#5
Diane Hathaway you have been a bad girl, a very bad girl.
Hathaway, speaking publicly for the first time, was on the verge of tears while speaking to U.S. District Judge John Corbett O'Meara.
"Your honor, I stand before you a broken person," said Hathaway, 59. "I am ashamed, embarrassed, humiliated and disgraced, and I have no one to blame but myself. I take full responsibility for my acts and am truly sorry for the choices I made."
O'Meara concluded Hathaway is not a risk of committing another crime and credited her for rising to the top judicial position in the state. But he ordered her to prison and to pay $90,000 restitution and serve two years' probation.
"We hope you accomplish a great deal more once you are by this thing," said O'Meara, who was nominated by President Bill Clinton in 1994.
The Clinton Administration the gift that keeps on giving....Really just a warm-up for what is to come....The Obama Administration
What took you so long, Lincoln?
Republicans never had much use for Lincoln Chafee. During his seven-plus years as a U.S. senator GOP colleagues regularly derided and mocked his moderation. After losing his Senate seat in the 2006 Democratic landslide Chafee came back four years later to claim the governorship as an independent.
Now Chafee's political journey is complete. He's joining the Democratic Party, and just in time for his 2014 reelection bid.
The move isn't altogether surprising. Chafee of late has veered on a left-leaning course. He vocally supported a gay marriage bill moving through the Rhode Island legislature, and signed it on the capitol steps just minutes after final passage.
#1
The action hero, martial artist and musician attempted to set up a visit of several members of Congress to Chechnya, but the lawmakers got cold feet at the last minute, POLITICO has learned.
I don't think it was cold feet. My theory is that he got distracted by some pie.
Additional scrutiny of conservative organizations activities by the IRS did not solely originate in the agencys Cincinnati office, with requests for information coming from other offices and often bearing the signatures of higher-ups at the agency, according to attorneys representing some of the targeted groups.
At least one letter requesting information about one of the groups bears the signature of Lois Lerner, the suspended director of the IRS Exempt Organizations department in Washington.
Jay Sekulow, an attorney representing 27 conservative political advocacy organizations that applied to the Internal Revenue Service for tax-exempt status, provided some of the letters to NBC News. He said the groups contacts with the IRS prove that the practices went beyond a few front line employees in the Cincinnati office, as the IRS has maintained.
We've dealt with 15 agents, including tax law specialists -- that's lawyers -- from four different offices, including (the) Treasury (Department) in Washington, D.C., Sekulow said. So the idea that this is a couple of rogue agents in Cincinnati is not correct.
Among the letters were several that bore return IRS addresses other than Cincinnati, including "Department of the Treasury / Internal Revenue Service / Washington, D.C.," and the signatures of IRS officials higher up the chain. Two letters with "Department of the Treasury / Internal Revenue Service / Washington, D.C." letterhead were signed by "Tax Law Specialist(s)" from Exempt Organizations Technical Group 1 and Technical Group 2. Lerners signature, which appeared to be a stamp rather than an actual signature, appeared on a letter requesting additional information from the Ohio Liberty Council Corp.
Lerner has become one of the public faces of the controversy after refusing to testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee last Wednesday, citing her Constitutional Fifth Amendment rights after reading a brief statement: I have not done anything wrong. I have not broken any laws, violated IRS regulations or provided false information to this or any other committee.
She was put on administrative leave at the end of last week after reportedly refusing to resign at Obama administrations request. She is continuing to collect federal paychecks on her almost $180,000 annual salary, though at least one Republican senator, Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, is urging the agency to speed up the process and fire her.
In the two weeks since the IRS acknowledged it targeted conservative organizations seeking status as tax-exempt "social welfare" organizations for additional scrutiny, many Republicans have sought to link the agencys actions to the White House. In an Op-Ed piece in the Washington Post on May 22, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., wrote that the administration has been extremely creative in employing throughout the federal government the sorts of intimidation tactics that were used at the IRS.
The White House has dismissed suggestions it was aware of the targeting, saying President Barack Obama only learned of the issue when it broke in the news on May 10. White House spokesman Jay Carney has since deflected most questions about the scandal, saying it would be inappropriate to comment until an FBI inquiry into the agencys actions one of five separate government investigations -- is concluded.
For its part, the IRS has declined additional comment beyond its congressional testimony -- including former IRS Commissioner Steven Miller's testimony that IRS employees didnt have partisan motives and only made "foolish mistakes ... trying to be more efficient -- and other previously released public statements, including its response to a Treasury inspector general (see pages 49-51) and a Q&A on 501 (c) groups it published on its website.
But attorneys for some of the targeted groups provided documentation and two IRS employees in the Cincinnati office made statements to NBC News that call into question parts of the official explanation Americans have heard from the IRS so far.
Sekulow, who worked with the office of the chief counsel of the IRS in the early 1980s as a trial lawyer representing the IRS on tax-exempt cases, said the number of groups hes heard from, and the scope of the requests for information the IRS sent them, persuaded him that this was not something that was just created at an agent level, that this was certainly higher up.
After reviewing all the IRS communications his clients received, Sekulow said he believes the IRS was engaged in a coordinated and deliberate attempt to silence, or at least stifle conservative organizations, he told NBC News.
Sekulow also said the practices continued well after May 2012, when the IRS has claimed they had stopped. Sekulow said 10 of the organizations he represents still have not received determinations from the IRS on their applications for tax-exempt status as 501 C (1)(4) organizations. He provided NBC News with a letter the IRS sent to one of his clients on May 6 requesting more information.
'Decisions ... made in Washington'
Cleta Mitchell, another attorney representing conservative groups that allege they were targeted, said an IRS agent in Cincinnati told her a task force IRS office in Washington, D.C., was making the decisions about the processing of applications, and that she subsequently dealt with IRS representatives there.
(The IRS agent in Cincinnati) told me that in fact the case would be transferred to a special task force out of Washington, and that he was told he was the originally assigned agent that he wasn't allowed to make decisions, the decisions were all going to be made in Washington, Mitchell said. I know that this process was going on in Washington because I've dealt with those people.
One of Mitchells clients, Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of True the Vote, a conservative elections monitoring organization, applied for tax-exempt status for the group in July 2010. She said that when she asked the IRS two years later why it was taking so long to get a decision, agents told her Washington was to blame.
Weve dealt with four separate analysts and their explanation for the way our case has been handled runs the gamut from their not having another organization like True the Vote to compare to so they had to develop new questions and new criteria -- all the way through to the fact that they were taking their orders from Washington and were waiting for Washingtons direction as to what steps to take next, she said. They were caught up in a process that seemed to be much bigger than Cincinnati and bigger than any single individual.
Mitchell, Engelbrechts attorney, said Engelbrechts case also raised questions about whether the IRS had subjected some applicants to other federal government scrutiny and action, beyond their IRS application.
Engelbrecht told NBC News that soon after she filed for tax-exempt status for True the Vote, the IRS audited her personal and business taxes for the first time, and her manufacturing business was visited by two other federal agencies, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
Her tax-exempt application still hasn't been approved after three years. She's now suing the IRS.
Sekulow said he also is preparing to sue the IRS in federal court this week, on behalf of the 16 groups he represents.
The only way to get this resolved is to go to federal court, Sekulow said, because that's the only thing that's going to compel the IRS to comply with the law.
From The Nation. The gist of the story is that taking money from Evil Corporations without making that public is, well, Evil. Even when you're the most powerful progressive think tank in Washington.
Apparently The Nation, like Nikita Khrushchev, has purged Uncle Joe Stalin and his "when we hang the capitalists they will sell us the rope" from its collective (no pun intended) memory.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
