Category: What’s Up!

The second Republican made-up scandal has to do with IRS targeting Tea Party groups applying for an exemption under 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code.  This “scandal” recently came to light when the Associated Press reported that a draft report by a Treasury Department Inspector General found that the IRS subjected certain Tea Party affiliated groups to undue scrutiny in reviewing their application under 501(c)(4).  This section requires such organizations to be “social welfare,” non political operations.  The main advantage for such an exemption is that these groups do not pay taxes and they do not have to disclose their donors.  In return for this benefit, these organizations must refrain from traditional partisan political activity such as endorsing candidates.  The head of the IRS tax-exempt organizations division said that the agency was “apologetic” for what she termed “absolutely inappropriate” actions by lower-level workers. 

The scandal perpetuated by Republicans is that the IRS situation was deliberately planned by the Obama Administration because the Tea Partiers were the most vocal opponent on Obamacare.  Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said that the IRS’s conduct in targeting conservative political groups seeking tax-exempt status, as well as the U.S. Justice Department’s investigations into national security reporters, reveals a “culture of revenge” that he suggested was the hallmark of U.S. President Barack Obama’s years in the White House.  “My belief about the IRS scandal is that this culture of going after Tea Party groups that were on the president’s case about Obamacare did just not accidentally happen,” the South Carolina senator recently said on “Fox News Sunday.”  “I think it comes from the top in terms of tone.”  Of course, Rush Limbaugh had to inject his asinine comment when he recently said on his radio program that Romney lost because of the IRS targeting conservative voters.  

The most shameful comment, however, was made by House Oversight Chairman, Darrell Issa in a recent interview on CNN that according to his “gut” the President’s Press Secretary, Jay Carney was a “paid liar.”  He said Carney was “making things up” when he said the IRS targeting of Tea Party groups was undertaken by “rogue” local employees. Issa said that the IRS review was “coordinated directly from headquarters in Washington.”  I guess Issa substitutes his “gut” for the “facts.” 

The so-called IRS “scandal” has nothing to do with the lower level employees in the Cincinnati IRS office who were responsible for doing the review, but as Fred Wertheimer, the President of Democracy 21, a government-ethics watchdog group, put it, “it is clear that a number of groups have improperly claimed tax-exempt status as section 501(c)(4) ‘social welfare’ organizations in order to hide the donors who financed their campaign activities in the 2010 and 2012 federal elections.”  So IRS employees apparently believed that the Tea Party groups may be maximizing their involvement in political activities which would disqualify them for 501(c)(4) status, and they set their applications aside for closer examination. This appears to have been a pretty reasonable assumption on the part of the I.R.S. employees: having “Tea Party” in your name is at least a slight clue about partisanship.  The Inspector General’s Report found no evidence of a political vendetta by Internal Revenue Service officials or of meddling from the White House, a fact Issa doesn’t want to accept.

One Tea Party favorite, Representative Michele Bachmann, claimed that Americans “most personal, sensitive, intimate, private healthcare information is in the hands of the IRS,” while implying that the IRS will misuse that information against “political opponents of this administration.” However, the Health Care Law (Obamacare) specifically states that the IRS will not have access to personal health records, but Michele needs to keep the scandal alive.

Senator Rand Paul, another Tea Party favorite, speculated that “the person running Obamacare was the one “who wrote the policy” at the center of the IRS scandal.Paul is apparently referring to a reference to a former IRS commissioner of the office responsible for tax-exempt organization who now heads the IRS Affordable Care Act office; however, the Inspector General’s report found that employees in the Cincinnati IRS office, not any administrators in Washington, “developed and implemented” the policy in question.

As taxpayers, we all should expect that the I.R.S. and every other part of government should apply the law without regard to political affiliation or whether a group or entity is liberal or conservative. If liberal organizations were disguising their true purposes to obtain 501(c)(4) status, the I.R.S. should have also designated them for further review.

The so-called I.R.S. scandal has nothing to do with a handful of employees setting aside Tea Party applications for further review (remember none were denied), but the scandal has everything to do with the law. 501(C)(4) clearly provides, among other things, that an organization must operate “exclusively” as a social welfare organization; however, the definition was changed in the Eisenhower Administration in 1959.  At that time, the when the acting IRS Commissioner decided to interpret the word “exclusively,” found in line one of the statute, to be defined as “primarily” which completely changed the meaning of the statute. The Acting Commissioner had absolutely no authority to make this change, and Congress has done absolutely nothing to change it.  If the IRS followed the law instead of its regulation, probably most all of the 501(C)(4) currently approved applications, both conservative and liberal, would not have been approved and there would not have been any made up scandal.

CONTINUED IN PART III

One of the most popular dramas on  TV land today is Scandal.  Scandal is an American political thriller series starring Kerry Washington as Olivia Pope.  Olivia and her team focuses on crisis management where she dedicates her life to protecting the public images of the nation’s elite and making sure their secrets never get out. Pope and her team seem to be able to resolve any scandal brought to her attention from murder to sensitive situations and issues involving the White House and other affluent politicians.  Olivia has so much clout that she is able to exert influence over some of the most influential political leaders in Washington including the Senate, Supreme Court and White House.Scandal, however, is nothing more than a series of made up events to entertain its viewers similar to the made up “scandals” recently perpetuated by Senate and House Republican leaders as well as the extreme right-wing.

