Thoughts on Paul Ryan's announcement

For starters, there are more stupid takes on it than accurate ones.

The other day I saw a particularly stupid left-of-center take at Huffington Post. Well, actually, maybe calling it stupid is a bit unfair, given that it was explicitly based on the general leftist premise that federal government programs are inherently good, as is a pervasive federal role in the lives of US citizens generally. Of course, someone coming from such a worldview is going to see the agenda Ryan has had throughout his career as dastardly.

But Trumpists bring to the table their own kind of stupid:

Laura Ingraham celebrated Ryan’s exit on her Fox show last night, calling it proof that the “GOP establishment” is “out of steam” and finally yielding to Trump.

How "establishment" is a guy who has repeatedly drawn up budgets that try to at least start addressing the looming debt-and-deficit dilemma, and the reason for it (doing nothing to restructure Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid)?

Trumpists would do well to remember the vitriol this effort earned him from the Left:

Ryan's departure will not be mourned by Democrats or Trump loyalists. The Democrats caricatured Ryan as the goon throwing Granny in her wheelchair off a cliff. They actually ran TV ads with a Ryan lookalike. Barack Obama singled him out for scorn at a White House meeting, claiming later that he was unaware Ryan was in the front row.

So he came in for derision from both sides.

This was his reward for attempting to drag his party, and the country, toward a grown-up reckoning with our debt. Nearly single-handedly, Paul Ryan had managed to put tackling entitlements on the national agenda. As chairman of the budget committee, he convinced his colleagues to endorse modest entitlement reform. As he kept trying to explain, making incremental reforms now -- with no changes for current beneficiaries or those in their 50s -- can prevent drastic shortfalls and extreme benefit cuts that will be necessary in just 16 years, when Social Security is depleted. The outlook is even worse for Medicare and Medicaid.

 

 Then along came the Very Stable Genius.

Mr. Shoot-From-The-Hip flatly declared that he would not be part of any attempt to make these restructuring moves. And the crickets emanating from his camp sealed the deal that his slavish devotees had abandoned any claim to being conservatives.

But since their man won the nomination and the presidency, they were in a position to claim the conservative mantle anyway, thereby causing massive cognitive distortion among the general populace:

Most of the press coverage in the past 24 hours says matter-of-factly that the party has moved to the right. That’s not quite correct. The party has moved toward Trump, who has redefined modern conservatism in his more nationalistic mold and made what was historically a movement of ideas into, mostly, a cult of personality. “Ryan’s retirement means America no longer has a conservative party,” observes The Post’s Editorial Board. “Republicans are decreasingly conservative and increasingly reactionary.”

The conventional wisdom when Trump took office was that Ryan would be in the driver’s seat on policymaking because the new president didn’t have many core convictions. While the speaker has played a hugely consequential role at shaping what the tax overhaul looked like, for example, the chattering class underestimated Trump’s penchant for disruption and domination.

My surprise about the announcement has pretty much worn off, as I reflect on Ryan's character. A devout Christian (Roman Catholic) who loves his roles as father and husband, and who retains deep ties to his hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin, and who knew from the get-go that he was dispositionally ill-suited to the Speaker position, he's just had it.

That's pretty much the motivation of all the House conservative retirement announcements. I know it is in the case of Trey Gowdy.

It's a depressing commentary on the state of post-American politics and governance that conservative principles get little to no airing inside the Beltway, but let us remember that one core conservative principle is squarely facing the world as it is as the starting point for applying our ideals.

It will be interesting to see what he chooses for a next step. I wouldn't be surprised if it was some kind of think-tank path.

In any event, the record shows that he was an agent of common sense, principle and robust thinking at a time when those traits were increasingly at a premium.

Medicare: Not set to go kabust in the future, already there

Juniper Research Group's Chris Jacobs, writing at NRO, explains what being gun-shy of the third rail hath wrought:

It’s not that Medicare will become insolvent in ten or twenty years’ time — it’s practically insolvent now. The program’s Part A (hospital insurance) trust fund lost a whopping $128.7 billion between 2008 and 2014, according to the program’s trustees. The Congressional Budget Office projected earlier this year that the trust fund would become insolvent within the decade.

But in reality, the only thing keeping Medicare afloat at present is the double-counting budget gimmicks created by Obamacare. In the year prior to the law’s enactment, the program’s trustees estimated that the Part A trust fund would become insolvent by 2017 — just a few short months from now. But within months after Obamacare became law, the trustees pushed back their insolvency estimate twelve years, from 2017 to 2029.

The trustees’ estimates notwithstanding, Medicare hasn’t become more solvent under President Obama — far from it. Instead, the Medicare payment reductions and tax increases used to fund Obamacare are simultaneously giving the illusion of improving Medicare’s insolvency. When former Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius was asked at a congressional hearing whether those funds were being used “to save Medicare, or . . . to fund health care reform [Obamacare],” Sebelius replied, “Both.”

The Madoff-esque accounting schemes included in Obamacare do not improve Medicare’s solvency one whit. In fact, they undermine the program, because the illusion of solvency has encouraged politicians to ignore Medicare’s financial shortfalls until it’s too late.

And ignore it they have. Sanders has proposed a “Medicare for all” plan that a liberal think tank this week estimated would cost the federal government $32 trillion over ten years. Hillary Clinton has proposed creating another new entitlement — this one a refundable tax credit of up to $5,000 per family to cover out-of-pocket medical expenses, for which many of the 175 million Americans with employer-sponsored coverage could qualify. And Donald Trump has run ads, in states including Pennsylvania, claiming he will “save Social Security and Medicare without cuts.”

And Jacobs spells out a key concrete reason why Speaker Ryan must exercise maximum wariness in these get-acquainted sessions with Squirrel-Hair:

By claiming he can ’save Social Security and Medicare without cuts,’ Trump is effectively signing Republicans up for a $28 trillion tax increase to ’save Medicare.’  Little wonder, then, that the Speaker expressed his reluctance to endorse Trump; at their meeting today, they could well address this topic in detail.

This piece was written before Ryan's post-pow-wow presser, which I found encouraging.

Choke on this little nugget of reality, Barracuda

Anybody getting all wet in the britches over the prospect of primarying Speaker Ryan is facing an uphill battle:

Later today, Paul Ryan will meet with Donald Trump, a summit brokered by the GOP in order to help unite Republicans against Hillary Clinton. Ryan, who as Speaker of the House would normally serve as convention chair, expressed reservations about supporting Trump — and immediately became the target of threats of getting primaried. So far, though, the “Cantoring” of Paul Ryan looks like a bust:

Paul Ryan has an overwhelming lead on GOP challenger Paul Nehlen, according to a new poll.

The Remington Research Group found 78 percent of likely Republicans in the 1st CD backed Ryan, while 14 supported Paul Nehlen. The firm’s director wrote in an email it was the first survey the Kansas City, Mo., firm has done in the Ryan-Nehlen match up.

The contretemps with Trump hasn’t done much damage to Ryan’s standing in his district, either. One reason is that Trump himself isn’t all that popular in WI-01. While Ryan gets a 75/15 favorability rating in the district, Trump only gets a 41/43. Sarah Palin, who threatened that Ryan would get “Cantored” by Nehlen and publicly endorsed the challenger, does even worse at 24/54.

Ryan’s numbers are only slightly lower than a separate poll of WI-01 conducted by Marquette Law School, considered the gold standard of Wisconsin pollsters in March, and repeated by USA Today yesterday:

Ryan was viewed favorably by 81% of Republican voters in his district and unfavorably by 12% in a late March poll by the Marquette University Law School.

By contrast, Trump was viewed favorably by 28% of those voters and unfavorably by 59%.

The survey was taken before Trump became the presumptive nominee and before last week’s dramatic announcement by Ryan, the party’s highest-ranking public official, that he isn’t ready yet to make an endorsement.

Here's hoping no common ground is reached in Ryan's meeting with Squirrel-Hair today.

A simple litmus test

If you side with Speaker Ryan on this, you still embrace conservative principles to at least some degree. If you side with former Speaker Gingrich, you're an idiot who still thinks there's a viable Republican party.

Thursday on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich criticized current House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) for his lack of endorsement of likely presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump earlier in the day in an interview with CNN.

Gingrich told host Sean Hannity it was a “big mistake” and that it sets the wrong tone for the rest of the Republican Party.

“[I]n the case of Paul Ryan he made a big mistake today and he needs to understand this,” Gingrich said. “He is the Speaker of the House. He has an obligation to unify the party. He has an obligation to reach out. Obviously he and Donald Trump are going to have disagreements. Some of them will work out and some of them they won’t. That’s fine. Our constitution provides that speakers and presidents can fight, but I think he sends the wrong signal and a signal which I think endangers the House Republicans and endangers the Senate Republicans.”

“I much prefer what Mitch McConnell did, what John McCain did –they both said, ‘OK game’s over, we have a nominee. I’m for him,'” he continued. “And I think Paul Ryan has some obligation institutionally to be responsive to the fact that the people of the party he belongs to have chosen a nominee. And frankly in the long history of American politics, Donald Trump is not outrageously outside the norm. This kind of vitriol you get does not reflect accurately people who have been nominated for president over the last 200 years.

Grim junctures like our present one do have the attribute of being clarifying. 2016 is a wheat-from-chaff time for  those of us who really love freedom, God, and the United States of America.

Still not bringing what's necessary to the war for America's soul

I'm thinking about an assessment that LITD made this year that was flat-out mistaken: That Paul Ryan was going to work out fine as House Speaker.

In my piece, I relied heavily on an American Spectator endorsement of Ryan by Ross Kaminsky. He knows him personally, and convincingly vouched for his conservative bona fides.

And, to be sure, an argument for mitigating circumstances surrounding the passage of the omnibus spending bill can be made. There was a time crunch. Much of the bill's structure was baked in due to the process underway before Ryan had assumed his post.

But there was not even any indication of a tone of disgust or anger. No statement, before signing onto it, along the lines of, "I hate that this bill funds the murder of fetal Americans and the sale of their organs. I hate that it squanders taxpayers' money on windmill subsidies. I hate that it continues to give a pass to illegal aliens. Circumstances being what they are, it is passing and will go to the President's desk, but in the next microsecond, the fight to reverse this kind of evil begins in earnest."

Couldn't we have at least expected something like that?

Let alone actually fighting before the signing, blowing up the whole process, breaking down appropriations into department-by-department packages, as is actually how it's supposed to be done, and sending each one to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, knowing full well the Most Equal Comrade would veto it?

Oh, but that would risk a - hold on for it - government shutdown - and Beltway Pubs have already promised that that weapon will never be found in their quiver.

Which brings me to a concern I expressed in another post more recently - that all Pub prez candidates not named Donald Trump would take an above-the-fray stance in regard to Hillionaire's continued feminist pose, even as she sends her Cosbyesque husband out on the campaign trail.

Indeed, we now see my favorite candidate, Ted Cruz, doing exactly that:

Ted Cruz says he won’t use former President Bill Clinton’s political liabilities against Democratic presidential contender and former First Lady Hillary Clinton.

“I am not interested in getting into personal attacks and innuendo,” he said Tuesday at a news conference in Cisco. “Hillary Clinton’s biggest liability is that her policies are a disaster.”

New York businessman Donald Trump, the frontrunner in the Republican race for president, has used Twitter to black Bill Clinton as abusive to women.

“If Hillary thinks she can unleash her husband, with his terrible record of women abuse, while playing the women’s card on me, she’s wrong!” Mr. Trump said Monday via Twitter.

Cruz says he won’t engage in such attacks.

Instead, he outlined how he would contrast himself with Clinton, should he get the Republican nomination for president.

Look, this is an admirable position for Cruz to take. But consider another factor we ignore at our own peril: It is late December 2015, a dark, grim ugly time in a gravely imperiled, once-great nation. 

Just like the maxim that you don't take a government shutdown off the table when talking about budget considerations, you don't take sexual behavior off the table when talking about defeating the Clintons.

And, as with so much - from an understanding of the Constitution, to basic articulateness, to, yes, gentlemanly behavior -  Cruz is astronomically better suited to wage such a fight than Squirrel-Hair, he of the serial mistresses-turned-into-wives.

This is what is driving the enraged post-American populace into the arms of this narcissistic charlatan: the deep thirst for someone who understands how savage the war for America's soul is and is going to get.

If this nation is going to be worth salvaging, it's only because there was an identifiable good side in the war.

Yes, Squirrel-Hair is willing to pull the trigger, to get as ugly as the bad guys. Do we actual conservatives have such a general, such a chief executive, among us? A Sherman, a Truman?

We'd better. God will not bless any other kind of victory over the Democrats, and we'll remain as hosed as we are with this nation's throat in their grip.

Off to a very bad start

We had so wanted to believe the opinion pieces, written by people we considered to be of sober judgement, that Paul Ryan would be just fine as House speaker.

We kept reminding ourselves that he was the only one crafting and peddling a serious reversal of course in the budgeting approach of Congress.

But something kept nagging at us. We couldn't shake the creepy feeling that he had a bad, bad case of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome.

And that creepy feeling has been justified.

The omnibus appropriations bill is Boehner redux.

It damages the cause of conservative government by perpetuating the very programs and priorities the ending of which we have been screaming and roaring for.

With a deadline looming, congressional leaders unveiled "sweeping" tax and spending legislation late last night. The result makes one wonder whether congressional Republicans negotiate directly with President Obama on these deals, or whether they just send corporate lobbyists‎ to do so, thereby cutting out the middle man.

The Wall Street Journal reports, "The agreement…is expected to suspend for two years a tax on medical devices and delay for two years the scheduled 2018 start of the so-called Cadillac tax on high-cost employer health plans." Each of these "fixes" to Obamacare will make deep-pocketed groups that much less interested in full repeal in 2017, while the suspension of the Cadillac tax will also make it that much harder to pass the conservative alternative needed to make full repeal a reality. The delay of that tax is also a big win for labor unions.

But that's just the beginning.

The Journal writes, "In one major concession to Democrats, the spending bill won't cut off federal funding to Planned Parenthood Federation of America, as many conservatives had sought."
The Journal also reports that "the deal would adopt environmental and renewable measures that Democrats want. These include extending wind and solar tax credits, reauthorizing a conservation fund for three years and excluding any measures that block major administration environmental regulations."

And that's not all: "Lawmakers and aides said the spending bill doesn't include any restrictions on the resettlement of Syrian and Iraqi refugees into the U.S." (It does, however, reportedly "limit certain travel privileges granted to citizens of 38 friendly foreign countries that are allowed to enter the U.S. without obtaining a visa.") 

As always, there's an excuse: the Speaker was under severe time constraints.

Excuses no longer wash with an enraged electorate.

Either what has been happening to this country since 2009 is the deliberate imposition of decline and tyranny and must be reversed with a sense of the greatest urgency, or the enemy - that is to say, the Democrats - will figuratively hold that enraged electorate down and inject it with a hefty dose of befuddled apathy, and then all us cattle-masses will dumbly await our slaughter.

I so wanted to believe that this guy wasn't susceptible to Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome - today's edition

But it looks like Paul Ryan believes there's a possibility for "bipartisan agreement" and a willingness on the part of The Most Equal Comrade to discuss "areas of cooperation" if we shift the focus from FHer-care to more general entitlement and tax reform.

His wonkery has been valuable, but it seems to have clouded his understanding of what our enemy is all about.

Why we are so hosed

Paul Ryan's latest budget plan is his best yet.  He shortens the time frame for balance from 30 years to 10.  He gets even bolder regarding re-defining our big entitlement programs.  And he guts FHer-care. Beautiful and glorious.

It is, as versions 1.0 and 2.0 were, the only attempt in Washington at an actual solution to our existential  threats of overwhelming debt and government intrusion.

And the fact that it is universally deemed to be DOA in the Senate, and that it goes without saying that it will be demagogued everywhere from the NYT op-ed pages to the walls of your leftist Facebook friends, is the clearest indicator available of how utterly mad our whole nation has become.

Reason to feel like there's a future for this world

A piece at The American Thinker today by Jay Schalin entitled "Political Fog Finally Lifts" really lifted my spirits. 
So much understanding among the American people has coalesced in the last week.  The Left is clearly flailing.  The rest of this campaign season will not be about tax returns or subsidized contraception or Mormonism or neo-deconstructionist interpretations of what it means to be black or "queer."  It will be about the reasons why we are headed full-tilt toward the cliff's edge.  And Paul Ryan will clearly show that it is because we have promised a cornucopia of goodies to various Americans that we could never have made good on.
People of all demographic groups will readily understand this and get behind the team that made it so clear.
It's already having an effect and will continue to do so.  What we have to do is be relentless about continuing to get out the message.

Erskine Bowles tells it like it is

Says it wasn't Paul Ryan who scuttled the deficit commission's recommendations, it was the MEC.

John Boehner spooks me with his occasional exhibiting of symptoms of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome

Holds a conference call with Pub candidates for the House to discuss their concerns about how Ryan's forthrightness about entitlement reform might subject them to attacks from the Left.

Deal with it.  As Dan Riehl says, man up.  If this isn't a war to you, get out of the way.

He'd put it on a market footing

Yuval Levin at NRO concisely explains how the Ryan-Wyden plan for Medicare would work.  (Ron Wyden, co-author of the plan, is a liberal Dem Senator from Oregon.) 

The government would provide a premium-support payment equal to the second-lowest bid for a package of health-care insurance benefits to a senior in a given region of the country.  All competing insurance companies would know what the package of benefits the government was saying it would pay for were.  If the senior chooses that second-lowest bid, voila, the package is paid for.  If the senior chooses the lowest bid, he pockets the difference. If he chooses a higher bid, which he or she might do for any number of reasons, such as being more comfortable with that insurance company's track record of providing maximum value, or wanting features from a health-insurance policy above and beyond what the government is willing to pay for, he pays the difference. 

It still involves the government, of course, but the free market is setting the prices and encouraging competition.  Costs could be driven down to the point at which government involvement would wither away from no longer being necesary.

Obviously the right pick

The crowd quickly achieved overflow status in North Carolina.

Paul Ryan: Hiding Spending Doesn't Reduce Spending

Let's rerun this FHer classic often and everywhere

The regime is not going to like having Tim Geithner's "We don't have a definitive solution to the debt crisis, we just don't like yours" remarks to the next vice president replayed everywhere for the rest of the campaign season.