WaPo opinion writer Dana Milbank has a perceptive take on the tone of the 2012 presidential campaign. Milbank quotes WaPo’s Dan Balz and other sources commenting on the toxicity of the campaign, but then adds that one major thing is indeed very different:

…Democrats are now employing harsh tactics that have been used against them for so long…Yes, it’s ugly out there. But is this worse than four years ago, when Obama was accused by the GOP vice presidential nominee of “palling around with terrorists”? Or eight years ago, when Democratic nominee John Kerry was accused of falsifying his Vietnam War record?
What’s different this time is that the Democrats are employing the same harsh tactics that have been used against them for so long, with so much success. They have ceased their traditional response of assuming the fetal position when attacked, and Obama’s campaign is giving as good as it gets — and then some.
Balz is correct when he observes that the “most striking” element of the campaign is “the sense that all restraints are gone, the guardrails have disappeared and there is no incentive for anyone to hold back.” In large part, this is because the Democrats are no longer simply whining about the other side being reckless and unfair:

And that’s all to the good — and long-overdue.

Looks like the GOP has dredged up a new ‘swift boat’-style attack ad to belittle President Obama’s leadership in the raid that did what the Republicans failed to do under nearly 8 years of their ‘leadership’ — find and kill bin Laden. As Juliet Lapidos explains in “Return of the Swift Boat” at the New York Times ‘Taking Note’ Editor’s Blog:

…A new group with ties to the G.O.P and the Tea Party called Special Operations Opsec Education Fund has released a 22-minute video rebuking the president for “politically capitalizing” on national security operations, like the raid that killed Bin Laden.
Anyone who watched the late-night address in which Mr. Obama announced bin Laden’s death will remember that he praised the “tireless and heroic work of our military and our counterterrorism professionals” and the “years of painstaking work by our intelligence community.” The Opsec video includes a clip of that address, but omits the “heroic work” and “painstaking work” lines so that it seems as though Mr. Obama gave himself undue credit. Cue Dave Lamorte, a retired C.I.A. officer, who says: “The administration didn’t capture, or kill or eliminate bin Laden or anybody else. There’s a whole lot of folks in the intelligence and the military community who have been working on this for a very long time.” Then Ben Smith, a former Navy SEAL, chimes in with his best Don LaFontaine impression: “Mr. President, you did not kill Osama bin Laden. America did.”

But the military leader who was actually involved with with the raid strongly disagrees with Lamorte. As Scott Shane notes in his New York Times Report,

In a CNN interview last month, Adm. William H. McRaven of the Navy, who oversaw the raid as commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, said, “The president and his national security team — I’m not a political guy, but I will tell you as, as an interested observer in this — they were magnificent in how they handled it start to finish.”

As Lapidos eloquently sums up the new swift boat attack ad:

It’s a dishonest hatchet job that’ll make you long for a shower, especially since the “stars” of the video present themselves as concerned citizens with no partisan motivations. “We have become a political weapon. We are not. Our job is to be silent professionals. We do not seek recognition; we do not seek popularity,” says Mr. Smith, evidently unaware that appearing in a long attack ad doesn’t gel with his claims.

Better make that two showers.

Greg Sargent blogs at WaPo’s The Plum Line on Mitt Romney’s unverified statement today stating that he never paid less than 13 percent taxes over the last decade. As Sargent explains:

What we’re looking at here is an extraordinary gamble by the Romney camp — call it the “just trust me” campaign. In essence, Romney is betting he can withhold huge amounts of detail about his finances and his major policy proposals without the public knowing or caring about it enough to matter.
On taxes, this lack of transparency goes beyond the amounts he paid; tax experts think the returns could shed light on Romney’s various offshore accounts and any techniques — fully legal, but perhaps difficult to explain politically — he used to keep his rates low. Romney has stuck to this stance even though multiple Republicans, including his longtime backer and fundraiser Jon Huntsman Sr., have called on him to come clean with the American people.
That’s only the begining. Romney won’t reveal the names of his major bundlers, even though he’s taken a drubbing from major editorial boards for failing to do so…

The lack of transparency and candor is not just regarding his personal finances; It’s also his policies that he keeps deliberately vague:

…Romney has claimed he wants to eliminate whole government programs and agencies, but has freely admitted he won’t specify which ones, because so doing could be political problematic. Romney did let a bit of detail slip about which programs and agencies he’d consolidate or eliminate, but only in a closed-door fundraiser that was overheard by reporters.
Romney has proposed a tax overhaul that he vows will be revenue neutral, but he won’t say which loopholes and deductions he’d close to ensure that his plan’s deep tax cuts on the rich will be paid for without hiking the middle class’s tax burden. And not only that, but Romney and his running mate have freely confirmed in interviews that they see no need to reveal these details until after the election — after which, they claim, it can all be worked out with Congress. And so on.

As for the strategy behind Romney’s evasions, Sargent adds, “Romney appears to be betting that he can muddle his way through to victory despite the merciless incoming he continues to take, because voters disillusioned by the bad economy will want an alternative so badly that they won’t be too picky about the details…Romney is betting on media incompetence — its inability to inform the public — or on voter apathy, or on a combination of both, to allow him to skate through.”
It’s a cynical ploy, one that assumes an extraordinary degree of apathy, dim-wittedness or distraction among voters. America’s hopes for a better future depend in no small measure on him being wrong.

To help cut through the thickening smokescreen the Romney-Ryan team is puffing up around their unpopular tax policies, Mike Lofgren’s “Romney and Ryan’s Phony Deficit-Reduction Plan” at The Daily Beast has a nut graph that simplifies it:

It is not just that he cuts taxes, it is how Ryan cuts taxes that gives us a clue as to the Republican agenda. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that under his plan, those making less than the princely sum of $20,000 a year would have an average tax increase of $193 annually, while those earning more than $1 million would reap an average tax cut of $265,000. When, under the Bush administration, the capital gains rate was lowered to 15 percent, it not only exacerbated the growing income disparity in America (many of the rich earn most if not all of their wealth from capital gains: that is why Romney pays an effective rate of less than 14 percent). The capital-gains rate cut also helped fuel the asset bubble that led to the greatest financial collapse in 80 years. Ryan’s budget would eliminate the capital-gains tax altogether. But, since we must all tighten our belts, he proposes to help offset the revenue loss by eliminating the child tax credit!

As Lofgren observes, “Republicans’ caterwauling about deficits and debt is eyewash to gull the public into believing they are serious fiscal stewards. Their rhetoric is intended to camouflage their real objective, which is to slash taxes for their wealthy contributors.”

