Democracy Forums

Liberals Should Worry About the IRS Scandal

Corodon — Mon, 20 May 2013 02:57:42 GMT

An interesting bit by Eric Liu in Time.

Quote:

It turns out that the Tea Party activists who�ve been ranting about IRS abuses of power were on to something. The taxman was engaged in ideological profiling. Conservatives are apoplectic. And their outrage, even if exaggerated for political effect, is justified.

Liberals, though, should also be outraged. First, this kind of profiling is indefensible and even dangerous. Second, the scandal plays into some of the worst stereotypes about government � that it�s overweening, prying, ham-handed, untrustworthy. As right-wingers now relish pointing out, the IRS is the agency responsible for enforcing key parts of the Affordable Care Act. If you�re a fan of Obamacare, the timing is terrible.

OK, nothing new here.

The next is the amusing part:

Quote:

But the main reason liberals should be outraged � indeed, embarrassed � is that the scandal reveals just how much ground they�ve lost in American politics in recent decades. Most of the media coverage has focused on the fact that IRS officials used �Tea Party� and �patriot� as their search terms of choice in targeting political groups over their non-profit status. Overlooked are some of the other shortcuts, phrases like �making America a better place to live� or �criticizing how the country is being run� or �educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights.�

It�s bad enough for progressives that the word �patriot� in 2013 so obviously signifies �conservative.� But it�s downright damning that talk of social and economic reform and of the Constitution itself can now also be considered right-wing.
. . . .

I had a running argument with several left-leaning posters in the run-up to the 2004 election. I noticed in my regular commute that among cars with Bush or Kerry markers, bumper stickers, or obvious identifiers ("Don't blame me, I voted for Gore," e.g.), the Bush cars tended to have American flags somewhere visible, and the Kerry cars never did. I was assured I was as wrong as could be, but scouting right up to election day didn't produce any surprises.

Quote:

This is trouble. When words of the nation�s creedal origins and civic identity become mere partisan code, it�s bad not only for the party that no longer has access to them; it�s bad for the nation. Anyone who cares about civic education and the integrity of democracy has to be disturbed that in the word association game of contemporary politics, �Defend the Bill of Rights� and �Respect the Constitution� sound Republican.

The answer for liberals is not to start sprinkling �patriot� and �Constitution� and �flag� throughout their materials. It�s to connect the story of their agenda to the deeper story of this country�s arc and aspirations, the way one successful progressive, Barack Obama, has done all his career � and the way effective conservatives do today. American politics is a continuous argument about who can best redeem the founding promise. When liberals join that argument, they might benefit. America certainly will.

Big Government Loses Control

Corodon — Mon, 20 May 2013 00:53:06 GMT

I find this essay by L. Gordon Crovitz in the Wall Street Journal uplifting, in its general message that "The government is losing the ability to manipulate information to avoid accountability."

Governments around the world are moving as swiftly as they are abler to throttle that trend. Meanwhile,

Quote:

What to make of the political scandals that are dominating the headlines and forcing the Obama administration into Nixonian damage control? Technology is finally doing to big government what it has done to big business, big media and other institutions that once could operate with nearly full control over information. The government is losing the ability to manipulate information to avoid accountability.

Consider how the news broke that the Internal Revenue Service has been targeting conservative groups. The admission by IRS official Lois Lerner came in response to a question from the audience at a low-profile meeting of the tax section of the American Bar Association. For a week, perplexed reporters quoted her supporters saying she was apolitical and must not have meant to make news this way.

Then reports online cited lawyers who had been at the ABA event saying they saw her consult prepared remarks as she answered the supposedly impromptu question. On Friday, the acting IRS commissioner confessed to Congress that the question was planted. Its purpose was to give Ms. Lerner a chance to minimize IRS wrongdoing before the release of the Treasury inspector general's report early last week.

