Free Republic

Our self-described most transparent administration in history is at it again. The folks who claim executive privilege over documents in the Fast and Furious case yet maintain the president wasn’t involved have decided transparency is overrated. The people who meet with lobbyists in coffee shops near the White House to keep unseemly names off the official visitor logs, have decided we don’t need to know who pays for their convention. The Washington Post reports, “In its marketing materials, the party promises that the “people’s convention,”…will be the “most open and accessible ever.” But the names of donors, some of whom...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Let me see if I understand this. On the one hand, we have over here "Barack Hussein Obama! Mmm! Mmm! Mmm!" who has (with the help of his party, the Democrat Party) unleashed untold damage on America, particularly the private sector economy. We have somebody who's created a new entitlement, which is going to fundamentally forever change the relationship between citizen and government in a way never contemplated by the Founding Fathers of our country. We have rampant unemployment, underemployment -- more part-time and temporary workers getting jobs than are getting full-time jobs. We have no end...

Scoffing at a judge’s call for Barack Obama to appear in court Thursday, Obama attorney Michael Jablonski says that not only will the president not be on hand but neither will Jablonski.

Why is he doing this? Is his campaign really that incompetent? Having successfully shut down scrutiny in the primaries (but not the general election) of his Bain record with unfounded cries of “Newt’s attacking capitalism and free markets,” Romney is back to what started it all, the demand that Newt give back the money he lawfully earned through consulting with Freddie Mac. As Morrissey notes, Newt’s campaign already has diffused another line of Romney’s Freddie Mac attack, quickly asking for the release of his consulting contract before the Florida primary. Romney will go on the offensive at tonight’s debate demanding...

President Obama plans to head out on a 3 day trip arriving in Las Vegas Wednesday afternoon and staying overnight well into Thursday. That afternoon he will leave for Denver and then Detroit. The president plans to promote his State of the Union address. With this action, President Obama intends to ignore a legal judicial subpoena from the state of Georgia requesting him, by name, to appear in court January 26th 2012 at 9am in Judge Michael Malihi's courtroom. Barack Obama's attempt as a candidate to be on the state ballot in Georgia has been officially legally challenged by state...

Reporting from Florence, S.C.— Newt Gingrich on Tuesday questioned why Mitt Romney has not released his tax returns, arguing that if the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination has nothing to hide, he ought to make the documents public before South Carolina holds its first-in-the-South primary on Saturday. "Either there's nothing there, so why isn't he releasing them, or there's something there, so why is he hiding them?" Gingrich told reporters here after holding a town hall at an art gallery. "I believe we have the right to know. Therefore, he owes us the knowledge. If there's nothing there, why...

After weeks of stalling, Mitt Romney did an about-face on Tuesday and said he will release his tax returns in April and that they will show he pays close to 15 percent of his income in taxes. Romney, a multimillionaire, has been under pressure from his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination and others to release the information. He'd previously said he wouldn't release it. He suggested Tuesday that he would make public only one year's worth of information, for 2011. Speaking to reporters after a campaign stop in South Carolina, Romney said most of his income comes from investments,...

In 1968, when he decided to run for president, the only serious debate at the time was whether George W. Romney was a natural-born citizen under Article 2, Section 1, not whether or not he was a U.S. citizen. Mitt Romney, then, was born on March 12, 1947, in Detroit, Mich., to two U.S. citizen parents – George W. Romney and Lenore Emily LaFount; LaFount was a U.S. citizen, born on Nov. 9, 1908, in Logan, Utah. Interestingly, LaFount, even though she was a U.S. citizen under the 14th Amendment because she was born in the United States and considered...

(MYRTLE BEACH, S.C.) -- Amid continued pressure from his rivals to make public his tax returns, Mitt Romney said at a Republican presidential candidates debate Monday night that he will "probably" release that information in April. That timetable is in line with tradition of past nominees, who have released their information around tax day in early April. "I have nothing in them that suggests there is any problem," he said. "I'm happy to do so." Romney had said as recently as last Wednesday that he doesn't feel the need to do anything more than the law requires him to do,...

MYRTLE BEACH, SC - Texas Governor Rick Perry is demanding Mitt Romney release his tax records, warning there can't be any surprises should the GOP front-runner become the party's nominee. "Anita and I put out our taxes every year since back the 80s, and every candidate up there, they should put their taxes out, including Mitt," Perry insisted during a town hall meeting. "You know, November, or excuse me, September and October, is not the time for us to be finding out that whoops, there's something out there that is a problem. We need to know it now." Perry has...

