Free Republic

Stand Your Ground: A big hypocrite in the IRS scandal targeting Tea Party groups sets his sights on a conservative think tank, asking its suspected supporters: "Are you now or have you ever been a conservative?" Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin is on a witch hunt that threatens anew the free speech rights of Americans who don't hold his views or those of the Obama administration. This time he has targeted the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group of state legislators who promote free markets, limited government and federalism, ahead of a "stand your ground" hearing Durbin announced after George...

The Virginia Tea Party Patriots have invited me to speak before them along with the Executive Director of the Black American Leadership Alliance(BALA) and Congressmen Peter King on the dangers of amnesty. As a member of the BALA, I have committed myself to fighting against amnesty as we were lied to in 1986, when we were told it was a one time deal! The Pro-Amnesty Forces have been using all types of misleading tactics and bald-face lies to achieve their goal of open border and amnesty for all. The Pro-Amnesty are using every underhanded tactic to get the Senate Bill...

The Mainstream (Establishment) Media is trying to once again do the Republican vs Democrat thingy: that Obama has proposed some serious (cough, laugh) changes to the NSA spying program, and those wascally wepubs (Rep. McCaul and Peter King (R-GOP-e) are trying to thwart him. I never thought that I would see a recent liberal rally where hundreds marched (not reported by the MSM-e) where a person would be carrying a sign that said Snowden, patriot and Pelosi, traitor. And even the New York Times (Editorial Board, June 6th: Obama administration has lost all credibility on the issue of the NSA...

Whether it was finding the solid ground in writing the Declaration of Independence that would justify and drive a revolution or defining the core rights that would guide the crafting for our Constitution, our Founding Fathers held firmly to core principles that would help them navigate through unchartered waters. Every improvement is the result of change, but not every change is an improvement. Our Founding Fathers had to find a compass to give them a true north as they sorted through the choices and changes our emerging country faced. After more than two centuries, it is understandable that our citizens...

The “phony scandal” at the IRS keeps growing. E-mail correspondence unearthed by the House Ways and Means Committee reveals that Lois Lerner, the figure at the center of the scandal, may have committed a felony by divulging information about a conservative group to the Federal Election Commission, in an incident that dates back at least to 2008, before President Obama took office. Though some conservatives have eagerly sought evidence that Obama’s White House instigated the IRS’s targeting of tea-party groups, the latest evidence suggests that an anti-conservative bias may instead be an endemic feature of the federal bureaucracy. And now,...

It seems that not only is Justice blind in Washington, D.C., but she's been kicked out of town altogether. On Saturday, it was reported that Cindy Thomas just got a big promotion. If you don't know who Cindy Thomas is, she was the IRS official in charge of the exempt organizations office in Cincinnati. This was one of the IRS groups who targeted conservative tea party groups for harassment and intimidation. They also illegally leaked confidential tax information to other agencies and liberal groups. Cindy Thomas is a 35 year veteran of the IRS (bet her pension plan is rocking!)...

Vitriol has gone beyond partisan give-and-take in the nation’s politics. It is now seeping into and poisoning the ranks of the Republican Party. Mainstream Republican politicians are cringing at the proposal of tea party Senators -– Ted Cruz (R-TX), Mike Lee (R-UT), Marco Rubio (R-FL) -– to hold federal appropriations legislation hostage in their quest to defund Obamacare. Republicans opposing this strategy see it as lose-lose. They don’t believe this tactic will work. And at the same time, they see it producing more antipathy toward Republicans and branding them as zealots and obstructionists. I think the tea partiers are on...

We’ll know that it was really about racism when Hillary’s elected in 2016 and GOP opposition to Democratic policies magically melts away. Didn’t this guy once compare opposing ObamaCare to opposing the end of slavery? Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) told KNPR radio Friday that he hopes Republicans’ ongoing opposition to President Obama is driven by “substance” and not race. “My counterpart, Mitch McConnell, said at the the beginning of the presidency of Barack Obama that he had one goal — and that is to defeat Obama and make sure he wasn’t re-elected. And that’s how they legislate in...

Memo to Charlie Rangel: You’re in some pretty uncharted waters if former Gov. David Paterson — son of one of your closest friends and allies — is publicly taking you to task for your racially charged remarks. The hoopla began with a Rangel slam against the Tea Party: “It is the same group we faced in the South with those white crackers and the dogs and the police,” the Harlem congressman told Politico. “They didn’t care about how they looked.” In other words, the Tea Partiers are the heirs of Bull Connor and the segregationists.

Potential 2016 presidential contender Donald Trump spoke to ABC's Jonathan Karl Sunday morning and reignited the birther issue that he helped spark back in 2011, questioning the legitimacy of Barack Obama's birth certificate and wondering whether Ted Cruz, who was born in Canada, was eligible to president. "Was there a birth certificate?" Trump asked. "You tell me. Some people say that was not his birth certificate. I'm saying I don't know. Nobody knows. And you don't know, either, Jonathan. You're a smart guy, you don't know, either." "I'm pretty convinced he was born in the United States," Karl said. "Ah!...

NOW - IT'S UP TO YOU! Please get involved in this effort. Now is the time! You have been asking for years - What can I do? Now, is your time to get involved. Thirty minutes of your time and handful of dollars, perhaps a phone call requesting a visit with your local congressman - These are the things that you can do NOW - that will MATTER. Please look at all the information below. Everything you need is right here on this page. Thank you and God bless you - and may God bless our nation.

Tea party groups have publicized their desire to find primary challengers for Republicans they don't like as well as vulnerable Democrats who are already in office. Here are a few tell-tale signs that a tea party challenger might jump into a race near you.

According to Team Obama’s “phony scandal” narrative, when the Internal Revenue Service processed 501(c)(3) tax-exemption applications, it equally tormented liberals and conservatives. No big deal, the argument goes. The IRS suffers from even-handed inefficiency rather than an un-American habit of slamming critics of the president of the United States. Unfortunately for the Obamites, actual facts annihilate their institutional-incompetence defense. New data deepen the suspicion that the IRS is the latest and most worrisome weapon in the left’s arsenal. Using his authority under Internal Revenue Code Section 6103, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) requested and received data...

Lately there’s been a growing chorus of calls for the Tea Party and the Republican Party to unite and find a way of compromising over their differences in order to achieve their common goal of defeating Democrats. This scares the heck out of me because many in the Tea Party may think it’s a good idea. The Tea Party is NOT (yet?) formally a political party, but a group of people who share certain ideas about political philosophy. True, for various reasons they tend to support Republicans more often than Democrats, but the basis for their support of any candidate...

The following image is a composite created by scanning the WH LFBC using Xerox WorkCentre 7655 upside down using the automatic feeder. The resulting file was opened in Preview, the image rotated 180 degrees and printed to PDF. The resulting PDF was opened in preview, the layers unlocked and moved to the side. In addition, a close up of the signature was ‘blown up’ to show how the background layer, not surprisingly, has filled in some of the white that resulted from the separation of the background and foreground layers. Note how for example the signature block is fully separated.

Vice President Joe Biden is calling Democrats to action to stop grassroots conservatives from electing more Republicans in the mold of Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Ted Cruz (R-TX). In a fundraising letter for the Democratic National Committee, first reported by Ed Krayewski at Reason, Biden wrote told prospective donors that a “group of freshmen senators are running the show in the Republican Party” and played up the possibility of a government shutdown over ObamaCare.

ObamaCare: Some Democrats are signing on to bills repealing the powers of the Independent Payment Advisory Board to effectively ration health care for seniors. So Sarah Palin was right about those death panels after all? Palin was mocked by liberals when at a Tea Party rally in Reno, Nev., in late 2010, shortly before the GOP retook the House of Representatives, she told attendees: "Don't be thinking that we've got victory for America in the bag yet. ... We can't party like it's 1773." Leftist know-it-alls insisted that 1776 was the correct year, when in fact Palin was right: The...

