Free Republic

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, phoned President Obama this morning and asked him to send members of his economic team to the Capitol to end the political stalemate and negotiate a path toward a one-year extension of the payroll tax credit. The president declined the offer. “With Sen. Reid having declined to call his members back to Washington this week to join the House in negotiating a full-year extension of the payroll tax cut, the speaker proposed that the president send members of his economic policy team up to Congress to

The State Department on Wednesday declined to describe the raging conflict in Libya as a civil war, after a key lawmaker used the term to characterize the ongoing battle between rebels and forces loyal to Muammar al-Qaddafi. "I would just say that what we have is a leader who used not just arms but heavy weaponry against his people and is now in a situation where he's lost all legitimacy," State Department spokesman Mark Toner said, when asked whether the fighting had escalated into a civil war.

In 1995, Christie Whitman, a New Jersey governor who was a rising Republican Party star, delivered the GOP’s response to President Bill Clinton’s State of the Union address in front of a cheering crowd in the Assembly chamber. Once again, New Jersey has a rising Republican star in the Statehouse, and a Democratic president about to give a State of the Union address. But history won’t repeat itself this year — even though Republicans were interested in making that happen. William Palatucci, Gov. Chris Christie’s close personal and political confidante, told The Auditor that Republican leadership had inquired with the...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The nation's labor unions saw another steep decline in membership last year, even as the economy showed signs of recovery and job losses slowed. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that unions lost 612,000 members in 2010, dropping the unionized share of the work force to 11.9 percent from 12.3 percent in 2009. That follows a loss of 771,000 workers in 2008, continuing a steady decline from the 1950s when more than a third of workers belonged to unions.

The Interior Department’s top drilling declined to give details on when the department will begin issuing new deepwater drilling permits for the Gulf of Mexico. “I don’t want to hazard a guess as to exactly when the first deepwater permits will be issued,” Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement Director Michael Bromwich said Wednesday. He added that he hopes new deepwater permits “will be approved before too long.” Bromwich said last week that he expects to begin issuing permits before the second half of the year. Asked by reporters for a more specific date, Bromwich

The ratings declines for Countdown with Keith Olbermann continue. Year over year declines for the first 3 months of 2010 ranged from 40-45% in the cable news advertiser target adults 25-54 demo, and between 21-29% among average viewership.While it’s hard to completely attribute cause and effect to TV ratings, it’s interesting to note that Countdown had better ratings (and a less severe year to year ratings and viewership loss) during the month of March, when Keith wasn’t on the air (he was off from 2/24 until last night) than it did during February (and was approximately on par with...

Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman has declined an invitation from The Sacramento Bee editorial board and FOX 40 to participate in a debate with GOP rival Steve Poizner. The Bee offered four possible dates in April, all of which the Whitman campaign rejected. The national FOX News Network had offered anchor Brett Baier to moderate the debate, and Poizner had agreed to attend.

WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency is refusing to make public hundreds of pages of internal documents about the agency’s defunct detention and interrogation program, saying such disclosures would jeopardize national security by revealing classified intelligence sources and operations. The C.I.A.’s argument to withhold the material, laid out Monday in a declaration to a federal court in New York, comes a week after the Obama administration declassified documents about abuses in the C.I.A.’s secret overseas prisons and the Justice Department began investigating the actions of C.I.A. operatives.

WASHINGTON – Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor declined repeatedly at Senate confirmation hearings Wednesday to disclose her views on abortion rights, and said President Barack Obama never asked her about the issue before he chose her for the bench. "I can't answer ... because I can't look at it in the abstract," she told Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., as he sought to draw her out with questions about hypothetical cases. Even if she knew more about the specifics of a case, she added, "I probably couldn't opine because I'm sure that situation might well arise before the court."

Any reasonably intelligent person understands that if the demand for a product increases then (all things being equal, as the economist would say) its price will rise. The same holds in the case of borrowing, except for congressional Democrats. These people seem to think that economics laws are a vicious Republican plot. Poll figures are now showing that the American public is growing alarmed by the Democrats' utterly reckless fiscal policy. Unfortunately, few people understand just how grave the danger really is

NEW YORK (Reuters) – If there's one thing that the U.S. public is not giving newspapers, it's their support. Paid weekday newspaper circulation in the six-month period that ended March 31 fell 7 percent to 34.4 million, compared with the same period last year, according to new figures released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC). That decline, which tracked 395 daily newspapers that had five-day-a-week circulation in both periods, accelerated from last year's decline of 3.6 percent. Sunday circulation at 557 papers fell more than 5 percent to 42.1 million. Last year, circulation fell 4.6 percent. The declines may...

WASHINGTON - The U.S. military acknowledged Wednesday that it considered bombing a group of more than 100 Taliban insurgents in southern Afghanistan but decided not to after determining they were on the grounds of a cemetery. The decision came to light after an NBC News correspondent's blog carried a photograph of the insurgents. Defense department officials first tried to block further publication of the photo, then struggled to explain what it depicted. NBC News claimed U.S. Army officers wanted to attack the ceremony with missiles carried by an unmanned Predator drone but were prevented under rules of battlefield engagement that...

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - Silicon Valley is bracing for even deeper cuts to community programs after politicians announced Friday that property values and tax revenues had shrunk dramatically for the second straight year. The Santa Clara County Assessor's Office said the assessed prices of industrial and commercial property in San Jose - the nation's 11th largest city and epicenter of the global technology industry - fell below prices that owners paid for them. When that happens, a state law goes into effect that allows owners to pay taxes on the lower value. Assessed property values in San Jose redevelopment...