Casualties

Today is the 150^th anniversary of the third and last day of the Battle of Gettysburg, the turning point of the Civil War and the long-sought victory that drew Abraham Lincoln back to the battlefield in November to give the best (and the shortest) speech in American history. The battle provided instances of extraordinary valor, notably the defense of Little Round Top by the 20^th Maine Voluntary Infantry Regiment. Out of ammunition, they fixed bayonets, charged the regrouping Confederates and saved their comrades from being overrun. Overall, however, it was three days of horrendous carnage and the bloodiest fighting of the war – 8,000 dead, 27,000 wounded, 11,000 missing or captured – symbolized by Pickett’s charge, one of the most senseless wastes of human life in the history of warfare. As Southern infantrymen walked in lines across three-quarters of a mile of open field, Union guns on Cemetery Ridge annihilated them; almost half never came back. Yet even those figures pale next to the magnitude of loss suffered by the Granite Mountain Hotshots, 19 of whose 20 members were burned to death last Sunday as they fought a huge fire outside Yarnell, Arizona. Young men in the prime of their lives, with young wives and children, girlfriends and parents and extended families, gone in an agonizing moment, while the 20^th, the survivor, will be forever changed. Despite all the current cynicism about human selfishness, we still depend on those who act bravely on our behalf. All deaths are sad, but some just break your heart.

Meat

This is no plea for Aaron Hernandez, the huge former tight end of the New England Patriots football team who has been charged with murdering Odin Lloyd, who dated Hernandez’s girlfriend's sister. The Patriots released Hernandez last week, 90 minutes after his arrest on then-unspecified charges. On Friday the team announced that fans could exchange his team jersey for another “of comparable value.” And that, as far as the Patriots are concerned, is the end of Aaron Hernandez. He had become “a distraction,” and the Patriots have become the league’s most successful franchise because they don’t brook distractions. The team was within its rights to dump Hernandez and had no obligation to offer him public support or mouth the usual pieties about “the presumption of innocence.” He seems an unsavory guy, but that isn’t the issue for the Patriots. To them, he is a piece of meat. Professional sports in America, and particularly football, should not be confused with the games we used to play. Nor should those who play them be confused with role models or heroes, however valuable their jerseys or their contracts. They are fodder for their egotistical owners, corporate profiteers and rabid fans. They are, like their forebears in ancient Rome, entertainment for the American empire’s masses.

In other NFL news, Jim Hudson, a hard-hitting defensive back for the 1969 New York Jets Super Bowl winner, died last week of “Parkinson’s dementia” likely caused by head traumas. He was 70, and his brain has been sent to researchers at Boston University.

The Mommy-and-Daddy State

The philosophical principle called Occam’s razor holds that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. That’s worth noting these days when hyperbole, contorted reasoning and convoluted language have become the coin of our political conversation. Take, for example, the [condensed] response of Heritage Foundation Fellow Ryan Anderson when a Times reporter asked if the Supreme Court’s gay-marriage decision “isn’t the ultimate conservative ruling because it [leaves] people’s lives to themselves:” “The reason the government is in the marriage business isn’t because it cares about the love lives of consenting adults. Government is in the marriage business because there is a certain type of union – the union between a man and a woman – that can produce new life. Government wants to make sure that new life has a mom and a dad; and upholding the institution of marriage is the least coercive way to ensure that. When this doesn’t happen, that is when we’ve seen government grow – the welfare state grows, crime increases, the prison population rises, child poverty increases, social mobility decreases. So, everything you care about, if you care about limited government and the poor, about liberty and social justice, is better served by a healthy marriage culture.”

If I understand this breathtaking – and unproven – assertion, we need government to enforce a particular view of the most intimate parts of our lives so that all the problems that require government solutions will disappear, and the state, as Engels wrote, will “wither away.” Good-bye, Nanny State. Hello, Mommy-and-Daddy State.

