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...Because there's no guarantee that ditching it will ensure a bipartisan bill. Health care was telling: Republicans called the public option a deal breaker, but once the public option was deleted, they found new excuses for obstruction. They say financial reform is different, but it's worth noting how many Republicans supported it in the House: zero. (See why financial reform is easier than health care...
Republican Congressman Paul Ryan recently received an unexpected olive branch, in a most unexpected setting. During a public sparring session with House Republicans in Baltimore on Jan. 29, President Obama singled out the Janesville, Wis., native, who has put forth a controversial plan to balance the federal budget with a sweeping overhaul of Medicare and Social Security, which together with defense spending comprise 55% of the government's total outlays. Obama called Ryan's "Roadmap for America's Future" a "serious proposal" and praised its author as a "pretty sincere guy" with a "beautiful family." It was a rare moment...
...Sarah Palin's mouth when the Tea Party queen was asked to handicap the field of GOP presidential candidates, and the conservative punditry hailed Ryan as a "one-man refutation to the idea that Republicans are the Party of No," as Pete Wehner, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, puts it. The response from the left has been equally charged. Paul Krugman of the New York Times skewered the proposal as the centerpiece of a Republican "economic agenda that hasn't changed one iota in response to the economic failures of the Bush years." The Washington Post...
...want to replace that with a more Western European notion of a welfare state, where the role of government is to equalize the results of people's lives?" Ryan, not surprisingly, is an Ayn Rand acolyte - he once cited her as the thinker who spurred his pursuit of public service. And while he says he does not subscribe to Rand's objectivist philosophy, he shares her conviction that the American promise is predicated on capitalism. "I do believe government has a role in making sure we have a safety net to help people who cannot help themselves or are temporarily...
What's more, the rebel stash had already been stolen by gun-toting bandits performing cashectomies on the good people of Colombia. Rather than committing a crime, Sanabria reasoned, his men were performing a public good. They were cheating the cheaters out of money that would otherwise go toward grenades and guns, making the guerrillas stronger. Rather than being castigated, they ought to be decorated. There was also a sense among the troops that the cash was a serendipitous payoff for years of dangerous duty protecting the homeland. And if that wasn't enough, it was Easter week, the holiest...