Paul Ryan Has No Spine For A Debate!

JSONLINE recently retained the services of some local bloggers on "both sides" and dubbed it the purple project.  It has really turned into a pretty red project with just more opportunity to push the WPRI agenda for free.

I have a hard time taking any project seriously that includes Christian Schneider.  Schneider does not take himself seriously so why should anyone else?  This however is about the one righty blogger of this group that I actually like and how ridiculously bad his most recent post is!

In his post, Rodriguez tries to give Paul Ryan (R-Wall St.) cover for ducking debates with his challenger Rob Zerban!  Aaron also fails miserably, let's take a look.

  Described by many pundits as the top intellectual mind of the Republican Party, Ryan excels in economic and fiscal policies. He’s a policy wonk for sure, but also possesses the finesse to communicate his ideas in a relatable format. 

Granted, thebar is not very high, however, outside of schneider(who once compared Paul Ryan to Batman, no kidding), and Rodriguez you would be hard find to find "many" more people to describe Paul that way, especially since his convention speech.   You will however find "many" who would call Paul ryan a fraud(27,900,000 google matches to be exact).  From Chuck Schumer, to Paul Krugman to Bill Maher and many others. 

But Ryan’s ideas and voting record are now the subject to national scrutiny by journalists, bloggers, economists, think tank analysts, and partisan advocacy organizations. What can a debate with an untested county supervisor add to the national discussion?

Umm Aaron, Paul ryan is also running to be congressman from the 1st Congressional District of Wisconsin.   Ryan understands that his prospects of becoming VP are not looking good, so he hedged his bets and bought $2,000,000 worth of ad buys.   So he must feel the need to get his "message" out to the voters of the First Congressional District.   WHat is $2 MILLION dollar ad buy going to ad to the "national debate"?

Ryan has not been timid about his views on pretty much anything from entitlement spending to tax reform. For years, Ryan has sounded the fiscal alarm, introducing multiple budgetary plans that sought to reform third rail issues like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Yes Ryan loves to talk about his "views" on almost anything, as long as he can control the debate and the questions.  If he does at least he understands his weakness and refuses to ever answer a question from someone who he does not know!

We have seen Paul in action over and over have complete disdain for his constituents who want to ask him a question.    When is the last time you saw paul on anything that was less than extremely friendly to him?   I have been trying for over a year to get an interview with him.  

If Ryan refuses a debate Rob Zerban, it’s not because he’s ducking a challenge by a formidable opponent. It’s because the debate is unnecessary. Debates tend to prove two things: who has the better ideas and who is better at communicating them. Fortunately for Ryan, he has skills in both areas.

The problem here is, that Aaron just does not live reality.   Here is a quick exchange betweenRyan and some reporters that you have seen over and over and over again:

Ryan declined to address Obama's charge that he was among House Republicans "standing in the way" of legislation designed to help the drought-stricken heartland. He said only that he would get into "those policy things later."
"Right now I just want to enjoy the fair," he said.

 Mr. Transparency and exchange of ideas!

 Even if Zerban were a quick study and proficient at communicating, the debate would likely be a wash. If he’s not particularly adroit, he’ll last about as long with Ryan as a balloon in a room full of kittens.

Yes it is very hard to debate this logic:

Critics of Mitt Romney's tax reform plan say his proposal leaves out too many details, but Paul Ryan, the Republican presidential nominee's running mate, says keeping the proposal vague gives it the best chance for passage through Congress.

During an interview with Christian Broadcasting Network's David Brody, Ryan said Romney is following Ronald Reagan's playbook by not divulging the details about what specific tax loopholes he would close and the rates that would be set under his administration. Ryan said the reason is "because we want to get it done."

It does take a lot of balls to tell people we will not tell you what your plan is as a politician UNTIL your elected.  The "just trust me" approach, has a hard time working with someone who is a well known liar!

So to wrap up, let's be perfectly clear.  Paul Ryan (R-Ayn Rand), is ducking a debate with Rob Zerban because he is scared of losing his Congressional seat.  Paul Ryan enjoys the wonders of a government paycheck every week.  

Please sign the petition telling Paul Ryan to debate Rob Zerban!!

Help Rob Zerban retire Paul Ryan! 

Cross posted @Cog Dis @JeffSimpson7

Turning Lyin' Ryan Into Cryin' Ryan

Maybe the Obama bounce-- even from right-wing polling-- is all about what a relatively flawless convention the Democrats staged in Charlotte, compared to the confused mess Romney presided over in Tampa. Or maybe not. Maybe it has more to do with the confused, incoherent mess the Romney/Ryan campaign has become. Nothing is going right, mostly because Romney is an egg shell-walking flip flopper with no core beyond a hodge-podge of crazy Mormon doctrine and because, as Krugman, so eloquently put it yesterday, Ryan is nothing but a shyster-- an obvious shyster. And anyone who is just becoming aware of this, obviously hasn't been paying attention for the last half dozen years as Wall Street picked out, succored, and pushed forward their freaky and empty-headed little Frankenstein monster from Janesville, Wisconsin.

Tom Edsall has a very good piece on one of the key evasions in the Ryan budget plan, the huge unspecified cuts in discretionary spending. Edsall goes into more detail than anyone else I’ve read about just how much is hidden in that “sinkhole” and how it calls everything else Ryan claims into question.

But can I point out that this basic piece of flimflam was obvious all along? From my original Ryan takedown, more than two years ago:

Finally, let’s talk about those spending cuts. In its first decade, most of the alleged savings in the Ryan plan come from assuming zero dollar growth in domestic discretionary spending, which includes everything from energy policy to education to the court system. This would amount to a 25 percent cut once you adjust for inflation and population growth. How would such a severe cut be achieved? What specific programs would be slashed? Mr. Ryan doesn’t say.

And yet until very recently the whole Beltway was united in praising Ryan as a Serious deficit hawk, with a detailed plan-- he even received a big award for fiscal responsibility.

So the Ryan story isn’t just about Ryan; it’s about how the establishment allowed itself to be taken in by such an obvious shyster, despite warnings from many of us that he was, well, an obvious shyster.

How lucky is Rob Zerban to have minds like Paul Krugman and Tom Edsall tuned in to Ryan's chicanery and doing his opposition research for him? It almost makes up for the sabotage to his congressional campaign from inveterate Ryan protectors Steve Israel and Debbie Wasserman Schultz. They're not only not helping Zerban beat Ryan in a very winnable Wisconsin district that Obama took in 2008, they're actually working behind the scenes to hurt his campaign. These are two of the most horrible people in the Democratic Party. Nancy Pelosi passed over one to be DCCC chair and gave the other one the job, who she describes as "reptillian." You can help Rob stop Paul Ryan from turning our country over to his Wall Street masters here-- because they're also Israel's masters and Wasserman Schultz's masters and those two will never help get rid of Ryan. What Ryan and Romney are hiding is that to implement their increase in military spending and their lowering of taxes on the rich, they will have to ease out the mortgage interest deduction on the middle class. No one could say that and hope to win an election. So they're not. Watch the video above where everyone dances around it. When releasing it, OFA put out, in part, this statement:

This unapologetic evasiveness by the Romney-Ryan ticket won’t be lost on voters because their lack of specifics carries a strong message of its own-- which President Obama and Vice President Biden translated for voters during campaign events in Florida and Ohio on Sunday afternoon. The Vice President put it plainly: “The money’s got to come from somewhere. Guess who? You.” And the President said, “They want your vote, but they don't have a plan. Or at least they don't want to tell you their plan. And that's because they've got the same plan they've had for 30 years.”

That’s all Americans need to know about the Romney-Ryan plan-– it’s the same one that got us into this mess in the first place. In other words, bad math.

