Issa's Job

When Boehner appointed a congenital liar and crook like Darrell Issa, a common street thug who robbed, cheated and burned his way into the ranks of multimillionaires, to head the House Oversight Committee, he knew exactly what he was doing. Issa's job was to drum up witch hunts and help discredit government and discredit Obama. He's been busy. Although today he was a different kind of busy-- screeching his outrage up and down the corridors of Twitter:

Issa's job is to blow up everything that's ptoblematic inside "the government," magnify it, make it look malevolent and then tie it to President Obama. His IRS mess is starting to unravel... and that's the one the Republicans have been counting on.

A “conservative Republican” manager of Cincinnati-based IRS screeners told congressional investigators there was no evidence the White House was involved in the agency’s targeting of conservative groups, according to the Democratic leader of a committee probing the scandal.

This refutes claims by some Republicans that the groups were targeted at the direction of political operatives working to get President Barack Obama re-elected, said Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Maryland, on CNN's State of the Union on Sunday.

“He is a conservative Republican working for the IRS. I think this interview and these statements go a long way to showing that the White House was not involved in this,” he said.

Further, Cummings said the interviews conducted by the House Oversight Committee were conclusive enough for the investigation to be considered complete.

“Based upon everything I’ve seen, the case is solved,” he said. “If it were me, I would wrap this case up and move on.”

Rep. Darrell Issa, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, told CNN’s State of the Union last Sunday that interviews with workers in the Cincinnati IRS office indicated the targeting of conservative groups was "a problem that was coordinated in all likelihood right out of Washington headquarters-- and we're getting to proving it."

“My gut tells me that too many people knew this wrongdoing was going on before the election, and at least by some sort of convenient, benign neglect, allowed it to go on through the election,” Issa said. “I’m not making any allegations as to motive, that they set out to do it, but certainly people knew it was happening.”

But in the interview excerpts released by Cummings, the charge of political motivation is refuted by the Cincinnati manager, who described himself to investigators as a “conservative Republican.”

“I do not believe that the screening of these cases had anything to do other than consistency and identifying issues that needed to have further development,” the manager said, according to the document released by the Democratic staff of the Oversight Committee.

The excerpts indicate the manager was later asked whether he had “any reason to believe that anyone in the White House was involved in the decision to screen Tea Party cases.”

The manager replied “I have no reason to believe that.”

Like Issa, Cummings released only portions of the investigators’ interview with the manager, despite CNN’s request for the full transcript. On State of the Union, Cummings said he has repeatedly called for Issa to release the full interview transcripts, and if Issa chooses not to by the end of the week, he would release the full interviews himself.

In the excerpts Cummings did release, the manager tells interviewers that it was his decision to send one particular application in 2010 to the Washington tax-exempt office-- not for political reasons, but rather so a precedent could be set for later cases where screeners suspected a group of conducting political activity.

“In his interview he said over and over again, ‘I want it to be consistent.’ So that's how all of this got started. Period,” Cummings said.

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Tobacco Industry Lobbyists And P.R. Hacks Reinvented The Tea Party-- All They Needed Were Some Angry, Lo-Info Kooks Willing To Wear "Attention-Drawing Accouterments"

Howie with a crackpot happily wearing attention-drawing accouterments, Pasadena, 2009 

Many Republicans will tell you former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) invented the TEA Party-- Taxed Enough Already-- to help popularize the Republican scheme to eliminate progressive taxation, which they feel puts too much burden on the wealthy-- and replace it with a flat tax that would force the burden down the income scale. But, as Lee Fang points out in his new book, The Machine-- A Field Guide To The Resurgent Right, that's not exactly what happened. The tobacco industry's expensive p.r. firms and lobbyists came up with the idea, fumbled it and watched Armey grab the ball and run with it. It was never grassroots at any time, though-- and always strictly astroturf.

[T]he roots of the modern antigovernment, antitax Tea Party can be traced to carefully formulated plans concocted by the tobacco industry. In the late eighties and throughout the nineties, the tobacco industry faced an assault from all sides. Legislators, litigators, and ballot initiatives alike sought to prohibit tobacco advertising to children, ban indoor smoking, tax tobacco products, place warning labels on tobacco products, and fine the industry for intentionally misleading consumers about the health effects of its products. The tobacco industry’s efforts to win the battle of public opinion by funding fake citizens’ groups sympathetic to the tobacco industry, such as “smokers’ rights” leagues, are well documented. It has also been reported that the industry made huge investments in conservative think tanks and bought off academics to produce junk studies casting doubt on the health effects of smoking. A less well-known tactic, however, was the attempt to create a “Tea Party” movement against government as a shield to protect the tobacco industry. Tobacco lobbyists, needing to win over public opinion-- and perhaps inspired by antitax political operatives like Norquist, who was on the tobacco industry payroll-- thought they could instigate a backlash against government regulation and taxes, and in doing so, stop government and consumer intrusion into the tobacco industry’s business.

