Also, as this occurred after the election, I don't see how this benefits Obama. That's what I'm saying. This makes sense as profiling, and does not make sense as top-down political persecution.
I'm not being paid or having tax debt forgiven for this. Are you being paid by the GOP, or has someone affiliated with the Republican Party in Congress promised to cut your taxes?
If TEA Party members and people who belong to groups with "Patriot" in the name were statistically more apt...
No. I don't have to prove that it was *good* profiling for it to be profiling. It can be bad, inaccurate and stupid profiling too.
Bad profiling happens all the time. It's still profiling. What makes it profiling, is that someone - *rightly or wrongly* - suspected a group of people with certain characteristics would be more likely than the average to indulge in certain behaviors. And that's what I see as likely being behind these behaviors - not vengefulness.
Which makes even more sense given the additional information you point out - that this was for nonprofit groups after the election. That would have zero usefulness for the Obama administration - if you believe the Tea Party was a threat to Obama, the time for Obama to use his world-running conspiracy powers would have beeb to do this would have been **before** the election.
And separately, the idea that this "effectively shut down political opposition" is just silly. If anything, the Tea party and other right-wing groups have stepped up their opposition to Obama to even greater butthurt tantrum levels.
... many things can be gleamed... such as the fact that you are not a lawyer... and probably not very good at whatever job you do
By the immediacy with which you sink to personal insult rather than argument, it can be easily presumed that you aren't a lawyer either. If you do plan on becoming one, you would do well to remove that arrow from your quiver right away. It does not impress. But hey, your life, do what you will.
You know... a black person is more likely to be convicted and sentenced to jail for a drug crime than a white... by your logic... or as you would say "and thus"... wouldn't any randomly selected black person be more likely to be engaged in the drug trade than a white "and thus" be fair game for further scrutiny?
By the logic of profiling, absolutely. Which also proves that profiling is something done by individuals, and not as a planned conspiracy let alone one requiring top-down orders. Nor does it even require a personal animosity towards the targeted - all it requires is an assumption - which can be right or wrong - that the target is more likely to be breaking the law.
So, thank you for proving my own point, that the profiling by the IRS did not require some sort of top-down orders OR personal animosity towards Tea Partiers and other conservative anti-Tax groups to happen. : )
You do seem to have some aspect of my entire argument misconstrued. In no way am I saying this profiling was awesome, enlightened or even something that I approve of. What I was, and am, saying is that this sort of profiling was based on assumptions that I can see the IRS coming to - and, once again, assumptions that didn't require any basis either in orders from the top or animosity towards the Tea Party.
And it seems to me that the only fair AND logical position is either no groups are profiled, or any group can be profiled. So if you don't like the idea of Tea Partiers being profiled, then you need to be against Muslims being profiled too.
I'm not saying it was right. Once again, I'm saying that this seems to me to be profiling and not persecution. Saying something was assault and not murder doesn't mean I'm saying assault is awesome.
The Tea Party isn't on it, but the libertarian party and other parties are.
Here's the estimated size of people who consider themselves to be in the Tea Party, according to the Tea Party: 8.9 million people. And at least 1.7 million attended Glenn Beck's rally. So just in case the Tea Party site is inflating it's own figures, I'll split the different at say 5 million. If you have other estimates you'd prefer, then please post your own.
http://teapartyorg.ning.com/page/tea-party-groups
Here's the Tea Party platform. Again, if you know other info then you post it. Note that # 1 is "eliminate excessive taxes".
http://www.teaparty-platform.com/
I just looked at the pages information for each of the other parties listed. Not one has the Tea Party's 4 million members. The closest is the Libertarian party; they cast 1.7 million votes in 2012 for Gary Johnson. So, let's generously double that to 3.4 million members. They mention taxes 9th in their platform. So, they still have fewer members and less of a focus on taxes. The next largest, the Green Party, has 500,000 members and no mention of taxes. The 5th, the Constitution party, had 125,000 presidential votes. Double that to 250,000 and that's nowhere near the Tea Party's size. Now, the Constitution party does appear to have quite a focus on taxes. But they are, at their highest estimation, much less than half the Tea Party's size.
