Free Republic

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.… But there can be only one reason for the stalled-out approval process for conservative groups. The IRS was trying to put them out of business....

Rubio was on Cavuto and Hannity’s shows today and so naturally I watched Cavuto (watch daily) not Hannity and he (Rubio) was outraged about the current IRS scandal and said we need MORE investigations into it. See? He is one of us. And he says we can’t trust Obama with big government health care, (how about big government amnesty-care Rubio?) and we must repeal it , see, he is going after Obama ? He is on OUR side. He really ripped Obama on that too. Then Cavuto got to immigration and never letting us down he started by played a...

Asked why he visited WH 118 times,Former IRS Commish Doug Shulman,cited the Easter Egg Roll as one reason. —Mark Knoller (@markknoller) May 22,2013 Well, give him points for creativity at least. When asked to account for his 118 visits to the White House within a two-year period, former IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman dug deep and managed to come up with one explanation: he took his kids to the White House Easter Egg Roll!… “@jpodhoretz: 118 times in 104 weeks Shulman went to White House. why?"Easter egg roll…" he actually said that.” Bold.—Dana Perino (@DanaPerino) May 22,2013 No kidding! Too bad...

The timeline for when senior White House officials knew about the IRS scandal seems to be shifting. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Monday that the president’s counsel was told on April 24 about the preliminary findings of an IRS audit that showed tax officials unfairly targeted Tea Party groups applying for tax-exempt status. Carney had previously said that White House counsel did not have any details about the IRS probe and was given a generic heads up that one was being conducted. Senior legal counsel Kathryn Ruemmler was told about the audit on April 24, Carney said Monday....

Top White House aides first learned of a draft report detailing IRS abuses in targeting conservative groups in late April, but they chose to insulate President Obama by not informing him until it exploded in the press, the president’s spokesman said Monday. White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters Monday that White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler learned about an IRS inspector general’s draft report looking into the singling out of conservative groups on April 24. She advised senior White House staff including chief of staff Denis McDonough — about the then-draft report, but Mr. Carney said she believed that...

“For me, it’s about collaboration.” — National Treasury Employees Union President Colleen Kelley on the relationship between the anti-Tea Party IRS union and the Obama White House Is President Obama directly implicated in the IRS scandal? Is the White House Visitors Log the trail to the smoking gun? The stunning questions are raised by the following set of new facts. March 31, 2010. According to the White House Visitors Log, provided here in searchable form by U.S. News and World Report, the president of the anti-Tea Party National Treasury Employees Union, Colleen Kelley, visited the White House at 12:30pm that...

A story in the Washington Post yesterday about the Internal Revenue ServiceÂ’s Cincinnati office, which does most of the agencyÂ’s nonprofit auditing, clearly contradicted earlier reports that the agencyÂ’s targeting of Tea Party groups was the result of rogue agents. The Post story anonymously quoted a staffer in Cincinnati as saying they only operate on directives from headquarters: As could be expected, the folks in the determinations unit on Main Street have had trouble concentrating this week. Number crunchers, whose work is nonpolitical, donÂ’t necessarily enjoy the spotlight, especially when the media and the public assume theyÂ’re engaged in partisan...

Pfeiffer: Republicans owe Susan Rice an 'apology' By MACKENZIE WEINGER | 5/19/13 12:07 PM EDT White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer on Sunday said Republicans “owe” U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice “an apology” for saying she misled the country in the wake of the Benghazi attack. “Frankly, I think that many of the Republicans who had been talking about this, now that they’ve seen the emails, owe Ambassador Rice an apology for the things they’ve said about her in the wake of the attack,” Pfeiffer said on ABC’s “This Week.” “Apology for what?” ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked. “For accusing her of...

On TV this morning, Bob Woodward made the case for not dismissing Benghazi and compared the scandal to Watergate: "You were talking earlier about kind of dismissing the Benghazi issue as one that's just political and the president recently said it's a sideshow," said Woodward. "But if you read through all these e-mails, you see that everyone in the government is saying, 'Oh, let's not tell the public that terrorists were involved, people connected to al Qaeda. Let's not tell the public that there were warnings.' I hate to show, this is one of the documents with the editing that...

