Free Republic

SANTA BARBARA (CBSLA.com) — State lawmakers are pushing for new legislation that would give family or friends of a potential gunman the ability to ask law enforcement to prevent them from owning or buying a firearm. The proposed bill from California State Assemblymembers Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley) and Das Williams (D-Santa Barbara) would create a gun violence restraining order, which would grant authority to “concerned family members, friends and intimate partners” to “intervene and potentially prohibit the purchase of firearms and/or remove the firearms already in possession.” Williams told KNX 1070 NEWSRADIO law enforcement would in turn have the ability to...

Last week, Michelle Obama made headlines when she exhorted graduating high schoolers in a commencement address to monitor their families for politically incorrect thoughts and behaviors. To one journalist, this was more than an off-hand comment made by the first lady. In the opinion of Cheryl Chumley, a reporter for The Washington Times and the author of “Police State USA,” Michelle Obama’s remark reflects a growing trend in America to target and attack individuals for committing “thought crime.”

Milwaukee police who forced their way into a gun rights advocate's home without a warrant, took her for an emergency mental evaluation and seized her gun were justified under the circumstances and protected from her civil rights claims, a federal appeals court has ruled. "The intrusions upon Sutterfield's privacy were profound," Judge Ilana Rovner wrote for three-judge panel. "At the core of the privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment is the right to be let alone in one's home." But the court also found, that on the other hand, "There is no suggestion that (police) acted for any reason other...

Lightning-Rod W. German Cop Unmasked as Stasi Spy Revelation likened to discovering Kent State shooters were KGB agents (Newser) – The West German cop whose shooting of an unarmed protester in 1967 changed the country forever has been unmasked as an East German spy by historians going through Stasi files, the New York Times reports. The shooting sparked a wide, sometimes violent left-wing protest movement many believe spawned Germany's current liberal disposition. The revelation that the "fascist cop" was a socialist spy has rocked the country. Many now ask whether the policeman was ordered to shoot a protester by Stasi...

You just can't make this stuff up.

Senate Democrats facing tough elections this year want the Internal Revenue Service to play a more aggressive role in regulating outside groups expected to spend millions of dollars on their races. In the wake of the IRS targeting scandal, the Democrats are publicly prodding the agency instead of lobbying them directly. They are also careful to say the IRS should treat conservative and liberal groups equally, but they’re concerned about an impending tidal wave of attack ads funded by GOP-allied organizations. Much of the funding for those groups is secret, in contrast to the donations lawmakers collect, which must be...

“After nearly 20 years of being in business,” Engelbrecht, said during the hearing, “and no agency coming to visit with us, the succession of agencies that have now come to us — for all manner of things — begs the question.” “Ms. Engelbrecht,” Jordan said, “in the first 20 years of business, did OSHA ever visit your place of business?” “No sir,” she responded. “Never once?” “No sir.” “After you filed the [tax-exempt application for King Street Patriots], OSHA visited then, right?” “Yes sir.” “In the first 20 years of business did the [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives]...

FEBRUARY 6, 2014 3:00 PM The IRS Secret Police? Proposed rules seek to curb the free speech of Obama’s political opponents. By L. Brent Bozell III The Internal Revenue Service was already an organization rightly looked on with scorn and fear by most Americans, heightened by the recent arrival of our W-2 forms. Since the early years of our country, when Chief Justice John Marshall in the Supreme Court’s landmark case McCulloch v. Maryland wrote that “the power to tax involves the power to destroy,” countless Americans have felt the heavy hand of the IRS.Then came Barack Obama. Today, the...

Republicans clashed with the Internal Revenue Service's new commissioner Wednesday in a Capitol Hill hearing that featured the unveiling a document indicating that the agency planned as early as 2012 to change its rules in a way that justified singling out tea party groups for special scrutiny. The document, an email from Treasury Department tax policy attorney Ruth Madrigal to a group of IRS officials including the disgraced Lois Lerner. 'Don’t know who in your organizations is keeping tabs on c4s,' Madrigal wrote, quoting an election law blog and referring to the 501(c)(4) tax-exempt groups that were the subject of...

A federal judge in New York has ruled that the National Security Agency's massive collection of American citizens' telephone records is both legal and useful. U.S. District Judge William Pauley wrote in his opinion issued Friday that the program "represents the government's counter-punch" to eliminate al-Qaeda's terror network. Pauley raised the specter of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and how the phone data-collection system could have helped investigators connect the dots before the attacks occurred. Pauley's decision appears to conflict with a ruling earlier this month by U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon, who granted a preliminary injunction against the...

