Let's see what particular litany of Obama administration scandals we're up to, now:

• Benghazi
• IRS targeting of Tea Party/conservative/Jewish/??? groups
• IRS leaking confidential info to liberal groups
• EPA fee politicism
• Snooping on AP reporters to find leak source 
• (added later) Sebelius shaking down companies in health biz to implement Obamacare (can't believe I forgot that one)

That's the ones of which I'm aware are currently "hot". I'm not even touching "old" scandals like Pigford  and Fast & Furious. 

I bolded one scandal: the snooping on the AP.  What's interesting about that one is that it is possible that the particular actions not only are totally legal, but also ethical (for a pretty good definition of ethics).  

But a different picture emerges if you look past the AP’s spin. DOJ is investigating a leak of national security information to AP reporters that culminated in a May 7, 2012 story that disclosed details of a CIA operation in Yemen that stopped a terrorist plot in early 2012. The story had the byline of five AP reporters. DOJ opened an investigation into the leak to the AP, and pursuant to itspublished special rules on investigations involving the media investigations, issued subpoenas to find out what numbers were dialed from the relevant AP reporters during the months of April and May 2012. Presumably the thinking is that AP reporters called their sources, and the investigators want to trace the phone numbers to see who the sources might be. As far as I can tell, the information collected by the subpoena concerned the work and personal phone numbers of the five reporters and their editor, as well as the general AP office numbers where the reporters were located and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery. The AP knows about this because pursuant to DOJ’s policies found in 28 C.F.R. 50.10, the government was required to give the AP notice that the records were obtained. The AP received that notice in a letter on Friday, and then today (Monday) it released its AP story expressing AP’s outrage. That’s pretty much all we know so far.

Based on what we know so far, then, I don’t see much evidence of an abuse.

As Orin Kerr notes, perhaps there's more to it, but you know what? I don't think it matters.

Because the ultimate result may be to light a fire under the media's asses.

And no, while in Benghazi the issue is primarily one of cover-up after colossal screw-ups to begin with, that's not the case with most of these scandals. The scandals are that they did them in the first place… WHICH THEY'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE DOING.

Thing is, the media have been coming up with all sorts of excuses for this behavior, about how it was only right to investigate Tea Party applications as clearly they're not in the "social welfare" biz. That sort of crap.  

But now, it's all changed. They'd been betrayed.

It's like the girlfriend of an asshole, who keeps excusing all the assholish things her guy has done – "Oh, it's okay that he stiffed that customer, the bitch deserved it", "Yeah, he's mean to his dad, but he is insufferable" ….. "Wait… he =cheated= on me? He cheated on ME?!?!?!  SON OF A BITCH MUST PAY!"

I have no sympathy for the media in this.  They were slackasses and dumbasses, and there were lots of signs of official malfeasance all over the place, but they were enablers. 

So now the media hungers for blood after they find themselves the target. Sure, FoxNews being targeted is just fine, but the AP?! How dare he! How dare they all!  We'll show them!

I bet if they work their investigative muscles, wasted on so many dead ends in the Bush years, they might just be able to dig up something new. I don't know what, but I bet there's loads of juicy stories just waiting to be had.

In the meantime, I'm playing "trying to avoid an audit" and seeing how my draft picks are doing.  I have a great feeling about "bad management processes" and "inadequate staffing due to Republican intransigence".

RELATED: Treacher thanks the media for noticing what conservatives have noticed since Obama came on the scene. He basically makes the same point as I do.

HEY WAIT: Maybe here's a new IRS scandal: accessing a shitload of health care records for… wtf reason, I have no clue.

AND NOW: Steven den Beste on the Enabler Media:

This week's dam burst of negative news may make an end to it. It's just too big. They can't ignore it, and despite their best attempts they can't tamp it down. Will this be the end of the protective press?

Probably not, but it may be too big for them to fight, even though I expect they still will try. Obama's legacy is now toast, and when Obamacare implementation gets botched it's only going to get worse.

