Free Republic

A former White House speechwriter, Mark Thiessen, has jumped to the defense of his former boss, writing for the Washington Post that George W. Bush “established a conservative record without parallel.” Even by the loose standards of Washington, that is a jaw-dropping assertion. I’ve been explaining for years that Bush was a big-government advocate, even writing a column back in 2007 for the Washington Examiner pointing out that Clinton had a much better economic record from a free-market perspective. I also groused to the Wall Street Journal the following year about Bush’s dismal performance. “Bush doesn’t have a conservative legacy”...

In what would amount to a slap in the face to a sitting Republican president and the party's Senate and House leaders, national GOP officials, including the vice chairman of the Republican National Committee, are sponsoring a resolution opposing the resort to "socialist" means to save capitalism. "We can't be a party of small government, free markets and low taxes while supporting bailouts and nationalizing industries, which lead to big government, socialism and high taxes at the expense of individual liberty and freedoms," said Solomon Yue, a cosponsor of a resolution that would put the RNC -- the party's national...

Obamamania on the Right AIM Column | By Cliff Kincaid | December 2, 2008 In terms of foreign policy, the same sleight-of-hand can be seen, and once again some conservatives are falling for it. On the Fox News program Hannity & Colmes Monday night, analyst Dick Morris made the absolutely critical point that President Bush has taken the country so far to the left, in terms of his socialist-style Wall Street bailout program and his integration of the U.S. economy into a new emerging international financial order, that anything Barack Obama does in this area seems almost mainstream. This is...

Rep. Mike Pence, a 46-year-old former radio talk show host from eastern Indiana serving his third term in Congress, is currently chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee (RSC). He has tried hard to cooperate with the regular House Republican leadership rather than confront it. So, he could not have been happy last Tuesday when he found himself in a closed-door autodafe, with GOP leaders as the inquisitors and Pence as the heretic. Pence and the RSC's heresy was to propose that massive federal outlays resulting from Hurricane Katrina be offset by reduced spending elsewhere. Specifically, they requested offsets to...

As if we needed another frivolous lawsuit, yesterday Connecticut became the first state to sue the feds over funding for No Child Left Behind. That education reform, which passed with bipartisan majorities in 2001, provided the largest increase in education spending in the nation's history. But never mind. According to state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who filed the suit, it's an "unfunded mandate." In fact, the money complaint is a red herring used by Mr. Blumenthal, Republican Governor M. Jodi Rell and others to avoid the real issues of accountability and transparency. In return for federal funds, No Child Left...