Freedom Line Blog

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

In an interview with CFIF, Hans von Spakovsky, Manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation, discusses Lois Lerner’s “lost” e-mails, how the Justice Department is not taking the IRS investigation seriously and other recent IRS scandals.

Listen to the interview here.

In an interview with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly that aired on Super Bowl Sunday, President Obama declared that there was “not even a smidgen of corruption” with regard to the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups.

The American people are not buying it.

According to a Fox News poll released last week, a whopping 64 percent of registered voters, including a majority of Democrats, think the targeting scandal does suggest corruption at the IRS.  A mere 27 percent don’t view the IRS’s targeting as corrupt.

When questioned about whether Congress should continue to investigate the IRS scandal, an even greater majority says “Yes!”

Majorities of Republicans (83 percent), independents (72 percent) and Democrats (60 percent) agree lawmakers should persist until they ‘feel they know the truth.’

For the poll results, click here.

You’d think the Obama Administration would have been sufficiently chastened by the IRS scandal not to push their luck. You’d have thought wrong. From the New York Times:

LOS ANGELES — In a famously left-leaning Hollywood, where Democratic fund-raisers fill the social calendar, Friends of Abe stands out as a conservative group that bucks the prevailing political winds.

A collection of perhaps 1,500 right-leaning players in the entertainment industry, Friends of Abe keeps a low profile and fiercely protects its membership list, to avoid what it presumes would result in a sort of 21st-century blacklist, albeit on the other side of the partisan spectrum.

Now the Internal Revenue Service is reviewing the group’s activities in connection with its application for tax-exempt status. Last week, federal tax authorities presented the group with a 10-point request for detailed information about its meetings with politicians like Paul D. Ryan, Thaddeus McCotter and Herman Cain, among other matters, according to people briefed on the inquiry.

Here’s the Administration’s problem: One of the reasons they were able to get away with targeting Tea Party groups for so long was because most of the victimized organizations were grassroots affairs without megaphones. But go after Hollywood? The tinseltown conservatives may have spent the past decade content to keep their opinions to themselves—but politically-motivated audits have a way of upsetting that equilibrium (how do you think the story got to the Times, after all?).

The old saying is “never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.” Ink may be going by the wayside these days, but it’s still ill-advised to throw a haymaker at people with this kind of clout. I suspect the White House will learn that sooner rather than later.

In celebration of Thanksgiving, the Taxpayers Protection Alliance named its annual “Turkeys of the Year.” The awards are presented in recognition of federal programs and agencies that have proven to be real turkeys for taxpayers, gobbling up tax dollars and giving hard working Americans the bird.

Among this year’s “Turkeys of the Year” are the IRS, Obamacare and the Export-Import Bank. Check out the Taxpayers Protection Alliance’s short video to see just why these three boondoggles were so deserving of the shameful award.

Here’s a quick rule of thumb for the IRS scandal dogging the Obama Administration: things will only get worse. The most recent domino to fall: those claims that the abuse was quarantined to the agency’s Cincinnati office just don’t hold up. From the Wall Street Journal:

Two Internal Revenue Service employees in the agency’s Cincinnati office told congressional investigators that IRS officials in Washington helped direct the probe of tea-party groups that began in 2010.

Transcripts of the interviews, viewed Wednesday by The Wall Street Journal, appear to contradict earlier statements by top IRS officials, who have blamed lower-level workers in Cincinnati.

Elizabeth Hofacre said her office in Cincinnati sought help from IRS officials in the Washington unit that oversees tax-exempt organizations after she started getting the tea-party cases in April 2010. Ms. Hofacre said Carter Hull, an IRS lawyer in Washington, closely oversaw her work and suggested some of the questions asked applicants.

“I was essentially a front person, because I had no autonomy or no authority to act on [applications] without Carter Hull’s influence or input,” she said, according to the transcripts.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. A low-level government employee is the most risk-averse creature on the planet. That doesn’t prevent them from being wildly incompetent or occasionally venal, but it’s not the stuff of which sweeping ideological crusaders are made. That tends to require direction from above. How far up the chain it goes remains an open question.