Free Republic

A day after a magazine quoted him as saying abortion was "an individual choice," GOP Chairman Michael Steele may soon be toast. A leading conservative called Steele's remarks in the magazine "cavalier and flippant," underscoring the new chairman's precarious position with party regulars concerned about his off-the-cuff style and penchant for miscues. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee called the remarks "very troubling" and said in a blog posting, "despite his clarification today the party stands to lose many of its members and a great deal of its support in the trenches of grass-roots politics. For Chairman Steele to even infer...

Sixty-four years ago, Sen. Arthur H. Vandenberg (R., Mich.) famously declared that in matters of foreign policy, "politics stops at the water's edge." His post-isolationist Senate career stands as a monument to the benefits of bipartisanship - an approach that endured through the Cold War and beyond. Today we stand not "at the water's edge," but we are staring over the edge of the economic cliff. What we are experiencing is so painful and dangerous that we must dampen, if not remove, partisanship for the common purpose of saving the nation. The debate in Congress over the economic stimulus was...

Before the Senate resoundingly defeated a McCain amendment on Tuesday that would have shorn 9,000 earmarks worth $7.7 billion from the $410 billion spending bill, the Arizona senator twittered lists of offensive bipartisan pork, including:

Barack Obama’s first budget is a revelation. The US president’s plans will not come to pass in the form he suggests. Congress writes the laws and will make a hash of it. Still, this first full statement of intentions speaks volumes, and leaves me in a paradoxical position. On one hand, I admire much of what the budget says. On the other, I feel I owe Republicans an apology.

Here's a fact that will probably shock you: Americans today have the same level of confidence in President Obama as they had in George W. Bush after his first month in office. According to Gallup, Obama’'s public approval rating currently stands at 63 percent, only a point above George W. Bush in late February 2001. Few modern presidents have been greeted with such lofty expectations as Obama. That Obama now stands where Bush did eight years ago, on the eve of his first address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, serves as a reminder of how quickly the...

The Biden prophecy has come to pass. Our wacky veep, momentarily inspired, had predicted last October that "it will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama." Biden probably had in mind an eve-of-the-apocalypse drama like the Cuban Missile Crisis. Instead, Obama's challenges have come in smaller bites. Some are deliberate threats to U.S. interests, others mere probes to ascertain whether the new president has any spine. Preliminary X-rays are not very encouraging.

Contrary to conventional Beltway wisdom, the House Republicans' zero votes for the Obama presidency's stimulus "package" is looking like the luckiest thing to happen to the GOP's political fortunes since Ronald Reagan switched parties. If the GOP line holds, the party could win back much of the goodwill it dissipated with its big-government adventures the past eight years. For starters, notwithstanding the new president's high approval rating, his stimulus bill (ghost-written by Nancy Pelosi) has been losing altitude with public opinion by the day. People are nervous.

Milwaukee Public Schools would reap $88.6 million over two years for new construction under the economic stimulus package just passed by the U.S. House of Representatives - even though the district has 15 vacant school buildings, a large surplus of property and no plans for new construction.

Maxine Allen lived quietly with her husband Frank for years in their Fox Point home, and after Frank died in 2004, she rarely was seen outside the house. She took the bus to her hairdresser and accepted help from a neighbor, who took her grocery shopping. Maxine Allen always used coupons, buying only sale and generic items, said neighbor Karen Wahlberg. Frugal and independent, Allen "was a loner. Just stayed at home, day in or day out," Wahlberg said. "I thought she was penniless." Allen, who died at age 85 in February 2008, left an estate worth $3.1 million -...

Rep. John Murtha's invitation to house Guantanamo Bay detainees in his district has some local officials seeing dollar signs -- even though Murtha's comment was met with disbelief by others. The Pennsylvania Democrat, chairman of the defense subcommittee for appropriations, is renowned for his ability to steer earmarked dollars to his district. And after Murtha told FOX News that he'd be willing to take in terrorist suspects, some saw it as a job-creation opportunity. His district's maximum-security prisons are full, according to the state Department of Corrections, so a new prison would likely be needed to house any of the...

Ever since president-elect Obama mentioned that his kids are getting a puppy, dog lovers around the world have been panting with anticipation to learn what kind of dog will become first pup. Obama, who described the decision as a "major issue," is on the hunt for an allergy-free dog, since daughter Malia is allergic. Seeing that Obama is the first "global president," it's not surprising that the Fido frenzy has gone international.

Alliant Energy Corp. executives hoped that a need for jobs and homegrown energy crops would trump concerns about global warming when it came time for regulators to decide the fate of a proposed $1.3 billion coal plant. But climate concerns won out Tuesday when state regulators voted unanimously to reject Alliant's plan to build a coal and biomass power plant on the Mississippi River in Cassville.

On CNN last evening both David Gergen and Ed Rollins echoed the current mantra that the "old" noble McCain is gone-and a "new" nastier one has emerged, largely because of his attacks on Ayers, perhaps his planned future ads on Wright, and a few unhinged people shouting at his campaign stops. Recently Christopher Buckley endorsed Obama, likewise lamenting the loss of the old noble McCain. New York Times columnist David Brooks dubbed Palin a "cancer," and he suggested that Obama's instant recall of Niehbuhr sent a tingle up his leg as Obama once did to Chris Matthews as well. A...

This is a live presidential debate thread.

The Treasury plan to buy illiquid financial assets has been widely criticized as being unfair to taxpayers, who will have to bear losses ahead of shareholders of the institutions that will be bailed out. There is a better alternative to stabilize the markets: Invest the $700 billion of taxpayer money in senior preferred stock of the troubled financial institutions that pose systemic risks. Let's call this the "Preferred plan." In fact, it is the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac model -- which the Treasury Department has already endorsed and used in practice. It is also the approach Warren Buffett used...

Hank Paulson’s $700bn rescue package has run into difficulty on Capitol Hill. Rightly so: it was ill-conceived. Congress would be abdicating its responsibility if it gave the Treasury secretary a blank cheque. The bill submitted to Congress even had language in it that would exempt the secretary’s decisions from review by any court or administrative agency – the ultimate fulfillment of the Bush administration’s dream of a unitary executive. Mr Paulson’s record does not inspire the confidence necessary to give him discretion over $700bn. His actions last week brought on the crisis that makes rescue necessary. On Monday he allowed...

Credit Crisis: Everyone's chiming in on the financial mess, but we have yet to hear a better idea than that set out by our Treasury secretary and Fed chief. Congress should act on it without further showboating or delay. Watching the same politicians who created this mess grill Mssrs. Paulson and Bernanke yesterday about what they intend to do about it was almost surreal. Where, for example, does Chris Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee and the leading recipient of Fannie Mae campaign cash, get off acting so self-righteously when he and his panel were asked to move quickly...

The mainstream media have gone over the line and are now straight-out propagandists for the Obama campaign. While they have been liberal and blinkered in their worldview for decades, in 2007-08, for the first time, the major media consciously are covering for one candidate for president and consciously are knifing the other. This is no longer journalism; it is simply propaganda. (The American left-wing version of the Völkischer Beobachter cannot be far behind.) And as a result, we are less than seven weeks away from possibly electing a president who has not been thoroughly or even halfway honestly presented to...

"Without vision, the people perish." That's what it says in the Bible. Before Sarah Palin was put on the ticket the vast majority of Conservatives had no vision. And we were perishing. In McCain Conservatives saw an aged guy with dubious conservative credentials who was seemingly quick to pander to the media and towards the liberal point of view. McCain/Feingold was but emblematic of what many Conservatives saw as a series of major sellouts by John McCain. With McCain Conservative had no vision of the future and we were perishing. There were no viable Conservatives in the Republican primary to...

Milwaukee’s election chief on Wednesday turned 32 more voter registration workers in to the district attorney’s office for possible prosecution, saying they tried to submit falsified registration cards. That brings to 39 the number of registration workers under scrutiny, and the number could grow, Election Commission Executive Director Sue Edman said. An organization warned the commission staff late Wednesday afternoon about some questionable cards in the latest batch collected by its workers, Edman said. Of the 32 ACORN workers referred Wednesday to Assistant District Attorney Bruce Landgraf, Edman said: