Archive for the ‘Paul Ryan’ Category
A number of years back, I heard a joke, part of which I can’t remember. Still, I can remember enough of it to make a point. Historic military figures were looking at the Soviet Union’s military hardware. When the tanks rolled through Red Square, Alexander the Great replied, “If I had had these chariots, I would’ve ruled the entire world.” On his left stood Napoleon Bonaparte. After Napoleon read the current copy of Pravda, he replied “If I had this as the official newspaper, nobody would’ve heard of Waterloo.”
The point of the joke isn’t to get people laughing. It’s to make the point that there’s a more insidious type of Pravda operating inside the United States. For the last 5+ years, I’ve called that operation the Agenda Media. The Agenda Media doesn’t think it’s their responsibility to get people important facts. In their minds, their responsibility is to push their politicial agenda. If that means omitting important facts, that’s what they’re willing to do. This video is a perfect illustration of the Agenda Media’s selective editing:
Thankfully, citizen journalists with cell phones are recording things as they happened. Thankfully, citizen journalists with video cameras are informing people by filming protests like this, then posting the video to Youtube, then reposting the videos to their Facebook page, then posting the links to their videos to Twitter.
There’s a more important point to this. OFA isn’t just about protesting against constitutional conservatives. They’re identifying people in communities who might vote for progressives. Conservatives will show up to counterprotest against OFA. The big question is whether they’ll get into the neighborhoods and identify people that might appreciate the conservative/capitalist message.
Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Tom Coburn, Ron Johnson, Paul Ryan and Rand Paul should be the blueprint for Republicans for 2014. They’re picking fights with President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, which is essential to winning elections. They’re framing debates. For instance, Sen. Coburn is highlighting tens of billions of dollars of duplicative spending that should be eliminated in this budget. Sen. Johnson is highlighting how government is used as a weapon against the citizenry. Paul Ryan is fighting for a pro-growth budget that will eventually balance within a decade.
It’s despicable that the Agenda Media would distort what happened at a protest. As despicable as that is, that’s only part of this story. OFA is already identifying potential Democrat voters. Republicans need to start this week at identifying potential conservative voters.
Tags: Organizing for Action, Gun Control, Protests, Agenda Media, Censorship, Voter ID, Democrats, Tom Coburn, Sequester This, Ron Johnson, Victims of Government Project, Mike Lee, Cut This, Not That, Ted Cruz, Second Amendment, Paul Ryan, Balanced Budget, Rand Paul, TEA Party Conservatives, Election 2014
John Boehner is failing. He’s playing President Obama’s game on President Obama’s court. He’s prosecuting the wrong case. Rather than discussing the terms of the fiscal cliff debate, Speaker Boehner should be talking about why Republicans’ pro-growth tax policies are America’s only hope for a variety of Obama-created ills.
First, Speaker Boehner should highlight the fact that President Clinton’s high tax rates didn’t trigger the great economy. He should remind the nation that it was Newt’s capital gains tax cuts that sent the economy into high gear. Prior to those tax cuts, the economy was doing ok. After cutting the capital gains tax, growth exploded.
Another thing that Speaker Boehner must do is remind people that Republicans’ insisting on balancing the federal budget helped strengthen the dollar, which led to a dramatic shrinking of America’s trade deficit. That especially affected gas prices.
Third, Speaker Boehner should shout from the rooftops that revenues during the Bush tax cuts were significantly bigger than revenues are today. If Speaker Boehner asked President Obama why he’s insisting on anti-growth policies that tamp the economy down rather than implementing new pro-growth policies that strengthen the economy, President Obama might well blow a gasket.
This is the debate we should start. This is the debate President Obama can’t win. This is the conversation that would expose President Obama’s motivation for imposing higher tax rates.
Rather than the pattern of proposal-counterproposal, then a counter offer to the counterproposal, with each side publicly stating that the other side needs to put forth a serious proposal, Speaker Boehner should ditch that pattern, especially the taunting language.
Instead, Speaker Boehner, followed by every Republican in Congress talking with their local newspapers and TV outlets about how cutting spending is what’s fair to taxpayers and how reforming the tax code, highlighted by fewer deductions and lower tax rates, would strengthen the economy.