The attempt to spin the story worked for a time. Ms. Lerner blamed everything on low-level IRS employees in the Cincinnati office and said that the targeting of conservative groups ended when higher-ups learned about it. But as targeted groups went online to reveal the communications they had received from numerous IRS offices, it became clear that abuses were widespread, including at headquarters, and that the targeting went on for years.

There is a long history of presidents using the IRS against political enemies. FDR went after newspapers that opposed the New Deal. JFK had his Ideological Organizations Audit Project target conservative groups like the American Enterprise Institute. Richard Nixon used the IRS to harass people on his enemies list.

Most of these abuses came to light only after the presidents left office. President Obama has to deal with the issue now because tea party and other groups used social media to share information about their experiences with the IRS.
Details also emerged this month about the Obama administration's efforts to spin last year's Benghazi attack. The White House was forced to release 100 pages of emails showing how "talking points" about the attack were edited to exclude references to al Qaeda. That set the stage for Mr. Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to spend two weeks falsely blaming an anti-Muslim video.

The emails detailed a dozen changes to the talking points, including eliminating a key CIA observation from the original draft: "We do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al Qaeda participated in this attack." The emails disclosed how Mrs. Clinton's spokesman Victoria Nuland successfully lobbied to excise earlier CIA warnings of terrorism in Benghazi. She emailed that this "could be used by Members [of Congress] to beat the State Department for not paying attention to Agency warnings so why do we want to feed that? Concerned."

Just as old media learned it is no longer the only voice heard in a new-media world, government spinners now must reckon that the truth will eventually come out—sometimes because the government is pressured to disclose damning internal emails.

Quote:

The third scandal dogging the Obama administration also has its roots in trying to downplay terrorist threats. The Associated Press reported in May 2012 that the CIA had stopped another attempt by an al Qaeda group in Yemen to have an underwear bomber blow up a U.S. passenger airplane. That contradicted administration claims that there were no known terror threats. A federal prosecutor trying to find the source of the leak seized phone records of dozens of AP editors and reporters from a two-month period last year, ignoring Justice Department guidelines that the AP at least be told in advance that the government is trolling its records.

As the nation's chief executive, President Obama is accountable for the IRS, State Department and Justice Department. His longtime adviser David Axelrod last week blamed a too-big government for the scandals: "Part of being president is that there's so much beneath you that you can't know because the government is so vast."

Messrs. Obama and Axelrod helped create that problem, but the argument against big government rings especially true in an era when not even the government can control information.

:thumbsup:

In the Mid-West, tornadoes today

Dasher — Sun, 19 May 2013 22:30:36 GMT

Tornadoes spotted in Kansas, Oklahoma as Midwest hit with second day of turbulent weather

http://www.foxnews.com/weather/2013/...est=latestnews
==============

This system is supposed to be moving Northward to my state sometime tomorrow.

If I had a choice, I'd choose a cane over a tornado, any day.

Drug crimes, prostitution alleged at New Jersey senior citizen building

Road Warrior — Sun, 19 May 2013 12:06:55 GMT

A novel way to supplement the retirement check.

Drug crimes, prostitution alleged at New Jersey senior citizen building

Quote:

Residents of a New Jersey senior citizen building have been accused of prostitution and drug-related crimes.

Police say building residents James Parham and Cheryl Chaney were charged with possession of drug paraphernalia and maintaining a nuisance. They say Parham allowed others to enter his apartment to use drugs and engage in acts of prostitution.

Selma McDuffie, who was found with a drug pipe and arrested in Chaney's apartment, was charged with possession of drug paraphernalia, police said.

They were arrested in late April, and Parham was scheduled to appear in Englewood Municipal Court on Wednesday.

Half a dozen more people were issued no-trespass orders to the Tibbs Senior Building, run by the Englewood Housing Authority, in Englewood, New Jersey.

The drug users ranged in age from their early 50s to late 70s and were both residents and outsiders, police said. The predominant drug involved was crack cocaine.

The lack of security in the building allowed residents to foster these illegal activities, police say. "With unrestricted access, no checks and balances with respect to who came or went, these residents offered a facility for these activities," Englewood Police Chief Arthur O'Keefe said.

