Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

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There was an article on BI a few days ago saying how "Americans don't care" about the AP spying (from a survey), and that they cared a lot more about IRS and Benghazi.

But let's put things in context. The IRS scandal, and especially the Benghazi one, have been trumpeted at least 10x more than the AP one. Maybe 100x more. With such "awareness campaign" is it really a surprise most people responded in the surveys with IRS or Benghazi?

So what this really means is that the media themselves don't really care about the AP spying - which is actually quite frightening, and a worse situation than I thought. You'd think they would want to turn this into another Watergate or something - but apparently not. Same for the Fox News journalist.

These two stories would be reason enough to call for the impeachment of the president in my book. I mean it threatens a core power in the society - the press. The Benghazi story, and even the IRS one to "some" degree, are the real distractions here.

As an American that doesn't care, I can say that the media is in quite a hypocritical situation with this one.

They've had 10 years to look into this, to take a stance, to confront the US Government on the issue. For 10 years they've ignored, or not cared, about issues like wire tapping, searching through emails and phone records, etc without a warrant. Issues like locking up an american citizens indefinitely without a right to trial. Issues like using drones to kill americans.

They've ignored these issues for going on 10 years because, I assume, they felt they were immune to them. That they had protections against them that 'regular' Americans didn't.

Now they find out and they are just as susceptible to those rules as the rest of us an want to put a rallying cry for us to come to their side? Even further they want special legislation protecting them from it, while leaving the rest of us unprotected?

Please. The media deserves absolutely zero sympathy on this one. Maybe if they were doing their jobs, maybe if they actually cared about the American people the way they claim, they wouldn't be in this mess.

I wonder if you oughtn't reconsider how important the IRS+ scandal is (for some targets, it went way past the IRS, even audits by them, e.g for Truth the Vote the FBI, OSHA and BATF all piled on). This systematic suppression by the ruling class* of their opposition implicates the 1st Amendment freedoms of religion†, speech, assembly and petition (e.g. unruly "Town Hall" events).

There's a lot of maxims out there that generally start with "soap box", put ballot box and/or jury box in the middle and end with "bullet box" at the end, and pushing a very large fraction of the polity out of the public square tends to have grave consequences. So far some of them are a massive distrust of one of the essential organs of government (tax collection) and an asterisk that honest historians are going to have to put after mentioning Obama's reelection.

That Team Obama is going after the press just completes the attacks on every single provision of the 1st Amendment (at least if you accept that "secular humanism" or whatever you want to call it is now the established religion, although in all fairness that far predates Obama).

* This is not entirely or perhaps even mostly partisan, for most of the people being suppressed are existential threats to the Republican party establishment, just ask ex-Senator Lugar who's now spending more time with his family. On the other hand, Kimberly Strassle of the WSJ reminds us this started out in 2008 against anyone who opposed Obama, as well as anyone opposing Democrats: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732465940457850...

† Religious organizations were asked impermissible questions that touched on the details of their theology and the like.

You're not contradicting my contention: Lots of political groups were applying for charitable status, they're not allowed to have it, and it's the IRS's job to flag those groups, filter them out and inform them that their donations are not tax-deductible.

Any political group asking for charity status was not being persecuted -- they were being very properly informed that they're not a charity. If any actual charity was caught up in this dragnet, then that charity was persecuted.

Look at it this way: This IRS dept (overseen by a bush appointee) in a particular year sees a lot of bogus charity 501c4 applications using the word "foobar". They set up a filter on the word foobar to flag any entries containing it for manual review. Completely reasonable, right?

Now change "foobar" to "tea party". That's where they screwed up on CYA, they should've added a bunch of democratic party type keywords to the list and then they're good.

You are very confused. 501(c) status is about being a non-profit, not necessarily a "charity". Only a few of the current 27 categories of 501(c) organizations can reasonably be called charities, look at the list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)_organization#Types, e.g. see 501(c)(16) for farmer's coops.

501(c)(4) organizations are mostly not charities, e.g. the NRA's lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action, and the current version of Obama's Organizing for America (Organizing for Action) are examples that passed IRS muster, and the vast majority of the ones maltreated by the IRS were going for that status.

OFA only switched to a tax-exempt organization in January 2013. I don't know the full story behind that, but I feel that their activity before 2013 was primarily political and shouldn't be tax-exempt (and it wasn't).

And their first big campaign as a 501(c)(4) was gun control, and that's not political?

Note, I'm not saying that's wrong, in fact, it mirrors the NRA's ILA on the opposite side of that fight.

Look, we had an established system for doing this sort of thing, and it makes no sense whatsoever to make political organizations organize as for profit entities, monetary return on investment is not their game. And donations for political purposes to 501(c)(4) orgs are not tax deductible for the donors.

What we'd like is a return to the level playing field pre-Obama, but I don't know of anyone who believes that will happen, e.g. the IG finished the audit of the program in the middle of last year, obviously didn't release the results, but most damningly didn't stop the abuse, which continues to this day.

That's actually a legitimate argument. In theory, there could be a tea party group that was doing issue advocacy and not campaigning for candidates. In practice, many of them were in fact advocating for candidates, and the IRS screwed up by not scrutinizing all issue groups equally.

You've actually changed my mind a little on this. I don't believe that this was some nefarious obama socialist plot (under a Bush appointed supervisor) as you seem to but I now think that the IRS actually screwed up as opposed to failed to cover their ass. So good job.

