Free Republic

The Obama administration’s Department of Justice shut down an attempt to force the Internal Revenue Service to search for Lois Lerner’s missing emails at off-site storage facilities. The IRS never looked for Lerner’s backup email tapes at the West Virginia storage facility where they were being housed. Treasury deputy inspector general Timothy Camus told Congress that the IRS never asked IT professionals at the New Martinsville, W.V. storage site for the backup tapes. Camus only found the backup tape for Lerner’s missing 2011 emails about two weeks ago. But the Obama administration knew that emails were stored at off-site facilities,...

A task force appointed by President Barack Obama to reform policing in the U.S. is recommending that the Department of Justice scrap an FBI database that gathers and maintains information on certain “immigration violators.” The recommendation, handed down by the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing in an interim report on Monday, pertains to FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database. NCIC is used by local law enforcement officers during traffic stops and other encounters with the public. The database, developed in 1967, allows officers to find out if the individuals are wanted for crimes in other jurisdictions. An...

RUSH: By the way, folks, just as I predicted, a bunch of liberals, a bunch of leftists have started learning what is in net neutrality, and they are unhappy. The Wall Street Journal has a headline: "Liberals Mugged by Obamanet -- Buyer's remorse is already setting in for Google and other 'net neutrality' proponents." You know what the one thing that none of these people ever figured on? None of them, none of these leftists ever dreamed Obama would do what they have now discovered is part of net neutrality. That is: The Regime is going to regulate content. They...

FASCIST STATE: Facebook Shuts Down Page Of Black 6th Grader Who Made Viral Video Questioning Obama’s Patriotism Excerpted from The Examiner: On Friday, C.J. Pearson, a 12-year-old conservative from Georgia who posted a viral video supporting Rudy Giuliani, discovered that his personal Facebook page was locked. In an exclusive interview with Examiner.com on Saturday, Pearson said he received a message from someone about 6 a.m. Friday. That’s when he learned his account and page had been locked for “suspicious activity.” He jumped through all of Facebook’s hoops, but wasn’t able to recover his account. So he created a new profile...

**SNIP** March 22: Jeanne Bishop will discuss her new book, "Change of Heart: Justice, Mercy, and Making Peace With My Sister's Killer," with Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. 4 p.m., Seminary Co-op Bookstore, 5751 S. Woodlawn Ave., semcoop.com, 773-752-4381

Harry Reid swaps shades for frosted lenses as Nancy Pelosi dons dark sunglasses in solidarity with her bruised colleague Comedy on Capitol Hill - the intentional kind, anyway - is pretty rare. But House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi got chuckles Thursday when she started a news conference by donning dark glasses, a teasingly sympathetic gesture to the man standing next to her, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. 'I brought my glasses to be like Harry, but he switched on me,' Pelosi said, removing her shades.

In an exit interview, the attorney general says his critics may be partly driven by race.

EXCLUSIVE: A senior State Department official in charge of federal counterterrorism programs was arrested Tuesday afternoon for allegedly soliciting sex from a minor, Fox News has learned. Fairfax County Police officials say Daniel Rosen was arrested by a county detective about noon at his Washington, D.C. home after he allegedly sought to arrange sex with a minor. The detective, a female officer working in the county's Child Exploitation Unit, had been posing as the minor in online exchanges with Rosen, police said. ·

"....In Walker's defense, Tim Graham of the Media Research Center (“Exposing and Combating Liberal Media Bias”) offers this exegesis: “Walker, the son of a Protestant minister, hears the question very differently: asking if someone is a Christian is a very personal question, asking whether someone has committed themselves to Jesus in their heart. It’s like asking if he knows how often Obama prays. His reluctance to answer for someone he doesn’t know is not a ‘No.’ " Nice try, but the political context of the question was clear and it’s the one Milbank mentioned: the conviction that “Obama is a...

For years, rape kits piled up in Houston. Thousands and thousands of swaps, running back almost 30 years, sat untested. Victims heard nothing. Perpetrators went on with their lives and, in some cases, committed further crimes. Eventually, there were nearly 6,700 kits waiting to be processed.

