Mitt Romney stopped running from his wealth Thursday, saying he won't apologize for his family's success after President Obama suggested that the presumptive GOP nominee was born with a "silver spoon in his mouth."

While much of the political world obsesses over Twitter fights and Seamus the dog, Barack Obama has set himself up for a high-profile defeat on one of the most important issues of the campaign.

Congressional lawmakers grilled General Services Administration officials for a third straight day Wednesday about a rogue employee's penchant for lavish, taxpayer-funded junkets, unearthing evidence that the waste, fraud and abuse is more common and has been going on much longer than first indicated.

Big business and the Tea Party are at swords' points once again, with GOP Senate primaries for the second straight election becoming proxy battles in the war over the soul of the Republican Party.

General Services Administration officials permitted a high-ranking employee to spend tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars on lavish travel junkets, despite an inspector general's dire warning about the executive's pattern of waste, fraud and abuse, officials said Tuesday.

President Obama still has confidence in Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan even as new details emerge from the agency's investigation into a prostitution scandal involving nearly two dozen American agents and military personnel and as many foreign women in Colombia.

Some 20 million Americans in primaries and caucuses will take part in selecting the Republican presidential nominee. One person will choose the vice presidential nominee.

Republicans are launching a massive jobs-focused campaign in six battleground states to woo Hispanic voters they believe are pivotal to their efforts to remove President Obama from the White House in November.

The man accused of spending $823,000 in taxpayer money on a lavish Las Vegas junket for government workers pleaded the Fifth at a House hearing Monday, refusing to answer questions from lawmakers digging into a scandal that has outraged the public and fueled Republican arguments for deeper cuts in wasteful government spending.

If a new Washington Post poll is correct, a majority of Republicans now believes the war in Afghanistan is not worth fighting. Fifty-two percent of GOP voters -- long the war's most resolute supporters -- have lost faith in the effort, along with 72 percent of Democrats and 66 percent of independents.

Big-business executives, big-bank dealmakers, big-government politicians and big-name politicians converged on Woodley Park last week to rally for increased cooperation among big government, big manufacturers and big banks.

Making the case for his Buffett Rule tax hike last week, President Obama told a crowd in Boca Raton, Fla., "What drags our entire economy down is when the benefits of economic growth and productivity go only to the few."

At times it seems President Obama believes the Buffett Rule -- his proposal that Americans making more than $1 million a year pay at least 30 percent in federal income taxes -- is the only solution needed to solve the nation's staggering fiscal crisis.  But with a Senate vote coming Monday in which the measure faces united Republican opposition -- plus no future in the House -- this week is likely to mark the end of the Buffett Rule as a major part of the Obama agenda.  That's not just because of the political opposition; just as important, the Buffett Rule is running into a dead end because a significant part of the political class in Washington has finally admitted the idea is little more than a gimmick that would do nothing to fix the country's problems.

President Obama's re-election team, in a quest to inoculate the president from his contentious health care law, is already making the case to voters that the president merely copied his reforms from the man who's running against him this fall, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

How much will Obamacare -- call it the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act if you like -- cost over the next 10 years?

Just when it appeared that President Obama had presumptive Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney on the defensive in the so-called "war on women," the president, vice president, first lady and most of Obama's campaign team were scrambling Thursday to distance themselves from a Democratic strategist who claimed Romney's stay-at-home wife Ann "never worked a day in her life."

Bay Buchanan, the Republican activist who often speaks publicly on behalf of Mitt Romney, baffled a group of reporters this week when she threw out a statistic no one had heard before.

Have you noticed the desperate-looking congressmen wandering around Capitol Hill these days, their faces all contorted in pain as they endure the agony of withdrawal from Federal Spending Addiction?

Controversial Democratic strategist and CNN contributor, Hilary Rosen, was hired by DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz to coach her on media appearances. According to a Wall Street Journal report in February, Obama advisers told Wasserman Schultz to "tone it down," suggesting that they hire "two seasoned Democratic female pros, Anita Dunn and Hilary Rosen," for media training, in preparation for the upcoming campaign. Wasserman Schultz willingly accepted.

Want a preview of the hyper-speed political warfare that will mark the general election campaign?  Look no farther than a skirmish, conducted first on Twitter and later everywhere else, that erupted Wednesday night over a Democratic strategist's accusation that Ann Romney has "never worked a day in her life."