Source: Clash Daily
Stewart Destroys Obama Over IRS Scandal, “You’ve Vindicated Conspiracy Theorists”
Jon Stewart mercilessly tore into the Obama administration tonight over the revelation that the Internal Revenue Service specifically targeted Tea Party groups for scrutiny. Stewart slammed the government’s lack of “managerial competence” and said that thanks to this scandal, conspiracy theorists how have a level of vindication they’ve never had before.
This just abut takes the cake, George. There is no scandal about the IRS targeting your pet wingnut astroturf cells. Plenty of ‘liberal’ outfits were audited – a whole slew of rinky-dink pseudo-public-interest shams have arisen since your beloved Citizens United hit the fan. Are you thinking of selling your blog to Rupert Murdoch? Good job, keep it up!
(Slow clap)
The scandal is not about the IRS targeting conservative groups for tax audits; it is about the IRS targeting, for extra scrutiny, the applications for tax-exempt status of groups that have conservative-sounding names. This is a violation of both US law and IRS policy. Obama, the head of the IRS, and the liberal news media are all in agreement that this happened, and that it was wrong. Are you saying they are part of this particular “rinky-dink pseudo-public-interest sham”? Doesn’t it bother you that the IRS would give extra scrutiny to groups that have words like Constitution and Freedom in their names? When did using those words begin to make the government look on you with a malevolent eye?
You claim that liberal groups were targeted too (which again, is still a violation of US law and IRS policy). Obama, the IRS, and the liberal news media don’t back you up, but maybe you have sources they don’t have. Can you name any groups with words like progressive, socialist, yes we can, and so on in their names whose applications for tax-exempt status received extra scrutiny? Can you point us to a politician, government bureaucrat, or news report that has made this claim? Somehow, I doubt it.
I read on a ‘liberal’ site they were targeted; it took them about six months to be approved for tax-exempt status. And the article commented on the fact that Tea Party type sites were still waiting two and a half years later. Pere’s statement doesn’t tell the whole truth.
Really? Is this the best you can dig up? Some IRS agents go rouge and it’s a government cospiracy? That’s not a government conspiracy. A government conspiracy would involve making tea baggers dissapear, maybe a gulag or two. But annoyance from the IRS? I don’t think you or the cospiracy theorist nut jobs know what a conspiracy is.
Dan, other liberals disagree with your assertion (and correctly so):
I never thought I would agree with Piers Morgan on much of anything but here he is absolutely correct. Note his use of the T word (tyranny, not T-Party).
Interesting you bring up “liberals”. They’re just as crazy as the tea baggers.
Wow – even Piers. Well he dug himself in a hole with the anti-gun sentiment. The truth (what people knew all along about gov’t) gave him a ladder out of the hole 🙂
With a fine rhetorical flourish, Dan asks, “Some IRS agents go rouge and it’s a government conspiracy?”
I guess I have not been paying attention. This is the first suggestion, as far as I know, that the cosmetic industry was involved.
Fr. Pat: Lipstick on a pig?
I’m sure Jon Stewart is overwhelmed by having you cite him
Probably not, but he sure can be funny. The fact that he’s turned on Obama shows me that he has intellectual honesty as well.
As much as I listen to Stewart for comic relief, there is definitely serious news in what he reports; and I can say without a doubt he is the most objective reporting source on television right now. For what it’s worth …
Orthodoxy Basics by Metropolitan Jonah
Thank you for posting this. The more I watch these Metropolitan Jonah talks, the more I believe that his leadership is exactly what Orthodoxy in America needs now (and the more frustrated I get at the leadership of the Orthodox Church in America for railroading him out). He gets it. “Secularism is the greatest challenge to our faith within our own culture. The greatest challenge to our faith outside of our own culture is Islam” (at approximately 42 mins in the video).
I suppose that he may have been too “intense” for what those in the OCA leadership wanted in a Metropolitan. But he gets it, he seems to understand the realities of what Orthodox Christians in America face, and what faces our church in the future, and he seems willing to address those issues head-on.
Thank you again for posting these talks for those of us who don’t live in Washington, D.C., and who are not able to attend.
Christ is risen!
“The constitution does not require the government to exempt churches from federal income taxation or from filing tax and information returns….. Currently, an estimated 1.8 million churches are exempted from income tax—as they have been since America created its modern income tax system in 1894.” – from The Economist, Jan. 27, 2011.
The reason, historically, that churches have been tax-exempt is because it has long been believed that man involved in churches creates a better American society. When an entity is taxed, it is discouraged. When it is not taxed, it is implicity encouraged. Thus, the long history of not taxing churches encourages church growth and people’s involvement in churches and in church activities. It sends the message that churches and man’s involvement in churches is good for America.
This latest overstep of the IRS to target Tea Party and church groups (just this weekend, it was confirmed that many church groups were targeted) for extra scrutiny confirms what many of us have believed all along: that government and those in the high echelons of government office *no longer believe* or *do not believe* or *never have believed* that church activity is good for man or is good for America. This is something we need to be aware of — that those in our government do not believe that church activities are good for America.
Similarly, our intuition tells us that the Benghazi disaster was covered up so that President Obama could maintain viability for the election — yes, politics came before protecting and saving Americans — we all know it’s true. Even some in the media acknowledge it. But their loyalty to their hero prevents them from saying it.
Yes, America has changed. Let us not be deluded.
Let me expand upon your thesis. Yes, you are correct that the Founding Fathers believed that religious (i.e. Christian) people were necessary for a virtuous polity, that goes without saying. However the exemptions given to religious bodies date all the way back to Constantine, and that’s because Christians were known for their philanthropy. Even during the Catacomb period, congregations gave freely of their substance.
Indeed, the experience of Christianity was never void of the eleemoysery elemets (schools, soup kitchens, hospices, orphanages, etc.) The codification of these exemptions was one reason why there was hardly any widespread poverty in the United States. Besides churches there were fraternities which funded hospitals (think Shriners) and set up healthcare co-ops.
Churches are non-profit organizations, like many non-church bodies. They don’t have profits. You only pay income tax on profits. They don’t have shareholders and don’t pay dividends.
The most important tax exemptions for churches are the exemptions from property taxes at the local level.
Actually, the constitution does exempt religious institutions from taxation. In the case of McCullock v. Maryland in 1819 Chief Justice John Marhsall ruled that “the power to tax is the power to destroy..” The first amendment guarantees the “free exercise” of religion. If the government takes upon itself the power to destroy religious institutions, that is a violation of this principle of the constitution.
For those of you who insist on using the term “tea-baggers” for members of the Tea Party (as President Obama and members of his Party have repeatedly done over the past several years), please remember that it is an extremely vulgar sexual term. Any high school or college student can tell you precisely what it means, or, you can simply “google” it on urbandictionary.com . Personally, I find the constant usage of this term and others like it on the part of the Progressive Left when describing the Conservative Right (Tea Party, etc.) conveys not only a profound sense of contempt, but a real hatred. Ilyich (Lenin) used language like that whenever he described his opponents in his speeches and correspondences. He was never content to simply deal with them as opponents. He had to use adjectives and nouns that made it clear how contemptible and subhuman they were and therefore, how acceptable it was to use any means available to undermine and destroy them.
The Right is by no means innocent of this kind of behavior, either. There are plenty of kooks on the airwaves who use shameful language when describing those they don’t like. But, it seems that it is far less common on the part of the Conservative political leadership (i.e. those who represent us). At any rate, if someone chooses to use the term he or she ought to be clear about the meaning and own up to it.
Thank you for pointing that out Ivan. One of the reasons I migrated over to the Right years ago was because of the extremely hateful language that Dem politicians, Liberal thinkers, and show-business personalities regularly used to describe conservatives. Not that the Right is exempt from criticism but the Left uses such language 10x more.
Considering you personally used the term “the slut vote” in an essay, and on another occasion posted on your front page an image macro propagating a vile piece of slander accusing a sitting Senator of having sex with underage prostitutes, I suggest any protesting you may have of “the Left” in such matters is coming from a place of profound personal moral bankruptcy. It’s going to take you a while to get that plank out, better start now.
Just out of curiosity, how would you label women who are not in monogamously-committed relationships, and think nothing of going out to bars for a fling with someone who is willing to buy them a drink, only to move on to someone else who is even more flashier due to having a nice car and wads of green paper?
And while we’re being equal opportunists, how would you label guys who are commitment-phobic, string along unsuspecting women just long enough sleep over for a night or two, and then proceed to not answer desperate phone calls, only to move on to the next woman who is foolish enough to believe all his promises?
And, how many politicians think getting a vote from them is worth pursuing?
You sound amusingly like a self-righteously offended character from the New Testament at the moment. Perhaps as a thought exercise you should re-read your comment as if you had not presented it to me, a total internet stranger, but to Jesus Christ or one of the saints of your Church and contemplate the answer you’d get.
The Mark Sanford jokes write themselves.
Good point. When all is said and done however the Left uses more vulgarity and hatred than the Right does by about 98:2. Just google the words “Sarah Palin” and see how her name has been destroyed for all time. We Conservatives couldn’t catch up even if we wanted to.
Google search: “Hilary Clinton (extremely vulgar obscenity)”: About 319,000 results
Google search: “Sarah Palin (extremely vulgar obscenity)”: About 682,000 results
So, 98:2 is a bit of an exaggeration. Of course, Hilary does run in 2016 those ratios will undoubtedly change.
OK, lemme get this straight, even with Google alone Palin-hatred eclipses Hillary-hatred by 2:1. Now add up all the other conservatives and compare them to liberals and see if my ratio wasn’t more correct. Two to one is 66% to 33%. And how many times was Hillary called a C—?
You presented a proposition that 98% of vulgar hateful political speech comes from “the Left”, leaving 2% to “the Right”. If those proportions were in fact correct, one could make a case that such behavior was an endemic problem on one “side” only, with the other side having just a few “bad apples”.
