Free Republic

The thing people often forget about the story of the boy who cried wolf was that, at the end of the day, there was a wolf. For the past six years – since Barack Obama announced his presidential intentions – Republicans have been crying themselves hoarse. Obama, if they were to be believed, was a Kenyan-born communist Muslim with a forged birth certificate who stole the election by registering millions of ineligible voters. "A lot of information about Obama's background is missing," said Abigail Billings, at a meeting of a 9-12 group (organised by the conservative former Fox host Glenn...

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...

It's often been said the Internal Revenue Service is the most feared bureaucracy in the United States. Little wonder. As the agency openly proclaims on their own website, concerning what actions they might take if your taxes are unpaid: We could seize and sell property that you hold (such as your car, boat, or house), or we could levy property that is yours but is held by someone else (such as your wages, retirement accounts, dividends, bank accounts, licenses, rental income, accounts receivables, the cash loan value of your life insurance, or commissions). You could even wind up in jail...

On behalf of Tea Party, Patriot groups, 9/12, liberty activists, and the American people, we are calling for anyone and everyone to protest the IRS’ complete abuse of power on Tuesday, May 21, 2013 at noon local time. Right now we are determining the best locations to host these rallies, so please let us know if you are available to go and where you are located. We will use the information to identify the closest IRS offices so that we get the most patriots to each location. IRS Protests The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is out of control and we...

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

Tea Party leaders from around the country gathered in Washington Thursday to vent outrage at the Internal Revenue Service for targeting them and other conservative organizations seeking tax-exempt-status and threatened to sue the agency for damages. "They lost membership and donations, they missed the election cycle, they missed key moments, they were not able to bring speakers in," Jordan Sekulow, a lawyer representing Tea Party organizations, told reporters outside the Capitol. The IRS last week confirmed that it had targeted conservative groups and the Justice Department responded Wednesday by announcing an investigation of the tax agency's practices. The IRS has...

IT GETS WORSE! The Obama IRS demanded that several Tea Party groups provide back-end access to their websites. From reliable sources: This happened to several Tea Party groups! The source has this in writing. It states they wanted access to everything the members had access to, which would be chats, email, contact information, etc. The group raised less than $600. She was targeted as early as October 2010....

U.S. President Barack Obama on Thursday chose a White House budget official to lead the beleaguered Internal Revenue Service temporarily and vowed to ensure that the tax-collection agency will not single out any more groups based on their political beliefs. Danny Werfel, the controller of the Office of Management and Budget who served as a point man on the controversial automatic spending cuts known as "sequestration," will start in the new post on May 22. ---snip--- 'SOMETHING PROFOUNDLY UN-AMERICAN' On Capitol Hill, the scandal seemed to rewind the clock to 2009 and 2010, when groups aligned with the conservative Tea...

Last night, Barack Obama tried to take control of the narrative on one of the scandals that have rocked his administration by announcing that IRS Commissioner Steve Miller had resigned by request of Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. As it turns out, Miller was leaving in a month anyway, but the outgoing IRS chief took the time to note that the wrongdoing was limited to two IRS employees in the Cincinnati office, who had already been “disciplined” — which directly contradicts the Inspector General’s report, which shows managerial involvement since March 2010 at least, and coordination between multiple offices and units....

In Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, he ran to the left of Hillary Clinton as a moral reformer. Obama promised to transcend the old politics and bring a new era of hope-and-change transparency to Washington. Five years later, those vows are in shambles. True, the murder of four Americans in Benghazi has become a mess of partisan bickering. But the disturbing facts now transcend politics. The Obama administration -- the president himself, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney -- all at various times blamed an obscure video maker for the "spontaneous...