He said that some residents were afraid to leave their rooms and enjoy common areas, fearing people who were in building hallways. Residents would often find "vagrants sleeping in stairwells and condoms in activity rooms."

Englewood police had received complaints about the activity over the past year, and in late March, they began working with the building staff, O'Keefe said. Soon after, undercover officers were sent in to identify who was responsible.

http://www.isciencetimes.com/article...ryl-chaney.htm

At Cincinnati IRS office, surprise over claims of partisan villainy

Corodon — Sun, 19 May 2013 11:05:52 GMT

A piece this morning in the "Style" section of the Washington Post, by Lisa Rein and Dan Zak.

Quote:

The fog of scandal hangs over a boxy, modernist, 10-story building that looks like a monument to paperwork. Shrubs and chain smokers flank its front entrance here on Main Street, in the heart of downtown. Every day, 2,000 employees go to work at various federal agencies in this John F. Kennedy-era structure, whose chief tenant is the Internal Revenue Service — which is having just about the worst week an agency can have.

The piece unsurprisingly presents the everyday atmosphere of a large bureaucratic outpost. The writers work to their essential conclusion, that the fault lies in sloppy management:

Quote:

And here [IRS headquarters in DC] is where Richard M. Nixon attempted to use the agency to harass his “enemies list,” which created the perception that a totally centralized authority could not be trusted, said Milton Cerny, a lawyer who worked from 1959 to 1988 in various IRS jobs, including in exempt organizations. The Tax Reform Act of 1969 had begun to decentralize decision making to IRS field offices, including Cincinnati’s, and Nixon’s behavior encouraged this trend.

“There was concern that the national office might be taking too much control over audits and other activities in the field, [that] it should only be program direction, and not control,” said Cerny, who wrote a historical paper on the IRS’s functions between 1972 and 1992 titled “Tax-Exempt Organizations: It’s Been a Memorable 20 Years.”

Nixon’s name has been invoked by outraged pundits envisioning a high-level conspiracy, but the inspector general’s report implies that the problem here is a lack of control. The “inappropriate criteria,” the report said, were “not influenced by any individual or organization outside the IRS.”

In a way, Washington wasn’t meddling enough.

And this allowed middle managers in Cincinnati to make some bad calls.

I certainly don't agree with their presumptions about centralized government, but what interested me more was the opening interviews with Cincinnati employees. I noticed this passage in particular:

Quote:

As could be expected, the folks in the determinations unit on Main Street have had trouble concentrating this week. Number crunchers, whose work is nonpolitical, don’t necessarily enjoy the spotlight, especially when the media and the public assume they’re engaged in partisan villainy.

“We’re not political,’’ said one determinations staffer in khakis as he left work late Tuesday afternoon. “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.”

The staff member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job, said that the determinations unit is competent and without bias, that it grouped together conservative applications “for consistency’s sake” — so one application did not sail through while a similar one was held up in review.

If the DC pols truly want to get to the bottom of this scandal, as Obama pledges to do, wouldn't they start at the bottom, those employees they maligned and embarrassed? Put them before a grand jury and simply ask them, under oath, who issued the directives they followed.

Seems to me this "low level" employees deserve an opportunity to exonerate themselves.

No Benefit Seen in Sharp Limits on Salt in Diet

Tom Servo — Sun, 19 May 2013 08:36:55 GMT

No Benefit Seen in Sharp Limits on Salt in Diet

By GINA KOLATA
Published: May 14, 2013

In a report that undercuts years of public health warnings, a prestigious group convened by the government says there is no good reason based on health outcomes for many Americans to drive their sodium consumption down to the very low levels recommended in national dietary guidelines.

Those levels, 1,500 milligrams of sodium a day, or a little more than half a teaspoon of salt, were supposed to prevent heart attacks and strokes in people at risk, including anyone older than 50, blacks and people with high blood pressure, diabetes or chronic kidney disease � groups that make up more than half of the American population.

