Free Republic

When the depth of corruption, deceit and red tape bureaucracy reach such astronomical levels, it is time for a complete overhaul! Fire them all!! Both the Congress and the Senate passed a 2015 spending bill, in record time, that has been labeled a “Cromnibus.” But where was the fight? Where were our representatives who swore they would not fund amnesty, Obamacare, taxpayer-funded abortion, and more irresponsible spending? No where to be seen! About Obama’s illegal amnesty, “We are going to fight the president tooth and nail if he continues down this path. This is the wrong way to govern. This...

With the passage of a $1.1 trillion spending bill that fails to defund President Obama’s immigration amnesty plan (as promised), it seems many Republicans still believe in Beltway fairy tales. If President Obama had shut down the government by vetoing an appropriations bill that didn’t fund the president’s amnesty plan, so the fairy tale goes, Republicans would be blamed and damaged politically. There’s just one problem with this fairy tale: the 2014 election results. Nobody blamed Republicans for a shutdown in 2013, and nobody cared. The Washington establishment fears big bad shutdowns because they illustrate to the rest of the...

Last week, George Will wrote a column about how progressive politics have fomented "rape culture" on college campuses. The column was not well received by some, or even, as a great many of the histrionic responses would indicate, well understood. I received the following press release yesterday, headlined: "87,000 Call on The Washington Post to Address Sexism, Fire George Will." A group called UltraViolet was touting the success of an online petition they'd whipped up over the controversy. From the release:

Things are pretty volatile in the Chaos Caucus. Every since Republicans took over the Assembly, things have been anything but smooth. That shouldn’t be much of a surprise. After all, even the GOP itself didn’t expect to be in charge of the lower house, and the last time the party was in charge, Ronald Reagan was in the White House and the pinnacle of technology was the Apple IIe desktop computer. You already know about the disastrous election of Ira Hansen, R-Sparks, as speaker. He was undone by ugly sentiments penned in a Sparks newspaper over a long career as...

After passing the Senate by unanimous consent on Monday, it seemed as if the FOIA Improvement Act would become law—a nearly identical version passed the House earlier this year. Today, however, it was up to Speaker of the House John Boehner to allow a vote on the bill’s final passage before the House adjourned this week. Instead, it was “held at the desk,” meaning Boehner may have just killed FOIA reform. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is a law, signed in 1966, that gives U.S. citizens the right to access information from the federal government. Through FOIA, journalists and...

Published on Dec 10, 2014Las Cruces City Attorney Harry S. Connelly lays out the incentives and tactics that drive the practice of policing for profit, better know as civil asset forfeiture. He explains how nuisance ordinances are lucrative grounds for police departments to mine.

Full title: Judicial Watch: State Department Documents Show Its Security Contractor Operating without a License in Benghazi on Day of Terrorist Attack State Official Describes Benghazi as an ‘Emergency’ Situation (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch has obtained andreleased internal Department of State documentsdetailing the department’s $783,284.79 contract with U.K.-based Blue Mountain Group (BMG) to provide security at the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya. The documents show that BMG did not have a license to operate in Libya at the time of the attack due to a business dispute with its partner in Libya, XPAND Corporation, and quote a State official...

A Republican has joined Democrats in criticizing the inclusion of a partial repeal of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law in legislation funding the government. Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) signed on to a letter with Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) that calls on congressional leaders to scrap portions of the $1.1 trillion "cromnibus" that relax restrictions on banks trading financial derivatives. The pair argued in the letter that there is "broad bipartisan support" for removing that particular language. Brown and Vitter, who have worked together in the past on bills to limit big banks, argued that the language was unfairly jammed into...

The federal government's funding authorization expires tonight at midnight, and the Republican plan to renew it bodes poorly for the GOP's leadership of Congress next year. ... Congress shouldn't let the government shut down, but Republicans should neither acquiesce to president Obama's unprecedented executive power grab, nor give up control over the budget for well into the 114th Congress. ... Republicans take control of both chambers in January, so they have no good reason to make a deal with the Senate Democratic leadership that sets spending levels until next October. ... There are, as speaker Boehner has pointed out, some...

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) argued that the "abomination" omnibus bill was "a chance to see if electing Republicans made a difference" on Tuesday's "Laura Ingraham Show." "I'll vote no to any kind of 2,000 page bill that I'm given at the last minute that we don't have time to read, it's an abomination, nobody should support a Congress that stuffs all the spending into one bill, nobody reads it, there are no reforms, no amendments, and it really is probably why Congress has about a 10% approval rate because this is not doing our job" he declared. Paul added that...

