Romney Picks Paul Ryan as Vice President

OU wrote:

Bird, what was the last Republican candidate you agreed with/liked?

I always liked John McCain (2000 was the first election i really paid attention to) , I didn't like Bush Jr, thought he was a moron and McCain really went after him, then came SOuth Carolina and Karl Roves "McCain has a black baby" ploy, which was utterly despicable and pathetic. I really like McCain, but did not vote in the last election because Palin was so clearly not ready to be VP.
I also liked Bush Sr for that matter, I like how he has become friends with Clinton and worked with him, he puts politics aside when stuff needs to be done (unlike Paul Ryan).

I also actually liked the 1994 version of Mitt Romney, when he was an anti Reagan, pro gay, woman's right to choose Republican.

Sad though cause McCain is no longer a maverick and has become the old man grouch of the republican party since 2008, I actually met him for a split second in Arizona airport in 2005.

That said, not too many Republicans are on my like list simply because i disagree with the trickle down ideology.

Ali wrote:

Paul Ryan does P90X...........I am sold.

lol I didnt neg you for that haha

Cu Bu wrote:

repped ali lol

BIrdman- Is medicare a failing program? meaning do we continue to have to borrow more money to keep providing it while continuously running in the negative(more going out than coming in)

haha ok lets talk medicare, how about the bush tax cuts, you want to refer to that on steroids? Its simple Cubua, just because you don't like it doesn't mean 22 million people deserve to be taken off the program that they put into.

Because Paul Ryan doesn't want to pay the taxes like 97% of americans or cut defense spending.

Birdofthad wrote:

OU wrote:

Bird, what was the last Republican candidate you agreed with/liked?

I always liked John McCain (2000 was the first election i really paid attention to) , I didn't like Bush Jr, thought he was a moron and McCain really went after him, then came SOuth Carolina and Karl Roves "McCain has a black baby" ploy, which was utterly despicable and pathetic. I really like McCain, but did not vote in the last election because Palin was so clearly not ready to be VP.
I also liked Bush Sr for that matter, I like how he has become friends with Clinton and worked with him, he puts politics aside when stuff needs to be done (unlike Paul Ryan).

I also actually liked the 1994 version of Mitt Romney, when he was an anti Reagan, pro gay, woman's right to choose Republican.

Sad though cause McCain is no longer a maverick and has become the old man grouch of the republican party since 2008, I actually met him for a split second in Arizona airport in 2005.

That said, not too many Republicans are on my like list simply because i disagree with the trickle down ideology.

I can't stand Palin but I voted McCain last election. I thought he was a decent candidate and I completely disagreed with the Obama campaign and attempts to elect a slogan and the idea of "change" without any real plans to accomplish that change. I HATED the Obama campaign. But the odds were stacked heavy against any Republican candidate last election because of Bush backlash.

hahah cubua sorry you claim medicare is in shambles, so you cut 700 billion. Way to think about the millions that will effect

Voted NO on $60B stimulus package for jobs, infrastructure, & energy. (Sep 2008)
Voted NO on defining "energy emergency" on federal gas prices. (Jun 2008)
Voted NO on revitalizing severely distressed public housing. (Jan 2008)
Voted NO on regulating the subprime mortgage industry.
Voted NO on monitoring TARP funds to ensure more mortgage relief.
Voted NO on enforcing against anti-gay hate crimes. (Apr 2009)
Voted NO on $40B for green public schools. (May 2009)
Voted NO on additional $10.2B for federal education & HHS projects. (Nov 2007)
Voted NO on allowing Courts to decide on "God" in Pledge of Allegiance. (Jul 2006)
Voted NO on $84 million in grants for Black and Hispanic colleges. (Mar 2006)
Voted YES on allowing school prayer during the War on Terror. (Nov 2001)
Voted YES on requiring states to test students. (May 2001)
Rated 8% by the NEA, indicating anti-public education votes.

oted YES on barring EPA from regulating greenhouse gases. (Apr 2011)
Voted NO on enforcing limits on CO2 global warming pollution. (Jun 2009)
Voted NO on tax credits for renewable electricity, with PAYGO offsets. (Sep 2008)
Voted NO on tax incentives for energy production and conservation. (May 2008)
Voted NO on tax incentives for renewable energy. (Feb 2008)
Voted NO on investing in homegrown biofuel. (Aug 2007)


FactCheck: No, Medicare cost doesn't exceed national defense. (May 2011)
FactCheck: costs go up just a bit; jobs go down just a bit. (Jan 2011)
FactCheck: No evidence that healthcare reform explodes debt. (Jan 2011)

Voted NO on overriding presidential veto of Farm Bill. (Jun 2008)
Voted NO on restricting employer interference in union organizing. (Mar 2007)
Voted NO on increasing minimum wage to $7.25. (Jan 2007)
Voted YES on end offshore tax havens and promote small business. (Oct 2004)


have fun voting for that.

Fact: The federal government had a budget surplus under the Clinton administration.

Fact: When George W. Bush left office, the budget had a deficit of over $400 billion.

Fact: The Bush tax cuts for the wealthy combined with the recession are the reasons why the deficit has reached over $1.5 trillion roday. (Brookings Institute)

Fact: In the run-up to the Iraq war, the Bush administration insisted that the total cost of the war would be $100 to $200 billion of taxpayer money. So far, over $1 trillion have been spent and the total tab will be $3 trillion by the time the war is over — if it’s ever, over. (CostofWar.com and Washington Post).

Fact: Under the Bush administration the country shed jobs. When Bush took office, the unemployment rate was 4.7 percent, when he left it rose to 5.8 percent. (Bureau of Labor Statistics)


Hey lets revert and do exactly what Bush did!!!!! That will work like a charm......

personally I thought Change was smart, 75% of the country, including 3 in 4 republicans blamed Bush for our countries financial collapse, thats all the Change was about and imo, it was needed badly, the bailouts clearly didn't destroy our country, GM would argue with anyone on that. Add in the DOW is back to 13,000 and Reublicans have to admit recovery took place, even ROney himself.

But I get what ya mean, his campaign mixed with Palin really divided sects of the country.

I think if McCain had picked Lieberman, he would have won handily, I also like Bush, I just think he really fucked the country up with his policies, literally nothing of his worked, from wars, natural disasters, tax reform, public education.
On second thought no one could have won on the republican side , especially after the real disaster, remember when McCain suspended his campaign to go back to watshington? That was the election right there, I seriously think this Republican ticket is the worst thing possible though.

I also like John Huntsman in this last republican primary, Gary Johnson is cool, Ron Paul has his moments.

Santorum is bat shit crazy, Newt is a hypocrite and ROmney is just.... the dude seems to say whatever the hell he thinks a room wants him to say. Changes and backtracks within a 24 hour news cycle.

Add in, something is in those tax returns, you see Ann say today, "we aren't releasing anymore tax returns because we aren't going to give the Obama administration more ammunition."

You don't create a non issue for nothing.

I think McCain could have ran with Jesus Christ as the VP and still lost. There was no hope for any Republican winning last election.

OU wrote:

I think McCain could have ran with Jesus Christ as the VP and still lost. There was no hope for any Republican winning last election.

ya your more than likely right, did you watch the dinner where Obama and MCCain both got to roast each other, it was right before the election.

McCain joked, "everyone calls him (Obama) the One, I call him "That One", but its ok Barrack has a nickname for me as well, "its George Bush".

I think someone like Pawhlenty could have really helped ROmneys chances, because Romney really has offered no plans, he hasn't offered his own jobs plan, hasn't offered his foreign policy, etc. WIth someone like Pawhlenty he could continue to just run as a referendum on Obama, by picking someone like Ryan, with plans actually laid out, its hard to distance yourself from them, and actually allows more of an attack to be made on him.

Romney himself is trying to distance himself from theRyan plan, which is hard todo when the guy is your VEEP

McCain would of been terrible, that guy is as corrupt and twisted as they get.

GDPofDRC wrote:

McCain would of been terrible, that guy is as corrupt and twisted as they get.

Then I must be a sucker. Cause he seems like a better man to me then Obama and Kerry.

IDK, I like Kerry and McCain, I thought it was pathetic how Karl Rove attacked both of them and their war records, as if Bush had done so much better by protecting Texas from Louisiana, lol.

Mitt Romney wants to cut funding to PBS, lol. Still won't cut any defense and won't give the middle class any tax cuts.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/15/mitt-romney-tax-cuts_n_1778429.html

Ryan claims, as Romney recently has, that he can affect growth by closing loopholes, but he has never specified which loopholes, and as we're learning from the Tax Policy Center, there aren't enough loopholes to close to achieve the desired ends. (Hence, you're stuck raising taxes on the middle class, or scuppering the entire government, or both.)

His plan to balance the budget is to not balance the budget. He's considered a "deficit hawk" -- but as he's put his rubber stamp on all of the Bush administration's budget-busting initiatives, that's a lot like calling an arsonist a fire-fighter. As Jacob Weisberg learned, to some chagrin, Ryan's budget plan "projects an absurd future, according to the Congressional Budget Office, in which all discretionary spending, now around 12 percent of GDP, shrinks to 3 percent of GDP by 2050."

Beyond that, of course, no one has any idea what programs Ryan would eliminate to achieve his "3 percent of GDP" discretionary budget dystopia. That's probably because the correct answer to the question is "nearly everything" and providing that answer would probably lead to voters outside of the goldbug/tenther set to decide that he is insane.

But in Washington, Ryan gets a pass for never specifying what he would do. This leaves it to others to attempt to game out what might be brought about by his roadmap. Typically, they assume that Ryan's budget plan will reflect Ryan's various opinions on those government programs that he doesn't favor, so they might choose to zero out agencies like the EPA, or federally funded education programs, or the National Park Service. Or they may simply take Ryan's budget cuts and apply them in some sort of uniform fashion, and show the hits that various government services might take if Ryan's cuts were applied proportionally across the board.

When this happens, Ryan complains that his opponents are imputing things that he has never said. The Beltway media takes his side. His opponents never get a pass. That's the benefit of being thought of as a Serious man.

Of course, that's only one of the many ways Ryan has gotten a pass. As much as the Beltway media lionizes the "Chairman's Mark" that was produced by Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles during their work on the "Simpson-Bowles Committee," the failure to get their supposedly meaningful deficit reduction plan to Congress, and thus to the president's desk, is widely seen as President Obama's fault.

In the Beltway Bubble's popular scenario, Obama "abandoned" a product that was never produced. After the Simpson-Bowles Commission foundered, Ryan reacted to criticism of his own plan by accusing the president of using "a rhetorical broadside to distract from the fact the president isn't proposing solutions." But Obama was the one who revived the entire idea of a deficit commission after the Senate's legislative attempt at creating one was undone by the GOP co-sponsors bailing on the idea. And it's not beyond the realm of reason that Obama would have endorsed the plan that the Commission was steaming toward, provided it tinkered with its prescriptions for Social Security. After all, as National Economic Council director Gene Sperling noted, Simpson-Bowles was set on levels of revenue-raising more generous than what Obama himself proposed. Sperling made the distinction between Ryan's roadmap and the cogitations of the Simpson-Bowles committee fairly legible:

"His budget has become the poster child for an extreme budget that puts all the burden on the middle class and the most vulnerable," Sperling said.
"It includes no revenue, when the core of Bowles-Simpson was a balance of revenue and entitlements savings, and a principle that you don't put much burden at all on the most vulnerable in our society."

Unfortunately for Sperling, the fact that Simpson-Bowles strove to not "put much burden at all on the most vulnerable in our society" is pretty much why it's deemed to be less legendary here inside the Bubble. These choices, they were not "tough" enough. Neither were the choices laid out in the "Grand Bargain" that was almost made between President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner. Let's take care to remember what this "Grand Bargain" entailed:

Obama had proposed to Republicans a "grand bargain" that accomplished a host of individual things that are unpopular on their own, but that just might pass as a huge package jammed through Congress with default looming. Obama offered to put Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid cuts on the table in exchange for a tax hike of roughly $100 billion per year over 10 years. Meanwhile, government spending would be cut by roughly three times that amount. It's no small irony that the party's dogmatic opposition to tax increases is costing the GOP its best opportunity to roll back social programs it has long targeted.
Republicans are now banking on a smaller deficit reduction deal that would still make major cuts, somewhere in the range of $2 trillion.

What was Ryan's role in all of this? The New York Times reported today that he was behind the scuttling of the deal:

Mr. Ryan's enormous influence was apparent last summer when Representative Eric Cantor, the second most powerful House Republican, told Mr. Obama during negotiations over an attempted bipartisan "grand bargain" that Mr. Ryan disliked its policy and was concerned that a deal would pave the way for Mr. Obama's easy re-election, according to a Democrat and a Republican who were briefed on the conversation.
Now, one might as well note that both Cantor and Boehner have denied the claims made by the Times' sources. But there's a larger point to be made here. That "Grand Bargain?" It was offered, and very nearly accepted. And yet the media has completely spaced on this, to the extent that Obama's role as a Grand Bargainer -- in which he signed onto increasing Medicare's eligibility age, among other things -- is consistently denied. Yet Ryan's plan, with all its undefined choices about where the budget axe is to fall -- the details of which, if they exist al all, remain locked with Ryan's cranium -- gets the credit for being the "serious" one.

All of the past benefits of the doubt that Ryan has received are going to serve him in good stead now that he's been selected to provide Mitt Romney with the core identity and policy specifics that Romney was unable or unwilling to provide himself. And already the media has proclaimed how "serious" and "brave" the political conversation to come will certainly be, now that Ryan's here to ensure it.

This is, in some ways, a fair assessment. To have a legitimate debate on the long-term policy direction of the nation, it surely helps to have Ryan in the mix, full-throatedly endorsing his vision of the future, even if its painted with the broadest brush. In turn, the Obama campaign will have ample opportunity to clarify its own. There's tremendous potential now for a debate to draw palpable lines and make clear contrasts between the two major party candidates.

But it comes at a cost: It means that very little time will be spent on the near-term economic crisis -- its rampant unemployment catastrophe, its continually unfolding foreclosure emergency -- or the widespread suffering that America is enduring. Yes, there will be sops to the current disaster: Romney will promise a brighter future ahead, Obama will suggest his opponents mean to return to the past. But contending directly with the present will likely be avoided in any way, save in the abstract. As far as the two competitors are concerned, the present-day suffering only speaks to whether or not one of them deserves to be president.

This is the biggest gift that Ryan has given the Bubble People. He's infused the race with a set of notions that extend to everyone a permission to look past and gloss over our present calamitous circumstances, and to do so with the assurance that they are really working hard to contend with all the 'substance-like substance' that Ryan brings to the race. To be sure, the Beltway Bubble media cut and run from the American people and their lingering suffering a long time ago. There's no currency, after all, in having access to poor people. Ryan's entry into the race, however, allows them to feel just as Serious and as Brave and as Tough as he is. As opposed to feeling like failed cowards. For that, their gratitude to Ryan will be fulsome, in every sense of the word.

Birdofthad wrote:

Cu Bu wrote:

repped ali lol

BIrdman- Is medicare a failing program? meaning do we continue to have to borrow more money to keep providing it while continuously running in the negative(more going out than coming in)

haha ok lets talk medicare, how about the bush tax cuts, you want to refer to that on steroids? Its simple Cubua, just because you don't like it doesn't mean 22 million people deserve to be taken off the program that they put into.

Because Paul Ryan doesn't want to pay the taxes like 97% of americans or cut defense spending.

i asked you about a social program and its standing not bush cuts, your not answering my question. I could care less about Ryan or his plan, its not americas plan and failed the senate so its mute

medicare needs to be saved, not killed.

THats where I stand on your social program

Birdofthad wrote:

medicare needs to be saved, not killed.

THats where I stand on your social program

Obamacare cuts Medicare. Care to change your stance to line up with your saviors.

Barack Obama, whose Affordable Care Act cuts Medicare by $716 billion from 2013-2022. Today, the Romney campaign reiterated its pledge to repeal Obamacare, and promised to “restore the funding to Medicare [and] ensure that no changes are made to the program for those 55 and older.”

While I want Medicare to go the way of the dinosaurs, but just putting this out there.

BAHAHAH thank you Farmer, you just told a flat out lie that has already been debunked by FactCheck.org

any other lies ya feel like telling?

(CBS News) One thing that has changed since Paul Ryan was added to Mitt Romney's presidential ticket is that more and more attention has shifted to Medicare, and every time Gov. Romney mentions it, he says the president robbed the program of $716 billion.

"I can't believe it. He has taken $716 billion out of the Medicare trust fund to pay for Obamacare," Romney said at a recent campaign stop.

But where did that $716 billion figure come from?

From here: A July letter from the Congressional Budget Office to House Speaker John Boehner, which says if the president's Affordable Care Act is repealed, "spending for Medicare would increase by an estimated $716 billion" over the next decade.

Mitt Romney: Ryan will fall in line on Medicare
Romney: Obama running just to hang on to power
Fact-checking the Romney-Ryan "60 Minutes" interview
The Romney campaign says that means the Obama adminsitration is cutting Medicare. Today, the president called it savings.

"I proposed reforms that will save Medicare money, by getting rid of wasteful spending in the health care system, reform that will not touch your Medicare benefits, not by a dime," Mr. Obama said.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, it's not the patients who would lose money. It's the providers.

The president's changes mean the annual increases insurance companies receive will be trimmed; hospital reimbursement rates would be reduced; and payments to home health care workers will also be cut back.

In fact, vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan's proposed budget contains these same reductions, something CBS News asked Governor Romney about today.

"Well, first of all, Congressman Ryan has joined my campaign and his campaign is my campaign now. And we're on the exactly the same page. And my campaign has made it very clear: The president's cuts of $716 billion to Medicare -- those cuts are going to be restored if I become president and Paul Ryan becomes vice president."

The Congressional Budget Office concluded the cuts -- which do not come out of the Medicare trust fund -- actually make Medicare more efficient and extend the life of the program. Additionally, all but four members of the house GOP voted for those same cuts in passing Ryan's budget plan.


thanks for making this so easy.

The Romney campaign’s new ad blitz reinforces its latest attack — that President Obama cut Medicare spending by $716 billion — with an ominous warning to seniors. But the Affordable Care Act’s cuts and other Medicare reforms don’t touch benefits, they target waste in provider payments.

In fact, the totality of Obama’s Medicare reforms expand benefits for seniors and lower out-of-pocket costs. The Affordable Care Act actually enhances Medicare benefits by closing the prescription drug coverage gap known as the “doughnut hole” and expanding free preventive services, including an annual wellness visit.

The Romney ad misleadingly implies that seniors will take a hit. “You paid in to Medicare for years. Every paycheck,” a narrator says. “Now, when you need it, Obama has cut $716 billion from Medicare.” The ad also ignores the bipartisan nature of the cuts: Congressional Republicans voted overwhelmingly in 2011 and 2012 to sustain them in the budget written by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), now Romney’s running mate



Oh man Im sorry, but thanks for placing that bullshit on the table.

Hey Farmer care to change your FALSE STANCE hahahah

so by your standards, then based on your bullshit, you are voting Obama right, cause he did what you wanted? hahah