The Six-Percent Solution

Yesterday five justices of the Supreme Court enshrined the southern strategy of the Republican Party into the Constitution of the United States. In so doing they vacated the court’s six-decade history as the protector of civil rights and social justice. In 1954, a Republican chief justice, Earl Warren, writing for a unanimous court in Brown v. Board of Education, declared segregated schools unconstitutional, a decision that changed America. Yesterday, another Republican chief justice, John Roberts, writing for a sharply divided court in Shelby County v. Holder, announced that the 1965 Voting Rights Act was no longer needed, at least in its current form. Certainly there have been improvements, and as Roberts noted, Philadelphia, Mississippi, and Selma, Alabama, both murderous places in the 1960s, now have black mayors. But in 2006, Congress, by a combined vote of 488-33, renewed the act until 2031, and recently we have witnessed a series of efforts, ranging from voter-identification laws to gerrymandering, aimed at suppressing minority voters. It’s that history the court majority ignored. Another movement emerged from the civil rights era, one that transformed the GOP from the party that enfranchised black voters to one that received 6% of the black vote in 2012, making it perhaps the most segregated institution in the United States. This is not a coincidence. From Strom Thurmond’s switch to the party in opposition to the Civil Rights Act in 1964 to Nixon’s southern strategy to Reagan’s “welfare queens,” Republicans have consciously sought to divide the country for political gain. The legacy of Lincoln is no more.

Double Oh Oh

“This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.”                   T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

As Edward Snowden reenacts OJ’s 1994 Bronco chase in airplanes, with Sen. Lindsey Graham squawking that “we’ll chase him to the ends of the Earth” and civil libertarians issuing apocalyptic warnings about “1984,” I am simply baffled by this theater of the absurd. The road to Armageddon turns out to be, not tragedy, but farce.

With college graduates suffocating under $1.1 trillion of student debt, a high-school dropout gets a job with a high-powered consulting firm, at a salary (he says) of $200,000, and subsequently hands over the U.S. espionage capability to a British newspaper. For his sins against the world’s largest spy network, our hero is charged with . . . espionage. And so, in search of a haven of transparency, he sets off for China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, where criticizing the government is not for the faint of heart. Carrying four computers of data, the man who condemned the NSA’s invasion of privacy seems bent on sharing its files with every other spy agency in the world. Since they are all engaged in the same activities, they presumably already have the information. Still, this is not the kind of transparency that reassures my sense of privacy. Meanwhile, we wait for the Chinese version of Edward Snowden, whom we will hail as a hero.

When Secretary of State Henry Stimson closed America’s code-breaking agency in 1929, he did so because “Gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail.” Naïve, yes, but how refreshing.

Google and Glenn Beck

As I drove outside our nation’s capital the last two days, I listened to C-Span-radio broadcasts that were at once mind-numbing and fascinating, if that’s possible. The first was a House Intelligence Committee hearing, in which members of both parties expressed support for NSA surveillance activities but fretted over privacy issues. One proposed remedy was to keep the “meta-data” in private hands unless and until the NSA needed specific information, which it would then request from the corporations that had it. Agency chief Keith Alexander said he was open to the idea, subject to “speed in crisis.” In other words, our own officials think it’s wiser to keep the massive amounts of personal information collected on all of us in the hands of Google, Facebook and Amazon.com instead of the government. Equally bizarre was a Tea Party rally on the Capitol steps, in which Glenn Beck, Rand Paul, Sen. Mike Lee and others spoke fervently about the movement to protect our civil rights from the godless totalitarianism of the Obama administration. Beck drew a straight line from the Tea Party to Martin Luther King, Jr., and he didn’t stop there, likening the protesters to Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist ex-slave whose bronze statue had earlier been unveiled on the Capitol steps.

I tried to picture Glenn Beck marching from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, just as I tried to imagine myself relieved that lots of information about me is owned and mined, without my consent, by corporate goliaths. I failed on both counts.

The People’s Parks

What is it about parks? From People’s Park in Berkeley to Uhuru Park in Nairobi to Gezi Park in Istanbul, governments have violently suppressed grassroots opposition to plans to convert public land to private use. At 4:30 a.m. on May 15, 1969, “Bloody Thursday,” California Governor Ronald Reagan’s unannounced decision to send troops to take back “People’s Park”* left one student protester dead, another blind and hundreds more hospitalized. In 1992, Kenyan President Daniel arap-Moi ordered his thugs to beat Wangari Maathai unconscious for protesting the proposed construction of a 60-story office complex in Uhuru Park. (Maathai received the Nobel Peace Prize 12 years later.) Last Saturday night Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan ordered the storming of Gezi Park, where protests against replacing the last significant green space in Istanbul with “an Ottoman-themed shopping mall” had escalated into broad rage against the government.

