Much ado about nothing?

As you know, there is a lot of hoopla in the press about the IRS situation and their aggressive investigation of applicants having Tea Party or Patriot in their group's names.

What surprises me about this is that no reporter has dug deeper to disclose whether this IRS practice is common when they evaluate any group seeking tax-exempt status, regardless of political affiliation.  Without that information, we have no way to know whether that is common practice, or whether those groups were singled out for special attention.

For example, how about groups with Democrat or Progressive in their names?

After all, political groups are not allowed tax-exempt status, so it seems perfectly reasonable that the IRS needs to make inquiries about their intentions, financing, etc.  If that were to happen, I suspect that we would learn that other groups were similarly quizzed.