Free Republic

The Battle of Athens (sometimes called the McMinn County War) was a rebellion led by citizens in Athens and Etowah, Tennessee, United States, against the local government in August 1946. The citizens, including some World War II veterans, accused the local officials of political corruption and voter intimidation. Here is what happened: Following World War II in 1946, violence erupted when returning American soldiers discovered their Tennessee county had been taken over by political corruption. Their plan to take it back involved bullets—lots of bullets—and dynamite. Why Athens in McMinn County, Tennessee became a battleground was due to Paul Cantrell,...

"In two weeks the naysayers will find out just how wrong they have been" - Mike Zullo

The Justice Department obtained a portfolio of information about a Fox News correspondent's conversations and visits as part of an investigation into a possible leak, The Washington Post reported Monday -- in the latest example of the government seizing records of journalists. The information follows the charge that the department secretly obtained two months of phone records from Associated Press journalists as part of a separate leak probe. In the case involving Fox News' James Rosen, a government adviser was accused of leaking information after a 2009 story was published online which said North Korea planned to respond to looming...

Move on to What? By Chris Stirewalt Published May 20, 2013 | FoxNews.com “Already, officials that would normally talk to us, and people we talk to in the normal course of newsgathering are already saying to us that they’re a little reluctant to talk to us. They fear that they will be monitored by the government…It’s not hypothetical, we’re actually seeing impact already.” -- Gary Pruitt, president of the Associated Press, on “Face the Nation.” How does an administration move on from scandals that are still unfolding? The answer: Not very effectively. President Obama and his team tried last week...

Fewer groups sught recognition as 501 (c)(4) social welfare organizations that year than in 2009, according to the Treasury Department. ...

It is now well known that the Obama justice department has prosecuted more government leakers under the 1917 Espionage Act than all prior administrations combined - in fact, double the number of all such prior prosecutions. But as last week's controversy over the DOJ's pursuit of the phone records of AP reporters illustrated, this obsessive fixation in defense of secrecy also targets, and severely damages, journalists specifically and the newsgathering process in general.

Daniele Perazzi, president of the Italian Perazzi Shotguns firm, was taken into custody yesterday by Adams County Deputies [see update, below] along with several prototype shotguns. The executive was picked up in the parking lot of the Denver Merchandise Mart, hosting the high-end Colorado Gun Collectors show this weekend, after a taxi driver, likely reacting to a suspicious activity reporting outreach program conducted by law enforcement, told authorities he thought he could be transporting an armed “foreign speaking” terror suspect. “He loaded prototype shotguns into the cab on the way to the Merchandise Mart,” gun rights activist and newly-elected National...

The IRS scandal keeps getting closer and closer to the top of the White House food chain as Obama officials desperately try to spin their way out of mounting evidence and foul play. The Wall Street Journal is reporting President Obama's top attorney knew about the IRS targeting weeks ago before news broke, but of course, Obama still didn't know about it until he learned about it "from the news." The White House's chief lawyer learned weeks ago that an audit of the Internal Revenue Service likely would show that agency employees inappropriately targeted conservative groups, a senior White House...

The scandals appearing in the news are merely symptoms of THE most important problem at hand, which has yet to explode on the scene. The Democrats stole the last presidential election (they first tried with Gore) and have probably stolen many legislative elections. Evidence seems to be mounting as one reads about the many precincts in Philadelphia having not a single Romney vote (statistical impossibility) and then the latest news were "True the Vote" was harassed by not only the IRS, but the FBI, OSHA AND the ATF. Since no charges were filed, WHO sicced four Federal agencies on an...

The Internal Revenue Service scandal may be the worst of all the current Obama administration fiascoes. It is an easily understood gross misuse of the powers of government to target opponents of the president. What is more, the administration’s supplicants in the lefty punditocracy can no longer claim this is just an IRS scandal. The Post reports: J. Russell George, the Treasury Department’s top tax watchdog, said Friday he had informed top Treasury officials starting last spring about problems related to the special attention the agency was paying some conservative organizations seeking tax-exempt status. George said he shared the information...

The president and chief executive officer of The Associated Press on Sunday called the government's secret seizure of two months of reporters' phone records "unconstitutional" and said the news cooperative had not ruled out legal action against the Justice Department. Gary Pruitt, in his first television interviews since it was revealed the Justice Department subpoenaed phone records of AP reporters and editors, said the move already has had a chilling effect on journalism. Pruitt said the seizure has made sources less willing to talk to AP journalists and, in the long term, could limit Americans' information from all news outlets.