Highlight the fact that this was the real reason why the economy was strong during the Clinton administration. Highlight the fact that the economy didn’t take off until Newt changed the trajectory of the debate.
President Obama is too arrogant to be frightened by that debate, which means Speaker Boehner should be able to turn this situation into a discussion on getting America’s economy going for the first time during President Obama’s administration.
With expensive utility bills, shrinking paychecks, high gas and grocery prices and unacceptably high unemployment rates, the indictment against President Obama’s mishandling of the economy should be lengthy and powerful.
Finally, he should unleash Paul Ryan. Speaker Boehner should insist on a televised fiscal cliff summit, with Ryan leading the prosecution of the case against President Obama’s reckless spending. Dave Camp should prosecute the case for why the GOP tax reform plan will strengthen the economy.
GOP senators and governors should take part in this summit, too. One tactic President Obama has overplayed is saying that ‘we can talk about that’ on a variety of policies, then dropping that position the minute he’s out of the room. Republicans should tell him that implementing a pro-growth economic plan is non-negotiable.
Finally, make the case that raising the top marginal tax rates won’t affect the Warren Buffetts of the world because their income comes from investments, not wages. Make the case that raising the top marginal tax rates will hurt small businesses, not the evil Wall Street fatcats President Obama always talks about.
President Obama’s policies are failing. Speaker Boehner’s ineptitude in highlighting those failures has the fiscal cliff conversation heading in the wrong direction. It’s time to change the direction of that conversation.
Tags: Fiscal Cliff, John Boehner, Debate, Fiscal Cliff Summit, Paul Ryan, Dave Camp, John Kasich, Bobby Jindal, Marco Rubio, Tax Reform, Spending Reform, GOP, President Obama, Unemployment, Deficits, Gas Prices, Electric Bills, Groceries, Inflation, Median Household Income, Democrats
Ralph Benko’s op-ed is the perfect counterargument to Michael Tomasky’s silly column, which I wrote about here. Benko didn’t waste time in highlighting the flaw in Tomasky’s logic:
Liberals do not grasp the distinction between Ronald Reagan and (either) George Bush. This blind spot creates a massive confusion and hazard to their ambitions. Obama defeated neither the Reagan Narrative nor Team Reagan. Team Bush appropriated, and then marginalized, both. Obama beat Team Bush, not Team Reagan. The implications are huge.
This post isn’t about trashing Karl Rove or the Bush family. Frankly, that’s a waste of time when there’s important things to be done. Instead, it’s about identifying underlying principles undergirded President Reagan’s policies. Mr. Benko is spot on with this analysis:
Real conservatives saw Reaganomics as a way of creating broad-based opportunity, not as catering to the rich. It worked out exactly that way in America and throughout the world. The blossoming of free market principles, especially low tax rates and good money, brought billions of souls out of poverty, from subsistence to affluence.
Several things worked together to make America infinitely more prosperous during Reagan’s time than during President Obama’s time in office. First, the dollar was much stronger than during President Obama’s time in office. That’s partially because President Reagan’s domestic energy policy was infinitely more robust than President Obama’s. The less money we needlessly ship money overseas for oil, the stronger the dollar is. Our trade deficit shrunk, too.
The new conservative Republican leaders are strikingly formidable. The leaders of the new generation, like Reagan, and Kemp, before them (and Kennedy still earlier), all recognize the power of the “rising tide lifts all boats”.
It isn’t a stretch to think that conservatives like John Kasich, Paul Ryan, Scott Walker and Marco Rubio will re-ignite the Reagan Revolution. Each of these men have spotless conservative credentials, which is why they fire up the base in ways Mitt Romney and John McCain couldn’t.
When President Bush won in 2004, he got 62,000,000 votes. McCain got fewer votes than President Bush. Mitt got fewer votes than Sen. McCain. Had Paul Ryan been at the top of the ticket, however, it isn’t a stretch to think he would’ve topped President Bush’s vote total.
That’s because he’s the spitting image of Reagan. The Reagan Revolution was fueled by a glut of great ideas. A Ryan Revolution would be powered by the same thing. Most importantly, he’d talk conservatism like his native language. This isn’t an attempt to trash Mitt. It’s simply stating the obvious. He just didn’t prosecute the case against President Obama the way Ryan would have.
President Bush’s spending turned conservatives off because he had a Republican House and Senate much of the time. President Reagan’s spending was done, in part, because he had to rebuild the military after President Carter gutted it, partly because Tip O’Neill controlled the House.
Everything President Reagan fought for was targeted towards creating prosperity. He didn’t back away from a fight, either. When PATCO went on strike, he fired them because they broke federal law. When Tip O’Neill accused him of not caring about the average working Joe, Reagan responded mightily. His temper flaring, he marched back to the podium, then said, essentially, that he’d made his money because he’d worked hard, then adding that it wasn’t given to him.
It’s a fight Mitt Romney backed away from too often in his attempt to win over women voters or independents. It’s a fight the next generation of conservatives will fight with vigor.
Tags: Reagan Revolution, Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, Prosperity, Pro-Growth Policies, Strong Dollar, Oil, Job Growth, GDP, Paul Ryan, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, Conservatism, President Bush, Karl Rove, Mitt Romney, GOP Establishment
Read more about it here. This poll would answer why Paul Ryan and Bill Clinton would campaign in Minnesota the last Sunday before the election.
Tonight’s debate wasn’t the substantive debate that conservatives were hoping for. When Vice President Biden rolled his eyes the first time, I wondered if that was a signal for what was ahead. It was.
Let’s be clear about this. Vice President Biden was the aggressor tonight. That’s almost automatically a sign of who won the debate. Tonight was the exception to that rule.
It isn’t that I think Paul Ryan won tonight’s debate, though he showed he’s more than capable of being a heartbeat away from the presidency. It’s that Joe Biden was consistently dismissive of Ryan.
There’s no question that the MSNBC crowd is ecstatic tonight. If I got a sawbuck for each of their internal and external fistpumps, I’d have enough to pay for a lavish month-long vacation in the Carribbean. There’s equally no question that Vice President Biden’s antics turned off independents and women. This video of Greta van Susteren interviewing Brit Hume says everything:
Vice President Biden didn’t just turn off Brit Hume and Greta van Susteren. He turned off Chris Wallace, too:
That’s only part of Vice President Biden’s problem. When asked about additional security forces for the Benghazi Consulate, Vice President Biden said that the administration didn’t know about requests for additional security. That’s a bald-faced lie according Wednesday’s testimony:
“We weren’t told they wanted more security. We did not know they wanted more security there,” Biden said.
First, this administration’s insistence that they didn’t know about the requests is frightening. Either the administration is lying about not knowing or they weren’t interested in the security conditions at a consulate in a growing terrorist hotspot.
If Vice President Biden wants us to believe that this administration didn’t pay attention to the escalating terrorist threats near the consulate, then he’s asking us to believe that they don’t pay attention to growing terrorist threats around the world.
That’s frightening.
The good news for Democrats about tonight’s debate is that it fired up the progressive base. The bad news is it turned off the other 70+ percent of the voters.
Tags: Joe Biden, The Base, Red Meat, MSNBC, Arrogance, Condescension, Benghazi, Terrorist Attack, Democrats, Paul Ryan, Debate, GOP, Brit Hume, Chris Wallace, Greta van Susteren, Election 2012
7:50 CT — Welcome to LFR’s VP debate liveblog.
8:00 — Ed Rollins “Paul Ryan will get the job done.” I agree.
8:02 — Martha Raddatz introducing the debate. Nine segments, alternating between foreign, domestic policy.
8:03 — Starting with Libya, Biden promises “We’ll get to the bottom of this.” Now Biden is talking about President Obama’s foreign policy accomplishments. “President Obama
8:06 — Ryan: “First they blame the Youtube video for the attack, now they’re blaming the Romney-Ryan ticket for the terrorist attack.”
8:08 Ryan: We shouldn’t have called Bashar Assad a reformer when he’s aligning with the Russians.
8:15 — Biden: These are the most crippling sanctions in history.
8:22 — Biden is being unbearably smug. I hope it’s coming across that way at home.
8:29 — Ryan: I think Vice President Biden knows what it’s like for the words to not come out right.
8:38 — First Biden gaffe: I heard that death panel stuff from Sarah Palin. It seems like every vice presidential debate, I hear this stuff.
8:40 — Ryan is now asserting himself. He’s pouring it on about Medicare, citing Ron Wyden, Alice Rivlin & Sen. John Breaux as proponents for premium support for Medicare.
8:58 — I thought I’d give Martha Raddatz a fair shot. The only time she interrupts, she interrupts Ryan right before he finishes his point.
9:00 — BIDEN’S SECOND GAFFE: We went there for one reason, to get that killed Americans.
9:25 — Best tweet of the night from Jonah Goldberg: Biden: We don’t have litmus tests, but I guarantee we’ll appoint pro-choice justices.
Jim Hoft’s post about this morning’s Morning Joe focuses on Joe Scarborough’s “Emperor has no clothes” moment. While that’s noteworthy, it’s worth talking about what Mika Brzezinski said about the vice presidential debate. That section starts with Mike Barnicle laughing while saying that Vice President Biden “will be great. He’s gonna be great.” That’s when Brzezinski said “And his decaded in Congress will help. I think Paul Ryan is outmatched.”
First, it’s noteworthy that Ms. Brzezinski thinks that the smartest man on policy in Congress is outmatched intellectually by the most gaffe-prone politician of the last half-century. That’s laughable. Paul Ryan is quick on his feet. He isn’t gaffe-prone. He knows the budget thoroughly. He was taught pro-growth economic policy by Jack Kemp.
What part of that resume says Ryan will be outmatched?
This leads to a second point, a point that the pundits aren’t making. The vice presidential debate is far more important than they’re admitting. It isn’t important because people are deciding whether they’d rather vote for Vice President Biden or Congressman Ryan.
It’s important because a strong debate performance by Congressman Ryan a) makes him acceptable as the man 1 heartbeat away from the presidency and b) would sustain the momentum created by Mitt Romney’s performance.
When Paul Ryan debated President Obama at the Health Summit, Ryan administered a thorough butt-whooping to President Obama’s ego. Now we’re supposed to believe that Vice President Biden has Ryan’s number, that he’s Kryptonite to Paul Ryan?
That’s a stretch even a double-jointed 15-year-old gymnast couldn’t make.
Tags: Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski, Mike Barnicle, Joe Biden, Paul Ryan, Debates, President Obama, Mitt Romney, Election 2012
Last night on Almanac, UW-River Falls professor Neil Kraus dismissed the possibility that Wisconsin was in play. Jennifer Rubin’s post shows that Prof. Kraus needs to pay more attention to his state:
When the Romney-Ryan ticket announced a major ad campaign in eight states last night, the media noted that Wisconsin and Michigan were not among them and then jumped to the conclusion that these states are no longer in play. Wrong. Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul told Right Turn that the campaign is “definitely not” abandoning these states. She told me: “Stay tuned.”
The Romney-Ryan camp, I was told, has expensive ground games in these states, as well as in Pennsylvania.
Then Saul provided these statistics on the Romney ground game in Wisconsin:
Wisconsin (as of July 1)
- Consistently in the top five states for number of voter contacts
- 500,000th volunteer phone call made this week
- Will knock on the 150,000th door this week
- 20 “victory centers,” or campaign offices
- More than 4 million voter contacts during the recall
It’s impressive that these statistics haven’t been current for over 2 months. The addition of Paul Ryan to the ticket will only add volunteers to Wisconsin’s GOTV operation. Another thing that’s important is that Democrats are all but conceding the State legislative races. If that’s true, then their turnout will be driven solely by the presidential ticket. That’s the definition of hanging on by a thread.
Tags: UW-River Falls, Neil Kraus, Pundit, Paul Ryan, Wisconsin, GOTV, Mitt Romney, GOP, Election 2012
Bill Clinton was true to form Wednesday night. The speech ran long. He told a few whoppers that will get clobbered this morning. He had people’s eyes glazing over. Bill Clinton didn’t deliver the entertaining speech he’s capable of.
Yes, the people in the arena got excited. No, the people watching on TV didn’t watch all of it.
Here’s the first whopper Bill Clinton told:
We Democrats think the country works better with a strong middle class, real opportunities for poor people to work their way into it and a relentless focus on the future, with business and government working together to promote growth and broadly shared prosperity. We think “we’re all in this together” is a better philosophy than “you’re on your own.”
