PrairiePundit

PJ Media: House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) is the latest Republican to attack President Trump’s claim that the FBI wrongly spied on his campaign during the election. This isn’t surprising considering the deepening political divide among Republicans over Trump’s policies, but Ryan, like others siding with the Obama administration, fails to address or explain irregularities in the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation. Democrats who have been briefed by the FBI on the investigation say they have seen “no evidence to support any allegation that the FBI or any intelligence agency placed a ‘spy’ in the Trump campaign, or otherwise failed to follow appropriate procedures and protocols.” Rep. Trey Gowdy agreed, saying he believed Trump would be “just fine” once he finds out what happened. “I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got, and that has nothing to do with Donald Trump,” Gowdy said. Ry...

Washington Examiner: House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., declared Saturday that President Trump will be an "asset" for Republicans competing in the 2018 midterms. Speaking to reporters after giving a speech at his state's GOP convention in Milwaukee, Ryan exclaimed that people in swing states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan care most about issues that impact them personally, and not troubling stories for the president that have been a mainstay in the media. "The president is strong in these states," Ryan said, according to the Associated Press. "He's an asset. ... Whether I'm running around southern Wisconsin or America, nobody is talking about Stormy Daniels. Nobody is talking about Russia. They're talking about their lives and their problems. They're talking about their communities, they're talking about jobs, they're talking about the economy, they're talking about national security." ... The Democrats hav...

Washington Examiner: House Speaker Paul Ryan said the Paris climate agreement President Obama announced Wednesday "would be disastrous for the American economy," and said Obama "acted unlawfully," in signing the deal without ratification from the U.S. Senate Ryan, R-Wis., has pushed an agenda in the House that would roll back the climate-focused EPA regulations that have hurt the U.S. energy-producing sector, in particular coal-fired power plants and the coal mining industry. Ryan said the Paris climate deal, which is a global agreement to curb greenhouse gas emissions, would further stifle those jobs. "It carelessly throws away the great gains that the United States has made over the past decade in energy development," Ryan said, leading to higher energy costs that will most deeply hurt the poor. ... Democrats have a despotic agenda and they are not going to let something like the constitution stand in their way.   They believe that the agreemen...

Politico: Paul Ryan on Tuesday night continued harshly criticizing Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while in office, saying that “she clearly lives above the law” and that her actions were disqualifying. “What bothers me about this is that the Clintons really are living above the law,” the House Speaker told Megyn Kelly during an interview on Fox News. “This is one of the reasons why people are so dissatisfied, so upset about government. They think that people live by a different set of rules, and the Clintons, they take the candle on this one.” Asked by Kelly whether he thought Clinton’s actions were disqualifying, Ryan replied: “Oh, sure I do.” Ryan also questioned how the FBI and director James Comey were able to come to the conclusion that he did regarding the FBI’s investigation, adding that he felt the bureau director laid out the perfect case for prosecution in his press conference Tuesday. “He basically spent a number of minutes walking through how she no...

Slate: ... The Journal blames the rise of Trump not on the fact that the conservative agenda championed by Ryan is not all that popular with rank-and-file conservatives. Rather, it claims that “[m]any of the most devout Never-Trumpers” are themselves to blame because they “have spent years fanning grassroots hostility against immigration and Mexicans.” According to the Journal , Trump would never have darkened the GOP’s door with his anti-immigration rhetoric had these dastardly right-wingers allowed Ryan to broker a deal with President Obama that would have increased immigration levels. The Journal deserves credit for offering such a daringly original take. Unfortunately, it does not bear even a passing resemblance to reality. First, it is worth noting that many of the most devout Never Trumpers are in fact open-borders Journal devotees, people who believe all conservatives who want to deport unauthorized immigrants are incorrigible racists. Second, it strains credulity to arg...

NY Times: Ryan-Trump Breach May Be Irreparable Mr. Trump may never succeed in winning Mr. Ryan, the House speaker, over to his side and getting his endorsement. Trump seems to be one of those guys who thinks telling a woman "you don't sweat much for a fat person" is a compliment.   Then he wonders why she might be offended.  He does the same thing with reluctant politicians.  It is the kind of attitude that makes sane people think, "I don't need this relationship."

Washington Examiner: Ryan says Obama labor policy having 'chilling effect' on economy ... The agency that Ryan was referring to is the Labor Department, which under Secretary Tom Perez has implemented a new rule intended to force businesses to pay more overtime by limiting the number of employees who can be exempted from the requirement. Perez also has announced that the agency will crack down on conflicts of interest in retirement financial advising by increasing brokers' legal liability. In January, the department also issued a new interpretation of the Fair Labor Standards Act that said that an employer can be liable for paying lost wages to another company's workers if the department determines that the company has "indirect" control over the workers. ... This is how the evils of liberalism infest the economy and makes it harder to make rational business decisions.  It actually hurts job creation in the name of "helping" the workers.

Washington Examiner: Paul Ryan's conditional run for speaker is fell flat with at least one key conservative Tuesday night, who said his candidate remains Rep. Daniel Webster, a member who is pledging to end the "top down" leadership approach. Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kan., head of the House Tea Party Caucus, called Ryan's conditions for becoming the next speaker "entirely unreasonable." Those conditions include a request that the House eliminate a rule that allows a member to seek a vote to oust the speaker. That provision is part of the original rules of the House, authored by Thomas Jefferson. "No other speaker I know of would ever have as much power as Paul Ryan asked for himself," Huelskamp said following a meeting among Republican lawmakers. "Is he serious?" Ryan outlined his conditions in the meeting but took no questions, Huelskamp said. Webster, who is now the only other official candidate for speaker, was not allowed time to addr...

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Republican Paul Ryan won't run for president in 2016 Ryan has said he would not run if Mitt Romney was running.

Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com Ryan makes clear he does not believe what the IRS is telling him and the committee.  The arrogance of the IRS was manifest.   The agency has lost the confidence of Republicans and has shown itself to be a partisan attack dog for the administration and Democrat politicians.

IBD: 'Stinkburger' Is An Insight On Adolescent Presidency We have a President who thinks grade school caliber insults are an appropriate response to a serious matter.  It is one reason why he is the worst negotiator in that office I have ever seen.

George Will: Critics of Rep. Paul Ryan’s remarks about cultural factors in the persistence of poverty are simultaneously shrill and boring. Their predictable minuet of synthetic indignation demonstrates how little liberals have learned about poverty or changed their rhetorical repertoire in the last 49 years. Ryan spoke of a “tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work,” adding: “There’s a real culture problem here.” This brought down upon Ryan the usual acid rain of accusations — racism, blaming the victims, etc. He had sauntered into the minefield that a more experienced Daniel Patrick Moynihan — a liberal scholar who knew the taboos of his tribe — had tiptoed into five years before Ryan was born. A year from now, there surely will be conferences marking the 50th anniversary of what is now known as the Moynihan Report, a k a “The Negro Family: The...

CNN: Rand Paul has done something his father never did - top the list of potential Republican presidential candidates in a national poll. According to a new CNN/ORC International survey, 16% of Republicans and independents who lean toward the GOP say they would be likely to support the senator from Kentucky for the 2016 nomination. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the 2012 Republican vice presidential nominee, garnered 15%, with longtime Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who's considering another bid for the White House, at 11%. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a 2008 GOP presidential candidate, is the only other Republican tested in the survey to crack double digits. The poll's sampling error means that statistically it's not a win for Paul, but his finish is a breakthrough for his family. A national Quinnipiac poll found Paul tied with Ryan in January for the top spot. That appears to be as close as either Rand Paul or his father, Ron Paul, has ever come to nabbing first place al...

Larry Kudlow: Did Paul Ryan's budget deal save the Republican party from itself? I think it did. Everyone acknowledges that Ryan-Murray is not a great deal. But the fact is, its passage will avoid a government shutdown. That's crucial. If the GOP wants to retake the Senate and hold the House in 2014, the key issues must be the catastrophic pitfalls of Obamacare and better economic growth. A shutdown would be a distraction. It would take the heat off Obama and Obamacare, and all the Democrats who falsely promised that if you like your insurance and doctor, you can keep them. Obama's "like it, keep it" promise was just named the lie of the year in the annual PolitiFact survey. Reminding voters of that lie is much more important than a government shutdown -- which would be blamed on Republicans anyway. Millions more people will be uninsured over the next year than those who are newly insured. At the very least, hundreds of thousands of people who thought they enrol...

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news , world news , and news about the economy Ryan does a good job in this interview in responding to the clips from the left.

And, Obama does not want to deal with it.

The Ticket: Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan lashed out at President Barack Obama on Sunday, saying the commander in chief does not have a full grasp of the budget problems facing the U.S. economy. "I don't think that the president actually thinks we have a fiscal crisis," Ryan said on NBC's "Meet The Press" in his first live interview since the 2012 presidential campaign, when he was Mitt Romney's running mate. "He's been reportedly saying to our leaders that we don't have a spending problem, we have a healthcare problem. That leads me to conclude that he just thinks we ought to have more government-run healthcare and rationing." Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, told David Gregory that while Democrats may have gotten higher taxes on the wealthy as part of the New Year's deal to avoid the fiscal cliff, that's all they'll get. "The president got his additional revenues," Ryan said. "So that's behind us...

The Morning Call: When Mitt Romney suggested several weeks ago that he would win Pennsylvania, the challenge seemed almost insurmountable. But when Paul Ryan asked a raucous Pennsylvania crowd of GOP faithful Saturday afternoon if they were ready to help the Republican ticket win the state, he was serious about the prospects. "It feels really good to be standing in here with Pennsylvania today," the Republican vice presidential candidate said. Throughout Ryan's 30-minute remarks inside a Harrisburg International Airport hangar, the crowd was deafening, at times chanting, "Three more days, Three more days." A month ago, with President Barack Obama holding a 7- to 10-point lead over Romney in several Pennsylvania polls, the GOP likely did not expect to be having huge political rallies here with less than 72 hours until Election Day. For most of the year, Pennsylvania was widely considered a sure thing for the Democrats . But in recent days, the Republicans ha...

The Hill: Paul Ryan: ‘In this war on poverty, poverty’s winning’ I have been curious why republicans have not made more of the failure of this war effort and the cost it entails.  Ryan makes an important point.

Voters Survey Service: Our latest Pennsylvania poll conducted 10/11-10/13 and released by the Washington Examiner October 18th shows Mitt Romney has taken the lead over President Obama by a 49-45 margin. This automated poll, conducted with 1,376 likely voters, was conducted on behalf of the Republican State Committee of Pennsylvania, and released publicly by the Pa GOP shortly thereafter. This poll validates our last three publicly released polls showing the Keystone State as a tossup – including a pair of polls taken before the first televised presidential debate in Denver both showing the Keystone State was already in play even when other firms continued to suggest Obama would win by huge margins. The fact of the matter is that Mitt Romney is winning Pennsylvania because he is winning the “jobs” argument. Every statewide poll we have done the past three years shows Pennsylvanians want the economy fixed. According to our latest polls, the economy continues to be cited as the m...