The magic of the internet is that we have instantaneous access to the vast sewer of partisan political discourse that quickly puts paid to that notion. Given the depth of the swamp, attempting to divide into the sides of light and darkness by metrics like a 2:1 ratio is a bit ludicrous. It’s like you are making an argument that because 80,000 died at Nagasaki and 160,000 died at Hiroshima so the crew of the Bockstar are “bad” while the crew of the Enola Gay are “good”. And you are making this argument when you yourself flew a bombing run over Dresden.
In this thread, the current running ratio seems to be…1:1. At the moment, in one corner, we have ‘Dan’ speaking of “teabaggers”, in the other corner we have ‘one’ making a sweeping generalization that a lot of Obama supporters are “brainwashed, jackbooted intellectual fascists”.
Nate, you have no idea. The Conservatives have been hated vituperatively since Goldwater 64. I know, and tens of millions of other Conservatives know. That’s why we’ve largely abandoned popular media and taken over talk radio and the blogosphere.
Conservatives are the bigger victims!
NO! Liberals are the bigger victims!
Really?
Boohoo.
Palin, Clinton, Obama, McCain, Bush, Biden, etc, etc, and all politicians are lying liars. I have more trust for a random homeless person than I do for ALMOST any politician. Congressman Ron Paul is the exception. I don’t agree with all of his views and ideas, but I do not doubt his honesty, integrity or sincerity.
The fact is that as vulgar as modern politics is, it is more civilized than at many times in the past. Washington remains our only clean President. The real problem is that we have become ideological .
Leftists are extremely vulgar and not to be confused with liberals—let’s identify them correctly. A genuine liberal, of which there are precious few these days, believes in freedom of speech and diversity of opinion. Unfortunately, a lot of misguided Obama supporters assume they are liberals when they are, in fact, brainwashed, jackbooted intellectual fascists—their opponents are not merely wrong, they are evil.
Why guys like Pere Lachaise and Dan frequent a blog for Christians, when they are, in fact, an unwitting Marxists, eludes me.
A worthy point to be made now and then, though it is no longer much understood, alas.
There’s much to be said for postwar “liberalism”, defined as, in my shorthand: Isaiah Berlin, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Jack Kennedy.
Of course, nobody knows what you’re talking about anymore if those names are brought up (not counting the last one), so, willy-nilly, you practically have to be “conservative” these days, whatever exactly that might be!
We need a few more of those “liberals” who don’t have a “progressive” bone in their bodies…..
It’s always nice to read comments from someone who realizes that history did not begin on the day of his birth.
Right you are Tim R. Mortiss. Liberalism lost after the McGovern loss to Nixon. McGovern lost the election but won the Democratic Party. Reagan won many Democrats over but this has been a mixed blessing for the Republican party since some of them were neo-cons who retained Progressive-style militarism (Arab Spring and all that) in their foreign policy.
Post war liberal ideals are preserved today in a lot of paleo-con thinking — sanctity of life, respect for family, subsidiarity, critique of Democratic/Republican crony capitalism (regulated free markets) and so forth. I don’t see it much elsewhere although Tea Party populism might bring some of this back. (The Obama administration is right to be afraid of this movement but establishment Republicans should fear it too.)
Still, as interesting as the politics are, political readings are a lagging indicator. Politics follows culture and the corruption within our political institutions indicates that a deeper cultural rot drives it.
Thank you for pointing that out Ivan. I never knew what a “Tea Bagger” was until last year. Disgusting.
All well, arguements over whose better, tweedledumb or tweedledumber. I will mention a wieghter matter of the Royal Law. The Only Holy One, never wants submissiviness, He wants a freewilled offering of obedience in Love. Nor do any of His authentic servant ever seek or demand this of thier flock.Know the Truth and it shall set you free, especially from the domineering in their own arbitaryness who love the high seats, so they can feel important and feed thier egos.Stand in the persuit of virtue, manly, this is true class, and leads to a genuine nobliity of spirit.Being genuinely noble in heart is not self exaultantion, as the more noble the spirit, the more it himbles the heart to the Only Holy One, and the Lord Jesus Christ, A noble spirit honors the Lord Jesus Christ and this honor is hearthfelt.
Only sodomites, and gommorhites demand submissiveness from others.
http://zoeforlifeonline.org/
WONDERFUL!
What else can one say? Oh, yeah.
Pray for them and offer them some financial support.
It’s always good to learn of such projects blessed by the Church yet not bogged down in the messes that can be created through chancery administrations.
Tornados struck hard in Oklahoma. People died, homes and entire communities destroyed.
Lord have mercy!
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/president-obama%E2%80%99s-use-of-teabagger-term-provokes-media-debate/
He is a comedian. It is hilarious. Don’t you get it. Easy does it. It. This too shall pass.
Taxation is theft.
Taxation in and of itself is not theft. It is only theft if it ceases to be transparent and necessary for legitimate government function