Slate Articles

How Lazy Reporting Made Rand Paul Look Like a Conspiracy Theorist

David Weigel — Mon, 20 May 2013 14:25:00 GMT

Sen. Rand Paul appeared on CNN's State of the Union yesterday, and the way the network's spun that interview, you'd think he said something crazy. Here's the end of the segment, with relevant sections in bold, as Candy Crowley asked Paul whether the IRS had political motivations behind its grilling of Tea Party groups.

CROWLEY: Well, they say it's a mistake. The question is whether it's political.

PAUL: Well, I think we're going to have to see the memorandum. Apparently, there is a policy, and I think we're going to find that there's a written policy that says that we were targeting people who were opposed to the president. And when that comes forward, we need to know who wrote the policy and who approved the policy. I can't believe that one agent sort of started this, one rogue agent started this, because it seems to be too widespread. And, we do need to get to the bottom of this, but I think what the American people want is just like on Benghazi.

Why does Benghazi go on? No one was ever fired? So, people made tragic errors. No one's accepting responsibility and no one was fired. Same with the IRS, they're having some commissioners resign who were going to resign already, and people still saying what was their policy? Who wrote the policy, and now, there's rumors that who wrote the policy is the person running Obamacare, which doesn't give us a lot of confidence about Obamacare?

CROWLEY: Senator, I have to run. I'm way over on this, but I have to just go back to something you said. Are you telling me you think there's a memo somewhere in which someone said in the memo we're targeting people who are going after the president? Is that what I heard you say?

PAUL: Well, we keep hearing the reports and we have several specifically worded items saying who was being targeted. In fact, one of the bullet points says those who are critical of the president. So, I don't know if that comes from a policy, but that's what's being reported in the press.

CROWLEY: OK.

PAUL: And reported orally. I haven't seen a policy statement, but I think we need to see that.

CNN's online wrap of the interview makes it sound like Paul had journeyed to Cloudcookooland. "Pressed for more precise details about the memo he was referring to," writes Ashley Killough, "Paul said he hasn't seen such a policy statement but has heard about it."

You know who else has "heard about" this statement? Anyone who actually read the IG report. On Page 6, investigators re-create the events of May 2010, when the Determinations Unit for the tax-exempt office "began developing a spreadsheet that would become known as the 'Be On the Look Out' listing." The report didn't supply the memo itself, but it included this cheat sheet.

In his CNN interview, Paul deviates only a little bit from the IG report; the groups that "criticize how the country is being run" become "groups who are critical of the president." But that's a pretty minor detail, and the people suggesting that Paul spun some wild conspiracy theory need to check themselves.

(Side note: Paul goes too far when he says "there's rumors that who wrote the policy is the person running Obamacare." The IG report credits BOLO to the Determinations Unit, not to the tax-exempt organizations commissioner at the time, Sarah Hall Ingram. In 2012 Ingram was moved over to run the burgeoning Affordable Care Act program. But nobody, up to now, has suggested that she wrote the key memo.)

... And When Did He Know It?

David Weigel — Mon, 20 May 2013 13:56:00 GMT

At the lower, grittier levels of politics, it's an established fact: Barack Obama is responsible for the IRS hassling Tea Party groups. Republican campaign organizations have drawn a straight line from Obama's complaints about giant 501(c)(4)s and (c)(3)s to the IRS' follow-up questions to tiny applicants. At this weekend's Virginia GOP convention, the party's nominee for attorney general accused the president of masterminding the whole shebang. "Mr. President," said state Sen. Mark Obenshain, "the next time you have the IRS target the Virginia Tea Party, you're gonna have to deal with me."

But when you get away from the news cycle and the Narrative Factory, it's harder to find ties between Obama and the IRS. Score one for Republicans: The White House's insistence that Obama learned of every scandal "by reading the news" has become a punchline. But, frustratingly, they haven't proved the smug guys wrong. There are, basically, two potential scandals about when the White House should have known about "Tea Party targeting."

They knew before the election! That's the most damaging possible scandal—the White House knew about the IRS' slow-walking of Tea Party applications and failed to act out before the election. If the administration knew, maybe it covered up the story! But the sad, stupid truth is that the targeting was being reported on as long as 15 months ago, when Roll Call's Janie Lorber picked up the story. Republicans discussed it from time to time. "I’ve been talking about this since June of 2012," said Mitch McConnell last week in an interview with Hugh Hewitt. "There were Tea Party groups in my state complaining about this back then."

Why didn't anything come from this? Reporters (myself included) didn't follow up. Republicans didn't make a great fuss about it—and one of the frequent failures of the political press is that it doesn't see the heat on a story until one party complains.

They knew before last week! That's the scandal birthed by this story by Peter Nicholas, who reports that the White House counsel was informed of the basics of the IRS investigation on April 22. Nailing a White House on when it learned of a scandal is a time-tested tradition. In May 2011, Eric Holder said he'd "probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks." He'd gotten memos about the scandal for months.

The White House has adapted and learned. Here's how Jay Carney handled a "timing" question last week.

Q: I want to follow up on the IRS. I still don't quite understand the timeline. We had members of Congress complaining about this for two years. Did it just never reach you guys here at the White House that there was these complaints that conservative groups felt that they were being singled out and targeted at any point in time?

MR. CARNEY: I'm not sure that people -- I'm sure people were aware of and knew some of the stories that had been reported about the complaints, but we were not aware of any activity or of any review conducted by the Inspector General until several weeks ago.

Several weeks? April 22? Close enough, probably. That leaves us with the theoretical scandal—maybe Obama's rhetoric convinced the IRS to go buck wild on the Tea Party!—as the best kindling for Republican activists.

Opening Act: A Day in the Life of a Troll

David Weigel — Mon, 20 May 2013 12:43:00 GMT

Ann Marimow tells the disturbing tale of how the DOJ tracked James Rosen's reporting.

They used security badge access records to track the reporter’s comings and goings from the State Department, according to a newly obtained court affidavit. They traced the timing of his calls with a State Department security adviser suspected of sharing the classified report. They obtained a search warrant for the reporter’s personal e-mails.

A New York Times reporting team dives into the recent secret history of the Cincinnati IRS office.

The Exempt Organizations Division — concentrated in Cincinnati with fewer than 200 workers, according to I.R.S. officials — is staffed mostly with accountants, clerks and civil servants. Working for one of only three I.R.S. divisions not charged with collecting tax revenue, specialists in the Determinations Unit in Cincinnati primarily review and process roughly 70,000 applications for exemptions each year, relatively few from groups engaged in election activity.

Inside the agency, the unit was considered particularly unglamorous. “Nobody wants to be a determination agent,” said Jack Reilly, a former lawyer in the Washington office that oversaw exempt organizations. “It’s a job that just about everybody would be anxious to get out of it.”

Paul Waldman plays out the Obamascandals and assumes that the administration will repeat the Clinton lessons and victories.

There will be more hearings, each one hyped by Republicans as the one that will "blow the lid off" this whole thing. They will fail to deliver much that's actually revelatory. Nevertheless, the volume of discussion and speculation will rise inexorably. Republicans will begin calling for President Obama's impeachment; first it'll be a few nutbar Tea Partiers, then it will spread to some of the seemingly more sane ones, and finally the desire for impeachment will be nearly universal on the right. John Boehner will know in his heart that it's a terrible idea, but he may be confronted with a rebellion: schedule an impeachment vote, or face a leadership vote. Boehner's choice could be between impeachment and seeing Eric Cantor take his job (whereupon there'd be an impeachment vote anyway).

Ana Marie Cox sees the same future: Republicans getting all excited by the modest hand they've been dealt, and blowing it.

Ken Cuccinelli has found an out from the the state's public records law.

And Mother Jones gets to know one of its most diligent Internet trolls, who turns out to be a mild-mannered prostate cancer survivor.

