Month: June 2014

Lois Lerner looked to target sitting Senator for IRS investigation.

Charming.

Today, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) announced the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) targeting of conservative individuals includes a sitting United States Senator.  According to emails reviewed by the Committee under its Section 6103 authority, which allows the Committee to review confidential taxpayer information, Lois Lerner sought to have Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) referred for IRS examination.

“We have seen a lot of unbelievable things in this investigation, but the fact that Lois Lerner attempted to initiate an apparently baseless IRS examination against a sitting Republican United States Senator is shocking,” said Camp.

Basically, what happened here was that Lerner got sent an invite meant for Sen. Grassley by mistake.  So she immediately started sniffing around for a way to make a federal case out of it, and got gently smacked down by a colleague more aware of the pesky reality that you actually have to wait for somebody to break the rules before you can investigate them for it.  Your tax dollars at work, folks: the IRS may not be able to follow the same document storage rules that they’ll enforce on the rest of us, but they’re absolutely proactive when it comes to trolling through your mail for a preemptive strike.

Sheesh.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

It’s almost over. At long last, the Mississippi Senate GOP primary…

…is almost over.  They just have to count the votes, now.  Yes, I am so ready for this to be over and done with. And I’ll be honest; I kinda feel sorry for Thad Cochran. I know, I know, he chose to be amenable to pressure to run just one more time – but I am often prone to these bouts of sentimentality, and I frankly cherish them. I feel that they keep me from engaging in thought-patterns that are not… optimal, in the long run.

What, exactly, victory condition is achieved by taking a picture of your genitals?

Perhaps I am simply old. But I am with Sonny Bunch on this:

…I do not understand what is accomplished by taking a picture of your penis and then showing that picture to a woman. I am certain that if this was an infallible way to make that woman engage in sexual congress with you then this practice would have been popularized in the first days of daguerreotypes. In fact, I am trying to think of a situation where things would be improved with a good round of Hey, let me show you this photo of my junk, and failing.

Again, I must be just getting old.

Moe Lane

PS: Forget my lawn: you kids GET OFF OF SOCIAL MEDIA.  It’s just messing up your lives.

Josh Marshall, on the oddity of keeping SCOTUSBlog from getting credentials.

I generally don’t agree with Josh Marshall about what color the sky is, but this is pretty much correct:

At the end of the day, all of it comes down to this. SCOTUSBlog is the preeminent source of real-time and journalistic reporting on the Supreme Court in the country. I say this with full knowledge that there are many extremely talented Supreme Court and legal affairs reporters working for various newspapers and news outlets. And it’s no disrespect at all to them. (I have no idea who the best individual Supreme Court reporter is.) The simple fact is that whenever a big case comes down, basically everyone goes to SCOTUSBlog to get the first read on what happened. This is quite simply a fact.

So you have this perverse situation in which what is arguably and close to objectively the top source of reporting and commentary on the Supreme Court being basically the only ones who aren’t credentialed to cover it. That’s the problem with this decision. From what I can see, the rules don’t at all prevent the committee from issuing SCOTUSBLog a credential. If the rules do, then the rules are outmoded and should change.

Continue reading Josh Marshall, on the oddity of keeping SCOTUSBlog from getting credentials.

IRS claims no criminal wrongdoing done, based on… feelings! “Nothing more than… FEELINGS!”

Sorry for getting that song stuck in your head, by the way.

Imagine, if you would, the following exchange:

IRS Agent: What you did here is suspicious.

Audited individual: I haven’t broken any laws!

IRS Agent: Really?  What are the relevant laws?

Audited individual: …I don’t know.

I want you to imagine what the IRS agent’s most likely response would be to that.  You can, right? It’s pretty easy. We all know just how much give there is when it comes to dealing with the tax man.

Continue reading IRS claims no criminal wrongdoing done, based on… feelings! “Nothing more than… FEELINGS!”

Sure, Joe Biden thinks that he’s got a shot at 2016.

I don’t know if Glenn Reynolds is any more surprised than I am at the idea that Joe Biden would think that, though. Even if you don’t agree with #2 or #3 in the list below, surely we can all agree with #1 , yes? After all, not having a shot has never stopped Joe Biden from making a run for the nomination anyway.

Anyway, there are three main reasons why Biden thinks that he has a shot:

  1. He’s Joe Biden.  I sometimes wonder what it’s like, there inside Joe Biden’s head. I suspect that it is a place with no soft edges; there are probably no unicorns, but there may be a wise standing stone or two to whisper on the wind the earth lore of the petty-gods.
  2. More pragmatically, he’s the Vice President of the United States. That’s not a bad place from where to launch a Presidential campaign.  It may or may not be the best place, but it’s certainly a legitimate place to start when it comes to getting the nomination.
  3. Look at the field. Seriously. Hillary Clinton is his most likely opponent, and the media has been hammering her ‘inevitability’ mostly because they hope that if they do then nobody will notice that she’s a horrible campaigner with bad political instincts. And after that, there is a deeeeeep chasm before you get to the next clump of candidates, like O’Malley and Schweitzer and Warren.

Personally, I don’t really care whether the Democrats nominate the old white guy with health problems, or the old white woman with health problems. From my point of view, either will be fine. For a given value of ‘fine,’ of course – and it’s a value that the Democratic party would not share.