During a recent stay in Berlin, I visited the old headquarters of the East German Ministry of State Security, better known as the Stasi. The building, in a suitably bleak part of what used to be East Berlin, is now a museum devoted to the communist surveillance state. The upper floors display some of the tools of that surveillance -- miniature cameras, listening devices, files on everything -- that the German Democratic Republic used to control every aspect of its citizens' lives. But the first floor of the Stasi Museum is not about spying. Instead, it is devoted to the...

Some drivers along a busy Fort Worth street on Friday were stopped at police roadblock and directed into a parking lot, where they were asked by federal contractors for samples of their breath, saliva and even blood. It was part of a government research study aimed at determining the number of drunken or drug-impaired drivers. "It just doesn't seem right that you can be forced off the road when you're not doing anything wrong," said Kim Cope, who said she was on her lunch break when she was forced to pull over at the roadblock on Beach Street in North...

<p>The National Security Agency has a secret backdoor into its vast databases under a legal authority enabling it to search for US citizens' email and phone calls without a warrant, according to a top-secret document passed to the Guardian by Edward Snowden.</p>

It was a confluence of magnificent proportions that led six agents from the joint terrorism task force to knock on my door Wednesday morning. Little did we know our seemingly innocent, if curious to a fault, Googling of certain things was creating a perfect storm of terrorism profiling. Because somewhere out there, someone was watching. Someone whose job it is to piece together the things people do on the internet raised the red flag when they saw our search history. Most of it was innocent enough. I had researched pressure cookers. My husband was looking for a backpack. And maybe...

On Monday afternoon, the US Department of Justice appealed to civil rights groups and the general public across the country for “tips” on George Zimmerman in their pursuit of potential federal civil rights charges against the just-acquitted defendant in the Trayvon Martin killing. The DOJ actually went so far as to set up an e-mail address to allow such tips: Sanford.florida@usdoj.gov. The email address is slated to go operational by the end of the week.

WASHINGTON — Even before a former U.S. intelligence contractor exposed the secret collection of Americans’ phone records, the Obama administration was pressing a government-wide crackdown on security threats that requires federal employees to keep closer tabs on their co-workers and exhorts managers to punish those who fail to report their suspicions. President Barack Obama’s unprecedented initiative, known as the Insider Threat Program, is sweeping in its reach. It has received scant public attention even though it extends beyond the U.S. national security bureaucracies to most federal departments and agencies nationwide, including the Peace Corps, the Social Security Administration and the...

The vast majority of the annual shooting homicides are committed by inner-city and minority youths below the age of 30. Handguns are involved in 80% of all murders. Rifles and shotguns account for less than 10% of homicides. No matter; the National Rifle Association is now blamed for generic gun violence, especially the mass shootings at schools, even though usually no one knows of any proposed gun law — barring outright confiscation of previously purchased firearms, bullets, and clips — that would have prevented the shooters at Sandy Hook and Columbine. Gun merchants are blamed by the president while in...

A new rule issued late Friday requires state, federal and local agencies as well as health insurers to swap the protected personal health information of anybody seeking to join the new health care program that will be enforced by the Internal Revenue Service. Personal health information, or PHI, is highly protected under federal law, but the latest ruling from the Department of Health and Human Services allows agencies to trade the information to verify that Obamacare applicants are getting the minimum amount of health insurance coverage they need from the health "exchanges." The ruling, explained on pages 72-73 of the...

Stewart Rhodes, the group's founder, has emailed me a statement about Snowden: He is an example of what needs to be done by anyone who has knowledge of such gross violations of our rights. We need more to stand up, because this is surely the mere tip of the iceberg of the infrastructure for a police state that is being built over us. This is about far more than supposed attempts to ferry out al Qaeda operatives. This is part of a growing Stasi and Checka style surveillance police state which tags, tracks, and prepares plans to detain dissidents with...

The German government is demanding explanations from the US after it emerged that its secret spying program PRISM collected more information from Germany than any other EU country. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is expected to raise the issue when she receives US President Barack Obama in Berlin next week, her spokesman said on Monday (10 June). Data privacy is a very sensitive topic in Germany and the cluelessness of Merkel’s government about the affair may become an issue in September’s elections. … Germany’s hawkish interior minister—a Bavarian Christian-Social politician whose party is standing for re-election both on regional and national...