If ever there was bad idea whose time never came, it is Paul Ryan's plan to slash Medicaid spending and convert what remains into a system of block grants administered by the states. The $300 billion federal-state program providing health care for millions of poor, elderly and disabled Americans faces a triple whammy from the […]

To be sure, Mitt Romney is the man Republican hard-liners love to hate. While anti-abortion groups and free-market fundamentalists ramp up their all-out "stop Romney" efforts, the Manchester Union Leader blasted Mitt as "high-falutin' and haughty" for acting as if had the GOP presidential nomination already sewn up. But after Romney's curious comments about Afghanistan […]

Tonight in Manchester, New Hampshire, CNN will broadcast the first major debate featuring the 2012 Republican presidential candidates. Predictably, the media are hyping a clash of personalities featuring the front-runner (Romney) vs. the challenger (Pawlenty), the cult heroes (Paul, Cain), the hard line social conservatives (Bachmann, Santorum), the absent (Palin) and soon-to-be departed (Gingrich). But […]

"We want to save Medicare," a senior GOP aide put it, "while Democrats would let it die." Sadly for him, it appears that Republicans spouting that talking point are about to be mugged by reality. For starters, recent polling shows the American people are overwhelmingly opposed to the Ryan plan to privatize and ration the […]

The Republican Party, Tim Pawlenty often lectures, "should be the party of Sam's Club, not just the country club." If so, the GOP White House hopeful miserably failed his own Sam's Club test this week. Unveiling his economic plan draining $7.8 trillion from the U.S. Treasury in order to give millionaires a 41% tax cut, […]

Unfortunately for Mitt Romney and American religious tolerance alike, a new Quinnipiac survey this week found that over a third of voters have misgivings about a Mormon President. So it came as no surprise that the Republican frontrunner told CNN's Piers Morgan, "I'm not a spokesman for my church." But Romney's declaration that he would […]

Today's 10th anniversary of the Bush tax cuts arrives at a particularly ironic time. Ironic, that is, because even as talk of deficits dominates the debate in Washington, that windfall for the wealthy was the single-biggest driver of U.S national debt over the past decade and, if made permanent, will be so for the next. […]

An interesting split is occurring within the ranks of the Republicans holding the American economy hostage over the debt ceiling. Led by Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Pat Toomey and Tim Pawlenty, the "Default Deniers" not only refuse the acknowledge the global economic calamity that would ensue should the United States fail to increase the $14.3 […]

The growing backlash against their plan to end the Medicare guaranteed government insurance program for 46 million Americans is producing near-panic in Republican ranks. With polls showing overwhelming opposition to the Ryan rationing scheme, House GOP leaders begged President Obama to stop the "demagoguery" about their reckless privatization scheme even as Republicans tried and failed […]