Free Republic

Senator responds This week, a letter writer criticized what he felt is my position on taxing the rich, reducing the debt and protecting the safety net. Let me set the record straight. I do believe the wealthy should pay their fair share. I voted for a bill raising taxes on those making more than $250,000 and protecting middle-income families from income tax increases this summer. That bill is being held up in the House of Representatives by the Speaker. I support closing tax loopholes, limiting deductions and elimination of some of the carve-outs and giveaways in our tax code —...

Dick Durbin, you spoilsport. The state's senior U.S. senator may (or may not) have made a wise decision to forego hosting health care town halls in his home state, but in any case he's denying us of a spectacle we deserve. After all, who isn't dying to see how a relatively close, personal friend of the president (and the No. 2 man in the Senate as Harry Reid's assistant majority leader) would handle the (planted or not) mobs that would turn out to shout him down? Some of those mobs may even be made up of liberals, now that Durbin...

Sen. Dick Durbin, who voted against going to war in Iraq in 2002 and has remained a steady foe of U.S. military involvement there, played host Tuesday to two wounded servicemen, his personal guests for President Bush's State of the Union Address. The men -- Marine Staff Sgt. Wade Cobar of Schaumburg, Ill., and Army Staff Sgt. Eric Sundell of Patoka, Ill. -- did not offer criticism of the war, but praised the care they received at military hospitals and the kindness of Americans who sent them care packages to Iraq. At a news conference in Durbin's Capitol office before...

President Bush, chastened and admitting his failed strategy in the four-year-old war in Iraq, is asking a skeptical nation to give him another chance to get it right. "Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me," said Bush, using the passive voice in his speech from the White House library. Mistakes? Bush blamed the Iraq government for putting restrictions on U.S. troop movements, al-Qaida and radical Islamists more than the policy choices his administration made that never led to the creation of a democratic Iraq anchoring a peaceful Mideast. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) delivered the official...