Free Republic

The New York Police Department said Tuesday it has disbanded a special unit whose efforts to try to detect terror threats in Muslim communities through secret surveillance sparked outrage. The surveillance program by the NYPD Intelligence Division had come under fire by community activists who accused the department of abusing civil rights. The program relied on plainclothes officers to eavesdrop on people in bookstores, restaurants and mosques. The tactic was detailed in a series of stories by The Associated Press and became the subject of two federal lawsuits. In a series of articles that began in August 2011, the AP...

A Houston businesswoman has rejected prosecutors’ efforts to get her to testify against Rep. Michael Grimm, R-N.Y., in exchange for a deal on the campaign fundraising charges against her, setting the stage for a trial in Brooklyn, N.Y., according to her lawyer. Attorney Stuart Kaplan said federal prosecutors were expected to seek a new indictment against Diana Durand, after cancellation of a scheduled court appearance on Monday to discuss the status of plea negotiations.

WASHINGTON — The Census Bureau, the authoritative source of health insurance data for more than three decades, is changing its annual survey so thoroughly that it will be difficult to measure the effects of President Obama’s health care law in the next report, due this fall, census officials said. The changes are intended to improve the accuracy of the survey, being conducted this month in interviews with tens of thousands of households around the country. But the new questions are so different that the findings will not be comparable, the officials said. An internal Census Bureau document said that the...

The death penalty is like gun rights in Texas politics: Candidates don’t dare get in the way of either. But Republican Greg Abbott, the favorite to succeed Gov. Rick Perry, must soon make a decision as attorney general that could disrupt the nation’s busiest death chamber. It’s an election-year dilemma for Abbott. But in Texas, it’s one that Democratic rival Wendy Davis can’t easily exploit, illustrating the difficulty of navigating the issue in such a pro-death penalty state. Abbott must soon decide whether to stick with his earlier opinions that Texas must disclose the source of the execution drugs it...

Latinos and immigration activists are warning of political peril for President Barack Obama and Democrats in the fall election unless the president acts boldly and soon to curb deportations and allow more immigrants to remain legally in the U.S. Many activists say Obama has been slow to grasp the emotions building within the Latino community as deportations near the 2 million mark for his administration and hopes for immigration legislation fade. With House Republicans unlikely to act on an overhaul, executive action by Obama is increasingly the activists’ only hope.“There is tremendous anger among core constituencies of the president and...

A public petition asking to broaden the legislative limits of self-defense has been rejected by the Interior and Justice Ministries, but activists intend to continue the campaign and promise pickets near the government HQ and rallies across the country. The petition entitled “My home is my fortress” has collected over 100,000 signatures of Russian citizens on a dedicated web-site which officially gave it legislative legs. If the draft was passed any action of a citizen inside his or her home against an intruder would be qualified as necessary self-defense, which, in turn, could lead to the withdrawal of murder charges...

PRIMM, Nevada – As part of President Obama’s all-of-the-above approach to energy, today Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar “flipped the switch” on the Enbridge Silver State North solar project, the first large-scale solar energy facility on U.S. public lands to deliver power to American consumers. This milestone is in line with the administration’s broad commitment to expanding production of all sources of American made energy, including from renewable sources, such as wind and solar, which has doubled in the President’s first term, as well as domestic production of oil and gas resources, which have increased each year the President...

The federal government threatens a Nevada rancher with the loss of his private property. A Long Island man loses his life to Obamacare while a Virginia woman’s family says, “Obamacare killed my sister." IRS bureaucrat Lois Lerner is held in contempt of Congress, having emerged as the key figure in a scheme to deprive conservatives of their rights. With these stories and endless others spilling into the news cycle, F.H. Buckley’s new book — The Once and Future King: The Rise of Crown Government in America — could not be better timed. Mr. Buckley’s writings are familiar on these pages...

April 15, 2014RNC Sues IRS for Illegal Stonewalling WASHINGTON – Today the Republican National Committee (RNC) filed a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for withholding records sought by the RNC’s 2013 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. In the initial request on May 21, 2013, the RNC sought to review documents and correspondence related to criteria used for reviewing and approving 501(c)(4) tax-exempt organizations. This request followed revelations that the IRS had been targeting conservative organizations, and the RNC sought to shed light on who had ordered actions to be taken against those groups and why.Over the course...

The events in Nevada this week have made a number of things crystal clear: 1) Our government, at least at the upper management/executive service level, is incredibly corrupt. 2) Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), Senate Majority Misleader, is incredibly corrupt. 3) Obama’s Executive Branch, which allowed this situation to take place in the way that it did, is incredibly corrupt. 4) The judicial branch that has consistently allowed “environmentalists” to dictate public land policy is incredibly corrupt. 5) The “environmentalists” and their co-conspirators in Congress who foisted the so-called “Endangered Species Act” and numerous other extreme laws on us, and turned...

New York Officials Argue for Flexibility with Gun Law Violators… As Long as They're on the City's PayrollSome of New York's most strident gun control advocates have rushed to the defense of an unwitting traveler who was arrested at an airport for a technical violation of a draconian gun law. Has a new era of sanity arrived in the Big Apple? Not really. This defendant happens to be an NYPD officer who is alleged to have violated India's strict firearm regulations. On March 10th, NYPD Officer Manny Encarnacion was arrested when officials at the airport in New Delhi discovered three...

This year April 15 is more than the tax deadline for an estimated one million New York State residents. It’s also the deadline to register “assault weapons” and “high-capacity” magazines. If they don’t, they’ll begin living outside the law. A lot of them have decided to do just that. They’ve decided to practice civil disobedience even though failure to register an “assault weapon” by the deadline is punishable as a “class A misdemeanor,” which means a maximum sentence of one year in prison. I put “assault weapon” and “high-capacity” in quotes because their definitions vary by state—they’re political terms. In...

Earlier this week, Sen. Jeff Sessions said that the president was deliberately dismantling our law enforcement system. Megyn Kelly of Fox News asked Rep. Gowdy about that. Rep. Trey Gowdy, a former prosecutor, agrees with Sen. Sessions that the president is systematically dismantling the nation’s laws, but he believes it is to win elections not to pursue an agenda. They [the administration] do however fundamentally view their role differently, he added. Attorney General Eric Holder recently claimed that illegal immigration is a civil right, if that is so, Gowdy says, that is like saying you and I have the right...

On August 25, 2006 the New York Times published a nearly 6,000-word, front-page analysis of the evidence in the case against the three lacrosse-playing students at Duke University who were charged with raping a prostitute who had been hired to dance at a party. The article conceded that holes had emerged in the case brought against them by Mike Nifong, the district attorney in Raleigh, North Carolina. But by presenting material in the light most favorable to Nifong’s claims and by excluding or diminishing the significance of key exculpatory evidence, the Times implied that a rape still might have occurred....

The Republican National Committee marked Tax Day by suing the Internal Revenue Service.The lawsuit charges that the IRS is withholding records sought by the RNC’s May 2013 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, in which the committee sought to review documents and correspondence related to criteria used for reviewing and approving 501(c)(4) tax-exempt organizations.The FOIA request seeks all documents dated between Jan. 1, 2010, and May 20, 2013, containing the words “tea party,” “patriot,” and/or “9/12 project,” referring to the group created by Glenn Beck, along with any documents pertaining to increased scrutiny of 501(c)(4)s, especially using “be on...

The IRS is cash-strapped and audit rates are down, but that doesn’t mean the average Jane or Joe can hide the ball from the tax man. The tax-collecting agency devotes more resources to chasing big fish like convicted tax cheat Wesley Snipes than the average middle-class taxpayer, that’s true. But the IRS is now using sophisticated software and data analysis that puts it in touch with taxpayers before the official audit process begins. “Now with automation and the electronic submission of W-2s and 1099s, the IRS just matches the information,” said David Kautter, managing director of the Kogod Tax Center...

A plan, now stealthily making its way through state legislatures with astonishing speed, would junk the Electoral College and award the presidency to the winner of the popular vote. The plan involves an Interstate Compact where states would commit to select electors pledged to vote for the national popular vote winner regardless of how their own state voted. When enough states pass this law, sufficient to cast 270 votes which is the majority of the Electoral College, it will take effect. So far, nine states and the District of Columbia, casting 136 electoral votes, have joined. This is halfway to...

The two paroled sex offenders who authorities in Southern California believe raped and killed four women allegedly wore GPS trackers while committing their crimes, and investigators believe there may be more victims. Anaheim police Chief Raul Quezada said Monday that Franc Cano, 27, and Steven Dean Gordon, 45, were wearing ankle tracking bracelets when the women were assaulted and killed last fall and earlier this year. The chief added that data from the devices "was one of the investigative tools we used to put the case together." Authorities at the news conference did not explain how Cano and Gordon allegedly...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama used the unique power of the nation's highest office Tuesday to correct a typo. The error was made in a report used to sentence convicted drug dealer Ceasar Cantu of Katy, Texas, and resulted in 3 1/2 extra years being added to his prison term. Obama took the extraordinary step of commuting Cantu's sentence from 15 years to 11 1/2 years. It's only the 10th time Obama has used his power to cut the sentence of federal inmates.

Islamic extremists abducted about 100 female students from a school in northeast Nigeria before dawn Tuesday, but some of the teens managed to escape from the back of an open truck, ... Islamic extremists have been abducting girls to use as cooks and sex slaves. Insurgents from the Boko Haram terrorist network are blamed for attacks that have killed more than 1,500 people this year alone. The group — whose name means "Western education is forbidden" — has targeted schools, mosques, churches, villages and agricultural centers in increasingly indiscriminate attacks. They have also made daring raids on military barracks and...