Free Republic

In progress. As I am writing this, they are just doing opening remarks.

Despite what you sometimes hear from eight-year-olds, pundits, lawyers, politicians, chat-room trolls, and UFOlogists, "proving a negative" is not just not "philosophically impossible" but often easily accomplished. One of the simplest ways to prove a negative is via a "proof by contradiction". Proving that a claim or assertion is false can be a simple matter of recognizing what would have to follow from that claim and also demonstrating that it could not or did not. We see examples of proof by contradiction regularly on Free Republic. If it had been true that "Tea Partiers spit on Emanuel Cleaver and called...

ENCINO (CBSLA.com) —Days after the Internal Revenue Service said low-level employees in a Cincinnati office showed uneven scrutiny to conservative groups with the words “tea party”, “patriots” and “9/12″ in their names, new reports are emerging of the practice at IRS offices in El Monte and Laguna Nigel. Karen Kenney of the San Fernando Valley Patriots said her local Tea Party group was politically targeted by the IRS when it applied for tax exempt status. After Kenney filed for 501(c)(4) status for her group in 2010, she said she was sent a packet with a list of questions. “We had...

On Monday, House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) responded to reports that the Department of Justice had secretly obtained two full months of phone records from the Associated Press, prompting the AP’s President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt to call it a “massive and unprecedented intrusion.” He also commented on the administration’s ever-changing story with regard to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2012 in Benghazi, Libya, and the IRS’ admissions that it politically targeted conservative organizations for scrutiny.

Internal Revenue Service officials in Washington and at least two other offices were involved in the targeting of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, making clear the effort reached well beyond the branch in Cincinnati that was initially blamed, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. IRS officials at the agency’s Washington headquarters sent queries to conservative groups asking about their donors and other aspects of their operations, while officials in the El Monte and Laguna Niguel offices in California sent similar questionnaires to tea party-affiliated groups. IRS employees in Cincinnati also told conservatives seeking the status of “social welfare”...