CONVERSE COUNTY, Wyo. (AP) — It happens about once a month here, on the barren foothills of one of America's green-energy boomtowns: A soaring golden eagle slams into a wind farm's spinning turbine and falls, mangled and lifeless, to the ground.
Was the White House involved in the IRS's targeting of conservatives? No investigation needed to answer that one. Of course it was.President Obama and Co. are in full deniability mode, noting that the IRS is an "independent" agency and that they knew nothing about its abuse. The media and Congress are sleuthing for some hint that Mr. Obama picked up the phone and sicked the tax dogs on his enemies.
As tax collector for the nation’s second-largest state, I know it’s a necessary function — from the fire station to the space station, nothing government does is possible without taxes.
The Justice Department secretly collected two months of telephone records for reporters and editors at The Associated Press, the news service disclosed Monday in an outraged letter to Attorney General Eric Holder.The records included calls from several AP bureaus and the personal phone lines of several staffers, AP President Gary Pruitt wrote. Pruitt called the subpoenas a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into its reporting.
Even as the politicized tax enforcement scandal expands, the Internal Revenue Service continues to expand its political powers thanks to the Affordable Care Act. A larger government always creates more openings for abuse, as Americans will learn when the IRS starts auditing their health care in addition to their 1040 next year.
Many Republicans are enraged over revelations in recent days that the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative nonprofit groups with a campaign of audits and harassment. But of all the troubles now dogging the Obama administration—including the Benghazi fiasco and the Justice Department's snooping on the Associated Press—the IRS episode, however alarming, is also the least surprising. As David Burnham noted in "A Law Unto Itself: The IRS and the Abuse of Power" (1990), "In almost every administration since the IRS's inception the information and power of the tax agency have been...
Conservative groups seeking information from the Environmental Protection Agency have been routinely hindered by fees normally waived for media and watchdog groups, while fees for more than 90 percent of requests from green groups were waived, according to requests reviewed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
LONDON—North American oil production will dominate world-wide supply growth over the next five years, the International Energy Agency predicted on Tuesday, as a result of growing production from fracking and other technologies that access once-inaccessible reserves.Five years ago, few predicted such a shift, which will come at the expense of producers such as members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries that for years have dominated the industry.In its most recent analysis, which takes a five-year view of the oil market, the IEA said U.S. production is rising much...
The Internal Revenue Service's scrutiny of conservative groups went beyond those with "tea party" or "patriot" in their names—as the agency admitted Friday—to also include ones worried about government spending, debt or taxes, and even ones that lobbied to "make America a better place to live," according to new details of a government probe.
Increased revenue and savings from efficiency efforts weren’t enough to prevent the U.S. Postal Service from losing $1.9 billion in its fiscal second quarter, postal officials said Friday.The earnings report, which follows a $1.3 billion first-quarter loss, spurred officials to again call on Congress to enact Postal Service-proposed changes to help stabilize the agency. Officials have urged changes to employee health insurance, retirement and mail-delivery schedules.
