Free Republic

Stick this on your bulletin board and send it far and wide. George Bush has been in office for 7½ years. The first six the economy was fine. In spite of the mid-2000 Clinton recession, it was even resilient enough to rebound after 9/11. A little over one year ago: 1. Consumer confidence stood at a 2½ year high; 2. Regular gasoline sold for $2.19 a gallon; 3. The unemployment rate was 4.5%. 4. The Dow Jones hit a record high—14,000 5. Americans were buying new cars, stoking the economy, taking cruises, vacationing overseas, living large! But Americans wanted change!...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Monday night called embattled Harlem Rep. Charlie Rangel to her office for a personal confrontation and asked him to step aside from his powerful tax-writing post due to the exploding scandal over his murky personal finances. Rangel, the chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee, had been resisting growing calls for him to step down from his leadership position in the wake of revelations by The Post that he owes thousands of dollars in unpaid taxes on his Dominican Republic vacation home and has major discrepancies on his personal financial-disclosure statements. Rangel declined comment but...

After yesterday's all-night Iraq war "defeatathon," as radio talk-show host Laura Ingraham described it, House and Senate Democrats continue to illustrate why Americans so distrust them when it comes to national security. Antiwar lawmakers have been losing momentum of late, to such an extent that U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and representatives of liberal humanitarian organizations like the International Crisis Group found it necessary to warn that a precipitous troop withdrawal could trigger a humanitarian catastrophe for Iraqis. So yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid staged an overnight session where senators debated abandoning Iraq. Mr. Reid came up eight votes short...

Congressional Democrats say their constituents are clamoring for something even the most liberal lawmakers promise they won't pursue: President Bush's impeachment. "I get one call after another saying, 'Impeach the president,' " said Rep. John P. Murtha, Pennsylvania Democrat and one of Mr. Bush's most relentless critics on the Iraq war. "It's a simple process but a very divisive thing," Mr. Murtha said. "You've got to measure what it's going to do to the country, and at this point I don't see that happening. Instead we'll fight it out on the issues." Some members speculated that the Democratic takeover of...