Free Republic

Republican lawmakers reportedly laughed at House Speaker Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) after he told them he had been given a promise from Senate Democratic Leader Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV). Lawmakers were amused at Ryan's naiveté for thinking that Reid is someone their party can trust. "I know, I know," Ryan replied with a smile, according to The Hill. Reid and Ryan just finished working together to help pass a $1 trillion dollar spending bill, which many argue contained far more liberal policies than conservative ones. Reid has promised Ryan that he will return to regular order in the New Year....

Could the failed Obamacare exchanges have been merely an excuse to direct payola to safely Democratic states? Based on a new report from the Government Accountability Office, and the actions of acting head of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Studies (CMS) Andrew Slavitt, the answer may well be yes. Let’s start with the report. Americans for Tax Reform summarized its findings: In all likelihood, officials were aware of the issues facing these states before exchanges launched. According to GAO, CMS conducted reviews on 15 state-based exchanges in August and September of 2013. Even though these tests found multiple issues...

Blames husband Weiner for failing to notice extra $30K paymentFederal investigators formally investigated top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin for the crime of embezzlement after confirming she took a “Babymoon” vacation and maternity time at the State Department without expending her formal leave, resulting in thousands of dollars of pay she wasn’t entitled to receive, The Washington Times has learned. The probe also gathered evidence she filed timesheets charging the government for impermissible overtime and excessive hours after she converted from a fulltime federal employer to a State Department contractor. Those timecards were filed during a period of time that...

Anthony Weiner will be conspicuously absent from the fundraiser his boss, Michael Kempner, is throwing for his wife’s boss, Hillary Clinton. Weiner has been kept away from Hillary since his second sexting scandal first broke in 2013, even though Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, has a bigger role than ever in Clinton’s presidential campaign. [Snip] But Weiner (a.k.a. Carlos Danger) will not be there. “He was not only not invited,” said one source. “He was specifically told not to show up just in case he had any plans to.”

During the August recess GOP senators were told to press for the passage of the TPP Trade Agreement. Yikes!! Wikileaks has gotten their hands on a copy of Obama’s phony TPP trade bill. It contains 29 chapters but only 5 pertain to trade. Wikileaks will be publishing the entire bill and they have already released the chapter on Investment. It’s very interesting. It is written in a such a way as to give multinational companies a huge advantage on trade. If a public hospital is built close to a private one, the private hospital has the right to sue the...

Federal judge Andrew Hannen, Brownsville, Texas has threatened to hold DHS Secy Jeh Johnson and top US immigration officials in contempt. The DOJ said about 2,000 individuals had been sent three-year work authorizations after Judge Hanen temporarily blocked Obama's immigration action Feb. 16. The judge had issued the injunction at the request of a coalition of 26 states, led by Texas, which filed to stop Obama’s action as unconstitutional. An appeal of Hanen’s ruling is set to be argued Friday before the 5th U. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. Obama's program protects young immigrants from deportation if they...

Activists demand answers to lawmakers' falsification of documents for ObamaCare perks. Americans fed up with the unbridled arrogance of the nation’s “ruling class” are about to be further infuriated. As American Commitment president Phil Kerpen reveals, there’s yet another outrageous scandal occurring on Capitol Hill, where the House and Senate have falsely certified themselves as small businesses so they can fund themselves and their staffs with taxpayer-funded health insurance—sidestepping ObamaCare provisions in the process. “They conspired to break the law,” Kerpen told Front Page. In an interview with Newsmax TV, Kerpen reminded viewers that Americans had “demanded” Congress enter the...

From Bare Naked Islam: Barack Hussein Obama together with Hillary Clinton decided to aid and abet al-Qaeda terrorists and Libyan Muslim Brotherhood jihadists to overthrow U.S. ally Muammar Ghaddafi and replace all the secular leaders in the Middle East with sharia-compliant Muslim Brotherhood governments. Former CIA Operations and Intelligence Analyist, Officer, Clare Lozez, says that “America has switched sides in the war on terror under Barack Obama.” She said the global war on terror had been an effort to “stay free of Sharia,” or repressive Islamic law, until the Obama administration began siding with such jihadist groups as the Muslim...

I have said it before -- the Obama administration’s Internal Revenue Service is institutionally incapable of self-correction. And, now it is even clearer that the Obama administration’s Department of Justice is incapable of holding accountable those responsible for a massive illegal targeting scheme. Even worse, its own involvement in the scandal not only means that it can’t properly investigate the IRS, it should instead be investigated for cooperating with the IRS in its campaign of censorship and oppression. The latest troubling development comes as the Justice Department announced it will not pursue criminal contempt charges against former top IRS official...

