In the wake of the faux scandal alleging partisan bias at the IRS, Washington state's homegrown faux think tank, the Freedom Foundation, has filed a series of extensive public records requests with various state agencies fishing for evidence of partisan bias against right-wing organizations and individuals.

According to a Department of Ecology email obtained by The Stranger, the search words include: "Tea Party," "Conservative," "Freedom Foundation," "Libertarian," "Liberty," "Redneck," "Small Government," "Hicks," "Teabagger," "Racist," "Far Right," "Right Wing," "Christian," "Fundamentalist," "Catholic," "NRA," "Gun nut," and "Mormon."

Looks like they forgot a search term, though: "Taxpayer-dollar-wasting Asshole." This fishing expedition is going to cost taxpayers a small fortune in wasted labor on the part of state government employees. According to the obtained email, it appears that all employees at these agencies are being instructed to search their email and their the computers for these related terms.

Talking Points Memo is also on this story, and has already obtained a comment from Freedom Foundation property rights director Glen Morgan:

“We are not trying to abuse the agencies,” Morgan said. “We were kind of interested in seeing if [the IRS targeting] was going on here.”

Uh-huh. Except, as we've already learned from the IRS faux scandal, evidence of targeting right-wing groups isn't evidence of targeting at all, if you don't also search for targeting against groups of other ideological persuasions. No doubt they'll attempt to trump up any hits they get, but it will reveal nothing about partisan bias.