Free Republic

Earlier this week, the Medicare system for the first time released a list of its payments to individual doctors, showing that just a few doctors accounted for a huge fraction of Medicare payments. As Frances Robles and Eric Lipton of The Times reported on Thursday, two of those doctors had given lavishly to Democratic politicians in hopes of getting Medicare investigators off their backs. The country’s top recipient of Medicare dollars was Dr. Salomon Melgen, a Florida ophthalmologist who has been repeatedly investigated for overbilling the government for an eye medication. In 2012, he received $21 million in Medicare reimbursements....

Federal authorities said today that they are likely within the next three months to announce additional charges and new defendants in the criminal case that involves Sen. Leland Yee and more than two dozen others accused of various crimes including running guns, selling drugs and arranging murder-for-hire. "While investigation by the Grand Jury is necessarily secret... it makes good sense to generally notify the Court and opposing counsel that additional charges and, potentially, additional defendants are inevitable," prosecutors wrote in a court filing today. Authorities continue to investigate possible racketeering and criminal violations and hope to return additional indictments in...

Texans like to talk all the time about how big Texas is, and how if you´re driving from the bottom of Texas to Canada, then you´re spending half of your time just getting through the state itself. So is that true? It´s pretty close. Texas really is gigantic. Redditor Armeleon put together a map that gives you a good idea of the massive size of Texas. Texas spans about 800 miles from north to south. Everything seen in red on the map is closer than 791 miles to Texas (the longest straight-line distance in Texas from north to south is

A House committee voted Thursday to hold Lois Lerner in contempt of Congress, as Republicans escalated their bid to "get to the bottom" of the former IRS official's role in the political targeting scandal. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee voted 21-12 to hold Lerner in contempt. The party-line vote followed hours of heated debate on the committee. The contempt measure heads next to the House floor. House Speaker John Boehner predicted earlier this week that unless Lerner agrees to cooperate, the full House will support contempt -- from there, the case would likely head to the courts. "This...

Washington superlawyer Cleta Mitchell represents True the Vote, one of the groups illegally targeted by the IRS in the scandals that have exposed the agency as a partisan operation. True the Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht has been harassed by federal law enforcement authorities representing three different federal agencies. They represent the price of politics in the Age of Obama. As John notes below, yesterday the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee released emails that show Democratic staffers communicating with the IRS about True the Vote. It appears that Elijah Cummings, the committee’s ranking Democrat and therefore the Congressman to whom these...

Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services auditing director Delrice Augustus has been formally charged fraud for allegedly buying personal items with a government purchasing card, U.S. Attorney Walt Green announced Wednesday. Augustus, 34, of Baton Rouge, is currently on leave as director of the bureau of auditing and compliance services for DCFS, an agency that receives over a billion dollars in federal funds, a U.S. Attorneys office press release says. A bill of information says that from 2010 though March 2014, Augustus used government purchasing cards for a dishwasher, televisions, I-Pads, hotel rooms gas and other personal items.

To liberals who see this post:Please don't misunderstand me, I'm not trying to imply that unreasonable people vote Democrat...I'm flat out saying it.

Ron Paul: Why didn’t the north just buy the south’s slaves and free them that way? Getting down to the last two questions here…. Most people consider Abe Lincoln to be one of our greatest presidents, if not the greatest president we’ve ever had. Would you agree with that sentiment and why or why not? No, I don’t think he was one of our greatest presidents. I mean, he was determined to fight a bloody civil war, which many have argued could have been avoided. For 1/100 the cost of the war, plus 600 thousand lives, enough money would have...

Democrat House candidate: NRA members are 'pure trash' with 'very low I.Q.s' If you're 'sucking the tit of the NRA,' he doesn't want your support. Everyone, meet Virginia Democrat Mike Dickinson. He's a little known anti-gun lefty currently running for the House of Representatives in VA's 7th district. The seat is held by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. While Cantor is facing a weak primary opponent, virtually everyone expects the seat to remain safely in his hands. Still, despite having almost no chance of winning, Dickinson has decided to take a shot at Cantor's brass ring. How will he overcome...

If Wendy Davis wanted to achieve the goal of becoming the first Democrat to win statewide office in 20 years, she needed to run an extremely well-funded and nearly flawless campaign. While the Wendy Davis campaign has received plenty of funding, its execution has been anything but flawless. Since Wendy Davis’ announcement to run in October 2013, the campaign has had a number of missteps along the way. A few of these include Wendy Davis getting caught misrepresenting the truth about her past, claiming to be “pro-life”, claiming she supports a ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, and...

