1. “Many millions of working-age Americans would lose health insurance. Senior citizens would anguish over whether to pay their rent or their medical bills, in a way they haven’t since the 1960s. Government would be so starved of resources that, by 2050, it wouldn’t have enough money for core functions like food inspections and highway maintenance. And the richest Americans would get a huge tax cut.”This is the America that Paul Ryan envisions. And now we know that it is the America Mitt Romney envisions.“ --Jonathan Cohn, ”Six Things to Know About Ryan (And Romney),“ The New Republic
2. ”Ryan does a good job of cloaking his radicalism in unthreatening everyday language. He doesn’t foam at the mouth or get too academic. He doesn’t blather on about Friedrich Hayek or Saul Alinsky. As he was standing up there saying, “we won’t replace the founding principles, we’ll reapply them,” he looked more like the youthful general manager of a baseball team—a Theo Epstein or a Brian Cashman—than a committed ideologue.“ --John Cassidy, ”Why Romney Picked Ryan: Let's Change the Subject from Me,“ The New Yorker
3. ”People love that Paul Ryan! The only downside, with Paul Ryan, is everything he believes.“ --Alex Pareene, ”Romney’s running mate distraction campaign reaches its zenith,“ Salon.com 
4. ”Ryan’s views are crystallized in the budget he produced for House Republicans last March as chairman of the House Budget committee. That budget would cut $3.3 trillion from low-income programs over the next decade. The biggest cuts would be in Medicaid, which provides healthcare for the nation’s poor – forcing states to drop coverage for an estimated 14 million to 28 million low-income people, according to the non-partisan Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. ... In all, 62 percent of the budget cuts proposed by Ryan would come from low-income programs. ... The Ryan plan would also turn Medicare into vouchers whose value won’t possibly keep up with rising health-care costs – thereby shifting those costs on to seniors. At the same time, Ryan would provide a substantial tax cut to the very rich – who are already taking home an almost unprecedented share of the nation’s total income. Today’s 400 richest Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150 million of us put together.“ --Robert Reich, ”The Ryan Choice,“ RobertReich.org 
5. ”Ryan and other conservative leaders, among them Senator John Sununu, of New Hampshire, wanted to be sure that Bush returned to [Social Security privatization] in 2005. Under Ryan’s initial version, American workers would be able to invest about half of their payroll taxes, which fund Social Security, in private accounts. As a plan to reduce government debt, it made no sense. It simply took money from one part of the budget and spent it on private accounts, at a cost of two trillion dollars in transition expenses. But, as an ideological statement about the proper relationship between individuals and the federal government, Ryan’s plan was clear.“ --Ryan Lizza, ”Fussbudget: How Paul Ryan Captured the GOP,“ The New Yorker 
6. ”... anyone who believes in Ryan’s carefully cultivated image as a brave, honest policy wonk has been snookered. Mark Thoma reviews selected pieces I’ve written about Ryan; he is, in fact, a big fraud, who doesn’t care at all about fiscal responsibility, and whose policy proposals are sloppy as well as dishonest. Of course, this means that he’ll fit in to the Romney campaign just fine. ...  As I said, I have no idea how this will play politically. But it does look like a move from weakness, rather than strength; Romney obviously felt he needed a VP who will get people to stop talking about him.“ --Paul Krugman, ”Galt/Gekko 2012,“ The New York Times 
7. ”Mr. Ryan is a national figure of some repute — before Saturday morning, his national name recognition was about 50 percent — but he has never been elected to anything larger than his Congressional district of about 700,000 people. Members of the House of Representatives have only occasionally been selected as running mates. The last one on a winning ticket was John Nance Garner, the speaker of the House, in 1932. The last time an ordinary member of the House was elected vice president, and the last Republican, was more than 100 years ago: in 1908, when William Howard Taft and James S. Sherman, a New York congressman, were chosen by voters. (Coincidentally, that fall was also the last time that the Chicago Cubs won the World Series.)“ --Nate Silver, ”A Risky Rationale Behind Romney's Choice of Ryan," Five Thirty Eight

For me? The key to taking down Ryan is not what he'd do to Medicaid and food-stamp programs, because, for most people, if it doesn't affect them, they don't care. The key to taking down Ryan is in his overhaul of Medicare and his attempted overhaul of Social Security. The social safety net that is holding you up, or might hold you up one day? He wants it down. Money that the government already has, for the few tattered programs it has, Paul Ryan wants to give away, in the form of tax breaks, to the richest people in this country. More for those who have more; less for we who have less. The health of the country, in essence, be damned.