Former White House Counsel during the Clinton Administration, Lanny Davis, is calling for the resignation of Obama White House Counsel, Kathryn Ruemmler. ... the White House counsel's office reportedly knew about the Inspector General's investigation into harassment ofdconservative groups, since April. Davis contends that if this is true and Ms. Ruemmler chose not to inform President Obama of the investigation and the possible legal and political ramifications, she should step down. ...

Today, the Thomas More Society offered over 150 pages of analysis and evidence to the House Ways and Means Committee about repeated IRS harassment of pro-life organizations. At the request of Congressman Aaron Schock (R-IL), Thomas More Society President Thomas Brejcha, Executive Director Peter Breen, and Special Counsel Sally Wagenmaker, prepared the legal memorandum with solid evidence of IRS harassment of pro-life organizations dating back to 2009. Shock asked the IRS commissioner today if this discrimination is appropriate and he was unable to say yes or no. The memo details the history of IRS misconduct in the cases of three...

<p>Long before the Internal Revenue Service revealed it had improperly targeted conservative 501(c)(4) groups, a group of Democratic senators led by New York Sen. Chuck Schumer urged the IRS to do just that.</p> <p>The IRS’s admission last Friday that it had singled out tea party and other groups for extra audits and delays has raised concerns that President Barack Obama’s administration quietly attempted to stymy opponents through intimidation. But many prominent Democrats — including Montana Sen. Max Baucus, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State and the New York Times editorial board — had been publicly calling for tighter restrictions on 501(c)(4) groups affiliated with the tea party and conservatives.</p>

Former Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Acting Commissioner Steven Miller, who only took over in November and resigned this week at President Barack Obama's behest, will testify before the House Ways and Means Committee Friday on his role in targeting Tea Party and conservative groups for audit or excessive review. Miller was the first senior IRS official to be disciplined in the scandal, though the problems began before he took over the IRS, and other senior officials were aware of the problem and appear to have misled Congress. Though Miller's resignation was reported as a decisive step by the president, his...

More than $92 million in bonuses averaging $5,500 per employee have been handed out by IRS executives to thousands of the tax agency’s employees since 2009, according to data obtained by The Washington Examiner. The average annual salary of the employees receiving at least one bonus during the four-year period between 2009 and 2012 was slightly less than $94,000, indicating that the extra tax dollars mostly went to managers and executives eligible for performance-based incentives. The IRS’s overall workforce includes more than 97,000 employees. According to the data, which the agency provided in response to the newspaper’s Freedom of Information...

Sarah Hall Ingram, the IRS executive in charge of the tax exempt division in 2010 when it began targeting conservative Tea Party, evangelical and pro-Israel groups for harassment, got more than $100,000 in bonuses between 2009 and 2012. More recently, Ingram was promoted to serve as director of the tax agency's Obamacare program office, a position that put her in charge of the vast expansion of the IRS' regulatory power and staffing in connection with federal health care, ABC reported earlier today **snip** High-ranking career federal civil servants like Ingram are eligible for recognition through citations known as Distinguished and...

The woman who ran the Internal Revenue Service's tax-exempt organizations division has been promoted, and now heads the agency's health-care office, ABC News reported. Sarah Hall Ingram was commissioner of the embattled IRS office from 2009 to 2012, roughly the period that the agency is accused of singling out Tea Party and conservative groups for extra scrutiny, based on nothing but their political bent. As a firestorm grows around the IRS, Ms. Ingram quietly left the tax-exempt office and was made director of IRS Affordable Care Act Division...

Senior Democratic Sen. Max Baucus, who recently slapped Obamacare as a "train wreck," believes that the IRS scandal is just beginning and that "a lot more" damaging information will be revealed, likely at congressional hearings. "I have a hunch that a lot more is going to come out, frankly," Baucus, whose pending retirement seems to have freed him up to speak bluntly, told Bloomberg Government's " Capitol Gains " TV show. "It's broader than the current focus. And I think it's important that we have the hearings, and I think that will encourage other information to come out that has...

NBC's Lisa Myers reported this morning that the IRS deliberately chose not to reveal that it had wrongly targeted conservative groups until after the 2012 presidential election:

The Internal Revenue Service official in charge of the tax-exempt organizations at the time when the unit targeted tea party groups now runs the IRS office responsible for the health care legislation. Sarah Hall Ingram served as commissioner of the office responsible for tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012. But Ingram has since left that part of the IRS and is now the director of the IRS’ Affordable Care Act office, the IRS confirmed to ABC News today. Her successor, Joseph Grant, is taking the fall for misdeeds at the scandal-plagued unit between 2010 and 2012. During at least part...

