Free Republic

Top House oversight committee Democrat Rep. Elijah Cummings wants to attack former lobbyist Jack Abramoff — again — in a Congressional hearing. While admitting Abramoff successfully completed his “three-and-a-half year sentence” in prison, and pointing out that the House oversight committee has, for years, “worked in a bipartisan manner to investigate the illegal activities of Mr. Abramoff and his associates, as well as the implications of his actions on the transparent and effective operation of our government,” Cummings wants to again dredge up the matter of the famously corrupt lobbyist. Cummings claims it’s because the oversight committee didn’t previously obtain...

Attorney General Eric Holder’s tenure in the Obama administration may be coming to an end. At least eight members of Congress have now called on Holder to resign over the growing Operation Fast and Furious scandal. Republican Reps. Vicky Hartzler of Missouri, John Mica of Florida, Quico Canseco of Texas and Gus Bilirakis of Florida each told The Daily Caller on Thursday that they believe Holder should step down now. The number of members of Congress calling for Holder to end his career in government because of Fast and Furious is now eight, a number which has doubled in one...

President Barack Obama has ignored the North Carolina Republican Party’s offer to tow his bus back to Washington, D.C., The Daily Caller has learned. The state GOP had planned to offer the president’s bus a free tow back to D.C. if he would fly back immediately to focus on creating jobs and fixing the economy instead of continuing to sell his controversial jobs plan on the campaign trail. “If the president had taken us up on our offer to tow his bus back to D.C., he would’ve stimulated at least one local company in Asheville,” NC GOP spokesman Rob Lockwood...

President Obama glowingly defended the $85 billion auto industry bailout during a speech to Detroit auto workers Friday, saying “the investment was worth it.” But the government still owns 500 million shares of General Motors which, if sold at today’s market price of $20 a share, would leave taxpayers on the hook for $16.5 billion in losses. The U.S. would have to sell its GM stock per $53 a share to break even, far higher than the $20 it is trading at now. The stock liability puts the Obama administration in a double bind. If the stock were sold all...

Two hours after President Barack Obama cited Rev. Martin Luther King’s advice that Americans not question each others’ love of country, his spokesman demanded that GOP legislators “put country before party” by ending their opposition to the president’s spending plans. Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest made the demand during an afternoon press conference called to tout the president’s three-day bus tour through counties in swing-states Virginia and North Carolina. The bus tour starts Monday and is intended to magnify the media’s coverage of poll-tested provisions in Obama’s proposed $446 billion, one-year stimulus bill, the American Jobs Act. For example, the...

At least one pizza joint is trying to take advantage of the hype surrounding Republican presidential candidate and former pizza magnate Herman Cain’s “9-9-9” tax reform plan. A Washington D.C. franchise of “Z Pizza” sent a promotional email out to customers Friday afternoon touting their new special: “The 9-9-9 Pizza,” offering a large cheese pizza for only $9.99. “Herman Cain is a pizza guy,” said co-owner Nick DeCarlo in an interview with The Daily Caller. “We thought we’d give our customers a little break, hopefully like Herman Cain’s tax plan might give taxpayers a break someday.”

Former Obama administration Department of Energy loan programs adviser Steve Spinner jumped up a bracket in fundraising for the president’s re-election campaign. Spinner was the staffer inside Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s office who pushed and advocated on behalf of Solyndra. Spinner was ranked in the Obama campaign’s $250,000 to $500,000 bundling bracket in the second quarter, but third-quarter fundraising numbers released on Friday show he raised more than $500,000.

Last week’s “Occupy Atlanta” protest baffled many around the country when a YouTube video showed what appeared to be Georgia Democratic Rep. John Lewis being denied the opportunity to speak at a “general assembly” marked by lengthy call-and-response chant rituals. But Lewis, who appeared on MSNBC’s “Up w/Chris Hayes” on Saturday, said he wasn’t offended at all. “Well, I didn’t feel that I was denied the right to speak,” Lewis said. “I couldn’t stay around for 45 minutes or to an hour to speak. I had another engagement. And I had to be there on time.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama saluted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Sunday as a man who “stirred our conscience” and made the Union “more perfect,” rejoicing in the dedication of a monument memorializing the slain civil rights leader’s life and work. “I know we will overcome,” Obama proclaimed, standing the 30-foot granite monument to King on the National Mall. “I know this,” the president said, “because of the man towering over us.” ... The dedication has special meaning for the Obamas. The president credits King with paving his way to the White House. Before his remarks, he left signed...

It was the news the world breathlessly waited for immediately after the 9/11 terror attacks: a report of the first American troops on the ground in Afghanistan. All at once the world’s attention focused on an iconic photo of those Special Operations Forces doing something no American military had done in nearly a century: They rode horses into combat. Their secret mission: secure northern Afghanistan by advising the warring tribal factions that formed the Northern Alliance. During the 2011 Veterans Day Parade on November 11, a new monument to these men — and to all Americans in uniform — will...

The Obama administration adamantly denies it, but rumors are circulating in Washington that his Department of Health and Human Services is already collecting Americans’ private health information, or at least preparing itself to do so. Rep. Denny Rehberg, the chairman of the House appropriations subcommittee on Labor, Health & Human Services and Education formalized the rumors by asking about them in a letter to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Thursday. “Specifically, I have been told that HHS has already procured a contractor to build a database and that this contractor has already taken steps to acquire personal health care data...

Who’s really behind the Occupy DC protesters? The Daily Caller noticed some striking similarities between everyone’s favorite purple dinosaur and this week’s protest outside the Americans for Tax Reform building in Washington.

The Obama administration adamantly denies it, but rumors are circulating in Washington that his Department of Health and Human Services is already collecting Americans’ private health information, or at least preparing itself to do so. Rep. Denny Rehberg, the chairman of the House appropriations subcommittee on Labor, Health & Human Services and Education formalized the rumors by asking about them in a letter to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Thursday. “Specifically, I have been told that HHS has already procured a contractor to build a database and that this contractor has already taken steps to acquire personal health care data...

Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley told The Daily Caller on Thursday that he’ll call for the resignation of the highest-level government official who signed off on Operation Fast and Furious. At this point, though, he’s not sold on whether that person is Attorney General Eric Holder. “I’m not going to ask for anybody’s resignation until I find out who signed off on this at the highest level of government — and then I’m going to ask for that person’s resignation,” Grassley said in a phone interview. When TheDC asked Grassley if he thought Holder signed off on Fast and Furious,...

At Friday’s Solyndra hearing, an Obama administration Treasury Department official admitted that he’s never heard of taxpayer money being subordinate to outside commercial firms. That means the Obama administration is admitting it’s awfully suspicious that investors like George Kaiser’s firms and others got their cash back when Solyndra failed, but the taxpayers ended up on the hook for the $535 million the Department of Energy promised it via a loan guarantee.

Anti-war protesters plan to storm the inside and outside of the Hart Senate Office Building at 11:30 a.m. today, with the intent of causing enough havoc to shut business down. David Swanson, one of the original organizers of the October 2011/Stop the Machine protests — which is distinct from the Occupy D.C. protests in McPherson Square — explained the plan to an assembled crowd of less than 100, mainly elderly protesters in Freedom Square Tuesday morning. The plan is to send protesters into the Hart building in small insurgent groups, which will begin causing chaos at 11:30 a.m.

Freshman Republican Rep. Austin Scott has introduced a bill he says would “politically neutralize” the National Labor Relations Board. Scott’s plan would remove adjudicatory power from the NLRB, but allow it to continue existing. That means the board would still oversee union elections and continue investigating labor complaints and disputes, but wouldn’t be judge, jury and executioner of labor law. Scott told The Daily Caller that his bill addresses the core problem of the NLRB, instead of merely addressing some of the issues that have hit headlines. He adds that the bill would “reduce the cost [of labor litigation] to...

During an evening meeting at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., protesters discussed plans to storm Capitol Hill Tuesday and create chaos inside and outside House and Senate office buildings. “We will have people going in over time into all the different doors of all the different buildings,” said one of the organizers of the “Stop the Machine” movement to roughly 100 assembled protesters. “Stop the Machine” was organized in commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the American invasion of Afghanistan and is distinct from the Occupy D.C. movement currently occupying McPherson Square. At an appointed time and in a particular...

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s strong statements in support of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement raise an interesting question: Does she, then, oppose the preferential treatment her son received at the hand of the financial industry? Pelosi’s son, Paul Pelosi, Jr., was protected from a round of layoffs when he was a mortgage broker for Countrywide, according to “Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon,” a 2011 book by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Gretchen Morgenson. “Paul Pelosi, Jr., the son of Nancy Pelosi, the former Speaker of the House, worked as a mortgage...

Herman Cain has surged into a statistical tie with Mitt Romney in the Republican presidential primary race, and has edged out Rick Perry for second place, according to the latest Gallup poll. Cain, who until last week was considered a second tier candidate, now sits at the top of the Republican primary field, and 18 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents nationwide say they would vote for him if the primary was held today. Romney holds a narrow lead over Cain with 20 percent of the vote. Rick Perry sits in third with 15 percent. Perry and Cain have both...