RYAN'S PEP RALLY

ACTUALLY....Republican vice president candidate Paul Ryan began his pep rally Wednesday night with this wife and three children on stage.  That was an admirable beginning to a speech full of  lies, dishonesty and anger.  He was there, of course, to accept the GOP's nomination for vice president or, in his own words, he "accepted the calling of my generation to help lead the county in tough times" and told the audience that Mitt Romney and he will make the difficult decisions needed to repair the nations economy. "We will not duck the tough issues, we will lead." Neither of the men has said how they would do that. WOW, why doesn't that give me a warm fuzzy feeling?
 
The National Catholic Reporter seems to think that Ryan's budget, fully endorsed by Mitt Romney, is taking out it's fiscal anger on the middle-class and poor, and asks where their deep seated anger comes from.  We all recognize that the federal deficit needs to be overhauled and that Medicare and Social Security could certainly stand improvement.  But the Ryan budget which the U.S. Bishops have called a "moral failure", is not the way to go.

Ryan hammered President Obama on a number of things.   His first hit was on, you guessed it, Medicare.  In a major section of his speech he tried to deflect Democratic criticism that he would slash Medicare benefits as part of his broad budget cutting plan.  Here is were he made one of his huge mistakes.  He said that President Obama made devastating cuts to the health care program for the elderly. Ryan said that the "president robbed Medicare of $716 billion".   What he didn't say that was Obama's Medicare cuts were to be over the next 10 years and in reimbursements to insurers and hospitals, not in payments to beneficiaries.  
Ryan ignored the fact that he incorporated the same cuts into budgets through the House in the past two years, using the money for deficit reduction.

Not everyone was pleased.  There was a woman who wanted to hear Republican leaders address foreign policy.  That was not included in Ryan's speech and she said obviously "this party isn't ready to talk about foreign policy".  (Perhaps it's because they don't know anything about foreign policy.)  Others noted that Ryan didn't say much about how he would cut spending and entitlement programs while preserving Medicare. There again, he probably doesn't have a clue.

He talked about the stimulus legislation that Congress passed at Obama's request in 2009 to help stabilize the economy.  What he didn't elaborate on was that he asked for some of that funding, which eventually went to two energy conservation companies in his home state.

Mr. Ryan spoke of other issues, many of which were based on deception and lies.  That topic is for another day.  As an unidentified woman said at the end of the evening:

"THE CONGRESSMAN'S SPEECH SKIPPED LIGHTLY OVER INCONVENIENT FACTS"