Free Republic

WASHINGTON - President Bush, brushing aside a stall tactic by Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., appointed the nine-member commission that will determine military bases closings without waiting for Senate confirmation. Bush made the appointments while the Senate was in recess, the White House announced Friday night. The recess appointments prevent delays as the commission prepares to make the first round of base closings in a decade. Before it left for its spring recess the full Senate had been expected to vote on the nomination of Anthony J. Principi, former secretary of veterans affairs, as chairman of the Defense Base Closure and...

TONIGHT Ed Gordon goes one-on-one with Trent Lott, tonight at 8 p.m. (ET). Then, a panel of African-American journalists react to the interview at 8:30 p.m. (ET) Republicans In Crisis Lott's Statements vs. Jesse Jackson's: What's the Difference?

I keep hearing the "talking heads" arguing that Senator Lott must be removed because he is in the line of succession to the presidency. I've checked the law and this is NOT true. As Chapter 1, Sec. 19 of the US Code indicates, after the Vice President, the sequence is: Speaker of the House of Representative, President pro tempore of the Senate, and then on to the cabinet, starting with the Secretary of State. The Senate Majority Leader is nowhere in the sequence. Ironically, though, when Strom Thrurmond was President pro tempore of the Senate, he WAS in the line...

Today on Fox's "The Beltway Boys" Senator Trent Lott was referred to as an "albatross around the Republican's neck." I have heard this expression before but don't understand what it means. When I looked albatross up in the dictionary, all I got was "a large seabird." Perhaps some of you Freeper linguists could help out. Where does the expression "an albatross around's one's neck" come from and what does it mean?