The following article, by Andrew Baumann and Erica Seifert, vice president and senior associate, respectively of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, is cross-posted from Politico:
Mitt Romney’s presidential team is touting Rep. Paul Ryan’s selection as the Republicans’ vice presidential candidate as a game changer. They may be right — but not in the way they’re hoping.
There are certainly benefits to Romney’s selection of Ryan. He not only consolidates but also electrifies a base that continues to have serious doubts about their presumed presidential nominee. Ryan will likely bring a boost to Romney’s already overflowing campaign coffers. He’s also a capable spokesperson for conservative economic policies.
But the risks for Romney are enormous. And the fact that the former Massachusetts governor is willing to take those risks shows that the Romney brain trust realizes that their recent dip in the polls is real.
Ryan begins this new chapter relatively unknown (54 percent have never heard of him in a recent CNN poll) and the voters who do know him are split — even in his home state of Wisconsin. He had a 36 – 29 percent favorable/unfavorable ratio in a recent Marquette University poll.
The impact of vice presidential nominees on the Electoral College is always overrated, and Ryan will likely be no exception. A recent analysis by Nate Silver in The New York Times estimated that Ryan’s addition to the ticket would add only a net 0.7 points to Romney’s margin in Wisconsin, hardly enough to swing the state.
Of course, the Ryan pick matters far more on a strategic, rather than tactical, level. Republicans have insisted from the beginning that this election would be a referendum on President Barack Obama’s economic record. Obama and his team have done their best to turn it into a choice between two governing philosophies: one holding that “the only way to create an economy built to last is to strengthen the middle class,” as Obama says in a recent campaign ad, and one that would sacrifice the middle class and its priorities in favor of more giveaways to the very wealthy and special interests.
The Romney camp’s selection of Ryan is an admission that their efforts to make this a referendum have failed. It also ensures that Ryan’s unpopular budget plan will be a focus of the campaign – to Obama’s advantage.
Obama and Democrats have been trying to hang Ryan’s plan around the necks of Republicans since it first passed the House in April 2011. And with good reason. Americans opposed Ryan’s plan to turn Medicare into a voucher program 58 to 35 percent, according to a CNN poll in May 2011. Our own research over the last year and half for Democracy Corps has found that the Ryan plan has only become less popular.
Ryan’s plan to privatize Medicare remains the most unpopular portion of his budget plan, raising serious doubts in the mind of two-thirds of voters in our April national survey.
But it’s hardly the only unpopular element. Voters also reject Ryan’s plan to cut taxes for the very wealthy while raising them on the poor and middle class; his plan to allow the refundable child tax credit to expire, which would push the families of 2 million children back into poverty; and to his drastic cuts to education spending. All these create serious doubts with at least 59 percent of likely voters, and very serious doubts with between 37 and 40 percent of likely voters (a strong intensity score).
They are even more potent with key swing groups (independents, suburban voters and seniors), as well as Democratic base voters (Latinos, youth and unmarried women) who have yet to become energized in this election.
While the individual elements of Ryan’s plan are deeply unpopular, the biggest effect on the campaign may well be how it helps Obama’s argument that Romney has the wrong priorities for middle class Americans. Obama has already been using Romney’s history at Bain Capital, plus the recent Tax Policy Center report on Romney’s tax plan, to argue that “Romney Hood” policies would rob the middle class to help the wealthy.
Swing voters expressed these same sentiments when we described the Ryan plan to them (in neutral language) in recent focus groups. One non-college, independent woman from Columbus. Ohio said:
“It’s just wrong, in my opinion…I think of Robin Hood, where the king is stealing from the poor to make more money.”
The Ryan budget’s impact on Romney at the ballot box will be very real. In our June national survey (before Obama’s recent surge in national polling), after voters heard a favorable description of the Ryan plan (paraphrased from Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) as well as balanced arguments for and against the budget, we asked them to imagine a debate in which Romney embraced Ryan’s plan while Obama opposed it.
The vote shifted significantly, with Obama’s lead more than doubling from 3 to 8 points (51 to 43 percent). Among critical independent voters, Obama’s margin expanded from 2 to 11 points.
Voters no longer have to imagine a Romney embrace of the Ryan budget. This weekend, Romney made Ryan’s priorities his own.

