This Is What Passes For A Scandal?

[UPDATE]:

Hilarious:

There was a commissioner, Douglas Shulman, who was appointed by the Bush/Cheney administration five years ago, and who was in charge when the agency began treating conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status unfairly. It’s unlikely that a Republican deliberately targeted groups on the right for extra scrutiny.

But more to the point, Rubio’s demand is problematic given the fact that Shulman has already resigned, leaving the IRS last November. It’s tough for a guy to fall on his sword after he’s already packed up his stuff and gone home.

So the guy in charge of the IRS when conservative groups say they were unfairly targeted was a Bush appointee, and he’s been gone for six months.

I’d say the Teanuts have been played.

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Help me out here, people. Other than massive butthurt and shrill whining, skills which the Tea Party employ with surgical precision, I don’t get what this supposed “scandal” involving the IRS is all about.

Tea Party groups were applying for 501(c)4 status. Political groups can’t be 501(c)4s. They can’t be involved directly in politics, raise money for candidates, launch primary challenges, run for office, etc. But groups calling themselves “Tea Party” and “Patriots” had been in the news for months doing exactly that! So why is it a big deal that the IRS was looking into the activities of groups calling themselves “Tea Party” before granting them non-profit status?

What am I missing here?

Also, many on the left have mentioned the numerous ways the Bush Administration did the same and even worse, without so much as a tear from conservatives or a front page headline from the mainstream media. Remember All Saints Church in Pasadena, California? Following a 2004 anti-war sermon which went viral, the IRS investigated the church for two years and threatened its non-profit status. At the same time, conservative “Patriot pastors” telling their congregations how to vote were ignored.

Remember when the FBI infiltrated anti-war groups as they planned protests ahead of the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minneapolis? Probably not — there’s little mention of this in the corporate media.

Or what about this one:

The FBI improperly targeted Greenpeace, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and two antiwar groups in domestic terrorism investigations between 2001 and 2006, the Inspector General of the Department of Justice said in a report released today.

The IG found there was “little or no basis” for the terror investigations, and that they were “unreasonable and inconsistent with FBI policy.”

At least two of the investigations resulted in innocent people being placed on the domestic terror watch list for years, and one resulted in FBI Director Robert Mueller providing Congress with “inaccurate and misleading information,” according to the report.

Remember the Pentagon’s TALON data base, which targeted anti-war Quakers and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell protestors? Doubtful: most people have probably never heard of it. Outside the lefty press, it got little attention on cable and network news.

Remember back in 2003 when the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation took down names of anti-war protestors at an MTSU peace rally? More recently, remember when the FBI targeted Occupy Wall Street?

Imagine the Tea Party hysterics if the FBI put their leaders on the terror watch list. But you don’t see Morning Joe booking the head of PETA to discuss the ways they were targeted; today he did book Newt Gingrich. And the Wall Street Journal is calling this “Nixonian.” Seriously? So you had to wait a little longer for your tax exempt status to clear on account of your politicking. Cry me a damn river, you big babies. Call me when your name is placed on a secret domestic terror watch list.

This is one giant nothingburger, another chance for the Tea Party to whine and call for the fainting couches about how unfair everyone always is to them. Seriously? The media is playing along with this? After ignoring the far worse ways liberal groups have been targeted by different government agencies — including the IRS?

Just further proof that the media is not liberal and its infatuation with all things Tea Party has continued.

You know what I think? I think the news media are desperate for a political scandal. We had so many of them during the Bush years, and then there was Clinton’s blow job and Gennifer Flowers and TravelGate and all the other Clinton-era scandals, phony and otherwise. Obama is just too boring.

They Won’t Ever Be Satisfied

“Dozens” of Tea Party crazies “rallied” at the Tennessee State Capitol, not to protest Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid as was the stated purpose of the event, but really just to protest Obama. Because the Teanuts will never, ever be happy as long as the Kenyan Usurper Nobummer Blackety Black Man is in “their” house:

DesJarlais spoke at the rally, which was sparsely attended. And in the crowd of around 100, most of the discontent was less with expanding Medicaid, and more with President Obama. Linda Tomasik traveled from Memphis.

“The only reason I’m here is not to protest Obamacare. I’ll put it that way. It’s just because I don’t think he should be president.”

Is this not hilarious? The last gasps of the disgraced Tea Party show up to hear disgraced Rep. Scott DesJarlaid talk about being “principled” in a protest of a president who just got overwhelmingly re-elected.

DesJarlais, of course, is the pro-life serial philanderer who begged his mistress to get an abortion. Yes, do tell me about how Tennessee needs to lead the nation in being “principled.” I’m all ears.

Also: There’s nothing like a pro-life doctor protesting providing healthcare to the poor. That, my friends, is the definition of fail.

