Obsidian Wings

The IRS Scandal Continued

by Ugh

As I noted in a comment, another post on the IRS exempt organizations scandal.  As usual, all the links to everything you would ever want to know about it are available at the taxprof blog, who for some reason is determined to number the days (as if there is going to be some definitive endpoint).

Since my last post, we've had three congressional hearings, a newly appointed Acting Commissioner of Internal Revenue (that no one had ever heard of), and a relatively high-level IRS employee invoke her 5th Amendment right not to incriminate herself (and perhaps improperly at that).  We've learned that, perhaps, this was not the sole idea of the IRS office in Cincinnati, or that maybe people in Washington had some involvement somehow.  We've also learned that high level officials at the IRS should have probably volunteered the information that, yes, "Tea Party" groups (and the like) were singled out for extra scrutiny, even if it was not a partisan effort (as the TIGTA report confirms).  

I noted in my last post that I haven't had any interaction with the IRS's exempt organization division and still haven't.  However, I have been in meetings with former Commissioner Douglas Shulman and (now) former Acting Commissioner Steven Miller, as well as other high ranking IRS officials.  And I will say again, there is simply no way either of them, or the other officials I know, would have engaged in a top-down targeting of Tea Party and similar groups.  What they appear to be "guilty" of is not showing Congress where the fire is when Congress smelled smoke (once they themselves learned of the fire's location). 

A number of other things to say:

(i) The executive branch should not treat inquiries from Congress like they are interrogatories in an adversarial legal proceeding, parsing through them wondering what the meaning of "is is."  Several times Miller said that he answered Congress's questions "truthfully" in letters to them.  I believe that, but once you learned that there had been some inappropriate selection criteria, and since that was what Congress was asking about - even if un-artfully - shouldn't you have told them?

(ii) You always look better standing up and taking responsibility and offering an apology than trying to weasel around questions and state lack of knowledge.  In the hearings, Miller did the former and has gotten high marks for it (not that that's going to help him much), Shulman did the latter and has been excoriated (which I was surprised at as he's generally a pretty savvy guy).

(iii) If someone tells Congress of their intention to assert their 5th Amendment right not to testify, then Congress shouldn't call them to testify in a sort of shaming exercise.  Leave it for the court proceeding (if any).

(iv) It has become apparent, in hindsight at least, that Obama made a huge mistake in not nominating a permanent IRS Commissioner when Shulman announced his intention to leave the post several months in advance of  November 2012.  Obviously Obama was a little busy running for President last year, but there's no reason he couldn't have nominated someone in December given the advance warning.  If that person came from outside the IRS (as did Shulman), s/he would have been able to say "Sh1t, I just started here, why are you looking at me?"  Now, of course, he's going to have to appoint some member of the GOP to "end" the scandal.  Super.

Likeability and motives for reading

by Doctor Science

From Andrew Sullivan, I learn that Claire Messud, author of The Woman Upstairs, was asked by Annasue McCleave Wilson of Publisher's Weekly, about the protagonist of the book:

I wouldn't want to be friends with Nora, would you? Her outlook is almost unbearably grim.

Messud exploded:

For heaven's sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? ... If you're reading to find friends, you're in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities.

The New Yorker wrote:

This critical double standard—that tormented, foul-mouthed, or perverse male characters are celebrated, while their female counterparts are primly dismissed as unlikeable—has been pointed out many times before. But Messud's comments seemed an occasion to examine the question again.

As a reader of fanfiction, I spend a great deal of time thinking about stories, discussing stories, and comparing my reactions to a story to other readers' (or viewers') reactions. It's disconcerting to read the responses from Donald Antrim, Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Franzen, Rivka Galchen, and Tessa Hadley -- all writers of Serious Literary Fiction -- who are clearly operating in a different critical landscape with different assumptions than I'm used to. Everything seems so much more tidy and certain where they are for both writers and readers, while I keep thinking "What do you mean we, Kemo Sabe?"

