Pejman Yousefzadeh

Just when you think you have seen it all …

We’ll start by noting yet more evidence that the IRS’s audits of political groups was entirely inequitable in nature:

When the Barack H. Obama Foundation sought tax-exempt status to raise money for good works in Kenya, the Internal Revenue Service provided quick help.

The IRS approved charitable status for the foundation, which was run by President Obama’s brother and named after his father, in about a month’s time. The IRS also agreed to give the group this important financial status retroactively, back to 2009, when it had begun its fundraising.

The 34 days the IRS’s Cincinnati office took to process the foundation’s application stands in contrast to the waits of several months — and sometimes longer than a year — that several conservative groups say they experienced with the same office. Obama has apologized, saying Americans have a right to be angry that the office improperly targeted conservative groups for extra scrutiny.

And more:

The Internal Revenue Service scandal involving the apparently unjustified targeting of Tea Party and other conservative groups has also hit home with the Hispanic community.

George Rodriguez, former president of the San Antonio Tea Party, said that when the organization applied for non-profit status, leaders were intimidated by IRS workers with excessive paperwork and meddling questions.

“They asked us all sorts of things that were out of the norm,” Rodriguez, now head of the conservative South Texas Alliance, told Fox News Latino. “We knew these questions were not the norm and we had our suspicions about them.”

Yes, I would like to write about things other than governmental malfeasance. But we go to blog with the administration we have, not the administration we wish to have.

So, let’s discuss the AP spying scandal. In general, the story revolves around the fact that Eric Holder had a very bad day yesterday:

As his Justice Department faces bipartisan outrage for , Attorney Gen. Eric Holder says he is not sure how many times such information has been seized by government investigators in the four years he’s led Justice.

During an interview with NPR’s Carrie Johnson on Tuesday, Holder was asked how often his department has obtained such records of journalists’ work.

“I’m not sure how many of those cases … I have actually signed off on,” Holder said. “I take them very seriously. I know that I have refused to sign a few [and] pushed a few back for modifications.”

The Sgt. Schultz act didn’t play any better on Capitol Hill:

As the nation’s top law enforcement official, Eric Holder is privy to all kinds of sensitive information. But he seems to be proud of how little he knows.

Why didn’t his Justice Department inform the Associated Press, as the law requires, before pawing through reporters’ phone records?

“I do not know,” the attorney general told the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday afternoon, “why that was or was not done. I simply don’t have a factual basis to answer that question.”

Why didn’t the DOJ seek the AP’s cooperation, as the law also requires, before issuing subpoenas?

“I don’t know what happened there,” Holder replied. “I was recused from the case.”

Why, asked the committee’s chairman, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), was the whole matter handled in a manner that appears “contrary to the law and standard procedure”?

“I don’t have a factual basis to answer the questions that you have asked, because I was recused,” the attorney general said.

On and on Holder went: “I don’t know. I don’t know. . . . I would not want to reveal what I know. . . . I don’t know why that didn’t happen. . . . I know nothing, so I’m not in a position really to answer.”

No wonder there is now talk that we are soon to have a new attorney general. After all, when even the port side starts demanding Holder’s firing, you know that a change is comin’ soon at the Justice Department.

It doesn’t help that Holder blames his subordinates for the scandal instead of taking responsibility for the actions of the Justice Department he (currently) leads.

In the meantime, it is nice to see that the media has actually grown a spine. Of course, they only appear to do so when their interests are threatened, but it would appear that we have to take what we can get. Also of note:

The government is simply too big for President Obama to keep track of all the wrongdoing taking place on his watch, his former senior adviser, David Axelrod, told MSNBC. “Part of being president is there’s so much beneath you that you can’t know because the government is so vast,” he explained.

Anyone who is located on the starboard side of the political divide would tell you that this is part of the problem.

I support law enforcement and in general, I think that police officers do dangerous work very well and very professionally. But this is an outrage:

When Maria Melendez emerged from Kern Medical Center in Bakersfield, Calif., just before midnight last Tuesday, she said, she heard screams that have kept her awake at night for an entire week.

A half-dozen Kern County sheriff’s deputies were across the street beating a man with clubs and kicking him, she said. So she whipped out her mobile phone and began to video the episode, announcing to the officers what she was doing.

For about eight minutes, Ms. Melendez said, the man screamed and cried for help. Then he went silent, she said, making only choking sounds.

Finally, having hogtied him, a number of witnesses said, two officers picked up the man and dropped him, twice. One deputy nudged the man with his foot. When he did not respond, they began CPR.

“He was like a piece of meat,” said Ms. Melendez, 53, who was visiting her son at the hospital after he was injured in a car accident. “We were telling them: ‘He’s dead. You guys already killed him.’ ”

Responding to a call, deputies had arrived at the scene to find the man, David Sal Silva, a 33-year-old father of four, on the pavement. Their attempts to rouse him resulted in the altercation, the authorities said. Mr. Silva was pronounced dead less than an hour later at Kern Medical Center.

Ms. Melendez said she recorded the entire episode on her phone, as did her daughter’s boyfriend. But before they could send the videos to news media outlets, detectives from the Kern County Sheriff’s Office took their phones before a warrant for them had even arrived, Ms. Meledez and her family said.

I got this story from Mark Lemley on Facebook, and I can get behind his comment: “I propose a simple law to apply to cops: seize a video recording of your acts, go to jail.”

