hard deadlines

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse floor speech.

In a Senate floor speech this afternoon, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) criticized the IRS for targeting conservative nonprofit groups for extra scrutiny, but also called on his colleagues to pay attention to a second, less visible "scandal" of tax-exempt organizations filing false statements "with impunity."

In the first scandal, the Treasury Inspector General report found the IRS unit tasked with evaluating applications for 501(c)4 tax-exempt status improperly targeted groups with names like "tea party." While the IG's report specifically notes that only "first-line management" in a Cincinnati office were responsible for developing the screening criteria, late today, the fallout cost the acting IRS Commissioner his job.

But that's not what brought Whitehouse to the floor today. In a 14-minute speech (YouTube, text), the senator chided both the IRS and the Department of Justice for failing to adequately enforce rules governing activities permitted tax-exempt social welfare groups under 501(c)4 status.

Part of the problem, Whitehouse said, lies with the IRS, who "decided that an organization is organized 'exclusively' for the promotion of social welfare if it is 'primarily' engaged in social welfare activities, that 'primarily' means 51%, and that the other 49% can be purely political." That slim majority, Whitehouse said, often comprises "educational" or "legislative" activities "that are really just the same political ads given another name."

Making it even worse — and what clearly got under this former prosecutor's skin — is that these same organizations sometimes filed conflicting reports with the Federal Elections Commission.

Citing data from ProPublica, the Pulitzer-winning nonpartisan investigative news site, Whitehouse noted that in almost a third of the cases reviewed, there were discrepancies. "[ProPublica] looked at 104 organizations that had reported electioneering activity to the Federal Election Commission or state equivalents, saying 'here is what we spent on elections.'  ProPublica cross-checked; 32 of them had told the IRS they spent no money to influence elections, either directly or indirectly.  Both statements cannot be true."

One group, he said, "declared to the IRS it had spent $5 million on political activities, but told the FEC it had spent $19 million on political ads.  Another pledged its political spending would be 'limited in amount and will not constitute the organization's primary purpose,' and then went out and spent $70 million on ads and robocalls in one election season."

"Making a material false statement to a federal agency is not just bad behavior, it's a crime," said Whitehouse. "It is a statutory offense under 18 U.S. Code Section 1001."

However, said Whitehouse, unless the IRS specifically refers a case to the Department of Justice, there's no attempt to hold groups accountable. And those referrals, he said, just aren't happening. "Apparently, no matter how flagrant the false statement, no matter how great the discrepancy between the statements filed at the IRS and the statements filed at the election agencies, no matter how baldly the organization in practice contradicts how it answered IRS questions about political activity, the IRS never makes a referral to the Department of Justice."

"Right now, organizations lie with impunity, and in large numbers," said Whitehouse.

Portsmouth school Supt. Lynn Krizic sent a note late this morning to parents describing what happened at Portsmouth High School last night and the administration and police response. From the AlertNow e-mail:

Dear Portsmouth Parents,

I am writing to share with you information regarding an incident that occurred very late last evening at Portsmouth High School. A handwritten note was discovered on a bathroom wall that contained a reference to an explosive device. At this time the details of this note cannot be fully revealed so as not to interfere with our ability to investigate who may have written it.

Police Chief Jeff Furtado contacted me to share that upon receiving a call from PHS night shift personnel, they immediately contacted the Rhode Island State Police K-9 team to request a search of the school. We made the shared decision to have the entire school searched as we place student safety as one of our highest priorities. In the very early morning hours of the day, we received a report that there was no evidence of any explosive device or explosive material in any part of the school. Based on that report, we made the decision to have school in session; and we requested to have a Portsmouth Police Officer on site at PHS today.

The administration and local law enforcement agencies are taking this event very seriously. If anyone has information regarding the person responsible for leaving the note, please contact PHS immediately at 683-2124. We will be conducting an internal investigation to try to determine which student and/or students may have been involved in making this threat. The appropriate disciplinary action will be taken for any student or students who had responsibility for this incident.

Incidents such as this, in light of the recent events in Boston, may cause your child to become upset. Counselors and/or social workers are available in each of our schools to meet with students if they need to talk about this incident as well as how this incident may be affecting them.

Sincerely,

Lynn S. Krizic, Ed.D.
Superintendent

Thomas Pynchon (photo: a friend)

In case you've forgotten (and how easy it is to forget, eh, folks like us who spend all our time at the movies) tomorrow is the birthday of pre-eminent American author Thomas Pynchon, and many of like mind (though what it is that mind is "like," exactly, few can say) opt to celebrate by wearing their affection on their sleeves, slid out of bookbags, unearthed from under a scumble of desktop detritus, on t-shirts, pie crusts, animated gifs, stickers, post horns surreptitiously chalked on girders to be hoisted skyward, retro-hip dayglo posters, skin art, nanofabricated movies starring individual atoms of Carbon (heh-heh, 6 protons, 6 neutrons, 6 electrons, I guess we all know what that means, eh?), or, even, the transgressive act of carrying the Rainbow in public...

More info on the reclusive but erudite web site Pynchon in Public Day.

Now, everybody...

Elyssa Baldassarri (Kayla) and Tony Amaral (Matt) in "Higher Methods" (photo: Daydream Theater)

If Antonin Artaud had written the screenplay for The Stunt Man, it might well have looked like "Higher Methods," the bracing, disorienting evening of dark drama offered by Providence's Daydream Theatre through Saturday, April 27. Written and directed by Rhode Island playwright Lenny Schwartz, this is an evening of in-your-face theatre that may not be for everyone, but those who can handle a bit of sjuzet with their fabula will not be disappointed. (A-and let me tell you, I don't crack out the narratology in the first graf of many theater reviews...)

The basic fabula is simple: 20-something Matt (Tony Amaral) arrives in Los Angeles in search of his sister, Katharine, who disappeared into fringes of the Hollywood machine some ten years earlier. He has caught a glimpse of her in the background of a film, and by retracing her steps (the clubs, the producers, the acting classes) he hopes to track her down.

Skewering the soulless anomie of Hollywood has been a perennial in fiction since Day of the Locust, but Schwartz manages to thread the needle of cliche with hard-edged dialog, a script that keeps us perpetually guessing, and strong performances from an ensemble cast

All the action is handled on a simple set: a blue backdrop, in front of which we see the back-lit letters of the Hollywood sign (from behind, of course, so we see the scaffolding that props them up). A couple of brick walls, a lamp, and a handful of chairs. As the scenes shift, the audience (and sometimes, Matt) may not know exactly where or when we are for a moment, but that's all part of the show. Schwartz wisely trusts his actors to just go there and take the audience with them.

The play opens with Matt landing at LAX, bantering with his seatmate, Kayla (Elissa Baldassari). Amaral delivers an appropriately muted, nuanced performance as Matt, who may be a naif, a tightly-wrapped obsessive with a secret, or, perhaps, a celluloid homunculus experiencing the entire action of the play in retrospect. Kayla is, in many ways, the axis of the show, as she accompanies Matt through a picaresque sequence of events where nothing is quite what it seems. Played with a delightful brash energy by Baldassari, Kayla is by turns a Tinseltown vamp, a cold-blooded killer, and a Beatrice in Matt's Purgatorio.

At what moment does Matt's journey go off the rails? Is it the first drink handed him by a Hollywood bartender/actor (played with just the right note of self-aware character-actor-ness by Daniel Lee White). Or is it getting high with Shannon, an actress who leads him to Katharine's acting class (Shannon Hartman, whose twisty repartee with Matt really crackles). By the time we find ourselves learning the Method from the "legendary" John Edward Marcus (who Aaron Andrade plays with extraordinary range, from whispering guru to menacing puppet master) we no longer know where to situate the reality of the action, as the first act ends with what is either a tortuous hallucination or a refreshingly simple mass stabbing.

Did Matt's sister Katharine become an acolyte of John Edward Marcus and his cult of murderous students (or is that all an acting exercise). Did she run into the big-time director Cameron Stark (played with grim intensity by John Campbell) and lose herself in one of the bags of the designer drug, "Midnight" that he tosses to aspiring actors? Certainly, once Matt has sampled the director's kindness, we can no longer trust what he's seeing or saying. Did Katharine have the twisted backstory Matt describes in his audition, or is that a fabulation? Does anyone in Hollywood even know the difference? (The reactions of Cameron's sycophantic assistants, played by Emma Fitzgerald and Christine Pavao, are spot-on and delightfully ghoulish.)

When Matt and Kayla break the fourth wall to watch a sunset -- prefiguring (or perhaps remembering) the final moments of the play where Matt appears in Stark's film -- all of nature itself has begun to look artificial to them. And in that last scene, does Matt finally meet his sister, or is that just an actress playing Katherine? "They thought they had us," she says, "But we fooled them."

Indeed. But Schwartz cleverly leaves us wondering whether that, or anything, can be taken at face value. This kind of theater is right in my wheelhouse: metafictional, irreducible to linear plot, and grimly sardonic. If you like this kind of stuff, I highly recommend catching the show this weekend.

But be aware: not for the kiddies. There are adult situations, extensive profanity, simulated drug use, multiple stabbings, and descriptions of sexual violence. As William Carlos Williams says in the introduction to Howl, "Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell." Or, in this case, just Los Angeles.

"Higher Methods," written and directed by Lenny Schwartz, produced by Daydream Theater at the Bell Street Chapel, 5 Bell Street, Providence RI through April 27. General admission, $10. More info on Facebook