IRS Agent: Keep Faith to Yourself (+video)

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

An Internal Revenue Service agent was recorded on audiotape telling a pro-life organization that they had to remain neutral on the issue of abortion and lectured the group’s president about forcing its religious beliefs on others.

“You have to know your boundaries,” IRS agent Sherry Wan can be heard telling Ania Joseph, president of the Pro-Life Revolution. “You have to know your limits. You have to respect other people’s beliefs.”

The Alliance Defending Freedom said Joseph recorded the March 8, 2012 conversation during a two-year battle with the IRS to obtain tax-exempt status.

“You have the religious freedom; the freedom of speech,” Wan told the pro-life president. “And other people also have the civil rights; human rights. You cannot, you know, use your religious belief to tell other people you don’t have a belief. So I don’t believe you need the right to do this.”

ADF attorney Erik Stanley said the actions of the IRS are simply unconstitutional.

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NSA Recording US Calls Since at Least 2008: Transformers Actor Tells Jay Leno That FBI Agent Played Phone Recording of Him 5 Years Ago (+video)

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Photo Credit: TIZIANA FABI/AFP/GettyImages

The leaks of previous whistleblowers have been recalled and compared to that of the former government contractor who leaked to the media classified documents of the NSA’s collecting of metadata from phone conversations. But these previous whistleblowers aren’t the only ones who tried to warn of government spying.

Hollywood actor Shia LaBeouf in 2008 during an appearance on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno detailed how he learned phone calls were allegedly being recorded.

Promoting the film “Eagle Eye,” which according to IMDb shows how “technology of everyday life [is used] to track and control,” LaBeouf told Leno that an FBI consultant for the movie said one in five phone calls made are recorded and logged.

“And I laughed at him,” LaBeouf said.

“And then he played back a phone conversation I’d had two years prior to joining the picture,” LaBouf continued.

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Obama: ‘We Don’t Want to Tax All Businesses Out of Business’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: AP

President Barack Obama says Democrats “don’t want to tax all businesses out of business.”

“I know that there are a few Republicans here in the audience,” Obama said Friday at a fundraiser for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign in Palo Alto, Ca. “If you talk to us, it turns out we’re pretty common-sense folks.

“We don’t think government can do everything,” he said. “We don’t think that top-down solutions are the right way to go. We believe in the free market. We believe in a light touch when it comes to regulations.”

“We don’t want to tax all businesses out of business,” Obama said. “But we do think that there’s a role to play for government.”

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Glenn Beck’s Passionate Defense of NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden: ‘He has Issued Himself a Death Warrant’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: The Blaze

Glenn Beck on his radio show Monday passionately defended Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower who leaked explosive classified information on the federal government’s massive surveillance programs.

“At least what he is doing is an act of heroism,” Beck said of Snowden. “What he is doing, coming out and speaking to the press, he has issued himself a death warrant.”

“He’s at least lost his life, and he may have his life taken from him,” he added.

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Tense: Ed Henry Confronts Jay Carney on Obama Statements During White House Press Conference (+video)

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White House press secretary Jay Carney clashed with both Fox News Chief White House correspondent Ed Henry and CBS News correspondent Major Garrett during Monday’s afternoon briefing.

Both intense exchanges surrounded the federal government’s data collection of phone and internet records and the administration’s handling of the issue.

Carney’s back-and-forth with Henry was the most notable. The journalist asked a number of pointed questions, especially about Obama’s claim on Friday that “every member of Congress” had been briefed on the NSA’s program involving monitoring of phone calls and Internet service.

“Why then are not just Republicans but Democrats like Keith Ellison saying ‘I’ve heard nothing about this.’?”

Carney responded by saying he couldn’t speak to “individual members,” and then launched into a prepared statement saying that the chair and ranking members had made clear that “every member” had been “advised of this” and “had the opportunity for briefings.”

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Ron Paul: ‘Thankful’ for Edward Snowden (+video)

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Former Rep. Ron Paul of Texas praised NSA leaker Edward Snowden for his part in exposing how much information the government has been collecting from private citizens.

“We should be thankful for individuals like Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald who see injustice being carried out by their own government and speak out, despite the risk,” Paul said in a statement posted on the website of Campaign for Liberty, a nonprofit political organization which focuses on educating about constitutional issues, which he chairs. “They have done a great service to the American people by exposing the truth about what our government is doing in secret.”

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Snowden: US Intelligence Would Have Killed to Stop Me; Greatest Danger to Freedom is our Omniscient State (+video)

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Edward Joseph Snowden, 29, knew full well the risks he had undertaken and the awesome powers that would soon be arrayed to hunt for him… Snowden was spilling some of the most sensitive secrets of a surveillance apparatus he had grown to detest. By late last month, he believed he was already “on the X” — exposure imminent.

“I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions, and that the return of this information to the public marks my end,” he wrote in early May, before we had our first direct contact. He warned that even journalists who pursued his story were at risk until they published.

The U.S. intelligence community, he wrote, “will most certainly kill you if they think you are the single point of failure that could stop this disclosure and make them the sole owner of this information”…

I asked him, at the risk of estrangement, how he could justify exposing intelligence methods that might benefit U.S. adversaries.

“Perhaps I am naive,” he replied, “but I believe that at this point in history, the greatest danger to our freedom and way of life comes from the reasonable fear of omniscient State powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents.” The steady expansion of surveillance powers, he wrote, is “such a direct threat to democratic governance that I have risked my life and family for it.”

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Congressman: IRS Case is Solved; Time to Move On

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Representative Elijah Cummings says based upon everything he has seen, the IRS case is “solved.” He believes it is time to wrap up the case and move on.

Never mind the fact that the DC ringleader of the IRS fiasco has yet to be identified, while lower level agents are being “thrown under the bus.”

And never mind the fact that no one has really been punished for the overt political targeting of conservatives, including Tea Party and Christian groups.

Representative Cummings is the poster child for what Congress has single digit approval ratings among the American public.

Liberal Pundit: U.S. Has Become an ‘Authoritarian Surveillance State’ (+video)

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Paul Krugman, an outspoken liberal economist known for his support of the Obama administration, today said the United States has become an ‘authoritarian surveillance state.’

Part of a panel on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Krugman offered his take on the bombshell NSA spying revelations:

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Paul Wants to Lead Supreme Court Challenge to Fed’s Tracking of Americans’ Calls, Emails (+video)

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Sen. Rand Paul said Sunday he wants to mount a Supreme Court challenge to the federal government logging Americans’ phone calls and Internet activities.

Paul, R-Ky., a leading voice in the Libertarian movement, told “Fox News Sunday” he wants to get enough signatures to file a class-action lawsuit before the high court and will appeal to younger Americans, who appear to be advancing the cause of less government and civil liberties.

“I’m going to be asking all the Internet providers and all of the phone companies: Ask your customers to join me in a class-action lawsuit,” he said. “If we get 10 million Americans saying we don’t want our phone records looked at, then maybe someone will wake up and something will change in Washington.”

Paul, a first-term senator and potential 2016 Republican presidential candidate, said he disagrees with President Obama’s argument that the National Security Agency collecting 3 billion calls daily and other information is a modest invasion of privacy.

“That doesn’t look like a modest invasion of privacy,” he told Fox. “I have no problem if you have probable cause … but we’re talking about trolling through a billion phone records a day.”

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