Cities and counties in Florida are getting more money in their coffers. Want to know how? I’ll tell you; they are shortening yellow light intervals so that more drivers are made to run red lights, and fined as a consequence.

If this doesn’t offend you, then I don’t know what to say.

Just imagine what the media response would have been if liberal groups got targeted like this during the Bush administration:

The Internal Revenue Service on Friday apologized for targeting groups with “tea party” or “patriot” in their names, confirming long-standing accusations by some conservatives that their applications for tax-exempt status were being improperly delayed and scrutinized.

Lois G. Lerner, the IRS official who oversees tax-exempt groups, said the “absolutely inappropriate” actions by “front-line people” were not driven by partisan motives.

Rather, Lerner said, they were a misguided effort to come up with an efficient means of dealing with a flood of applications from organizations seeking ­tax-exempt status between 2010 and 2012.

During that period, about 75 groups were selected for extra inquiry — including burdensome questionnaires and, in some cases, improper requests for the names of their donors — simply because of the words in their names, she said in a conference call with reporters.

They constituted about one-quarter of the 300 groups who were flagged for additional analysis by employees of the IRS tax-exempt unit’s main office in Cincinnati.

When mere words that carry a certain partisan/philosophical meaning trigger IRS harassment, we can dispense with the nonsensical assertion that the harassment was “not driven by partisan motives.” The IRS tried to explain its actions to curtail any public relations damage to its reputation. The effort turned into a catastrophe:

About a half-hour into a conference call with reporters Friday afternoon, senior Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner said something she will regret.

“I’m not good at math,” she confessed as she tried to summon a statistic.

Lerner clarified that she is a lawyer and not an accountant (a fair defense) but the remark instantly blew up on Twitter — an IRS official being bad at math!? — and wound up punctuating what was a torturous response to the IRS’ admission that it inappropriately targeted tea party groups.

A skeptical press corps peppered Lerner with questions, many of which she and her staff were unable or unwilling to answer.

Read the whole thing, which is utterly damning in discussing the IRS’s attempts to evade serious and justified questions regarding its harassment of conservative groups. Incidentally, I don’t find the words “tea party” or “patriot” in Commentary’s name, but that didn’t stop the IRS from targeting it in 2008:

This morning, an IRS official named Lois Lerner apologized for inappropriately targeting non-profit groups for scrutiny in 2012 based on the fact that they had the words “Tea Party” or “Patriot” in their names. There are many things that need to be said about this. First, and simplest, is to ask how seriously the Obama administration is going to take this outrageous effort at political suppression by an agency under its charge. Has the IRS inspector general gotten involved? Has a U.S. attorney been apprised of this matter, which can only be considered an act of political intimidation and therefore would fall under the aegis of various federal criminal statutes? If not, why not?

Second, this is a test for the mainstream media. If the fact that the targeted groups are conservative means that the story is soft-pedaled and not subject to major investigative scrutiny, any argument against liberal bias evaporates now and forever. Will this be brought up at today’s press briefing at the White House with Jay Carney? You can bet that had any such thing happened in reverse during the Bush administration, Tony Snow would have been bombarded with questions for weeks if not months.

As it happens, I know something about the chilling effect of an IRS investigation into a non-profit’s 501 (c)-3 status because in 2009, COMMENTARY (a non-profit) received a letter from the Internal Revenue Service threatening the revocation of the institution’s standing as a non-profit due to a claim that on our website we had crossed the line in the 2008 election from analysis to explicit advocacy of the candidacy of John McCain for president. (Non-profits are not permitted to endorse candidates.) The charge was false—all we had done was reprint a speech delivered at a COMMENTARY event by then-Sen. Joseph Lieberman in which he had endorsed McCain.

Taking away a non-profit’s ability to receive tax-exempt charitable contributions is equivalent to a death sentence.

Again, imagine the media response if it were a liberal magazine that was targeted by the IRS during the Bush administration.

It’s worth remembering that a year ago, the New York Times heartily approved of the harassment the IRS is now forced to apologize for (to be fair, the Times also argued that the pro-Obama Priorities USA also ought to be harassed). One wonders when the Times will issue its own apology. Speaking of apologies, when will the IRS apologize for its continuous violations of the Fourth Amendment?

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has claimed that agents do not need warrants to read people’s emails, text messages and other private electronic communications, according to internal agency documents.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which obtained the documents through a Freedom of Information Act request, released the information on Wednesday.

In a 2009 handbook, the IRS said the Fourth Amendment does not protect emails because Internet users “do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such communications.” A 2010 presentation by the IRS Office of General Counsel reiterated the policy.

Under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986, government officials only need a subpoena, issued without a judge’s approval, to read emails that have been opened or that are more than 180 days old.

Privacy groups such as the ACLU argue that the Fourth Amendment provides greater privacy protections than the ECPA, and that officials should need a warrant to access all emails and other private messages.

Traditionally, the courts have ruled that people have limited privacy rights over information they share with third parties. Some law enforcement groups have argued that this means they only need a subpoena to compel email providers, Internet service companies and others to turn over their customers’ sensitive content. 

But in 2010, a federal appeals court ruled that police violated a man’s constitutional rights when they read his emails without a warrant.

I await the outrage of those who thought that the Bush administration’s advocacy of the Patriot Act meant the end of the Constitution.

And speaking of the Bush administration, as might be expected, it got the blame for this mess from Jay Carney. Never let it be said that the Obama administration has forgotten how to shirk responsibility.