Seabass wrote:Ken Starr: Dems shouldn't pursue impeachment because "it's so bad for the country".

Unfuckingbelievable.

How the IRS Gave Up Fighting Political Dark Money Groups
Six years after it was excoriated for allegedly targeting conservative organizations, the agency has largely given up on regulating an entire category of nonprofits. The result: More dark money gushes into the political system.
https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-political-dark-money-groups-501c4-tax-regulation

...

Such spending is legal because of a massive loophole. Section 501(c)(4) of the U.S. tax code allows organizations to make independent expenditures on politics while concealing their donors’ names — as long as politics isn’t the organization’s “primary activity.” The Internal Revenue Service has the daunting task of trying to determine when nonprofits in that category, known colloquially as C4s, violate that vague standard.

But the IRS’ attempts to police this class of nonprofits have almost completely broken down, a ProPublica investigation reveals. Since 2015, thousands of complaints have streamed in — from citizens, public interest groups, IRS agents, government officials and more — that C4s are abusing the rules. But the agency has not stripped a single organization of its tax-exempt status for breaking spending rules during that period. (A handful of groups have had their status revoked for failing to file financial statements for three consecutive years.)

Most cases do not even reach the IRS committee created to examine them. Between September 2017 and March 2019, the committee didn’t receive a single complaint to review according to one former and one current IRS employee who worked closely with the committee, even as at least 2,000 warranted its consideration. (The IRS disputes this.) The standards are almost as permissive when organizations apply for C4 status in the first place. In 2017, for example, the IRS rejected only three out of 1,487 applications.

The IRS’ abdication of oversight stems from a trio of causes. It started with a surge in the number of politically oriented C4s. That was exacerbated by the IRS’ almost comically cumbersome process for examining C4s accused of breaching political limits; the process requires a half-dozen layers of approvals and referrals merely to start an investigation. That is abetted by years of IRS staff attrition and loss of expertise that was then compounded by steady budget reductions by Congress starting in 2010. The division that oversees nonprofits, known as the “exempt organization” section, shrank from 942 staffers in 2010 to 585 in 2018, according to the IRS.

...

But how does one define an organization’s “primary activity”? For decades, the point was largely moot. Big funders used other means to funnel money to campaigns. Then came a series of Supreme Court rulings, the best known of which was the Citizens United decision in 2010, that loosened restrictions on political contributions. In that case, the court concluded that, like people, corporations and unions could spend unlimited funds for elections.

The Citizens United decision was followed by a surge in the formation of politically focused organizations seeking IRS approval as C4s. In 2012, at least $250 million passed through such groups and into efforts to elect candidates, an 80-fold increase from eight years prior.

continued: https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-political-dark-money-groups-501c4-tax-regulation

Seabass wrote:Ken Starr: Dems shouldn't pursue impeachment because "it's so bad for the country".

Unfuckingbelievable.

North Carolina is one of several states in which lawmakers are pushing new proposals to undercut wind energy. State Sen. Harry Brown (R) has long positioned himself as a wind power opponent and this legislative session he is pushing Senate Bill 377, the “Military Base Protection Act.”

The bill argues that wind farms pose a national security risk and uses Department of Defense maps to essentially outlaw wind farms built on land within 100 miles of the state’s coast. Brown has received support from fellow state Sens. Norman Sanderson (R) and Paul Newton (R), the latter of whom was previously an employee of Duke Energy, one of the country’s largest utilities.

But the military already has veto power over any projects that are deemed a national security risk. North Carolina’s Amazon Wind Farm, the first large-scale wind farm in the state, went through years of review and permitting studies, in addition to coordinating with the U.S. Navy and Department of Defense. Proponents of renewable energy say arguments about national security are just another way for fossil fuel interests to dissuade potential wind and solar investments in the state.

aban57 wrote:

Seabass wrote:Male lawmaker says he’s trying to restrict abortion because women ‘are not having enough babies’
https://www.rawstory.com/2019/04/male-lawmaker-says-hes-trying-restrict-abortion-women-not-enough-babies/

Delaware state Rep. Richard Collins (R) said this week that he was sponsoring an anti-abortion bill because women are not replenishing the U.S. population quickly enough.

While speaking to WGMD-FM on Tuesday, Collins explained that he was introducing a bill that would require women to listen to the fetal heartbeat before having an abortion. A second bill would outlaw abortion after 20 weeks.

“God is moving in strange and wonderful ways, folks,” the lawmaker insisted. “Gun bills that we’ve talked about will save essentially no lives because it will have no impact on criminals getting of keeping their guns. But every single year, we kill hundreds of people in abortions.”

“You know, we have a massive problem in this country,” he continued. “Our birthrate is way, way below replacement [levels]. You know, we are just not having enough babies.”

Oh yeah... the "Great Replacement" theory...

