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"

WHERE IS THE MIDDLE-CLASS ???

ACTUALLY...... It's extremely hard to define our social classes in America. The gap between the rich the middle-class is indeed widening.  A new survey found that most Americans believe the very wealthy are intelligent, but greedy and less honest than the average American.

According to latest research findings "about 63% of Americans say the GOP favors the rich over the middle-class and poor, and 71% say Romney's election would be good for wealthy people.  The Great Recession was not an equal opportunity dis-employer."  A public policy professor at the University of Michigan describes the gap between rich and poor as the widest in decades.  College graduates, whites, and middle aged workers, had fewer and shorter layoffs than high school graduates, blacks, Hispanics and younger workers.  And only a small percentage of the rich work in the hardest hit industries, like construction and manufacturing.

Mr. "Fix-it" will double interest on student loans, making a college education harder for middle-class Americans.  Next, seniors won't know what hit them when he makes changes in Medicare.  There are many more 'shockers' that he has in store, but I'll leave that for another time.

That Americans, is the Romney-Ryan partial plan for a "better America".  More tax cuts for the rich, who don't need it; higher taxes on the middle-class, who don't need it; higher interest rates for student loans, who don't need it, less Pell grants for students, who don't need it, and less Medicare.  How can that plan fail?  It did fail from 2001-2009 under the last Republican president.

The Romney campaign has an up hill battle as they try to win over the middle-class voters.  They are  known, by many, as the party of the rich.  People have said that Romney has always felt that his wealth puts him out of touch with regular Americans...... now he must convince the voters that he is the candidate who represents the middle-class.  Romney and Ryan dubbed their campaign as The Come Back Team.

I JOIN PRESIDENT OBAMA, WHO DUB THEM AS THE GO BACK TEAM