Free Republic

A crosscheck of voter rolls in Virginia and Maryland turned up 44,000 people registered in both states, a vote-integrity group reported Wednesday. And that’s just the beginning. “The Virginia Voters Alliance is investigating how to identify voters who are registered and vote in Virginia but live in the states that surround us,” Alliance President Reagan George told the State Board of Elections.

While Homeland Security is reconsidering their position on deporting illegal criminals with ‘trivial’ crimes, Maryland’s Governor O’Malley has taken it one step further. He announced that the Baltimore City Detention Center will no longer comply with a federal policy that requires the jail to detain illegal immigrants for deportation. O’Malley said the Detention Center will now consider the severity of the charges a person is facing when reviewing I.C.E. requests to hold immigrants through the ‘Secure Communities’ program. The federal program ‘Secure Communities’ was intended to catch and deport dangerous criminals by coordinating with local jails. We are a government...

<p>"Rep. Paul Ryan and the Wall Street Journal are for throwing in the towel. Legalize them all and start them on the path to citizenship.</p> <p>A full and final capitulation. Let’s get it over with.</p> <p>To understand why and how the Republican Party lost Middle America, and faces demographic death, we need to go back to Bush I.</p>

A Democratic candidate for governor of Maryland is defending comments he made Monday in which he suggested his opponent, an Iraq war veteran, was not up to the task of a “real job.” Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler drew ire from a veterans’ group after he made the comments about his opponent for the Democratic nomination, Maryland Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown, at an event held by the Tech Council of Maryland.

The former hedge fund of one of the Democratic Party’s most important donors was involved in a scheme to defraud foreign investors out of tens of millions of dollars, according to documents filed in a Texas court. Farallon Capital Partners L.P., a fund run by Farallon Capital Management, the multibillion-dollar hedge fund founded by Democratic donor Tom Steyer, became a limited partner in a project to build a large shopping mall near Seattle, Wash., in the mid-1990s after it guaranteed a line of credit for the project.

Maryland has given up on its Obamacare website, but not before spending $90 million of taxpayer funding on technology, according to a cost breakdown released Friday.Of the $90 million, exchange board Chairman Joshua Sharfstein said that the marketplace spent $55 million on the website itself, The Washington Post reports. Officials opted in late March, after six months of struggling with the inoperable system, to give up on fixing the website and start over again with a model of Connecticut’s more successful exchange website.Maryland’s Obamacare exchange received millions in federal taxpayer dollars to build its Affordable Care Act website and was...

April 18, 2014 CUMMINGS’ “MCCARTHYISM” CHARGE IN LERNER HEARING IS BOGUSM.Stanton Evans Five plus decades after he left the national scene, Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-Wis) remains the target of inaccurate charges by leftward elements in Congress and the press corps.The latest example in this vein is the uproar over IRS official Lois Lerner, who took the Fifth Amendment before the House Government Oversight Committee, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), concerning hostile treatment of conservative groups seeking tax exemptions,. Having proclaimed her innocence of wrongdoing, Lerner then refused to discuss specifics, pleading possible self-incrimination. This led Issa and his GOP...

Governor Cuomo has signed off on the National Popular Vote Compact, giving New York's 29 electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. SILive: Count New York in. The Empire State has joined the National Popular Vote compact with legislation signed Tuesday by Gov. Andrew Cuomo. States that have signed on to the interstate agreement will award electoral votes for president to the candidate who receives the majority of the national popular vote. "With the passage of this legislation, New York is taking a bold step to fundamentally increase the strength and fairness of our nation's presidential elections,"...

After explaining how Maryland regulates out-of-state providers, the letter presents them with three options: Confirm that the institution enrolls students in Maryland, then pay an annual registration fee of $1,000 and a bond valued at five times the average cost of tuition; confirm that the institution is interested in enrolling students in Maryland, and pay the same fee; or decline any interest in enrolling students in Maryland, thereby barring those students from enrolling altogether. [...] According to the letter, recipients have until April 25 to respond—even if they don’t enroll students in Maryland. [One] provost therefore described the letter as...

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...

... Instead of asking Congressman Cummings about this damaging new report surrounding the IRS scandal, Schieffer ignored the entire issue, and focused on ObamaCare and equal pay for women for the entirety of the interview. The CBS host even falsely claimed that the GOP did not support equal pay for women: “Marsha Blackburn says Republicans are actually for equal pay for women. But yet, it was blocked in the Senate by Republicans…What is going on here?” Given that Schieffer had the opportunity to interview the ranking Democrat on the committee leading the IRS investigation, it would have made sense to...

April 12, 2014 True the Vote president calls Cummings damning emails ‘the tip of a very ugly iceberg’ by Michael Dorstewitz The explosive discovery by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that its ranking Democratic member coordinated with the IRS to target True the Vote came as no surprise to its founder and president. She called it “the tip of a very ugly iceberg.”Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., the committee’s chairman, released emails earlier this week strongly suggesting that Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., was in direct communication with disgraced IRS supervisor Lois Lerner in an effort to target True the...

New IRS emails released by the House Oversight Committee show staff working for Democratic Ranking Member Elijah Cummings communicated with the IRS multiple times between 2012 and 2013 about voter fraud prevention group True the Vote.

The heat in the IRS investigation just went up. Rep. Darrell Issa, head of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sent a letter today to ranking member Rep. Elijah Cummings in which he accuses Cummings of working to "obstruct the investigation" into IRS misbehavior. The bulk of Rep. Issa's letter is devoted to some recently uncovered emails which demonstrate that Rep. Cummings was seeking information on True the Vote, the voter integrity group based in Texas which became the target of much unwanted government attention. Cummings' staff contacted the IRS in August 2012 to inform them that they...

This story was published at 4:33 p.m. and has been updated with a response from Rep. Cummings.House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., has accused the panel's top Democrat of prompting the Internal Revenue Service in 2012 to target a conservative organization applying for non-profit status. Issa said records obtained last week from the IRS show communications from the office of ranking member Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., about True the Vote, a Texas-based, non-profit conservative group that aims to prevent voter fraud.The communications at one point involved Lois Lerner, the ex-IRS official whom Issa's panel is poised...

Rep. Aaron Schock (R., Ill.) told Fox News host Gretchen Carlson there is “clear evidence” embattled former IRS official Lois Lerner broke the law Wednesday on Fox News. The House Ways and Means Committee released a report today revealing evidence highly incriminating to Lerner, and will refer her to the Justice Department for prosecution. Among the more startling allegations, Schock revealed the committee found evidence she deliberately attempted to obstruct Crossroads GPS’s 501 (c)(4) approval for purely political reasons. “We have in writing her own e-mails after meeting with liberal-leaning groups like Democracy 21 and others where they specifically say,...

Speaker Boehner Comments on the Criminal Referral For Lois Lerner Posted by Speaker Boehner's Press Office April 9, 2014 Press Release WASHINGTON, DC - House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) issued the following statement after the House Ways & Means Committee sent a criminal referral letter to the U.S. Attorney General outlining probable criminal actions taken by Lois Lerner during her tenure at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS):“The Ways & Means Committee, led by Chairman Camp, has conducted a serious and thorough investigation of the IRS, uncovering abuses and criminal acts that should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the...

The ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee actively conspired to inappropriately target and silence tea party-affiliated groups, says Catherine Engelbrecht, president of True the Vote. House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa released emails this week that suggest Rep. Elijah Cummings, Maryland Democrat, prompted the Internal Revenue Service to investigate the conservative organization as it was applying for nonprofit status, according to The Washington Examiner. Engelbrecht told John Bachman and J.D. Hayward of "America's Forum" on Newsmax TV that these emails will undermine claims by Cummings and the IRS that no conservative groups were targeted for political reasons. "I'm thrilled to...

A top building trades union is launching a midterm-election assault on House Democrats who oppose construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline. A letter distributed Friday by the Laborers' International Union of North America (LIUNA) to the districts of 27 House Democrats calls for union members to make sure their representative "feels the power and the fury of LIUNA this November." Their crime: signing a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry last month urging him to reject Keystone, which would carry oil sands from Canada to Gulf Coast refineries.

You know, when we raise an issue, we’re too emotional,” Mikulski added. “Well, I am emotional.” “It brings tears to my eyes,” she exclaimed, “to know how women every, single day are working so hard and are getting paid less. It makes me emotional to hear that.” “I get angry, I get outraged, I get volcanic,” Mikulski asserted.