Free Republic

The Democratic National Convention may be long over, but its organizers have not forgotten the almost half a million dollars worth of electronics they seem to have lost. Organizers of the Charlotte, N.C., convention have filed a police report for lost and stolen electronics, some of which they appear to have valued at as much as 62 times the listed market prices. A reportedly stolen 13-inch MacBook Pro laptop? $75,537. The price listed on the Apple website is $1,199. A lost iPhone? $30,503. A lost Blackberry? $54,250. The DNC did not respond to a request for comment. Calls to the...

We all know now what the vengeful Obama IRS has been doing to conservative nonprofits the past four years: strangling them in the crib. But do you know how much pampering and largesse far-left welfare-state charities have received while limited-government groups suffered? You don’t know the half of it. Before President Obama took office, I warned that Democrats planned to steer untold amounts of taxpayer dollars to his shady community-organizing pals. The Dems’ 2008 party platform proposed the creation of a “Social Investment Fund Network” to subsidize “social entrepreneurs and leading nonprofit organizations [that] are assisting schools, lifting families out...

<p>Google on Wednesday pushed harder to downplay its role in a secret national surveillance program, detailing for the first time how it typically hands over data to federal officials.</p> <p>Surprisingly, the global innovator uses decidedly simple and low-tech methods, including the delivery of information by hand or by transferring files from one computer to another.</p>

Urgent. While some Tea Party groups testified at the House Ways and Means Committee Hearing last week over the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) abuse of power for targeting and harassing them and approximately 500 other conservative groups when they sought tax-exempt status, if you are looking for a political judicial solution, such as congress, impeachment or a special prosecutor to solve the tsunami of unlawful acts coming out of Washington, you are looking in the wrong place. What the IRS did tilted President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election in his favor. The bottom line is this. You can’t get justice within...

Letter submitted to Atty Sekulow via his Facebook site Atty. Sekulow, I have been a faithful ACLJ contributor for several years and, like many multiple thousands of God-fearing Americans, am extremely proud of the unprecedented progress you have achieved in exposing this formerly 'unquestionable, unapproachable and untouchable' organization ! I would like to suggest a matter for your consideration regarding your legal case against the IRS, namely our President's CT SS#. It is a FACT that Barack Obama has a CT SS#. It is also a fact that the role of the IRS is to review and oversee tax returns...

When Darrell Issa called Jay Carney a "paid liar" this week, his critics figured he'd finally gone too far—that his one-step-ahead-of-the-facts rhetoric would force Republicans to rein him in. They figured wrong. For all the polite Washington handwringing over that single comment, the truth is this: Issa’s aggressive approach is just what the Republican House leadership wants. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor singled out Issa for praise at a closed-door GOP conference meeting on Tuesday. Hours later, Cantor gave him plaudits on national television, saying on CNN that Issa and other GOP chairmen investigating the IRS were doing “a fantastic...

The House Ways and Means Committee Hearing today shocked America. But it destroyed Democrats. No matter what the Democrats tried to do to deflect attention away from the scandal targeting conservatives, nothing worked. They don’t have an answer. The Democrats on the panel looked sad and despondent by the end of the hearing today.

In the fall of 2011 the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) submitted Freedom of Information requests to the Department of Labor and the Internal Revenue Service following an announcement that the administration was investigating homebuilders in an attempt to bolster union membership at the expense of housing sector jobs. “In a letter [from the Labor Department] cited by The [Wall Street] Journal,” wrote Crain’s Detroit at the time “homebuilders were asked to immediately turn over the names, addresses, Social Security numbers, pay rates and hours worked for all employees over the past two years. The letter from the Labor...

The now infamous 2010 Internal Revenue Service conference in California — where goofy, expensive video parodies were shown — also featured $135,000 in spending on outside speakers like a "happiness expert" and a session titled "Leadership Through Art," congressional sources briefed on an upcoming inspector general's report told NBC News Monday night. The IRS hired 15 speakers to present at the conference in Anaheim, Calif., including $11,430 for positive psychology guru Shawn Achor — referred to as a "happiness expert" by the sources — to lead a 90-minute workshop and $17,000 for artist Erik Wahl to hold a session that...

PHOENIX (CBS5) - Immigration and Customs Enforcement Officials say the man who owns the SUV that struck and killed a Phoenix police officer is not in the country legally.((snip)) "In March 2012, ICE placed Mr. Cabrera-Molina in removal proceedings and detained him following his incarceration in the Maricopa County Jail on a charge unrelated to this most recent arrest. Mr. Cabrera-Molina was ordered released from ICE custody in May 2012 after he posted the $5,000 bond granted by an immigration judge with the Department of Justice's Executive Office of Immigration Review. His removal proceedings remain pending at this time. In...

