Paul Ryan, bowhunter

[Nemont]

I agree with a lot of that, especially on the Healthcare side (Romneycare v Obamacare, etc).

I would disagree that Obama has done little for hunters. His approach to public land policy through Salazar has been pretty danged good compared to past administrations. He's also pushed for increased funding for key conservation programs and has tried to end the ridiculous regulations surrounding Brucellosis (Elk are in the cross-hairs of producers, btw).

Do I agree with him on everything? No. But given the choice between two candidates who are similar in so many respects, it does come down to hunting and fishing for me. Romney and Ryan don't cut it.

Ben,

He has increased that spending on conservation and put on the backs of my children and grandchildren. He folded like a cheap chair when it came to additional revenues and the payroll taxes he cut blows a bigger hole in Social Security.

I could put up with some of that but looking around my hunting areas I have lost thousands of acres of prime upland bird hunting that was in CRP. Talking to many of the landowners they wanted to bid back in and they weren't allowed to. Yes prices for commodities have something to do with it but so does cuts to CRP. I am all for cutting our deficit but please don't tell me the Obama administration has improved my hunting, they haven't, neither would Romney.

I realize some of the cap was from the 2008 farm bill but President Obama has provided zero leadership on getting a new farm bill passed or halting the loss of CRP, which BTW if one believes in global warming, the loss of CRP acres is a very bad thing for CO2 levels.

CRP General Sign-up Period Ends


Wednesday, 13 June 2012 14:45

Despite near-record prices for many crops, interest in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) remains high, reports the Wildlife Management Institute. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently announced that nearly 48,000 offers were received from agricultural producers covering 4.5 million acres during the 43rd general sign-up opportunity for CRP that concluded in late May. USDA accepted 3.9 million acres into the program out of the 4.5 million acres offered.

Currently 29.6 million acres are enrolled in CRP nationwide. Six and a half million of those acres are scheduled to expire on September 30 this year. Sixty percent of those expiring acres were offered for re-enrollment during this latest sign-up opportunity indicating many producers are happy with the program.

While it is comforting to see interest in CRP remain strong during periods of high commodity prices, there is some cause for concern. With the 3.9 million acres from this sign-up, and assuming full enrollment in continuous CRP practices that are targeting 1.75 million acres, it is estimated that around 27.5 million acres will be enrolled in CRP by the end of 2012--well below the program’s 32 million-acre cap. Additionally, about a million acres of CRP will be lost in the northern Great Plains, a region that supports some of the nation’s best grassland wildlife populations. That area is also in the upper watersheds of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. Additional nutrients and sediment entering these streams as a result of converting CRP lands in this region back to crop production will adversely impact water quality throughout the length of these rivers and into the Gulf of Mexico.

USDA estimates that in 2011, CRP reduced losses of nitrogen and phosphorous from farm fields by nearly 800 million pounds. Additionally, they estimate that CRP reduces erosion by over 300 million tons per year. (pmr)

Is it all President Obama fault, nope, but the buck stops where? It is happening on his watch.

Nemont

 

[Ben Lamb]

I think that discounts the relationship that Obama has with Congress.

Congress has spent over $1 billion trying to dismantle the ACA, which they passed in order to make political hay.

Congress is responsible for the Farm Bill, and no amount of arm twisting by Obama would have changed the fact that the 2008 farm bill called for those cuts to CRP. The emergency haying and grazing rules sure, that's impacted CRP greatly and he is responsible for that.

But you also have increasing commodity prices and livestock prices leading to more of that crp land coming into production, so we can blame the market as well, right?

The Big O might be viewed as all powerful but he can't control congress. He can't control the market, and he can't stop CRP from coming out of the program when it's based on the willingness of the landowners involved in the program.

Congress sets those caps. Not the president. The president can't control a congress that has been openly hostile. I mean, Obama is no Bill Clinton!

 

[Nemont]

I think that discounts the relationship that Obama has with Congress.

