Free Republic

The full face of political evil and arrogance showed its ugly features when progressives went up against the folks. And what we saw were the cruel, prideful, insensitive machinations of an Obama administration whose mantra involves the ends justifying any of their means. Showing no interest in their oath to maintain the public trust, these progressives revealed in real time television their demonic minds at work. When the outgoing IRS chief smirked at one Congressman’s question, hid behind the bureaucrat’s trompe l’oeil of “I don’t know,” and then used the intellectual’s latest, snarky transitional word “So,” we saw how he...

(CNSNews.com) – Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) was applauded at a congressional hearing Wednesday, after he objected to Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner pleading the Fifth Amendment and refusing to testify before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. After invoking her right to avoid self-incrimination, Lerner, the head of the tax-exempt division of the IRS, was dismissed from the hearing, which is examining the agency’s inappropriate targeting of conservative groups. After giving a brief opening statement -- in which she said she did nothing wrong -- then refusing to answer any questions, Lerner was dismissed by Committee Chairman...

Farhad Manjoo thinks the IRS scandal should teach the right something Imagine you're an overworked IRS employee, charged with finding, in your massive stack of 501(c)(4) applications, the groups most likely to make electioneering their main focus. Wouldn't it make a little sense to focus on self-proclaimed Tea Party groups? Sure it would. And there's a word for that shortcut, Farhad Manjoo at Slate observes: profiling. By making decisions based on surface details like a group's name, "the IRS was acting like the TSA agent who pulls aside the guy in the turban." Which is ironic, because the right...

It is the Washington way. Egregious misconduct surfaces, showcasing the militantly officious nature of bloated big-government bureaucracy. But the Beltway and the commentariat cry in unison for a special counsel, ensuring that the symptoms — a few corrupt bureaucrats — will get all the attention while the underlying cancer metastasizes. In the unfolding IRS scandal, we already know President Obama’s conservative political opponents were targeted for the revenue agency’s version of waterboarding. On cue, prominent Republicans and conservatives are starting to call for a special counsel — clearly under the misimpression that a “special counsel” would mean a prosecutor “independent”...

Although there’s still a great deal to be learned about the scandals and controversies swirling around the White House like so many ominous dorsal fins in the surf, the nature of President Obama’s bind is becoming clear. The best defenses of his administration require undermining the rationale for his presidency. “We’re portrayed by Republicans as either being lying or idiots. It’s actually closer to us being idiots.” So far, this is the administration’s best defense. It was offered to CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson by an anonymous aide involved in the White House’s disastrous response to the attacks in Benghazi, Libya....

As Tea Party groups stage successful rallies at Internal Revenue Service offices nationwide, one California organization is staging a frontal assault on this government behemoth. One of the largest and most active Tea Party groups in the nation is filing the first of what is expected to be many lawsuits against the government for allegedly singling out conservative organizations. The NorCal Tea Party Patriots, based in northern California, claim the IRS violated its rights when it either held up or rejected its applications for tax-exempt status…. The NorCal lawsuit was filed Monday in the U.S. District Court of Cincinnati. The...

MADISON – Call it a quiet controversy. But there are a lot of people who don’t much care for Common Core State Standards. Opposition to the K-12 academic benchmarks that some conservatives have described as Big Brother education has swept the nation, and there is a growing core of Common Core combatants in the Badger State. They just don’t seem to get a lot of attention. Several tea party groups, however, plan to be front and center at 10 a.m. Wednesday in room 411 of the Capitol for an informational hearing on Wisconsin’s implementation of the Common Core. The joint...

ARMED DHS GUARDS greeted St. Louis Tea Party protesters at the Town and Country IRS office on Tuesday. Around 300 protesters turned out anyway. DHS parked their vehicles right outside the IRS office just in case the Tea Party protesters got crazy and violent. But the DHS intimidation was not isolated to St. Louis. In Los Angeles DHS put a chopper in the air and told Tea Party protesters they could not be on federal property. They had to move away from the building. This report came from a Tea Party protester in California. Many of our 300 tea party...

