Congrats, residents of Missouri! Your brave legislature, fresh off of defunding the driver's license bureau, has gone on further, passing bills to protect you from UN Agenda 21, Sharia Law, and nullified any federal laws regarding guns.

Shape Of Debate In Missouri: Tinfoil Hats And Toy Helicopters : It's All Politics : NPR

The Sharia law thing is ridiculous. The other two don't seem like a big deal. I'm a fan of state rights on the other two.

So what does this have to do with Obama?

I expected nothing less from you, MBBF, and you delivered

1) a state cannot nullify federal laws. In Cooper v. Aaron, the Supreme Court directly ruled that a state cannot nullify a federal law.

2) The US hasn't ratified anything at all related to Agenda 21, and most of the fear attached to it is from a Glenn Beck work of fiction.

It's amazing how this real public push for more gun control has resulted in no more gun control, but a huge gun industry boom and a flurry of state legislative activity to protect gun rights that are not threatened. The NRA wins at politics.

I was simply responding to the notion of the law. You obviously know more about the current status of both situations. It sounds like both situations will be resolved.

So, what up with the IRS targeting the Tea Party?

color me shocked.

oh, and what about the benghazi cover up? and..

oh nevermind.

You know, I can't say I'm the last guy to call this stuff out, but really - can we get past the /rolling eyes phase? While I know the Beghazi thing is largely partisan there is some substance here, and cnn is reporting that an inspector general report to be released next week will admit that IRS agents targeted conservative groups. Aren't we all anti-corruption here?

Benghazi is a big deal and getting bigger. It's bad on so many levels.

How so? Darrell Issa was trumpeting last week that the hearings on Wednesday were going to blow things wide open. No information came out there that wasn't already known. The worst thing they came up with were that there was a number of edits of the administrations talking points, with the CIA and the State Department trying to play down their roles.

AP has rolled today (tonight?) with an exclusive about the IG report. It shows that the targeting was known by the head of the department that handles auditing non-profits as far back as June 2011 ... nearly a year before the IRS Commissioner told a Congressional committe in March 2012 that "There's absolutely no targeting"

My Way News - AP Exclusive: IRS knew tea party targeted in 2011

Now here's a kinda interesting tidbit about Commissioner Shulman: he was a Bush appointee

yeah, the only folks believing so (that there's this huge cover up) really are hoping to sink Clinton '16 before it gets started.

As for the IRS thing, anyone who deliberately targeted the Tea Party groups, and anyone who KNEW about the deliberate targeting without raising a protest should be fired, end of story. I disagree vehemently with their politics, but holding an unpopular opinion shouldn't mean that you are more likely to be targeted by the IRS.

The IRS thing is a much bigger deal. I'd like it if the IRS took away tax exempt status for all sorts of political groups, but they can't target only one or two key words to do it. I'm still not convinced that it was evil rather than stupid, but it deserves a thorough investigation.

It depends on what you think the cover-up was for. I think it was mostly just to cover some really bad decisions and they got caught. It's my understanding there were several minor events leading up to the attack that they did not step up security after. That's a pretty bad mistake. Then, to have tried to twist/turn the story into it being about some sort of protest about some video was really bad. Finally, could they have got military intervention to limit things? I guess that's a debatable point.

I don't think it's a cover-up in some sort of conspiracy way but it was an effort to try and make some very poor decisions appear to be defensible and I'm not so sure they are.

Lets look at the IRS thing from a logical perspective. One of the things these tea party groups claim they want to do is abolish the IRS. Why exactly is it shocking that the IRS would put a little more effort into investigating a group who wants to end their livelihoods? It would be as shocking as a police group wanting to investigate a group that advocates hollow tipped bullets.

Before anyone gets too shocked that panerd isn't outraged by an investigation into "tea party" groups that fact is most of those groups are about as small government as Obama/Pelosi. They still want the wars, more Jesus in our lives, and more government health care for rich old white people. Otherwise big government to them just means more bombers and business as usual.

