NB Columns

Mitt Romney has outdone himself in choosing Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate. The conservative base is ecstatic, and that will translate into voter intensity and high turnout.

Our country faces an unprecedented debt crisis, primarily driven by our entitlement programs. We have more than $100 trillion of unfunded liabilities — a staggering, incomprehensible number — and we are on a collision course with national bankruptcy.

Last Thursday's Wall Street Journal editorial "Why Not Paul Ryan?" made the case for his selection as the Republican vice-presidential nominee in this statement: "Romney can win a big election over big issues. He'll lose a small one."

After Ryan's serious proposal to restructure Medicare -- which virtually everyone knows must be reformed -- the response from Democrats was an unserious TV ad, which showed a Ryan look-alike pushing an old woman in a wheelchair over a cliff.

I sometimes wonder how far some Americans are going to stick their heads in the sand and pretend that the policies Obama is putting in place will actually bring the American economy back to prosperity. I wonder if some people even really care about what we have already done to the generations to follow, what kind of future they will have, burdened with the debt being left to them.

I can't help but ponder why people are still gullible enough to totally blame the ruinous state of the economy on George W. Bush after three and a half years of Obama's total and abject fiscal failure even after holding power over the White House and both houses of Congress for two full years.

President Barack Obama recently wrote an executive order that established a White House initiative on educational excellence for black Americans that will be housed in the Department of Education. It proposes "to identify evidence-based best practices" to improve black achievement in school and college. Though black education is in desperate straits, the president's executive order will accomplish absolutely nothing to improve black education. The reason is that it does not address the root causes of educational rot among black Americans. It's not rocket science; let's look at it.

The president's initiative contains not one word about rampant inner-city school violence, which makes educational excellence impossible. During the past five years, Philadelphia's 268 schools had 30,000 serious criminal incidents, including assaults — 4,000 of which were on teachers — robberies and rapes. Prior to recent layoffs, Philadelphia's school district employed about 500 police officers. In Chicago last year, 700 young people were gunfire victims, and dozens of them lost their lives. Similar stories of street and school violence can be told in other large, predominantly black cities, such as Baltimore, Detroit, Cleveland, Oakland and Newark.

Fifty years from now, everyone will agree that Karl Rove committed treason by revealing the identity of CIA "spy" Valerie Plame, tea partiers shouted the N-word at a black congressman and Duke lacrosse players gang-raped a stripper. Liberals tell whopping lies, and most conservatives can't be bothered to learn history.

In the last few days, we've heard both George Will and Charles Krauthammer, otherwise intelligent people, repeating bogus Democratic talking points about how Joe McCarthy allegedly smeared innocents with false allegations.

PLYMOUTH NOTCH, Vt. -- Two of my pundit colleagues -- David Brooks of The New York Times and Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal -- have written about this "boring" and "inconsequential" presidential campaign.

Perhaps the reason is that we've heard it all before. "There is nothing new under the sun," wrote the author of Ecclesiastes, but that doesn't mean old ideas that worked in the past can't be updated and applied to our time.

The Obama re-election team must be in panic mode. The president is stuck in a virtual tie with Mitt Romney in some polls and behind him in others, so in desperation it has reached out to the Big Dog, Bill Clinton, for help.

Clinton will speak next month at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., in a Wednesday night position often reserved for the vice presidential nominee. Obama and Clinton have not had the most cordial relationship, but when you're drowning, your feelings about the lifeguard matter less than his ability to keep you afloat. And Obama is a sinking man.

Consumer confidence fell to the lowest levels of 2012 this past week. Most Americans believe that both the economy and their own personal finances are getting worse. Just 25 percent believe the economy is getting better, and only 22 percent say the same about their personal finances.

Still, the lows of 2012 aren't nearly as bad as they were in the previous three years. But the trend is discouraging. It looks like yet another year starting with improved outlooks for the economy that fade by summer, and it's clearly taking a toll on the American people.

President Barack Obama's recent business-related comments in Virginia ("If you've got a business — you didn't build that; somebody else made that happen") sounded more communistic than capitalistic, especially because the "somebody" to whom Obama referred was in fact the U.S. government.

Progressives and the mainstream media were quick to come to the aid of the president by stating that similar statements have been said by other entrepreneurial moguls, such as Henry Ford, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Andrew Carnegie and Walter Chrysler. Others excused Obama by saying he "borrowed" his business verbiage from Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren.