VP Wars: Paul “Skywalker” Ryan Vs. “Jar Jar” Biden

…with a representative from “Emperor Obama Palpatine” moderating.

A long, long time ago…in a law school far, far away…

It seems that — with her jobs as an NPR correspondent and ABC TV journalist, and her marriages to Ben Bradlee, Jr. (with whom she has a daughter); FCC Commissioner Julius Genachowski (with whom she has a son); and now an NPR journalist — she is very much a creature of the Washington establishment.

Maybe she will be fair to Paul Ryan. We will see. Given her past and connections, however, one cannot help suspecting where her sympathies lie — and it’s difficult to imagine her doing anything that would upset the NY-DC liberal elite cocktail circuit. I’d love to be wrong on that.President Barack Obama was a guest at the 1991 wedding of ABC senior foreign correspondent and vice presidential debate moderator Martha Raddatz, The Daily Caller has learned. Obama and groom Julius Genachowski, whom Obama would later tap to head the Federal Communications Commission, were Harvard Law School classmates at the time and members of the Harvard Law Review.

After TheDC made preliminary inquiries Monday to confirm Obama’s attendance at the wedding, ABC leaked a pre-emptive statement to news outlets including Politico and The Daily Beast Tuesday, revealing what may have been internal network pressure felt just days before Raddatz was scheduled to moderate the one and only vice-presidential debate Thursday night.

Both Politico and The Daily Beast jumped to ABC and Raddatz’s defense. The Huffington Post, a liberal news outlet, joined them shortly thereafter, while calling “unusual” ABC’s attempt to kill the story before it gained wide circulation.

Genachowski — called “Jay” at the time of his wedding, sources told TheDC — and Raddatz would go on to have a son together before their divorce in 1997. They have both since remarried to other people.

A source who attended the 1991 wedding told The DC that Obama was also a guest there, and remembered that a man by the name of “Barry Obama” was among the guests dancing at the reception. (RELATED: Marital, personal ties link Obama administration to Commission on Presidential Debates)

…Carol Platt Liebau, a political commentator who was a Harvard Law Review colleague of Genachowski and Obama, wrote that “despite being a year below both men on the Review and not close personal friends with either of them,” she remembered Genachowski and Raddatz’s relationship as “quite public” during those days, and that “Raddatz visited Boston frequently.”

Genachowski’s friendship with Obama would continue through the campaign trail in 2008 and into the White House: He aggressively fundraised for Obama in 2008 as a campaign bundler, and served on the presidential transition team before winning his appointment to chair the FCC.

Tonight is the Vice-Presidential Debate.  By all rights, this “wrestling match” should be about as even as Jerry “The King” Lawler vs. Andy Kaufman was.

In fact, per weeklystandard.com:

Vice President Joe Biden has not sat down for a nationally televised interview in 5 months. The last big TV interview Biden did was on NBC’s Meet the Press, when he jumped the gun and came out in favor of gay marriage before President Obama was able to publicly shift his position. Days later, Obama did his own nationally televised interview and expressed his own support for that initiative.

Biden’s Meet the Press interview aired Sunday, May 6, 2012.

In fact, it is not just TV Biden has been avoiding. He’s done only one print interview since Paul Ryan joined Mitt Romney on the Republican ticket back in August.

“From all we can find, Joe Biden has done one interview since Paul Ryan joined the ticket August 11. One. And it was with John Heilemann for New York magazine. Over that period, Paul Ryan has done 197 interviews, 153 of those on TV (29 National & 124 local/regional). The rest print or radio,” says an aide at Mitt Romney’s campaign headquarters.

A Republican source explains why Biden is being kept away from the press.

“Joe Biden gets used by the Obama Campaign like Bernie from ‘Weekend at Bernie’s,'” says the Republican source. “They drag him out to a battleground state, prop him up on a podium in front of a teleprompter, pose him for photos with locals, and then quickly roll him back to Air Force 2 before reporters have a chance to ask him questions. They want Biden to be seen, but not heard in any interviews because they’re afraid he might embarrass the president with another one of his hilarious gaffes.”

