Free Republic

WASHINGTON - How it happened or who's responsible is a mystery eight years after the fact. But what may have been a simple error — or perhaps something more ominous — has given a multimillion-dollar windfall to a group of oil and gas companies and could cost the government billions of dollars more in the years to come. The Interior Department disclosed Wednesday that a provision was mysteriously deleted from hundreds of federal drilling leases in the late 1990s that would have required producers to pay royalties, once prices reached a certain level, on oil or gas taken from deep...

The Man From Might Have Been In a way, it took Bill Clinton himself to tell his deflated fellow Democrats that the Clinton party is over. That was hardly his intended message when he spoke this week to his old colleagues at the Democratic Leadership Council, the faction that flourished for eight years under his "triangulation" strategy of stealing the electoral middle ground out from under the Republicans. Much of his speech was a recitation of accomplishments he has been tirelessly claiming for his presidency in wandering the political afterlife. But he also revised his signature campaign message to tell...