Today's Doonesbury

Garry Trudeau — Mon, 20 May 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Wine Drinkers of the World, Unite

Christopher Hitchens — Sat, 18 May 2013 09:30:00 GMT

The other night, I was having dinner with some friends in a fairly decent restaurant and was at the very peak of my form as a wit and raconteur. But just as, with infinite and exquisite tantalizations, I was approaching my punch line, the most incredible thing happened. A waiter appeared from nowhere, leaned right over my shoulder and into the middle of the conversation, seized my knife and fork, and started to cut up my food for me. Not content with this bizarre behavior, and without so much as a by-your-leave, he proceeded to distribute pieces of my entree onto the plates of the other diners.

No, he didn't, actually. What he did instead was to interrupt the feast of reason and flow of soul that was our chat, lean across me, pick up the bottle of wine that was in the middle of the table, and pour it into everyone's glass. And what I want to know is this: How did such a barbaric custom get itself established, and why on earth do we put up with it?

There are two main ways in which a restaurant can inflict bad service on a customer. The first is to keep you hanging about and make it hard to catch the eye of the staff. ("Why are they called waiters?" inquired my son when he was about 5. "It's we who are doing all the waiting.") The second way is to be too intrusive, with overlong recitations of the "specials" and too many oversolicitous inquiries. A cartoon in The New Yorker once showed a couple getting ready for bed, with the husband taking a call and keeping his hand over the receiver. "It's the maitre d' from the place we had dinner. He wants to know if everything is still all right."

The vile practice of butting in and pouring wine without being asked is the very height of the second kind of bad manners. Not only is it a breathtaking act of rudeness in itself, but it conveys a none-too-subtle and mercenary message: Hurry up and order another bottle. Indeed, so dulled have we become to the shame and disgrace of all this that I have actually seen waiters, having broken into the private conversation and emptied the flagon, ask insolently whether they should now bring another one. Again, imagine this same tactic being applied to the food.

Not everybody likes wine as much as I do. Many females, for example, confine themselves to one glass per meal or even half a glass. It pains me to see good wine being sloshed into the glasses of those who have not asked for it and may not want it and then be left standing there barely tasted when the dinner is over. Mr. Coleman, it was said, made his fortune not from the mustard that was consumed but from the mustard that was left on the plate. Restaurants ought not to inflict waste and extravagance on their patrons for the sake of padding out the bill. This, too, is a very extreme form of rudeness.

The expense of the thing, in other words, is only an aspect of the presumption of it. It completely usurps my prerogative if I am a host. ("Can I refill your glass? Try this wine—I think you may care for it.") It also tends to undermine me as a guest, since at any moment when I try to sing for my supper, I may find an unwanted person lunging carelessly into the middle of my sentence. If this person fills glasses unasked, he is a boor as described above. If he asks permission of each guest in turn—as he really ought to do, when you think about it—then he might as well pull up a chair and join the party. The nerve of it!

To return to the question of why we endure this: I think it must have something to do with the snobbery and insecurity that frequently accompany the wine business. A wine waiter is or can be a bit of a grandee, putting on considerable airs that may intimidate those who know little of the subject. If you go into a liquor store in a poor part of town, you will quite often notice that the wine is surprisingly expensive, because it is vaguely assumed that somehow it ought to cost more. And then there is simple force of custom and habit—people somehow grant restaurants the right to push their customers around in this outrageous way.

Well, all it takes is a bit of resistance. Until relatively recently in Washington, it was the custom at diplomatic and Georgetown dinners for the hostess to invite the ladies to withdraw, leaving the men to port and cigars and high matters of state. And then one evening in the 1970s, at the British Embassy, the late Katharine Graham refused to get up and go. There was nobody who felt like making her, and within a day, the news was all over town. Within a very short time, everybody had abandoned the silly practice. I am perfectly well aware that there are many graver problems facing civilization, and many grosser violations of human rights being perpetrated as we speak. But this is something that we can all change at a stroke. Next time anyone offers to interrupt your conversation and assist in the digestion of your meal and the inflation of your check, be very polite but very firm and say that you would really rather not.