I’ve said from day one that the Tea Party stands for nothing more than an inchoate rage at their cultural irrelevance, with a dash of fear of change. Doesn’t seem like the message has “evolved” in any way.

Payback, Republican Style?

Oh my God, how did I not know that the WWE had created a villainous Tea Party wrestling character, with an evil manager sidekick? To wit:

Appearing on Monday Night Raw last week, Swagger and Colter were booed by the crowd as they overzealously talked about the Constitution, the scourge of illegal immigration, and “true patriotism.” Other promotional videos of the two show them talking about freeloading immigrants and welfare recipients in front of the Gadsden flag, which has become symbolic of the Tea Party movement.

Swagger is set to battle for the “World Heavyweight Championship” (or whatever it’s called) against Mexican wrestler Alberto Del Rio — clearly a play on the stereotypical tension between anti-immigration types and Mexicans.

Further hyping the “Tea Party” gimmick, during one match ringside commentators Michael Cole and Jerry Lawler continually referred to Colter as Swagger’s “nutjob” manager, and said that the pair had received “fan mail” from controversial conservatives like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Alex Jones.

Conservative blog Twitchy hit back at the WWE with a clever swipe at pro-”wrestling” itself: “WWE’s racist Tea Party villain as realistic as pro wrestling.”

Oooh yes, clever indeed. Nobody ever made that joke before!

Trying to think of why WWE would make fun of the Tea Party. I wonder if it has anything to do with Linda McMahon’s failed run for Connecticut Senate? McMahon, whose husband owns and operates WWE, lost handily to Democrat Chris Murphy. But I had thought McMahon was the Tea Party candidate?

Odd, but there’s no fuck you like a Republican fuck you.

Steve Gill: Don’t Let The Door Hitya Where The Lord Splitya

Nashville-based syndicated conservative talk radio host/Tea Party hero Steve Gill is quitting his radio show. All together now: Awwwwwww. You’ll love the reason why:

He said the growing corporate influence on radio also has made it more difficult for small broadcasters to thrive.

“When we started 15 years ago, radio was a different animal,” Gill said. “The way corporations work, it’s difficult to have a grassroots, listener-focused show right now.”

Wow. The guy who never met a tax or regulation he couldn’t slam, who devoted his career to selling free market snake oil, who promoted the Tea Party every chance he got? That guy? He appears completely oblivious to the fact that the very policies he promotes has created an environment of corporate consolidation, which actually suppresses free markets and free speech.

Facepalm.

But sure, Steve. Remind me how the Muslim Brotherhood is behind the Murfreesboro Islamic Center, how we need to kill Julian Assange, or how Obama’s nomination of Hillary Clinton to be Secretary of State violates the Constitution. Or how high gas prices are Democrats’ fault. Dude, you were always focused on the wrong things. The foamy-mouthed, hate-spewing, fearmongering, bash-the-left stuff. Can’t believe WKRN hired him has a “political analyst.”

I mean, I could spend all day dredging up more of Steve Gill’s greatest hits, but I think you get the point. Gill is the worst sort of political hack who never missed a chance to twist a fact or gin up an outrage if it slammed liberals, President Obama, or any politician with a “D” after their name. Amazingly, people seem to be tired of that shit! Hoocouldanode?

The free market has spoken.

I’m not crying for Gill, he’ll no doubt benefit from Wingnut Welfare. But at least he won’t be spreading his crackpot ideas on the public airwaves anymore.

By the way, I dredged up this excellent 2009 piece from the memory hole. Mary Mancini saw it all coming. She predicted not just the decline of conservative hate ratio, but the destruction of the GOP brand overall.

The Great Tea Party Con

UN-believable. Anyone who gave so much as $1 to the Tea Party got fleeced in a well-orchestrated conservative con job:

“The arrangement was simply FreedomWorks paid Glenn Beck money and Glenn Beck said nice things about FreedomWorks on the air,” Armey, the former House majority leader, told Media Matters Friday. “I saw that a million dollars went to Beck this past year, that was the annual expenditure.”

Armey, who left the organization this past fall after a dispute over its internal operations, said a similar arrangement was also in place with Rush Limbaugh, but did not know the exact financial details.

Wow. So the Tea Party was basically a massive shake-down by the conservative media. Beck and Limbaugh get all the white folks in a lather about some invented Obama conspiracy they cooked up, then they tell everyone to donate to FreedomWorks to fight said manufactured horrible thing, and all the money goes straight back to Beck and Limabugh.

You know what gets me? That Dick Armey had nooo problem with this little scam as long as he was in charge of FreedomWorks. But he obviously knew the whole set-up was a grift, because he wouldn’t be spilling the beans about it now.

These people have no shame. Every damn one of them should be thrown in jail for fraud. The syndicators and networks who aired their programming were complicit in the fraud, and they need to be held accountable too. And finally, the MSM which decided the Tea Party was some shiny-sparkly political toy deserve to go out of business for their negligence.

