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LAST TICKET: What Obama will say about Libya; Rand Paul and Michele Bachmann are frenemies

_ylt=AtlOJH0fcJocxbtbLZpp8dys0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTRrOXI0bmE0BGFzc2V0A3libG9nX2V4Y2x1c2l2ZS8yMDExMDMyOC9saWJ5YS1zcGVlY2gtd2hhdC1vYmFtYS13aWxsLXRyeS10by1zYXkEY2NvZGUDbW9zdHBvcHVsYXIEY3BvcwMyBHBvcwM5BHB0A2hvbWVfY29rZQRzZWMDeW5fdG9wX3N0b3J5BHNsawNsaWJ5YXNwZWVjaHc-">National Journal)

Mitt Romney gave $25,000 to the New Jersey GOP. ()

Mike Huckabee insists he has broad appeal in 2012. ()

Obama has been granting interviews to TV stations in key battleground states. ()

Rand Paul says it's "possible" Michele Bachmann's 2012 announcement might have been spurred by his own White House talk. ()

Michael Bloomberg dressed up like Spider-Man. ()

Newt Gingrich says presidents don't have to be likable. ()

Jon Huntsman's 2012 campaign is ready to go--if he's running. ()

Reince Priebus spends at least five hours a day raising cash for the RNC. ()

The White House's Easter logo looks a little familiar. ()

Round 4 of Baylor-Texas A&M for Final Four berth

If Baylor is going to get to the NCAA Final Four for the second year in a row, Brittney Griner and the top-seeded Lady Bears are going to have to figure out how to beat Texas A&M for the fourth time this season.

While Baylor (34-2) has won eight games in a row against its Big 12 rival, the three games this season have been by a combined 15 points.

So, Aggies coach Gary Blair, is it better to be the team trying to win for the fourth time or the one trying to break through for the first time when it matters the most?

"Shoot, what would some of the big-timers do with that question? I can just hear Bobby Knight. But I like my chances," Blair said. "We didn't struggle against Baylor, we had three damn good ball games."

The much-anticipated matchup when the NCAA brackets came out three weeks ago is here. The Big 12's top two teams play in the Dallas Regional championship Tuesday night.

Baylor coach Kim Mulkey cringed when her Big 12 champion Lady Bears and Texas A&M were made the top two seeds in the same bracket.

"It was a shock to me that they would do that to us. It was a shock. And Gary knows it was a shock to him," Mulkey said Monday. "When we shook hands at the Big 12 tournament, we were like we can get there, we're telling each other we'll see you in the Final Four. That's basically the conversations that were taking place between me and him and the players."

Except the familiar foes are now in each other's way. Baylor is trying to get to its third Final Four in seven seasons, and the Aggies (30-5) are trying to get there for the first time.

The Lady Bears had to overcome a nine-point deficit midway through the second half at home last month to beat Texas A&M. They then had to come back from Texas A&M's 12-0 start in the Big 12 tournament championship game three weeks ago.

"You just have to have a lot of respect for A&M. Every time we've played them it's just been close," Bears senior guard Melissa Jones said. "Every game has been a battle. And that's what we'll expect again this time around."

Since their 61-58 loss in the Big 12 championship, the Aggies have won their three NCAA tournament games by an average margin of 34 points. They had a 79-38 rout against Georgia on Sunday, just before Baylor had to hold off feisty Green Bay 86-76 in a game when Griner had a career-high 40 points with 10 rebounds and six blocked shots.

And now the Aggies have the matchup they were hoping for with another chance against Baylor.

"We've looked for this opportunity since we lost to them in the Big 12 championship," Aggies leading scorer Danielle Adams said. "I mean, the first three times we played them, we weren't quite there, and we played them close."

Adams certainly hasn't been herself against Baylor.

While Adams averages 22.7 points a game and is shooting 49 percent from the field for the season, those figures are cut in half for the three games against Griner and Co. The 6-foot-1 senior is 12 of 50 (24 percent) from the field and had three of her four lowest-scoring games of the season — 13, nine and 12 points — against Baylor.

"A lot of it is Danielle has rushed her shots, even though 90 percent of the time she's been guarded by Destiny Williams or Brooklyn Pope. But Griner is nearby," Blair said. "Just like in the men's game, when you would have Chamberlain or Alcindor, they would influence the game because in the corner of your eye you see them coming."

Baylor will be trying to accomplish something rarely done in men's or women's basketball.

Since 1996-97, the only time a women's team defeated another four times in the same season was Oral Roberts over Missouri-Kansas City in 2004-05, according to STATS LLC. The only time it's happened on the men's side during that span was Michigan State over Wisconsin in 1999-2000.

Don't expect any trickery from Mulkey or Blair, who was an assistant coach at Louisiana Tech when Mulkey was the point guard and they won two national championships in the early 1980s.

"Well, the challenge is what are either of us going to do differently. He's not going to change what got him here. I'm not going to change what got us here," Mulkey said. "The players aren't going to change. You might tweak an inbounds or tweak a way you're going to guard Griner or throw a zone out there. You're going to do what you do best."

Blair expects a fun and entertaining game, predicting already that "it will be the best basketball game, women's game, that's ever been played in Dallas or maybe in Texas. ... It's going to be something special."

Only one of them gets to go to Indianapolis, which is where Baylor won its national championship six years ago.

"We've gone five times against (Baylor with Griner) now. I've lost all five," Blair said. "But I keep knocking on that door and I'm getting closer and closer. And if it doesn't happen this year, it's going to happen next year and we're going to keep going."

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A Two-Minute Guide to GQ's Billy Ray Cyrus Interview

WASHINGTON, DC – Miley Cyrus is a tween idol with problems. Billy Ray Cyrus is her dad, a former country star who was closely aligned with her career right up to the point it gave signs of going off the rails. Now estranged from his family and living in a farmhouse in Tennessee, Billy Ray is the subject of aby Chris Heath in the new issue of GQ. The interview, which has been deemed "devastating" and "shockingly candid" by the New York Daily News and Hollywood Reporter, respectively, sheds new light not just one of the major recent phenomenons in pop music, but the collateral damage fame can inflict on those who would seem most prepared to avoid its trappings. Here is our two-minute version of Billy Ray's most jarring--and downright weird--claims about life in and around the teen fame bubble: He never made any money off his daughter"For the record," Cyrus proclaims, "to set it straight, I want to tell you: I've never made a dime off of Miley. You got a lot of people have made percentages off of her. I'm proud to say to this day I've never made one commissioned dollar, or dime, off of my daughter." This seems difficult to fathom considering he played the character of Robbie Stewart, manager to the title character forof Hannah Montana. Cyrus later likens his $15,000 weekly salary on the show to "peanuts."Miley's handlers blamed him for everythingHalf-nude photos in , provocative outfits on tour, TMZ videos of hera bong: every time something went wrong with Miley's public image, her father says he was made to take the fall. "Every time something happened in Miley's career," he recalls, "every time the train went off the track...every time they'd put me... 'Somebody's shooting at Miley! Put the old man up there!'" Cyrus says he took the public's slings and arrows "because I'm her daddy, and that's what daddies do. 'Okay, nail me to the cross, I'll take it....'"David Lynch is to blame for his daughter getting Hannah MontanaThe noted pseudo-experimental filmmaker never worked with Miley, but he did cast Billy Ray in a minor roll in his 2001 film Mulholland Dr. "Were it not for David Lynch, Miley would never have been Hannah Montana," Cyrus tells Heath. Heath unpacks Cyrus's "highly tenuous" logic. "If not for Lynch's leg up, Cyrus might not have spent four years in Toronto starring in the uplifting, moral TV medical drama Doc, in which his daughter Miley would get early opportunities to guest-star...and so on."He really misses his mulletThe mullet--business in the front, party in the back--was Cyrus's signature hairstyle during his Achy Breaky Heart days--but his mane took on a more Hollywood look during his time on his daughter's Disney Channel show. "I swear I didn't realize [the mullet was gone] until recently," he tells Heath, "when I went, 'Holy crapI've lived the last five years with Geronimo's hairdo.'" He responded a few months ago by having "most of his hair cut off, in the way that men and women often do when their lives change dramatically, but left whatever hair he had at the back to slink down his neck."He hasn't spoken to Miley since video of her with a bong appeared after her 18th birthday party in DecemberAnd it doesn't sound like he's particularly broken up about it. "You know, it seems at this point there's not a lot that I can say she doesn't already know. And of course I've sent her the texts of 'I'm here if you need me,' 'Always still love you,' those kind of things...I'll see when she [visits Tennessee again.] Hopefully there's something I can do. I don't know. Who knows? Maybe she knows exactly what she's doing."He's worried about Miley joining the ranks of celebrities who lived fast and died youngMiley's mistakes, in Heath's estimation, seem more like the "stupid crap" every teenager does than genuinely self-destructive behavior, but her father isn't so sure. "I'm scared for her," Billy Ray admits. "She's got a lot of people around her that's putting her in a great deal of danger. I know she's 18, but I still feel like as her daddy I'd like to try to help. Take care of her just a little bit, to at least get her out of danger. I want to get her sheltered from the storm." He cites Kurt Cobain, Michael Jackson, and Anna Nicole Smith as celebrities who would have benefited from similar guidance.

Obama defends his new budget of 'tough choices'

WASHINGTON – Defending his new budget as one of "tough choices," President Barack Obama said Tuesday that more difficult decisions about the nation's biggest expenses — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — will have to be tackled by Democrats and Republicans acting together, not by White House dictates.

"This is not a matter of, `you go first, I go first,'" he said. "It's a matter of everybody having a serious conversation about where we want to go and then ultimately getting in that boat at the same time so it doesn't tip over."

The president pitched his $3.73 trillion budget as a balance of spending on needed programs and significant reductions that would cut the deficit by $1.1 trillion over 10 years. The budget includes a mix of spending freezes on domestic programs, pay hike suspensions for federal civilian workers and new revenues from increased taxes on the wealthy and on oil and gas producers.

But Obama's deficit relief is far more modest than that detailed by his fiscal commission, which in December proposed measures that would mop up four times as much red ink. Unlike his blue-ribbon group, the administration's budget does not address structural changes in Social Security or Medicare, the two largest items in the federal budget.

"Look at the history of how these deals get done," Obama said Tuesday. "Typically it's not because there's an Obama plan out there. It's because Democrats and Republicans are committed to tackling this in a serious way."

The commission's bipartisan report included politically difficult recommendation such as increasing the Social Security retirement age and reducing future increases in benefits. And while Obama has promised to overhaul the corporate tax system, he stops short of commission recommendations that would lower rates but generate additional revenue at the same. Obama has called for "revenue neutral" fixes to corporate taxes, meaning they would neither cost more money nor add money to the treasury.

"I'm not suggesting we don't have to do more," the president said.

At times defensive, Obama used his news conference to offer his own tutorial on how Washington works.

He voiced exasperation at what he said was the capital's impatient culture and its insistence on immediate results. He said he faced the same demands on health care, the military's don't-ask, don't-tell policy on gays, and on the uprising in Egypt.

"There's a tendency for us to assume that if it didn't happen today, it's not going to happen," he said.

He also pulled the curtain back on the partisan positioning typical of politics, while at the same time pressing Republicans to join him at the negotiating table.

"I expect that all sides will have to do a little posturing on television and speak to their constituencies and rally their troops," he said. "But ultimately what we need is a reasonable, responsible and initially probably somewhat quiet and toned-down conversation about, `all right, where can we compromise and get something done.'

Obama at one point overstated the achievements of his budget, asserting that by the middle of the current decade annual federal spending would match annual revenues."We will not be adding more to the national debt," he said.

But his budget shows deficits as well as debt increasing every year through 2021, and the president later had to clarify. The balance in spending and revenue, he said, applied only to the smaller "discretionary" portion of the budget, not to interest on the national debt or to rising health care costs in Medicare and Medicaid.

"That's going to require entitlement reform and it's going to require tax reform," he said.

Obama said he also wants to work with Republicans to find common ground on government spending for the remainder of this fiscal year and to avoid a government shutdown. Stopping the basic functions of government could damage the economic recovery, he said.

"I think it is important to make sure that we don't try to make a series of symbolic cuts this year that could endanger the recovery," he said. Obama said cutting too deeply in Washington could prompt thousands of layoffs in state and local governments, which would hurt the economy.

"The key here is for people to be practical and not score political points," he said. "That's true for all of us."

Obama's budget aims to cut the deficit in part with tax increases, including eliminating tax breaks for oil and gas producers, which have failed to win support before under a Democratic control Congress. The measures face an even tougher challenge now that Republicans control the House of Representatives.

"I continue to believe I'm right," he said, when asked why he relied on previously defeated proposals. "So we're going to try again."

His new budget would cut spending on popular energy assistance programs and community development projects. Obama took note of the harsh impact that cuts can have on individual Americans. But he said the most important thing he can do as president is focus on the long-term stability of the economy to help the largest number of people.

"I definitely feel folks' pain," he said, mentioning the gripping stories recounted in the 10 letters a day that he reads from among the thousands received at the White House. "You want to help every single one individually."

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Associated Press writer Jim Kuhnhenn contributed to this report.