Congressman Paul Ryan

Joshua Hersh, HP 8/20/12 2:15 PM
Former Dem Congressman: Paul Ryan Never Committed To Simpson-Bowles Commission

A former Democratic congressman who sat across from Paul Ryan on a major bipartisan budget deficit commission said Mitt Romney's running mate took a hard line on fundamental economics issues and never fully committed to negotiating a deal. "Paul drifted -- he came to all the meetings, and kept asking pertinent questions, but his heart wasn't in it," said John M. Spratt, a recently retired member of Congress from South Carolina who served with Ryan on the Simpson-Bowles Commission in 2010. "Eventually, he just went back to what he was doing before, back to developing the roadmap, working for his party and not for bipartisanship." The Simpson-Bowles commission was a high-profile effort by President Obama to reach bipartisan agreement on reducing the budget deficit. It eventually failed to reach a consensus, largely owing to the opposition of fiscal conservatives, even though many officials in both parties continue to tout the wisdom of its recommendations. In fact, in an interview in early August, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney said his own deficit reduction plan "is very similar to the Simpson-Bowles plan." For many months, Erskine Bowles, the commission's Democratic co-chair, "bent over backwards trying to accomodate" Ryan, Spratt said. Had he succeeded in persuading Ryan, who had already emerged as a leading voice for fiscal conservatives, Spratt believes that the other two House Republicans would have come along. "Paul really spent most of his effort [in Congress] building bridges within the Republican Party for a particular ideology that views all taxes as anathema," Spratt said. "Any package that has any taint of taxes involved in it, he's simply not interested in supporting." The Romney campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Spratt also told HuffPost in a phone interview that Ryan -- and the depth of his conservatism -- is "not to be underestimated." "He is intelligent, likeable, affable, and he is well to the right of center," Spratt said. "I remember when Dick Cheney ran for V.P., and people started looking into his background, what they found was that Cheney was a lot more conservative than he had appeared to be in public. I would say the same is true of Paul Ryan. Once the media and opposition dig into his voting record, I think they're going to be rather surprised how far to the right he is." Spratt's assessment of Ryan's negotiating style mirrors that of another Democrat who served across from Ryan on the House Budget Committee, Maryland's Chris Van Hollen. In an interview a week ago on MSNBC, Van Hollen, who is now the committee's ranking member and poised to play Ryan in Vice President Joe Biden's debate prep, said that Ryan was civil but impossible to negotiate with on matters of principle. "There's a distinction between civility and congeniality and willingness to compromise," Van Hollen said. "If you look at the Ryan Republican budget, it is a totally uncompromising document."



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Michelle Goldberg puts Human and Women's rights in perspective

Paul Ryan’s Extreme Abortion Views - The Daily Beast
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articl2012/08/11/paul-ryan-s-extreme-abortion-views.html

Less attention has been paid, though, to Ryan’s hard-right positions on social issues. Indeed, on abortion and women’s health care, there isn’t much daylight between Ryan and, say, Michele Bachmann. Any Republican vice-presidential candidate is going to be broadly anti-abortion, but Ryan goes much further. He believes ending a pregnancy should be illegal even when it results from rape or incest, or endangers a woman’s health. He was a cosponsor of the Sanctity of Human Life Act, a federal bill defining fertilized eggs as human beings, which, if passed, would criminalize some forms of birth control and in vitro fertilization. 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


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The $700 Billion Medicare Smokescreen - The Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/jared-bernstein/paul-ryan-medicare-cut_b_1776031.html

PLAY BY MY RULES - AP 8/15/12 4:33 PM

WASHINGTON -- Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan has been one of the harshest critics of President Barack Obama's economic stimulus plan. But months after Congress approved the nearly $800 billion package, the Wisconsin lawmaker was trying to steer money under the program to companies in his home state.

Rep. Ryan wrote letters in 2009 to Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis seeking stimulus grant money for two Wisconsin energy conservation companies. One of them, the nonprofit Wisconsin Energy Conservation Corp., later received $20.3 million from the Energy Department to help homes and businesses improve energy efficiency, according to federal records.

In a letter to Chu in December 2009, Ryan said the stimulus money would help his state create thousands of new jobs, save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That contrasted with his public statements denigrating the stimulus program as a "wasteful spending spree." It also conflicts with his larger federal budget proposal, which would slash Energy Department programs aimed at creating green jobs.
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Reagan's Stockman puts the money in perspective:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/14/opinion/paul-ryans-fairy-tale-budget-plan.html?_r=3
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Branden posits that Objectivist beliefs are very similar to behavior exhibited by the GOP obstructionists in the House:

The Benefits and Hazards of the Philosophy of Ayn Rand: A Personal Statement by Nathaniel Branden, Ph.D. (NathanielBranden@compuserve.com)
Copyright (C) 1984, Nathaniel Branden, All Rights Reserved
Copyright (C) 1984, Association for Humanistic Psychology

http://mol.redbarn.org/objectivism/Writing/NathanielBranden/BenefitsAndHazards.html

Here is the problem: There is a difference between reason as a process and what any person or any group of people, at any time in history, may regard as "the reasonable." This is a distinction that very few people are able to keep clear. We all exist in history, not just in some timeless vacuum, and probably none of us can entirely escape contemporary notions of "the reasonable." It's always important to remember that reason or rationality, on the one hand, and what people may regard as "the reasonable," on the other hand, don't mean the same thing.

The consequence of failing to make this distinction, and this is markedly apparent in the case of Ayn Rand, is that if someone disagrees with your notion of "the reasonable," it can feel very appropriate to accuse him or her of being "irrational" or "against reason."

If you read her books, or her essays in The Objectivist, or if you listen to her lectures, you will notice with what frequency and ease she branded any viewpoint she did not share as not merely mistaken but "irrational" or "mystical." In other words, anything that challenged her particular model of reality was not merely wrong but "irrational" and "mystical" -- to say nothing, of course, of its being "evil," another word she loved to use with extraordinary frequency.

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"Those eyes, just so blue, it's like looking into a smurfs anus. " - John Stewart 81312 ... while gazing at Ryan's "glowing" eyes.

"I have heard very few bad things about him as a human being, other than his views." - Gov. Howard Dean