For $10,000, you can be luncheon guest. For $16,200, you can be a VIP luncheon guest and have your picture taken with Obama. For $32,400, the package "includes an official photograph with President Obama, as well as a very special one-hour roundtable discussion with the President after the luncheon. President Obama will take your questions in a private, off-the-record conversation where you can discuss with him what you'd like. Please note this is limited to 25 people to keep it an intimate discussion, and so will sell out very fast."

MALIK OBAMA’S CHARITY LINKED TO GENOCIDAL REGIME! In light of the recent revelations that the IRS has been unfairly targeting conservative groups, President Obama’s half-brother “got a sweetheart deal” from the IRS. According to the Daily Caller, 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 years. Lerner approved the foundation’s tax status within a month of filing. But now there is evidence that the...

The Department of Transitional Assistance paid out more than $2 million in benefits to 1,164 people who were dead, according to a scathing new audit calling on the embattled agency to tighten up its fraud investigations. The report, released this afternoon by state Auditor Suzanne Bump’s office, also showed where DTA failed to use technology that could have identified $15 million in questionable benefits and shelled out a $1 million more to those using fake Social Security numbers. The audits follows a damning report released earlier this year by the Inspector General’s Office, which found $25 million in EBT money...

We have put together what might be called a basic “timeline of tyranny.” A timeline that connects the dots of IRS behavior in the Obama administration not just to the specifics of the IG’s timeline, but to other events of a similar nature. Events that set the stage for what was to come, and most importantly events that illustrate the mindset of the American Left when it comes to free speech, to dissent — and how that mindset plays out when married not just to money but to a perceived or very real access to serious government power. Drawing on...

CHRIS WALLACE: Why single out Crossroads when you didn't mention a single liberal group, and there were a bunch that were applying for tax-exempt status at exactly that point with the name "progress" in their name. SEN. DICK DURBIN: I can just tell you flat-out why I did it. Because that Crossroads organization was boasting about how much money they were raising as a 501(c)(4). Let's get back to the basics. Citizens United really unleashed hundreds if not thousands of organizations seeking tax-exempt status to play in political campaigns. The law we wrote as Congress said that they had to...

The “tonight’s news” referred to by The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza comes via the New York Times: Wow, tonight's news dramatically escalates the war between DOJ and Fox. Somebody is not telling the whole truth.— Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) May 27, 2013 News Corporation said on Sunday that it had no record of being notified by the Justice Department nearly three years ago of a subpoena for the telephone records of a reporter at its Fox News cable channel [James Rosen]. The company’s chief legal counsel at the time also said that he had never seen material from the government related...

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog President Obama had armed SWAT agents raid a law-abiding guitar factory because it was owned by a Republican donor President Obama had armed SWAT agents raid the Gibson guitar factory, ordered the employees to leave, and seized guitars and other property from the factory – and all of this happened without any charges being filed.It was later reported that Gibson had not broken any U.S. laws.Obama’s so-called justification for the raid was that Gibson had broken environmental laws from India regarding the imported wood that Gibson had been using.Gibson claimed that it had not broken any...

From the outset, Internal Revenue Service lawyers based in Washington, D.C., provided important guidance on the handling of tea-party groups’ applications for tax-exempt status, according to both IRS sources and the inspector general’s report released in mid May. Officials in the Technical Unit of the IRS’s Rulings and Agreements office played an integral role in determining how the targeted applications were treated, provided general guidelines to Cincinnati case workers, briefed other agency employees on the status of the special cases, and reviewed all those intrusive requests demanding “more information” from tea-party groups. At times, the Technical Unit lawyers seemed to...

When heading the FEC’s enforcement office in the late 90’s, the beleaguered IRS official was accused of failing to investigate a Democratic fundraiser. “When it recommended not pursuing the allegations against Mr. Glicken, the FEC staff specifically cited his close ties to the Vice-President, Vice-President Gore,” Dan Burton (R-IN) said at the hearing. The IRS scandal currently engulfing Washington isn’t the only episode in which Lois Lerner, the embattled head of the agency’s tax-exempt organizations office, has come under fire for playing partisan politics in a nonpartisan entity. In 1998, while heading the Federal Election Commission’s enforcement office, she was...

The dam protecting the IRS scandal began to crack today when Lois Lerner, the IRS official who announced, and apologized for, the improper singling out of conservative-leaning organizations by IRS employees under her command, announced through her criminal defense lawyer that she will not testify as scheduled tomorrow before the House Oversight Committee. Rather, she will assert her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. This marks a milestone in the IRS investigation. It can now be taken as more or less established that crimes were committed by Obama administration employees. LernerÂ’s lawyer tried to minimize the significance of her invoking the...