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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.
How the fuck is this news for nerds?? Its not remotely related to tech or topics that slashdot normally covers.
This does not belong on slashdot. Stop using this as your personal blog, timothy.
Now I expect this to turn into a left-wing bashfest. Commence.
neither is your comment, but you posted it anyway. Stop using slasdot as your personal rebuttal space.
No matter how much the left will want to make this about Ryan wanting to kill little old ladies (as in their ad showing him literally throwing one off a cliff), what this will really do is force people like Biden (in debates, with Ryan) to directly address some specific things that the current administration would really, really rather not talk about. Which is good for everyone, no matter how the voting goes.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I think this falls under the, "stuff that matters", bit.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Fine message to send. "My Party is an obsolete old rustbucket that went aground so hard it was laid up for years as they patched it together again. Oh by the way, it uses so much oil to get anywhere we can't afford to run it anymore."
On the other hand, maybe it is an appropriate message after all. And I say this as a Navy veteran and former resident of Wisconsin.
So Romney, who has attacked Obama for having "no private sector experience" taps a career politician to be his VP. One with less executive experience than Sarah Palin, and one who has advocated for what Newt Gingrich called "right-wing social engineering".
Nice one, Mittens.
Why pick a guy that appeals to those on the far right of the spectrum when you already know none of those people would ever vote for Obama....
Maybe Romney will try to paint himself as more of a moderate now?
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Republicans will be (mostly) pleased with Romney's choice, since Ryan has built up some street cred with them through his knock-down, drag-out fight with Democrats in Wisconsin. But Democrats see Ryan as a monster who must be stopped at all costs, and will likely be motivated to come out and vote against him. It should be an interesting election.
. I think a presidential election is something that matters.
And you're wrong. The whole plan for the republicans is to lose the presidency, but remain an obstructive (or destructive) legislative force in the senate, congress and supreme court.
The whole race is just bread and circuses; even more so once you consider that both parties are right wing by any sane standard...
consider that both parties are right wing by any sane standard.
+1 informative.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
I get enough of this bullshit in the papers, TV, radio, diner, pamphlets, grandpa.... etc.. I come to /. to get away from stupid shit. Do you really believe this website is a peer on politics. Nope. Is it a peer in tech? Yep. Don't polarize this website with political prop.
Paul Ryan was picked because stupid people will think that he's Ron Paul.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Anyone who votes for any candidate at any level of government because of the color of the candidate's skin does not deserve to vote. Of all the criteria out there, skin color is the least important (and gender is right down there on the same level, not more nor less important).
FC Closer
Now the Dems can segue from pounding on Romney about not releasing his tax returns to pounding on Republicans about wanting to turn Medicare into a voucher program so rich people don't have to pay more in taxes.
Whoever decided to release this on Saturday should be beat with sticks. Had the announcement gone out on Monday, they could have owned the news cycle. Now the Dems will have their surrogates ready with a simple talking point that they can just keep hammering all the way to November.
The best thing I can say about picking Ryan is it was better than picking Sarah Palin.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Austerity is a death spiral that creates needless suffering at a time when govt should be fulfilling the Constitutional mandate to "provide for the general welfare."
By what standard? The far-left standard? Jeez, if you're to the right of Mao Zedong you get tarred and feathered these days. Not to mention your bizarre opinions of the Pubs aspiration for the Presidency. How, pray tell, does losing help in the supreme court? The sitting President nominates new members. Of course, if you're a Euro-leftist (the only sane people left in the world), you likely have no idea of how the American system works. Give the Constitution a glance, it's a good read. Influenced by Europeans, it was, that should make everyone happy.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I think part of the reason she seems more harmless and amusing now is that the likelihood of her ever occupying the Presidency has declined. Palin as political pundit vs. Palin as a person one McCain health problem away from the Oval Office are pretty different scenarios.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
"Far right"? Don't demonize your political adversareis. This causes polarization, hatred, alienation and isolation. It also makes collabortation almost imposssible.
Paul Ryan is not "far right" any more than the DEM is "far left".
There are legitimate grounds to oppose President Obama; it is disingenious to yell "SHUT UP you racist!" everytime someone criticizes bailouts or oppose federal medicine.
NOTE: I am not opposing federal medicine, just arguing that we should get over skin color.
By the standards that exist in all other nations on this planet. Republicans are being attacked and losing primaries for being moderates and compromising.
Last week he repeatedly said "Sheikh" when he meant "Sikh". One of many WTF moments. I find it hard to understand why a guy who so thoroughly sucks at speechifying is even in politics, never mind the Presidential candidate of a major party.
Obama's politics place him -- from the European point of view -- somewere around Merkel, probably somewhat left of Cameron. Clearly to the right of Hollande. He is between the European Aliance of Liberals and Democrats and the Eropean Popular Party.
In Europe, to his left, you will find the German Socialist party, parts of the UK Labour, all the other members of the Organisation of European Socialist Parties. All the mainstream parties from the Nordic countries (except the nationalists, who used not to be mainstream).
Yet more to the left, and sometimes a significant force in national politics, there are Ecologists, Marxists, unreformed Communists.
Further to his right, basically, you have the fascists/ultra-nationalists. Which is where the GOP is.
So from the point of view of every one else outside the US, Obama is a somewhat right-of-center candidate, and Romney is basically Hitler. So yeah, we root for Obama.
If you don't consider Obama to be right winger, you must then agree that GWB was not a right winger. Their policies are practically identical although in some ways, Obama is even more far right, for example, he just murders people by drone rather than indefinitely detaining them. Solves the whole pesky trial problem.
Here's my list of the similarities: nothingchanged.org
Compared to the Lilly Leadbetter Act that he signed (which was basically passed unanimously and is a one page tweak to existing law), there's some serious shit to explain if you are going to say Obama is NOT a rightwinger.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
The United States has 700 military bases in over a hundred countries, far eclipsing the military presence of any other nation. The rest of the world has no choice but to pay attention to the elections inside the empire.
So your point is that he was influenced by Ayn Rand's ideas to get into politics, but that he's decided to stick with some of her ideals, but reject her overall personal philosophy?
Since I know of hundreds of other people, including public figures, that could describe, I'm not really sure what your point is. There isn't a contradiction in not being a Randian Objectivist while still thinking Any Rand made some good points about government.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
> If the tea party wasn't so dead stuck on tax cuts for the wealthy
And if YOU could get away from the Soros/Think Progress/CAP/Kos talking points you might realize we aren't for 'tax cuts for the wealthy' we are for either keeping rates WHERE THEY ARE AND HAVE BEEN FOR A DECADE or for a major overhaul of the tax code to reduce rates across the board in exchange for eliminating deductions, carveouts and loopholes such that it is revenue neutral on the static CBO scoring but will actually produce MORE revenue to the treasury, almost all from the 'wealkthy', from a growing economy.
> but when you want to cut medicare/medicaid, funding for schools and teachers
We are spending over a trillion more than we are taking in and Obama plans to do that into the forcastable future. That isn't a sustainable plan. And most of the spending growth is in the welfare state. Taxes at all levels (fed, state, local) are almost certainly on the side of the laffer curve where raising rates won't bring in more actual revenue and my team isn't into 'redistributive justice' so why in the name of hell would we want to raise tax rates? So that leaves cutting spending untl it matches revenues or making the tax base grow until it can support the spending. So lets hear YOUR plan. What do you want to cut? Or do you want to try inflating our way out? Or what? There aren't many choices available so please stop bitching about our choices and pick something to be for.
And screw the teachers. We have more than doubled per pupil spending in the last generation and test scores have went down. The best thing we could do for the students is fire the lot of em and sell off the infrastructure to private entities. At least some of them would succeed.
Democrat delenda est
And they like intra-vaginal ultrasounds. Keep telling yourself lies, buddy: the US right is libertarian like I am turnip.
Bush Junior inherited a budget surplus from Clinton's term. Obama inherited the mess of a deficit from Bush Junior
Actually Jr inherited the fake prosperity of the Internet Bubble and its popping, a popping that began under Clinton. Jr was then immediately hit with 9/11. Clearly the economy took hits that were not Jr's doing.
And despite this Jr managed a recovery of sorts within a few years. Something Obama seems incapable of. However then the Housing Bubble popped. And who authorized those Credit Default Swaps so critical to the current economic crisis? It was Clinton. Clinton not only authorized these financial WMDs but he also made it illegal for states to enact state-level laws that would regulate them.
It seems Clinton had far more of a role in the current economic crisis than Jr. Jr did not help with his spending however Obama is going far beyond Jr in terms of spending and that is also contributing to the ongoing crisis.
