What’s
Wrong Today:

The
news is awash with the sad story from London where 2 apparent Islamists hacked
a British soldier to death in front of horrified Londoners.

So,
what to do when a man is killed in the streets where you live?

The English Defence League, a far-right street protest movement that opposes what it considers to be the spread of Islamism, Sharia law and Islamic extremism in the UK, issued a call to put “feet on the street” in an obvious call for vigilante retaliation on innocent Muslims.

Tommy Robinson, leader of the far
right English Defence League, has called for supporters to go to Woolwich, a
section of London where the murder took place. Robinson sent a message to his EDL supporters through his
Twitter account, which is run by his second in command:

 

The English
Defence League’s call led to more violence in South London after yesterday’s
attack:

Apparently,
about 100 men including some wearing balaclavas printed with “EDL”, engaged in
running battles with police for less than an hour.

Although UK Muslim groups and leaders were swift to condemn the attack,
knowing they’ll be in the bigots’ sights, but it may have been too late. According to the wonderful humans
quoted below, you are now permitted to call for the mass slaughter of all those who
practice the same religion that the killers (probably) practice. The Wrongologist curates for you from among the racist, violent reactions in England, as compiled
by Public Shaming:

So, the terrorists won. That’s who
wins when there is anarchy. It doesn’t matter if it is Iraq, Afghanistan,
Turkey, Pakistan, Palestinian Territories, Israel, Lebanon, or Boston; society
wants a peaceable environment, while terrorists want anarchy.

When Londoners fight among
themselves or single out a group for hate after a triggering event designed to
inflame the bigots on the other side, the terrorists have won.

“They made me do it” is never a winning argument.

What’s
Wrong Today:

Another just-released
Inspector General’s Report damns another federal agency. This time it is the
Justice Department’s IG, and according to the May 2013 IG’s Report:

The USMS
now believes both terror suspects are “residing outside the United States”. This
means that two
suspected terrorists placed in the federal witness security (WITSEC) program
have managed to elude the USMS, even
though their status as suspected terrorists meant they should have appeared on
federal no-fly lists. And not allowed to leave!

It could
be worse, but CNN’s Jake Tapper reported last Thursday that
only two former terrorists have entered witness protection in the last six
years. Guess that means we don’t have to worry about any more sneaking out of
the country.

From the
IG:

The
evasion of the No-Fly List by two terrorists in witness protection apparently
wasn’t a problem for the Justice Department until the Inspector General brought
it to the attention of law enforcement and homeland security officials, the
report states.

Before May
2012, there wasn’t even a process to
share witness protection information on terrorists with the FBI.
Without informing the FBI’s Terrorist Screening
Center
about new terrorist identities, there’s no way the No-Fly tracking database that
feeds off the Center’s information can know about them.

According
to the IG, the Justice Department didn’t even “definitively know” how many
known or suspected terrorists were in witness protection.

Who is in
charge of this asylum?

Did you even
know that there is
a witness-protection option
for terrorist suspects?

But the IG
says some snitches have “provided invaluable and critical information and
testimony” in cases ranging from the Oklahoma City bombing to the 2007 attempt to blow up jet
fuel tanks at New York’s JFK Airport.

The
underlying problem is almost laughably absurd: Once the terrorists get new
identities, those identities aren’t provided to the Transportation Security
Agency (TSA) for inclusion on the federal No-Fly List.

The Justice
Department told CNN that:

So, maybe
we know where they went, maybe we don’t, maybe they didn’t come back to the US.
Typical bureaucratic gibberish.

The
Justice Department doesn’t contest the IG’s findings about absconded
terrorists. Here is Armando Bonilla, a senior counsel to Deputy Attorney
General James Cole:

Bonilla went
on to say that the Marshals Service and the Justice Department Criminal
Division’s Office of Enforcement Operations have now disclosed to the FBI and
other agencies “the true and new identities and known aliases” of “all
identified former known or suspected terrorists admitted into the WITSEC
Program.”

It is
difficult to count the failures demonstrated by Mr. Holder’s Justice Department
in this stunning fail:

• We
  absolved them of their possible guilt

• We
  gave them new identities

• We
  gave them money

• We
  stopped watching them

• We
  let them get away

And they potentially
endangered others while traveling on the plane they left on. After all, they
might have downed the planes.

We have “invested”
multi-billions of dollars in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in the FBI
and in the surveillance state that targets
the rest of us. But this failure proves again that it is really a
multi-billion security theater system.