If you weren't excited from the explosions-filled Man of Steel movie trailer before, after seeing this final trailer that teases General Zod threatening Earth, you will be. It shows more of the conflict of the film and reveals even more insane action sequences. In the trailer, which is probably the final one before the movie releases next month on June 14, you hear Michael Shannon as General Zod demand that Kal-El surrender himself or Earth will suffer consequences. This is going to be a good one, huh. [WarnerBros]

President Barack Obama's former chief of staff, Jack Lew, the current treasury secretary, said today at a Capitol Hill hearing that he was aware "questions had been raised" about the IRS when he was at the White House:

The idea that this targeting practice was isolated in some off-shoot Ohio office was preposterous from the beginning. Even if no other office were involved, Cincinnati is the central office for clearing tax-exempt applications and has been since the late ’90s. Its location in Cincinnati just gave apologists a convenient way to imply it was not involved in carrying out a national policy.Since the early days of this scandal, we’ve learned, even if it was buried in the Style section of the Washington Post, there was a “directive.�Now, National Review‘s Eliana Johnson reports there was guidance from Washington’s Technical Unit...

Can’t do better than Popehat’s wry take:*********************************TWEET***********************Popehat @Popehat ******************************Top IRS official will invoke 5th Amendment WASHINGTON — A top IRS official in the division that reviews nonprofit groups will invoke the 5th Amendment and refuse to answer questions before a House committee investigating the agency’s improper... Los Angeles Times @latimes IRS Official to Reaffirm Importance of Constitutional Rights In Response To Congressional Inquiry http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-top-irs-official-fifth-amendment-20130521,0,6645565.story … 3:38 PM - 21 May 2013 Hey, remember when Steve Miller insisted there’s nothing illegal about the IRS targeting a particular political faction for extra scrutiny? He was wrong, potentially: There are civil-rights laws in play as...

The confederacy of dunces that makes up the Republican Party leadership and Fox News want you to believe that liberal operatives at the IRS abused power -- for political purposes -- by scrutinizing conservative Tea Party affiliates applying for tax-exempt 501(c)(4) status. What has been missed in the mainstream debate on the topic is the fact that the Tea Party should have been scrutinized. Race, money, political power and extremist ideology are the smoking guns -- and it's time to follow the money trail. President Obama chose to get ahead of the scandal, saying that targeting of conservative groups was...

Twice they say is a pattern. Or a charm. And there isn’t much charm in using government agencies to conduct an illegal war against the opposition. Perhaps no other IRS official is more intimately associated with the tax agency’s growing scandal than Lois Lerner, director of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations Division. Since admitting the IRS harassed hundreds of conservative and Tea Party groups for over two years, Lerner has been criticized for a number of untruths—including the revelation that she apparently lied about planting a question at an American Bar Association conference where she first publicly acknowledged IRS misconduct. Prior...

Four Armed Colorado River Tea Party Members Exercise Their Rights About 50 people showed up at high noon in Yuma to exercise their First and Second Amendment rights. A common theme among the Tea Party members was that using the machinery of government to suppress dissent and political opposition is the very essence of tyranny. Signs varied from "Shut Down the IRS" to "We will not be Intimidated" to "Obama IRS Tyrant!" to "Congress disregards the Constitution it's up to us to do something" About 50 Protesters Showed up. I counted nearly 40, and several joined the group over...

Coburn is sticking to his fiscally conservative principles, even after a twister killed at least 24 of his constituents On Tuesday morning, emergency responders began dealing with the aftermath of a tornado that killed at least 24 people in Moore, Okla., and injured at least 140 more. The White House has announced that "the administration and FEMA stand ready to provide all available assistance in response to the severe weather." However, one of the state's two Republican senators, Tom Coburn, wants to put a stipulation on that offer: No federal aid without corresponding federal budget cuts.

ARMED DHS GUARDS GREETED TEA PARTY PROTESTERS TODAY AT THE ST. LOUIS IRS RALLY– No sign of the Light-Armored Tanks yet… But there were DHS vehicles parked outside the IRS office just in case the Tea Party protesters got violent. Alex Cohen holds a Gadsden flag at the IRS building. It was his first Tea Party rally. Over 300 Tea Party protesters turned out for the rally against IRS harassment and intimidation. Tea Party protesters at the St. Louis-Town and Country IRS protest today wore targets on their backs. There were plenty of American and Gadsden flags at the rally....

Nothing there? The hope is gone? Bring in Biden? Tell us what you think.

