Comments by "silat13" (@silat13) on "Yo, Conservatives! Turns Out Solyndra Made Money and That's Not Even the Point..." video.
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kathy kelly
IRS and CONSERVATIVE GROUPS
OK- so lets look at exactly what's being said. "These groups claim tax-exempt status under section 501 (c) (4) of the federal tax code, which is for social welfare groups. Unlike other charitable groups, these organizations are allowed to participate in political activities, but their primary activity must be social welfare."
Would anyone deny that tea party groups are not primarily political? In which case, groups applying for 501 c3 status would and should be subject to scrutiny.
"As part of the review, staffers look for signs that groups are participating in political activity. If so, IRS agents take a closer look to make sure that politics isn't the group's primary activity. As part of this process, agents in Cincinnati came up with a list of things to look for in an application. As part of the list, they included the words "tea party" and "patriot," Lerner said.
And again- why is this a big deal? We know such groups are primarily political groups. How many of them have actually engaged in actual social welfare programs? Calling it "targeting" is hyperbole. And out of 300 groups, 25% were tea party of conservative. Liberal groups were also scrutinized. 75% of the groups that applied were not con or TP- 75%.
You know what's political? That anyone made an issue of it. The the IRS (although it may have been overzealous in its questioning) is actually being taken to taks for doing its job- in this case. Because when it comes to religious organizations, they have been giving them a pass on their political activity. But now we'll have months of faux outrage, and clamoring for Obama's head because, of course, he will be blamed. And of all those groups, how many were actually denied that status? To date, according to the article- none.
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kathy kelly
IRS Lerner emails
http://crooksandliars.com/2014/06/louis-lerners-emails-were-lost-due
Republicans will seize on anything at all to perpetrate a faux scandal against the Obama administration and the facts of the Lois Lerner/IRS email scandal backs that up. If you haven't been in Antarctica for the last few months you'll know that Republicans have been going ballistic on the IRS and Lois Lerner, claiming a government conspiracy directed at poor misunderstood conservatives. What has their undies in a bunch at this time is a batch of lost emails from 2011, that the IRS said they lost.
What Republicans aren't really telling you is that Lerner herself reported the computer crash and tried to recover them all.
Over the past week, there have been many headlines about "lost emails" from a key IRS figure. This has fed some fears of a possible cover-up in the scandal over the IRS's treatment of conservative groups.References have been made to Watergate and the infamous gap of 18 and a half minutes in one of President Nixon's tapes.
But right now, this doesn't look like much of a cover-up. Lerner reported the emails lost, and tried to have them recovered, in mid-2011 — two years before the IRS scandal broke. So while the IRS's technical proficiency doesn't come off looking particularly good, the timeline we have suggests that the lost e-mails have little to do with the scandal.
I guess she must have used her lucky eight ball that whispered sweet nothings into her ear.
Last week, the IRS told Congress of its findings — Lerner's computer crashed in mid-2011, and many of her emails appear to be gone. The agency did manage to reconstruct and supply some of them by pulling them from other employees' accounts — and 67,000 emails that Lerner wrote or received were handed over. But Congressional Republicans were unsatisfied, to say the least, as you can see in this angry statement from Rep. Paul Ryan:
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