Free Republic

Steven T. Miller, the acting IRS commissioner who managed the division that has admitted targeting anti-Obama Tea Party groups, was one of several agents who investigated anti-Clinton organizations including Judicial Watch during that Democrat´s administration, according to court documents and interviews. Miller, who headed the IRS Services and Enforcement Division from 2009 until the end of last year, is named in court documents as part of a trio of Internal Revenue Service officials who allegedly characterized the 1998-2001 investigation of Judicial Watch as politically motivated.

U.S. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said Sunday that the IRS´ admission of targeting various conservative groups for extra scrutiny was "absolutely chilling," and she called on President Barack Obama to apologize. "This is truly outrageous and it contributes to the profound distrust that the American people have in government," Collins said on CNN´s "State of the Union." "It is absolutely chilling that the IRS was singling out conservative groups for extra review, and I think it´s very disappointing that the president hasn´t personally condemned this and spoken out." The Alabama Democratic Party:

The Internal Revenue Service admitted Friday to improperly targeting conservative groups for aggressive applications processes for tax exempt status in 2012, using the terms “Tea Party” and “patriot” as flags. Here are some of the things they wanted to know about those groups. 1. We’re gonna need all your direct and indirect communication. “‘Direct and indirect communications’ is profoundly chilling of First Amendment rights, ” said David French, senior counsel for American Center for Law & Justice, which has been representing 27 conservative organizations met with IRS inquisitions. “It’s so vague as to be impossible to comply with.”

This Tea Party Thing I am a Tea Party Patriot. I know what that means to me but I am confused about what it means to others. The point of this post is to learn what being a Tea Party Patriot means to other Tea Party Patriots. I doubt I will learn anything that would alter what I believe but I can’t know until it is learned. Declaring I am a Tea Party Patriot means I favor a constitutional government. No more and no less. I accept the Constitution as the proper amount of government. My believe is that the...

Commentators across the board have been hailing the "British Tea Party" for at least a year. Daniel Hannan, the Tory MEP, has even tried to launch one, without much success. The latest to ride on the coat-tails of the popular US movement is Nigel Farage, newly re-elected as UK Independence Party leader. Speaking on Sky News, he said that his party shared the feeling of being "overtaxed, overgoverned, not being listened to". He claimed that this gave the party a "bigger political opportunity than ever before" to recruit Tories dissatisfied with David Cameron's EU-friendly policies. Could Ukip be the British...

How often do we use the old saw, “A person who doesn’t study history is doomed to repeat it.” ? Well, here’s your history. And it bears repeating. If you’re anything less than hard-core about your history lessons, you’re probably just like me when it comes to “those dang DATES”. I can get you to the right century, yes, and even to the right decade most times, but the year is not always as spot-on as I would like. This applies, today, to some ideas for our future that I proffered on PQRM40. The Democratic-Republican Party was formed by Jefferson and Madison in the...

San Francisco park workers and volunteers spent much of Sunday picking up and hauling away 10,000 pounds of garbage strewn all over the eastern part of Golden Gate Park known as Hippie Hill, the remnants of Saturday's annual yet unofficial pot-smoking bacchanalia. But this year's annual celebration - which falls each year on April 20 and is known as "420" - drew a larger-than-average crowd of between 10,000 and 15,000 revelers on the warm weekend day. They proceeded to smoke, drink, eat and rack up more than $10,000 in costs for city crews to clean up the mess, ironically just...

President Obama had another tough week in a second term filled with bad news and blunders — and he’s only 10 weeks in. While the White House suddenly decided to drop its budget Friday in an effort to control the news, there was no covering up the disastrous jobless numbers: 90 million Americans out of the workforce, the highest level since 1979; another 663,000 joining the ranks of the long-term unemployed; a measly 88,000 jobs “created.” But what seems stuck in the craw of a lot of you readers out there was last week’s column on the Obamas’ 1 percent...

I can't explain how sick I am. I don't like drudge much, but he is doing a good job exposing the clown tonight.

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle will host a star-studded roster of music legends April 9 for another glitzy installment in the “In Performance at the White House” concert series, according to a White House press released issued Tuesday. The concert comes as the White House is emphasizing cuts caused by sequestration and criticizing reporters for not paying enough attention to the hardship caused by the mandatory slowdown in the rate of spending increases. Though the White House notably canceled all visitor tours in March, ostensibly due to sequestration, the First Couple’s series of White House concerts — billed...

In a fresh New Republic story, reporter Rebecca Dana profiles Phil Griffin, the boss of a surging MSNBC. It’s a sympathetic look at the network exec, complete with a detailed rundown of how he and others happened upon the programming identity that has captivated liberal Americans across the land. One aspect of the piece that Griffin himself must adore is its disavowal of equivalence between MSNBC and cable top dog Fox News. Here’s how Dana makes the case that these outlets are distinct: Still, MSNBC isn’t an instrument of the Democratic Party in the way that Fox is of

A new poll for the Hill newspaper finds that “more voters trust the Democratic Party than the Republican Party on budgetary issues . . . even though a strong majority actually prefer Republican fiscal policies.” The poll of 1,000 likely voters was taken last week by Pulse Opinion Research. It asked respondents to choose between two different budget approaches without their being identified with a particular party. A total of 55 percent picked a plan similar to the one offered by House budget chairman Paul Ryan: Trimming federal spending by $5 trillion, not raising taxes, and reaching a balanced budget...

...First, and most important, is focusing on the economic concerns of working-and middle-class Americans, many of whom now regard the Republican Party as beholden to “millionaires and billionaires” and as wholly out of touch with ordinary Americans. This is a durable impression—witness Bill Clinton’s effective deployment of it more than 20 years ago and its continued resonance during the 2012 campaign when Team Obama portrayed Mitt Romney as a plutocrat who delighted in shutting down factories and moving jobs overseas. Sure enough, in November exit polls, 81 percent of voters said that Barack Obama “cared for people like me”; a...

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right government said Wednesday that it would not try to ban a far-right political party deemed “racist, anti-Semitic and revisionist” by domestic intelligence, choosing instead to focus on combating neo-Nazi extremism through other channels.

Four hundred U.S. Postal Service executives are heading to San Francisco next month for workshops, meetings — and a dance party. And a golf tournament. And a dinner event. That’s according to a report by KTVU, which found 400 USPS staffers, including the postmaster general, are set to attend the four-day National Postal Forum in March at the Moscone Center in California. The trip is expected to cost the flailing agency — which is pushing to stop Saturday letter delivery due to revenue issues — more than $2 million, KTVU reports. An estimated $220,000 is going to spent on exhibit...

Democrats and the media have accuses Tea Party favorite Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) of "McCarthyism" merely for posing tough questions to and about Chuck Hagel during the latter's confirmation as Secretary of Defense. Yet a recent column by former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich reveals who the real McCarthyites are in U.S. politics today, as Reich likens the Tea Party to a conspiracy "to undermine the government of the United States." Reich, who has steadfastly supported President Barack Obama's big-government, tax-and-spend agenda, wrote that the Tea Party had "infiltrated" the government at every level, and had used the budget cuts...

Their official name is the Richmond County Tea Party Patriots -- and they arguably put Congressman Michael Grimm (R-NY) in office twice, first in 2010 when Tea Party supported this U.S. Marine veteran for the U.S. House, and again in 2012. Grimm won the 2010 general election for his district which covers both parts of New York City's Staten Island and Brooklyn with 51 percent of the vote. Ron Devito also created a video of the entire collection of speeches. It can be seen on YouTube.

Bay Area bridge commuters will be ponying up $37 for each of the 150,000 people expected to walk across the new Bay Bridge span during the big Labor Day opening celebration. That's the breakdown on the math for the $5.6 million in toll money going toward the public side of the public-private celebration marking completion of the new eastern span.

An idea I've been kicking around for a while.... Suppose there were a coordinated effort -- for registered Republicans to dump their current registration during a specific time frame -- let's say the month of February. Enough to get noticed -- by Boehner, by McConnell, by the conservative pundits (both the legit ones and the phonies). Do you think maybe THEN they'd get the message that we've reached the final straw of them not representing us? Change to Independent, change to Conservative -- even change to Democrat, to start screwing up *their* primaries for a change. This is a step...

The New York Times´s Manny Fernandez greeted the opening of the biannual Texas legislative session in Austin in Wednesday´s paper: "Texas Budget Surplus Proves as Contentious As a Previous Shortfall." After explaining how Texas has become flush with cash over the last two years, going from a budget deficit to surplus, Fernandez couldn´t help working in a cut against the "far-right" Tea Party. Shortly after noon inside the Capitol’s Senate chamber, Gov. Rick Perry told senators that the comptroller’s revenue estimate released the day before was good news, but cautioned them to retain the state’s fiscally conservative model.