Regarding Paul Ryan by Niki2

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Regarding Paul Ryan

POSTED BY: NIKI2
UPDATED: Sunday, August 19, 2012 06:24
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Tuesday, August 14, 2012 8:46 AM

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...

Horribly long, but a lot of what I found out about Ryan from a few hours of searching this morningm if anyone's interested.

As more and more comes to light and WILL come to light, it's gotta make a FEW people on the right nervous, whether it changes any votes or not (I think it's impossible to change the votes or minds of those who hate Obama so much they'll vote for ANYONE else). But here are a few points they might want to ponder, if they took their fingers out of their ears:

1. Ryan and abortion:While they keep insisting Romney's not for abortion in the case of rape or incest, Ryan IS. He supported The Sanctity of Human Life Act, a piece of legislation so extreme that it would have enshrined the notion that life begins at fertilization in federal law--a "personhood bill", in other words. Ryan has proposed national bills to effectively ban abortion-—even in cases where the mother's life is at risk—-and many forms of hormonal birth control as well as in vitro fertilization.

Quote:
The National Right to Life Committee has scored his voting record 100 percent every year since he entered the House in 1999. “I’m as pro-life as a person gets,” he told The Weekly Standard’s John McCormack in 2010. “You’re not going to have a truce.”

Indeed, Ryan exemplifies a strange sort of ideological hybrid that now dominates the GOP. On economic issues, he’s a hardcore libertarian who once said, “[T]he reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker…it would be Ayn Rand. And the fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.” Yet when it comes to women’s control of their bodies, he quickly turns into a statist. “In the state of nature—the ‘law of the jungle’—the determination of who ‘qualifies’ as a human being is left to private individuals or chosen groups,” he wrote in a 2010 essay titled “The Cause of Life Can’t Be Severed From the Cause of Freedom.” “In a justly organized community, however, government exists to secure the right to life and the other human rights that follow from that primary right ."

For anyone who wants to know how Ryan thinks, that essay is worth reading. It’s about 1,500 words long, but the word “woman” doesn’t appear in it once. Nor does the word “mother.” To him, a woman’s claim to bodily autonomy or self-determination doesn’t merit even cursory consideration. Here’s his analogy: “The car which I exercised my freedom of choice to purchase…does not ‘qualify’ for protection of human rights. I can drive it, lend it, kick it, sell it, or junk it, at will. On the other hand, the widow who lives next door does ‘qualify’ as a person, and the government must secure her human rights, which cannot be abandoned to anyone’s arbitrary will.”

Ryan also expressed his willingness to let states criminally prosecute women who have abortions. According to another Journal Sentinel article, he “would let states decide what criminal penalties would be attached to abortions. Ryan said he has never specifically advocated jailing women who have abortions or doctors who perform them, but added, ‘If it’s illegal, it’s illegal.’” http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/11/paul-ryan-s-extreme-a
bortion-views.html

Think of what his desire to ban not just abortions, but in vetro fertilization AND CONTRACEPTION would mean to this country!

2. Ryan and Medicare: He started out with a bill to privatize Medicare, Medicaid AND Social Security (see below). It didn't fly, so he tried again with just privatizing Medicare and cutting Medicaid. That hasn't gotten anywhere, either, so his latest is to give the OPTION of staying with Medicare or doing the voucher thing. In the most recent budget proposal, Ryan pledged to cut Medicaid spending by $810 billion dollars over ten years.

But here's the key detail, the trick that yields all those budget savings conservatives are after: The grants would be indexed to grow much slower than healthcare costs. Conservatives hope that will force states to find new efficiencies. More likely, it will just lead them to insure fewer residents, offer less generous coverage, or both. Eventually, the idea is to bulldoze Medicaid--and Medicare as well. You can be sure Social Security is on the chopping block, too, they just put it off for a while.

3. Ryan campaign beginning: He's started right out giving the impression of someone as elite and out of touch as Romney, which won't help him. At the Iowa state fair, when questioned about legislation designed to help the drought-stricken heartland (which Republicans are blocking), he said only that he would get into "those policy things later. Right now I just want to enjoy the fair," he said. He's running for Vice President; he's there to introduce himself as a candidate; it doesn't look so good in a place where people are suffering to say he'd rather enjoy the fair, thank you, than address important issues...but vote for him, okay? Some of the fairgoers felt like 64-year-old attorney Bill Thomas of Indianola, said he wanted to hear Ryan address the subject directly. "There's a lot of farmers here," Thomas said.