President Obama is doing very well against Romney/Ryan. Thank God. Rob Zerban, however, doesn't have the resources available to make the case in WI-01. Israel and Wasserman Schultz have seen to that. In Edsall's Sunday column Krugman referred to, he makes the point that one of the "most striking aspect of the omissions in the Ryan budget is the failure of Obama and other Democrats to capitalize on it." He cites two factors Democratic leaders say limit their ability to mount a counter-attack.

First, the complexity of the issue makes it difficult for reporters to understand and write about the subject. After wading my way through all of this, I know what they mean. Second, the Ryan tactic of obscuring the cuts successfully plays to a fundamental ambivalence that amounts to an internal contradiction in public opinion: strong support for spending cuts in the abstract, but opposition to many specific cuts in programs that have popular support.

...In an interview, Christopher Van Hollen Jr. of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, told me that the Ryan budget “is a shell game designed to hide the damage to the country.” Van Hollen is frustrated that the damage to which he alludes has not become a campaign issue: “The magnitude of this budget gimmick takes your breath away.”

Instead of sabotaging his campaign and telling institutional donors not to give him any money, Israel and Wasserman Schultz should be helping to finance Zerban in a way to significantly threaten Ryan's political career. They never will. We should do it instead.

A terrible day for Paul Ryan in the NY Times

A one-two punch for Paul Ryan in today's New York Times.

Front page headline: Paul Ryan's speech contained a litany of falsehoods

Then, on the op ed page, Ryan nemesis Paul Krugman, leads his column with:

Paul Ryan’s speech Wednesday night may have accomplished one good thing: It finally may have dispelled the myth that he is a Serious, Honest Conservative. Indeed, Mr. Ryan’s brazen dishonesty left even his critics breathless.

It gets worse from there:

But Mr. Ryan’s big lie — and, yes, it deserves that designation — was his claim that “a Romney-Ryan administration will protect and strengthen Medicare.” Actually, it would kill the program.

Read it all here.

Rep Ryayn (R-WI)

Ever see someone dressed to the nines step out of a fancy car, about to walk into a fancy building for a fancy party and realize he has to get the dogshit off his fancy shoes... fast? That would be Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan. He used to be able to ignore all the videos and blog posts about his infatuation with the adolescent heartthrob he never could quite get over. But now that it's entered the zeitgeist and voters are starting to grok that not only has Ryan based his miserable budget proposals on the anti-social philosophy of Ayn Rand but that his entire political career is predicated on the work of this Republican prophet of gloom and-- for the 99%-- doom... well he can't get it off his shoes fast enough. He hasn't been recorded saying, "Ayn? Ayn who" yet, but if Ron Zerban keeps pressing him of where all the mean-spirited, hysterical, unAmerican selfishness comes from... I hope someone has a tape recorder ready.

Ryan may have been a little embarrassed this when Edward Hudgins, a director at the Randian Atlas Society said he would-- like most Gordon Gekko types-- "like to see Paul Ryan as president one day." That's also Wall Street's goal-- which is why Blue America started StopPaulRyan, perhaps the most crucial page for the future of this country on all of ActBlue.

"I'd love to see him as president or as vice president on the ticket coming up because I know what the man's values are: They're admirable values," Hudgins said. "To what extent he considers himself in agreement with Ayn Rand, as a public figure, a public policy person, you're not going to find them a lot better."

And that isn't all the could be causing the Randian congressman indigestion today. Henry Aaron was the co-creator of Ryan's plan to end Medicare. Yesterday Aaron, who works at the Brookings Institute withdrew his support for the whole idea and told Ryan-- and the world-- that the plan won't work.

Mike Tate, chairman of Wisconsin's Democratic Party agrees with Aaron. "Medical professionals, the faith community and now even the inventor of the central concept of the Romney-Ryan budget, he pointed out after the committee meeting, "have come forward to say that this budget that ends Medicare as we know it is wrong for America. As more experts come forward, and people learn the truth about the Romney-Ryan budget, it becomes more clear that this budget is fundamentally flawed, with the potential to cause real harm if implemented."

Poor misunderstood Ryan would surely like to blame his exposure on that dreadful Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize laureate in economics who has been repeatedly warning his NY Times readers that Ryan is nothing more than a lightweight phony being pumped up by avaricious special interests. Yesterday Krugman told TPM's Sahil Kapur that Paul Ryan's arithmetic just "doesn’t add up at all... All he does is make scary noises about the deficit, with mood music, with organ music in the background about how ominous it is, and then propose a plan that would in fact increase the deficit.”

Rob Zerban is the progressive Democrat taking Ryan on this year-- the first serious reelection campaign Ryan has ever had to face. The DCCC may continue ignoring Ryan for whatever reason but Wisconsinites and people from all over America, sensing the danger, are rallying to Rob. If Ryan's numbers don't add up, Rob's always do. He's not some hack beholden to the wealthy special interests who have molded him into a national personality and conservative celebrity. Rob's always been part of the real world. This is what he had to say about Ryan's support of Republican Party tactics to double the interest rate on student loans:

“Doubling the student loan interest rate and saddling our young people with an extra $1,000.00 in costs each year, at a time when families are already struggling to make sure their children have the opportunity for higher education, is a recipe for disaster.

“I personally know how important these programs are-- they are the reason I was able to attend school and become a job creator that Paul Ryan and his Washington Republican buddies tout. I was able to live my version of the American Dream because our country made a modest investment in me through Pell Grants and Stafford Loans.

“We as a country can never compete in the global economy if we continually put up barriers for young people to thrive in whatever future they choose.  Paul Ryan’s budget does absolutely nothing to help Americans succeed-- it is simply yet another giveaway for the oil & gas companies, Wall Street and corporations who fund his campaigns on the backs of our working families.”

Blue America has endorsed Rob and we've put up a wonderful billboard at the Ryan Road offramp on the I-94 just south of the Milwaukee Airport. Please take a look-- and if you'd like to help us put a few more like that around the district, you can do that here-- where there are no contribution limits.

Jonathans Chait And Weisman Dissect The Legendary Paul Ryan... In Great Detail

Ayn Désastre :: The Sinking of the S.S. Prospérité

The new issue of New York features a "photo-illustration" of Wall Street's and the One Percent's favorite up-and-coming politician of Reaction, Paul Ryan, by Jesse Lenz... and it gets very close in style to Pierre et Gilles. I think Jesse knew exactly what he was doing. Parisians Pierre Commoy and Gilles Blanchard produce highly stylized art pieces that have become part of popular culture. At Warners we used them to do album covers for Marc Almond, Erasure and, eventually, Madonna. Jesse may have actually been given Chait's manuscript for inspiration. What artistic heights could an opening like this inspire you to?

The implosion of the Newt Gingrich presidential campaign-- the first implosion, before the weird resurrection and inevitable second implosion-- came because he used four words: right-wing social engineering. He used the phrase, last May, to describe the Republican budget designed by GOP icon Paul Ryan. It was as if he had urinated on Ronald Reagan’s grave. Party leaders rounded on him. In Iowa, an angry voter cornered him and fumed, in a video captured by Fox News that quickly went viral, “What you did to Paul Ryan was unforgivable … You’re an embarrassment.” Gingrich quickly apologized to Ryan, pledged his fealty to the document, and then, lending his confession an extracted-at-NKVD-gunpoint flavor, announced, “Any ad which quotes what I said on Sunday is a falsehood.” It was no use: Despite years of diligent service, his support among Republicans collapsed, his fellow partisans holding him in the low regard ordinarily reserved for liberals.

