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As the Congress hurdles itself to putting a Health Care legislation on the desk of the the POTUS, American voters are once again telling the Democratic party that they would prefer a different approach to using that money. According the the latest Rasmussen study, 54% rate middle class tax cuts as the priority over more health care spending, 33% prefer spending on heath care.

Here are the news stories, editorials, and videos that conservatives dugg yesterday, Thursday, August 20, 2009. Please take a moment to digg these articles at Digg.com, then get back over here! What is Digg? And why should I care?

Security Before Politics (Obama Crossed the Red Line, Publication of CIA Memos) By Porter J. Goss Saturday, April 25, 2009 Since leaving my post as CIA director almost three years ago, I have remained largely silent on the public stage. I am speaking out now because I feel our government has crossed the red line between properly protecting our national security and trying to gain partisan political advantage. We can't have a secret intelligence service if we keep giving away all the secrets. Americans have to decide now. A disturbing epidemic of amnesia seems to be plaguing my former colleagues...

From an e-mail sent overnight by Anchorage attorney Kevin Clarkson: Five Alaska Legislators, Rep. Wes Keller, Rep. Mike Kelly, Rep. Bob Lynn, Sen. Fred Dyson, and Sen. Tom Wagoner, will file suit in state superior court in Anchorage tomorrow morning (9/16/08) at 9:00 am (Superior courthouse 4th Avenue) against Sen. French, Sen. Kim Elton, Stephen Branchflower and the Alaska Legislative Council in order to halt the investigation of Governor Sarah Palin and others because the investigators have lost the appearance of impartiality required under the Alaska Constitution. The Legislators will ask for declaratory and injunctive relief in the investigation, stating...

California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer is blocking the nomination of former Republican Congressman James Rogan to the federal bench, due largely to Rogan’s leading role in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. Rogan served in the U.S. House from 1997 to 2001, and due to his background as a prosecutor, was selected as one of 13 House managers for the impeachment trial. “U.S. Rep. Rogan was one of the most enthusiastic backers of impeachment — he thought President Clinton had committed high crimes and misdemeanors,” Boxer’s spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz said.

Last week I wrote an essay analyzing the legacy of Karl Rove. My argument was that one of Mr. Rove's biggest problems--and indeed a major failure of this White House--was the failure to do all that could be down to control his and his boss' image. I received more than a few emails in response to the essay. Many of them echoed the thoughts of this emailer: I'm in direct disagreement with your attempt to present Karl Rove as a normal guy. Rove has a serious lack of ethics. He doesn't have sense of right or wrong as much as...

Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson signed on with Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign yesterday, saying "it's entirely possible" his ex-spy wife will hit the trail with her, too. Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a covert CIA operations officer by President Bush's advisers in 2003 as they sought to discredit her Iraq war critic husband. She's writing a memoir due in the fall. "I would expect her to be engaged [politically] probably after the book tour," Wilson told the Daily News after Clinton announced his endorsement. Wilson said his wife shunned politics during her two decades as a covert spy. But...

In Washington these days, even a simple act to honor a veteran can fall victim to partisan rancor. Consider the case of Raymond G. "Jerry" Murphy, a Marine Corps officer during the Korean War who was awarded the Medal of Honor for courageously rescuing many of his fellow Marines one night in February 1953. He was also the recipient of a Silver Star and a Purple Heart. To honor Mr. Murphy, who died just last month, New Mexico congressmen and senators want to rename the Department of Veterans' Affairs Medical Center in Albuquerque after him. This seems a fair, fitting...

Attorney General Jay Nixon's gubernatorial campaign asked Ameren Corp. for political donations after Nixon launched a criminal probe into the utility, according to an Ameren executive. But the executive said the request was routine and had nothing to do with Nixon's role as prosecutor in the case. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Thursday quoted Ameren Vice President Richard Mark saying Nixon's campaign asked Ameren lobbyists to donate money to four democratic campaign committees after Nixon became special prosecutor over the Taum Sauk reservoir collapse. Mark told the newspaper that Nixon's campaign staff approached the utility's governmental affairs staff last spring...

It's election season, and so it's natural that the American political discussion is slavishly dedicated to random partisan foibles. Nancy Pelosi's wobbly resistance to her carnal desire to impeach President Bush as prospective Speaker of the House, the unsightly erosion of the Republicans' tacit claim of moral superiority by the decidedly unwholesome behavior of one of their congressmen, dual glittering examples of government corruption (Tom DeLay and William Jefferson), and Hillary Clinton's politically aggrandizing strategms are all the hot topics in blogs, magazines and books.

