Free Republic

Karl Rove is now attacking Barack Obama’s record — as a senator. Appearing Thursday night on Fox News, the Republican strategist said he doesn’t know whether Obama “was paying much attention” while he served on the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee. “President Obama was a member of the Senate veterans committee. He very rarely showed up at those meetings,” Rove told “On The Record” host Greta Van Susteren. “It would be interesting for your staff to go take a look at that but he — these issues about scheduling and the backlog, these were discussed at Senate veterans committee meetings and...

The United States and Russia are approaching "a second Cold War," and President Barack Obama is to blame for the deteriorating relations between the countries, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said. In an interview with Bloomberg Television, Medvedev said Russia is preparing retaliatory steps in response to the sanctions the United States imposed on the country due to the escalation of conflict in Ukraine. "We are slowly but surely moving toward a second Cold War, which no one needs," Medvedev said. "Why am I saying this? Because a competent politician knows how to make reserved, careful subtle, wise, and intelligent...

Democrats running in November’s midterm elections are being advised to avoid using the economic recovery as a selling point since their core constituency – including women, blacks and Hispanics – are not really feeling the uptick, according to The New York Times. "As a start, Democrats should bury any mention of 'the recovery,'" said an April memo from Democratic polling firm Democracy Corps, which includes President Bill Clinton’s political strategists, James Carville and Stanley B. Greenberg. The memo instead encouraged Democrats to zero in on a "populist message comparing the fortunes of the top 1 percent with the struggles of...

With the news that Condoleeza Rice has been hounded from a commencement speaking engagement at Rutgers University by left-wing faculty and student protests on the grounds that Rice “had played ‘a prominent role in the administration’s effort to mislead the American people about the presence of weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq,” the question that haunted Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign must be asked again: can the Democratic base ever forgive her support for launching that war? The answer, in all likelihood, is that the Democratic Party’s base will forgive and forget – not only out of political expediency and...

House Oversight Committee head Darrell Issa slammed the State Department Thursday for using “slippery tactics” to weasel out of providing documents related to the 2012 Benghazi attack – and issued a new subpoena to haul Secretary of State John Kerry before the panel. The California Republican said he'd kept his part of a bargain – lifting an initial May 21 date for Kerry to go before the committee – but the State Department has "back tracked," The Hill reports. “With this State Department’s slippery tactics, it’s no wonder our friends in the world are losing faith in us and our...

The emails released by Judicial Watch showing that the IRS targeting of conservative groups was based in Washington also show that former IRS official Lois Lerner and others were getting direction from President Barack Obama's campaign, says Judicial Watch Director Chris Farrell. "It's very clear that she and the rest of the staff of the political operatives at the IRS are acting at the direction of people from the president's campaign," Farrell told J.D. Hayworth and John Bachman on "America's Forum" on Newsmax TV. "There's a concerted effort to suppress the president's political opposition, and that doesn't just happen in...

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says she won't decide whether Democrats will participate on the House select committee on Benghazi until after she has a meeting with Republican House Speaker John Boehner. She also says Boehner is "trying to avoid the meeting." But it was Boehner who suggested the meeting in the first place, Pelosi said Wednesday on CNN's "The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer." Democrats are divided on whether they should participate in the hearings, which they call a Republican witch hunt to hurt President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who is expected to make...

Mark Levin weighs in on the new emails revealing Washington DC’s hands in the IRS scandal as well as exposing how Carl Levin tried to pressure the IRS to prosecute conservative groups:

The IRS’ Washington, D.C. headquarters targeted conservative groups in part due to pressure from Democratic Sen. Carl Levin, according to emails obtained by the watchdog group Judicial Watch and reviewed by The Daily Caller. Levin, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs’ permanent subcommittee on investigations, wrote a March 30, 2012 letter to then-IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman discussing the “urgency” of the issue of possible political activity by nonprofit applicants. Levin asked if the IRS was sending out additional information requests to applicant groups and citing an IRS rejection letter to a conservative group as an example of...

When Barack Obama was running for the presidency, there were a number of people who warned he wasn’t ready for prime time – that he’d never really “done anything or run anything”. That he had never demonstrated any penchant for leadership at any time in his life, nor had he ever had any executive experience. That most of his adult life had been political campaigns for the next highest office – moving directly from one to the next with few if any accomplishments in-between. Those people were shouted down by their “betters” claiming Mr. Obama was hip, wicked smart, charming,...