A Den of Liberals

David Weigel — Fri, 17 May 2013 22:29:46 GMT

Maybe it wasn’t the best idea for acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller to resign before talking to Congress. He appeared before the House Ways and Means Committee on Friday as a sort of human sacrifice; the first bureaucrat to resign in the scandal, and not even the one Republicans or Tea Partiers wanted. Miller had been a deputy commissioner during the years of scandal, and the IRS inspector general’s report didn’t tie him to any bias or malfeasance.

“I resigned,” he shrugged, “because as the acting commissioner, what happens in the IRS, whether I was personally involved or not, stopped at my desk.”

He wasn’t fighting for his job, which freed him up to be the most unsympathetic public servant not currently employed by a North Korean prison. Republicans insisted that the IRS had “targeted” Tea Party groups when they applied for tax exemption, because the Inspector General (sitting right there in the room) had said so. Miller kept quibbling with the word “targeted.” Republicans asked if the 501(c)(4) follow-up questions were criminal; Miller called them “bad customer service.” Miller confirmed that the Treasury Department was made aware of the letters during the 2012 campaign, without quite appreciating why this made Republicans turn such a vibrant shade of red.

“Nothing bad is going to happen to you,” said Rep. Tom Reed, a ruddy, low-profile former mayor from western New York.

Miller, for some reason, saw an opening for some snark.

“Nothing bad is happening to me, congressman?”

Reed snapped right back at him. “You're getting paid for being here today, right?” he asked.

“Right,” said Miller, thoroughly defeated.

It was an ironic little exchange. For the moment, both of these men still work for the government. (Miller won’t actually leave his post until June.) One of them keeps his job by convincing conservative-minded voters in Corning, Orlean, and Pittsford, N.Y. to send him back to Washington. One of them was a civil servant. Nobody in politics appointed him to the job he’s leaving. The president can hire and fire IRS commissioners, but the people below him—the people fingered in the IG report, from D.C. to the fabled Cincinnati office—work their way up the ladder regardless of who the president is.

In theory, the civil-servant structure should make an organization less prone to an eruption of bias or of hive-mind behavior. But that’s not how it works. Liberals are more likely to enter the civil service, and to stick to it, than conservatives are. And why not? Conservatives want to shrink the size of government; Republicans have negotiated deals federally, and in the states, that slashed or froze the size of the bureaucracies. Ron Swanson aside, the public sector is no place for a libertarian.

Every single number proves this. Tim Carney has collected the campaign finance figures for IRS employees nationally and in the Cincinnati office. In the past three election cycles, IRS workers donated $247,000 to Democrats and $145,000 to Republicans. In Ohio, the number was skewed even further—75 percent to Democrats. According to a 2011 Gallup poll, around 40 percent of unionized federal employees identified as Democrats; only 27 percent identified as Republicans. State and local government employees are far more likely to be Democrats than Republicans.

If you check the timing of that poll, you realize something about how obvious this all is. Gallup went into the field to quiz bureaucrats because Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was rolling back collective bargaining rights for state employees. Doing so, as Republicans knew, would weaken a constituency that was inclined to vote for Democrats after filling their campaign accounts.

Now, does that excuse the IRS’s behavior in what Tom Reed called “Tea Party-targeting-gate?” No. It explains the behavior. In the IG report, you encounter bureaucrats presented with a challenge—“some organizations were classified as 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations but operated like political organizations”—and responded by drafting a “Be on the Look-Out” (or BOLO) memo with some anthropological advice about conservatives. Any application with “Tea Party,” “Patriots,” or “9/12 Project” in the name was flagged, as was referring to “government spending, government debt or taxes.” And this, as Doug Donovan reported, was before the surge in 501 applications really got going.

Based on what we know about the sort of people who aspire to become IRS commissioners, how much direct knowledge did they probably have about the conservative movement? How much did they fear it? So far in this story, Republicans have raced to find answers tying low-level IRS behavior to directives from the Obama administration, or table-pounding from Democrats who were worried about 501s like American Crossroads or Americans for Prosperity. But you don’t need to make that leap to explain why civil servants working for a tax-collection agency—the very heart of the Leviathan—might have been extra-skeptical of conservative groups.

