Free Republic

President Barack Obama is ending his fifth year in office with the lowest approval ratings at this point in the presidency since President Richard Nixon, according to a new Washington Post/ABC poll released Tuesday. Obama's approval rating in the poll stands at 43%. By comparison, President George W. Bush had a 47% approval rating at the end of the fifth year of his presidency. And all other Post-World War II presidents had approval ratings above 50% — with the exception of Nixon, who, amid the Watergate scandal, had a dreadful 29% approval rating.

Urgent. While some Tea Party groups testified at the House Ways and Means Committee Hearing last week over the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) abuse of power for targeting and harassing them and approximately 500 other conservative groups when they sought tax-exempt status, if you are looking for a political judicial solution, such as congress, impeachment or a special prosecutor to solve the tsunami of unlawful acts coming out of Washington, you are looking in the wrong place. What the IRS did tilted President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election in his favor. The bottom line is this. You can’t get justice within...

Friday afternoon on The Five, Bob Beckel tore into Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) for an online ad he released this week that uses the IRS scandal to equate President Obama with Richard Nixon. Beckel called it “one of the cheapest ads I’ve seen” and said to McConnell, “you ought to be ashamed of yourself!” “To politicize this thing before you have the hearings,” Beckel went on, “and to go on the air with that kind ad, that’s a muckraking, disgraceful, disgusting ad, and it’s typical of a guy from the bourbon state.” To protestations from his co-hosts, Beckel said “in...

Overall, the Post found that $3.9 billion in federal grants and financing flowed to 21 companies backed by firms with connections to five Obama administration staffers and advisers. Obama’s program to invest federal funds in start-up companies — and the failure of some of those companies — is becoming a rallying cry for opponents in the presidential race. Mitt Romney has promised to focus on Obama’s “record” as a “venture capitalist.” And in ads and speeches, conservative groups and the Republican candidates are zeroing in on the administration’s decision to extend $535 million to the now-shuttered solar firm Solyndra and...

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama on Thursday will propose $634 billion in new taxes on upper-income Americans and cuts in government spending over the next decade to pay for his promised health-care expansion. The tax increases and spending cuts will be included Thursday in Mr. Obama's comprehensive budget blueprint, and signal his ambition to overhaul the health-care system, one of the main planks of his presidential campaign. The tax increases would raise an estimated $318 billion over 10 years by reducing the value of such longstanding deductions as mortgage interest and charitable contributions for people in the highest tax brackets....