Introducing himself at the Iowa State Fair wasn't the tightly controlled campaign event like the ones typically held by Mitt Romney. Instead, Ryan was dispatched to the Des Moines Register’s soapbox at the Iowa State Fair, a site where heckling is almost always expected, and where Romney himself last year had a terse exchange with an attendee over Medicare and Social Security, and made the infamous claim that “corporations are people.”

Quote:
Within minutes of Ryan kicking off his remarks, a small but persistent group of protesters began to yell over him, at times drowning out his remarks. A few women took it a step further and attempted to rush the stage, climbing over reporters crouched in front of the stage to observe Ryan’s remarks.

“You know what? It’s funny. It’s funny because Iowans and Wisconsinites, we like to be respectful of one another and peaceful with one another and listen to one another. These ladies must not be from Iowa and Wisconsin,” Ryan said.

“Go, go, go get her" a campaign staffer said to a local law-enforcement officer, referring to one of the protesters, as the women were detained. Hecklers continued to shout fervently during Ryan’s remarks, and a man screaming in the middle of the crowd was escorted out by Iowa State Patrol officers.

4. The Ryan Budget. The Ryan plan would not balance the federal budget for another 28 years at least, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. That means the federal debt would continue to rise. That's partly because the tax cuts take effect right away while the Medicare cuts kick in later, as people now 55 hit retirement age. It's also partly because Ryan's proposed tax cuts considerably outweigh even his ambitious spending reductions.

Ryan himself concedes that his plan would not balance the budget this decade, predicting it could be balanced by the "mid-to-early 2020s" because his plan would ignite rapid economic growth. Like his onetime mentor, Jack Kemp, the 1996 Republican vice presidential nominee, Ryan argues that the key to economic growth is not balancing the budget but lowering tax rates.

But even if low tax rates spur the economy — a debatable point among economists — a balanced budget will depend on wiping enough tax breaks off the books to offset the new tax cuts.

In the more than two years since his budget was unveiled, Ryan has not specified any tax breaks he would eliminate. Independent analyses have shown that offsetting the tax cuts would require changing things such as the mortgage interest deduction, the tax exclusion for employer-financed health insurance or other popular tax preferences widely used by middle-income households.

It gets even cuter. Bear in mind that when something is presented to the CBO for analysis, it comes with INSTRUCTIONS. The instructions given to the CBO to evaluate the proposal specified revenue of 19% GDP, which is above the current level of around 15% GDP and slightly above the 30-year historical average of 18.2% GDP.

Quote:
Mr Ryan's staff simply instructed the CBO to assume revenues remain at 19% of GDP. “There were no specifications of particular revenue provisions that would generate that path”, it says. This can be risky. When the CBO analysed Mr Ryan's Roadmap for America's Future, it accepted Mr Ryan's instructions that revenues would rise to 19% of GDP. When the Tax Policy Center analysed the specifics of the Roadmap, it concluded that tax revenue would fall below 17% of GDP.

The CBO also notes that Mr Ryan's staff specified that all spending other than health care, Social Security, interest, defence and security decline from 12% of GDP in 2010 to 6% in 2021, then grow with inflation thereafter. That would cover, among other things, federal civilian and military retirement, food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, parts of the earned-income and child-tax credits, and most veterans' programmes. http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/04/americas_budget

Quote:
CBO assumed this wonderful outcome would occur only if the revenue portion of Ryan's plan generated 19 percent of GDP in taxes. And there is not the slightest evidence that would happen. Even though Ryan's plan has a detailed tax component, his staff asked CBO to ignore it. Rather than estimate the true revenue effects of the Ryan plan, CBO simply assumed, as the lawmaker requested, that it would generate revenues of 19 percent of GDP http://mediamatters.org/research/2010/02/10/gerson-says-cbo-found-ryan
s-plan-would-balance/160298

Ergo, if we don't get 19% of GDP in revenues, the whole thing goes out the window; and the odds of getting up to 19% of GDP are really high. Ryan is going on the old assumption that cutting taxes will spur economic growth, but that's been disproven over and over again.