Alan C wrote:When will Jordan and his fellow 'Freedom caucus' windowlickers be turfed out?

GOP lawmakers undermine voter suppression probe

The Republican correspondence to state officials, signed by Jim Jordan and several of colleagues, said federal lawmakers believed it would be “prudent” to inform them of the concerns.

“With a Democratic president, there was no allegation too small to investigate,” Elijah Cummings said this week, “but now that Donald Trump is in the White House, there is apparently no scandal too big to ignore.”

At issue are suspected voter-suppression tactics in Texas, Georgia, and Kansas, each of which generated national headlines during the 2018 election cycle.

Why Won’t Twitter Treat White Supremacy Like ISIS? Because It Would Mean Banning Some Republican Politicians Too.
A Twitter employee who works on machine learning believes that a proactive, algorithmic solution to white supremacy would also catch Republican politicians.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3xgq5/why-wont-twitter-treat-white-supremacy-like-isis-because-it-would-mean-banning-some-republican-politicians-too

...

With every sort of content filter, there is a tradeoff, he explained. When a platform aggressively enforces against ISIS content, for instance, it can also flag innocent accounts as well, such as Arabic language broadcasters. Society, in general, accepts the benefit of banning ISIS for inconveniencing some others, he said.

In separate discussions verified by Motherboard, that employee said Twitter hasn’t taken the same aggressive approach to white supremacist content because the collateral accounts that are impacted can, in some instances, be Republican politicians.

The employee argued that, on a technical level, content from Republican politicians could get swept up by algorithms aggressively removing white supremacist material. Banning politicians wouldn’t be accepted by society as a trade-off for flagging all of the white supremacist propaganda, he argued.

...

That same eradicate-everything approach, applied to white supremacy, is much more controversial.

“Most people can agree a beheading video or some kind of ISIS content should be proactively removed, but when we try to talk about the alt-right or white nationalism, we get into dangerous territory, where we’re talking about [Iowa Rep.] Steve King or maybe even some of Trump’s tweets, so it becomes hard for social media companies to say all of this ‘this content should be removed,’” Amarasingam said.

...

Any move that could be perceived as being anti-Republican is likely to stir backlash against the company, which has been criticized by President Trump and other prominent Republicans for having an “anti-conservative bias.” Tuesday, on the same day Trump met with Twitter’s Dorsey, the President tweeted that Twitter “[doesn’t] treat me well as a Republican. Very discriminatory,” Trump tweeted. “No wonder Congress wants to get involved—and they should.”

JM Berger, author of Extremism and a number of reports on ISIS and far-right extremists on Twitter, told Motherboard that in his own research, he has found that “a very large number of white nationalists identify themselves as avid Trump supporters.”

“Cracking down on white nationalists will therefore involve removing a lot of people who identify to a greater or lesser extent as Trump supporters, and some people in Trump circles and pro-Trump media will certainly seize on this to complain they are being persecuted,” Berger said. “There's going to be controversy here that we didn't see with ISIS, because there are more white nationalists than there are ISIS supporters, and white nationalists are closer to the levers of political power in the US and Europe than ISIS ever was.”

full article: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3xgq5/why-wont-twitter-treat-white-supremacy-like-isis-because-it-would-mean-banning-some-republican-politicians-too

On Monday, right-wing economist Arthur Laffer went on Fox News and warned that if Bernie Sanders is elected president, he would cause a financial crash just like the one Barack Obama caused in 2007 — two years before he took office.

“Whenever you redistribute income, you reduce total income, and that is what [Sanders is] doing, and I’m very afraid that if he were elected, we would have an enormous crash in the market,” said Laffer. “Now that crash would come in anticipation of his election, but it’s much like Obama, who I believe was the reason we had the Great Recession. As he got closer and closer to winning, the markets collapsed.”
https://www.rawstory.com/2019/04/notori ... s-elected/

Indeed, if it were a Democratic president faced with identical allegations, we’d expected to see Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill walking around despondent, with their faces in their hands, wondering what they’re going to do about their own party’s president being exposed as a suspected criminal.

And yet, Trump’s Republican allies seem quite content, indifferent to the special counsel’s revelations, and incurious about their president’s alleged felonies.

As Ezra Klein put it last week, “It’s a sign of the rot in our political system that all conversation about holding the president accountable takes the form of discussing ‘What Democrats should do,’ because Republicans have utterly abdicated their oversight role.”

Alan C wrote:Why isn't more focus being put on the Repugnants after the report?

Following the report why are Dems the only ones wrestling

Indeed, if it were a Democratic president faced with identical allegations, we’d expected to see Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill walking around despondent, with their faces in their hands, wondering what they’re going to do about their own party’s president being exposed as a suspected criminal.