Congress has spent over $1 billion trying to dismantle the ACA, which they passed in order to make political hay.

Congress is responsible for the Farm Bill, and no amount of arm twisting by Obama would have changed the fact that the 2008 farm bill called for those cuts to CRP. The emergency haying and grazing rules sure, that's impacted CRP greatly and he is responsible for that.

But you also have increasing commodity prices and livestock prices leading to more of that crp land coming into production, so we can blame the market as well, right?

The Big O might be viewed as all powerful but he can't control congress. He can't control the market, and he can't stop CRP from coming out of the program when it's based on the willingness of the landowners involved in the program.

Congress sets those caps. Not the president. The president can't control a congress that has been openly hostile. I mean, Obama is no Bill Clinton!

So if he can't corral congress then why reelect somebody who has proven he cannot get things done with the legislative branch?

I don't view him as all powerful but Presidential leadership can accomplish alot, including making your opposition look like total idiots and getting the majority of Americans to go along with your vision. Obama has only the left supporting his agenda. Ever hear of the Reagan Democrats or do a Bill Clinton and co-op the opponents issues? Vision, leadership and shaping policy is almost the sole function of the Executive branch with the President in the big chair.

The market has affected CRP but I have not heard a word from the President on the farm bill, which if he chose to, he could have alot of input in what is and is not in the bill.

So if it is just up to congress, then do you trust them to write tax reform as well without input? What about education policy? Defense policy? Foreign policy? Why do you cede farm policy only to congress?

Congress has spent Billions more on other idiotic pursuits. Billion here, billion there it adds up.

I agree Obama is no Bill Clinton, he is barely a GWB.

Nemont

 

[Ben Lamb]

I agree Obama is no Bill Clinton, he is barely a GWB.

Dude, that's below the belt.

Corralling congress is one thing, dealing with a congress that intentionally delays and obfuscates critical bills like the transportation bill, farm bill, etc, is another. It's not like the old days with Newt and Clinton, or even Tipper and the Gipper. Those men realized for the most part that partisanship doesn't come before country.

That's not what we have now. Congress is broken, and has a 17% approval rating. I'm not sure who that 17% is, but they're clearly not interested in good governance.

 

[Nemont]

Dude, that's below the belt.

Don't believe me with the GWB comparison? Go look at the 2004 Bush numbers vs. the 2012 Obama numbers. Almost like a mirror.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/obama_vs_bush_election_day_job_approval.html

That's not what we have now. Congress is broken, and has a 17% approval rating. I'm not sure who that 17% is, but they're clearly not interested in good governance.

Exactly, with hugely unpopular congress one would think a President could twist them up into knots politically. I just don't see it in this President, I don't see in Romney for that matter either but I can't just put everything on a do nothing congress when in the first two years President Obama enjoyed control of both the House and Senate and didn't deal with things then. Or at least set the table to force Republicans to take a serious of very, very unpopular votes.

Yes congress is broken and broken institutions are vunerable. Should be lots of vunerable incumbent Republicans to beat up on. Yet the Republicans probably will keep the House and should have a net gain in the Senate.

Nemont

 

[Ben Lamb]

There is a huge difference between Bush's first term and Obama's even though the numbers look similar. Congress went along with all of Bushes plans during that first term and caused us ridiculous amounts of grief. Congress went along with Obama's agenda on healthcare and got that passed. I think that is a major accomplishment given the amount of money thrown against the bill.

Nobody gets to 60 in the senate. The House will clearly stay R. I'd rather have a good veto to stop Ryan's attacks on public lands than worry about non-existent gun bans.

Thanks to Citizens United, it's a much, much different world that it used to be. Money purchases power openly, and corruption is paraded around like it's a nice tie.

I agree that Obama should have been a stronger influence on congress. There's no denying that he tried to negotiate against himself. Like you, I don't see Romney being any better. So again that brings us to ensuring that a positive veto stays in the WH.

