Free Republic

IRS head touts “efficiencies" but some groups fear fraud.Amid ongoing controversy over its scrutiny of non-profits, the Internal Revenue Service has decided it will no longer screen approximately 80% of the organizations seeking tax-exempt charitable status each year, a change that will ease the creation of small charities while doing away with a review intended to counter fraud and prevent political and other non-charitable groups from misusing the tax code. As of July 1, any group that pays a $400 fee and declares on a three-page online form that it has annual income of less than $50,000, total assets of...

CNN's "The Sixties" episodes started out giving me feelings of nostalgia, as I grew up in that era. The Beatles coming to America and all the great 60's TV shows brought a smile to my face! But then they started getting into the Vietnam War which I really didn't pay attention to until I enlisted in 1969 and spent a year there. I guess I missed the obvious bias of Walter Cronkite etal as they declared us baby killers. One of the CNN segments quoting CBS said US Forces were killing 25,000 Vietnamese civilians a year. Bull crap! Vietnam is...

A perfect example of the blatant hypocrisy of the mainstream media is CNN posting this video entitled, “Who cares what Cheney says?” because of the supposed hypocrisy of entering the Iraq War and criticizing Obama’s abandoning Iraq to ISIS terrorists. Funny how they don’t talk about the massive hypocrisy of former DEMOCRAT Vice President Al Gore, who sold his cable network to oil interests for millions, while shamelessly whining about Global Warming. Or how about his enormous energy-devouring house? Or how about the time HE criticized George H.W. Bush for not going after Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass...

Between Rick Perry, Ted Cruz and Wendy Davis, Texas politicians in recent years have lived up to their state's reputation for producing larger-than-life characters. That makes the Texas political scene a natural for the Hollywood treatment. HBO has given God Save Texas, a drama about the state's often raucous political culture, the green light for development. It's set to unfold at the Texas statehouse, a perennial flashpoint for national debates about issues ranging from abortion to gun rights to the size and role of government. According to an early description first reported by Deadline.com, the show will follow an "idealistic...

Happy Fathers Day, everyone. (I know it sucks to spend the day with civilians…) And on that note you should know that Disney and Warner Bros are sorting out the rights to Father Of The Bride 3 with Charles Shyer to write and direct (Nancy Meyers passed) and Steve Martin to return. (What else does he have going?) The twist in this threequel is that Little Matty is now 29 and gay and getting married to a Navy SEAL’s son. Father of the bride George is "thunderstruck and speechless" and has problems with the whole gay thing. So wife Nina...

Bergdahl's hometown is carrying on with a celebration for the returned sergeant at the end of the month, despite a rising backlash A rally in U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s Idaho hometown celebrating his release after nearly five years of captivity will go on as planned, despite growing questions about the circumstances of the soldier’s capture. The joy over the soldier’s return among residents of the small mountain community of Hailey, Idaho has been dampened by claims that he abandoned his post. Some have also claimed that the subsequent search for Bergdahl cost the lives of up to six soldiers,...

Robert Bergdahl said he began growing the beard as soon as he received news of his son’s capture. ...those attempts to understand the Taliban have occasionally shaded into acts and gestures that strike some critics as a little too close for comfort. Just recently, reports surfaced of a tweet deleted from Bob Bergdahl’s Twitter account that directly addressed a Taliban spokesman. “I am still working to free all Guantanamo prisoners,” it read. “God will repay for the death of every Afghan child, ameen.”

Without mentioning reports that the man accused of shooting up a Jewish Community Center over the weekend was apparently a fan of the left's Max Blumenthal, CNN National Security Analyst Peter Bergen exploited the murders to claim the American Right is more deadly than jihadists.

Blame it on a drunken stupor. That's what Toronto Mayor Rob Ford did. If you pick up the new issue of Rolling Stone, you'll get to see in Julia Louis-Dreyfus in the buff. The 53-year-old "Veep" actress unveiled the magazine's cover photo on Twitter: She tweeted that she's about to get more Twitter followers -- and she's right. We just started following her. Her butt-naked appearance coincides with the third season of "Veep," which premiered on Sunday. In the issue, which hits newsstands on Friday, Louis-Dreyfus dishes on the upcoming season (she's thrilled her character gets to curse a lot),...

