Free Republic

Statism: Pope Francis seemed to have an economic blind spot, to say the least, when he urged more "state control" to cut global poverty Thursday. On the contrary — the biggest poverty-killer in history is free enterprise.Before we go further, let us say that we know that the pope does seem to have the best intentions and his devotion to the poor is indisputable. But it appears he has been infected by the local economic pathologies of his homeland, Argentina, and its liberation theology among the Jesuits, at least when he warned ambassadors about "the tyranny of money" and called...

[Team Obmaugabe]continues its demonization of anyone that stands in its way. Formerly Organizing for America, Organizing for Action, a non-profit, non-partisan(laughable) group the pushes President Obama’s liberal ideology and agenda, has been targeting everything and everyone who is supportive of the right to bear arms. Back in early April, we interviewed several OFA volunteers who attended a gun buy-back program put on by the Broward County, Florida Sheriff’s Department in Pompano Beach, Florida... Now OFA has sent out another ‘call-to-arms’ email to protest members of the South Florida Congressional delegation. OFA’s recent email announces that they are organizing ”Gun Violence...

When it comes to the IRS’s ongoing, repressive behavior against conservative groups, you’re likely to hear different verdicts: The hard Left says, of course, that this is a molehill that the Republicans are scandalously trying to turn into a scandal. (The New York Times perfectly exemplifies this line of thinking.) Others on the Left admit incompetence, but refuse to assign moral blame. Conservatives are willing to assign moral blame but think that no one really cares. I believe that everyone should care because what we’re seeing now is a new type of scandal in American history, and the biggest crime...

Why does the U.S. Constitution make no mention of education? Because the Founding Fathers understood that the education of children must be at the local level. We now stand at the edge of a cliff as the federal Common Core State Standards continues its march across the country. How did we get here? In 2009, the U.S. Department of Education blackmailed the states with stimulus money in the form of Race to the Top (RTTT) grants. If states wanted to get out from under No Child Left Behind, and wanted more funding they had to agree to adopt the Common...

The Internal Revenue Service scandal may be the worst of all the current Obama administration fiascoes. It is an easily understood gross misuse of the powers of government to target opponents of the president. What is more, the administration’s supplicants in the lefty punditocracy can no longer claim this is just an IRS scandal. The Post reports: J. Russell George, the Treasury Department’s top tax watchdog, said Friday he had informed top Treasury officials starting last spring about problems related to the special attention the agency was paying some conservative organizations seeking tax-exempt status. George said he shared the information...

It eventually comes down to who — who at the IRS was responsible for targeting conservative and Tea Party groups for special scrutiny. Because, after all, you can’t put a “system” in jail. You can’t put a report in prison. You can’t indict a department for corruption. At the end of the day it’s people who are responsible for using the enormous powers of the Internal Revenue Service to go after other people and groups because of their political beliefs. U.S. Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) told the tale of one of his constituents who applied for tax-exempt status for her...

From The White House web site: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Facts-Are-Stubborn-Things/ "There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov." Yes, you read that correctly. The Orwellian White House wants to silence the opposition...

In the wake of one of the worst abuses of government power in recent history, many are rushing to frame the Internal Revenue Service scandal as simply an attack on conservative activists. That view risks creating a partisan political football and misses a fundamentally scarier abuse that exceeds the scandals of Watergate or any other prior government abuse. The IRS has admitted that since May 2010 it targeted grassroots-conservative organizations that had applied for tax-exempt status, unfairly subjecting them to rigorous scrutiny due to their political leanings. Such groups were told they were required to comply with IRS requests, no...

That’s the revelation made by California Congressman Devin Nunes, who sits on the House Ways And Means Committee on Hugh Hewitt’s Show Wednesday night. Here’s the key part of that transcript: HH: The idea that this might be a Geithner-Axelrod plan, and by that, the sort of intimation, Henry II style, will no one rid me of this turbulent priest, will no one rid me of these turbulent Tea Parties, that might have just been a hint, a shift of an eyebrow, a change in the tone of voice. That’s going to take a long time to get to. I...

Many observers have pondered if the United States is following the same troubled path as Argentina. In the 1940s, Argentina’s Juan Domingo Perón used government agencies for political gain and created a popular form of fascism called Perónism. In the United States, the recent revelation of the Internal Revenue Service targeting political enemies is a bad omen. Are we on an Argentinean course? The road to decay in my native country, Argentina, began with the implementation of one of the most powerful collectivist doctrines of the 20th century: fascism. The Labour Charter of 1927 – promulgated by Italy’s Grand Council...