Letters from the IRS to tea party-related organizations in Oklahoma City and Albuquerque, New Mexico show that IRS headquarters in Washington, D.C., and two satellite offices in California, were directly involved with sending harassing letters to conservative organizations that sought tax-exempt status. The IRS has acknowledged only the involvement of its Exempt Organizations office in Cincinnati, Ohio, which typically makes most decisions about granting or denying tax-exempt status to non-profit organizations. And Wednesday afternoon, CNN cited a congressional source in reporting that the acting IRS Commissioner – whom President Obama fired later in the day – had identified two 'rogue'...

This morning from The Washington Post’s Kathleen Parker: "Breaking news: Conservative organizations suddenly have found common cause with one of their favorite objects of contempt — the benighted Mainstream Media ... Or as the tea party queen and former Alaska governor likes to put it, the ‘lamestream media.’ In a twist of irony, the two groups have coalesced around a common enemy: the U.S. government.” The Tea Party queen here is, of course, Sarah Palin. Interesting, because Parker was among the first to announce, when Palin first arrived on the scene, that Palin was “out of her league.” “The league”...

My rule of thumb is that a vast majority of alleged political scandals will have less electoral impact than the conventional wisdom initially holds. There are two main reasons for this. First, voters weigh major issues like economic performance and the conduct of foreign wars heavily in making their decisions, leaving relatively little room for everything else. Second, the news media may overplay the lead story, scandalous or otherwise, on any given day, even though it may turn out to be relatively unimportant in the context of a multiyear political cycle. But the recent admission by the Internal Revenue Service...

The Internal Revenue Service asked tea party groups to see donor rolls. It asked for printouts of Facebook posts. And it asked what books people were reading. A POLITICO review of documents from 11 tea party and conservative groups and the IRS scrutinized in 2012 shows the agency wanted to know everything — in some cases, it even seemed curious what members were thinking. The review included interviews with groups or their representatives from Hawaii, New Mexico, Ohio, Texas and elsewhere. The long-awaited report Treasury Department inspector general report released Tuesday says the agency itself decided some of its questions...

Kevin Drum outlines what I take to be the emerging case for the defense of the IRS agents who applied special scrutiny to tax-exemption applications from Tea Party groups: Roughly speaking, what seems to have happened is that three years ago the IRS was facing an explosion of newly formed 501(c)4 groups claiming tax exempt status, something that's legal only for groups that are primarily engaged in promoting education or social welfare, not electioneering. So some folks in the Cincinnati office tried to come up with a quick filter to flag groups that deserved extra scrutiny. But what should that...

The Right constantly claims devotion to our founding documents. The problem: Its policies completely violate them. Last month, 20 House Republicans, along with staffers from nearly 40 congressional offices attended the first meeting of the Congressional Tea Party Caucus. The three premises behind the Caucus, according to Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), who emceed the event, are “we’re taxed enough, we spend less than we take in, and we follow the Constitution.” This purported devotion to the founding documents echoes the themes reverberated at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in March, where Sarah Palin and former Rick Santorum declared that...

<p>Sarah Palin said the Internal Revenue Service's recent scrutiny of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status is a sign of "corruption at the heart of big government" in Washington.</p> <p>"So many Americans knew this was happening, but many felt defenseless and even helpless against a government that seems to roll along without accountability or sense of obligation to the people it's supposed to serve. These Americans were mocked for being concerned about this, but now we see light shining on the truth, finally," she wrote in an online posting shortly after the IRS acknowledged it made "mistakes" in handling the applications of tea party groups.</p>

The admission by the IRS that its workers targeted conservative Tea Party groups was so scandalous even some of the liberals at MSNBC felt compelled to condemn the tax agency. On Friday's edition of Andrea Mitchell Reports substitute host Chris Cillizza exclaimed he was "stunned" by the "dumbness" of the IRS. Cillizza's Washington Post colleague, Ruth Marcus called the revelations "outrageous." Marcus added: "The absolute worst thing that the IRS can do is make itself look political/ideological and to make it look like it's picking on some political groups and not others. That is terrible." (VIDEO-AT-LINK) Guest panelist Alex Gomez...

An IRS official apologized on Friday to tea party organizations and other conservative groups for inappropriately targeting them during the 2012 election, the Associated Press reports. The groups, which enjoyed tax-exempt status under the internal revenue code, were singled out for additional scrutiny of their tax exemption if their names included the words "tea party" or "patriot." In several cases, the groups were asked to provide a list of donors for review, usually a violation of IRS policy. "That was wrong. That was absolutely incorrect, it was insensitive, and it was inappropriate. That's not how we go about selecting cases,"...

"Do the words 'Senator Sarah Palin' excite you?" That's the opening line of a recent email by The Tea Party Leadership Fund, which is trying to draft the former Alaska governor and past Fox News commentator to run for the Senate in 2014. The fund argues Palin has a clear path to victory in part due to recent polling showing incumbent Sen. Mark Begich, a Democrat, with less than 50 percent of the vote. But, it being a draft, the group hasn't talked with Palin about whether or not she's interested. And Palin – whose PAC didn't respond to request...

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Tuesday equated the Tea Party to a non-violent “anarchist” group because, in his mind, Tea Partiers don’t believe in any form of government. He was speaking about the sequester and other financial issues on the Senate floor. “We have a situation where this country has been driven by the Tea Party for the last number of years,” Reid said. “When I was in school, I studied government and I learned about the anarchists. Now, they were different than the Tea Party because they were violent. But they were anarchists because they did not...

The Tea Party Patriots organization is planning protests on Tuesday at the home state offices of several Senators that the group argues are in need of an “intervention” for being sucked up into inside-the-Beltway politics, including Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA). The group is targeting Rubio on immigration reform and Toomey on gun control. “Two Senators in particular are facing Tea Party pressure, as they should--Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Pat Toomey (R-PA),” Tea Party Patriots said in a release. “Both of these men were elected thanks to Tea Party support, yet Senator Rubio is the...

A veterans organization in a New York town is fighting for its right to fly a patriotic flag after the city council refused to let the group display the flag, calling it a symbol of the Tea Party with right-wing connotations. The United Veterans Memorial & Patriotic Association replaced a tattered American flag at the New Rochelle Armory, flying the Gadsden flag underneath it. The bright yellow “Don’t Tread On Me” flag has been used by the Navy and Marine Corps since 1775. When a city council member complained to the city manager that he found the flag offensive, the...

Sen. Rand Paul's filibuster against the confirmation of CIA Director and "drone czar" John Brennan offers a "teachable moment" to the media and the left about the Tea Party. As they seethe in outrage and confusion that it took a Republican to question the constitutionality of drone attacks, it is important to remind our friends on the other side that it wasn't just any Republican, but a--gasp!--Tea Party Republican who spoke "truth to power." Not only that, but the Senators who were first to offer their assistance were also Tea Party Republicans--the so-called McCarthyist Ted Cruz of Texas, and Marco...

The modern day tea party movement took shape in 2007. Yet, it is hardly a reflection of the anti-war, anti-deficit, pro-civil liberty message that propelled its early popularity. During a time of impending recession, a government that had taken us to endless wars on false pretenses, and an unprecedented expansion of government under eight years of “conservative” leadership, the tea party began as a fundraising rally cry for a then relatively unknown dark horse candidate, Representative Ron Paul. The first “modern day tea party” was held on the anniversary of the original Boston Tea Party, December 16, 2007. In a...

For decades, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) has been a barometer of the different political tendencies inside the right-wing. In the 1980s, Reagan administration officials and Reaganite New Rightists dominated the podium. Pres. Reagan spoke at CPAC in both 1984 and 1988. In the 1990s, culture warriors like Pat Buchanan and the Rev. Pat Robertson joined Republican regulars such as Sens. Bob Dole and Phil Gramm. At this years’ CPAC13, Tea Party leaders and Tea Party-supported politicians will dominate the proceedings. The result is an agenda filled with bigots, conspiracy mongers, and publicity hounds. Consider the inclusion of...

The history of the Republican Party shows that the effort of Karl Rove and his Conservative Victory Project and Crossroads political groups to neutralize the Tea Party wing of the GOP likely is doomed, said political pundit William S. Bike. Bike is the author of the book Winning Political Campaigns: A Comprehensive Guide to Electoral Success. "Whereas the Democratic Party seems to evolve its positions over time, the Republican Party has frequently throughout history been taken over by insurgent groups like the Tea Party, with rearguard actions by the ruling elite attempting to hold on to power usually failing," Bike...

What this has to do with health is beyond me. Perhaps they are thinking metaphorically; the Tea Party is a cancer on the country, or something. Regardless, your tax dollars were spent funding a study that purported to show a link between the Tea Party and tobacco companies. It’s all very academic and complicated — not to mention laughably bogus. Fox News: The charge that the Tea Party is a tool of broader corporate interests is one often leveled by Democratic critics. House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi was fond of calling the movement “astroturf” in the run-up to the 2010...

According to Politico, “a political colonoscopy is going on before our eyes.” Yuck. Karl Rove has set up a Super PAC to keep controversial conservatives from winning Republican primaries and the Senate leadership has established a “buddy system” to keep Tea Party congressmen in line (“buddy” as in “you should probably vote the way we tell you to, buddy…”). But the most important changes are taking place at Fox where heavyweights Sarah Palin and Dick Morris are out as contributors. A lot of this is post-election house clearing (CNN has moved staff around, too) but it also suggests that the...

Is it last call for the tea party? Consider these recent developments: Late Thursday: Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a possible presidential candidate in 2016, ridicules fellow Republicans as the "stupid party" and urges Washington Republicans to get over their obsession with cutting budgets. Friday afternoon: The office of Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, another would-be Republican presidential candidate, declares that he will not go along with a plan, hatched by conservative legislators, to rewrite the state's election laws in a way that would stack Virginia's electoral votes against Democrats. Late Friday: Fox News says it has parted ways with Sarah Palin,...

The news that Sarah Palin will no longer be a paid contributor to Fox News puts an exclamation point on the end of an era, or at least a chapter, in U.S. political history. She could land somewhere else, and she still has her Facebook friends, but it’s hard to imagine she’ll find a more visible or influential platform than Fox. The former Alaska governor and 2008 vice presidential nominee has been fading from the scene for some time, as she inadvertently highlighted when she complained on Facebook during the Republican convention in August that the network had canceled her...

There is an epidemic taking hold in America that appears immune to intervention or therapy, and despite the best effort of the nation’s brightest minds to find a cure, it seems likely to remain virulent, but limited to a particular segment of the population for the foreseeable future. The disease’s symptoms are beliefs with the strong conviction despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and unlike beliefs based on confabulation, faulty or incomplete information, there are no known remedies for delusion. Unlike most severe mental disorders, this epidemic has a traceable beginning and a very predictable demise, but that is little...

After Democrats in New York rammed a sweeping assault on the right to keep and bear arms through the legislature that failed to exempt police officers from the draconian restrictions, gun owners and even some lawmakers are planning what has been dubbed potentially the largest act of civil disobedience in state history. According to news reports, gun rights activists are urging everyone to defy far-left Governor Andrew Cuomo’s new registration mandate while daring authorities to “come and take it.” Analysts say the legislation, passed in a frenzy last week in the wake of the Newtown shooting, represents the most brazen...

Crazies. Cliff divers. Nihilists. Nutjobs. Those are just a few of the descriptions being applied to the 151 House Republicans who broke with Speaker John Boehner—they included his own supposed wing men, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Whip Kevin McCarthy—to vote against the fiscal cliff deal Tuesday night. In truth, what the fine print of the bill demonstrates is that the Republicans who refused to vote for the fiscal compromise had every right to be disgusted by it—that is, if you expect legislators to hold true at all to the beliefs that inspired them to run for office in...

