Let’s see whether Paul Ryan has what it takes to push the Tea Party agenda in a debate situation.
Paul Ryan vs Barack Obama:
Paul Ryan vs Debbie Wasserman-Schultz:
Paul Ryan vs Tim Geithner:
Paul Ryan against MSNBC leftist Chris Matthews:
Paul Ryan can really debate economic issues – he is the Chair of House Budge Committee, after all. The focus of this election will now be on the economy, where it belongs, and the Democrats will be forced to discuss specifics.
Not only can he debate, but he explains our economic situation well:
He can explain this stuff to you and I. He can explain this stuff to Democrats and Independents.
By the way, Paul Ryan has a perfect score on the pro-life issue, and he has even written about his pro-life views on his Congressional web site.
Here is an excerpt in which he contrasts the Supreme Court decision on abortion with the Supreme Court decision with racial discrimination:
Twice in the past the U.S. Supreme Court—charged with being the guardian of rights—has failed so drastically in making this crucial determination that it “disqualified” a whole category of human beings, with profoundly tragic results.
The first time was in the 1857 case, Dred Scott v. Sandford. The Court held, absurdly, that Africans and their American descendants, whether slave or free, could not be citizens with a right to go to court to enforce contracts or rights or for any other reason. Why? Because “among the whole human race,” the Court declared, “the enslaved African race were not intended to be included…[T]hey had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” In other words, persons of African origin did not “qualify” as human beings for purposes of protecting their natural rights. It was held that, since the white man did not recognize them as having such rights, they didn’t have them. The implication was that Africans were property—things that white persons could choose to buy and sell. In contrast, whites did “qualify,” so government protected their natural rights.
Every person in this country was wounded the day this dreadful opinion was handed down by this nation’s highest tribunal. It made a mockery of the American idea that human equality and rights were given by God and recognized by government, not constructed by governments or ethnic groups by consensus vote. The abhorrent decision directly led to terrible bloodshed and opened up a racial gap that has never been completely overcome. The second time the Court failed in a case regarding the definition of “human” was in Roe v. Wade in 1973, when the Supreme Court made virtually the identical mistake. At what point in time does a human being exist, the state of Texas asked. The Court refused to answer: “We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.” In other words, the Court would not “qualify” unborn children as living persons whose human rights must be guaranteed.
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) gave a speech Thursday to the Alexander Hamilton Society in Washington. If one is looking for clues as to Ryan’s interests beyond chairing the House Budget Committee, a speech, as he put it, to “a room full of national security experts about American foreign policy” would merit attention.
…Ryan delivered an above-the-fray talk on the subject of American uniqueness (a less loaded term) and the myth that American decline in inevitable. He posited, “Our fiscal policy and our foreign policy are on a collision course; and if we fail to put our budget on a sustainable path, then we are choosing decline as a world power.”
Ryan contends that the debt crisis is not a bookkeeping problem or even simply a domestic problem; it is about maintaining our status as a superpower and about American values.
[…]He plainly is not with the cut-and-run set on Afghanistan. “Although the war has been long and the human costs high, failure would be a blow to American prestige and would reinvigorate al-Qaeda, which is reeling from the death of its leader. Now is the time to lock in the success that is within reach.” Nor can he be accused of wanting to “go it alone.” “The Obama administration has taken our allies for granted and accepted too willingly the decline of their capacity for international action. Our alliances were vital to our victory in the Cold War, and they need to be revitalized to see us through the 21st century.”
As for China, he bats down the idea that we should go along to get along… He’s clear that China has “very different values and interests from our own.”
And finally on defense spending, he rejects the sort of penny-pinching isolationism of Jon Huntsman or Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.).
I have blogged about Paul Ryan continuously over the life of this blog – probably second only to Michele Bachmann. Definitely more than my other favorites Marco Rubio and Bobby Jindal. I think it’s telling that Romney chose one of my 4 favorites.
So we are basically getting a full spectrum conservative (social, fiscal, defense) who can debate calmly and confidently, and with the support of evidence. Ryan also has a solidly middle-class background. I now predict a Romney-Ryan victory in November.
Chick-fil-A appears to have set a company record in sales on Wednesday, a day on which Americans were encouraged to show their support for the fast-food restaurant whose leadership has drawn both criticism and praise in recent weeks for its opposition to same-sex marriage.
The privately held company declined to give specific sales figures but released a statement to the Los Angeles Times confirming that frenzied sales of chicken sandwiches and cross-cut waffle fries had made for a record-setting day.
“We are very grateful and humbled by the incredible turnout of loyal Chick-fil-A customers on August 1 at Chick-fil-A restaurants around the country,” said Steve Robinson, executive vice president of marketing, in the statement. “While we don’t release exact sales numbers, we can confirm reports that it was a record-setting day.”
[…]Robinson said the Atlanta-based company was “grateful and humbled by the incredible turnout of loyal Chick-fil-A customers” who showed up at outlets in droves coast-to-coast. Customers often waited in long lines, many weathering the blistering summer sun, just to get in the front door.
Such images — as well as those of crowded Chick-fil-A counters and long lines of cars snaking through the drive-thru lanes — created a social media frenzy on Wednesday as they were shared and reshared on a variety of platforms, including Twitter.
The images suggested that sales were indeed going gangbusters, and confirmation of those suspicions arrived when Orange County Pastor Rick Warren tweeted a snippet of a conversation he’d had with Dan Cathy, president of the popular fast-food chain:
@DanCathy just called me. #ChickFilA has already set a world record today, with 7 more hrs to go in the West. #OutOfChicken”
The company, which proudly abides by Bible-based principles and closes its doors to sales on Sundays, stressed in its statement that Chick-fil-A did not promote Wednesday’s turnout.
It also stressed that its employees abide by a service tradition to “treat every person with honor, dignity and respect — regardless of their belief, race, creed, sexual orientation or gender.”
Why is it that everyone is so angry with people who express a pro-marriage point of view? I think the problem is that militant secularists are very focused on hedonism in this life. They cannot ground objective morality, including human rights such as the right to free speech. They have no notion of an after-life, so they are trying pack in as much happiness as they can. Their purpose in life is not to form their own character in this life, so they can be rightly related to God. They want to be selfish and they want to be celebrated by others for it.
Often, militant atheists know nothing at all about Christianity and why Christians hold to their positions. This makes them even more intolerant of Christians who act like Christians in public and who participate in politics, like the abolitionists or pro-life activists. These people have never sat through a formal academic debate, and they have never heard the arguments for God’s existence and Christianity in particular. They don’t want to listen, they just want to shame Christians and smash the windows of their businesses and put them into prisons until there is no one left to call their selfishness into question.
People who supported Chick-Fil-A were protesting this coercion and censorship by the secular left. They were saying, “you can’t use the law and the government to take away my freedom to speak out in protest of things like slavery, abortion and redefining marriage”. It’s ironic that everyone is always accusing Christians of hypocrisy, and yet when we are authentic in public, they try to coerce us into acting like non-Christians!
I noticed that Gay Patriot, a well-known gay Republican and supporter of gay marriage, was out with his partner to Chick-Fil-A. He got some Chick-Fil-A food, and spent some time talking to the pro-marriage Chick-Fil-A customers. And everyone was nice to him. He is not a militant secularist – he thinks that everyone should be able to participate in defining policy and not be discriminated against for their views. No one who went to Chick-Fil-A was protesting Gay Patriot’s freedom to do what he pleases in his own life. We were protesting the government’s use of force to silence and coerce those who don’t want to have marriage redefined for the whole society. And we can defend our view using a variety of secular reasons, too, if anyone is interested.
WINTERY KNIGHT 