Following his SOP, Zero has de facto fired the acting head of the IRS before actually looking at the situation.

Bloomberg discovered that the IRS gave Democratic leaning organizations the same treatment as the Tea-Partiers, but there were apparently fewer liberal applicants.

They also noted that:

Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who sits on the Senate Finance Committee, which is conducting its own IRS investigation, has introduced legislation with Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski to require all groups spending money on politics to disclose their donors.

“These problems will continue as long as there is an absence of clear and enforceable rules,” Wyden told reporters yesterday. “In the absence of clear and enforceable rules the bureaucracy pretty much makes it up as they go along.”

Jeffrey Toobin on his New Yorker blog wonders why no one has asked the obvious question: did the Tea-Partiers deserve 501(c)(4) status?

On MSNBC’s The Last Word, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has petitioned the IRS to enforce the law as written. That change would eliminate all of the political organizations from the category. The IRS IG report at the center of this ‘scandal’ references the problem for employees of the reinterpretation of the law in the regulations written in 1959, for the 1954 law.

Essentially, under the law as written, the IRS employees should have denied all of the applications from the groups they are accused of targeting. If their keyword searches to were to locate political groups, they were justified.

It’s that time of the month when people get really irritable and workflow is interrupted for extended periods. You ask if something is done yet and it sets off strings of curses.

Yes, it is Patching Microsoft time, and anyone with multiple computers has to sit and wait. This month it coincided with FireFox and Adobe updates, so it was a bigger annoyance on three boxes.

In Linux you decide when to upgrade, you don’t have your virus software nagging you about it, or you programs turning to tar because someone else thought it was time to update.

Both Lawyers, Guns & Money and Charley Pierce offer a different view of what the IRS office in Cincinnati was doing.

I have a view that most people would miss because the Section 501(c)(4) “social welfare tax exemption” takes some getting used to.

If you look at a group like MADD [Mothers Against Drunk Driving] there is no problem. They push for strengthening the laws and increasing the penalties for drunk driving. That’s where they put their effort, on that issue. When you get a single issue group with a defined goal, there is no problem making the status determination.

What happened to the IRS office in Cincinnati was a flood of applications from groups that had very general issues and vague goals. The agents were supposed to determine who met the rather vague definition of a “social welfare” group, as opposed to a political group.

Given the speed with which everyone identified these groups as belonging to one political sphere, that of the Republican Party, I would say that it was obvious that they weren’t valid “social welfare” groups and their applications should be turned down. There is a separate tax exempt section for political groups, and it would appear to be the best choice for them. There are activities of political groups that are tax exempt, but donations are not, and reporting of donors names is required.