Free Republic

In the wake of one of the worst abuses of government power in recent history, many are rushing to frame the Internal Revenue Service scandal as simply an attack on conservative activists. That view risks creating a partisan political football and misses a fundamentally scarier abuse that exceeds the scandals of Watergate or any other prior government abuse. The IRS has admitted that since May 2010 it targeted grassroots-conservative organizations that had applied for tax-exempt status, unfairly subjecting them to rigorous scrutiny due to their political leanings. Such groups were told they were required to comply with IRS requests, no...

...The Internal Revenue Service, apparently determined to get out ahead of an inspector general report critical of its handling of tax exemptions for Tea Party groups, came up with a plan: Lois Lerner, the official responsible for the tax-exempt division, would publicly apologize in response to a question at the American Bar Association conference in Washington... ...It was the day after Lerner had testified to Congress last week, failing once again to disclose the extent of the Tea Party targeting even under direct questioning. The damning inspector general report would come out any day, and Lerner and Miller wanted to...

•Fast And Furious (guns for drug lords, resulting in murder of Americans and Mexicans)

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew on Friday urged congressional leaders to raise the debt limit and insisted that the White House is not going to negotiate over the increase because lawmakers have "no choice." "We will not negotiate over the debt limit," Lew wrote. "The creditworthiness of the United States is non-negotiable. The question of whether the country must pay obligations it has already incurred is not open to debate." Lew said that while President Obama is willing to discuss plans to reduce the nation's deficit with Congress, those talks must be kept separate from any effort to raise the nation's...

I got to thinking about all this tax talk on another thread and I wondered ... what do we need taxes FOR in the first place ...

Despite what you sometimes hear from eight-year-olds, pundits, lawyers, politicians, chat-room trolls, and UFOlogists, "proving a negative" is not just not "philosophically impossible" but often easily accomplished. One of the simplest ways to prove a negative is via a "proof by contradiction". Proving that a claim or assertion is false can be a simple matter of recognizing what would have to follow from that claim and also demonstrating that it could not or did not. We see examples of proof by contradiction regularly on Free Republic. If it had been true that "Tea Partiers spit on Emanuel Cleaver and called...

The fallout from the Internal Revenue Service targeting scandal is going to be felt in many other federal agencies and programs, including Obamacare and immigration reform, Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker says. "This episode is going to have a big effect … There are multiple, multiple issues that have to be addressed,'' Corker told "The Steve Malzberg Show'' on Newsmax TV. "This is a wakeup call for all of those who see our large government and the way people can be coerced … For instance, as we move to immigration reform, just being aware … of judgments that take place within...

In response to The Smoking Gun’s publication of a classified CIA terrorism report, the Department of Justice launched a lengthy leak investigation that included subpoenaed telephone records, interviews with dozens of government officials, polygraph and computer examinations, and “a fair amount of time trying to dig up information about the site itself,” according to FBI records.

Higher-than-expected premiums, combined with the scandal-ridden IRS, are putting a shadow over Obamacare, with House Republicans vowing to keep up the fight against President Barack Obama's key agenda item. On Thursday, the House voted once again to repeal Obamacare. This time around, two Democrats, Reps. Jim Matheson (Utah) and Mike McIntyre (N.C.)., sided with Republicans on the vote. All GOP members voted to repeal the health care issue. In Saturday's weekly GOP address, Maryland Republican Rep. Andy Harris vowed his party will keep up the fight, discussing a report by the House Energy and Commerce Committee that detailed how insurance...

Then in one of the best displays of civil disobedience I’ve ever seen, the entire audience recited the pledge of allegiance, while most of the lawmakers remained seated. This is one to share. Patriotism is ALIVE in America.

WASHINGTON — Senior Treasury officials were made aware in June 2012 that investigators were looking into complaints from tea party groups that they were being harassed by the Internal Revenue Service, a Treasury inspector general said, disclosing that Obama administration officials knew there was a probe during the heat of the presidential campaign. J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration, testifying alongside ousted IRS head Steven Miller on Friday, said he had told the department's general counsel about his investigation on June 4, 2012, and Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin "shortly thereafter." But, George cautioned, those discussions...

