pacino wrote:it should also be noted Rosen wasn't charged with anything, and FOX didnt even bother to look at this until this past week. Wonder why it came up now?

jerseyhoya wrote:I don't know what collateral estoppel means but had the Supreme Court declined to side with Bush, he still would have won Florida

pacino wrote:i think in the end we'll find that the IRS thing is nothing other than an office being overwhelmed by an influx of applications and trying to get ahead of it, albeit clumsily. blame the supreme court. this needs to be fixed legislatively, not by attacking the IRS.

jerseyhoya wrote:

pacino wrote:i think in the end we'll find that the IRS thing is nothing other than an office being overwhelmed by an influx of applications and trying to get ahead of it, albeit clumsily. blame the supreme court. this needs to be fixed legislatively, not by attacking the IRS.

The office was not inundated with applications. The number of 501c4 applications actually fell from 2009 to 2010. The excuses the IRS has put forth have been completely full of #$!&@. The White House's timeline on this keeps shifting. 501c4s existed before Citizens United. I worked for one in 2008. Attack the IRS. They deserve it.

Houshphandzadeh wrote:pretty great article by Jim Webb in the National Interest about troubling trends in how Presidents wage war these days:

http://nationalinterest.org/article/con ... ation-8138

pacino wrote:would you call this a political witchhunt (with the IRS being the arm coming down on conservative groups)/political scandal, or a bureacratic mess? i'd call it the latter.

and, in the end, your organization sounds like it had more than nominal political goals and aims, so why should it get the special exemption?

A top IRS official in the division that reviews nonprofit groups will invoke the Fifth Amendment and refuse to answer questions before a House committee investigating the agency’s improper screening of conservative nonprofit groups.

Lois Lerner, the head of the exempt organizations division of the IRS, won’t answer questions about what she knew about the improper screening – or why she didn’t reveal it to Congress, according to a letter from her defense lawyer, William W. Taylor 3rd.

Lerner was scheduled to appear before the House Oversight committee Wednesday.

“She has not committed any crime or made any misrepresentation but under the circumstances she has no choice but to take this course,” said a letter by Taylor to committee Chairman Darrell E. Issa, R-Calif. The letter, sent Monday, was obtained Tuesday by the Los Angeles Times.

Taylor, a criminal defense attorney from the Washington firm of Zuckerman Spaeder, said that the Department of Justice has launched a criminal investigation, and that the House committee has asked Lerner to explain why she provided “false or misleading information” to the committee four times last year.

Since Lerner won’t answer questions, Taylor asked that she be excused from appearing, saying that would “have no purpose other than to embarrass or burden her.” There was no immediate word whether the committee will grant her request.

jerseyhoya wrote:And the group got 501c4 status because our primary mission was to educate voters. I think that's been the standard.

jerseyhoya wrote:
I presume Issa won't let her off the hook. Makes the finding out what happened trend toward later and not sooner though.

drsmooth wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:And the group got 501c4 status because our primary mission was to educate voters. I think that's been the standard.

501c4's tell lies about candidates in the guise of "education". that they don't just come out & tell you to "vote against so & so" is no grounds for tax-favored treatment.

Think of the burden on honest taxpayers that these freeloaders impose!! (present company excepted of course)

A record seven-in-ten (69%) Hispanic high school graduates in the class of 2012 enrolled in college that fall, two percentage points higher than the rate (67%) among their white counterparts,1 according to a Pew Research Center analysis of new data from the U.S. Census Bureau.2

This milestone is the result of a long-term increase in Hispanic college-going that accelerated with the onset of the recession in 2008 (Fry and Lopez, 2012). The rate among white high school graduates, by contrast, has declined slightly since 2008.

The positive trends in Hispanic educational indicators also extend to high school. The most recent available data show that in 2011 only 14% of Hispanic 16- to 24-year-olds were high school dropouts, half the level in 2000 (28%). Starting from a much lower base, the high school dropout rate among whites also declined during that period (from 7% in 2000 to 5% in 2011), but did not fall by as much.

Despite the narrowing of some of these long-standing educational attainment gaps, Hispanics continue to lag whites in a number of key higher education measures. Young Hispanic college students are less likely than their white counterparts to enroll in a four-year college (56% versus 72%), they are less likely to attend a selective college,3 less likely to be enrolled in college full time, and less likely to complete a bachelor’s degree.

At a ceremony in Lavallette, NJ, to preside over the final nail being hammered into the boardwalk, post-Sandy, WNYC/New Jersey Public Radio asked Christie about our reporting showing New Jersey Transit made multiple errors getting ready for Sandy and severe storms brought on by climate change. Had Christie done enough to prepare for state agencies for climate change?

"Well, first of all, I don’t agree with the premise of your question because I don’t think there’s been any proof thus far that Sandy was caused by climate change," Christie said, as residents and officials from Lavallette clapped. "But I would absolutely expect that that’s exactly what WNYC would say, because you know liberal public radio always has an agenda. And so since I disagree with the premise of your question I don’t feel like I have to answer the rest of it.”

The federal government has warned transit agencies that severe hurricanes, increased precipitation, drought, and hotter days are effects of climate change, and has advised that "climate change impacts are here and will increase in the future."

New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority has been creating plans to respond to climate change and severe storms since 2007. Only 19 of their 8,000 rail cars were flooded during Sandy. Meanwhile, hundreds of NJ Transit’s rail cars were engulfed after being parked in areas recently declared vulnerable to flooding.

Our reporting found that the MTA had developed detailed hurricane plans.

By contrast, NJ Transit's plans were three-and-a-half pages.

jerseyhoya wrote:

drsmooth wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:And the group got 501c4 status because our primary mission was to educate voters. I think that's been the standard.

501c4's tell lies about candidates in the guise of "education". that they don't just come out & tell you to "vote against so & so" is no grounds for tax-favored treatment.

Think of the burden on honest taxpayers that these freeloaders impose!! (present company excepted of course)

What burden do they put on taxpayers?