The White House said the $606 billion education and health was loaded with 2,000 earmarks - lawmaker-sponsored projects that critics call pork-barrel spending - which Bush wants stripped from the bill.

“Some of its wasteful projects include a prison museum, a sailing school taught aboard a catamaran and a Portugese-as-a-second-language program,” the president said. “Congress owes the taxpayers much better than this effort.”

The Herald

I’m happy to see that Bush has finally located a frugal bone in his body. This will be another test for the Congressional Republicans. Will they stand up for taxpayers or will they override to buy votes again?

Bush also makes a justified jab at the Democrats, which is always nice to hear:

“The Congress now sitting in Washington holds this philosophy,” Bush told an audience of business and community leaders. “The majority was elected on a pledge of fiscal responsibility, but so far it’s acting like a teenager with a new credit card.

“This year alone, the leadership in Congress has proposed to spend $22 billion more than my budget provides,” the president said. “Now, some of them claim that’s not really much of a difference. The scary part is, they seem to mean it.”

While the Democratic contest in Iowa has been a three-way battle for some time, most polls have shown Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, with a strong lead in the Hawkeye State, dominating the GOP field. Recent surveys, however, have shown Huckabee picking up steam, and he is well within striking distance in the CBS News/New York Times poll, where he trails Romney, 27 percent to 21 percent, with a 5 percent margin of error.

Rudy Giuliani was in third at 15 percent. All other candidates were in single digits, including Fred Thompson, who had 9 percent support among likely caucus-goers.

CBS News

Iowa Republicans had better take their heads out of their rear before this election. Huckabee makes Bush look like Goldwater when it comes to social welfare handouts and “compassionate conservativism.” I watched a video yesterday from four years ago with then Governor Huckabee standing before the Arkansas State Assembly declaring how he would happily sign any combination of multiple tax increases they deliver and I quote, “You Will Have Nothing But My Profound Thanks.”

No doubt, Hillary Clinton has the Democrat primary all wrapped up. A couple of one-term senators are simply no match for the political machine she and her husband have built. I won’t go so far as to say that it’s not possible for a Republican to defeat her in the general election. But as things stand today, the GOP has a very real set of problems that are larger than any of the party’s candidates.

First and foremost, the Republican brand as effective stewards of the taxpayer dollar is in tatters, and the shredding doesn’t look to stop any time soon. Just yesterday, 138 House Republicans joined the Democrats in voting to override the president’s veto of a wasteful and pork-ridden Water Resources bill. That vote was a shameful display of personal politics over the national interest, and it contains the seeds of destruction of whatever conservative principles remain in the Republican party.

The callow accommodation to big-spending Democrats in Congress is one of the ways the Republican party will return itself to the days of serving as a compliant, permanent minority. Happy for table scraps, elected Republicans will simply abandon the ideas of their party in order to “get along”.

No wonder Americans prefer Democrats on the economy, taxes, and spending issues, according to recent polling data. When the choice is between Democrats, and the Democrat-lite ideas the GOP has become so comfortable offering, the Democrats will win every time.

The only way the Republican party will beat Hillary Clinton is to return to its limited-government roots. That’s the only way to rebuild a majority coalition.

Freedom Works

Sometimes I think that Congressional Republicans are more than happy to remain in the minority of our government as long as they are still able to bring table scraps back to their homes to buy votes with. We continuously hear the same message that Armey is espousing in this article and while the Congressional leadership has paid it some lip service, when they continue to stick their hands into the trough of a pork barrel monstrosity such as this, how will anyone take them seriously? The Republicans are going to be a drag on our candidate no matter who it is and participating in the overrides of fiscally responsible vetoes will aid in putting Hillary in the White House, make no mistake about it.

I’d love to list the Republicans who cared more about themselves than our country on this vote, but I don’t have the time to list 138 of them.