Conservatives

It's strange how "scandal" gets defined these days in Washington. At the moment, everyone is screaming about the "scandal" of the Internal Revenue Service scrutinizing conservative nonprofits before granting them tax-exempt status. Here are the genuine scandals in this affair: Political organizations are being allowed to masquerade as charities to avoid taxes and keep their donors secret, and the IRS has allowed them to do this for years. The bottom line first: The IRS hasn't done nearly enough over the years to rein in the subversion of the tax law by political groups claiming a tax exemption that is not legally permitted for campaign activity.

We have once again entered the college commencement season, which means we'll soon be reading about uplifting graduation speeches delivered by prominent Americans. Or at least by prominent liberal Americans. It's becoming increasingly apparent that conservative speakers aren't welcome on college and university campuses. Last month, in the span of a few days, student protests disrupted a presentation by Karl Rove at the University of Massachusetts and one by Rand Paul at Howard University.

WASHINGTON - President Obama forced out the head of the IRS on Wednesday, seeking to restore the public's faith in the tax agency while asserting a measure of control over a rapidly growing political problem. Making a hastily scheduled statement at the White House, Obama denounced the targeting of conservative groups by the Internal Revenue Service as "inexcusable" and pledged to "do everything in my power to make sure nothing like this ever happens again. " "Americans are right to be angry about it, and I am angry about it," he said.

About 300 labor union members and other activists staged a demonstration to protest the potential sale of the Los Angeles Times to the politically conservative Koch brothers. Demonstrators marched outside the downtown L.A. headquarters of Oaktree Capital Management, an investment firm that holds a roughly 20% stake in Tribune Co., which owns The Times. Protesters alleged that Charles and David Koch, billionaire siblings who fund conservative causes, want to buy The Times in order to skew the paper's coverage to favor anti-union objectives.

WASHINGTON - First came the letter-writing campaigns, then the protests at town hall meetings and now the television ads. The last several weeks in New Hampshire have had the feel of a heated electoral season - but the target of this siege, first-term Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte, isn't on the ballot until 2016. Welcome to Round 2 in the battle over gun control. The first round ended last month, when a proposal to expand the background check system to cover most commercial gun sales fizzled in the Senate.

A few years ago Ann Coulter published a book titled "How to Talk to Liberal (If You Must). " With all due respect, Coulter, one of my favorite conservative eye-pokers, was wrong. There is no "how" in talking to a liberal. You can't talk to a liberal, period. Believe me, I've tried. I've got a liberal mother, four liberal siblings and their assorted liberal offspring, and a horde of liberal friends (I went to college and grad school). Whenever I advance to them even the mildest of challenges to liberal orthodoxies, on topics ranging from the welfare state to illegal immigration to abortion, I'm greeted with name-calling, obscenities, shout-overs and, finally, the grave-like silence of ostracism.

Conservative die-hards and reformers went to war Tuesday for the hearts and minds of the Soviet Communist Party, with Yegor K. Ligachev denouncing the Gorbachev era's "reckless radicalism" and other leaders defending policies that stripped the "evil empire" label from their nation. One day after President Mikhail S.

One Saturday last spring, the same day that marked the kickoff of West Hollywood's annual Gay and Lesbian Pride Celebration, a small group of conservative Republican activists got together for an alfresco fund-raising brunch in a Hollywood Hills home. The setting seemed like heaven--ripe oranges and lemons on curving branches, mockingbirds burbling arias beneath an azure sky--and the dozen or so guests seemed perfectly cast for their roles as Grand Old Party stalwarts.

Ours is the only civilized country in the world that refers to narrow-minded bigots, racists and militant war hawks as "conservatives." KARL ZERK Los Angeles

I recently played poker with a bunch of Republicans. My husband and I, both bleeding-heart liberals, are part owners of a cabin in the Sierra outside Fresno, a very conservative area. The Camp Sierra Assn. president has an annual poker game, and this year we, the newcomers, were invited. No one mentioned politics. We talked instead about our kids and Las Vegas and the odd warm weather. There was a lot of laughter and a lot of very good Scotch. I had fun even though I lost $4. When the game was over, we walked home with our across-the-road neighbors and invited them in for a final nightcap.

WASHINGTON - President Obama forced out the head of the IRS on Wednesday, seeking to restore the public's faith in the tax agency while asserting a measure of control over a rapidly growing political problem. Making a hastily scheduled statement at the White House, Obama denounced the targeting of conservative groups by the Internal Revenue Service as "inexcusable" and pledged to "do everything in my power to make sure nothing like this ever happens again. " "Americans are right to be angry about it, and I am angry about it," he said.

WASHINGTON - The Justice Department began a criminal investigation Tuesday into overzealous scrutiny by the IRS of applications for tax exemptions by conservative groups, an improper targeting that an inspector general's report blamed on a confused staff and lax oversight. The improper activities "were not influenced by any individual or organization outside the IRS," the auditors said they were told by Internal Revenue Service officials. Instead, the report painted a picture of an IRS unit based in Cincinnati that used "inappropriate criteria" for deciding which applications to examine, without any review by senior managers.

One of the great outrages of the Watergate scandal was President Nixon's use of the Internal Revenue Service to harass his political opponents. Yet some IRS officials appear to have forgotten what happens when tax law enforcers pick their targets based on their politics. A forthcoming report from the agency's inspector general is expected to describe how IRS employees inappropriately scrutinized grass-roots conservative groups that were seeking tax-exempt status. If that happened, it's unacceptable, and Congress should find out what involvement, if any, the Obama administration had in the abuses.

LONDON - Prime Minister David Cameron moved Monday to beat back a brewing rebellion within his Conservative Party over Britain's membership in the European Union, rejecting demands for a speedy public vote on exiting the trading bloc but insisting that he would offer such a referendum by the end of 2017. As he met with President Obama in Washington - where Cameron lobbied for a U.S.-EU free-trade pact - the British leader found himself on the defensive at home against members of his party who want their country to withdraw from the 27-nation EU as soon as possible.

WASHINGTON - Top career officials in the Internal Revenue Service withheld information from Congress for months about the tax agency's targeting of conservative organizations for extra scrutiny, according to documents released Monday as a controversy involving alleged political bias in tax enforcement gathered strength. Members of Congress called for firing the agency's acting commissioner, one of the senior officials involved, and President Obama said he would "not tolerate" any such abuse of power by the IRS. "If you've got the IRS operating in anything less than a neutral and nonpartisan way, then that is outrageous; it's contrary to our traditions.

WASHINGTON - A top Internal Revenue Service official knew as early as June 2011 that conservative groups seeking nonprofit status were being singled out for additional scrutiny, raising questions about when senior officials were informed and why the IRS allowed the agency's commissioner to deny the targeting effort in March 2012 testimony before Congress. The IRS has said the commissioner was not aware of the targeting at the time, but it has not explained why the testimony was never corrected.

WASHINGTON - The Internal Revenue Service improperly singled out conservative groups for extra scrutiny of their applications for nonprofit status, a top agency official said Friday, setting off calls for investigations into an organization already under fire for its handling of secret political spending by nonprofits. Employees at the agency's Cincinnati nonprofits office, while screening a flood of applications from so-called social welfare groups last year, set aside about 75 containing the words "tea party" and "patriot" for more detailed review, said Lois Lerner, IRS director of exempt organizations.

Marine biologist Dan Madigan stood on a dock in San Diego and considered some freshly caught Pacific bluefin tuna. The fish had managed to swim 5,000 miles from their spawning grounds near Japan to California's shores, only to end up the catch of local fishermen. It was August 2011, five months since a magnitude 9 earthquake and tsunami had struck in Japan, crippling the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. Madigan couldn't stop thinking about pictures he'd seen on TV of Japanese emergency crews dumping radioactive water from the failing reactors into the Pacific Ocean.