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Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said he thinks that House Budget Committee chairman Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is presidential material because of his work on the spending deal he cut with Senate Budget Committee chairwoman Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA). “From my point of view, he's showing leadership," Graham said, according to the Huffington Post. “I mean, if you want to become president, maybe instead of trying to please every faction of your party, maybe you should show the country as a whole I can actually work with the other side on something important.” Huffington Post noted that Graham “added with a...

Despite the fact that the Ryan-Murray budget deal passed the House with overwhelming support, it was not a slam dunk in the Senate as of late last week. Without Paul Ryan’s strong influence, individual GOP senators were leery of the deal. Even the defense hawks view this deal as ‘too little too late.’ The Senate whip count began with only one Republican – John McCain – vocally supporting the deal. Moreover, it’s not a sure thing that there won’t be any Democrat defections either. On Sunday, Senator Dick Durbin was worried he wouldn’t get 60 votes for the deal. He...

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) signaled that Republicans would not raise the debt ceiling next year without some sort of concessions from Democrats, saying lawmakers were still crafting their strategy. “We, as a caucus, along with our Senate counterparts, are going to meet and discuss what it is we want to get out of the debt limit,” Mr. Ryan said on Fox News Sunday. “We don’t want ‘nothing’ out of the debt limit. We’re going to decide what it is we can accomplish out of this debt limit fight.” The U.S. government spends more money than it...

’Tis the season, and Nancy Pelosi has given the hands-down best gift to the American people — her phrase “Embrace the suck.” Miraculous. Offered to fellow Democrats as a push to pass the bipartisan budget bill, the phrase has all the characteristics necessary to ensure a permanent place in the popular lexicon. It’s succinct, raunchy-esque and, most important, you know exactly what it means. “It sucks, but it’s the best we’ll get.” (snip) And Republicans are on fire. The real story isn’t that a bipartisan budget bill has been hammered out but that House Speaker John Boehner has ignited. He...

Wisconsin Republican Rep. Paul Ryan tried to calm the burgeoning feud between Republican Party leadership and its conservative critics over the budget deal passed in the House this week, requesting that the Tea Party “keep these conversations within our family.” Ryan appeared on “Fox News’ Sunday” with Chris Wallace to discuss the budget deal he brokered with Washington Democratic Sen. Patty Murray. The agreement, which passed the House on Thursday, scraps nearly one third of sequester cuts and replaces them with promised future reductions. Conservative groups largely came out against the deal, prompting an angry tirade from Speaker of the...

House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) misled his colleagues in the House of Representatives about several major areas of the budget deal he cut with Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), Breitbart News has learned. Misrepresentations include serious budget details ranging from how much deficit reduction is actually in the plan to how spending in this plan compares to spending if the current law, the Budget Control Act (BCA), remains the law of the land. The budget deal passed the House 332-94 on Thursday evening, with 169 Republicans voting for it and 62 Republicans voting against...

Several possible contenders for president could end up running against political allies from their own states. Donations and bragging rights are at stake. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Rep. Paul D. Ryan are friends and political allies, one helping the other in 2012 when Walker faced a recall attempt and Ryan ran for vice president on the Republican ticket. But when it comes to winning the White House, Walker has sounded less than supportive of a candidacy by his fellow Badger State lawmaker, suggesting someone more like himself. "There's no doubt, as much as I love Paul and some other...

<p>Editor's note: Rebekah Sanderlin is an Army wife, Military Spouse of the Year finalist, and a writer who focuses on military issues. She, her husband and their three children are stationed at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. She is an advisory board member of the Military Family Advisory Network.</p>

So what happened? Why didn’t those Tea Party lawmakers and conservative groups get their way? Here’s what happened: Boehner took control.

And the Winner of this year’s Biggest Liar Award is…at least I think that telling the Politifact’s Lie of the Year makes you the Liar of the Year, right?Period.So I think you can safely add Politifact to the ever growing list of the IRS’s audit clients. Right behind Spirit Airlines:That Obamacare themed ad was bad enough, butt this…this is just irresponsible. And in bad taste.Oh no! They didn’t go there! Oh yes they did.And apparently these irresponsible practitioners of free market capitalism have forgotten how the rules work under Big Guy:Which is to say, we change the rules as we...

Lynn Westmoreland (Vichy-GA) will betray his district this afternoon and vote for the Murray-Ryan budget compromise.

Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY) on Wednesday told the New York Times that she and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) are friends and that she calls him "Naughty Boy." "Believe it or not, Paul Ryan is a good friend," Lowey told Times columnist Gail Collins in a conversation about GOP trainings on how to speak to women. "He calls me Mom. I call him Naughty Boy." Lowey told Collins that the GOP trainings will not solve candidates' difficulty appealing to women voters.

Well that was fun, butt it’s back to work today.Happy, Happy, Happy!I can’t believe that people are still talking about whether Lady M was really mad at Big Guy for his sophomoric antics at the memorial. I’m not going to discuss this any further, because I don’t want to be accused of being a racist. I will, however, direct you to a close up of our return to the Big White.Look closely: that is NOT smoke coming out of her nose/ears.Suffice it to say I spent the evening in the bunker. Butt with so many new issues on deck, we’ll...

Senate Republicans scrubbing the Ryan-Murray budget deal have come across a little-noticed provision that will limit the GOP’s ability to block tax increases in future years. The bill includes language from the Senate Democrats’ budget to void a budget “point of order” against replacing the sequester cuts with tax increases. The process is quite complicated, but in practice it grants Harry Reid the authority to send tax increases to the House with a bare majority, rather than the 60 vote threshold that would be required under the point of order. The provision has angered key Republican Senators. Reeling from Harry...

House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan has now accomplished the astonishing task of pushing House Republicans substantially to the left of the Senate GOP. His budget deal, announced Tuesday night, was achieved by shutting conservative Senate Republicans out of negotiations, by resorting to the old trick of spending now while claiming savings later, by ignoring a symbolically important budgetary red line, and by treating as Democratic “concessions” things to which even Democratic budgeteers already had agreed. The chess equivalent of Ryan’s deal would be trading a castle for a mere pawn. No wonder conservatives are feeling rooked. One need not...

Paul Ryan (WI-VR) and Patty Murray (WA-D) have announced a “bland bargain” on the Federal budget. The proposal would “restore” $65 million in automatic spending cuts currently in law and increase federal spending from $967 billion next year to roughly $1 trillion. In other words former Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan was outfoxed by former pre-school teacher Patty Murray. This will add $70 billion to Federal spending both this year and next. The result? The Federal debt load will be $25 trillion by the end of the next Presidential cycle. What happened to the downsizing of the Federal government that...

...These Republicans had just been briefed on a new, bipartisan budget blueprint that would establish long-term federal government spending caps. The plan, a product of months of negotiation between Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, a Republican, and Washington Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat, lacks many priorities Republicans have fought for during the Obama era. ... Because the new budget deal sets spending levels until 2015, it eliminates the possibility of shutdown battles over the next few years, which serves as a welcomed relief to Democrats and Republicans alike. ... “Most major conservative groups have put out statements blasting this deal,” the...

The budget deal announced Tuesday by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) would boost federal spending by around $65 billion over the next two years. This new spending is offset by increasing user fees, boosting pension contributions by federal employees and the military, and other minor changes. Ryan and Murray also say that the deal will reduce the deficit by $23 billion over the next 10 years. This reduction, however, doesn't start until 2022. According to a 4-page summary document of the deal obtained by Breitbart News, "[t]he budget proposal saves $28 billion over ten years by...

The Democrats hated the sequester, and have been trying to bust it ever since it went into effect. Today, they succeeded. The Ryan/Murray deal pegs FY 2014 spending at $1.012 trillion, which Ryan’s press release described as “about halfway between the Senate budget level of $1.058 trillion and the House budget level of $967 billion.” What Ryan didn’t say is that $967 billion isn’t just the House proposal, it is the discretionary spending limit under current law. The sequester is now out the window. Republicans did get something in exchange for increasing spending: notably, federal employees will have to increase...

The actual text of the Ryan-Murray budget deal came out late last night, so it’s only now possible to really consider the particulars and see how it looks. It seems to me that the details look a fair bit better than the general outline that had been reported in the press over the past week or so, particularly on the question of whether the entitlement cuts that would replace some discretionary sequester cuts could be expected to actually materialize. As it stands, this strikes me as more or less a very small-scale version of the sort of thing that Republicans...