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.
[…]Many conservative groups complained during the election that they were being harassed by the IRS. They accused the agency of frustrating their attempts to become tax exempt by sending them lengthy, intrusive questionnaires.
The forms, which the groups made available at the time, sought information about group members’ political activities, including details of their postings on social networking websites and about family members.
It’s gangster-government all over again. A continuous stream of abuses of government power.
Join us as we celebrate 20 years of Stand to Reason and clear thinking Christianity. The event kicks off Friday night with stimulating apologetics lectures and a celebration! Join us for the full conference on Saturday featuring lectures from the Stand to Reason speakers and friends. Can’t make it to Biola? This event will be available via live stream online.
Conference Schedule:
Friday Night, May 10 (7:00 – 9:30 pm)
6:15 pm – Doors Opens 7:00 – 8:05 pm – Lectures from J.P. Moreland, Sean McDowell, Mary Jo Sharp, and Craig Hazen 8:05 – 8:25 pm – Break 8:15 – 9:30 pm – Panel featuring Stand to Reason’s Speakers Greg Koukl, Brett Kunkle, Alan Shlemon, and J. Warner Wallace 9:30 pm – Cake & Book Signing in the Courtyard
Saturday, May 11 (9:00 am – 12:30 pm)
8:00 am – Registration Opens 8:30 am – Doors Opens 9:00 – 9:50 am – Session 1: “Who’s Waiting for Your Kids?”
Lecture by Stand to Reason’s Brett Kunkle 9:50 – 10:00 am – Break 10:00 – 10:40 am – Session 2: “Compromise Is Not an Option”
Lecture by Stand to Reason’s Alan Shlemon 10:40 – 10:50 am – Break 10:50 – 11:30 am – Session 3: “Cold-case Christianity”
Lecture by Stand to Reason’s J. Warner Wallace 11:30 – 11:40 am – Break 11:40 am – 12:30 pm – Session 4: “Still Standing”
Lecture by Stand to Reason’s Greg Koukl
Conference Location:
Sutherland Auditorium
Biola University
13800 Biola Avenue
La Mirada, CA 90639 View Map
If you are in the South California area, you can attend in person. Otherwise, you can watch it online.
There’s new evidence, obtained by ABC, that the Obama administration did deliberately purge references to “terrorism” from accounts of the attack on the Benghazi diplomatic mission, which killed four people including the US ambassador to Libya.
This is the first hard evidence that the state department did ask for changes to the CIA’s original assessment.
Specifically, they wanted references to previous warnings deleted and this sentence removed: “We do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qa’ida participated in the attack.”
There’s little doubt in my mind that this will haunt Hillary Clinton if she decides to run for president, unless she executes some pretty fancy footwork.
State department spokesperson Victoria Nuland is directly implicated, and the fingerprints of senior White House aides Ben Rhodes and Jay Carney are there as well.
And look at this closely:
In the interests of full disclosure I have to say I have not in the past been persuaded that allegations of a cover-up were a big deal. It seemed to me a partisan attack based on very little.
I remember listening to reports from the BBC and others at the time that did suggest the attack in Benghazi was a spontaneous reaction to a rather puerile anti-Islamic video.
I understand President Barack Obama’s careful use of the word “terrorism” when it actually means something, rather than as a knee-jerk description of any violence by foreigners against Americans, often in order to justify a “war on terror”.
But the evidence is there in black and white, unless we doubt the documents obtained by ABC, which I don’t.
Mr Obama’s critics are often not very clear what is behind their allegations. I presume they think that the White House wanted to avoid claims the murders were the result of terrorism because this would undermine his claim that al-Qaeda was seriously “degraded”. There’s also a vague sense he’s “soft on terror”.
The purpose of this deception was to make the American people re-elect Democrats who are soft on terrorism, by hiding the fact that Democrats are soft on terrorism. Democrats prefer to think that Tea Party, low-tax, small government, pro-life conservatives are terrorists. Not the radical Muslims who actually do terrorist attacks in the real world. Democrats think they need to be affirmed and defended from criticism.
Frankly, I think that Obama should feel obligated to resign over this self-serving deception. If the media had done their jobs before the election, we wouldn’t have this man as President. As it stands, we’ll just have to vote his America-blaming, terrorist-sympathizing Democrat Party out in 2016.
WINTERY KNIGHT 