Free Republic

CHICAGO – Employers in Illinois can no longer access criminal background checks on potential hires until after an interview is conducted. Gov. Quinn signed into law this week a bill that prohibits private employers from asking applicants about their criminal history prior to determining if they are qualified for the job. “Everyone deserves a second chance when it comes to getting a job,” Governor Quinn said in a press release. “This law will help ensure that people across Illinois get a fair shot to reach their full potential through their skills and qualifications, rather than past history. It will also...

The feud between Campbell, Wisconsin, Police Chief Tim Kelemen and local Tea Party Leader Greg Luce began last fall, when Luce started organizing protests against Barack Obama on an interstate overpass. Kelemen objected to the protests, claiming they disrupted traffic. So, he did what any responsible police chief would do: he persuaded the town board to pass an ordinance banning signs on the bridge. Oh, and he also signed Luce up on homosexual dating, pornography and federal healthcare websites. Via Police One: Kelemen told investigators ...........

On Thursday, with PJ Media's J. Christian Adams as her guest, Fox News's Megyn Kelly recited a list of assertions (under oath, she reminded us) made by Internal Revenue Service officials which have later been shown to be lies or cause for agency flip-flops after "new" facts have been revealed. It's a significant list. By implication, it's an indictment of the vast majority of the establishment press, which has refused to give the IRS scandal the attention it deserves. Video and a transcript follow the jump. ... The establishment press has been almost completely uninterested in telling their readers, listeners,...

Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. Hebrews 11:1 NIV It is time to impeach this Marxist dictator, not for this generation, but for generations to come. It is time for America to send the message that this is still a country of laws even for the lawless. This is not a political message, it is a message that nobody is above the law and especially the most powerful person in the land. This is once again calling on the most democratic institution in the land, our House of Representatives...

The media are abuzz with the IRS affair. As you may have heard, former IRS official Lois Lerner, in charge of tax exempt groups, directed harassment operations targeting conservative groups. She also recommended auditing Republican Senator Charles Grassley. Appearing in front of the House Oversight Committee (HOC) in May 2013 and again last March, she pled the Fifth and refused to answer any questions. Later, IRS commissioner John Koskinen announced that potentially damning emails that were subpoenaed by the committee had disappeared in a series of computer crashes affecting Lerner’s machine, as well as the machines of at least six...

. July 27, 2014 Newt Gingrich : Bigger than President Obama ===================================================== A Fox News poll this week reported that 58% of the American people felt the Obama Administration was incompetent. That sense of incompetence included 32% of Democrats, 67% of independents and 84% of Republicans. As president, having your political opponents believe you are incompetent is not a shock. Having two out of three independents find you are incompetent is a shock. Having one out of three of your partisan supporters consider you incompetent may mean it is time for the Obama team to panic. This survey on incompetence...

I visited the Kelly File last night on Fox News with Megyn Kelly. The segment provides an excellent summary of the IRS flip flopping and lies. Here is the video from Fox News Insider:

Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price was arrested today as a result of a 13-count indictment which claims the powerful Texas Democrat took $950,000 in bribes. Wiley's attorney, Billy Ravkind, confirmed that he was arrested early Friday morning and is in Federal custody. The indictment indicates Wiley received the bribes in the form of cash, cars and property and that he and his political operatives used the ill-gotten gains to commit tax and mail fraud. For the full indictment, please access the following link. The indictment charges that, among other things, Price and his accomplices used his office and stature...

<p>DALLAS - Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price was arrested Friday morning and is in federal custody.</p> <p>The arrest for bribery, mail fraud and tax fraud comes after a lengthy federal investigation.</p> <p>Three years ago, the FBI served search warrants at Price’s home, his county office and at the homes and offices of others. They were looking for evidence of public corruption.</p>

... “They are people who have already made money and are now scared to lose it,” Paley said.... “I don’t share the opinion of 90 percent of the country: I feel like a foreigner here now so why not leave?” said Tatiana Konkova, a Russian literature teacher and singer, giving her last concert in Moscow this month.... The number of Russians emigrating in the last two years was some five times higher than in the two before Putin began a new six-year term in May 2012, official figures show.... Echoing the post-Soviet brain drain, sociologists say Russia is bleeding exactly...

Paul Farhi of The Washington Post writes today about a trend at the White House—and throughout journalism—that threatens the quality and credibility of news-gathering: Public-relations "minders" are injecting themselves into our interviews with politicians, CEOs, and other policymakers. Minder madness joins the surge of "background briefings" and the decline of access to decision-makers as evidence that the White House—and other big instititutions—are manipulating the press. It's that, but it's also something worse: It's evidence that journalists are ceding control when they should be seizing it, accepting canned news rather than breaking it. Farhi writes, "Almost every officially sanctioned exchange between...

SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his top staff thwarted efforts by an investigatory commission to uncover political corruption and expose campaign finance loopholes because the panel... got too close to the governor's own politics... Cuomo's top aide, Larry Schwartz, interfered with the commission's attempts to investigate campaign spending for a media company that the governor also used....the commission's executive director reported back to Schwartz while its staff grew increasingly suspicious and frustrated that the governor's office was meddling in the investigations. The commission developed a list of promising targets, including a lawmaker suspected of using campaign funds to...

An investigation has found that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s aides deeply compromised the panel’s work, objecting to any inquiries about groups tied to Mr. Cuomo.

After touching down around 3:15 p.m. at Boeing Field, Obama's first stop will be to a mansion in Seattle's Madrona neighborhood where 250 people will attend a fundraiser. From there, he'll head to former Costco CEO Jim Sinegal's Eastside home at Hunt's Point for a fundraiser there.

IRS Deputy Associate Chief Counsel Thomas Kane said in transcribed congressional testimony that more IRS officials experienced computer crashes, bringing the total number of crash victims to “less than 20,” and also said that the agency does not know if the lost emails are still backed up somewhere. The new round of computer crash victims includes David Fish, who routinely corresponded with Lois Lerner, as well as Lerner subordinate Andy Megosh, Lerner’s technical adviser Justin Lowe, and Cincinnati-based agent Kimberly Kitchens.

One of the architects of the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping technology told a radio host today the Internal Revenue Service, or IRS, has “direct access” to the NSA’s domestic spying data and was likely using it to target the tea party. NSA whistleblower William Binney was being interviewed on “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio” on New York’s 970 AM The Answer when he disclosed the startling revelation. “For example,” Binney said in response to a question on how the NSA can use data and metadata to identify potential threats, “if you started to communicate with people involved in the tea party...

Something has gone wrong in our civil service. Consider some recent developments. The IRS was forced to pay the National Organization for Marriage $50,000 for leaking the group’s donor list. Tea-party organizations and donors were much more likely than others to be audited by the IRS. This misbehavior was not the work of a few rogue employees in Cincinnati. In general, the IRS stalled tea-party applications for status as 501(c)(4) groups. Meanwhile, April Sands, an employee of the FEC, recently pleaded guilty to violating the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from campaigning at the office. Ms. Sands, who worked...

Lois Lerner's pension defunded and a whole lot more Saturday, July 19, 2014 9:15 pm | Updated: 1:29 am, Sun Jul 20, 2014.By Rick ManningLois Lerner was apparently patient zero of deadly computer viruses within the United States government as it has been learned that some of her former colleagues at the Federal Election Commission also mysteriously lost their computer hard drives. Of course, they had to be destroyed as well.The evidence must be pretty damning to have involved what appears pretty clearly to be an interdepartmental cover up. Two separate federal courts are now involved demanding an explanation from...

Goal is 'greater accountability' ... for foreign nations' governments...[C]hanges to government transparency are in the works with a plan to spend up to $600 million of U.S. taxpayers’ money to launch programs to “foster greater accountability of institutions and leaders to citizens.” However, Obama’s plan won’t benefit the U.S. taxpayers, who will be on the hook for the changes. His plan is to help make foreign governments more accountabile to their citizens. The Democratic, Responsive, and Accountable GOverNance, or DRAGON, project is to develop strategies to encourage citizens “to participate actively in governance,” according to a “concept paper” that WND...

Living in a city that had 82 shootings over the Fourth of July weekend, Chicagoans could be forgiven for envying the residents of Indianapolis. Imagine living in a place where homicides have been reduced by more than half in the past two decades, where robberies are less common than they've been in nearly half a century, where car theft is at levels not seen since "The Dick Van Dyke Show" was still in production. Actually, that's where Chicagoans do live. I was only pretending to talk about Indianapolis. Those developments have all occurred right here. Right now, the city...