The CBO also stated that "his economic plan 'calls for radical policy changes that would result in a massive transfer of resources from the broad majority of Americans to the nation’s wealthiest individuals and that

Quote:
It is therefore quite different from a cost estimate for legislation, which would require much more detailed analysis, focus on the first 10 years, and be based on more recent baseline projections.

5. Romney Plan not Ryan Plan: Romney has said his won't be the Ryan Plan, but the "Romney Plan", incorporating some of Ryan's ideas but reflecting HIS philosophies. Problem with that is his previous statement, “I’m very supportive of the Ryan budget plan,” Mitt Romney said on March 20th, in Chicago. The following week, while campaigning in Wisconsin, he added, “I think it’d be marvellous if the Senate were to pick up Paul Ryan’s budget and adopt it and pass it along to the President.” . The other problem is that his OWN budget, back in April, brought these remarks:

Quote:
The Romney campaign has been very clear about what he is promising: $5 trillion in tax cuts on top of extending the Bush tax cuts, with those benefits heavily weighted toward the country’s wealthiest taxpayers. Romney claims to pay for this plan by ending tax shelters, principally for the wealthy, but he hasn’t specified a single tax break that he would close. Romney himself has acknowledged the lack of details in his plan, stating in reference to his tax plan that “frankly, it can’t be scored.” I have been party for many years to searches for “high-income tax shelters” than can feasibly be closed. I know of no reputable expert in either political party who would find that there is anything even approaching $5 trillion in potential revenue to be generated from this source.

Romney has also proposed a massive defense buildup, even while he says he will cut spending deeply enough to balance the budget. I think it’s clear why he won’t tell voters which cuts he would make: because in the past, disclosing his planned budget cuts was politically damaging.

We have seen this movie before. President George W. Bush campaigned on a program of tax cuts supported by economic advisers not subject to the rigors of official budget scorekeeping. The results – trillions of dollars of budget deficits – speak for themselves.

Voters should have a chance to choose between clear alternatives. President Obama – consistent with his obligations as president – has laid out a multiyear budget embodying his vision for the future, and it has been evaluated by independent experts. It is time for Romney to do the same.

We all know how determined Romney has been in refusing to give specifics about exactly WHAT he would cut (or pretty much anything else), so without specifics, how can anyone objectively decide what his "plan" is?

6. Ryan as "blue collar": "Wisconsin values and Iowa values mesh pretty well together. One of the things I say about Paul is he’s a blue-collar guy,” said Rep. Steve King, one of the Republicans accompanying Ryan as he took a turn around the fairgrounds. Although he's connected well with blue-collar types, he's no blue collar himself: Three families, the Ryans, the Fitzgeralds, and the Cullens, sometimes called the Irish Mafia, helped develop the town of Janesville, Wisconsin, where Ryan was born and still lives, especially in the postwar era. The Ryans were major road builders, and today Ryan, Inc., is a national construction firm. The historic Courthouse section of Janesville is still thick with members of the Ryan clan. Ryan lives in a large Georgian Revival mansion with six bedrooms and eight bathrooms that is on the National Register of Historic Places.

With business investments and a family inheritance, Rep. Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin and his wife have accumulated millions of dollars in assets and generated income last year well above his congressional salary, according to his most recent financial disclosure statement. The largest was the interest that his wife, Janna, holds in a trust, which falls in the range of $1 million to $5 million, Ryan reported

Ryan reported assets in the range of $2 million to $7.7 million. The report shows that Ryan has spread his wealth among a wide variety of investments. Ryan reported partnership income from an Oklahoma mining business, Ava O Limited Co., and royalties from the Oklahoma gravel rights of Blondie & Brownie. He also reported interests in mineral rights, vacant land, a cabin and a timber business in Oklahoma.

We can't know just HOW rich the couple is or what taxes they've paid beyond the past two years, as Ryan has said he will reveal the same number of years as Romney: two.

7.The Ayn Rand connection:

Quote:
To envisage what Republicans would do if they win in November, the person to understand is not necessarily Romney, who has been a policy cipher all his public life. The person to understand is Paul Ryan.

Like many conservatives, he claims to have been profoundly affected by Ayn Rand. After reading “Atlas Shrugged,” he told me, “I said, ‘Wow, I’ve got to check out this economics thing.’ What I liked about her novels was their devastating indictment of the fatal conceit of socialism, of too much government.” He dived into Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman.

In a 2005 speech to a group of Rand devotees called the Atlas Society, Ryan said that Rand was required reading for his office staff and interns.

Now, of course, he's changed his position completely and distanced himself from his pervious beliefs as much as possible, as you can easily notice in any speech he gives. But at heart, he'sa Randroid and we shouldn't ever forget it.

8. The Rise of Ryan: In 1993, Ryan went to work as a speechwriter and policy analyst for Jack Kemp, who led Empower America, an organization then in the vanguard of making policy for supply-side conservatives who were pushing Republicans rightward in their views on taxes and the size of government. “Jack Kemp is what sucked me into public policy, public service, and politics,” Ryan said. “He called it the battle of ideas, and I just really got into it.”

In 1997, Ryan went back to Wisconsin, worked briefly for the family business as a “marketing consultant”—a bit of résumé padding that gave him his only private-sector experience—and decided to run for the House seat in his Wisconsin district. He won the election, becoming the second-youngest member of the House, and he has been reëlected easily ever since.

As a thirty-four-year-old representative, he set out to privatize Social Security. For decades, policy wonks on the Republican fringes had talked about turning Social Security, the government safety-net program for retirees, into a system of private investment accounts.

Under Ryan’s initial version, American workers would be able to invest about half of their payroll taxes, which fund Social Security, in private accounts. As a plan to reduce government debt, it made no sense. It simply took money from one part of the budget and spent it on private accounts, at a cost of two trillion dollars in transition expenses. But, as an ideological statement about the proper relationship between individuals and the federal government, Ryan’s plan was clear.

The release of the Social Security proposal was a turning point in Ryan’s career. Two weeks after Bush’s Inauguration, Ryan gave a speech at Cato asserting that Social Security was no longer the third rail of American politics. He toured his district with a PowerPoint presentation and invited news crews to document how Republicans could challenge Democrats on a sacrosanct policy issue and live to tell about it.

Conservative editorialists and activists cheered him on. Ryan enjoyed a round of worshipful media coverage. “THAT HAIR, THOSE EYES, THAT PLAN,” proclaimed the headline of a long home-state magazine profile in 2005.

But Ryan’s assurances proved to be wildly optimistic. Bush, urged by Karl Rove to keep his distance from Ryan’s plan, released a far more cautious proposal, with smaller accounts and less expensive transition costs. He spent months on a national tour promoting it, as Ryan had in Wisconsin. Democrats savaged the plan. Bush’s poll numbers sank, and the plan was effectively dead by the fall. What some might interpret as the failure of an unpopular idea Ryan insisted was mostly a communications problem. “The Administration did a bad job of selling it,” Ryan said. “You’ve got to prepare the country for these things. You can’t just spring it on them after you win.”

In 2006, Ryan was sent back to Washington and won the top Republican spot on the Budget Committee. Once again, he set about testing the bounds of conservative ideology within the Party. Even for the smaller, more conservative G.O.P. caucus of 2007, Ryan’s draft budget was so extreme that forty out of two hundred and two Republicans voted against it.

He returned the following year with something more polished and more ambitious. Ryan remade his budget into something he called the Roadmap for America’s Future. Rather than just build support inside Congress, he promoted the Roadmap through the rich network of conservative media and think tanks that helped influence Republican members. “I thought fiscal policy was on the wrong path,” he sid.

Unlike the 1994 Contract with America, which in substance was not nearly as ideological as people thought, and unlike Bush’s compassionate conservatism, which was sold as a rejection of anti-government philosophy, the Roadmap was a comprehensive plan to reduce the welfare state and radically curtail the government’s role in protecting citizens from life’s misfortunes.

Ryan recommended ending Medicare and replacing it with a system of direct payments to seniors, who could then buy private insurance. He proposed ending Medicaid and replacing it with a lump sum for states to use as they saw fit. Ryan also called for an end to the special tax break given to employers who provide insurance; instead, that money would pay for twenty-five-hundred-dollar credits for uninsured taxpayers to buy their own plans.

Conservative intellectuals at National Review and the Heritage Foundation loved the Roadmap, and Ryan became an icon within the insular world of right-wing pundits. In Congress, things were different. In 2008, with midterm and Presidential elections looming, the Roadmap attracted just eight co-sponsors.

In late January of 2010, a week after the victory of the Republican Scott Brown in the contest for Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts—the first election fuelled by the new Tea Party movement—Ryan offered the Roadmap as an alternative to Obama’s budget. In a press briefing, Peter Orszag, the budget director at the time, dismantled Ryan’s plan, point by point. Ryan’s proposal would turn Medicare “into a voucher program, so that individuals are on their own in the health-care market,” he said. Over time, the program wouldn’t keep pace with rising medical costs, so seniors would have to pay thousands of dollars more a year for health care. The Roadmap would revive Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security and “provide large tax benefits to upper-income households . . . while shifting the burden onto middle- and lower-income households. It is a dramatically different approach in which much more risk is loaded onto individuals.”

Dick Armey, the former congressional leader, who had become a Tea Party organizer, demanded that Republicans have the “courage” to back Ryan’s plan. Boehner’s position insured that most Republican candidates didn’t listen to Armey’s advice, and in 2010 they campaigned against Obama’s alleged cuts to Medicare rather than for Ryan’s plan to end the program.

Still, after the election, with the Republican Party racing rightward, Ryan provided an intellectual blueprint: there were eighty-seven Republican freshmen who wanted to starve the government but had no clear idea how to do so. During the next four months, Ryan and McCarthy, the third-ranking Republican in the House, convened a series of listening sessions for their colleagues, placing special emphasis on the Republican freshmen. and patiently explained how Ryan’s plan was both the only solution and a political winner. In April, after months of this education campaign, Ryan formally unveiled a third version of the Roadmap, renamed the Path to Prosperity.

After the listening sessions, Ryan had removed some of the most controversial ideas. Ryan added a new plank: to repeal Obama’s health-care law and to effectively cut Medicaid by a third. (Under the plan, Medicaid would no longer keep up with rising medical costs.) Ryan conceded that he couldn’t get his colleagues to go along with everything in the old plan. “I had to pass a bill—I had to get two hundred and eighteen people,” he

Conservative opinion-writers again celebrated his bravery. But there was one note of caution. The ornery Charles Krauthammer doubted that Ryan’s ideas could survive a Democratic onslaught in the 2012 campaign. “House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan has just released a recklessly bold, 73-page, 10-year budget plan,” he wrote. “At 37 footnotes, it might be the most annotated suicide note in history.”

In mid-April of 2011, in a speech at George Washington University, Obama once again decided to make an example of Ryan. Republicans were finally about to vote on the Path to Prosperity, and the President was eager to offer his opinion. The White House invited Ryan to the speech and reserved a V.I.P. seat for him.

Ryan sat in the front row as the President shredded his plan. “I believe it paints a vision of our future that’s deeply pessimistic,” Obama said. “There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. And I don’t think there’s anything courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill.”
Ryan seemed genuinely shocked. Two days after the speech, despite some desperate appeals by Republican pollsters, Ryan’s plan passed the House of Representatives, 235 to 193. Only four Republicans voted against it.

Ryan helped scuttle three deals on the budget. He had served on the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission but refused to endorse its final proposal, in December, 2010. When deficit negotiations moved from the failed commission to Congress, Ryan stuck with the extreme faction of the G.O.P. caucus, which withheld support from any of the leading bipartisan plans. In the summer of 2011, when a group of Democratic and Republican senators, known as the Gang of Six, produced their own agreement, Ryan’s detailed criticism helped sink it. And, also that summer, during high-level talks between the White House and Republican leaders, Cantor and Ryan reportedly pressured Boehner to reject a potential deal with President Obama.

Ryan had aligned himself with Cantor and the self-proclaimed Young Guns, who made life miserable for Boehner, their nominal leader. They were the most enthusiastic supporters of the Ryan plan, while Boehner had publicly criticized it. Cantor’s aides quietly encouraged Capitol Hill newspapers to consider the idea that Cantor would one day replace Boehner. As the Republican negotiations with the White House fizzled in the summer of 2011, Barry Jackson, Boehner’s chief of staff and a veteran of the Bush White House and Republican politics, blamed not just Cantor, who in media accounts of the failed deal often plays the role of villain, but Ryan as well.

“That’s what Cantor and Ryan want,” Jackson told a group of Republican congressmen. “They see a world where it’s Mitch McConnell”—as Senate Majority Leader—“Speaker Cantor, a Republican President, and then Paul Ryan can do whatever he wants to do. It’s not about this year. It’s about getting us to 2012, defeating the President, and Boehner being disgraced.”

