Paul Ryan: A One-Man Fiscal Cliff?

Paul Ryan demonstrating his patented "Budget Karate Chop"

There were a couple of funny hashtags trending on Twitter the day Romney announced Paul Ryan as his choice for Vice Presidential running mate. Republicans were giddy about the prospect of a Romney/Ryan ticket, and together with horrified Democrats, they propelled the #RomneyRyan2012 hashtag to the number one spot for at least a full 14 hours. One excited tweeter cited the top-trending status as proof that Romney had knocked it out of the park, to which I felt obliged to reply, "Yes, haven't seen this much excitement since McCain picked Palin."

The thrust of the #BidenDebateLines thread seemed to be that Biden was a doddering fool, and that the silver-tongued Ryan would give him a sound thrashing in a debate. My contribution to the campaign is this debate line: "My opponent is on record as wanting to dismantle Social Security and Medicare... I think we're done here." Go ahead, Joe. That joke is on the house (pun intended).

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Pat Buchanan Blames Obama For Spooking S&P

My first article at PoliticusUSA.com:

Conservative scribbler and erstwhile Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan has always been crazy, but apparently it hasn't kept him from going insane.
In a recent American Conservative article ludicrously titled "Barack Hussein Hoover," Patrick "Sybil" Buchanan begins by raising the specter of "a debt crisis to dwarf the one that befell us in 2008," a frightening prospect indeed. The theory is that if the US is unable to arrive at some consensus and get our debt under control, a global crisis will ensue, and the myopic soothsayers at Standard & Poor's have recently stoked such fears by revising their outlook to "negative" on their triple-A rating of US debt. In an overwrought attempt to forecast a catastrophe before it happens, S&P offers their prediction "that congressional negotiations could result in no agreement on a medium-term fiscal strategy until after the 2012 congressional and presidential elections."