<snip>

There are physiological consequences of consuming little sodium, said Dr. Michael H. Alderman, a dietary sodium expert at Albert Einstein College of Medicine who was not a member of the committee. As sodium levels plunge, triglyceride levels increase, insulin resistance increases, and the activity of the sympathetic nervous system increases. Each of these factors can increase the risk of heart disease.

Worth the green then, worth it now!

btthegreat — Sun, 19 May 2013 01:38:58 GMT

Look over your Reputation Given Archive You are looking for posts you honored in the past, that you believe still stand out beyond the context of the thread or discussion. Yep, even a year later, they are worth a re-read as wit, as reason, as wisdom or as poetry. Share them with the rest of us. Credit twice is credit more sweet. If they no longer post here, its just reminds us of their talents.

Mind, this is not a thread where I hope we rehash the debates inside the threads. Just appreciate the gems themselves.

Edit. I have no idea which forum to put this thread. Best guess.

IRS sued for seizing 60 million medical records

Trish — Sun, 19 May 2013 00:46:06 GMT

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...dical-records/

Now this ought to be interesting!

Obama�s trust-in-government deficit

Trish — Sun, 19 May 2013 00:00:24 GMT

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politi...1f9_print.html

this is one of the most balanced analyses I've seen.

Conservative case for gay marriage

Road Warrior — Sat, 18 May 2013 23:37:29 GMT

Good case. IMHO, true conservatives should be supportive of our rights under the Constitution. To say Constitutional rights are limited to certain people demeans those rights.

Conservative case for gay marriage

Quote:

"It became a cascade." Dale Carpenter, a friend who e-mailed those words from Minneapolis, was writing about the unexpectedly lopsided vote for same-sex marriage in the Minnesota House last week (the state Senate approved it Monday, and the governor has signed it), but he might have been writing about the whole marriage movement.

This month, Rhode Island and Delaware approved gay marriage. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court could restore it in California. If that happens, nearly 30% of the population will live in gay-marriage states.

The cascade extends beyond marriage. America is rethinking its whole relationship with its gay citizens. This month, a poll by ABC News and The Washington Post found not only a 55% majority supporting marriage equality, but also even bigger majorities in favor of allowing openly gay Boy Scouts and opposed to banning gay Scout leaders. As for NBA center Jason Collins' public announcement that he's gay, it isn't even controversial: It enjoys 68% approval......

.....The father of conservatism, Edmund Burke, famously said society is "a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are to be born." In seeking marriage, gays are asking to join Burke's mighty stream of tradition. They are asking to be constrained, not liberated: to be tied to a commitment larger than themselves, larger even than each other.

That is why same-sex marriage is cascading. The public looks at marriage equality and sees the greatest social conservative movement of our time. And, at least outside South Carolina, it looks at Mark Sanford and sees something else.

Pat Buchanan:Requiem for a Grand Old Party

Gaia — Sat, 18 May 2013 20:58:50 GMT

I always read or listen to Pat Buchanan every chance I get. He's honest, tells it like he sees it at least. I disagree, of course, with his pov's, motives, his obsession. But, for me anyway, he's a weathervane and doesn't use code much that I can tell anyway. While Other rightwingers are saying "URBAN", "welfare queen" or "states rights" and more to raise the well established vision, in their audience.."you KNOW what I'm sayang? wink wink" ie we white ppl don't much like sharing America with poc.

Buchanan doesn't really play that game too much. Of course, he was a part of the Nixon admin, so if anybody knows a little something about how RACE was deliberately used to cause an extreme polarization that the US has never recovered from. People act like polarization was caused by Obama or at least in the last few elections. Oh no... it began in the late 60's and early 70's period and was a deliberate move to divide the nation, to bring togethor whites who oppose minority's and women from enjoying the same civil liberties white men never had to concern themselves with.....unless they were gay.

Long story short.. Buchanan confirms what others won't admit... and one of those is that Nixon's "New Majority was created by the "S bnb9outhern Strategy".

