Free Republic

As Americans file returns this season, some worry about IRS audits amid agency efforts to ramp up service, technology and enforcement. Recent IRS enforcement has targeted high-income individuals, large corporations and complex partnerships. But everyday filers could still face an audit — and certain issues are more prone to IRS scrutiny, experts say. You don’t want to face the “audit lottery,” warned Ryan Losi, a certified public accountant and executive vice president of CPA firm Piascik. Audit rates of individual income tax returns decreased for all income levels from tax years 2010 to 2019, largely due to lower IRS funding,...

She's b-a-a-a-ck! Remember Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg? She's the tenured Marxist activist who from circa October 2001 until August, with the media's consent, manipulated coverage of last fall's anthrax attacks, in which five people were murdered and over a dozen sickened by anthrax-contaminated letters. She also engineered the smear campaign that sought to railroad scientist Dr. Steven J. Hatfill for the anthrax attacks. On September 22, 2002, Rosenberg published a long op-ed essay in the Los Angeles Times, in which she sought to resurrect her discredited theory, according to which the anthrax killer was an insider from the American biodefense...

We get the feeling that things are only going to get worse for Target. Not only are they pushing trans clothing on children, but it sounds like they’ve been donating to a group that promotes SECRET child gender transitions and LGBTQ books in schools. No words. Ok, so that’s not true, this editor has lots and lots of words but none that can be shared in a Twitchy article. Grrrr. Target Donates To Group That Promotes Secret Child Gender Transitions, LGBTQ Books In Schools https://t.co/7obKCxB9QC pic.twitter.com/i09qCyTFZD — Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) May 26, 2023 From The Daily Wire: The retail behemoth...

As you're getting ready to file your tax return, you may be wondering about the chances that the IRS will audit your return. Most people can breathe easily because the vast majority of individual returns escape the audit machine. In recent years, the IRS has been auditing significantly less than 1% of all individual tax returns – and the trend has been towards fewer audits from one year to the next. Plus, most audits are handled solely by mail, meaning taxpayers selected for an audit typically never actually met with an IRS agent in person. But this doesn't mean it's...

Texas officials holding a special Senate hearing on the Uvalde elementary school mass shooting recognized how despite the 18-year-old gunman’s prior "abhorrent behavior" and animal abuse being common knowledge in the small town of just 17,000 people it was never reported to law enforcement. During his testimony, Col. Steve McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, also acknowledged how social media — and the lure of instant worldwide notoriety — may have motivated 18-year-old Salvador Ramos to commit the act of mass violence at Robb Elementary School on May 24. In the aftermath of the shooting that left...

The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed its version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the annual defense bill that directs funding for our nation’s military. Unfortunately, this year’s bill contains two anti-gun provisions opposed by NRA-ILA. The first provision, included in the bill by Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA), would ignore due process protections afforded by the U.S. Constitution and allow for the confiscation of firearms owned by those in the armed forces. The Speier language would allow the military judicial system to issue ex parte protective orders that prohibit firearm possession. In other words, military personnel could be...

Labour MPs held an impromptu socialist singalong in the Commons this morning as they boycotted the prorogation ceremony in protest at Boris Johnson's decision to shut down parliament ahead of Brexit. In scenes captured on video by shadow minister Danielle Rowley they sang the protest song The Red Flag which is the party anthem and is usually performed at the end of each of its annual conferences. Its lyrics hail the fight for workers' rights, saying it was used to shroud the bodies of 'our martyred dead'. In the footage the MPs could be heard singing the chorus lines: 'Though...

The shooter Seth Ator had been calling the FBI and police “for years” and “leaving incoherent messages” before the mass shooting.

A 16-year-old student at a Colorado high school was informed by the school district Wednesday that he was not allowed to return to classes until the school could conduct an investigation into an anonymous tip that he had posted "threatening" content online. Current Time 0:11 Duration 0:51 Trump Slams 'Totally Fake' Washington Post Report That He Floated Pardons For Border Wall Construction In a story that has gained national attention from conservative sites, including RedState, the parents of a junior at Loveland High School learned Wednesday that their son could not appear on campus until the Thompson Valley School District...

Recent shootings serve to highlight how we live in times that are violent and lonely. Young shooters are breaking the precarious rhythms of our daily lives with tragedy. We know little about them. However, one thing they all have in common is loneliness. The Loner as Ideal Revolutionary In times past, subversives would seek strength in organization and numbers. They would conspire with others to carry out their nefarious deeds. Intelligence services could trace links and patterns to uncover vast conspiracies. The loner finds his strength in loneliness. He does not need or seek others. There is no organization or...

Everyone is debating “red flag” laws like they’re some new thing, but California has had variations of them for decades. We call them domestic violence restraining orders, civil harassment restraining orders, workplace restraining orders, elder abuse restraining orders, mental health seizures and prohibition orders, and, more recently, gun violence restraining orders. They’re all meant to disarm dangerous people — but they’re all fundamentally flawed. None of these red flag laws would have prevented recent mass shootings. And in my 23 years practicing law in the heart of Silicon Valley, I have litigated dozens of these cases. I’ve seen firsthand the...

Paul, a strong gun-rights advocate, signaled his willingness to support something along the lines of "red flag" laws that allow guns to be removed from those who may be a danger to themselves and others. "I'm not opposed to sort of an emergency order for 48 hours and then you get a hearing in a court where you get the full due-process protections," he said in the interview. "It's the one thing that could fix a lot of stuff. I think most of these homicidal attackers ... are sending off signals to their family and community."

Hold your fire on Trump and don't burn your bridges yet. What we see is what we get and we haven't seen it one way or the other on specific gun measures. So far he has kept every promise he could and those he couldn't were not for lack of trying. He did promise to protect our second amendment rights and has done so up to now. He is a master at leaving our soc./commie enemies holding the bag and I believe he is setting them up for a fall as I write this.

Benjamin Wittes, a friend of former FBI Director James Comey, said that he's unable to say how far President Trump is willing to push the legal bounds of the presidency because it would involve "looking into his soul" — and he's not quite sure Trump has one. Asked by former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara on his podcast "Stay Tuned with Preet" how far he thinks Trump is willing to stretch the constitutional constraints of his office, Wittes said he would need to look into Trump's soul to answer that question. "I'm hesitant to answer that question because it involves looking...

...Rush Limbaugh criticized ... Donald Trump for his remarks about fellow candidate Texas Senator Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, saying the attacks raised “red flags” and that Trump’s attack on Cruz are “no different than what the Democrat Party would say” on Monday.Rush said, after playing a clip of Trump calling Cruz a “maniac” in the Senate, “even people who are not particularly aligned with Cruz on the right have gotta be curious about this because this is no different than what the media would say about Ted Cruz. This is no different than what...

Are you ready for what is coming in August? All over America, economic, political and social tensions are building, and the next 30 days could turn out to be pivotal. In July, we saw things start to turn. As you will read about below, a major six year trendline for the S&P 500 was finally broken this month, Chinese stocks crashed, commodities crashed, and debt problems started erupting all over the planet. I fully expect that this next month (August) will be a month of transition as we enter an extremely chaotic time in the fall and winter. Things are...

The market has started to spin its wheels and that makes people nervous. I will lay out the red flags. I am not talking about the $18 trillion in government debt, the Fed's balance sheet, or the ticking time bomb of pensions, but trends that could arguably derail the stock market rally.Earnings are beating lowered estimates, but are yielding less than the twenty-year average. Sure, stock yields are attractive versus bond yields, but are they good enough to justify higher share prices? Here is the rub: consensus on earnings points lower and lower for this year, but it should reverse and...

If you believe that the U.S. economy is heading in the right direction, you really need to read this article. As we look toward the second half of 2014, there are economic red flags all over the place. Industrial production is down. Home sales are way down. Retail stores are closing at the fastest pace since the collapse of Lehman Brothers. U.S. household debt is up substantially, and in 20 percent of all U.S. families everyone is unemployed. In so many ways, what we are witnessing right now is so similar to what we experienced during the build up to...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Crammed into conference rooms with pizza for dinner, some programmers building the Obama administration's showcase health insurance website were growing increasingly stressed. Some worked past 10 p.m., energy drinks in hand. Others rewrote computer code over and over to meet what they considered last-minute requests for changes from the government or other contractors. As questions mount over the website's failure, insider interviews and a review of technical specifications by The Associated Press found a mind-numbingly complex system put together by harried programmers who pushed out a final product that congressional investigators said was tested by the government...

On Jan 27, 2010 Hawaii State Senator Will Espero has introduced a bill to label some people "vexatious requestors" who can be denied responses from the DOH. This action was taken 2 weeks after I posted "Red Flags in Hawaii", (see at http://butterdezillion.wordpress.com/2010/01/11/red-flags-in-hawaii-2/ ), a blog post documenting how Hawaii government officials have broken laws and rules in order to cover for Obama. The Honolulu Advertiser has an article about it. Apparently I can't post anything from the HA because they won't allow it, but it's in an article online today. In it, Okubo claims that she gets about 50...