Free Republic

The media are abuzz with the IRS affair. As you may have heard, former IRS official Lois Lerner, in charge of tax exempt groups, directed harassment operations targeting conservative groups. She also recommended auditing Republican Senator Charles Grassley. Appearing in front of the House Oversight Committee (HOC) in May 2013 and again last March, she pled the Fifth and refused to answer any questions. Later, IRS commissioner John Koskinen announced that potentially damning emails that were subpoenaed by the committee had disappeared in a series of computer crashes affecting Lerner’s machine, as well as the machines of at least six...

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. —In recent years, gun sales have gone through the roof out of fear gun laws would drastically change, but they didn’t.

This is the evil of a dying republic - waving through gangbangers at the southern border, but at the northern border detaining boy scouts for four hours. No novelist or movie director would attempt that contrast - it's too pat, too neat. But it's somehow become American reality in the 21st century.Just to be clear: that boy scout did nothing wrong. When the CBP officer demanded he hand over the camera, Mr Fox should have refused and asked to see the agent's supervisor.But it gets better: Another of the Scouts was taking luggage from the top of a van to...

“The Five” co-host Andrea Tantaros wants President Obama to stop even trying to protect America’s interests on the global stage, claiming he should “stick to beer summits and birth control” or risk “stumbling into another war.”

The federal government says 173 unaccompanied immigrant children have been placed in Minnesota since the start of the year. The Office of Refugee Resettlement on Thursday issued a state-by-state breakdown of unaccompanied child placement. The figures show more than 30,000 children have been released to sponsors this year through July 7. The specific locations of the placements were not specified. Fifty have been placed in Wisconsin. Texas, New York, Florida and California are receiving the most unaccompanied children caught at the U.S. border, according to the information. Federal and state governments are scrambling to find shelter for the children fleeing...

Psychiatrist Lee Silverman worked in a gun-free hospital, but pulled out a gun in his desk to subdue an armed patient, who had just shot his caseworker. The case renews the issue: Should doctors and teachers be armed? A mental-health caseworker is dead and a doctor and his patient wounded after a bizarre gunfight at a gun-free-zoned hospital in Yeadon, Pa., near Philadelphia, Thursday. As police prepare murder charges against the wounded patient, focus is shifting to the gun-toting psychiatrist who stopped the mayhem, likely saving other lives.

Lady Liberty's lamp has been lowered. Its light flickering. The huddled masses are no longer wanted — be they tired or poor, be they homeless or hungry, be they adults or children threatened and yearning to breathe free. The welcome light has dimmed. The spirit embodied in the words inscribed on the plaque on the Statue of Liberty rarely lived up to the reality of America's view and treatment of immigrants, whether they were from Europe, the Far East, Haiti and, now, Mexico and Central America. In the late 1700s, the fear of immigrants, also known as aliens, partly led...

Three siblings who were helping their mother sell fruit along a North Philadelphia street are dead after carjackers ran them down, police say. Their mother, another woman and the carjacking victim are fighting for their lives as police search for the men responsible.

DOVER — Misinformation has surfaced this week regarding the relocation and settlement of Congolese refugees to Tri-City communities; however, one aspect of the program through the Organization for Refugee and Immigrant Success is true — the communities of Dover, Somersworth and Rochester will have no say in the matter. Dover Mayor Karen Weston said Friday that the notion of 3,000 refugees being resettled in the Garrison City is not accurate and also the GraniteGrok.com report by Skip Murphy that a meeting scheduled with ORIS Aug. 13 will not allow for residents to ask questions is a total fabrication. What is...

At 74,000 pages, the IRS code is a mind-boggling ode to lobbying, pork-barrel spending and graft. These are the only good things that I can say about the IRS. Ode may be too friendly a word, however. Let’s instead call it an incantation for our country. Because the code holds a country in thrall like the winged monkeys in Dorothy’s Oz were held. And until the witch is dead, we monkeys must do her bidding. Politicians, economists and ordinary citizens can’t follow the tax code, which has tripped up cabinet nominees, majority leaders and others who ought to know...

Even as investigators say they need more access to bodies and wreckage from last week's Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crash in eastern Ukraine, the pro-Russian rebels that control the territory say they're tiring of having any probe there, a spokesman for a monitoring group said Friday. With the site still not secure eight days after the crash, and victims' remains still lying with debris, nations such as Netherlands are pressing to send their own police and investigators to the scene. Various negotiations are under way. But rebels controlling the area -- the same rebels that Ukraine and the United States...