 

[1_pointer]

Not that it pertains all that much to the discussion, but the Presidents proposed budget for 2013 was pretty easy on CRP compared to other similar programs. Wetland Reserve Program's budget goes to $0 and the Grassland Reserve Program, Wildlife Habitat Improvement Program and Conservation Stewardship Program get healthy cuts as well. WRP, GRP, and WHIP are good programs that get a lot done.

Anywho, carry on, I'm learing lots...even if I did come to the discussion with preconcieved notions.

 

[Nemont]

There is a huge difference between Bush's first term and Obama's even though the numbers look similar. Congress went along with all of Bushes plans during that first term and caused us ridiculous amounts of grief. Congress went along with Obama's agenda on healthcare and got that passed. I think that is a major accomplishment given the amount of money thrown against the bill.

Nobody gets to 60 in the senate. The House will clearly stay R. I'd rather have a good veto to stop Ryan's attacks on public lands than worry about non-existent gun bans.

Thanks to Citizens United, it's a much, much different world that it used to be. Money purchases power openly, and corruption is paraded around like it's a nice tie.

I agree that Obama should have been a stronger influence on congress. There's no denying that he tried to negotiate against himself. Like you, I don't see Romney being any better. So again that brings us to ensuring that a positive veto stays in the WH.

The challenge is that Obama spent the first year getting the ACA passed while the economy was the single biggest problem. He shot his wad on a bill that institutionalized many of the problems with our current health care system. It kind of picked the flowers and left the weeds in alot of ways.

We are just going to have to agree to disagree on keeping the current occupant. I say a pox on both their houses. I am finished picking the lesser of two evils as that means I had to pick an evil either way. My vote doesn't matter anyway as Romney/Ryan will win Montana for the electoral college.

Just to be clear you argue that congress went with along with GWB and that was bad, but they should go along with Obama because that would be good? What is the difference?

Were you worried about Money in politics when Obama out raised and out spent McCain and rejected public financing of his campaign? Yes CU is a stupid decision and it perverts our system and I believe allows curruptions but I bet if Obama was out raising Romney there would be silence on the left about it and all the crying would come from the right.

I don't know what a positive veto is? If Obama/Biden can't get congress to go along with them, what makes you think Romney/Ryan can?

Nemont

 

[Tom]

Romney's experience as governor and Ryan's 20 years experience in Washington seem like they should go a long way in getting people to work together for solutions. Here's a decent view of why pick Ryan?

http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/11/why-paul-ryan/

 

[JoseCuervo]

Ben, I'd drink a real beer with Biden and Dubya...

Dubya doesn't drink, he was a weak person and couldn't handle the evils of the bottle..... or cocaine......

 

[JoseCuervo]

Any man willing to make cuts to entitlements, support the 2nd amendment and hunters, and start balancing the budget has my vote.

Oh, please. When does he "start balancing the budget"? LMAO


And, if you care about hunting on My Public Lands, you don't want an ass-clown like Ryan.

 

[JoseCuervo]

Romney's experience as governor and Ryan's 20 years experience in Washington seem like they should go a long way in getting people to work together for solutions. Here's a decent view of why pick Ryan?

http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/11/why-paul-ryan/

Romney's "experience" as governor was barely any better than 1/2 term governor Palin's. He couldn't even win re-election.

And, you want 42 year old Washington insiders who have spent 20 years in DC supporting your interests? Ryan hasn't shown he can work with ANYONE.

 

[noharleyyet]

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_...nce-gop-ticket-would-put-them-back-in-chains/

Who's the assclown? Note the part where he tells his audience if they get out the vote they can win N.C. again.....one small detail, he's speaking in Virginia.

 

[JoseCuervo]

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_...nce-gop-ticket-would-put-them-back-in-chains/

Who's the assclown? Note the part where he tells his audience if they get out the vote they can win N.C. again.....one small detail, he's speaking in Virginia.

