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LGBT

Hatch Parrots Anti-Gay NOM’s Self-Victimizing Talking Points

By Zack Ford on May 9, 2012 at 4:30 pm

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) has the back of the National Organization for Marriage. In a letter to IRS Commissioner Doglas H. Shulman this week, he called for an investigation into the leak of NOM’s 2008 Schedule B, which revealed some of the anti-equality group’s top donors, including Mitt Romney. Hatch’s letter parrots the same conspiracy-mongering rhetoric that NOM has been pushing:

The public 2009 and 2010 forms do not include confidential donor information.  Moreover, unlike the 2009 and 2010 public 990s, the 2008 Schedule B published by HRC and Huffington Post is a PDF document that appears to have been deliberately altered in a manner to obscure information that would identify its origins with the IRS.  First, the 2008 Schedule B appears to have been cropped in order to hide a stamp appearing across the top of each page that states, “THIS IS A COPY OF A LIVE RETURN FROM SMIP.  OFFICIAL USE ONLY.”  Second, a white rectangle appears diagonally across the middle of each page of the document at issue — a redaction that hides a number that appears to have been generated by the IRS.

Blogger David Cary Hart has already debunked NOM’s “proof” that the documents had to have originated from the IRS. When the Human Rights Campaign and Huffington Post originally reported on the leak, they attributed the document to a whistleblower within NOM. Because it seems that Romney’s contribution was not properly disclosed, it’s likely that NOM’s cries for an investigation are an attempt to distract attention from their potential lawbreaking.

Hatch faces a primary challenge from former Utah state Sen. Dan Liljenquist and has been swinging to the right to appeal to his base. Though polling overwhelmingly favors Hatch, this may explain why he’s endorsed NOM’s attempt to avoid taking responsibility for its misdeeds and its possible whistleblower.

LGBT

NOM Calls For Federal Investigation To Hide Its Own Wrongdoing

By Zack Ford on Apr 5, 2012 at 3:55 pm

The National Organization for Marriage continues to pretend the release of its damning race-baiting confidential memos last week is not a big deal, but it is now outraged that one of its tax returns was leaked, revealing that Mitt Romney had secretly given the group $10,000 to advocate for Proposition 8 in 2008. Today, NOM’s Brian Brown demanded a federal investigation of the Human Rights Campaign and the Internal Revenue Service for the memo getting out:

BROWN: It appears that someone with either the IRS or the HRC may have committed a federal crime by illegally obtaining and then releasing a confidential tax return of the National Organization for Marriage. It’s clear that the tax return was stolen, either from NOM or from the government. The Huffington Post article says that HRC claimed they received the document from a ‘whistleblower.’ But the term ‘whistleblower’ is completely inapt. We’re talking about a criminal who has stolen confidential tax return information. We demand to know who this criminal is, whether they work for the HRC or the IRS, and how they obtained confidential tax information filed only with the US government.

“Inapt” has become NOM’s go-to word for trying to play the victim — that and “vituperative.” Both Brown and Maggie Gallagher used the same outside-the-vernacular rhetoric last week in an attempt to distance the organization from its race-baiting tactics, so its use here is conspicuous.

At question is whether or not Romney’s gift to the organization was properly disclosed. As Sam Stein pointed out when breaking the story at the Huffington Post, there is no documentation of Romney’s donation in either his own PAC’s records nor in NOM’s publicly disclosed 990 forms. The Romney campaign admitted the donation had come from the Alabama chapter of his Free and Strong America PAC, but NOM’s leaked IRS filing shows the donation coming from a PO Box in Belmont, Massachusetts. There is considerable reason to believe that Romney’s donation was intentionally hidden in violation of non-profit disclosure laws.

NOM is clearly trying to shift the blame to deflect any investigation into its own wrongdoing. Whistleblowers expose the illegal activity of their employers, so the evidence suggests the term is anything but “inapt.”

NEWS FLASH

Every Hour Spent Auditing Corporate Tax Returns Yields More Than $9,000 In Revenue | Near the top of the list of counterproductive budget cuts is cutting funds for the Internal Revenue Service, as every dollar of tax enforcement yields $4-$5 in revenue in a country where uncollected taxes have hit $385 billion per year. Along those lines, Reuters’ David Cay Johnston noted today that IRS auditors “assigned to the 14,000 or so largest corporations found $9,354 of additional tax owed for every hour spent testing tax returns in the 2009 fiscal year.” “The highest-paid IRS auditors make $71 an hour. Based on a 2,080-hour work year, that works out to around $19 million of lost revenue annually for every senior corporate auditor position cut from the payroll,” Johnston wrote.

Economy

Dumb Budget Cuts: How Slashing Funds For The IRS Winds Up Costing The U.S. Money

By Pat Garofalo on Jan 12, 2012 at 6:45 pm

When does a cut to the federal budget actually result in an increase in the deficit? When, as the New York Times profiled today, it cuts the Internal Revenue Service, leaving the IRS understaffed and unable to collect all the taxes owed to the federal government:

An expanding workload and cuts in funds have left the Internal Revenue Service unable to adequately perform either of its primary duties — collecting taxes and providing the public with reasonable service, according to a report released Wednesday by the I.R.S.’s internal monitor.

The agency’s staff reductions and backlog have limited its ability to collect the hundreds of billions of dollars a year that the government is owed but not paid, Nina E. Olson, the national taxpayer advocate, said in her annual report to Congress.

In the report, Olson noted that, due to budget cuts, the IRS “is unable to maximize revenue collection, contributing to the federal budget deficit.” “It will never be possible to eliminate the tax gap entirely, of course, but even modest improvements would help to reduce the federal budget deficit. Moreover, even apart from the fiscal implications, the size of the tax gap raises important equity concerns,” the report added.

The latest data shows that there is a $385 billion gap between the taxes owed to the U.S. and those collected, meaning close to 15 percent of federal taxes went unpaid. There would have to be a $3,400 “noncompliance surtax” paid by every tax compliant household, in order “to enable the federal government to raise the same revenue it would have collected if all taxpayers had reported their income and paid their taxes in full.” The IRS, meanwhile, estimates that every dollar spent on enforcement brings in $4-$5 dollars of additional revenue.

Alyssa

‘Boardwalk Empire’ Open Thread: Darmody Family Values

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Dec 5, 2011 at 4:07 pm

This post contains spoilers through the Dec. 4 episode of Boardwalk Empire. And are there ever spoilers!

As Benjamin Freed said on the Twitters at the conclusion of last night’s episode of Boardwalk Empire, “so much for the all-Darmody spinoff.”

It’s actually fascinating to compare the approach that Boardwalk Empire and Shame take to incest narratives. While the latter shows us a brother and sister between whom the appropriate behavioral boundaries clearly and disastrously were shattered long ago, it never confirms the means of their destruction, or shows us the immediate aftermath of the breach. By contrast, Boardwalk Empire has been building up to the revelation that, while he was at Princeton, Jimmy had sex with his mother at her initiation, telling him, “There’s nothing wrong, baby. There’s nothing wrong with any of it.” Whether she’s been telling Angela that she used to kiss Jimmy’s penis when he was an infant; or her smooth slotting of him into the Commodore’s role; building his sympathy for her by discussing her sexual abuse at the Commodore’s hands; or in flashbacks tonight showing us Gillian trying to simultaneously destroy Angela’s budding relationship with Jimmy while forcing him to transfer his affections from his lover to his mother by telling him “Oh, baby. I’m just the loneliest person on earth. Do you love that skinny girl?” Boardwalk Empire isn’t really showing us the day-to-day routine between two people who have violated sexual norms. It’s been telling us that it’s going to tell us something even more shocking than what we’re seeing on screen so far. And so it’s not particularly shocking when we see the inevitable happen, when we learn the real reason Jimmy ran off to join the Army. Oversignaling is a problem in this show generally, and this isn’t the only plotline where that’s a problem tonight. The only genuinely shocking moment in this plotline was the implication that Gillian might target Jimmy’s son next, telling Jimmy that “One day soon, he won’t be a little boy anymore. It happens, just like that. I’ll put him to bed. And I’ll be upstairs.”

I’m actually much more interested in the prospect of Jimmy falling into heroin addiction. He’s always been a weak personality, shaped by Nucky, manipulated by his mother, eager for the Commodore’s affections when the old man reemerges to offer them. But this would be a weakness of his own choosing, to a certain extent. And if this is a story less about Prohibition than about the transition from alcohol to drugs in the role of public menace, it would be interesting to see Jimmy personify it. Certainly, had his confrontation with Gillian and the Commodore not fallen short of double murder, it would have had the flair of a crime of the century — the beautiful young mother, the spear, the old man, the blood on the brocaded wallpaper.
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Alyssa

‘Parks & Recreation’ Open Thread: Soulmates

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Sep 30, 2011 at 8:38 am

This post contains spoilers through the Sept. 29 episode of Parks and Recreation.

As someone who has spent a lot of time reporting on things governments do and the people who do them, I am constantly surprised by the way Parks and Recreation manages to find specific functions for the various departments it covers and make them slightly, and delightfully surreal. Also, the way it manages to take on various tropes of female behavior and make them incredibly funny.

In this first category is what Leslie describes as “Budgetary thunderdome!” an annual staredown between the various Pawnee departments. “So make lists of why other departments suck, and I’ll get our secret weapon.” As a perfect example of the marvelous dynamic between Leslie and Ron, Leslie’s looking forward to turning Ron into a weapon by targeting his libertarianism at agencies other than their own. Except the arrival of Tammy One is getting in the way of her careful plans. “You love arguing against government spending!” Leslie wails when she finds Ron tamed and shaved, a plot twist that could only come after the discovery of how funny Nick Offerman looks when some of his facial hair is surprisingly removed. I have to say, though, the fact that Tammy One is conducting a totally fake IRS audit of Ron as a way to get back into his life — and more importantly into his gold stashes — makes them seem like an even more perfect odd couple than Ron and Leslie, who clearly should be his work wife until the end of time.
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NEWS FLASH

U.S. Representatives Call On IRS To Assist Same-Sex Couples | Seventy-five members of the House of Representatives are calling on the IRS to better accommodate same-sex couples. There are 15 states that recognize same-sex couples, but because of the Defense of Marriage Act, the IRS treats those couples as single individuals. In some states, the IRS even penalizes same-sex couples with fees because of the state’s community property deduction laws. The congressional letter asks the IRS to develop a set of specific guidelines for same-sex couples so that they can be treated as fairly as DOMA allows, avoiding “unnecessary audits and inappropriate enforcement actions.”

Alyssa

‘Breaking Bad’ Open Thread: No Return

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Sep 12, 2011 at 8:38 am

This post contains spoilers through the Sept. 11 episode of Breaking Bad, Bug.

One of my relatives always wears the same kinds of shoes that Walter White wears, those ultimate Dad shoes, and so there was something particularly shocking about the sight of blood on them tonight. Breaking Bad can be precious — I was supremely irritated by both the teddy bear in the pool and the absurdity of the second-season events that lead up to it — but tonight, the episode was both a masterwork of the menace of the everyday, and proof of deeply impressive long-range planning.

We’ve all seen a reckoning stalking towards Walt, but I’m not sure I saw anything coming for Skyler. It would have been enough if Ted was Skyler’s revenge affair, the weak man she took up with when her husband went through the first stage of his increasingly unnerving transformation. But there’s something magnificent about his reappearance at the moment when she’s faking transactions to launder drug money, down to the level of a faux-cheery, “Thank you. Please give this to your car care professional,” with every faked receipt. The man who gave her the respite from her husband when she needed it and the skills to join Walt’s criminal enterprise is now reaching out to pull her back to — and down with — him.
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NEWS FLASH

Tax Evasion Costs The U.S. $400B To $500B Annually | According to an analysis by Seth Hanlon, director of fiscal reform at the Center for American Progress, “$400 billion to $500 billion in taxes go uncollected every year in the United States because of tax evasion and noncompliance.” At the same time, a bill proposed by House Republicans “would slash IRS funding by more than $600 million and lead to the furlough of 4,100 to 5,000 employees, mostly enforcement agents,” even though every dollar invested in enforcement can shrink the deficit by $3.

Politics

The New ‘Death Panels’: Gingrich Says GOP Should Campaign Against Nonexistent IRS ‘Health Gestapo’

By Lee Fang on Apr 7, 2010 at 12:08 pm

Last summer, Sarah Palin famously tried to poison the discourse surrounding health reform by charging that the legislation included bureaucratic “death panels” that would sentence the disabled and the elderly to death. Of course, the accusation was a flat out lie, and news agencies eventually fact-checked and rebuffed Palin’s claim. But that did not stop right-wing partisans and Republicans from using Palin’s absurd death panel claim to try to sow fear in the public and kill the bill.

Now, Newt Gingrich is urging Republicans to campaign on a new, equally absurd myth. Over the last few days, Gingrich has been appearing on television and radio alleging that health reform includes “16,000 IRS agents” as “health police.” Noting that the 16,000 IRS agents claim is “wildly inaccurate,” FactCheck.org explained that the new health law requires the IRS mostly to hand out tax credits, not collect penalties. The bill signed into law (on page 131) specifically prohibits the IRS from using the liens and levies commonly used to collect money owed by delinquent taxpayers, and rules out any criminal penalties for individuals who refuse to pay the tax or those who don’t obtain coverage. PolitiFact, in their own article on the misinformation, reported that the number of new IRS workers would be closer to 8,000, and that the workers would not be “agents,” but rather “clerks, accountants, computer programmers, telephone help line workers and other support staff.” Indeed, FactCheck concludes that the 16,000 claim is “a partisan analysis based on guesswork and false assumptions, and compounded by outright misrepresentation.”

Nevertheless, Gingrich is pressing on, hyping his own false claim with hyperbolic rhetoric and Nazi Germany comparisons. In a segment on PJ TV today, Gingrich claimed that Democrats are hiring “16,000 IRS agents” as a “a health Gestapo” — like that of the Nazi secret police. He continued, with pictures of federal agents with guns and sledgehammers splashed across the screen, by predicting that “every Republican candidate” should campaign on a promise of defunding these “government policemen”:

GINGRICH: I believe one of the biggest issues in September and October will be 16,000 IRS agents and I suspect every Republican candidate will campaign on a promise to cut off all funding in January for the 16,000 IRS agents. You don’t need a health Gestapo in the United States. And I think the Democrats are going to be faced with a real decision, do they really want to campaign in September, October favoring 16,000 more IRS agents to enforce the health law? And what does it tell you about a health law so complicated that you need 16,000 government policemen? It’s sort of creating a brand new health police.

Watch it:

Already, Republicans across the country are echoing this false charge. Sens. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), John Ensign (R-NV), as well as Reps. Paul Ryan (R-WI), Pete Sessions (R-TX), and Cliff Stearns (R-FL) have repeated the same 16,000 IRS agents lie.

Despite the domestic terrorist attack against an IRS building in Austin, Texas earlier this year, conservatives are continuing to stoke fear and hatred towards the government agency. After the plane attack, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) justified the attack, saying that he too fears the IRS and wants to abolish it.

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