Being hysterical, while trying to sell you chocolate covered strawberries for Mother's Day?
Well guess again, because you know this is seriously crazy when even the AP is using all caps for their headline, and filing it under a subdomain called "bigstory":
The AP says:
The Internal Revenue Service inappropriately flagged conservative political groups for additional reviews during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status, a top IRS official said Friday.
Organizations were singled out because they included the words "tea party" or "patriot" in their applications for tax-exempt status, said Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups.
In some cases, groups were asked for their list of donors, which violates IRS policy in most cases, she said.
"That was wrong. That was absolutely incorrect, it was insensitive and it was inappropriate. That's not how we go about selecting cases for further review," Lerner said at a conference sponsored by the American Bar Association.
"The IRS would like to apologize for that," she added.
Lerner said the practice was initiated by low-level workers in Cincinnati and was not motivated by political bias. After her talk, she told The AP that no high level IRS officials knew about the practice.
Agency officials found out about the practice last year and moved to correct it, the IRS said in a statement. The statement did not specify when officials found out.
About 75 groups were inappropriately targeted. None had their tax-exempt status revoked, Lerner said.
The IRS admitted it and apologized for it. Apology not accepted. Can someone investigate high level IRS officials instead of just taking a high level IRS official's word that the high level IRS officials didn't know anything about this? Just saying. Who's responsible for that? Can we get the ACLU on this? Government harassment of a group for the way they describe themselves in the form of speech?
The Tea Party's critics will paint them as paranoid that the government's out to get them. But is it paranoia when the government-- actually is-- out to get them-- just for using a certain label to describe themselves? And here's a nb: who's really acting paranoid?
