Patrick Caldwell

When Jon Huntsman announced last month that he would not be actively campaigning for votes in the Iowa Caucuses, he said, “I’m not competing in Iowa for a reason. I don’t believe in subsidies that prop up corn, soybeans and ethanol.” It was assumed that Huntsman — former supporter of the stimulus, climate-change solutions, and […]

President Obama stopped by the White House briefing room late Tuesday afternoon to make a speech that announced, well, essentially nothing. The only straight news from Obama’s speech was scant information on an invitation extended to Congressional leaders for a meeting at the White House on Thursday. After he interjected himself in the debate during […]

Earlier this morning Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann launched her presidential campaign for real with a speech in Waterloo, Iowa. What made this declaration different from Bachmann’s pseudo announcement at the Republican debate two weeks ago? This time she turned her full attention to wooing Iowa Caucuses goers. After listening to Bachmann’s speech, you’d be forgiven […]

Via James Fallows, Republican Mark Amodei, a Nevada candidate in a U.S. House special election scheduled for September 13, has released an noxiously xenophobic campaign ad: For those who don’t watch the video, the ad features a fake Chinese news reporter discussing how out of control spending allowed crippled the U.S. government as imagines of […]

The Wall Street Journal wrote yesterday afternoon that Rick Perry was ready to jump into running for president. The sourcing for the piece was incredibly unconvincing; I’m not sure how one “normally reliable Republican source” who is clearly not part of Perry’s camp would know the Texas governor’s intentions (and for what it is worth, […]

Members of the House Republican leadership gathered yesterday to announce their new proposal for job growth. In the 2010 midterms, Republicans continually hammered Democrats for not focusing 100 percent of their time on job creation, though once elected, the GOP has spent the majority of their time gutting funding for liberals’ favorite programs rather than […]

Senate Democrats plan to introduce taxes on the extremely wealthy to combat Republicans’ insistence that taxes must be off the table in a deficit-reduction deal. According to The Hill, they want to either cut the Bush tax cuts for people earning over $1 million a year or alternatively add a 3 to 5.4 percent surtax […]

As the Prospect‘s Jamelle Bouie also notes, earlier this week Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn abandoned the Gang of Six, the bipartisan group of senators negotiating a deal for deficit reduction. Any compromise reached by the five remaining senators will likely go nowhere without Coburn’s conservative cred. Coburn turned to The Washington Post‘s editorial pages to […]

The docket of candidates for the Republican presidential field has almost finalized after a slow start earlier this year. It is increasingly clear that Michele Bachmann and Jon Huntsman are primed to enter the field, and both Mike Huckabee and Donald Trump removed themselves out of contention over the last several days. Mitch Daniels and […]

Rep. Paul Ryan‘s plan to re-create Medicare as a voucher system has a next to zero chance of becoming law now that Senate Republicans have excluded it from their own budget proposal and GOP presidential contenders like Newt Gingrich are openly criticizing it. Ezra Klein thinks “we’ve wasted the last few months arguing over a […]