No
security expert has claimed the TSA improves our security; rather, most of the
world’s leading experts have called it out for the lame garbage it is. The real
purpose of the DHS and the TSA is to siphon your tax dollars into a multi-$billion
fund for the defense/security industries, while politicians say “look, we did
something”!

That’s all
it’s for. The anti-terror-attack value is precisely zero.

No
connected process, no contemporaneous oversight. We have heard since 9/11 that we did not connect the dots. The
Congress and Presidents Bush and Obama have made a huge investment of people,
process and technology in the DHS, FBI, TSA and the National Security Agency (NSA)
specifically to “fix” those problems.

Along the
way, our constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms have been eroded, we are not
safer, we are weaker. No mad bomber, no lunatic, no fanatic with explosives can
destroy America, only we can do that ― by being so frightened that we forget to
defend our rights. We must refuse to be cowards.

We should
require top quality management of our national security investment, one that matches
the scale of that investment.

Mr. Holder
must go. It will be an example to security establishment bureaucrats
everywhere.

What’s
Wrong Today:

It’s
been more than 7 years (2005) since the US Supreme Court decided Kelo vs. City of New London, involving the use of eminent domain to transfer land from one private
owner to another private owner to further economic development.

In
a 5–4 decision, the Court held that the benefits a community enjoyed from
economic growth qualified private redevelopment plans as a permissible “public use” under the Takings Clause of the Fifth
Amendment.

So, homeowners
lost. And corporations won in the Supreme Court, again.

According
to the CBS affiliate Channel 8, the city then ripped down 90 acres
worth of homes. But 7 years later, nothing
has been built there. Still, the corporatists won anyway since companies, not
just governments, now enjoy the fruits of eminent domain.

Eminent
domain and the Keystone XL pipeline.

Keystone,
a subsidiary of TransCanada, wants to build a
pipeline across America from the Canada
border to the Gulf of Mexico. There are two challenges to building the
pipeline: The US Department of State needs to issue a presidential permit to allow
the project to cross the international border, and TransCanada needs to acquire
the private land on which to build the pipeline.

TransCanada
isn’t waiting for the permit; they are busy acquiring rights to private lands
throughout the mid-west using eminent domain.

Keystone
Pipeline under construction in Oklahoma in March 2013

In a free
market, Keystone would have to negotiate with each landowner along the
pipeline’s path, from North Dakota to Texas.  If a landowner declined to
sell or lease land to Keystone, there would be no recourse for Keystone. It’s
the landowner’s private property, after all. But Keystone is another example of the Federal Government taking care of
corporations rather than the rights of its private citizens.

Why is it
that Republican Free Marketers hate free markets?

Eminent
domain enables Keystone’s game plan. They can ask a state government to use
eminent domain and if successful, Keystone is granted an easement or even
direct rights to the land at a “fair price.”  

But that “fair”
price is in the eye of the beholder. More often than not, landowners were not
willing to sell in the first place.  The only reason they are selling is
because eminent domain forces the transaction.  So, is the “fair” price
fair? Unlikely.

In this
case, eminent domain works like a subsidy, because Keystone’s buying price is lower
than the price at which most landowners are willing to sell. Without assistance
of eminent domain, it would most likely be unprofitable for Keystone to build
the thousand mile pipeline in the first place.

Eminent
domain could also breed collusion
between the corporation and state. The next time will not be the first
time.

From State
Impact: Julia Trigg Crawford of Lamar County, Texas, is the manager of
a 650-acre farm that her grandfather bought in 1948. TransCanada offered
Crawford $21,626 for an easement. Here’s Crawford:

She
refused, and TransCanada exercised the right of eminent domain and seized two
acres of the farm for their pipeline.

Since Kelo, private corporations may seize
private property if the property is taken for public use and the owner is given
fair compensation.

Although
the exercise of eminent domain to seize land for the public good is commonly
believed to be restricted to the government, in addition to Kelo, federal
law gives natural gas companies that right. To get the “right,” in Texas, all
TransCanada had to do was fill out a one-page form and check a box that the
corporation declares itself to be a “common carrier.”

The Texas Railroad
Commission, which regulates oil and gas, merely processes the paper, it doesn’t
investigate the declaration. In the contorted corporate logic we often see,
TransCanada declared itself to be a common carrier because the Railroad
Commission said it was, even though the Commission’s jurisdiction applies only to intrastate, not
interstate, carriers.

