Morning News Round-Up

"Are you saying, as part of your budget, you assume the repeal of Obamacare?," Fox News host Chris Wallace asked Paul Ryan (R-WI) on Sunday.

"Yes," Mr. Ryan answered.

"That's not going to happen," Mr. Wallace later commented.

Y'know, it 's SO much easier to balance a budget when you're able to use facts that don't exist.  Just cut out billions of dollars that, in reality, you can't cut.  At least it looks good on paper -- and in stump speeches.  It's sort of the equivalent of the old Steve Martin joke, about how to make two million dollars.  "First, get a million dollars."

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“Your facts are false,” Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman told Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), during a Sunday talk show debate about Social Security funding.  “It's important to realize that the facts that are being brought out here are in fact, non-facts.

Again, it's SO much easier to win a debating point when you're using fact that don't exist.  I don't know if this is a Republican issue in general -- going back to when New Yorker writer Ron Suskind quoted a high-ranking Bush White House official (believed to be Karl Rove) chastising those people who lived in a "reality-based community," saying that instead, "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." (So, how did that work out for them?) -- or just a Wisconsin Republican thing.   Either way, reality and facts have a funny way of rearing their ugly heads.

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Former governor Jeb Bush (R-FL) went on five Sunday talks.  And five time defended his flip-flop on immigration, contradicting himself in his own book.  It's shocking, I know, that Mr. Bush defended contradicting himself.  The alternative of saying, "Oops, I got that wrong," is difficult for anyone, especially a politician, especially a politician testing the waters to run for president.  But not doing so leaves the voting public with no idea what in the world you stand for.  This might not seem like a bad thing to many politicians, especially those who don't stand for much of anything, but ask Mitt Romney how that worked out.

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There's been a lot of discussion in the media the last couple of days on whether co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck has been fired from The View.  I'm still trying to figure out why she was ever hired.  Certainly there had to have been other conservative women in America whose qualification exceeded being blonde, pretty and finishing fourth  on a reality game show.  At least if she is let go (or voted off, or whatever it is they do on The View), then I'll be up to speed again.

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The #1 movie at the box office this weekend, with an $80 million domestic opening was Oz: The Great and Powerful.  Apparently they named it properly.