re: #7 iossarian

According to an inspector general’s report, Lerner found out in June 2011 that some staff in the nonprofits division in Cincinnati had used terms such as “Tea Party” and “Patriots” to select some applications for additional screening of their political activities. She ordered changes.

This is the extent of the ‘scandal’. A couple of guys got the (to me, completely reasonable idea) that, given the huge amount of scammy Tea Party groups, they were going to use that as a search key to find nonprofits to investigate.

This is a grey area, to me. There are a shitload of scammy Tea Party groups. I think, on one hand, using that is completely fair. There’s also a shitload of scammy religious groups, scammy help-the-orphans-in-Africa groups, etc. This search concentrated on the former, rather than the latter. That’s quasi-biased, and I think it should probably stop, but it’s not a very big deal.