News flash. Senate Democrats pass a budget out of committee that includes massive tax increases, dramatically increases spending, never is projected to come close to balancing the budget, and in a tip of the hat to George Orwell, they call it “balanced” in its approach.

Is there any doubt why House Republicans found it nearly impossible to find budget solutions with a group so far out of touch?

Paul Ryan is the subject of much criticism because he is tainted as one who has no concern for the poor and the elderly. This is because he has advocated fiscal responsibility and the curtailment of out-of-control entitlement spending.

Why does Mitt Romney appear tonight at CPAC? To carve a future (monarchist) dynastic path to politics like Bush and Kennedy; a final investment for his children, his friends and his aunties here in the 11th hour? Possibly because he can’t let go of the conviction that he is not one of them, when he is not, and sadly, has never been. He has an unearthly, spooky quality, says Noreen, my dental hygienist, among the staunchest conservatives in New Hampshire. He lives here in New Hampshire, kind of, but is among us and not of us. He governed Massachusetts and was not one of them, while Gov. Bill Weld, New Yorker Brahmin, fit in easily. He has tried to be so many things to so many people — a Mormon pioneer and a westerner, a Midwestern industrialist native son, a New England liberal — and has worn so many masks, that he can no longer find his face. And now he is in a panic.

To merely surmise, he feels he can in his “rite of exit” from the political world prop up the Marco Rubio contention, for Rubio is now and always has been and wanted to be the Dan Quayle of our age. He is the immaculate manifestation of the imagining of a passing, geriatric generation which meets in their own reclusive revivalist tent. And there the “stale and moss-covered” visualize themselves again as young: Suppose we were not 66 now with bad knees and expanded prostates, but young, and Cuban too? And tragically for America, Bush the Second, venerable now and a storied painter of dogs, was one as well.

Read more...

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) demonstrated in his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference meeting that he lacks the toughness and political courage to be elected president in 2016. By running like a frightened rabbit from his own immigration proposals and refusing to champion them in his speech, Rubio suggests he has nothing to fear except his base itself. If Rubio could not handle this speech, he's gonna have a tough time in roughhouse Republican presidential primaries, and he will look like shredded wheat if he ever faces the inside fastball of the formidable Hillary Clinton if this mismatch ever comes to pass.

The news that Ed Schultz will be leaving prime time weekday television on MSNBC and move to the weekend is not welcome news in this quarter. Don’t get me wrong, Chris Hayes, who will be moving into prime, is first-rate and will do a great job. But Ed is one of a kind, and he is the kind we need on television because on the single greatest issue of our age, the Les Miserables economy with too many jobless people and too much social injustice, Ed Schultz fights like hell for the people who need more voices fighting for them.

Brent Budowsky, yet again, takes to this space to defend President Obama and Democrats in Congress when they fail, lie, and try to pull the wool over our eyes and disregard the truth.

Through the glass darkly we gaze into the unknown ahead, spear in hand at the front of the boat, and the new pope seems an auspicious beginning. Not a profane New York globalist, a "rock star" marketing agent, which The Wall Street Journal calls for, but possibly a true holy man, one to which the world might instead be naturally drawn.

“Taxes should hurt.” That is what then-Gov. Ronald Reagan of California said back in the late 1960s. And while these words seem curious coming from the man who lowered the overall income tax rates significantly and flattened the tax code during his eight years in the White House, they are as true today as they were when Reagan uttered them.

Reagan’s premise was simple. If the people are separated from the cost of government through hidden fees, inflation or taxes, then they mistakenly believe that the government services they demand are free. And who wouldn’t want free?

And now in the next act of the Washington performance, the Senate Democrats offer their budget, the House Republicans offer their budget, the president (between resets about what his presidency is about) will sooner or later offer his budget.

But one thing is clear: Nobody will offer a budget that promises to create significantly more jobs at a time when joblessness is the great national scandal.