Republicans change their "tough on crime" tune this year at CPAC.

The Congressional Budget Office can rsquo t entertain us every day so the website Funny or Die filled the vacuum on Tuesday with an episode of Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis with President Barack Obama as a guest Obama dropped in on the talk-show parody to promote the Affordable Care Act

Robert D. Sullivan on the GOP's "tough-love" opposition to social welfare programs.

For Dems, it's not either Medicaid and food stamps or same-sex marriage and gun control.

The State of the Union speech in Washington gets plenty of attention but as local governments seem to be hurtling in different directions the annual reports from governors may be more relevant to voters Most of the addresses for 2014 have been delivered some states don rsquo t have them at all

A follow-up to yesterday rsquo s post on the retirement of Michigan Congressman John Dingell The Atlantic rsquo s David A Graham astutely writes that Dingell ldquo represents a kind of politics that doesn rsquo t really exist anymore anywhere It rsquo s a mix of New Deal-style social politics

John Dingell Jr who rsquo s represented many-times-redrawn pieces of Michigan in the U S House since winning a special election in 1955 announced this week that he won rsquo t run for another term this fall ldquo I rsquo m not going to be carried out feet first rdquo said the 87-year-old Demo

The actor and frequent talk-show guest Alec Baldwin has never run for political office and he rsquo ll probably never slake that obvious thirst now that he rsquo s been defined as an Obama-loving homophobe mdash a demographic that at best is a majority on a few scattered streets on his native L

Here rsquo s another red vs blue map but this one shows the changes in partisan strength over the past quarter-century See larger version below It rsquo s from David Jarman at the Daily Kos That rsquo s a Democratic site as is ThinkProgress which flagged the map today but the map is based

The Republican Party got some free mdash and inadvertent mdash rebranding advice this month from the Congressional Budget Office First the CBO estimated that the Affordable Care Act would eventually cause beneficiaries to reduce work hours by the equivalent of 2 million full-time jobs And thi