Three parks, decades and worlds apart, become epicenters of popular protest, which three elected officials brutally crush. Why? Parks are the epitome of the people’s land, open to all, owned by none. They are some of the last refuges from the chaos of modern urban life. And the public insistence on their sanctity threatens the growing determination of corporate and political institutions to sell off what little remains of the commons.

These places of tranquility have become battlegrounds for all who oppose privatizing the public square. Parks are the antithesis of the gated community, and their protection is everyone’s fight.

*The University of California at Berkeley owned the land.

A Different Path

“In a striking repudiation of the ultraconservatives who wield power in Iran,” wrote Thomas Erdbrink of The New York Times, “voters here overwhelmingly elected a mild-mannered [president] who advocates greater personal freedoms and a more conciliatory approach to the world.” We did the same thing in 2008. Yet here we sit, almost five years later, with a massive hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay, an imploding Iraq and exploding Afghanistan, getting ready to enter the Syrian minefield. Syria, we are told, is a humanitarian disaster whose dictator clings to power with atrocities and chemical weapons. Therefore, to level the playing field, we must give the rebels more destructive weaponry. The increasingly collateral damage must be very grateful.

Meanwhile, next door in Iran, a majority of the people, in something called an election, expressed their demand for change. How did a vile theocracy that builds bombs, supports terrorism and rigs votes, let that happen? America’s default reaction is that any expression of democracy in the Middle East is a vote for America’s values. But maybe the Iranians decided they wanted a different, more moderate and less belligerent approach to the world based on their own values – just as we did in 2008. And maybe, instead of arming dissident groups we don’t understand, so they can fight their way to the kind of elections that don’t work in Iraq, we could look at a different way, one that goes back to Gandhi and Havel and Mandela and that just might be emerging in Iran.

Sins of the Fathers

Yesterday Pope Francis stunned the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics by announcing the Church’s support for gay marriage. In his first encyclical, De Coniugium Hominum, the Argentine-born pontiff called gay marriage the eighth (or “lost”) sacrament, which the Church has been looking for since the second century. “I’m just relieved we found it before Dan Brown did,” he told a press conference. “He’d have had a field day.”

Although the pronouncement came on the heels of revelations in La Repubblica and The New York Times about the existence of a powerful “gay lobby” at the Vatican, Francis emphatically denied that the group had pressured him into his new position. “They contributed excellent research,” he said, “but they always presented it in a scholarly manner. Think more ‘library’ (biblioteca) than ‘lobby’ (Via K).”

Asked if the apparent liberalizing of Church doctrine might lead to the ordination of women, Francis replied, “I see no connection. We’ve had gay clergy for centuries, and we have never yet had a woman priest. That should tell you something.”

Speaking on condition of anonymity (which in the Vatican is pronounced “Omertà”), one insider said, “You can take it to our bank – and for a small fee we will launder the money for you – you’ll see a queen sitting on Saint Peter’s throne before you hear a woman preaching from the pulpit.”

Francis affirmed that homosexuality remains a moral disorder and a sin in the Church’s eyes. “Do as we say,” said the pope, “not as we do.”

American Terror

“Please, Daddy, please get up!” Fifty years ago last night, Medgar Evers was murdered in his driveway in Jackson, Mississippi, shot in the back by Byron De La Beckwith of the White Citizens Council. Because it collides head on with our national myths of liberty, democracy and equality, it is hard for white Americans to fully grasp – or accept – the often-subterranean violence that erupted into the open in the early 1960s. “They hate our freedoms,” George Bush told the nation after 9/11, “our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” These were precisely the freedoms that black Americans were demanding 40 years earlier and that led to a backlash of terror – a terror that so disfigured the tortured body of 14-year-old Emmett Till that his mother insisted on an open casket to wake up the world; that bombed the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young girls; that kidnapped and killed James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner one night in Mississippi. It was, in fact, the kind of terrorism we associate with al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas.

In the face of that terror arose one of the most extraordinary movements in history, as thousands of anonymous people rode buses, sat in at lunch counters and registered to vote, endured beatings and bombings unprotected by the state and unsupported by the public, and maintained a disciplined commitment to non-violence in the greatest demonstration of courage this country has ever witnessed.

