Re: While Rome Burns . . .

Sullys On a Roll
I can’t quit you when you write things like this: So true. You’ve got Andy McCarthy telling us that president Obama is allied with radical Islamists in a Grand Jihad against America, Stanley Kurtz insisting that he was a Marxist revolutionary in college, and Dinesh D’Souza claiming he is motivated by the Kenyan anti-colonialism of a bygone era. John Yoo and Marc Thiessen established themselves as national pundits by insisting that strapping someone to a board and nearly drown...

Paul Ryan: We Do Plan on Defunding ObamaCare
Friday, January 07, 2011 By Matt Cover Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., speaks at a news conference on Capitol Hill in this March 19, 2010, photo. Republicans are promising to Repeal and replace President Barack Obama's Health Care overhaul if they win control of Congress. (AP File Photo/Harry Hamburg) (CNSNews.com) - House Budget chief Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said that Republicans would use the appropriations process, along with the budget process, to deny funding for the Controversial ObamaCare ...

Rep. Paul Ryan Rails Against CBO On Health Care, But Hypes Report On His Budget Plan
Like many of his Republican colleagues, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) doesn't have much faith in the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office's determination that repealing Health Care reform will increase the Deficit by $230 billion. Last night on right-wing talker Mark Levin's Radio Show, Ryan complained that "the Health Care bill is full of gimmicks and spending tricks" that steer the number crunchers to an unrealistic conclusion. "What they have is a piece of paper that the...

Ryan Takes the Point on Fiscal Reform
With the National Debt now topping $14 Trillion, up from $13 trillion just seven months ago, and a Gallup Poll revealing the outgoing Democratic Congress to have among the lowest average Approval Ratings recorded in the last two decades, it is a great relief to hear that incoming House Republicans are planning to cut funding of their legislative offices by 5 percent. They are also cutting the House Appropriations Committee Budget by 9 percent. Both actions are part of new House Speaker John A. B...

Liberal calendar
From Republican Congressman Paul Ryan: “We’re gonna be reducing all domestic Discretionary Spending. I can’t tell you by what amount and which program, but all of it is going to be going down, and the aggregate amount will be back to 2008 levels before the spending binge occurred.” From Andrew Sullivan: “Before the spending binge occurred? You mean to say that the eight years of George ‘Deficits Don’t Matter’ Bush did not include spending binges?...

DNC blasts GOP 'broken promises'
House Republicans have already scammed the American People just a few days into their new majority, the Democratic National Committee charges in a new web video unveiled Friday. In the two-minute spot, titled “Broken Promises,” the DNC accuses the GOP of quickly backtracking on its pledge to slash the federal Budget by $100 billion. Continue Reading Text Size - + reset Politico 44 The video strings together a series of clips of media commentators and Journalists questioning what t...

Libya Chairs Human Rights Committee, Domestic Equivalent
The Committee For A Responsible Federal Budget and the Concord Coalition have bestowed a "Fiscy Award" upon, in addition to two others, Paul Ryan for his "frequent efforts to promote fiscal discipline and leadership to restore fiscal health," Let us examine those efforts. It's true that Ryan talks about the Deficit a lot. It's also true that he has a plan that, though increasing the Deficit over the next decade, would decrease it over a very long period of time so long as un...

House Republicans challenge Obama on debt limit
(01-06) 15:20 PST WASHINGTON (AP) -- In power scarcely a day, House Republicans bluntly told the White House on Thursday its request to raise the nation's $14.3 Trillion Debt Limit will require federal Spending Cuts to win their approval, laying down an early marker in a new era of divided government. Speaker John Boehner made the challenge as the new GOP majority voted to cut funding for House members' own offices and committee operations by $35 million. Rank and File Republicans described th...

House budget chairman says deeper cuts ahead
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Republican-led House of Representatives will push for Spending Cuts in the next Fiscal Year that will be deeper than they promised voters in last year's congressional Elections, the lawmaker leading the effort said Thursday. "If people think we're afraid of cutting $100 billion they've got another think coming," House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan said Thursday. "That's just a down payment." Ryan's comments come one day after he and other Republicans said they wo...

Ryan vows to cut $100 billion in spending from budget
House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said he still intends to cut $100 billion in spending this year even as time ticks away.  Ryan, who with other House Republicans have vowed to slash federal spending to fiscal 2008 levels, said the initial estimate of $100 billion in savings has dropped to between $50 billion and $60 billion because of money that has been spent since the Fiscal Year started Oct. 1. Several Republicans have said they still want to cut the $100 billion but are finding th...

Republicans May Not Care About Deficits, But They Care About Cutting Social Spending
It’s tempting to just laugh at the hapless Republicans who are flailing away at their initial promises, and to conclude that they don’t care about the Deficit. This is all true, and they don’t. But that doesn’t mean they won’t engage in very consequential Spending Cuts. There’s no question that the new House rules allow for broad exemptions on deficit-busting Legislation, particularly the Repeal of Health Care. As Harry Reid said today in a statement, the re...

The Spending Cut That Wasn't
Douthat sees a silver lining: The [GOP] pledge to cut $100 billion was always more of a symbolic sop to the Tea Parties than a real step toward fiscal discipline. The question for the new Republican majority has always been whether it will make any serious progress on entitlement reform and Tax Reform, not whether it will find inevitably-marginal ways to trim Discretionary Spending. You can’t have Fiscal Responsibility if you keep entitlements, tax expenditures and defense spending off the t...

Rep. Ryan: 'The Spending Spree Is Over'
GRETA VAN SUSTEREN, Fox News HOST: So in terms of what's -- you're the new chairman of the Budget Committee. What's going to happen? Tell us next month or two. REP. Paul Ryan: The Spending Spree is over. We're going to stop all this spending gusher that's been happening, and we're going to start cutting spending and get back to normalcy. First of all, we started today by cutting our own budgets. We started... You must login to comment. The Fox Nation is for those opposed to intolerance, excessiv...

Geithner Pushes Congress to Raise Debt Ceiling
Reuters reports: Republicans acknowledged on Thursday they will have to sign off on more Deficit spending to avoid a Debt default that would roil Financial Markets and bring the government to a grinding halt. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner pressed lawmakers to raise the nation’s $14.3 Trillion Debt Limit to allow the United States to borrow more and avert a crisis in the coming months. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, a Republican, said he recognized the need to allow the ...

Gates's budget ax: winners and losers
Politico's Phil Ewing runs down highlights from Defense Secretary Bob Gates's barn burner Budget- cut Speech yesterday and judges the winners and losers: WIN, LOSE or DRAW: The Army: DRAW - Loses the Surface-Launched Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile and the Non-Line-Of Sight Missile, which was dead already. Gains new funds for soldier Suicide prevention and Substance Abuse counseling, modernization of its vehicle fleet, faster fielding...

CHairMaN BuN S iS iN Da HouSe
chairman conrad, senata sessions, and udda members of da committee, thank yous fa dis hope atunity to offa my views on current economic conditions, recent Monetary Policy actions, and issues related to da federal Budget. me's thinkin da Economic Outlook ?the Economic Recovery dat began a year and a alf ago is continuin, although, to date, at a pace dat as bin insufficient to reduce da rate of Unemployment significantly. da initial stages of da recovery, in da second alf of 2009 and in early 2010...

No More Mister Nice Blog
IN THE FUTURE, EVERY REPUBLICAN WILL RUN FOR PRESIDENT FOR 15 MINUTES I can't keep track of all the crazy talk surrounding the race for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination -- it's getting so complex that I'm really beginning to doubt my own ability to offer idle, ill-informed speculation on how it will all shake out. It's not just the New York Post's report that Rudy Giuliani is seriously considering a run, though that's bizarre enough. I guess he's thinking that if the gay group GOProud can g...

China's development of stealth fighter takes U.S. by surprise
Source: Los Angeles Times By Ken Dilanian, Los Angeles Times January 7, 2011 A few weeks ago, grainy photos surfaced online showing what several prominent defense analysts said appeared to be a prototype of a Chinese stealth fighter jet that could compete with the best of America's warplanes, years ahead of U.S. predictions. Days later, the commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet disclosed that a long-awaited Chinese anti-ship missile, designed to sink an American Aircraft Carrier, was nearly operat...

The Texas FAIL
Paul Krugman’s column on the failure of the state of Texas as an incubator of Republican economic ideas is a good one. Wasn’t Texas supposed to be thriving even as the rest of America suffered? Didn’t its Governor declare, during his re-election campaign, that “we have billions in surplus”? Yes, it was, and yes, he did. But reality has now intruded, in the form of a Deficit expected to run as high as $25 billion over the next two years. And that reality has implications for t

If Republicans Are Serious About Debt Reduction, Defense Cuts Must Be On The Table
The Republican Pledge to America promised Budget cuts, but only to non-defense Discretionary Spending. Which leaves just 15% of the national Budget available for cutting. Many who are concerned with National Security are inclined to say that defense spending shouldn’t be cut as national defense is one of the few actual duties assigned to the Federal Government by the constitution. We should, it follows, cut spending from all the things the government isn’t supposed to be doing before...

Boehner claims he'll hold debt limit hostage
Reuters: U.S. House Speaker John Boehner said on Thursday that any move to increase the United States' $14.3 Trillion Debt Limit must be accompanied by Spending Cuts. "The American People will not stand for such an increase unless it is accompanied by meaningful action by the President and Congress to cut spending and end the job-killing spending binge in Washington," Boehner said in a prepared statement. Boehner is doing his best to pretend that he has a strong hand, but let's not forget, if ...

Should Defense be immune from cuts?
Mark Tapscott asks the same question at the Washington Examiner I have begun asking fiscal Conservatives who rightly see runaway federal spending as a threat to our economic health.  We need to find ways to erase over $1.3 Trillion from annual spending just to get to the point where we don’t add to the National Debt, let alone start to shrink it.  After the obvious targets at NPR and the National Endowments for the Arts contribute their drops in the bucket, where will those cut

Watch Paul Ryan Live
Get alerts when there is a new article that might interest you. Paul Ryan will soon sit down for a conversation with Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot. e21 and the Manhattan Institute are sponsoring the event, which will be at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. from 12-1 p.m. Bill Kristol will be introducing Ryan and Gigot. You can watch live on C-SPAN3 or online, here. The new Republican majority in the House has promised to reign in the federal Budget by cutting spe...

Will Obamacare cut our federal deficit?
The short answer is this: no government program reduces the Deficit. The only action a government can take to reduce the deficit is to cut spending or raise taxes - and often as not, raising taxes just opens the door for new spending. What the Affordable Care Act does is reduce some spending, while creating a whole bunch of new, untried subsidies for the Middle Class. But interestingly enough, the mainstream press has simply taken for granted the ‘fact’ that ObamaCare reduces Deficit...

Fraud
On his show yesterday, Hugh Hewitt interviewed Paul Ryan about his plans during the next Congress: HH: In terms of the staff that you’ve got coming to Budget committee, out of the culture of Washington, they’re all kind of suspect. Where are you finding the people who are going to have sort of the immunity to the spending disease? PR: Well, I just hired somebody from the National Review. He knows his audience. But you don't need someone from NR to cut spending. We all know how to cut t...