ARMED DHS GUARDS GREETED TEA PARTY PROTESTERS TODAY AT THE ST. LOUIS IRS RALLY– No sign of the Light-Armored Tanks yet…

You know, a White House that just got exposed for spying on journalists probably should be doing some bridge-rebuilding, especially for an administration who needs a friendly media as much as this one does. What’s the worst possible way to get back in the media’s good graces? Accusing them of being conspiracy nuts for asking about Kathleen Sebelius’ fundraising for ObamaCare, starting with CBS’ Major Garrett, who just got done fronting the Benghazi e-mail defense demolished by Glenn Kessler today. Thanks bunches, Major: (VIDEO-AT-LINK) Struggling with a reporter about which Republican concerns are and are not legitimate, White House spokesman...

Carney Compares Questions about Scandals to Birth-Cerificate Inquiries By Andrew Johnson May 21, 2013 2:49 PM Jay Carney tried to move past questions about the series of scandals surrounding the Obama administration by comparing them to questions about the president’s birth certificate at today’s press conference. Major Garrett asked Carney if the White House thought Republican inquiries were “legitimate” on the issues of Benghazi, the IRS, the Department of Justice targeting reporters, and the Department of Health and Human Service’s efforts to raise funds from private companies for promoting the health-care law. “We could go down the list of questions...

I’m not talking about conservative publications either, but outlets that normally would allow Barack Obama and his team the benefit of the doubt. Bloomberg starts us off with a straight report on the changing explanations:

Members of tea party claim the movement springs from and promotes basic American conservative principles such as limited government and fiscal responsibility. But new research by University of Washington political scientist Christopher Parker argues that the tea party ideology owes more to the paranoid politics associated with the John Birch Society — and even the infamous Ku Klux Klan — than to traditional American conservatism. Parker is the author, with fellow UW political scientist Matt Barreto, of a new book titled “Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America,” published this spring by Princeton University...

If President Obama didn't know about the IRS targeting of Tea Party groups, and Hillary didn't know about security lapses in Benghazi, ...— Joseph Curl (@josephcurl) May 21, 2013 ... and Holder didn't know a thing about Justice tapping phones and reading emails of reporters, don't you wonder what ELSE they don't know?— Joseph Curl (@josephcurl) May 21, 2013

Looks like yet another left-winger missed the meme on the New Civility. Attorney and "Ring of Fire" radio show co-host Mike Papantonio, guest-hosting on Ed Schultz's radio program yesterday, revealed two things -- he hates old people and wants tea party retirees to hurry up and die. Don't take my word for it, listen to Papantonio's remarks after a caller said he saw "one of these baggers" push a woman during dueling protests over the weekend in Madison, Wisc.

Enough! For many years, the American Left has and continues to shamelessly abuse the American people; slandering, beating up and bullying them into submission by using the easily proven false narrative that America is a racist nation. In other words, the Left recklessly and unfairly plays the Race Card. Why? The Left has great disdain for traditional American values and desires to transform America into it's dreamed Socialist/Progressive utopia. Calling an opponent to the Left's agenda “racist” typically frightens and shuts them down. On behalf of my decent and hard-working fellow Americans, I demand an apology from the NAACP, the...

During Tuesday's Senate hearings into the widening IRS scandal, Senator Ron Wyden (OR-D) suggested that the conservative groups, targeted for paralyzing IRS harassment and leaks to the left-wing media, had it coming. (snip) (from John Harwood) Sen Wyden: If political groups don't want hassles from government, they shouldn't go to government asking for tax-exempt status.

WASHINGTON — Ranking Member Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, didn’t mince words. He said IRS’s decision not to notify Congress of the agency’s targeting of tea party groups was “a lie by omission” and that the man in charge at the time just “sat on that guilty knowledge.” Acting Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service Steve Miller replied, “Mr. Hatch, I did not lie.” But during Tuesday’s Senate Finance Committee hearing Hatch insisted Miller knew there was a list IRS officials were using to target conservatives when he failed to inform Congress of the abuse. Hatch said “you knew what was...

Organizers mobilizing for demonstrations Tuesday at agency buildings Prompted by the admission by the Internal Revenue Service that tea-party groups and other conservative organizations seeking non-profit, tax-exempt status were targets of discrimination, the tea-party movement is mobilizing like-minded citizens to hold demonstrations in front of IRS buildings across the nation at noon, local time, Tuesday. “I’ll bet this is gonna be huge,” said talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh on his show Monday. “It’s entirely possible that people are going to see once again just how big and how deep the tea party is.” Nothing tells the story of the tea-party movement...

Over / under Appropriate / inappropriate: 30 Any reference to investigations: 50 Ask somebody else: 25Odds “Mistakes were made” 200:1 Carney is confronted on his bald faced lies about WH role in sanitizing Benghazi talking points: 10:1Benghazi Emails Directly Contradict White House Claims WH Live Stream

The opening day excuse for the IRS targeting conservative groups requesting tax exempt status was that the IRS was facing an unusual influx of applicants. But that turns out not to have been the case. Applications for tax exempt 501 groups didn’t surge in 2010. In fact, the number of applicants was down in every category from 2009. The new line on the scandal is that it was a product of poor management, incompetence, and a struggling, understaffed agency. Here, for example, is The New York Times, in a reported piece from yesterday: “Overseen by a revolving cast of midlevel...

Internal Revenue Service officials not only wanted a wide variety of information from the Albuquerque Tea Party's application for non-profit status, it also wanted to know what contacts it had with people from other political organizations too. That included an 83-year-old great-grandmother who was once held in a World War II internment camp, New Mexico Watchdog has discovered. "I've always paid my taxes and everything," Marianne Chiffelle told New Mexico Watchdog. "What I do think is, it doesn't surprise me...because of this government we have at the moment." According to a review of documents conducted by the online news organization...

That the Tea Party has been under attack is not exactly news to Tea Partiers, though we are grateful that the rest of the country has finally taken notice. Much ado was made of the fact that the Tea Party seemed to wield a smaller political footprint in 2012 than in 2010, but nobody ever suggested that the reason for that might be that it was harassed away by its own Executive Branch. Perhaps things would have been different had Andrew Breitbart been alive, for nobody defended the Tea Party as passionately and tirelessly as he did. As the director...

A California tea party group sued the Internal Revenue Service on Monday, saying it was among the conservative organizations the federal government targeted for special scrutiny because of its political positions. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Cincinnati, seeks the certification of a class action, which could open the floodgates for as many as 300 other right-wing groups to join the legal effort. NorCal Tea Party Patriots, based in Colfax, California, told the court that the IRS discriminated against it because of the beliefs of its members, subjecting it to 'a lengthy and costly delay in recognition of...

What is the next step for the tea party groups who feel they were unfairly scrutinized by the Internal Revenue Service? For many of them, it may be lawsuits, against the IRS. Jay Sekulow, the chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, said the group will be bringing a lawsuit on behalf of many of those groups next week.

Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) asked Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate election integrity org True the Vote and its associated Tea Party group, King Street Patriots, immediately before the IRS and DOJ began targeting the group in June 2010. Rep. Jackson Lee sent a letter to Holder which alleged that True the Vote was intimidating voters and their election monitors were crossing the line in unspecified “instances” of voter intimidation. The letter went on to directly assert that the “alleged events” were factual and that the True the Vote effort was behind the crimes. The letter offered no documented...

. "Today" ... fellow AMERICAN PATRIOTS ... is "our" DAY !!! Let this Day be known as a "Second Independence Day" for America's 21st Century Patriots ... Proudly tell your children and grandchildren that "YOU" stood-up for FREEDOM on this day ... 21 May 2013 ... Protest Obama's GESTAPO IRS-EPA-BAFT Marxist Thuggery TODAY at Noon ! Tampa, Florida location: 3848 W. Columbus Dr, Tampa, FL 33607 Our Battle Cry : "REMEMBER BENGHAZI !!!!" "Assimilate THIS" ... Barrack "Hussein" Obama and Hillary "Fort Marcy Park" Clinton !!! Henry V St. Crispin's Day Speech: Henry V -- St. Crispin's Day Speech -...

Yesterday I asked in this space, among other questions about the IRS scandal, this: What was the subject of the Obama-Kelley March 31, 2010 meeting? I received the following response to my question from the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) — the union for IRS employees headed by ex-14 year agent Colleen Kelley. The response came from union spokesperson Dina Long. It reads, in its entirety, this: Statement of NTEU On March 31, 2010, NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley attended the White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility at the Old Executive Office Building. The forum was attended by approximately 200...

Scandal Watch: Despite White House attempts to brush the IRS scandal aside as "irrelevant" or the work of rogue miscreants, huge questions remain about who ordered IRS agents to harass Tea Party groups, and why. Every day, in fact, raises new and more disturbing questions that congressional investigators must get answers to. Among them:

President Obama believes in the public sector. He thinks it should be made ever more expansive and entrusted with ever more complicated tasks. Its unions should be powerful. It should be hailed by all the great and good, and attract the nation’s best and brightest. This is how the president portrays the public sector at a level of glittering generality. Then there’s the reality of all that government that is too big for him to monitor, the workings of which he learns about only when he reads the newspapers and watches TV. There’s the incompetence, the dishonesty and the self-justification....

Richmond County Tea Party Patriots and Gun Rights Across America yesterday held a rally in the rain to defeat Gov. Cuomo's unconstitutional and ill-conceived NYSAFE Act. Tea Party Patriots member and American Grizzlies United / Organize4Palin NY State Coordinator, Ron Devito spoke at this rally, beginning at the 21:45 mark in the video. His remarks were covered by the Staten Island Advance. The Richmond County Tea Party Patriots were initially denied the permit to hold the rally, but it was ultimately granted. The denial may or may not be part of a pattern of harassment and intimidation of Tea Party...

Back in their day, the tea party folks were riding high, fueling indignation over alleged government-run death panels, a treasonous Federal Reserve and the like. They commandeered sparsely attended Republican primaries, managing to nominate for Senate seats a dabbler in witchcraft in Delaware, holders of strange views on rape in Missouri and Indiana, and in Nevada, a candidate suggesting armed insurrection if her people didn't win elections. All lost -- some in races an old-fashioned Republican would have won. In the interest of party self-preservation, Republican leaders sidelined the more extreme tea partiers, or tried to. Meanwhile, the tea party's...

As a major tea party group plans protests Tuesday at Internal Revenue Service offices across the country, a new national poll indicates that the IRS controversy has given the four-year-old movement a shot in the arm. The week-and-a-half-old controversy, which involves the IRS targeting of tea party and other conservative groups which were seeking tax exempt status, has dominated headlines and put the White House on the defensive. And according to a CNN/ORC International survey released Monday, it's also boosted the favorable rating for the tea party movement. Thirty-seven percent of people questioned said they see the tea party in...

The head of the National Treasury Employee Union (NTEU), which represents employees of the Internal Revenue Service, met with President Barack Obama in the White House one day before the manager of the IRS’s “Technical Unit” suggested establishing a “Sensitive Case Report” for the tax-exempt status applications of Tea Party groups, according to data from the official White House visitor log and the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. The White House visitor log shows that NTEU President Colleen Kelley met with Obama--“POTUS,” President of the United States--on March 31, 2010. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report on...

Fun from MSNBC’s early afternoon “news” bloc of programming via Noah Rothman. The logic is ironclad and inexorable: Doug Shulman, appointed IRS commissioner by Bush in March 2008, was so fiercely loyal to his Beltway Republican masters that he decided to risk his career to kneecap conservative insurgents’ nonprofits in 2010 … even though Bush had left office more than a year before and the GOP establishment he represented was widely loathed by pretty much everyone in America. Oh, and even though (again per Rothman) Shulman himself has donated to the DNC in the past. Say it with me, guys:...

A few weeks back, the Tea Party was little more than a relic of political history, and its former superstars such as Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann were lost in a sea of irrelevance. Now the Obama administration has gotten the Tea Party started again. The trio of scandals that are rocking Washington smack of the exact kind of government overreach and abuse of power that fueled the movement in the beginning. Suddenly, Tea Party darling and likely presidential hopeful Rand Paul is selling out speaking events from Iowa to New Hampshire, and PalinÂ’s tweets are making headlines again. The...

Why Sarah Palin? Because when I write a blog here on Jeb Bush or President Obama, it will bring in maybe 10 comments. A piece on Sarah Palin last week brought 135. Same every time. She strikes a chord which runs deep. She has a purpose here. She may be today the most important person in American culture and politics. She may always have been. The flak you draw tells of your truth and importance, and no one has taken more flak than Palin. Most has been neutralized now as Tea Party meets the mainstream with the IRS affair in...

Top White House aides first learned of a draft report detailing IRS abuses in targeting conservative groups in late April, but they chose to insulate President Obama by not informing him until it exploded in the press, the president’s spokesman said Monday. White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters Monday that White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler learned about an IRS inspector general’s draft report looking into the singling out of conservative groups on April 24. She advised senior White House staff including chief of staff Denis McDonough — about the then-draft report, but Mr. Carney said she believed that...

"In two weeks the naysayers will find out just how wrong they have been" - Mike Zullo