IRS Audits of Small Businesses Soar Under Obama

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President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney continue to tussle over tax rates and deductions. Ignored, however, have been questions about tax collection and enforcement—tools presidents use to achieve their economic policy goals. Hit a wall ramming your tax hike or cut through Congress, simply increase or decrease tax enforcement and audits.

Under the Obama Administration, the Internal Revenue Service has placed small and medium-size businesses—the engines of job creation—in its auditing crosshairs.

According to IRS statistics, from 2009 to 2011, the coverage rate (number of audits as a percentage of total returns filed) for corporations with assets between $10 million and $50 million has increased 32 percent. The coverage rate for corporations with assets between $50 million and $100 million has increased at the same rate. Some businesspeople file individual returns, and those with incomes higher than $1 million have experience a 94 percent increase in their coverage rate, and a 29 percent increase in the actual number of exams since 2009. Those with incomes $200,000 and higher have seen a 36 percent increase in their coverage rate.

So, has ratcheting up audits on small and medium-size businesses produced more revenue bang for the IRS’s buck? Hardly.

Using 2011 IRS data, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University found that audits of a company with assets between $10 and $50 million yielded $702 in recommended additional taxes per hour. For large corporations with assets of $250 million or more, the recommended additional taxes are $9,173 per hour. Yet while the coverage rates of companies with assets between $10 to $50 million are up 32 percent, rates for companies with assets of $250 million or higher are up just 7.4 percent.

Read more from this story HERE.

Experts: Hackers WILL Crack US Voting Systems, Changing Results

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With the U.S. presidential election turning into a dead heat, every vote is going to count, but if some hackers had their way, your vote won’t matter.

Hacktivist groups like Anonymous and LulzSec are growing more sophisticated every day with their use of new collaborative hacking techniques, such as “crowdsourcing.” Meanwhile, voter databases are increasingly being put online on state and local computer systems that are often insecure and administered by part-time IT personnel.

“If big, Internet-based companies like Yahoo, LinkedIn, or Sony can fall to hackers, then, yeah, big government databases and local authorities who actually administer the election process can be hacked,” said [computer security expert Stephen] Cobb.

While the voter databases carry mostly innocuous information, such as name and address, a hacktivist group could create havoc in an election if they were to make changes to that database.

A hacker could, for example, switch the addresses of people on a voting roll, putting them in a different precinct than where they actually live. An error like this could be done close to the election and could very well not be noticed until the day of the election. By then it would be too late. That person would be ineligible to vote that day.

Read more from this story HERE.

Hearing Set For General Charged With Sex Crimes, Sodomy With Subordinates

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An Army brigadier general who served five combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan has been charged with forcible sodomy, multiple counts of adultery and having inappropriate relationships with several female subordinates, two U.S. defense officials said Wednesday.

The defense officials spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to provide details on the case.

Brig. Gen. Jeffrey A. Sinclair faces possible courts-martial on charges that include forced sex, wrongful sexual conduct, violating an order, possessing pornography and alcohol while deployed, and misusing a government travel charge card and filing fraudulent claims.

Sinclair, who served as deputy commander in charge of logistics and support for the 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan, was sent home in May because of the allegations, the officials said.

The charges were announced at a brief press conference Wednesday at Fort Bragg, the sprawling Army base in North Carolina that is home to the 82nd Airborne. After reading a prepared statement, base spokesman Col. Kevin Arata refused to take any questions. Reporters were told all questions would have to be made in writing and that no response was likely to come until the following day.

Read more from this story HERE.

Bernie Sanders: Multinational Corporations Raping the US Treasury, Outsourcing Hundreds of Thousands of Jobs

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After a group of CEO’s wrote an opinion piece today in the Wall Street Journal about the country’s deficit and the need to rein in social security, medicare, and other programs, Leftist Senator Bernie Sanders went on the offensive:

There really is no shame. The Wall Street leaders whose recklessness and illegal behavior caused this terrible recession are now lecturing the American people on the need for courage to deal with the nation’s finances and deficit crisis. Before telling us why we should cut Social Security, Medicare and other vitally important programs, these CEOs might want to take a hard look at their responsibility for causing the deficit and this terrible recession.

Sander’s Senate website went on to note that

Many of the CEOs who signed the deficit-reduction letter run corporations that, in total, evaded at least $34.5 billion in taxes by setting up more than 600 subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands and other offshore tax havens since 2008. As a result, at least a dozen of the companies avoided paying any federal income taxes in recent years, and even received more than $6.4 billion in tax refunds from the IRS since 2008.

