to do. . . . That’s why there are so many people here who are flustered. Everything comes from the top. We don’t have any authority to make those decisions without someone signing off on them. There has to be a directive.” . . .

UPDATE: Now Democrats are making the only defense that they can for Obama -- that his closest aides never told him about the IRS scandal.  Obama feints great anger about this scandal, but it apparently never dawned on his closest aides that he would care enough about the IRS scandal.  If they so let him down, why aren't these people being fired?   From The Hill newspaper:

Senior White House officials were briefed about a federal audit of the IRS’s improper focus on conservatives, but they decided not to tell President Obama about it, press secretary Jay Carney claimed Monday.
White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler learned about the report in April and made the decision not to tell the president, even as other senior staffers got wind of the audit by Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration, Carney said.
Denis McDonough, White House chief of staff, was among those told about the nature of the report, which found that Tea Party and other small-government advocates seeking tax-exempt status were tagged for special screening because of their names.Carney defended the decision to keep the president out of the loop, saying conclusions often change in the final stages of inspector general reports. It also would’ve been inappropriate, Carney added, for the White House to involve itself in an ongoing investigation. . . .

UPDATE: Even the press is covering the shifting Obama administration story line about who was informed about the IRS scandal.  Politico notes how many people very close to the president knew about this scandal, but that somehow none of them mentioned it to him despite the fact that he now claims that he cares intensely about the issue.

Even Politico has a headline: "The White House's shifting IRS Account"

They note: "Monday’s revelation amounts to the fifth iteration of the Obama administration’s account of events, after initially saying that the White House had first learned of the controversy from the press." 

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What the IRS tactics have meant for some individuals

Where are these news stories from places other than Fox?  Isn't it interesting to see the damage actually done to people's lives?  Could it be that such news stories would increase anger against the IRS and the Obama administration?  From Fox News:

. . . While initially waiting for IRS approval, Devereaux dipped into his own bank account, maxed out credit cards and even borrowed money from friends so his group could put on a civic-engagement training session at the Omni Shoreham hotel in Washington. His goal was to eventually set up a steady stream of revenue for a tax-exempt nonprofit.
The next time Devereaux heard from the IRS, they had requested details and credentials on every single speaker and all the educational materials provided in the 78 classes held at the hotel. The IRS also wanted information on all 45 vendors, their credentials and a donor list.
Devereaux refused.
Five rounds of IRS letters later, and United in Action’s tax-exempt status is still in limbo.
If they are denied, Devereaux’s group would owe the federal government “somewhere in the neighborhood of $70,000 in back taxes,” he said, referring to money he would owe the government on donations.
“It’s more than we have in our bank account,” he said. . . .
Waco Tea Party President Toby Walker said her group applied for a 501(c)(4) status in July 2010. She’d call the IRS from time to time to check on the progress but was basically told, ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you,’ she said.
Then in February 2012, the IRS finally made contact.
Walker said she was asked questions that went well beyond the purview of the agency's authority. They wanted to know everything about the Waco Tea Party group, their relationships with public officials, lists of volunteers and every single news story the group had ever been mentioned in.
Walker said the request was so lengthy and intrusive that had she complied with the demands, she “would have needed a U-haul truck of about 20 feet.”
While Walker’s group was finally granted tax-exempt status in March 2013, she said a lot of damage has already been done. She said people were afraid to support her group financially because they had not received the IRS-stamped status.
Others were afraid that they might be targeted by the IRS if they supported Walker’s group publicly. Having one of the most powerful government agencies angry at them wasn’t a risk many people were willing to take. And so the group suffered, she said.
“We spent thousands of our own dollars fighting this,” she said. “If this happens to one organization in America, we should all be outraged.” . . .

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IRS scandal: Mainstream media fails to show the slightest curiosity about inconsistencies in Obama administration defenses

It has been troublesome that so much of the media is already arguing from the beginning of this last week that this wasn't like Watergate.  My question is: how could they already know that the Obama White House wasn't involved in these decisions?  What would have happened with Watergate if the media had shown the same quickness in drawing conclusions?  

Politico provides one of many examples of how the mainstream media.

