Free Republic

If the headline on a recent Associated Press dispatch failed to alarm you, you can’t have been paying attention. “Bush confident sweeping measure will stabilize economy,” it read. That was scant hours before the House rejected Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s Wall Street rescue plan, thrashed out over a long weekend of intense congressional negotiations. As a rule, the more confidence that George W. Bush expresses, the worse things are. How and why the administration allowed what even cautious commentators describe as “the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression” to worsen until stopgap emergency measures couldn’t wait would appear something...

Retired NATO commander Wesley K. Clark left last month as Summit Global Logistics chairman following a one-year stint that saw the East Rutherford, N.J. shipping concern's stock fall 60% as its losses rose 10,000%. An ill-fated corporate buying spree fueled by $163 million of debt and equity financing boosted revenues, but not as much as expenses, prompting a default. Clark, once a presidential candidate, had headed the investment bank arranging the initial financing. In 2006 he resigned as a director of Viaspace (otcbb: VSPC.OB) after just two weeks amid sharp questions about high-pressure penny-stock promotions on its behalf over the...

WORST JOB IN THE WORLD Which circle of Hell would this be, exactly? For one's sins, one spends eternity as a Democratic spokesman with the duty of finding a rationale for why everything is terrible: According to one Democratic operative, the Dow's record close is "not an achievement but a failure." Robert Weiner, a Democratic strategist and former member of the Clinton administration, said people should remember it's taken nearly seven years for the Dow to break its previous record close, which happened on Jan. 14, 2000 - near the end of Bill Clinton's presidency... He said Tuesday's stock market...

2004-07-21) -- Former Clinton national security advisor Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger today returned the orginal copy of the U.S. Constitution to the National Archives. "It was an honest mistake," said Mr. Berger, who until this morning was an advisor to Democrat presidential hopeful John Forbes Kerry. "I accidentally wrapped the Constitution around my left leg and mistakenly secured it with rubber bands." A spokesman for the National Archives said he was pleased to have the Constitution back."Until Mr. Berger returned it," said the source, "our prime suspects were all in the federal judiciary."