Fresh and Alarming -- Revisiting the "IRS Scandal"

Credit Where Credit's Due

MeanMesa first heard this take on the "IRS Scandal" from Hall Sparks on the Stephanie Miller Show, June 19, 2013. [The Stephanie Miller Show, AM 1350, KABQ Albuquerque, 7 AM to 10 AM daily on weekdays]  MeanMesa has posted before on the cheap, puzzling elements of the artificial "scandal blitz" the GOPCons cooked up in their desperate hopes of future election victories. (Links to the MeanMesa "scandal posts:" Flaming, Red Hot Crisis at the GOP Scandal Factory Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.)

Naturally, any such tale stuck in the sleazy, synthetic PR world of Darrell Issa's Oversight Committee "hearings" must be told from the parts which are missing rather than from the parts that are present, but when just a few of those "missing parts" are laid out in the light, this one is fascinating.

What if -- instead of the Obama White House -- the evil doers behind the IRS's suspicious targeting of  tea bag 501C-4's were actually GOP Party operatives?

Immediately embracing the total validity of the old saying: "some old, something blue, something borrowed and something new," MeanMesa will quite happily "turn over the wheel" to an article by Mark Segal from Philly.com.  (Visit the site and read the whole thing here. All links in the original article are left enabled in this post.)

Are Karl Rove & GOP behind IRS scandal?

No, it's not from the "10 Most Wanted" poster (image source)

Mark Segal

Last updated: Monday, June 3, 2013, 11:40 AM
Posted: Tue Jun 18 00:01:00 PDT 2013

We know the Republican Congress is in a tizzy about the IRS looking into requests for IRS Tax exemptions for organizations named "Tea Party" and other conservative labels. They even had some hearings on them, attempting to tie the White House and President Obama to the scene. But as hard as they try, they simply cannot, since the White House had no knowledge of the incidents until told by the Inspector General. But wait. If President Obama, the White House and Democrats had nothing to do with something that seems so political, what about the Republicans?

Rather than the guessing game that the Republican Congress wants to play,let's take a look at the facts, firstly from the hearings themselves. Democrats were not allowed to have any information gathered by the committee's staff or the list of witnesses in advance. That is highly unusual in a Congressional hearing. Why all the Republican control? To further the point, last week an eye opening report revealed that Congressman Darrell Issa, the House Oversight Committee chairman who made all the charges against the White House, actually knew about the Inspector General's report before them, the people he was accusing. Remember that this is the same committee that falsified White House emails during the hearings on Benghazi.

Second, let's take a look at the questions asked during those hearings, specifically the questions that were not asked. While they searched for a White House link, the committee never asked about any connections to Republican operatives. Not one question. Why?

The man in charge of the IRS when this took place was a Bush appointee, Douglas Shulman, at the same time that Karl Rove worked in the White House and Dick Cheney was Vice President. These guys know a thing or two about appointments. And take note that several Liberal organizations and churches were targeted during those Bush days. Most famously All Saints Episcopal, in Pasadena, California. Their crime? A sermon about the ills of the Iraq war. A subject so close to the Bush administration's hearts that they sent an American hero, Colin Powell, to lie before the United Nations. So rather than the Obama administration contacting the IRS, it is more likely that a Republican like Rove would give orders to the man that he helped appoint. But still, why would they target their allies the Tea Party?

The formal Republican party was frustrated with the Tea Party, who won primaries with candidates like one who believed in "legitimate rape," but lost general elections along the way. Rove and his gang realized that as long as the right wing elements of the Tea party were around, they would not win the Senate, much less the White House. And it was Rove who was the most outspoken about the Tea Party at that time. Heck, that Tea Party made Romney, the candidate of choice for Rove, go so far right in order to win the primaries, he never really had a shot. On the flipside, Democrats loved the Tea Party, who campaigned against women, gays, and immigration. The Tea Party was helping the Democrats win elections, why would they want to stop them?

Step in Rove, a man who would step on your grandmother's grave to win an election. He knows all the IRS players, he helped appoint some of them in his days in Bush's White House. In fact, many in formal Republican circles did, too. Isn't it time to summon those phone and email logs from those Bush-era IRS appointees? Unless, of course, they have something to hide.

Mark Segal is one of Philadelphia's most awarded opinion writers and has been recognized by the National Newspaper Association, Pennsylvania News-media Association, Suburban Newspapers of America and the Society of Professional Journalists, among others. He can be reached on facebook or on twitter. 

Now, all these typically myopic, high level [Karl "Death to the Tea Bags!" Rove] Republican political machinations left poor, incompetent, House Oversight Committee Chairman, Darrel Issa, in way over his head.  Darrel must have been having wet dreams of the good old days when he was just a simple, hard working car thief.  Inundated by the necessity of building a case from all the chaotic, contradicting details, his soiled career as a professional GOP fact bender was already rapidly showing its age.

Good, Old Fashioned GOP "Up is Down"

And, of course, war is peace -- if you're a private contractor.

The notable thread which runs through this story is the amazingly arrogant willingness of the Republican-tea bag Party to stridently accuse their political opposition of precisely what they, themselves, have just been convicted. Granted, the owners of the Republican Party have long ago realized that their base of illiterate hill billies is totally unable to comprehend such obvious contradictions, but their eagerness to trot out the same insults for consumption by the larger base of voters is evidence of a "Hail Mary" panic.

Not even the permanently confused denizens of their savagely gerrymandered districts could be expected to find this stuff all that palatable.  While the Republican base is famous for its unusually stubborn invulnerability to nuance, the masses of more rational voters is not. 

Rove is no dummy.  The carefully crafted IRS scandal was a progeny of the think tanks simply performing as ordered by their check writing bosses.  After the scheme had flopped during the Romney catastrophe, Rove probably assuaged his wounds with a presumption that it was just too complicated to possibly cost the GOP any actual votes among its base.  His expected cover did, in fact, materialize, but only in a temporary way.

Someone else in the Party renown for its zombie-like unanimity in all things ideological must have picked up the possibility that Issa could embarrass the President with a half-baked, "patchwork investigation" and, from that realization, simply run with it.  The structural failure of the GOP to consolidate lies before going public is not particularly news worthy, but these gaffs generally occur between the classic old school oligarchs and the rambunctious, policy-free tea bags.

In this case, MeanMesa sees an unusual and refreshing departure from this GOP norm -- one creating an even more hysterical anomaly than usual.  For this "shoot out" both sides were comprised of servants to the constantly scheming oligarchs -- this time just servants from different GOP think tanks and perhaps different oligarchs.

MeanMesa has mentioned this in previous posts.  The Republicans are allergic to leadership because they think that everyone else in their Party is just like they are -- and they are generally right.  Naturally, in such a fear driven political culture this shattering lack of trust is predictable, but now it has obliterated every potential leader in the entire gang.  Not even their old favorite, mistake plagued Rush Limbaugh, has emerged with his "character" -- or his ratings -- in tact.

Historically, even after losing an election the rejected Republican candidate would have continued to be the face of the Party until someone with a brighter visage slaughtered his way to the top to replace him. However, after his drumming Mitt Romney has been officially vaporized from the political scene leaving in his absence the "empty chair" which made such a hit at the Convention.

The talk shows are not yet ready to resurrect George W. Bush, so they have settled for a thousand remakes of John McCain, the loser from just before the last loser and the loser after the last loser. This Rovian flummox was supposed to help, but the odor drifted into the nest before the egg hatched.

Part 2: Flaming, Red Hot Crisis at the GOP Scandal Factory

[This is Part Two of this post series.]

Part Two
of three parts 

No, wait...we LOST the election??

Gosh.  How much will it cost to turn THAT around?

Of course, these shabby scandals really are both a tragic eye sore and a pathetic revelation of oligarchic panic.  However, it will be a bit more substantial if we examine three of the most "road weary" cases in a little depth.  While these have been the "red meat" leads for countless, bone crushing, relentless days of "breathless media scandal reporting," the underlying incentives driving such a bold and risky gambit remain largely unreported.  Some are obvious; some are devious. All of them lead directly back to the check books funding the wing nut think tanks, and those checks bear the signatures of the rapacious oligarchs.

Tracking Security Leaks with AP phone records

Benghazi as a domestic Muslim conspiracy

Targeting 501C-4 "social welfare" non-profits for exemption compliance

1. Plugging Security Leaks In The Government

Some highly classified information about exactly how it was possible to thwart a terrorist jet liner bombing appeared in the press.  What was made public did not include all the details of the affair, but it contained enough information to allow an investigative reporter or two to "rough out" the missing links.

The damage was quite material.  CIA under cover operatives had penetrated this Yemeni terror cell, and the revelations appearing the AP more or less directly identified them -- more than closely enough for the bat shit crazy jihadists in charge.  Afterwards, the value of this valuable intelligence asset as represented by these in-place operatives evaporated.  Further, the lives of these valuable men and their families were immediately placed in grave jeopardy.

The Administration was not only troubled by the security leak, but also compelled -- by law -- to discover the source of the leak.  Standard policy requires that a list of people who know about such matters be maintained for exactly this reason.  Someone on that list called someone in the AP.  Naturally, it was necessary to know where the leak was to protect national security.

The FBI did not monitor the content of AP phone calls, but instead -- quite legally with a warrant from a court with jurisdiction -- investigated the list of phone numbers called from the AP phones which very reasonably might have included the specific call which constituted the leak.  If your hair is on fire over the prospect of illegal wire tapping, that would be the W. Bush Administration.  They monitored the content of phone conversations without warrant, not the Obama Administration.

The motivation for "amplifying the outrage" over the legal monitoring of these phone lines is obvious when we recall that the media is owned by and controlled by the corporate interests of the oligarchs [6 US media corporations own the domestic network giants - Read more.].  The "low hanging fruit" was another possible opportunity to inflame the information devoid hill billies with specious claims that the President was acting dictatorially, but the play also included opportunities for promoting distrust of the government to the larger base while offering "covering excuses and explanations" for the continuing deterioration of media credibility.

2. The Unending Benghazi Story

The "feet of clay" for this "scandal" were unavoidably exposed in the constantly less believable flip flops of ABC news.  The "scandal" was supposed to be based on revelations of press release manipulation to obscure an undefined Administration scheme to shield the President after he "ordered" American forces to "stand down" instead of defending the Ambassador to Libya from the attack in Benghazi.

As the "elephant in the living room" with respect to things that evoke the GOP's sheer terror, the corporatists eagerly ordered their media to attach this particular fabricated scandal -- no matter how tenuously -- to Hillary Clinton as a conspiring protagonist in this comical hodge podge.  The increasing likelihood of her campaign for President in 2016 sends spine freezing, electrifying panic through the blood of the oligarchs, hopefully with good reason.

Keep listening.  It's...uh...Hillary's "Benghazi problem." (Image)

While the geopolitical details of the implied conspiracy were never clearly presented, the tale's potential for inciting more distrust in public opinion was simply too appealing to refuse.  However, the "scandal" suffered a mortal wound when the specific email containing these "Administration cover up instructions" turned out to be utterly falsified.  That email never existed.  Initially, ABC News reported that their reporter had seen this email.

The "had seen" part of that claim, once the facts were exposed, was quickly modified to "had access to a source purportedly sharing of the contents of that email," but the thing was, by this point, wallowing in its "scandal" death throes on the floor of ABC's city desk room.  The affair had officially transformed itself from a "deliciously deceptive fly by" to a monumental embarrassment of quickly clotting ratings blood.

When the Obama Administration -- under the pressure of ABC's faux news "reporting" -- had released all the actual emails, the foundation of the manufactured "scandal" fractured and collapsed.

Obviously, if this had worked better, a public opinion reaction would have served to pre-emptively soil the very likely Hillary Clinton campaign for President in 2016, but right here MeanMesa must add a "little something" about ABC's media reputation.  To consider this corporate monster as an innocent victim of one or two rogue reporters in this matter would be a mistake.

A few weeks after the 9/11 attack in New York ABC broadcast a two hour long "documentary" intended to concretely insinuate that the previous President, Bill Clinton, was actually responsible for allowing the tragedy.  The "documentary" was aired without commercials.  ABC "absorbed" the broad cast's estimated $2.5 Mn cost without any compensation from commercial sponsorship.

We were supposed to forget this outrageous editorial exposure and start, once again, to believe that there was something materially objective in ABC's thoroughly biased "reporting" policy and, hence, the corporation's claim for membership in a noble "fourth estate."  We would have been fools to believe ABC in 2001, and we would need to be fools to believe ABC in 2013.

The reporting of the arrogant, duplicitous fabrication of this non-existent email should not come as a surprise.

3. The Heartbreaking IRS Search

for 501C-4's "Social Welfare"

We should begin with just a bit of history, in this case of course, history of the notorious 501C-4exemption clause.  MeanMesa will turn the task over to a nice summary provided by the Wall Street Journal Law Blog. (Please note:  The Wall Street Journal is currently owned by [FOX] Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Read more.)

The Surprisingly Muddled History of the 501(c)(4) Exemption

By Jacob Gershman

May 16, 2013

Sen. Oscar Underwood (D-Al) source

As the IRS scandal grips the capital, Law Blog wondered about the history behind the section of the tax code at the center of the controversy.

It turns out that the origins of section 501(c)(4), providing exemptions for “social welfare” groups, are surprisingly foggy.

“There’s almost no history on it,” said New Mexico tax attorney Robert J. Desiderio, a former dean of the University of New Mexico School of Law, in an interview with Law Blog.

Here’s what we know.

The roots trace back a century ago to when Congress enacted the Revenue Act of 1913, also known as the “Underwood Tariff Act,” according to Mr. Desiderio and other tax

“The legislative history of the Tariff Act contains no reason or explanation for the exemption. The general belief is that [the] United States Chamber of Commerce pushed for the enactment of exemptions for both civic and commercial nonprofit organizations,” wrote Mr. Desiderio in a book about tax-exempt groups.

The statute, described as a precursor to section 501(c)(4), aimed to patch up a gap in the law and carve out exemptions for “organizations which could not qualify as charitable, educational, or religious, but whose activities somehow benefited the general public,” wrote Case Western Reserve University law professor Laura B. Chisolm in a 1988 article for the Indiana Law Journal.

Over the years, the IRS expanded the exemption into more political territory, allowing 501(c)(4) groups to engage in lobbying and other political activity.

The “notion that the section 501(c)(4) social welfare organization category is an appropriate classification for politically active charitable organizations seems to have originated with the IRS in the 1950′s,” wrote Ms. Chisolm.

She cited a 1955 IRS revenue ruling that was spurred by questions over the tax-exempt status of an unnamed group whose stated missions involved encouraging government to “practice wise economy in public spending.”

The IRS stated that one of its “principal means of accomplishing these purposes is the printing and dissemination of literature devoted to advocating the principles which it supports. Occasionally, the literature may advocate or oppose pending legislation.”

The agency ruled:

It is deemed that the above method is an indirect means of subsidizing the dissemination of the literature produced by the M organization and constitutes in effect a contribution to the latter organization in support of its own purposes rather than a contribution to the recipients of the literature.

Four years later, the federal government codified that policy, assigning the label of “action organization” to any legislatively active organization and issuing regulations stating that an action organization can qualify as a social welfare organization under section 501(c)(4), wrote Ms. Chisolm.

The IRS then loosened the rules on political campaign activity in 1981 with another ruling, which stated:

[An] organization may carry on lawful political activities and remain exempt under section 501(c)(4) as long as it is primarily engaged in activities that promote social welfare.

As Law Blog discussed earlier, exactly when a 501(c)(4) crosses the line has never really been sorted out. “It’s always been a tough question,” said Mr. Desiderio.

While the actual bill may be somewhat dated, the purpose of the 501C-4 exemption clause has been a quietly utilized, ill defined "legislative gizmo" from the outset.  Now that this decade's clutch of "Citizen United eggs" have hatched under the warm rear ends of a notably oligarchic Supreme Court majority, the current paranoid tax collection maelstrom was not only predictable but inevitable.

The aspects of the 501C-4 exemption criteria which are almost narcotically attractive to these modern anti-democracy wealth redistribution experts are two fold:

First, after a carefully manipulated "re-definition" of the already cloudy language in the clause, massive political activity, massive political media purchases and equally stinky "black money" -- frequently from other 501C-4s or thinly veiled PAC check books -- channelled over to obediently sympathetic political candidates have all become "entirely consistent" with the "newly interpreted" intention of the exemption. 

Very much strangers to those "social welfare" interests, these dollars, in the wink of an oligarch's eye, became officially free to purchase the most outrageous, sordid advertisements -- advertisements characterized by MeanMesa as "campaign assistances."  The messages they carry are typically issue of outright racism, incendiary ideology, incomprehensible, arcane and grotesque false accounts of history, perverse religionist "pitches" implying divine or biblical approval of one candidate over the other and so on, but in every case these were such rancid messages that not even the most reckless wing nut tea bag candidate would even consider personally associating them with his campaign.

Second, the identities of the "donating parties" remains undisclosed and legally nonymous even though it turns out that most of the "anonymous donating parties" which contributed to the 501C-4s in question have, in their own turn, still freely deducted their contributions as altruistic, tax exempt "social welfare" contributions on their own tax returns.  If you see a picture in which the average tax payer pays twice, you are "seeing clearly."

The 501C-4 clause acts as a very well Congressionally lubricated, ravenous "black box" into which all these heavily soiled, tax deductible, mean spirited billionaire dollars flow, and from which they emerge as bright, shiny, tax exempt, "wholesome social altruism" dollars literally sparkling with an almost ethereal, virginal, "free market innocence."  Moments after this glacier of cash enters one of these full service "Citizens United laundromats," five hundred wing nut radio shows are proclaiming that the President is an Islamic terrorist and someone other than George W. Bush had looted the economy into its current comatose state.

Heh, heh.  Thanks to the think tanks the talking points on every one of those five hundred "independent" radio shows are astonishingly identical. Don't underestimate the advantage of owning the media.

Meanwhile, the 501C-4 managers are gleefully checking the box on their tax exemption form giving forth a solemn promise that they will not engage in any sort of direct political action.  Why would anyone at the IRS possibly suspect otherwise?  The utterly cynical, tax deductible, anonymously donated, "social welfare"  is, of course, rushing out the 501C-4's door to conveniently invisible boxes to equally conveniently invisible trucks, an allegedly striking example of a generous, albeit invisible and immaterial, "safety net" to those who in need.

Naturally, if you are an oligarch with coup d'etat fantasies of a total economic take over, all this is absolutely nothing less than an irresistible "heroin and cheap sex sandwich" dangling in front of your plutocratic nose.  Actually, however, it is no more than a cheap cover for the oligarchs' real skull duggery lurking just out of sight.

The remaining post in this series has everything to do with skull duggery.

Please visit Part Three, the final post of this MeanMesa series.

Part 3: The Flaming, Red Hot Crisis at the GOP Scandal Factory

[This is the final part of this three part post.  Thanks for visiting!]

Part Three
of three parts

Health Care "Skull Duggery" Reaches Adulthood

Every single week since the Congressional "debate" on the Affordable Care Act began five years ago, mountains of cash -- on average about $1 Mn every seven days -- has flowed directly from the parasitic "health insurance" corporations and the "hard working" pharmaceutical manufacturers into an irritating collection of little street gang hit men in these illicit 501C-4s along with the express orders to discredit the bill with "everything they've got." 

As the result of this, we've had every sort of nightmare including health care rationing, death panels, economic euthanasia, enforced vaccinations, Washington politicians between you and your doctor and the homosexual agenda spewed at us relentlessly in an well orchestrated, well financed public relations campaign.

It was an everyday "career opportunity" for the mouth junk boys such as Beck, Limbaugh, Savage and Hannity.

The dutifully obedient corporatists on the Supreme Court did their part, too.  In the decision "legalizing" ObamaCare, the already heavily soiled Chief Justice painlessly inserted his own "poison pill" into the mix by declaring that the Affordable Care Act could, indeed, be legally financed by an "imposed tax."  That seemed innocuous enough at the time -- something appearing to be only a nondescript judicial detail -- but, now we can see that this was nothing less than the judicial insertion of another desperately concocted vulnerability to be exploited later to stop implementation of the program.

The money boys' almost phobic "Hail Mary" reaction in hastily fabricating the IRS scandal is full evidence that it was "now later," that is, that it was time to press the exploitation potential that their boy, Chief Justice Roberts, had so craftily laced into the decision like a terrorist grenade.  It may be more than innocent irony that while the favorite explosive device of terrorists is plastic C4 , the favorite corrupt money moving device of the anti-democracy oligarchs would be the 501 C-4 exemption clause.

Naturally, the IRS would be involved in financing the Affordable Care Act in a number of ways, but one important duty would be to review individual claims for the federal subsidy and authorize it for those citizens who met the bill's criteria.  The think tanks decided that the best way to undercut this process would be to discredit the IRS, hence the ridiculous 501C-4 scandal.

The mechanism the think tanks selected for this task was to embellish the "invasive" nature of gathering the information necessary to determine if individual citizens would qualify.  Predictably, this set the hill billies' hair on fire, and the chumpy news pundits couldn't get enough of it.

The think tanks and their obedient, domesticated 501C-4s had already invested literally billions of dollars into convincing the hill billies of the Republican base that the IRS was purely "Satanic big government."  MeanMesa can easily imagine an Affordable Care Act interviewer working to sign up eligible citizens facing a shot gun in the hands of a toothless, near sighted, overweight, crippled diabetic with no health care options but full of the propaganda.

