ROMNEY/RYAN 2012: Confirmed.
Mitt Romney’s pick for Vice Presidential candidate? Looks like it’s Paul Ryan.
You know the architect behind the GOP’s cynical budget? That’s the one.
He’s got nice hair. He’ll excite the cynical of Mitt GOP base. He won’t excite anyone else: women, Latinos, independent voters—he’s Mr. “Mr. Ayn Rand-Free Market”…
Via the NY Times:
Ratings:
- Rated 13% by the ACLU, indicating an anti-civil rights voting record. (Dec 2002)
- Rated 0% by the HRC, indicating an anti-gay-rights stance. (Dec 2006)
- Rated 36% by NAACP, indicating a mixed record on affirmative-action. (Dec 2006)
- Rated 8% by the NEA, indicating anti-public education votes. (Dec 2003)
- Rated 30% by CURE, indicating anti-rehabilitation crime votes. (Dec 2000)
- Rated 0% by the CAF, indicating opposition to energy independence. (Dec 2006)
- Rated -3 by AAI, indicating a anti-Arab anti-Palestine voting record. (May 2012)
- Rated 11% by APHA, indicating a anti-public health voting record. (Dec 2003)
- Rated 0% by the AU, indicating opposition to church-state separation. (Dec 2006)
- Rated 10% by the ARA, indicating an anti-senior voting record. (Dec 2003)
Early White House response?
Also via Reddit:
I’ve seen a lot of people already congratulating the President on his second term “win” but the thing that will hurt his campaign the most is apathy. Don’t forget to sign up (https://my.barackobama.com/page/s/become-a-volunteer/) and volunteer for the campaign, even if it’s just for a few hours!
Can’t emphasize this enough. Just getting out to volunteer once is a huge asset to the campaign. Don’t underestimate the power of Romney’s unlimited money and incredibly loose morals when it comes to advertisements. http://www.barackobama.com/one
Bonus:
Paul Ryan on Ayn Rand:
“I just want to speak to you a little bit about Ayn Rand and what she meant to me in my life and [in] the fight we’re engaged here in Congress. I grew up on Ayn Rand, that’s what I tell people.”
“I grew up reading Ayn Rand and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are, and what my beliefs are.”
“It’s inspired me so much that it’s required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff. We start with Atlas Shrugged. People tell me I need to start with The Fountainhead then go to Atlas Shrugged [laughter]. There’s a big debate about that. We go to Fountainhead, but then we move on, and we require Mises and Hayek as well.”
“But the reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.”
“And when you look at the twentieth-century experiment with collectivism—that Ayn Rand, more than anybody else, did such a good job of articulating the pitfalls of statism and collectivism—you can’t find another thinker or writer who did a better job of describing and laying out the moral case for capitalism than Ayn Rand.”
“It’s so important that we go back to our roots to look at Ayn Rand’s vision, her writings, to see what our girding, under-grounding [sic] principles are.”
“Because there is no better place to find the moral case for capitalism and individualism than through Ayn Rand’s writings and works.”
And some video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmW19uoyuO8
^ Ryan: “I think a lot of people would observe that we are right now living in an Ayn Rand novel, metaphorically speaking.
…
Ayn Rand, more than anyone else, did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism.”
And then, apparently, Ryan discovered she was an atheist: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/297023/ryan-shrugged-robert-costa
“I reject her philosophy,” Ryan says firmly. “It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas,” who believed that man needs divine help in the pursuit of knowledge. “Don’t give me Ayn Rand,” he says.
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