If we've accomplished anything here at the 2012 Speculatron in these first few weeks, we hope we've encouraged all of you to just chill out about the ...

The budget battle narrative will depict Paul Ryan's budget plan as the work of someone "serious" and "courageous." So far, the White House doesn't seem willing to fill the "seriousness and courage gap" with any seriousness or courageousness of its own.

One of the more enjoyable parts of the Ryan budget proposal is it's contention that, if enacted, it will "create nearly one million new private-sector...

David Brooks, naturally, is a big fan of Rep. Paul Ryan's budget. He is thundering from his New York Times column that Ryan's "proposal will set the standard of seriousness for anybody who wants to play in this discussion." I'd say that he'd like my "0.8 percent unemployment plus everyone in the top one percent of income earners gets a free Pegasus" plan even more, but the Congressional Budget Office has refused to score it, saying, "Who the hell are you and how did you get in the building?"

By now, you're probably asking yourself: is there going to be a government shutdown? And the answer is: I don't know! Maybe? Probably? It's impossible to know right now if all the lines drawn in the sand are part of some grand base-building performance art project or if they're actually serious. This could all get pushed to the last minute and then everyone ends up taking the deal on the table. Or not!

WASHINGTON -- Earlier this morning, Minnesota Congresswoman and potential GOP presidential aspirant Michele Bachmann appeared on "The Daily Rundown" t...

Should a government shutdown occur, there would be any number of detrimental effects, the first being that thousands of government workers would have ...

GOP presidential-hopeful Tim Pawlenty's Iowa operation is up and running. And apparently testing voter attitudes by "trespassing" in people's homes and "vomiting" in public after getting "wasted." Everyone who said that Pawlenty wasn't going to run an edgy campaign had better apologize now.

Most of the drama over primary scheduling involves states that want to move their contests up on the calendar, which ends up ruffling the pretty feath...

Trump went further down the rabbit hole on "Morning Joe" Thursday morning. Willie Geist, Ed Rendell, Donnie Deutsch and -- sweet fancy Moses -- even Pat Buchanan attempted to talk Trump down out of the tree, to no avail. They ended up basically staring slackjawed at each other and laughing as Trump went nuts.

So, what do your beloved Congresscritters spend the bulk of their time in Washington, DC doing? Mostly they have cuddle parties with lobbyists, or, if you've got the exquisite sense of timing of Rep. Corrine Brown, you're taking a "boutique shopping trip" to the brutalist wonderland of Crystal City, Virginia. But outside of that, they basically spend their days and nights straight up "doin' the dozens" on one another, in press releases. This is according to new research from Harvard, an important university.

Former and would-be future Virginia Sen. George Allen, who quarterbacked the University of Virginia for a pair of losing seasons in the 1970s and come...

More bad news for embattled Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker as Brian Deschane, the only man he trusted to be the state's administrator of environmental an...

The entire government will shut down in just about ten hours unless Democrats agree to allow House Republicans to hurl angry birds at every Planned Parenthood facility in America.

There's only a few hours left before all of America is plunged into John Boehner's Pap Smear Armageddon or whatever, and Matt Yglesias has video of Re...

As you may recall, during today's lengthy Pap Smear Armageddon/Government Shutdown 2011 pageant play, Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) stood on ...

Anyone who is worried about what a potential Michele Bachmann presidency would look like should stop worrying, because by her own admission, she isn't...

For a long while now, the political media has been sad about how the 2012 campaign doesn't seem to want to begin and none of the presumed top-tier can...

Over the weekend, the White House averted a government shutdown by largely agreeing to the GOP's terms on discretionary spending. One might see this as a bad thing, but not the White House. Advisor David Plouffe has been on the air ever since, linking Friday's capitulation with the administration's December lame duck capitulation as a great example of a governing strategy, where everyone "comes together" and more or less agrees to what John Boehner wants to do.

If you're like most Americans, you have been completely blindsided by today's news that Mitt Romney has formed a presidential exploratory committee. ...

For as long as I can remember, social conservatives have been at war with the "gay agenda" -- whatever that is. Probably just the notion that members ...