Deadline Hollywood puts the best spin they can on the disastrous season finale ratings for HBO's impossibly low-rated series "Girls." Deadline calls the a dismal 670,000 viewers "steady." Yeah, "steady" in the same way the Titanic steadily sank. After three airings Sunday night, "Girls" averaged only a million viewers. If you are looking for a reference point, the season finale of "True Detective" averaged 11 million viewers. Not beholden to ratings, and obviously eager to not the pop the bubble of a small group of elite urban provincials who have spent three years trying to convince themselves "Girls" is not...

CNN’s Don Lemon has been entertaining all sorts of theories about the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, including the chance something “supernatural” happened, but on Wednesday night, he actually asked panelists about the possibility a black hole was involved.

Maher began the monologue by declaring that America is “stupid” because 60 percent of the country reportedly believes the tale of Noah’s ark is literally true. He went on to slam the film Noah as “floating giraffe cr**,” but said it “must be doing something right” since it’s been condemned by both Muslims and Christians. And the fact that it might lose a lot of studio money, he joked, “may put it in hot water with the Jews too.”

Reality TV is about to get hot and heavy. The Post reports that WE tv has ordered a one-hour pilot of Sex Box, a reality show where couples will do the deed inside a soundproof box. Based on the U.K. show of the same name, the format takes real couples whose relationships are on the rocks, has them fornicate in the box, and then immediately address their issues with a panel of experts. The ‘in the moment’ approach “fosters conversations about intimacy that are completely filterless and emotionally honest,” according to the network’s pilot description.

The Mongol warlord built the world's largest land-based empire. But he couldn't have done it without a change in climate. The difference was Genghis Khan, the warlord who united the tribes and launched them on their wave of unstoppable conquest. But the Mongol Empire wasn’t solely the product of Genghis’s will. As a fascinating new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) demonstrates, the rise of the Mongols may have owed just as much to beneficial changes in the climate that made the grasslands of the Mongol steppes green and verdant, fueling the horses that were...

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer sent cheers rippling through a group of protesters gathered outside the state capitol on Wednesday evening when she vetoed a controversial bill that would have protected business owners who cited their religious views in denying service to gays. Ohio spiked a similar measure on Wednesday. Kansas lawmakers created the same kind of firestorm earlier this month when the House passed a bill allowing private and public employees to refuse to serve same-sex couples (the state Senate later killed that measure). And this could still be just the beginning. These two high-profile legislative debates are just part...

The anti-balaka have outgrown their name. These militias in the Central African Republic, once united under a moniker meaning “anti-machete” in the local Sango language, are exacting their own vicious revenge upon the mainly Muslim rebels who overthrew the government last March and waged months of terror against the Christian population. They are now accused of atrocities far worse than what first prompted them to take up arms. An Amnesty International report on Feb. 12 said attacks on Muslims in January by anti-balaka militias, made up of Christians and animists, had amounted to “ethnic cleansing.” Fatou Bensouda, chief prosecutor at...

Is communism making a comeback? On its face, the question seems more than a little absurd. The Berlin Wall came down over 24 years ago. We are more than 22 years removed from the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. All that remains are the Stalinist museum pieces of North Korea and Cuba, the former an isolated country known mainly for its absurd dictator and starving population, the latter a beautiful island stuck in a 1950s time warp due to backwards economic and social policies. Even China, the one major power still ruled by...

or the first time in 50 years, the educational balance among married couples has tipped towards women. Wives are more likely to be the better educated partner than the other way around. The trend is particularly sharp among newlyweds; in 2012 almost 40% of college educated women were married to a guy without a degree. This is a big reversal from the 30 year trend between 1960 and 1990, when it was the men who were marrying down, educationally speaking. The difference is not yet huge; Pew researchers, using data from the American Community Survey and the Decennial Census, found...

Taking a swipe at conservatives on gun control, liberal comic Bill Maher joked that a mass shooting should take place at the Country Music Awards. “Now that liberals have forwarded their agenda by inserting a mass gay wedding into the Grammys, conservatives must match them tit-for-tat by having a mass shooting at the Country Music Awards,”

If you have a chance, I recommend each of you carve out the evening of Dec 20, from 7-9pm, to watch CNN. The show is called After Jesus: The First Christians, and it is an excellent and stimulating presentation of the first four centuries of the Christian faith. CNN kindly sent me an advanced copy and I have watched it in its entirety. Dec 21, in the morning, I would like to begin a conversation on this blog with those who watched it the evening before. (It will also be replayed Friday Dec 22 at 10pm and 1am; Saturday Dec...