When Democratic National Committee operatives describe something as "undemocratic," they mean it's not good for the Democratic Party. "We believe that we should expand democracy -- that expanding democracy is good for the nation; it is good for our party," Democratic National Committee spokesman Mo Elleithee told reporters during a conference call in which he attacked "undemocratic" Republican voter ID laws and other state-level election laws.

Fundraising emails frequently offer an amusing glimpse into the thinking and strategy of a political party. Remember earlier this month when Democrat senators took to the floor for an overnight session about “climate change”? The very concerned senators warned of grave consequences of human activity, painted pictures of global catastrophe, and chided critics and “deniers” of “settled science.” And then proposed exactly zero words of legislation in a chamber they control. **SNIP** Now comes a fundraising email from Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA): We must rise to the challenge, but too many people are standing in our way.

Leland Yee should be making national headlines. A Democratic state senator from San Francisco, a statewide candidate until this week, and a rising member of Nancy Pelosi and Diane Feinstein’s Democratic political machine, was arrested on Wednesday by the Justice Department for wire fraud, corruption, and his alleged involvement in illegal gun deal between Chinatown gangsters and Islamist militants. **SNIP** Yet four of the most prominent news outlets in America — CNN, USA Today, Politico and the Chicago Sun-Times — made no mention of the Leland Yee scandal within two days of the story breaking. When Politico finally ran a...

The Georgia Supreme Court has disbarred former Georgia Congresswoman Denise Majette, finding she overbilled clients and misled the court about how much she was owed in fees. *** DeKalb County voters elected Majette to Congress in 2002 after she defeated then-Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney in the Democratic primary. She resigned after one term to run for the U.S. Senate and lost to Republican Johnny Isakson in the general election in 2004. In 2008, she sought office again but lost her bid to unseat state School Superintendent Kathy Cox.

Many leftist politicians who want to strip Americans of their Second Amendment rights say their position is based on concern for the safety of citizens. Somehow, they contend, forcing law-abiding gun-owners to give up their weapons will result in street gangs following suit. According to a recently unsealed affidavit, however, one state senator in California allegedly wanted to curtail gun rights for everyone except violent gangsters. State Sen. Leland Yee, the court documents state, was the subject of an FBI raid that led to his arrest Wednesday along with 25 other individuals. Among those arrested was Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow,...

<p>While discussing plans to smuggle arms from the Philippines, Yee allegedly said to the undercover FBI agent: "People want to get whatever they want to get. Do I care? No, I don’t care. People need certain things.”</p>

<p>“As a grandparent, I say enough is enough,” Reid said in a statement.</p> <p>The unusual emotional plea came just as the amount of money Reid will repay his campaign doubled to more than $31,000 after additional payments to the jewelry company were found in Federal Election Commission filings from 2012.</p>

SAN FRANCISCO -- Known for navigating the state Capitol's backrooms and this city's complicated political landscape, state Sen. Leland Yee now is accused of consorting with notorious felons, accepting money for his cash-strapped political campaigns in exchange for favors and promising undercover FBI agents he could deliver connections to international gun runners. In a stunning development that almost certainly torpedoes Yee's quest for statewide office, the San Francisco Democrat wound up glum and disoriented in a federal courtroom Wednesday. The politician who introduced anti-gun-violence legislation is now charged with trafficking in firearms and public corruption in an FBI undercover operation...

The 137-page, FBI-sworn affidavit against California State Sen. Leland Yee, a Democrat who is also running for Secretary of State, and over two dozen other individuals reads like a crime thriller. Beyond the widely reported stories of alleged wire fraud, money laundering, corruption, and bribery, the affidavit contains tales of alleged murder-for-hire plots involving a political consultant close to Yee, as well as large international weapons trafficking operations.Indeed, while the media have fixated on the hypocrisy of a gun-control advocate--Yee sponsored legislation against detachable magazines, for example--alleged involvement in gun smuggling, few reports delve into the kind of weapons with which...

A California state senator has been arrested for promising shoulder-fired automatic weapons and missiles from a Muslim separatist group to an undercover FBI agent in exchange for campaign donations, according to court documents unsealed Wednesday. In San Francisco, FBI agents have charged California State Sen. Leland Yee with conspiracy to deal firearms and wire fraud. The allegations were outlined in an FBI affidavit against Yee and 25 others. The allegations against Yee include a number of favors he requested in exchange for campaign donations, as well as performing "official acts" in exchange for donations to get himself out of a...