The following article by Democratic Stategist Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
I can’t think of any other VP pick in history who has ever made the activists on both sides of the political divide so immediately ecstatic. Most VP picks are snoozers picked to balance the ticket geographically or demographically. Some are unknowns like Palin was last time, and/or like Palin and Quayle quickly become seen as duds that weigh down the ticket. But the Ryan pick instantly electrifies and clarifies the political dynamic for both movement conservatives and movement progressives. It is the dream ticket for both sides- but in the end I think it will be a dream for us Democrats and a nightmare for the Republicans.
At the top of the ticket you have Mr. 1%, the Wall Street tycoon poster child whose brutal brand of corporate ethics made him wealthy beyond his dreams while laying off workers, cutting benefits, pioneering out-sourcing, and bankrupting companies. And as his number 2, you have the ultimate cheerleader and intellectual wunderkind for this style of Ayn Randian capitalism. Paul Ryan, whose open worship of Rand (his inspiration for getting into politics) will be a major discussion in this campaign, crafted the ultimate budget document for rewarding the Romneys of the world and punishing everyone else, and Romney rewarded him with the VP pick.
Romney’s strategy will be to use Ryan to try and make this campaign about the federal debt, but don’t be fooled: the Ryan budget doesn’t project actually balancing the budget until 2040, and then only with wildly optimistic economic growth projections that no economist with a straight face could back up. Yes, he radically slashes the budget in Medicare, Medicaid, education spending, services for the poor and disabled, and other domestic spending- but his spending cuts are basically just given to the wealthiest people in America, the Romneys of the world, in the form of tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires as deep as his radical spending cuts.
The Ryan budget, which Romney has enthusiastically endorsed, is the ultimate fantasy of the far right and the extremist followers of Rand. It has virtually every cut and tax cut for millionaires ever proposed by right wing think tanks over the last 20 years in programs for the middle class and poor; it ends the guarantees of health and nursing home coverage for seniors and those with disabilities in Medicare and Medicaid; it completely deregulates Wall Street, health insurers, and oil and coal companies while keeping all their tax loopholes; it dramatically increases defense spending far beyond what even those in the Pentagon have been calling for, giving a massive benefit to defense contractors; it will, according to Brookings and every other analysis of the Ryan budget done, will force taxes on the middle class and the poor to rise in order to meet their deficit targets.
This budget is the ultimate document for making people like Mitt Romney and his wealthy benefactors like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson and all those Wall Street bankers far richer while at the same time cutting the heart out of the things everyone else in our society benefits from. Our elderly parents will have to move in with us; our children will be going to devastated schools, and their student loans to go to college decimated; our kids with disabilities will have the programs to help them slashed; our air and water will get dirtier and dirtier; and the Too Big To Fail banks will have no one watching over them. All of this so that millionaires and billionaires can get larger tax cuts than even George W. Bush gave them.
The Romney-Ryan budget could just as easily be called the Ayn Rand budget, because it does everything Rand dreamed of. She proclaimed selfishness as the ultimate virtue, and said that Christian charity and compassion was evil and weakened society. She rejected the idea of the Golden Rule and that we are to be our brother’s and sister’s keeper. She glorified the wealthy as the only ones who mattered in society, the only ones who weren’t leeches and failures. This is her budget, the budget that she inspired Paul Ryan to write. Bain Capital was her kind of company, where the wealthy and well-connected did whatever it took, ran over whoever it took, to be successful. If there is an afterlife with a heaven and a hell, I think it is quite likely she is being tormented in hell, but even so she would have to be looking up and glorying in this selection today. The founder of Bain Capital and the author of the Ryan budget as the Republican nominees for President and VP: this is Ayn Rand’s moment.
This is the dream ticket for Democrats and progressives. They have given us the ultimate chance to make our case as to why the Wall Street ethics of Bain and the ultimate suck-up-to-the-rich budget of Ryan are fundamentally wrong for America. This is not a debate about how we cut the federal deficit, as many Democrats have far more realistic and responsible plans to do that. This campaign instead is about the ultimate debate in values and morality and what will benefit the future of the vast majority of Americans more. If we preach the historic values that made this country great — our beloved communities, our belief that we are all in this together and that we rise or fall as one people, our belief that our policies should be oriented toward making the middle class prosperous and growing, our belief in the Golden Rule and government of,by, and for the people — we will win this debate and this campaign. The values of Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and Ayn Rand will not prevail if we make our case without fear and equivocation to the American public.

