Free Republic

Pundits are pointing to President Obama’s recent decline in public opinion polls, and saying that he may now become another “lame duck” president, unable to accomplish much during his final term in office. That has happened to other presidents. But it’s extremely unlikely to happen to this president. There are reasons why other presidents have become impotent during their last years in office. But those don’t apply to Obama.

Attorney General Eric Holder should be impeached if he refuses to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the targeting of tea party groups by the IRS, according to Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas). With the IRS claiming to have lost two years of former official Lois Lerner’s emails, Cruz is headed to the floor to introduce a resolution calling for the special prosecutor. “He’s going to say, if Attorney General Holder does not appoint a special prosecutor, he should be impeached,” a Cruz aide told National Review Online. “Eric Holder has been at the center of every big scandal in...

Imagine how much better off America’s veterans would be if the federal government spent more time delivering actual care and less time compiling tyrannical lists. The death-inducing secret waiting lists for patients are just the tip of the iceberg. Did you know, for example, that the VA keeps a database on “disgruntled” and “disruptive” vets that results in arbitrarily restricted care?

This picture of a banged-up Ferrari Enzo is enough to make any car lover shed a tear. The rare million-dollar vehicle was involved in a crash in Stamford, Connecticut on Monday when a mechanic took the sports car out for a ride and spun out of control. The car's owner, 71-year-old mattress company mogul Michael Fux, had placed the prized car in the care of Greenwich dealership Miller Motorcars.

It has been persuasively argued that President Obama is impeachable on many grounds. Having joked that he could do anything he wants, Obama is guilty of running roughshod over the Constitution, bypassing Congress and governing by executive decree, stuffing his administration with Muslim Brotherhood operatives, making common cause with America’s enemies and betraying its allies, promoting the global warming scam at enormous cost to the taxpayer, accepting illicit campaign donations, failing to defend U.S. soil against illegal border crossings (in direct contravention of Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution), being in contempt of federal court for his oil-drilling moratorium...

I run a data center. Disk drives that are left running continuously last between two and three years. Three years is about 36 months. The odds of a disk failing in any given month are roughly one in 36. The odds of two different drives failing in the same month are roughly one in 36 squared, or 1 in about 1,300. The odds of three drives failing in the same month is 36 cubed or 1 in 46,656. The odds of seven different drives failing in the same month is 37 to the 7th power = 1 in 78,664,164,096.

Forty-one years ago, during a small and largely ignored government scandal, a great mystery occurred. A group of determined congressional investigators, who had learned the president of the United States was running a voice-activated taping system in the Oval Office, pressed to get their hands on the tapes. The courts ruled in their favor. The White House had to hand over a number of tapes. But it turned out one of them, which was understood by the timeline to potentially be the key one, the one that might reveal exactly how the scandal began, turned out to have an 18½-minute...

According to most of the Morning Joe panel on Monday, the media is not doing its job covering the IRS scandal. As Mark Halperin opined, "I think with a different administration, one that was a Republican administration, this story would be a national obsession, and, instead, it's getting coverage here and a few other places. But it deserves a lot more questions."

[SNIP]...This section of Discover The Networks provides a timeline of this illegal, blatantly partisan practice by the IRS.

The timing is not merely suspicious, it is damning. [T]he alleged disappearance of Ms. Lerner's hard drive—and the fact that the missing conversations are those the former IRS director had with people outside the IRS—has suddenly resurrected, with force, the explosive possibility that she was chatting with Democrats who mattered. There's plenty of reason to believe she was. Just last week Congress discovered (via a subpoena to the Justice Department) emails showing that Ms. Lerner had conversations with Justice prosecutors about investigating conservative nonprofits. Who else in the Obama administration was Ms. Lerner talking to? I'm omitting all of the...

t's not like a player would ever forget winning the Super Bowl, but it's nice to have a giant diamond ring there to remind you. Seattle Seahawks owner Paul Allen revealed his team's ring. Unlike a lot of Super Bowl rings, it's kind of cool, or at least not overdone and as tacky as some of them are.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office has canceled the Washington Redskins trademark registration, calling the football team’s name “disparaging to Native Americans.” The landmark case, which appeared before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, was filed on behalf of five Native Americans. It was the second time such a case was filed.

A newly-declassified report reveals that two nuclear bombs accidentally dropped in North Carolina were much closer to detonation than previously reported. On January 21, 1961 a B-52 bomber went into a tailspin, breaking apart mid-flight over Goldsboro, N.C. The plane was carrying two nuclear bombs, both of which were pushed into free-fall. The parachute for one of the bombs was safely deployed, but the other continued to plummet. It had been previously believed that, though nerve-racking, the incident was not nearly as dangerous as it sounded as neither bomb was armed. But documents released Thursday by the National Security Archive...

Washington superlawyer Cleta Mitchell represents True the Vote, one of the groups illegally targeted by the IRS in the scandals that have exposed the agency as a partisan operation. True the Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht has been harassed by federal law enforcement authorities representing three different federal agencies. They represent the price of politics in the Age of Obama. Cleta has just served the letter below on the attorneys at the Department of Justice representing the IRS in True the Vote’s pending lawsuit referenced in the subject line below. She has also served the letter on Steptoe & Johnson partner Brigida...

So this explains all the Hillary-isms of late. We’ve been busy keeping up with all the crazy Hillary Clinton has been saying, like her “dead broke” comment, her “not equipped” explanation of Benghazi, and her chest-thumping “restored America’s leadership” boast. In a recent interview, she explained, “Maybe it’s the wonderful wealth of experience that I’ve now had. Maybe it’s because I’m totally done with being really careful with what to say because somebody might think this instead of that.” She continued, saying American politics could use more civil discussions. “Maybe I’m trying to model that. I don’t know, and it...

While answering a few questions on Tumblr this week, President Obama informed participants that “our levels of gun violence are off the charts.” He claimed that it was incomprehensible that congress hadn’t reacted to overwhelming public opinion and passed legislation to expand gun background checks, adding that nations like Australia had long ago enacted sensible gun control laws to stop mass shootings:

The New York Times today reports on a disturbing development at Bowdoin College: For 40 years, evangelicals at Bowdoin College have gathered periodically to study the Bible together, to pray and to worship. They are a tiny minority on the liberal arts college campus, but they have been a part of the school’s community, gathering in the chapel, the dining center, the dorms. After this summer, the Bowdoin Christian Fellowship will no longer be recognized by the college. Already, the college has disabled the electronic key cards of the group’s longtime volunteer advisers. … The students, who plan to meet...

The Tea Party is five years old this election season, which means it’s done teething and spitting up on itself, but still prone to temper tantrums, irrational outbursts and threats to take its toys and storm off if it doesn’t get its way. As a movement, it is down to a couple of former talk-radio hosts running for office in two states of the old Confederacy, Texas and Mississippi. And in the latter, the Senate candidate, Chris McDaniel, has given a keynote to a group that considers Abraham Lincoln a war criminal. It’s not hard to make the case that...

[SNIP]...Responses from more than 8,800 service members, their spouses, veterans and retirees to questions regarding Bergdahl's release show the military community would not forgive Bergdahl and want him held accountable if he willingly left his post on June 30, 2009...[SNIP]...About 95 percent of the more than 1,000 active duty, Guard and Reserve troops who responded to the survey said Bergdahl should face a court-martial or separate punishment if it is found he deserted his unit. If Bergdahl is convicted, 86 percent of survey respondents said Bergdahl should not receive back pay for the past five years. The voluntary survey was...

Death Penalty Month at anncoulter.com has already been interrupted by the psycho in Santa Barbara, and now it’s being interrupted by the Buddhist in Bagram. Keeping to the spirit of Death Penalty Month, let’s review the execution of Pvt. Eddie Slovik. Slovik’s offense: desertion in wartime. (See the tie-in?) Unlike Bowe Bergdahl, who deserted his unit, according to the accounts of his comrades, Slovik never actually deserted. He also didn’t call America a “disgusting” country or say he was “ashamed to be an American.” Slovik was just a chicken.