Can anybody unite a party that’s at war with itself? That’s the question Republicans are asking, and the answer might be former vice-presidential contender Paul Ryan, whose low profile amidst the intra-party squabbling suggests he is deftly positioning himself as Speaker in waiting or the GOP’s last best hope for 2016—either way a Hobson’s choice given the demoralized state of the party. Ryan wrote the budget that balances in 10 years, and that helped bring Congress to its knees, unable to find the votes to pass any of its traditional priorities, a farm bill or a transportation bill, much less...

Charging that Delaware officials have stopped cooperating with his investigation, Sen. Chuck Grassley on Friday sent a pointed letter to the state's Division of Revenue in which he outlines specific, outstanding questions that still swirl around the handling of former U.S. Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell’s tax records. “On multiple occasions, my staff has requested a copy of your records retention policy, the opportunity to speak with [officials at the state's Division of Revenue] and other clarifications related to these matters. To date, you have failed to respond,” the letter from the Iowa Republican reads in part. In a case first...

Freshman Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) dismissed a question about President Barack Obama’s birth certificate Thursday, calling it a “dead issue” that he doesn’t “give a sh*t” about. Mullin took a question during a town hall meeting in his Oklahoma district from a woman who identified herself as a “birther princess” and asked about “Obama’s identification fraud.” “You’re talking about the birth certificate?” Mullin responded, according to video of the exchange posted by liberal website Think Progress. “We lost that argument on November 6. We had four years to get that proven, we didn’t, we re-elected him, so that’s a dead...

<p>This is new information received today from a FOIA request to the Social Security Administration by attorney Orly Taitz. She posted it on her website which Free Republic will not let you post a link to in the Source URL box above. Here is an excerpt from the press release she posted. The link to the press release in typed in below.</p>

I was recently over at the website 'Obama Release Your Records' viewing their articles and came across a revealing post in the comments section by king obot Kevin Davidson aka Dr. Conspiracy. He runs a disinformation website called 'Obama Conspiracy Theories' that claims Obama's birth certificate is 100% authentic. He opposes Sheriff Joe Arpaio's investigation into Obama's birth certificate and selective service registration. The post revealed that Mr. Davidson is trying to get Sheriff Joe's Cold Case Posse in trouble with the IRS. His post states: "I and some other anti-birthers have referred certain matters to the IRS that we...

“If you thought the IRS targeting — scandal, controversy, whatever you want to call it — was forgotten, think again,� said CNN’s Jake Tapper, introducing Dana Bash’s report last night on House Oversight Chair Darrell Issa’s expansion of the probe. Issa requested information from the Federal Election Commission after leaked e-mails suggested that coordination may have taken place between the two agencies in pursuit of conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status. That may increase the focus on one particular figure in the scandal, as well as potentially add more to it: CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO House Oversight Committee...

Joe Scarborough has yet again scaled his soap box to mock those of us in the conservative blogosphere. He described us today as a bunch of "very stupid people" living in their mama's basement who write "really stupid things" about him. The thin-skinned Scarborough has often derided his blogging critics as Cheetos-chewing cellar-dwellers. He was at it again this morning, depicting them as people who if not in mama's basement would otherwise be wandering the streets in their pajamas. View the video here.

...Interview after interview of IRS employees by congressional investigators began to expose the inconsistencies in the administration’s narrative. There were no “rogue” agents, only employees who followed the implicit or explicit directions of more senior IRS officials in Washington. When Washington told Cincinnati IRS employees to “hold” other tea party cases while officials in Washington scrutinized early “test cases” concerning the group, they did it. When Washington told them to assign a tea party case coordinator, they obliged. Employees also told investigators that the IRS chief counsel’s office was not, as the American people were first led to believe, merely...

I just got back from a Central Kentucky Tea Party town hall meeting with Senator Rand Paul. The meeting lasted about an hour and hit topics ranging from the IRS scandal to drones over the US, and from Benghazi to the Fort Hood Massacre.

Should Democrats have at least one presidential primary debate on Fox News? Will Republicans once agin have primary debates on Fox News, MSNBC and CNN, with Democrats only debating on CNN and MSNBC, but not Fox News? And why not have both parties have one presidential debate (once each party has their nominee) on: Fox News, MSNBC, CNN and finally Link TV (for a total of 4 presidential debates), where Link TV can rip into both political parties on the NSA program, interventionism, NAFTA, the federal reserve, etc? Surely the Dem-e and GOP-e would love this...

Interesting developments: Matt Bevin is challenging Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in the Kentucky GOP primary. Checking his biography, I’m glad to see that Bevin is a graduate of Washington & Lee University, a U.S. Army veteran, and a small business owner — exactly the kind of outsider “not a politician” profile anyone would want in a Tea Party candidate. If grassroots conservatives in Kentucky rally behind Bevin, I think we can start chilling the champagne for Mitch McConnell’s retirement party. However, defeating the party’s Senate leader in a primary would be completely unprecedented. If this is Star Wars, Luke...

This wasn’t the revolution the tea party had in mind. Four years ago, the movement and its potent mix of anger and populism persuaded thousands of costumed and sign-waving conservatives to protest the ballooning deficit and President Obama’s health care law. It swept a crop of no-compromise lawmakers into Congress and governor’s offices and transformed political up-and-comers, including Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, into household names. But as many tea party stars seek re-election next year and Rubio considers a 2016 presidential run, conservative activists are finding themselves at a crossroads. Many of their standard-bearers have embraced more moderate positions on...

Congressman Steve Stockman has confirmed to U.S. Representative Ted Yoho that he will introduce a bill to investigate Obama's birth certificate forgery. This is the kind of action that Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Mike Zullo have been hoping for. http://obamareleaseyourrecords.blogspot.com/2013/08/rep-stockman-confirms-obama-fraud-bill.html#idc-container

FANCY FARM — For the first time, Republican U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell shared the stage with challengers who want his job and stuck around long enough at Saturday’s Fancy Farm picnic to hear one of them speak. Democratic candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes — and later Democrat Ed Marksberry and McConnell’s Republican primary challenger Matt Bevin — slammed McConnell for being in Washington too long and not doing enough to help Kentuckians, fix what ails Washington or both. McConnell, for his part, ignored Bevin completely, both in the senator’s speech and by leaving before Bevin addressed the crowd, which organizers estimated...

This wasn't the revolution the Tea Party had in mind. Four years ago, the movement and its potent mix of anger and populism persuaded thousands of costumed and sign-waving conservatives to protest the ballooning deficit and President Obama's health care law. It swept a crop of no-compromise lawmakers into Congress and governor's offices and transformed political up-and-comers, including Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, into household names. But as many Tea Party stars seek re-election next year and Rubio considers a 2016 presidential run, conservative activists are finding themselves at a crossroads. Many of their standard-bearers have embraced more moderate positions on...

The White House publicity machine has tried to turn the national conversation from the topics of the day to attempt to make our President relevant again. Obama, who has gained the new nickname Griffin (as in H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man), has all but disappeared since his failed attempt to change the national gun laws in the beginning of this year. To clear grass so high that Obama needs a weed whacker just to be seen, his team has attempted a typical Obama technique. In this case they are creating a new mantra to discredit legitimate concerns of American voters...

Mickey: Stay down, Stay down Rocky 1974 John Rambo: Live for nothing or Die for Something Rambo 2008 I was watching Morning Joe today and as usual the entire table was united in asserting that Ted Cruz and the Tea Party caucus was wrong to consider fighting to de-fund Obamacare highlighting a piece by Krauthammer This is about tactics. If I thought this would work, I would support it. But I don’t fancy suicide. It has a tendency to be fatal. They stressed the wisdom of Krauthammer’s assertion that the GOP should not fight. It seemed an odd assertion since...

One big question raised by IRS political targeting is whether Obama officials or their bureaucratic allies unleashed the power of the administrative state for partisan ends. Now evidence is emerging that officials at another agency, the Federal Election Commission, used their enforcement power as an anti-conservative sword. The House Ways and Means Committee this week released emails showing that, in 2008 and 2009, the FEC's general counsel staff sought tax information about conservative political groups from Lois Lerner of the IRS. Ms. Lerner is the IRS official who took the Fifth before Congress rather than tell her side of the...

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform subpoenaed Obama Treasury Secretary Jack Lew for withholding documentation from Congress in the ongoing IRS Tea Party Scandal investigation. The Oversight Committee accuses the Obama Administration of impeding and obstructing the investigation. “During the past two weeks, President Obama and you have repeatedly labeled the IRS’s strategy of targeting Americans for their political beliefs as a ‘phony’ scandal. While the Obama Administration has so publicly deflected responsibility for the targeting, it simultaneously has attempted to thwart congressional oversight into the matter… the IRS has engaged in a systematic effort to delay, frustrate,...

Earlier this year we brought CHQ readers news of establishment Republican election guru Karl Rove’s plan to take unto himself the decision about which candidates in Republican primaries were “electable” and which were not. The enforcement mechanism Rove intended use in this effort was to be the millions of dollars in “Super PAC” money he was expected to raise from the multimillionaire donors who funded his outrageously expensive and largely unsuccessful efforts in the 2012 election cycle. Except the millions of dollars Rove and company were expected to raise haven’t shown up yet. What’s more, as Michael Patrick Leahy noted...

I love how the words just casually roll off his tongue, as if he had been saying them all his life. Which he has. But there is no such thing as black racism, don't you know? Using a racial epithet to describe one's political opponents is accepted behavior. Or at least it must be because the only people saying anything about it are those on the right. But even at 83, dressed in a blue bow tie and crisp gray suit, Rangel is relentless toward those who he feels are slowing the forces of progress. House Republicans? Have done more...

In an interview with the Daily Beast published Friday, Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) suggested Tea Partiers are the "same group" who fought for segregation during the Civil Rights movement. “It is the same group we faced in the South with those white crackers and the dogs and the police. They didn’t care about how they looked," Rangel said. Because of this, Rangel said the Tea Party could be defeated using the same tactics employed against Jim Crow. "It was just fierce indifference to human life that caused America to say enough is enough. ‘I don’t want to see it and...

Rep. Martha Roby (R-Ala.) is no John McCain. At a town hall forum in her district on Monday that was sponsored by a local tea party group, Roby was asked by an attendee what she would do to counter the supposed abuses of President Barack Obama, whom the man described as ineligible for office, a communist, and a tyrant. Here's how the fellow put it: "What I need from you is to know what you can do, you and your fellow non-communist colleagues in the lower House, what you can do to stop these communist tyrannical executive orders laid down...

National Rifle Association board member Ted Nugent endorsed the conspiracy theory that President Obama's birth certificate is a forgery in his regular column for conspiracy website WND. Riffing on a recent claim by Obama that his critics promote "phony scandals" involving his administration, Nugent wrote in his July 31 column that "more of us believe in the American hero Sheriff Joe Arpaio's thorough investigation into your phony birth certificate and phony history than the phony media's smoke and mirrors." In July 2012 Arpaio, a controversial Arizona sheriff, announced that a "Cold Case Posse" under his direction determined that Obama's "long-form...

In an interview with the Daily Beast published Friday, Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) suggested Tea Partiers are the "same group" who fought for segregation during the Civil Rights movement.