At least 89
Texas landowners
have had their properties seized by TransCanada.

But this
isn’t just happening in Texas. Randy
Thompson, a cattle buyer in Nebraska, was
informed that if he did not
grant pipeline access to 80 of the 400 acres left to him by his mother along
the Platte River, “Keystone
will use eminent domain to acquire the easement.”

Sue Kelso’s family in
Oklahoma was sued in the local district court by TransCanada
after she refused to allow the pipeline to cross their pasture. Mrs. Kelso:

By its own count, the TransCanada currently
has 34 eminent domain actions pending against landowners in Texas and an
additional 22 in South Dakota.

The New York Times reported that a TransCanada spokesman,
Shawn Howard, said the company does not have to wait for a license from the
State Department to begin securing land in Nebraska. He said the company has
the right to force lease agreements upon landowners in all six states the
pipeline would pass through. 

Timothy Sandefur, a
lawyer with the Pacific
Legal Foundation,
a nonprofit advocate for property rights issues, said that if the project is
approved, Keystone will be on firmer ground. He said: (Emphasis by the
Wrongologist)

In what has been
interpreted as a virtual green light for the project, a State Department report last August concluded that the pipeline would have minimum
environmental impact if operated in compliance with federal regulations.

So eminent
domain will continue to be one of TransCanada’s tools to muscle their way
across the Mid-West.

We need to
end the use of eminent domain for corporate gain.  

What’s
Wrong Today:

You missed Thomas Midgley’s 124th
birthday last week. He was an industrial chemist. He held 100 patents and made two big inventions
that changed history.

His first big
invention was made while he worked for a subsidiary of General Motors. It was an additive for gasoline that almost completely eliminated
knocking in car engines. The additive was tetra ethyl lead (TEL) If
you are over 60, you may remember pulling into a service station and being
asked by the attendant “Do you want regular or ethyl?”

General Motors and the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (now Exxon) formed the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation to
sell this product. Unfortunately, they ran into a problem. Lead is a dangerous neurotoxin. Their workers suffered all
kinds of health affects, up to and including death. This was seen at the time
as an inconvenience, as there was money to be made.

Midgley understood that adding lead
to gasoline made car engines perform better. At the time, two things were widely
known by chemists: First, adding grain alcohol to gasoline dramatically
increases octane and performance; and Second, ingesting or sniffing lead leads
to serious injury, brain damage and death.

The problem
was that grain alcohol isn’t cheap and using it couldn’t be patented. As a
result, they searched for a cheaper process that could be protected and that
could open the door for market dominance. If you own the patent on the cheapest
and easiest way to make cars run quieter (and no one notices the brain damage and death
thingy), you can corner the market in a fast-growing profitable industry.

As soon as
lead started being used, people began dying. Factory workers would drop dead in
the plant. Even Midgley contracted lead poisoning. At a press conference
where he tried to demonstrate the safety of the gasoline, he washed his hands
in it and sniffed it, even though he knew it was already killing people. That
brief exposure was sufficient to spend six months away from work to recover his
health. The employees would have been completely exposed to the large amount of lead that they were working with, without so much as a protective mask (such as this N95 Mask you can find online, for example). In today’s factory settings, where some harmful chemicals and compounds are still used, the amount of PPE that is now required normally covers head to toe!

Bill Bryson, in his
book “A Short History of Nearly Everything“
devotes a chapter to Midgley and the Ethyl Corporation. TEL would not be banned
in gasoline until the 1970?s! The company denied that lead was dangerous to
humans until it was banned.

If you were born in the 1900?s,
you have over 600 times more lead concentration in your body than someone who
died before World War I.

The Ethyl Corporation
exists today and they still make the product. They sell it in other countries
and it’s still used in some fuels in the USA.

Midgley wasn’t done. He went on to
invent a way to eliminate the dangerous chemicals used in early air
conditioning systems. He invented a product called dichlorodifluromethane
(CFC).

That is correct, Midgley
invented CFC’s! He had no idea of course that they would not only work well as
a refrigerant, but they were also effective at destroying the Ozone Layer.

Once
again, Midgley’s industry fought hard to maintain the status quo for years after
the damage was widely known.

The hole in the Ozone
Layer still exists, but the Montreal Protocol has banned most CFC’s. The Ozone
hole should begin to close by 2050.