The Huffington Post reports that a bill to move the District of Colombia toward statehood has been introduced in the Senate. Buzzfeed says “the 51st state would be called New Columbia” and be granted full voting representation in the Senate and House. A group called DC Vote has launched a White House petition to call on President Obama for support. It is indeed time that D.C. voters become fully enfranchised as the 51st state. But it is also high time that the nation’s capital be moved from its quaint antiquarian, Eastern enclave to the center of our country. Louisville would...

Puzzling me for a long time is the inconsistency between two claims by gun and Second Amendment supporters. One is that what they worship is critically needed to defend themselves against a government that they would view as oppressive and unacceptable. The other is their belief that the US government has already become awful, stealing their liberties. Why then, I keep asking myself, have we not seen a violent uprising among the untold millions of Americans owning guns to take back their government? Why do we not see what goes on in European nations, namely violent public uprisings against governments?...

A PROUDLY conservative group that wants to be the "Australian Tea Party" will push for corporal punishment, referendums to sack bad governments and tougher refugee policy at the federal election. CANdo, a group created by Liberal firebrand Cory Bernardi and loosely modelled on the right-wing faction of the US Republican Party, also claims gay marriage could lead to Muslim polygamy. CANdo is run by chairman David Flint, former Australian Broadcasting Authority chair and leading monarchist, and Jai Martinkovits, who also runs Australians for a Constitutional Monarchy. Professor Flint said CANdo wants a referendum on gay marriage and defended Senator Bernardi...

The presidential campaign of 2016 was launched as soon as the last light dimmed on the stage after Mitt Romney gave his concession speech, in losing his presidential bid to Barack Obama. With the new battle now warming up amongst the GOP hierarchy there are many Republican leaders who want to point the party leftward, away from Ronald Reagan and his heir apparent Sarah Palin. That is correct. There is no stuttering here. Sarah Palin may appear to liberals and leftwing pundits, as well as, GOP Washington leaders as yesterday’s news. Yet Mitt Romney’s loss was not due to conservative...

A chilly day in February came to a boil without warning. A frenetic CNBC reporter, Rick Santelli, took the floor at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in 2009 to vent his rage against the U.S. government’s foreclosure-relief plan. “The government is rewarding bad behaviour,” he ranted to cheering traders. “Subsidized losers” didn’t deserve to have mortgages. The people who needed support were ones who “carry the water instead of drink the water.” Then, to louder cheers, “I’m going to have a Chicago Tea Party in July, all you capitalists that want to show up at Lake Michigan, I’m going to start...

Frank Aquila wasn’t 100 percent positive that former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney was going to win heading into Tuesday’s election. Despite his strong conservative roots, Aquila – who served as a county chair for John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign and penned a book about the decision to go with former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate – had seen too much transpire over the course of four years to count out to former senator from Illinois that cut his teeth in the rough-and-tumble world of Chicago politics. And while certain parts of the election – like the Democrats...

"Bring out yer dead!" The left spent the last two years shouting the famous Monty Python line at the Tea Party, determined to infect the movement with cadaverous gloom. By mid-2011 the press had started a death watch. "Tea Party's heyday could be nearing end," warned the Hill. "Tea Party movement looks stalled," exhorted ABC News. A poll by CBS/New York Times (and when are they ever not reliable?) alleged that Tea Partiers were less popular than Democrats, Muslims, and atheists. Also Stalinists, Imperial Stormtroopers, and the Jersey Shore cast. Loony Tea Party ideas, declared serious people with pale faces...

Republican John Koster, a candidate for Congress in the 1st District, received a $5,000 contribution from SarahPAC, the political organization headed by Sarah Palin. Koster is in a tight race with Democrat Suzan DelBene to represent the 1st District, a newly drawn swing district that runs from Redmond to the Canadian border. Palin endorsed Koster in 2010, when he ran against Democrat Rick Larsen. Koster’s far-right tea party ties have been a major talking point for the DelBene campaign, which has branded Koster “too extreme” for the 1st District. Koster’s campaign says DelBene is too liberal...

