Always ready to welcome a new convert, even President Bush discovering fiscal restraint:
WASHINGTON, DC, United States (UPI) -- In a welcome message to the new Democratic Party-controlled Congress, U.S. President George Bush asked to be given line-item veto authority for spending bills.
One good thing about the Clinton-Obama slugfest is that it might knock Edwards out of the race fairly quickly:
Former senator John Edwards of North Carolina launched his second campaign for the White House from this flood-ravaged city Thursday with a call for the United States to reduce its troop presence in Iraq and a plea for citizen action to combat poverty, global warming and America's reliance on foreign oil.
I would like to thank the "key legislators" who are watching out for me and really seem to care about my well-being:
Concerned about new casinos that could be more like buildings than boats, several key legislators want to review whether state regulators are stretching what Indiana's gambling law allows.
Indiana lawmakers return in January -- one variation of headline in many newspapers and on many Web sites in the last couple of weeks.
"No man's life, liberty or fortune is safe while our legislature is in session." -- attributed to Benjamin Franklin.
I've written enough about the need for us to move on from the time-zone issue, and every time I do, I get calls and mail from people who don't want to let it go. But let me say an unkind word or two about the rederendum, which we should be thankful Indiana uses only sparingly rather than promiscuously as California and some other states do:
I read this Richard Cohen column in yesterday's Journal Gazette, and it really ticked me off, which, I suppose, is a better way than some to make sure one is awake enough to leave the house and get into the car:
Barack Obama is saying nothing, but doing so eloquently, he is "humble in all the right places," and he is just exotic enough at a time when people are sick and tired of all the same old faces. So says columnist Froma Harrop, who compares the senator to a couple of Hoosiers:
If you weren't watching TV on Wednesday, you missed some good cussin', on C-SPAN, of all places. That dull little cable network was carrying the hearing on the FCC's tough new decency standards, and the judges and attorneys involved actually used the F-word and the S-word, among other expletives. The FCC apparently didn't come off looking too good:
Well, that's the problem, isn't it?
As he searches for a new strategy for Iraq, Bush has now adopted the formula advanced by his top military adviser to describe the situation. "We're not winning, we're not losing," Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post. The assessment was a striking reversal for a president who, days before the November elections, declared, "Absolutely, we're winning."
The president, on his belief that he and Democrats in Congress can find common ground:
"I believe it's going to be possible here," Bush said. "... I'm going to sprint to the finish and we can get a lot done."
That's what many of us are afraid of. Between Bush, who has never been a small-government conservative, and Democrats, who are, well, Democrats, there is no limit to what this will cost us.
