Who the IRS Really Targeted (Yes, Cons were lying about it)

[Triana]

IRS targeted more than conservative groups

The May 20 front-page article “How the IRS seeded the clouds for a political deluge” buried inside the paper the following sentence: “Many liberal-leaning and nonpolitical groups were also caught up in the effort.”

Oh? The entire thrust of the Internal Revenue Service “scandal” being pushed by Republican and tea party groups is that President Obama had the IRS target them for special mistreatment because of their political leaning. If that were true, one would have expected that tax-exemption applications from left-leaning “social welfare organizations” would have sailed through the IRS at warp speed.

For the past week, I have read many articles online of similar problems encountered by progressive groups seeking 501(c)(4) status. But there has been far less about this in what the GOP and tea party groups like to call the “liberal lamestream media.”

THE REST:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/irs-targeted-more-than-conservative-groups/2013/05/24/299b6da0-c227-11e2-9642-a56177f1cdf7_story.html

AND

IRS Approved More Conservative Groups Than Liberal Groups Selected For Review: Report

. . . conservative groups were reviewed and approved more often than liberal groups, but it does not state the total number of conservative and liberal groups that applied for tax exempt status during that period. The analysis also does not identify the ideological breakdown of groups that applied and have not been approved, since the IRS is prevented by law from providing the names of groups still being processed by the service. All of these caveats are noted in the analysis.

At least one error was readily identifiable in the Tax Analysts' analysis. A group named U.S. Health Freedom Coalition is listed as a liberal or non-conservative group, when it was in fact created by the conservative group Americans for Prosperity as the principal funding mechanism for ballot initiatives opposing the implementation of the Affordable Care Act in Arizona and Ohio. The group is run by Eric Novack, a former Americans for Prosperity fellow and known conservative activist

.


THE REST:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/06/irs-conservative-groups_n_3396998.html

[merrily]

1. Is "targeted" even the correct word, or was the IRS really targeting the left?

IOW, was the IRS just doing its job as to both sides, or was it indeed "targeting" one side or the other?

If the IRS was simply doing its job, why the 5th amendment and lost emails?

[markpkessinger]

2. Inferring some kind of guilt from the fact that a witness invokes the Fifth Amendment . . .

. . . that is to say, that the witness exercises his or her rights under the Constitution, is a very dangerous business. Facing a Congressional Committee controlled by a hostile party, any lawyer in his/her right mind would counsel a client to take the Fifth.