Memos from the American Tobacco Company, Philip Morris, and R.J. Reynolds detail a broad array of strategies to engineer an antigovernment backlash, using a “Boston Tea Party” theme. A campaign advertisement from tobacco giant Philip Morris sought to use former Republican Senator Howard Baker to compare curbs on tobacco products to infringements on freedom tantamount to the British repression that led to the Tea Parties. A document, dated 1989 and archived at the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library at the university of California, San Francisco, outlined an advertisement with the following script: “British policies of minority rule, increased government intervention, unfair taxation... Ironically, those same issues face us again today. Excise taxes, advertising restrictions, franchise legislation, price supports, and smoking bans make it necessary to act to protect our rights as citizens of the united States.” After a movie clip of colonists casting tea into the harbor, the advertisement proposal indicated that Senator Baker was supposed to say, “The Boston Tea Party was one of the sparks that ignited the Revolution.” A call to resist government regulation of tobacco closed the video.

One attempt to create a national Tea Party phenomenon was defused when O’Dwyer’s Washington Report, a trade publication for the public relations industry, exposed the plan. O’Dwyer’s revealed a proposal from a tobacco industry group, Coalition Against Regressive Taxation (CART), to contract the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller to create a citizens’ protest against a proposal to eliminate deductions on excise taxes on products such as tobacco. Burson-Marsteller said it would create a “Boston Tea Party theme” that included a “guerrilla campaign after Labor Day” aimed at the 1992 presidential candidates. Burson-Marsteller's agents would hand out signs while wearing “attention-drawing accouterments” to create political buzz for the cause. One of the fake citizens’ groups suggested in this campaign was Citizens for a Sound Economy, a corporate front group that would later play a dominant role in the anti-Obama Tea Parties (subsequent documents from the late nineties, naming the tobacco industry’s “3rd party allies,” showed that Philip Morris had budgeted up to $2 million a year for Citizens for a Sound Economy).

The exposure of the CART document killed the Tea Party idea in 1992, but Tea Party themes from tobacco lobbyists continued to emerge in later years. When President Clinton proposed taxing cigarettes to fund his health reform plan, the tobacco industry needed citizen outrage. In June of 1994, the New York Times reported that “about 3,000 tobacco farmers mounted what was billed as a modern-day ‘Boston Tea Party’ today, cheering as bales of tobacco were tossed into the Kentucky River to protest proposals to increase taxes on tobacco products to help finance health care.” The Times reporter, as well as dozens of other media outlets which carried the story, did not realize that the event was orchestrated by political operatives working for big tobacco. In an October 5, 1995, memo to Philip Morris, the PR firm Jack Guthrie and Associates of the Worldcom Group took credit for the event. The lobbyists at Jack Guthrie and Associates saw the Kentucky River protest as just a start. The memo outlined that a broad antigovernment Tea Party movement could be orchestrated as a political maneuver to kill proposed Food and Drug Administration regulations on tobacco products as well:

It is conceivable that tens of thousands of people from the six states-- representing hundreds of industries and interests-- could carry a powerful message to the President, Congress and the FDA. JGA (Jack Guthrie and Associates) will explore possible “themes” that could be associated with such rallies. (In June 1994, for example, JGA organized a reenactment of the Boston Tea Party, where 6,000 farmers converged at the Kentucky state capitol to hurl stalks of tobacco into the Kentucky River-- in protest to President Clinton’s proposed tax increases on cigarettes to pay for health care reform. The event, organized on behalf of the Council for Burley Tobacco, was covered by nearly every national print and broadcast outlet.)

Ultimately, the anti-FDA Tea Party never took place. But the David vs. Goliath ethos of the Tea Party clearly took hold within the executive suites of the tobacco industry. “The government’s plan to influence personal behavior through higher taxes is reminiscent of colonial times,” wrote Philip Morris CEO Michael Miles in a letter to shareholders. He added, “back then” the people responded with the “Boston Tea Party.”

