Free Republic

Last week's GOP debate was instructive on many levels. Some candidates continued to separate themselves from the GOP establishment (especially Donald Trump and Ted Cruz), while others attempted to obscure their records to court conservative voters (e.g., Marco Rubio and immigration). The choice between the RNC's preferred candidates and the true anti-establishment became clear. -In what has become the norm, the media tried to force the other candidates to attack Donald Trump. This time, they tried to make Ted Cruz their tool. Yet both Trump and Cruz declined the bait, and instead complimented each other. Furthermore, their body language told...

When Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., withdrew from the race for speaker of the House, some people wondered whether it signaled the approaching death of the Republican Party. It was indeed a potent moment, for the majority leader, backed by a massive majority of his congressional party colleagues, was derailed by an intransigent and habitually disruptive minority. Yet the exit of McCarthy may end up being the party's lifeline. For Republicans now have the opportunity instead to elect Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who is both less inclined to seek power and, we think, more likely to use it effectively. GOP...

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid preemptively slammed the budget proposal Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) will release Tuesday, calling it a document written to pander to the Koch brothers and other billionaires. “It’s a blueprint for a modern… how would we say this? Koch-topia. Yes, that’s it,” Reid said. “Call it whatever you want. We might as well call it the Koch budget because that’s what they’re doing, protecting the Koch brothers.” Reid’s remarks mark the latest volley in Democrats’ mid-term election year strategy of attacking the Kochs repeatedly, hoping to fire up their liberal base and associate Republicans with the...

"Tighten the belts" is one tired takeaway from House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's budget proposal, released today. The budget proposes to cut $5.1 trillion from projected spending over the next 10 years, getting a lot of its savings from repealing the president's health care law and changing Medicaid. The document, titled again, "Path to Prosperity," is largely for show, as the bipartisan budget agreement authored by Ryan, R-Wisc., and his Senate counterpart, Senate Budget Chairwoman Patty Murray, D-Wash., already set discretionary spending levels for the 2015 fiscal year. The budget agreement passed in both the Senate and the House...

Last week, Paul Ryan and House Republicans released their budget plan, which combined spending and tax cuts to reach a projected balanced budget by 2022. It was met with skepticism by pundits from the left and center, and even by some on the right. A common refrain was that the GOP hadn’t learned the lessons of 2012, and that it would probably take another losing cycle or two before the party wised up and moved to the middle. The problem is, in a reasonably close election like the last one, there are conflicting signals that make it nearly impossible to...

This week the House of Representatives will vote on its Budget Committee plan, which would bring federal finances into balance by 2023. The plan would do so by gradually slowing the growth in federal spending without raising taxes. Still, the plan has been denounced by naysayers who assert that it would harm the economic recovery and that, at the least, any spending reductions should be put off until later. This thinking is just as wrong now as it was in the 1970s. According to our research, the spending restraint and balanced-budget parts of the House Budget Committee plan would boost...

Yesterday, Paul Ryan, Republican Chairman of the House Budget Committee, unveiled his plan that would balance the federal budget within one decade. Considering that the nation’s debt (not including the huge future cost of major entitlement programs) is now approaching $17 trillion, one might think political leaders in Washington, D.C. would consider such a proposal. On the Democratic side of the aisle, however, there is no interest whatsoever in taking such a constructive approach. Democrats in both houses of the Congress and the Obama Administration, along with many media-based pundits, began to loudly criticize the Ryan proposal even before it...

While the pundits may dismiss Vice President Joe Biden’s pained expressions and hyperbolic claims as just “Joe being Joe,” there is ample reason for voters of all stripes to be concerned with claims last week. With an electorate so distrusting of Washington (and rightfully so), Joe Biden did absolutely nothing to instill confidence that the next four years will be better than the last. There is one line, buried at the end of a rambling answer, which not only defined the Vice President’s debate strategy, but also his belief that his folksy, blue-collar personality gives him license to send facts...

For much of the past few generations, the debate over balancing the federal budget has been a central feature of every presidential campaign. But over time, the goalposts have moved. As the amount of red ink has grown steadily larger, the suggested time frames to restore balance have gotten increasingly longer, while the suggested cuts in government spending have gotten increasingly shallower. In recent years, talk of balancing the budget gave way to vague promises such as “cutting the deficit in half in five years.” In the current campaign, however, it appears as if the goalposts have been moved so...

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/08/13/erskine_bowles_ryan_budget_is_sensible_honest_serious.html Great clip. Destroys zero in this.

Why is this important? Erskine Bowles has a long pedigree as a Democratic budget thinker — and presidential adviser. When Barack Obama needed to pick the co-chair for his deficit committee, which he roundly ignored in the end, he chose Bowles to represent his side on the panel. Bowles served as Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, and earlier ran the Small Business Administration for Clinton. Ezra Klein predicted on Friday that Bowles would be the front-runner for Tim Geithner’s job at Treasury if Obama wins a second term. Bear in mind this while you watch this clip, found by our...

WASHINGTON — President Obama opened a full-frontal assault Tuesday on the budget adopted by House Republicans, condemning it as a “Trojan horse” and “thinly veiled social Darwinism” that would greatly deepen inequality in the country. Mr. Obama’s attack, in a speech during a lunch with editors and reporters from The Associated Press, was part of a broader indictment of the Republican economic blueprint for the nation. The Republican budget, and the philosophy it represents, he said in remarks prepared for delivery, is “antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everyone who’s willing to...

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) indicated on Tuesday that he has come around to Mitt Romney on the issue of healthcare. “Romney’s been very clear that he’s against ObamaCare and he’s going to repeal it. So I for a second don’t worry about whether he’s going to shy away from repealing the president’s health care law,” Ryan said in an interview with The Weekly Standard. (snip) Ryan went on to compliment Romney on a variety of issues. He described Romney as proving himself “pretty capable and strong and resilient” when it comes to the slew of GOP debates over the past...

Standard & Poor’s downgrade of the nation’s credit rating gives House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan every right to say “I told you so.” Even earlier this week when President Obama was taking his victory lap for the debt-ceiling compromise, Ryan was disclosing the cold, hard truths of the economic troubles that lie ahead — truths that a jittery Wall Street has been more than aware of. In an oped column in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, the Wisconsin Republican reiterated, of course, that the president really has no budget plan. “The president’s February budget,” he wrote, “deliberately dodged the tough...

During the summer of 2009, in the early stages of the health care debate, a frustrated Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., lamented that he wasn't getting any cooperation from Republicans. "On something as important as health care, you would think people would be interested in working together," Reid grumbled. "Republicans aren't interested in working with Democrats. That's pretty clear. ... The party of no is hoping that we trip and fall." This "Party of No" rhetoric was parroted by nearly every liberal writer. It is less common today, now that the tables have turned. The new Republican House majority...

Obama budget receives zero votes in Senate By Jordan Fabian - 05/25/11 06:14 PM ET No senators voted for President Obama's 2012 budget when it came up for a vote in the Senate Wednesday. A procedural vote to move forward on the president's plan failed 0-97. Just minutes earlier, the Senate failed to advance Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-Wis.) budget plan by a vote of 40-57, a vote on which five Republicans voted against their party. Democrats sought to put Republicans on the defensive over the Ryan budget, which they have described as extreme. But Republicans, who demanded a vote on...

FOX's NEIL CAVUTO, HOST OF "YOUR WORLD": Finally, we really got to cut this out. This notion we are cutting spending. We are not. The president isn't. Republicans aren't...