“The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) cancelled its longtime relationship with an email-storage contractor just weeks after ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s computer crashed and shortly before other IRS officials’ computers allegedly crashed.” Basically, the Daily Caller – doing the legwork that our legacy media apparently cannot – determined that Sonasoft offered email backup services from 2005 to 2011 (Sonasoft certainly claimed that). A couple of weeks after Congress started requesting Lois Lerner’s email records from the IRS, Lerner’s computer crash – and, shortly after that, the IRS let their contract with Sonasoft lapse.
Related – “The IRS tea-party audit story isn’t Watergate; it’s worse than Watergate. The Watergate break-in was the professionals of the party in power going after the party professionals of the party out of power. The IRS scandal is the party in power going after the most average Americans imaginable.
Someone, somewhere, has copies of those emails.
You need/probably know they are more valuable than gold.
Please don’t release more than one or two at a time,
watching the Obama administration and Lois Lerner dangling at the end of a rope,
and twisting in the wind is part of the fun.
enjoy your well deserved fortune…
This is scorched earth if ever there was.
But the IRS scandal wouldn’t have happened if “Tea Party” groups hadn’t decided they wanted to fight The Establishment yet be part of its apparatus at the same time, by applying for charitable status.
Solidarnosk and the French Resistance (not to mention the original Tea Party raiders) didn’t apply for de facto government sanction, or want to get benefits from the same State they were fighting against.
Many of these Tea Party groups are self-aggrandizing personal fiefdoms, much like the televangelists of the 1980s.
Real rebels operated without the benefit of the IRS’s “permission” and go without the perks of charitable status.
Lois Lerner took an ax
Gave her hard drive forty whacks,
When she saw what she had done,
She gave six others forty one.
And yet some backups did exist,
so carefully then made a list.
When she found them, she was not slow,
To give those too the old heave ho.
That is probably true, Kathy, but this has been a successful blow to the king, in any event. How his followers are going to rationalize this one is going to be interesting to watch.
Kathy, a somewhat jaundiced view in my opinion.
To not avail yourself with any and all tools at hand, in this battle for freedom, would seem foolish.
Kathy Shaidle – Look into True the Vote, then please tell me if this individual is looking for self-aggrandizement. Would Obama have sicced an alphabet soup of Federal regulatory agencies on Catherine Engelbrecht if she was really just out for ” self-aggrandizement?
Or is True the Vote, in the eyes of the radical left, an organization that poses an existential threat to the radical left’s totalitarian dreams?
Without further explanation from you, I feel safe in dismissing your post as a casual, and lazy smear.
Obama would have been impeached already if this were the 70s, maybe even the 80s. I’m pretty convinced now that this is directly traceable to The One himself, and that’s why all this information has conveniently gone “missing”. This is a presidency-ending level scandal that’s being, so far, successfully covered up by the Democrats, the Media, the IRS, and all their stinking enablers.
Sadly, I’m not even convinced the Republicans really want to get to the bottom of it. They love the political theater aspect of it, and playing to their voters, but doing the real hard work of holding these corrupt criminal actors accountable… nah, they might get accused of racism, and they’ve got no stomach for that fight.
It is so saddening to see how far America has fallen.
“Lois Lerner took an ax
Gave her hard drive forty whacks,
When she saw what she had done,
She gave six others forty one.”
Freaking Hilarious..
–
I am stealing that..
need to be careful,
‘can I please back that up?’
“…IRS scandal wouldn’t have happened if “Tea Party” groups hadn’t decided they wanted to fight The Establishment yet be part of its apparatus at the same time, by applying for charitable status.”
Dead on. Pretty hard to have freedom if you give away independence. Our farm organizations in Ontario gave away their independence 20 years ago, and the vast majority of our print media toes the implicit line by receiving “a$$istance” from government.
thanx for that post Kathy, I’v always considered you a lefty try to act as a rite winger, and you just proved it. The right side of the poli/soci spectrum would be idiots to not take advantage of tax breaks, their TEA stands for taxed enough already, and they would piss away tax dollars, dream on lefties.
Jamie McMaster – Could it be they applied for tax exempt status so they didn’t lose 40% of their donations to Federal taxes? The IRS is flouting the Constitutional right of free assembly. To the bet of my knowledge, none are looking for Federal money/handouts.
Yeah it is true that the GOP establishment is as fond of the TEA Party as the PCs were of the Reform Party.
However this IRS thing is a made to order means to crucify the Donkeys…an opportunity that logic would dictate not be wasted.