In a shocking affront to the United States Constitution, the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education have joined together to mandate that virtually every college and university in the United States establish unconstitutional speech codes that violate the First Amendment and decades of legal precedent. "I am appalled by this attack on free speech on campus from our own government," said Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which has been leading the fight against unconstitutional speech codes on America's college campuses since its founding in 1999. "In 2011, the Department of Education took a...

Letters from the IRS to tea party-related organizations in Oklahoma City and Albuquerque, New Mexico show that IRS headquarters in Washington, D.C., and two satellite offices in California, were directly involved with sending harassing letters to conservative organizations that sought tax-exempt status. The IRS has acknowledged only the involvement of its Exempt Organizations office in Cincinnati, Ohio, which typically makes most decisions about granting or denying tax-exempt status to non-profit organizations. And Wednesday afternoon, CNN cited a congressional source in reporting that the acting IRS Commissioner – whom President Obama fired later in the day – had identified two 'rogue'...

‘The politics of the political right,” Charles Blow blew in a recent New York Times column, “have become the politics of paranoia.” If this is true, it is to the Right’s immense credit. Contrary to the derisive dismissals of our elites, paranoia is among the most transcendent of American virtues. In a week in which it was revealed that the Department of Justice undertook a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into the privacy of the Associated Press, the Internal Revenue Service admitted that it had singled out the president’s enemies for special scrutiny, and the administration’s story on Benghazi started to...

With Obama’s IRS scandal mushrooming by the day, we’ve been learning that some applications for 501(c)(4) status have languished for years and while some targeted groups have simply given up since delays were so long. Yet curiously, some groups favorable to Obama or actually run by an Obama have been mysteriously sped up through the process. Lois Lerner, the senior IRS official at the center of the decision to target tea party groups for burdensome tax scrutiny, signed paperwork granting tax-exempt status to the Barack H. Obama Foundation, a shady charity headed by the president’s half-brother that operated illegally for...

Across this great land, patriotic Americans are behaving subversively. We’re quoting from our pocket Constitutions, starting reading groups to discuss our founding documents, even gathering together to “petition the government for a redress of grievances.” Uncle Sam is not amused. As leaders of tea party groups have been painfully aware for years, the Internal Revenue Service has given “special” attention to conservative groups. Heritage sounded the alarm on the Obama Administration’s hit list nearly a year ago. Idaho businessman Frank VanderSloot was singled out by the IRS and the Labor Department after making a sizable donation to Mitt Romney. Who...

President Barack Obama said Tuesday the Treasury Department inspector general's report examining how the Internal Revenue Service allowed for the targeting of "tea party" and other groups shows some IRS employees "failed" to act in a way "that's worthy of the public's trust." "Regardless of how this conduct was allowed to take place, the bottom line is, it was wrong," the president said. In his statement, Obama said he's directed Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew "to hold those responsible for these failures accountable, and to make sure that each of the Inspector General's recommendations are implemented quickly, so that such conduct...

The Internal Revenue Service asked tea party groups to see donor rolls. It asked for printouts of Facebook posts. And it asked what books people were reading. A POLITICO review of documents from 11 tea party and conservative groups and the IRS scrutinized in 2012 shows the agency wanted to know everything — in some cases, it even seemed curious what members were thinking. The review included interviews with groups or their representatives from Hawaii, New Mexico, Ohio, Texas and elsewhere. The long-awaited report Treasury Department inspector general report released Tuesday says the agency itself decided some of its questions...

...Obama said...has "no patience" for reports that the [IRS] singled out conservative groups....

Kevin Drum outlines what I take to be the emerging case for the defense of the IRS agents who applied special scrutiny to tax-exemption applications from Tea Party groups: Roughly speaking, what seems to have happened is that three years ago the IRS was facing an explosion of newly formed 501(c)4 groups claiming tax exempt status, something that's legal only for groups that are primarily engaged in promoting education or social welfare, not electioneering. So some folks in the Cincinnati office tried to come up with a quick filter to flag groups that deserved extra scrutiny. But what should that...

The Government has forced Cody Wilson’s company, Defense Distributed, to take down his designs for 3D printed firearms. I can’t say I’m surprised, and if you had read my other article earlier in the week you would understand why: This is a blatant attack on the first amendment. Forget, for a minute, that these plans can be used to create guns. What is the difference between banning these plans from distribution, and banning a book? There are quite a few books out there that could be considered just as dangerous. I downloaded a PDF book on building machine guns last...

An IRS campaign to apply additional scrutiny to conservative groups went beyond targeting "Tea Party" and "patriot" groups to include those focused on government spending, the Constitution and several other broad areas. The additional guidelines created by the agency were part of a timeline, obtained by Fox News, from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, which is looking into the controversial IRS practice. IRS officials apologized Friday for the scrutiny, but new information suggests senior leaders were apprised of the effort as early as 2011 despite public denials from the top.

A timeline of Internal Revenue Service activities that was developed by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration and provided to congressional staff indicates that early last year—as the nation was headed toward a presidential election—the IRS issued a “be on the lookout order” (BOLO) for officials in its “Determinations Unit” to ferret out for heightened scrutiny organizations applying for tax exempt status that were involved in educating Americans “on the Constitution and Bill of Rights.” The inspector general’s timeline indicates that as early as March 2010 the IRS’ “Determinations Unit” had begun targeting for special scrutiny organizations that used...

Sarah Palin, former governor of Alaska and 2008 vice-presidential candidate, released a statement today concerning the news that the IRS targeted conservative leaning groups during the 2012 presidential election. She said, “today we learned that our government targeted and harassed conservative Americans who simply wanted to be involved in the national discussion. Is it any wonder why Americans are so distrustful of D.C.? I'm sure President Obama is grateful for all the help the IRS gave his reelection campaign, but, still, you have to wonder how the bureaucrats who tried to pull this off can sleep at night.” “So many...

The admission by the IRS that its workers targeted conservative Tea Party groups was so scandalous even some of the liberals at MSNBC felt compelled to condemn the tax agency. On Friday's edition of Andrea Mitchell Reports substitute host Chris Cillizza exclaimed he was "stunned" by the "dumbness" of the IRS. Cillizza's Washington Post colleague, Ruth Marcus called the revelations "outrageous." Marcus added: "The absolute worst thing that the IRS can do is make itself look political/ideological and to make it look like it's picking on some political groups and not others. That is terrible." (VIDEO-AT-LINK) Guest panelist Alex Gomez...

An IRS official apologized on Friday to tea party organizations and other conservative groups for inappropriately targeting them during the 2012 election, the Associated Press reports. The groups, which enjoyed tax-exempt status under the internal revenue code, were singled out for additional scrutiny of their tax exemption if their names included the words "tea party" or "patriot." In several cases, the groups were asked to provide a list of donors for review, usually a violation of IRS policy. "That was wrong. That was absolutely incorrect, it was insensitive, and it was inappropriate. That's not how we go about selecting cases,"...

Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS unit that oversees tax-exempt groups, said organizations that included the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their applications for tax-exempt status were singled out for additional reviews.

Last week, President Obama traveled to Ohio to speak at the Ohio State University commencement. There, he trotted out his new favorite line of attack against Second Amendment advocates: He said it is unpatriotic to believe in the possibility of government tyranny. Why? According to Obama, the Founding Fathers created our government. The American dream and American government are one and the same. By definition then, believing in the possibility of government tyranny means opposing the Founding Fathers and the American dream. Here’s how Obama expressed this nasty notion. He said that the Founders left us “the keys to a...

Additionally, the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office was slammed for keeping secret police files on private citizens.

My thought is certain recreational drugs, such as marijuana, should remain off legal limits for the under 18 year olds, but become legally available when used in the proper environment. In many ways, pot is quite similar to alcohol, in that they should be used responsibly. My thought is to make the sale of marijuana less profitable by making it legal for home use. Personally, I don't smoke anything now, and do not want the smell of tobacco or pot on my clothes should I visit a public place, such as a shopping mall or bus stop. I know this...

Photos of a visit Michelle Obama is alleged to have had with Abdul Rahman Alharbi — the Saudi national previously considered to be “person of interest,” “armed and dangerous,” and worthy of inclusion on a watch list — may have appeared on a Facebook page associated with an English language school in Boston or students who share a common bond of going to English schools in the area. The above photo montage, which was posted at FreeRepublic today, originally appears on the Facebook page for “EC Boston Saudi’s.” EC Boston most likely refers to the EC Boston English Language School....