Long Beach resident Tom Greer, 80, told KNBC-TV that the burglar had said she was pregnant and asked Greer not to fire, but he shot her twice in the back anyway. An autopsy later found that Andrea Miller, 28, was not pregnant, said coroner's spokesman Ed Winter. Autopsy reveals Andrea Miller was not carrying a baby when she was killed Miller was allegedly working with robbery suspect Gus Adams, now arrested for 'taking part in crime that led to Andrea Miller's death' Homeowner Tom Greer claimed he discovered them attempting to rob them and shot Miller in self-defense Greer claimed...

Officials have said that more than half of all children initially placed in shelters have gone on to be reunited with at least one parent already living in the United States, and 85 percent of all children have been placed with a close family member.

U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe turned up the rhetoric on immigration late this week, telling a national television audience that young immigrants at Fort Sill and elsewhere are in the U.S. “at the invitation of the president” and comparing the situation to the administration’s exchange of five Guantanamo Bay prisoners for U.S. serviceman Bowe Bergdahl. Inhofe also signed on to a bill by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz that would effectively end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama administration’s policy of giving low priority to deportation of undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children and have been in the...

Police praise 'heroic' doctor and caseworker who stopped psychiatric patient in terrifying close-quarter gunfight after he shot dead their colleague Richard Plotts, 49, is sedated and under guard after killing Theresa Hunt Patient's intended target may have been Dr Lee Silverman who managed to stop Plotts by shooting at him 10 times Caseworker John D'Alonzo wrestled patient to floor after shooting Plotts has been charged with murder and attempted murder Hospital policy bars anyone except on-duty law enforcement officers from carrying weapons on campus, a Mercy Health System spokeswoman said. She otherwise declined to discuss the reports that Silverman was...

CHILTON COUNTY, AL (WBRC) - In a twist in the case of a former Thorsby teacher accused of rape and sodomy of a teen, the judge has postponed her sentencing due to a social media post. Jennifer McNeill was supposed to be sentenced on Thursday morning, but a Facebook post caused the judge to delay sentencing until August 7 at 8 a.m. The Facebook post indicated McNeill is innocent. Her attorney claims the victim, his mother and his brother hacked her Facebook account and made the post. However, the family denies that claim.

Overpromising? Not really. Obama himself allegedly threw around numbers in the millions when he spoke to immigration activists about this a few weeks ago. Politico has a fine reminder today that everything he says, including what he says about his own presidential powers, can be trusted only up until the moment when the politics of the situation change and not a second longer. President Barack Obama insisted for years that he had absolutely no legal authority — none whatsoever, zero, zilch — to slow deportations on a broad scale… Obama’s pledge to use his executive powers by the end of...

Terrible ideas never really die on the Left; they just come back over and over again, like a gas station sandwich after a night of heavy drinking. So it is with reparations for slavery, which liberals would happily embrace en masse if they ever thought they could ram it through Congress. Here's why reparations for slavery are a bad idea. 1) How do you prove that slavery is responsible for problems black Americans are having today? If it were 1866, it would be easy to prove that black Americans who had been enslaved were hurt by the practice. They were...

**SNIP** At one meeting with an undercover FBI agent, Jackson allegedly told Yee that the agent knew the owner of an NFL team. Yee then told the agent about a pending law that would limit NFL players from filing workers' compensation claims in the state if they played for out of state teams. Yee told the agent that he should "convey this information to the owner of the NFL team" with an offer of help from Yee. Asked about the cost of such a vote, Yee reportedly said, "Oh no...we gotta drag it out, man. We gotta juice this thing."...

A young Ukrainian has prompted widespread outrage after posing in make-up apparently looted from the crash site of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17. Ekaterina Parkhomenko, who describes herself as a ‘separatist’ from the eastern region of the country, posted images of herself on Instagram along with the claim that she was wearing make-up ‘from the field’ – hinting the products were taken from the same area where the bodies of victims of the plane crash lay. ‘Mascara from Amsterdam, or rather from the field. Well, I think you know what I mean,’ she reportedly wrote on her social media page, before...