Several of the companies received a total taxpayer bailout of more than $2.5 trillion from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department.

Many of the companies also have outsourced hundreds of thousands of American jobs to China and other low wage countries, forcing their workers to rely on unemployment insurance and other federal benefits.

“In other words,” Sanders said, “these are some of the same people who have significantly caused the deficit to explode over the last four years.”

Sanders then documented the CEO’s and their companies’ outsourcing, tax credits, and other benefits in a document that can be seen here.

Although Sanders and Restoring Liberty have little in common, he has identified a real problem: we have increasingly powerful multinational corporations in the United States that have absolutely no loyalty to our Constitution or nation. Many are not only actively involved in subverting national sovereignty but are also milking the treasury through corrupt relationships with political insiders in DC. Crony capitalism is not free market economics.

Economist gives Obama ‘F,’ Romney ‘D-minus’ for Economic Literacy

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Donald J. Boudreaux is on a mission to correct economic nonsense.

A professor of economics at George Mason University and a blogger at Cafe Hayek.com, Boudreaux has been writing letters to the editor of various American publications for years in an attempt to correct economic fallacies promoted in articles he read. He has compiled the best of his letters in a new book, “Hypocrites & Half-Wits: A Daily Dose of Sanity from Cafe Hayek.”

While Boudreaux says the ”typical American is quite uninformed about economics,” he doesn’t rate the current major presidential contenders much higher on that score.

“Neither man gives much reason to believe that he is economically literate,” he said. “Judging only by what they say, though, I give the edge to Romney. He’d likely earn a D- in my Intro econ class; Obama likely would earn an F.”

Boudreaux doesn’t shower scorn on every member of the media or politician for being economically ill informed, however. He praises Fox Business Network’s John Stossel, the Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady and conservative Washington Post columnist George Will for their grasp of economic issues. As for politicians, he suggests Indiana Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels and Michigan Republican Rep. Justin Amash are the best of the lot.

Read more from this story HERE.

Gloria Allred’s Court Case: Romney Attorney Says, “Have At It”

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As we posted yesterday, Gloria Allred is involved in a Massachusetts court case seeking to unseal testimony Romney allegedly gave to help his friend, founder of Staples, Tom Stemberg.

The court hearing that was supposed to occur yesterday was rescheduled for this morning. According to the Examiner, Romney’s attorney, Robert Jones, isn’t fighting Allred’s application. In fact, he apparently told Judge Jennifer Ulwick that, although he wanted to review the testimony, he “didn’t anticipate objections to its release. Jones also requested the case proceed quickly, to avoid speculation.”

In an interview with Time Magazine, Romney’s attorney went even further stating, “This is a decades-old divorce case in which Mitt Romney provided testimony as to the value of a company. He has no objection to letting the public see that testimony.”

Romney’s friend, however, wants to keep the gag order in place.

TMZ suggests that what Allred is trying to get is evidence that Romney testified falsely about the value of his friend’s company so that his ex-wife would receive less in the divorce:

Multiple sources connected with the divorce tell TMZ … during Tom’s uber nasty divorce case with ex-wife Maureen, Mitt Romney gave a deposition and testified during the trial that Staples was worth virtually nothing. Romney testified that the company was worth very little and Tom was a dreamer and “the dream continues.”

Romney characterized the Staples stock as “overvalued,” adding, “I didn’t place a great deal of credibility in the forecast of the company’s future.”

Partly as a result of Romney’s testimony, Maureen got relatively little in the divorce, but we’re told just weeks after the divorce ended, Romney and Tom went to Goldman Sachs and cashed in THEIR stock for a fortune.

Even if Allred and TMZ’s sources are correct and the court releases the testimony, a decades old case compared to the expanding firestorm over Obama’s lies about Benghazi and his utter incompetency in failing to respond to the American defenders’ pleas for help is likely to offset any damage to Romney.

Mark Levin Suing EPA to Disclose Devastating Regulations it Intends to Implement After Election

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As we reported yesterday, the EPA has prepared numerous new regulations for implementation after the November election that would effectively destroy the US economy.

Today, the Daily Caller reports that Mark Levin’s legal group, Landmark Legal Foundation, is suing the EPA to force the agency to disclose what regulations it intends to implement after November:

Conservative radio talk show host Mark Levin’s legal group is suing the Environmental Protection Agency to obtain documents pertaining to the regulations the agency plans to implement after the election.

Levin’s law firm, the Landmark Legal Foundation, filed the lawsuit in federal court this week, seeking a court order directing the EPA to preserve and produce all records related to the agency’s regulatory plans after the presidential election.

