House Republicans unveiled an ambitious cost-cutting plan Tuesday that would balance the budget in 10 years without raising taxes, while repealing ObamaCare and overhauling entitlements -- a document Democrats are sure to reject but could be used as a negotiating tool in talks with President Obama.

Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., chairman of the House Budget Committee, is sticking by controversial proposals, including one to give future Medicare retirees the option of using government payments for private health care plans.

The plan warns of a looming debt crisis, and endeavors to pay off the debt by 2050.

"We are addressing the most predictable debt crisis in this country's history," Ryan said Tuesday. "Our plan will balance the budget and pay off our debts."

In response, the White House issued a statement complaining that the plan does not include tax increases for top earners and said the president believes it is the "wrong course for America"...

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House Speaker John Boehner had a simple message Wednesday for President Obama after he used the bully pulpit to blame Republicans for the "meat cleaver" of looming spending cuts: You created it, you fix it.

"Having first proposed and demanded the sequester, it would make sense that the president lead the effort to replace it," Boehner wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

The "sequester" is the Washington word for the $85 billion in 2013 spending cuts set to hit starting March 1, with more than $1 trillion in cuts on tap over the next decade. Boehner and Obama both agree that the federal budget needs that level of deficit reduction and more, but sharply disagree over how to achieve it. In the absence of any compromise, the set of indiscriminate cuts which would hit the military hardest are set to take hold in less than two weeks.

South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint is leaving Congress to head the conservative Heritage Foundation.

The Tea Party-backed senator announced the move Thursday, saying he will step down from the Senate in January to become president of The Heritage Foundation think tank.

"I'm leaving the Senate now, but I'm not leaving the fight. I've decided to join The Heritage Foundation at a time when the conservative movement needs strong leadership in the battle of ideas," he said in a statement. "No organization is better equipped to lead this fight and I believe my experience in public office as well as in the private sector as a business owner will help Heritage become even more effective in the years to come."

DeMint has been an outspoken voice in the Senate for its most conservative wing, most recently chiding House Republican leaders for offering to put revenue on the table as part of negotiations over the looming fiscal crisis...

After proclaiming to the world that Mother Jones had the "complete" video of Romney speaking at a private fundraiser in May, David Corn admitted that "one to two minutes, maybe less, of recording was missed," William A. Jacobson wrote at Legal Insurrection on Tuesday.

On Tuesday, Mother Jones released what it claimed was the "full," ”raw and uncut” video of Mitt Romney’s comments, but the "uncut" video left out a critical portion of the speech between two parts.

The Blaze noted that "one simply has to watch the videos back to back to see that there is clearly no natural link between them."

“We do all these polls — I find it amazing. We poll all these people to see where you stand in the polls but 45 percent of the people vote for the Republicans and 48 or 49–,” Romney says in the video before it ended.

The beginning of the next part starts with Romney saying: “…about twice as much as China, not 10 times as much like is reported.

TAMPA, Fla. – Mitt Romney was formally nominated Tuesday as the Republicans' presidential candidate, hitting the magic number of delegates late in the afternoon -- capping an eight-year quest for his party's nomination.

Shortly before 6 p.m., Romney notched the 1,144 delegates needed to claim the party nomination going into November. The New Jersey delegation, whose governor is giving the keynote, delivered the final delegates that put him over the top.

The proceedings, as per tradition, were part pep rally for the individual state delegations that one-by-one took the stage and jazzed up the crowd before announcing their delegate totals. But they also concluded what for Romney has been a protracted and hard-fought battle for the nomination -- he is here in Tampa only after warding off a rotating field of feisty primary challengers ranging from Rick Perry to Newt Gingrich to Rick Santorum to Herman Cain...

While many presidential candidates head to the convention podium with an Ivy League degree in their back pockets, a majority of Republican vice presidential candidates in the last 24 years have come with a common qualification on their resumes.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney‘s selection of Wisconsin Republican Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate continued a trend of Republican vice presidential candidates with resumes boasting former and, now with Ryan, current membership, in the Republican Study Committee (RSC).

Six of the last seven presidential elections, and four of the last five tickets have featured RSC vice presidential candidates — former Vice President Dan Quayle (1988 and 1992), former Housing Secretary Jack Kemp (1996), former Vice President Dick Cheney (2000 and 2004), and now Ryan (2012).

"...the budget that [Rep. Paul Ryan] came forward with is just like Paul Ryan. It is a sensible, straightforward, honest, serious budget and it cut the budget deficit just like we did, by $4 trillion. ... The president came out with his own plan and the president, as you remember, came out with a budget, and I don't think anybody took that budget very seriously."

-- Erskine Bowles, Democratic co-chairman of President Obama's debt and deficit commission, in a Sept. 8, 2011 speech at the University of North Carolina.

President Obama and Vice President Biden have been escalating their attacks in the days since soon-to-be Republican nominee Mitt Romney tapped Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan to be his wingman. But not in the way everyone expected.

Suggesting Republicans want to enslave people and reverting to a 29-year-old charge that Romney was unkind to his dog isn't where the Democratic debate was supposed to be today.

Mitt Romney has selected strongly pro-life Rep. Paul Ryan as his vice-presidential running mate. Ryan is a Wisconsin congressman know for his conservative stances on fiscal and budget issues but he is very strongly pro-life — saying he would never vote for abortion.

Ryan has made a solid pro-life pledge that will endear him to millions of voters looking for a pro-life Vice President to replace pro-abortion Vice President Joe Biden.

During the 2010 elections, Ryan told The Weekly Standard’s John McCormack, “I’m as pro-life as a person gets.”

He responded to a controversial “truce” that Mitch Daniels of Indiana had put forward saying social issues should be put on the back burner, and repudiated it.

“You’re not going to have a truce. Judges are going to come up.

House Republicans said Monday they were “disappointed” with the Obama administration’s plan to waive mandatory work requirements for welfare and questioned the legal grounds being used to make such changes.

“We are disappointed to see that the administration through this action and others seems intent not on helping to get Americans back to work,” said the letter signed by 76 House Republicans.

The one-page letter to Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius also states the administration is instead intent upon increasing Americans’ reliance on welfare and other government programs.

The work requirements in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families legislation were signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996...

House lawmakers voted Wednesday to repeal the federal health care overhaul -- the latest in a long line of anti-"ObamaCare" votes, but the first since the Supreme Court upheld the law and defined one of its key provisions as a "tax."

The House has voted more than 30 times to scrap, defund or undercut the law since Obama signed it in March 2010. As with those bills, the repeal bill approved Wednesday on a 244-185 vote faces certain demise in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

But Republicans were looking to get lawmakers back on record on the law in the wake of the high court ruling last month. The ruling upheld most the law as constitutional, but in doing so determined that the controversial penalty on those who do not buy insurance technically qualifies as a "tax" and not a "penalty" as the administration had claimed. That definition fueled GOP criticism of the law, and put some Democrats in a politically tricky position...