Quote:

Requiem for a Grand Old Party

By: Patrick J. Buchanan
5/10/2013 09:45 AM

Has the bell begun to toll for the GOP?

The question arises while reading an analysis of Census Bureau statistics on the 2012 election by Dan Balz and Ted Mellnik.

One sentence in their Washington Post story fairly leaps out:

�The total number of white voters actually decreased between 2008 and 2012, the first such drop by any group within the population since the bureau started to issue such statistics.�

America�s white majority, which accounts for nine in 10 of all Republican votes in presidential elections, is not only shrinking as a share of the electorate, but it is declining in numbers, as well.

The Balz-Mellnik piece was primarily about the black vote.

Sixty-six percent of the black electorate turned out, to 64 percent of the white electorate. Black turnout in 2012 was higher by 1.7 million than in 2008. Hispanic turnout rose by 1.4 million votes.

But from 2008 to 2012, the white vote fell by 2 million.

This is the crisis of the Grand Old Party:

Minorities, peoples of color � Hispanic, black, Asian � gave 80 percent of their votes to Obama. And while the minorities� share of the electorate was 26 percent in 2012, minorities constitute 36.3 percent of the population. And their share of both the electorate and the population is inexorably rising.

Obama won only 39 percent of White America, lowest ever of any victorious presidential candidate. But he did not need any more white votes, when he was carrying people of color 4 to 1.

Any good news in the Census Bureau report for the GOP?

Only this: The tremendous turnout of black Americans in 2012 was surely due to Obama�s being under ferocious attack and in peril of being repudiated. Black folks turned out in record numbers to rescue the first black president. That situation will not recur in 2016.

Yet the bad news for the Republican Party does not cease.

While the total Hispanic vote rose by 1.4 million between 2008 and 2012, some 12 million eligible Hispanics did not bother to vote. And when one considers that Romney lost Hispanics 71-27, any Democratic effort to get out the Hispanic vote is going to be problematic for the GOP.

Only 48 percent of eligible Asians voted. But when they did, they went 70 percent Democratic. Asians� numbers, too, are growing, and as more go to the polls, the GOP crisis deepens.

The Republican response to this gathering disaster?

Led by Sens. Marco Rubio, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, Republicans are pushing for amnesty and �a path to citizenship� for the 11 to 12 million illegal aliens in the country today.

Who are these folks? Perhaps half are Hispanic, but 90 percent are people of color who, once registered, vote 4-to-1 Democratic. One would not be surprised to hear that the Senate Democratic Caucus had broken out into chants of �Go, Marco, Go!�

Setting aside the illegals invasion Bush 41 and Bush 43 refused to halt, each year a million new immigrants enter and move onto a fast track to citizenship. Between 80 and 90 percent now come from the Third World, and once naturalized, they vote 80 percent Democratic.

This brings us back around to the Electoral College.

After Richard Nixon cobbled together his New Majority, the GOP carried 49 states in 1972 and in 1984, 44 states in 1980 and 40 in 1988. In four elections � 1972, 1984, 1988 and 2004 � the Republican Party swept all 11 states of FDR�s �Solid South.�

Such were the fruits of that evil Southern Strategy.

But when conservatives urged Bush 1 to declare a moratorium on legal immigration in 1992 and build a security fence, the politically correct Republican establishment fought tooth and nail to keep the idea out of the platform.

So, where are we?

Eighteen states, including four of the seven mega-states � California, New York, Illinois and Pennsylvania � have gone Democratic in six straight elections. Two others, Florida and Ohio, have gone Democratic twice in a row. And white folks are now a minority in the last mega-state, Texas.

In Ohio, which produced seven Republican presidents, more than any other state, Republicans are dropping out, and may be dying out.

�Eight years ago, blacks and whites voted at about the same rate (in Ohio),� write Balz and Mellnik. In 2008, �the participation rate for whites dropped to 65 percent, while the rate for blacks rose to 70 percent. Last November, the turnout rate among whites fell to 62 percent, while the rate for blacks ticked up to 72 percent.�

From these Census figures, white folks are losing interest in politics and voting. Yet, whites still constitute three-fourths of the electorate and nine in 10 Republican votes.