The suit argues that news stories and political observers have indicated the EPA is “intentionally delaying the issuance of controversial new regulations until after the November election” with the possibility that “a) the Obama Administration is improperly politicizing EPA activities; b) EPA officials are attempting to shield their true policy goals from the public; and/or c) EPA officials themselves are putting partisan interests above the public welfare.”

In August, Landmark, via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, sought all the records dealing with rules and regulations from Jan. 1 to Aug. 17, 2012 that have not been finalized. The EPA acknowledged receipt of the request in August, but denied the group’s request to expedite the process.

Landmark appealed the denial, the EPA again refused to expedite the process this week.

Bill Clinton Pushing Hillary to Release Benghazi Documents That Would Destroy Obama’s Reelection Hopes (+video)

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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered additional security for the U.S. mission in Benghazi ahead of the terrorist attack but the orders were never carried out, according to “legal counsel” to Clinton who spoke to best-selling author Ed Klein. Those same sources also say former President Bill Clinton has been “urging” his wife to release official State Department documents that prove she called for additional security at the compound in Libya, which would almost certainly result in President Obama losing the election.

Appearing on TheBlazeTV’s “Wilkow!” on Wednesday night, Klein told host Andrew Wilkow that Bill and Hillary Clinton have been having “big fights” for “two or three weeks” about the issue, according to his two sources on Clinton’s legal counsel. While Bill Clinton wishes his wife would “exonerate” herself by releasing the documents that show she wasn’t at fault for the tragic security failure in Libya, the secretary of state refuses to do so because she doesn’t want to be viewed as a traitor to the Democratic party.

On Glenn Beck’s radio show earlier on Wednesday, Klein said his information comes from two “very good” sources.

Wilkow pointed out the obvious, that the Obamas and the Clintons have a “very behind the scenes, tense relationship” — to put it lightly.

“I said to you last night, and I think I stand corrected, that it seemed like Obama out-Clintoned the Clintons,” Wilkow said. “But Clinton seems to have gone along with all of this because he knew that Hillary would be exonerated in the end.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Here’s the interview with Ed Klein:

Glenn Beck: Benghazi Cover-Up is 1000 Times Worse Than Fast & Furious (+video)

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By Jason Howerton. During his show on TheBlazeTV Wednesday night, Glenn Beck said President Barack Obama has “crossed a line” concerning the “lies” about the terrorist attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi on Sept. 11. In fact, he claims “Benghazi-gate” is “Fast and Furious times 1,000.”

“I don’t think that we are going to have time to be able to get this out to the American people before the election, because the press is of no help,” Beck said. “You need to try to listen and get your friends to listen next door because this isn’t about politics. This truly is about the future of the country because we are in grave, grave danger.”

Beck explained that America has had three major scandals in the White House: Former President Richard Nixon’s Watergate, the Iran-Contra scandal with former President Ronald Reagan and former President Bill Clinton’s sex scandal with Monica Lewinsky.

But in those cases, “as the old catchphrase goes, When Clinton lied, no one died,” Beck said. In Benghazi, four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, were killed in a horrific manner.

Speaking from the model Oval Office in his Dallas studio, the host said “when you’re in this office” every lie told matters. Read more from this story HERE.

Here is a powerful, highly recommended video of less than two minutes that, in the Obama Administration’s own words, clearly lays out the lies on Benghazi:

Trump’s “Explosive” Announcement: $5 Million for Obama’s College Records (+video)

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In a much-hyped announcement, real estate mogul and reality television star Donald Trump pulled yet another flashy move on Wednesday offering a monetary incentive in exchange for private information from President Barack Obama’s past.

Trump, in a stunt designed to draw media attention and set afire the conservative blogosphere, said he would donate $5 million to charity if the president released his college records and passport applications.

“I have a deal for the president, a deal that I don’t believe he can refuse, and I hope he doesn’t. If Barack Obama opens up and gives his college records and applications and if he gives his passport applications and records, I will give to a charity of his choice – inner city children in Chicago, American Cancer Society, AIDS research, anything he wants–a check immediately for $5 million,” Trump said.

He added that the check will be written “within one hour” of the documents’ release and set a deadline of 5 p.m. on October 31, one week before Election Day…and also right as children are heading out the door to begin trick or treating on Halloween.

“Frankly it’s a check that I very much want to write,” he said. “I absolutely would be the most happy of all if I did in fact make this contribution through the president to the charities.” Read more from this story HERE.

Here’s Trump’s Tweet about the offer:

Here’s a CNN Interview with Trump about his $5 million charity offer: