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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.
Mitt Romney introduces Paul Ryan as the "next President of the United States"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTzssn6JQVQ
Its not remotely related to tech or topics that slashdot normally covers
Seriously? Have you been on a deep space mission and not read Slashdot since 2000 or something?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Looks like the story from the other day about knowing Romney's VP from Wikipedia edits was wrong.
Wikipedia Edits Forecast Romney's Vice Presidential Pick
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....
To help give them motivation to go vote at all. Plenty of conservatives look at Obama and look at Romney and don't see a lot of difference (from their point of view). If it doesn't matter (to them) who wins, why bother voting?
So you think that skin color or gender is what makes a person correct for a given job? Do you understand how absurd that actually sounds? I guess not.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Perhaps Romney is simultaneously announcing his choice of running mate and his plan to commit suicide if elected.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.'"
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?
I always thought that Romney (or McCain the last time) had chosen Colin Powell it would have been a much better strategic decision to fight the Democrats. You'd also be showing people that you were planning a split from Bush in many ways.
Of course that'd be logical, and not something the crazies that have taken over the Republican party would listen to. I think the GOP needs to go full retard/crazy and get their electoral asses handed to them a few times for sense to come back to them—I'm just worried that the lesson they would learn is not that they've gone too far, but haven't gone far enough.
Thankfully I'm Canadian so I only have to worry about the secondary effects of all this madness.
Criticizing Mitt Romney makes one automatically an Obama fan?
I guess that's what happens when your mind is distorted by a de-facto two party system, though thankfully not every American has succumbed to this.
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Video of Romney introducing Ryan as the next president here. Later he comes back, puts his arm around Ryan and says he has been know to make a few mistakes. Great start.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
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.
If he was, I think Ryan has decided to not being him back.
Paul Ryan proposed an additional 6% budget cut for NASA in the Ryan Budget so that he could increase DOD spending.
Sorry, it's more important that we kill each other than understand our place in the universe. Have a good day.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
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
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.
Bush Junior inherited a budget surplus from Clinton's term. Obama inherited the mess of a deficit from Bush Junior. 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 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. PLUS not a single life was lost, no buildings were destroyed, and no refugees had to flee their homes. It's time the US started spending MORE money building a positive image, making new discoveries , and advancing human achievement ........and spend LESS money trying to become the policeman of the world.
> 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
Obama has been a useless sack(though most of the problems aren't actually his fault except in not actually doing anything about them). Health Care is about the only thing he's actually done right, and even that's not what it should have been.
Problem is, the Republicans don't actually want an election about the economy(mostly because their plan is going to do two tenths of fuck all to help anyone except the very rich and they don't need the help), instead they've made this election about a level of ideological war which hasn't been waged, since Jefferson put in the Alien and Sedition acts more than 200 years ago.
This election isn't about the economy, the economy is fucked, cutting taxes isn't going to change that and it's probably too late for any serious stimulus even if the economy was healthy enough in the first place to stimulate back to life.
Romney made this election about extreme right wing ideology in the primaries, and by choosing the poster boy of everything wrong with the Republican platform as his running mate he's made the general election about it. Now of course the ironic thing is that there is pretty much nothing he could have done to make it easier for Obama to win reelection than picking this knucklehead to run with, so who knows why he's done this. There's no President etch-a-sketch with Paul Ryan on the ticket.
What's the difference between ignorance and apathy?
Don't know, don't care.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
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.
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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.
even more so once you consider that both parties are right wing by any sane standard...
By what standard? The far-left standard? Jeez, if you're to the right of Mao Zedong you get tarred and feathered these days.
How about by the standards of the right wing just a generation ago right here in the good ole USA.