Lew also defended Sarah Hall Ingram, a commissioner who has been targeted by Republicans for formerly overseeing the tax exempt division before heading to her current post helping the agency implement the health care law.
Ingram, Lew said, was not involved in the targeting program.
“Chronology matters in cases like this,” he said. “I’ve asked some questions since becoming aware of this, and my understanding is her responsibilities moved over from the tax exempt unit to implementation of the Affordable Care Act before there was any opportunity to be involved in this.”
Ingram served as the commissioner of tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012. . . .

Why not even list some obvious questions such as the events at the tax exempt division occurred during  early 2010, early in the 2009 to 2012 period when Sarah Hall Ingram was in charge of the division?  How could she have been involved in the implementation of the ACA in March of 2012 before it was signed into law on March 23, 2010?

Timeline of Key Events Surrounding IRS Targeting of Conservative Groups 

March 1, 2010:  An IRS manager in Cincinnati, Ohio asks employees to begin searching for 501(c) tax exemption applications using the terms Tea Party, Patriots and 9/12 as their criteria. 

April 1, 2010:  Managers in Washington, DC and Cincinnati decide to send a “Sensitive Case Report” about the Tea Party cases up the chain in Washington. 

April 19, 2010:  The Sensitive Case Report is shared with two executives in Washington, DC, one of whom is Lois Lerner and the other her immediate subordinate.   

August 12, 2010:  The IRS creates a “BOLO” (Be on the Lookout) listing instructing agents to identify Tea Party case files. 

December 13, 2010:  A manager for the Exempt Organizations (EO) group at the IRS in Washington informs the manager in Cincinnati that the processing of Tea Party cases would soon be reviewed with the Senior Technical Advisor to Lois Lerner, the Director of EO. 

June 1, 2011: The Acting Director of Rulings and Agreements in Washington, DC, Lois Lerner’s immediate subordinate, asks the manager in Cincinnati for the criteria used to identify Tea Party groups. 

June 29, 2011:  The Director of EO in Washington, DC, Lois Lerner, is briefed that the criteria being used by employees includes “Tea Party,” “Patriots,” “9/12 Project,” “Government Spending,” “Government Debt,” “Taxes,” “make America a better place to live,” and cases with statements that criticize how the country is being run. 

July 5, 2011:  The BOLO listing criteria is revised to search for “organizations involved in political, lobbying, or advocacy.” 

January 25, 2012:  The BOLO is updated to change the search criteria to “limiting/expanding Government,” “Constitution and the Bill of Rights,” and “social economic reform/movement.” 

March 12, 2012: Senator Chuck Schumer sends a letter to IRS Commissioner Shulman along with six of his Democrat colleagues, calling for the agency to impose a strict cap on the amount of political spending by tax-exempt, nonprofit groups. 

There is another problem.  Let's just say that Sarah Hall Ingram immediately started working on Obamacare when it became law even though she was still technically in charge and running the tax exempt division.  Why was that?  Was something being hidden by her not being officially assigned to Obamacare?  For example, where costs for Obamacare being shifted onto other programs?

Take another claim from something taken seriously by the mainstream media, Salon.com.  "No evidence of White House involvement . . . none is found in the IG’s report"

If the IG did not interview people in the White House, how could the report determine that there was no evidence of White House involvement?  If the IG did interview people in the White House, how could the Obama White House claim that they had no knowledge of IRS punishing conservatives?

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The IRS scandal grows: Deliberately delaying info until after the election, hiding information, clear evidence that people right next to Obama knew about the problem

OK, so senior Obama officials were told of IRS probe last year, but they did nothing with this information?  Now we are told how upset and outraged they are by this information, but if they were so outraged, wouldn't they have said something publicly about this last year?  

“We have zero tolerance for this kind of behavior,” [Jack] Lew said.

Isn't the proof of their lack of outrage shown by their lack of action?  From The Hill newspaper:

Russell George, Treasury’s inspector general (IG) for tax administration, testified that he told the department’s general counsel and Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin about the probe in June of 2012 — months after media reports started detailing Tea Party complaints about the IRS. . . .
But the attention is quickly shifting to Wolin, who is scheduled to testify before the House Oversight Committee and Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) on Wednesday, where he will be grilled on what he and other Treasury officials knew — and when.
Treasury confirmed Friday that George’s office told Wolin about the forthcoming audit last year, and that the inspector general personally told Treasury Secretary Jack Lew about it in March. Lew confirmed that timeline in an interview with Bloomberg Television.
But the Treasury department also says neither Lew nor Wolin found out about the inspector general’s findings until they started filtering out to the public last week. . . .

NBC's Lisa Myers "reported this morning that the IRS deliberately chose not to reveal that it had wrongly targeted conservative groups until after the 2012 presidential election."  Obama administration officials clearly knew what the scandal was about (conservative groups being targeted) in June 2012.

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew has apparently been less than forthcoming in his answers to questions about the scandal.  It looks as if Lew knew about the scandal while he was Obama's chief of staff, which means it is quite possible that Obama knew about it as well.  Examples of how difficult Lew is with speaking openly about what he knew can be seen here:

. . . Bloomberg's Al Hunt asked Lew, whose Treasury Department oversees the IRS: “When were you first notified that IRS agents were targeting conservative groups like the Tea Party?”
Instead of answering Hunt’s question directly, however, Lew instead chose to answer when he first learned about the IG report, a tactic President Barack Obama also used earlier this week during a press conference.
“I learned the substance of this report last Friday when it became a matter of public knowledge,” Lew claimed. “Before that, in mid-March [2013], I had had a conversation, just a getting-to-know-you conversation, with the inspector general right after I started, and he went through a number of items that were matters they were working on. And the topic of a project on the 501(c)3 issue was one of the things he briefed me was ongoing.”
Hunt then asked whether former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, Lew’s deputy, Neal Wolin, or the general counsel knew about the IRS’s political profiling of conservative groups.
“I think that there was-the heads-up that I got was something that was a matter of public knowledge,” said Lew. “It was posted on the IG's website in the fall of 2012. I believe that other is typically the practice that an inspector general notify the agencies when matters are opened. I was not aware of any details.”
It is possible that "fall of 2012" could refer to a period of time before the election. Regardless, Lew would have discovered the investigation in his capacity as President Obama's chief of staff, meaning that it is possible the president knew of the investigation in 2012 as well. . . .

A very different take on the same interview is available from Politico.  Others, such as acting IRS director Steve Miller, are having massive memory failures.

. . . That’s the kind of week Miller is having. To make matters worse, he spent most of the hearing saying he didn’t remember things — like the details of how he first learned of the targeting — and insisting he didn’t mislead Congress by not telling lawmakers.Over and over again, Miller swore he just answered the questions lawmakers asked him in various letters. “I answered the questions as they were asked,” Miller told Charles Boustany of Louisiana.
At times, Miller struggled to find phrases that wouldn’t sound politically tone deaf. He tried to pick a fight over whether the IRS search terms should even be called “targeting” — even though they included terms like “tea party,” “Patriots” and “9/12,” and the inspector general report says specialists were told to look specifically for tea party applications. . . .

Miller also made laughable claims such as the targeting of conservative groups, and conservative groups only, was simply an effort to make IRS agents "more efficient in their workload selection." 

Now we learn that since the IRS knew that a critical IG report was coming out, the Obama people asked a member of the press to raise the whole issue in a press presentation a week ago.

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Scary: Obama uses the power of the federal government to destroy his political opponents

These audits just didn't represent the costs of lawyers' fees and delayed refunds, but also all of the time and emotional drain that was spent personally dealing with the audits.  From Kimberly Strassel in the WSJ:

