"Final Audit"

Michael Ramirez on IRS Scandal Hearings

This was the 'toon I was originally searching for. Classic Ramirez! Note the "news" coverage in the lower right corner.

Making a Hash Out of the IRS

Quote du jour

"Religions have been founded on less"

-George Will, on the coincidence of 7 key IRS employees' hard drives failing at the same time

We Has Nothing To Apologizes For!

John Koskinen
Cross posted at LCR

If You Like Your Cherry Tree, You Can Keep It...

Original art by John Cox. More at John Cox Art

Cross posted at LCR

Platitudes-R-Us in Obama's Weak-ly Address

Saw Obama's weak-ly radio address over at American Power. The Bamboozler-in-Chief runs his mouth in campaign mode for four minutes in what sounds like a speech he could have given in 2008 (and probably did, except for the "phony scandals" part), as if he hasn't held the highest, most powerful office in the land for the past five years. Listen, if you have the stomach for it:


For Obama to insist on calling these scandals "phony", even as more and more evidence mounts in them, in hopes that they go away, would be slightly akin to you or I calling Obama a phony president and hoping he would go away. (The difference is, in the latter case, you or I would be correct, and Obama will go away as president no later than Jan. 2017)


Cross posted at LCR.

Proglodyte Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Republicans Are To Blame For IRS Tea Party Scandal

I'd heard this meme several times, that the Cincinnati office was soooooooooo overwhelmed, that "mistakes were made"! And I'm picking on RFK Jr. not because he may be the dimmest bulb on the Kennedy family tree, but because, thanks to the journalistic efforts of the Puffington Host, we have both video and a transcript of him saying stupid things.

Originally, I was going to make some snide crack, bout how if it wasn't for his father's name, he'd be taking tolls in a booth alongside a turnpike somewhere along the Eastern Seaboard. We'll come back to that in a minute.

Bobby Junior blames the Republicans for the IRS scandal. It was those wascally Wepubwiccans who allowed Obama's sequester to remain in place, and that slashed funding for everybody. Well, it slashed it down to what they spent the year before and a little bit more. It is painfully obvious that you cannot expect a Democrat administration to run a department at the same funding level as the year before without draconian cuts, now, can you?

And it wasn't just the sequester! No, no! These cuts went all the way back to BUSH!!! (Anyone know if Bush Derangement Syndrome is covered under Obamacare?) And so obviously, because of cutbacks, they were understaffed and overwhelmed with 60,000 applications for tax exempt status.

And because of a lack of training, these poor rubes in Cincinnati hadn't a clue as to how to deal with these 501c4 applications (even though they apparently didn't have the same lack of training problems in processing the same sort of requests from left of center groups.) And so, we are supposed to believe, that this required that they ask many, many more questions of groups with "Tea Party" or "Patriot" in their names. Personal questions, invasive questions...hundreds more questions than asked of liberal groups, along with requests for more and more documentation. Now, if the reason for the scandal were the lack of manpower, caused by wascally Wepubwiccans, can we get someone with a higher candle power intellect than RFK II to tell us what the results would be?

Let's go back to our toll booth for a minute. Let's say that the Peter Principle advanced RFK II to the point where he is the chief toll taker in his booth. And there's a long line backing up at his booth. The toll is fifty cents. The woman in the first car with a "Don't tread on me" sticker in the window hands him two quarters. "I'm sorry, ma'am", says RFK II, "we can't accept quarters, we need five dimes". So the woman rummages around in her purse, finds five dimes and hands them to him. "I'm sorry, ma'am. That rule only applies after nine o'clock. We'll need ten nickels for the toll this morning."

Again, if we have someone smarter than RFK II around here, that is to say, someone who can tie his own shoes, would making more difficult requests on certain individuals in a toll booth or a federal government office tend to increase or decrease your workload? If the problem is too much workload for the people you have, why wouldn't you ask fewer questions, or at least the same number of questions from every individual applicant? And if you ask for additional, unnecessary documentation from any of the individual applicants, that delay means at some point you have to process the same request again (and again, and again - for months, sometimes years!), that is not the logical response of anyone who has too much work.

As a general rule, on their own, people would tend to look for shortcuts, ways to shorten the process, not lengthen it. Someone with an ideological bent was targeting these groups for political purposes. The thought of using the IRS as your own personal attack dog used to at least publicly horrify liberals like Bobby Kennedy. What the Left did at the IRS is inexcusable. That the proglodytes have to grasp at straws for any defense of it, is not surprising.

The video of RFK's mind drool is at Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Republicans To Blame For IRS Tea Party Scandal

Cross posted at LCR.

Quote du jour

Drew Ryun applied (to the IRS) for permanent nonprofit status for a group called "Media Trackers" in July 2011. Fifteen months later, he'd heard nothing. So he applied again under the eco-friendly name of "Greenhouse Solutions," and was approved in three weeks.

-Mark Steyn

A Tale of Three Gates