The current Presidential campaign centers on the debate about the government’s role in the economy. Ryan, by forcing Republicans to embrace his budget plan, has helped shape this debate. As in 2009, Republicans are divided between those who think they can win by pointing out Obama’s failures and those who want to run on a Ryan-like set of ideas. Romney seems to want to be in the first camp, but during the primaries he championed the ideas in Ryan’s budget. Ryan is frequently talked about as a future leader of the House Republicans and even as a long shot to be Romney’s running mate. He surely would take either job, but he seems better suited to continuing what he’s been doing since 2008: remaking the Republican Party in his image. You can’t “run on vague platitudes and generalities,” he said with regard to Romney's candidacy. “He’s already endorsed these things,” Ryan said. “I want a full-throated defense for an alternative agenda that fixes the country’s problems. I want to show the country that we have a solution to get us out of the ditch we’re in, and to be proud about it.”
Ryan seemed unconcerned that pushing his policy agenda on Romney might damage the candidate. “I think life is short,” Ryan said. “You’d better take advantage of it while you have it.” Excerpts from a VERY long New Yorker article by Ryan Lizza, written August 6, just before Ryan was chosen as Romney's running mate, at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/08/06/120806fa_fact_lizza

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Tuesday, August 14, 2012 1:50 PM

KWICKO

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." -- William Casey, Reagan's presidential campaign manager & CIA Director (from first staff meeting in 1981)

"I supported Bush in 2000 and 2004 and intellegence [sic] had very little to do with that decision." - Hero

Mitt Romney, introducing his running mate: "Join me in welcoming the next President of the United States, Paul Ryan!"

Rappy's response? "You're lying, gullible ( believing in some BS you heard on msnbc ) or hard of hearing."

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Tuesday, August 14, 2012 4:46 PM

FREMDFIRMA

This just in, Romney/Ryan star in bromance slash fic!

-Frem
cause that was too awful not to share

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Tuesday, August 14, 2012 5:33 PM

KWICKO

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Wednesday, August 15, 2012 5:33 AM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...

Ewww, Frem, and I haven't even had BREAKFAST yet! There goes my appetite...

Oh, what the hell:

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Wednesday, August 15, 2012 5:11 PM

KWICKO

And now Ryan is trying to sell the line of BS that he had no idea Ayn Rand - his idol, the person who most shaped his political and ideological views - was [ GASP! ] an ATHEIST!

Gosh, she hid that so well in her books. I can't recall ever reading anything about that in any of her books!

It still cracks me up that the right wing idolizes a Russian atheist from the Soviet Union. Brings whole new meaning to the old slogan "Better dead than RED!", doesn't it?

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Thursday, August 16, 2012 4:43 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Please quote important parts and send the link....

If I wanted to read 8 pages of journalist-speak, I'd have continued paying my membership to the Post-Trib after the 2 months that would have helped that black kid going door to door pay for his college.

"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." ~Shepherd Book

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Thursday, August 16, 2012 3:25 PM

KWICKO

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Please quote important parts and send the link....

If I wanted to read 8 pages of journalist-speak, I'd have continued paying my membership to the Post-Trib after the 2 months that would have helped that black kid going door to door pay for his college.

In other words, "I'm part of the entitled 'ME' generation, and I believe that everybody gets a trophy, even if they're too lazy and intellectually bankrupt to read and do their own research, so please hand me my trophy now." That's what you sound like.

"I supported Bush in 2000 and 2004 and intellegence [sic] had very little to do with that decision." - Hero

Mitt Romney, introducing his running mate: "Join me in welcoming the next President of the United States, Paul Ryan!"

Rappy's response? "You're lying, gullible ( believing in some BS you heard on msnbc ) or hard of hearing."

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Friday, August 17, 2012 4:24 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Sure, if that's how you read it.

I was thinking more along the lines of "I do respect Niki's thoughts and think she's quite cunning, but reading an eight page diatribe by a person I don't care about on a topic I'm not convinced I should be concerned about... especially since I'll probably end up with a different standpoint than she intended anyhow is quite boring to me.

Remember Kwick....

Back when I was here before the two of you, I got blasted for making posts like this. Not because they were boring, but because I was accused of copyright violation and was told to just put the link of the thread if I was going to post the entire thing.

"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." ~Shepherd Book

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Friday, August 17, 2012 5:19 AM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...

Yup, Mike, you pretty much nailed it. Despite the fact that the link IS posted at the bottom, I never had any expectation some here would bother to read even the parts I copied. That kind will ramble all day about THEIR lives, THEIR bitches, etc., but would never bother to look up, much less READ, any cogent material on any topic, which is why I gave up, again and finally, reading posts of people like Six. I know what they already are from having read enough of them to grasp the point. I used to try, but there's nothing pertinent to read, just stuff he's picked up. The fact that Ryan Lizza is a respected journalist who has been featured on BOTH left, right and neutral sources--including FauxNews--and that Lizza's writing has been included in the 2003, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009 editions of The Best American Political Writing, means nothing to any on the right, and informing oneself takes far too long compared to bitching and moaning about our personal lives while doing nothing about them or the country.

So I post for those who actually might be interested in educating themselves, and for those few non-liberals whose minds are open enough to be willing to spend the time learning about politicians who will actually influence our lives (of which there are damned few here). There are others who write far more succinctly and better than I do, who know far more than I do, and who make their points much better than I ever could, so rather than blather about what little I know, I read; and when I read things that make the points I would make if I could write as well as them, I post them for others and condense them so others won't HAVE to read eight pages. There was much more pertinent material in that article I found informative, but I knew it would just be called "journalist-speak" and "diatribe" by those like him here, so I could give a flying fuck whether they ever read my posts or not.

All I expect from people like that is insane remarks like

Quote:
Obama and the Dems would love to keep giving you food stamps for the rest of your life. That's right where they want you to be. And they will continue to bankrupt America for their so-called social justice agenda while creating zero jobs, so prepare to learn to be extra grateful to your handout givers. In time you'll be beholdin' to vote for them because there won't be anything left of entrepeneurial capitalism in America.

Stuff like that is so absurdly asinine it's not worth commenting on, and I know it came from no reasonable source which they just parrot, so people like that have don't interest me. I read some of their posts (that was from Jong) because sometimes they have interesting things to say or I even agree with them on some issue, but I have no expectations they will take the time to read anything cogent, rather than post the pervasive overblown bullshit from the right, thus illustrating their own ignorance and hate, not any actual facts or logical arguments.

I should probably do like you often do, Mike, and post amusing cartoons which reflect equal absurdity and make few relevant points. Trouble is, while I find them amusing, I prefer to COMMUNICATE with people and learn from them--at least those who can be communicated with and learned from.

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Friday, August 17, 2012 5:30 AM

STORYMARK

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Please quote important parts and send the link....

If I wanted to read 8 pages of journalist-speak, I'd have continued paying my membership to the Post-Trib after the 2 months that would have helped that black kid going door to door pay for his college.

Dude, most journalists write at a 5th grade level. And you need help parsing that down??

Note to anyone - Please pity the poor, poor wittle Rappyboy. He's feeling put upon lately, what with all those facts disagreeing with what he believes.

"Goram it kid, let's frak this thing and go home! Engage!"

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Friday, August 17, 2012 7:51 AM

KWICKO

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Back when I was here before the two of you...

That's pretty funny, Jack. You remember 2006 as being BEFORE 2005, eh?

"I supported Bush in 2000 and 2004 and intellegence [sic] had very little to do with that decision." - Hero

Mitt Romney, introducing his running mate: "Join me in welcoming the next President of the United States, Paul Ryan!"

Rappy's response? "You're lying, gullible ( believing in some BS you heard on msnbc ) or hard of hearing."

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Saturday, August 18, 2012 6:19 AM

KWICKO

Can you imagine the hue and cry from the right if Obama had listed as his main reason for getting into politics an atheist from Soviet Russia who said "I don't think the family is a necessary unit of society" ?

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Saturday, August 18, 2012 8:17 AM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...

It's amusing to watch Ryan try to distance himself from his proclaimed adoration of Rand. It's patently obvious from his "budget" and attitude that he's a Randophile, whatever he says, and gawd help our country if he got power!

