Free Republic

IRS: An aide to the attorney general accidentally calls the office of the House Oversight Committee chairman, asking for help in spinning the defense of the agency whose head just said they obey the law when they can. We have commented many times of the all-too-cozy relationship between the IRS and Democratic members of the House and Senate, with members writing to the agency demanding that specific conservative groups and political action committees they find particularly irritating be subject to the "special scrutiny" that the Tea Party and other conservative and religious groups were subjected to in the ongoing scandal....

The tea party may have learned its lesson. As Congress finishes work on a must-pass spending bill set for votes next week, the most conservative lawmakers on Capitol Hill are eager to send a message on immigration, and stand firm against a government lending bank. But a year after they forced a 16-day partial government shutdown over President Barack Obama’s health care law, few seem to have the stomach to push their demands that far again. “No question we learned that with the aid of the news media the Democrats were able to pin the blame on us” for last...

"I should have anticipated the optics," President Obama said by way of acknowledging that golfing right after making a statement about the beheading of James Foley looked bad. "Part of this job is also the theater of it," he said. "It's not something that always comes naturally to me. But it matters." For those who remember that this is the same guy with the Greek pillars, the campaign stop in Berlin, the newly minted "seal" of the president-elect, it was an odd confession. Obama likes theater just fine; he just doesn't like having to read from a script not of...

The pro-choicers don’t like the populists, who don’t like the…enough already! Factions of the left, please stop being so…factiony.On Tuesday, barring any surprises, Democrats in New York will nominate Andrew Cuomo to serve as the party’s nominee—making it highly likely Cuomo will eventually serve a second term in the governor’s office. In his first term, Cuomo lowered taxes for the rich, increased corporate subsidies, undermined public sector unions, championed charter schools, and blocked campaign finance reform. Were it not for progressive stances on marriage equality and abortion, Cuomo might easily be mistaken for a Republican. Yet for his second term,...

A senior communications aide to Attorney General Eric Holder seemingly called House oversight committee chairman Darrell Issa's staff by accident and asked for their help spinning new revelations about the IRS scandal, Issa said in a September 8 letter to Holder. The aide, Brian Fallon, is a former senior aide to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and a well-known personality on Capitol Hill. The letter describes Fallon as “audibly shaken” when he realizes his request to leak documents to help get ahead of news stories about them was mistakenly made to the very office he was seeking to undermine. Issa believes...

The only interesting things about Douglas Carswell's swtich from the Tory Party to Ukip are that it took him so long and that he has acted alone. Any thinking person has been able to see for years that the Tory Party hates conservatives. It is a roadblock, not a road, championing the elite against the people. It is kept in being only by the BBC and various dodgy billionaires, who provide it with airtime and money out of all proportion to its real support. It has no actual aims except office at all costs. It was no actual policies either,...

In June, IRS commissioner John Koskinen testified he had no idea who tipped off Obama officials, much sooner than Congress, about missing IRS emails. "Did you cause someone to find out at the White House, at Treasury, or your IG?" Representative Darrell Issa asked Koskinen on June 23rd. "I did not," answered Koskinen. "And if you have any evidence of that, I'd be happy to see it." "I asked a question," said Issa. "And I answered it," replied Koskinen. In a new development, we've learned it was IRS Commission John Koskinen's own chief legal advisor at the IRS, Catherine Duval,...

A Senate report released Friday criticized the IRS Inspector General's investigation into whether the tax agency targeted conservative tea party groups for excessive and burdensome scrutiny during the 2012 election cycle. The report, written by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, acknowledged that the IRS did mismanage applications from groups applying for tax exemption, but it argued that mismanagement affected both liberal and conservative groups. "The subcommittee found no evidence that political bias influences the decisions made by IRS personnel," the report stated. "A review of nearly 800,000 pages of documents and nearly two dozen interviews produced no evidence of political bias...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The IRS says it has lost emails from five more workers who are part of congressional investigations into the treatment of conservative groups that applied for tax exempt status.

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released a new batch of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) email documents revealing that under former IRS official Lois Lerner, the agency seems to acknowledge having needlessly solicited donor lists from non-profit political groups. According to a May 21, 2012, memo from the IRS Deputy Associate Chief Counsel: “such information was not needed across-the-board and not used in making the agency’s determination on exempt status.” Later, in her May 10, 2013, remarks in which Lerner first revealed in response to question she planted about the IRS targeting of conservative groups, she conceded that the requests...

