Free Republic

The rapid deterioration of Libya’s oil-dependent economy is threatening the objectives of the country’s new Western-backed government and budding efforts to confront the Islamic State in North Africa, political and security analysts say. Within hours of arriving in Tripoli two weeks ago, the government made controlling the nation’s oil a priority. It persuaded a powerful militia to hand over three oil terminals, and the national oil company gave its support. But the road to securing Africa’s largest reserves is riddled with even greater obstacles, and bringing the battered industry back to its full potential promises to be a colossal mission....

An estimated 45.3% of American households — roughly 77.5 million — will pay no federal individual income tax ... The top 1% of taxpayers pay a higher effective income-tax rate than any other group (around 23%, according to a report released by the Tax Policy Center in 2014) — nearly seven times higher than those in the bottom 50%. On average, those in the bottom 40% of the income spectrum end up getting money from the government. Meanwhile, the richest 20% of Americans, by far, pay the most in income taxes, forking over nearly 87% of all the income tax...

WASHINGTON - Almost everyone agrees that America's income tax is too complex. Considering this, you might expect that simplifying the income tax would be a slam dunk. Sure enough, the various presidential candidates have proposed sweeping overhauls. But any agreement is mostly rhetorical. The odds that the next president, whoever it be, will engineer genuine tax simplification are negligible. On this Tax Day, it's worth pondering why. Make no mistake: I think we'd be better off with a simpler system. By this, I mean a system with a broader tax base and lower rates. I'd eliminate most tax preferences and...

‘The Local Budget Act is a naked and unabashed effort to strip Congress of powers vested in it by Article I of the Constitution, and to circumvent… the one constitutionally-appropriate way to proceed.’ – House of Representatives’ amicus curiae (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that on March 31, 2016, the U.S. House of Representatives filed an amicus curiae brief urging a U.S. District Court to deny the D.C. government’s efforts to dismiss a Judicial Watch lawsuit, which seeks to prevent D.C. from illegally expending tax dollars. The House amicus brief was filed in the U.S. District Court for...

President Barack Obama’s income fell to just over $436,000 in 2015, the lowest of his presidency, and he and first lady Michelle Obama paid nearly $81,500 in taxes, according to tax returns the White House released on Friday. The president’s more modest adjusted gross income reflected book sales that have continued to fall off in the years since he last published in 2006. The first family paid an effective tax rate of 18.7 percent. The Obamas also reported donating $64,000 to charity, or about 15 percent of their income. Their largest charitable donation, $9,000, went to the Fisher House Foundation,...

One of the two firefighters who were shot Friday night in Maryland has died of his injuries, officials confirmed late Friday. ... The incident began at about 7:30 p.m., when firefighters and police received a 911 call from a "concerned individual" who was worried about the resident of a home in the 5000 block of Sharon Road in Temple Hills in Prince George's County, Stawinski said. The firefighters tried to communicate with the resident, but there was no response. As they tried to go into the house to help the resident, the resident fired several rounds that hit the two...

The U.S. government on Friday barred its employees from traveling to the Mexican resort city of Acapulco, where a rise in homicides attributed to drug gangs has made it one of the world’s deadliest cities in recent years. The new travel guidelines posted online by the State Department extended a ban that already covered nearly the entire state of Guerrero, where Acapulco is located and which has been a flashpoint of drug violence. American government employees previously could go to Acapulco as long as they traveled by air instead of land. They are still allowed to visit the Guerrero state...

Merkel allows prosecution of German comedian who mocked Turkish president By Rick Noack April 15 at 9:30 AM German Chancellor Angela Merkel has cleared the way for the prosecution of German comedian Jan Böhmermann, whose poem mocking Turkey's president has become the centerpiece of a clash between Germany's free-speech traditions and the government's efforts to safeguard its important relations with Turkey. In a news conference Friday, Merkel emphasized that it will now be up to German courts to decide whether Böhmermann is guilty of insulting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. But critics — including members of her own government —...

A top Donald Trump adviser told House Republicans Thursday there's no need to worry about a contested Republican National Convention, promising to clinch the nomination outright in June. In a private meeting on Capitol Hill, Trump aide Ed Brookover laid out a bullish road map for Trump to win by healthy margins in the upcoming primary states, starting in New York on Tuesday and concluding with a victory in California's June primary. Despite Trump's steep climb to win 1,237 delegates before the Cleveland convention, Brookover insisted a contested convention simply wouldn't happen and that Trump was on a "glide path"...

The goal of the nebulous, sort-of-a-thing "never Trump" campaign is to do whatever is possible to stand between Donald Trump and the 1,237 delegates he needs in order to claim the Republican party's nomination on the first ballot at the convention. The informal effort has resulted in a lot more anti-Trump ads, and has benefited from the businessman's own natural inability to organize on-the-ground efforts in critical states. But the overarching idea, that the Republican base would slowly turn against Trump, doesn't seem to be paying off. In fact, a new CBS News poll suggests that Republicans are pretty comfortable...

Ted Cruz stands by his claim that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is a liar arguing, “Every word I said there was true and accurate.” In a town hall on MSNBC hosted by the moderator of “Meet the Press” Chuck Todd on Thursday, Todd asked Cruz, “You called Senate Majority Leader a liar on the Senate floor. That has not sat well with your colleagues. Do you regret calling him a ‘liar’ on the Senate floor?” “You know, Washington is an amazing place,” Cruz said. “When somebody stands up and lies to you, and someone else points out that they...

NEW YORK — It’s the evening rush on the Staten Island Ferry, and Donald Trump’s New Yorkers, spent after a day’s work in Manhattan, are heading home. There’s the construction worker who is convinced Trump will stop “pussyfooting around” when it comes to terrorism. There’s the Hungarian immigrant tow-truck driver who says Trump speaks his language. There’s the moving-company worker who believes Trump would be the first honest and courageous president in his lifetime, the diamond dealer who respects his toughness and the fashion model in awe of his glamour. “He’s just the man, right?” says Jimmy Dawson, 20, just...

Many of the exact same groups that participated in Occupy Wall Street and helped organize protest rallies in Ferguson and Baltimore are now promising to bring us “the largest civil disobedience actions in a generation”. I recently wrote about the trouble that radical leftists have caused by attempting to disrupt Trump campaign events, but now there is a very organized effort to turn this into a national movement. On March 19th, thousands of angry protesters will descend on Trump Tower in New York City to denounce Donald Trump’s “fascist policies”, and on April 2nd dozens of leftist organizations will join...

The Tennessee General Assembly is on track to sue the federal government over the refugee resettlement program on Tenth Amendment grounds after Senate Joint Resolution 467 cleared its last substantive hurdle in the Tennessee House Finance Committee. The resolution sailed through the committee on a voice vote, and is now headed to the Calendar and Rules Committee, which will schedule a vote on the floor of the House of Representatives some time during the next seven days. The resolution is expected to pass in a landslide, as 74 of the House’s 99 members have already signed on as sponsors. In...

(CNN)The forces of Occupy Wall Street, splintered and faded in the aftermath of their 2011 demonstrations, are getting the band back together to boost Bernie Sanders ahead of next week's critical New York primary. Nearly five years since Occupy was evicted from Zuccotti Park, blocks from the New York Stock Exchange in lower Manhattan, a coalition of organizers, labor leaders and progressive activists who lined up under the banner of "the 99 percent" are renewing their efforts in pursuit of a more traditional cause: Getting voters to the polls on April 19.

The Trump campaign said Wednesday that Rick Wiley — who has more than two decades of experience in state and national politics and most recently served as campaign manager for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s presidential bid — is joining the operation as national political director. “Rick is a seasoned political expert with a very successful career in winning elections,” Trump said in a news release. “He brings decades of experience, and his deep ties to political leaders and activists across the country will be a tremendous asset as we enter the final phase of securing the nomination.” Wiley said in...

A lawyer who once represented the woman known as the "DC Madam" circulated documents Monday that he says contain the names of 174 government entities and businesses that were among the sources of phone calls to his former client. Montgomery Blair Sibley has been promising that the phone records he has could affect the 2016 presidential election, but the papers he emailed to the media this week did not contain any obvious connections to the campaigns. There was also no evidence of any wrongdoing on the part of the agencies or companies whose names he released. "I am not releasing...

A girls high school soccer team in Wisconsin walked off the field after they were the target of Donald Trump chants from people on the sideline, according to WISC-TV. It was the Beloit Memorial girls varsity soccer team, which took on Elkhorn Area High last Thusday. Reportedly there were kids on the side of the field yelling "Donald Trump, build that wall," toward Hispanic and African American players.

On Monday, the former lawyer of the late Deborah Jeane Palfrey—known as the “D.C. Madam”—released some names of the government agencies, companies, and groups that purportedly called Palfrey’s escort service between 2000 and 2006. In the court filing, lawyer Montgomery Blair Sibley listed 174 entities that had dialed the service, Pamela Martin & Associates. The roster includes the FBI, State Department, Department of Commerce, Department of Health and Human Services, IRS, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, and U.S. Coast Guard. So far, no names of specific individuals from this list of 174 have been released. (Since February, Sibley has...

If you live any distance beyond the Capital Beltway you probably didn’t notice, but an important part of government in Washington shut down on Wednesday, March 16. That’s when the Metro subway system’s recently installed general manager, Paul Wiedefeld, ordered a one-day shutdown of the entire 117-mile system for emergency inspection of track-based power cables.