Republicans hope putting Ryan on the GOP ticket will help galvanize public support for his austerity budget. But the American people are looking for a very different agenda, as TDS CO-Editor Ruy Teixeira explains in his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’

In the recently released American Values Survey, conducted by Penn Schoen Berland for The Atlantic Monthly and the Aspen Institute, the public endorses spending more on education and infrastructure while raising taxes on the wealthy as the best route to economic growth (56 percent) instead of lowering taxes on individuals and businesses while cutting spending on government services and programs (42 percent).
The public’s opposition to cutting even less essential government services to provide such tax cuts was made clear in a mid-July CBS/New York Times poll where 66 percent opposed that approach, compared to just 30 percent who supported it.

It’s highly unlikely that Ryan, Romney or any Republican ideologue is going to transform the public’s deeply-held beliefs about fairness in tax policy and government’s important role in addressing human needs. As Teixeira concludes, “If Conservative politicians’ crusade to cut spending and preserve tax cuts for the wealthy may charge up the conservative base. But the broader public seems distinctly unenthusiastic.”

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Since Mitt Romney named Paul Ryan as his running mate on Saturday, right wing pundits have done their best to frame his pick as a “bold” choice. In fact, it appears to have been a choice born of the dawning realization at Romney’s high command, that his political situation was becoming increasingly desperate.
And the notion that Ryan himself is a “bold visionary” is nothing more than sheer fantasy — unless, of course, your “vision” of the future is the “Gilded Age.”
Before the announcement, conventional wisdom held that Romney would make a safe, boring choice for vice president — somebody like Tim Pawlenty or Rob Portman. The thought was that he would be cautious, both because he is, by nature, a cautious kind of guy — and because he was doing well enough that he didn’t want to make the a rash move that could blow up the way McCain’s decision to enlist Sarah Palin as his running mate exploded four years ago.
But let’s face it, Romney was having a terrible summer. According to Nate Silver’s 538.com — the most sophisticated forecasting model around — Romney’s chance of winning this fall had dropped to under 30%. His Las Vegas odds — and odds on the Intrade political market — weren’t much better.
Romney’s foreign trip was a disaster. As much as anything it demonstrated that he lacks the most important single trait of successful political leaders: empathy. Romney seems constitutionally incapable of putting himself in other people’s shoes. He launched his expedition to Europe and Israel to demonstrate that he was a capable statesman, and looked instead like a bull in a china closet — insulting everyone in sight. Worse yet he looked out of his depth — like a student who was allowed to create his own SAT test and still failed to pass. Or, as former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs put it — he looked like a guy who struck out at T-Ball.
His refusal to release his tax returns has continued to focus attention on Romney’s wealth — and the fact that in the one full year of returns he has opened to public scrutiny, he paid only a 13.9% effective tax rate makes it look like he plays by a different set of rules than ordinary mortals. Matters got worse when the a non-partisan Brookings Institute Study found that his tax “reform” plan would increase the taxes of 95% of Americans, and give him — and millionaires like him — hundreds of thousands of additional tax breaks.
Romney’s history of outsourcing American jobs, his record at Bain Capital, his Swiss Bank Accounts and cash in the Caymans, have all begun to convince persuadable voters that he just isn’t on their side. And it has become apparent that the more voters learn about his record as governor of Massachusetts — 47th out of 50 in job creation — his claims to be an effective job creator were just so much hot air.
And finally there was the indisputable fact that Romney seems incapable of relating to ordinary Americans and their lives (e.g., “corporations are people too,” “Ann drives two Cadillacs,” “I love firing people,” etc.).
That’s not to say that Romney doesn’t still have a lot of chips on his side of the table. The long recovery from the Great Recession — which was, of course, caused by precisely the same policies that Romney would like to revive — presents a headwind for President Obama. And that headwind has been amplified by Republicans in Congress who have intentionally sabotaged the American economy for their own political advantage — doing everything in their power to prevent passage of the infrastructure and jobs programs that independent analysts say would have created at least another million jobs.
And, of course, there is the advantage bestowed by the unprecedented tsunami of money with which multi-millionaires like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson hope to buy the outcome of the election.
In fact, a good case can be made that Romney still has a pretty good chance of beating the odds in November. But the Romney campaign — and its super wealthy right wing supporters — were starting to panic. And the forces that wanted to bet the ranch on a real, radical right-wing take over of American government used that panic to successfully promote their choice of most right wing vice presidential candidate since 1900. They convinced the campaign high command to double down on the view that this election is ultimately about mobilizing their base — and, they argued no one could do that better than Paul Ryan.
Ryan’s choice must have been controversial among Romney’s advisers. Medicare is enormously popular in America — especially among senior citizens who make up a disproportionate percentage of the vote in swing states like Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and Nevada. Ryan is — after all — the leader of the movement that no kidding around, wants to abolish Medicare as we know it. Presumably they believe that they can spend enough to confuse older voters into believing something different. Don’t bet on it.

Read more…

With the selection of Paul Ryan for V.P. The Democratic Strategist is reissuing several posts about his political philosophy. This post by James Vega is from April 25th 2011
Paul Ryan is unusual among politicians because – unlike most — he is actually committed to a specific, explicitly formulated social philosophy – the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Here are three facts that make the depth of his commitment unmistakably clear:

• Paul Ryan was a speaker at the Ayn Rand Centenary Conference in 2005, where he cited Rand as his primary inspiration for entering public service. “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.
• He has at least two videos on his Facebook page in which he heaps praise on Rand. “Ayn Rand, more than anyone else, did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism,”
• He distributes copies of Rand’s books to his staff and requires them to read them.

So is Ryan really a committed and genuine follower of Rand? Let’s try just a little bit of intellectual honesty here. Just replace the name Ayn Rand with V.I. Lenin and imagine a Democrat trying to get away with doing the things listed above without being labeled a hard-core Leninist fanatic.
OK, so let’s accept that Ryan is a serious, dyed-in-the-wool Ayn Rand-ian. So what? Well, listen to these quotes from Rand about ordinary working people:

“The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all their brains…
…Wealth is …made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools, by the able at the expense of the incompetent, by the ambitious at the expense of the lazy….
“What are your masses but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?”

No, these are not out of context, uncharacteristic remarks and no, they are not referring only to people on welfare. They are the core of an organized philosophy that glorifies the wealth-creating businessman and dismisses the ordinary working stiff as a dumb and lazy parasite whose mediocrity is his own damn fault and who lives off businessmen’s productivity like a blood-sucking leech. It’s the philosophy at very heart of “Atlas Shrugged” the book that made Rand a right-wing hero.
Now here is Ayn Rand on God:

Every argument for God and every attribute ascribed to Him rests on a false metaphysical premise. None can survive for a moment on a correct metaphysics.

Ayn Rand on Faith:

…. The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind Faith is the worst curse of mankind, as the exact antithesis and enemy of thought.

Ayn Rand on Christian Compassion:

Now there is one word–a single word–which can blast the morality of altruism out of existence and which it cannot withstand–the word: “Why?” Why must man live for the sake of others? Why must he be a sacrificial animal? Why is that the good? There is no earthly reason for it–and, ladies and gentlemen, in the whole history of philosophy no earthly reason has ever been given. It is only mysticism that can permit moralists to get away with it. It was mysticism, the unearthly, the supernatural, the irrational that has always been called upon to justify it… one just takes it on faith.

Ayn Rand on the Cross:

“It is the symbol of the sacrifice of the ideal to the non-ideal. . . . It is in the name of that symbol that men are asked to sacrifice themselves for their inferiors. That is precisely how the symbolism is used. That is torture.”