Reagan's tax policies and Obama's are very close. Broad cuts (or in Obama's case extention in existing cuts) in rates and closing loopholes for the rich. Obama's signature bill was his medical insurance reform act, was a slight mod of the early '90's Republican health care alternative to Hilarycare. Obama has continued extra-judicial detentions of bush, the domestic surveillance of bush, the wars of bush, and has radically expanded the extra-judicial assasinations via drone strikes that bush started. A generation ago it was unthinkable for any politician left or right to attack social security or medicare. The democrats, while still getting some support from unions, have completely abandoned returning that support. Obama is pushing a trade deal with So. Korea that like NAFTA is based on looney right wing economic falderol. Obama and Clinton's supreme court nominations only appear liberal in comparison to the new conservative justices. Kagan and Sotomayor don't hold a candle to any of the great liberal justices of the mid-twentieth century. Recall that Nixon signed into law the EPA, OSHA, and the Endangered Species Act. Hell Nixon didn't just sign the EPA bill, he proposed it! Obama has been a big supporter of big oil and big military spending. Obama has also done nothing to restrict gun rights.
In fact with a few exceptions the Democrats of today look a lot like the Republicans of 20 or more years ago. Those exceptions obviously include social hot-button issues like abortion/women's right to choose, and gay marriage/protect marriage. The other big exception is that Obama after his continuation of big bailouts and stimulus started by bush to save the economy from the freefall we were in, has been that Obama has actually tried to reign in the deficit unlike his borrow and spend republican opponents.
The reason that the US seems so politically polarized today is that the Democrats have only strolled to the right during the last 30 years while the Republicans have been sprinting to the right, while the people who haven't been infected by fox etc have remained mostly in place.
-- QED
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.
Your premise has been tried, and it failed. It turns out that people who cooperate to build roads, sewers, armies, and the other trappings of modern states have much better standards of living than those living in the state of nature you advocate. Just look at Somalia.
If every person on the planet was, good, kind, intelligent, and hard working then the anarchy you proposed would work great, but that is not how the real world is.
Anarchists never rule
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.
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.
No, I wouldn't. I make a fair chunk of my income from capital gains, and even still, I think the capital gains tax rate is too low. Most first-world countries have top income tax brackets over 50%. For the United States, a significant percentage of the people who earn the most money are paying 15%. That's basically third-world territory. Governments can't usefully function with such a low income tax rate, with the possible exception of tiny nation states.
Here's a reality check for you: political stability and economic stability require that the gap between the "haves" and the "have nots" be kept in check. When this doesn't happen, eventually the people at the bottom get tired of being shat upon by the people at the top, and there's a violent revolution. That's reality, and there's no ecaping it. Sure, some of the people at the top can flee to other countries, but with their money becoming almost immediately worthless, their homes captured by revolutionaries, etc., even in the best case scenario, they end up as a poor shadow of what they were before.
And even if you ignore that reality, there's still the fact that the people at the top got where they are because of the support of all the people at the bottom. You can't become a billionaire in a vacuum. You either get there by hiring people to work for you or by getting lucky on the stock market, in which case you're basicaly loaning money to people in the hope that they'll give you more money later. Either way, your success is almost entirely caused by other people doing the work. And that's true at every level of the economy. I'm successful as a programmer in part because I got a good education from public universities, and in part because lots of other people got acceptable levels of education that enabled them to get jobs that produced economic output, which in turn paid them money to buy the things that my employer produces. Even a grocery store employee is only employed because there are people buying groceries. No matter how far down the economic food chain you go, we are all interconnected, and anyone who claims otherwise is either a complete fool or a liar.
What this means is that when the gap between the "haves" and the "have nots" grows too big, there's nobody left to buy that MP3 player, and the economy falls apart. The economy is only capable of functioning as long as there is enough money getting poured back in. Right now, the rich are amassing fortune. They aren't pouring it back into the economy by buying things, by hiring people, etc. And as long as that is true, the economy will continue to suffer. Income taxes are not the only way to cause money to flow back into the economy, but they are one way, and more to the point, they are the only way that cannot be avoided.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
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!