Even President Obama has sat for interviews during this time. Most notably, Obama joined the ladies of The View for a daytime interview when he was in New York City recently for the United Nations General Assembly.

According to Paul Ryan, we shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover, or a politician by his gaffes:

GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan says he’s ready for Joe Biden to come at him like a “cannonball” in their debate later this week.

“Because they had such a bad debate, Joe Biden is just going to come flying at us,” Ryan told radio host Frank Beckmann on WJR in Detroit. “It seems pretty clear that their new strategy is just to call us liars, to descend into a mud pit.”

Biden and Ryan will meet in their only debate on Thursday at Centre College in Danville, Ky. ABC’s Martha Raddatz will moderate the event, which will feature questions on both domestic and foreign policy.

Ryan has been getting ready for the debate with the help of Ted Olson, a former solicitor general for President George W. Bush. Biden’s debate partner has been Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee that Ryan leads. CNN reported Obama adviser David Axelrod also sat in on some of the pre-debate sessions.

In the radio interview, Ryan called Biden a “gifted speaker” and “proven debater.”

Polls by Gallup and Pew found that voters believe Romney did better than Obama in their first debate last week. Ryan said today that his running mate “raised the bar quite high” for his own performance on Thursday.

I think Ryan will do well. This is an administration in the death throes of circling down the porcelain receptacle.

All the future Vice-President has to do is bring his light saber of truth, facts, and figures, and the “gaffemeister”, “Jar Jar” Biden, will not be able to formulate any sort of logical counter-attack.

Hopefully, just as in “Star Wars 6: Return of the Jedi”, a “Skywalker” will be victorious.

Jar Jar Biden Stumbles Upon the Truth.

Shortly after the immaculation of the leader of the Regime, as I was beginning my journey into the world of blogging, I made the statement that, in terms of Vice-President, America had gone from Darth Cheney to Jar Jar Biden.

I didn’t exaggerate.

Thehill.com reports on the latest open mouth, insert foot moment from the Gaffemeister:

Vice President Biden said he understood the frustration that led many West Virginia Democrats to vote for a felon over President Obama in the state’s presidential primary.

Asked what he made of a felon sitting in a Texas prison who won four out of 10 Democratic primary voters in West Virginia, Biden told Ohio television station WTOV that he doesn’t blame people who are frustrated and angry over the economy.

“Look, I come from a household where whenever there’s a recession, somebody around my grandpop or my dad’s table lost a job. A brother, a sister a friend, a neighbor,” Biden said. “When you’re out of work, man, it’s a depression.” [Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then.]

Biden said a lot of Americans are still hurting because of the recession the Obama administration inherited.

“And so I don’t blame people. They’re frustrated, they’re angry,” Biden said.

He added that Americans would eventually decide that the path back to employment and prosperity would lead them to Obama’s approach rather than Mitt Romney’s.

You need to stop those liquid lunches, Joe.

Average Americans are drowning in a sea of debt.

Here are some depressing statistics, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, from an article published May 7th:

Consumer credit outstanding surged by $21.36 billion, or 10.2%, to $2.542 trillion, Federal Reserve data showed Monday. That was the biggest jump since November 2001, in both dollar and percentage terms. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires had forecast an $8.5 billion increase. February’s expansion in consumer credit was revised up, as well, to $9.27 billion from an initial estimate of an $8.73 billion rise.

With consumer credit expanding at the fastest rate in the six months ending in February since late 2007–before the credit crunch caused a painful contraction–and commercial banks showing an increasing willingness to lend, Deutsche Bank analysts said earlier Monday the household deleveraging process may finally be running its course.

Still, much of the credit expansion has reflected a shift in student loans to direct borrowing from the federal government, with loans held by the Department of Education surging more than four-fold since 2008. Federal student credit outstanding rose to $460.2 billion in March from $453.3 billion the previous month.

