And somewhere high atop of the Prudential Building, Team Obama is going
‘FOR REAL?’
‘FOR REAL?’
Willard Romney has once again shown that he has no spine, and caved to the right-wing by choosing the Zombie-Eyed Grannie Killer known as Congressman Paul Ryan. He didn’t even choose his own VP Candidate.
What did Grover Norquist say?
They don’t need anyone that actually thinks in the White House, only someone to sign the bills shoved in front of them.
Willard has shown repeatedly that he has no core, no center, no spine.
And, the President gets what he wants: a clear CHOICE for November.
The Ryan Budget plan is now the ROMNEY/RYAN Budget plan until Election Day.
Willard chose as a running mate, Dubya’s House Point Man on Privatizing Social Security, the author of VOUCHERCARE, which they got the GOP House to vote for not once, but TWICE.
Oh yes, the high fives went up all over the Prudential Building once this was leaked last night. The last group that was stubborn to the President have been Seniors – now, they have to confront for themselves…vote for the scary Black man or vote for those who would take away their Social Security and Medicare. With this selection, these Seniors have been bitchslapped into reality.
UPDATE:
CHECK OUT THE INTRODUCTION OF RYAN BY ROMNEY
Here’s what your next POTUS believes
I love this pic
August 11, 2012
Obama’s luck (Wouldn’t YOU want to run against Romney?)
The choice of Ryan would seem to confirm two perpetual truths about Gov. Romney and President Obama: the latter is the luckiest politician since Reagan, and the former is the worst presidential candidate since Dukakis. The first premise flows naturally and inexorably from the second.
Once it became stunningly obvious that he was blowing it, Romney had two ways to go in this race. He could a) move more briskly and openly to the center-right, trusting that his base would vote not for him but nonetheless feverishly against Obama, or b) he could nervously shore up his base by selecting as his running mate a certified snake-oil pitchman who would imperil the independent vote.
There was risk involved in choice “a”–risky, because “a” entailed trust. Romney is clinically risk-averse, however, and he Nixonianly drips paranoia and therefore the quality of ever trusting in others. In choice “b,” though, greater certainty awaited. Sure there would be independent casualties, but his core strike force would remain unmolested.
http://pmcarpenter.blogs.com/p_m_carpenters_commentary/2012/08/obamas-luck-wouldnt-you-want-to-run-against-romney.html
August 11, 2012
It … is … over
I should think that this morning the happiest man in America is Steve Schmidt.
For four years this former top adviser to presidential candidate John McCain has suffered the torment of damnable ridicule and roasted burlesque: How could you guys have been so dumb as to enlist Sarah Palin as the VP pick? Where was the “process”? Were you really so desperate and knowingly doomed as to heave overboard all semblance of good judgment and prudence? In brief, what were you thinking?
Now, though, the pressure is off Mr. Schmidt, the ridicule is redirected, the snickering burlesque has relocated, and that fundamental question–What were you thinking?–has descended on the reigning nincompoops at the Romney campaign. Alas, Sarah Palin has been replaced as America’s worst vice-presidential candidate ever, and Steve Schmidt can now avert the slings and arrows of snickering interviewers. Four words: Paul Ryan, Eric Fehrnstrom.
For the last two years, President Obama has struggled to fashion the election as a choice. Mitt Romney has countered, logically, with a referendum. For the Republican, a choice election is a lost election; he would instead billboard the economy’s chronic troubles and recommend a fix or two and thereby capitalize on electoral malaise. Romney’s plan entailed a simple, straightforward strategy which had decades of empirical justification behind it.
Yet three little complications emerged. One, jobs have continued their return, despite congressional Republicans’ best efforts to waylay every last American family. Two, Romney somehow forgot to piece together a plausibly specific, alternative economic plan (the Keystone pipeline is no fix for a $15 trillion economy). And third, Mitt Romney has proceeded to demonstrate beyond any doubt or mistaken impression that he is the bumbling, befuddled, squawking and exceedingly irritating Jerry Lewis of this Martin & Lewis presidential contest.
The Democratic mauling of Paul Ryan will approach felonious assault. Joe Biden will leave only barely recognizable pieces of him in the veep debate and President Obama will crucify him on the stump and congressional Democrats can now officially present to their districts and states the Great Satan of pseudoconservative extremism as being in the direct employ of Jerry Lewis.
http://pmcarpenter.blogs.com/p_m_carpenters_commentary/2012/08/it-is-over.html
Paul Ryan is Very Serious About Ballooning The Deficit
Posted on 08/11/2012 at 4:30 pm by JM Ashby
The primary causes of today’s deficit and the largest contributor to the national debt continue to be Bush-era policies. Policies that Paul Ryan voted for.
Paul Ryan voted for the Iraq war.
He voted for Medicare Part D.
He voted for TARP.
He voted for the Bush Tax Cuts. Twice.
He also voted for the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, HR 5140.
Paul Ryan is not a deficit hawk, and he’s not a “serious budget cutter.” He’s a fake. A reverse Robin Hood who takes advantage of the media’s malfeasance to push an austerity agenda, which includes austerity for “you people” and none for their betters, designed to funnel money to the top at the expense of the deficit and the national debt.
Or as Charles Pierce put it earlier this week
[E]very time he comes up with another “budget,” actual economists get a look at it and determine, yet again, that between “What We Should Do” and “Great Things That Will Happen When We Do” is a wilderness of dreamy nonsense, wishful thinking, and an asterisk the size of Lake Huron. At which point, Republicans who’d like to have careers in five years take to hiding behind the drapes when he comes down the hall. Then, a few months later, he’s at it again. And even some putatively liberal commentators shrug and tell themselves that, at least, Paul Ryan is a Serious Person. He gets credit for sincerely wanting to “reform” entitlements, when his entire career makes it quite plain that he doesn’t believe in the concept of entitlements, let alone the ones we actually have.
The only real fiscal conservative in the race at this point, if the phrase still has any meaning, is President Obama.
http://bobcesca.com/blog-archives/2012/08/paul-ryan-is-very-serious-about-ballooning-the-deficit.html
Fox News Pundits Wonder If Republicans Can Defend ‘Tax Cuts For The Wealthy’ With Ryan On The Ticket
By Igor Volsky on Aug 11, 2012 at 3:42 pm
Bill Kristol, who had predicted that Mitt Romney would name Paul Ryan as his vice presidential running-mate, expressed some concern Saturday morning that Republicans may have a hard time defending the GOP budget, which disproportionately cuts taxes for the rich.
“It’s the tax cuts for the wealthy, where Republicans have not done a particularly good job of defending it and I think you’ll see Democratic attacks focus on that side of the equation,” he said. The Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore agreed, but noted, “who’s better to defend those policies that Paul is, I mean he knows this stuff better than anyone.” Watch it:
Paul Ryan’s infamous budget — which Romney embraced — replaces “the current tax structure with two brackets — 25 percent and 10 percent — and cut the top rate from 35 percent.” Federal tax collections would fall “by about $4.5 trillion over the next decade” as a result. To avoid increasing the national debt, the budget proposes massive cuts in social programs and “special-interest loopholes and tax shelters that litter the code.”
But 62 percent of the savings would come from programs that benefit the lower- and middle-classes, who would also experience a tax increase. That’s because while Ryan “would extend the Bush tax cuts, which are due to expire at the end of this year, he would not extend President Obama’s tax cuts for those with the lowest incomes, which will expire at the same time.” Households “earning more than $1 million a year, meanwhile, could see a net tax cut of about $300,000 annually.”
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/08/11/678701/fox-news-pundits-wonder-if-republicans-can-defend-tax-cuts-for-the-wealthy-with-ryan-on-the-ticket/
“As House Budget Committee chairman, Mr. Ryan has drawn a blueprint of a government that will be absent when people need it the most. It will not be there when the unemployed need job training, or when a struggling student needs help to get into college. It will not be there when a miner needs more than a hardhat for protection, or when a city is unable to replace a crumbling bridge.
And it will be silent when the elderly cannot keep up with the costs of M.R.I.’s or prescription medicines, or when the poor and uninsured become increasingly sick through lack of preventive care.
More than three-fifths of the cuts proposed by Mr. Ryan, and eagerly accepted by the Tea Party-driven House, come from programs for low-income Americans. That means billions of dollars lost for job training for the displaced, Pell grants for students and food stamps for the hungry. These cuts are so severe that the nation’s Catholic bishops raised their voices in protest at the shredding of the nation’s moral obligations.
Mr. Ryan’s budget “will hurt hungry children, poor families, vulnerable seniors and workers who cannot find employment,” the bishops wrote in an April letter to the House. “These cuts are unjustified and wrong.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/11/opinion/paul-ryans-cramped-vision.html?_r=1
11, 2012, 3:45 pm7 Comments
Galt / Gekko 2012
Paul Ryan for VP — or, as Romney said in the press conference, “the next president of the United States”. I did say Galt/Gekko, not Gekko/Galt.
There is, I gather, lots of horse-race speculation: It’s a disaster! No, it changes the conversation away from Bain and those missing tax returns! I have no idea who’s right.
What I do know is that anyone who believes in Ryan’s carefully cultivated image as a brave, honest policy wonk has been snookered. Mark Thoma reviews selected pieces I’ve written about Ryan; he is, in fact, a big fraud, who doesn’t care at all about fiscal responsibility, and whose policy proposals are sloppy as well as dishonest. Of course, this means that he’ll fit in to the Romney campaign just fine.
As I said, I have no idea how this will play politically. But it does look like a move from weakness, rather than strength; Romney obviously felt he needed a VP who will get people to stop talking about him.
Six Things You May Be Surprised To Learn About Paul Ryan
Posted by KATHY GILL, Technology Policy Analyst in Politics.
Aug 11th, 2012
Or not.
In the 112th Congress, Paul Ryan (R-WI) is one of the most powerful members of the GOP. He’s the House Budget Committee Chairman. And reportedly will be named Mitt Romney’s running mate later today.
1. Paul Ryan (R-WI) was elected to Congress in 1998. At the age of 28. “I learned economics working for Jack Kemp,” he said in 1999. Kemp served in the George H.W. Bush administration, and he was Bob Dole’s running mate in 1996. And in case you forgot, Kemp was the supply-side economics messiah. A discredited bit of hokum that has had more lives than Felix the cat.
2. When Ryan was 16, his father died. He attended Miami University (Ohio) with the proceeds of his Social Security survivors benefits. He studied economics and political science, graduating in 1992. Six years later, he was a Congressman from Wisconsin’s first district.
3. Like many in politics, when his party’s in power, his budget scruples differ dramatically from when the other guys are in the White House. For example, he voted yes on President Bush’s expansion of Medicare’s drug benefit. In 2005, the Washington Post reported that the White House had revised its estimated costs of the program:
[T]he new Medicare prescription drug benefit will cost more than $1.2 trillion in the coming decade, a much higher price tag than President Bush suggested when he narrowly won passage of the law in late 2003…. As recently as September, Medicare chief Mark B. McClellan said the new drug package would cost $534 billion over 10 years.
As Bruce Bartlett noted in 2009, “the drug benefit had no dedicated financing, no offsets and no revenue-raisers; 100% of the cost simply added to the federal budget deficit.”
Of course, now Ryan wants a Mulligan.
4. Ryan has been on the Social Security “reform” kick for a long time. Back in 2005, Bush was arguing for introducing private accounts. Ryan introduced a bill that would have “create[d] new private accounts funded entirely by borrowing, with no benefit cuts. Ryan’s plan was so staggeringly profligate, entailing more than $2 trillion in new debt over the first decade alone, that even the Bush administration opposed it as ‘irresponsible’.”
5. On to 2006. Democrats took control of Congress and re-instituted fiscal restraint: new spending or new tax cuts had to be offset by revenue increases or spending decreases. Ryan opposed it.
6. Now it’s 2008, and the economy is going to hell in a hand basket due to Wall Street’s machinations. Ryan voted “yes” for TARP, Economic Stimulus HR 5140, the $15 billion bailout for GM and Chrysler. I’m not going to sit here and say those votes were wrong; I’m merely pointing out the inconsistency between rhetoric and action when his party is the one pulling the strings.
http://themoderatevoice.com/155706/six-things-you-may-be-surprised-to-learn-about-paul-ryan/
Posted at 11:11 AM ET, 08/11/2012
With Ryan pick, Romney doubles down on economic radicalism
By Greg Sargent
It’s fitting that Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate comes after days of debate over the radicalism and vacuousness of Romney’s tax plan. His proposal won’t say how its deep tax cuts for the rich would be paid for — but if you grant the plan the most generous possible assumptions, the Tax Policy Center found, those tax cuts would have to be paid for by increasing the tax burden on the middle class.
Similarly, as experts have pointed out, Paul Ryan’s infamous budget — which is now officially the overarching blueprint for the whole GOP agenda — simply doesn’t add up unless you presume extraordinarily deep cuts to the nation’s safety net and a shockingly dramatic shrinking of government, even as it, too, cuts taxes deeply on the rich. Those experts see Ryan’s vision as deeply radical. As Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently put it, Ryan’s blueprint “would likely produce the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history.” Greenstein added that “for most of the past half-century,” the Ryan agenda “would have been outside the bounds of mainstream discussion.”
It is now the central, driving idea for the GOP ticket for the presidency of the United States.
In picking Ryan, Romney is confirming his commitment to full-flown economic radicalism — something that he had kept well disguised until the Tax Policy Center study unmasked it. The central idea driving the GOP ticket is not just that tax hikes on the rich must be avoided at all costs. It’s that dramatically reducing the tax burden on the wealthy — coupled with deep cuts to social programs and a quasi-voucherizing of Medicare — is the route back to prosperity.
Call it the “Ryan/Romney vision.” Not the “Romney/Ryan vision.” The “Ryan/Romney vision.” The Ryan pick was urged upon Romney by conservatives who wanted him to “go bold,” i.e., to confirm beyond doubt that he will govern from the Ryan blueprint. “We want the Ryan budget,” Grover Norquist said recently, adding that the paramount requirement in the next president is that he have “enough working digits to handle a pen” to sign it. The Ryan pick is a triumph for this wing of the party.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line
MEDICARE, TAXES, SOCIAL SECURITY, AMERICA’S SAFETY NET UNDER FULL-BLOWN ATTACK BY ROMNEY/RYAN TICKET.
If you’re old, poor, or middle class these two will make your life much more difficult
Pingback: Well, I’ll be Damned | A Voice From the Foothills
I am in my late 30s and I am telling my friends that if they plan of voting for Romney/Ryan, they should plan to come home immediately after and clear out a room in their house for their parents to live in.
OBAMA CAMPAIGN STATEMENT ON ROMNEY VICE PRESIDENTIAL PICK
CHICAGO – Obama for America Campaign Manager Jim Messina released the following statement in response to Mitt Romney picking Congressman Paul Ryan to be his presumptive nominee for vice president:
“In naming Congressman Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney has chosen a leader of the House Republicans who shares his commitment to the flawed theory that new budget-busting tax cuts for the wealthy, while placing greater burdens on the middle class and seniors, will somehow deliver a stronger economy. The architect of the radical Republican House budget, Ryan, like Romney, proposed an additional $250,000 tax cut for millionaires, and deep cuts in education from Head Start to college aid.
His plan also would end Medicare as we know it by turning it into a voucher system, shifting thousands of dollars in health care costs to seniors. As a member of Congress, Ryan rubber-stamped the reckless Bush economic policies that exploded our deficit and crashed our economy. Now the Romney-Ryan ticket would take us back by repeating the same, catastrophic mistakes.”
Michael Tomasky on Romney’s Stunning, Terrible Choice of Ryan for VP
by Michael Tomasky Aug 11, 2012 7:20 AM EDT
So much for Romney making a pick that says something about his own views (whatever they are). Instead, he feared what Bill Kristol might say and buckled under. As always.
Ryan will immediately become the flashpoint of this campaign. Yes, he’ll get the usual soft-focus biographical rollout. Expect Republicans to talk endlessly about his authenticity, his blue-collar roots, the fact that he once drove an Oscar Mayer weiner truck—and, certainly, his Catholicism. Also, his brains. He’s a smart guy, no doubt of that, although as I’ve written many times, it says something deeply pathetic about the GOP that Ryan has managed to become a star just because he’s bothered to learn policy.
So he’ll get some good press, and he’ll generate great enthusiasm among conservative intellectuals. But the introduction of him to the American people will inevitably involve some other things, too. It will involve explanations from the media that he is the GOP’s archconservative theoretician. It will involve explaining who Ayn Rand is. It will involve going into detail on his budget, and in particular his plans for Medicare. Learn that now, folks, if you don’t know it already. It will involve endless interpretations exactly like mine, about Romney sending a signal that he is running an ultraconservative campaign. The Ryan controversy will overtake the campaign. Romney will become in some senses the running mate—the ticket’s No. 2.
Think of it: The candidate will be running on his vice president’s ideas! It’s a staggering thought. Ryan might as well debate Obama this October, and Romney can square off against Biden.
Paul Ryan defends his controversial Medicare plan.