So, there you have it. My statement stands: the Tea Party is far more anti-tax than any party that is even close to their size. Which, by the way, I remain convinced you were aware of but for some reason you were attempting to deny.
If you disagree, please prove that some other group is angrier about taxes and is more driven to reduce taxes than the Tea Party, by showing a) more members and b) more virulence in their platform. Or, come up with some other way to prove me wrong.
No, that doesn't fit the analogy. It would be more like a company saying they don't believe the DMV has the right to say whether or not people can drive, and then the same company applying for a set of commercial driving licenses for a fleet, and the DMV making extra sure that they had fully documented drivers.
I.e. not a great thing for the DMV to do, but more likely as profiling than as some sort of punitive task.
Glad we can agree on something. In that case... do you support the idea of the president resigning from office over his unconstitutional NLRB appointments
I support the President resigning for any reason he wishes. : ) but if you mean, do I think he should be forced from office, no. Just as I don't think GWB should have been forced for office for his (successful) attempts to use recess appointments when he felt thwarted. Or for any of the other things that Bush tried to do, where the SCOTUS ruled against him. The SCOTUS ruled, the appointments were voided, that's that. I will say that the GOP congress is very much operating to the letter of the law and not the spirit - they are doing whatever they can to keep a legitimate government agency unstaffed and crippled because they don't like what it does, but they can't muster the votes to get rid of it. That's slimy, but that's within their rights to do.
You are free to draw that conclusion... that is not however what is being alleged (even though the Pres did in 09 joke about sic'ing the IRS on his opponents)
Ok, well that seemed to me the very clear implication of the article that I'm responding to. And judging by the many responders to my comment, both for and against, it's clear I was not alone in that interpretation. But if so, great.
1.oppress people: to systematically subject a race or group of people to cruel or unfair treatment, e.g. because of their ethnic origin or religious beliefs
2.pester somebody: to make somebody the victim of continual pestering or harassment
Seems rather apt... doesn't it?
That hinges on a) whether or not you consider profiling to be intrinsically unfair, or b) whether in this case it was so extreme that it's more unfair than other profiling that you agree with. Personally I think a better case can be made for a) - which I must say I have not found to be the position of most conservatives, at least until now.
No, I disagree that the presence of profiling requires the presence of a conspiracy. A conspiracy requires secretive group planning with malicious intent, by definition. And other cases of profiling don't have this - cops all across the country don't have to get together and plan to pull over kids who look like stoners. Nor do the TSA or others have to get together and collude to be immediately suspicious of Muslims.
Please note that I'm not referring to the fairness or even the usefulness of profiling. All I'm saying is, this looks like profiling to me - and profiling is not at all dependent on conspiracy.
I agree with you, and I think it's a shame you've been voted down. I do wish people wouldn't vote others down for simple stating of an opinion, with insult to none.
I'm saying that this seems clearly to me to be a case of profiling, rather than willful political persecution.
But, with that in mind, I do think that those who support profiling in all of the other cases you mention but not in this one are being hypocritical. And yes, any who support profiling in this case with the IRS but not in those other cases you mention, are being hypocritical as well.
That's a case of a real-world implementation that makes sense to me. It does seem that it's pretty hard to review an organization's tax-free status without knowing who they support, however. So I don't think that removing political affiliation would work.
What would probably work best is not profiling in this manner, unless there was evidence of a systemic effort on the part of a certain type of *organization* to cheat taxes. And even if so, that profiling should only apply to the organizations and not any individuals within it.
Oh, come on. The Tea Party probably helped Obama get elected. He should thank them. That endless parade of Tea Party-pandering GOP candidates was amazing to behold. It was like a reality TV show.
So, I assume you've got a list of actual tax dodging right wing political advocacy groups to back up your profiling comparison to Muslim radicals with a very real body count.
No, of course I don't. And I don't need to. Whether it's accurate or inaccurate profiling, the point is that it's still profiling. If you think the profiling is wrong, take it up with the IRS.
All I'm saying, once again, is that the IRS doing this makes much more sense as a case of profiling than as a case of willful political persecution.
Of course any lawbreaking should not be tolerated.
We may be getting into semantics here. But the implication of "persecution" here is that Obama/ The Government was mad at the tea partiers, and sicced the IRS on them to make the Tea partiers lives miserable.
And that's the implication that I disagree with. This seems much more likely a case of profiling than of that specific sort of vindictive persecution. Yes, of course profiling can be done to a degree that is wrong, intrusive, and despicable. Some would argue that any sort of profiling at all is morally and ethically wrong, and I have a great deal of sympathy with that position.
But profiling in and of itself is not political persecution.
Agreed there, to at least a certain degree. I'm sure there is a lot of confirmation bias in the application of profiling. And when statistics do come in, in the results can be wrong enough to be very amusing. The best recent case of this was when Florida applied drug testing to welfare recipients - and found they had a lower percentage of drug users than in the general population. Which is obvious in retrospect. Of course people on welfare do fewer drugs - they're broke! But so it goes.
But yes, profiling is doubtful. There is a certain part of the mammal mind that does work off of generalizing off of scant information. It's theorized to have a survival value - all the times one generalizes a behavior is wrong are generally harmless to the individual, as long as the one time the individual is right it saves his life. It's like avoiding lions all the time, even though 23 hours of the day they probably aren't hungry.
I'm not rationalizing anything. I'm glad you personally have the integrity of your opinion, that it is objectively unacceptable in all cases. My opinion differs slightly from yours. I don't like profiling in any cases, whether towards liberals, conservatives, people I tend to like or people I don't. On the other hand, in cases of public safety, I can understand a certain amount of profiling, and that leaves me conflicted.
This doesn't change the larger point that it appears to me that, in this case, the IRS was engaged in profiling and not persecution.
Interesting how you hear what you want to hear... or simply aren't paying attention.
Interesting how many people can do that. : ) Also interesting how you can assume a lot of things about me, what I hear and what I'm paying attention to.
I can't say I've heard all that many tea-partiers (and I've known and protested with quite a few) who are absolutely anti-tax in all forms... or uniformly claim that they are unconstitutional.
Uh-huh, sure. But haven't you heard MORE tea-partiers be completely anti-tax, than any other political groups even half their size?
And thus, since a randomly-selected tea partier is *more likely* to be completely anti-tax than a member of any other large political group I can think of, that's why the IRS would conceive of profiling them.
Lemme guess... you also heard that there were tons of racists and tea party events with pictures of Obama with a Hitler mustache... without ever knowing that the bulk of them are Lyndon LaRouche fans.
LaRouchites tend overwhelmingly to be douches, no question. From the few that I have met, I am very confident in profiling them as douches.
All I'm saying is, it seems like a reasonable connection to me, so I can understand the IRS pursuing this as a method of profiling. And it certainly seems much more likely to me than some sort of grand conspiracy from the top.
Hell, if anything Obama owes his reelection to the Tea Party. The Tea Party foisted one completely insane candidate after another on the GOP, and forced Romney to go so far to the Right in the general that when he came back he simply wasn't credible as a moderate.
I definitely agree with you there. I don't like the idea of profiling at all.
It does seem to me that the converse of what you say is also true: a lot of conservatives don't mind if it's some pot-smokers or some Muslims who are profiled - then it's "If you're innocent, you've got nothing to lose." But as soon as it's people like them who are being profiled, it instantly becomes unacceptable. You know?
Whoa, slow down there: profiling is not persecution. That's all I'm saying. And this seems almost certainly to be profiling.
