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Are Texas-based tea party groups being unfairly singled out for persecution by crazed IRS agents? Or, rather, are they in fact actually violating federal election laws and thus deserving of careful scrutiny? If you read Milwaukee's daily newpaper, you might think the former; but if you read Houston's daily paper, you might think the latter.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel jumped into the continuing fray over the Internal Revenue Service's handling of tea party requests for tax-free status last week by localizing the story. The paper's prominently placed headline fairly shouted: "IRS asked about Wisconsin recall, Texas tea party group says". The story went on:

The Northeast Tarrant Tea Party posted on its website that IRS officials asked for extensive information about the group's activities, including copies of all the tweets, Facebook posts and fliers that the group had sent out.
Julie McCarty, president of the Fort Worth, Texas, area tea party group, said the IRS also asked it to "explain our relationship with Verify the Recall," an effort to confirm the signatures that had been turned in last year as part of the petition to recall Gov. Scott Walker.
McCarty said she thought it was clear that group had been unfairly targeted and was still waiting for a decision on its tax-exempt status. Her group had minimal involvement with the recall fight in Wisconsin or Verify the Recall, she said.

The group's application for 501(c)4 status, which would enable it to operate tax-free and accept anonymous donations, is still pending. But while that case is unresolved, check out what has happened with respect to another Texas-based tea party group. This headline just ran in the Houston Chronicle: "Judge rules tea party group a PAC, not a nonprofit". The story begins:

A Travis County district court judge ruled this week that a Houston-based tea party group is not a nonprofit corporation as it claims, but an unregistered political action committee that illegally aided the Republican Party through its poll-watching efforts during the 2010 elections.
The summary judgment by Judge John Dietz upheld several Texas campaign finance laws that had been challenged on constitutional grounds by King Street Patriots, a tea party organization known for its "True the Vote" effort to uncover voter fraud.
The ruling grew out of a 2010 lawsuit filed by the Texas Democratic Party against the King Street Patriots. The Democrats charged that the organization made unlawful political contributions to the Texas Republican Party and various Republican candidates by training poll watchers in cooperation with the party and its candidates and by holding candidate forums only for GOP candidates.

Unlike the Journal Sentinel, the Chronicle story noted that as a nonprofit, King Street Patriots does not have to list its funders but by law then must not participate in partisan activity. To support a party or a candidate, a nonprofit must create a political action committee. PACs can be involved in partisan politics, but must list their donors.

Which is why tea party groups and massive outfits like Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS want to be simultaneously treated as both political and not political. Because then they get to accept anonymous donations, they aren't taxable and they can be partisan, all just by asserting it. The IRS strained to figure out that intestinally designed argument. No wonder it took many months for a small band of low level IRS staffers to finally approve every single tea party application to date. The only real outrage is that they approved very single tea party application to date.

We'll wait with high expectations for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to catch up with this story and balance its early report with word of the Houston case. Yes, it's true: Important legal people looking at the goals and aims of the tea party [the name alone sounds kinda political, huh?!] are skeptical that those supposedly betrodden, intimidated groups should in great numbers so far have been approved for non-profit status by the IRS. Although, realistically speaking, we'll probably be waiting a long time to read about it in the Journal Sentinel.

Related Links

• "Judge rules tea party group a PAC, not a non-profit"
• "Tea party group says IRS asked about Wis recall"

"And the theory is, it seems, oh, there are investigations of the IRS so we can’t interfere."
There is this leak investigation of the AP, so we can’t get involved. Oh, there is an investigation of Benghazi, so we’re not responsible. The President and the executive branch need to govern on a daily basis and you can’t purchase immunity from governing....

But some institutions have a no-surprise rule, which is you need to make sure the person at the top, who is the president in this case, he is constitutionally responsible for the whole executive branch, to be told about things that are going on that are bad. And you can’t kind of say, oh, that happened last year and they’re investigating. You need to stop the bad things right away.