[Editor's note: The original copy of this article incorrectly identified Rep. Ellison as a Democrat from Wisconsin. The oversight has been corrected, and a formal apology has been sent to the people of Wisconsin.]Forget about the Tuesday following the first Monday of November… Let’s just run an online poll for future public elections. Maybe we can set up a phone bank, kinda like PBS donation drives, for people without access to the internet. Heck, let’s just do a show of hands: Hillary or Jeb for 2016?Okay, that might be a slight over-simplification of what Representative Keith Ellison (D-MN) was suggesting, but...

Talk about bad timing. Echo Lake Entertainment is set to release its independent film, Truth, the story of former CBS anchor Dan Rather’s self-destruction. It’s based on the 2006 book Truth and Duty: The Press, The President, and the Privilege of Power by Mary Mapes, the discredited CBS producer. Mapes documents and defends Rather’s 2004 attempts to use the forged “Killian documents” to portray former President George W. Bush as someone who shirked duty in Vietnam.

Speaking today in Iowa, Vice President Joe Biden called out to his "old butt buddy" Neil Smith, wondering whether his friend was in attendance for his speech:

What a snob! On today's Morning Joe, Howard Dean, a product of fancy prep schools and Yale, suggested that Scott Walker was unfit to be president because his lack of a college degree rendered him "unknowledgeable." Dean's disdain for the un-diplomaed came during a discussion of Walker having declined, during his recent trip to the UK, to state whether he believes in evolution. Joe Scarborough was incredulous at Dean's diss, pointing out that people such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg never finished college. To which list could be added super-successful and knowledgeable people from Rush Limbaugh to Steve Jobs,...

Prince Andrew Sex Scandal: Virginia Roberts claims FBI have videos of her having sex with high-profile people **SNIP** Addressing 200 leading figures from the worlds of business and politics, the 54-year-old said: "I just wish to reiterate and to reaffirm the statements which have already been made on my behalf by Buckingham Palace." The latest revelations come a week after Epstein hit out at 'outlandish attacks' by the 'gossip media' over the case. The former financier was jailed for 18 months in 2008 for soliciting paid sex with minors under a secret deal which saw more serious federal charges dropped....

There are understandable differences of opinion between the American and Israel leaders on the issue of Islamist terrorism. It is wholly appropriate and desirable that they should be heard in the U.S. Congress. It is therefore painful that some honorable Democratic members of Congress should be so misguided as to declare that they will not attend the Israeli leader’s address. John Lewis (Georgia), a hero of the civil rights movement, G.K. Butterfield (North Carolina), chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, and Eric Blumenauer (Oregon) are among those who are engaging in what is tantamount to a boycott of Israel. According...

Brian Williams said on Saturday that he was stepping aside from the daily broadcast of NBC’s “Nightly News” for the next several days, after admitting that he had misled the public about being on a helicopter that was forced down in Iraq. In a memo to the NBC News staff, Mr. Williams said that Lester Holt, the anchor for “Dateline,” would step in as the network dealt with the issue. “In the midst of a career spent covering and consuming news, it has become painfully apparent to me that I am presently too much a part of the news, due...

At the National Prayer Breakfast, President Obama reminded attendees that violence rooted in religion isn’t exclusive to Islam, but has been carried out by Christians as well. ~snip~ “Unless we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” Obama said. “In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

On January 26th, the Union Theological Seminary hosted a new event called the Congressional Faith Orientation on Capitol Hill. At the event, five democrat legislators spoke about how their faith influences their work in the legislature. According to the Christian Post, the representatives included, Sheila Jackson Lee, R-Texas, Emanuel Cleaver, D-Missouri, and James Clyburn, D-South Carolina. In the past, these lawmakers have opposed pro- life legislation, and at the orientation a few of them argued against cutting funding of Planned Parenthood. In their opinion, it is ok for Christians to collaborate with the abortion giant because they are dedicated to...

A bitter partisan battle is developing among members of the House committee investigating the 2012 Benghazi attack chaired by Rep. Trey Gowdy and Democrats bent on limiting access to witnesses. And a potential clash between Gowdy and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is waiting in the wings.The Democratic members, headed by Maryland’s Elijah Cummings, seek veto power over the committee’s subpoenas and object to Gowdy’s examination of witnesses by only the GOP members.The Democrats would rather debate the matter than hear what the witnesses have to say.Gowdy, a former South Carolina prosecutor, knows that giving Democrats veto power over...