Honest question: If extra review of obviously-political groups calling themselves social welfare organizations were perfectly balanced across the political spectrum, would you support it?

Not sure, I find it impossible to believe that the establishment will give anti-establishment political organizations a fair shake, which is exactly what happened in this scandal. These orgs are not partisan per se, for all I know there's some anti-establishment Democrats out there that they've supported (e.g. many of my home state's Missouri Democratic "liberals" are to the right of the national Republican party/establishment), and they've collected many Republican establishment scalps.

But one of the problems is that before the fact investigation just doesn't work, for how can you tell if an org is going to do impermissible actions? The only one that counts is coordination with a campaign, which is by definition secret, because the other impermissible actions (at least that I know of) are by definition public.

Although, now that I think about it, I'm not sure where the lines are drawn. The NRA-ILA explicitly "endorses" some politicians in addition to grading all they can afford to do, and boy do anti-gun Republicans squeal like stuck pigs when the NRA tells the truth, or, worse, goes after them with a rusty knife like they did with F rated Lugar. So explicit endorsement per se does not cross the line....

Look at the examples of the suppressed orgs that said their purpose was teaching people about the Constitution. That's obviously subversive nowadays (heck, look at the IRS ex-Commissioner I think who said he didn't know the contents of the 1st Amendment), and yet they somehow deserve extra scrutiny?

Look up the concept of prior restraint, which the government is seldom allowed to do when it comes to enumerated Constitutional rights. I.e. they can't order the press to not do something, only prosecute them afterwords.

Yeah, I hate that circular logic. Americans drink more coke than pepsi, look at the advertising budgets. You hammer something on prime time every night for 6 months and people will think it's a bigger deal than the story you don't.

There's not an actual scandal behind Benghazi. Literally none. They're alleging a cover-up, "of what?", "they're covering it up!". That's the whole story and somehow it's 6 months of airtime.

The IRS story is just bad CYA by the administrators there. Political groups applying for charity status is in fact something that the IRS should be auditing and cracking down on, regardless of political party, and there were a lot of tea party groups applying for charity status -- The dept head was actually a Bush appointee, they just weren't tactful enough about how they set their filters to make it look more bipartisan.

This leak case, on the other hand, is actual erosion of press freedoms. And the media (?!?!?!!) seem to care the least about it.

Well, the New Yorker has been printing exactly your stance on this, so at least some elements of the media care. :)

Without asserting criminality, the Benghazi affair was entirely deserving of serious inquiry and investigation but regrettably we such have such immature and partisan Government that the opposition party chose to make it a completely farcical political spectacle.

So much that, it is easier for reasonable people to assume there's nothing to any of it other than political attacks when in fact there clearly was some kind of bureaucratic ineptitude and they were officially blaming a YouTube video for weeks.

I'm not sure if I agree with you about Benghazi.

Brandon Webb and the guys over at SOFREP have been doing a fair bit of reporting on the subject. tl;dr: Benghazi was a colossal screwup and exposed how JSOC operations in the area put State Department people at risk.

Obviously, if people died, then someone screwed up bad.

But the "scandal" hasn't been about who screwed up. It's been about whether Obama used the word terrorism enough times in the aftermath, and nebulous accusations of "cover-up" with no actual allegations of wrongdoing that's being covered up. It's pathetic.

That part of the scandal is about Team Obama blaming this on the Emmanuel Goldstein du jore, who's still in jail. Otherwise you have to accept the Administration's narrative that Arab mobs routinely bring RPGs and mortars to their protests of insults to their religion.

Maybe it is because the media has traditionally been at the end of the strings of the State[0], so to be surprised about such actions seems kinda naive. Some people probably stopped taking orders…

But it is interesting/amusing to see the State encroaching upon itself and its own devices in the pursuit of terrorism or whatever thing we're supposed to be fighting these days.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_influence_on_public_opinio...

Lying to everyone about Benghazi to maintain a narrative about terrorism prior to the election satisfies most people's definition of a scandal. And for some reason the people on the ground, even in the country, were told to stand down rather than attempt to help, something that no one can remember ever happening before.

Really now, this is the first Ambassador killed in the line of duty in 33 years (previously under Carter, of course) and you're sure there's nothing suspect about it?!??!!!

Your claims about the IRS abuse completely fail, since no "progressive" organizations suffered such abuse. One group even resubmitted their application, just changing the name to include the word Green and sound progressive, and it sailed through the process. And stonewalling != investigation, many groups were delayed for 3+ years, two election cycles, and are still left hanging. Compare to many many other examples, like Obama's Organizing for America -> Organizing for Action 501(c)(4).

You may have no problems with the heavy hand of the government suppressing those you politically oppose, but I assure you the other side does, and as I note elsewhere in this subthread this sort of thing has grave consequences.

If it were just about my political preferences, I'd be thrilled that conservatives can't shut up about Benghazi. It didn't play during the last election, it won't play during the next one, and makes Republicans look like frothing at the mouth idiots.

But I'm actually concerned as an American about real issues, even real criticisms of Obama that get no attention while this idiocy goes on.

And this is why they say to keep politics off of HN. None of your assertions are backed up by fact. It's really disheartening to see this nonsense here.

In other words, you have no basis to deny my words, so you want them banned on this forum.

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