Coyote Blog

Since Richard Nixon weaponized the IRS against his enemies, by mining their tax returns for information he could use against them and calling down onerous audits on them, I thought it was an established principle of liberal democracy in this country that tax returns could not be used politically.  The only people who are supposed to have access to them are people who have legitimate enforcement responsibilities for tax collection.  That means the President and his staff can't rifle through them, and I thought those rules applied to Congress as well.

However, the Democrats in the House of Representatives, who mostly grew up excoriating Nixon's excesses, are now arguing the House should have access to any tax return they wish for any reason.  Of course, this is all playing out vis a vis Donald Trump.  From the WSJ:

The House’s tax-writing committee sued the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service on Tuesday for access to President Trump’s tax returns, hoping federal judges will pry loose records that the administration has refused to hand over.

The lawsuit from the House Ways and Means Committee puts the clash over Mr. Trump’s tax returns and audit records in the courts, exactly where Committee Chairman Richard Neal (D., Mass.) and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchinhave predicted for months that it would land.

Mr. Neal is asking the courts to enforce a subpoena that Mr. Mnuchin and IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig have defied and produce the records immediately. The chairman also wants the courts to validate his authority under a tax code section that says he can get any taxpayer’s returns upon request.

My little town that in the Phoenix area is apparently setting up surveillance cameras all over town, hidden in fake cacti.   This never once was discussed in any public meeting, and residents only found out about it when the cameras starting going up.

Residents were alarmed to see the cactus cameras popping up throughout the town over the last few days with no indication of what they were being used for as city officials refused to explain their purpose until all the cameras were installed.

Town leaders initially declined to even talk to local station Fox 10 about the cameras, with Paradise Valley Police saying they were “not prepared to make a statement at this time.” The network was similarly rebuffed when they attempted to get answers on license plate scanners that were being installed in traffic lights back in February.

Fox 10’s Jill Monier was eventually able to speak to Town Manager Kevin Burke, who admitted that the cameras were being used to “run license plates of cars against a hotlist database.”

When asked why officials had been secretive about the cameras, which are being placed on the perimeter of the town, Burke asserted that there was “nothing to hide” and that the cameras wouldn’t be activated until privacy concerns had been addressed.

“Shouldn’t that have been vetted before they even went up?” asked Monier, to which Burke responded, “It probably is fair.”

This appears to be part of the on-again-pretend-to-be-off-again DHS program to set up nationwide tracking of license plates.  Ugh.  Really gives a creepy Owrellian vibe to our town name of "Paradise Valley".  More good news:

The American Civil Liberties Union subsequently revealed that the cameras were also using facial recognition technology to record who was traveling in the vehicle “as part of an official exercise to build a database on people’s lives,” reported the Guardian.