The Democrat-backed resolution citing "no confidence" in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is mostly motivated by: Rumsfeld's performancePartisan politics

AUSTIN - A federal judge hearing a ballot dispute Monday involving former U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay said he thinks that DeLay withdrew from the November election, indicating potential trouble for Republicans who want to name a replacement candidate. "He is not going to participate in the election and he withdrew," said U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks, who did not issue an official ruling after a daylong trial regarding DeLay's status as the GOP nominee for the 22nd Congressional District. Jim Bopp, a lawyer for the Republican Party of Texas, disagreed, telling Sparks "there's been no withdrawal." Bopp said that instead,...

It was late 2000 -- early 2001. To protect her identity, let's call her Tereza. Tereza was never a friend---just a work acquaintance. We argued about politics quite regularly at work (lots of down-time in the particular industry we were in at the time). But the arguments were always civil, for one overriding reason----Tereza is a really really really nice person. Seriously, she is calm, sweet, understanding---a lovely and pleasant demeanor. And she was wrong on just about everything she espoused in those arguments. Not just wrong on little details either---her positions themselves, as well-meaning and pleasantly expressed as they...

While listening to the news this evening I had a sobering personal question that had me stunned, and set back, 'about political backstabing. Tom Delay is being accused of taking a trip on Lobby money, "yes we know". But, what we know is not what I am looking for. What truely concerns me is, If a lobby group member "Single Member sponsoring (A) lobby group" knowingly violates the law by tossing in their CC to pay for a trip for a said member of the Government through A lobby group. Without said Government official's knowledge, Can't thee lobby group be...

On two propositions most good-hearted civic-minded people agree: It is good to have centrist politics, and it is good to have high turnout in elections. But what if it should turn out that the two are in fundamental conflict? For that is what political history, here and abroad, suggests. Consider the 2004 election in the United States. George W. Bush, his opponents contended, with some justice, governed as anything but a centrist. Installed in office with a bare majority of the Electoral College, he pushed successfully for massive tax cuts, for conservative positions on cultural issues, for military action not...

Frist finger on ‘nuclear’ button By Alexander Bolton Senate Republican leaders are considering rewriting the chamber’s rules to limit what they call Democratic obstructionism that has slowed the pace of work in the Senate to a trickle. In particular, Republicans want to eliminate the ability of Democrats to filibuster consideration of the president’s executive and judicial-branch nominees, as well as bar filibusters that block the naming of conferees prior to House and Senate negotiations. To do so, Senate GOP leaders are considering resorting to what they call the “constitutional option” and what Democrats deride as the “nuclear option” because they...

The roots of political gridlock in Washington and of the hyper-partisanship dividing "Red" and "Blue" America came into view on successive days at the end of April. [snip]Specter was barely able to survive. He is a tenacious campaigner and not to be underestimated in November. But the trend lines of history are working against him. As the polarization continues in both parties, moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats have become endangered species.

"President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney answered questions before the 9/11 commission ... They did not testify under oath, there was no videotape, no audiotape, not even a stenographer writing down the questions or the answers; there's no record of any kind; kind of like President Bush's National Guard service." —Jay Leno "President Bush and Vice President Cheney went before the commission investigating what exactly happened on 9/11. The President is weird...afterwards, he told reporters he 'enjoyed' it. What? You can say many things, but you can't 'enjoy' it. We kicked back, talked about 9/11, there were cookies —...

Making women's issues go away A damning new report reveals that the Bush administration has quietly removed 25 reports from its Women's Bureau Web site, deleting or distorting crucial information on issues from pay equity to reproductive healthcare National Council for Research on Women (report March 2004) Missing: Information About Women's Lives http://www.ncrw.org/misinfo/report.pdf ____To get access to the Salon article you have to watch a short little ad for the ACLU featuring Martin Sheen. Strange new tactic.

