August 11, 2012

that's MY ticket

August 11, 2012

Luckovich cartoon - The Romney Plan

August 11, 2012

NYT Sunday Editorial Smacks Romney/Ryan "A Blueprint Of A Government That Will Be Absent"

Mr. Ryan’s Cramped Vision
Editorial
New York Times
August 12, 2012

Mitt Romney’s safe and squishy campaign just took on a much harder edge…
…
…Voters will now be able to see with painful clarity just what the Republican Party has in store for them.

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…”

MORE:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/11/opinion/paul-ryans-cramped-vision.html?_r=1

August 11, 2012

Undecided voters found literal descriptions of Romney’s plan SO radical they didn’t believe them.

It's Paul Ryan's Party: With Romney VP Pick, Movement Conservatives Openly Control GOP At Last
By Jonathan Chait

The premise of my April profile was that Ryan had become the leader of the Republican Party, with the president himself relegated to a kind of head of state role, at least in domestic affairs. As Grover Norquist put it, the only requirement for a nominee was enough working digits to sign Ryan’s plan. Ryan’s prestige within the party is unassailable. If he doesn’t want something to happen, it won’t happen (say, several bipartisan deals to reduce the deficit that he squashed.) If he wants something to happen, however foolhardy (like putting the entire House GOP caucus on record for his radical budget plan despite a certain veto) it will happen. It is Ryan’s party.

The only real question left was how to handle the optics of this reality. Theoriginal operating plan of the Romney campaign was to run against the bad economy, and then implement the Ryan Plan, which of course is a long-term vision of government unrelated to the current state of the labor market. Romney’s campaign had been bravely insisting for weeks that the plan was working, or that it was due for a 1980-like October leap in the polls, but clearly Romney did not believe, or had come to disbelieve, its own spin.

So Romney is conceding that the current track of the campaign is headed for a narrow defeat and has decided to alter its course. Obama has successfully defined Romney as an agent of his own economic class, a ploy that was clearly designed to make the attacks on Romney’s policy agenda hit home. (Focus groups had previously found that undecided voters found literal descriptions of Romney’s plan so radical they didn’t believe them.)

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/08/paul-ryans-party.html

August 11, 2012

George W. Bush thinks its a good idea -- RUN! RUN AWAY AS FAST AS YOU CAN... ARGH.....

Democrats are busy painting Paul Ryan as a George W. Bush "rubber stamp," but Mitt Romney's campaign just put out a statement from former President Bush praising the VP pick:

"This is a strong pick. Governor Romney is serious about confronting the long-term challenges facing America, and Paul Ryan will help him solve the difficult issues that must be addressed for future generations."

This removes getting reaction from Bush as a story down the road.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/burns-haberman/2012/08/praise-from-bush-131795.html

August 11, 2012

...the end

&

August 11, 2012

"SCAPEGOAT" Politics: "Ryan is the way Romney & his aides escape blame for their now-likely defeat"

Noam Scheiber: "So, to review, the key recent development is that Romney is poised to lose a race he should by all rights be winning, and conservatives are poised to blame this loss on his ideological moderation... Against this backdrop, the rationale for the Ryan pick strikes me as pretty clear: Ryan is the way Romney and his aides escape blame for their now-likely defeat -- blame which would have vicious and unrelenting -- and pin it in on conservatives instead. With only minor historical revisions, they will be able to tell a story about how Romney was keeping the race close through early August, at which point the party's conservative darling joined the ticket and sent the poll numbers into steady decline."

"According to this narrative, the campaign will merely be guilty of a political misdemeanor -- being bullied by conservatives into a lousy running mate -- not the felony of strategically miscalculating against a historically weak incumbent (which is where the existing storyline was headed). That's a plea bargain any right-minded politico would take, even if they didn't consciously consider it in those terms."

http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/106035/picking-ryan-isnt-bold-its-highly-risk-averse


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

August 11, 2012

After Ryan, Romney cancels TV interviews (including Gwen Ifill)

Source: Politico

After Ryan, Romney cancels TV interviews

By DYLAN BYERS | 8/11/12 11:43 AM EDT

Mitt Romney has cancelled this weekend's scheduled television interviews, following today's announcement that Paul Ryan had been tapped as running mate.

PBS Newshour confirms that the Romney campaign has cancelled today's interview with Gwen Ifill, which was to air on Monday. The Romney campaign also cancelled one-on-one interviews with local networks in the Virginia area, where Romney launched his bus tour.

The Romney campaign did not respond to request for comment.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2012/08/after-ryan-romney-cancels-tv-interviews-131785.html

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hmmmmmmm...

August 11, 2012

ROMNEY-My VP Candidate Is NOT Qualified.

House Republican Paul Ryan has no private sector experience.


May 29th, 2012
08:14 PM ET



73 days ago

"I was speaking with one of these business owners who owns a couple of restaurants in town," Romney said. "And he said 'You know I'd like to change the Constitution, I'm not sure I can do it,' he said. 'I'd like to have a provision in the Constitution that in addition to the age of the president and the citizenship of the president and the birthplace of the president being set by the Constitution, I'd like it also to say that the president has to spend at least three years working in business before he could become president of the United States.'"
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/29/romney-makes-stop-at-raucous-vegas-rally/

August 11, 2012

Romneys pick of Ryan as VP and the INSANITY of the Ryan budget plan

Romneys pick of Ryan as VP and the INSANITY of the Ryan budget plan
Submitted by Ian56 on Sat, 08/11/2012 - 09:34
in
Daily Paul Liberty Forum
http://ian56.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/romneys-solution-to-wide...

The ABSOLUTE INSANITY of the Romney/Ryan budget plan - three reasons

The INSANITY of Ryan's proposed budget plan needs to be aired to Independent voters who are the ones that will decide this election.

Romney has just helped to drive away 98% plus of Independent voters with his pick of Ryan as VP.
When Independent voters are informed about and understand Ryan's budget plan, Romney will sink EVEN lower in the polls.

He is already being slaughtered in polls for swing states and Electoral College maps and the trend is like a nose dive off a cliff.

1) The INSANITY of Paul Ryan's budget plan

1.1) Summary
The Ryan plan proposes MASSIVE budget deficits ad infinitum of well over $1tn per year.
The Ryan plan swaps social spending for massively increased military spending. (E.G. cuts to Medicaid, reductions to social security payouts.)
The Ryan plan offers NO CUTS, only a very slight slow down in the planned rate of future spending INCREASES.
The Ryan plan overstates future growth, by a very large margin.
The Ryan plan will not create any jobs. It is EXACTLY the same as GW Bush and Bush has the worst record for job creation in the post WW2 period.
The Ryan plan will increase the US debt to GDP ratio until the US is no longer seen as a good credit risk and it snaps.
The US dollar will then lose it's reserve status and economic carnage will ensue.

The collapse of the USSR in the 1980's and the collapse of Greece recently, offer good models of what to expect in the US in the fairly near future under the Romney/Ryan plan.

http://ian56.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/romneys-solution-to-widest-income.html

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/08/11/1118922/-Nate-Silver-Ryan-one-of-the-least-helpful-choices-available