Just two weeks after he seconded Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's dire warnings about the August 2 deadline to raise the U.S debt ceiling, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor walked out of the budget talks aimed at reaching a bipartisan compromise over deficit reduction. Like Arizona GOP Senator Jon Kyl, Cantor shifted the burden to Speaker […]

Seizing on recent rankings of American high schools by Newsweek and the Washington Post, Walter Russell Mead crowed that "blue state education [is] the shame of the nation." Eager for any data point to bash the supposedly high-tax, big government, union-dominated states which generally vote for Democrats, the conservative blogosphere quickly regurgitated Mead's jubilation "that […]

Of all of Mitt Romney's comical flip-flops on the issues, his gymnastic reversal on the abortion rights is the most pathetic. During his 1994 Massachusetts Senate run, Mitt and his wife Ann contributed $150 at a Planned Parenthood event. Eight years later during his race for governor, Romney assured Planned Parenthood he supported Roe v. […]

As his aides head off to Iowa to assess his prospects for a run at the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, Texas Governor Rick Perry has been hinting that he may be more than just the savior of the Republican Party. After issuing his invitation to the other 49 governors for an August 6 "day of […]

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 […]