Free Republic

North Carolina has been in the media recently for all the wrong reasons, whether it be the state Democratic Party scandal or the John Edwards trial. It is time for the media and the public to talk about the right reasons that attention should be paid to the Tar Heel State, namely that the state is home to one of the most pro-taxpayer pieces of legislation ever crafted. The aforementioned legislation is The Taxpayer Information Act (HB 315), and it is the brainchild of NC Speaker Pro Tem and candidate for Lt. Governor, Dale Folwell. The Taxpayer Information Act is...

Late Friday afternoon, Free Beacon reporter CJ Ciaramella requested a comment from the Justice Department about my new book Fast and Furious: Barack Obama's Bloodiest Scandal and Its Shameless Coverup. This was the response he received.   That's right folks. Media Matters, the far Left website funded by George Soros, is now serving as a mouth piece for the United States Department of Justice. Not only did DOJ refer Ciaramella to Media Matters for information about Operation Fast and Furious, but didn't even refer him to material that had anything to do with his original question about the FBI covering...

Safeguards against tampering with election results are in place throughout the election process, but for Pennsylvania's absentee voters, a potential security breach exists. Printed on the envelope used to return completed absentee ballots is an "R" or "D," noting the voter's Republican or Democratic party affiliation. A person intent on influencing election results could weed out unopened ballots of one party. All they would need is access to the mails. That could happen in a college mail room or another origination point, at the post office, during delivery or when county mail is being sorted. The envelope marking is plain...

Nanny Bloomberg’s at it again; exasperated environmentalists try another approach to save spotted owls; and Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood moonlights as a traffic cop all in this week’s edition of Nanny State overreach. Highway to Hell: Last week we brought you news of Nanny State regulators at NHTSA battling what they now call “the distracted driving epidemic.” Perhaps they should add Transportation Secretary LaHood to their expanding list of potential distractions. In a fit of self-righteousness LaHood claimedduring a speech this week that he hasn’t used a cellphone while driving in over three years. LaHood also stated that he...

SNIP The curious fact is, President Obama’s attorney, Alexandra Hill, couldn’t have been more adamant about not citing the online birth certificate as a means of proving the president’s identity in this recent challenge – and after everyone went to so much trouble to get it! Indeed, she called the Internet image “legally irrelevant,” arguing that New Jersey law doesn’t specifically call for a birth certificate to qualify a presidential candidate for the ballot. Exactly how a presidential candidate demonstrates he is at least 35 years old and “natural born,” the constitutional requirement New Jersey upholds, Hill didn’t say, but...

General Services Administration officials permitted a high-ranking employee to spend tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars on lavish travel junkets, despite an inspector general's dire warning about the executive's pattern of waste, fraud and abuse, officials said Tuesday.GSA Inspector General Brian Miller warned Martha Johnson, then head of GSA, in May 2011 about Neely's pattern of inappropriate and unbridled spending, including a $823,000 Las Vegas conference for 300 GSA employees in October 2010. A month later, a GSA official informed a White House lawyer about an investigation of "fraud and wasteful spending" at GSA Despite those warnings, Neely received a...

An employee working for the Medicaid program of the Department of Health and Human Services inappropriately transferred some personal information of more than 228,000 beneficiaries to his personal email. Update 1:30 p.m.: The S.C. Law Enforcement Division has identified the employee behind the breach as 36-year-old Christopher Lykes of Swansea. He was arrested this afternoon and booked at the Richland County Detention Center on five counts of violating the Medically Indigent Act and one count of disclosure of confidential information. SLED has confirmed that at least one other party received the information Lykes transferred to his email.

CHINATOWN (CBS) – Boston police raided five stores in Chinatown Thursday morning in a crackdown on welfare fraud. The businesses were suspected of misusing Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards. Some are suspected of paying cash for the food assistance cards, which are limited in how they are used. Last year, the Legislature voted to prohibit the use of EBT cards to buy alcohol, tobacco or lottery tickets. Just last month, a special state commission recommended expanding those restrictions to include a ban on using the cards in nail salons, tattoo parlors, strip clubs and casinos.

However, there may be a more fundamental reason we are so consistently lied to by Barack Obama and his allies: they just do not respect most Americans and have very little regard for our intelligence. Where, one may ask, is the proof of this claim? Barack Obama and his closest advisers have in fact told us they don't think too highly of most Americans. The tip off should have been Barack Obama's "gaffe" (Michael Kinsley's definition of a gaffe made by a politician is when he tells us how he truly thinks by accident) back in 2008 when he derisively...

Mitt Romney will take a victory lap before members of the Republican National Committee when the party meets at an annual event in Scottsdale, Ariz., this week While Romney is not formally the party's nominee yet -- he has not clinched the 1,144 delegates required to secure the nomination, and two other candidates remain in the race -- party rules all but guarantee he will win enough delegates to claim the nomination on the first ballot at the GOP's convention in Tampa. Recognizing that reality, Romney and the RNC set up a joint fundraising account earlier this month to begin...

