Paul Ryan

George Will on Sunday marvelously told liberal economist Robert Reich something that many conservatives have been dying to say for years.

During a fascinating Right vs. Left debate on ABC's This Week, after Reich predictably pined for higher income tax rates to solve all that ails us, Will struck back with the line of the weekend, "You are a pyromaniac in a field of strawmen" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Interviewing Chicago Mayor and former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel on Sunday's Meet the Press, host David Gregory fretted over the 2009 stimulus not being big enough: "Do you think this president wasted it – the crisis you talked about – to do the big things at that moment, to really be a jobs president to create the demand in the economy that you're talking about through more government spending?" [Audio available here]

While Emanuel defended the stimulus package, Gregory continued to hit from the left: "What were the opportunity costs of not a big enough stimulus, of healthcare reform that hurt him [Obama] politically at a time when he now needs, as you say, more government spending, but he doesn't have the political capital to get it done, does he, Mayor?" [View video after the jump]

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman showed his usual class when discussing Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, whose comprehensive budget plan calls for transforming Medicare into a voucher system in order to preserve the financially imperiled program and to trim the deficit. For his efforts, Krugman claimed that Ryan’s “voucher would kill people, no question.”

Krugman featured as a talking head in a CNN “Up Close” profile of Ryan by CNN journalist Gloria Borger that aired Sunday night.

[Video below the break.]

It's official -- I'm an Ed Schultz fan.

OK, well, "fan" isn't exactly the right word. Let's just say I'd be crushed if MSNBC canceled "The Ed Show." After all, nowhere else on cable does one find such a consistent stream of idiocy that never fails to amuse. Not even from Schultz's colleague Al Sharpton, though the man is certainly a contender. (video after page break)

It often amazes that liberals in this country revere New York Times columnist Paul Krugman as being an expert economist.

Take for example Friday's intellectually challenged piece entitled "Bernanke's Perry Problem" in which the Nobel laureate accused prominent Republicans such as the Texas governor and Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan of preventing the Federal Reserve chairman from enacting monetary policy that would save the economy:

Yo, Rev Al: thanks to Al Gore, we've got the internets.  We can look things up.  So when, on your MSNBC show this evening, you ripped Republican Paul Ryan for holding a $15-a-head fundraiser, of course we're going to check out how much President Obama pulled in per head at a recent do.  Turns out it was . . . $38,500!  So what's your point?

View video after the jump.

Remember the good old days when political commentators were governing their tongues and offering Americans a far more civil tone in the wake of the tragic shootings in Tucson?

Well, MSNBC's Chris Matthews on Thursday demonstrated just how bygone those days are when he gleefully reminisced about Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) sticking his neck out with a bold budget proposal months ago only to have President Obama "[punch] his head off" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Obama advisers, Democrat senators, and terminally stupid ideologues that for days have blamed Standard and Poor's downgrade of America's debt on the Tea Party are sadly mistaken.

Next to the President of the United States and his Party, those really responsible are members of the media.

As NewsBusters reported Sunday, Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) set off a liberal firestorm when he called Standard and Poor's U.S. credit rating change the "Tea Party Downgrade."

On Monday's "Morning Joe," host Joe Scarborough told "terminally stupid ideologues" that "really don't understand" anything because they're "so dogmatic [they] can't think for [themselves]" to "stop using the Tea Party as a piñata" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

In the past week, you couldn't swing a debt cat without hitting a press report about how irresponsible the "Cut, Cap and Balance" bill passed by House Republicans is.

A new CNN/ORC poll released a few hours ago finds the media very much on the wrong side of public opinion concerning this issue:

Correction: The original post incorrectly stated that former Speaker Pelosi had "extravagant use of Air Force One on the taxpayer's dime." While Pelosi did charter military aircraft for cross-country flights at taxpayer expense, Air Force One is the call sign exclusively reserved for the president of the United States.

At a time when the government is facing billions of dollars in cuts to programs that many Republicans deem as wasteful, it seems that the only spending Democrats want to address is Rep. Paul Ryan's expensive taste in wine, even though they have past ignored a number of instances of wasteful Democratic spending on the taxpayer's dime.

Last Friday, Talking Points Memo published a piece criticizing Ryan for sipping a glass of wine from a $350 bottle of Pinot Noir. Onlooker Susan Feinberg, an associate business professor at Rutgers, took pictures of Ryan and his two economist friends sipping the wine before approaching Ryan and asking how he could live with himself for dropping hundreds of dollars on wine while arguing for cuts to programs benefitting the poor and elderly.

The New York Times on Friday once again proved itself to have absolutely no clue how budgets work.

In its editorial "Negotiating the Debt Ceiling on a Knife's Edge," the Times - like so many other math-challenged "news" organizations in America today - blamed the current debt ceiling woes on the Bush tax cuts and Republican refusal to raise revenues:

As he normally does on "Inside Washington," PBS's Mark Shields Friday was waxing moronic about Republican plans to balance the budget.

Not pleased by the fictional account on display, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer challenged his fellow panelist saying, "Democrats have not even produced a budget for 2012. What’s their budget?" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh had more fun Friday with what Mark Halperin said on "Morning Joe" the previous day.

In Limbaugh's view, you can't call Obama the D-word on MSNBC, but you can debase conservatives however you want including saying they're "racist, sexist, bigot homophobes" (video follows with transcript and commentary, minor vulgarity warning):

CNN asked Wednesday if a person can follow "both Ayn Rand and Jesus," pulling quotes from both a Democrat and a fellow at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights to answer that Christianity and Rand's philosophy oppose each other. Buried deep within the post on CNN's Belief Blog was the contrary view that Christians can adopt certain tenants of Rand's philosophy while rejecting others contrary to their faith.

The question is popular among Christians at odds with the Republican budget authored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), a Catholic, who is a fan of Rand and her defense of capitalism and individualism. The American Values Network (AVN) in particular has tried to make known his endorsement of Rand and pitch it side-by-side with her anti-religious beliefs.

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? -- Matthew 7:4

On a somewhat slow Thursday night, let's have a good chuckle.  On his MSNBC show this evening, Cenk Uygur jumped on a poll showing Paul Ryan with a 26% unfavorability rating to declare that America "can't stand" the Wisconsin congressman and that the 26% unfavorable rating is "disastrous."

Question for Cenk: if a 26% unfavorable rating is that bad, how would you describe Nancy Pelosi's unfavorable rating of . . . 63%?  Just wondrin' . . .

View video after the jump.

The MacIver Institute, a Wisconsin-based free-market think tank, has released a new video exploring the essential philosophy that underlies many liberal economic policies of late:the belief that the government, not the individual has the foremost right to the nation's wealth. Check out their new video with commentary by Rep. Paul Ryan after the break, and let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Newsweek's Evan Thomas on Friday tried to float the typical media meme that neither Party is doing anything to solve our nation's budget crisis.

Unfortunately for him, fellow "Inside Washington" panelist Charles Krauthammer accurately noted that the Republicans have offered a proposal to cut $6.6 trillion in the next ten years, "but the Democrats have done nothing except to demagogue the plan and to destroy it" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

CBS hounded four Republicans from the left during a town hall on the economy which aired on Tuesday's Early Show. Bob Schieffer, Erica Hill, and Rebecca Jarvis pressed Reps. Paul Ryan and Allen West, Senator Tom Coburn, and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley to consider tax hikes to deal with the deficit. Schieffer also specifically accused the three members of Congress of "doing nothing" to fix the economy.

The two online questions which Jarvis took from viewers touted Democratic talking points about deficits under former President George W. Bush and how cutting the federal budget would lead to an increase in the unemployment rate, due to the laying off of federal employees. She also vigorously pursued both Rep.  Ryan and Rep. West. about the issue of jobs. In the first instance, the CBS business correspondent used an earlier answer from Haley, which emphasized the issue, to actually accuse the greater Republican Party of not paying enough attention to this issue, as well with the overall issue of the economy:

In the '80s the liberal media filled the airwaves with tales of woe from the homeless as a way to distract viewers from the runaway success of Reaganomics. In the 2000s, the same media chatted with one frustrated gas station customer after another to slam then-President George W. Bush.

However in 2011, with over 44 million Americans on food stamps, a new high according to the latest data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (See Table 2), the Big Three broadcast network news programs have been virtually devoid of anecdotal sob stories of moms and dads struggling to pay for their kids' box of Frosted Flakes, as a way to hammer Barack Obama's failed economic policies.

"I am fairly certain that when Paul Ryan first decided to publicly share his admiration of Ayn Rand, he could not have imagined it would lead to him speed-walking to his SUV to avoid a young Catholic trying to give him a Bible and telling him to pay more attention to the Gospel of Luke," Time's Amy Sullivan snarked in a June 3 Swampland blog post.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman demonstrated perfectly Friday evening the double-talk required from America's left to convince the public Medicare is fine despite recent warnings by its Trustees that it will go bankrupt in thirteen years without major changes.

In his blog posting at the Times website, the Nobel laureate insisted the senior health insurance program "is sustainable in its current form" - as long as changes are made to what it covers, that is:

Fox News's Greta Van Susteren on Saturday took issue with New York Times columnist Charles Blow's recent piece "False Choice."

In it, the perilously liberal commentator criticized Republicans for wanting to solve the nation's economic woes with a mixture of tax and spending cuts:

In an exchange with Pat Buchanan on Thursday’s “Morning Joe,” MSNBC reporter Norah O’Donnell demonstrated just how out of touch she is when it comes to her view of the state of the American economy (video follows page break): 

It never ceases to amaze me what people on MSNBC are willing to say while cameras are rolling.

On Wednesday, the perilously liberal Cenk Uygur - with a straight face no less! - told Congressman Brian Bilbray (R-Calif.) in the midst of a budget discussion, "I'm actually a fiscal conservative" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Debbie Wasserman Schultz, new chairwoman of the DNC, falsely claimed Sunday that the Ryan Medicare plan would deny care to seniors with preexisting medical conditions and that all future beneficiaries of Medicare would be abandoned by the Ryan plan and have to buy their own insurance from a private company.

As reported by both FactCheck.org and Washington Post, both of her Democratic talking points are simply untrue. In reality, according to the two sites, the Ryan plan specifically says that insurance companies "must agree to offer insurance to all Medicare beneficiaries" and subsidizes future beneficiaries so they can buy private insurance through a Medicare exhange program set up by the government.

Read what Wasserman-Schultz had to say after the break, and let us know what you think in the comments.