This post has been bubbling around in my mind since Easter, because of this:

The New York Times published a fairly straightforward story about Pope Francis’ first Urbi et Orbi message. With this paragraph:

Easter is the celebration of the resurrection into heaven of Jesus, three days after he was crucified, the premise for the Christian belief in an everlasting life. In urging peace, Francis called on Jesus to ”change hatred into love, vengeance into forgiveness, war into peace.”

Yes, the professionals at the New York Times are confused about what Easter marks. If you were satirizing the poor state of the Grey Lady’s understanding of religion, this would seem over-the-top. And yet it’s real. My favorite part is the correction to the piece — yes, it was corrected to drop the “into heaven” and replace it with “from the dead.” The correction is:

An earlier version of this article mischaracterized the Christian holiday of Easter. It is the celebration of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead, not his resurrection into heaven.

To be clear, not only is Easter not about Jesus’ “resurrection into heaven,” Christians don’t believe Jesus “resurrected into heaven” period. There are some ancient creeds that could be quickly accessed (for those who have never heard them) that explain all this. Those creeds confess Christ’s ascension into heaven, not “resurrection.”

Some have called for "diversity" (aka hiring actual Christians) in the journalistic ranks to prevent such base errors, but it wouldn't fix the problem. After all, the putative Christians can get stuff wrong, too, because they are ill-catechized. Or they're being asked about a denomination they know nothing about. Ask me about the dietary habits of Seventh Day Adventists…. I'm not going to be able to answer off the top of my head.  

But I would go and ask, because I know I don't know about them. And no, Wikipedia isn't sufficient if you're a journalist (for a blogger, sure. We're not getting paid.)

A few other stories:

I grew up in the Bible Belt. I had no clue what the evangelicals thought about the Church until I got to high school (and we were doing world history and discussing the Reformation) — everyone who went to my church was Catholic, after all. I didn't even pick it up at the fundamentalist Christian summer camp I went to because: 1. we mainly did camp stuff like shooting rifles and 2. the religious content was rather non-denominational. I was a bit confused about all this "born again" talk and asked my ma when I got home. "It's like confirmation," she told me (which is not correct, but close than the NYT got about the central concept and holiday of Christianity.) As an adult, I have learned just to ask people what they believe rather than assume anything about it.

In high school, I got my first militant atheist friend.  Pretty much nobody would argue with him because he was tiresome and ignorant (like many a militant atheist). I enjoyed argument as a form of entertainment, but I liked having actual arguments (as opposed to mere contradiction or abuse).

I was embarrassed by his ignorance — he had been brought up in an atheistic household, and didn't even know the most basic of Bible stories. So one year, I gave him a KJV Bible – and told him the good bits to read.  I had given him two reasons. First, most obviously, so he could know what he was arguing against and not come off as a dumbass. The second was more important: the  KJV Bible underlies much of English language literature, and not having that as a reference point means you miss so much in classic English literature, in terms of phraseology as well as allusions.

(I also gave him a copy of a Rush Limbaugh book – which was funny. We were both standards liberals at the time. I found Rush amusing, but unconvincing. But it was important to listen to him – he was definitely influential.)

The point was that both my friend and I had gaping areas of knowledge in the religious sphere, and we worked to correct this problem as we got older. If we had reported on one of the groups of which we were wholly ignorant, substituting our own assumptions, we would have been exposed as ignoramuses.  But we were just kids, and had no reporting responsibilities.

A two more items for inspiration, both from JammieWF:

1. Exhortation from Mrs. Obama on being exposed to new ideas:

Such helpful advice to the close-minded bigots on the left.

'First lady Michelle Obama urged Eastern Kentucky University graduates on Saturday night to reach out to people with different political beliefs, saying the country would benefit from the conversations.

“If you’re a Democrat, spend some time talking to a Republican,” Mrs. Obama told about 600 education, business and technology graduates at the third and final commencement ceremony of the day. “And if you’re a Republican, have a chat with a Democrat. Maybe you’ll find some common ground, maybe you won’t.”'