Query: Is the way to increase the enthusiasm and turnout among this three-fourths of the electorate for the GOP to embrace amnesty and a path to citizenship for 12 million illegal foreign aliens?

Or is it to demand the sealing of America�s borders against any and all intruders?

Just asking.

At the moment... the GOP does not have ONE candidate the red voters can get excited about. Rand Paul will fail, so will Santorum and I doubt Rubio OR Cruz will go very far. If I chose right now, Rubio or Jindal, possibly Chris Christie have real futures. But, Christie is not in love with the Koch/GOP and they definitely have little love for him. He's going to tell them to go fly a kite or worse. Jindal and Rubio won't fire up the white red voter... So I'd say...the GOP is in a pickle and needs to make radical changes now. But, they won't.

A pictoral; Orb prepares for the Preakness

Dasher — Sat, 18 May 2013 12:25:04 GMT

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports...pid=z6#photo=1

What a fabulous horse...

Conspiracy of the unproductive

Dasher — Sat, 18 May 2013 12:13:49 GMT

Conspiracy of the unproductive

By Dana Milbank, Published: May 17

At the end of a truly dismal week in his presidency, President Obama remains lucky in one crucial category: his opposition.

It has been only a few days since two administration scandals — the IRS harassment of conservative groups and the Justice Department’s seizure of Associated Press phone records — dropped into the Republicans’ lap. But instead of turning public outrage to their advantage, Republicans have already begun overreaching, turning legitimate areas of inquiry into just some more partisan food fights.

Consider Thursday morning’s circus on the east lawn of the Capitol, where Republican lawmakers gathered with tea party leaders to declare their thoughts on the IRS scandal.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), mother of the House Tea Party Caucus, said her constituents are demanding, “Why aren’t you impeaching the president?”

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) referred to Obama as “a tyrannical despot” and said: “This is the way a tyrannical government comes into being and perpetuates itself.”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said he’s “quite worried” that the Obama administration will go through the medical records of the president’s political opponents.

Jenny Beth Martin, head of the Tea Party Patriots, supposed that “perhaps” the administration has used the IRS to “sway elections.” Another tea party leader characterized the recent developments as worse than Watergate, and another demanded the abolition of the IRS.

Then there was rookie Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), leader of the neo-McCarthyite wing of the GOP, who relayed to the national media the secondhand accusation that “confidential taxpayer records were handed over” by the IRS “to the co-chairman of President Obama’s presidential campaign.” He suggested this was evidence that “the federal government is being made to behave as if it is an arm of a political, partisan campaign apparatus.”

Chased down by reporters to explain this explosive allegation, Cruz said only that “I don’t know the facts beyond what I read” — and then sped off in a BMW 328.

Think these characters don’t speak for Republican Party leaders? Consider that the first person Bachmann called to the microphones was Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. “This is runaway government at its worst,” he proclaimed. “Who knows who they’ll target next?”

We do know whom the Republicans are targeting. Politico reported this week that about a third of the House’s 21 committees are investigating the Obama administration. And the head of Heritage Action for America, the influential lobbying arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation, wrote to congressional Republicans on Thursday urging them to concentrate on the administration scandals and avoid policy issues that could distract from this singular focus.

“[I]t would be imprudent to do anything that shifts the focus from the Obama administration to the ideological differences within the House Republican Conference,” warned Heritage Action chief executive Michael Needham. “To that end, we urge you to avoid bringing any legislation to the House Floor that could expose or highlight major schisms within the conference.” This, Needham reasoned, “would give the press a reason to shift their attention away from the failures of the Obama administration.”

House Speaker John A. Boehner (Ohio) apparently didn’t need convincing, for he had the House stage yet another symbolic vote Thursday on repealing Obamacare. At a news conference before that debate, Fox News’s Chad Pergram asked whether Boehner worried that probes of the Obama administration would cross “a line” and cause the sort of backlash that hit Republicans in 1998.

“Listen,” Boehner replied, “when you are trying to seek the truth — and that is the goal, to seek the truth — there is no line.”

And so Republicans, freed from lines, are turning justifiable inquiries into wild conspiracies.

At her news conference Thursday morning, Bachmann said it is “more than reasonable” to ask whether the Obama administration will deny health care to people “based upon a person’s political beliefs or their religiously held beliefs.”

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said the administration’s actions “tend to confirm . . . that your government is targeting you, that your government is spying on you and that your government is lying to you.”

And, of course, there was Cruz’s “story” about the IRS turning over tax records “to the co-chairman of President Obama’s presidential campaign.”

The article in question was apparently from the conservative (and controversial) Web site Breitbart, which published what it called the “claim” of a group opposed to gay marriage that the IRS leaked its financials to the head of the “rival” Human Rights Campaign. The accusation was speculative and, even if true, the gay-rights leader wasn’t “the co-chairman” of Obama’s campaign but one of 35 people in that ceremonial role.

These are relevant details — but easy to miss when you’re overreaching.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...1f9_story.html

Well put, well put. :lmao:

Disturbing abuses of power

Corodon — Sat, 18 May 2013 11:53:04 GMT

So reads the headline over this Colbert King column in the Washington Post, which includes a timely remembrance of abuses past:

Quote:

[Third paragraph] [I]t was especially galling to learn upon returning to the states in 1969 that the FBI had a counterintelligence program, known as COINTELPRO, that was, in some ways, as pernicious as the threat we were working against overseas.

Senate hearings in the 1970s revealed that the FBI, under the guise of protecting national security, had treated rights guaranteed by the First Amendment as little more than a collection of antiquated wishes best ignored.

With its surveillance of citizens, infiltration of civil rights groups and disruption of legal activities, the FBI’s counterintelligence program echoed the behavior of East Germany’s Stasi. The FBI acknowledges on its Web site that “COINTELPRO was later rightfully criticized by Congress and the American people for abridging first amendment rights and for other reasons.”

Fortunately, Congress reined in the FBI, placing it behind, and not beyond, the Constitution.

Where are we now?

Mr. King divides his attention for theremainder of the column between the IRS debacle and the AP phone grab, concluding in the best grandfatherly tradition of "back in my day...."

Quote:

COINTELPRO? No. Unchecked government power? Yes.

I don't think the two scandals should be conflated. The AP phone grab may be exactly what Abrams calls it, quoted in King's essay,

Quote:

Famed First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams told the Daily Beast this week that the Justice Department’s broad seizure of journalists’ phone records was “certainly one of the most intense intrusions by the government into a pressroom that I can remember.”

but an "intense intrusion" isn't the same beast as a politicized IRS. I agree more with this column by Matt Kibbe at FOX News:
Watergate 2.0 -- why the IRS scandal is far worse

Quote:

In the wake of one of the worst abuses of government power in recent history, many are rushing to frame the Internal Revenue Service scandal as simply an attack on conservative activists. That view risks creating a partisan political football and misses a fundamentally scarier abuse that exceeds the scandals of Watergate or any other prior government abuse.

Quote:

But this abuse extends far beyond the last or next election and strikes at the very core of the people’s relationship with their government.

The Washington Post’s editorial board wrote that, “A bedrock principle of U.S. democracy is that the coercive powers of government are never used for partisan purposes.”

In her apology, Lois G. Lerner, IRS director of exempt organization, insisted that the extra scrutiny was not politically motivated. The narrow focus on partisanship as the primary point of controversy is dangerous. This is not first and foremost a partisan issue.

It doesn’t matter whom the IRS was targeting or what specific beliefs they held: the fact remains that for years the agency used its power to discourage and intimidate Americans from speaking out against what they viewed as bad policies, stifling the First Amendment right of every citizen to hold government accountable.

The president says he was not aware of the problem. If so, then the state of our freedom is far worse than any of us has imagined – the gray suits are in place and already taking over.

Pundits have compared the current scandal to Watergate, but this one, frankly, is worse.

When the abuses of Watergate – which included misuse of the IRS to launch audits against Nixon’s enemies - were discovered, they stopped and the perpetrators were brought to justice.

We don’t yet know just how high the knowledge of the IRS practice reached, but it’s already clear that a broad element of the agency – including those with the power to stop it – knew about this blatant violation of basic constitutional rights for years and did nothing to stop it.

Despite Ms. Lerner’s statements to the contrary, it’s clear the IRS has been using its power for years to discourage and intimidate Americans from participating in their right to hold government accountable.

This abuse of power and “unequal treatment under the law” is truly chilling, and must not be brushed away with apologies or toothless inspector-generals’ reports.

It demands a rigorous congressional investigation and severe punishment of the power-drunk bureaucrats who carried it out.

No government agency must be allowed to abuse its powers so blatantly and get away with it. The freedom Americans hold so dearly is at stake.

We must demand that government account for its actions.

And he goes on, with more redundant table-thumping.

But the point is correct, and the WaPost editors are correct and worth repeating:

“A bedrock principle of U.S. democracy is that the coercive powers of government are never used for partisan purposes.”

The IRS debacle demonstrates a politicized bureaucracy wherein the corruption is widespread, long-standing, and, for all appearances, completely rationalized in the warp and woof of the corporate structure such that the apparent director of this malevolent abuse gets bonuses and now a nice promotion.

Of the three Horribles on the administration's doorstep, the Benghazi disaster, the AP phone grab and this, the corruption of the IRS, it's the last that has metastasized most extensively, it appears, and will require the most intense and thorough cleansing.

Jennie Runk: My life as a 'plus-size' model

Road Warrior — Sat, 18 May 2013 02:04:15 GMT

Jennie Runk uses her career as a model to help growing young women avoid negative body image issues.

Jennie Runk: My life as a 'plus-size' model

Quote:

When H&M hired a "plus-size" model to show off the range of sizes for its beachwear, the ad campaign caused much discussion. Model Jennie Runk says it's time we stopped obsessing about size.

I had no idea that my H&M beachwear campaign would receive so much publicity. I'm the quiet type who reads books, plays video games, and might be a little too obsessed with her cat.

So, suddenly having a large amount of publicity was an awkward surprise at first. I found it strange that people made such a fuss about how my body looks in a bikini, since I don't usually give it much thought.

When my Facebook fan page gained about 2,000 new likes in 24 hours, I decided to use the attention as an opportunity to make the world a little nicer by promoting confidence. I've since been receiving lots of messages from fans, expressing gratitude.

Some even told me that my confidence has inspired them to try on a bikini for the first time in years. This is exactly the kind of thing I've always wanted to accomplish, showing women that it's OK to be confident even if you're not the popular notion of "perfect".

This message is especially important for teenage girls. Being a teenage girl is incredibly difficult. They need all the help and support they can get.

When our bodies change and we all start to look totally different, we simultaneously begin feeling pressured to look exactly the same. This is an impossible goal to achieve and I wish I had known that when I was 13. At 5ft 9in and a US size eight (usually either a UK 10 or 12), I envied the girls whose boyfriends could pick them up and carry them on their shoulders.

Gym class was a nightmare. While the thin girls were wearing shorts, I was wearing sweat pants because my thighs were the size of their waists, and those pants were embarrassingly short because I was taller than the average adult, but still shopped at (pre-teen clothing store) Limited Too.

I also had thick, curly hair that only drew more attention to me, hiding behind my braces and beige, wire-rimmed glasses. On top of all this I've always been rather clumsy, so to say that my adolescence was awkward is an understatement.

Having finally survived it, I feel compelled to show girls who are going through the same thing that it's acceptable to be different. You will grow out of this awkwardness fabulously. Just focus on being the best possible version of yourself and quit worrying about your thighs, there's nothing wrong with them.........