Paul Ryan

Vice President Joe Biden was all smirks, smiles, laughs, sharp elbows and impolite interruptions in his debate with the No. 2 guy on the Republican ticket, Paul Ryan. It is always a risky tactic to let Joe be Joe, but it seems to have paid off. After President Obama's passive, lackluster response to Mitt Romney's energetic assault during the first presidential debate, demoralized Democrats were praying that Biden would come out swinging at Ryan. They got what they wanted and, as a result, Democrats should be reinvigorated as the closing days of the 2012 campaign tick away.  Photos: Biden and Ryan square off That matters because, after weeks of gaffes and goof-ups, Romney finally got Republican blood pumping with his debate performance.

WASHINGTON - The divide within the Republican Party over immigration reform was on full view Monday, as top party leaders made a case for overhauling the laws even as conservative senators argued that the Boston bombings showed the need to go slow. Momentum appeared to be on the side of the reformers. They have amassed an unusually robust alliance of business, labor and faith leaders that on Monday included the head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who said "now is the time" to fix the immigration system.

WASHINGTON -- Before he was Mitt Romney's running mate, Paul D. Ryan was a prominent congressman, an intellectual leader of the GOP and, of all things, a stand-in for actor Ryan Gosling in an Internet meme. “Hey Girl, It's Paul Ryan” takes the Wisconsin representative and, with a bit of wordplay, turns him into an Internet sex symbol. Take, for example, this photo of Ryan , with the caption, “Hey girl, you know I can't inflate our love … and that would just devalue it anyways.” The site started when Emily Zanotti, an account services director for a Chicago-based communications agency, and two friends, Lyndsey Fifield and Lindsey Dodge, drew a connection between Ryan's stories of bare-handed “catfish noodling” ( popularized by the New York Times )

WASHINGTON -- President Obama argued for “manageable” changes to Medicare and other social safety net programs as he released his budget proposal, a plan aimed at staking out the middle ground in the stalled deficit reduction talks. “If we want to preserve the ironclad guarantee that Medicare represents, then we're going to have to make some changes. But they don't have to be drastic ones,” Obama said in remarks in the Rose Garden on Wednesday morning. “And instead of making drastic ones later, what we should be doing is making some manageable ones now.” Obama's remarks intended to draw a contrast with House Republicans' budget proposal, fashioned by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, which would balance the federal budget in 10 years in part by transforming Medicare into a voucher-style system and cutting government spending on Medicaid.

Americans may not know Mitt Romney yet, but they do know a little more about two impressive people he has chosen to team up with at pivotal moments in his life - Ann Romney and Paul Ryan. One has been his life partner, the other will be his political partner through the 2012 campaign and, if things go well for Republicans, his partner in governing. Ann Romney's speech to the Republican National Convention on Tuesday night was a huge hit. The candidate's wife went a long way to connect with female voters who have had serious doubts about putting her husband in the White House.

Everybody seems happy with Mitt Romney's choice of Wisconsin congressman Paul D. Rya n as his running mate. Republicans are joyful because it is a bold move that will electrify the tea party troops of the party's base. Democrats are gleeful because they think they can scare older voters with Ryan's proposal to turn Medicare into a voucher program. Ryan is no bland, play-it-safe choice of the kind many expected from Romney -- a Tim Pawlenty, for instance, who has all the charisma of an Arby's franchise manager.

Many Republicans believe theirs is the party of Jesus Christ, but, in practice, they are the party of an atheist, Hollywood intellectual named Ayn Rand. After establishing a career as a screenwriter, Ayn Rand authored two novels, “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” that are the intellectual bibles of libertarian conservatives, corporate executives and callow undergraduates. Among the many aspirational young conservatives inspired by Rand's philosophy was a kid named Paul D. Ryan . “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” Ryan said in a 2005 speech.

Despite the rainy weather, Tampa, Fla., was good for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan; a bit less so for Clint Eastwood. As the cleaning crew sweeps up the confetti and burst balloons, here are the highlights of the 2012 Republican National Convention… Oddest use of prime time: Clint Eastwood's improvisation with an empty chair They seemed to love it inside the hall, but the folks in charge of keeping the program on schedule were going nuts...

In a postmortem of his campaign, Mitt Romney blamed his loss on President Obama's "gifts" to key voting groups, thereby demonstrating, one last time, how he does not understand the country he hoped to lead. Meanwhile, Paul Ryan's poor showing in his own hometown indicates how out of touch he is with the community he claimed to know so well.  Maybe that lack of perception is one reason why these two aspirants for the highest offices in the land fell short of their goal. As many pundits have noted, Romney's characterization of government programs as gifts was an echo of his earlier disparaging remarks about the 47% of Americans who pay no income taxes.

Missouri congressman Todd Akin's outrageously weird assertion that a woman cannot get pregnant from “forcible rape" exposes three predicaments facing the Republican Party. First, Akin has made himself so toxic that he may lose his race against Missouri's Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill and thereby kill any chance Republicans have of taking control of the U.S. Senate . Second, Akin's sudden notoriety is bringing to public attention the fact that his absolutist stance on abortion is fully shared by a guy named Paul Ryan, the chap who will be nominated for the vice presidency at the Republican convention next week.

