Tag: Paul Ryan

Paul Ryan’s First Big Lie As Speaker

Jon Ponder

screenshot-ryan-abc-immigration-lie

Earlier this week, Paul Ryan marked the occasion of his first appearance on the Sunday shows as speaker of the House by telling a whopper. In an interview by Martha Raddatz on ABC’s “This Week,” Ryan took immigration reform off the table because, he said, Pres. Obama had been “proven untrustworthy on this issue.”

That’s rich, since it was Ryan who became immigration reform’s biggest advocate in 2013 — only to pull his support and help collapse passage in the House after a bipartisan bill proposed by the “Gang of Eight” had passed in the Senate with more than 80 votes.

It’s also rich because the real reason Speaker Ryan won’t pursue immigration reform now is because he struck a backroom deal with the fire-eating tea baggers in the House who drove his predecessor, John Boehner, out of office. Ryan traded killing immigration reform for their votes for him as speaker.

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Ryan Advises Clinton Not to Be a Campaign Robot

Buck Banks

You can’t let the process numb you to the point where you’re just a robot. Even though all the pressure is ‘Don’t gaffe, don’t deviate, be prepared, give the prepared thing,’ you’ve got to watch that, because you can just be boring and you can be vanilla and you can so sanitize yourself that you’re not yourself.

— Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), quoted by Politico, on running for national office.

The Curse of the SOTU Response

Buck Banks

The Bobby Jindal slow-motion train wreck.
The Bobby Jindal slow-motion train wreck.
First Read suggests having pity on Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) for being picked to give the GOP response to President Obama’s State of the Union address. Why? Because of the curse of the State of the Union responders. Here are the last eight:

2007: Jim Webb (out of politics, although he’s making a quixotic presidential bid)

2008: Kathleen Sebelius (Obamacare rollout!)

2009: Bobby Jindal (uncomfortably awkward intro, his star has fallen)

2010: Bob McDonnell (felony conviction)

2011: Paul Ryan (losing VP nominee, though he’s still a top GOP voice)

2012: Mitch Daniels (out of politics)

2013: Marco Rubio (the great water incident, incident, maybe running for the White House)

2014: Cathy McMorris Rodgers (safe – so far)

Jeb Bush’s Electability is Far from Inevitable

Buck Banks

In two solid years of being pitted against Hillary Clinton in polls, Bush has not led a single one, and trails her in the latest RealClearPolitics average by over 9%. That’s a poorer margin than for Ryan (6%), Christie (7%), and Huckabee (8%), and about the same as for Paul. Ted Cruz is the only regularly polled putative GOP candidate running significantly worse than Bush against HRC (an RCP average gap of 13%), and that’s largely because he’s far less well-known.

— Ed Kilgore, writing in Talking Points Memo.

Paul Ryan Caught on Tape: ‘We’re Not Going to Give Up on Destroying the Health Care System for the American People’

Jon Ponder

Remember Kinsley’s rule: In Washington, a gaffe is when someone accidentally tells the truth:

Republican House Budget Committee Chairman PAUL RYAN: “This to us is something that we’re not going to give up on, because we’re not going to give up on destroying the health care system for the American people.”

The “new” Republican budget released by Ryan, the infamous zombie-eyed granny starver, is the same as the old budget he drafted — it voucherizes Medicare, repeals Obamacare and the rest. Why would Republicans phone in a new budget that’s the same as the budget that is unpopular in the polls and was rejected by Congress?

Paul Krugman cuts to the heart of it:
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Paul Ryan’s ‘Biggest Boosters’ and ‘Senior Republicans’ Send Signal That They Expect Romney to Lose

Jon Ponder

Professor Ryan?
Professor Ryan?
On her MSNBC show last night, Rachel Maddow reported that off-the-record comments by sources close to Paul Ryan and high in the GOP ranks appear to signal that Republicans in high places are anticipating that Mitt Romney will lose the presidential election on Tuesday.

Maddow suggested that the anonymous comments from the Ryan camp this week were ominously similar to anonymous comments made to the media as the presidential campaign was drawing to a close four years ago by pro-Sarah Palin conservatives — comments that, according to Maddow, citing an anonymous senior official from the McCain campaign leadership team, caused a rift between Palin and John McCain in the last week before the 2008 election. (McCain’s campaign manager, Steve Schmidt, is an MSNBC contributor and McCain senior advisor Nicolle Wallace is a frequent guest on the network.)

Here is the statement about Palin to the New York Times from a supporter that created agita for McCain and his senior management team at the end of October 2008:

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