There’s a subtle story going around this week that you definitely won’t see covered on Fox News. You won’t hear Speaker John Boehner or Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell discussing these results in their usual rote talking points about Obamacare and the socialist takeover of the country by the President’s policies. Between all the baying about the deficit, the budget and the huge negative impacts of the upcoming sequestration plan that will be implemented in the absence of fiscal resolution, if you blinked, you could almost miss the headline:

Slower Growth of Health Costs Eases U.S. Deficit

The New York Times ran this piece on Monday morning, and to be fair, it might have been difficult for anyone to focus what with Benedict XVI’s stunning announcement that he would be the first Pope in six centuries to resign his post. There’s also the President’s first State of the Union Address since winning re-election in 2012. It has undoubtedly been a busy news cycle and that will likely continue as we move through the week.

But come on! This is a big deal!According to the piece by writer Annie Lowrey, “A sharp and surprisingly persistent slowdown in the growth of health care costs is helping to narrow the federal deficit, leaving budget experts trying to figure out whether the trend will last and how much the slower growth could help alleviate the country’s long-term fiscal problems.”

Excuse me for asking this obvious, but isn’t this precisely what both political parties claim to be after? Going back to the 2008 Presidential campaign, then candidates John McCain and Barack Obama devoted near equal time to lamenting the spiraling costs of healthcare and its affect on deficit spending. Both men vowed to do something if elected. It seemed to be an issue that most Americans and politicos could get behind.

Then low and behold, early into his first term, Obama and the Democrats actually got something accomplished – with the GOP fighting them every step of the way. It wasn’t pretty. It was embarrassing and painful for almost everybody, and the end result was a far cry from the single payer system that many liberals badly desired. But in the end the Patient Protection and the Affordable Care Act was a huge pivot away from a throughly broken system that seemed to exist for the benefit of health insurance companies, rather than the sick and injured they were created to serve.

Republicans wasted no time decrying the Act as the largest increase in government bureaucracy since ___ (fill in the blank), a measure that would drive medical costs and the Federal deficit up rather than down. Through it all, Obama held steady, confident that history would have the final say.

It didn’t even take a leap year. Lowrey goes on to write, “In figures released last week, the Congressional Budget Office said it had erased hundreds of billions of dollars in projected spending on Medicare and Medicaid. The budget office now projects that spending on those two programs in 2020 will be about $200 billion, or 15 percent, less than it projected three years ago.”

President Obama is way too gracious a person to perform the “I told you so dance” on Capitol Hill to which he is richly entitled. So I will do it for him. BOOM!!! How’s that for change you can believe?

Here’s hoping the President and his team use this data to their advantage, to head naysayers and sycophants off at the pass who stand to gain much by protecting the status quo. As the POTUS seeks to take on a host of issues this calendar year that seem to draw crazies out of the woodwork (I’m thinking gun control and immigration), let this early data from the effects of health care reform empower him to keep doing what is right.

I mentioned this in my column last week, but I am finding that the observation bears repeating. Hardly a month into 2013, the ideological tug-of-war taking place inside the ranks of the Republican party is both refreshing and portentous. It remains to be seen if the increasingly silenced moderate wing can wrest control of the platform and its awful messaging machine from the radicals who have come to dominate it. It’s a watershed moment for a political party that has fallen out of step with the general public on a whole host of critical issues.

Last week it was a somewhat academic David Brooks column that served as the launchpad for discussion about the GOP’s current and future ability to speak to voters that have been alienated by the right’s anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-middle class rhetoric. But this week, we examine the curious case of now-retired Congressman Ron Paul ruffling the feathers of his partymates and a constituency that the Republican Party has traditionally served very well: “war hawks.”

Jumping into the fray of the frenzied gun control debate against the backdrop of a high profile series of civilian casualties, Ron Paul (who now manages his own feed in retirement) took to Twitter this past weekend. In an effort to comment on the untimely death of Chris Kyle, a former Navy SEAL and author of the best-selling autobiography American Sniper who was shot at a Texas shooting range, Ron Paul made a subjective statement that is highly open to interpretation:

“Chris Kyle’s death seems to confirm that ‘he who lives by the sword dies by the sword.’ Treating PTSD at a firing range doesn’t make sense.”

While Paul’s flippant tweet is certainly insensitive to the victim’s grieving family at best, the former congressman does make a couple of spot-on observations. In a time when the Republican Party is contorting itself to link increased gun violence with a lack of resources for the mentally ill (with logic that eats itself as the GOP seeks to further reduce funding for the most vulnerable Americans) it does seem ironic that Kyle was killed while attempting to distract a fellow soldier suffering from PTSD. Isn’t that a bit like taking a recovering alcoholic to a distillery? There’s nothing funny at all about the incident but the way in which a certain section of the political spectrum treats access to guns as a cure-all for whatever ails you has been discredited once again.

And at the risk of reading too deeply into 140 characters, it appears to this columnist that Paul made a second, more obscure point about the long-term effects of the Iraq and Afghani conflicts on a small percentage of men and women who have carried the burdens of war. It is with this pacifist line of thinking that Paul really breaks ranks with party standard bearers. According to this element, continuous conflict is good for America, economically and ideologically. As such, Republican pundits wasted no time jumping on the former congressmen.

But as Peter Weber, a writer for The Week, noted:

“Who can be surprised that conservatives… have been falling all over themselves to condemn Ron Paul for [noting] that the violence wrought by over a decade of nonstop war in America leads to tragedy on the home front?… The most transparent were the conservatives who claimed to be former supporters of Paul who must now go support some more ‘patriotic’ politician: One who doesn’t actually question anything the military does…. This is what it comes down to for most conservatives, of course.”

The speedy vitriol heaped upon Ron Paul by his fellow Republicans is intended to punish him for walking astray of party dictates that it’s all about war and guns, baby. Mercifully the always autonomous Paul has less to lose by speaking his mind than ever – the benefits of old age and retirement. I hope he continues to act as a thorn in the side of GOP mouthpieces. The right may not realize it, but it needs these dissenting voices if it is to have any chance at survival.

This is an era of diminished expectations and cynicism where Congressional approval rates have fallen under 10 percent, narrowly beating out the public’s surprising fondness for cockroaches and Genghis Khan. And no one expects grand bargains of any type to be negotiated that will put the country and its’ middle class back on the road to solvency. We must take solace where we can find it.

This was a  week which commenced with a subdued  inaugural vision of hope and change, shared by a battle-scarred and wary second-term President. Still, it can’t escape our collective liberal notice that by any standards this was also a  very bad week for the Republican Party and its stubbornly quaint platform. If, as our very own Sarah Jones writes this week, “John Boehner Thinks Obama Wants to Shove the GOP to the ‘Dustbin of History’,” the Speaker of the House may thank his party mates for acting as the President’s accomplices.

Case in point: as NPR and other news outlets reported just a few days ago, Republicans were forced to blink during their latest turn at fiscal war games. In a report entitled House GOP Backs Off Debt Ceiling Demands, NPR host Scott Simon states “After insisting for weeks on a dollar in spending cuts for every dollar that they would agree to raise the debt ceiling, Republicans dropped that demand, at least for the next three months.”

As we know now, the right did not surrender out of a genuine concern for the credibility and financial state of the nation. No, ultimately the party bowed because even their closest cohorts found the position untenable. When the Koch Brothers are unable to stand by their man Boehner (because at the end of the day, unmitigated, selfish, wealth creation is behind all their demands), even the stubbornest radical is forced to face the likelihood of defeat. Queue the retreat and inevitable patriotic messaging.

And that’s not all. Coming off an election cycle stunning in its attempted reversal of 50 years of social, economic and professional progress for women, the GOP proponents of “traditional family values” were handed an unexpected setback. Outgoing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced plans this past Wednesday to open more than 230,000 front line combat positions in the U.S. Armed Forces to female soldiers.New York Times columnist Gail Collins reported that only recently, “[Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee] and her allies declared victory when they merely got language in the defense authorization bill requiring the Defense Department to study the question of women in combat.”

From a meandering study to a done deal in record time. How must it have hurt Fox News to have to run this headline: Leon Panetta Praised by Latinas After Combat Ban Lifted? Could it happen to a better party? A group that made a concerted effort to degrade Latin American immigrants and female reproductive rights in the run-up to the 2012 Presidential election is now forced to watch idly as a second-term Obama receives the gratitude of a constituency comprised of both of the GOP’s most reviled elements..

Most of the nation appears to be following the lead of the POTUS. Don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back for embracing changes that probably should have been instituted long ago. Announce it and move on to putting out the next fire kindled in some fashion by Republican opposition. The clock is already ticking on the President’s remaining ability to foment the reversal of eight years of comprehensively schlocky, dangerous policy. But these small victories are a painful reminder of where we’ve been and how far the President’s leadership has taken us.

That deserves at least a moment of celebration.