Republicans continue to play games, calling President Obama a “socialist,” a “communist” and/or a “Marxist.”  Republican Secretary of Transportation, Ray LaHood, was so unhappy with his party’s desperate games that he lashed out at them yesterday in an interview with the Huffington Post.  Secretary LaHood “ scoffed at the recent talking points emanating from the congressional leaders of his own party. His voice rising at times with emotion, the transportation czar tackled first the notion that the president was a socialist in disguise.”

“I don’t agree with it,” LaHood said. “If you go out and interview these people working on this road in Maryland… these people are thrilled. They are thrilled that they are working in March on a good paying job building roads, which is what they were trained to do. That’s going to be happening all over America. So the idea that this is socialism — it is not socialism, it is economic development. It is going to provide an economic engine around communities all over American for jobs; good paying jobs; and help people pay their bills. I don’t call that socialism…. We are the model for the world when it comes to infrastructure. We are the model for the interstate system. I don’t call that socialism. Our $40 billion [for the Department of Transportation]: not socialism. It is good paying jobs that is going to drive the economies in a lot of states and a lot of communities.”

A large proportion of the American public agree with Secretary LaHood and President Obama on the stimulus spending and the government’s efforts to save our country’s failing financial institutions.  President Obama recently accurately pointed out to the New York Times when asked whether the was a socialist that “…it wasn’t under me that we started buying a bunch of shares of banks.”  Now Republicans have gone so far as to call the “recession” the Obama recession, notwithstanding the fact that the recession started well before Barack Obama assumed office and the near total collapse of the United States’ financial institutions occurred during George Bush’s watch.  Americans are too smart to fall for this ridiculous attempt at revisionist history.

Meghan McCain gets off the topic of dating today on The Daily Beast, instead taking shots at Ann Coulter and her role in the Republican Party. The senator’s daughter calls Coulter “offensive, radical, insulting, and confusing all at the same time.”

I am not suggesting that extreme conservatism wasn’t once popular, nor am I suggesting I should in any way be any kind of voice for the party. I have been a Republican for less than a year. Still, even after losing the election, I find myself more drawn to GOP ideals and wanting to fight for the party’s resurgence. And if figureheads like Ann Coulter are turning me off, then they are definitely turning off other members of my generation as well. She does appeal to the most extreme members of the Republican Party — but they are dying off, becoming less and less relevant to the party structure as a whole

Signaling another break with his predecessor’s expansive view of executive power, President Barack Obama is essentially nullifying hundreds of so-called signing statements in which George W. Bush took issue with provisions in bills he signed.

Bush used signing statements to express opposition to about 1,200 items in legislation passed during his eight years in office. In many instances, he told federal agencies they should ignore the offending provisions because they intruded on duties he said the Constitution reserved exclusively for the executive branch.

On Monday, Obama issued a memorandum effectively negating Bush’s signing statements by telling agencies not to follow on them without consulting with the Justice Department in advance.

“There is no doubt that the practice of issuing such statements can be abused,” Obama’s directive said. “Constitutional signing statements should not be use to suggest that the President will disregard statutory requirements on the basis of policy disagreements.”

http://www.newsweek.com/id/188279?from=rss

Go to the link above or click on the author David Frum to read the whole story! FINALLY a Republican has grown a set of COHONES or BALLS to say Rush Limbaugh is not the LEADER of the REPUBLICAN Party!

But I for one hope that the Grand Old Party keeps kissing Limbaughs rather ample ASS. Republican still cannot see how bad it makes them look to be following Limbaugh like SHEEPLE, fawning over him, bowing to him etc. Keep it up Rush

On the one side, the president of the United States: soft-spoken and conciliatory, never angry, always invoking the recession and its victims. This president invokes the language of “responsibility,” and in his own life seems to epitomize that ideal: He is physically honed and disciplined, his worst vice an occasional cigarette. He is at the same time an apparently devoted husband and father. Unsurprisingly, women voters trust and admire him. And for the leader of the Republicans? A man who is aggressive and bombastic, cutting and sarcastic, who dismisses the concerned citizens in network news focus groups as “losers.” With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence—exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party. And we’re cooperating! Those images of crowds of CPACers cheering Rush’s every rancorous word—we’ll be seeing them rebroadcast for a long time. Rush knows what he is doing. The worse conservatives do, the more important Rush becomes as leader of the ardent remnant. The better conservatives succeed, the more we become a broad national governing coalition, the more Rush will be sidelined. But do the rest of us understand what we are doing to ourselves by accepting this leadership? Rush is to the Republicanism of the 2000s what Jesse Jackson was to the Democratic party in the 1980s. He plays an important role in our coalition, and of course he and his supporters have to be treated with respect. But he cannot be allowed to be the public face of the enterprise—and we have to find ways of assuring the public that he is just one Republican voice among many, and very far from the most important.

By MIKE ALLEN |

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele says he has reached out to Rush Limbaugh to tell him he meant no offense when he referred to the popular conservative radio host as an “entertainer” whose show can be “incendiary.”