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From the May 17, 2013 to May 18, 2013 Amazon Associates Report:
Orbit 91213 One-Dial Garden Hose Digital Water Timer

The Weekly Standard has this clip of Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer this morning on ABC's "This Week," asked whether the IRS's actions were illegal:



Drudge links to this in a top-left headline reading "Law is irrelevant," which appears above the main headline: "'IRRELEVANT' WHERE OBAMA WAS DURING BENGHAZI," which links to another Weekly Standard clip of Pfeiffer — appearing, also this morning, on "Fox News Sunday" — saying "I don't remember what room the president was in on that night, and that's a largely irrelevant fact":



The double use of the word "irrelevant" seems significant, but let's notice the difference between the 2 usages.

In talking about Benghazi, the interviewer, Chris Wallace, is trying to extract a specific fact about the events, a fact that has not yet come out and that Pfeiffer might know. Pfeiffer blows out a tirade of truly irrelevant verbiage to distract us from the question asked, including the notion that the fact isn't important. Who cares where the physical body of Obama was as long as he was "in touch"?
Well, some people would like to know, so tell us the fact and let us decide what use to make of it. To withhold the fact — on the ground that, in your opinion, we don't need it — is to make us think it would be damaging. We're likely to think Obama went golfing or something like that. Otherwise, why not just cough up the irrelevant fact? It must be relevant, we think, at least for political purposes, or Pfeiffer wouldn't strain so hard to suppress it. (He does claim at one point that he doesn't remember where Obama was.)

But in the ABC interview, the use of "irrelevant" was mostly a bad choice of words, and it unnecessarily makes Pfeiffer seem cagey and evasive. The question is whether what the IRS did was illegal. Pfeiffer doesn't want to give a legal opinion. He says: "Look, I can't speak to the law here. The law is irrelevant. The activity was outrageous and inexcusable." He could have put that more elegantly: I am not a lawyer, and this does need to be analyzed to determine if there were legal violations, but what I can say clearly and categorically — even if no laws were violated — is that the activity was outrageous and inexcusable.

Not every terrible policy is illegal. You can condemn a policy and vow to end it without determining that it's illegal. Pfeiffer — like Obama — concentrates moving forward and fixing problems, not prosecuting anyone for committing a crime in the process of doing the work of government. I can see why Pfeiffer wants to be circumspect about the question of whether anyone committed a crime, and he's only withholding his own legal opinion, not — as in the Fox News interview — trying to suppress a fact we'd like to know.

The phrase "for the birds" — originally, "strictly for the birds" (I guess the strictures broke down over time) — is defined by the (unlinkable) Oxford English Dictionary to mean "trivial, worthless; appealing only to gullible people." This isn't such an old expression, according to the OED, which finds its first print appearance in  J. D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye," published in 1951: "‘Since 1888 we have been moulding boys into splendid, clear-thinking young men.’ Strictly for the birds."

But the 1957 book "American Speech" tells us about its use in speech, which goes back to 1942:
In 1942, when I entered the U.S. Army..the disparaging term that's for the birds was in common use among officers and enlisted men... The metaphor alludes to birds eating droppings from horses and cattle. So "for the birds" is a way of saying "shit"!

This is especially amazing to me this morning as I'm pursuing a bird theme this morning, but I'd gone off-theme in the previous post to talk about Maureen Dowd's column and encountered the expression "sad sack" and learned for the first time that it's a short version of the WWII military slang "sad sack of shit."

How many more common expressions have a hidden shit theme dating back to World War II? If I encounter another one this morning by accident, it's going to feel cosmic. And don't tell me "cosmic" WWII slang for Coincidence Of Shit Metaphors In Combat.

Obama's in trouble, and Maureen Dowd is trying to help. I think. But lamely describing lameness? What's the solution?
The president should try candid; wistful and petulant aren’t getting him anywhere. The Republicans who are putting partisan gain above solving the country’s problems deserve a smackdown. Oh, please. That deserve-a-smackdown sentence is typical of what Obama's been saying for months. It's the very "wistful and petulant" that's not "getting him anywhere." And saying that a smackdown is deserved is perfectly passive. There's no solution there.

Is "try candid" a solution? It's very funny to say "try candid." Try. See if it works, because that other thing you've been doing hasn't worked. Candid is another means to an end, to be tried after dissembling has failed. Try it. For what end? Obviously not for its own sake or you wouldn't say try.  The end must be partisan gain. Or... no, partisan gain is that terrible end sought by Republicans. Democrats are about solving the country’s problems.

