Free Republic

With the elections over and the 110th Congress settling in, the media have been reporting ad nauseam about who has assumed new political power in Washington. We're subjected to breathless reports about emerging power brokers in Congress; how so-and-so is now the powerful chair of an important committee; how certain candidates are amassing power for the 2008 elections, and so on. Nobody questions this use of the word "power," or considers its connotations. It's simply assumed, in Washington and the mainstream media, that political power is proper and inevitable. The problem is that politicians are not supposed to have power...

Presidential candidate Duncan Hunter may be the one true Republican running for President. He has got all the right beliefs. Here is the link or cut and paste this URL into your browswer: http://www.thebulletin.us/site/news.cfm?newsid=17769078&BRD=2737&PAG=461&dept_id=576361&rfi=6

Rep. Ron Paul has filed papers in Texas to create a presidential exploratory committee that will allow him to raise money, the Associated Press reported late Thursday. The nine-term congressman from southeast Texas was the Libertarian nominee for president in 1988 and received more than 400,000 votes, the AP reported. This time he plans to run as a Republican.

Texas Congressman Ron Paul files for GOP presidential bid HOUSTON -- Ron Paul, the iconoclastic nine-term congressman from southeast Texas, took the first step Thursday toward launching a second presidential bid in 2008, this time as a Republican. Paul filed incorporation papers in Texas on Thursday to create a presidential exploratory committee that allows him and his supporters to collect money on behalf of his bid. This will be Paul's second try for the White House; he was the Libertarian nominee for president in 1988. Kent Snyder, the chairman of Paul's exploratory committee and a former staffer on Paul's Libertarian...

Dr. Tom Coburn, the plainspoken obstetrician from Muskogee, Okla., was back in Washington briefly last week. Republican senators greeted him with mixed emotions. He is their best hope for keeping an Oklahoma seat Republican in the closely divided Senate. The bad news is, he would be as prickly as he was during his six years in the House (1995-2000). Coburn's problem is that he takes seriously the professed Republican agenda: limited government, entitlement reform and anti-abortion advocacy. He was a rare sincere GOP supporter of term limits, leaving the House after three terms as he promised to do. The result...