Wednesday, May 15, 2013

IRS Was Right To Target Phony Right-Wing Tax Evaders

Ceaselessly looking for ways to topple the Black Muslim, socialist, Kenyan President, conservatives have crosses blazing and rhetoric on fire like it's a KKK meeting. They think they have finally latched onto some meaty Obama scandals, and hatemongers like Darryl Issa, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and the rest of the Klan are whipping the base into a frenzy. And what's at the center of all the hoohah? An attack of a middle East consulate (54 of which occurred under W without so much as a whimper from the right), the Justice Department tapping phones in the name of national security (a daily occurrrence under Cheney), and some zealous IRS agents doing the job they were paid to do. The Benghazi incident is much ado about nothing. The Republicans are acting like Obama himself, M-16 in hand, attacked our embassy and killed a few of our foreign delegation. The phone taps were apparently unlawful, but right-wingers were mute when Dick Cheney regularly used his AT&T cronies to spy on left-wingers' phone calls during the Bush administration. And W used the IRS against his political enemies. A liberal southern California church which took a stand against the Iraq War was hounded for years by W's IRS. That IRS church was targeted for unwarranted auditing and was threatened with the loss of its tax-exempt status. A year later the NAACP was attacked in the same way after the civil rights organization criticized various Bush administration policies. These were legitimate tax-exempt organizations, unlike the phony Tea Party groups who seek only to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. Here's how these right-wing groups work: One fringe hillbilly says to another fringe hillbilly, "Hey, let's me and you git us a name and call ourself sumpin' like 'Patriots for Freedom.' Thattaway, we can ask for donations and we ain't a-gonna have to pay no taxes on that there money. We'll show that uppity Obama." Hundreds of these groups have cropped up in recent years, and they need to be scrutinized. They are nothing but illegal tax avoidance schemes, and they should be policed by the IRS. Which is exactly what the IRS was doing, until some Tea Party nut came along and cried foul. Now these tax frauds will be immune from prosecution, and rednecks everywhere will be forming their own tax-exempt "Fascists for Freedom" groups.

Friday, May 10, 2013

My Conversation With JFK Coincidence Theorist

It is sometimes a burdensome and wearying task to educate the uninformed about the truth of the Kennedy assassination, but I feel compelled to do it whenever I bump into a coincidence theorist (i.e., one who believes Oswald acted alone, or a "lone nutter"). I call them coincidence theorists because they must overlook a mountain of suspicious coincidences to believe no conspiracy was involved in JFK's murder. For instance, the accused murderer had a direct link to one of the men charged with investigating the murder. Lee Harvey Oswald and his family lived with Ruth Paine in Dallas at the time of the assassination. Ruth Paine's mother was best friends with Mary Bancroft, Allen Dulles's mistress. You know, the same Allen Dulles who was on the Warren Commission. Ruth Paine's statements to authorities helped frame Oswald for the murder. Dulles never disclosed his relationship to Paine. Just a little suspicious, don't you think? Anyway, the other day a stranger sitting next to me is reading a copy of Vincent Bugliosi's book "Reclaiming History." I casually remarked, "You don't believe those lies, do you?" The stranger looked at me like, "Who are you?" I told him I was an author currently working on a book about the assassination called "The President's Mortician." His eyes narrowed in disbelief. He fumbled for words, and finally said, "Why Mortician?" I replied, "Because a mortician alterd JFK's wounds as the the President's corpse was being transported between Dallas Parkland Hospital and Bethesda Naval Hospital on Novemeber 22, 1963." The stranger exclaimed, "Why would anyone do that?" "Simple," I said. "To make it appear as if he had been shot from the back and not the front. Thus the autopsy report could be used to frame Oswald." The stranger gathered his thoughts and said, "But that would mean that the autopsy had to contradict what the Dallas doctors said. How do you know which group of doctors was right?" I responded, "Whom should we believe? The doctors who were experts in gunshot wounds and who saw JFK immediately after he was shot, or the autopsy doctors who had never performed an autopsy before and who were not experts in gunshot pathology and who saw JFK six hours after he was shot?" The stranger put down the book and thought about that one for a while.