It looks like it's Paul Ryan!!!

Many Brits will be wondering what Paul's brother Barry thinks about this.

It is funny that both the right (Redstate) and the left (DailyKos) are thrilled with the Paul Ryan pick. It is nice when both sides can agree like that.

It sure makes the Obama re-election team's job a lot easier.

Oh whew, it's that guy.

I had a boyfriend named Paul Ryan when I was 15. Fortunately, it is not the same guy.

Buh-bye Florida.

LOL dumb and dumber - the remake!

I also found it funny that there was a black guy standing in the crowd right over Romney's right shoulder where the cameras would see him. I wonder if he was hired for that position, or if they just found him in the crowd.

should have picked paul bunyan, he's lost the blue ox vote now

This is really a difficult choice to defend for the Romney campaign. GOP hardliners get all dreamy-eyed about Ryan because he's what passes for an intellectual in the Republican party these days, and I'm sure the thinking inside the GOP is that people would like Ryan's budget if they just knew more about it. The problem is, though, that the more people learn about the Ryan budget, the more they hate it. That's going to become increasingly apparent as the campaign proceeds, and the Obama camp has every reason to break out the champagne to celebrate. Furthermore, Ryan doesn't even bring Wisconsin with him, which Portman at least arguably could have done with Ohio.

This is clearly a pander to the right wing of the party -- without stooping so far as to bring in someone who is too closely identified with the teabaggers. At this stage in the campaign, however, Romney shouldn't need to pander to them -- he needs to draw in uncommitted independents. I wonder if this decision wasn't motivated, in some significant part, by the Romney organization's attempt at damage control after Andrea Saul praised Romneycare a few days ago.

That black guy is at every GOP nominating convention. The cameras film him from multiple angles so it looks like there's more than one.

I've been considering this and it may not be so difficult. Romney had two basic options; he could move to the middle and ignore the tea party or move to the tea party. He couldn't stand still in no-man's land. Towards the middle, he had ... well no one. Who might get moderates excited? Christie? J. Bush? Pawlenty? I can't see any good options for moving to the middle. Moving to the right might settle the issue for some moderates but at least it gives him an excited base. Rubio might have been a better source if it brought him Florida.

Romney could have found someone else on the right.

Paul Ryan comes with the Ryan budget. The Ryan budget is very easy to argue against, and defiantly against what most Americans want for the country.

The Ryan budget budget makes the debate over the direction of the economy easy for Obama, and this debate should be difficult for a sitting president in a painfully slow recovery.

The message will be that Romney-Ryan are radicals who want to take money from the middle class to give tax breaks to the rich. And this isn't a very difficult message for Obama to sell when Ryan put it so clearly on paper with Romneys applause.

There is a reason that the approval rating of Congress (which Ryan is a part of) is 17% (about a third of Obama's approval rating). Rubio or Christie would have been better choices.

12 Things You Should Know About Vice Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan
By Igor Volsky
Aug 11, 2012

Mitt Romney has picked as his running mate 42 year-old Republican Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI), the architect of the GOP budget, which the New York Times has described as “the most extreme budget plan passed by a house of Congress in modern times.” Below are 12 things you should know about Ryan and his policies:

1. Ryan embraces the extreme philosophy of Ayn Rand. Ryan heaped praise on Ayn Rand, a 20th-century libertarian novelist best known for her philosophy that centered on the idea that selfishness is “virtue.” Rand described altruism as “evil,” condemned Christianity for advocating compassion for the poor, viewed the feminist movement as “phony,” and called Arabs “almost totally primitive savages. Though he publicly rejected “her philosophy” in 2012, Ryan had professed himself a strong devotee. “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” he said at a D.C. gathering honoring the author of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.” “I give out ‘Atlas Shrugged’ as Christmas presents, and I make all my interns read it. Well… I try to make my interns read it.” Learn more about Ryan’s muse:

2. Ryan wants to raises taxes on the middle class, cuts them for millionaires. Paul Ryan’s infamous budget — which Romney embraced — replaces “the current tax structure with two brackets — 25 percent and 10 percent — and cut the top rate from 35 percent.” Federal tax collections would fall “by about $4.5 trillion over the next decade” as a result and to avoid increasing the national debt, the budget proposes massive cuts in social programs and “special-interest loopholes and tax shelters that litter the code.” But 62 percent of the savings would come from programs that benefit the lower- and middle-classes, who would also experience a tax increase. That’s because while Ryan “would extend the Bush tax cuts, which are due to expire at the end of this year, he would not extend President Obama’s tax cuts for those with the lowest incomes, which will expire at the same time.” Households “earning more than $1 million a year, meanwhile, could see a net tax cut of about $300,000 annually.”

Audiences have booed Ryan for the unfair distribution:

3. Ryan wants to end Medicare, replace it with a voucher system. Ryan’s latest budget transforms the existing version of Medicare, in which government provides seniors with a guaranteed benefit, into a “premium support” system. All future retirees would receive a government contribution to purchase insurance from an exchange of private plans or traditional fee-for-service Medicare. But since the premium support voucher does not keep up with increasing health care costs, the Congressional Budget Offices estimates that new beneficiaries could pay up to $1,200 more by 2030 and more than $5,900 more by 2050. A recent study also found that had the plan been implemented in 2009, 24 million beneficiares enrolled in the program would have paid higher premiums to maintain their choice of plan and doctors. Ryan would also raise Medicare’s age of eligibility to 67.

4. Ryan thinks Social Security is a “ponzi scheme.” In September of 2011, Ryan agreed with Rick Perry’s characterization of Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme” and since 2005 has advocated for privatizing the retirement benefit and investing it in stocks and bonds. Conservatives claim that this would “outperform the current formula based on wages earned and overall wage appreciation,” but the economic crisis of 2008 should serve as a wake-up call for policymakers who seek to hinge Americans’ retirement on the stock market. In fact, “a person with a private Social Security account similar to what President George W. Bush proposed in 2005″ would have lost much of their retirement savings.

5. Ryan’s budget would result in 4.1 million lost jobs in 2 years. Ryan’s budget calls for massive reductions in government spending. He has proposed cutting discretionary programs by about $120 billion over the next two years and mandatory programs by $284 billion, which, the Economic Policy Institute estimates, would suck demand out of the economy and “reduce employment by 1.3 million jobs in fiscal 2013 and 2.8 million jobs in fiscal 2014, relative to current budget policies.”

6. Ryan wants to eliminate Pell Grants for more more than 1 million students. Ryan’s budget claims both that rising financial aid is driving college tuition costs upward, and that Pell Grants, which help cover tuition costs for low-income Americans, don’t go to the “truly needy.” So he cuts the Pell Grant program by $200 billion, which could “ultimately knock more than one million students off” the program over the next 10 years.

7. Ryan supports $40 billion in subsides for big oil. In 2011, Ryan joined all House Republicans and 13 Democrats in his vote to keep Big Oil tax loopholes as part of the FY 2011 spending bill. His budget would retain a decade’s worth of oil tax breaks worth $40 billion, while cutting “billions of dollars from investments to develop alternative fuels and clean energy technologies that would serve as substitutes for oil.” For instance, it “calls for a $3 billion cut in energy programs in FY 2013 alone” and would spend only $150 million over five years — or 20 percent of what was invested in 2012 — on energy programs.

8. Ryan has ownership stakes in companies that benefit from oil subsidies . Ryan “and his wife, Janna, own stakes in four family companies that lease land in Texas and Oklahoma to the very energy companies that benefit from the tax subsidies in Ryan’s budget plan,” the Daily Beast reported in June of 2011. “Ryan’s father-in-law, Daniel Little, who runs the companies, told Newsweek and The Daily Beast that the family companies are currently leasing the land for mining and drilling to energy giants such as Chesapeake Energy, Devon, and XTO Energy, a recently acquired subsidiary of ExxonMobil.”

9. Ryan claimed Romneycare has led to “rationing and benefit cuts.” “I’m not a fan of [Romney's health care reform] system,” Ryan told C-SPAN in 2010. He argued that government is rationing care in the state and claimed that people are “seeing the system bursting by the seams, they’re seeing premium increases, rationing and benefit cuts.” He called the system “a fatal conceit” and “unsustainable.” Watch it:

10. Ryan believes that Romneycare is “not that dissimilar to Obamacare.” Though Romney has gone to great lengths to distinguish his Massachusetts health care law from Obamacare, Ryan doesn’t see the difference. “It’s not that dissimilar to Obamacare, and you probably know I’m not a big fan of Obamacare,” Ryan said at a breakfast meeting sponsored by the American Spectator in March of 2011. “I just don’t think the mandates work … all the regulation they’ve put on it…I think it’s beginning to death spiral. They’re beginning to have to look at rationing decisions.”

11. Ryan accused generals of lying about their support for Obama’s military budget. In March, Ryan couldn’t believe that Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey supports Obama’s Pentagon budget, which incorporates $487 billion in cuts over 10 years. “We don’t think the generals are giving us their true advice,” Ryan said at a policy summit hosted by the National Journal. “We don’t think the generals believe that their budget is really the right budget.” He later apologized for the implication. Watch it:

12. Ryan co-sponsored a “personhood” amendment, an extreme anti-abortion measure. Ryan joined 62 other Republicans in co-sponsoring the Sanctity of Human Life Act, which declares that a fertilized egg “shall have all the legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood.” This would outlaw abortion, some forms of contraception and invitro
fertilization.

Middle class could face higher taxes under Republican plan, analysis finds
By Lori Montgomery
June 19, 2012

The tax reform plan that House Republicans have advanced would sharply cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans and could leave middle-class households facing much larger tax bills, according to a new analysis set to be released Wednesday.

The report, prepared by Senate Democrats and reviewed by nonpartisan tax experts, marks the first attempt to quantify the trade-offs inherent in the GOP tax package, which would replace the current tax structure with two brackets — 25 percent and 10 percent — and cut the top rate from 35 percent.

Those changes would benefit virtually every taxpayer, but they also would reduce federal tax collections by about $4.5 trillion over the next decade, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. To avoid increasing the national debt by that amount, GOP leaders such as House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (Wis.) have pledged to get rid of all the special-interest loopholes and tax shelters that litter the code.

Republicans have declined to identify their targets. However, some of the biggest “loopholes” on the books are popular tax breaks for employer-provided health insurance, mortgage interest, state and local taxes, and retirement savings, which disproportionately benefit the upper middle class.

So although households earning $100,000 to $200,000 a year would save about $7,000 from the lower tax rates in the GOP plan, those savings would be swamped by eliminating major deductions, according to the report by the Democratically controlled congressional Joint Economic Committee.

The net result: Married couples in that income range would pay an additional $2,700 annually to the Internal Revenue Service, on top of the tax increases that are scheduled to hit every American household when the George W. Bush-era cuts expire at the end of the year.

Households earning more than $1 million a year, meanwhile, could see a net tax cut of about $300,000 annually.

“According to this report, while millionaires will receive a huge tax break, earners making under $200,000 will see their taxes rise significantly,” said Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. (D-Pa.), who chairs the Joint Economic Committee.

“Ryan seems to want to have his cake and eat it, too, and this report shows that you can’t,” added Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), who requested the analysis. “If you want to cut taxes on the rich and not raise the deficit, you’re going to have to basically clobber the middle class.”

House Republicans called the report premature and unfair. For example, it assumes that Republicans would maintain lower rates for capital gains and dividends — which disproportionately benefit the very wealthy — a long-standing part of GOP tax orthodoxy. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has said he would preserve the lower rates for the wealthy and eliminate taxes on investment income for the middle class.

However, the budget blueprint the House passed this spring sets no such conditions on tax reform, and Ryan spokesman Conor Sweeney said Republicans “are open to changes to those rates.”

GOP aides noted that the report assumes that major tax breaks such as the mortgage interest deduction would be eliminated. But some Republicans have argued that similar savings could be achieved by trimming the breaks, perhaps by limiting them for wealthy households, as Ryan suggested in a recent interview with Al Hunt of Bloomberg News.

“There is a saying about why you shouldn’t assume things, but I will just politely suggest that the actual tax writers would probably write a different bill than the staff at JEC,” said Sage Eastman, a senior adviser to House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (Mich.), who is leading the Republican tax-reform effort.

Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, reviewed the Joint Economic Committee report. Although the numbers are rough, he said, the conclusions are largely accurate.

“Even with eliminating fairly major tax preferences, the Ryan tax plan remains regressive. That’s the bottom line,” he said. “Unless you go after the tax preferences that benefit the wealthy” — capital gains, dividends, tax-free interest on municipal bonds — “it’s really hard to undo the regressivity of the rate changes. You’ll be shifting the burden of the tax code toward the middle class.”

Mitt Romney goes bold (and risky) with Paul Ryan vice presidential pick
Posted by Chris Cillizza
08/11/2012

The news that Mitt Romney has chosen Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan as his vice presidential nominee today in Norfolk, Virginia amounts to a decidedly bold stroke for the typical risk-averse GOP presidential candidate, a pick that will almost certainly turn the race into a choice between two competing — and strikingly contrasting — visions for the country.

Ryan, a seven term Congressman from Wisconsin, has emerged from (relative) obscurity in the last several years to become the intellectual and policy center of the Republican party thanks in large part to the budget proposal he has offered that would, among other things, fundamentally re-shape Medicare and other social safety net programs in an attempt to get the country’s fiscal house in order.

While that proposal has won him kudos among Republicans, it’s turned him into something of a whipping boy for Democrats, who insist that Ryan’s budget is not only bad policy but also bad politics. In fact, Democrats were openly rooting for Romney to pick Ryan as his VP over the past week, believing that it could well help their efforts to keep control of the Senate and win back the House in November.

