(FoxNews.com) For the first time in years, the IRS was knocked down a peg or two.
In a hearing that escalated into a boisterous public shaming of one of the country’s most-feared government agencies, lawmakers took turns Friday calling outgoing IRS Commissioner Steven Miller on the carpet for his department’s scandalous practice of targeting conservative groups.
Miller rebuffed attempts to extract the names of those responsible, saying he did not know. But lawmakers vowed that the tense hearing would mark only the start of a series of investigations, in which criminal activity could be probed.
(Breitbart.com) An event touting itself as an evening of immigration reform discussion with a “diversity of opinion” turns out to be slanted heavily towards “comprehensive immigration reform.” The BuzzFeed Brews Special Edition: Immigration Summit, sponsored by the Charles Koch Institute, will take place Tuesday, May 14th from 6 PM – 8 PM Eastern Time. The Charles Koch Institute is an educational offshoot of the Charles Koch Foundation.
It’s an unusual pairing: BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith has a reputation for liberal bias (he recently blamed “the right” for conditions of Kermit Gosnell’s abortion clinic) will be the moderator; Charles Koch, founder of the libertarian CATO Institute, is one of the people most reviled by the left.
(FoxNews.com) Stockton, Calif., became the most populous city in the nation to go broke Monday, after a judge accepted the city’s application to enter bankruptcy.
In the closely watched decision, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Klein said the bankruptcy declaration was needed to allow the city to continue to provide basic services. He determined Stockton would not be able to perform “its obligations to its citizens on fundamental public safety as well as other basic government services without” the protections provided under bankruptcy proceedings.
(HumanEvents.com) Since the GOP’s loss in the 2012 election, the Republican establishment has been scrambling to rebrand itself. But the GOP still hasn’t gone far enough with its post-election soul searching. Fixing the problem will require a number of novel ideas – but let me put one on the table.
The Republican Party must engage its members in an open and collaborative process to discuss exactly what the party should stands for and believes in. In so doing, they will effectively create a new Party platform and update the concept of the platform for the 21st century. Such a platform is proposed, written, and ratified in an open process should be the foundation behind which the GOP rallies and will the beginning of a real effort to establish a modern social media presence.
(TheBlaze.com) The world learned Saturday that the small Mediterranean country of Cyprus had agreed to a deal with European Union creditors that would impose a financial transaction tax as high as 9.9 percent on all depositors.
Depending on whether the Cypriot government finalizes the deal, which is still pending, this means that every depositor will have a portion of his money confiscated by the government when the banks reopen Tuesday morning.
“Accounts under 100,000 euros will have 6.75% of the funds seized. Accounts over 100,000 euros will have 9.9% seized,” Business Insider’s Henry Blodget explains.
After these funds are seized, the EU’s emergency lending facility and the International Monetary Fund, headed by Christine LaGarde, will drop €10 billion on keeping the banks in Cyprus running.