Nobody really wins unless you address root causes and target the big fish instead of small fish. Attacking the gun-toting south and hunters to solve (or seriously degrade) the problem of people shooting people was doomed from the start.

You want to stop crime, target criminals. You want to eliminate firearms that do a majority of the carnage? Go after handguns. Going after semi-automatic rifles by calling them assault rifles was a targeted attack against a certain voting block and it had no intention of solving the problem. Like in the Untouchables, Sean Connery says, "Everybody knows where the crime is...but what are you prepared to do?". Admittedly, I get it though, it's a little harder when you have to go after your own voting block to affect change.

I agree, and we have actually done those things and been wildly successful, per capital violent crime rates have dropped off a cliff in this country. The mainstream debate isn't as subtle though, and its been intense - us v. them, the battle for gun regulations. And in that debate, not only has the gun-side not lost any ground legally, but gun sales are booming, and the % of households which own guns has gone up after decreasing for about 20 years (and most of that "% of households" increase is fueled by Democrats and women.)

It's just interesting to see all of those numbers going in all different directions. Crime is way down, public support for stricter gun regulations is way up, gun ownership is way up.

Sarcasm:

HOWEVER if the targeting of the Conservative groups kept them from auditing me, who can I give a medal too?

/sarcasm

Im not sure what to think of Benghazi other than it falls right in line with what I hated about the Bush Admin. The coverup and the constant spinning. Thats what this harkens back to. Had they just come out and said, "We were attacked at a remote outpost, we didnt have resources to get there in time, heres the plan to fix that going forward, etc." then perhaps it wouldnt be as big a deal as the 'coverup'. It disappoints me greatly.

Ill say however that we now are in our 13th or so year of one party absolutely doing everything in their power to make the other party fail and I cannot wait until there are more then 2 parties. Its a faiure to America when they act like this out of the gates, see McConnell, etc.

haha...which party are you talking about?

Both, so maybe it goes back even longer but the placing of the hatred higher than the good of the people is a detriment to our entire country.

Depends upon whether that which you hate is involved in "the good of the people".

It sounds like the IRS might have been within their bounds to take closer looks at the tax-exempt applications from the Tea Party groups. The statute they were claiming exemption under, 501(c)(4), is supposed to be used for "Civic Leagues, Social Welfare Organizations, and Local Associations of Employees". They can act as a group in political activities, but their main purpose cannot be political in nature, their main purpose is supposed to be related to social welfare.

It isn't too far-fetched of a scenario where a slew of applications came in when tea party groups were first formed that were rejected due to not meeting the requirements of 501(c)(4) and at that point they were met with closer scrutiny.

I don't think they get to decide "conservatives are cheaters" and then target groups exclusively based on their political affiliation for closer inspection. Even Obama has said that.

I didn't say they got to decide they were cheaters. What I said was it isn't too implausible that they got a rash of incorrectly submitted applications, and that was what triggered the closer inspections.

501(c)(4) is abused by political action committees of all ideologies. I don't want the IRS to be one sided, but if they cracked down across the board I'd be happy. Unfortunately, one of the side effects of this mess is going to be reduced scrutiny of 501(c)(4) groups.

And I'm sure that the big groups, like Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks knew just how to work the system like the existing PACs. But for the smaller, local groups I can see them getting tripped up by the "primary purpose not being political" requirement on their applications.

It may not have been politically motivated, but they're still not permitted to profile groups based exclusively on their politics and hold them to greater scrutiny. Even if there was a previous "rash of incorrectly submitted applications" involving that or a similar political view.

I didn't say it was exclusively based on their politics, I posited that it would have been due to a pattern of incorrectly/incompletely submitted applications. And I'm not saying that is what happened in this case, but a not implausible scenario.

Dola,

Which is the unsettling thing in all of this, because by their nature, tax exempt 501(c)(4) groups are supposed to be non-political to start with, so it seems kind of strange to say that they are being targeted because of their politics.

Even if that was what happened - they're not allowed to do that. If tea party groups submitted a whole flurry of incorrect applications, the IRS is STILL not allowed to say, "these tea party groups are bad news, from now on, everybody flag everything with the word "patriot" in it, or anything that looks like it might have anything to do with these people, and we'll go over it with a fine toothed comb." If obama is correct, that's still not cool, even if the motivation wasn't political.

If they get a rash of incorrectly submitted applications that certainly does allow them to decide to take a closer look at all of those types of applications though. Which I'm guessing is what happened. It triggered a flag of "let's audit the whole lot of people claiming to be 501(c)(4)."

But shouldn't they be allowed to say something like "the last 25 of these we've gotten in from these groups have had errors, so watch out for errors when these come in"? That is different than if every application had been submitted correctly, and then a mandate came down to go over them with a fine tooth comb.

Actually that's how their audit flagging system works. It's all computerized though, nobody is sitting there making an active political decision. Now maybe the computer is smart enough to flag anything with "American" or "Patriot" based on the incorrect ones that were noted (if they had a whole bunch along those lines), but it's a big stretch to say that somebody was targeting them b/c they were tea party groups.

Persecution complex much? Probably because it fits their narrative of being oppressed. Particularly silly because isn't the IRS guy a Bush appointee? Didn't I see that somewhere?

One of the flags was groups who appear to "criticize the way the country is run". They were going after tea party groups as opposed to government criticism generally, but that illustrates why its so important for the irs not to screen based on politics

Which as I posted earlier, if they were filling out the applications correctly, there should have been nothing overtly mentioning politics as the group's primary mission for the tax exempt status they were seeking.

If this was just fox news complaining I wouldn't have even noticed this. But obama called it "outrageous". What's his angle here? Why do you think he's lying about this being a big deal(if you guys are right and the irs acted appropriately?)

You left out some key words from Obama.

"What's been reported" is exactly what we're talking about here.

And he said if that was true, then it is outrageous. If it ends up not being as reported, then it isn't outrageous, and he wouldn't be lying, as you put it.

Exactly.

cartman wins.

You're disagreeing with obama here. You think its ok to target conservative groups, because those groups aren't even supposed to identify themselves as "conservative" in these filings (which I think is an incorrect interpretation of the law). If liberal groups were being targeted like this during the bush years, you'd be going apeshit. I tend to think obama is right, the irs fucked up, it wasn't politically motivated, heads will roll, and conservative conspiracy theorists will make more out of this than it deserves for years to come

Yes, if its a fake news story, and there was zero targetting of conservative groups, than it wasn't outrageous, agreed. But it sounds like you and dt aren't saying the story is fake, you're justfying the irs' actions.

I don't know how I can make it more clear. I do not think it is ok to target conservative groups, or any group for that matter for no reason other than where they are coming from on the political spectrum. I believe it is entirely ok to take a closer look at applications for tax exemption if a group has shown a pattern of incorrect/incomplete applications. And again, I have no proof one way or the other of what triggered the audits.

This is 100% where I stand too. Not sure why you're not getting that from what we're saying molson.

The latter is still nappropriate is because you can make those kind of accusations against any group and there's no process or oversight. Its creates the appearance of impropriety. Obama knows that tea party groups have been iffy on tax stuff. That's not some new revelation. The irs still can't screen in this manner, looking for political affiliation.

Dude - seriously. YES THEY CAN IF THESE GROUPS ARE CLAIMING A STATUS THAT IS FOR NON-POLITICAL GROUPS.

Whew, she mentioned Oregon as a place she'd go to. I was worried she would say Texas.

Gah, had the link sent to me and was too excited to check out the site and find it was fake. Glad I don't have to apologize to any other state for her at least.

One of the criteria that has come out is they were targeting... "political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding Government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform movement"

Sometimes I really feel like I fell asleep and woke up in an Orwell novel. LOL on the explanation of that one though I am sure Obama will have some doublespeak that someone will say makes sense.

Look at the terms that are being flagged. They're looking beyond "primary purpose" and trying to root out the organizations more subtly. These groups are allowed to have political opinions and are allowed to engage in political activity. The irs is trying to predict what type of political activity these groups might engage in, and flagging them based on that.