Inside the Terminal
It’s a new era, and reporters are bolder.
What’s “private” now is in the eye of the beholder.
So don’t express your views
Or consume the wrong news,
‘Cause Bloomberg’s looking over your shoulder.
Day: May 13, 2013
IRS Fesses Up
Mistakes were made.
— An IRS statement after disclosure that disclosure that the agency was targeting conservative groups for exams.
IRS Scandal Places Obama in Long Line of Presidents Like Richard Nixon
Previous Presidents, including great ones like Roosevelt, have used the IRS against their enemies. But I don’t think Barack Obama ever wanted to be on the same page as Richard Nixon. In this specific case, he now is.
— Joe Klein, writing for NYT’s Swampland blog.
Palin Leads Alaska Senate Straw Ballot
32%
Percentage by which Sarah Palin (R) leads a possible Republican U.S. Senate primary, followed by Lt. Governor Mead Treadwell (R) at 30% and 2010 GOP Senate nominee Joe Miller (R) at 14%, a new Harper Polling survey in Alaska finds.
Obama Piles on IRS
You don’t want the IRS ever being perceived to be biased and anything less than neutral in terms of how they operate. I’ve got no patience with it, I will not tolerate it and we will make sure we find out exactly what happened on this.
— President Obama, at a news conference.
Thank You, IRS, for Giving the Tea Party What It Needs Most: Victimhood
CBS News headline: “Recharged tea party demands justice in IRS targeting scandal”
In public, tea party activists and pundits and the lobbyists who fund them may be expressing outrage over the admission by the IRS that it has targeted tea party groups over their claims of nonprofit status, but away from the cameras and microphones, the movement’s members and the corporatists who back them are surely dancing the happy dance. Miracles do happen. A purportedly anti-tax movement has been resurrected — by the IRS.
Before the scandal broke last week, the tea party was at its lowest point nationally since its inception four years ago. Now it’s alive again and surely to be increasingly reinvigorated as the scandal drags out over the next weeks and months into next year — just in time to give it the power and influence to tilt the 2014 midterm elections to the extreme right, just as it did in the in 2010 midterms.
In fact, the lobbyists who run the tea party couldn’t have asked for a better scandal. By targeting the tea party, the IRS has played into the movement’s key motivator: the victimhood of conservatives in general and of white right-wingers specifically.
The fundamental paranoia of the movement is evident in its foundational myths:
