Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Ryan and nothing but Ryan


AAA Obama's distractions
What’s New Today
Story # 1 and #2 are signs of desperation.  #3 is a story of how stimulus money was used for unlawful lobbying.  #4 looks at the lefts and the rights take on Ryan’s budget plan.  #5 has the first poll on Ryan since his being named Romney’s VP.  #6 is a collection of 8 democrats who had nice things to say about Paul Ryan.  #7 looks at the Ryan pick and wonders if it was inevitable.  #8 asks if we will have an adult discussion or simply Mediscare.  #9 is another example of a biased MSM.  #10 has Little Debbie doing what she does best…. Lie.  

Today’s Thoughts

Mark Steyn: “‘Forward’ means ‘Even more of the same’: You can't say he isn't warning us.”

Civil discourse Democrat style:  Just two days after Romney put the House Budget Committee chairman on the ticket, hecklers tried to shout Ryan down, even rushing the stage where he was speaking and reportedly punching a backer.


Lie of the Day

President Barack Obama praised his adopted city at a campaign event saying, “Chicago is an example of what makes this country great.”

1.  Signs of Desperation

More Republicans than Democrats are engaged in the presidential contest and voter turnout could decrease compared with the 2008 election, according to a Gallup poll on Monday.
Seventy-four percent of Republicans said they’re thinking about the election “quite a lot,” compared to 61 percent of Democrats, the USA Today/Gallup survey found…

Gallup has picked up a much more focused following of the coming elections by Republicans. That should turn out with greater numbers of Republicans going to the polls.


2.  Signs of Desperation part 2

The recent frantic email theme to supporters from Team Obama about Mitt Romney's run-away fundraising successes has been expanded to the crowd size gap between the thousands who rushed out over the weekend to see Romney and new running mate Rep. Paul Ryan and the hundreds who cheered on President Obama.

The big worry expressed in a new email from Obama's Chicago HQ: "The Republican base is energized." The reason: Romney attracted 15,000 at a rally over the weekend.

The email:

Paul --

I just got this disturbing report: Yesterday's Romney-Ryan rally in North Carolina pulled in an overflow crowd of 15,000 people….


While the crowds are a concern, it is the fundraising that is the bigger concern.  Obama and the Democrats have been significantly out raised for money for the campaign for the past three months.  Add to this the rate that Obama is spending at you may find the campaign in October and November will be the opposite of what it was in 2008.

3.  Stimulus Money used for unlawful lobbying efforts

President Obama’s health care law and the 2009 stimulus have provided money to groups pushing for tax increases on soda and price controls for other unhealthy foods, despite laws against taxpayer-funded lobbying of lawmakers.

Word of the campaigns, funded by grants from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Communities Putting Prevention to Work program (CPPW) provoked letters to the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) from the inspector general and House lawmakers.

“CPPW grants, funded through both the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, have been touted by the Obama Administration as initiatives designed to improve health outcomes through preventive measures,” a group of legislators on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, led by chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., wrote today to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, based on a letter from the inspector general (OIG).

“The OIG’s notice stated that CDC-provided information ‘appear to authorize, or even encourage, grantees to use grant funds for impermissible lobbying,” the investigators wrote. Anti-lobbying laws ban the use of federal funds to influence government officials on particular policies.

Despite that restriction, “CPPW grantees provide quarterly reports describing activities supported by the grant . . . [which] contain numerous activities that, on their face, may violate anti-lobbying provisions,”  inspector general Daniel Levinson warned Sebelius last month...


Add another illegal activity to the Obama Administration.


4.  Paul Ryan’s Budget Plan

No sooner had Mitt Romney announced Paul Ryan as his running mate than Democrats and their backers started attacking the Wisconsin Republican as a "radical."

President Obama's campaign manager, Jim Messina, immediately sent an email out to supporters calling Ryan the "author of a budget so radical the New York Times called it 'the most extreme budget plan passed by a House of Congress in modern times.'"

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett said "Paul Ryan's radical budget would ... end Medicare as we know it."…
…Obama himself blasted Ryan's budget plan last spring, calling it "thinly veiled social Darwinism" and "an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country."

Average, The New Radical?

But Ryan's budget plan is far from radical.

His proposed spending and revenue levels are above historic averages. His Medicare reform has strong bipartisan support. His tax reform plan is similar to one proposed by Obama's own bipartisan debt reduction commission.

Ryan's budget, which passed the House last March, would set the federal government on course to spend an average of 20% of GDP over the next decade. That's slightly higher than the post-World War II average of 19.8%.

His tax plan would produce revenues averaging 18.3% of GDP. That, too, is somewhat higher than the 17.7% post-war average. What's more, Ryan's plan would set tax and spending rates higher than every Democratic president before Obama.

By this measure, what's radical is Obama's tax and spending plans….


Radical and extreme are words the Democrats use when talking about any Republican.  But in reality with 42% of the country self-identifying as conservative and only 21% identifying as liberal, it is the left not the right that is extreme and radical.  


5.  Ryan seen as favorable by 50%

Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan’s favorables are up after the first blush of national media exposure following Mitt Romney’s selection of him as his vice presidential running mate. But as is generally the case with running mates, Ryan gives only a slight boost to Romney. 

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 50% of Likely U.S. Voters now have a favorable opinion of Ryan, while 32% view him unfavorably. This includes 29% with a Very Favorable view of Romney’s vice presidential pick and 13% with a Very Unfavorable one.  Only 13% are now unfamiliar with Ryan, and five percent (5%) are not sure about him…


At first blush, this is a very good number. 

6.  Eight Democrats who have Praised Paul Ryan

Democrats may be in full attack mode against Republican Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan, but a good number of them have praised the GOP budget leader in the past for his intellectual and moral leadership.

Here are eight Democrats who have praised Paul Ryan and his approach:
1.      Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore)…

http://freebeacon.com/eight-dems-who-have-praised-paul-rya/

Included in this number are two presidents.  Ryan is a serious person who has picked up the issues that most politicians run away from.  The Democrats think the public isn’t ready for this.  I on the other hand think the voters are yearning for it. 


7.  The Paul Ryan Choice

Governor Mitt Romney's choice of Congressman Paul Ryan as his vice-presidential running mate is one of those decisions that seem obvious -- if not inevitable -- in retrospect, even though it was by no means obvious to most of us beforehand.

Anyone who wants to get a quick sense of who Paul Ryan is should watch a short video of a February 2010 meeting in which Congressman Ryan politely, but devastatingly, "schools" Barack Obama on the utter fraudulence of the statistics that the Obama administration was using to claim that ObamaCare would reduce the deficit. That video is available on the Drudge Report.

As a long-time member, and now chairman, of the Budget Committee in the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan is thoroughly familiar with both the facts and the fictions in the federal government's budget. In recent years, the fictions have grown much bigger than the facts. But, as Congressman Ryan reminded the president, hiding spending is not the same as reducing spending.

If this year's election is going to be decided on the basis of hard facts, the Obama administration is doomed. But the Obama campaign is well aware of that, which is why we are hearing so many distracting innuendoes and outright lies about such peripheral issues as what Mitt Romney is supposed to have done while running Bain Capital -- or even what is supposed to have happened at Bain Capital, years after Mitt Romney was long gone….


He’s a winning choice for Romney, but more importantly, the country. 

8.  A Serious Debate or Mediscare?

Pundits hope a Romney/Ryan presidential ticket will spark a much needed, serious and sober discussion about big issues. Don't bet on it. These days Democrats want only to scare voters, not enlighten them.

Columnist Robert Samuelson wrote this week that Romney's vice presidential choice "has the potential to turn this dreary presidential campaign into a meaningful debate over the size and role of the federal government."

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorialized that "this may be a campaign about big ideas, after all." Centrist pundit John Avlon exclaimed that Ryan "makes this election a real choice between competing philosophies of government — and that's a healthy debate to have during a presidential election."
There's no question that a sober discussion about the proper size and scope of government would be welcome. And Ryan has proved himself more than capable of engaging in such a dialogue. But don't expect anything even remotely resembling that from today's Democrats. The party of FDR these days is only interested in one thing: spreading fear.

To get a taste of the Democrats' "sober" and "serious" approach to big issues, consider the ad a liberal group ran last May attacking Ryan's Medicare reform. That ad depicted a Ryan lookalike shoving a screaming, wheelchair bound woman off a cliff. Not one prominent Democrat decried that ad.
And let's not forget the Democrats' months-long campaign of lies about Romney's record at Bain, his views on abortion and his taxes.

Does anyone really believe this will change now that Ryan is on the ticket? It hasn't so far.

Democratic National Committee head Debbie Wasserman Schultz said Ryan wants to "shred the safety net for seniors." Service Employees International Union President Mary Kay Henry said Ryan has a "no-holds-barred record of attacking seniors, children and working men and women." And Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., says with Ryan, Romney "has doubled down on his commitment to gut Social Security and end Medicare as we know it."…


If the Democrats get into a serious debate of the issues, they lose.  If they get into talking about the state of the economy, they lose.  If they talk about job creation, they lose.  Their only hope of winning is to smear the other side and make the electorate fearful. 

9.  Soledad O’Brien using a left wing blog on air

Can CNN's Soledad O'Brien make her sources any more apparent than she did Monday night?
While filling in for Anderson Cooper, O'Brien was actually caught on screen looking at an article from the far-left website Talking Points Memo to assist her in a heated debate with Romney campaign senior adviser Barbara Comstock.

Ali Akbar at Viral Read reported Monday:

During her interview with Virginia House of Delegates Republican member Barbara Comstock, O’Brien became visibly flustered and was actually caught doing finger stress exercises as she attempt [sic] to insert editorial commentary while her guest, a former skilled Republican operative, defended the House GOP budget, designed by Budget Chairman Paul Ryan.

Accidentally, a cameraman captured O’Brien furiously flipping through notes, only to cut out seconds later.

What she's reading from is a TPM article titled "The Myth of Paul Ryan The Bipartisan Leader” published Monday at 6:08 PM only a few hours before this program started….

 
You can actually watch the clip if you use the link.  Soley still try’s to pretends she is a unbiased journalists, but it isn’t working.

10.  Little Debbie lying again

Guy Benson did a nice job of writing this up but really, there’s no comment necessary. The clips speak for themselves. Job one for Democrats: Lie your ass off in the interest of convincing seniors that Romney and Ryan are prepared to reduce Medicare benefits for everyone, regardless of age, instead of exempting people aged 55 and over as Ryan has promised. When that doesn’t work — and thanks to a surprisingly dogged Wolf Blitzer, it doesn’t — shift to plan B by arguing that Romney and Ryan are prepared to reduce Medicare for the grandmas of the future, which could totally be avoided if we just keep reelecting Democrats and have the magical unicorn in Obama’s backyard fart out a few new trillion-dollar bills to keep the program solvent. No mention of the unicorn here by Debbie, alas, but be patient. I think they might be ready to roll him out at the convention.

Mark my words. By October, Wasserman-Schultz will be doing these segments standing next to old ladies who are eating Fancy Feast out of the can. “Is this what you want, America?”


There are lies, damned lies, and Democratic talking points. 

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