Free Republic

As you're getting ready to file your tax return, you may be wondering about the chances that the IRS will audit your return. Most people can breathe easily because the vast majority of individual returns escape the audit machine. In recent years, the IRS has been auditing significantly less than 1% of all individual tax returns – and the trend has been towards fewer audits from one year to the next. Plus, most audits are handled solely by mail, meaning taxpayers selected for an audit typically never actually met with an IRS agent in person. But this doesn't mean it's...

Calling a secretive government operation to strangle politically out-of-favor businesses “more dangerous” than the IRS targeting scandal, a congressman with a background in banking is preparing to introduce legislation to kill the Obama administration initiative. “I believe this activity is probably more dangerous and more disastrous than that of the IRS scandal because this is running people out of business for no reason and it’s harming livelihoods, incomes [and] families,” Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer, R-Mo., said today in an interview with The Daily Signal. Luetkemeyer, a member of the House Financial Services Committee, was comparing the Department of Justice’s Operation Choke...

Apparently the “chilling effect” of Justice Department leak investigations on communications between government officials and the press has not been so chilling after all. It certainly did not deter former CIA employee and National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who has admitted that he is the principal source of recent leaks to The Post and the Guardian revealing top-secret NSA programs tracking terrorist communications. The exposure of the PRISM program under which the NSA monitors foreign terrorists on the Internet, as well as the leak of a top-secret court order requiring Verizon to share calling data with the government, are...

Another Open letter to Washington DC “Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience.” ~ John LockeOn Wednesday, November 4, 2009, I posted an open letter on this forum addressed to Washington, D.C. I posted a similar letter to one of my websites, http://www.homeland-defender.com on February 1, 2010. Given the events of the last week, I feel that I must write another letter to the former...

Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, has apparently hired a cadre of left-wing, Democrat campaign bloggers to troll through the Internet looking for news stories and blog posts that denigrate the Obama agenda. After such websites are found it is the job of these secret lefty bloggers to leave comments that come to the support of Obamaism in the comments sections. It seems that Eric Holder has created his own little propaganda unit in a valiant effort to become the Bloggi Riefenstahl of the Obama era. As reported at The Muffled Oar, a blog that first broke the story of Holder’s...

Analysis of the latest Census data indicates that California's illegal immigrant population is costing the state's taxpayers more than $10.5 billion per year for education, medical care and incarceration. Even if the estimated tax contributions of illegal immigrant workers are subtracted, net outlays still amount to nearly $9 billion per year. The annual fiscal burden from those three areas of state expenditures amounts to about $1,183 per household headed by a native-born resident. This analysis looks specifically at the costs to the state for education, health care and incarceration resulting from illegal immigration. These three are the largest cost areas,...