Let’s
think more deeply about Thomas Midgley: His work gave us ubiquitous air
conditioning in the developed world. It gave us cheap-to-use internal
combustion engines that drive tractors, generators, scooters and cars around
the world.

Wikipedia
quotes J. R. McNeill, an environmental historian, saying that Midgley
“had more impact on the
atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth’s history.”

Not for
the better either.

Some would
say that Midgley was “just doing his job”. He pushed products to
market ?in the case of TEL, products he knew were toxic, so his company could
turn a profit.

Sound
familiar? A company needs the public and their government to ignore what they’re
doing in order to defend their market niche and extract the maximum value from
their assets. They sow seeds of doubt about the science. They remind us of the jobs created, profits made and the money saved.

And we
give them a pass. Because it’s their job, or because it’s our job, or because
our culture has created an artificial distinction between individuals who create
negative impacts and organizations that create them.

People who
might in other circumstances, speak up, decide to quietly stand by, or worse, actively lie as they engage in PR
campaigns aimed at undermining those that are brave enough to
point out just how damaging the status quo is.

It took
sixty years for leaded gas to be banned here and worse, it’s still used in many
places that can ill afford to deal with its effects.

When Midgley
did it again with CFCs, he certainly didn’t know the effects in advance. He died
three decades before the ozone depleting effects of CFCs in the atmosphere
became widely known.

Maybe we
should consider requiring every CEO have a statue of Midgley in their office, as
a reminder that we’re ultimately
responsible for what we make, that spinning to defend the status quo can hurt all
of us, and most of all, that we have to balance the benefits of
progress, innovation and industry with the social costs to all concerned.

Is there a
better person to use as the symbol for vigilance, candor and outspokenness than
Midgley, someone who was none of the above?
 

The happy talk theory of business ethics is: Doing the right
thing builds your brand, burnishes your reputation, helps you attract better
staff and gives back to the community, the very community that buys from you. The happy talk theory says, do these
things and you’ll make money.

The unhappy talk theory of business ethics
is this:
You have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit. To do anything less
than that is to cheat your investors. And in a competitive world, you don’t
have much wiggle room there.

If you believe
in business ethics, the unhappy talk theory is a big problem.

We can only count on people having
ethics, not businesses: Ethics, as in doing the right thing. Pointing to
the numbers (or to the bosses) is easy for those who want to duck an issue,
but you either do work you are proud
of, or you look away and try to make the most money possible. (It would
be nice if those overlapped much of the time, but they do not).

“I
just work here” is the worst sort of excuse, whether it’s from the IRS in Cincinnati,
or from JP Morgan. It is better to work with a company staffed with ethical
people than to try to find an ethical company.

In fact,
companies we believe to be ethical got that way because ethical employees made it
so.

Machiavelli said it well:

Sunday Homily
from Dr. Wrong:
 Do three scandals in one week mean Mr.
Obama is finished as president and will be impeached shortly? Do three scandals
in one week mean that the administration is floundering and has lost the hold
on the rudder of the ship of state? Does it matter that the scandals are not
really scandals (mostly) and that one of them didn’t start this week?

The
important thing is the number three, because that means it’s a PATTERN that we
can understand even if we don’t exactly understand the underlying particulars.
Three! Yer Out, Mr. Obama. Three strikes! Just like baseball.

There is a difference between a Bad Thing
and Scandal.
Moreover these things aren’t congruent with each other. “Congruent” implies a
lot more analysis of these tempests than either politically motivated congress
critters or our main stream press wants to give them.

But you
needn’t bother with that task either, because next week the press will move on
and the narrative will change to “The West Wing Regains Its Footing”.

These
scandals distract us from the real problems and issues that we face. Who is
talking much now about gun safety legislation, immigration reform, climate
change, the economy and unemployment, Obamacare implementation?

Instead,
the right (and their lackeys in the media) is absolutely consumed by
Benghazigate, IRSgate, and whatever other gates are being dreamed up by
congressional Republicans. Maybe nothing will get done in Obama’s second term.
The GOP strategy of misdirection and blocking everything seems to be working for
them, and the Obama administration’s lapses aren’t helping.

Conservatives
clearly have a “so what” attitude to our country’s continuing problems.
They have decided to run a shadow
government. This shadow government has no interest in governing, as we understand
the word governing. Rather they are focused entirely on attacking and destroying
their enemies: the President, Democrats, the middle class and poor. The behavior
of Republicans in the past 5 years should be enough for the thoughtful among us
to never vote Republican again. 