Taunting The Tea Party

Ha ha ha:

The DCCC sent the above cards to freshman Republican House members today, as well as media releases to their districts which …

… identify each member as “the newest Tea Party House Republican who will put millionaires ahead of the middle class and dysfunction ahead of progress,” according to DCCC communications director Jesse Ferguson.

Love the expiration date! Seriously, every craptacular thing which happened in President Obama’s first term is because a bunch of fucking Democrats didn’t get off their asses and vote in 2010. Let’s not make that mistake in 2014, ‘mm’kay?

BTW, the NRCC taunted incoming Dems in a similar way today, so put away the Faux Umbrage Concern Kits, Teanuts.

Grand Old Graft

This story of Dick Armey trying to take over FreedomWorks with a gun-wielding enforcer in tow cracked me up. There’s a lot that’s outrageous here but the part that got me was the way they got rid of him: they wrote him an $8 million check. If only all of our gun-wielding nutjobs were appeased so easily.

Also: I’m pretty sure when a guy walks into an office with an armed accomplice and walks out with money the word for that is robbery. But I’m just an old-fashioned housewife from Tennessee. What do I know.

This is how your modern Republican Party works, people. It’s all about the Benjamins. It’s funny because just last night I read “Blues Cruise,” New York Magazine’s take on the NRO’s post-election Caribbean cruise, followed by Bruce Bartlett’s post-election bridge-burner, “Revenge Of The Reality-Based Community.” Both pieces present different sides of the same coin, which is the GOPs alternate reality problem. And what I realized after reading them both is that conservatism, and the Republican Party in particular, is no longer a political party or ideology. No, it has disintegrated into an elegant, elaborate money-making scheme. What Dick Armey did with his gun-toting friend is the apotheosis of modern, institutionalized conservatism. It’s simply perfect. Hollywood couldn’t write a better epilogue for the GOP’s election loss.

Here’s the thing: A lot of us have looked with great puzzlement at the Republican Party’s strict allegiance to an alternate conservative reality, their disinterest in facts, and their willful denialism (or, to use the wonky term, “epistemic closure”). It makes no sense to anyone looking at the GOP as a political operation. This self-sequestration into a conservative bubble is completely at odds with what a political movement should do. Don’t they want to win elections? Don’t they want broad appeal? Isn’t the point to put your policy stamp on the governing mechanism? Isn’t that what it’s supposed to be about?

But no, we’ve had it all wrong. They don’t want to govern. That’s the last thing they want. They want money. End, full stop. They want to keep the national amygdala tweaked, keep telling the rich precisely what they want to hear, and keep the donations flooding in. Spend that money on renting your own mailing list to ask for more donations. Or another con, it doesn’t matter. As long as the money keeps coming. It’s really that simple. It’s all a huge grift.

This isn’t a new revelation by any means — Rick Perlstein pretty much laid it out in The Long Con: Mail Order Conservatism — but I always assumed the con referred to a few leeches sucking off the system. There will always be some Glenn Beck types playing the rubes in Missouri and Tennessee, selling their snake oil and taking advantage of the gullible in flyover states. But I didn’t realize the whole fruit was rotten. I didn’t realize, until now, that the con is the point of the Republican Party. The Republican Party and all of its ancillary operations are simply mechanisms for making money. Again: end, full stop.

This explains so much. It explains all of the petty graft at the heart of the GOP. It explains why we have dysfunction in Washington. One party doesn’t want to win the policy debate, they don’t really care about their legislation, they just want a talking point for the next fundraising letter.

And it explains the incredible infrastructure they’ve built up — the think tanks, the polling firms, the media outlets, and on and on. It’s all carefully (and expensively) crafted to reinforce a conservative alternate reality, firmly planted sometime in 1988 when Reagan was still president, whites were still a majority, the Soviets were our clear-cut enemy, and conservative ideas still had some credibility.

That reality is 25 years in the past but shh… don’t tell conservatives that. They might stop the money flow.

Grifters Gotta Grift

This whole FreedomWorks/Tea Party scam reeks worse than a 40,000-pound whale carcas rotting on a Malibu beach. How long before a little forensic accounting lands some FreedomWorks mucky muck in jail? And will one of his cellmates be from Tennessee?

A lawyer in Tennessee who is mysteriously linked to millions of dollars in campaign contributions steered to congressional candidates doubled his investments in the weeks before Election Day and quietly funneled $6.8 million more to a prominent Tea Party group, according to new financial statements filed with the government.

William Rose of Knoxville previously said his business was a “family secret” and he was not obligated to disclose the origin of what now amounts to more than $12 million that he routed through two companies he recently created. Rose did not immediately return phone calls from the Associated Press on Friday.

The money went to the Tea Party’s most prominent Super PAC, FreedomWorks for America, which spent it on high-profile congressional races. The $12 million accounted for most of the $20 million the group raised this year.