Massachusetts has lost more than $90 Million paying out unemployment benefits to people cheating the system. Since 2008, the Bay State has written checks to unemployed residents, totaling $6.5 Billion. This does not include the extended benefits from the Federal Government. Michelle Amante, Acting Director of Labor and Workforce Development said, “We have the lowest overpayment rate in the country, meaning we shouldn’t have made a payment to them or overpaid them.” Amante said Massachusetts’ overpayment rate is 1.4%, while the National average is 2.51%. But even that small percentage of six billion dollars works out to be about 90...

The senior government executive who organized the lavish Las Vegas conference at the center of a General Services Administration spending scandal took dozens of trips for the agency. The boss's wife accompanied him on some of them — and taxpayers picked up the tab. Deborah Neely wasn't always just sharing husband Jeffrey E. Neely's hotel rooms at resorts from Las Vegas to the Pacific islands. She handled party arrangements, directed event planners to spend government money and arranged lodging for relatives on the GSA trip to Las Vegas in 2010, an unusual role revealed in transcripts of interviews that the...

04/17/2012 Constitution Party National Convention to Meet in Nashville Amidst Unprecedented Voter Dissatisfaction with Obama and Romney Constitution Party National Chairman, Jim Clymer, announced the 2012 National Convention of the Constitution Party which will be held April 18-21 in Nashville, Tennessee. “American voters who support limited, constitutional government, traditional American values, the protection of American jobs and preservation of individual liberty can take heart! They will not be limited to a difficult choice between Obama and Romney as the one likely to be the least threat to their life, liberty, property and other interests. The Constitution Party will be offering...

Amanda Clayton, who admitted to receiving public food assistance after winning $1 million in the state lotto, was arrested Monday evening in Michigan on two felony counts of welfare fraud. Clayton, of Lincoln Park, Mich., failed to report her winnings and employment while receiving $5,475 in food and medical assistance, the state Attorney General said. "It's simply common sense that million dollar lottery winners forfeit their right to public assistance," Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette said in a statement. "We will continue to work with local, state and federal authorities to uphold state laws intended to ensure wise stewardship of...

BRONX (WABC) -- What is drawing huge crowds in the Bronx, people lining up around the block, to get into a storefront that houses a tax preparation office, what's really going on? People who went to the storefront asked Eyewitness News to investigate after they claim they were promised thousands of dollars in government surplus money that would be put on pre-paid debit cards. Now, the bank that issues those debit cards has put out a warning. "I'd like to talk to the boss," Eyewitness News Investigative Reporter Sarah Wallace said. "He's not here," security at E &M Multi Service...

Naoki Mori, the Japanese cancer researcher who has had 30 papers retracted by scientific journals, was asked to give his side of the story. In an e-mail, he acknowledged that his colleagues “were lax in certain regards in the preparation of papers,” but he denied having committed a grave offense. The studies were retracted because they used pictures from older papers, rather than from the experiments described in the studies. “I think this reuse is not a scientific misconduct,” Dr. Mori wrote. He and his colleagues studied the response of human cells to infection by bacteria and viruses. To measure...

In the fall of 2010, Dr. Ferric C. Fang made an unsettling discovery. Dr. Fang, who is editor in chief of the journal Infection and Immunity, found that one of his authors had doctored several papers. It was a new experience for him. “Prior to that time,” he said in an interview, “Infection and Immunity had only retracted nine articles over a 40-year period.” The journal wound up retracting six of the papers from the author, Naoki Mori of the University of the Ryukyus in Japan. And it soon became clear that Infection and Immunity was hardly the only victim...

Van Jones, one of the most effective organizers and strategists on the left, is out with a new book. Rebuild the Dream, which debuted last week on the New York Times bestseller list, takes its name from the organization Jones helped found a year ago to stir up a grass-roots insurgency against the plutocrats we now call the 1%—and now seek harness the insurgent energies expressed by the Occupy movement into lasting institutional reform. “The American dream—the idea that ours is a land where any hard-working person can better herself or himself—is at risk of being wiped out, right before...

Meteorologist Brian Sussman blows whistle on president's scheme The environmentalist movement isn’t about protecting the environment at all, according to meteorologist-turned-journalist Brian Sussman. It’s about destroying private property, controlling behavior, and expanding government – and the Obama administration has a secret plan to further all of it, he says. Sussman is now blowing the whistle on the real nature of environmentalism in his explosive brand-new book, “Eco-Tyranny.” He reveals secret memos from inside Obama’s Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, outlining a covert plan “to pursue a program of land consolidation” for the federal government to secure tens of millions...

MIDLAND — Michigan’s 60,000 home health care aides will no longer be deemed government employees — meaning they cannot be forced into a government employee union and have dues withheld — as a result of legislation signed today by Gov. Rick Snyder. The next step is for the Michigan Department of Community Health to immediately stop the collection of dues from subsidy payments intended to assist developmentally disabled adults and the diversion of those funds to the Service Employees International Union, said Patrick J. Wright, director of the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation. “Ending this lucrative charade is terrific news for...