Saturday, December 23, 2006

What does Mark Nickolas have to fear or hide concerning his tax-exempt status?

We thought we'd share this e-mail we got from a reader. Being frequent visitors to bluegrassreport.org ourselves, we are familiar with the touchy nature of this subject:

Dear Kentucky Pachyderm,

I wanted to let you know about this since of all the conservative blogs in the state, yours seems to be the most hard-hitting, pull-no-punches site.

As you may know, Mark Nickolas runs his Bluegrass Report blog as part of a tax-exempt foundation he claims to have set up called Foundation For Kentucky's Future. He says he has set it up as as a 501(c)4 organization. Occasionally a reader who appears to be well-versed in taxation law will call Nickolas' tax-exempt status into question because of his blatant partisan political activity. Sometimes those comments are deleted.

He has a thread going now where he looks back at his predictions for this year and looking ahead to next year. I posted a prediction about how someone will finally successfully challenge his tax status. That comment was deleted from the thread. I tried to post a comment about how my original comment was deleted and found that I was blocked from commenting. So I logged off my ISP and logged back in (changing my IP address by doing so) and posted that this had happened. THEN, I find that my post about doing that has been deleted! What the (expletive deleted since we don't allow that type of language here) is with him? Obviously he is afraid of someone challenging his tax status.

I think that some attention should be called to this. What is Mark Nickolas hiding and why is he afraid of people commenting about his 501(c)4? Is he afraid of getting in trouble with the feds?

I know that Al Cross and some reporters read his blog but I don't expect them to investigate a Fellow Traveler on the left. I sure wish some savvy tax attorney would ask the right questions of the right people and take him down for tax fraud. Here he is, he can't even win a governor's race in a Democrat state like Kentucky with a good candidate like Ben Chandler, and yet he comes in here from California and tries to tell us how we should run our state.

Please help me in getting this message out, and Merry Christmas to you!

Name Withheld On Request


Like we said, we are familiar with the challenges that have been posted on Nickolas' blog to his tax status and we are well aware of his partisan activities like draftkenlucas.com. Even now we see him trying to take out his own party's state chairman and doing his best to talk up candidacies of Greg Stumbo and Steve Beshear and running down the candidacy of Steve Henry.

So ... are there any conservative tax lawyers who want to take this and run with it?

What, exactly, is Mark Nickolas so afraid of concerning his tax-exempt status that he even deletes comments from his blog when the subject comes up? We'd love to know.

Thanks, anonymous reader, and Merry Christmas to your and yours!

5 Comments:

At 9:22 AM, December 24, 2006, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I agree about Mark taking off comments he doesn't like, such as negative comments about Stumbo and one involving IP numbers.

Why would he take one off about IP numbers? Could somebody sell those numbers and let people trace where those people go in cyberspace?

A hypothetical; if a prominent politician had a private fetish, lets say for dressing in womens clothing and search online. Somebody with his IP number could trace his online purchase. You could see the possible scenarios which would profit another person with that information.

 
At 10:31 AM, December 24, 2006, Blogger K-Pac II said...

IP addresses aren't as easily traceable as you might think.

Now if it's a static IP from, say, a state government computer, I'm sure the information on who the computer is used by could be easily discovered.

It'd be a bit harder to get the user of a computer with a static IP from a corporate network or home T1 line. That would take a subpoena or search warrant and a meticulous search of the ISP's records.

Identifying a dynamic IP address user would be even harder. As a test, once upon a time we ran a "whois" on the IP address on our home computer. It traced back to Miami, Fla. Then we logged out and back in again to our service provider, thus providing a new IP address. That address traced back to Georgetown, Ky. We weren't in Georgetown at the time and we sure aren't in Miami.

That info would definitely not be obtainable from a commercial ISP except as part of a subpoena or search warrant, and then said ISP would have to search through thousands or millions of customer records to see who had what IP address at which hour of which day.

So don't put too much stock in IP addresses as a means of identification.

Of course, this has nothing to do with the question of why he's so sensitive about his tax status.

 
At 12:09 AM, December 25, 2006, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Okay, let's not talk about Steve Henry as a real candidate. Not after all his law breaking and tax evasion.

While Mark hasn't trashed Stumbo and others as much as he should, at least he's doing it. Not many other folks will do so on his side of the aisle.

I'm not a Nickolas apologist, mind you. Let's just not refer to Henry as a candidate. Let's refer to him as a crook. Same goes for his crooked wife.

 
At 4:46 PM, December 26, 2006, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I too look at BGR to get the latest lies put out by Mark and guess what I was just looking at his self proclaimed POLL, right and I will sell you the Brooklyn bridge for two dollars, and your post/thread was on the site. I copied the link and pasted it. It brought me directly to this page. Good work and I bet the link is removed immediately upon Mark reading it.

 
At 9:30 PM, December 26, 2006, Blogger K-Pac II said...

We gave Bluegrass Report a quick perusal earlier today and did not see a reference to this site posted. Nickolas must have deleted it. He's getting paranoid, it appears -- possibly for good reason?

We'd still love to see a good tax attorney with a penchant for investigation delve into the Foundation for Kentucky's Future's financials. Those things are supposed to be open for public inspection.

If someone can provide that information -- scanned returns in PDF format would be great! -- we will gladly post it on this site.

 

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