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Romney Taps Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan As Running Mate
Shortly after 9 a.m. Eastern time Saturday, Republican candidate Mitt Romney officially announced (via phone app) his selection of 42-year-old Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan as running mate for the 2012 U.S. presidential race. Ryan's selection was announced by the Romney campaign to various media outlets earlier this morning. Ryan is considered popular among a wide range of Republican voters, being a budget hawk who favors less liberal laws concerning abortion. Ryan's lauded popularity among Tea Party voters is mixed; some reports describe him as a Tea Party favorite, others as a far-right imposter.
Ayn Rand also nearly worshipped a sadistic child murderer and mutilator. She called this man "ideal".... Ayn Rand's Early Inspiration: A Child Killer
This certainly belongs in the "you can't make this stuff up" category. As J. Brendan Ritchie, who flagged it for me, wrote: "Apparently Ayn Rand was heavily inspired by (and admired) a psychopath. Incidently, objectivism now makes a lot more sense to me."
The best way to get to the bottom of Ayn Rand's beliefs is to take a look at how she developed the superhero of her novel, Atlas Shrugged , John Galt. Back in the late 1920s, as Ayn Rand was working out her philosophy, she became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation. Rand filled her early notebooks with worshipful praise of Hickman. According to biographer Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market , Rand was so smitten with Hickman that she modeled her first literary creation -- Danny Renahan, the protagonist of her unfinished first novel, The Little Street -- on him.
What did Rand admire so much about Hickman? His sociopathic qualities: "Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should," she wrote, gushing that Hickman had "no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel 'other people.'"
Your country doesn't have a left wing.
Interestingly the fight in Wisconsin lead to Wisconsin being distanced by the rest of the USA in what concerns job performance. See this graph which shows the total number of nonfarm employees in Wisconsin (blue) vs. the entire US (red). Note how in early 2011, when Wisconsin's job creation policies were enacted Wisconsin stopped following the upwards trend of the country. (Details: the graph is normalized to the 2009 numbers, any other pre-2011 normalization wouldn't change the picture; nonfarm to not be distorted by seasonal variations; employment numbers instead of unemployment to accoutn for people leaving the state).
I don't know how much of Wisonsin's policies Ryan could claim for himself, but it certainly looks like he shouldn't at all.
then bumbled his way to a $2 trillion dollar a year deficit
You conveniently ignore his predecessor's tenure, during which spending spiked to its highest-ever levels with two unfunded wars and more military and security spending than even at the height of the Cold War.
the U6 unemployment rate didn't spike up to 16% until after Obumbles was in office.
A delayed reaction to the financial meltdown which, again, happened on his predecessor's watch.
But don't let facts get in your way.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
I think you misspelled socialist. We have neosocialists. We do not have a left wing. There's more to being liberal than socialism. It must be balanced with libertarianism in ways that make sense.
For example, that. That is not left-wing. That's way, way far to the right. It is putting the desire to keep a business artificially running above the rights of the stockholders. That's a corporatist, fascist way of doing things. It means that the people who put money into the company by buying its stock lose their investment, while the big corporations that the company owes money don't lose their investment. They spin off a shell company that holds the company's debts without any of its assets, and the working class get screwed, while the rich get richer. If they had allowed the company to fold, the working class might have at least gotten back some of their investment instead of ending up with worthless stock certificates. Instead, they chose the rights of a few big companies over the rights of the majority.
Those people are also not on the left. Someone truly on the left is typically in favor of greater personal freedom, not bigger government for government's sake. True left-wing politics requires government to interfere in the lives of individuals only when those individuals hold undue power over others.
Note that this is not the same thing as libertarianism, where the government never interferes. Nor is it socialism, where the government always interferes. Both of those are skewed politics that don't represent the true political left.
You're kidding, right? You just described the political far right, except for the "small" bit. The far right consists mostly of investors who make their money by using funds and effort removed from the masses, who are beasts of burden providing all those things. Most of those people contribute little, if anything, to society other than loaning money, and for that, we reward them with a life of luxury while almost everyone else has to work like slaves just to afford basic healthcare.
Yet even the far left does not want them to become beasts of burden. They merely want those people to pay their fair share. While the rest of us are paying 30% in taxes, they pay 15%. They do less work to earn their money, yet they get to keep more of it. By any reasonable and sane standard, they're cheating the system, and that's wrong.
Capital gains should be taxed as ordinary income. At most, there should be a one-time homeowner exemption so that people can afford to change houses once in a while. Only if we treat unearned income with the same level of taxation as earned income can we legitimately say that nobody is using anyone else, treating anyone else as beasts of burden.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Bullshit claim is bullshit:
http://www.tnr.com/article/82962/conservatives-economic-chart-fox-de-rugy
Indeed, the real story here isn’t necessarily Emmerich’s fuzzy math; as important is the fact that the chart was posted again and again with so little discussion of its accuracy. If those who pushed the chart along in its Internet journey cared about its content and the methodology, rather than its underlying political message, they could have done a little Googling. It wouldn’t have taken much to crack the surface, get below the presumption that poor people are coddled by the government, and find the beginning of a long list of problems with Emmerich’s work. But, perhaps because of ideological bent or maybe due to simple laziness, people decided that no fact-checking was required.
Ayn Rand died on welfare and medicare, two things Ryan would cut to the bone if he had a chance. Part of the reason she was living on government assistance was that she was sick with cancer. She refused to believe the medical warnings about smoking. In that way she was a forerunner of the TEA party type denialists. The mentality of believing what you want because your opinion matters as much as someone who has studied something for years when you have not.