Category Archives: Last Word

Economics, Facebook, Last Word, Politics, Taxes, TV

501c4 Means “No Politics”

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I ran across a DailyKOS article in my Facebook feed today. I went looking and discovered they’re doing what I did ten years ago on this blog. They wrote one paragraph, pasted someone else’s content in as the body of the article, then wrote another paragraph and pretended it was their article. The original reporting is from CNN,

The Justice Department notified members of Congress on Friday that it is closing its two-year investigation into whether the IRS improperly targeted the tea party and other conservative groups.

There will be no charges against former IRS official Lois Lerner or anyone else at the agency, the Justice Department said in a letter. 

The probe found “substantial evidence of mismanagement, poor judgment and institutional inertia leading to the belief by many tax-exempt applicants that the IRS targeted them based on their political viewpoints. But poor management is not a crime,” Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik said in the letter.

“We found no evidence that any IRS official acted based on political, discriminatory, corrupt, or other inappropriate motives that would support a criminal prosecution,” Kadzik said. “We also found no evidence that any official involved in the handling of tax-exempt applications or IRS leadership attempted to obstruct justice. Based on the evidence developed in this investigation and the recommendation of experienced career prosecutors and supervising attorneys at the department, we are closing our investigation and will not seek any criminal charges.”

This really isn’t news. The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell was all over this more than a year ago. The stats showed that liberal groups were actually turned down while none of the conservative or tea party groups were, so the claim of targeting was demagoguery and nothing more.

The truth is that no political groups should be allowed to operate under the tax status of 501c4 since they don’t meet the criteria for that bracket; or wouldn’t if the IRS hadn’t changed the wording of the law that congress passed.

It is the IRS that should be filing charges, and they should be doing it against all the political groups that wrongfully use this code to skirt the requirements for political contributions. I would love to see some tax cheats go to jail over this and related violations. Wouldn’t hold my breath on that score either.

(Facebook status from this date published on the blog two years later)

Activism, Conspiracy, DanCarlin, Last Word, Podcast, Politics, TV

Much Ado About NSA

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Dan Carlin chose to make his latest Common Sense episode all about the historic outrage that is the NSA spying on us, likening it to the kind of outrage that Lawrence O’Donnell pokes holes in during the attached video segment.

Approaching this idea from the perspective of ‘Vampiric Memories’ (memories of several centuries) as Dan does, what would be most striking was not that governments do what governments have always done; but that the people who run this government are more varied in race and sex than at any time previously in history.

Now, this observation can lead to other insights such as how white men aren’t nearly as bad as we’ve been lead to believe since we don’t run everything anymore and it all still sucks, or that inclusiveness in government hasn’t gone far enough because the suckage of government hasn’t been alleviated yet.

But what you cannot say is that this is an outrage as has never been seen before, and it’s only our relative blindness to change (for various reasons) that allow this outrage to continue.  Should the NSA programs be brought down?  Certainly, and it appears that they will be.  But can we tone down the histrionics, please?

Edited to add the following;

Seriously Dan?  Another podcast on the same subject? Only this time to attack the false premise that NSA spying isn’t a big deal?  I’ve been trying to tell people that privacy was dead for a decade or more.  I use my real name on the internet and yell from the rooftops repeatedly that there is no such thing on the internet as privacy, precisely because I suspected the NSA was doing exactly what it’s been shown to be doing over the last year.

Just because I’m ready for a new subject to discuss, has nothing at all to do with the assumed importance of the NSA spying problem.  The real problem is, most people who object to the spying aren’t willing to fight the hard fight it’s going to take to get the laws changed to forbid the government from engaging in this kind of data collection; largely because most of them think like you and don’t want to dirty themselves by getting into political fights, joining parties, and changing the system.

When you’re ready to seriously get involved, let me know.  I have some pointers on that score.