You have got to be fucking kidding me. The all-powerful Tea Party group FreedomWorks got most of their money from one secretive East Tennessee guy this year? And do we think he raised that money by selling brownies and magazine subscriptions door to door? Hell, no. This is a handful of bazillionaire corporate hedge fund and banking guys calling their Tennessee lawyer buddy up to create some shell corporations so they can launder the funds through a now legal entity and buy a house or senate seat or two (or three, or four…). Wake up and smell the plutocracy, people.

Of course, there is no indication that anything illegal happened (yet). But take it from me, when you’re dealing with sums of money this large, and it’s the balance of power in Washington at stake, and you’ve got a man who says “his family business is a secret,” and then the FreedomWorks chairman abruptly resigns while accusing the group’s president Matt Kibbe of “misappropriating FreedomWorks resources for his own personal benefit” … well, all I can say is, grab the popcorn. Something sure is rotten somewhere in this mess. It might take an army of pointy-headed pencil pushers to find it but it defies belief that there isn’t a scam under this manure pile.

You know what the funniest part about all of this is? That money was wasted. It went toward defeating House candidates like Tammy Duckworth and Senate candidates like Joe Donnelly. And it was all for nought. Well, except for Dick Armey, who leaves FreedomWorks with an $8 million golden parachute.

I’m trying to think of any aspect of the Tea Party that hasn’t been sullied with the whiff of grift. Did you hear about the Dick Morris-Newsmax grift? That’s hilarious. And then there was the Tea Party TV Network grift, and let’s not forget the Sarah Palin Summer Holiday Bus Tour de Grift.

But the FreedomWorks grift is a whole ‘nother kettle of fish. Because this wasn’t fleecing the gullible rubes over at WingNut Daily. This was fleecing Daddy Warbucks, stealing from the people who have been in charge. These are not people who spend $12 million and have nothing to show for it on the other end but prying phone calls from Associated Press reporters. And you just knew that was gonna happen, didn’t you?

Things at the country club are going to be mighty awkward. I wonder who the first plutocrat to get thrown under the bus will be?

As I said, grab the popcorn and take your seats. This show is just getting started.

I Thought They Hated The Feds?

The above photo is from a Tea Party rally going on right now at Tennessee’s Legislative Plaza. It was posted to Twitter by Tennessean state house reporter Chas Sisk. (Yeah it’s a crappy photo but it’s all we’ve got, folks.)

Tennessee is one of the few states which still has not made a decision about setting up a state health insurance exchange as part of Obamacare. The Tea Party is rallying against the state exchange, of course.

Which begs the question: they do know that if the state doesn’t set up its own exchange, the Feds will do it for them, right? Right?!? Aren’t these the “states rights” people? They really want the Feds to do this instead of letting Tennessee do it? Are they serious?

Not the first time the Tea Party hasn’t made a lick of sense.

Oh, and also from Chas Sisk’s reporting on the rally comes this gem:

Steve Gill is our local conservative radio blowhard. Hilarious. Apparently Republican votes count twice as much as Democratic ones! Must have something to do with that “real America” stuff I mentioned in my last post.

Creepy Scott DesJarlais Even Creepier Than We Thought

Damn:

But the new transcript and other revelations from court documents paint a more damning picture of a man who was a serial philanderer willing to push one of his lovers — whom he met as a patient with a foot problem — to terminate a pregnancy, even when he suspected he was the father.

“You told me you’d have an abortion, and now we’re getting too far along without one,” DesJarlais tells the woman at one point in the call while negotiating with her over whether he’ll reveal her identity to his wife. They then discuss whether he will accompany her to a procedure to end the sort of life the congressman now describes as “sacred.”

“You told me you would have time to go with me and everything,” the woman complains.

“I said, if I could, I would, didn’t I? And I will try,” DesJarlais says. “If I can [find] time, you’re saying you still will?”

“Yeah,” the woman answers.

The two bicker over when they can meet to hash out a solution, and they make clear the nature of their relationship when DesJarlais says delaying a resolution isn’t fair to his wife.

“This is not fair to me. I don’t want you in my life,” the woman says.

“Well, I didn’t want to be in your life either, but you lied to me about something that caused us to be in this situation, and that’s not my fault, that’s yours,” the doctor responds.

“Well, it’s [your] fault for sleeping with your patient,” the woman fires back.

Jesus effin’ whatever. I thought it was weird enough that he spent three hours with a gun in his mouth when he split from his first wife. Now DesJarlais just looks like a freaking monster.

Just your modern pro-life Republican, Tennessee Tea Party style. How the hell did Lincoln Davis lose to this sleazebag?

Also, the best part of all this? He apparently made the tape recording himself. To prove to his wife that the affair was over.

Can you imagine? Not just a sleazebag but a stupid one.