U.S. Sen. Bob Corker says he is awaiting an explanation from the White House over reports that the United States has made millions of dollars in secret cash payments to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan. Corker told "The Steve Malzberg Show'' on Newsmax TV that a letter he wrote to the Obama administration was first answered with officials telling him it wasn't his business, but added they have since softened their stance. "I want to know why we're doing it. I understand when we go into conflict areas in the very beginning, there's no doubt we deal with cash,'' Corker,...

Rep. Paul Ryan said on Friday that the hearing with the ousted head of the Internal Revenue Service on the agency’s targeting of conservative groups made at least one thing clear to legislators. “The one answer we did get, though, is that the IRS withheld information from Congress,” the Wisconsin Republican told Jake Tapper on CNN. “We have many more questions that result from today’s hearing.” A member of the House Ways and Means Committee, Ryan was among the many panel members from both parties who grilled Miller on the agency’s singling out of groups with the words “tea party”...

The IRS targeting Tea Party groups and other conservative-leaning political organizations has reignited calls for reform and the argument among Capitol Hill Republicans that the federal government has become too big and out of control. Among those leading the calls for reform is Michigan Rep. Dave Camp, chairman of the Republican-led House Ways and Means Committee, which held a hearing on the scandal five days after the targeting was made public and two days after the resignation of acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller. “This systemic abuse cannot be fixed with just one resignation,” Camp said at the start of the...

When you get right down to it, the political targeting and stalling of tax-exempt applications by the IRS was an effort to defund the Tea Party. Rick Santelli, one of the Tea Party founders and my CNBC colleague, was the first to make this point. I’ve taken it a step further: The IRS was taking the Tea Party out of play for the 2012 election, as it looked to avoid a repeat of 2010 and another Tea Party landslide. There are a lot of numbers out there. Some say Tea Party applications for tax-exempt status averaged 27 months for approval,...

Andrew McCarthy makes the case that the 10:00 PM phone call on September 11 last year between Hillary Clinton and President Obama may be the conversation that led to the bogus story of an anti-Muslim video setting off "demonstrations" in Benghazi that led to the deaths of Americans. Fraud flows from the top down, not the mid-level up. Mid-level officials in the White House and the State Department do not call the shots -- they carry out orders. They also were not running for reelection in 2012 or positioning themselves for a campaign in 2016. The people doing that were,...

This is a woman we will need to learn much more about in the coming weeks. Sarah Hall Ingram is a highly valued employee at the IRS. In the last three years she has received $103,390 in bonuses for her excellent work. She was the Commissioner of the Tax-Exempt and Government Entitles Division. Under her leadership, groups that expressed a fear of large, out-of-control government were systematically crushed by her branch of our large, out-of-control government. They were specifically singled out for harassment for political reasons. Secret information about the conservative applicants was leaked to leftist opposition groups to facilitate...

Though Senator Cruz has not gone into specifics in “140 characters or less,” we can gain a general idea from the article he wrote for The National Review, which now resides in the archives of the TedCruz.org website. Two of his twelve points relate specifically to the tax code. Here is an excerpt from that article: 7) Slash Corporate Tax Rates. Right now, U.S. corporations face the highest tax rate in the developed world, and they face double taxation if they invest their profits in America. As a result, American companies are today keeping over $2 trillion overseas. With over...

How big of a wake-up call are the Obama scandals, especially the ones surrounding the seizing of phone records from the Associated Press and the IRS's targeting of conservatives? So big that two of the media's most shameful and shameless gun control advocates -- Joe Scarborough and Piers Morgan -- have finally conceded that arguments made by pro-Second Amendment activists against the expanding of background checks might not be so ridiculous. In a roundtable discussion on Friday's "Morning Joe," Scarborough said that because of the IRS scandal, “My argument is less persuasive today because of these scandals.” He added: "People...

You know the people I’m talking about. The Know-Nothings. You know the folks who pushed that one law regarding almost 20 percent of the entire economy before they even read the bill? The ones who rushed it into law just to see what was in it? The ones who managed to write a bill, while still not being familiar with what the bill actually did?   Yeah, those guys? The Know-Nothings. Well, they know nothing about a lot of other stuff too. Obama’s one of those guys. So is Eric Holder. So, apparently, is the entire staff at the IRS...

On Thursday, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) lashed out at Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), calling her recent comments regarding Fast and Furious "mind-numbingly stupid," and suggested she "schedule an appointment" with a doctor. On Thursday, Pelosi claimed that the contempt vote against Attorney General Eric Holder was part of a grand conspiracy to undermine his fight against voter suppression. “This is no accident. It is no coincidence. It is a plan on the part of the Republicans,” Pelosi said. “It’s really beneath the office of a member of Congress to say something that outrageous, and the fact that she was...

HHS:'Telework' Gives Gov't Employees More Time for 'Planning and Preparing Healthy Meals' May 17, 2013 By Terence P. Jeffrey (CNSNews.com) - The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services says it wants as many as 20 percent of its workers to "telework," use an "alternative work schedule," or do both, in order to "reduce green house gas emissions," decrease "employee stress," and give these government workers more time for "planning and preparing healthy meals." So says one of the HHS "performance measures" detailed in an appendix to the department's latest strategic plan. HHS's performance measure "4.D.05" says: "Increase the percent...

The liberal media are not really "up in arms" with the Obama administration, but are simply having a "lover's quarrel" over the AP scandal in particular, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell told CNBC host Larry Kudlow on his May 16 The Kudlow Report program. What's more, it won't be that long until "[t]he Bill Clinton syndrome is going to be upon us, where it's time to move on, we've covered it [the media will say] and they're going to turn the fire right on Republicans as being obstructionists. Mark my word," the Media Research Center founder predicted. "They would report what...

If you’ve seen the video we posted earlier today, then you definitely want to check this one out. There was some question that when Second Amendment activist, James Kaleda, was removed from the hearing if the audience was clapping for him or for his removal. I think this video, which took place immediately following that, should clear things up. After a Second Amendment activist was forcefully removed from a hearing on upcoming gun legislation in NJ, the audience wasn’t too happy. Several members of the audience yelled at the state senator in charge from the audience, several called him out...

I’ve been dealing with this scenario for so long, I had forgotten how strange it was until just a few days ago when I was talking to Joe on the telephone and the topic somehow came up. What scenario am I talking about? Well, that would be a law enforcement call for service that those of us in law enforcement refer to as the “Dial-A-Dad”. The “Dial-A-Dad” is essentially when a parent, for one reason or another, calls the cops to come and discipline their child. I am not talking about the 6’ tall, 200 pound high school football lineman...

The Homeland Security Department has granted legal status to 99.2 percent of all illegal immigrants who have applied under President Obama’s new non-deportation policy for young adults, according to the latest numbers released Friday. That’s a slight drop from the 99.5 percent approval rate reported last month. The policy, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, grants legal status to most illegal immigrants under the age of 31 who came to the U.S. before age 16 ... DACA is seen as a test-run should Congress pass a broad legalization for the 11 million illegal immigrants estimated to be in the...

For several weeks now, LiveAction has been publishing a series of articles revealing the secret horror taking place inside abortion clinics – the deliberate murder of infants born alive following a failed abortion. (LifeSiteNews has reprinted and cataloged this series here.) Gruesome testimonies of nurses forced to ignore infants gasping for breath, or covered in horrific wounds. Undeniable reports of doctors strangling, drowning and suffocating infants who just “won’t die”. Photos of tiny, still children, with skin the undeniable pink of a human being who had shortly before had a heartbeat. Most of these stories occurred prior to the passage...

Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz was born in Canada but is qualified to become president should he mount a campaign in 2016 or beyond. Cruz was born in Calgary, and his father is from Cuba. But the Republican senator’s mother is from the first state of Delaware, which appears to settle the issue. Government officials didn’t exactly have to scramble for the information amid speculation the firebrand freshman senator was contemplating a presidential run and might be ineligible, considering similar questions about President Obama’s birth prompted the Congressional Research Office to compile a 2009 report to try to resolve the...

Clinton and Obama discussed Benghazi. What did they say? ‘What would you be focusing on in the Benghazi investigation?” I spent many years in the investigation biz, so it’s only natural that I’ve been asked that question a lot lately. I had the good fortune to be trained in Rudy Giuliani’s U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan. Rudy famously made his mark by making law enforcement reflect what common sense knew: Enterprises take their cues from the top. Criminal enterprises are no different: The capos do not carry out the policy of the button-men — it’s the other way around. So...

