Somewhat after the fact, the Department of the Treasury's Inspector General for Tax Administration released its report detailing the "inappropriate criteria" used by the IRS to filter applications for non-profit status. Or, in English: here's why the IRS apologized to the Tea Party last Friday. But it owes an apology to a lot of other groups, too.
Here's another smoldering ember in the IRS's Tea Party targeting kerfuffle: the same Cincinnati office responsible for giving some extra scrutiny to conservative "social welfare" groups applying for non-profit status also released confidential, pending applications to at least one media organization.
Everything about the brouhaha surrounding the IRS' enhanced investigation of Tea Party groups could have been handled better. But the main reason the IRS got in trouble is because it never addressed the fundamental problem in the first place. These are the options now.
It came as a surprise when the Internal Revenue Service apologized, seemingly out of the blue, to a number of Tea Party groups for unfairly scrutinizing their tax exempt status on Friday. Now we know why the apology came when it did.
A representative of the Internal Revenue Service has issued a verbal apology to a number of Tea Party groups that were asked an unusually complex set of questions to justify their non-profit status.
It would have been hard to predict that one of the events that most clearly articulated the line between the Tea Party and other conservatives on economic issues would be the failure of two banks on a Mediterranean island.
Does the Tea Party still exist? Michele Bachmann's Tea Party Caucus has been all but dormant for months, while new Republican stars are stealing the limelight.
New bad guys are not-so-loosely inspired by the Tea Party, and that has commentators not-so-quietly complaining about a couple of outwardly racist xenophobes who want to send Mexicans back across the border. Even if that was kind of the whole point.
"GOP grassroots" can mean thousands of activists, drawn from Christian conservatives and Tea Partiers, gathering because they feel the the country and culture is drifting dangerously off course, or it can mean the paid consultants, like FreedomWorks, who think a video in which two female interns, one dressed as a panda and the other as Hillary Clinton, simulated oral sex, is hilarious.
Karl Rove said on Fox News Tuesday night, "This is not Tea Party versus the establishment... I don’t want a fight." It looks like he's too late.
The former head of the Tea Party group said FreedomWorks paid Beck about $1 million to say "nice things" about it, and that it got a negative return on that investment, in an interview — with the liberal group Media Matters, of all places.
Both The Washington Post and The New York Times have front-page stories today about competing factions within the movement — gun-toting infights and all — and how they will fight to control its mission looking forward to 2014.
Jonathan Cohn on the emerging fiscal cliff deal, Frank Bruni on a shooting's aftermath, Jeffrey Toobin on the Second Amendment, Haytham Manna on Syria, and Josh Kraushaar on Tim Scott.
The South Carolina leader is quitting the Senate to run the conservative think tank that invented Obamacare. And if you take a look into his past, well, this guy really hates Obamacare.
One of the most conservative of conservatives leaders in the U.S. Congress and a founder of Washington's Tea Party movement will resign from the Senate to take over the Heritage Foundation.
He left his job as chairman of FreedomWorks over a dispute with the Tea Party group's president, Matt Kibbe, and the fight was not over the direction of the group but over Kibbe's book deal.
While the Tea Party won Republicans a majority in the House in 2010, election night 2012 showed the party's message is toxic at the national and statewide levels.
Today, Serena Dai drew our attention to Glenn Beck's new line of jeans, which only come in classic or straight fits. One commenter says that without a skinny version, hipsters won't wear them. Not even ironically.
As soon as Rush Limbaugh linked Friday's shooting near the Empire State Building with President Barack Obama's policies, he started qualifying the connection as "absurdist," which is the same way he qualified calling Sandra Fluke a slut.
It might seem impossible now, but House Speaker John Boehner may follow in the footsteps of John McCain and George H.W. Bush, and become the Republican that liberals love after his comments to Fox News suggesting the Tea Party is made up of "knuckle draggers."
After a day of staring at Twitter, we're sharing our favorite tweets that made no sense.
For every sign that Republicans and conservative voters are finally embracing Mitt Romney as their presidential nominee, there's another that shows he still hasn't satisfied them.
Most Republican voters have closed all tabs to the right of Mitt Romney, but conservative politicians won't let him maximize his window.
Some liberal activists have become frustrated at their top issues being hung out to dry by the gridlocked Congress; others felt called to respond to the tea party movement with their own brand of local organizing.
Herman Cain will be delivering the Tea Party response to the State of the Union tonight—not that any basic cable viewers will notice.
Ron Paul won just 3 percent of the votes in the Tea Party Patriots' "tele-forum and straw poll" Sunday, a pretty poor showing for a guy routinely called "the godfather of the Tea Party."
Mark Meckler -- co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, one of the largest Tea Party groups in the country -- has gotten to know that his Second Amendment rights are more nuanced than he'd probably like after after being arrested for trying to bring his pistol onto a flight from LaGuardia Airport in New York.
In the battle for control of the Republican Party, the Imperial establishment scored a couple blows against the rebel Tea Partiers Tuesday.
The Players: Glenn Beck, a conservative provocateur who has a burgeoning news site called The Blaze ; Andrew Breitbart, a conservative provocateur who's run his own news site Breitbart.com and conservative-slanted Big aggregation network.
Newt Gingrich has the lead in Iowa, and has taken a big chunk of support from Mitt Romney in New Hampshire, new polls say.
The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street -- fairly or unfairly pegged as the yin and yang of American political discourse -- have flip-flopped in the polls.
Rep. Michele Bachmann owes much of the support that fuelled her presidential campaign to her ties to the Tea Party, but she is now finding out that the fiercely decentralized movement can be a double-edged sword.
Ohioans will vote in two weeks whether to keep a law curbing union power on the books, and a lot of people wish the country were paying more attention to the election -- reporters, Tea Partiers, unions -- except for maybe Mitt Romney.
Things are easier for Newt Gingrich now that he's not the only Republican presidential candidate in the race to make money.
House Republican leaders are afraid to punish conservative congressmen for not toeing the line because they'll turn them into martyrs, but they don't have much to reward them with either.
You've got to love when the words of a mere comedian can become the conventional wisdom of the President of the United States.
Two lawsuits by two former Tea Party Patriots workers claim the group's founders defamed them online with some pretty nasty language, including allegations of rape and child molestation through a fake Facebook account.
By running through the same script liberals used when tea partiers started rallying
A step-by-step guide to coopting a movement
Rising disapproval of the conservative movement has now reached a majority
Texans lost a bit of their home-state pride in the process
Cartoonist Steve Benson on 'class warfare'
A Tea Party activist from Ohio will challenge the Republican Speaker in 2012
A Canadian band named after a drug reference is hoping to cash in on U.S. politics
Half of the GOP does not support the movement in a CNN poll
The "Communist News Network" is paired with the "Astroturf Express"
Opposition researchers have easy pickings from his recent book
Everybody talks about Rick Perry but no one knows what to do about him
Lone Republican in Congressional Black Caucus might leave over lynching comments
Romney had snubbed Sen. Jim DeMint's candidate forum
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