CARSON CITY — Faced with rising costs, Gov. Brian Sandoval is backing off his promise to undo pay cuts imposed on state employees last year. Gerald Gardner, his chief of staff, said the governor has issued orders to agency heads to continue the reductions in the proposed 2014-15 budget. Gardner told the Nevada Appeal that Sandoval hasn't given up on efforts to undo the work furloughs, pay cuts, and suspension of merit and longevity pay imposed on state workers.

Rep. Elijah Cummings needs someone in his office that knows election law to write his next letter attacking the Tea Party. This week, Cummings sent a nastygram letter to the Houston based Tea Party group True the Vote. The organization has been working to clean up the voter rolls of dead and ineligible voters. Apparently this sort of civic minded volunteerism rubbed Cummings the wrong way. The Baltimore Sun reported his threats to a group of law-abiding private citizens: In a letter to Texas-based True the Vote, the Baltimore Democrat argues that the group and its affiliates have been unsuccessful...

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the third in an occasional series of stories based on meetings between The Telegraph editorial board and candidates running for federal and state offices in the Nov. 6 general election. The first time former Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter ran for office, she had just returned from New Orleans soon after Hurricane Katrina, where she found people struggling and abandoned by their government. Now, six years later, she worries Congress is heading down the same road. “In 2006, I said the poor have fallen and the middle class are stumbling, and it has not gotten easier,” Shea-Porter, who...

Let me get this straight: a spontaneous movement arises and takes up the name "Tea Party" based on historical actions and the acronym "taxed enough already," amasses a very large number of either followers or sympathizers, and literally reverses the party breakdown in the U.S. House of Representatives and state-level assemblies, but it is not worth receiving any reporting. When it is reported upon, the items are buried deep within the pages of The Sun and are usually flippant or derogatory in nature. Adherents are perceived as backward, ignorant, uneducated and subject to every epithet that can be used in...

Almost every state in the U.S. has made cuts to its public-employee pensions, seeking to dig out from the economic downturn, but so far the measures have fallen well short of bridging a nearly $1 trillion funding gap. Since 2009, 45 states have rolled back pension benefits for teachers, police, firefighters and other public workers, including cuts by Michigan and California this month. Next week, Republican Ohio Gov. John Kasich is expected to sign legislation requiring, for example, that certain teachers work longer and pay more toward their pensions.

Veteran American libertarian author and activist Jerome Tuccille once wrote a book titled It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand. Not true in my case. For me it all began with Walt Whitman, the 19th-century mystic whose mesmerizing American poetry helped turn me into a free market individualist. “I celebrate myself, and sing myself…” But that’s another story. These days, I find what began with Walt Whitman is usually fired up in me now by leftist economists who promote big government, Occupy activists who attack corporate greed and politicians who cravenly exploit class warfare over allegedly expanding inequality. Which is how...

A bumper sticker is making the rounds with Joe Biden's words: Osama is Dead; GM is Alive. Apparently, that resonates with democrat voters who want to believe Obama knows a thing or two about foreign relations. Not. Ambassador Stevens is Dead...Al Qaeda is Alive. Ambassador Stevens is Dead...The Muslim Brotherhood is Alive. The above are the real truth, and any chest thumping on the part of Obama is really misplaced self-congratulatory narcissism. We all know it was our special operations forces who took out Osama. We're pretty sure that Obama did not put on a black mask, take up a...

Just a day after Mitt Romney made the most important speech of his life, the edges of it are slipping away. You can remember some of the themes and Romney's wonderful chin and his big soft eyes. The rest is fading out. But Clint Eastwood, standing before a blank teleprompter, muttering at a chair - that is an image no one is going to forget soon. By 10pm on Thursday night, the 50,000 odd delegates, party members and reporters who had travelled to Florida for the Republican National Convention were tired. There had been 18 hours of speeches over three...