Many liberals have objected to the IRS's targeting of conservative groups, but others see nothing wrong with it, including one Kossack who asserted this week that the revenuers in Cincinnati were simply "doing their job."
As usual, each headline is preceded by the blogger's name or pseudonym.
Mark Sumner: IRS-gate is no scandal
...[T]he exact purpose of the IRS office in question IS to look at political groups. Specifically, to weed out purely political groups that promote or oppose candidates from obtaining a tax status that's supposed to go to nonprofit educational organizations. The crime of the IRS agents in Cincinnati? They were doing their job.
But what about the specific targeting of Tea Party groups? Doesn't that show that this was all just a witch hunt against groups with right wing ideologies? Uh, no. It came up at exactly the time the office was getting flooded with a bunch of hastily prepared applications spewing from the Tea Party's messy birth. The edict went out expressly because the office was being flooded with a bunch of hastily prepared, clearly political, applications all using very similar terms. In fact, the entire group of IRS employees in question was created to address the influx of possibly political applications. If the office had suddenly received a hundred applications for exempt status all claiming to be from the Sierra Club, wouldn't you want them to pay a bit more attention? I would. What if those applications had all been from groups using Muslim Brotherhood in their titles? Would the same pundits still be on the air screaming about the IRS getting all political?...
Hunter: The right is running a temperature
...There's a reason convicted clinic bombers can still hold high-profile jobs in anti-abortion organizations, and why people who shoot doctors on the doorsteps of their churches can generate fawning interviews with anti-choice activists wondering if the replacement doctors need to be shot as well. You take one little step and you've gone from there into the realms of the Rick Perrys and Jan Brewers and that particular scab on Texas' ass, Rep. Steve Stockman, looking to defund [Planned Parenthood] by name, even if its absence in their states will harm the women of their states directly. It's a religious war, and in a religious war you're allowed to bomb things, you're allowed to kill people, and you're allowed to inflict as many unnecessary casualties as possible to get your point across...
...[T]he far-right position is based on a fever dream. Reality is not allowed to intrude on the happy conspiracy theories that make the practitioners feel oppressed, or feel righteous, or feel like freedom fighters in service of a cause that nobody else can even parse out. That was always the case, but now Republican governors, senators, congressmen and other party leaders have embraced the fever dreams as governing strategy, and are holding hearings based on the fever dreams, and are passing laws based entirely on the premises of the fever dreams. Government by conspiracy theory.
Troubadour: Conservatives should be shunned or ticketed
...The GOP is doing (list of ten million horrific things) to irreparably harm the country, and doing them brazenly in full public view and with obvious, sick pleasure. Even though the media barely covers any of it, it's still taking its toll on the GOP - it seems like every day is a disgrace or a real scandal for them, making them look stupid, criminal, evil, stupidly criminal, criminally stupid, stupidly evil, evilly stupid, criminally evil, and/or evilly criminal: Which they are...
...I want consequences for Republicans, and if the government can't provide them, at least they can be provided socially. Here is just one suggestion off the top of my head: A 1 day ban of exile and ostracism from all social or business interaction every time an affluent conservative complains about how poorly society treats them. We will not accept their money, we will not wash their clothes, we will not mow their lawns, we will not let them into our lane, we will not speak to or acknowledge them in any way that our employers do not absolutely force us to, and if we are forced, the job will be done with passionate and vengeful fuckery that stays within the bounds of law while grinding the fact of it directly into their nuts - preferably with a written ticket explaining that you have been issued a citation for being a right-wing piece of shit, and sentenced to 1 day of being treated like you treat the world...
Spencer Troxell: Marx and Jesus, unfairly charged
A little poem I wrote after being informed that being a Marxist put 'blood on my hands'...
...Karl Marx needs no alibis
For Stalin and Mao’s many dead...
Marx is as guilty of Stalin’s crimes
As Jesus was for the crusades.
Ticorules: Dancing to the end of homophobia
...There are a ton of interesting ways to cover the changing attitudes in America toward homosexuality and what that means for our past, present and future as a nation. But when the team representing the Obviously Wrong Side of History insists on having a little bitchfit about how they're the ones now being oppressed, this is not a reason for raising the alarm and slamming on the brakes for some soulful reflection on empirically idiotic claims. This is the time to play those people a very sad song on the world's tiniest little violin -- and let the rest of us dance into the future.