Nearly all conservatives I know approve of paying special attention to people with Muslim backgrounds when trying to root out terrorists. That doesn't seem to be considered as persecution, that's considered profiling too.
This just happens to be a case where conservatives are probably being profiled. And I say, good for the goose then good for the gander.
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I don't see how any of that follows.
Also, as this occurred after the election, I don't see how this benefits Obama. That's what I'm saying. This makes sense as profiling, and does not make sense as top-down political persecution.
I'm not being paid or having tax debt forgiven for this. Are you being paid by the GOP, or has someone affiliated with the Republican Party in Congress promised to cut your taxes?
No. I don't have to prove that it was *good* profiling for it to be profiling. It can be bad, inaccurate and stupid profiling too. Bad profiling happens all the time. It's still profiling. What makes it profiling, is that someone - *rightly or wrongly* - suspected a group of people with certain characteristics would be more likely than the average to indulge in certain behaviors. And that's what I see as likely being behind these behaviors - not vengefulness.
Which makes even more sense given the additional information you point out - that this was for nonprofit groups after the election. That would have zero usefulness for the Obama administration - if you believe the Tea Party was a threat to Obama, the time for Obama to use his world-running conspiracy powers would have beeb to do this would have been **before** the election.
And separately, the idea that this "effectively shut down political opposition" is just silly. If anything, the Tea party and other right-wing groups have stepped up their opposition to Obama to even greater butthurt tantrum levels.
Do you think the police profiling of stoners is either a conspiracy, or perpetrated by a single person?
By the immediacy with which you sink to personal insult rather than argument, it can be easily presumed that you aren't a lawyer either. If you do plan on becoming one, you would do well to remove that arrow from your quiver right away. It does not impress. But hey, your life, do what you will.
By the logic of profiling, absolutely. Which also proves that profiling is something done by individuals, and not as a planned conspiracy let alone one requiring top-down orders. Nor does it even require a personal animosity towards the targeted - all it requires is an assumption - which can be right or wrong - that the target is more likely to be breaking the law.
So, thank you for proving my own point, that the profiling by the IRS did not require some sort of top-down orders OR personal animosity towards Tea Partiers and other conservative anti-Tax groups to happen. : )
You do seem to have some aspect of my entire argument misconstrued. In no way am I saying this profiling was awesome, enlightened or even something that I approve of. What I was, and am, saying is that this sort of profiling was based on assumptions that I can see the IRS coming to - and, once again, assumptions that didn't require any basis either in orders from the top or animosity towards the Tea Party.
And it seems to me that the only fair AND logical position is either no groups are profiled, or any group can be profiled. So if you don't like the idea of Tea Partiers being profiled, then you need to be against Muslims being profiled too.
Here's a simpler answer: The Tea Party's initials are supposed to be "Taxed Enough Already".
What other US political group has anagrams of it's initials that mention taxes?
I eagerly await your response.
I'm not saying it was right. Once again, I'm saying that this seems to me to be profiling and not persecution. Saying something was assault and not murder doesn't mean I'm saying assault is awesome.
Oh, come on now. You really want me to go this degree, to demonstrate something I'm sure we both are reasonably sure about? OK.
Here's a list of US political parties: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_the_United_States
The Tea Party isn't on it, but the libertarian party and other parties are.