MeanMesa visitors have already concluded long ago that the Republican Party would be left as nothing more than an untalented, castrated clown if the fear and distrust of its base were ever to be shaken.  Further, after the lunatic fringe of the party assiduously excluded one voting block after another following back room verdicts of ideological impurity during the campaign, the population of the Grand Old Party's faithful has fallen to a depressing all time low.

At the same time, the political cash available from the GOP's cynical, openly craven, billionaire owners has reached an all time high.

The self-inflicted damage which began as the Party's comical ideological witch trials has grown far worse since then.  While PEW reports that only 28% of American voters self-identify themselves as Republicans, 61% of that 28% want the future GOP to become even more conservative. [Read more.]

Only election crimes in Republican controlled states preserved the tea bag GOP's illegitimate death grip on the House of Representatives after the 2012 election.  As long as this remained no more than an incomprehensibly complex political subtlety, it enjoyed a certain synthetic immunity from wider political outrage, but that, it turns out, was temporary.  Even more low information voters are now having the nagging suspicion that "something's not quite right" with the old, previously settled, majority rule principle. 

A Tour of Republican Hell - 2013

The "hellish nature" of the present torment facing the oligarchs and their wholly owned Party derives primarily from the comparison of the "products of politics" and the "products of policy."  The first may be flamboyantly incendiary, but the latter have significantly more "staying power" with voters.  The carefully imaged picture of an American disaster which the oligarchs have invested so much to fabricate is now countered daily not by contradicting politics, but by unavoidable reality.  The ogre in the closet is the Republican record of governing, but, for Republicans, the "man eating monster" is the visible fact of the recovering country.

Everyone -- even the otherwise uninterested -- can see everything for themselves, that is, on their own -- without faux editorial assistance from the oligarchic echo chamber media.

The value of the stock market is stable at an all time record high.  Half of its current value was created during the Obama Presidency.  A respectable fraction of the 40% wealth lost by middle class Americans in the Republican fiasco of 2008 is being slowly restored.

Nationally, consumer confidence is climbing back to a workable level.  

There are regional housing markets with actual inventory shortages.  Home prices are slowly increasing [Read More.] throughout the bankster induced foreclosure wastelands.  New home construction is faltering back to reasonable levels.

Even after the suffocating House tea bag austerity tantrums vaporized 750,000 government jobs and Obama's jobs programs [Read more.], the overall unemployment figures still continue their torturous descent down to the 5% the US economy considers "normal."  On the down side, domestic labor costs have dropped so low that manufacturing businesses are dragging their plants back home from China to enjoy the low labor rates created by the GOP's wild austerity policies.  

The GOP's Nightmare (Image source)

The Federal budget deficit which exploded when Obama visibly added the un-financed Bush war costs is dropping in a repeat of the Clinton years.  While deficits were solidly perched in the trillions during the autocracy, Obama is expecting an astoundingly low deficit of $650 Bn this year.  The national debt -- the topic chosen to replace discussion of Republican jobs failures -- shows the results.

After a well lubricated beginning which promised "no real pain for anyone," the Republicans' economy wrecking austerity programs have begun to reach the base of the Party.  All across the nation confused hill billies and bigots are slowly realizing that their roads and bridges are collapsing, that their children are sitting in over packed public school classrooms and that the police and fire departments in their own towns are smaller and smaller.

Now that the dust has settled after the media onslaught of the earlier years of the Obama Administration, it turns out that the rabidly "free market" states with wall to wall Republican legislators and governors slicing and dicing general funds -- and services --  to "spur growth" and  "provide incentives" for their local gangs of "job creators" are being revealed as failed parasites desperately dependent on federal spending to sustain their horrible governance.

The Republican base with actual employment, most of whom are non-union wage earners, have been constantly tempted with the wild fantasy of joining the billionaire oligarchs who own the Party, but these same dreamers are now facing the toothache reality of rapidly descending wages, benefits and job security.  While these GOP voters listen to the relentless drum beat blaming liberals and Democrats -- contrary to fact -- for the debt, the annual budget deficits and the utterly lack luster recovery, their personal financial condition continues to decline.

What is good news for Americans is bad news for the Republican Party.  2014 just might be the worst mid term election in that unfortunate Party's history.