David Obey, D-Wis., the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, had been working with moderate Republicans to generate momentum for a catchall spending bill that split the differences between increases wanted by Democrats and the strict budget submitted by President Bush in February.

But after a White House veto threat over the weekend, a frustrated Obey said he would rip up the compromise bill and devise a new one using the strict spending ceiling set by Bush - but would reach it by whacking GOP priorities and stripping the bill of billions of dollars in pet projects for legislators in both parties.

The Winston-Salem Journal

And this is supposed to be a bad thing?  Obey has no idea how much he just made me smile.  Cut it all out, dude.  I don’t care whose side of the aisle it’s on.

Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee’s rise to the top of Iowa polls has drawn attention to his embrace of a national retail sales tax. Backers of the concept call the former Arkansas governor a visionary; detractors call it unworkable.

Huckabee supports the FairTax, a national retail sales tax that his campaign Web site says would abolish the Internal Revenue Service, and federal income and payroll taxes.

“And I do mean all — personal, federal, corporate federal, gift, estate, capital gain, alternative minimum, Social Security, Medicare, self-employment,” Huckabee said on the site. “All our hours filling out forms, all our payments for help with those forms, all our shopping bags filled with disorganized receipts, all our headaches and heartburn from tax stress will vanish.”

Charlotte Observer

Huckabee has really brought this bill a lot of exposure by getting behind it.  I have very little expectation that this will ever see the light of day, but there’s nothing wrong with being a dreamer now and then.

It’s the political equivalent of a hunger strike.

As Congress lurches toward a budget showdown before Christmas, Minnesota Rep. John Kline is at the center of an ideological food fight over the role of pork-barrel “earmarks.” The Lakeville Republican calls the system of special funding for pet projects a “corrupting” influence in Congress, and says he won’t take any.

The Star Tribune

It’s nice to see another Republican speak out against wasteful earmarks. Kline has done a 180 on this issue. He had his fair share of the trough when the GOP controlled Congress. He claims that partisanship has nothing to do with him changing his mind on the issue. Hey, I don’t care what his reasons are for reversing his view on this as long as he will stick with the handful of others in Congress who have been fighting Congressional spending. If we keep bringing them on board one at a time it brings us that much closer to the party renewing their fiscally conservative vows.

Rudy Giuliani says he wanted to deport all 400,000 illegal immigrants from New York City when he was mayor, but ended up welcoming most of those who were “causing me no trouble.”In an interview for the new book “Meet the Next President,” Giuliani lamented that the Immigration and Naturalization Service deported only 700 to 1,500 of the city’s 400,000 aliens each year during his mayoralty. Giuliani said it was obvious the INS was not about to increase deportation “from 700 or 1,500 to 400,000.”

“If they could, I would have turned all the people over. It would have helped me. I would have had a smaller population. I would have had fewer problems,” the Republican presidential candidate told The Examiner in an interview. “But the practical reality was, they were going to make an infinitesimal, statistically insignificant contribution to the problem. I was stuck with it. And no matter what their promises, they weren’t going to do anything about it.”

In fact, according to Giuliani, the INS told his predecessor, David Dinkins, to stop reporting criminals for deportation. Dinkins complied, even though he had re-issued an executive order by his predecessor, Ed Koch, that called for the reporting of illegals suspected of “engaging in criminal activity.”

When Giuliani took over as mayor, he too re-issued the Koch order.

“Why don’t you throw out the people who are drug dealers, that are coming out of jail? And before they hit the streets, we can turn them over,” Giuliani recalled telling the INS. “We couldn’t work that out with them. They wouldn’t do it for us.

“They wouldn’t do it for us because they had, you know, some professor with a visa first, and they had two restaurant workers, and three gardeners. Now it may or may not be right for them to be here, but they’re not threatening anybody. These drug dealers are threatening people. I couldn’t get them to do that, so I had to handle the thing myself. And I handled it.”

Giuliani handled it by cracking down on illegals who broke more than immigration laws. Meanwhile, he adopted a laissez-faire attitude toward everyone else who entered the United States illegally.

“The ones that are causing me no trouble, I’m going to leave them alone,” he told The Examiner. “They’re contributing to the lawful part of the city. I’ve got so many citizens — legal immigrants, and then some illegal immigrants — committing crimes that I’ve got to pay attention to them.”

Similarly, Giuliani concluded that going after school-age illegals would be an empty political gesture.

Examiner

So Giuliani claims that he did what he had to as mayor regarding the illegal alien situation because INS wouldn’t do their job. That is certainly on surprise. INS has been failing in their responsibility for years. The question here is whether or not Giuliani is being genuine. Did he really hold a more complacent attitude towards this problem because at the time there was really nothing else he could do, or is he just saying this to win the nomination?