I ran across this today. From Dave Camp, chairman of the House Ways and Means committee...
"At Washington, DC’s direction, dozens of groups operating as 501(c)(4)s were flagged for IRS surveillance, including monitoring of the groups’ activities, websites and any other publicly available information. Of these groups, 83 percent were right-leaning. And of the groups the IRS selected for audit, 100 percent were right-leaning."
(link)
Of course, Fox News and Red State are all over it. Chances are others at Daily Kos will run into this in various forms of exaggeration so I thought I would throw out some observations for people to think about.
First note the word "dozens". Are we talking about exactly two dozen, as in 24? You see 20 out of 24 is 83.333% (rounded to 83%).
Are the Republicans claiming this is the big IRS "scandal"? A couple of dozen inquiries?
More likely, the couple of dozen cases were "randomly" chosen by republican operatives as examples for the committee to examine. In this scenario, 17% non-right leaning samples was generously high. But wait, 100% of those actually audited were right-leaning.
That begs the question, how many of the chosen "dozens" were audited? two? three?
The clear objective of this announcement is to presume the target audience will only see the "100%", "audited" and "At Washington, DC’s direction".
Who in Washington DC directed this? Mayor Vincent C. Gray?
Did the city itself call up the IRS?
Unfortunately, Dave Camp's target audience is all too willing to hear and believe what they want to hear and believe.
Please excuse the rant, but for some reason this one got to me.
Thank you for listening.