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Senator Tom Coburn on Tuesday said that he’s “taking a break” from the Gang of Six, the Senate group that has been trying for months to reach a bipartisan deal on deficit reduction. The Oklahoma Republican’s withdrawal likely dashes any hopes that the three Democrats — North Dakota’s Kent Conrad, Dick Durbin of Illinois and Virginia’s [...]
One of the raps against Newt Gingrich is that he lacks the discipline to sustain the rigors of a presidential campaign. And while an outburst or two was inevitable, it’s safe to say nobody expected the former House Speaker to melt down like this within the space of a week.
–Rep. Paul Ryan, explaining his decision not to run for Senate in Wisconsin to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
So I open up The New York Times this morning to find heartening news from op-ed columnist Timothy Egan: There is a very simple way to make Medicare whole through the end of this century, far less complicated, and more of a bargain in the long run than the bizarre Ryan plan. That’s a relief!
In recent years, John Kerry seems to have settled into a new role in the Senate. The 2004 Democratic presidential nominee finally got a major chairmanship at the helm of the Foreign Relations Committee. And he’s been in the thick of several major issues from climate change and health care reform to Afghanistan/Pakistan relations. It [...]
Jared Bernstein, the most prominent Manhattan School of Music alumnus on the White House economic team, has left his job as Vice President Biden’s chief economist. He was the most liberal member of the team, so it’s no surprise that he started a new gig on Monday at the left-leaning Center for Budget and Policy [...]
Paul Ryan often says that he hopes to invert the notion that Social Security is the third rail of American politics. In Ryan’s ideal world, not tackling entitlement reform and deficit reduction would become the new third rail. I doubt the country has swung that way yet, but it seems that attacking Paul Ryan’s entitlement [...]
The lurid revelations from the Senate Ethics Committee’s report on John Ensign’s alleged cover-up of an extramarital affair have raised a battery of questions, including why the Department of Justice and Federal Election Commission investigations stalled. Here are a few lingering issues:
Mitt Romney raises $10 million and change in his Vegas phone-a-thon. Obama could run on the auto bailout — Romney might be right there with him. The President has a dearth of effective surrogates.
Updated: 6/6/2011, 9:20 a.m. The “serious” Republican candidates for President, apparently, are Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty and Jon Huntsman. But none of these boring establishment guys represent the fire-breathing, far-right id of today’s Republican Party. Jonathan Chait thinks this represents a huge opportunity for fire-breathing, far-right Michele Bachmann, even though (he’d probably say because) she [...]
