Free Republic

A new audit-report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) shows that the IRS sent at least 343 potentially fraudulent tax returns in 2011 to the same, single address in Shanghai, China, for a total of $156,533 in tax refunds. The same report also shows that 655 potentially fraudulent tax refunds totaling $220,489 were sent to the same address in Kaunas, Lithuania. Other potentially fraudulent refunds, 580 of them, were sent to the same address in Orlando, Fla.; 355 to the same address in Lakewood, Colo; and another 291 to another single address in Orlando, Fla. In total,...

WASHINGTON -- For Rep. Gary Miller and voters in his Inland Empire district, this is just the beginning: A television ad began airing Thursday in the Republican’s district seeking to ratchet up pressure on him to support a pathway to citizenship for immigrants in the country illegally. Miller is among seven GOP lawmakers nationwide targeted in the roughly $500,000 ad buy by the Service Employees International Union. Many more ads are expected because Miller is regarded as among the most vulnerable House Republicans, a top Democratic target who represents a heavily Latino district won by President Obama. Miller said in...

Pray For Our American Heroes and Our Nation It is God who arms me with strength and keeps my way secure. He makes my feet like the feet of a deer; he causes me to stand on the heights. He trains my hands for battle; my arms can bend a bow of bronze. Psalm 18:32-34 (NIV) ----

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Thursday said Republican complaints about President Obama’s unpopular health-care law are not valid criticisms, but rather “jokes.” In a speech on the Senate floor Thursday, the Nevada Democrat didn’t address any of the GOP’s specific complaints about the law. But he playfully suggested that Republicans, in order to save time, just “number their one through 50 criticisms of Obamacare” and yell out a number when they want to reference a specific complaint. “We’ve heard things so many times, we would immediately laugh because basically they’re jokes,” Reid said. He continued: “It’s too bad that...

Chicago (AFP) - A French family who came to the United States for medical treatment said they were stranded in Chicago after British Airways determined their son was too fat to fly. Kevin Chenais, 22, spent a year and a half at the Mayo Clinic for treatment of a hormone disorder which led him to weigh 500 pounds. His mother was near tears as she described the family’s problems to the local CBS affiliate. "We blame British Airways because now they just leave us, and they brought us here,” Christina Chenais told the station. "If they could bring him here...

Sales of natural-gas powered big rigs could jump as much as fivefold this year as falling prices for both natural gas and the carbon fuel tanks required for such trucks come down, the Wall Street Journal says. Lowe's, Procter & Gamble, UPS and PepsiCo are among the major US companies that have gone on record saying they're expanding their fleet of trucks that can run on either compressed natural gas (CNG) or liquefied natural gas (LNG). For instance, UPS is buying 1,000 natural-gas trucks by year-end, and P&G, whose fleet is about seven percent natural gas, is looking to boost...

The state of Delaware spent $4 million in federal grant money on Obamacare enrollment and has only signed up four people in the last month– effectively costing taxpayers $1 million per enrollee.

The shooting apparently stemmed from "an ongoing feud between a particular individual and members of the gambling party," Craig said. Word of the killings first spread on Twitter. Craig said a man inside an automobile fired at another vehicle outside the business on the east side of Detroit. The shooter got out of his car and fired the rifle into the back room of the barbershop, where men had gathered to gamble, he said.

Barrie Schwortz, the Official Documenting Photographer for the Shroud of Turin, joins Fr. Joseph Mary Wolfe to discuss this remarkable & sacred image of Our Lord. "EWTN Live" Link

Glenn Beck and Harry Reid have practically nothing in common, except for one little detail: both men are Mormons. And it was with that in mind that Beck felt he could say without reservation that Reid and his Republican colleague Orrin Hatch are “two spooky Mormons” amidst a tirade against the GOP establishment and the NSA. Beck was fired up about Hatch throwing Ted Cruz and Mike Lee under the bus by blaming the government shutdown on them and blaming Ken Cuccinelli‘s loss in Virginia on that shutdown. But Beck was far more worried about another issue he’s convinced Hatch...

Dejection and dismay has been the reaction of many people in Pakistan to the news that Mullah Fazlullah has been made head of the Pakistani Taliban (TTP). He is still remembered for his atrocities in Swat - banning girls' education, destroying schools, ransacking music shops, carrying out public executions, and attempting to enforce a brutal moral code of Islamic law. He was the pioneer of what many in Pakistan and internationally believe to be a senseless campaign against the United Nations-funded polio vaccination drive. His elevation has also taken aback those in official Pakistani circles who had been pushing for...

LARGO, Maryland (AP) — With just five days to go before Americans can begin signing up for health care under his signature law, President Barack Obama on Thursday ridiculed Republican opponents for "crazy" doomsday predictions of the impact and forecast that even those who didn't vote for him are going to enroll. "The Republican party has just spun itself up around this issue," Obama said. "And the fact is the Republicans' biggest fear at this point is not that Affordable Care Act will fail. What they're worried about is it's going to succeed." Obama didn't call out any of his...

President Obama considered veteran Harlem Rep. Charles Rangel a political hack and had such little regard for Jesse Jackson that he “effectively banned” the civil rights leader from the White House, a new book claims. The political tome about the 2012 presidential campaign, “Double Down,” says Obama had little patience for “professional left” activists and “vanishingly close to zero” for what a White House aide called “professional blacks.” “Apart from Georgia Congressman John Lewis and Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, Obama had nearly as much contempt for the CBC (Congressional Black Caucus) as he did for the Tea Party Caucus,”...

The National Immigrant Youth Alliance (NIYA), on its Dream Activist affiliate website, took issue with the Illinois Democrat’s criticism of it as exploiting undocumented immigrants who were detained after approaching authorities at the U.S.-Mexican border requesting political asylum. .... Gutierrez has said that NIYA’s leader, Mohammad Abdollahi, doesn’t face the same risk of deportation that the immigrants who approached the border do because of past comments that Abdollahi has made that he is gay and from Iran and it would be unlikely that the United States would deport him, given the Iranian government’s condemnation of gays. Gutierrez said that in...

It was less than a week before Obamacare’s exchanges launched that President Obama gave a speech in Maryland about the benefits of the Affordable Care Act. Using a community college in a friendly county as a backdrop, Obama pushed back against Obamacare critics, charging them with “fear-mongering” and mocking them for “crazy” predictions about the law. In that speech, he repeated the promise that the law’s changes would not affect those who already had health insurance. Here’s the “if you like your plan, you can keep it” segment of the speech, which made specific reference to the individual market— the...

Vaccinating only Syrian refugees against polio may not be enough to prevent the crippling viral disease from re-infecting Europe where it has not been seen for decades, German scientists warned on Friday. Writing in The Lancet medical journal, they said the risk to Europe from a re-emergence of polio in Syria was partly due to the type of vaccine generally used in regions that have not had the disease for many years. Polio, caused by a virus transmitted via contaminated food or water, was confirmed among young children in northeast Syria last month - its first appearance there in 14...

But on both occasions, Twitter's own location services -- which a user can set to broadcast where the tweet originated -- showed they were sent from far outside the City-County Building. On one occasion, Twitter showed the tweet was sent from near the mayor's home in the middle of the day. In the second, Twitter showed the message was sent from a country club, again, during the workday. On Friday afternoon, he tweeted "Friday staff mtg. Our success is a result of so many dedicated City employees! #7yearsofsuccesses." His tweet included a photo of his conference room, with nine staff...

Head of the Armenian Apostolic Church (AAC), Catholicos of All Armenians Karekin II was elected Chairman of the World Council of Churches (WCC), the Holy See of Etchmiadzin said in an official statement, posted in Facebook. It said Catholicos Karekin II was elected unanimously in the South Korean city of Busan at the 10th assembly of the WCC for the next eight years. The presidium of the WCC includes eight people. Their mission is to encourage interfaith and ecumenical relations, human rights, justice and peace, the statement says. The World Council of Churches is an international ecumenical organization founded in...

The Vatican says Pope Francis will hold talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Vatican City on Nov. 25. Details are still being worked out, but the Vatican press office said Thursday the private audience would likely take place that afternoon.

The Maybe-Murder of Yasser Arafat