Who’s right? Well since 1961, the Republicans have held the White House 28 years, the Democrats 24. In those 52 years, our economy produced 66 million private sector jobs. What’s the jobs score? Republicans 24 million, Democrats 42 million!
According to the BLS chart, Democrats created 39,700,000 jobs in 24 years. Republicans created 36,600,000 jobs in 28 years.
Here’s another whopper:
He also tried to work with Congressional Republicans on Health Care, debt reduction, and jobs, but that didn’t work out so well.
Three days into his administration, President Obama met with House GOP leaders to discuss the stimulus bill. During the meeting, President Obama swatted down the Republicans’ suggestions:
President Obama listened to Republican gripes about his stimulus package during a meeting with congressional leaders Friday morning, but he also left no doubt about who’s in charge of these negotiations. “I won,” Obama noted matter-of-factly, according to sources familiar with the conversation.
Later, the House and Senate health care bills were written in Nancy Pelosi’s and Harry Reid’s offices. Republicans weren’t allowed into their offices. If that’s Bill Clinton’s idea of trying “to work with Congressional Republicans on health care”, then he’s got a warped picture of what bipartisanship looks like.
I can’t dispute the fact that Bill Clinton knows a thing or two about the economy. I also can’t dispute the fact that Bill Clinton takes some major liberties with the truth. Here’s something that he can’t possibly believe:
President Obama started with a much weaker economy than I did. No President, not me or any of my predecessors could have repaired all the damage in just four years. But conditions are improving and if you’ll renew the President’s contract you will feel it.
Conditions aren’t improving. Median household incomes dropped $4,019 since the recovery began. That’s why more people dropped out of the middle class during the Obama recovery than during the Bush recession. That’s why 15,000,000 more people are on food stamps today than there were when President Obama took office.
President Obama’s surrogates frequently recite the point that the economy was losing 800,000 jobs a month when President Obama took office. It’s closer to 600,000 a month, which is still a devastating number. That lasted 5 months. That’s potentially 3,000,000 new people receiving food stamps.
That still doesn’t explain where the other 80% of the people on food stamps come from.
The labor force participation rate is near its 30 year low. Still, the U-2 unemployment rate is 8.3% going into Friday’s jobs report. If the LFPR was 2 points higher, the unemployment rate would be over 10%.
That’s before talking about how many times more people were added to SSI than new jobs were created. The most recent time that happened was 2 months ago.
If that’s President Clinton’s definition of ‘things are improving’, he’s either living in a different galaxy or he’s spinning terrible news the best he can. I suspect it’s the latter.
Both Governor Romney and Congressman Ryan attacked the President for allegedly robbing Medicare of 716 billion dollars. Here’s what really happened. There were no cuts to benefits. None. What the President did was save money by cutting unwarranted subsidies to providers and insurance companies that weren’t making people any healthier. He used the saving to close the donut hole in the Medicare drug program, and to add eight years to the life of the Medicare Trust Fund. It’s now solvent until 2024. So President Obama and the Democrats didn’t weaken Medicare, they strengthened it.
The money collected from the Medicare payroll tax is supposed to go into the Medicare trust fund. The Affordable Care Act redirects that money to make it look like the ACA is deficit neutral. The Medicare actuaries testified that you can either keep that money in the Medicare Trust Fund or you can use it to make it look like the ACA is deficit neutral. You can’t use it for both simultaneously.
Bill Clinton knows this. He’s just saying this to be a good team player.
Finally, anyone who thinks that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan want to follow in President Bush’s spending footsteps is kidding themselves. Ryan’s spending habits aren’t anything like President Bush’s spending habits.
Last night, Bill Clinton was in all his glory, strutting his stuff to a gullible audience while reminding us why he was nicknamed Slick Willie.
Tags: Bill Clinton, Slick Willie, President Obama, ACA, Stimulus, Food Stamps, Unemployment, Democrats, Election 2012
It’s getting tiresome to write that the Democrats’ spokespeople are lying in their attempt to criticize Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. Still, it’s important to highlight their attempts to dishonestly smear the Romney-Ryan ticket.
