May 13, 2013
Death panels! I mean, Demon Pass! I mean, Benghazi! I mean, IRS! Yeah, we probably shouldn't feed this, but there's so many tangential issues tied up in how we treat charges of politicization of federal agencies, we just had to take a look. Greg Dworkin reminded us all too briefly that there are other things happening in the world, specifically the decision of what to do in Newtown, CT with the now-vacant Sandy Hook Elementary School building. But local decisions, like national ones, are political by nature, and the dynamics are surprisingly familiar. For the most part, the rest of the show was given over to the weekend's IRS blow-up. We recall the Republicans' own effort to "defund the left" through the mid-90s-era Istoook amendment, targeting federal grantees involved in what they felt was "improper" political activities, as well as Newt Gingrich's efforts to shoehorn his own political activity into a tax-exempt context. And the Bush-era audits of the NAACP, Greenpeace and others. We discussed Ezra Klein's take, and were reminded by it of the Bush administration's politicization of the US Attorneys and the wider DOJ (including the voting rights section, which created its own political targeting problems). And Alex Seitz-Wald's compilation of the many, many things Republicans have used of late to suggest impeachment, paired with Michael Tomasky's look at the subject. Finally, we read Daily Kos' own Jon Perr on "Benghazi and the Republican scandal management playbook."