Free Republic

"My view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks" Rarely do you see a politician quite this honest: Last Wednesday, just hours after securing the position of chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Spencer Bachus, R-Ala., told the Birmingham News that "in Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks." In the very next paragraph, the newspaper reported that Bachus "later clarified his comment to say that regulators should set the parameters in which banks operate...

It's a long and ignominious list. First there was Newt Gingrich. Then came Larry Craig, Mark Foley, David Vitter, Chip Pickering and Vito Fossella. Now starring John Ensign and Mark Sanford. Politically, sex scandals are equal-opportunity destroyers. For every David Vitter, there is an Eliot Spitzer. For every John Ensign there's a John Edwards. For every Bill Clinton there's... well, there's only one Slick Willie. But you get the point: Sexual scandal knows no party. Yet, a common denominator linking many political sex scandals of the last few years is the involvement of conservative Christian politicians who, it seemed, had...

In what is shaping up to be one of the more effective boycott campaigns in years, advertisers are abandoning the "Glenn Beck" show on Fox News following the host's incendiary comments that President Barack Obama is a "racist" and has a "deep-seated hatred for white people." Among the advertisers to pull spots from the popular cable talk show are Geico, owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway /quotes/comstock/13*!brk.a (BRK .A 99,275, +275.00, +0.28%) /quotes/comstock/13*!brk.b (BRK .B 3,235, +5.20, +0.16%) ; Procter & Gamble /quotes/comstock/13*!pg/quotes/nls/pg (PG 52.49, +0.28, +0.54%) ; Sargento Cheese; and Progressive Insurance /quotes/comstock/13*!pgr/quotes/nls/pgr (PGR 16.01, -0.08, -0.50%) , according...