IRS Employees Do "The Cupid Shuffle On Taxpayer's Dime". #BlameObama

As a veteran of corporate kickoff meetings, seminars, conferences, and "management retreats", I can tell you they're usually not very entertaining. Unless you personally have something to present, the relentless cavalcade of speakers, quarterly numbers, and PowerPoint decks can make even the most dedicated of Corporate Negroes get drowsy. In an attempt to liven up things for their 2010 retreat, some DC Urreah (peep those accents) IRS employees made a bunch of cutesy videos that cost the taxpayers a pittance. Of course, in post-Obama America, and dollar spent on anything invites scrutiny, and now a bunch of agency employees are in hot water for... wait for it... shooting a video of themselves doing The Cupid Shuffle.

In the latest black eye for the Internal Revenue Service, the agency provided Congress on Friday with another video featuring its employees, this one showing about a dozen of them line dancing on a stage.

The video of the IRS workers practicing their dance moves, which lasts just under three minutes, comes weeks after it was revealed that agency workers produced two other videos parodying the “Star Trek” and “Gilligan’s Island” TV shows.

The latest recording cost about $1,600 and was produced to be shown at the end of a 2010 training and leadership conference held in Anaheim, Calif., said IRS spokeswoman Michelle Eldridge. At a time when most government agencies are coping with across-the-board spending cuts by furloughing workers and finding other savings, that conference has become the target of a report a Treasury inspector general plans to release next week.

The report, called “Collected and Wasted: The IRS Spending Culture and Conference Abuses,” will be the subject of a hearing Thursday by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, that panel said Friday.

In a written statement, the IRS said the video was “unacceptable and an inappropriate use of government funds.” It said the agency has new policies in place “to ensure that taxpayer funds are being used appropriately.”

Eldridge said the dance video was recorded at IRS offices in New Carrollton, Md., outside Washington, D.C.

In the video, various workers comment as colleagues practice their dancing in the background to music that sounds like “Cupid Shuffle,” a 2007 hit by the performer Cupid. In the version obtained by The Associated Press, IRS employees’ names have been erased.

Here's the video. It's sorta hilarious, for obvious reasons.



This video cost $1,600? Why? Did Stephen Spielberg direct it or something? Anyone with an iPhone and iMovie coulda pulled this off for about $5. I'm outraged!

I'm also outraged that every assemblage and 2 or more black people in the year 2013 still has to eventually be followed by The Cupid Shuffle or the Electric Slide. Seriously, we can do better, my people.

Jokes aside, this was just some co-workers trying to liven up a dreary conference. And the IRS's annual operating budget is about $40 billion. This is the definition of "no big f*ckin' deal". But of course the optics are terrible, and on the heels of the IRS' recent bad news regarding the Tea Party, it all adds to the impression that the feds are a fiefdom run amok. You can bet that those on the right are gonna dig up a grainy cell phone video of Michelle Obama doing the Cupid Shuffle (or The Wobble, doesn't really matter) and play it side-by-side with this IRS clip. There will be a Congressional inquiry into whether or not President Obama told those IRS employees to do The Cupid Shuffle, and when he found out/covered it up. The President will be accused of being biased against the "to the right to the right to the right to the right" part in the song.

Yeah, that's pretty much the state of politricks in America right now.

Question: Is this an actual "controversy" or merely indicative of the current state of American politics?