Clandestine Transparency

Perhaps because I keep trying to get the government to listen to me, my initial reaction to the National Security Agency’s widespread “data mining” program was: Hey, maybe they are listening to me, and I just don’t know it. I do find the NSA’s activities worrisome. As a first-amendment fundamentalist and a privacy zealot, I believe the Patriot Act should be repealed. And yet my outrage meter over the current revelations is low. Why?

• The over-the-top reactions from right and left about the assault on our civil liberties seem to have little connection to the scope or intent of the program as I understand it.
• I am uncomfortable with a 29-year-old high-school dropout – who joined the Special Forces to free Iraqis “from oppression” and wants to bring transparency to the NSA – deciding on his own what should be declassified.
• Fear. It’s true – I’m more afraid of terrorists than of my government, and I don’t feel I am living in an Orwellian state.
• This is not “Pentagon Papers II”, which exposed a massive cover-up of government wrongdoing that caused countless casualties.
• The irony is not lost on me that the government had to go to Google, Microsoft and Verizon to implement the program – that’s where the real information on our lives is stored.

We need a vigorous and public debate on transparency and security, and insofar as his revelations help spur it, we should thank Edward Snowden. But we should not let our visceral reactions curtail the debate before it happens.

The Nameless Ones

The byline caught my eye. Beneath an incomprehensible headline about an increasingly complicated and bloody war (“In Besieged Area of Syria, Bitterness of Sunnis Points to Rending of Sects”), I read “By an Employee of The New York Times and Anne Barnard.” Anne Barnard is an experienced foreign correspondent for the Times. But who is the unnamed employee, and why is he or she nameless? Even the dateline is vague” “Near Qusayr, Syria.” Clearly Barnard is outside Syria, but the lead reporter is traveling with a rebel group in an area of the most intense fighting. Yesterday, as the Syrian army was recapturing the town of Qusayr, the nameless reporter described a people in misery and a landscape laid waste.

The reporter gives us, when he can, the names of the fighters and the victims. To humanize an inhuman existence, he has put his own life in peril, for in this war, as in so many like it around the world, there is no sanctuary for correspondents. Nor is there for others who work anonymously in the midst of carnage to ease the suffering. Red Crescent (The Islamic Red Cross) workers care for victims without regard to their status or politics. Doctors treat all the wounded, operating in makeshift basements without anesthetics or drugs. In a war in which the combatants have become unbendingly sectarian, killing those who are different because they are different, these medical workers, volunteers  and reporters risk their lives on behalf of our common humanity.

O Tempora! O Mores!

In one of America’s odder new political customs, yet another celebrity has blazed a path to a foreign dictator. Building on Denis Rodman’s bizarre February visit to North Korea, where the body-scarred basketball player became the first American to call Kim Jong Un “my friend,” Steven Seagal recently shepherded a congressional delegation, led by Dana Rohrbacher (R, CA), to Russia, where the action film star introduced the group to his friends, Vladimir Putin and Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov The delegation, which was seeking clues to the Boston Marathon bombing, unearthed no new Obama scandal. Unfortunately, they were unable to carry their investigation into Chechnya, where Kadyrov rules with an iron (many say bloody) fist. Congressional rules prohibited them from flying on Seagal’s plane. (I am not making this up.)

At first blush, Rohrbacher and Seagal seem strange bedfellows. The actor is an environmentalist and animal-rights activist, whereas Rohrbacher received a 5% approval rating from the League of Conservation Voters. But Rohrbacher’s rationalization for Putin’s and Kadyrov’s crackdowns on dissent could have come straight from the mouth of a Seagal character: “yeah, guess what, there are people who overstep the bounds of legality.”

Rohrbacher was especially complimentary about the actor as tour guide compared to the American Embassy, which had arranged all his previous junkets. "You know what we got?” he asked. “We got the State Department controlling all the information that we heard. You think that's good for democracy? No way!"

The delegation also included an unusually quiet Michele Bachmann.

Beauty and the Pest

No, not another article on Michelle Bachmann, but on the wild geese, whose behavior this year seems connected to overpopulation and diminishing habitat. Canada geese no longer bother to migrate past the Mid-Atlantic states, where they find mild winters and plenty to eat. And so a bird of great beauty, once hunted almost to extinction, threatens to overrun its food, its housing and its welcome. Our two small ponds have traditionally drawn two breeding pairs, as geese are both monogamous and territorial. Some of our neighbors, tired of the excrement, have put wire mesh across their ponds, and so this year we have three families plus a number of bachelors (or bachelorettes) who have no communal role and nowhere else to go. Although the monogamous geese have always fiercely protected both mate and brood, the cramped quarters have produced a new level of bickering and bullying, particularly against the single members, who are gratuitously attacked and put to flight. One flew hissing for me yesterday. I ducked, and we have kept our distance since.

The parents are now teaching the first batch to fly, and it is wonderful to watch the goslings tentatively flap their feathering wings. It’s also time for them to go. To paraphrase the proverb, “Don’t set foot too frequently in thy neighbor’s [yard], lest he become weary of you.” And indeed it is harder to love your neighbor when he craps all over your lawn than it is when he is flying north, in a majestic V, at 4,000 feet.

What Me Worry?

Despite recent headlines of deadly flooding from San Antonio to Chicago, much of the mid- and southwest continues to face a second year of searing drought. This year’s most drought-stricken region sits on top of the Ogallala aquifer, the 174,000-square-mile well that has been geology’s gift to the nation’s breadbasket. It holds a seemingly inexhaustible supply of fresh water, some of which has been underground for six million years. Unfortunately, it is not inexhaustible, and what has taken nature 6,000 millennia to do, humans can undo in decades. And we have begun: the Ogallala’s water is already leaving at a faster rate than it is being replenished. This is not a new story. We have done it with oil, with topsoil, with the codfish. And yet here we are, 7 billion of us, living longer, growing bigger, getting richer (at least in the aggregate). The enviro-radical Cassandras keep prophesying doom, but the human race keeps trucking forward. We discover new oil, apply more fertilizer, farm fish, desalinate the oceans. We have faith that our next technological fix will come before the last one expires – such as Monsanto’s imminent launching of a genetically modified drought-resistant corn – and the plan to run the Keystone pipeline, which will carry the world’s dirtiest oil, over the Ogallala aquifer, which holds the earth’s cleanest water, is no cause for concern.

So why are we uneasy? Is it because we know we can’t go on like this forever and worry that the price of progress is our great-grandchildren?

Tax Abuse

Never mind how, but a 2013 Membership Appeal of the Tea Party Patriots has found its way into my hands. The appeal asks for money and then outlines how it will use it:

1. Keep Obama and the Liberal Democrats from bankrupting the country, shackling our liberties and turning America into a second-rate state.
2. Keep John Boehner and the Republican leadership from betraying the party’s core principles.
3. Get legislation that will reduce spending and the debt, unshackle free markets and preserve liberty.

To accomplish this the Patriots are launching:

•  “A massive 2013 Congressional Accountability Project” to keep those folks in line.
• “A state-by-state ground game” to develop coalitions and activate voters.
• “A media Boot Camp” for party candidates and elected officials.
• “The public advancement of serious legislation”.
• “A nationwide TV and radio campaign”.

This is how democracy works: you advance your creepy program and I counter with mine. The problem with this letter is its stamp. It says “Nonprofit org”, which means it comes from one of those 501(c)(4) organizations that have gotten the IRS publicly toasted of late. Would you think the organization that sent this operates “exclusively for the promotion of social welfare”, as the law requires? Then why would an IRS employee? These Patriots are violating the spirit and the letter of the law, while taking advantage of the government they wish to dismantle.

PS The Patriots have launched a $500,000 campaign on Mark Levin’s radio show. If you've never listened to Mark, you should. He'll turn your stomach.

Father and Son

Haynes Johnson died on Friday.  He and his father, Malcolm, are the only father-son duo to win Pulitzer Prizes for journalism. Haynes won for his reporting from the deep South during its reign of terror in the 1960s, when he traveled the region for months, reporting on the fears, aspirations, disappointments and triumphs of Southern blacks during and after the Selma-to-Montgomery march. Malcolm’s Pulitzer was awarded in 1949 for a 24-part series (that is not a misprint), “Crime on the Waterfront”, which chronicled the murderous alliance between the International Longshoreman’s Union and organized crime that ruled over the New York waterfront with a bloody fist (and led to one of the great movies of all time). This was journalism at its best: committed, courageous and thoughtful. It started at the top, for the pressures on publishers and editors to go easy or look the other way were relentless, and the costs of producing such efforts were enormous. But it was the reporters who really put their lives on the line. In 1965 Selma, Alabama, was a violent place where both public officials and private vigilantes used intimidation and murder to enforce the local order. The same was true of the waterfront, where people named Anastasia and Costello, Lansky and Luciano only made death threats they were more than happy to keep. These were the beats of Malcolm and Haynes Johnson, places where they were not welcome, places where people disappeared without a trace, places that had stories they believed must be told.