So how do you feel about turning over access to sensitive healthcare information to the Internal Revenue Service? In the wake of running disclosures of the agency’s nefarious snooping and political targeting, its new role as chief health insurance enforcer should give us heartburn. Under Obamacare, responsibility for verifying eligibility for the healthcare program, and monitoring whether you carry “qualifying” health coverage (and are exempt from the law’s penalties) falls principally to the IRS. The IRS was given expansive, new powers to execute these goals. That includes more authority to share your personal information — not only about your income,...

The recent scandals that have rocked the White House represent Americans’ worst fears about big government: Your government is spying on you; your government is targeting you; and your government is lying to you. Americans should be outraged, but they should not be surprised. It would be wrong to view the controversy over the IRS scandal as a typical Republican vs. Democrat squabble. The IRS is a powerful agency that can influence nearly every decision Americans make through its authority to tax and regulate. The IRS grows stronger and more powerful the more the federal government spends and borrows. Organizations...

The IRS? It’s about a union: the National Treasury Employees Union. The NTEU. A left-wing union representing 150,000 employees in 31 separate government agencies, including the IRS. A union that not only endorsed President Obama for election and re-election, but a union whose current president, Colleen Kelly, was a 14-year IRS agent and now is both union president and Obama administration appointee (of which more in a moment). It’s about 94% of NTEU union contributions going to Democrats in the Senate and House in 2012 — candidates who campaigned as vociferous opponents of the Tea Party. And the recently released...

Franklin Graham calls IRS probe of ministry finances ‘un-American’ Adelle M. Banks | May 15, 2013 (RNS) Evangelist Franklin Graham blasted the Internal Revenue Service probe of conservative nonprofit groups as “un-American,” saying both the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and the relief group Samaritan’s Purse were audited by the IRS. In a Tuesday (May 14) letter to President Obama, Graham said the two organizations he leads were notified last September that the IRS would review their records for the 2010 tax year. The IRS inquiry, he noted, occurred months after the BGEA ran ads in April 2012 supporting a North...

Thursday, May 16, 2013 May 16, 2013 Another IRS scandal: agents illegally seized 60 million medical records Image009And as if there's not already an abundance of problems at the IRS, another one erupts, involving 60 million private medical records of 10 million patients - including all California state judges - from Healthcare IT News: The Internal Revenue Service is now facing a class action lawsuit over allegations that it improperly accessed and stole the health records of some 10 million Americans, including medical records of all California state judges. According to a report by Courthousenews.com, an unnamed HIPAA-covered entity in...

California congressman David Nunes made the claim yesterday that the Justice Department wiretapped telephones in the House of Representative's Cloak Room, an exclusive part of the Capitol where members are able to privately interact with one another. Nunes made the claim on Hugh Hewitt's radio show. "I don’t trust the Department of Justice on this," said Hewitt, referring to the subpoenas the Justice Department to obtain the Associated Press's phone records. "Do you, Congressman Nunes?" "No, I absolutely do not, especially after this wiretapping incident, essentially, of the House of Representative. I don’t think people are focusing on the right...

Scandal: Senate Democrats, including supporters of the Disclose Act, provided the names of groups they wanted targeted in a taxpayer-funded witch hunt overseen by an IRS employee and Obama campaign donor. Using the Citizens United case as a pretext, retiring Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., on July 27, 2012, wrote IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman to investigate 12 conservative groups he accused of violating their tax-exempt status and engaging in coordinated political activity. The groups Levin asked to be targeted for special scrutiny were Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, Priorities U.S.A., Americans Elect, American Action Network, Americans for Prosperity, American Future Fund, Americans...

FULL TITLE - "The Media Meme of the Day is BS! Obama Isn't Disengaged -- He Leads a Government Waging War on Its Domestic Enemies" BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Did you hear how David Axelrod attempted to defend Obama on the IRS scandal? I think he was on MSNBC today. David Axelrod said (paraphrasing), "Well, you know, the government's too big. The government's simply too vast for Obama to control it." Bingo! Exactly! That's the whole reason the Tea Party exists. The government is too big. Not only is the government too big, it's growing. It's growing to the point that...

The last scandal dampening rods just failed, and the reactor core at the Internal Revenue service may be about to blow. From Healthcare IT News: The Internal Revenue Service is now facing a class action lawsuit over allegations that it improperly accessed and stole the health records of some 10 million Americans, including medical records of all California state judges.According to a report by Courthousenews.com, an unnamed HIPAA-covered entity in California is suing the IRS, alleging that some 60 million medical records from 10 million patients were stolen by 15 IRS agents. The personal health information seized on March...

Excerpted from EO-History: The now-retired general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee, who supervised Hillary when she worked on the Watergate investigation, says Hillary’s history of lies and unethical behavior goes back farther – and goes much deeper – than anyone realizes. Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, supervised the work of 27-year-old Hillary Rodham on the committee. Hillary got a job working on the investigation at the behest of her former law professor, Burke Marshall, who was also Sen. Ted Kennedy’s chief counsel in the Chappaquiddick affair. When the investigation was over, Zeifman fired Hillary from...

Across this great land, patriotic Americans are behaving subversively. We’re quoting from our pocket Constitutions, starting reading groups to discuss our founding documents, even gathering together to “petition the government for a redress of grievances.” Uncle Sam is not amused. As leaders of tea party groups have been painfully aware for years, the Internal Revenue Service has given “special” attention to conservative groups. Heritage sounded the alarm on the Obama Administration’s hit list nearly a year ago. Idaho businessman Frank VanderSloot was singled out by the IRS and the Labor Department after making a sizable donation to Mitt Romney. Who...

Throughout Barack Obama's tenure as President of the United States and throughout every major scandal during that time period, nobody important has known anything important about anything...important. Every time a new scandal breaks, the White House comment is "we found out about this through news reports," "we need to wait for all the facts," and of course, "this was just a few low-level employees in X-state or X-city, nobody in Washington was involved."  Operation Fast and Furious After it was discovered in early 2011 the Department of Justice [DOJ] had knowingly and willingly trafficked 2500 semi-automatic Ak-47 style rifles,...

- Federal government demanded a list of everyone a Tennessee organization had ever trained, or planned to train - Linchpins of Liberty mentors high school and college students and teaches them conservative political philosophy, but is not tea-party-linked - 'Can you imagine my responsibility to parents if I disclosed the names of their children to the IRS?' asked the group's founder - IRS Inspector General report listed seven questions the agency should never have asked, but this wasn't one of them When a Tennessee lawyer asked the IRS for tax-exempt status for a mentoring group that trained high school and...

The government lied to us. The government targeted its political opponents and people who taught about the Constitution. The government secretly scoured the phone records of America’s biggest news agency. Is that the change you were hoping for? Is that the country you want to live in? Without regard to party or philosophy, this is not acceptable. Put more pointedly, this is not America. In the past week, we have seen conclusive evidence that the federal government purposely deceived the American public about the attack on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya. We have also learned that a secret subpoena let...

Some days one can't help but look at the headlines and think of Ayn Rand. With all the destructive measures by desperate governments from Cyprus to Argentina, it seems sometimes like we're reading from the pages of her seminal work, Atlas Shrugged. But what we're seeing now seems to have far surpassed Atlas Shrugged. We're definitely into 1984 territory. We've recently learned that the US federal government has (a) secretly tapped the Associated Press's phone records, and (b) used the nation's tax authorities to target opposition political groups. This is the same sort of thing one would expect from Belarus...

Here's the link.

<p>Lois Lerner’s now infamous conference-call remark about not being good at math came in the course of an exchange where she claimed that 300 or so groups had been singled out by the IRS for special scrutiny, a quarter of which had “tea party� or “patriot� in their name and the rest of which were guilty of sins like criticizing the government.</p>

TAMPA BAY, Florida (WTSP) -- A subtle, but significant tweak to Florida's rules regarding traffic signals has allowed local cities and counties to shorten yellow light intervals, resulting in millions of dollars in additional red light camera fines. The 10 News Investigators discovered the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) quietly changed the state's policy on yellow intervals in 2011, reducing the minimum below federal recommendations. The rule change was followed by engineers, both from FDOT and local municipalities, collaborating to shorten the length of yellow lights at key intersections, specifically those with red light cameras (RLCs). While yellow light times...

ALBANY - State police have charged a 31-year-old Dutchess County driver with a misdemeanor after he was pulled over and found with two more bullets in his handgun magazine than allowed under New York's new gun control law. Gregory Dean Jr. of Hopewell Junction was stopped for an inadequate light on his license plate about 9:45 p.m. Sunday in New Lebanon, troopers said...

(CNSNews.com) - The Internal Revenue Service has given no indication to the House Ways and Means Committee about whether it will respond to the committee’s demand, delivered in writing last Friday, that the agency hand over copies of all internal communications containing the words “tea party,” “patriot,” or “conservative” and the names and titles of all IRS officials involved in discriminating against tea party and conservative groups when they submitted applications for tax-exempt status.

The Liberty Township Tea Party was one of several Tea Party groups in Ohio who were harassed by the IRS in the lead-up to the 2012 elections. The group recently released the extensive list of the questions sent to them by the IRS. Ohio patriot Carol Greenberg sent in this information. As many of you know, the IRS issued an apology for targeting “tea party� and “patriot� groups. We within the Liberty Township Tea Party are painfully aware of these intrusive actions. Click this link and download a PDF to see the type of questions that were demanded of us...

The division of the Internal Revenue Service that improperly scrutinized the tax-exempt status of conservative groups sent confidential information on 31 conservative groups to the well-funded liberal nonprofit journalism organization ProPublica, according to a revelation made by ProPublica Monday. “The same IRS office that deliberately targeted conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status in the run-up to the 2012 election released nine pending confidential applications of conservative groups to ProPublica late last year,” according to the ProPublica report. “In response to a request for the applications for 67 different nonprofits last November, the Cincinnati office of the IRS sent ProPublica applications...

The IRS and the Obama administration are coming under fire for targeting conservative groups — but a new report indicates at least one pro-life group faced discrimination as well. The Internal Revenue Service has issued an apology to conservative groups that it targeted in the lead up to the 2012 presidential election. The move is seen by many conservatives as the Obama administration doing post-election damage control after infringing on the rights of citizens groups. But a new WorldNetDaily report has more on how the federal agency targeted pro-lifers:

The DOJ’s U.S. Attorneys’ Manual is quite clear on this point: The Attorney General’s authorization is normally required before the issuance of any subpoena to a member of the news media or for the telephone toll records of a member of the news media. However, in those cases where the media member or his or her representative agrees to provide the material sought and that material has been published or broadcast, the United States Attorney or the responsible Assistant Attorney General may authorize issuance of the subpoena, thereafter submitting a report to the Office of Public Affairs detailing the circumstances...

The Justice Department’s monitoring of the AP’s phone records is one of the most bone headed moves of this administration. And to announce it on the heels of two major scandals seems to defy logic. But does it? The only thing standing in the way of a torrent of whistle blowers, purloined emails and first hand testimony has been the pliant and fawning media. They have ignored blatant falsehoods, obvious phony cover stories and have not followed through on potentially explosive stories such as Fast and Furious. With few exceptions, the established media has been an effective shield protecting those...

Tuesday, May 14, 2013 Did Obama's IRS also harass pro-life groups? WASHINGTON - With the revelation that the Obama Administration's Internal Revenue Service harassed and beleaguered groups seeking tax exemption status if their names included "Tea Party" or "Patriots," and then later admitting they targeted groups with purposes of promoting limited government and other conservative missions, questions are being raised about other targeted groups. Were pro-life groups also a target of the staunchly pro-abortion Obama Administration? Chicago's Thomas More Society reported first dealing with IRS concerns from pro-life groups as early as 2009. When the Coalition for Life of Iowa...

President Obama’s second-term campaign slogan was “Forward,” but instead we’ve got cover-ups, congressional investigations and the government persecution of political opponents and reporters. That sounds like “backward” to me. All the way to, say, 1972. Who would have guessed that just a few months into his second term, President Obama would be compared to Tricky Dick. And by a liberal Massachusetts Democrat — U.S. Rep. Michael Capuano. Republicans could not even have scripted this one. The agency most hated by voters, the Internal Revenue Service, admits to going on a Nixonian witch hunt against Tea Party and conservative groups during...

"Certain elements may try to stretch the Watergate burglary beyond what it is." – Nixon Press Secretary Ron Ziegler, 1972, referring to Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. @ http://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com/2013/05/scandals-cover-ups-irs-intimidation.htmlGov't obtains wide AP phone records in probe "The president is aware of what is going on in Southeast Asia. That is not to say that there is anything going on in Southeast Asia." – Ron Ziegler, 1971.Meanwhile, Jay Carney continues to morph into Baghdad Bob with stories like this appearing in the previously reliable Pravda-on-the-Potomac: "IRS officials in Washington were involved in targeting of conservative groups." Ooopsie! Carney...

So, we have learned that the IRS orchestrated systematic prejudice against Americans whose political views this administration's mobsters found distasteful. It order to decide upon whom to bestow what the law fully permits certain entities, regardless of their politics, some clever Brownshirts working for the most coercive governmental agency there is, decided that before these Americans would be denied their legal rights, they'd be made to dance for the enjoyment of liberal/progressive/Socialist bureaucrats. What sport! Equal treatment under the law has been made secondary to overt political intimidation by these fine administrators. No news here. Our Department of Justice is...