In naming Ryan to the national ticket, Romney is sending a simple message to those Democrats: Bring it.

Rather than go safe — with a pick of Ohio Sen. Rob Portman or former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty — Romney and his team appear to have made the decision to place a big bet on the idea that people understand that now is a time in which tough choices need to be made and that the conservative vision for how to make those choices is one that can win majority support in the country.

The thinking in the Romney camp is clearly that the Ryan budget was likely to be at the center of the debate over the right way forward for the country whether or not the Wisconsin Republican was on the ticket so why not embrace that debate and try to own it with the man who is best able to articulate why the plan does what it does.

In a campaign that, of late, has been defined by its smallness, the naming of Ryan as VP is Romney suggesting that this is an election about big things — and that Republicans are the party better suited to win an ideas/issues-focused campaign like that.

(Romney hinted at that sentiment during an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd on Thursday; the former Massachusetts governor said that his VP pick would need to have a “vision for the country that adds something to the political discourse about the direction of the country”, adding: “I happen to believe this is a defining election for America, that we’re going to be voting for what kind of America we’re going to have.”)

Picking Ryan is also a tacit admission from Romneyworld that their long-held belief that the best path to victory was one in which the spotlight shone entirely on President Obama and his performance in his first term might not have been entirely correct.

In selecting Ryan, Romney is making clear that this isn’t simply about what President Obama has done for/to the country but also what a President Romney would do for/to it.

In that regard, Romney appears to have heeded the advice of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a Ryan advocate, who has long argued that his party cannot win the presidency by simply being against Obama but rather also had to articulate its own positive vision of governance. The choice of Ryan makes clear that Romney agrees with that premise — at last in part.

But, for all the plaudits the pick will draw among the conservative crowd, real questions remain as to Ryan’s ability to prosper under the massive spotlight of a presidential election.

Ryan, as several Republican reminded us once it became clear late Friday night that he would be the pick, is someone who is largely untested on the national political stage.

Having won a difficult race for his competitive 1st district in 1998, Ryan has faced little challenge in his subsequent races and has steered a course far heavier on policy than politics during his Congressional tenure.

“It’s risky but not for the reasons that most folks think (the entitlement reform stuff),” wrote one senior Republican strategist in an email late Friday night regarding the Ryan pick. “The risky part is this: the guy is an untested candidate. He’s a policy wonk who doesn’t really have much experience as a campaigner. He could end up being fine or he could blow up.”

Even those Republicans more favorably inclined to Ryan acknowledged that the vice presidential nomination amounts to a major step up for him politically and wondered whether he had the stuff to stand up to what will be a withering attack from President Obama’s campaign on his budget proposal.

Viewed from 50,000 feet, Romney’s decision to tap Ryan is a break with the play-it-safe mentality that has defined the Republican nominee’s general election campaign to date. While Ryan isn’t as risky as the likes of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio or even New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, he is far less safe as a pick than Portman or Pawlenty.

Whether Romney was driven to take something of a risk due to his recent fade in state and national polling or whether this sort of bold move to push the GOP governing vision to the fore had been in the works all along matters less now than how Ryan performs as a candidate, however.

If Ryan can dodge the slings and arrows sent his way from Democrats while casting himself as the Republican ideas man for this and future generations, Romney will look like a smart gambler — betting on a proven commodity with a high upside and relatively little downside.

If, on the other hand, Ryan — and, by extension, Romney — struggles to get out from under attacks on his budget proposal and allows President Obama to turn this election into a pure choice rather than primarily a referendum on his own first four years in office, Republicans may look back at the Ryan pick with a grim shake of the head.

The next 87 days will decide which narrative wins out. But what we know today is that Romney took a risk — and bet big on Paul Ryan.

How is Paul Ryan a Bold choice?

The Right Wing Establishment told Romney to pick Paul Ryan. And so Romney picked Paul Ryan. Of course the Right Wing Establishment is really looking toward 2016 with this pick.

The word "bold" would be appropriate if Romney were willing to buck against the Right Wing Establishment. Ironically that would have been has best bet of winning.

The really funny part is that Ryan is considered to be a fiscal conservative.



In truth, he's nothing of the sort. He's just a continuation of the GOP tradition: destroy public spending and cut the gov't to the bone, so that taxes on the wealthy can be cut as far as possible.

Cycloptichorn

Looks like Obama will have four more years!

Good choice Romney! Thanks!

I'm hoping for eight, and no GOP President this side of 2052.