Republicans have been clever in their response to all that. Led by Rep. Tom Price in the House and Sen. Dean Heller in the Senate, they’ve called for the IRS to be stopped from enforcing “Obamacare” regulations. They received a remarkable gift horse on Thursday, when—after six days!—ABC News noticed that the former director of the IRS’s tax exempt division, Sarah Hall Ingram, was the current director of Affordable Care Act enforcement. By Friday morning, conservatives were asking Hall Ingram to be fired. Let’s say that her superior did let her go. Her likely replacement, the sort of person who’d spent enough time in the bureaucracy to be qualified, would be someone committed to the health of the state. What Republicans need, in the long run, is either a much-reduced government or a surge of civil-servant Ron Swansons.

The IRS Asked a Pro-Life Group to Explain its Prayers Outside Planned Parenthood, Which Is Now a Scandal

David Weigel — Fri, 17 May 2013 22:09:00 GMT

Chris Moody followed up on one of the next-wave conservative outrages over the IRS in the Obama years. It sounds incredible: In 2009, when the Coalition for Life of Iowa asked for tax exemption, the IRS' follow-up letter asked it about members' prayers.

Please explain how all of your activities, including the prayer meetings held outside of Planned Parenthood, are considered educational as defined under 501(c)(3). Organizations exempt under 501(c)(3) may present opinions with scientific or medical facts. Please explain in detail the activities at these prayer meetings. Also, please provide the percentage of time your organizations spends on prayer groups as compared with the other activities of the organization.

Like I said, incredible—which, when you think about it, tells you how quickly the Overton window has shifted. If you read the document trove, CFLI ended up handing the feds documentation on stem cells, on the viability of life in the womb, etc. The IRS accepted this; the group got tax-exempt status. The scandal, obviously, is that there's something inherently evil about inquiring into the "content of prayers." But the agency was easily satisfied. The point of the story isn't that Christianity is being oppressed in America. The point is similar to that of "Pulpit Freedom Day," an annual nationwide campaign to get churches to allow political sermons, and publicize them, and dare the IRS to step in and experience blowback.

The blowback is here. We will hear more stories like this, as long as people are primed for outrage.

Begun, These Gasland Wars Have

David Weigel — Fri, 17 May 2013 19:52:00 GMT

When we left Phelim McAleer, the pro-fracking filmmaker who keeps critiquing Josh Fox's Gasland and winning conservative fans, he was promoting his own film and earning an exasperated diss. "They're the birthers of fracking," Fox told me. Since then, McAleer filmed as a few fracking supporters tried, and failed, to gain (ticketed!) entry into a Gasland 2 screening.

McAleer had long wondered whether Gasland 2 would ever be released, speculating that HBO had cooled on it. But no: HBO will run Fox's sequel on July 8. In response, Mark Cuban's AXS has scheduled a July 9 showing of McAleer's FrackNation, in the hops of setting up a media battle about the Fracking Truth. (I think I'm engaging or enabling in the battle by pointing this out.) The natural gas industry was spooked and surprised by Gasland, which defined public opinion of fracking before they'd figured out a way to popularize it. This time, they want to updgrade from PR disaster to debate about the real facts, with both sides represented on panels.

Watch Rep. Mike Kelly, the Republican Hero of the IRS Hearing

David Weigel — Fri, 17 May 2013 18:48:00 GMT

By general acclamation, the greatest Moment from today's battering of the IRS (with an assist from the bored, doomed outgoing acting commissioner) came when Pennsylvania Rep. Mike Kelly went buck wild. After pressuring the witness a few times and getting non-answers, Kelly finally just went on a tirade about the IRS, the "monster under the bed," the force that terrifies hard-working Americans. When he finished, Kelly earned spontaneous applause from the public seats. (Some Tea Party activists had lined up to get those seats.)

Kelly was an emblematic member of the 2010 Tea Party freshman class. Aged 62 when he won—the oldest of the freshmen—Kelly ran because he ran a Chevy dealership and got intimate with the hand of government. In a fine 2010 profile, Phil Rucker tailed Kelly around D.C. and around his district, and asked him who in the Capitol impressed him. His answer was "nobody."

