Republican IRS agent says he instigated ‘Tea Party’ inquiries

abaldwin360:

WASHINGTON (Reuters, Raw Story) – A U.S. Internal Revenue Service manager, who described himself as a conservative Republican, told congressional investigators that he and a local colleague decided to give conservative groups the extra scrutiny that has prompted weeks of political controversy.

In an official interview transcript released on Sunday by Democratic Representative Elijah Cummings, the manager said he and an underling set aside “Tea Party” and “patriot” groups that had applied for tax-exempt status because the organizations appeared to pose a new precedent that could affect future IRS filings.

Cummings, top Democrat on the House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee conducting the probe, told CNN’s “State of the Union” program that the manager’s comments provided evidence that politics was not behind IRS actions that have fueled a month-long furor in Washington.

“He is a conservative Republican working for the IRS. I think this interview and these statements go a long way toward showing that the White House was not involved in this,” Cummings told CNN’s “State of the Union” program.

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If this turns out to be true, it may confirm a suspicion I’ve had since this whole IRS/Tea Party ordeal broke.

Maybe it wasn’t an organized effort on part of the GOP, but the Tea Party has definately become a thorn in the Republicans’ side, and maybe a few of them (republicans) decided to try and do something about them …

abaldwin360:

It’s like the GOP approves of the actual fucked up shit that is going on with the Obama Administration and would rather make up or trump up shit to try to smear them with.

Why aren’t they raging about this internet tracking and phone records shit the way they were raging about Benghazi?

Bobby Jindal’s School Voucher Funding Ruled Unconstitutional By Louisiana Supreme Court

Louisiana’s Supreme Court issued a 6-1 decision on Tuesday that struck down Gov. Bobby Jindal’s (R) plan to power a private school voucher program with state funds, the AP reports.

With Justice Greg Guidry dissenting, the majority ruled in favor of the Louisiana Association of Educators, the Louisiana Federation of Teachers and the Louisiana School Boards Association. Justice John Weimer wrote “the clear, specific and unambiguous language of the constitution” does not allow the state government to divert state funds earmarked for public schools in the state’s Minimum Foundation Program to pay for private or parochial tuition, according to the Times-Picayne, which added that the court did not consider the program on its merits….

….Jindal has been a vocal critic of the American public education system and teachers unions, claiming they give students no alternatives to failing schools. Critics have [correctly] noted that schools accepting voucher money teach to different standards. In some cases, schools were teaching creationism and the existence of the Loch Ness monster, and in others, offered no services to students with special needs or learning disabilities.

Source

Belief in biblical end-times stifling climate change action in U.S.: study

The United States has failed to take action to mitigate climate change thanks in part to the large number of religious Americans who believe the world has a set expiration date.

Research by David C. Barker of the University of Pittsburgh and David H. Bearce of the University of Colorado uncovered that belief in the biblical end-times was a motivating factor behind resistance to curbing climate change.

“[T]he fact that such an overwhelming percentage of Republican citizens profess a belief in the Second Coming (76 percent in 2006, according to our sample) suggests that governmental attempts to curb greenhouse emissions would encounter stiff resistance even if every Democrat in the country wanted to curb them,” Barker and Bearce wrote in their study, which will be published in the June issue of Political Science Quarterly.

The study, based on data from the 2007 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, uncovered that belief in the “Second Coming” of Jesus reduced the probability of strongly supporting government action on climate change by 12 percent when controlling for a number of demographic and cultural factors. When the effects of party affiliation, political ideology, and media distrust were removed from the analysis, the belief in the “Second Coming” increased this effect by almost 20 percent. (This suggests there is a significant overlap between those three variables and belief in the “Second Coming.”)

“[I]t stands to reason that most nonbelievers would support preserving the Earth for future generations, but that end-times believers would rationally perceive such efforts to be ultimately futile, and hence ill-advised,” Barker and Bearce explained.

That very sentiment has been expressed by federal legislators. Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL) said in 2010 that he opposed action on climate change because “the Earth will end only when God declares it to be over.” He is the chairman of the Subcommittee on Environment and the Economy.

Though the two researchers cautioned their study was not intended to predict future policy outcomes, they said their study suggested it was unlikely the United States would take action on climate change while so many Americans, particularly Republicans, believed in the coming end-times.

“That is, because of institutions such as the Electoral College, the winner-take-all representation mechanism, and the Senate filibuster, as well as the geographic distribution of partisanship to modern partisan polarization, minority interests often successfully block majority preferences,” Barker and Bearce wrote. “Thus, even if the median voter supports policies designed to slow global warming, legislation to effect such change could find itself dead on arrival if the median Republican voter strongly resists public policy environmentalism at least in part because of end-times beliefs.”

(Source: rawstory.com)