<p>On February 3, by a vote of 394 to 0, the House overwhelmingly approved a resolution (H.J. Res. 84) congratulating Ronald Reagan on his 93rd birthday.</p> <p>Not surprisingly, a group of five angry liberal congressmen refused to pay Reagan even this small courtesy and instead voted "present." A handful of Democrat congressmen did the same last year.</p>

<p>Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee fiercely denounced staffers in their own party yesterday for secretly accessing computer files of their Democratic colleagues.</p> <p>Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican and member of the Judiciary Committee, said that acquiring the Democratic memos was "an unethical or illegal wrong."</p>

Hip hop gets out vote Houston event aims to register 10,000 youths By WYATT BUCHANAN Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle Political and hip-hop industry leaders are kicking off an effort to register 4 million new voters for the November general election at a "Hip Hop Summit" in Houston scheduled during Super Bowl week. "There is a new movement. It is hip hop ... it is the civil rights movement of the 21st century," said U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston, among local political leaders and hip-hop artists announcing the event Thursday at Texas Southern University. The event will draw top hip-hop...

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - Rush Limbaugh was wrong when he accused prosecutors of singling him out, but not by much. Palm Beach County prosecutors investigating the right-wing radio host for his prescription drug abuse have filed "doctor shopping" charges against one other person in the past five years, according to records. Limbaugh's lawyer said the court documents, reviewed by The Palm Beach Post yesterday, prove his client was unfairly targeted. "Rush Limbaugh has been singled out for special prosecution because of who he is," Roy Black told the paper. "We believe the state attorney's office is applying a double...

"Four things belong to a judge: to hear courteously, to answer wisely, to consider soberly and to decide impartially." -- Socrates, 470-399 B.C. A devastating memo written by a Democratic member of the staff of the U.S. Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence and leaked to Fox News is now creating a furor on Capitol Hill. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is charged with protecting the nation's most guarded secrets. The members of that panel have the nation's highest security clearance. Much of the sensitive information they review is for their eyes only and is off limits even to the...

The Commerce Department this morning announced that the economy grew at an astounding 8.2 percent in the third quarter of this year the fastest pace in nearly two decades and higher than previously reported. This comes at a time when the Democratic presidential candidates would have liked exactly the opposite. Now they are without a talking point on economics for their troubled bids for the highest office in the land. At the beginning of their campaigns they tried to use the economy as a talking point. While the markets were well beneath the psychological 10,000 mark, they were able to...

A Republican Senate Judiciary Committee staff member has been suspended with pay after he admitted that he improperly gained access to "secure committee computers," Fox News Channel reports. Whether the staffer is the person who leaked numerous memos in which Democrats on the committee plotted to turn toe current filibuster of judicial nominees for political advantage was not stated. An angry Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch denounced the staffer's action, saying that senators expect their computers to be secure and calling the staffer's action "entirely unacceptable."

<p>Senate Republicans have thrown their support behind the investigation into how internal memos written by Democratic staffers on the Judiciary Committee wound up in the Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times.</p> <p>Since the memos surfaced ? revealing how Democrats planned with liberal interest groups to block President Bush's judicial nominees ? Democrats have accused Republican staffers of hacking into their computers, downloading the 14 memos and leaking them to reporters.</p>

Subject: Don't let Bush question your patriotism Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2003 19:24:07 -0500 From: "Democratic Party" dnc-002Nf03W5y@mailer.democrats.org To: "Jim Robinson" webmaster@freerepublic.com GOP Revs Up Attack Machine Dear Jim Robinson, This time, they have gone too far. We know Republicans are willing to politicize the attacks of September 11. Karl Rove explicitly told them to do so in the 2002 elections, and the Republicans even sold a September 11 picture of George W. Bush to raise money. But now the Bush attack machine has crossed the line again. The RNC has released an advertisement that questions our Democratic candidates' commitment...

<p>The source of the memos is unclear. The sheer volume of the memos, however, suggests that the memos weren't simply misplaced by someone – they appear to have been intentionally leaked by a Democrat. Also, the memos, which begin in late 2001, cut off suddenly in April 2003. This suggests that they came from a former staffer, rather than someone who recently accessed Democrats' computers. Finally, the only information blacked out in the memos is staffers' names. Whoever leaked these memos did not care about the Senators, but apparently knew the staffers and cared enough to spare them embarrassment.</p>

I am increasingly impressed with the calm, mature professionalism of the elite Washington/New York media. Only recently, and for several decades, the WashingtonPostNew YorkTimesCBSNBCABCCNN entities could not resist reporting dramatic national news -- even if the information came to them by informal or questionable methods. From the illegally leaked Pentagon Papers three decades ago, to the illegally leaked Pentagon Iraq war plans of last year, the media elite senior editors never spiked an important revelation for mere want of quiet title to the document in question. They would leave it to red-faced and exasperated senior government officials to express impotent...

<p>November 12, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - A Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday said it was "unfortunate" that Democratic committee staffers wrote a memo outlining a strategy to play politics with prewar intelligence. "The memo was unfortunate because it had a tone of pre-judgment," Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) told The Post. "I think the tone of the memo was unfortunate."</p>

Another Blackhawk helicopter was downed in Iraq outside of Tikrit. While the number of coalition and US soldiers who have become victims of the War on Terror mounts, and regrettably so, we have to remember to look at the big picture before we demonstrate to the world that our resolve is made of cardboard rather than titanium. Without belittling the number of casualties in the conflict, a number that is sure to rise before we rid the world of terrorist threats, we need to remember to keep the issue in perspective. It was put to the public forum by conservative...

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH -- (House of Representatives - July 16, 2003) ---    The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Gingrey). The gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon) is recognized for 40 minutes.    Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, enough is enough. I sat in my office last night and listened to Member after Member on the other side rail about President Bush and whether or not we could trust him in the Iraqi situation. I have listened to my colleagues tonight. Enough is enough. Mr. Speaker, this is just outrageous.    So what I have done is I have got a whole file here,...

Congressional continuityOliver North (archive) June 20, 2003 | Print | SendWASHINGTON, D.C. -- Herman Khan, the brilliant thinker who founded the Hudson Institute, used to call it "thinking the unthinkable." Edward Teller, inventor of the hydrogen bomb, described it as "prudent planning for the ultimate catastrophe." Bill Baker, the genius from Bell Labs, once told me it was the "most difficult engineering challenge" he ever faced. And Gen. Andy Goodpaster, the nation's first national security advisor, called it, "a strategy for democratic survival." They were all correct, and they were all talking about the same thing -- a tightly held,...

Lawmaker Calls War Resolution 'Dishonest' By MATTHEW DALY .c The Associated Press WASHINGTON (AP) - He was one of only 11 members of Congress to oppose a resolution aimed at showing support for U.S. troops in Iraq, but Rep. Jim McDermott said it had nothing to do with his feelings for the men and women of the military. ``I wish it to be clearly understood that I have the utmost respect and appreciation for the courage, tenacity and dedication of those currently serving in Iraq and elsewhere,'' the Seattle Democrat said Friday. McDermott, an outspoken opponent of the war, said...

My daughter belongs to a very good website, but one problem the majority of the youth their have had their minds poisoned by their parents, media etc. They are holding a protest that is completely UnAmerican and I was hoping maybe some Illinois Freepers may want to Freep. From one of the young men read the following: The buggest insult is they use a religious song to do this: a nice little tune my english teacher of all people gave me "bush's proposal for a revised national anthem" sung to the tune of if your happy and you know it...

Watching the State of the Union speech President Bush gave earlier this year one wouldn’t have noticed the walkout staged by a group of the most liberal Democrats, which occurred about ten minutes before President Bush's speech ended, but it did happen. As the president was talking about the serious problems that face the United States and the world with regards to Iraq, North Korea and the War on Terror, serious matters that no doubt should have commanded everyone’s attention and which prompted Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke to the United Nations Security Council recently, a group of the...

The naysayers speak As we hear naysayer, hate-filled rhetoric concerning our nation and its strong stance against the evils of Saddam, we must boldly question where their sympathies lie. And as we question, we must also state without apology that those voices attempting to divide the country are aiding and abetting our enemy. Most assuredly, Saddam looks on their actions with pleasure. Are you aware that the organized antiwar demonstrations occurring throughout the nation are under the auspices of the international activist group called Answer? This group is a front for the Stalinist organization, Communist Workers World Party. How surprising...

8am | prayer service | union plaza The schedule of Sept. 11 events will begin with an 8am prayer service at the Nebraska Union Plaza, led by Larry Meyer, pastor of the campus Lutheran Center. 9:06am | moment of silence At 9:06am, UNL will observe a moment of silence (the impact of the second plane into the World Trade Center was felt at 9:06am in New York), followed by playing of America, the Beautiful on the Mueller Tower carillon. 11:55am - 1pm | commemorative program | union plaza A commemorative program will run from 11:55am to 1pm on the Nebraska...