How much attention does Maureen Dowd pay to her writing? I suspect that she giddily spins out colorful sentences. She's got a knack. But then she doesn't look at them critically. For example, that sentence I put in the post title:
The onetime messiah seems like a sad sack, trying to bounce back from a blistering array of sins that are not even his fault. Speaking of a blistering array...  that's quite an array of images. And what's a blistering array? It's like the rays of the sun got into array and caused a second-degree sunburn. But the oldest meaning of the word "array" is military — soldiers lined up for battle. It's not really anything that sins do.

But Sad Sack has a military connotation to some of us who remember the old comic book character:



Sad Sack was "an otherwise unnamed, lowly private experiencing some of the absurdities and humiliations of military life. The title was a euphemistic shortening of the military slang 'sad sack of shit,' common during WWII."

I doubt if Dowd meant to associate Obama with a sack of shit, but she asks us to picture this sack bouncing. Bouncing back from an array of sins. So the sins are arrayed in military formation — perhaps in the sun, with second-degree sunburns — and the sack of shit (which was once a messiah) is trying to bounce, as if bouncing is a good response to an organized military attack.

Seems like a sad sack, trying to bounce back... I take it that's an accidental rhyme, just one more lump dingleberry of evidence that Dowd doesn't look critically at her writing, but it's possible, considering her reference to Obama's statement that "he dreams of 'going Bulworth,' a reference to the Warren Beatty movie in which a depressed and fading Democratic senator from California starts rapping, speaking with politically incorrect candor and dating Halle Berry." Seems like a sad sack, trying to bounce back... that could be a line in a rap. But no, it's an unintentional rhyme. Just as throwing Halle Berry into that riff about Bulworth unintentionally imputes an adultery component to Obama's Dreams From Warren Beatty.

"Huitzilopochtli, Aztec God of Sun and War."
Huitzilopochtli's name is a combination of two Nahuatl (or Aztecan) words, huitzilin, meaning hummingbird, and opochtli, which means left — the god's name translates literally as "Hummingbird on the Left." This resulted in Huitzilopochtli often being depicted as a blue- or green-colored hummingbird or as a warrior whose armor and helmet were made of hummingbird features.... More here:
Huitzilopochtli's mother was Coatlicue, and his father was a ball of feathers....

His sister, Coyolxauhqui, tried to kill their mother because she became pregnant in a shameful way (by a ball of feathers). Her offspring, Huitzilopochtli, learned of this plan while still in the womb, and before it was put into action, sprang from his mother's womb fully grown and fully armed. He then killed his sister Coyolxauhqui and many of his 400 brothers. He tossed his sister's head into the sky, where it became the moon, so that his mother would be comforted in seeing her daughter in the sky every night. He threw his other brothers and sisters into the sky, where they became the stars.

"And a group of robotics researchers at the University of Maryland got that compliment last month, when their robotic bird, dubbed 'Robo Raven' was attacked by a hawk."

"... as they wing their way south for the winter. It's an ancient tradition, but in recent years the custom has gotten out of hand."
A few scattered nets along the coast have metastasized into a nearly impenetrable wall of traps, stretching almost without break from the Gaza strip in the east to the Libyan border in the west. Conservative estimates set the annual death toll of migratory birds in this area at 10 million, but others say it is probably an order of magnitude more.

In some areas, especially near Libya, the birds are caught for subsistence, by people who currently have no other way to feed themselves, but the vast majority, perhaps eighty percent of the birds trapped, are sold in markets as a pricey delicacy or hocked to high-end restaurants in Cairo for up to five euros for each slight songbird.

"What the State Birds Should Be."
This has been the most depressing post I have ever put together. Three robins but no blue jay? Seven cardinals but no owls or hawks? Five filthy mockingbirds? This is what we pay taxes for, folks.

"... and that he nonetheless exercise those powers to the limit as needed to protect the nation and its people."

Says Harvard lawprof Laurence Tribe, quoted in a Washington Post article amusingly titled "President Obama exercises a fluid grip on the levers of power."

Nathan Heller: Gregory Nagy, a professor of classical Greek literature at Harvard, is a gentle academic of the sort who, asked about the future, will begin speaking of Homer and the battles of the distant past. At seventy, he has owlish eyes, a flared Hungarian nose, and a tendency to gesture broadly with the flat palms of his hands. He wears the crisp white shirts and dark blazers that have replaced tweed as the raiment of the academic caste. His hair, also white, often looks manhandled by the Boston wind. Where some scholars are gnomic in style, Nagy piles his sentences high with thin-sliced exposition. ("There are about ten passages--and by passages I simply mean a selected text, and these passages are meant for close reading, and sometimes I'll be referring to these passages as texts, or focus passages, but you'll know I mean the same thing--and each one of these requires close reading!") When he speaks outside the lecture hall, he smothers friends and students with a stew of blandishment and praise. "Thank you, Wonderful Kevin!" he might say. Or: "The Great Claudia put it so well." Seen in the wild, he could be taken for an antique-shop proprietor: a man both brimming with solicitous enthusiasm and fretting that the customers are getting, maybe, just a bit too close to his prized Louis XVI chair. Nagy has published no best-sellers. He is not a regular face on TV. Since 1978, though, he has taught a class called "Concepts of the Hero in Classical Greek Civilization," and the course, a survey of poetry, tragedy, and Platonic dialogues, has made him a campus fixture. Because Nagy's zest for Homeric texts is boundless, because his lectures reflect decades of refinement, and because the course is thought to offer a soft grading curve (its nickname on campus is Heroes for Zeroes), it has traditionally filled Room 105, in Emerson Hall, one of Harvard's largest classroom spaces. Its enrollment has regularly climbed into the hundreds. ...... Rather than writing papers, they take a series of multiple-choice quizzes. Readings for the course are available online, but students old-school enough to want a paper copy can buy a seven-hundred-and-twenty-seven-page textbook that Nagy is about to publish, "The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours." ... At one extreme, edX has been developing a software tool to computer-grade essays, so that students can immediately revise their work, for use at schools that want it. Harvard may not be one of those schools. "I'm concerned about electronic approaches to grading writing," Drew Gilpin Faust, the president of the university and a former history professor, recently told me. "I think they are ill-equipped to consider irony, elegance, and . . . I don't know how you get a computer to decide if there's something there it hasn't been programmed to see." ... The answer is c). In Nagy's "brick-and-mortar" class, students write essays. But multiple-choice questions are almost as good as essays, Nagy said, because they spot-check participants' deeper comprehension of the text. The online testing mechanism explains the right response when students miss an answer. ... It is also under extreme strain. In the mid-nineteen-sixties, two economists, William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, diagnosed a "cost disease" in industries like education, and the theory continues to inform thinking about pressure in the system. Usually, as wages rise within an industry, productivity does, too. But a Harvard lecture hall still holds about the same number of students it held a century ago, and the usual means of increasing efficiency--implementing advances in technology, speeding the process up, doing more at once--haven't seemed to apply when the goal is turning callow eighteen-year-olds into educated men and women. Although educators' salaries have risen (more or less) in measure with the general economy over the past hundred years, their productivity hasn't. The cost disease is thought to help explain why the price of education is on a rocket course, with no levelling in sight. ... King rattled off three premises that were crucial to understanding the future of education: "social connections motivate," "teaching teaches the teacher," and "instant feedback improves learning." He'd been trying to "flip" his own classroom. He took the entire archive of the course Listserv and had it converted into a searchable database, so that students could see whether what they thought was only their "dumb question" had been asked before, and by whom.

"A swarm of black flies at the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge appears to be the best explanation for why endangered whooping cranes are abandoning their nests, but the pesky insects might not be the only reason the birds are struggling in Wisconsin."

Michael A. Woodley, Jan te Nijenhuis, Raegan Murphy : The Victorian era was marked by an explosion of innovation and genius, per capita rates of which appear to have declined subsequently. The presence of dysgenic fertility for IQ amongst Western nations, starting in the 19th century, suggests that these trends might be related to declining IQ. This is because high-IQ people are more productive and more creative. We tested the hypothesis that the Victorians were cleverer than modern populations, using high-quality instruments, namely measures of simple visual reaction time in a meta-analytic study. Simple reaction time measures correlate substantially with measures of general intelligence (g) and are considered elementary measures of cognition. In this study we used the data on the secular slowing of simple reaction time described in a meta-analysis of 14 age-matched studies from Western countries conducted between 1884 and 2004 to estimate the decline in g that may have resulted from the presence of dysgenic fertility. Using psychometric meta-analysis we computed the true correlation between simple reaction time and g, yielding a decline of − 1.23 IQ points per decade or fourteen IQ points since Victorian times. These findings strongly indicate that with respect to g the Victorians were substantially cleverer than modern Western populations.

Naveen Jain: I suggested in my first article that our education system is not broken but has simply become obsolete. It's doing exactly what it was designed to do but unfortunately, our needs have changed. We can't just make incremental improvement to the current education system to somehow make it work for the next century. It's like changing the screen or making incremental changes to an old Nokia phone and somehow expecting it to become an iPhone. It's time for us to go back to the drawing board and redesign the education system for the next century. Let me give you my thoughts on the functional specifications of the education system for the next century. Adaptive - Student Centric Learning

Dr. Larry Feinsod: As NJSBA's semi-annual Delegate Assembly approaches (Saturday, May 18 is the meeting date), it's a good time to recount the Association's progress on key initiatives during the past six months. Special Education Task Force: In January, NJSBA formed a task force to review our state's current process for funding and providing special education services. The study group will recommend changes to state and federal statute and regulation. The goal is to reduce special education costs to local school districts without diminishing the quality of needed services. In addition, the task force will identify best practices. As I've previously stated in this column, I began my career in education as a special education teacher. The education of children with special needs will always be close to my heart. However, there is a dire need to develop strategies that will maintain quality services, without negatively affecting resources for general education programming. The Task Force is working under the guidance of Dr. Gerald Vernotica, Montclair State University associate professor and former assistant commissioner of education. The group has been involved in data collection and research, has consulted with experts, and is seeking information from New Jersey's local school districts. Earlier this month, it issued a survey on special education trends to superintendents and special education directors. For more information on the survey, please contact John Burns, NJSBA counsel, at jburns@njsba.org.

Allen Frances: Editor's Note: The controversial fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM-5 (a.k.a. the manual formerly known as "DSM-V") is being released tomorrow - after a 14-year revision process to update its criteria for defining mental disorders. This opinion is from the former taskforce chairman and leader of previous DSM editions. Nature takes the long view, mankind the short. Nature picks diversity; we pick standardization. We are homogenizing our crops and homogenizing our people. And Big Pharma seems intent on pursuing a parallel attempt to create its own brand of human monoculture. With an assist from an overly ambitious psychiatry, all human difference is being transmuted into chemical imbalance meant to be treated with a handy pill. Turning difference into illness was among the great strokes of marketing genius accomplished in our time. All the great characters in myths, novels, and plays have endured the test of time precisely because they drift so colorfully away from the mean. Do we really want to put Oedipus on the couch, give Hamlet a quick course of behavior therapy, start Lear on antipsychotics?

Jeff Yang:It's a sign of just how deep tensions are around parenting today that, over two years after Amy Chua's "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" was published, its combination of shocking revelation, serious reflection and tongue-in-cheek exaggeration still sends T. Rex-scale ripples skittering across the surface of our sociocultural Dixie cups. Two weeks ago, novelist Kim Wong Keltner's "Tiger Babies Strike Back" was published -- her nonfiction account of growing up under the paw of her authoritarian Tiger parents. Last week, the web was abuzz over the release of UT Austin psychology prof Su Yeong Kim's longitudinal study tracking the parenting styles and social outcomes of over 400 Chinese American families in the Bay Area, which seemed to show that children of Tiger Parents had both poorer emotional health and lower GPAs than those of parents who embraced warmer and fuzzier child-rearing strategies. Up until now, Chua herself has assiduously stayed out of the fray. "I really didn't want to get into the middle of this," she told me by phone from New Haven. "People keep trying to pit me against Kim Wong Keltner, or to ask me to comment on that parenting study, and I keep telling them 'Look, all I did was write my personal family story. I'm not a social scientist, I'm not a parenting expert. So all this is like asking apples to comment on oranges.'" (Keltner isn't keen on being positioned as the Anti-Chua either: "I really see my book as an alternative, not a rebuke to 'Battle Hymn,'" she says. "And frankly, [Chua] seems like she's smart and funny and highly accomplished and very beautiful, and we'd probably have a great time hanging out.")

Della Bradshaw:For decades companies have faced the conundrum of how to ensure managers can implement what they have learnt at business school when they are back at work. Management guru Henry Mintzberg, scourge of business school complacency, sums it up succinctly: "You should not send a changed person back into an unchanged organisation, but we always do." Now Mintzberg's Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, among others, is addressing the issue of how to ensure the dollars invested in the classroom convert into dollars for the corporate bottom line. One idea gaining currency is that of "cascading", in which every manager who has been on a campus-based course has to teach a group of more junior colleagues back in the workplace. It has been more than a decade since Duke CE, the corporate education arm of Duke University, North Carolina, US, promoted the concept, but advances in workplace technology are accelerating its adoption. "The leader as teacher is very effective," says Ray Carvey, executive vice-president of corporate learning at Harvard Business Publishing. "The leader goes back and cascades [what he or she has learnt]."

The toxicity level in the state capitol has never been low, but its recent rise may be unprecedented.

It started on its upward course during the bellicose years when the two tough, smart, uncompromising leaders Scott Jensen in the Assembly and Chuck Chvala in the Senate ordered an end to the casual camaraderie that had characterized those two bodies for years.

The public show in both houses had been somewhere between bitter and vitriolic, but the after hours was where the deals were made and the rhetoric toned down. The watering holes were off the record and populated by seemingly irreconcilable partisans from both sides. Breaking bread together was common, neither encouraged nor frowned upon.

The respect for the trade and its practitioners was evident despite the disputatious nature of the institutions.

In the winter of 2011 and the recall rants that followed camaraderie was out the window and the toxicity level went ballistic. The issues that were the worthy subjects of debate and disagreement became personal. “He said, she said,” escalated to, “If he [or she] is for it, I’m against it.”

Compromise and civility were history. Ideological purity and rigidity reigned.

The toxicity level reached 100.

One respected veteran of the legislative wars predicted, “It will take 30 years to get over this.”

I asked the journalists Patrick Marley and Jason Stein, who had reported on the wars of 2011 at the time and revisited and updated them in their admirable book, where they thought the toxic index was. They thought it was still high, but dropping ever so slightly.

A good sign.

A better sign is the informal survey taken by a newly elected member of the Assembly who said that a good third of the group that came in in 2012 said their constituents had been vocal and firm about their desire to see if not peace a lower level of conflict in that chamber.

Organized sociability was common in the last third of the last century where a series of governors brought presumed enemies together at the executive residence for drinks and dinner along with citizens, administrators, academics, and others who didn’t belong to the same clubs or hang out at the same taverns in their home venues either.

These soirees have been more rarely used in the new millennium and hardly ever as an antidote to the rising toxicity downtown.

And Washington is reputably as bad or worse. A new member of Congress has said that there has been one social occasion since November when an event in DC brought the partisans under the same roof. A long series of Wisconsin governors would have told the president, if asked, that he might have followed their example and hosted more than a few of those kinds of occasions himself.

What we need is a sociologist to creative a Toxicity Index along with the criteria used to measure the intensity of the affliction. The questions should go beyond attendance at official occasions. Co-sponsorship of legislation would be a factor. Hanging out together in the off hours at places where guns are figuratively left at the door, and all who enter are welcome and comfortable. Talking to, instead of at, each other. Even freeing whatever free spirits there are in today’s legislators from caucus control.

It’s not against the rules for cabinet secretaries to invite legislators out for or to their homes for dinner.

Driving to work together. How many deals were cut by the carpoolers from central Wisconsin on the way to and from Madison in the not-so-distant past?

Does that 10 percent approval rating bother anybody? Outsiders are asking why they should respect people who don’t respect their trade or each other. It’s a legitimate question.