Three of the last five Republican presidents
could have been impeached: Nixon for Watergate, Reagan for Iran-Contra and Bush
2 for lying about WMD or torture. Only the very decent Gerald Ford and Bush 1 had
no impeachable offenses. The mossbacks among us remember that the impeachment hearings for Nixon were a solemn, unhappy
event for Congress and the people of the US.

No real American wants to impeach a
president (except many, many Republicans, of course), and no one really wants
to see highly placed government officials ending up in jail. That would be a failure
of our system and our democracy.

OK, back to Humor.

Why the AP can’t find its contact information:

Scandal round-robin:

House Republicans repeal Obamacare for 37th time:

What’s
Wrong Today:

Pew has released another installment of
data from its massive research into Muslim attitudes, conducted from 2008-2012,
entitled “The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society.” Over 38,000
Muslims in 38 countries were surveyed, in interviews in 80-plus languages, thus
constituting a huge survey that is both statistically sound and geographically broad.

 

Pew found that most Muslims are deeply
committed to their faith and want its teachings to shape not only their
personal lives but also their societies and politics.

• Asked “Should Sharia (religious law) be the law of the land?” 57% of
  Muslims across 38 countries answered “yes”, including most problematically for the
  US: 99% of Afghans, 91% of Iraqis, 89% of Palestinians, 84% of Pakistanis and
  74% of Egyptians. 

99% of Afghans…Don’t
you wish we knew THAT before we
started surging, nation-building and paying off Mr. Karzai?

• “Should Sharia apply to non-Muslims as well as Muslims?” Across 21
  countries surveyed on this question, 40% answered affirmatively, with the highest
  positive response coming from Egypt (74%) exceeding even Afghanistan’s 61%.

• In the 20 countries where it was asked, the question of whether Sharia
  punishments (such as whippings and cutting off of thieves’ hands) should be
  enacted, the average of those who answered “yes” was 52%, led by Pakistan (88%), Afghanistan (81%),
  the Palestinian Territories (PT), (76%) and Egypt (70%). The survey showed that
  Muslims tended to be most comfortable with using Sharia in the domestic sphere,
  to settle family or property disputes.

• On
  the specific penalty of stoning for adultery, the
  20-country average was 51% — with Pakistan again leading
  at (89%), Afghanistan (85%), the PT (84%) and Egypt (71%) highest in approval.

• 38% of Muslims across those same 20 nations support the death penalty for those leaving Islam for another
  religion (apostasy).

• Majorities in most countries say that “democracy is better than a powerful
  leader;” however, a powerful leader was preferred by more than 50% in Russia,
  Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as by 42% of Iraqis, 40% of Palestinians and
  36% of Egyptians.

• Most
  Afghans, Egyptians and Tunisians believe that “Islamic political parties” are
  better than other parties.

Data from the global
survey was compared with prior Pew surveys of Muslims in the US. Pew reports that there were 2.6 million Muslims in
the US in 2010 and that their population will grow to 6.2 million by 2030. American
Muslims are much more likely than Muslims in other countries to have close
friends who do not share their faith, and they are much more open to the idea
that many religions – not only Islam – can lead to eternal life in heaven.

On the question
of suicide bombing: Across 20 countries, only 13.5% think it is
ever justified, but support is much higher in the Palestinian Territories
(40%), Afghanistan (39%) and Egypt (29%).

It is the reverse in
the US, where 81% of US Muslims
say suicide bombings or other forms of violence against civilians in the name
of Islam are never justified, while just
1% say violence against civilians is often justified, or is sometimes
justified (7%) to defend Islam.

Dr.
Timothy R. Furnish, who served as an Arabic linguist with
the 101st Airborne and as an Army chaplain, holds a PhD in Islamic history from
Ohio State. He is the author of Holiest
Wars: Islamic Mahdis, Their Jihads, and Osama bin Laden (2005),
and blogs at MahdiWatch,
has these conclusions about Pew Research’s work:

1) The high degree of Muslim support for Sharia is a red flag: Despite assurances
by both the Obama and Bush administrations that most Muslims are “moderate,” empirical
data clearly show that most Muslims support not just Sharia in general, but also
its brutal punishments. Just as
disturbing, almost 40% of Muslims are in favor of killing those who choose to
follow another religion. The countries in which the US is heavily
involved either diplomatically or militarily are where such sentiments run most
high: Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, and the Palestinian Territories.