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) defended the release of the CIA enhanced interrogation report in a testy exchange with CNN today, arguing that ISIS “may seize” upon the report, “they may not.” Feinstein pushed for the release of the report in the waning days of her chairmanship before handing over the gavel to Republicans in the 114th Congress. “Look, there is no perfect time to release this report,” she said when asked about the potential risk to American lives because of its publication, as the White House warned Monday. “This began 12 years ago. We have worked for...

Anyone who followed this year's Senate race in Kansas — the one longtime GOP incumbent Pat Roberts appeared to be losing to Greg Orman, the businessman running as an independent — knows Orman and his supporters vigorously denied Roberts' allegation that Orman was really a Democrat running to further the Democratic agenda. "By word, by deed, by campaign contribution, this man is a liberal Democrat," Roberts said of Orman during a debate in October. "A vote for Greg Orman is a vote to extend the Barack Obama/Harry Reid agenda." Not true, Orman answered. "The senator can say that over and...

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio's bill to ban horse-drawn carriages reached the City Council on Monday, in a move to phase out the carriages that often give tours around Central Park. The legislation says that as of June 1, 2016, "it shall be unlawful to operate a horse-drawn vehicle in the city of New York or offer rides to the public on a vehicle drawn or pulled by a carriage horse." ... It also boosts the penalty for breaking horse-carriage rules to a maximum of $25,000 instead of the current $500. The proposed ban was introduced one day after...

Today, we requested that the House Committee on Oversight & Government Reform undertake an "independent" investigation of the General Motors ignition switch recall delay, in light of newly obtained emails by lawyers suing GM. Those emails suggest that the Treasury may have timed its final sale of GM shares to precede public knowledge of the ignition switch fiasco. They also cast doubt on GM CEO Mary Barra's previous account of what she knew and when she knew it. Here is the text of a letter I sent today to Rep. Jason Chaffetz, in photo, the incoming Chairman of the...

The UVA rape story peddled by Rolling Stone has fallen apart. This is what happens when advocacy journalism pushes narratives rather than actual news. The feminist narrative these days is that we live in a country that hates women and ignores their violent rape. In order to fight back against a society that hates women, feminists have to make up stories about rape to confront society with. One wonders why, in a nation that hates women and doesn’t care about their violent rape, the left would bother making up stories when actual stories of violent rape must be so plentiful....

The IRS scandal is not much in the news these days, but it is not going away. The more Obama’s minions stonewall this scandal, the more congressional Democrats discount the scandal, the more the leftist establishment media ignores this scandal, the more toxic it will be for the left. In late November we learned that 30,000 of Lois Lerner’s lost e-mails have been found, but these e-mails have not yet been converted into readable form. The utter contempt the Obama administration shows toward the oversight powers of Congress, toward the millions of information technology-savvy Americans who grasp the lying and...

Judson Berger December 05, 2014 Senior officials at the Social Security Administration (SSA) tried to hide a damning report on a $300 million computer system that lawmakers have called a “boondoggle” in order to protect President Obama’s nominee to lead the agency, a whistleblower claimed in an interview with FoxNews.com. Whistleblower Michael Keegan told FoxNews.com that McKinsey & Company, a consulting firm, issued a draft report in December 2013 saying the agency had spent $288 million over six years for a new computer system processing disability claims that has yet to launch. But Keegan said he was present at a...

The “independent” watchdogs that are supposed to root out waste, fraud and corruption inside U.S. government agencies often help cover it up, according to a scandalous newspaper exposé that reveals sometimes they actually become the lapdogs of the agencies they’re charged with overseeing. Published this month by the capital area’s conservative newspaper, the four-part series exposes the state of inspectors general tasked with keeping an eye on the government. In all there are 72 inspectors general—with heads appointed by the president—thanks to a decades-old law that passed with strong bipartisan support in Congress. The idea is to have a completely...

James O’Keefe has filed an ethics complaint with various bar associations against Department of Justice Civil Rights Attorney Karla Dobinski and three others arising out of a prosecution of police officers in New Orleans. PJ Media has covered Karla Dobinski’s ethical misconducthere and here. Dobinski was in charge of the taint team in the prosecution of New Orleans polices officers on civil rights charges in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The taint team was responsible for protecting the Constitutional rights of the accused police officers. It is responsible for ensuring that evidence obtained in the local internal affairs investigation did...

The recent Chapter 7 bankruptcy and liquidation filing of the Toledo, Ohio-based solar-panel manufacturer Xunlight Corp. has attracted barely any national attention. Maybe it’s gotten to the point — after Solyndra, Evergreen, Abound, and Satcon — that the failure of another government-backed alternative energy company is a dog-bites-man story. It’d be newsworthy if any of them actually ever succeeded. But it’s worth pausing for an autopsy and retrospective on Xunlight, because it’s a great (or terrible, depending on how you look at it) example of how government at all levels — state and federal — and in both parties —...