Free Republic

<p>WASHINGTON — The Senate has confirmed Mark Everson as the new commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service.</p> <p>Everson, a top manager at the White House Office of Management and Budget, will serve a 5-year term as chief of the nation's tax collection agency.</p>

maybe a 4-5; struck at 4:20 am, lasted about 10 seconds total. Was it local, or was this a bigger one that we felt from far off? Anyone?

In South Dakota, Democratic Senator Tim Johnson won re-election in the face of everything the White House could throw at him. The President recruited his opponent, helped raise him all the money in the world, and visited and revisited to galvanize Republican voters in a state that Bush carried easily in the 2000 presidential race. But Johnson won. He survived in part because he ran a remarkably populist campaign on corporate scandals and kitchen table issues like protecting Social Security and standing up for small farmers. People who listened to the debates -- and in South Dakota people do listen...

From the moment the Transportation Security Administration was formed, agency officials have been consumed by the idea of a vast network of supercomputers that would instantly probe every passenger's background for clues about violent designs. (click on link for remainder of article)

Leaders of the Jehovah's Witnesses are taking steps to excommunicate a Western Kentucky man and three other church members who have publicly criticized what they say is their church's secretive handling of child-molestation cases. Bill Bowen of Benton, Ky., said he was summoned to a judicial hearing to be held Friday at his Draffenville, Ky., church to answer allegations of ''causing divisions within the congregation and organization of Jehovah's Witnesses.'' Bowen resigned as an elder in the Marshall County congregation in December 2000 to protest the church's handling of a local case and its policies on handling abuse allegations. He...