“Mysticism” and “superstition” were two of Ayn Rand’s favorite derogatory terms for religion and her dismissal of Christ for sacrificing himself for his “inferiors” ties together her contempt for both ordinary working people and Christianity at the same time. There are in her works countless statements that literally drip with scorn and loathing for the weak, the helpless, the needy – the people Jesus called “the least of these”. Her “Virtue of Selfishness” described such people as contemptible failures and parasites — inferiors to be despised, not comforted.
Many conservative Christians who take their Christianity seriously do face up to the genuinely creepy and sinister “uber-mensch” (superior man) and “unter-mensch” (inferior man) elements of Rand’s philosophy and reject it categorically.
Here, for example, is Michael Gerson:

Reaction to Rand draws a line in political theory. Some believe with Rand that all government is coercion and theft — the tearing-down of the strong for the benefit of the undeserving. Others believe that government has a limited but noble role in helping the most vulnerable in society — not motivated by egalitarianism, which is destructive, but by compassion, which is human. And some root this duty in God’s particular concern for the vulnerable and undeserving, which eventually includes us all. This is the message of Easter, and it is inconsistent with the gospel of Rand.

But Paul Ryan doesn’t believe this at all – he considers Rand his hero and inspiration – and it’s really vile and contemptible that so many conservatives who claim to be both devout Christians and great defenders of the average American are happily snuggling up under the covers and making goo-goo eyes with a guy whose philosophy should make them gag up their lunch and run to take a shower. Politics may make strange bedfellows, but this slimy and perverse union is particularly grotesque.

“Koch Industries ranks as the Wisconsin Republican’s sixth-largest source of campaign money throughout his career, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which says the company’s PAC and affiliated individuals have given him a total of $65,500 in donations.”
– from Bob King’s Politico post, “Koch brothers have Paul Ryan’s back”
“He has never held statewide office and has no foreign-policy experience. Both could be liabilities.”
– from NBC News.com’s First Read on “Paul Ryan’s Strengths and Weaknesses”
“Ryan “was voted prom king and the ‘Biggest Brown-Noser’ of his 1988 high school class before leaving for college in Ohio.”
– from Bryan Bakst’s Associated Press profile of Ryan
Wikipedia deleted the “biggest brown-noser” comment from its bio page on Ryan this morning.
— from Dylan Byers’s Politico post, “The Paul Ryan Wikipedia edits begin”
Politifact gave him a “Pants on Fire” animated gif rating for his statement that “President Barack Obama “has doubled the size of government since he took office.”
– from Politfact Wisconsin’s “Paul Ryan’s File”
He may be Mr. Deficit Hawk now. But twas not ever thus: “He was the sponsor in the House of a bill to create new private accounts funded entirely by borrowing, with no benefit cuts. Ryan’s plan was so staggeringly profligate, entailing more than $2 trillion in new debt over the first decade alone, that even the Bush administration opposed it as “irresponsible.”
— from Jonathan Chait’s New York magazine article on “The Legendary Paul Ryan: Mitt Who?”
Further, “There are also holes in Ryan’s budget-hawk armor: He voted for some of the biggest drivers of the deficit/debt — the Bush tax cuts, the Iraq war, and the Medicare prescription-drug benefit, all of which weren’t paid for. Moreover, Ryan voted against the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles recommendations.”
– from NBC News.com’s First Read on “Paul Ryan’s Strengths and Weaknesses”
Worse, “Ryan has been a steady voter for unwise bailouts of big banks, unfunded mandates and unnecessary wars. Few members of Congress have run up such very big tabs while doing so little to figure out how to pay the piper.”
— John Nichols, The Nation
“Ryan is just a “hyper-ambitious political careerist– who has spent his entire adult life as a Congressional aide, think-tank hanger-on and House member,” says Nichols. He “wants to keep on climbing until he’s America’s real life John Galt. He knows he could control a doddering fool of a puffed up CEO type like Romney as easily and thoroughly as Cheney controlled Bush,” adds the Paul Ryan Watch.
– from “Paul Ryan? Seriously?” by The Nation’s John Nichols, via The Paul Ryan Watch
Romney may have just booted Florida.