Free Republic

Eric Holder should be impeached from the office of Attorney General, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) declared http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Cruz-Holder-Lerner-IRS/2014/04/11/id/565100/?ns_mail_uid=55029093&ns_mail_job=1564099_04112014&promo_code=yvrdjwg6#textSize on Thursday. If Holder fails to seek indictments of IRS manager Lois Lerner and others responsible for targeting groups and individuals for their political views, Cruz says Congress should impeach Holder. However, Cruz does not go far enough. Federal law requires the U.S. Attorney General to now prosecute himself for criminal contempt. Eric Holder was held in criminal contempt of Congress by the US House of Representatives on June 28, 2012, for refusing to provide documents concerning the “Fast and Furious” gun-running...

Deserts always feel like my natural habitat, and I am very fond of them. That being said, I have, for my sins, spent a fair amount of time in Clark County, Nev., and it is not the loveliest stretch of desert in these United States, or even in the top twelve. Protecting the pristine beauty of the sun-baked and dust-caked outskirts of Las Vegas and its charismatic fauna from grazing cattle — which the Bureau of Land Management seems to regard as an Old Testament plague — seems to me to be something less than a critical national priority. At...

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter joined nine other Nobel Peace Laureates in sending a strongly worded letter to President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry, urging them not to approve construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline. The letter opened as follows: "You stand on the brink of making a choice that will define your legacy on one of the greatest challenges humanity has ever faced – climate change. As you deliberate the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, you are poised to make a decision that will signal either a dangerous commitment to the status quo, or bold leadership that...

Dan Patrick and Julian Castro Immigration Debate http://kut.org/post/rewatch-dan-patrick-and-julian-castro-immigration-debate BY MATT LARGEY 4/15/2014 KUT.ORG State Senator and GOP Lt. Governor candidate Dan Patrick faced off against San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro in a televised debate over immigration tonight at 6pm. The debate was moderated by the Texas Tribune's Evan Smith.

This Incredible New Footage Shows How Close Bundy Standoff Came To A Massacre The inside story of how one New Yorker may have kept the Bundy protestors from a bloody end Documentary filmmaker Dennis Michael Lynch was at the Bundy Ranch front line and has never seen that type of force at the border where drugs and people are routinely smuggled across.

War on the West: Why More Bundy Standoffs Are Coming 15 April 2014 The recent standoff between the BLM and rancher Cliven Bundy is a symptom of the exasperation of citizens in the Western states over the federal government's massive and oppressive footprint affecting all aspects of their lives.... Full Story:http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/18056-war-on-the-west-why-more-bundy-standoffs-are-coming

A common concern among Article V opponents is fear that a convention of the states to propose constitutional amendments will result in an oppressive constitution. All we need to do is enforce the constitution we have. Elect the right people to implement our written constitution and all will be well. As logical and appealing as that approach appears to be, it ignores some horrible realities, and actually promotes our headlong dive into tyranny, for the anti-constitution, the unwritten Frankenstein constitution rules. First, aside from the occasional heat politicians take from an outraged populace, our legislative and executive branches in the...

Less than a minute into his speech at the Boston marathon bombing memorial on Tuesday, Vice President Joe Biden went tragically off script and told the crowd of Boston bombing survivors that "it was worth it."

Chapter 3 of the Vienna Document is designed to reduce risk of international conflicts through "exchanging information on defense policy, force planning, budgets, procurements, and calendars." In other words, OSCE members now believe that the movement and position of Russian troops in eastern Europe constitutes an unusual situation, and one of which the international community has not been properly informed. http://pressimus.com/Interpreter_Mag/press/2339

Fox News toured the damage -- allegedly caused by the Bureau of Land Management -- which included holes in water tanks and destroyed water lines and fences. According to family friends, the bureau's hired "cowboys" also killed two prize bulls.

Top House conservatives are pressuring Republican leaders to bring an ObamaCare replacement bill to a vote by the August recess. Conservatives cheered when Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) pledged a vote during the House GOP’s annual retreat in January, viewing the commitment as a central element of the party’s vow to be “the alternative party” and not merely stand in opposition to President Obama. Yet 10 weeks later, party leaders have given no indication when they might present a plan or what form it will take. Conservatives like Rep. Steve Scalise (La.), chairman of the Republican Study Committee (RSC), are...

(CNN) – Hoping to help close the gap between workers' skills and the needs of businesses, President Barack Obama on Wednesday will announce he's putting hundreds of millions toward job training programs that produce highly skilled workers. Obama and Vice President Joe Biden will head to a community college in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania to make the announcement. The funding will come in two parts: $500 million toward a new job training competition that pairs community colleges with businesses, and $100 million for new apprenticeship programs to train workers. The White House says the new initiatives are meant to combat a...

A well-loved Maryland supermarket is being forced to limit the amount of full time workers they hire because of the harsh mandates imposed by Obamacare. Snider’s Superfoods, family owned and operated since 1946, says that they will not be hiring any new baggers or cashiers in order to avoid the 50 worker threshold, which under the new Obamacare stipulations, would require that they provide health insurance if they employ 50 or more full time workers. …

Federal systems remained vulnerable to hackers even after researchers identified the bug. Google knew about a critical flaw in Internet security, but it didn't alert anyone in the government. Neel Mehta, a Google engineer, first discovered "Heartbleed"—a bug that undermines the widely used encryption technology OpenSSL—some time in March. A team at the Finnish security firm Codenomicon discovered the flaw around the same time. Google was able to patch most of its services—such as email, search, and YouTube—before the companies publicized the bug on April 7. The researchers also notified a handful of other companies about the bug before going...

In Congress, the vulnerability of the power grid has emerged as among the most pressing domestic security concerns. ... Crain, the owner of a small tech firm in Raleigh, N.C., along with a research partner, found penetrating transmission systems used by dozens of utilities to be startlingly easy. After they shared their discovery with beleaguered utility security officials, the Homeland Security Department began sending alerts to power grid operators, advising them to upgrade their software. The alerts haven't stopped because Crain keeps finding new security holes he can exploit. "There are a lot of people going through various stages of...

Sending scores of armed agents along with helicopters and dogs to confront an elderly Nevada rancher over grazing fees may seem like overkill, but critics say it’s not inconsistent with the federal government’s recent approach to environmental enforcement. The simmering truce between the Bundys and the Bureau of Land Management comes after high-profile raids last year by armed federal agents on small-time gold miners in tiny Chicken, Alaska, and guitar makers at the Gibson Guitar facilities in Tennessee. That doesn’t include more subtle threats, such as recent efforts by the Obama administration to raise grazing fees or pressure permit holders...

The U.S. government does not represent the interests of the majority of the country's citizens, but is instead ruled by those of the rich and powerful, a new study from Princeton and Northwestern Universities has concluded. The report, "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens" (PDF), used extensive policy data collected between 1981 and 2002 to empirically determine the state of the U.S. political system.

That honor now goes to New Jersey. Tax reforms passed in the latest budget represent big improvements for corporations, but not so much for individuals. ... Still, New York remains a burdensome place to earn a living. The reforms did not change the state's poor rankings for having high sales taxes (No. 38), individual income taxes (No. 49) and unemployment taxes (No. 45). Meanwhile, the governor announced Tuesday that the state tax department collected nearly $4 billion in evaded taxes in the past year, a 5% or $200 million increase compared to the year earlier.The state collects about $87 billion...

I have never paid close attention to the massive federal Bureau of Land Management. I'm an East Coast guy; never been West, where the BLM is a much, much bigger name, and, for some, a bigger headache. The BLM, according to its website, tends to a huge amount of turf: 258 million surface acres of the United States. It sees to the mineral rights of 700 million acres. The latter number is 13 percent of the total land acreage of the United States. Yet, by its own count, BLM only manages 40 percent of the territory actually owned by the...

Many say Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid could easily arrange for his home state to get back most of the 84 percent of Nevada territory owned and controlled by the federal government. So does the Democrat represent the interests of Nevada, or does he put the interests of the U.S. government and the Democratic Party over his own stateÂ’s needs?Nevada would get what it deserves if Reid drafted a measure to treat Nevada the same way as other states. The Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives would eagerly vote to treat Nevada like a grown-up. Instead, Reid runs the U.S. Senate...