Free Republic

Russian President Vladimir Putin skewered the leadership of Ukraine and the West in a speech Monday night, in which he gave his most aggressive remarks yet on the brewing conflict between Moscow and Kyiv. Putin delivered nearly an hour-long speech lobbing allegations of foreign meddling in Ukraine against the west and reiterating accusations of oppression of ethnic Russians by the government of Ukraine. He called Ukraine a puppet state of the United States and officially recognized two separatist groups in eastern Ukraine as independent states. The Russian president began the speech with a history lesson, in which he argued that...

A federal court ruled Friday that the Internal Revenue Service has not yet demonstrated that officials stopped targeting Tea Party groups in a decision that excoriated the tax agency for its "discriminatory" treatment of conservative organizations. "This is a blistering rebuke to the IRS and its defenders," Walter Olson, senior fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies, said of the court's ruling. "It takes on squarely the defense the IRS had raised in this case which is, 'Whatever happened, we promise not to do it again.'" "The court goes through and systematically takes that apart in a way...