. . . Mr. Obama now professes shock and outrage that bureaucrats at the IRS did exactly what the president of the United States said was the right and honorable thing to do. "He put a target on our backs, and he's now going to blame the people who are shooting at us?" asks Idaho businessman and longtime Republican donor Frank VanderSloot.
Mr. VanderSloot is the Obama target who in 2011 made a sizable donation to a group supporting Mitt Romney. In April 2012, an Obama campaign website named and slurred eight Romney donors. It tarred Mr. VanderSloot as a "wealthy individual" with a "less-than-reputable record." Other donors were described as having been "on the wrong side of the law."
This was the Obama version of the phone call—put out to every government investigator (and liberal activist) in the land.
Twelve days later, a man working for a political opposition-research firm called an Idaho courthouse for Mr. VanderSloot's divorce records. In June, the IRS informed Mr. VanderSloot and his wife of an audit of two years of their taxes. In July, the Department of Labor informed him of an audit of the guest workers on his Idaho cattle ranch. In September, the IRS informed him of a second audit, of one of his businesses. Mr. VanderSloot, who had never been audited before, was subject to three in the four months after Mr. Obama teed him up for such scrutiny.
The last of these audits was only concluded in recent weeks. Not one resulted in a fine or penalty. But Mr. VanderSloot has been waiting more than 20 months for a sizable refund and estimates his legal bills are $80,000. That figure doesn't account for what the president's vilification has done to his business and reputation.
The Obama call for scrutiny wasn't a mistake; it was the president's strategy—one pursued throughout 2012. The way to limit Romney money was to intimidate donors from giving. . . .

Peggy Noonan has a similar list here:

. . . Hal Scherz, a Georgia physician, also came to the government's attention. He told ABC News: "It is odd that nothing changed on my tax return and I was never audited until I publicly criticized ObamaCare." 

Franklin Graham, son of Billy, told Politico he believes his father was targeted. A conservative Catholic academic who has written for these pages faced questions about her meager freelance writing income. Many of these stories will come out, but not as many as there are. People are not only afraid of being audited, they're afraid of saying they were audited. 

All of these IRS actions took place in the years leading up to the 2012 election. They constitute the use of governmental power to intrude on the privacy and shackle the political freedom of American citizens. . . . 

Fox News has this story about a Texas Tea Party group's filing with the IRS.

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What some celebrities think of the IRS scandal

Bill Maher's statement is the strongest argument against ever giving the government much power to begin with.  The fact that he believes it is so understandable that the government would take these actions must scare anyone and make them think twice before advocating new government programs.  Will Maher rethink his support of so much new government?

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Lois Lerner, at the center of the IRS storm, rewarded handsomely by Obama administration

Lois Lerner apparently sent at least one of the letters to conservative groups out under her own signature.

The director of the Internal Revenue Service division under fire for singling out conservative groups sent a 2012 letter under her name to one such group, POLITICO has learned.
The March 2012 letter was sent to the Ohio-based American Patriots Against Government Excess (American PAGE) under the name of Lois Lerner, the director of the Exempt Organizations Division. . . .
It is unclear if American PAGE had been selected for any additional scrutiny. But at the time of the letter, the group was in the midst of the application process for tax-exempt nonprofit status — a process that would stretch for nearly three years and involve queries for detailed information on its social media activity, its organizational set-up, bylaws, membership and interactions with political officials. . . .

Lerner has also been caught making numerous false statements from only "low level" involvement, that there was "no political bias," and that "seventy-five organizations effected."   Yet, Lerner is the one who has been extensively rewarded for her work by the Obama administration.  From the Washington Examiner:

Lois Lerner, the senior executive in charge of the IRS tax exemption department and the federal employee at the center of the exploding scandal over the IRS targeting of conservative, evangelical and pro-Israel non-profits, was given $42,531 in bonuses between 2009 and 2011. . . .

An additional point.  Obama appears tough by removing Acting Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Steven Miller.  Headlines claim: "IRS: First head rolls."  But he didn't really do that.  1) Miller will soon be out of a job anyway because acting commissioners are only allowed to serve for six months and his six months are up in early June.  2) Miller isn't leaving right away and will leave when his acting assignment ends.  As Miller writes:

"It is with regret that I will be departing from the IRS as my acting assignment ends inearly June."

So my reaction is: is this serious?  

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Press's questions to Acting IRS Commissioner

Press goes after Acting IRS Commissioner



Acting Commissioner: "We will talk on Friday."

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Democrats breaking ranks on IRS scandal

Elijah Cummings on IRS: Laws 'probably broken' 'this is one of the most alarming things that I have ever seen'

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