One Republican scandal involves the tragedy in Benghazi where four Americans were murdered.On May 10, 2013, ABC News commentator Jonathan Karl reported that they had “obtained 12 different versions of the talking points that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows.”  The changes made to the talking points, according to the report, appear to directly contradict what White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said about them in November 2012. On the May 12 episode of ABC News This Week, Karl said that when then-CIA Director David Petraeus saw the final talking points the Saturday before Rice went on the Sunday talk shows he said they were “essentially useless.” Karl went on to quote from an e-mail in which Petraeus said of the talking points: “I would just as soon not use them, but it’s their [the White House’s] call.”  A “scandal” has developed.

In response to Republican pressure as well as respond to their “scandal” assertions, the White House released the entire set of emails related to the Benghazi media talking points.  The most provocative charge directed at the president was that to insulate himself in an election year, he and his team made up a fake story about a “spontaneous uprising” in Benghazi and downplayed intelligence that it could have been a premeditated attack by known terrorist organizations. However, the emails show a lot of CIA and State Department action but little White House involvement other than a minor non-substantive change. 

The Congressional Republicans argued that the Obama team put United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice on the Sunday talk shows to promote a lie about a link between the violence in Benghazi and the demonstrations in Cairo over an anti-Islamic video. However, the most consistent thing throughout the talking-point editing process was the first sentence of the CIA assessment: “The currently available information suggests that the demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.”

This “scandal” relies on the premise that Obama administration officials pushed the idea of spontaneity to obscure the fact that they had missed warnings of a planned terrorist attack. But there’s no evidence in the emails that the idea of spontaneity was initiated by anyone associated with President Obama, the White House, or the president’s wider political fortunes.

Republicans also claimed that the president and his team removed the references to al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations as well as references to prior warnings about terrorist activity.  However, there is nothing in the emails to support that accusation.  In fact, the opposite is true. In the initial round of emails, one CIA official reported that the White House signed off right away on the full initial CIA assessment. “The White House cleared quickly, but State has major concerns,” reads an email that a CIA official sent to CIA director Petraeus.  The White House did not have a problem with the talking points mentioning Ansar al-Sharia, al-Qaida, and that the CIA had produced numerous warnings about extremists in Benghazi. White House aides reviewed the talking points, made no substantive changes, and moved them along.

When the language does eventually change in the talking points, it is clear that it is at the request of State Department officials, not anyone in the White House. One State Department official writes, “Talked to [NSC spokesman] Tommy [Vietor], we can make edits.” This is hardly the vision of a campaign-obsessed Obama operation pushing a storyline. What’s clear from the email exchanges is that the State Department insisted on the certain changes that had nothing to do with the President or anyone else in the White House. 

Former Secretary Clinton accepted responsibility for the terror acts that occurred in Benghazi and the killing of four U.S. government personnel, and the State Department is implementing all of the recommendations by the Accountability Review Board that investigated and examined the facts surrounding the Benghazi attacks.  But Congress has to shoulder some of the blame because State Department requests for additional funding to “beef up” embassy were repeated denied.  So much for the “made-up” Benghazi scandal.

CONTINUED ON PART II

In response to a comment on a previous article, I decided to provide my take on Dr. Kermit Barron Gosnell.  As many of us recently learned, Dr. Gosnell is a former physician who practiced as an abortion provider in Philadelphia from 1972 to 2011.  He was arrested in January 2011 and charged with eight counts of murder resulting from gross medical malpractice in the treatment of patients at his clinics.  The murder charges related to a patient who died while under his care and seven newborns said to have been killed after being born alive during attempted abortions.  Although Gosnell denied the allegations, he was convicted on charges of first and third degree murder, illegal prescription of drugs, conspiracy related to corruption and illegal abortions and related medical malpractice offenses at his practice.

It was reported that before the trial opened, all defendants with the exception of Gosnell and one other, had already pled guilty to similar charges including for some, charges of third degree murder.  Several defendants had testified to “snipping” the spines of babies. One defendant, Steven Massof, testified that he had personally done this over a hundred times, describing it as a “standard procedure” at the Gosnell clinics.  On May 13, 2013, Gosnell was convicted of three counts of murder, one count of involuntary manslaughter, and numerous other charges, including 211 counts of failing to wait 24 hours between consulting with a patient and performing an abortion. He was found not guilty of one other charge of murder.

In 2011, Gosnell was well known in Philadelphia for providing abortions to poor minority and immigrant women.  It was also claimed that he charged $1,600–$3,000 for each late-term abortion.  Gosnell was also associated with clinics in Delaware and Louisiana.  Atlantic Women’s Services in Wilmington Delaware was Gosnell’s place of work one day a week. The owner of Atlantic Women’s Services, Leroy Brinkley, also owned Delta Clinic of Baton Rouge, Louisiana and facilitated the hiring of staff from there for Gosnell’s operation in Philadelphia.