The political impact of the Tea Party is a subject which has been debated ceaselessly over the course of the past six years. Even as it has made tremendous strides in mobilizing public opposition to disastrous statist manipulations of the economy and health care, the tangible results of this nationwide experiment in philosophical education and civic action have been ambiguous, at best. Many in the class of newcomers ushered into Congress on a wave of conservative resistance in 2010 have turned their backs on the citizens who voted them into office, in an all-too-familiar pattern of ostensible outsiders being absorbed...

<p>Now that Labor Day has passed, the 2014 campaign season is officially underway. By any measure, the Republicans seem to have the advantage and are poised to take control of the Senate in the midterm elections. The Democrats are struggling on just about every front. They do not have a credible economic agenda, and under President Obama, our country’s foreign policy has gone from bewildering to frightening.</p>

How do we decide who deserves a place in history? Generations of devoted American history buffs have spent countless hours reading and writing long books about the American Revolution without ever having come across the name of Dr. Thomas Young. Yet it was Young who came up with the idea for the original tea party—the one in Boston Harbor. And he went on from there to help kick off the Revolution in Pennsylvania, co-write the first modern constitution, and name the state of Vermont. The reason he isn’t well remembered today is just this: The grandfather of today’s Tea Party...

DALLAS, Texas — Texas Senator Ted Cruz recently spoke at the Defending the American Dream Summit organized by Americans for Prosperity. The eighth annual Summit was the largest in the event’s history, with over three thousand attendees, and Cruz’s popularity with the conservative crowd was obvious. Like Governor Rick Perry’s speech at the Summit, Cruz’s speech was enthusiastically received by the audience and received multiple standing ovations. AFP President Tim Phillips introduced Cruz as “one of our favorite United States Senators,” praising him as someone who “doesn’t just take the fight to the left… when it’s required, he stands up...

President Barack Obama on Friday blamed dysfunction in Congress on a Republican Party he said is captive to an ideologically rigid, unproductive and cynical faction, urging like-minded Democrats to show up for November's midterm elections. Addressing Democratic donors at a fundraiser in Rhode Island and another in New York, Obama said Republicans had realized that blocking all progress led Americans to become cynical about government. Republicans consider that "a pretty good thing" because they don't believe in government to begin with, Obama said. "It doesn't have to be that way," Obama said during a barbecue in Purchase, New York. "There...

In Dallas at an Americans For Prosperity event, Heritage Foundation president and former-Sen. Jim DeMint put his thumb firmly on the scale for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) over fellow Texan Gov. Rick Perry for the coming 2016 presidential contest. “I think Cruz even more than Perry right now,” DeMint told the Associated Press. “Ted has become really the national conservative leader.”(continued)

Whether the issue is climate change, healthcare or gun control, libertarians are on a permanent collision course with evidence.The observation that science and politics make uneasy and often treacherous bedfellows is hardly revelatory. In science, all hypotheses must withstand the trial-by-fire of experiment; its methodology is self-correcting and objective, unconcerned with petty prejudices or personal conviction. Politics, by contrast, is deeply entangled with ideology – it is not bound to respect reality as science is, and thinks nothing of substituting convincing evidence for emotive rhetoric. And yet, when science and politics clash, it is all too often science that loses....

When we look back on what happened in Ferguson, Mo., during the summer of 2014, it will be easy to think of it as yet one more episode of black rage ignited by yet another police killing of an unarmed African American male. But that has it precisely backward. What we’ve actually seen is the latest outbreak of white rage. Sure, it is cloaked in the niceties of law and order, but it is rage nonetheless. Protests and looting naturally capture attention. But the real rage smolders in meetings where officials redraw precincts to dilute African American voting strength or...

Louisiana GOP Senate candidate Rob Maness filed legal complaints against incumbent Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu on Friday, saying questions about her residency should disqualify her from the ballot. A week ago, Maness, a Tea Party-backed retired Air Force colonel, informed the Louisiana secretary of state of inconsistencies in Landrieu’s residency status. The Washington Post looked into the issue and found she listed her parents’ home in New Orleans to qualify for the ballot, but listed her home on Capitol Hill in Washington as her home address. "The Constitution, Louisiana law and common sense say candidates for Senate have to live...

The nation’s top television news broadcasts - in both English and Spanish - have been entirely mum on the latest revelations related to alleged obstruction of justice and politically-directed abuse of power at the Obama administration’s Internal Revenue Service. Whether at ABC, CBS and NBC, or Univision, Telemundo and Mundo Fox, these networks to date have essentially censored the admission by a U.S. Justice Department official –revealed by government watchdog group Judicial Watch – that allegedly lost e-mails of Obama IRS official Lois Lerner are in fact accessible, through the federal government’s computer back-up system. As Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton...