[QUOTE=cheesehead;342392]Instead, you use fantasy phrases such as "extreme political biases" without factual justification rather than confine your accusations to reality.[/QUOTE]

That was an actual phrase used by me, not a fantasy one. But I have a simple way to settle the "extreme political bias" issue - see below.

[QUOTE=cheesehead;342392]Do you intend for your readers to accept that as evidence that you were completely accurate and truthful in your assertions about me, the DOJ/AP scandal, or the IRS scandal? Care to post an image of your receipt for the $1000, with an explanation of how it implies your truthfulness about anything else?[/QUOTE]

I added that to demonstrate that I at least may have a modicum of nonpartisanship in my take ... it's actually quite unnecessary for me to do so, as I have a quite-lengthy history of bipartisan ragging-on-those-in-power, probably best captured in the voluminous 5-year-plus-running series of Econ-threads in this same subforum. You on the other hand, have to the best of my knowledge never shown any deviation whatsoever from your monomaniacal, blinkered partisanship. Thus, before wasting any more of my time arguing with the political analog of a religious zealot, here is what I propose:

I will be happy to provide article links supporting my characterization of the above issues by the major press outlets, but before I undertake the time-consuming task of digging through articles I have read over the past few months on both (alleged) scandals, I have a condition - namely that you demonstrate that you possess the tiniest glimmer of open-mindedness and bipartisanship on matters of a U.S.-political nature. Specifically:
[u]
Provide links to at least three separate posts in your entire past-posting history here in which you criticize the Obama administration about any significant issue of governance in unambiguous terms.
[/u]
There are many themes where anyone with an iota of objectivity could have done so - drone wars, the creeping post-9/11 national security state, the failure to prosecute anyone high in the TBTF banks for fraud related to the GFC, the rudderless "print money and hope" economic 'policy', the AP-spying by DOJ, etc. (A Pentagon "warhead" might characterize this as a "target-rich theater of operations.")

Note this which makes your time-wastage burden much less than mine, since it requires you to only search through your posting history on this forum, which you are better-acquainted with than anyone else. It amounts to less than one administration-critical post per year over the course of the Obama presidency, on average.

Given your many hundreds of politically-themed posts, if you have even a shred of political objectivity, that should be easy to do. Note I include the words about governance to rule out purely-political statements which are really criticisms regarding lack of zeal in the Great Jihad against Satanic republicans/conservatives, e.g. "Obama/democrats should have been more aggressive in pointing out republican lies about ...".

As to the judgment of whether the posts you provide satisfy the above criterion - should we even get as far as 3 candidate posts, which I am highly doubtful of - I will be happy to leave that up to a reader poll.

Just 3 posts from nearly 5 years' worth of politically-themed posting. It should be easy.

If you don't like the terms, I am happy to leave you to your echo chamber.

-------

[i]Aside: I believe George first used "nanoquoting" in the public areas of the forum to characterize your posting style. But he plagiarized it from me. I'm OK with that - imitatery being the sincerest form of flattening, and all.[/i]

[QUOTE=ewmayer;342503][i]Aside: I believe George first used "nanoquoting" in the public areas of the forum to characterize your posting style. But he plagiarized it from me. I'm OK with that - imitatery being the sincerest form of flattening, and all.[/i][/QUOTE]

My apologies. It was unintentional. I don't keep mental notes of what I see in the public areas and what I see in the private area. The word nanoquoting was indeed coined by Ernst, and I hope he doesn't mind that I allowed it to enter the public domain.

No worries, George - I already gave you my blessing. [We need Ralph Feinnes to make a cameo appearance and give his in-mirror-practice "Eye pahhdon you" from [i]Schindler's List[/i].]

I just wanted the term to receive proper retribution, or something. :)

[i]p.s.: I deliberately left pico-, femto- and attoquoting for anyone else to claim. No need to get hoggish.[/i]

[QUOTE=Brian-E;342485]The only thing I might mention is that sometimes your habit of taking [I]everything[/I] up which has been said < snip > in the interests of keeping the forum a place of discourse rather than dissertation.[/QUOTE]You have a valid point, sir. It's on my makeover list.

[QUOTE=ewmayer;342503]But I have a simple way to settle the &quot;extreme political bias&quot; issue - see below.

Provide links to at least three separate posts in your entire past-posting history here in which you criticize the Obama administration about any significant issue of governance in unambiguous terms.
[/QUOTE] While I am conducting my research, will you please:

1) Define &quot;extreme political bias&quot;, and

2) Describe the criterion you use to separate &quot;extreme political bias&quot; from non-extreme political bias?

For our purpose here I am using "grossly one-sided record of political posting" as the criterion. That implies that you have many more than 3 posts which criticize Republicans/conservatives/W-Bush-administration, but I am sure you know as well as I how easily those can be produced. It's the countervailing "evidence of open-mindedness/balance/bipartisanship" that I claim is vanishingly scanty. Your task is to prove me wrong.

Again, to take our personal subjectivity out of things, we will submit your evidentiary posts to reader poll. Fair enough?

Meanwhile, I don;t mind posting key new evidence on the IRS "missteps" as it rolls in [underlines mine, some to emphasize the news outlet's characterization of the story, some to aspects which are new or which I feel are especially noteworthy]

[url=www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/07/us-usa-irs-scrutiny-idUSBRE95605X20130607?feedType=RSS&feedName=domesticNews]Misfired 2010 email alerted IRS officials in Washington of targeting[/url]: [i](Reuters) - A misfired email from a U.S. Internal Revenue Service employee in Cincinnati alerted a number of Washington IRS officials that extra scrutiny was being placed on conservative groups in July 2010, a year earlier than previously acknowledged, according to interviews with IRS workers by congressional investigators.[/i]
[quote]Transcripts of the interviews, reviewed by Reuters on Thursday, provided new details about Washington managers' awareness of the heightened scrutiny applied by front-line IRS agents in Cincinnati to [u]applications for tax-exempt status from conservative groups[/u] with words like "Tea Party" in their names.

A political furor over the practice has engulfed the tax agency for nearly a month since a senior IRS official publicly apologized for it at a conference. Since then, the IRS' chief has been fired by President Barack Obama, the FBI has mounted an investigation and Congress has held numerous hearings.

The transcripts show that in July 2010, Elizabeth Hofacre, an IRS official in Cincinnati who was coordinating "emerging issues" for the agency's tax-exempt unit, was corresponding with Washington-based IRS tax attorney Carter Hull.

[u]In April 2010 Hofacre had been put in charge of handling tax-exempt status applications from conservative groups by her Cincinnati supervisor[/u].[/quote]
So we know the IRS grouped such applications by "political leaning".
[quote]She was asked to summarize her initial findings in a spreadsheet and notify a small group of colleagues, including some staff in the Washington tax-exempt unit. However, she sent her email to a larger number of people in Washington by accident.

"Everybody in DC got it by mistake," Hofacre said in the transcripts. She later clarified that she did not mean all officials but those in the IRS Exempt Organizations Rulings and Agreements unit.

The Cincinnati office, where IRS reviews of applications for tax-exempt status were centralized, used a "be-on-the-lookout" (BOLO) list that included the words "Tea Party" and "Patriot" for flagging applications for extra review.

This practice has drawn criticism. However, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, which closely studied the matter, has said [u]no evidence exists that the list was created by high-level IRS officials, or political officials in the U.S. Treasury or the White House[/u].[/quote]
That statement is patently false, because evidence is still accumulating - more accurate would have been to say "no evidence of which we are aware". Why is this important? Because TIG made a similar assertion in the following matter, which is now demonstrably false:
[quote]Lois Lerner, the IRS official who set off the controversy, has said that she first learned of the BOLO list in June 2011, and that she ordered the partisan criteria to be removed immediately. The Treasury inspector general backed up that statement.[/quote]
So now it's clear that Ms. Lerner lied. (Or "misspoke" - yes - that sounds much nicer) and the folks at TIG took her word for it. Not surprising - after all both TIG and IRS are part of the same cabinet-level department. The only way Ms. Lerner could have been telling the truth is if she was somehow not on (either directly or by cc-to-our-superiors) the e-mail distrib list in question. And even if not - which frankly beggars belief - we are to believe that an accidental wide-cast of such sensitive information would not have brought to her attention?

Next we get to the "how high does this go?" question:
[quote]Neither Hofacre, nor a second IRS worker in Cincinnati, Gary Muthert, knew who asked for the partisan names to be added to the BOLO list in the first place, the transcripts showed.

Still, Muthert said that when his supervisor in Cincinnati initially asked him to look for "Tea Party" applications, [u]"he told me Washington, D.C. wanted some cases,"[/u] according to his interview with congressional investigators.

Hofacre, however, indicated that a Cincinnati official told her to use the criteria. That official "told me what I needed to put on this particular BOLO list," Hofacre said, referring to the list for Tea Party cases only.

[u]Hofacre lashed out at Washington officials for attributing the extra scrutiny to the staffers in Cincinnati[/u]. "It was a nuclear strike on us," she told congressional investigators.[/quote]
So we know - or at least have good reason to believe, in the form of sworn testimony - it goes much higher than the IRS field office in question. Stay tuned...

For clarification and confirming my understanding (not just being picky):

[QUOTE=ewmayer;342687]For our purpose here I am using "grossly one-sided record of political posting" as the criterion.[/QUOTE]So, "extreme political bias" is "grossly one-sided record of political posting" (as defined below),

whereas non-extreme political bias is ...

non-grossly "one-sided record of political posting", or
not-one-sided "record of political posting", or
simply meeting the definition/criterion described below?

Not trying to be difficult, but I want to know how I could have not triggered your ire about this, since I thought I met the requirements that you have posted in the past. (When we're settled, might you post these new requirements also, where others can refer to them outside this thread?)

[quote]That implies that you have many more than 3 posts which criticize Republicans/conservatives/W-Bush-administration,[/quote]So this is the definition/criterion of "grossly one-sided record of political posting" for our current purposes, right?

I'm not quibbling about 3 vs. 2 or 4, for instance, but just confirming that it's about [the ratio of posts one way vs. the other] being substantially far from 1 ("substantially" being a judgement call, not some specific number).

[quote]It's the countervailing "evidence of open-mindedness/balance/bipartisanship" that I claim is vanishingly scanty. Your task is to prove me wrong.[/quote]Suppose that I produced "evidence of open-mindedness/balance/bipartisanship" without specifically including links to at least three separate posts in my entire past-posting history here in which I criticize the Obama administration about any significant issue of governance in unambiguous terms.

If that evidence were deemed sufficient by reader poll, would that satisfy your requirement?

(Again, not trying to be difficult -- just want to know how I could have not triggered your ire about this.)

[QUOTE=ewmayer;342758]Meanwhile, I don;t mind posting key new evidence on the IRS "missteps" as it rolls in

< snip >

[/QUOTE]I accept this as the first evidence I've seen that conservative groups were targeted [i]because they were conservative[/i] rather than as a byproduct of nonpartisan criteria.

Nothing I saw previously was evidence that conservative groups were targeted [I]because they were conservative[/I].

[QUOTE=cheesehead;342759]I'm not quibbling about 3 vs. 2 or 4, for instance, but just confirming that it's about [the ratio of posts one way vs. the other] being substantially far from 1 ("substantially" being a judgement call, not some specific number).[/QUOTE]
3 is an admittedly somewhat-arbitrary number - I wanted it to be "more than one" since we all have lapses. :) But because I made the criteria deliberately narrower than they might be - in the sense that they could be "unambiguous criticism of Obama/Democrats/the-political-left - I didn't want to ask for a number which could be construed as "unreasonable" by a reasonable person. I feel using Obama as a proxy makes the search easier - if you prefer, I am happy to substitute something like
[i]
Greater than 10:1 ratio of posts predating my original proposal which criticize - in unambiguous terms - Bush/Republicans/the-political-right to those criticizing Obama/Democrats/the-political-left."
[/i]
You produce as many of the latter as you can find, I then produce more than 10x as many of the former (You first as before, because your burden of proof is much lower). But both steps would now require reader poll-as-to-admissibility, so you see things get more complicated. But hey, if more complicated is what you want, fine. As long as both agree on the specific criteria at the outset.

[QUOTE]Suppose that I produced "evidence of open-mindedness/balance/bipartisanship" without specifically including links to at least three separate posts in my entire past-posting history here in which I criticize the Obama administration about any significant issue of governance in unambiguous terms.

If that evidence were deemed sufficient by reader poll, would that satisfy your requirement?[/QUOTE]
What type of evidence might that be? On a forum like this, history-of-posts is all we have to go on, objectively speaking.

[QUOTE=cheesehead;342760]I accept this as the first evidence I've seen that conservative groups were targeted [i]because they were conservative[/i] rather than as a byproduct of nonpartisan criteria.

Nothing I saw previously was evidence that conservative groups were targeted [I]because they were conservative[/I].[/QUOTE]

So our little "partisan challenge" game may be moot, or do you wish to proceed?