Sunday, November 17, 2024
Trey Gowdy wants to see IRS jail time By ANDREA DRUSCH Rep. Trey Gowdy says he wants a “full throated outrage” from the president over the recent controversy at the IRS. “We’re not interested in retirements and forced ousters, we’re interested in people going to jail,” the South Carolina Republican […]
The initial story from the IRS regarding alleged targeting of conservative groups has fallen apart. These actions go well beyond one or several low level employees acting on their own.
According to a report from the IRS Inspector General’s office, senior officials at the IRS knew about the targeting of conservative groups for over a year without doing anything about it.
Every new revelation makes this whole caper seem more and more politically motivated regardless of what the Obama administration says.
Yesterday we heard that at least one organization in South Carolina, the Laurens County Tea Party, was one of the many organizations having problems with the IRS. The group applied for tax-exempt status in 2010 and still has received no answer.
Yesterday we also heard that the Justice Department had begun an investigation into the actions of the IRS. This would be the same Justice Department that performed warrantless searches on the phone records of several reporters at the Associated Press.
If government officials don’t respect the laws of the United States and the provisions of the Constitution, who will?
We now know that at least three IRS offices were involved in the targeting of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status.
The Washington Post reported today the IRS Washington, D.C. headquarters sent questionnaires to conservative groups asking about their donors and other areas of their operations while the El Monte and Laguna Miguel offices in California did the same with tea party affiliated groups.
This takes the investigation of IRS activities well beyond the initial claim that some low level functionaries in the Cincinnati office were to blame.
According to the article, an employee in the Cincinnati office told a lawyer representing one of the targeted groups that its application was “under review” in Washington.
Interestingly, it was George W. Bush appointed IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman who told a Congressional committee in spring 2012 that no targeting was occurring. Shulman resigned in November 2012.
The increasing revelations of the Internal Revenue Service targeting conservative groups for increased scrutiny are the potential political scandal that Congress should be investigating.
In addition to groups with the words “tea party,” and “patriot” being targeted for extra IRS scrutiny, we learned over the weekend groups criticizing the government and those seeking to educate people about the Constitution were also given extra scrutiny.
It is now obvious that these acts were not the isolated, random acts of a couple of low level IRS employees as they were first characterized. The head of the IRS tax-exempt division was made aware of this activity as early as June 2011.
Using the IRS for a political agenda was the second article of impeachment prepared against President Richard Nixon.
It has been written that use of the IRS against political opponents goes back at least to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Use of the IRS or any other government agency to target political opponents by either party is absolutely unacceptable and investigations of such alleged activity and prosecution of those responsible should be pursued to the absolute maximum.
The major question to be answered is what did President Barack Obama know and when did he know it?
Wednesday’s Benghazi hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee gave Americans the first public eyewitness account from anyone actually on the ground in Libya on September 11, 2012.
Gregory Hicks, the former number two at the U.S. embassy in Tripoli, walked committee members through that fateful night. The testimony of the witnesses was totally gripping, extraordinary, and very emotional. Even if some of this account had already been made public, hearing it live was nothing less than tragic.
Unbelievably, it took eight months for this hearing to happen. Credit goes to the great courage of the three witnesses—Hicks, Mark Thompson, who leads State’s Foreign Emergency Support Team (FEST), and Eric Nordstrom, former regional security officer for the Middle East. And credit also goes to the persistence of committee chairman Darrell Issa (R–CA) to shine a light on the terrorist attack that took the lives of four brave Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens.
Most impressive were the glaring contrasts contained in the testimony. Hicks’s on-the-ground testimony shows both the glaring inadequacy of Washington’s response and the heroic efforts of the embassy and CIA teams on the ground in Libya. Both aspects of this case should be explored.
The S.C. Budget and Control Board heard from S.C. Comptroller General Richard Eckstrom Wednesday that S.C. public pension plans are “dying on the vine” due to declining funding levels.
A combination of factors including investment returns, contribution levels and benefit-allocation amounts all contribute to what amounts to a train wreck waiting to happen. Eckstrom said unfunded liabilities of the various pension funds are increasing.
According to the latest numbers we have seen, the state’s pension fund assets are approximately $26 billion with unfunded future liabilities of approximately $17 billion. According to Eckstrom, the unfunded liability grew by approximately $1.5 billion in the past year.
Who is on the hook for making up the shortfall? That’s easy, the state’s taxpayers.
A S.C. Senate sub-committee Tuesday made major changes to an ethics reform bill the House had rushed through last week to meet the May 1 crossover deadline for legislation.
The amended bill would make major changes to the way in which ethics violations against members of the General Assembly are investigated as well as requiring new income source disclosure for public officials throughout the state.
The amended legislation takes investigation of allegations of ethics violations against House and Senate members out of the hands of legislative committees and puts a revamped state Ethics commission in charge of all ethics investigations.
The House bill proposed elimination of the House and Senate Ethics committees, replacing them with a Joint Committee on Ethics, a body that would include eight legislators and eight members of the public chosen by legislators.
Ethics investigations of legislators would have effectively remained in the control of legislators with this committee.
Republican Mark Sanford will be returning to Washington to again represent the citizens of the South Carolina 1st Congressional District after a nearly 12 ½ year break.
Sanford easily defeated Democratic opponent Elizabeth Colbert Busch in a special election to fill the seat after former representative Tim Scott was elevated to the Senate earlier this year when Jim DeMint resigned to head up the Heritage Foundation.
Despite turning off some voters with his 2009 antics of disappearing for several days to visit his Argentinian mistress while serving as governor of South Carolina, Sanford was never really in danger of losing this election.
A bill that would make flow control illegal in South Carolina currently rests in the S.C. Senate Rules Committee awaiting a majority vote to put it on the calendar for full Senate vote.
Flow control is the term that means establishing monopoly control over the flow of the solid waste stream in an area, in this case a county.
It is illegal for private companies to establish flow control over a waste stream, but, currently, not for county government to do so. Horry County currently has a flow control ordinance in place that makes its Horry County Solid Waste Authority the monopoly arbiter over county waste.
Former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and presidential candidate Newt Gingrich was in Myrtle Beach earlier this week to push an initiative for oil and gas drilling off the coast of South Carolina.
Gingrich spoke at a forum of oil and gas industry representatives who want Congress to allow exploratory drilling and development of possible offshore oil and gas resources.
One of the issues at the forefront of talks about oil and gas drilling off the U.S. coast is the number of high paying jobs such economic activity will bring to the area.
If those types of jobs would become available, it would certainly help the Horry County area which consistently ranks dead last in average worker income among the 335 largest counties in the nation.
The irony here is that wage levels in Horry County have been consistently depressed because of the tourism industry. It’s just over 50 years ago that Horry County business leaders met with then Sen. Strom Thurmond to stop plans for extending I-20 to the coast. They worried an interstate would bring industrial development that would rob them of low wage workers in the hotels, restaurants and tobacco fields in the county.
Speak Up…