2. A journalist whining that they suck:

A bad few months? Try decades, Scotty.

'“These have been a bad few months for journalism,” he added. “We’re getting the big stories wrong, over and over again.”

The CBS newsreader was quick to take at least partial blame. “Let me take the first arrow: During our coverage of Newtown, I sat on my set and I reported that Nancy Lanza was a teacher at the school. And that her son had attacked her classroom. It’s a hell of a story, but it was dead wrong. Now, I was the managing editor, I made the decision to go ahead with that and I did, and that’s what I said, and I was absolutely wrong. So let me just take the first arrow here.”'

Perhaps the can make amends by covering any of the myriad Obama scandals. There’s something called Benghazi. You might want to look into it. One of your colleagues is just itching to cover it. Granted, there could well be a conflict of interest there.

Now here's my advice:

DO YOUR FUCKING HOMEWORK

It's that simple.  It used to be a basic tenet of journalism to go find out stuff. To ask questions. To know enough to know what kind of questions to ask, as opposed to merely running lightly-edited press releases.

No, you don't actually have to hire people with a diversity of viewpoints. What you do need are people who understand the danger of confirmation bias and have some integrity to fight against it.

You need people who understand that people might lie or just make shit up for a variety of reasons, and how to dig into that.

You need people who have memories that last more than a few months.

You need people who recognize something is truly newsworthy, and run with it even if their first instict is to hide (aka integrity).

You need people who realize when they don't actually know or understand something and who will work to amend that ignorance.

A journalistic staff, unless it comprises the entirety of humanity (and even then, it's iffy), will not have all knowledge or viewpoints covered. Making "diversity hires" is an easy answer that doesn't fix the core problem. 

To reiterate:

GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR ASS

DO YOUR HOMEWORK

Hmm, looks like an extra piece of advice slipped in there. I must fire my editor.

This is expanding on my comment from Dan's Jay Carney post. But I will address the IRS brou-ha-ha first.

Really, Megan? This was your expectation?

Conservative groups have been complaining for a few years that they're being harassed by the IRS, forced to endure an inordinate amount of scrutiny. I've been ignoring those complaints, because it just seemed so unlikely. Sure, that sort of thing used to go on: Kennedy ordered the IRS to investigate both right- and left-wing groups he didn't like, and Richard Nixon was audited three times between 1961 and 1968. But those were the bad old days.  No modern administration, or modern agency would do that.  

Well, I take it back. The IRS admits that, in fact, it did single out conservative groups for scrutiny:

And why would you think that? Had the nature of politicians' really changed all that much? Were bureaucrats less likely to be politicized? And when you've got an administration where the press desperately wants to spin everything positive, why the hell do you think there would be any accountability?

Truth be told, I don't think she really believed this. I think this was a rhetorical trope. After all, she's at the Daily Beast/Newsweek now, so she's got to be "reasonable".

But back to the ostensible belief: that a bureaucratic entity wouldn't be used improperly.

That people wouldn't abuse their power.

That there was "professionalism". 

Funnily enough, I took (and passed) an exam on ethics and professionalism this week from PRMIA, an organization that focuses on financial risk management (also some non-financial, but primarily financial).  This particular IRS malfeasance reminds me of the case studies I had to read — three in particular, where some golden boy/team were untouchable, and red flags were thrown well ahead of time, but powers-that-be were pleased with the initial profits that had been brought in. Nick Leeson is the most infamous example, but the one that stuck out in my mind involved National Australia Bank, which involved a team of people.

Now for both Leeson and NAB, there were criminal charges brought against the "rogue traders" (and they were convicted and did time). However, in both cases they were enabled by very lax oversight.  Leeson ran everything – he did the trades, and booked them – did the financial reporting.  This is a known invitation for trading fraud. For NAB, not only were the team messing around with a timing hole in the reporting system, but their trades had been getting flagged for exceeding limits – about every day. And nothing was done – because they were booking steady profits.

That's always a red flag.  Somebody who busts through the limits and always does well.