The GOP has the same problem Canada’s CPC have…a civil service infested with Donkeys/LIBRANOS.
This IRS scandal clearly demonstrates that our elected governments govern at the pleasure of the bureaucrats. Subversion. This is the end result of Gramsci’s “Long March through the institutions”. That is a big problem.
A big contributor is the demographic which seeks and gains employment in the civil service…The same element who run unions….IOW…people who can’t/don’t want a real job.
The Watergate burglars were looking for the lists of prostitutes used by Ted Kennedy. This was going to be released, or the girls were going to contacted, paid off, and whatever ensued from that would have been a ton of fun.
Having worked in IT and information disaster prevention for near twenty years, I’m always amused by the blind faith people have in enterprise IT. I can think of at least half a dozen scenarios that fit the information that’s been released so far where there’s no intentional coverup, just typically average (by which I mean incompetent) IT management. (Note that whether the IRS was intentionally targeting the President’s political enemies or not, that all by itself ought to be a scorched earth scandal).
Consider this scenario, which fits the available evidence:
1) IRS gets subpoena from Congress
2) IRS IT staff start trying to comply. They contact Sonasoft.
3) Sonasoft reveals that it can’t actually comply with the terms of the service contract because they’ve had a cascade failure in their own data center (if you don’t think this is plausible, you’ve never worked with real-world “cloud” service providers).
4) IRS IT chooses not to renew their contract with Sonasoft, because they suck.
5) IRS IT tries to recover emails from hard drives.
6) IRS IT discovers that most of the hard drives involved have failed and been replaced and no one bothered to secure them for forensics because after all, that’s why we’re paying Sonasoft. (Again, if you don’t think multiple hard drive failures in an enterprise situation is plausible, you haven’t worked with real hardware recently).
7) Panic sets in and a garbled version of what happened gets passed off to investigators because the suits don’t understand the details.
Now, I don’t believe any of this. I think this is a poorly managed coverup and there rot goes clean to the bone. But if you want to nail the IRS on this one, you need to go after them with real information forensics specialists who know how to distinguish between malfeasance and incompetence, and not keep wanking on about how perfect RAID and backups are in a magical fairy world of unicorns and puppies.
Tea Party approval rating in the US: 21 per cent
Josef Stalin’s favorable rating in Russia: 49 per cent
Kathy’s critique of the Tea Party folks victimized in the scandal is principled but somewhat naive, like expecting all businessmen to embrace laissez-faire capitalism instead of rent-seeking cronyism.
The evil is in the boldness of corruption of a criminal enterprise masquerading as representative government – all condoned by a progressive cultural bubble. With apologies to Ronald Reagan, America is now a Government that has a people not the other way around.
But the IRS scandal wouldn’t have happened if “Tea Party” groups hadn’t decided they wanted to fight The Establishment yet be part of its apparatus at the same time, by applying for charitable status
That thought has been lingering in the back of my mind too. Not so sure about the self-aggrandizing bit though.
The King’s socialist followers rationalize it this way” “Quite justified to stick it to our enemies any way possible”
You seem a bit confused, Kathy. This is isn’t PJMedia; casual drive-by trolling won’t generate the clickrage you need to pay for the BPD meds.
If “Tea Party” groups hadn’t decided they wanted to fight The Establishment yet be part of its apparatus at the same time, by applying for charitable status, the IRS scandal as it appears to be unfolding might not have. But what reason is there to think the Obama regime would not have still misdirected the IRS and/or other federal agencies to attack the Tea Party and other opposition, and that they would not have found the civil servants more than willing to carry out those orders?
Solidarnosc and the French Resistance (not to mention the original Tea Party raiders) can present more idealistic examples and some Tea Party groups may be self-aggrandizing personal fiefdoms much like the televangelists of the 1980s, but those who refuse to work with imperfect tools and methods end up doing no work at all.
You guys can bash Kathy all you want but she’s right.
You can’t take down the system whilst being part of it. It’s not grassroots if you’re trying so hard to save money by doing it. Why did the TP have to become such large organizations that required tax sheltering? Get together in a meeting, pool the cash together, go buy what you need to protest (bristolboard, 1x6s, Sharpies) and go protest.
“IRS IT discovers that most of the hard drives involved have failed and been replaced and no one bothered to secure them for forensics because after all, that’s why we’re paying Sonasoft”
That is a bit far fetched in that real Corporation IT techs are not the Computer Hardware experts. The Computers are generally serviced by IBM or HP experts and it would be them that replaced the PC drives. Single PC drives now use RAID technology, in self healing schemes, that IBM/HP can recover seamlessly even if they have to move the data platter to a development platform. Truly erasing the platter is only done by Degaussing coils, otherwise there is always recoverable Data.
If HP replaced a failed Drive, but was unable to retrieve Emails
from the IT Server, that would mean incompetence by both HP & IT server…Not likely.
“…Could it be they applied for tax exempt status so they didn’t lose 40% of their donations…”
Could well be…and maybe a few other reasons as well. But if donations received are in fact being taxed, that means that “money out” (for promotion of cause)is less than “money in”. In other words, income exceeds expenses, so it is taxed as income/profit.
“…You can’t take down the system whilst being part of it….”
Dead on, Sean! And a hell of a lot of Canadians just can’t figure that part out. It’s simply another twist on the old saw: “If you take the King’s shilling, you do the King’s bidding”.
The various Ontario Landowner groups are not beholding to any level of government in any way, shape or form. No grant monies, no publication assistance, no tax breaks for donor or receiver. They are volunteer organizations in the truest sense, and any and all monies coming in are disbursed for the promotion of the cause: the acquisition of effective property rights.
Jamie McMaster – you neglected to answer whether the IRS actions are unConstitutional.. In the US, churches are exempt from all Federal income taxation, because the power to tax is the power to control/influence/destroy..
The freedom of assembly and expression is contained in the same Amendment ( 1st Amendment ) as the one prohibiting governmenal interference in the free exercise of religion. There is no reference to costs, profit, or income because the government is to have NO SAY in this aspect of a citizen’s life.
You may want to acquaint yourself with the US Bill of Rights, the reasons it was created, and the commonplace American view of them as an American birthright to understand why the IRS campaign against the political activity of US citizens is regarded as far beyond the pale in America. ( Obama has acknowledged this right indirectly, by emphatically saying no violation has taken place). To Americans, this is a violation of a God-given right.
Kathy’s comment, and some of the supporting comments, remind me of the old joke about Lutherans being opposed to sex because it leads to dancing. The joke (such as it is) is that if you chew too hard on the proverbial bit you confuse the antecedent and the result — or, put differently, you lose track of where you’re going, and why, and of which landmark comes first on the road to your goal.
If anti-Establishment, anti-Big-Government groups who oppose punitive, confiscatory taxation and regulation do whatever they can under existing law to *not* give half of their privately-generated funds to a profligate, corrupt, unconstitutional, anti-private-sector administration led by a virtual fifth columnist, are they really asking for a perk which, if received, makes them part of The Establishment, or are they telling the establishment to eff off and keep their greedy hands to themselves?
Personally, I think it’s more the latter, and that the fact that a demonstratively corrupt, big-government administration used the powers of the IRS to target its political enemies is a far more salient issue here – by orders of magnitude — than that of whether or not particular advocacy groups should apply for, or be accorded, charitable status.
It depends on how one looks at it, I guess — everyone’s free to decide on their own what’s more important, and what’s less important.
“…You can’t take down the system whilst being part of it….” – Obama seems to be doing a pretty good job of it!
That’s exactly how one “takes down the system”. “Principled” conservative / libertarians would stop paying taxes and go to jail where they could “take down” nothing. Unless you take up arms and go full revolution and are successful, the only way to change the system is to live to fight another day. Tea Party organizations vying for equal treatment by a government agency is what brought about the scandal in the first place. Scandals are blemishes on the political enemy.
The left owns the culture because they infested academia, the media and entertainment. Freedom lovers will have to do the same if they want to take it back.
Yup. A principled conservative who gets himself elected becomes part of the “system”, but that’s better than him sitting it out and handing it over to twats like Obama, Holder, Pelosi, Wasserman-Schultz, etc. who want to ensconce their, umm, way of life, rather than that of the American people, in the system.
“…you neglected to answer whether the IRS actions are unconstitutional…”
Oh, they most certainly are. None of the comments have suggested otherwise.
And valid points have been made that the ‘bamarats may well have found other ways to target the Tea Party and their compadres.
But no one can argue against the point that the job was made really easy for the IRS because the contact info for all the targets was one click away in their files.
“At 7:00pm EST, the IRS Commissioner John Koskinen will testify before the Oversight committee on the loss of Lois Lerner’s emails.”
I think that begins, at about this moment actually, live stream here:
http://therightscoop.com/watch-live-irs-chief-testifies-before-the-oversight-committee-on-lois-lerners-emails/
I’ll be watching for a bit, can’t tell if there’ll be sparks.