Sky I (Over Fantasyland), 2011. "Silkscreen print on acid free paper, misted with the scent of enlightenment." From the exhibition Likeable at Supercollider | Contemporary Art Projects in Blackpool, UK, April-May 2012.

I AM NOT HILZOY (obviously)

by dr ngo (posted by liberal japonicus who will quickly get his grubby fingers out of dr ngo's prose as soon as we can sort out the typepad shtuff)

Let me introduce myself with some important disclaimers:

First, I am not Hilzoy. That's OK, because no one else is. On the other hand, some denizens of Obsidian Wings cling to the hope the next front-pager will be the second coming of Hilzoy.  Not me. (In both senses: I am not the second coming, and I've given up hoping.)

Second, I am not Gary Farber, or Doctor Science, or Slacktivist http://http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/

Each of them does an admirable job of following current events and providing many useful links to, as well as engaging commentary upon, these events.  Not me. Such writing would imply a level of commitment to – and awareness of – What's Happening in the World that I couldn't muster even when I was younger. I became a historian to escape the present, not to explain it.

So if you want the qualities represented by either of these alternatives, don't bother to read my contributions.  Or if you do read them, and I persist in being neither Hilzoy nor timely and link-friendly, don't complain.  You have been warned.

Who I am is “dr ngo” - lurker and occasional commentator here for about a decade – a retired professor of Asian history, now living in a Blue Blotch on a Red State. I've never blogged before, though I've contributed a couple of guest posts here and there, but I come from a verbal, not so say verbose, family. My son (Anarch) will also be joining the front page here; my daughter (Magistra) has a blog of her own   http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/ (Where history, religion and motherhood meet and have a long intellectual conversation) as does my sister (A Musing Amma) http://www.patheos.com/blogs/amusingamma/ . They don't speak for me, and I certainly don't speak for them, but there's a lot of verbiage going around.

I expect that most of my posts will be drawn from my life and readings, and will probably feature two aspects of my life: age and Asia. I am now in my 70^th year, which places me well above the ObWi average, I believe, and that fact has become central to much of my consciousness. A lot of this has to do with health – the betrayal of the body – but I will try to spare you the details, because no one really wants to know. (Even I don't want to know, but I can't avoid it.) There are other aspects of aging, however, that may prove fruitful to discuss.  And you're all going to get old, eventually – consider the alternative.

I have studied Asia for more than fifty years, written and published about it for more than forty, taught about it for more than thirty, and lived there for more than twenty years, so it's a big part of who I am and what I know. It's also REALLY big – more people there than in all the rest of the world put together – so I don't kid myself that I know more than a small fraction of what there is to know, but even that small fraction puts me well ahead of most non-Asians. As noted above, I don't try to keep up on current events much, so I won't be trying to tell you what the Asian Century looks like this week, but I may be able to provide some longer term perspective.

Beyond that, who knows? I'm interested in music (especially vocal: choral and opera), theatre, travel (now in the past: Don't Get Around Much Any More), and spectator sports. With regard to the last of these, I once said that if it moved and they kept score, I'd watch it. I've been to a Rose Bowl game, seen Major League Baseball in BOTH Wrigley Fields (bonus points for anyone who can identify the non-Chicago one), watched Gary Sobers hit a century at Lords and Greg Chappell hit one at the Sydney Cricket Ground, saw the first (legal) seven-foot high jump and what is now the oldest (juiced) track record still extant, and enjoyed many Duke basketball games – women's, and some men's – at historic Cameron Indoor Stadium, but I'm not sure any of this qualifies me to say anything significant or new about sports. On the other hand, this is the Internet, so what difference does it make?

Let the revels commence.

Star Trek could use a Hard Reboot

by Doctor Science

I was not looking forward to Star Trek: Into Darkness, though I am a ST: The Original Series fan.

By which I mean, because I am a ST:TOS fan.

[the following post is *spoiler-free* with regard to ST:ID -- I started working on it weeks before the movie came out. I'll put up a spoilery post at some other time.]

The thing about ST:TOS that you whippersnappers may not realize is that it was both radical and transformative. I can talk for hours about Gene Roddenberry's many faults, but he actually had a political vision with Star Trek. He wanted to show a universe -- a future -- in which peace, diversity, and rationality are not only desirable, they are *possible*, we *can* get there from here.

And it started with the casting.

Your cockroaches are going to win Friday open thread

by liberal japonicus

The NYTimes had this cheery science tidbit.

Some populations of cockroaches evolved a simple, highly effective defense against sweet-tasting poison baits: They switched their internal chemistry around so that glucose, a form of sugar that is a sweet come-hither to countless forms of life, tastes bitter.

Your other 'we're doomed' thoughts are welcome here.

A tornado safety tip

by Doctor Science

It was a truly horrific day for tornados. Moore, OK was hit by a large, devastating tornado that followed a path very close to a very destructive tornado that hit in 1999.

Yesterday was also really bad in Oklahoma, especially Shawnee.

As Jeff Masters at Wunderground reported:

The Shawnee tornado hurled a semi-trailer off of an expressway overpass at Highway 117 and I-40 in Oklahoma, and toppled another semi. Four people who sheltered under this overpass were injured, one seriously, and taken to the hospital. Highway overpasses can act to amplify a tornado's winds, and are very dangerous places to be during a tornado. According to the NWS in Norman Oklahoma, during the tornado outbreak of May 3, 1999, tornadoes crossed three highway overpasses, and at all three locations, there was a fatality. One of the fatalities occurred from an EF-2 tornado in a rural area, which suggests that a tornado need not be a large, violent tornado with a considerable debris cloud to cause fatal injuries to people seeking shelter from storms under overpasses. In addition to the fatal injuries to three people, there were also many severe, potentially life-threatening and gruesome injuries inflicted upon people underneath the overpasses, that in some cases, has left these people with permanent disabilities. Don't take shelter under a highway overpass from a tornado!. Image credit: KFOR.com.

[emphasis added] I have, in fact, taken my car to shelter under an overpass in tornado conditions in the past, but not any more.

For the those of you who've never been near a tornado, they are *extremely* scary. This video by the late, great stormchaser Andy Gabrielson gives a particularly chilling look:

Direct YouTube link.
It's really hard to resist the feeling that a god is walking, there.

I hope the rest of the country gives to the people of Oklahoma what they need to live -- though not necessarily to rebuild in the same spot, because sometimes you've got to take a hint. Anyway, I hope we can be generous to people who need it, despite the lack of charity their elected representatives have shown us.

Failita, or, Lolita and the problem of the unreliable narrator

by Doctor Science

Brand, Gerhard. "Lolita." Magill's Survey Of American Literature, Revised Edition (2006): 1-2. Literary Reference Center. Web. 13 May 2013.

The novel works on many levels: It is a remorseless satire of middle-class, immature America and a seriocomic commentary on Continental-American cultural relations. More profoundly, it is a moving romance in the medieval tradition of courtly love, with the afflicted Humbert Humbert displaying his derangement by obsessional devotion and self-pitying masochism. He submits himself to his emotionally unattainable mistress as her slavish servant, glorying in her cruelly capricious power over him.

[emphasis mine] The medieval tradition of courtly love is calling, they want an apology. Flogging would be traditional.

From a manuscript, 1490-1500, of the Romance of the Rose.

Hoisted from the comments

hoisted by liberal japonicus

If you enjoyed The Christmas Rats story by our own 'Jill Kearney', you will want to download the rest of the book for you Kindle. The title is The Dog Thief and Other Stories. It’s available as a Kindle download. [ed. note $0.99, a steal!!] The author says: The author is listed as Jill Kearney, which is not my real name. One of the stories is about stealing a dog, so I needed to distance myself somewhat. The stories are fictional, but composed of snippets of truth, kind of like a collage made of pieces of photographs.

Check it out!

Your recycled instrument Friday open thread

by liberal japonicus

A very interesting story from Mother Jones magazine. The video is below the fold

"You asked for miracles, Theo, I give you the" I.R.S.*

by Ugh

In this post the role of Theo will be played by the GOP.

As most of you have no doubt heard, the IRS has admitted targeting right-leaning organizations applying for tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code for extra-scrutiny.  There will be an official Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report on this released this week (a portion of which was leaked by some, um, helpful congressional aide either Friday or over the weekend). 

I have no dealings with the IRS's Exempt Organizations (EO) division, and thus no inside information on what may have gone on, but based on what I can piece together what went on was that the IRS EO staff charged with approving tax-exempt applications was overwhelmed in 2010 by the number of applications, in part due to the Citizens United Supreme Court decision.  They were looking for shortcuts to determine which applications might deserve extra scrutiny to ensure the applying organizations were not going to engage in impermissible political activities, and they chose a very very poor shortcut by referencing "tea party" and the like.

This went on for about 15 months.  However, if you look at the timeline in the second link above, you'll see a reference to a meeting with the Director of the EO division in June 2011 - that is, "management" - who when she found out about this "instructed that the criteria be immediately revised."  This was done in one week, after which the guidelines for picking out applications for review no longer had any "right wing" tint to them, it seems to me, at least, although likely still problematic for other reasons.  

Josh Marshall sums up:  

There are really three things that seem worth immediately investigating. First, is it clear that the decision bubbled up from below rather than being ordered from above? Second, was the decision to target in this way just really bad judgment or was it driven by partisan decision-making on the part of these low-level employees in Cincinnati? Third, if it really was just bad judgment, is there something broader about the organizational culture that would breed that kind of misjudgment?

On one, if this were "ordered from above," I'd be utterly and completely stunned, depending on what "above" means.  For example, if this came from the White House to Commissioner Shulman who then got the EO division on board, that would mean Shulman was not only willing to go through with it, but lie before Congress, jeopardizing his future career, and he's just too much of a nerd to do that (not that that would be the first time someone did so).  

On two, it certainly could have been partisan decisionmaking, but more likely bad judgment.  Even if the former, that still gets to his number three.  And, well, I doubt the IRS breeds misjudgment any worse than an organization of similar size.  But when you have more than 100,000 employees, what the people at the top want doesn't always trickle down to the bottom.  I have been in numerous meetings with top level officials where taxpayers complain about the behavior of IRS line employees and the response is always "that's not the IRS's policy, if there is a problem, elevate it.  In fact, give me a call if you need to."  They are sincere.

Here is the WaPo story on the director of the IRS EO Division (Lois Lerner), which says, among other things, In interviews Monday, even Lerner’s critics said she had done her job without showing a political bent.  So, again, I'm not sure there's anything here other than some dumb decisionmaking by lower level employees that, when the people higher up found out about it, it was immediately changed.

Not to say that it was okay, or there shouldn't be any discipline/firings, but to compare this to Nixon (I'm looking at you, serious guy George Will), is, at a bare minimum, premature.  The ultimate solution would be to adequately fund the IRS so that all applications receive the same amount of scrutiny and thus little judgement is left to the Executive, but alas.  

Post Script:  Of course, as I write this post and then look at the news, the WaPo has another article that calls into question alot of what I wrote above.  I guess we'll see what the TIGTA report says and what comes out of the congressional hearings (the first of which is Friday).  

*I love Alan Rickman.

Update on 5.14.2013 at 2:35pm EDT:  I put a bunch of links to additional stories in comments but, wow.  Attorney General Eric Holder said at a press conference on Tuesday that he had ordered an investigation into the IRS scandal....  That's just unbelievable.  Of course, maybe it's double-secret bankshot chess to give acting IRS Commissioner Miller a reason to invoke the 5th Amendment so he doesn't have to testify on Friday, thus protecting the administration.

Update the Second:  Here is the TIGTA report.  I have not read it yet.

Update in Round:  And the Acting Commissioner of Internal Revenue resigns.  What a disaster.