Here are a few examples of Gosnell’s appalling behavior as a physician:

1. Girl age 15, accompanied by relative (1998): said to have told Gosnell she changed her mind about the abortion once inside the practice. Gosnell allegedly got upset, ripped off the patient’s clothing, and forcibly restrained her. The patient later stated that Gosnell told her “This is the same care that I would give to my own daughter.” She regained consciousness 12 hours later at her aunt’s home, the abortion having been completed against her will.
    
2. Woman age 28, five months pregnant (2001): Patient described the pain four days after abortion as being so bad she could barely walk. The patient described that upon returning to the clinic because of the pain, ultrasound showed fetal remains left inside her womb, and that Gosnell suctioned these out without anesthesia.  “I was just laying on the table and crying and I just asked the Lord to get me through it.”
   
   
3. Fifteen year old (undated): damages awarded in court upon a finding that Gosnell performed an abortion on a fifteen-year-old without parental permission.
    
4. Karnamaya Mongar, a 41-year-old refugee from Bhutan (2009): according to prosecutors, Gosnell’s staff gave the 90-pound woman a lethal dose of anesthesia and painkillers during a 2009 abortion (this is the adult whose death is charged as third degree murder). During his trial, a toxicologist testified to unsafe levels of the drug, and the chair of Anesthesiology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School testified that the dose she had was “outrageous” and “most” average adults would have stopped breathing if dosed in the manner described.  Gosnell’s lawyer asserts that Karnamaya Mongar also had other drugs in her system that did not come from Gosnell’s clinic, and that none of the infants were born alive.

The conditions of Gosnell’s practice should also be noted such as: (1) Extreme unsanitary conditions, including STDs, septic (unsterile) conditions, blood and animal feces and urine and other noxious fluids and waste, and months-old fetal remains stored in “jars, bags and jugs.” (2) Improper equipment and usage including reuse of disposable supplies and broken life-saving and monitoring equipment; (3) Padlocked emergency access and exit routes; (4) Lack of properly trained staff including “bogus doctors-unqualified, unlicensed and unsupervised staff who misrepresented themselves to patients as qualified licensed clinicians; (5) Operation of a “prescription treadmill” whereby blank signed prescriptions would be left for those seeking controlled medications, unsupervised and uncontrolled by Dr. Gosnell.

As reported by Policymic, Dr. Gosnell was the operator of an abortion mill – this was no clinic – located in West Philadelphia called the “Women’s Medical Society” and set up in 1972. He was a product of the local neighborhood, and he had spent almost four decades running his establishment – “giving back” to the community he grew up in. Of course, he had a peculiar form of charity: “Infant be-headings. Severed baby feet in jars. A child screaming after it was delivered alive during an abortion procedure.” Gosnell’s mill was known for its willingness to carry out late-term abortions – the illegal practice (in Pennsylvania) of killing a child after the initial 24 weeks of pregnancy. Indeed, as word spread about the doctor’s services, women would come from all around to subject their bodies for the benefit of his services.

“There was blood on the floor,” witnesses reported. “A stench of urine filled the air. A flea-infested cat was wandering through the facility, and there were cat feces on the stairs. Semi-conscious women scheduled for abortions were moaning in the waiting room or the recovery room, where they sat on dirty recliners covered with blood-stained blankets.”  Despite the dreadful conditions, the illegal practices, and the innumerable women and children who were both injured and killed as a result of Gosnell’s actions, he was still able to operate for almost 40 years. The reason is because of politics, prejudice, and plain negligence.  After approving the Women’s Medical Society to open an abortion clinic in 1979, the Pennsylvania Department of Health apparently conducted no site reviews for another 10 years. In both 1992 and 1993, Gosnell’s “clinic” was guilty of “numerous violations,” but was allowed to stay open on the promise that he would go about fixing them.

“After 1993, however, even that pro forma effort came to an end. Not because of administrative ennui although there had been plenty. Instead, the Pennsylvania Department of Health abruptly decided, for political reasons, to stop inspecting abortion clinics. The politics in question were not anti-abortion, but pro-abortion. With the change of administration from Governor Casey to Governor Ridge, officials concluded that inspections would be ‘putting a barrier up to women’ seeking abortions.”

Basically, “the reason no one acted is because the women in question were poor and of color, the victims were infants without identities, and  the subject was the political football of abortion.”  Despite countless appeals, complaints, warnings, and deaths, the Gosnell murder trainl continued to operate until February 18, 2010, when an FBI raid of the offices was executed because of reports of “illegal prescription activity.”  What they found, of course, was much, much worse.

As I mentioned in a previous article, without exception, the Sixth Commandment says, “Thou shalt not kill” and it doesn’t matter if it’s a baby or adult.  In my view, Dr. Kermit Gosnell is one of the most wicked and shameful murderers in modern times and even the severest penalty will not come close to matching his crimes, but that’s just my take.

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