Oh, look. It's Megan "Jane Galt" McArdle, excitedly tweeting a completely discredited story.
There are a few problems with the story. First, why on Earth would Shulman need to visit the White House 157 times except to crack down on the Tea Party and other American Patriots? Well, it turns out there’s this thing conservatives have never heard of called OBAMACARE, which actually relies a fair amount on the IRS for implementation.
...The public meeting schedules available for review to any media outlet show that very thing: Shulman was cleared primarily to meet with administration staffers involved in implementation of the health-care reform bill. He was cleared 40 times to meet with Obama’s director of the Office of Health Reform, and a further 80 times for the biweekly health reform deputies meetings and others set up by aides involved with the health-care law implementation efforts. That’s 76 percent of his planned White House visits just there, before you even add in all the meetings with Office of Management and Budget personnel also involved in health reform.
But it gets better. Those 157 visits? Those are times he was ‘cleared’ to visit the White House. The logs only show he actually showed up 11 times. It’s quite possible that the records missed a couple visits. But it seems likely that the story - which originated at The Daily Caller - was off by about ten fold.
Memo to Jane Galt: tweeting stories from The Daily Caller is bad for your journalistic reputation among non wingnuts.