I hope I don't sound arrogant about this, but at 62 years old, I've pretty much seen what I need to see. There've been times when I didn't even take a paycheck out of here for six months. There've been times I cashed in my pension to put money back in the shop. There've been times I mortgaged my home to keep this business alive. I've been to the edge of the abyss and looked in and there's nobody there to help you - nobody there.

Once in Congress, Kelly became a pretty reliable team player. In one of the dark stretches of the 2011 debt limit fight, it was Kelly who brought Notre Dame slogans to a House Republican meeting and urged colleagues to vote for the leadership's preferred compromise—to, in his words, "knock the shit out of 'em."

He may play that role again during the next tussle over whether to hold fast on spending or pass a compromise. For now, his extremely telegenic outrage demonstrates how Republicans have been brought together by this scandal.

Who Said It: Toronto Mayor Rob Ford or Simpsons Mayor Diamond Joe Quimby?

Justin Peters — Fri, 17 May 2013 17:59:50 GMT

Crime is Slate’s crime blog. Like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter @slatecrime.

On Thursday, Gawker’s John Cook reported the existence of a video that allegedly shows Toronto Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack cocaine. Since entering public service as a city councilor in 2000, Ford has been known for his odd and improper public behavior and comments, a habit that only got worse after he was elected mayor in 2010. Whether he’s accosting out-of-towners at a hockey game, offering to help procure OxyContin for a constituent, or railing against streetcars and anti-poverty activists, Ford has consistently tested the limits of “mayoral behavior.”

In fact, the public servant Ford most closely resembles is the fictional mayor from The Simpsons, Diamond Joe Quimby. Both men are heavyset. Both are often at odds with constituents, colleagues, and the press. And both are prone to saying outrageous things in public.

I’ve prepared a 20-question quiz of quotes from Ford and Quimby. Which mayor said which wildly inappropriate thing? Answers are at the bottom.

1. “Are these morons getting dumber or just louder?”

2. “It’s hard to hide 300 pounds of fun.”

3. “People don't want to see their mayor stuck in an office all the time, they want to see him right at their door.”

4. “We'll blow up our dams, destroy forests, anything! If there's a species of animal causing problems, nosing around your camera, we'll have it wiped out.”

5. “Demand? Who are you to demand anything? I run this town. You’re just a bunch of low-income nobodies.”

6. “Let’s call a spade a spade. The left would have taken it and just wanted to spend it on crazy, stupid things like more social programs ...”

7. “Oh my god, I never want to hurt a bike. That’s the last thing I want to do, precious little bikes.”

8. “I ordered the re-opening of this prison to send a message to the criminals of [name of city]. If you commit a violent crime in my town, you are going to end up here. To demonstrate what you're in for, I will now strap myself into this electric chair, which was deactivated over 30 years ago, and, I can only assume, still is.”

9. “Water is the healthiest form of liquid.”

10. “By the way, this woman is not my wife, but I am sleeping with her. I'm telling you this because I'm comfortable with my womanizing."

11. “I'm sick of you people, you’re nothing but a pack of fickle mush heads.”

12. “Tuesday, Nov. 27, I’m going to be playing hooky from City Hall.”

13. “Those Oriental people work like dogs. … They're slowly taking over.”

14. “Now on to the next item, the proposal for putting term limits on public office. All those in favor say, ‘I have sex with animals.’ ”

15. “I’d love to see us sell the zoo and make money on it if we can. ... Keep the elephants here and take it from there.”

16. “You don't scare me, that could be anyone's ass. Now beat it! I'm calling the shots.”

17. “I will retract the word ‘ass.’ ”

18. “Very well, if that is the way the winds are blowing, let no one say I don't also blow.”

19. “You are tampering with forces you can't understand, we have major corporations sponsoring this event.”

20. “I’m as clean as the days are long.”

ANSWERS:

Ford: 2, 3, 6, 7, 9, 12, 13, 15, 17, 20

Quimby: 1, 4, 5, 8, 10, 11, 14, 16, 18, 19