Following May's presentation of the New York Meeting on Monday, former Democrat pollster and insider Pat Caddell called Benghazi the "biggest cover-up since Watergate" and said that the key to getting to the bottom of the Benghazi scandal is to "do what we did in Watergate, which is gather the facts … not go out and … hammer a political position." Caddell claimed that should the recently established select committee on Benghazi do what he had suggested, "This President and the Democrats will be in deep trouble. Democrats can’t afford to stand against the truth." The "bad guy" in the...

A leftover from yesterday via the Corner in case you missed it. I understand his reluctance: Having Congress send its own “police,” a.k.a. the sergeant-at-arms, to arrest a citizen is bad optics notwithstanding the merits of the contempt charge. It risks turning Lerner, the shadiest actor in the IRS scandal, into a media martyr “persecuted” by Republicans. Is it too much to ask, though, that Boehner relay the history of this power correctly in declining to use it? Contra what he says, the House has arrested people before, more than once. And it’s all perfectly legal. Congress’ “inherent contempt” power...

While some lawmakers have questions about what happened before or after the 2012 bombing of the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, Rep. Tom Cotton said he wants to know what President Barack Obama was doing during the attack. "As a former soldier myself, I particularly want to know what happened during the attacks. Why didn't the president send reinforcements from Tripoli, or from our fleet in the Mediterranean Sea, or even from Italy?" the Arkansas Republican said Monday on "Fox & Friends." While conceding that support forces "might not have reached Benghazi in time," Cotton said, "You just don't know...

A majority of Americans are in favor of a deeper investigation into the Internal Revenue Service for targeting the tea party and other conservatives, a new survey shows. Fifty-seven percent of likely American voters believe the Obama administration has not gone far enough in its probe into the scandal surrounding the agency’s officials giving special scrutiny to right-wing groups while processing their tax-exempt claims, according to Rasmussen Reports. A little more than one quarter of Americans, 28 percent, think the case should be closed, according to Rasmussen. The Justice Department and three congressional committees have been investigating the matter for...

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: I don't think you have to have a committee of seven experts. I think it is good to choose people who will not seek the limelight. The most important thing here is that the legitimacy of the committee will not come from the composition, but will come from its results. So, the Democrats imagine that if they boycott it will delegitimize it and the results will be ignored. Perhaps initially, but all the committee has to do is to discover new facts as we discovered a week and a half ago with the [Ben] Rhodes memo and that...

Even though President Obama has declared the innocence of all involved, we have much to learn about the illegal targeting of conservative/Tea Party groups applying for tax-exempt status. Lois Lerner is supposedly under investigation by the Department of Justice for this activity that coincidentally benefited the administration and seemed to be conducted with the administration’s interests at heart. Now we can add a few more items to be determined: The acting deputy U.S. attorney general in charge of overseeing ‘public integrity’ prosecutions testified Friday that he doesn’t know who’s in charge of the criminal investigation of Lois Lerner, the former...

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is well aware of her culpability leading to the Benghazi attack, but still won't come clean to the American people, says U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson. It was Johnson's grilling of Clinton in January 2013, in which he hammered away at the State Department's initial report that the attack was a reaction to an anti-Islam video — that prompted her infamous reply, "What difference at this point does it make?" "Some choose not to be honest with the American people … some choose not to provide all of the evidence when requested or subpoenaed by...

House Speaker John A. Boehner's selection of seven Republicans on a select committee to investigate the Benghazi attacks that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other diplomatic staff members in September 2012 reveals a mix of male and female lawmakers who bring a variety of experience and political power to the table. The committee, which is being led by Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., includes Republican Reps. Susan Brooks, Indiana; Jim Jordan, Ohio; Mike Pompeo, Kansas; Martha Roby, Alabama; Peter Roskam, Illinois; and Lynn Westmoreland, Georgia, reports The Washington Post. Boehner announced the committee earlier on Friday, including a message on...

The Benghazi investigation should go forward but with knowledge that it will face heavy partisan and media pushback. Democrats will argue—they already are—that with the country in crisis the attention of Congress should be turned to addressing the issue that weighs most on the public mind: a bad economy with the very top flourishing while the middle is stuck, stressed and sinking. That will not be a wholly effective line for Democrats. Their and the president's inability to work legislatively with Republicans the past 5½ years has left the American people understanding that nothing's going to get done in the...

You can read the full text of the letter she sent to Boehner at the Examiner. Fox News heard from its sources a few hours ago that she was thinking of appointing a single Dem to the committee, which makes sense. She and her caucus want to show people that they think it’s illegitimate, which counsels a boycott, but they also don’t want GOP members having a field day with Democratic witnesses on TV with no Dems on the committee to push back, which counsels participation. Obvious solution: Partial boycott. Let Elijah Cummings participate, rant about a witch hunt and...