When Dr. Roy Spencer looked up summer temperature data for the U.S. Corn Belt, it showed no warming trend for over a century. But that was before temperatures were “adjusted” by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration climate scientists — now the same data shows a significant warming trend.Spencer, a climate scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, said that the National Climatic Data Center made large adjustments to past summer temperatures for the U.S. Corn Belt, lowering past temperatures to make them cooler. Adjusting past temperatures downward creates a significant warming trend in the data that didn’t exist before....

An IRS employee tasked with trying to restore and obtain emails on Lois Lerner’s IRS computer’s hard drive was legally blind. Stephen Manning, the deputy chief information officer for strategy and modernization at the IRS, submitted an affidavit in the True the Vote vs. IRS litigation regarding the persons and procedures used to attempt to recover Lois Lerner’s hard drive containing emails pertaining to Tea Party targeting. The affidavit can be read here. Paragraph 14 describes the educational background of the person searching for data on Lois Lerner’s hard drive: “According to the Specialist, prior to joining the Internal Revenue...

The IRS’s inspector general confirmed Thursday it is conducting a criminal investigation into how Lois G. Lerner’s emails disappeared, saying it took only two weeks for investigators to find hundreds of tapes the agency’s chief had told Congress were irretrievably destroyed. Investigators have already scoured 744 backup tapes and gleaned 32,774 unique emails, but just two weeks ago they found an additional 424 tapes that could contain even more Lerner emails, Deputy Inspector General Timothy P. Camus told the House Oversight Committee in a rare late-night hearing meant to look into the status of the investigation. “There is potential criminal...

Thursday night Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration and Deputy Inspector General for Investigations will update the House Oversight Committee on the status of former IRS official Lois Lerner's "missing" emails. As a reminder, last year IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said two years of Lerner's emails, between 2010 and 2012, had been "lost" in a hard drive crash. A few months later, some of those emails were recovered after Koskinen said under oath they had been lost forever. Since the announcement of the missing emails, Congress has asked Inspectors General from different departments to look into their recovery. The emails...

MONTPELIER (AP) >> Vermont is applying a fresh round of scrutiny to its contract with Jonathan Gruber, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology health economist who got into hot water for talking about what he called "the stupidity of the American voter." Vermont State Auditor Doug Hoffer has been reviewing the contract under which Gruber got paid $500 an hour and his assistants got $100 per hour. Hoffer said Friday Gruber provided insufficient documentation to support his invoices to the state. Hoffer said officials in Gov. Peter Shumlin's administration had been in close touch with Gruber throughout his work, but that...

Ever wonder how lowly paid lawmakers leave office filthy rich? Sen. Dianne Feinstein is showing how it’s done. The US Postal Service plans to sell 56 buildings — so it can lease space more expensively — and the real estate company of the California senator’s husband, Richard Blum, is set to pocket about $1 billion in commissions.

There’s a common cause that bonds the black United States attorney with the black criminal.” These words, according to Department of Justice whistleblower J. Christian Adams, were uttered by none other than Attorney General Eric Holder. And now another former government official is blowing the whistle — and blowing off some righteous steam — in Holder’s direction. He is ex-FBI Special Agent K. Dee McCown, currently director of Global Security and Loss Prevention at W.W. Grainger, Inc. He has written a damning open letter to the attorney general, confirmed as authentic by Snopes. It’s a long missive, but worth the...

A consultant considered an architect to the federal health care law who said a “lack of transparency” and “stupidity of the American voter” were critical to getting it passed reportedly received $481,050 from the state of Michigan, and a recently elected state representative said he wants an investigation. Jonathan Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who created an econometric model intended to project health care spending and costs under different assumptions, along with his team, was granted a $481,050 contract by the state of Michigan, according to the Washington Post. He was paid that to help set up state...

The son of a former Virginia state senator has told federal investigators that U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner discussed the possibility of several jobs, including a federal judgeship, for the senator’s daughter in an effort to dissuade him from quitting the evenly divided state Senate.

Previously unpublished data from the last big election in Burlington, Vt., reveals a significant number of votes were cast by individuals whose names were not on the statewide checklist. In the 2012 presidential election, 17,383 votes were cast in Burlington, according to city-published data. According to data not published by the city, but made available to a reporter, 639 of those votes, or 3.7 percent, came from election day walk-in voters whose names were not on the voter rolls and whose registration status was unknown. As previously reported, votes by individuals whose names don’t appear on the checklist count whether...

While strong cases can be made for both Benghazi and Fast and Furious, most voters consider Barack Obama’s misuse of the IRS to be his administration’s worst scandal so far. But, as we wrote last year, targeting of conservative non-profits for harassment is not the only dimension of the IRS scandal. In addition, there is strong reason to believe that one or more White House political appointees have illegally accessed private taxpayer information and used it for political gain.Austan Goolsbee directed Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board and later chaired his Council of Economic Advisers. In August 2010, Goolsbee conducted...