Those two cases are far from the only two such problems. And I am under no illusion that this can't happen again. This is a recurrent problem in the financial sector, especially during bull markets.

Financial regulations are set up to try to prevent these problems, but they often fall short (primarily because it's run by lawyers, as opposed to people who understand finance – see this book for details). But the concept that independent oversight and accountability is well-established, and there are few who think there should be no financial regulations at all. Yes, some of the financial regs are idiotic, as per my prior post. But that doesn't mean oversight should be taken away.  

Oversight does drive away fraudsters from certain areas — insurance, for example, is far less skeevy than it used to be (and I've got some 19th century books on that subjects which I really must scan for posterity. Or, at least for the actuaries.) Insurance is so heavily regulated that it's far more fun to be Wild West in a hedge fund or some such.

So now back to the IRS. Somebody thought it would be a good idea to target their political enemies.  I could get all Juvenal and throw up my hands, but the nature of government and politics, at least in the U.S., is that there should be checks and balances, and that when some entity gets out of line, there is another entity that can and will smack down said straying entity.

Thing is, it's not just a matter of the official governmental bodies, but also other power structures, that have provided oversight. I assume Megan thought of the media role in highlighting Nixon & company's activities.

A conservative IRS employee, I'm sure, would know they couldn't get away with targeting every Soros-funded activity out there, even during the Bush administration. There's the matter of career bureaucrats who may have their own skids greased by Soros, but more to the point, they'd be flayed in the media when it came out (and it would come out) and it's not like Bush would protect them.

But golden boy Obama and crew? He Who Can Do No Wrong for the Low Info Media?  I can see an IRS employee, probably not a low-level one (the low-level ones don't get to pick who they audit, I'm sure), thinking that they'd get cover. After all, the LIM was doing a good job of marginalizing the Tea Party groups, connecting them to every violent nutball they could (even when said nutball was blatantly left-wing), and diligently ignoring or minimalizing actual violent groups, like OWS.

Some very serious problems were being papered over by the LIM where people actually died: Fast & Furious and Benghazi. What's a few audits compared to gun-running and whitewashing terrorism?  Of course they could get cover.

Those are only a few of the most serious situations where there has been no accountability asked for in the LIM. There have been passes for all sorts of things, until the bad behavior escalates so much that it can't be ignored (such as John Edwards' affair).

Providing no oversight or accountability invites malfeasance. This is well-known when money is involved. Why should it be any different when it comes to power?

This is also a reason I'm very wary when one party controls anything in an area. This isn't liberal v. conservative, Democrat v. Republican. I've seen this happen in an all-Republican town council, where "party loyalty" provided cover for a particularly corrupt manager. I have several family members who deliberately vote split tickets for this very reason. 

Any auditor and regulator who wants to do their job properly must take as their motto: "Distrust and Verify".  The same should go for the media.  (and where is their oversight and accountability? Good question. It will fix itself eventually, but eventually can take a long time.)

I leave you with a quote from The Federalist #51:

But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

Now, the story here sounds like the "news of the odd", but in the financial press, but instead of "unintended consequence" this should be seen as "totally anticipated consequence":

Unusual OCC Order Hits Bank for Discriminating Against White Males

….

Pikesville-based Community First Bank, which has just $7 million of assets, was slapped in March with an enforcement action by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency because its lending practices showed it had inadvertently charged higher loan rates for white men and married couples.

The disparity stemmed from a lending program created by the bank to specifically assist minorities, which capped the institution's compensation at 2.5% of the loan amount for minority and women borrowers. Such a cap was not in place for white borrowers, causing the bank to generally charge them more.

The OCC ordered the bank to refund 64 affected borrowers an average of $1,144 per person — an amount far higher than the $300 that most struggling borrowers received through the recent independent foreclosure review settlement.

Wow, when you don't cap the possible incentives to the people selling stuff, they sell more? The hell you say!  

Imagine if tips at restaurants were capped. Do you think the server would be trying to sell you desserts? More drinks?  No, they'd want the table to turn over.

Now, there is a bit here that connects to something Ace posted earlier:

Though reverse discrimination allegations are rare, the case reinforces bankers' fears of navigating the tangled web of fair lending regulations that they face. New products, discount offers or even policies designed to be consumer-friendly can have a so-called "disparate impact" that disadvantages a legally protected class.

"There are institutions out there that could be engaging in lending practices with no worldly attempt to discriminate or to treat people unfairly," said Michael Mierzewski, a partner at Arnold and Porter LLP. "But unless they're monitoring to make sure their policies and procedures are not having disparate treatment or impact, they could be in for a rude awakening."

….

Some bankers argue it's safer not to offer any specialized products or discount rates to any consumer.

"You've got to look at the business justification because if you look hard enough, you're going to find some kind of disparity," said Thomas Eck, the associate general counsel specializing in fair lending at Capital One Financial, who also spoke at the panel.

The piece of Ace's has to do with how the media zoom in on some stats about their particularly unfavored target-of-the-moment (in this case, those interested in Benghazi, but as he says it is also used on the Tea Party, and if they could get away with it, Gosnell. But they'd rather not talk about Gosnell at all.)

This is how they describe the Tea Party — "overwhelmingly white and older, and poorer than the average." Actually that's how they first reported the Tea Party, assuming that they were poor (because of the liberal bias in the assumption, as first announced by the Washington Post, that the Christian right was "poor, uneducated, and easily led").

Once they discovered that the Tea Party was wealthier than average, the standard description became "overwelmingly white, older, and richer than the average American."

"Poorer" just disappeared from the narrative. Why? Because noting that the Tea Party was represented by those from a range of economic situations would be the Just Like You treatment — casting a wide net — and the media was determined to give them the Not Like You treatment, with as small a net as possible.

I don't want to bust out the math on people right now, but I want you to look at the number I bolded in the first quote. 64. 64 total affected borrowers (and that might be even fewer in terms of total number of loans if a married couple is being counted as 2).

Do you realize how easy it is to find differences in a group of such small size? 

A good deal of actuarial work is looking at averages and trying to determine how significant differences between averages are. We have a concept of credibility, where if a group is large enough, we give full credibility to its experience (say, auto claims) — but usually there isn't full credibility, but a sliding scale where we're using a mixture of the group's experience along with a total population experience to set claim estimates for pricing and reserving purposes.

64 is nowhere near any standard for full credibility.

I really really hate disparate impact arguments.  Because first, they are often put forth without any concept of statistical significance or credibility. 64? REALLY?!  Maybe there was a larger amount of data involved, but… 64?!

So back to Ace's "Not Like You" piece — I hate hearing info on population mean or median without any kind of reference to width of variation, which is usually measured by standard deviation. It doesn't need to be a Bell Curve argument going on, but if two averages are less than a standard deviation apart, sure, it might be "Statistically significant" (depending on what you mean), but it might not be terribly significant to say the populations differ.

I look at all sorts of stats all the time, and I can tell you now — it is extremely unlikely to find any particular non-randomly-picked group to have the same average as the entire population.  Age & income distribution of the Northeast compared to the entire country? Very different (Not Like You).

But hey, let's talk white people, given WaPo's focus on that (and I bet WaPo's writing/editorial staff is also whiter, richer than most of the U.S.) Amusingly, the Northeast is whiter than the "evil" South (whether or not you consider white Hispanics as part of the white group).   

You want to know why there is more ethnic and racial diversity of politicians in the Southeast compared to the Northeast?  Because the overall population of the South is more ethnically and racially diverse than the NE, and thus the pool of potential politicians from any one group is larger. Also, the South is less geographically segregated than the NE (and some further support for what I just said, and a nice tool to play with).   By the way, the NE also skews older than the SE population.  

Richer, whiter, older.  

Not Like You.

Oh, but that doesn't fit the narrative, does it.  We will continue using statistics in misleading ways until we get the result we want.

Remember talking about needing to require cash up front?

Hey, don't worry!  You can get advances on your unpaid bills!

Companies tired of waiting for the deadbeat state of Illinois to pay its bills are embracing a new way to get their invoices paid more promptly using a state-authorized middleman.

 

After a slow start, the two-year-old private venture, Vendor Assistance Program LLC, has advanced $52 million to about 120 vendors since December. Another $50 million or more will be advanced to vendors by the end of May. And by year-end, the venture expects to be advancing $100 million a month, helping ease the pain caused by the state's multibillion-dollar backlog of bills.

….

Here's how it works: Illinois is required by law to pay interest of 1 percent a month on most invoices more than 90 days old. At that point, vendors are eligible to sell their invoices to Vendor Assistance Program or other state-approved lenders. The vendor is paid 90 cents on the dollar upfront, eventually getting back the remaining 10 percent in two installments while Vendor Assistance Program collects the interest penalties. The 14-employee company, whose no-frills office is in the Pilsen neighborhood, makes money by keeping expenses low and borrowing money at rates less than the state's 1 percent a month interest payments.
….

While many firms borrow against their receivables or sell them at a steep discount, a transaction known as factoring, the state's program is designed to pay vendors all they are owed at no additional cost to the state.

 

“This is not a high-yield business like the factoring business,” Vendor Assistance Program CEO David Reape says. “But it is a business model that's profitable.”

 

I assume they're talking simple, not compound interest. So the math is pretty simple – if they've got $100 million each month in outstanding bills they've got their hands on, they theoretically will be getting $1 million per month.

If the state pays up.

Let us rightly understand: the state of Illinois can't pay its operating costs without extra interest, and even if 1%/month in simple interest is not a lot, it's not as if the bills are getting that much more affordable for the state as time goes on. They can't print money, remember.

The state is having difficulty issuing bonds. They already have the lowest credit rating out there for states.

I suppose the theory is that these guys amass so much in unpaid receivables that somehow they get leverage on the state. 

And I think this is probably the key point:

The idea was created by Brian Hynes, a well-connected Chicago lawyer and lobbyist who emerged from the Blagojevich era unscathed despite some dealings with imprisoned fraudster Tony Rezko. Financed by Des Plaines-based payday lender AmeriCash Loans LLC, which is no longer involved, he teamed with Patti Solis Doyle, a former top aide to Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. She helped sell the state on the idea and remains president of the firm, while Mr. Bynes is an investor with a non-operating consulting role.

 

He assumes he will get his.  I guess he'll find out in time.

There's also a pension angle:

The turning point came when Mr. Reape and another executive came onboard last year from J.G. Wentworth LLC, a large firm in Radnor, Pa., that buys insurance settlements and annuities from individuals, converting future payments into cash upfront.

Remember my post on "pension advances"?  Yeah.

It sounds like the vendors do not have a liability hanging over their heads if this Vendor Assistance Program LLC doesn't collect.  But I'd be very careful in reading the fine print.

Of course, this is not a 1-to-1 on number of sales.  Some of the sales may not go through (due to results of the check, or the buyer changing their mind).  Still, it is rather indicative of interest.

I got this from the Wall Street Journal, via Andy at Ace of Spaces.  Here's the PDF I yanked the numbers from if you want to check it yourself.

If you look at the light green bars in the background, you will notice some definite seasonal patterns. For example, there is usually a spike in December, probably due to Christmas buying. 

To try to remove those seasonal effects, I also plotted the percentage year-over-year change in background checks, so that one is comparing a December to a prior December, for example. I could've gotten all fancy-pants and done a moving average, but I think you get the picture.

Movements of note:

- Oh look. Huge increases from Nov. 2008 – June 2009. Hmm. Wonder what happened then.

- There's a negative change from Nov 2009 – May 2010, but that's just because you're comparing them against the huge increases in the prior year.  Compare them against two years prior, and it's still a large increase.

- Holy crap it's taken off in the last few months. January especially.  Yeah, wonder what that was all about?