WASHINGTON - The austere House budget drafted by Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) that has come to define the Republican Party was approved Thursday on a strict party-line vote, as the GOP argues that a balanced budget should now be Washington's top goal. The blueprint is merely a proposal, without the force of law, but its overhaul of the Medicare program and steep reductions to other social safety net spending serves as the GOP's opening salvo in renewed budget negotiations with President Obama.

One criticism of the Medicare overhaul that House Budget Committee Chairman Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) has championed is that it would shift more and more of the program's costs onto seniors. In the latest version of his plan, Ryan acknowledges that capping the growth of the program could, in fact, make health insurance more expensive for some retirees. But that's part of the point of the change, which would concentrate Medicare spending on the poorest and sickest seniors. This page has argued that Ryan's overhaul goes too far, threatening Medicare's fundamental promise of affordable health insurance for all seniors.

I'd like to offer my thanks to House Budget Committee Chairman Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) for doing so much to validate my list of the five biggest lies about "entitlement" programs published on Sunday. Ryan's proposed federal budget , released Tuesday, uses four of them. As a dividend, he exploits a few that I didn't mention. The ones from my list are: He uses the thoroughly discredited "infinite horizon" projection to claim that Social Security and Medicare are "tens of trillions" of dollars in the hole; he suggests that retirees aren't paying their fair share for their benefits; he suggests that the programs are hammered by benefits going to the wealthy; and he treats Medicare and Social Security as though they're similar programs with similar issues.

WASHINGTON - Fired up as once-unimaginable spending cuts start to slice the federal budget, Republicans are launching a new phase in their austerity campaign - resurrecting the party's cost-cutting plan to turn Medicare into a voucher-like system for future seniors. Despite public uncertainty Saturday about the $85 billion in so-called sequester cuts, Republicans now believe they have momentum to ask Americans to make tough choices on Medicare, as rising healthcare costs combine with an aging population to form a growing part of future deficits.

WASHINGTON -- Reemerging as a party spokesman following a self-imposed post-election hiatus, Paul Ryan this weekend called upon Republicans to remain united against a president he sees as bent on "political conquest" in his second term. Ryan, in a pair of public appearances, said the GOP must continue to challenge President Obama on areas of principle but also be prepared to work with him on other areas. Notably, on NBC's "Meet The Press," he signaled he might be open to the president's push to expand background checks on gun purchases, but not other proposals the administration has put forward in the wake of the Newtown school shooting.

Now that two months have passed since the 2012 election, what does Rep. Paul Ryan think the voters' message was? It wasn't a rejection of the Romney-Ryan platform or of the "Ryan Budget" that would have turned Medicare into a voucher plan, Ryan told reporters on Wednesday. "I don't see this [election result] as a rejection of our principles," Ryan said at a Wall Street Journal breakfast. Instead, the message Ryan heard was that Republicans need to make it clear that they're not the party of the rich -- that they're as intent on ending poverty and increasing opportunity as Democrats.

Wednesday night at the Democratic National Convention, Bill Clinton put on a master's clinic on how to fight a political campaign. It may not have made Democrats wish he was back in the White House (at least not every Democrat), but they sure long to see him out on the campaign trail. The former president took the stage to nominate the current president -- "I want to nominate a man who is cool on the outside, but burns for America on the inside" -- and found a way to turn every vulnerability of Barack Obama's candidacy into a strength.

" There are two sides to every issue: One side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. " - Ayn Rand's hero John Galt speaking in "Atlas Shrugged" Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged" has polarized opinion for more than 50 years. Its fans - including, until recently, vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan - applaud the book's celebration of rugged individualism and no-holds-barred capitalism. Its critics dismiss it as heartless, simplistic and elitist. In the novel, many of the nation's most brilliant and innovative entrepreneurs and business leaders have disappeared, leaving the nation in chaos.

In the weeks after President Jimmy Carter lost his reelection bid to Ronald Reagan, when I was a young reporter at the Washington Post, I was assigned to cover a luncheon on Capitol Hill honoring Patricia Derian, Carter's assistant secretary of State for human rights. Reagan's inauguration was days away, and Derian was facing a room full of dejected Democrats and longtime human rights activists. Some were nearly in tears. And since Derian was relinquishing her post, she had every reason to be the most bummed in the room.

Had things gone his way, Mitt Romney would have raised his right hand Monday and sworn an oath to serve as the nation's 45 th president. Instead, the vanquished Republican nominee spent the day at home in La Jolla, out of sight if not quite out of mind. Former campaign aides said they had no details on how Romney spent his day, or whether he was among the millions of TV viewers who watched the events in Washington from afar. But his absence from public view was consistent with the low profile Romney has kept since being soundly defeated by President Obama in both the Electoral College and popular vote.