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President Barack Obama is promising to lay out his long-awaited ideas on how to restrain Medicare and Medicaid spending this week — just in time to take the spotlight away from Paul Ryan. But he'll have to do it in a way that doesn't provoke a Democratic revolt or give the Republicans an easy target. And right now, there aren't a lot of Democratic ideas on either Medicare or Medicaid that Obama can just pull off the shelf, dust off and use.

Donald Trump said Wednesday that he's proud to be part of the so-called birther movement, which he says is comprised of "great American people.” "I don't feel heat; I think he's got heat," Trump said of President Barack Obama on the Laura Ingraham show . "Look, he cannot give a birth certificate. You can, I can, I got one yesterday, it took me a day, 24 hours, I got one. "A lot of the so called birthers, these are great people, these are really great American people,” he added. “These are hard working, unbelievable, salt of the earth people." Trump’s...

Here's a part of his post at CNN, where he is apparently a regular contributor, which makes the point: "Ben Smith in Politico reports that the trip was booked through a Christian tour operator. But the real news is who did not book the trip: the Republican Jewish Coalition, the group that brought George W. Bush to Israel in 1998, Mitt Romney in 2007, Haley Barbour in 2011, and many other presidential hopefuls beside. "Very likely you have never heard of the Republican Jewish Coalition. But then again, you probably are not seeking the Republican presidential nomination. If you were...

Any news junkie will tell you that Politico has been on a steady decline in journalistic standards for the past few years. They have taken it to new levels with the latest piece of hackery by the leftist mouthpiece Jonathan Martin and Kendra Marr entitled "For Michele Bachman, a pattern of getting facts wrong." This story, the top "news item" last night on politico.com was a hitpiece entirely about some verbal miscues Michele Bachmann apparently made in New Hampshire. Martin said: "For Bachmann, who leads the House Tea Party caucus and champions a return to the Constitution, to get such...

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann’s suggestion Saturday that the Revolutionary War began in Concord, N.H., rather than Lexington and Concord, Mass., marks the third time in recent months that the potential GOP presidential hopeful has committed a puzzling gaffe about history and current affairs. Making her first trek to New Hampshire as a 2012 prospect, Bachmann told a GOP crowd in Manchester: “You’re the state where the shot was heard around the world at Lexington and Concord.” The Revolutionary War began, not in New Hampshire’s capital, but in the famous two towns more than 50 miles away in...

UPDATE: NPR released a statement condemning Liley’s statements in the video. “The statement made by Betsy Liley in the audio tapes released today regarding the possibility of making an anonymous gift that would remain invisible to tax authorities is factually inaccurate and not reflective of NPR’s gift practices. All donations – anonymous and named – are fully reported to the IRS. NPR complies with all financial, tax and disclosure regulations.” Liley, who was caught on the initial videotape laughing at the suggestion that NPR was sometimes called National Palestinian Radio, was placed on administrative leave with Ron Schiller on Tuesday...

<p>Two potential candidates for the Republican presidential nomination have been described as “frontrunners”: former governors Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin. According to pollster Scott Rasmussen, they’re the candidates with the most supporters among likely Republican-primary voters: Romney has 24 percent, Palin 19 percent. Intrade, the prediction market, has them as the most likely nominees: Romney is given a 23 percent chance of winning, Palin 15 percent. Each of them has a claim to being “next in line”: Romney because he was arguably John McCain’s strongest rival for the nomination in 2008, Palin because she was his running mate.</p>

Mike Huckabee is going against the grain of conservative pundits and potential 2012 rivals who are merciless in attacking the Obamas, taking a softer tack as he defends the first couple on issues like healthy eating and the president’s citizenship. While conservative talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh trashed First Lady Michelle Obama’s healthy-eating initiative — one of her few forays into public policy — as an effort to have a government-run food program, Huckabee went the other way. “I do not think she's out there advocating that the government take over our dinner plates,” Huckabee, who’s been open about...

Sarah Palin used to pronounce Mitt Romney's name "M-I-L-T." In one of the many embarrassing anecdotes about the former Alaska governor, former aide Frank Bailey writes in a leaked manuscript that Palin actually argued with some of her staffers about how to correctly pronounce Romney's name. During her own 2006 campaign for governor, when Romney was chairman of the Republican Governors Association, Bailey writes that Palin didn't seem to know much about the then-Massachusetts governor. “During the campaign for governor, when Romney was in the background of our Republican Governors’ mess, Sarah didn’t even have a clear idea who he...

Oprah called on President Obama's critics on Friday to “show some level of respect.” "I feel that everybody has a learning curve, and I feel that the reason why I was willing to step out for him was because I believed in his integrity and I believed in his heart," the influential TV host said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” in Chicago. Of the negative mood of the country, Oprah added, “I think everybody complaining ought to try it for once.” She said the presidency is a position that “holds a sense of authority and governance over us all,” and that...

President Obama has earned the trust of most Americans on his handling of Egypt’s political crisis, but not by much, according to a Pew Research Center survey. Around 58 percent of respondents said they believe the protests in Egypt won’t affect the United States very much, and around the same number believe the Obama administration has handled the protests well. Obama gets positive marks from a majority of Democrats and independents in the survey, but only 43 percent of Republicans believe he’s done well.

Last Spring in New Orleans, Jonathan Martin and I picked up a very clear sentiment from Republican activists about Sarah Palin, reporting from the Southern Republican Leadership conference that "the wide admiration for Palin among the rock-ribbed Dixie Republicans gathered in the room wasn't matched by a confidence that she was ready to run." Jeff Zeleny picks up something very similar at the Reagan Library this weekend: Roy Billings, a Reagan admirer and a longtime contributor to the [Young America's Foundation], said he liked Ms. Palin a great deal, but he hoped that she would not run for president in...

Palin’s putting the safety catch on her references to weapons in the wake of Rep. Giffords's shooting. Continue Reading Her speech last night to the Safari Club in Reno was closed press, but thanks to the Reno Gazette-Journal's David Jacobs putting his ear to a closed door, we’re hearing the former Alaska governor’s new line. Palin dropped the "reload" phrase from her routine, telling the audience of hunters "don't retreat, stand tall" — a shift from her now infamous and well-known "don't retreat, reload" line that played on a loop on cable in the after the Tucson shooting.

Americans responded with overwhelming positivity to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech, two polls conducted after the Tuesday night speech found...

And Politico effectively joins Barack Obama's re-election campaign. Politico's increasingly leftward lean has finally caused it to fall over entirely. The sheer volume of anti-Palin stories over the last week was breathtaking. It's clear that they have targeted Palin. To wit: First they were critical of Palin for not saying anything: Tucson shooting presents 2012 test Their widely divergent reactions — from Tim Pawlenty’s subtle distancing from his beleaguered rival, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin; to her virtual disappearance; to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s feeding of the right-wing base — are telling for what they show about the...

In the span of a single news cycle, Republicans got a jarring reminder of two forces that could prevent them from retaking the presidency in next year. At sunrise in the East on Wednesday, Sarah Palin demonstrated that she has little interest — or capacity — in moving beyond her brand of grievance-based politics. And at sundown in the West, Barack Obama reminded even his critics of his ability to rally disparate Americans around a message of reconciliation. Palin was defiant, making the case in a taped speech she posted online why the nation’s heated political debate should continue unabated...

On a day that political leaders in Washington and Arizona devoted to honoring Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and other victims of Saturday’s mass shooting in Tucson, Sarah Palin proved once again that her bully pulpit is second to none in commanding the attention and passions of the political world. As Democratic and Republican lawmakers filed into the well of the House to offer prayers for the severely wounded Giffords and the six people who were killed, Palin’s eight-minute Facebook video — in which she accuses her opponents of “blood libel” — dominated the national political conversation. The video, released shortly after...

(snip) Dig long enough and just about every Republican has a green skeleton in their closet. Many of them have their last presidential nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain, a longtime cap-and-trade enthusiast, to thank for it. (snip) "I support a reasonable cap-and-trade system," [Pawlenty] said. "I think it'd be good for the federal government to take that up rather than have states take it up as clusters of regions." Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, appealed to a New Hampshire audience in October 2007 on moral grounds by saying he backed a cap-and-trade system to reduce greenhouse gases and faulted the...

Republicans have a problem. The most-talked-about figure in the GOP is a reality show star who cannot be elected. And yet the same leaders who fret that Sarah Palin could devastate their party in 2012 are too scared to say in public what they all complain about in private. Enough. It’s time for the GOP to man up. Everybody knows that Palin is a busy woman. The former half-term governor of Alaska stays so busy these days that one wonders how this mother of five manages to juggle her new reality show, follow her eldest daughter’s dancing career and launch...

Long-simmering tensions within the Republican Party spilled into public view Wednesday as the pragmatic and conservative wings of the GOP blamed each other in blunt terms for the party’s failure to capture the Senate. With tea party-backed candidates going down in Delaware, Colorado and Nevada, depriving Republicans of what would have been a 50-50 Senate, a bloc of prominent senators and operatives said party purists like Sarah Palin and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) had foolishly pushed nominees too conservative to win in politically competitive states. (snip) Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott put it plainly: “We did not nominate our...