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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: greatplains_guy who wrote (66940)	10/9/2013 3:06:44 PM
From: Peter Dierks	1 Recommendation Recommended By greatplains_guy Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

White House, IRS exchanged confidential taxpayer info Patrick Howley 1:17 PM 10/09/2013 Top Internal Revenue Service Obamacare official Sarah Hall Ingram discussed confidential taxpayer information with senior Obama White House officials, according to 2012 emails obtained by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and provided to The Daily Caller. Lois Lerner, then head of the IRS Tax Exempt Organizations division, also received an email alongside White House officials that contained confidential information. Ingram attempted to counsel the White House on a lawsuit from religious organizations opposing Obamacare’s contraception mandate. Email exchanges involving Ingram and White House officials — including White House health policy advisor Ellen Montz and deputy assistant to the president for health policy Jeanne Lambrew — contained confidential taxpayer information, according to Oversight. The emails provided to Oversight investigators by the IRS had numerous redactions with the signifier “6103.” Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code forbids a federal employee from “disclos[ing] any return or return information obtained by him in any manner in connection with his service as such an officer or an employee.” Federal employees who illegally disclose confidential taxpayer information could face five years in prison. “Thanks, David. Thanks for the information on [6103],” White House official Lambrew wrote to IRS official David Fish in a July 20, 2012 exchange. “I am still hoping to understand whether the 50 percent rule is moot if the organization does not offer goods and services for sale to the general public. Do we assume that organizations like [6103] do offer goods and services for sale?” Another email from Montz to Ingram and others refers to the “[6103] memo” and the “[6103] letter” while discussing organizations that are not required to file 990's. Ingram appeared before Rep. Darrell Issa’s House Oversight Committee Wednesday and claimed she could not recall a document that contained confidential taxpayer information. “Well one of the areas of interest is there’s a significant redaction that quotes the statute 6103. Do you know who is underneath that blackout?” Issa asked Ingram. “I don’t recall the document so I can’t help you with what’s underneath that redaction,” Ingram said. “Her response has not put concerns to rest,” Oversight staffer Frederick Hill said. ”This caught people’s eye.” Issa has requested unredacted copies of the emails, citing a prohibition from misusing Section 6103 “for the purpose of concealing information from a congressional inquiry.” Ingram headed the scandal-ridden IRS office responsible for overseeing tax-exempt nonprofit groups before leaving to head the agency’s office in charge of Obamacare implementation. An IRS voice mail message declined to comment on any media inquiries during the government shutdown, citing law. Follow Patrick on Twitter dailycaller.com

To: greatplains_guy who wrote (66940)	1/17/2014 3:08:55 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Respond to of 71588

Solving the Net Neutrality Problem Is Actually Very, Very Simple By Brendan Greeley January 17, 2014 businessweek.com The Federal Communications Commission is sitting on a mess. This week the U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C. decided in Verizon v. the FCC (PDF) that the commission didn’t have the authority to impose its open internet order on Verizon or anyone else. There is a simple fix for this mess. It does not require any new laws from Congress. It already has the support of the Supreme Court. If the FCC actually wants to ensure net neutrality, it will have do something that every regulator in every other developed country did a long time ago. (It will also turn Verizon litigiously apoplectic.) It has to unmake the mistake it made in 2002, when it failed to classify cable internet providers as telecommunications services. Doing so will solve everything. The last major piece of internet law, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, gave the FCC the authority to regulate internet service providers as either telecommunications services, which transmit data, or information services, which process data. Early in the 2000s, the cable industry argued that it not only transmitted internet data to customers, it also provided email addresses and web pages—it processed data as well. Since cable companies were therefore both telecommunication and information services, the industry argued, it could only possibly be an information service. The FCC bought this argument. In 2002, it decided that since cable was both, it could only be one. The FCC still treats broadband internet access as an information service. No one has ever done a better job of pointing out the absurdity of this decision than Antonin Scalia, who in a dissent in a Supreme Court case in 2005 pointed out that the cable industry was like a pet shop that sold a leash with every puppy, then decided that it was not in the puppy business, but the leash business. The distinction matters because under the Telecommunications Act, an information service is automatically regulated as a common carrier—it cannot discriminate among the kinds of traffic that pass through it. In its statement after the decision, Verizon argued that the “the court found that the FCC could not impose last century’s common carriage requirements on the Internet.” Telecoms like to use that phrase, “last century’s common carriage requirements,” so as to imply that the concept of common carriage is horribly outdated. But common carriage is not a last-century concept. It’s a legal necessity that goes back to Rome. Ferrymen in medieval England could not deny any man passage; the crossing was too vital to commerce. Internet service providers have always been allergic to this possibility, because it inevitably means some kind of regulation will curb their market power. Sometimes this regulation is more drastic. The telecoms regulator in the U.K. broke up British Telecom, the old monopoly, into two separate companies: a common carrier that maintained the backbone of actual wires as a heavily regulated utility, and a customer-facing internet service provider that competed with other ISPs on that same backbone. France took a similar step. Because of this, broadly in the developed world there are more ISPs competing for each customer, which has driven prices down and speeds up. It has also turned net neutrality into a non-issue everywhere else. Net neutrality is far better for consumers, and so in truly competitive markets for internet access, no company dares annoy its customers by attempting to breach it. Nothing this dramatic will ever happen in America. (It should, but it never will. We’ll leave that for another day.) There are two traditional monopolies in America, the cable provider and the phone carrier. Since they compete with each other (inadequately), all the FCC has ever even considered doing, should it decide that Verizon is a common carrier, is enforcing net neutrality. Unlike the rest of the developed world, America’s two-player market lacks the competition to have consumers enforce net neutrality on their own. This is all fixable. The court did not say that the FCC could not enforce net neutrality. It said only that if the commission wanted to enforce it—a measure the court broadly agreed with—it would need to decide, as every regulator in every other developed country has decided, that a company that owns the wires is a common-carrier telecommunications service. In its 2005 decision, the Supreme Court already confirmed that the FCC is within its rights to make this decision. The FCC just has to do it. The carriers will sue again. Let them. They will lose. And then we can all move on.

