Free Republic

Sonoma County law enforcement officials promised a crowded community forum on Thursday that they will eventually answer the many questions surrounding the shooting death of Andy Lopez, but declined to discuss details of the case. “I can assure you that once the decision is made, it will be a very public decision and my hope is that everybody understands the reason for my decision,” said District Attorney Jill Ravitch ... “But until that time, there may be information you're not made aware of, and that's the nature of an investigation, so that the integrity can be protected,” she said. Assistant...

I am beginning to think that, short of Obama being videotaped murdering a Fox News reporter on the east lawn of the White House, he will not be impeached. Calls for a president’s impeachment are commonplace. I have written in the past that Obama was likely unimpeachable on the constitutional grounds of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors. Even so, I increasingly believe that Obama should be impeached.

It’s been a rough fifth year in office for President Obama, with overwrought sequestration scare tactics, Scandalpalooza, and the Syrian debacle all chipping away at his leadership street cred, among other things — but this disaster of an ObamaCare rollout is really hammering the heightened disapproval home with what’s starting to look like a majority of Americans. During past job-performance dips, O’s job approval rating has been reliably bolstered by his personal favorability ratings and Americans’ sense of trust in him — but the health care law is helping to erode those usual go-to’s, and quickly. Via the WSJ:

Sound Off Connecticut is a popular conservative/libertarian call in talk show hosted by Jim Vicevich weekday mornings from 9 a.m. to noon ET. Although based in Connecticut, the show welcomes callers from all over the United States! This is your chance to sound off America! Call into the show toll free (800) 966-9842! Listen to the LIVE AUDIO STREAM at http://wtic.com - it's free and NO registration is required! If you're in southern New England listen over the air to WTIC 1080 AM, the 50,000 watt Connecticut powerhouse! Are you outside of Connecticut? Start your day off listening to Jim...

A 16-year-old suspected gang-banger virtually confessed to shooting two people over a coat at the Bryant Park skating rink as he ranted online about keeping the cops at bay and whether to kill himself, make the cops kill him or surrender Sunday.

With home invasions and other robberies on the rise in and around Indianapolis, gun store owners say there is a "large increase" in the number residents who are "buying guns, applying for gun permits, and taking gun safety courses."

They loom over him, brandishing their weapons, their gaze steady. The sculptor can feel the presence of the heroes he honors in clay and bronze, U.S. Navy SEALs all. And all of them gone. “I am an intuitive artist. I believe and I feel that their spirits are in the room when I am working, and that they’re helping me finish that work,” said Greg Marra, a Florida sculptor who is a man on a mission. He is determined to tell the stories of fallen American warriors. “I know it sounds crazy, but I feel their presence. That’s what happens...

James Carville to President Obama: Try crack pipe By: Tal Kopan November 11, 2013 07:33 AM EST Democratic strategist James Carville said Monday in light of President Barack Obama’s declining poll numbers, maybe he should take a page from an infamous Canadian mayor. “I think the best thing he can do is take a toke on the mayor of Toronto’s crack pipe, because his numbers are about 48,” Carville joked on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” referring to Rob Ford, who has admitted smoking crack. On a more serious note, Carville said in some ways, the falling poll numbers are overblown, and...

Google mapping out 400,000 graves at Arlington Cemetery to create virtual walking tour.....

Arguably, one of the biggest accomplishments of supply-side economist Art Laffer in the late 1970s and early 1980s was to get mainstream economists to take marginal tax rates seriously. We all knew that the deadweight loss from a tax is proportional to the square of the tax rate so that, say, doubling the tax rate quadruples the deadweight loss. But, for some reason, economists talked very little about this. And this was during an era when the top federal marginal tax rate on income in the United States was a whopping 70 percent and the top federal marginal tax rate...

By 2007, a century of drilling had drained the biggest U.S. sandstone reservoirs and sent oil and gas producers overseas to virgin lands. Then a new combination of drilling techniques came into play, sparking a rush to amass as much once-abandoned American land as possible. Merging hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, wildcatters blasted through tight rock formations that had fed the country’s sandstone with crude oil and natural gas for millions of years. For the U.S. oil and gas industry, it meant wiping the map clean of its aging framework for producing from softer sandstone, and starting over. “The amount...

The Internal Revenue Service sent $4 billion to identity thieves filing fraudulent tax returns in 2012, at the same time it was devoting resources to invasive politically targeted audits of not-for-profit groups, according to a recent report released by Treasury Inspector General J. Russell George. The IRS, which is now overseeing Obamacare’s complicated implementation and collecting its tax penalties, sent 343 tax refunds to a single address in Shanghai, and another 655 tax refunds to one in Lithuania, according to CBS News. A statement detailing a similar report filed by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found 1.1 million...

For anyone interested in the politics of left and right -- and in political journalism as it is practiced at the highest level -- George Orwell's works are indispensable. This week, in the year marking the 110th anniversary of his birth, we present a personal list of his five greatest essays. The winner and still champ, Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" stands as the finest deconstruction of slovenly writing since Mark Twain's "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses." Orwell's essay, published in 1946 in Cyril Connolly's literary review Horizon, is not as sarcastic or funny as Twain's, but unlike Twain, Orwell...

When the rain stopped falling in Texas, the prairie grass yellowed, the soil cracked and oil drillers were confronted with a crisis. After years of easy access to cheap, plentiful water, the land they prized for its vast petroleum wealth was starting to dry up. At first, the drought that took hold a few years ago seemed to threaten the economic boom that arose from hydraulic fracturing, a drilling method that uses huge amounts of high-pressure, chemical-laced water to free oil and natural gas trapped deep in underground rocks. But drillers have found a way to get by with much...

Remember when Geraldo opened Al Capone’s vault live on national TV? Well I’m about to solve the mystery of Obama. I’m about to break “the Obama code.” I’m about to tell you everything about the way Obama, and the people around him, really think. I’m about to rip open the true Obama plan to destroy our country. Because I was there when the plan was hatched. How do I know all this? Because I was Barack Obama’s college classmate at Columbia University, Class of 1983. I was easy to recognize – the lone outspoken conservative in a class of 700...

Republicans have shifted their strategy on ObamaCare. Weeks ago, many Republicans said ObamaCare—including Speaker John Boehner (Ohio)—was too broken to fix. But now, the GOP is drafting legislation that aims to do just that. The GOP wants to rebuild its political capital and public credibility by solving ObamaCare’s implementation problems. This pivot comes after Republicans took major hits in polls following the government shutdown. The House this week will vote on a measure called, “Keep Your Health Plan Act.” It aims to do what the president promised years ago: If you like your health plan, you can stay on it....

As we pause to remember and honor the service of our veterans on this Veterans Day, let us also remember those veterans who are all too often remain forgotten – even when we take the time to remember those who were intentionally overlooked for so many years. Just three of these examples include the Filipino Scouts of World War II, the US Soldiers and their Korean Augmentees who fought and died along the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) in Korea in the years after the Korean War ceasefire was signed, and the Hmong tribesmen who fought along with our Special Forces in...

Okay, my last novel, "Castigo Cay," is in the Kindle store on a free run today through Wednesday. It's a departure from the characters and situations in the Enemies Trilogy, but it's still a look forward at a crumbling, semi-dystopian America. The main character is Dan Kilmer, a thirty-something former Marine scout/sniper who is trying to live as a free man in a world that is anything but free. This is the last novel I have written. Over the past six weeks I've put all of my titles on Kindle free runs. I have nothing left in the inventory, and...

Criminals take note; You're taking a chance if you try to ply your trade in the Dodge County town of Rhine. Local law enforcement is praising townspeople for some de facto community policing, after tracking down and helping catch an armed robbery suspect. For 60-year-old Ken Lowery the commotion began around 2:30 Thursday afternoon as he stepped inside Aden's convenience store and encountered the store clerk in distress. "The lady screamed at me and said 'I've been robbed, he's got a gun, and I gave him all the money,'" Lowery recalled. Lowery says he saw the suspected gunman, identified as...

Prediction: even if HealthCare.gov is fixed by the end of the month (unlikely), Obamacare is going to be repealed well in advance of next year’s election. And if the website continues to fail, the push for repeal—from endangered Democrats—will occur very rapidly. The website is a sideshow: the real action is the number of people and businesses who are losing their health plans or having to pay a lot more. Fixing the website will only delay the inevitable. It is important to remember why it was so important for Obama to promise repeatedly that “if you like your health insurance/doctor,...