And yet, Trump’s Republican allies seem quite content, indifferent to the special counsel’s revelations, and incurious about their president’s alleged felonies.

As Ezra Klein put it last week, “It’s a sign of the rot in our political system that all conversation about holding the president accountable takes the form of discussing ‘What Democrats should do,’ because Republicans have utterly abdicated their oversight role.”

Their rampant hypocrisy shouldn't be taken for granted.

According to Mueller, not only did Trump and the Trump campaign not collude with the Russians, neither did any other American.

...if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment. The evidence we obtained about the President' s actions and intent presents difficult issues that prevent us from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.

The IRS Tried to Take on the Ultrawealthy. It Didn’t Go Well.
Ten years ago, the tax agency formed a special team to unravel the complex tax-lowering strategies of the nation’s wealthiest people. But with big money — and Congress — arrayed against the team, it never had a chance.
https://www.propublica.org/article/ultrawealthy-taxes-irs-internal-revenue-service-global-high-wealth-audits

...

In 2009, the IRS had formed a crack team of specialists to unravel the tax dodges of the ultrawealthy. In an age of widening inequality, with a concentration of wealth not seen since the Gilded Age, the rich were evading taxes through ever more sophisticated maneuvers. The IRS commissioner aimed to stanch the country’s losses with what he proclaimed would be “a game-changing strategy.” In short order, Charles Rettig, then a high-powered tax lawyer and today President Donald Trump’s IRS commissioner, warned that the squad was conducting “the audits from hell.” If Trump were being audited, Rettig wrote during the presidential campaign, this is the elite team that would do it.

The wealth team embarked on a contentious audit of Schaeffler in 2012, eventually determining that he owed about $1.2 billion in unpaid taxes and penalties. But after seven years of grinding bureaucratic combat, the IRS abandoned its campaign. The agency informed Schaeffler’s lawyers it was willing to accept just tens of millions, according to a person familiar with the audit.

How did a case that consumed so many years of effort, with a team of its finest experts working on a signature mission, produce such a piddling result for the IRS? The Schaeffler case offers a rare window into just how challenging it is to take on the ultrawealthy. For starters, they can devote seemingly limitless resources to hiring the best legal and accounting talent. Such taxpayers tend not to steamroll tax laws; they employ complex, highly refined strategies that seek to stretch the tax code to their advantage. It can take years for IRS investigators just to understand a transaction and deem it to be a violation.

Once that happens, the IRS team has to contend with battalions of high-priced lawyers and accountants that often outnumber and outgun even the agency’s elite SWAT team. “We are nowhere near a circumstance where the IRS could launch the types of audits we need to tackle sophisticated taxpayers in a complicated world,” said Steven Rosenthal, who used to represent wealthy taxpayers and is now a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution.

...

The IRS’ new approach to taking on the superwealthy has been stymied. The wealthy’s lobbyists immediately pushed to defang the new team. And soon after the group was formed, Republicans in Congress began slashing the agency’s budget. As a result, the team didn’t receive the resources it was promised. Thousands of IRS employees left from every corner of the agency, especially ones with expertise in complex audits, the kinds of specialists the agency hoped would staff the new elite unit. The agency had planned to assign 242 examiners to the group by 2012, according to a report by the IRS’ inspector general. But by 2014, it had only 96 auditors. By last year, the number had fallen to 58.

The wealth squad never came close to having the impact its proponents envisaged. As Robert Gardner, a 39-year veteran of the IRS who often interacted with the team as a top official at the agency’s tax whistleblower office, put it, “From the minute it went live, it was dead on arrival.”

full article: https://www.propublica.org/article/ultrawealthy-taxes-irs-internal-revenue-service-global-high-wealth-audits

The sanctification of Donald Trump

For his closest advisers, President Donald Trump is a godsend — literally.

Trump’s campaign manager says the president was sent by God to save the country. The White House press secretary thinks God wanted Trump to be president. And the secretary of state believes it’s possible that Trump is on a holy mission to protect the Jewish people from the threat of Iran.

Forget the allegations of extramarital affairs, the nonstop Twitter insults and the efforts to close off the border to migrants. Trump’s allies insist that his presidency is divinely inspired.

“There has never been and probably never will be a movement like this again,” Brad Parscale, the president’s campaign manager, wrote Tuesday morning on Twitter. “Only God could deliver such a savior to our nation and only God could allow me to help. God bless America!”

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/30/donald-trump-evangelicals-god-1294578

willhud9 wrote:First amendment? Pretty sure it was drafted with revolution talks at the forefront of Madison’s mind.

Sad to see history repeat itself though in this manner.

felltoearth wrote:

willhud9 wrote:First amendment? Pretty sure it was drafted with revolution talks at the forefront of Madison’s mind.

Sad to see history repeat itself though in this manner.

Would the same apply to a general? Wasn't there an oath of office?