The Evolving IRS Scandal

These Sources are Partisan but they all have good sourced info:

#1

“We did pose that question, and no one would acknowledge who, if anyone, provided that direction,” Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George said in response to a question from Representative Tom Graves (R., Ga.). George interviewed employees in the IRS field office in Cincinnati as part of his audit, which found that the agency inappropriately targeted conservative organizations seeking nonprofit status.

So around 90 people decided to target political opponents of the president and they refused to answer

And they targeted A major donor to the group that was the logistical backbone for the tea party movement in its earliest days. A movement that was acting funny and whose former head had to get a golden buyout.

And when that backbone went to develop further it was targeted The Scandal here is that while groups like the NAACP, SIERRA CLUB, and other 501c4's get the chance to do this very sort of work... people who opposed the president were being denied that same opportunity

When Speech is silenced

I thought it was bad and an abuse of our first amendment. It appears however this sort of moral cowardice is not unheard of

At least one newsman was alarmed, however. And on the day of the 1933 elections, he gained a brief audience with the future Fuhrer. That man was Cornelius “Neil” Vanderbilt IV, great-great-grandson of the railroad tycoon. Fed up with the malaise of his privileged peers, Vanderbilt had moved to journalism from his position as a driver during the First World War. His name gave him access to Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler, whose impending Reich became the subject of Vanderbilt’s documentary film, called Hitler’s Reign of Terror, released on April 30, 1934, a short portion of which you can see above.

The New Yorker obtained the clip from Brandeis University professor Thomas Doherty, who rediscovered the film in a Belgian archive while researching a recent book. Vanderbilt’s documentary might well be the first American anti-Nazi film, but its contemporary reception speaks volumes about how criticism of the new Nazi regime was suppressed in the mid-thirties; the film was censored across the U.S., denied a license, and banned.

People say things like "Never Again" but we miss out on one of the great evils of civilization. Civilization makes us averse to violence. We abandon Hobbes right to "War" in exchange for more peaceful and productive avenues. But when we hide from evil some times evil comes to rise, and we must take action against it.

Before a patterned curtain, the newsman asks the correspondent what he thinks of Hitler, and Vanderbilt replies: “Unquestionably he is a man of real ability, of force. But the way I sized him up after interviewing him is that he is a strange combination of Huey Long, Billy Sunday, and Al Capone.” He goes on, “I had never heard a man so able to sway people. He said Germany refused to forget her two million war dead. In the hour and a half that Hitler talked to that packed audience that night, he was as effective as a barker in a sideshow travelling with a circus. The German people had suffered so long that they were ready to accept the promises of anyone who held out some hope for the future.”

Hill’s newsman wonders, “Is it your belief that Europe is getting ready for another world war? Has she forgotten the horrors of the last World War? Is she trying to force another such war on humanity?”

Vanderbilt answers with a touch of sorrow, noting the clear desire for revenge.

“It all seems a ghastly, incredible nightmare,” Hill says.

Vanderbilt, in his boarding school pronunciation, “Yes, I agree with you.”

I wonder if we are facing the same sort of storm clouds waiting for as Hitler called himself "the man of the hour, not because he has been appointed Chancellor by Hindenburg but because no one else could have been appointed Chancellor instead."

The IRS Front on the War on the First Amendment

The "Few" Bad Employees in the Cincinnati office...

well of course the Cincinnati office runs operatives all over the United States. How many of them were involved with the targeting of IRS groups?

90 Employees

90 Employees that had at least 1 supervisor, 3 managers, the director of the Cincinnati office, and Lois Learner all participating in some level in the targeting of Tea Party, Religious Conservative, and Pro-Israeli groups for political purposes. Now while its possible these groups were targeted for non political purposes the memorandum focusing on specific groups by ideology shows there was a non financial reason for the targeting.

So we have a US Attorney saying you can be prosecuted for your face book posts and IRS agents attacking you if you seek to use your first amendment rights in the political realm

Also the IRS has a warning system if cases take to long to be resolved which means reports went all the way up the chain of command (past Lois Learner) so on the desk of the director of Internal Revenue was a report of all the cases going late in the Cincinnati office.

This corruption is far more wide spread then these 90 people

The War on the First Amendment Continues

So our President and his administration continues their assault on our constitution and on the relationship between the state and the citizen.

Special speakers for the event will be Bill Killian, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Tennessee, and Kenneth Moore, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Knoxville Division.

Sponsor of the event is the American Muslim Advisory Council of Tennessee — a 15-member board formed two years ago when the General Assembly was considering passing legislation that would restrict those who worship Sharia Law, which is followed by Muslims.

Killian and Moore will provide input on how civil rights can be violated by those who post inflammatory documents targeted at Muslims on social media.

This is how policies change. Small little interpretations are spoken by US Attorneys and people in a place of political power, and they become part of the background discussion of the living constitution. As speech takes on a new form speech is not respected as the right of all free men (who are the sovereigns of the country) but a right doled out by the state that identifies it as the new sovereign. Eventually these ideas form a doctrine that everyone accepts.

But just as with the famous broccoli doctrine question we are faced with a parallel on the most fundamental of all constitutional rights. If what some weirdo in his pajama's can post on the internet so long as it does not promote -criminal- conduct, what speech can the state not stop online or offline?

Their was a line drawn in the sand (called the Brandenburg test)

The Brandenburg test (also known as the imminent lawless action test)

The three distinct elements of this test (intent, imminence, and likelihood) have distinct precedential lineages.

Judge Learned Hand was possibly the first judge to advocate the intent standard, in Masses Publishing Co. v. Patten, 244 F. 535 (S.D.N.Y. 1917), reasoning that "[i]f one stops short of urging upon others that it is their duty or their interest to resist the law, it seems to me one should not be held to have attempted to cause its violation." The Brandenburg intent standard is more speech-protective than Hand's formulation, which contained no temporal element.

The imminence element was a departure from earlier rulings. Brandenburg did not explicitly overrule the bad tendency test, but it appears that after "Brandenburg", the test is de facto overruled. The "Brandenburg" test effectively made the time element of the clear and present danger test more defined and more rigorous.

If a post on facebook that is rude, crude, inappropriate, and wrong: Does it meet this clear standard of law to cross the line into violence. Short of the sort of conduct that people only commit in isolated and hidden parts of the internet there is no speech on the internet that meets this standard of law.

Killian referred to a Facebook posting made by Coffee County Commissioner Barry West that showed a picture of a man pointing a double-barreled shotgun at a camera lens with the caption saying, “How to Wink at a Muslim.”

Killian said he and Moore had discussed the issue.

“If a Muslim had posted ‘How to Wink at a Christian,’ could you imagine what would have happened?” he said. “We need to educate people about Muslims and their civil rights, and as long as we’re here, they’re going to be protected.”

Except their are innumerable posts of that sort of nature by Muslims on Facebook and other places on the internet. And when confronted with such conduct in the past we have British law enforcement officers saying that they can't monitor every crazy post by a Muslim Imam on the internet.

So instead of monitoring the law abiding, we should monitor the law breaking