Free Republic

President Obama lent his voice last night to the push for a mandatory cap on greenhouse gas emissions, using his first speech to a joint session of Congress to lobby for controversial legislation sure to spark a heated debate during tight economic times. Obama campaigned for president last year with climate change and energy issues atop his agenda. And he returned to those themes yesterday, saying that a cap-and-trade bill would help spark economic recovery by giving U.S. companies greater incentive to start producing more wind turbines, solar panels, biofuels and battery-powered automobiles. "To truly transform our economy, to protect...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republican Senator John McCain said on Tuesday night he believed an overhaul of the U.S. healthcare system was possible this year after President Barack Obama called for such a timetable. In his speech to a joint session of the U.S. Congress, Obama said that due to rising costs, revamping the healthcare system "must not wait, and it will not wait another year." McCain, who is a member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, said in an interview after the speech that he felt an accord was reachable this year. "I do think it's...

Despite the fact that he might have wished he had been the man who just finished his first address to a joint session of Congress as president, Sen. John McCain had kind words for President Obama's address this evening. "The president gave a very effective speech," McCain told Katie Couric on CBSNews.com's presidential webcast following Mr. Obama’s address. "His delivery and the theme of the speech was excellent."Still, McCain said, "now I would like to know how we are going to implement it." "I don't know where Social Security was,” McCain said. “I don't know how you increase all of...

* Willing to work with Obama on health care. * Talked about Palin: "I think the world of Sarah." * Admitted rushing into TARP.

WASHINGTON, Feb 24 (Reuters) - The U.S. Defense Department would be forced to change its acquisition process under legislation introduced on Tuesday by top senators determined to crack down on the runaway costs and costly schedule delays dogging many Pentagon weapons programs. Senators Carl Levin, the Democrat who heads the Senate Armed Services Committee, and John McCain, a former presidential candidate and the top Republican on the committee, said the bill aimed to achieve more reasonable cost and schedule estimates before programs started. It also would ensure technologies were more developed before production began and would crack down on the...

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Cost overruns on big-ticket Pentagon projects have left the U.S. military facing a budgetary "train wreck" at a time of growing budget deficits, Sen. John McCain said Tuesday. McCain and Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan and the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the cost of 95 major weapons systems -- ships, aircraft and armored vehicles -- have ballooned by a total of 30 percent in recent years, to about $1.3 trillion. The senators announced an effort, including legislation, to rein in that spending and tighten Defense Department oversight. With U.S. troops fighting two wars overseas...

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has taken steps to mend his relationship with Sen. John McCain after a bruising election year, but an upcoming vote on legislation loaded with earmarks could test their fragile détente. The Senate this week may debate a $410 billion package of spending bills that includes thousands of member projects. Sen. McCain (R-Ariz.) staunchly opposes them, while Reid (D-Nev.) insists the furor over earmarks is overblown. All this might be another healthy debate for the world’s most deliberative body if it were not for another recent disagreement — McCain thought he was the best candidate to...

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. listens during remarks of the Fiscal Responsibility Summit, hosted by President Barack Obama, not pictured, Monday, Feb. 23, 2009, in the East Room of the White House in Washington. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Henry Waxman (R) speak to reporters during the Fiscal Responsibility Summit hosted by U.S. President Barack Obama at the White House in Washington February 23, 2009. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., second fromleft, accompanied by, from left, Rep. John Larson, D-Conn., Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., and Rep. George Miller, D-Calif. gestures...

On now. Watch and weep. Obama is telling an audience of reporters -- who are giggling like school girls before The One -- that the military will pay for his deconstruction of the economy to the status of a third world social democracy. Obama promises "to protect the retirement of Americans." This appears to be the next attack he will mount against those of us who have lived responsibly -- to take-away our retirement and give it to others. "... We have areal sustainability problem regarding retirement and healthcare...this is the only area in which we have done any prejudging......

Gaming his 2010 reelection prospects. BY SEYWARD DARBY Since losing to Obama in November, Senator John McCain has conspicuously focused attention on his home state of Arizona, where he plans to run for his fifth term in 2010. The Arizona Republic recently reported that, in the few months since the presidential election, McCain has taken renewed interest in meeting with elected officials and getting up to speed on local issues. And, when he's been in D.C., McCain has squashed any hope that he would revisit his "maverick" phase, circa 2001, by becoming a Republican friend to the White House. Instead,...