What do the Benghazi cover-up and the IRS scandal have in common? They were both about winning elections, under false pretenses. Winning elections, after all, is something Barack Obama is good at. He obviously loves campaigning and delivering grand orations to enormous adoring crowds. He loves it so much that he flew off to Las Vegas to campaign the day after the first murder of a U.S. ambassador in 33 years. What actually happened in Benghazi was out of sync with the Obama campaign line. Osama bin Laden was dead. Al-Qaida was on the run. The global war on terror...

Under President Obama, “justice” is anything but blind. Neither is it deaf. In fact, based on recent revelations, it appears to be watching your every move and listening to your every word. Still, if you happen to be a federal employee, now it’s even listening for your silence. The only thing this Obama White House seems to generate is scandal. Well, here’s yet another to add to the growing list. In addition to the Benghazi cover-up, IRS targeting of political dissenters and the illegal seizure of media phone records, whistleblowers within DOJ have contacted Liberty Counsel to express grave concerns...

SANFORD, Fla. —A Sanford couple has been met with a new wave of unwanted attention directed at George Zimmerman. One year ago, a tweet was sent out by director Spike Lee, identifying a Sanford address as Zimmerman's home. The home belongs to the McClain couple, who have no relation to Zimmerman or the case. Lee later apologized and offered an undisclosed amount of money as a settlement. Last night, the tweet resurfaced in a series of retweets, accompanied with some unsettling messages, were again aimed at the couple's home. "We're asking people to please stay away from this home. These...

Once government is ensnared in every aspect of life, a bureaucracy grows increasingly capricious. Speaking at Ohio State University earlier this month, Barack Obama urged students to pay no attention to those paranoid types who “incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity.” Oddly enough, in recent days the most compelling testimony for this view of government has come from the president himself, who insists with a straight face that he had no idea that the Internal Revenue Service had spent two years targeting his political enemies until he “learned about it from the same news...

This must be part of that new civility Democrats promised us. Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) has a gun firing off at the head of GOP opponent Gabriel Gomez in his latest campaign ad. Coincidence?

The all-night games were held in rarefied settings like a suite at the Plaza Hotel. One pink chip was worth $25,000. Masseuses were on hand to help relieve the tension, while the players were fueled by food and drink. And the stakes climbed into the stratosphere, with as much as $2 million on the table to be lost or won. * * * At roughly the same time, some of the people who helped organize the poker games were taking in breathtaking wagers on college and professional sports. One man bet $300,000 on last year’s Super Bowl — and lost....

The Moscow city government has rejected an application for a homosexual march permit for the eighth year in a row, citing the need for “respect for morality” and patriotism, according to Russian media sources. “According to Russian law, we must work clearly and consistently on maintaining morality, directed to the teaching of patriotism to the growing generation, and not toward unclear aspirations, not to mention taking the city’s central squares and streets for this,” said Aleksei Mayorov, head of Regional Security for the city of Moscow, according to Interfax If homosexual activists defy the law and attempt to march as...

The Obamas announced today that they will be hosting another “Performance at the White House” event on May 28 to honor American singer and songwriter Carole King: As part of their “In Performance at the White House” series, the President and First Lady will host a concert in the East Room honoring singer-songwriter Carole King, who will be awarded the 2013 Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. President Obama will present the award as he did when the Library of Congress honored Stevie Wonder (2009), Sir Paul McCartney (2010), and the songwriting team of Burt Bacharach and Hal...

A hotly contested gun-control law that was passed in 2007 is finally ready to be implemented, Attorney General Kamala Harris said Friday: a requirement that every new semiautomatic handgun contain "micro-stamping" technology that would allow police to trace a weapon from cartridges found at a crime scene. The law, signed by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, made California the first state to require micro-stamping, which engraves the gun's serial number on each cartridge. But the legislation specified that it would take effect only when the technology was available and all private patents had expired. The gun owners' group Calguns Foundation tried to...

Under President Obama, “justice” is anything but blind. Neither is it deaf. In fact, based on recent revelations, it appears to be watching your every move and listening to your every word. Still, if you happen to be a federal employee, now it’s even listening for your silence. The only thing this Obama White House seems to generate is scandal. Well, here’s yet another to add to the growing list. In addition to the Benghazi cover-up, IRS targeting of political dissenters and the illegal seizure of media phone records, whistleblowers within DOJ have contacted Liberty Counsel to express grave concerns...

"We try to cooperate fully with the IRS, because, as citizens, we feel a strong patriotic duty not to go to jail" ~ Dave Berry

Civil servants always will have the “American people’s back” despite dysfunctional politics, former Vice President Al Gore told federal employees on Monday. “I have never lost faith in you, the career people who keep this thing going in spite of all curveballs thrown in front of you, the latest being the sequester, well, the latest is -- what’s the date today?” the head of an initiative to reform government during the Clinton administration told a standing room-only crowd of federal employees at the Excellence in Government conference, sponsored by the Government Executive Media Group, in Washington. **SNIP** “Workers know, they...

Some of the world's biggest oil companies may have a new mess on their hands. The European Commission raided the offices of Shell, BP and Norway's Statoil this week as part of an investigation into suspected attempts to manipulate global oil prices spanning more than a decade. None of the companies have been accused of wrongdoing, but the controversy has brought back memories of the Libor rate-rigging scandal that rocked the financial world last year.

The outgoing head of the IRS disputed Republicans’ suspicions that the tax-collecting agency’s targeting of conservatives was motivated by partisanship at the first congressional hearing on the scandal. **SNIP** “I do not believe that partisanship motivated the practices of the people described in the IG report,” Miller said. “I think that what happened here was that foolish mistakes were made by people who were trying to be efficient in their work.” GOP lawmakers also repeatedly sought to ferret out any information as to whether Miller had talked with White House officials about the targeting of conservatives, or – more ominously...

**SNIP** A quick read of the overview on the IIIT website sounds innocent enough with wording that readily appeals to an intellectual community. “The International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) is a private, non-profit, academic, cultural and educational institution, concerned with general issues of Islamic thought and education. The Institute was established in the United States of America in 1981 (1401 AH). It is independent of local politics, party orientations and ideological bias. The headquarters of the Institute are situated in Herndon, Virginia.” Seeking evidence of contributing to terrorist organizations, the FBI raided the IIIT headquarters in Herndon in 2002....

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday defended the Obama administration’s move to solicit private donations to implement ObamaCare, arguing that the government has a responsibility to help beneficiaries enroll under the law. Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the Health and Human Services Department, has come under fire from Republicans for asking some prominent healthcare groups for financial help in executing the central elements of President Obama's healthcare reform law, which are slated to take effect within the next year. But Pelosi, who shepherded the proposal through the House, said educating the public on the intricacies of the complex law...

In an email to supporters of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi encouraged readers to sign a petition to "declare your support" for Obamacare ahead of the House plan to hold a vote on repealing the unpopular health care law. The email, which had the subject line "this has gotten out of control,"claims that the vote to repeal is "worthless," particularly because "a real repeal would actually COST money rather than save it." Read the whole email from Pelosi below:

Issuing misdemeanor summonses to two of the three people involved in the “brutal attack on an innocent family” at a gas station in north Baton Rouge Sunday night was an “error in judgment” by the officers who did not book the suspects into East Baton Rouge Parish Prison, Provisional Police Chief Carl Dabadie Jr., said Friday. “We have counseled the officers involved and I have re-emphasized to all my commanders that I expect offenders who commit misdemeanor crimes of violence will be booked into the prison, not summonsed,” Dabadie said in a statement.

In short, Obama has never addressed his duty to govern. He has instead maintained a non-stop process of campaigning and fund-raising. It did not work in 2010 when voters returned power to the Republicans in the House and now he is doing everything he can to regain Democrat control there in 2014.

Gov. Chris Christie has warned potential investors there is no guarantee the state will make its required pension payments in future years, an admission that underscores a looming financial crisis he and future governors face as retirement costs are expected to explode before the decade ends. The disclosure, buried in a 156-page bond prospectus for investors, also casts doubt on one of the key commitments Christie and leading Democrats made to public employees as part of the 2011 health and pension reform: Workers would shoulder a greater share of pension costs in exchange for the state making required payments to...

DENVER (Reuters) - A group of Colorado county sheriffs, angry about two new state gun control laws passed in the wake of last year's mass shootings in Connecticut and Colorado, filed a federal lawsuit on Friday seeking to block the laws from going into effect. The two laws, passed by the state's Democratic-controlled legislature with scant Republican support, ban ammunition magazines that hold more than 15 rounds and require background checks for all private gun sales and transfers. All but 10 of the state's 64 county sheriffs signed on to the suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Denver. In...