And then along came Armey and his big money sugar daddies, the Koch brothers, with their plans to slash government functions-- like privatizing Social Security and e and shift more of the tax burden onto the middle class. How ironic that by trying to cheat the IRS by setting up phony social welfare organizations and triggering a badly handled series of investigations, the Establishment has played right into their hands.

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Tea Party Crackpots Shouldn't Be Investigated?

I'm not a tax accountable and I'm not an election attorney. But I do run a PAC and we have an accountant and an attorney on retainer to keep us from running afoul of the FEC's and IRS' myriad arcane rules and regulations. A few years ago, a notorious GOP shill complained that we were coordinating our campaign efforts with Nancy Pelosi. We sent in so much paperwork showing that we were working at cross-purposes to Pelosi by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars against Blue Dog Democrats she was helping to defend that the "case" was immediately thrown out. This was while Bush was president but the FEC staffer told me that the complaint came from someone does that all the time.

There was also an instance of an FEC staffer who is a conservative and who was constantly harassing Blue America. We knew she wasn't acting on Bush's orders and that she was just a nasty zealot. But she was just a pest and because of her we had to retain our attorney.

I don't want to get into this whole Republican attempt to smear Obama with this IRS mess. They're on a roll, appealing to their base. But I'm not so certain that these Tea Party groups looking for tax exempt status shouldn't be thoroughly investigated. I'm in the middle of reading investigative journalist Lee Fang's stupendous new book, The Machine: A Field Guide To The Resurgent Right. These two pages make the case very clearly who these people absolutely should be investigated.

Colin Hanna, the silver-haired chairman of the Republican front group Let Freedom Ring, approached the podium and announced that his group had covertly provided training and resources to the Tea Party Patriots throughout the election. Young men working for Hanna handed out pamphlets to the reporters in the room detailing their efforts, which included providing the Tea Party Patriots with a small army of election lawyers, training for over 1,748 Tea Party Patriot “poll watchers,” and state-of-the-art technology from the Republican consulting firm Edge Targeting. Hanna’s group paid for the Tea Party Patriots’ automated phone calls, which reached over 1.6 million households focusing on twenty-three swing congressional districts. Hanna said his Let Freedom Ring group, which had aired a series of million-dollar ads supporting establishment Republican John McCain in 2008, was itself part of the Tea Party revolution.

Let Freedom Ring was not the only group propping up the Tea Party Patriots. Staffers from FreedomWorks, the front group led by Dick Armey, had managed the Tea Party Patriots’ listserv. Corporate front groups like Americans for Prosperity and the Heartland Institute provided many of the talking points and speakers used by the Tea Party Patriots Free training seminars and online tutorials for grassroots organizing were provided to the Tea Party and its affiliates.

Patriots by the Leadership Institute, which is funded by the billionaire Koch family as well as by other corporate interests, including Amway. Even the Tea Party Patriots’ website was sponsored by a who’s who of Republican front groups, including Regular Folks United, FreedomWorks, and Americans for Tax Reform. A mysterious donor granted Tea Party Patriots an additional $1 million for increased electionseason outreach.

Shortly before the election, a memo from the Tea Party Patriots leaked. The Tea Party Patriots had attended a meeting of the Council for National Policy, a secretive group of conservative donors, and presented a wish list with dollar amounts attached. The Tea Party Patriots asked the donors to underwrite their campaign efforts. To fund the Tea Party Patriots’ “traditional” get-out-the-vote walk and phone lists, they asked for $150,000, as well as $250,000 for “GPSenabled smart-phone walk lists and technology,” $125,000 for help setting up house parties, and finally $250,000 for “collateral material.” It didn’t end there. For efforts after the election, the memo demanded $110,000 for help protesting possible legislation during the lame-duck session of Congress, $175,000 for a summit to entertain newly elected Tea Party politicians, $300,000 for “Younger Generation Outreach,” at least $500,000 for a renewed advertising budget, $200,000 for help organizing tax-day Tea Parties in 2011, and a litany of other high-priced requests.

Aside from their somewhat casual attire, Mark Meckler, Jenny Beth Martin, and the Tea Party Patriots leadership were indistinguishable from any ordinary Republican consultants with high-priced demands and orthodox supplysider beliefs. With donors from the Reagan-era Council for National Policy and allies like Koch Industries and Let Freedom Ring, the Tea Party Patriots were like any other Republican group. However, to the media and to millions of Americans, they were still rag tag protesters fighting against the grain of the establishment.

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