 

This explains why very few Islamic leaders
have publicly tried to lead the Muslim world towards moderation.

 

Further, it appears that our military, two
presidents and 4 CIA directors owe an explanation to the American people.

 

2) Afghanistan was always a lost cause.
Afghans are at the top of almost every list in support for Sharia, suicide
bombing and honor killing, as well as
dislike for democracy. The data are clear: Our military’s inability
to explain the causes of “green on blue” attacks or the Taliban’s continuing popularity in Afghanistan shows they
never understood the environment.

 

Strategically, the
US decision to stay there after taking out al-Qaida and then attempting to nation-build
in Afghanistan was a huge mistake.

 

2014 can’t come soon enough.

 

3) Islam in Southeastern Europe and Central
Asia is a more tolerant brand of the
faith than
the Middle Eastern variety. For example, the SE European and Central
Asian Muslims are the least likely to support the death penalty for apostasy,
and are the most supportive of letting women decide whether to veil.

 

Muslims in Sub-Saharan Africa are the most
likely to know about Christianity, and to interact with Christians. On the
other hand, African Muslims are among
the most enamored of Sharia, while those in Central Asia are fond of
letting Islamic judges decide family and property disputes. So there does
not seem to be a direct link between Westernization and moderation.

 

4) Malaysia may
be the next breeding ground of Islamic terrorism:
61% of its population (17 million) are Muslims, and they hold harsh views: 86%
want Sharia to be the law of the land; 67% favor the death penalty for
apostasy; 66% like Sharia-compliant corporal punishments; 60% support stoning
for adultery; and 18% think suicide bombing is justified.

 

It looks like we need to hire more Malay
linguists and analysts.

 

In summary, Islam is the world’s
second-largest religion, numbering some 1.6 billion humans (behind Christianity’s
2.2 billion).

 

There is enormous diversity of opinion among Muslims on
many issues of doctrine and religious practice, and we shouldn’t categorize
Islam as either “peaceful” or “violent”. That is the superficial thinking that
has gotten us into big trouble in the last decade.

 

Nonetheless, this latest Pew study provides
empirical evidence that many, many Muslims retain a literalist, supremacist
and often brutal view of managing their world. 

 

The
best news in the research is the tolerant and nuanced world view of American
Muslims compared to that of Muslims worldwide, particularly in the Middle East.
Our decade-long military involvement in the Middle East has given many Muslims
a direct, and in many ways, a negative experience with Americans. That
experience may contribute to certain survey results, particularly about the
desire for Sharia in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, or it may contribute to the finding that 39% of Afghans have no issue with suicide bombings.   

 

Our politicians and military must build a
deeper understanding of the global Muslim landscape if we are to have peace and
security in the 21st Century.

 

A deep dive into the Pew data is a great
place to start.

 

What’s Wrong Today:

From
CNN:
Acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller resigned Wednesday amid controversy over
Internal Revenue Service targeting of conservative groups that applied for
federal tax-exempt status.

The IRS appears to have acted in ways that are wholly inconsistent
with their mandate to perform unbiased investigations. In this case, the issue
is whether certain political groups, contending that they operate under a
“social welfare” part of the tax code, and should receive tax-exempt status. 
It is unclear how high up the chain of command these actions went, but WaPo’s report suggests it wasn’t simply a few rogue auditors in
Cincinnati. 

 

The Inspector
General’s Report on the IRS scandal seems to show two things:
First, how
unbelievably boring their writing is. Second, that this may be a non-scandal.

 

Why? Because the report
indicates that the IRS didn’t actually
deny tax-exempt status to a single Tea Party applicant. Not one.

 

What did they do? They
delayed responding to some applicants. They asked for inappropriate information
from some applicants. But they didn’t actually deny any nutball group’s
tax-exempt application.

When someone simultaneously tells you that they don’t intend to
engage primarily in political behavior and that their organization’s name
includes the word “party,” shouldn’t we do a little investigating?

That the IRS screwed up seems
undeniable. Instead of creating Be on
the Lookout (BOLO) criteria directed at the Tea Party, they should have
crafted ideologically-neutral language that had the effect of doing exactly
the same thing. It’s clear that the IRS violated
neutrality, investigating conservative groups by searching on “tea party” and
“patriot.” Of approximately 300 organizations sampled by the Inspector General,
about 100 had an affiliation with “Tea Party”, “Patriot”, “9/12” or other
common terms used by conservative organizations.