And in this light, it’s what this choice says about Romney that is most interesting. Romney had to know all this. He had to accept, privately and internally, the arguments one hears that he’s a boring white guy who excites no one. And he had to accept the reality that he still, after flip-flopping on a half-dozen key issues and doing so much pandering, hasn’t koshered himself up with the right.
So, you’re Mitt Romney. You’re sitting there in your hotel suite alone at midnight. You’re thinking about this choice. After plowing through the angles about this state and that state and each person’s plusses and minuses, you think to yourself, “But I have to make the choice that I want to make, a choice that says something about me.” And yet, at the crucial moment, you recoil from it. You’re afraid to do that. Doing that might upset The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page or Bill Kristol, and goodness, that can’t be. It’s deeply craven.
Democrats are celebrating. Are they overdoing it? Ryan is smart. He’ll hold his own on the trail. He’ll talk about the fiscal cliff coming at the end of the year, and he’ll probably make as credible a case as any conservative can make that Obama won’t make the “tough choices” and Republicans will. And don’t forget that he has a grudge against Obama personally, ever since that George Washington University speech of Obama’s in April 2011 when he invited Ryan—and made the guy sit there and listen to the president of the United States trash him. That’s probably a motivator. And the Democrats might overplay their hand. That’s always a temptation when the target is as big and juicy as Ryan is.
So Democrats will have to be smart. They should show respect for Ryan for being a serious guy, but then just explain to people, urgently but not over-heatedly, what he’s proposed. It’s just very hard to imagine that middle-of-the-road voters want harsh future cuts to Medicare, massive tax cuts for the rich, and huge reductions to domestic programs that most swing voters really don’t hate. Does this choice work in Florida, with all those old people? If Romney just sacrificed Florida, he’s lost the election already.
And why? To placate a party that doesn’t even want him as its nominee anyway. It’s psycho-weird. But at least it will carry the benefit, if this ticket loses, of keeping conservatives from griping that they lost because their ticket was too moderate. Conservatism will share—will own—this loss.
Is all that “daring”? Well, Thelma and Louise were “daring” too, but they ended up at the bottom of a canyon. If the Democrats handle this situation properly, that’s where this ticket will end up too, and then the rest of us—the people who don’t want federal policy to be based on Atlas Shrugged—can finally and fully press the case to the right that America is not behind you, and please grow up.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/11/michael-tomasky-on-romney-s-stunning-terrible-choice-of-ryan-for-vp.html?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=exclusive_breaking_news&cid=newsletter%3Bemail%3Bexclusive_breaking_news&utm_term=Breaking%20News%20and%20Exclusives
LOL I knew it right down to my DNA that Romney would pick lil “Eddie Munster”
So now we keep pounding at Mitt for his TAX RETURNS and Ryan’s SOICAL DAWINISTIC budget to obliterate MEDICARE & SOCIAL SECURITY.
BRING IT ON MOFOS!
Let the Games begin! Finally!
The GOP has put ALL their cards on the table for Americans to see. NO HOLD BARRED.
IT’S WAR AGAINST WOMEN, SENIORS, MIDDLE CLASS, STUDENTS, BLACKS, HISPANICS, ASIANS, GAYS, NONCHRISTIANS, POOR AMERICANS. OH AND WHITE TRAILER PARK CROWD, WHO VOTE AGAINST THEIR OWN BEST INTERESTS.
Let’s see, did I leave anyone out? NOPE,! IT’S THE RICH, WHITE HETEROSEXUAL MENS’ CLUB!
That’s the ROMNEY/RYAN PLAN
So now the debate turns to THE BUDGET and Ryan’s proposal to dismantle all of the major entitlement programs. How will the country respond when the real true issue is JOBS-JOBS-JOBS? Is a Ryan-Romney ticket really addressing the most pressing issues affecting the country -is it truly the BUDGET???? Is this again, more support for the rich getting richer and the middle class loosing even more governmental support? Does the Tea Party really bring the entire party down or will we see rallying of an opposing electorate rally to take the country BACKWARDS? Interesting dynamics, and as you said Ametia CLEAR CHOICES….the upcoming days are crucial in seeing where those who would elect Presidents, REALLY stand. I’m betting on the side of the rights of the people and EXPECTING them to re-elect Barack Obama, POTUS.
I am a “senior” in the technical sense. I clearly and loudly stand for Obama. Just wanted you to know there are some of us out there.