Free Republic

Serious question: who do you think the liberal media loathes more: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Grover Norquist? I'm going with 'b.' After all, Mahmoud merely wants to build an atom bomb and wipe Israel off the map, for starters. But Grover Norquist wants to keep taxes from increasing and thereby limit the growth of government. In a 60 Minutes hit piece tonight, CBS correspondent Steve Kroft claimed Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform, "likes things ugly." For good measure, Kroft claimed that Norquist's strategy has some of the characteristics of a "protection racket." View the video here.

A leading anti-tax-increase crusader says he doesn't think that letting Bush-era tax breaks expire is violation of a no-tax-increase pledge. So do Republicans now have a way out of the debt ceiling deadlock? Democrats sure seemed to think so Thursday. Grover Norquist, president and founder of Americans for Tax Reform, told The Washington Post's editorial board this week that he wouldn't consider voting to let the Bush-era tax cuts expire at the end of 2012 to be breaking his organization's pledge that most Republicans and some Democrats signed. "Not continuing a tax cut is not technically a tax increase," Norquist...

Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, says he supports Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's "contingency plan" designed to force President Obama to assume nearly all of the responsibility for raising the debt ceiling. "Obama is playing politics," Norquist tells National Review Online in an interview. "Republicans need to force him to do what the established press is not doing. He says he’s got a serious proposal. Could we see it written down please?" McConnell’s plan would require the president to submit, in detail, a list of spending cuts of equal or greater value than the amount of debt increase...