The
tax law in this area is an accident waiting to happen, and is one that may need some Tax Lien Help to help with in the interim period due to the concerns raised.  The problem isn’t the president.  It’s the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision
and the subsequent tax law written by Congress that gives these groups tax exempt
status under rule 501(c)(4) as long as
most of their activities are focused primarily on educating the public about
policy issues, not direct campaigning.

Of
course, the ambiguities therein may be insurmountable.  Many of these
groups, especially the big ones, spend millions on campaign ads mildly
disguised as “issue ads,” and under current law they can do so limitlessly and
with impunity.

According
to the NYT:

Nowhere do the rules specify the meaning of “primarily
engaged”. At what point does an issue ad cross
the threshold into a campaign ad? What kind of “education” is provided and how
does it promote “social welfare?”

Consider
what CBS reported this week regarding Karl Rove’s ad about
Hillary Clinton and Benghazi:

And
the IRS hasn’t seemed particularly interested in going after the big fish, like
Rove’s American Crossroads on the right or Priorities USA on the left. 
Instead, they appear to have targeted small fry on the far right.  If so,
not only is that clearly biased and unacceptable, it’s also ridiculous given
the relative possibility of violations of tax exempt status by these small
groups relative to the larger ones.

Can the IRS fairly interpret and enforce these instructions? 
Of course. But we should really be asking ourselves what
societal purpose is being served by carving out special tax status for any of
these groups. The Wrongologist doesn’t believe there is a single Tea
Party group in the country that isn’t primarily concerned with politics.

If
anyone can show evidence that these groups are making our political system and
our country better off, please do so. If not, no one is saying shut them
down, they’ve got a constitutional right to speak their minds. 

But,
why on a tax exempt basis?

What’s Wrong Today:

Apparently, electric cars are totally
unfair to auto dealers. Of course, we know that sites like Intelligent Car Leasing are, along with many others, beginning to make further steps in the electric car field, but apparently this is rather dangerous for those that make their living from selling cars. So much so that North Carolina Republicans are
pulling the plug on Silicon Valley darling Tesla Motors.  Slate’s Will
Oremus reports:

It’s just a simple little bill that would prohibit automakers from direct sales of their cars in North
Carolina.

Tesla
Model S

It’s easy
to understand why some car dealers might feel a threatened: Tesla’s Model S outsold the Mercedes S-Class, BMW 7 Series, and
Audi A8 last quarter without using dealers.  If this business model were to catch on,
consumers might find that they don’t need the middle-men at all.

And North
Carolina isn’t the only state trying to eliminate Tesla’s “unfair” competition.
In Texas, the company is fighting a law under which the employees of its
“showroom” in Austin are not allowed to sell any vehicles, offer test drives, or even
tell customers how much the car costs.

But Texas allows
sales of the car online, which North Carolina’s law would prohibit.

Slate
reports that Tesla has already sold 80 cars in North Carolina, mostly through
the Web, and has about 60 more orders in the works. It also has plans to build
its first showroom in the state next year. The Raleigh-Durham Research Triangle
in particular appears to be a hotbed of Tesla interest, which makes sense given
its similarities to Silicon Valley. They’re probably
also doing well in liberal Asheville. 

The real issue is, by taking dealers out of the sale, Tesla’s
business model is a direct threat to the dealerships in the state, and
they want Tesla gone.


The bill is supported by the North
Carolina Automobile Dealers Association, a trade group representing the
state’s franchised dealerships. Its sponsor, state Sen. Tom Apodaca, (R-
Henderson), has said the goal is to prevent unfair competition between
manufacturers and dealers.

What makes
what Tesla is doing “unfair competition” as opposed to plain-old
“competition”—something Republicans typically favor—is not
entirely clear.

Tesla rejects
the idea that prohibiting direct to consumer sales will protect consumers, as the North Carolina Automobile Dealers’ Association claims. The
franchise-dealer model might work fine for giant automakers, but since Tesla’s
products represent a challenge to the traditional products the auto industry relies
upon, it wouldn’t work for Tesla.

How do you sell the future when your business depends
on today?