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Here's Greg in Nashua, New Hampshire. You're next on the EIB Network. Hello. CALLER: Hi, Rush. Based on what you're saying about the Republican Party abandoning a large chunk of the American population -- including conservatives -- or even being any real opposition to the Democrats on Obamacare and apparently everything else, I'm wondering whether Sarah Palin's recent gambit that if the GOP... I think she calls them the GOP brain trust on the Greta show. If the GOP is indeed abandoning her as well as a large swath of American voters, she's going independent. Palin is...

"Today... I'm proud to be an American.” – Robert Zimmerman Jr., on Twitter, following his brother's acquittal An ABC News-Washington Post poll reveals that a full two-thirds of white Americans believe that Trayvon Martin’s killing was justifiable. Therefore, that same two-thirds of white folks also believe that George Zimmerman's acquittal in the second degree murder trial against him was also justifiable. Historian and activist Paul Street writes in BlackAgendaReport.com that these poll numbers reflect the “separateness in perspective that reflects very real, savage, and profound, literal segregation” of the races in America. “That’s a lot more than just the segment...

As the prospects for passing comprehensive immigration reform have dwindled, a favorite pundit talking point has emerged: "House Republicans are voting so conservatively because they fear a campaign challenge from their right." The mere threat of primaries has become the catch-all for explaining Republican opposition in the House. But as the argument became ubiquitous in 2013, something funny happened. The number of conservative challengers going up against GOP members of Congress hasn't developed as had been expected. In fact, there are currently as many notable Democratic primary challengers to incumbents as Republican intraparty battles. Rep. Mike Simpson of Idaho is...

Embattled Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner and an attorney in the Federal Election Commission’s general counsel’s office appear to have twice colluded to influence the record before the FEC’s vote in the case of a conservative non-profit organization, according to e-mails unearthed by the House Ways and Means Committee and obtained exclusively by National Review Online. The correspondence suggests the discrimination of conservative groups extended beyond the IRS and into the FEC, where an attorney from the agency’s enforcement division in at least one case sought and received tax information about the status of a conservative group, the American...

The Republican Party is divided—and the small-government conservatives, who want to reduce government’s size but preserve its institutions, are losing. Jon Favreau on the ruinous ideology that’s ascendant.Nine months after a decisive loss in the 2012 elections, the battle for the soul of the Republican Party—or whatever’s left of it—has begun. I’m not talking about a battle between moderates and conservatives. The conservatives won that fight a long time ago. Our children may never believe that moderate Republicans once roamed the Earth, advocating policies that would limit carbon pollution and invest in scientific research, reform our schools and build new...

George Zimmerman's brother is trying to warn Trayvon Martin's family about the additional pain and suffering they could go through if they try to bring a wrongful death civil suit against his acquitted brother. As of July 30, many people in the country still labor under the illusion of the images painted of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman on the night Zimmerman shot and killed Martin, an unarmed teen from Miami. For example, erroneous reporting about the 911 call led many to believe that Zimmerman racially profiled the teen when NBC News later admitted the tape was aired out of...

ReelzChannel is getting back into the Kennedy family business, and once again likely to make some waves. In November, the network that aired the Emmy-winning 2011 miniseries "The Kennedys" will debut "JFK: The Smoking Gun," a new documentary offering the theory that John F. Kennedy was killed, not by Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle, but by the friendly-fire bullet of an inexperienced Secret Service agent. "The only possible gun that could have been in that area is that Secret Service gun. So the finding is that it was an accidental discharge. Nobody's claiming anybody did anything wrong. But at the time,...

The Republican Party wishes the tea party would go away, and would prefer a new base altogether, says conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh. In an hour-long interview with Fox News Channel’s Greta Van Susteren Tuesday, Limbaugh said the Republican leadership isn’t conservative.“They’re not particularly crazy about conservatives,” he said, adding that members of the tea party can’t be controlled by the GOP leadership. In 2010, the grassroots movement rose up in opposition to President Barack Obama, but the Republican establishment didn't embrace them. …