The ass-clown would be anybody that thinks Ryan's Plan would solve anything. There is a reason that the Democrats have been demonizing it for 2 years and why they were excited that Romney saddled himself with Ryan. There is a reason why even Romney is running AWAY from the Ryan plan...

And, in irony of irony, I find myself agreeing with David Stockman, yes, THAT David Stockman.....

Paul Ryan’s Fairy-Tale Budget Plan
By DAVID A. STOCKMAN
Greenwich, Conn.

PAUL D. RYAN is the most articulate and intellectually imposing Republican of the moment, but that doesn’t alter the fact that this earnest congressman from Wisconsin is preaching the same empty conservative sermon.

Thirty years of Republican apostasy — a once grand party’s embrace of the welfare state, the warfare state and the Wall Street-coddling bailout state — have crippled the engines of capitalism and buried us in debt. Mr. Ryan’s sonorous campaign rhetoric about shrinking Big Government and giving tax cuts to “job creators” (read: the top 2 percent) will do nothing to reverse the nation’s economic decline and arrest its fiscal collapse.

Mr. Ryan professes to be a defense hawk, though the true conservatives of modern times — Calvin Coolidge, Herbert C. Hoover, Robert A. Taft, Dwight D. Eisenhower, even Gerald R. Ford — would have had no use for the neoconconservative imperialism that the G.O.P. cobbled from policy salons run by Irving Kristol’s ex-Trotskyites three decades ago. These doctrines now saddle our bankrupt nation with a roughly $775 billion “defense” budget in a world where we have no advanced industrial state enemies and have been fired (appropriately) as the global policeman.

Indeed, adjusted for inflation, today’s national security budget is nearly double Eisenhower’s when he left office in 1961 (about $400 billion in today’s dollars) — a level Ike deemed sufficient to contain the very real Soviet nuclear threat in the era just after Sputnik. By contrast, the Romney-Ryan version of shrinking Big Government is to increase our already outlandish warfare-state budget and risk even more spending by saber-rattling at a benighted but irrelevant Iran.

Similarly, there can be no hope of a return to vibrant capitalism unless there is a sweeping housecleaning at the Federal Reserve and a thorough renunciation of its interest-rate fixing, bond buying and recurring bailouts of Wall Street speculators. The Greenspan-Bernanke campaigns to repress interest rates have crushed savers, mocked thrift and fueled enormous overconsumption and trade deficits.

The greatest regulatory problem — far more urgent that the environmental marginalia Mitt Romney has fumed about — is that the giant Wall Street banks remain dangerous quasi-wards of the state and are inexorably prone to speculative abuse of taxpayer-insured deposits and the Fed’s cheap money. Forget about “too big to fail.” These banks are too big to exist — too big to manage internally and to regulate externally. They need to be broken up by regulatory decree. Instead, the Romney-Ryan ticket attacks the pointless Dodd-Frank regulatory overhaul, when what’s needed is a restoration of Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era legislation that separated commercial and investment banking.

Mr. Ryan showed his conservative mettle in 2008 when he folded like a lawn chair on the auto bailout and the Wall Street bailout. But the greater hypocrisy is his phony “plan” to solve the entitlements mess by deferring changes to social insurance by at least a decade.

A true agenda to reform the welfare state would require a sweeping, income-based eligibility test, which would reduce or eliminate social insurance benefits for millions of affluent retirees. Without it, there is no math that can avoid giant tax increases or vast new borrowing. Yet the supposedly courageous Ryan plan would not cut one dime over the next decade from the $1.3 trillion-per-year cost of Social Security and Medicare.

Instead, it shreds the measly means-tested safety net for the vulnerable: the roughly $100 billion per year for food stamps and cash assistance for needy families and the $300 billion budget for Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor and disabled. Shifting more Medicaid costs to the states will be mere make-believe if federal financing is drastically cut.