Drones and the Law

Anwar al-Awlaki was not the first American citizen to wage war against the United States. Former Vice-President Aaron Burr certainly thought about it, and former Senator Jefferson Davis actually did it. But al-Awlaki was the first to be taken out by a drone. Probably the most famous homegrown terrorist to declare war on the United States was John Brown, whose band of 21 men captured the arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859. Brown planned to arm nearby slaves and lead a guerilla army in a war against slavery. Ten of his followers were killed in action; seven, including Brown, were captured, tried and subsequently hanged. The idea that Brown (or Burr or Davis) would not be accorded his legal right to a fair trial was unthinkable, even as the nation careered toward civil war.

Does that make al-Awlaki’s killing unjustified? No. He was engaged in activities that put Americans in real and imminent danger. The nation must have the right to protect its citizens from such a threat however it can – and those of us who fly on airplanes would be hypocrites to say otherwise. But the same cannot be said for Samir Khan, 'Abd al-Rahman Anwar al-Awlaki, and Jude Mohammed, who were “not specifically targeted by the United States” but became collateral damage in the war on terror. Given their names and locations, there has been little public outcry, but Obama’s thoughtful speech yesterday made clear that our government is once again taking seriously the rule of law.

Theorem of Toxic Attraction

I'd like to introduce my Theorem of Toxic Attraction (ToTA), which states that toxic people, toxic activities and toxic places have an elective affinity that intensifies the damage they do. It’s not my entire theory for the existence of evil in the world, but it’s a start. Take, for example, the recent New York Times story headlined “A Black Mound of Canadian Oil Waste is Rising Over Detroit”, which describes a three-story pile of petroleum coke covering an entire city block along the Detroit River. When people talk about dirty tar sands oil, they mean petroleum coke, a waste byproduct the EPA no longer permits to be burned in the United States. Who owns the growing toxic black pile along the Detroit River? Koch Carbon, a company controlled by Charles and David Koch.

Cigarettes have been dubbed the perfect product: they cost a penny to make, they sell for a dollar, and they’re addictive. They also cause cancer. Think of this pile of cheap toxic waste as a cigarette millions will soon have to smoke. “It is,” said an expert, “the dirtiest residue from the dirtiest oil on earth.”

So you have the Koch brothers pushing for the Keystone XL pipeline so that more cheap waste can be produced to sell at a huge profit to China and Mexico to burn as cheap fuel. And you have 501(c)(4) non-profits spending hundreds of millions of dollars given by anonymous donors to buy politicians who will get the government regulators off their backs.

Something stinks.

Cerberus at the White House Gates

In Greek mythology Cerberus is the ferocious three-headed dog who guards the gates of hell. In current Republican folklore, the dog has been replaced by the Justice Department, State Department and Internal Revenue Service, who defend the White House gates and the devil who lives behind them. Now that Congress’s vigilant and moral majority has neutered the modern Cerberus, we can all sleep better at night. It is the IRS scandal, in which federal agents stand accused of screening “politically active organizations seeking tax exemptions,” that really has Republicans salivating. "Is this still America?” Kevin Brady of Texas demanded. “Is this government so drunk on power that it would turn its full force, its full might, to harass and intimidate and threaten an average American who only wants her voice and their voices heard?"

Whoa there, Congressman, isn’t it the IRS’s job to vet organizations seeking tax exemptions? Otherwise, heaven forbid, groups might take advantage of a loophole.

Ah, but didn’t the agents target “conservative” organizations? No, they targeted groups with “tea party” and “patriot” in their names.

Whatever gave them the notion that those organizations are not “operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare” as the law requires? Perhaps they read the same news accounts the rest of us do.

And what benefit does the 501(c)(4) exemption confer on them? Only one: they get to keep their donor lists secret. Just like Karl Rove’s somehow-exempt Crossroads GPS, which raised hundreds of millions from anonymous donors in the last election. That’s the real scandal.