Robert
Glaser, president of the Dealers Association, told the News & Observer that
the law prohibiting Tesla sales isn’t just about his industry’s self-interest.
Pointing to the Tesla representatives at a recent hearing, he said:

All this is
from the state that brought you the nation’s first ban on climate science.  So, it would make sense that NC Republicans also
hate electric cars. 

Free
markets aren’t free, that’s for suckers. 

Crony
Capitalism: So much nicer to rig the game.

 

Cleveland:

Syria for dummies:

Family values takes a Republican hit:

Comment on Mark Sanford:

“There are no second acts in American lives.” ―F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald was wrong. Mark Sanford shows that the distinction between the party of Absolute Standards of Morality and the party of Relativists is not very big.

That old question asked when we were young, whether religion was necessary for a person to have morality has been answered: Look at the behavior of believers and look at the behavior of non-believers. Do you see much difference?  

Conclusions? Certain patterns of moral behavior are organic in humans. Could it be that organized religion is a explanatory scaffolding erected around those innate behaviors?  Often, that scaffolding fails to prevent wayward behaviors even by believers. All people have a capacity to veer from the moral track under the right circumstances.

So even politicians have second acts.

However, hypocrisy will remain ever present in the party of Morality.

What’s
Wrong Today:

The
hive communicates about everything, sometimes it communicates about real and important
things. They snap digital photos with smart phones and cameras that are better and
easier to use than only a few years ago. In fact, compare 1993’s gadgets with
2013’s:

In 1997, Scott Adams, the creator of
Dilbert, predicted that all crimes would become
solvable because video surveillance and other technology would make it
nearly impossible to get away with much that was illegal. And now, 16 years later, the Boston bombers were
spotted on several security videos, marking the point at which the public learned
how ubiquitous video recording is in a major US city. The FBI asked the public
for help in finding the bombers. Twitter helped spread the word. They were
caught in less than a week.

We have
built a large post-9/11 domestic security apparatus. It is based on massive
crunching of big data. We know that the government is probably recording every
phone call, email, and text of every American citizen. We are told that the
information is being used to fight terrorism. But we also know that it won’t
stop there.


In 10 years, the government will always know where your car is, the same way
they can track your mobile phone today. Taxis will only take credit cards. Buses
and trains will require you to swipe an ID. If you travel, the government will
know where you went and how you got there.

So,
along with help finding bad guys, there could be some very real threats to our
other freedoms:

“We need to suspend temporarily your rights to protest,
privacy, and trial by jury.”
“Why?”
“To protect
you from terrorists.”
“Why do I need to be protected from
terrorists?”
“Because they hate you for your freedom.”

What protects us from the
slippery slope of abusive government acting ostensibly for our protection?

More Information. Information in the
sunshine, information that wants to be free:

Today, the
biggest stories break online first and then cross over to the mainstream media.
Maybe video surveillance and the recording of texts and email have a role to in
our new security. 

The Wrongologist is a citizen of
Blogostan, a pundit with portfolio who does not yet use Twitter, but who sees more
value than harm in democratizing the reporting of news.

Bob Lefsetz
says, “Twitter is a news service.”

The
dirty little secret of the mainstream media is its limited resources. With weak
financials and ever fewer talented people working for them, the MSM usually can
only report what is pitched to them. They are a virtual megaphone of press
releases and spin (see Meet the Press, The News Hour and all the rest). Old
time pols and publicists pitch in prime time, ideas that most of us have
already made up our minds about, usually along with one big issue (like Benghazi)
or a disaster that everyone’s anointed as important for the lead. From Lefsetz:

The
MSM think of themselves as gatekeepers with a corner on the market for
journalistic integrity that is lacking in Blogostan.

But
there are no gates, they were torn down years ago when the Internet became
ubiquitous and we all got broadband.

Crowdsourcing
works for investigative news as well. Look
at Cleveland and Ariel Castro: We now have reporters tweeting on every
street corner, in every home, nothing goes unreported, un-commented upon, un-experienced.

No
one is interested in all of it, but if we get interested, there is a permanent
record in the cloud, a trail of information that we can drill into, unpack and decipher.
Instead of a reporter whose editors have a corporate agenda calling the usual
suspects to spin a story, we’ve got citizens with very limited skin in the game
trying to call it as they see it.


Democracy in 140 characters. If you want more than
140 characters, you know how and where to get that, but the public is now in
charge of the story.

You
go to the people to learn what went on: In Syria, in Cleveland, in Bangladesh.
Everywhere but DC.


And this is good. Because the more facts, the
better.