Likewise, hacking away at the roughly $400 billion domestic discretionary budget (what’s left of the federal budget after defense, Social Security, health and safety-net spending and interest on the national debt) will yield only a rounding error’s worth of savings after popular programs (which Republicans heartily favor) like cancer research, national parks, veterans’ benefits, farm aid, highway subsidies, education grants and small-business loans are accommodated.

Like his new boss, Mr. Ryan has no serious plan to create jobs. America has some of the highest labor costs in the world, and saddles workers and businesses with $1 trillion per year in job-destroying payroll taxes. We need a national sales tax — a consumption tax, like the dreaded but efficient value-added tax — but Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan don’t have the gumption to support it.

The Ryan Plan boils down to a fetish for cutting the top marginal income-tax rate for “job creators” — i.e. the superwealthy — to 25 percent and paying for it with an as-yet-undisclosed plan to broaden the tax base. Of the $1 trillion in so-called tax expenditures that the plan would attack, the vast majority would come from slashing popular tax breaks for employer-provided health insurance, mortgage interest, 401(k) accounts, state and local taxes, charitable giving and the like, not to mention low rates on capital gains and dividends. The crony capitalists of K Street already own more than enough Republican votes to stop that train before it leaves the station.

In short, Mr. Ryan’s plan is devoid of credible math or hard policy choices. And it couldn’t pass even if Republicans were to take the presidency and both houses of Congress. Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan have no plan to take on Wall Street, the Fed, the military-industrial complex, social insurance or the nation’s fiscal calamity and no plan to revive capitalist prosperity — just empty sermons.

David A. Stockman, who was the director of the Office of Management and Budget from 1981 to 1985, is the author of the forthcoming book “The Great Deformation: How Crony Capitalism Corrupts Free Markets and Democracy.”

 

[Tom]

Ryan just cosponsored a medicare bill with a democrat. That's working with people in a good way for sure.

 

[Don K]

http://www.nwf.org/~/media/PDFs/Wildlife/NWF_RyanBudgetReview.ashx

http://wilderness.org/update/house-budget-public-lands-sale

http://refugeassociation.org/2012/04/the-great-american-public-lands-sell-off/

 

[schmalts]

Not that it pertains all that much to the discussion, but the Presidents proposed budget for 2013 was pretty easy on CRP compared to other similar programs. Wetland Reserve Program's budget goes to $0 and the Grassland Reserve Program, Wildlife Habitat Improvement Program and Conservation Stewardship Program get healthy cuts as well. WRP, GRP, and WHIP are good programs that get a lot done.

Anywho, carry on, I'm learing lots...even if I did come to the discussion with preconcieved notions.

Pointer, WHIP is a good program? for who?? A guy with some cash buys a large chunk of farm land, enrolls it into WHIP, turns it into a duck and deer hunting paradise by flooding some of it, gets paid back the purchase price from tax payers and has the right to keep everyone off that land but his buddies. IMO WHIP is a taxpayer scam unless it has changed in the last few years. WHIP should have never been, the money used to pay back owners who still own it should have been used to purchase said land instead.

 

[steamfitter]

Well looks like he might hunt but he is a union buster so if people like working for low pay and no benefits he is your man.

 

[WBouldin]

Well looks like he might hunt but he is a union buster so if people like working for low pay and no benefits he is your man.

Seriously? Unions are shit! (Here come BuzzH) Unions are a sensible idea that blew way out of proportion. As a Home Depot associate im proud not to be in a union. The idea of paying union dues to some fat cat who occasionally decides to scratch his balls "for the good of the employees" is a joke. I earn my money, I keep my money and if i have a problem with anything I voice my opinion like an independent American can. I dont need some fat cat parading around with his cronies and my money to do that for me.

Go Scott Walker! Go Paul Ryan! Go anyone that isnt pro union!

 

[WBouldin]

Well looks like he might hunt but he is a union buster so if people like working for low pay and no benefits he is your man.

And by the way, Home Depot amongst other pro associate companies provide better pay and benefits that most others. Hell im 20 and work part time, I have dental, medical, stock options AND a 401k....