1. We spent 804 billion dollars in Iraq and didn't even get a "thank you card"..or a drop of oil 2. We spent 90 billion dollars on reconstruction in Afghanistan to "win hearts and minds"...and they hate us
And Obama continued Jr's war policy and exited Iraq on Jr's timetable.
3. We spent 2.5 billion dollars sending CURIOSITY to MARS, a technological feat that set space exploration ahead 50 years, sent a message to the world that the US is still the leader in technology.... and will provide us with a wealth of scientific data for years to come.
And the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity mission began and hardware and software mostly completed under Jr's term.
A decade of tax cuts which the cutters in question promised to end in 2010, because otherwise they totally raped the deficit, and doing so it was the only way to get them past the Byrd rule and passed under Reconciliation rules. And at that, only after Trent Lott had the first senate parliamentarian fired for not accepting their fairy-story economic growth projections (which didn't pan out, either).
See this is what the election is going to come down to. The Republican platform is now "Vote for us, or else we will become Greece." And whenever someone voices and disagreement, factually or otherwise, Paul Ryan will do what he's done his entire career: he'll climb up on a cross, demand the spikes be hammered, and declaim from on high "They are doing this to me because I dared tell the Truth!"
And I bet this will work. American folk history is filled with valorizations of people who are persecuted for speaking out, even when the guy speaking out is lying through his teeth.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
The left wing in the USA thinks that the government should control every aspect of your lives. The right wing thinks that this can be done more efficiently by the private sector. Both are authoritarian, it's just that your left wants to retain the illusion that you have some influence over your oppressors via elections, while the right wants to retain the illusion that you have some influence over your oppressors via marketplace competition.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The right wing in the US is libertarian
Libertarianism is objectively pro-$strongest. In the US, $strongest is the corporations. Thus, the right wing in the US is corporatist. I'd say "fascist", but that's a word that people in the US associate with a charismatic "leader for life", and a degree of internal oppression to which we have not yet risen.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Your post makes no sense.
Romney would be much more likely to sign a Ryan Budget or a Ryan-like Budget than Obama would and Romney has endorsed the Ryan plan.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
PS. This guy above is not a Troll. He is merely wrong. Do not censor this discourse.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
So from the point of view of every one else outside the US, Obama is a somewhat right-of-center candidate, and Romney is basically Hitler. So yeah, we root for Obama.
As a left of center (at least left of what I consider the center) American, it amazes me that so many Americans don't recognize this shift to the right that's taken place in their own country. The right seems to be almost blind to the fact that someone like Reagan, let alone someone like Eisenhower, would be WAY to far to the left for their party today, yet they continue to pretend that they worship them. I just don't get it. In fact, Obama's record puts him closer to someone like Eisenhower than to any leftist...and these folks are calling him a Socialist...really????. I mean hell...is there even anyone left in U.S. politics at any serious level that's even in the same universe as, say for example, George McGovern???...not from where I stand.
I'll tell you what though...it's not flying with everyone. Almost every one of my family and friends who were hardcore Reagan Republicans in the 80s have ended up to the left of me amazingly. They're just dumbfounded as to what's going on there.
No. US politics are truly and objectively fucked up. This is not a misunderstanding. The policies of the two US parties have counter-parties in Europe. Their philosophical underpinning and rhetoric are not alien, we get them too.
They just happen to map to "centre right" and "batshit nationalist with no social plank". This is because the consensus on social issues is mostly what the Democrats hold true in Europe, whereas the position of the GOP is identical to that of our fascists/ultracatholics/ultranationalists/ultraliberals. For the exact same reasons (our country is the best/illegal immigrants/God/business is always right).
That a large part of the US population thinks those reasons are OK those not make them so. Broken logic based on flawed morals is wrong independently of the flag on your passport.
> The Republican platform is now "Vote for us, or else we will become Greece."
Consider why that strategy is one you are afraid will work. It is a combination of two factors, remove either one and it wouldn't work. One you can argue isn't under your control/isn't Obama's fault/blah blah but the other certainly is.
One, the economy is in the crapper and most Americans think it is more likely to get worse than to get better. Worse they think, by a large margain, that we are on the wrong course.
Second, the D team is offering no plan at all to deal with the elephant in the room. The ginormous deficit and rampant spending. Obama promised to cut the deficit in half and instead doubled it. Congress didn't even try to pass a budget in 2010 and the Senate refuses to even start debate on one for the third year in a row. Obama's last two budgets were forced to a vote by the Republicans and went down in flames by his own party. In short, the entire Democrat machine is totally AWOL, ceding the most important issue to the voters to the Republicans.
Ok, you don't like Ryan's budgets. You aren't supposed to, that is why we have two parties. But you won't beat something with nothing. Right now Ryan looks like the adult in the room while you guys are banging your spoons on the high chair. Get you ass in the game and tell us what you are for, we know what you are against. We are spending a trillion a year we don't have and the cutrrent plan is to do that until things go kaboom. What is your plan, other than kaboom. We can see Greece and hell, we can see California; we know how this story ends and it isn't somewhere we want to go.
Democrat delenda est
You know who else thought you could pick and choose ideas from the writings of various authors? Hitler.
See that url? politics.slashdot.org
If you don't like political news, disable the politics section in your account settings.
Ah yes, extrapolation, what fun. Obviously by the same measure, because America now decided everyone should have healthcare, it'll be communist by 2018.
It sounds like your beef is that you feel you should be free to be openly homophobic, but this is identical to suggesting you should be free to be openly racist, be free to be openly anti-semitic. That's fine if you believe that, but you're a far right minority, and your viewpoint isn't one shared by the vast majority of the population.
Note that every country outlaws some speech, some do it explicitly (like Germany and nazism, China and Tianamen square), some do it implicitly (like America bankrupting the Phelps, going after Assange/JÃnsdÃttir, abducting foreign Islamic preachers to guantanamo, ICE DNS seizures etc.). Ultimately America censors much like everyone else, it just has to pussy foot around it because it has to pretend it still cares about the constitution absolutely, whilst everyone else doesn't have this rather obscure situation, so they just explicitly state it instead.
In the UK we outlaw hate speech that is offensive based on race, disability, and interestingly, religion. It only makes sense therefore that homosexuality is equally protected, as it is, like race and disability, extremely natural, and certainly not something someone chooses like religion (which is why plenty of people change their religion without problem, but no one genuinely manages to change their sexual desires). For what it's worth homosexuality doesn't have the same degree of protection in the UK as religion, but it hopefully will soon as homosexuality is simply the latest fight for equal rights, just as there was a fight for gender and race equality beforehand.
For what it's worth regarding your original question "Perhaps Europe is just leftist?" the answer is no, because when you also look at countries like China, India, Japan etc. it's most certainly the US that is far to the right compared to Europe and the rest of the world, than Europe being far left compared to the US and the rest of the world. You can effectively use other nations as your point of reference and the idea that America is far right is the only thing that makes sense using a global frame of reference. Europe being much more leftist doesn't really make any sense, as where would that leave the genuinely leftist nations like Argentina and Venezuela, or the far left like Cuba and North Korea? In contrast, there aren't many nations that are particularly more right wing than the US nowadays, and certainly not to the degree that say Argentina and Venezuela are to the left compared to Europe.
The right wing thinks that this can be done more efficiently by the private sector.
Except for your bedroom. That's too important to be left to the whims of the market, apparently.
I think you are living in a fact free zone.
The Republicans are not offering real solutions. All they want to do is give tax breaks that will mostly go to their rich cronies and privatise everything, again for the benefit of the richest.
They are in the process of killing the U. S. Postal service by requiring that they fund their retirement system 75 years in advance. They want to sell off our national treasures and they don't mind rigging elections to get that done.
Right now they are enacting voter suppression laws that will primarily suppress voting in areas that would tend to vote for Obama under the guise of preventing voter fraud even though voter fraud has never been a major problem.
They create gridlock like little children throwing a tantrum. Can you say filibuster, filibuster, filibuster? Sure you can! And then claim that Obama can't get anything done. Well no shit Sherlock. Remember that they admitted that their number one priority was to make Obama a one term President! THERE NUMBER ONE PRIORITY! Screw the economy, screw anything else. And they announced their evil little pin head plan right from the start.
The American people cannot afford to allow these cheating low life scum bags to stay in office. They almost destroyed our country during the eight years that Bush and his cronies ran the country and we just can not afford to have a repeat. Oh, and isn't it curious that Bush didn't even really win the election but the Republicans suppressed the recount which later showed that he lost!!
Get ready folks. These bastards are gearing up to steal the election again. They have already voted in Iowa to extend the voting period for Republican leaning counties while shortening the voting period for Democratic leaning counties! That's right! Make it harder to cast your vote if you live in a primarily Democrat county and easier if most of the people would vote Republican!
Is it any wonder people are getting pissed off?
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!