Appearing on Geraldo Rivera‘s radio show Monday afternoon, conservative columnist Ann Coulter proposed surveillance in every American mosque as a means to giving law enforcement an extra eye in such religious institutions. Agreeing with co-panelist Alan Dershowitz‘s suggestion that “surveillance is a very good thing” and that “we should learn to live with video cameras” because a mosque, church, or synagogue are “not a private place,” Coulter told Rivera: “I have long disagreed with my libertarian friends on this. It’s not difficult to explain: Any place a cop can be, or an undercover cop — standing, watching, and observing —...

“[Drones are a] game-changing technology, akin to gunpowder, the steam engine, the atomic bomb—opening up possibilities that were fiction a generation earlier but also opening up perils that were unknown a generation ago.”—Peter Singer, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution America will never be a “no drone zone.” That must be acknowledged from the outset. There is too much money to be made on drones, for one, and too many special interest groups—from the defense sector to law enforcement to the so-called “research” groups that are in it for purely “academic” reasons—who have a vested interest in ensuring that drones...

Mark Levin opened his show tonight saying that a certain Republican Congressman who doesn’t like what he’s saying is trying to get the local affiliate in their district to stop running the Mark Levin Show. And apparently they are trying to do it behind the scenes. But Levin says EVERYTHING gets back to him and he will not tolerate fascism.

On his Friday show, syndicated talk show host Mark Levin said that a Republican congressman is attempting to persuade one of his affiliates to remove his show from the airwaves.Although Levin would not offer the congressman’s name on air, he has been a vocal critic of various members of the House Republican leadership in the past. But Levin called the situation “fascism.”“Well, it has come to my attention that there is a Republican congressman out there who doesn’t like what I’ve been saying,” Levin said. “It has come to my attention that there is a Republican congressman out there, a fairly...

Mark Levin opened his show tonight saying that a certain Republican Congressman who doesn’t like what he’s saying is trying to get the local affiliate in their district to stop running the Mark Levin Show. And apparently they are trying to do it behind the scenes. But Levin says EVERYTHING gets back to him and he will not tolerate fascism. He gives this unnamed Republican Congressman a warning below noting that if they succeed in getting him silenced, he will expose them: Click excerpt link for audio!

President Barack Obama removed some language in his budget, released Wednesday, that restricts the ability of the federal government to regulate the firearms industry. The pair of provisions ban law enforcement from requiring gun dealers to conduct an inventory once a year and defining antique firearms, which are not subject to federal firearms licensing procedures or background checks. --snip-- "By eliminating these unnecessary and dangerous gun riders from his budget proposal, President Obama took an important step forward in strengthening the federal government’s ability to regulate the firearms industry and fight gun-related crime," said Arkadi Gerney, a senior fellow at...

Maryland Democratic Governor Martin O’Malley has instituted a tax on citizens for the amount of rain that falls on their property. The tax, officially known as a "storm water management fee," will be enforced in nine of the state's counties. The state legislature passed it in 2012 purportedly to "raise revenue to cleanup [sic] the Chesapeake Bay," according to MarylandReporter.com. Former 2012 GOP U.S. Senate candidate Dan Bongino bashes the tax in a Wednesday afternoon press release. The law "requires individuals, businesses, and even charitable organizations and houses of worship to pay a tax based on the amount of rain...

Via Newsbusters, something to tide you over on a news day that started out fast and has slowed considerably. Give Harris-Perry credit, at least, for fine-tuning her messaging. You’re not going to sell swing voters on far-left liberalism by telling them their kids don’t really belong to them, but tell them that they have a right “at all times” to things they need and you’re golden. If you polled the public on whether people should have a right to all of this, where would the numbers top out? Seventy percent? Eighty? The American public loves, loves, loves government spending, partly...

Following what she describes as a “flood of vitriolic responses” from conservatives outraged at the implication that the state should have more responsibility for child-rearing than individual parents and families, MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry took to the pages of MSNBC.com to mock concerns about the network promo’s implications. She said that conservatives’ fears may be illogically rooted in the fact that America has, in the past, seized and “re-educated” the children of African slaves and Native Americans. “One thing is for sure: I have no intention of apologizing for saying that our children, all of our children, are part of...

Hitler was all for the state controlling "education" With Hillary Clinton the favorite for the 2016 presidential race, collective responsibility for the children of the United States is being promoted again. The Obama Administration is pushing for universal Pre-K and MSNBC is promoting the notion that family responsibility for children should be succeeded by collective responsibility. Remember Hillary Clinton's It Takes A Village? In 2006, it was republished as the "10th Anniversary Edition" and during her presidential campaign in 2007, she said "I still believe it takes a village to raise a child." It doesn't, but she's unlikely to have...

You’re probably heard by now about the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms’ solicitation for a massive new database. It will essentially figure out everything there is to know about you, and your friends too. It’s potentially a massive invasion of privacy on a grand scale. The folks at Wired tends to be leftists. Let’s take a look at how they’re reacting to what looks like a fabulous tool for an electronic police state. Primarily, the ATF states it wants the database to speed-up criminal investigations. Instead of requiring an analyst to manually search around for your personal information, the...

Steven Spriggs was stopped in a traffic jam near downtown Fresno and thought nothing of whipping out his iPhone 4 and clicking on the map feature to see if there was an alternate route around the construction mess. He was startled when he looked up and saw a California Highway Patrol motorcycle officer ordering him to pull over. He showed the officer that he was looking at a map and not texting or talking. “Pull over,” Spriggs recalled the officer as saying. “It’s in your hand.” A little more than a year later, Spriggs is at the heart of a...

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is actively shopping for a drone that would "stalk hunters," the organization said Monday. The group says it will "soon have some impressive new weapons at its disposal to combat those who gun down deer and doves" and that it is "shopping for one or more drone aircraft with which to monitor those who are out in the woods with death on their minds." The group says it will not weaponize the drones, but will use them to film potentially illegal hunting activity and turn it over to law enforcement. "The talk is...

A math teacher at an Italian high school reportedly told a Jewish female student which she felt was not paying attention in class, “Had you been in Auschwitz, you would have been more careful.”According to the student in Rome’s Caravillani high-school, the remarks were made after she had re-entered the classroom, having left it to wash her face as she was feeling ill. … The student, who considered pressing charges, and two of her friends, decided to boycott the teacher’s classes. The school’s headmaster called the teacher for a meeting in which she reportedly misspoke again when she said, “I...

Under the Patriot Act” the DHS has the absolute right to seize, without any warrant whatsoever, any and all customer bank accounts, to make “periodic and unannounced” visits to any bank to open and inspect the contents of “selected safe deposit boxes.

The budget President Barack Obama will submit on April 10 will contain a proposal that would prohibit individuals from accumulating more than $3 million in Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) and tax-preferred retirement accounts. According to a White House statement, the Obama administration believes the current rules allow some wealthy individuals "to accumulate many millions of dollars in these accounts, substantially more than is needed to fund reasonable levels of retirement saving." "The budget would limit an individual’s total balance across tax-preferred accounts to an amount sufficient to finance an annuity of not more than $205,000 per year in retirement, or...

In 1932, a 24ft marble statue of a young, muscular male athlete was unveiled in Brescia, northern Italy, and given the name Fascist Era. With its rippling torso and hand placed solemnly on hip, it was considered to symbolise the "rejuvenating ideals of the fascist regime", and, when Benito Mussolini came to visit, he was said to have praised it for its strength. Its sculptor, Arturo Dazzi, was reported to have remarked, "even if they want to tear it down, I don't care at all." Some 13 years later, that is what happened when, with the second world war over...

These are trying times. Never in the history of this country have we been so weakened and polarized by what many view as deliberate government policy. Now anti-gunners in the U.S. Congress, the Obama administration, and legislatures across the country are seeking to exploit the Newtown tragedy to promote their “gun control” agenda that envisions federal, universal background checks on gun purchases, and that could lead to gun registration and confiscation. At the same time, the increasing militarization of law enforcement, most visibly demonstrated by the growing use of massive, SWAT-type raids on businesses and individuals, sometimes with federal

Am I trying to suggest that Democrats are like Nazi's right now? No. I don't think they are.Am I trying to suggest the policies of their party and ideology are laying the foundation for a leftist government that will repeat history?.....YES!

The past week has seen a tsunami of stories about the so-called “Monsanto Protection Act,” more accurately known as Section 735 of HR 933. It’s a tiny provision attached to a massive agricultural spending bill signed into law by President Obama last week. According to detractors, Section 735 is the “most dangerous food act ever” and a “terrifying piece of policy.” Why? Because, among other claims, it purportedly allows biotech companies to sell seeds that can cause serious consumer health problems. Here is how Gawker frames it: "Section 735 effectively shields large biotech companies, like Monsanto, from the federal courts...