To: greatplains_guy who wrote (66940)	1/20/2014 1:14:19 AM
From: greatplains_guy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

IRS Targeting and 2014 Democrats are working hard to make sure conservative groups are silenced in the 2014 midterms. By Kimberley Strassel January 17, 2014 President Obama and Democrats have been at great pains to insist they knew nothing about IRS targeting of conservative 501(c)(4) nonprofits before the 2012 election. They've been at even greater pains this week to ensure that the same conservative groups are silenced in the 2014 midterms. That's the big, dirty secret of the omnibus negotiations. As one of the only bills destined to pass this year, the omnibus was—behind the scenes—a flurry of horse trading. One of the biggest fights was over GOP efforts to include language to stop the IRS from instituting a new round of 501(c)(4) targeting. The White House is so counting on the tax agency to muzzle its political opponents that it willingly sacrificed any manner of its own priorities to keep the muzzle in place. And now back to our previously scheduled outrage over the Chris Christie administration's abuse of traffic cones on the George Washington Bridge. The fight was sparked by a new rule that the Treasury Department and the IRS introduced during the hush of Thanksgiving recess, ostensibly to "improve" the law governing nonprofits. What the rule in fact does is recategorize as "political" all manner of educational activities that 501(c)(4) social-welfare organizations currently engage in. It's IRS targeting all over again, only this time by administration design and with the raw political goal—as House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R., Mich.) notes—of putting "tea party groups out of business." Congressional sources tell me that House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers (R., Ky.) had two priorities in the omnibus negotiations. One was getting in protection for groups that morally oppose ObamaCare's contraception-coverage requirement. The other was language that would put a hold on the IRS rule. The White House and Senate Democrats had their own wish list, including an increase in funding for the International Monetary Fund, the president's prekindergarten program and more ObamaCare dollars. Yet my sources say that throughout the negotiations Democrats went all in on keeping the IRS rule, even though it meant losing their own priorities. In the final hours before the omnibus was introduced Monday night, the administration made a last push for IMF money. Asked to negotiate that demand in the context of new IRS language, it refused. That's a lot to sacrifice for a rule that the administration has barely noted in public, and that then-acting IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel claimed last fall when it was introduced is simply about providing "clarity" to nonprofits. It only makes sense in a purely political context. The president's approval ratings are in the toilet, the economy is in idle, the ObamaCare debate rages on, and the White House has a Senate majority to preserve. With one little IRS rule it can shut up hundreds of groups that pose a direct threat by restricting their ability to speak freely in an election season about spending or ObamaCare or jobs. And it gets away with it by positioning this new targeting as a fix for the first round. This week's Democratic rally-round further highlights the intensely political nature of their IRS rule. It was quietly dropped in the runup to the holiday season, to minimize the likelihood of an organized protest during its comment period. That 90-day comment period meantime ends on Feb. 27, positioning the administration to shut down conservative groups early in this election cycle. Mr. Camp's committee has meanwhile noted that Treasury appears to have reverse-engineered the carefully tailored rule—combing through the list of previously targeted tea party groups, compiling a list of their main activities and then restricting those functions. And an IRS rule that purports to—as Mr. Werfel explained—"improve our work in the tax-exempt area" completely ignores the biggest of political players in the tax-exempt area: unions. The guidance is directed only at 501(c)(4) social-welfare groups—the tax category that has of late been flooded by conservative groups. Mr. Obama's union foot soldiers—which file under 501(c)(5)—can continue playing in politics. Treasury is also going to great lengths to keep secret the process behind its rule. Cleta Mitchell, an attorney who represents targeted tea party groups, in early December filed a Freedom of Information Act request with Treasury and the IRS, demanding documents or correspondence with the White House or outside groups in the formulation of this rule. By law, the government has 30 days to respond. Treasury sent a letter to Ms. Mitchell this week saying it wouldn't have her documents until April—after the rule's comment period closes. It added that if she didn't like it, she can "file suit." The IRS has yet to respond. Mr. Camp has now authored stand-alone legislation to rein in the IRS, though the chance of Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) allowing a Senate vote is approximately equal to that of the press corps paying attention to this IRS rule. So that puts a spotlight on newly sworn-in IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, who vowed during his confirmation hearing to restore public trust in the agency, and now must decide whether to aid in a new and blatantly political abuse of IRS powers. The White House is using the agency to win an election this fall. They gave the proof this week. Write to kim@wsj.com. online.wsj.com