Free Republic

Movement conservatives and self-styled Republican populists have long been joined in conflict with the party establishment, but the GOP presidential race has set them on a collision course. Friction between these two GOP factions is being fueled by the increasingly bitter battle between Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and New York celebrity businessman Donald Trump in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Cruz represents ideologically committed conservatives, although he has appealed with some success to populist voters. Trump has given big government populists, who have aligned with the GOP mostly for cultural reasons, a champion, while appealing to some...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Man, are we loaded today.  I'll tell you right now, it's going to take all three hours and then some.  I'm gonna try to get it all in here in three hours.  Much of today is gonna build on points that I have been making the past two days, evolving, growing, adding evidence to it, all rooted around the question, who is and what is the conservative movement, and why is it apparently behaving so oddly?  I think I can explain this and much else to all of you as the program unfolds today before your very...

Can we all just get along? President Obama says he's fed up with "obscene bonuses" on Wall Street. The Congress is in an uproar. And new numbers from the front page of The Wall Street Journal today are stoking this mob mentality to feverish proportions. Yet the actual metrics in the Journal story raise a key question: What’s all the screaming about? Wall Street’s total compensation simply isn’t out of control. And the pay critics, in their pious, get-tough crackdown, are only ensuring a new round of outrage when some of these banks recover. First, some key numbers (rounded up)...

WASHINGTON (AP) - A senior administration official says President Barack Obama is ready to announce an administration plan to recover Wall Street bailout shortfalls with a bank fee on the country's biggest financial firms. The announcement is expected Thursday. The official was not authorized to discuss the fee publicly. The official said the fee would be designed to recoup as much as $120 billion. That's the most administration officials expect to lose from the government's $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program that bailed out banks, automakers and other financial firms.