If you needed any additional evidence that the Republican Party is a quasi-religious organization that no longer relies on empirical evidence in forming its policy positions, here’s Paul Ryan (R-WI) explaining why he wants to destroy Medicare to keep taxes low for millionaires.

This won’t just be a public relations nightmare, but on every imaginable policy level, including environmental, health, government spending, national security, and civil liberties, this is a really terrible idea. I can only hope this is a trial balloon I can soon pop.

A couple weeks ago, Matt Yglesias made the astute observation that since conservatives can no longer argue that low tax rates on the rich produce widespread prosperity, they’ve had to switch gears and claim that progressive taxation itself is immoral. In other words, most of the American Century, which saw the greatest expansion of the middle class in world history, was a big exercise in immorality.

You would think, based on this poll, at least one of America’s two major parties during this era of deficit hysteria and huge economic pain for the middle class would make the political decision to run on a populist platform of taxing the wealthy and our bailed-out Wall Street firms as the top way to reduce the deficit. It would be wildly popular.

Who will save us from the socialist dystopia that is Obama’s America?

While there is a strong belief that wealth should be more evenly distributed, the country is more divided on whether or not the government should correct this problem by heavily taxing the rich and redistributing the wealth.

Thanks to many loopholes in our tax code–the carried interest loophole being the most important–the richest people in American are likely paying a lower tax rate than you are.

Hey Paul Ryan. I’ve got a better, simpler plan for returning the country to prosperity. Here it is.

Progressives United is a very new formulation for former Senator Russ Feingold. With all the tumult in his backyard over Scott Walker and the unions, it was natural that would be an early focus. But I think it’s interesting that he went here for his first campaign outside that.

Haley “Jim Crow Mississippi Wasn’t That Bad” Barbour was on Faux News Sunday this morning defending his wingnut credentials in the wake of his poor performance in the CPAC straw poll — and this slipped out.