Rep. Ryan: We have more questions for IRS

Members of the House Ways and Means Committee have more questions on the Internal Revenue Service targeting conservative groups after outgoing acting commissioner Steve Miller testified before the committee on Friday, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said.

Asked Friday afternoon in an interview with CNN if Miller answered all the questions Ryan had, the congressman from Wisconsin, who is a member of the Ways and Means Committee, said "no."

"We —we have many more questions that resulted from today's hearing.  The one answer we did get, though, is that the IRS withheld information from Congress," Ryan told CNN's Jake Tapper.

Miller's appearance came a week after the IRS publicly apologized for applying a higher level of scrutiny to conservative organizations applying for tax exempt status. Since the IRS admitted to targeting conservative organizations, a number of congressional committees have planned hearings investigating the service's conduct.

Ryan said Ways and Means had been receiving reports about the IRS focusing on conservative organizations.

"Jake, you had to know that last year, we had these investigations on the Ways and Means Committee," Ryan said. "We were receiving all of these reports of this kind of harassment.  We questioned the IRS in hearings, in letters, and the IRS withheld all of this information that they were in possession of as to whether this targeting was occurring or not.

"We do now know that this targeting did occur, that it was politically biased.  It was only of conservative groups.  Now we're getting lots of questions with respect to religious groups and other kinds of groups."

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National Security Brief: Former Top Obama Military Aide Questions Benefits Of Drone Program

The former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said on Thursday that the costs of the Obama administration’s counter-terror drone program may be outweighing its benefits.

“We’re seeing that blowback,” said retired General James Cartwright at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “If you’re trying to kill your way to a solution, no matter how precise you are, you’re going to upset people even if they’re not targeted.”

The CIA will reportedly be moving its armed drone program under the auspices of the Defense Department and because of that, according to the New York Times, Cartwright is also worried about “blurring the line” between soldiers and spies if DOD is running armed drones “outside a declared area of hostility.”

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that the new U.S. drone base in Niger is starting to take shape. “We welcome the drones,” Niger’s President Issoufou Mahamadou said. “Our countries are like the blind leading the blind,” he said. “We rely on countries like France and the United States. We need cooperation to ensure our security.”

In other news:

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei suggested in a lengthy speech on Thursday that he is open to nuclear talks with the United States, if not optimistic about their outcome.

The Washington Post reports: The U.N. secretary general said Thursday that he will launch an investigation into whether chemical weapons were used in Syria, seeking to address accusations that, if proven, could alter the trajectory of the two-year-old civil war in the country.

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New Pope Spotlights Questions About Church’s Relationship With Military Dictatorship

Pope Francis I

The election of Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio as Pope Francis I has sparked new interest in the atrocities performed during Argentina’s period of military rule from 1976-1983.

Francis is the first pope to have been elected from the Americas, which will more accurately reflect the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America. That primacy, however, during the Cold War led to many dioceses throughout the region turning a blind eye to the atrocities of military governments. These right-wing governments, often taking power via coup, were supported by the United States and the church alike for their stand against Communism.

Particularly devastating was the period known in Argentina as as “The Dirty War.” Beginning as a crackdown on armed left-wing guerrilla groups following a military coup in 1976, the regime soon expanded its focus, imprisoning and torturing anyone thought to hold leftist views or criticize the government. Women who were pregnant at the time of their incarceration were allowed to bring their children to term, before being “transferred” — a euphemism used by the junta for execution — drugged and tossed from airplanes into the ocean. All-told, an estimated 30,000 civilians were “disappeared” by the government.

Years later, one priest told a panel of judges that the church at the time was “scandalously close to the dictatorship” in turning a blind eye, “to such an extent that I would say it was of a sinful degree.” Former Argentine dictator Jorge Videla claimed in an interview years removed from power that the Church was definitely “consulted” throughout the crackdown. That included offering their good offices and discouraging families from searching for relatives who had “disappeared.” That link was much stronger in Argentina than in neighboring dictatorships in Brazil and Chile:

“Patriotism came to be associated with Catholicism,” said Kenneth P. Serbin, a history professor at the University of San Diego who has written about the Roman Catholic Church in South America. “So it was almost natural for the Argentine clergy to come to the defense of the authoritarian regime.”

That tie has been a stain on Catholicism in Argentina ever since. The Argentine Catholic Church issued a document in 1996 admitting they had made “insufficient efforts” to prevent atrocities. When Pope John Paul II issued a blanket apology for church abuses throughout the ages in 2000, Bergoglio — by then the archbishop of Buenos Aires — insisted that Argentine Catholic officials wear garments symbolizing penance for sins committed by the clergy during the military dictatorship.

Bergoglio’s precise role during the Dirty War is still clouded. In 2005, when he was first considered as a possible replacement for John Paul II, a human rights activist accused Bergoglio of aiding in the military’s kidnapping of two Jesuits, filing criminal charges in a Buenos Aires court. That case has since not moved forward, though claims exist that he actively prevented human rights groups from finding political prisoners. However, at least one woman, former Buenos Aires Ombudsman Alicia de Olivia, has come forward to say that Bergoglio hid her from the military government during the crackdown.

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Biden to field gun questions from Field & Stream magazine

Vice President Biden will sit Thursday for an interview with Field & Stream magazine, as the White House tries to rally additional support for its package of new gun reforms.

The sportsman magazine is inviting readers to submit questions to ask the vice president ahead of the sit-down interview.

“Do you have a question for the Obama administration about guns? Now's your chance to get it answered,” a post on the magazine's website reads.

The editors of the magazine go on to say that, unsurprisingly, the interview will focus solely on the administration’s gun-control efforts.

“What do you want to know about the administration's plans for and positions on making background checks universal? Limiting high capacity magazines? Banning so-called 'assault' weapons? The importance of the Second Amendment? Any question is valid, as long as it pertains to guns,” the announcement reads.

President Obama has called for sweeping new gun restrictions in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., elementary school shooting that left 20 children and six staff members dead. The president has proposed a renewed assault weapons ban, limits on magazine capacities and universal background checks.

The interview comes amid a packed week of gun-related events for the White House.

Biden is also slated to meet with law enforcement officials on Monday in Philadelphia, while Obama will posthumously award the Presidential Citizens Medal on Friday to the six teachers and administrators who died in December's Newtown shooting. Obama is also scheduled to travel to Chicago on Friday for a public event that is likely to touch on gun violence, and first lady Michelle Obama will reportedly host the mother of a slain Chicago teenager at Tuesday night’s State of the Union.

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Stray Questions About Two Befuddling 2012 Movies

Post contains mild spoilers for Django Unchained, especially if you somehow missed the news that Django kills everybody.

Two of the most challenging movies I saw last year came in December: Django Unchained, and Killing Them Softly. Try as I might, I never managed to cull my many and contradictory thoughts on these movies into a coherent post. Here are some orphaned ideas that continue to trouble me in conversations about the three:

1. Why have Django don the trappings of Calvin Candie in the closing frames of Django Unchained? I didn’t take notes when I saw Django, so I don’t recall the very last shot of the movie with precision. But when Django is done killing everyone on the Candieland plantation, he puts on what appear to be Calvin Candie’s clothes – the red smoking jacket, if nothing else, is certainly Candie’s. He also chomps down with satisfaction on the ivory cigar holder that Leonardo DiCaprio’s vicious dilettante slaveowner had wielded throughout the latter half of the movie. What precisely are we to make of Django stepping into the mantle of his enemy? It fits, roughly speaking, into some of the more unnerving themes from the rest of the film. It seems to reinforce Django’s disinterest in liberating anyone other than his wife, which the PostBourgie podcast crew spent significant time on in their rousing discussion of the flick.

The other costuming moment that stuck in my mind was Django’s choice, when Dr. King Schultz tells him he can pick his clothes, of a powder-blue outfit with high white socks and a white cravat. This got a hearty laugh in the Silver Spring, MD, theater where I saw the movie, and that includes me—it’s a good gag, if somewhat cheap. Looking back, I felt okay having laughed at it because its exploitation of modern stereotypes about black men and outlandish fashion choices fits Tarantino’s fundamentally fantastical project of putting a Blaxploitation twist on a Western homage set in the antebellum south. Shortly after the cheap gag of a smash cut to Django gone dandy, he’s whipping an overseer while wearing the same getup, and I was half expecting to hear Curtis Mayfield cut into the soundtrack. And once on board with Tarantino’s aims, it’s tough to single out elements of it as going too far.

Still, that endpoint bothers me. Django relishes stepping into his wife’s owner’s clothes and signature accessory just a little too much for me not to feel queasy.

2. Did Killing Them Softly stink, or was it brilliant, or did it brill-stink? I did take notes while watching Andrew Dominik’s overstylized, beautifully acted, and well-written hitman movie. They include, on the top of the first page, things like “this kinda sucks” and “pacing??” and my little glyph that represents the universal PG-rated sign for self-indulgence. The movie is set in late 2008, and its only soundtrack is news clips of various speeches from President Bush and Hank Paulson and President-elect Barack Obama, on the financial crisis and our government’s response to it. A couple of these moments could have been a masterstroke of subtlety, but Dominik prefers to beat you over the head with the parallels between the inept criminal organization in the background of the story, and the ineptitude of every other major American institution. If someone described Killing Them Softly as a crime thriller filtered through a few reads of “Twilight of the Elites” and a few Occupy general assembly meetings, you’d be intrigued, right? The cruelty of Killing Them Softly is it heavy-hands everything that should be interesting about that idea, and leaves critics wishing for the Coen brothers version of this picture.

So why am I holding the door open to the possibility that it’s brilliant? For one thing, the performances and dialogue are marvelous. Richard Jenkins’ squeamish mob go-between is funny and dour and occupies basically the same place within his organization as Paul Bettany’s character in the excellent Margin Call did within that movie’s not-Lehman Brothers financial firm. James Gandolfini’s prideful, depressive, unraveling hitman is captivating every time he’s on screen. Brad Pitt’s protagonist hitman with a simple code is enjoyable to watch, most of all in his immaculately written conversations with the Jenkins and Gandolfini characters. But more than the performances, what keeps a torch half-lit in my mind for Killing Them Softly is how relentlessly unsexy and frustrated and dysfunctional and inconsistent an underworld it portrays. Our expectations for crime movies are that they’ll be all efficacy and power and languid allure, and that a lot of folks will get killed in a lot of awesome ways. Most of all, everybody will be cool. They’ll talk cool and smoke cool and shoot even cooler. Nobody does any of these things in Killing Them Softly, and nobody is particularly cool, including Pitt. And the big climax isn’t gunplay, but a heavyhanded yet effective soliloquy about the ways America lies to itself to sleep at night. By refusing to give me anything that I expected from a gangster flick, Killing Them Softly made me tempted to forgive its cinematic sins.

Teasing over these kinds of questions is part of what makes film so much fun, and I hope some of y’all have thoughts on these two movies.

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