WASHINGTON (CNN) – Another prominent Republican told the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday that the president’s spending plans are pushing the country to the brink of socialism.

Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, the only member of the senate to earn a perfect rating from the American Conservative Union, called President Obama “the world’s best salesman of socialism” on Friday in describing his prime time speech earlier this week.

DeMint, a fierce opponent of government expansion, told the CPAC crowd that conservatives might have to “take to the streets to stop America’s slide into socialism.”

His remarks comes a day after Mike Huckabee told the conference of conservative activists that “the Union of American Socialist Republics is being born” with the president’s stimulus package.

“Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff,” Huckabee said of the government bailing out financial institutions.

(02-26) 20:00 PST San Francisco -- U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is sending strong signals that President Obama - who as a candidate said states should be allowed to make their own rules on medical marijuana - will end raids on pot dispensaries in California.

Asked at a Washington news conference Wednesday about Drug Enforcement Administration raids in California since Obama took office last month, Holder said the administration has changed its policy.

"What the president said during the campaign, you'll be surprised to know, will be consistent with what we'll be doing here in law enforcement," he said. "What he said during the campaign is now American policy."

Bill Piper, national affairs director of the Drug Policy Alliance, a marijuana advocacy group, said the statement is encouraging.

"I think it definitely signals that Obama is moving in a new direction, that it means what he said on the campaign trail that marijuana should be treated as a health issue rather than a criminal justice issue," he said.


"The president believes that federal resources should not be used to circumvent state laws" and expects his appointees to follow that policy, Schapiro said.

The federal government has fought state medicinal pot laws since Californians voted in 1996 to repeal criminal penalties for medical use of marijuana.

GORDON BROWN hopes to forge a partnership with President Barack Obama in Washington this week, to call for a “global new deal” to lift the world out of recession.

As he prepares for his first White House visit since the president’s inauguration, the prime minister has hinted that he is ready to make further tax cuts to boost the UK economy.

Brown will meet Obama on Tuesday and address a joint session of Congress on Wednesday. Aides say he has both to demonstrate to a sceptical British public that he commands the respect of the president, and to persuade the American political establishment that global action is needed to rescue the US economy.

Brown is under pressure to persuade American political leaders to sign up to bold aims for the G20 summit of industrial and leading developing nations, which is to be held in London next month.

February 28, 2009 at 6:00 AM EST

The bad news bears have just wrapped up another stellar week full of worst-in-decades economic stats, dividend cuts and confidence indicators, topped yesterday by the latest revised U.S. figures.

It turns out that the U.S. economy actually shrank in the fourth quarter at a stunning 6.2-per-cent annual clip. It was the worst such nosedive since the grim early months of 1982 and only the fifth time a negative quarterly number has exceeded 6 per cent since the green eye-shade brigade began keeping track of such things more than 60 years ago.

It was all too much for one U.S. economist, who gloomily declared: “Economic developments in recent months have been consistently worse than the worst-case scenarios.”

All this is fuel for the professional purveyors of doom and the opportunistic politicians who, to paraphrase an aide to U.S. President Barack Obama, consider a crisis of any kind a terrible thing to waste. Mr. Obama actually declared in his best preacher's tone this week that the “day of reckoning has arrived,” before unveiling a $3.6-trillion (U.S.) budget that made his free-spending predecessor look like a paragon of prudence.