Lie No. 1: Lois Lerner’s apology last Friday was a spontaneous reaction to an unexpected question from an unknown audience member. In fact, the question came from tax lawyer and lobbyist Celia Roady. Ms. Roady has some interesting career highlights: She was part of the 1997 ethics investigation of Newt Gingrich, but, more to the point, she was appointed to the IRS’s Advisory Council on Tax-Exempt and Government Entities by IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman. She is a longtime colleague of Lerner, who is director of tax-exempt organizations. Ms. Roady has declined to comment on whether her question was planted, but...

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: It's clear that that the press has turned. I'm not sure how permanent it will be but this is surely different than what we've seen over the four years being acolytes and cheerleaders and really supine. And the reason I think, a, is the accumulate of scandals all at once and the remarkable coincidence that the president was speaking early on about conspiracies and don't worry about government, tyranny, you know. The IRS scandal, which is the second most powerful agency in government as an agent suppression of political speech is almost a definition of tyranny. But that...

Although it appears Obama is immune from impeachment, the challenge is to think of ANYTHING that he could be impeached for! CAN you? This list is by no means complete, but have a look.. It's your turn. Go ahead! Would he have to fail to force Eric Holder to resign following his 'Fast & Furious' scandal and Congress' finding that Holder was in 'Contempt of Congress'? Would he have to deceive the American people by lying about Obamacare not being a tax solely for purposes of getting it passed in Congress then arguing it as a tax before the Supreme...

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...

President Obama used British Prime Minister David Cameron as a human shield as he ranted on about how he and his administration had honestly portrayed the Benghazi terrorist attack. Obama’s remarks at the press conference with Cameron were a tidy 928 words that covered the relationship between Britain and the United States. Following the remarks of Obama and Cameron, the first two questions asked by a reporter concerned the current IRS and Benghazi scandals. Obama launched into a defense of 1,192 words, Well, let me take the IRS situation first. I first learned about it from the same news reports...

Is expected to take questions regarding the IRS scandal and Benghazi. We will see......

At a press conference today at the White House, President Obama said "There's no there there" on criticism of how his administration handled the Benghazi terror attack: "And suddenly three days ago this gets spun up as if there's something new to the story," Obama said in response to a question about Benghazi. "There's no there there." The president continued, "Keep in mind by the way these so-called talking points that were prepared for Susan Rice, five, six days after the event occurred, pretty much matched the assessments that I was receiving at that time in my presidential daily briefing."

Judge Jeanine Pirro: Benghazi whistle-blowers changed everything!If someone lies once you're free to assume they'll lie again! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQ40cxD8H_U

Excerpted from The New Yorker: But the mere existence of the edits—whatever the motivation for them—seriously undermines the White House’s credibility on this issue. This past November (after Election Day), White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters that “The White House and the State Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those talking points by either of those two institutions were changing the word ‘consulate’ to ‘diplomatic facility’ because ‘consulate’ was inaccurate.” Remarkably, Carney is sticking with that line even now. In his regular press briefing on Friday afternoon (a briefing that was delayed...

THE capital is in the throes of déjà vu and preview as it plunges back into Clinton Rules, defined by a presidential aide on the hit ABC show “Scandal” as damage control that goes like this: “It’s not true, it’s not true, it’s not true, it’s old news.” The conservatives appearing on Benghazi-obsessed Fox News are a damage patrol with an approach that goes like this: “Lies, paranoia, subpoena, impeach, Watergate, Iran-contra.” (Though now that the I.R.S. has confessed to targeting Tea Party groups, maybe some of the paranoia is justified.) Welcome to a glorious spring weekend of accusation and...

Now that it is clear that the Obama Administration’s story about the Benghazi attack has been a total fabrication, “Plan B” has been launched. Press Secretary Jay Carney pilot tested the new talking points late Friday. “Let’s for purposes of argument say that the initial story about a riot over a video was incorrect,” Carney offered. “That doesn’t necessarily mean that issuing the story wasn’t the right course of action. Suppose we move our point of reference from the acknowledged tragedy of the deaths of four Americans to the bigger picture. What happened to these people is not as important...

CBS Anchor: 'We Are Getting Big Stories Wrong, Over and Over Again' "Our house is on fire." Daniel Halper May 11, 2013 12:09 PM CBS anchor Scott Pelley said at a speech at Quinnipiac University that journalists "are getting big stories wrong, over and over again." "Our house is on fire," said Pelley. The video of Pelley's speech is courtesy of nowthisnews.com. "These have been a bad few months for journalism," he added. "We're getting the big stories wrong, over and over again." The CBS newsreader was quick to take at least partial blame. "Let me take the first arrow:...

It is for Freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. Gal 5:1 Guess who got it right from the beginning? As always Free Republic was ahead of the curve. 11/12 Just when you think it could not get any worse with the Benghazi negligent homicides and cover-up the CIA spills the beans and exposes the liars for who they are. We now know the White House and State Dept both knew two hours after the attack an Al Queda group named Ansar Al-Sharia attacked...

If verification is not seriously attempted, lies will go unnoticed. More lies will follow. That's one difference Benghazi makes now. What difference does it make? On May 5th, President Obama delivered an address to the graduating class at Ohio State University. The following was included in his remarks. Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems; some of these same voices also doing their best to gum up the works.  They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. ...

While political pundits and media analysts who live in an alternative universe (also known as the left-wing) scream conspiracy theory from the rooftops, we are witnessing an historic event playing out in the form of the Benghazi hearings. Reminiscent of Hillary Clinton's infamous accusations of a "vast right-wing conspiracy" when the House impeached her husband, everyone from Al Sharpton to Debbie Wasserman Schultz is demonizing the House Oversight Committee for staging a "witch hunt" in order to understand what happened the night that four American citizens were murdered by al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists in Libya. But despite Obama and Clinton's combined...

The Department of Justice under Eric Holder can’t seem to help itself. Truth and candor have gone extinct. The latest lie involving the nomination of Thomas Perez to be Labor secretary is found in today’s Washington Post. Naturally, the compliant reporter, Josh Hicks, appears to make no effort to challenge the lie, and probably never will. This latest lie about Perez revolves around his illegal use of his personal Verizon email account to conduct Justice Department business at his Takoma Park, Maryland, home. I testified to the House Judiciary Committee last month that when he was confronted with the question...

- FrontPage Magazine - http://frontpagemag.com - Obama’s Benghazi PropagandistPosted By Matthew Vadum On May 8, 2013 @ 12:56 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 4 Comments A young White House speechwriter may be responsible for concocting the official lies about last September’s deadly terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya.The Obama administration’s rapidly unravelling narrative about what happened at the U.S. consulate in Libya’s second-largest city may have been cooked up by creative writer Ben Rhodes, the president’s 30-something Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting.The origin of the administration’s desperate election-season fabrications may come up today as a congressional committee...

As the congressional investigation into the terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, continues to heat up, State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell told reporters on Monday that the administration is allowing survivors of the attack and other Department employees to come forward and tell the truth about what happened. “We have always encouraged any State Department employee who wants to share their story and tell the truth,” Ventrell said on Monday, according to the Washington Post. But a letter the State Department’s Acting Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs Thomas Gibbons sent to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on the...

A source with intimate information about the events that happened on the ground in Benghazi the night the U.S. Consulate and the CIA annex was attacked by terrorists told Breitbart News that, ultimately, only the President of the United States, or someone acting on his authority, could have prevented Special Forces either on the ground or nearby from helping those Americans who were under deadly assault. According to the source, when the attack on the Consulate occurred, a specific chain of command to gain verbal permission to move special-forces in must have occurred. SOCAFRICA commander Lieutenant Col. Gibson would have...

The Benghazi scandal is easy to understand, and that’s what makes it so dangerous for the White House. Simply, the Obama administration’s narrative — that al-Qaeda was on the run, that Hosni Mubarak had to go, and that the Arab Spring was a good thing — was proven false when four brave Americans were killed. Because the administration was a slave to their own narrative, rather than aggressively fighting al-Qaeda, rather than recognizing the $50 billion investment in Mubarak’s stability, and rather than realizing that the upheaval they sponsored in the Middle East empowered Muslim Brotherhood radicals, they lied repeatedly...

Are snowboard instructors key to American immigration policy? Well, they're important enough to be specifically included in the Senate bipartisan Gang of Eight immigration reform bill. How did that happen? The original 844-page Gang of Eight bill, released in mid-April, granted a break to certain foreigners who come to the United States to work but do not wish to settle here. The Gang -- which includes Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet from the nation's skiing capital of Colorado -- gave one of those breaks to anyone who is "a ski instructor seeking to enter the United States temporarily to perform instructing...

Guns To Mexico: Once again blaming his own country for Mexico's gun violence without mentioning Fast and Furious, the gun runner in chief pledges to find and jail gun smugglers. Perhaps he should start with his own administration. 'We recognize that most of the guns used to commit violence here in Mexico come from the United States. ... We'll keep increasing the pressure on the gun traffickers who bring illegal guns into Mexico, and we'll keep putting these criminals where they belong — behind bars," President Obama told students assembled at the Anthropology Museum in Mexico City on Friday, repeating...

Cesar Conda is Marco Rubio’s Chief of Staff. He recently made his Tweets private (protected) so the general public can’t read them. Cesar Conda has been pushing amnesty for illegals on Twitter and else as Marco Rubio’s PR agent. Conda, who is an immigration lawyer, went to work for George Soros before becoming Rubio’s Chief of Staff. Cesar Conda worked on the editorial advisory board of George Soros magazine, The International Economy Magazine. Cesar Conda had been spinning lies about the amnesty bill about how illegal wouldn’t get welfare, wait more than 10 years for citizenship, etc. Those lies have...

U.S. President Barack Obama gives the commencement address to the graduating class of The Ohio State University at Ohio Stadium on May 5, 2013 in Columbus, Ohio. PRESIDENT OBAMA: Unfortunately, you've grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's at the root of all our problems. Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works. They'll warn that tyranny always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave, and creative, and unique experiment in self-rule...

"Most of the guns used to commit violence here in Mexico come from the United States," President Obama said during a speech at Mexico's Anthropology Museum. "I think many of you know that in America, our Constitution guarantees our individual right to bear arms. And as president, I swore an oath to uphold that right, and I always will.""But at the same time, as I’ve said in the United States, I will continue to do everything in my power to pass common-sense reforms that keep guns out of the hands of criminals and dangerous people. That can save lives here...

I mentioned this in the earlier Syria post but it’s worth repeating in light of WaPo’s bombshell this afternoon. A quote from this weekend’s NYT: “Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of.” What could go wrong?

James Rosen on Special Report tonight said that the State Dept. is not providing ‘a process’ for lawyers, being retained by whistleblowers, to get classified information on Benghazi, as we reported earlier today. But not only are they interfering with the legal representation, Victoria Toensing, one of the attorneys representing the whistleblowers, says that they have clients in both the State Dept. and CIA who are being threatened that if they come forward their careers will be over.

Israel and Turkey agreed last week to start pooling their incoming intelligence on the Syrian civil war, intelligence sources report exclusively. Exchanges will take place at the highest level between Mossad Director Tamir Pardo and Hakan Fidan, head of Turkey’s MIT. The United States will also provide additional security for Syria’s southern neighbor by the relocation of US Patriot missile interceptors from West Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to northern Jordan opposite the Syrian border. The new Patriot deployment indicates that the Obama administration is now treating the peril to its allies from Syria as greater than the Iranian menace. Things...

Rep. Trey Gowdy says that more Benghazi hearings are ‘coming quickly’ and they will be ‘explosive’. When asked if it will include witnesses who were there but haven’t been allowed to come forward, he wouldn’t say directly because of confidentiality but told the Fox News host that she was ‘very warm’ and suggested it may include ‘direct testimony by eyewitnesses’:

Hiding The Unemployed: Disability And The Politics Of Stats Wendy McElroyApril 26, 2013 Some statistics cannot be understood without being set within a political framework, because they reflect politics as much as, or more than, they do reality. The unemployment rate is an example and a cautionary tale. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the seasonally adjusted official unemployment rate for February fell to a four-year national low of 7.7%. While the White House cautiously congratulated itself, Republicans quickly pointed to what is often called the real unemployment rate; it stood at 14.3%.The BLS looks at six categories...

Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano admitted Tuesday that a Saudi national once identified as a “person of interest” in the Boston Marathon bombings was put on a terror watchlist after the attack.

Tech industry groups are cautiously optimistic and tech workers are wary of the immigration reform bill introduced in the U.S. Senate this week, which was released by its sponsoring “Gang of Eight” early Wednesday in all its 844-page glory. On Tuesday, Neil Ruiz, associate fellow and senior policy analyst at the Brookings Institution, told us prospects for the bill’s passage looked promising, though at that point he had seen only a 19-page summary of the legislation. Among the wide-ranging bill’s provisions: • Raising the cap on the number of H-1B visas from 65,000 to 110,000 annually, with as many as...

Gang of Eight Bill Opens Door to Bigger Amnesty By Fred Bauer April 16, 2013 Over at Talking Points Memo, Benjy Sarlin has posted a legislative summary of the Gang of Eight immigration-reform proposal, which is due to be released by tomorrow. Assuming this summary draft is accurate, one thing is clear: This proposal truly lives up to the name of “comprehensive immigration reform.” It would be a far-ranging proposal, one that would substantially transform the immigration system of the United States. The major parts of the bill seem to include: a process for legalizing current illegal immigrants, a few...

**SNIP** According a survey by the American Action Forum, healthy young people in the individual or small-group insurance markets can look forward to rate increases averaging as much as 169%. In addition, ObamaCare requires all insurance plans to offer new and more expensive benefits. Remember President Obama’s promise that “If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, period?” Well, a recent study of more than 11,000 plans on the individual market found that less than 2% of existing plans are fully in compliance with the law’s benefit requirements. While current plans are technically grandfathered...

As recently as 1956, nearly 39 percent of blacks voted Republican in that year's presidential election. After the Civil War, Abe Lincoln's Republican Party easily carried the black vote -- where blacks were allowed to vote. Unwelcome in the Democratic Party, most blacks voted Republican and continued to do so through the early part of the 20th century. It wasn't until 1948, when 77 percent of the black vote went to Harry Truman, who had desegregated the military, that a majority of blacks identified themselves as Democrats. Yet, as a percentage of the party, more Republicans voted for the passage...

President Obama found himself weathering bipartisan broadsides Wednesday as he sent Congress his 2014 budget proposal, which in its effort to please both sides of the aisle has ended up angering both. The budget arrived on Capitol Hill Wednesday morning, delivered 65 days after the legal deadline. The $3.77 trillion spending plan, which is over 2,000 pages, tries to curb deficits by further raising taxes on top earners and reining in the growth of Social Security. Obama called his plan "a fiscally responsible blueprint for middle class jobs and growth," during remarks he made Wednesday morning in the White House...

President Obama told a group of Democratic donors Wednesday night that the children killed in the Newtown, Conn. attack last December were shot with a “fully automatic weapon.”Speaking to donors at a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee fundraiser in San Francisco, Obama urged the need for “gun control,” and referred for the first time to an alleged “fully automatic weapon” involved in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, which took the lives of 20 children and 6 adults.

There was a heated exchange today between White House press secretary Jay Carney and Fox News' Ed Henry about Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s claims that America was going to be less safe because of the Administrations claims the sequester cuts could not be changed.

Remember how since-demoted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said we'd have to pass the massive ObamaCare health law to find out what's in it? Well, now three years later that's happening and a lot of people are not liking what they see. Remember how ObamaCare was going to save you money? Not going to happen. Premiums are going up, some by as much as 100%. And a new study by the nonpartisan Society of Actuaries finds that on average insurers will have to pay 32% more for claims under ObamaCare. Remember how ObamaCare was going to cover more than 44 million...

Newtown shooter Adam Lanza's home contained an arsenal of guns, more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition, samurai swords, a bayonet and knives, search warrants released Thursday show. The warrants show that police found the items after searching Lanza's home and car following the Dec. 14 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, where Lanza killed 20 first-graders and six women. Portions of the documents were blacked out, including the name of a witness who told police that Sandy Hook Elementary School was Lanza's "life." Police found a copy of Lanza's report card from Sandy Hook in the house.

The Supreme Court and Faux-marriage Fallacies By Selwyn Duke The Supreme Court is behaving as a reluctant agent of social engineering and not an ardent guardian of constitutional integrity in its approach to the last two days of oral argument on marriage. Furthermore, the pro-marriage (conservative) contingent is likewise confused, making the case that striking down Prop. 8 would be the wrong kind of social engineering. Thus have we heard arguments about the "sociological" impact of faux marriage and about awaiting "additional information from the jurisdictions where this experiment is still maturing." Justice Anthony Kennedy, who could be the swing...