Free Republic

Time managing editor Rick Stengel's decision to join the Obama administration is just the latest example of a new trend among mainstream media journalists who are making it official by officially joining the Obama administration. Stengel, who is joining the State Department, is just one of 15 (or 19) who have given up a career in journalism to join Obama's crusade to fundamentally transform America:

The U.S. Justice Department announced Thursday that it will challenge Texas’s Voter ID law, saying it violates the Voting Rights Act, as well as the Constitution’s 14th and 15th Amendments. (snip) The department’s complain[t] alleges that the Texas Voter ID law “was adopted with the purpose, and will have the result, of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group.”

...........Officials said the indictment alleges Solis lived in Brownsville during the runoff election and cast five votes by absentee ballot in the names of five different people. Authorities did not release what candidate received the votes............

Speaking with Laura Ingraham this afternoon, George Stephanopoulos addressed Republican Sen. Rand Paul‘s suggestion that the ABC host purposely aided the Obama White House in driving the “war on women” narrative of 2012. In an interview with Geraldo Rivera last week, Sen. Paul asserted that Stephanopoulos’ “obscure” question about contraception during a GOP debate might hint that the newsman colluded with the Obama campaign to generate the resultant “war on women” narrative.

In their efforts to promote the re-election of Barack Obama, our nation's premier law enforcement agencies presented false data to the American public about a "crackdown" on mortgage fraud. Fox News reports: The Justice Department and FBI have quietly acknowledged they grossly overstated the scope of a mortgage fraud crackdown, which the administration heralded with much fanfare a few weeks before last year's presidential election. According to a memo circulated by the FBI and a correction posted online by the Justice Department, the number of defendants, the number of victims and the size of the losses are, in reality, a...

Embattled Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner sent official documents from her government e-mail address to a personal account, according to House Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa and his colleague, Ohio congressman Jim Jordan. “This raises some serious questions concerning your use of a non-official e-mail account to conduct official business,” the GOP lawmakers wrote in a letter to Lerner demanding all documents from her non-official account for the period between January 2008 and the present. “Additional documents related to the Committee’s investigation may exist in these non-official accounts over which you have some control, and the lack of access...

On a number of occasions I've noted that the Obama administration has taken a schizophrenic approach to the raid that led to the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden. On the one hand, the administration refuses to release the bin Laden death photos and the details of the reportedly honorific burial the terrorist mastermind received at sea. Why? Because the information might harm our nation's security by getting al Qaeda terrorists upset. On the other hand, administration officials have improperly leaked information to two Hollywood filmmakers behind the film Zero Dark Thirty because the film was initially timed to...

A new video shows Lois Lerner talking about the pressure being brought to bear on the IRS to halt GOP money going into the 2010 election: Newly uncovered video shows Lois Lerner discussing the political pressure that swirled around the IRS in 2010. Lerner says "everyone" was "screaming at" the IRS to stop the flood of money pouring into the 2010 elections through 501(c)(4) groups as a result of Citizens United. Lerner spoke to a small group at Duke's Sanford School of Public Policy on October 19, 2010, just two weeks before the wave election that brought the Tea Party...

The Obama administration embarked on a new strategy on Thursday to challenge voting laws it says discriminate by race, an effort to counter a Supreme Court ruling last month that freed states from the strictest federal oversight. Attorney General Eric Holder vowed to start in Texas, a conservative stronghold. Texas' voter ID law requires voters to show a photo ID before casting a ballot, a measure its supporters, mostly Republicans, said is necessary to prevent fraud. Democrats said it would disproportionately affect the poor and minorities because even getting a free photo ID would require travel to a state office...

The Obama appointee implicated in congressional testimony in the IRS targeting scandal met with President Obama in the White House two days before offering his colleagues a new set of advice on how to scrutinize tea party and conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status. IRS chief counsel William Wilkins, who was named in House Oversight testimony by retiring IRS agent Carter Hull as one of his supervisors in the improper targeting of conservative groups, met with Obama in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on April 23, 2012. Wilkins’ boss, then-IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman, met with Obama on April...

On Tuesday, William W. Taylor III, attorney for Lois Lerner, the IRS official at the center of the Tea Party targeting scandal who invoked her Fifth amendment rights before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on May 22, set forward his client's hard line conditions to return and testify openly before the committee."They can obtain her testimony tomorrow by doing it the easy way … immunity. That’s the way to resolve all of this," he told Politico.Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH), a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee was unimpressed. "We hope she comes in and gives us the truth...

This week’s Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder overturned Section 4(b) of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which mandated federal oversight of changes in voting procedure in jurisdictions that have a history of using a “test or device” to impede enfranchisement. Here is one example of such a test, used in Louisiana in 1964.

Rev. Jesse Jackson slammed the Supreme Court’s decision on the Voting Rights Act saying that civil rights activists have “bled too much” to be “stabbed in the heart” this way. “The right to vote is too precious. We’ve bled too much, we’ve died too young, the price has been too great to now watch it be stabbed in the heart by the Supreme Court today,” the civil rights leader told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Tuesday. Jackson urged President Obama to use his executive power to convene Congress and make a case to set the record straight on the court’s ruling...

Mitch McConnell delivered a speech today at the American Enterprise Institute to officially signal that the IRS scandal has entered its post-fact phase. When the IRS first revealed that its Cincinnati office had attempted to enforce its nonprofit laws using a search function that disproportionately impacted conservatives, Republicans were certain it must have come from the White House. They were going to follow the facts. But all of the facts point in the same direction, which is that the Obama administration had nothing to do with it at all. That was the conclusion of the agency’s inspector-general report, as well...

A manager from a U.S. Internal Revenue Service office in Cincinnati where staff have been accused of unfairly subjecting conservative groups to extra scrutiny has said his agents were not influenced by any political agenda. John Shafer, who described himself as "a conservative Republican," told congressional investigators he sought advice from his boss on how to handle the first Tea Party application he and a lower-level agent came across in February 2010 because it was a new, high-profile issue. The furor since then has led to the ousting of the IRS chief by President Barack Obama, an FBI investigation and...

Internal Revenue Service employees in Ohio, who singled out conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status for extra scrutiny, likely did not consider the political implications, an IRS official in Washington has told congressional investigators. Providing additional details about the worst crisis to hit the IRS in years, tax agency official Holly Paz told investigators she was concerned when she learned that IRS employees were singling out groups with "Tea Party" and other key words in their names. Paz is the most senior IRS official to be extensively interviewed by investigators. A mid-level official in Washington before she was put on...

The President has put in place an organization with the kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life," Representative Maxine Waters told Roland Martin on Monday. "That's going to be very, very powerful," Waters said. "That database will have information about everything on every individual on ways that it's never been done before

Former head of the IRS Douglas Shulman made a multitude of visits to the White House during his tenure Top IRS officials, whose agency was under investigation for targeting conservative groups, visited the Obama White House more than 100 times over two years while the probe was going on, far more often than in previous administrations and frequently enough that Republicans suspect White House officials knew about the targeting. Lawmakers now investigating the Internal Revenue Service practice zeroed in on those nearly weekly White House meetings to determine whether an IRS official — or someone higher up in the administration...

full title.....Chelsea Clinton puts her religious roots to academic use as she lands new job as 'multifaith' leader at New York University Chelsea Clinton, who is a member of the United Methodist Church, has landed a new job at New York University as co-founder and co-chair of its brand-new 'multifaith initiative,' Of Many Institute. The 33-year-old's role, which is yet to be formerly announced, will aim to develop multifaith dialogue and 'support a new generation of religious and civic leaders who. . . [will] reach across faith boundaries to solve social problems together,' explains the NYU website.

WASHINGTON — Senior Treasury officials were made aware in June 2012 that investigators were looking into complaints from tea party groups that they were being harassed by the Internal Revenue Service, a Treasury inspector general said, disclosing that Obama administration officials knew there was a probe during the heat of the presidential campaign. J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration, testifying alongside ousted IRS head Steven Miller on Friday, said he had told the department's general counsel about his investigation on June 4, 2012, and Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin "shortly thereafter." But, George cautioned, those discussions...