Jake Tapper’s interview of Ben LaBolt and Stephanie Cutter is enlightening how hard they’re selling the “Paul Ryan lied” meme:
CUTTER: Well, I mean, Jake, I understand the conversation that we’re having about whether campaigns sometimes bend the truth. And we try very hard to get it right. As opposed to the Romney campaign, who’ve said they’re not going to run their campaign based on fact checks, which means facts don’t matter to them. We do care about fact checks. We do care about the honesty of our ads. I just want to, you know, on your own network this morning, Paul Ryan was at it again. And it wasn’t our headlines last Thursday morning. It was the news media headlines about all of the lies in Paul Ryan’s speech.
So I think we do have to acknowledge that there’s a difference between running a campaign and prosecuting a case against your opponent and flat-out lying. You know, once again this morning, Paul Ryan said that the president was responsible for the closing of the Janesville plant, a G.M. plan that closed. The announcement was made in December of 2008, but production stopped, do I have that right?, before the president took the oath of office.
Paul Ryan never said that President Obama was responsible for shutting down the Janesville GM plant. Here’s what he said in his acceptance speech:
My home state voted for President Obama. When he talked about change, many people liked the sound of it, especially in Janesville, where we were about to lose a major factory.
A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant. Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: “I believe that if our government is there to support you…this plant will be here for another hundred years.” That’s what he said in 2008.
Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day. And that’s how it is in so many towns today, where the recovery that was promised is nowhere in sight.
There are 3 important points to make about what Paul Ryan said in his acceptance speech.
The first important point was that then-Candidate Obama made it sound like an Obama administration would support keeping the Janesville GM plant open “for another hundred years.”
Another important point to talk about this plant’s closing is to highlight the fact that the recovery President Obama promised hasn’t happened. As Paul Ryan said later in his speech, many of his friends who worked at that plant still are unemployed.
Hope and change has morphed into disappointment and despair as a direct result of President Obama’s policies. LaBolt and Cutter will undoubtedly attempt to spin that but that’s what the statistics show.
Here’s the obligatory Cutter-LaBolt spin:
LABOLT: They’ve actually put Congressman Ryan in the position of attacking $716 billion in Medicare savings that he preserved in his own budget.
CUTTER: And this is the man that was chosen because he was the intellectual leader of the Republican Party.
There’s a gigantic difference between the Ryan plan and the effects of the Affordable Care Act. I wrote here about Mr. LaBolt’s deception about Medicare:
Medicare actuaries said that the Medicare cuts can’t be used to make Medicare more solvent at the same time as it’s being used to fund the Affordable Care Act, aka the ACA.
The funds generated from the Medicare payroll tax are supposed to be dedicated to Medicare. Using that trust fund money to pay some of the expenses of the ACA can’t save Medicare because they’re paying down the ACA’s expenses.
It isn’t surprising that LaBolt and Cutter aren’t telling us the truth. They’re in a difficult, impossible position of trying to tell the American people that President Obama’s Medicare actuaries didn’t testify to the things they testified to.
It isn’t that LaBolt and Cutter said these things once, then abandoned them the minute that they were discredited. They’re still repeating them:
LABOLT: But the entire premise of the Republican convention last week was based on a set of lies and they were a replacement for Governor Romney talking at all about his policies. You didn’t hear about those $5 trillion tax cuts for the wealthiest. You didn’t hear about his budget proposal and the fact that if we pass it it will be harder for students to get a loan. It would turn Medicare into a voucher program and cost seniors thousands of dollars out of pocket. Instead, you heard the president’s remarks ripped out of Congress — out of context. You heard Congressman Ryan attack Medicare savings in his own budget and blame the president for the closure of a G.M. plant that was slated for closure before the president took office. That was the entire premise of their three-day convention.
First, there is no $5,000,000,000,000 tax cut for the wealthiest Americans. Next, Paul Ryan didn’t blame President Obama “for the closure of a G.M. plant.” Ryan blamed him for not keeping his promise of keeping the plant open for the next 100 years and for not putting in place policies that produced a real economic recovery.
Cutter and LaBolt: One lies. The other swears to it.
Tags: President Obama, Affordable Care Act, Stephanie Cutter, Ben LaBolt, Mediscare, GM Plant, Lies, Democrat, Paul Ryan, Medicare, GOP, Election 2012