Overall nonrevolving credit, which includes student credit as well as auto loans, rose $16.17 billion to $1.739 trillion.

Revolving credit, which includes credit-card debt, increased in March by $5.18 billion to $803.63 billion. That was the first gain in three months.

The consumer-credit report doesn’t include numbers on home mortgages and other real-estate secured loans. But the Fed data are important for the clues to behavior by consumers, whose spending helps propel the economy.

So, what sort of economic example is our Federal Government setting for us average consumers?

A horrible one, per cnsnews.com:

The White House and the congressional leaders of both parties in Congress have begun maneuvering this week over the issue of the federal debt and what to do when the government hits the latest statutory limit on that debt–$16.394 trillion—which Congress and the president agreed to when they cut a deal on the debt limit last August.

The federal debt is currently $15.709 trillion, or about $685 billion below the limit.

The first spending deal the White House and leaders of both parties in Congress made last year was on March 2. On that day, the president signed a continuing resolution to keep the government funded past March 4, when the previous continuing resolution, passed by a lame-duck Congress in late 2010, expired.

The March 4 CR kept the government funded for two weeks and was approved by a bipartisan 335-91 vote in the House and a bipartisan 91-9 vote in the Senate.

Since that March 4, 2011 bipartisan continuing resolution, the federal government has been funded by a series of bipartisan deals cut between the White House and congressional leaders.

In the meanwhile, under these bipartisan spending deals, according to official figures published by the U.S. Treasury, the federal debt has climbed from $14,182,627,184,881.03 to $15,708,753,671,767.64.

That is an increase of $1,526,126,486,886.61.

Given that the Census Bureau estimates there are about 117,538,000 households in the United States, the per household increase in the federal debt since Congress enacted its March 4, 2011 bipartisan spending deal has been approximately $12,984.

So, what is President Barack Hussein Obama (mm mmm mmmm) doing about our National Debt?

Per openmarkets.org, he’s trying to add to it:

President Obama’s proposed budget is so irresponsible that even the Senate, controlled by Obama’s own political party, just rejected it in a 99-to-0 vote. Reading the proposed budget does not inspire confidence, even in liberal journalists. In February, USA Today wrote that “Obama’s budget plan leaves debt bomb ticking… The best test of a budget proposal these days is whether it reins in the national debt… The election-year budget President Obama sent to Congress on Monday fails that test.”

The Los Angeles Times noted on February 14 that Obama’s proposed budget “offers no real solution to the United States’ long-term fiscal problems.” That same day, the Washington Post wrote that “Mr. Obama’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2013 falls short. At the end of the 10-year budget window, he would have the national debt at a disturbing 76.5 percent of gross domestic product” even under very optimistic assumptions. “The final budget of his first term does not reflect the leadership on issues of debt and deficit that Mr. Obama once vowed.”

The Detroit News noted that “President Barack Obama’s 2013 budget proposal should be dismissed as a blueprint for his re-election campaign. But it’s worse than that. If passed as presented — and there’s little likelihood of that — the spending plan would lock America on an auto-pilot course for Greece.” (Editorial, “Obama Budget Shirks Off Any Pretense To Fiscal Responsibility,” The Detroit News, 2/14/12.) The Chicago Tribune called Obama’s budget the blueprint for a “debt debacle.” In March, the House rejected the Obama budget in a 414-0 vote. In 2008, Obama promised a “net spending cut,” but as soon as he was elected, he proposed massive spending increases.

While the GOP-controlled House has passed a budget plan of its own, the Democratic-controlled Senate has not passed a single budget during the Obama administration, leaving the country without an official budget for over a thousand days. Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) acknowledged that “there’s no excuse” for Senate Democrats’ failure to pass a budget, and that a state governor might face impeachment for similarly failing to put together a budget.

No chance of that happening in Washington, DC.  A realistic National Budget would lead to those professional politicians actually being held accountable.  And those jokers up there have never seen a tax dollar that they did not want to spend.