By Joey Lauer
Will there ever be an end to the spending in Washington? Representative Paul Ryan has a plan. In an interesting article, Ryan defends his “Roadmap for America’s Future 2.0″ against the objections of Peter Orzag, the director of the Office of Management and Budget. Ryan explains the key provisions of his “Roadmap” while rufuting Orzag’s claims at the same time.
Congressman Ryan’s Roadmap  proposes some drastic changes to the government’s entitlement programs to help solve the financial crisis. He suggests changing tax codes to help reduce the number of low-income uninsured and dramatically …

By Lingfeng Li
New York Magazine just published an excerpt from the book Game Change about the rise and fall of John Edwards.  It also reveals a different side to Elizabeth Edwards, who is often portrayed in the media as the “sainted” wronged woman.
From NY Mag:
Many of his friends started noticing a change—the arrival of what one of his aides referred to as “the ego monster”—after he was nearly chosen by Al Gore to be his running mate in 2000: the sudden interest in superficial stuff to which Edwards had been …

By Aaron McGuire

Jay Cost is one of my favorite writers. He’s a professor of political science, and writes about politics in a manner more akin to V.O. Key than Jim Geraghty or Eleanor Clift (or any of that crowd, really). This week, he wrote an exquisite piece highlighting the popular conception that Obama has “let us down” and noted how that shouldn’t be a surprise. It’s a very good piece, I enjoyed it quite a bit. Hope you do too.

In case you weren’t following political news this first week of the new year, we’re starting a new weekly summary series to help you catch up.

Top Democrats drop out of 2010 election races
Dorgan (D-ND), Dodd out (D-CT) (Politico)
Democratic majority still looks safe (Politico)
CO Governor Bill Ritter (D) drops out (WSJ), CO Interior Secretary Ken Salazar will not run for Governor (Washington Post)
NJ State Senate rejects gay marriage proposal in a 20-14 vote.  The bill’s supporters had hoped it would be passed before Governor Corzine left office.  (NY Times)
Improvements in security policies ordered after …

By Vikram Srinivasan
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Ken Blackwell of the Family Research Council, and Kenneth Klukowski of the American Civil Rights Union are out with a great editorial in the Wall Street Journal today on some of the major constitutional questions hanging over the health care legislation that just passed the Senate.  The key take-away is that the legislation breaches traditional balances between state power and individual liberty in ways never seen before:
America’s founders intended the federal government to have limited powers and that the states have an independent sovereign …