A simple apology would have sufficed. Instead, Sen. Russ Feingold has decided to follow his McCain-Feingold evisceration of the First Amendment with Feingold-McCain, more vandalism against the Constitution. The Wisconsin Democrat, who is steeped in his state's progressive tradition, says, as would-be amenders of the Constitution often do, that he is reluctant to tamper with the document but tamper he must because the threat to the public weal is immense: Some governors have recently behaved badly in appointing people to fill U.S. Senate vacancies. Feingold's solution, of which John McCain is a co-sponsor, is to amend the 17th Amendment. It...

During his visit to Mohave County, Arizona Sen. John McCain sat down with the Kingman Daily Miner Editorial Board to discuss a number of issues. The senator answered questions about the economic stimulus package, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, education and other issues. The following is part of the discussion the board had with the senator on Thursday. . . . . . The president campaigned on change. He campaigned that we would sit down and work together. Maybe we couldn't; maybe we were just too philosophically different. But there wasn't a single attempt made. I know bipartisanship; I...

Meghan McCain wasn't impressed with Michael Steele, or Sarah Palin, in an interview with ABC Radio's Curtis Sliwa yesterday: On Michael Steele's New "Hip-Hop" Strategy:"You know with all due respect to the new chairman, Michael Steele, I do not believe that is actually something that is going to work because it is premeditated...I think they need to rely on a message that is going to really stick with people of my generation. That message has to be equated in the medium of the internet, which obviously up to this point just hasn't happened."On whether Sarah Palin appeals more to a...

In reporting yesterday on the fallout from Sen. Patrick Leahy’s (D-Vt.) proposal last week to create a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate the Bush administration’s alleged crimes in connection with its “war on terror,” I neglected to mention that in 2005 Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) had proposed a similar commission — which he called a “National Commission on Policies and Practices on Treatment of Detainees Since September 11, 2001.” The aim would similarly have been to get at the truth, though the amendment did not rule out the possibility of subsequent prosecutions. (To be fair, Leahy hasn’t actually proposed...

Senator says despite hard times now, nation will recover. KINGMAN - "I think it's a time of testing, a time of difficulty. We have had other crises in the history of this country and we have recovered, and we will recover," Sen. John McCain told a large crowd of Mohave County residents and the Board of Supervisors Thursday morning. After meeting with officials in Bullhead City and Lake Havasu City, the senator stopped at the County Administration Building to meet with the county supervisors and take questions from residents during a tour of Mohave County Thursday. "It does require government...

KINGMAN - Arizona Sen. John McCain stopped in Kingman Thursday to visit with the Mohave County supervisors. McCain fielded questions from the three supervisors and Sheriff Tom Sheahan, then answered questions from about a dozen people. The Republican senator assured the crowd in the auditorium at the administration building that the country will recover from the current economic crisis. McCain also said the Republicans proposed a stimulus bill of about $420 billion, mostly money for jobs creation. Congress passed and President Barrack Obama signed into law a larger, $787 billion stimulus bill.

President Obama's $275 billion housing bailout plan, aimed at halting mortgage foreclosures, is drawing comparisons to a proposal championed last year by John McCain. President Obama, in rejecting GOP alternatives to his massive economic stimulus plan, cited his electoral victory over John McCain in November as proof that Americans wanted change. But Obama's $275 billion housing bailout plan, aimed at halting mortgage foreclosures, is drawing comparisons to a proposal championed last year by John McCain. "I hope they took the best ideas wherever they found them. And, certainly, Senator McCain campaigned for a long time on this proposal," said Douglas...

The Daily Beast’s Meghan McCain talks to Republicans about the party’s crippling technology disconnect—and the new conservative Web zealots who can save the GOP.

More than 100 members of Congress—past and present—as well as congressional campaign committees and the national parties benefited from political donations from the political action committee or employees of Stanford Financial Group since 2000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The Securities and Exchange Commission charged the firm’s head, R. Allen Stanford, on Tuesday with orchestrating a $8 billion fraud. Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal reported on Stanford’s status as an “international cricket sponsor, Washington political donor and private banker to Latin America’s wealthy.” President Barack Obama was the third-ranking recipient among lawmakers, with $31,750 collected from company employees during...

One of Washington's time honored rituals is that when a donor turns out to be a sleaze ball, or even an alleged sleaze ball, beneficiaries distance themselves -typically by donating the amount received by their campaign committees to charity. The disgorging has begun when it comes to R. Allen Stanford, the Houston-based banker who - according to the SEC - ran a fraudulent $8 billion investment scheme out of his office on the Caribbean island Antigua. Sen. John McCain of Arizona was the first major recipient to step forward. An aide said this morning that he will donate his receipts...