Here's the estimated size of people who consider themselves to be in the Tea Party, according to the Tea Party: 8.9 million people. And at least 1.7 million attended Glenn Beck's rally. So just in case the Tea Party site is inflating it's own figures, I'll split the different at say 5 million. If you have other estimates you'd prefer, then please post your own. http://teapartyorg.ning.com/page/tea-party-groups
Here's the Tea Party platform. Again, if you know other info then you post it. Note that # 1 is "eliminate excessive taxes". http://www.teaparty-platform.com/
I just looked at the pages information for each of the other parties listed. Not one has the Tea Party's 4 million members. The closest is the Libertarian party; they cast 1.7 million votes in 2012 for Gary Johnson. So, let's generously double that to 3.4 million members. They mention taxes 9th in their platform. So, they still have fewer members and less of a focus on taxes. The next largest, the Green Party, has 500,000 members and no mention of taxes. The 5th, the Constitution party, had 125,000 presidential votes. Double that to 250,000 and that's nowhere near the Tea Party's size. Now, the Constitution party does appear to have quite a focus on taxes. But they are, at their highest estimation, much less than half the Tea Party's size.
So, there you have it. My statement stands: the Tea Party is far more anti-tax than any party that is even close to their size. Which, by the way, I remain convinced you were aware of but for some reason you were attempting to deny.
If you disagree, please prove that some other group is angrier about taxes and is more driven to reduce taxes than the Tea Party, by showing a) more members and b) more virulence in their platform. Or, come up with some other way to prove me wrong.
No, that doesn't fit the analogy. It would be more like a company saying they don't believe the DMV has the right to say whether or not people can drive, and then the same company applying for a set of commercial driving licenses for a fleet, and the DMV making extra sure that they had fully documented drivers.
I.e. not a great thing for the DMV to do, but more likely as profiling than as some sort of punitive task.
I support the President resigning for any reason he wishes. : ) but if you mean, do I think he should be forced from office, no. Just as I don't think GWB should have been forced for office for his (successful) attempts to use recess appointments when he felt thwarted. Or for any of the other things that Bush tried to do, where the SCOTUS ruled against him. The SCOTUS ruled, the appointments were voided, that's that. I will say that the GOP congress is very much operating to the letter of the law and not the spirit - they are doing whatever they can to keep a legitimate government agency unstaffed and crippled because they don't like what it does, but they can't muster the votes to get rid of it. That's slimy, but that's within their rights to do.
Ok, well that seemed to me the very clear implication of the article that I'm responding to. And judging by the many responders to my comment, both for and against, it's clear I was not alone in that interpretation. But if so, great.
That hinges on a) whether or not you consider profiling to be intrinsically unfair, or b) whether in this case it was so extreme that it's more unfair than other profiling that you agree with. Personally I think a better case can be made for a) - which I must say I have not found to be the position of most conservatives, at least until now.
No, I disagree that the presence of profiling requires the presence of a conspiracy. A conspiracy requires secretive group planning with malicious intent, by definition. And other cases of profiling don't have this - cops all across the country don't have to get together and plan to pull over kids who look like stoners. Nor do the TSA or others have to get together and collude to be immediately suspicious of Muslims.
Please note that I'm not referring to the fairness or even the usefulness of profiling. All I'm saying is, this looks like profiling to me - and profiling is not at all dependent on conspiracy.
Oh, ok. : ) Good to know people aren't necessarily actively being dicks then.
I agree with you, and I think it's a shame you've been voted down. I do wish people wouldn't vote others down for simple stating of an opinion, with insult to none.
I'm saying that this seems clearly to me to be a case of profiling, rather than willful political persecution.
But, with that in mind, I do think that those who support profiling in all of the other cases you mention but not in this one are being hypocritical. And yes, any who support profiling in this case with the IRS but not in those other cases you mention, are being hypocritical as well.
I don't know, I'm not trying to apologize. That might be why it seems like such a weak apology - it isn't one.
It's profiling. It could even be lousy profiling. All I'm saying is that this is almost certainly not some kind of gubmint conspiracy.
That's a case of a real-world implementation that makes sense to me. It does seem that it's pretty hard to review an organization's tax-free status without knowing who they support, however. So I don't think that removing political affiliation would work.
What would probably work best is not profiling in this manner, unless there was evidence of a systemic effort on the part of a certain type of *organization* to cheat taxes. And even if so, that profiling should only apply to the organizations and not any individuals within it.
Oh, come on. The Tea Party probably helped Obama get elected. He should thank them. That endless parade of Tea Party-pandering GOP candidates was amazing to behold. It was like a reality TV show.
No, of course I don't. And I don't need to. Whether it's accurate or inaccurate profiling, the point is that it's still profiling. If you think the profiling is wrong, take it up with the IRS.
All I'm saying, once again, is that the IRS doing this makes much more sense as a case of profiling than as a case of willful political persecution.
Of course any lawbreaking should not be tolerated.
We may be getting into semantics here. But the implication of "persecution" here is that Obama/ The Government was mad at the tea partiers, and sicced the IRS on them to make the Tea partiers lives miserable.
And that's the implication that I disagree with. This seems much more likely a case of profiling than of that specific sort of vindictive persecution. Yes, of course profiling can be done to a degree that is wrong, intrusive, and despicable. Some would argue that any sort of profiling at all is morally and ethically wrong, and I have a great deal of sympathy with that position.
But profiling in and of itself is not political persecution.
Agreed there, to at least a certain degree. I'm sure there is a lot of confirmation bias in the application of profiling. And when statistics do come in, in the results can be wrong enough to be very amusing. The best recent case of this was when Florida applied drug testing to welfare recipients - and found they had a lower percentage of drug users than in the general population. Which is obvious in retrospect. Of course people on welfare do fewer drugs - they're broke! But so it goes.
But yes, profiling is doubtful. There is a certain part of the mammal mind that does work off of generalizing off of scant information. It's theorized to have a survival value - all the times one generalizes a behavior is wrong are generally harmless to the individual, as long as the one time the individual is right it saves his life. It's like avoiding lions all the time, even though 23 hours of the day they probably aren't hungry.
I'm not rationalizing anything. I'm glad you personally have the integrity of your opinion, that it is objectively unacceptable in all cases. My opinion differs slightly from yours. I don't like profiling in any cases, whether towards liberals, conservatives, people I tend to like or people I don't. On the other hand, in cases of public safety, I can understand a certain amount of profiling, and that leaves me conflicted.
This doesn't change the larger point that it appears to me that, in this case, the IRS was engaged in profiling and not persecution.
Is that how you profile liberals? : )
Interesting how many people can do that. : ) Also interesting how you can assume a lot of things about me, what I hear and what I'm paying attention to.
Uh-huh, sure. But haven't you heard MORE tea-partiers be completely anti-tax, than any other political groups even half their size?
And thus, since a randomly-selected tea partier is *more likely* to be completely anti-tax than a member of any other large political group I can think of, that's why the IRS would conceive of profiling them.
LaRouchites tend overwhelmingly to be douches, no question. From the few that I have met, I am very confident in profiling them as douches.
I don't have any evidence, I'm not doing it. : )
All I'm saying is, it seems like a reasonable connection to me, so I can understand the IRS pursuing this as a method of profiling. And it certainly seems much more likely to me than some sort of grand conspiracy from the top.
Hell, if anything Obama owes his reelection to the Tea Party. The Tea Party foisted one completely insane candidate after another on the GOP, and forced Romney to go so far to the Right in the general that when he came back he simply wasn't credible as a moderate.
I definitely agree with you there. I don't like the idea of profiling at all.
It does seem to me that the converse of what you say is also true: a lot of conservatives don't mind if it's some pot-smokers or some Muslims who are profiled - then it's "If you're innocent, you've got nothing to lose." But as soon as it's people like them who are being profiled, it instantly becomes unacceptable. You know?
Whoa, slow down there: profiling is not persecution. That's all I'm saying. And this seems almost certainly to be profiling.
Nearly all conservatives I know approve of paying special attention to people with Muslim backgrounds when trying to root out terrorists. That doesn't seem to be considered as persecution, that's considered profiling too.
This just happens to be a case where conservatives are probably being profiled. And I say, good for the goose then good for the gander.