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The people showing up at town hall meetings to voice their strong disapproval of President Obama's health care plan have been called thugs, extremists, mobs, terrorists and, this week, "un-American." Ever since Democrats headed home for the one-month August recess to hear what constituents are saying about their pending health care reform bills, White House and Democratic Party officials have been attempting to demonize opponents who are packing congressional town hall meetings to freely express their opinions. According to reports from around the country, most opponents are civil and respectful, but in some cases many are also angry; voices are...

WASHINGTON -- The escalating war to block Barack Obama's hostile takeover of our healthcare system has moved to a wider battlefield of TV ads, Internet videos and town-hall meetings where his opponents may have the advantage. With Congress on vacation through Labor Day, the grassroots ad wars of August against Obama's government-run medical-care scheme is being fought out on a more level playing field where Republicans have shown they're better at this kind of combat than their Democratic rivals. Think Hillarycare, for example, an incomprehensible, Rube Goldberg budget buster that Democrats never brought up for a vote in the House...

Two guys in a newsroom discussing Governor Palin:Click on image.Don Lambro speaks to Ralph Z. Hallow about his exclusive interview with Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

Republican Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska announced Friday that she will resign her office July 26, fueling speculation that she intends to spend the next four years pursuing her party's presidential nomination in 2012. Mrs. Palin made her stunning announcement at her Wasilla home with Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell, who will be sworn into office at the end of the month, she said. She did not take questions from reporters and only cryptically referred to her future plans. In her announcement, she said it "hurts to make this choice," but compared herself to a point guard in basketball. "A good...

President Obama's original plan to pay for his health care reforms was to limit charitable contributions and mortgage interest payments that people can deduct from their taxable income. But both proposals were nonstarters from the moment they reached Capitol Hill. They would raise taxes on the two sectors that we need to be encouraging, not stifling. The former would reduce charitable giving. The latter would hurt the beleaguered housing industry at time when it needs all the incentives it can get. So now Democratic leaders are considering yet another sacrosanct tax-free benefit they can tap into: employer/employee health insurance premiums....

WASHINGTON -- Five months into his presidency, the biggest items on Barack Obama's agenda are in deep trouble, and support for his handling the economy and a ballooning budget deficit is plummeting. The national news media was still trying to deal with the administration's agenda as gently as possible, as if everything was on a steady course. But his top proposals are dangerously off course and headed for defeat. Healthcare reform is mired in Democratic dissension, especially on the sky-high taxes needed to pay for it. His revenue-raising, inflationary, climate-change "cap and trade" energy bill is all but dead. His...

WASHINGTON -- President Obama, known for his soaring oratory, has been having a hard time finding the right words to respond to the Iranians' struggle for political change and freedom in a repressive society. The reason: He has so much invested in his let-us-sit-down-and-settle-our-differences diplomatic approach to Iran that it has all but turned into a "see no evil, hear no evil" policy toward that nation. Continues... Surprise, surprise! A systemically corrupt party mafia, using a network of thugs to carry out the theft of an election through criminal shenanigans, human rights violations, cash payoffs, fake votes, stuffing of ballot...

No one envies Sen. John Cornyn's job as chairman of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee in a daunting election cycle when the party likely will lose more Senate seats in 2010. Soon after the two-term Texas senator took over the No. 4 Republican leadership post, five Republican-held Senate seats became open contests as a result of four retirements in New Hampshire, Missouri, Ohio and Florida and a devastating party switch in Pennsylvania - states that are trending Democratic and where his party's prospects of holding them look bleak. "History has dealt Cornyn a bad hand," veteran elections forecaster Stuart Rothenberg...

Nearly four weeks after President Obama met with health-industry officials touting a "watershed" cost-cutting agreement, the goal of slowing the sharp rise in medical-care spending is elusive as ever. Appearing with executives of six industry groups on May 11, Obama announced what he called a "historic" and "unprecedented commitment" by the medical-care industry to "cut the rate of growth of national healthcare spending by 1.5 percentage points each year" that would yield $2 trillion in savings over 10 years. The story got front-page play and nightly news coverage across the country. However, after American Hospital Association president Richard Umbdenstock returned...

WASHINGTON -- After all is said and done in Judge Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation proceedings, the fact of the matter is that she will not change the ideological makeup of the Supreme Court. The appeals-court jurist will replace retiring Justice David Souter, one of the high court's four reliably liberal members. Many, if not most, of the cases heard by the conservative-leaning body are decided by 5-4 votes, and that ratio will remain unchanged. For that, conservatives have President George W. Bush to thank. He is responsible for choosing Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito Jr., who shifted the...

Former Vice President Dick Cheney's sweeping indictment of administration policy changes on the handling of terrorism-suspect detainees has thrown President Obama on the defensive and scored points for the vice president and his party, according to pollsters and political analysts. While Mr. Cheney has come under increasing fire from Democrats for charging that Mr. Obama's policies have made the country more vulnerable to future terrorist attacks, polls show a majority of Americans side with him on using aggressive interrogation methods on high value al Qaeda prisoners and are against moving them from the detention facility at U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo...

Not long after President Obama was sworn into office, he faced a monstrous $1.8 trillion budget deficit that analysts said would force him to sharply curtail his big-spending agenda. But Obama saw the economic recession he inherited as another Great Depression (which it's not) that demands the enactment of a lengthy list of new social programs, whose costs will drive total federal spending to more than $3.7 trillion in 2010 and add more than $9 trillion to the government's total debts over the coming decade. Deficits or no deficits, debts or no debts, Obama sees no reason to cut back...

Last month's nationwide "tea party" demonstrations to protest massive government spending increases and rising taxes received relatively little coverage from the national news media. Liberal big-government groups dismissed them as the work of right-wing advocacy organizations in Washington, and the events were so dispersed - most of them in small cities and towns - that no one could be sure how many actually had turned out to attend them. In fact, the events were organized locally by nonactivists who had never done anything like this before. More than 600,000 people in nearly 600 localities - from Bakersfield, Calif., to Atlanta...

The grass-roots "tea party" movement that swept across the country April 15 to protest federal tax and spending hikes will hold demonstrations in Washington and elsewhere this summer and fall when Congress will be battling over President Obama's biggest budget proposals. Leaders of the Tax Day rallies that drew an estimated 600,000 people in nearly 600 cities and towns say the seemingly spontaneous local protests have grown into a more muscular movement concerned that the escalating growth and cost of government threatens to undermine economic freedom. Organizers say rallies are planned here and around the nation on the Fourth of...

WASHINGTON -- President Obama set great expectations for himself on his first European diplomatic trip to test his new get-along-by-going-along foreign policy. And it was a complete success, according to the gushing reports from the news media. Not everyone agreed with that assessment. Obama certainly proved "that he can work smoothly and productively with a wide range of foreign leaders -- provided that he allows them to set the agenda," remarked the Washington Post's foreign-policy analyst Jackson Diehl. Obama went to Europe to persuade the major European powers and other countries who make up the world's richest G-20 to pump...

WASHINGTON -- Most media polls are showing President Obama's job approval in the 59 percent to mid-60 percent range, but not pollster John Zogby, who says Obama's rating has dipped below 50 percent. Contrary to many of the other major presidential surveys such as the venerable Gallup Poll, which puts Obama's number at around 60 percent or higher, Zogby's poll (mid-March) showed that Obama's job performance fell. His findings are significant for a number of definitional reasons and are worth a closer look. In his most recent survey, the pollster said that "49 percent rate his job performance as excellent...

GOP gleeful at prospects for 2010Donald Lambro Tuesday, March 31, 2009 Republican strategists eager to rebuild the party and regain voter confidence see the comeback road running over a number of unpopular Democratic governorships on a playing field that favors making statehouse gains in traditionally Republican red states. Boosting the Republicans' potential political appeal in the current two-year election cycle is the Democrats' tendency to propose higher taxes as the solution to their state budget deficits that has sent gubernatorial polls into a steep nose dive in these tight economic times — giving the Republican Party a potent issue in...

The Republican brand is badly damaged and won't be in the majority anytime soon. But independent campaign analysts say the GOP will likely make gubernatorial and House gains anyway in the 2009-10 election cycle. The reasons have more to do with political geography and math than with any forecasts about what the economic climate will look like this year and next when the off-year and midterm elections will be influenced by the by whether the nation's economy responds to President Obama's stimulus programs. Republicans will just have more opportunities than the Democrats next time around in the congressional and gubernatorial...

President Obama told executives of big business last week that he believed in free-market economics, capitalist risk-taking, wealth creation and possibly lower corporate taxes - terms he rarely, if ever, uttered in his stump speeches for the presidency. In an address Thursday before the Business Roundtable, a powerful lobbying organization made up of America's richest blue-chip corporations, Mr. Obama sounded at times like a cross between Ronald Reagan and free-market crusader Jack Kemp as he sought to win over titans of industry, many of whom are skeptical about his economic policies. In the course of his fence-mending speech and...

President Obama and his White House staff are making mistakes that continue to worsen an already deflating U.S. economy. As the stock market plunged below the Dow's 7,000 mark -- a loss of 1,500 points since his inauguration -- Obama casually dismissed the sharp drop in equity values, comparing it to the ups and downs of a poll. The stock market "is sort of like a tracking poll in politics," he told news reporters. "You know, it bobs up and down day to day. And if you spend all your time worrying about that, then you're probably going to get...