The obstacles in Barack Obama's path to the presidency have been overcome, or covered over. Rather than merely avoiding the contentious question of Obama's "natural born" eligibility, America's academic establishment has muffled discussion on the inextricably related issue of citizenship law in our country, in the greater context of immigration reform. The first instance of academia's cloak-throwing was noted in an American Thinker article which described the revision made by Professor Larry Solum to his scholarly paper that addressed Senator McCain's eligibility, "Originalism and the Natural Born Citizenship Clause." The original version was published in 2008. Without saying it explicitly...

I noted the other day Romney’s emerging secrecy problem, including the refusal to release income tax returns even if he becomes the nominee.This is a break with standard practice for nominees, and creates a no win situation in which Romney makes his income and taxes a central general election issue or gives in and looks weak.  Or worse, we find out too late that there was a reason he resisted disclosure.In a preview of the general election, Occupy protesters have seized on the non-disclosure issue and Romney is digging in: Des Moines police today arrested a total of 10 protesters...

<p>Mitt Romney is zero for two when it comes to transparency in campaigning.</p> <p>First, Romney, breaking with the practice of previous Republican presidential candidates.....has refused to release the identities of his bundlers, the well-connected fundraisers who help the campaign haul in stacks of checks adding up to hundreds of thousands of dollars....</p>

Mitt Romney said he will not release his tax returns if he wins the Republican nomination for president, a rare move for a candidate. When asked if he would, Romney, in an unaired segment of an interview with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, said that he doesn’t “intend to” release the returns. “I doubt it. I will provide all the financial info, which is an extraordinary pile of documents which show investments and so forth,” he said, according to video provided by NBC. When Todd pointed out that Romney had asked Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) to release his returns during their 1994...

This past weekend, Attorney General Eric Holder attempted to intimidate his critics by accusing them of racism. Under the Attorney General's watch more than a thousand weapons have been walked across the border by the ATF and more than 300 people are dead as a direct result. Even Holder himself admits that the 'Fast and Furious' guns will be used in more crimes. Innocents on both sides of the border have more to fear. The mixture of fear and intimidation has existed since Holder's first days in office. Who can forget his first major speech after confirmation? In that speech...

A year ago this week, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was murdered. He died protecting his country from brutal Mexican gangsters. Two AK-47 assault rifles were found at his death site. We now know the horrifying truth: Agent Terry was killed by weapons that were part of an illegal Obama administration operation to smuggle arms to the dangerous drug cartels. He was a victim of his own government. This is not only a major scandal; it is a high crime that potentially reaches all the way to the White House, implicating senior officials. It is President Obama’s Watergate. Operation...

Following a pattern established in previous hearings, today's House Judiciary Committee hearing produced fireworks from the Republicans and calls for more gun control from the Democrats. The grilling of Eric Holder climaxed at the very end of the day's proceedings, when Rep. Darrell Issa threatened the attorney general with contempt of Congress for his refusal to produce communications and logs, resulting in the embattled top law enforcement officer shooting back a line reminiscent of the McCarthy hearings: "Have you no shame?" Among some of the surprises: Holder was not sworn in as Issa had requested. Chairman Lamar Smith indicated the...

As if Congress didn’t have enough evidence that the Department of Justice has completely lost its mind, the New York Times is reporting that the Drug Enforcement Agency has helped launder “millions of dollars in drug proceeds” on behalf of Mexican drug cartels, a figure much higher than previously estimated. The Department of Justice has been under investigation by Congress for facilitating gun smuggling during Operation Fast and Furious. Fast and Furious was a gun running scheme on the US-Mexican border that’s resulted in violence and death on both sides of the border including the deaths of federal agents in...

AG Eric Holder attempts to avoid question about lying to congress. Saying that lying depends on one's state of mind. (December 8, 2011)

Wrapping himself in the mantle of Theodore Roosevelt's "National Greatness" agenda, President Obama urged the nation to stand strong and unite behind ... his umpteenth regulatory czar. Nothing symbolizes American strength and vigor more than another unaccountable Washington bureaucrat. If Richard Cordray, the stalled White House nominee to enforce the Dodd-Frank financial bureaucracy, is not approved, the wheedler-in-chief warned in Osawatomie, Kan.: "Every day we go without a consumer watchdog in place is another day when a student or a senior citizen or member of our Armed Forces could be tricked into a loan they can't afford -- something that...