As I quoted in one of the posts, the right figured if they could just get someone (exactly like Romney) to be figurehead, then stick a policy wonk in as V.P. to pull the strings, they'd be thrilled. Unfortunately, they seem to have gone about it entirely the wrong way and haven't got a chance at this point (tho' it's still a few months out). It blows me away that the fierce Republican Party hasn't realized what a death knell their fringe and Tea Partiers are when they have the power to nominate someone who makes such a terrible choice for V.P. and pretty much implodes his own candidacy in so many ways! Is the ultra-right THAT powerful that they can dictate all this, or are TPTB in the party THAT enamored of them that they can't see straight?

Or did the 2010 midterms make them think they could just go gung ho and the country would come along with them? I can't decide, but whatever the cause, they're sure shooting themselves in the foot! Hell, if it keeps up like it's going, Obama will win by something like the same majority he did last time; he doesn't deserve it (!), and it will be astonishing if the Republicans CAUSE it to come out that way themselves!

I'm just amazed at how this is going, I've never known the Republicans to be so politically inept before, and it's just astonishing to watch it unfold. I almost feel sorry for them. Almost!

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Saturday, August 18, 2012 2:58 PM

KWICKO

They chose Ryan to try to get the teabaggers to come out and vote, plain and simple. The hard-right wing of the party was not thrilled at all with Romney as the nominee, and the fear was that many Republican voters would simply stay home, not being able to see a dime's worth of difference between Romney and Obama.

So they tacked Ryan, a Randroid neocon, onto the ticket in an effort to recruit the teabag wingnuts to their cause. Of course it will work, to some extent, because teabaggers are not very bright, and will either (a) never research Ryan's actual policies, stances, and background, or (b) will simply go along with whatever the Koch brothers tell them to do.

"I supported Bush in 2000 and 2004 and intellegence [sic] had very little to do with that decision." - Hero

Mitt Romney, introducing his running mate: "Join me in welcoming the next President of the United States, Paul Ryan!"

Rappy's response? "You're lying, gullible ( believing in some BS you heard on msnbc ) or hard of hearing."

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Saturday, August 18, 2012 5:47 PM

KWICKO

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Saturday, August 18, 2012 5:49 PM

KWICKO

Well, technically they're not *banning* her from the convention, but she's been asked not to speak at it.

"I supported Bush in 2000 and 2004 and intellegence [sic] had very little to do with that decision." - Hero

Mitt Romney, introducing his running mate: "Join me in welcoming the next President of the United States, Paul Ryan!"

Rappy's response? "You're lying, gullible ( believing in some BS you heard on msnbc ) or hard of hearing."

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Saturday, August 18, 2012 5:51 PM

KWICKO

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Saturday, August 18, 2012 7:22 PM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...

Uh, you forgot about the "national" ultrasound bill he sponsored, too...

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Sunday, August 19, 2012 1:21 AM

KWICKO

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Sunday, August 19, 2012 1:23 AM

KWICKO

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Sunday, August 19, 2012 3:16 AM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...

Wow, I missed that one! We live in the Time of No Responsibililty For Anything You Say, truly! If that's accurate, how DO they keep getting away with such blatant lies? Yeah, rhetorical question, it just continues to blow my mind.

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Sunday, August 19, 2012 3:45 AM

KWICKO

Ryan, whose plan virtually the entire GOP has embraced, the guy who's supposed to be a hardcore economics policy wonk, explains how his plan will balance the budget:

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Sunday, August 19, 2012 3:47 AM

KWICKO

Quote:
Originally posted by Niki2:
Wow, I missed that one! We live in the Time of No Responsibililty For Anything You Say, truly! If that's accurate, how DO they keep getting away with such blatant lies? Yeah, rhetorical question, it just continues to blow my mind.

Yup, he actually blamed Obama for closing the GM plant in his hometown. In 2008. Either he's an idiot, or he expects his supporters to be idiots.

Or both.

"I supported Bush in 2000 and 2004 and intellegence [sic] had very little to do with that decision." - Hero

Mitt Romney, introducing his running mate: "Join me in welcoming the next President of the United States, Paul Ryan!"

Rappy's response? "You're lying, gullible ( believing in some BS you heard on msnbc ) or hard of hearing."

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Sunday, August 19, 2012 6:24 AM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...

He KNOWS his supporters are idiots. He knows that, like Raptor, they never get their "info" from any place but right-wing talk radio and FauxNews. And nobody on the right will ever call out any of these blatant lies, so they'll never know differently.

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