Ryan’s rise occurred so rapidly that an old hand like Gingrich hadn’t yet fully grasped the fact that he had become unassailable, though most (and, by now, virtually all) of his fellow Republicans had. Ryan’s prestige explains, among other things, the equanimity with which movement conservatives have reluctantly accepted the heresies of Mitt Romney. They may not have an ideal candidate, but they believe Romney could not challenge Ryan even if he so desired.

“Now, we are truly at an inflection point, between the Barack Obama and Paul Ryan approaches to government,” National Review editor Rich Lowry wrote recently, treating the elevation of the chairman of the House Budget Committee over the presidential nominee as his party’s standard-bearer as so obvious it requires no explanation. “We don’t need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We want the Ryan budget,” says anti-tax enforcer Grover Norquist. “Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States.” In any case, Romney has shown no inclination to challenge Ryan, praising him fulsomely and even promising him, according to the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes, he’d enact Ryan’s plan in the first 100 days. Republicans envision an administration in which Romney has relegated himself to a kind of head-of-state role, at least domestically, with Ryan as the actual head of government.

Chait then veers off into an analysis about why the Village loves Ryan in a way it never embraced Newt or even Reagan in their heydays. And at the same time Chait had the Ryan phenomenon under his microscope, Jonathan Weisman was engaged in the same task over at the NY Times. Ryan listens to Rage Against the Machine on his iPod. But Ryan is the voice of the Machine... always has been, although it's only recently most people are listening. And Weisman reminds us "That is not bad for a man who was once just another minion on Capitol Hill, working for a research group, then for a member of Congress, and moonlighting as a waiter at the Hill hangout Tortilla Coast and as a personal trainer at a gym. Co-workers at the conservative policy group Empower America admonished him for hanging his workout clothes out to dry at work rather than laundering them." From that to undoing the New Deal.

Weisman is probably unaware that Dave Obey, Wisconsin's top-dog Democrat protected and even nurtured Ryan's political career and made sure he would never be seriously challenged for reelection even though he represents a swing district filled with Democrats, a district Obama won in 2008. Obey, who was forced into retirement from Congress after voting for the Stupak Amendment, has an obvious man crush on the much younger Ryan. Weisman uses Obey as an example of how "those who know him cannot seem to dislike him."

“I’m stunned by how oblivious he is to the pain his policies would cause people,” said David R. Obey, a Democrat from Wisconsin who jousted often with his downstate colleague before retiring from the House at the end of 2010. “What amazes me is that someone that nice personally has such a cold, almost academic view of what the impact of his policies would be on people.”

No one ever asks Obey about the notorious Obey Pact that protected all Wisconsin incumbents; convenient. Of course Obey isn't the only member of Washington's Conservative Consensus with a man crush on Paul Ryan's. Notorious GOP closet case, Aaron Schock from Peoria is completely smitten who gushes his homoerotic admiration for the older Ryan. Schock, who's ditched his pink belt and lavender shirts to blend in better with the straights, tells Weisman that Ryan is “in kick-butt shape."

Paul Krugman has long decried Ryan as a fraud and a flimflam man and it's driven him to distraction that an even less serious Beltway media has conferred upon Ryan some kind of mantle of seriousness and wonkishness... and, worse yet, wisdom. Ryan's a Wall Street special interest hack, bought and paid for in the hopes of installing him one day in the White House, the way MCA and organized crime did with Reagan. Ryan's fame-- at least outside the Beltway-- rests in his plan, a redistribution of wealth plan (from bottom to top) masquerading as a deficit reduction plan. Chait puts it at the center of the Ryan legend:

The centrist political Establishment, heavily represented among business leaders and the political media, considers it almost self-evident that the budget deficit (and not, say, mass unemployment or climate change) represents the singular policy threat of our time, and that bipartisan cooperation offers the sole avenue to address it. By casting his program as a solution to the debt crisis, by frequently conceding that Republicans as well as Democrats had failed in the past, and by inveighing against “demagoguery,” Ryan has presented himself as the acceptable Republican suitor the moderates had been longing for.

Whether Ryan’s plan even is a “deficit-reduction plan” is highly debatable. Ryan promises to eliminate trillions of dollars’ worth of tax deductions, but won’t identify which ones. He proposes to sharply reduce government spending that isn’t defense, Medicare (for the next decade, anyway), or Social Security, but much of that reduction is unspecified, and when Obama named some possible casualties, Ryan complained that those hypotheticals weren’t necessarily in his plan. Ryan is specific about two policies: massive cuts to income-tax rates, and very large cuts to government programs that aid the poor and medically vulnerable. You could call all this a “deficit-reduction plan,” but it would be more accurate to call it “a plan to cut tax rates and spending on the poor and sick.” Aside from a handful of exasperated commentators, like Paul Krugman, nobody does.

The persistent belief in the existence of an authentic, deficit hawk Ryan not only sweeps aside the ugly particulars of his agenda, it also ignores, well, pretty much everything he has done in his entire career, and pretty much everything he has said until about two years ago.

In 2005, Ryan spoke at a gathering of Ayn Rand enthusiasts, where he declared, “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.” Ryan has listed Rand’s manifesto, Atlas Shrugged, as one of his three most often reread books, and in 2003, he told the Weekly Standard he tries to make his interns read it. Rand is a useful touchstone to understand Ryan’s public philosophy. She centered libertarian philosophy around a defense of capitalism in general and, in particular, a conception of politics as a class war pitting virtuous producers against parasites who illegitimately use the power of the state to seize their wealth. Ludwig von Mises, whom Ryan has also cited as an influence, once summed up Rand’s philosophy in a letter to her: “You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: You are inferior and all the improvements in your condition which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you.”

Ryan now frequently casts his opposition to Obama in technocratic terms, but he hasn’t always done so. “It is not enough to say that President Obama’s taxes are too big or the health-care plan doesn’t work for this or that policy reason,” Ryan said in 2009. “It is the morality of what is occurring right now, and how it offends the morality of individuals working toward their own free will to produce, to achieve, to succeed, that is under attack, and it is that what I think Ayn Rand would be commenting on.” Ryan’s philosophical opposition to a government that forces the “makers” to subsidize the “takers”-- terms he still employs-- is foundational; the policy details are secondary.

...In 2001, Ryan led a coterie of conservatives who complained that George W. Bush’s $1.2 trillion tax cut was too small, and too focused on the middle class. In 2003, he lobbied Republicans to pass Bush’s deficit-financed prescription-drug benefit, which bestowed huge profits on the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. In 2005, when Bush campaigned to introduce private accounts into Social Security, Ryan fervently crusaded for the concept. He was the sponsor in the House of a bill to create new private accounts funded entirely by borrowing, with no benefit cuts. Ryan’s plan was so staggeringly profligate, entailing more than $2 trillion in new debt over the first decade alone, that even the Bush administration opposed it as “irresponsible.”

When Democrats took control of Congress in the 2006 elections, they reimposed a budget rule requiring that any new spending or tax cuts be offset by new revenue or spending cuts. Ryan opposed it, preferring to let new spending or tax cuts go on the national credit card. Instead, he continued to endorse Bush’s line that tax cuts were leading us to a glorious new era of prosperity and budget balance. “Higher revenues flowing into the Treasury, as a result of economic and job growth, have given us a real chance to balance the budget,” Ryan announced in 2007. “The president’s budget achieves the important goal of balancing the budget in the near term-- without raising taxes,” he wrote in August 2008.

So Ryan's a fraud? Isn't that what we've been telling you for 6 years? Yes, he's a fraud. And in his own district that fraudulence has never been examined by voters. Is Rob Zerban up to the task? We think so. Blue America has endorsed him. We're raising money for him on a Stop Paul Ryan page which is what that thermometer leads to. And, we have an Independent Expenditure Committee we can use to really go after Ryan ourselves... if we can raise enough money. Right now we have a billboard up on the I-94 at the Ryan Road exit just south of the Milwaukee Airport. If you want to help, perhaps we can do a lot more than that between now and November.

Is Paul Ryan Not Merely A Flimflam Man, But A Fraud As Well?

What the DCCC should have run

Over at DownWithTyranny we've been castigating the DCCC for campaigning against Paul Ryan everywhere in the country-- except WI-1, his own congressional district. Now, for the first time in a decade-- yes, first time in 5 congressional races (even though Obama won the district)-- they've finally put up on medium sized billboard (which doesn't mention Rob Zerban's name and isn't in a place that will be seen by anyone and, in fact, is smack in the middle of Democratic territory anyway). But at least they're not actively sabotaging Rob-- unless you count when DCCC Chair and "ex"-Blue Dog Steve Israel whispers to major donors not to contribute to his campaign. Anyway, besides the DCCC, DSCC and DNC all attacking Paul Ryan and his dystopic plans for America, half the Democratic candidates running for office are also attacking him. Sunday night, for example, we ran a great OpEd by Carol Shea-Porter, tying Ryan to her own opponent, teabag-idiot Frank Guinta.

I decided to ask some of the Blue America candidates if they'd consider contributing some of their own campaign funds to Rob Zerban. Alan Grayson, who has been raising money like mad for Democratic candidates all over the country, was very straightforward: "The most effective way to beat the Ryan Budget is to beat Paul Ryan in November." I don't want to spoil any surprises though.

The next guy I asked was Dr. Lee Rogers since we were on the phone discussing his call for a single-payer health care system to replace the flawed conservative individual mandate. He informed me that he had already sent Rob a pretty hefty contribution out of his personal funds a couple months ago and that he and Rob have been communicating directly!

Rob Zerban is fighting a difficult fight and truly it's a battle for all of us. I personally contributed to his campaign for that reason. Here I am, a Democratic candidate in California speaking about the Ryan/GOP budget every day to voters and the effect it will have for Americans on Medicare or even veterans. I felt obligated to help Rob in his battle against the author of the "Reverse-Robin Hood" budget. Because if Rob can beat Paul Ryan, I know it will have a national impact.

This kind of thing is right up central Florida candidate Nick Ruiz's alley and he thinks about forging a strong progressive alliance inside and outside Congress all the time:

Liberal and progressive Democrats have a vital lesson to learn about getting things done. Up until now, we've practiced the unproductive rigamarole of "every man for himself." Hence we've appeared to the world like an unorganized morass of jellyfish washing up on the beach, stinging here and there, but accomplishing nothing of recent gravity and import.

This has to change. We have to school like dolphins. One for all and all for one. Each and every one us is important to this movement, and has something vital to contribute to it. But most importantly, we need the numbers. We have to reach a critical mass in the Congress.

Pass a Budget4All? Defend the social safety net? Create jobs? Raise wages and benefits? Tether Wall St. to Main St.? We need new political minds and we need the votes to make this happen. Minds to create legislation and votes to pass that legislation into law. We have little of this at the moment. You know why? Because too many of us refuse to help one another. Whether it's out of fear of retribution by the Democratic establishment, or personal vendettas, or straight-up selfishness. Who knows? In any case, forget about them. Liberal and progressive Democrats need only stick together, and we'll have the power and numbers to get things done, but only if we are willing to let go of the fear that keeps us complicit.

If we play the game by the political establishment's rules-- I guarantee you liberals and progressive Democrats will lose. You'll get the wrong people elected every time. We have to hold each other up. It is the only way we can win-- and if we do this, we will prevail.

Nick's leadership PAC has endorsed Zerban. Yesterday Steve Benen over at Rachel Maddow's blog gave Ryan a little schooling on what the word "misspoke" means-- and how a verbal slip is different from an attempt to deceive or slander.

On Thursday, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Budget Committee, insisted that he, not America's military leadership, should be trusted when it comes to Pentagon spending levels. Ryan went on to say that he believes Pentagon leaders may be deliberately misleading Congress about spending cuts that they've requested, but which Ryan does not want to make. A day later, Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was not at all pleased with the congressman's public comments.

Frightened of getting into a public spat with the Pentagon when his district-- Les Aspin's old district, mind you-- is already turning against him, he backed down and whined that, "like, dude, I totally misspoke, dude." Benen ran a video of Ryan again playing politics with national security and again calling the Pentagon budget "dishonest and dangerous."

Yesterday, Ryan used the identical language. How can someone claim he "totally misspoke" and then say the same thing again?

Ryan still thinks military leaders lied to Congress; he still thinks he knows better than the Pentagon what spending levels are necessary to keep America safe; and he still thinks Congress should give the Defense Department money the Pentagon doesn't want.

The only difference between Thursday and Sunday is that Ryan has stopped attacking U.S. military leaders and started attacking the president. But since it's the same attack, and this is a distinction without a difference, it's laughable for Ryan to say he "misspoke."

And misspeaking is about the only thing Paul Krugman has never accused Ryan of. Krugman may find Ryan a serious threat to America but he doesn't find him a serious intellect, just a lightweight shill for the Wall Street and Insurance Industry interests which have paid for his political career. Yesterday Krugman liked his vision to Pink Slime Economics, an apt analogy. He explains why the Ryan budget is "surely the most fraudulent budget in American history."

And when I say fraudulent, I mean just that. The trouble with the budget devised by Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, isn’t just its almost inconceivably cruel priorities, the way it slashes taxes for corporations and the rich while drastically cutting food and medical aid to the needy. Even aside from all that, the Ryan budget purports to reduce the deficit-- but the alleged deficit reduction depends on the completely unsupported assertion that trillions of dollars in revenue can be found by closing tax loopholes.

And we’re talking about a lot of loophole-closing. As Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center points out, to make his numbers work Mr. Ryan would, by 2022, have to close enough loopholes to yield an extra $700 billion in revenue every year. That’s a lot of money, even in an economy as big as ours. So which specific loopholes has Mr. Ryan, who issued a 98-page manifesto on behalf of his budget, said he would close?

None. Not one. He has, however, categorically ruled out any move to close the major loophole that benefits the rich, namely the ultra-low tax rates on income from capital. (That’s the loophole that lets Mitt Romney pay only 14 percent of his income in taxes, a lower tax rate than that faced by many middle-class families.)

So what are we to make of this proposal? Mr. Gleckman calls it a “mystery meat budget,” but he’s being unfair to mystery meat. The truth is that the filler modern food manufacturers add to their products may be disgusting-- think pink slime-- but it nonetheless has nutritional value. Mr. Ryan’s empty promises don’t. You should think of those promises, instead, as a kind of throwback to the 19th century, when unregulated corporations bulked out their bread with plaster of paris and flavored their beer with sulfuric acid.

Come to think of it, that’s precisely the policy era Mr. Ryan and his colleagues are trying to bring back.

So the Ryan budget is a fraud; Mr. Ryan talks loudly about the evils of debt and deficits, but his plan would actually make the deficit bigger even as it inflicted huge pain in the name of deficit reduction. But is his budget really the most fraudulent in American history? Yes, it is.

...What’s going on here? The answer, presumably, is that this is what happens when extremists gain complete control of a party’s discourse: all the rules get thrown out the window. Indeed, the hard right’s grip on the G.O.P. is now so strong that the party is sticking with Mr. Ryan even though it’s paying a significant political price for his assault on Medicare.

Now, the House Republican budget isn’t about to become law as long as President Obama is sitting in the White House. But it has been endorsed by Mr. Romney. And even if Mr. Obama is reelected, the fraudulence of this budget has important implications for future political negotiations.

Bear in mind that the Obama administration spent much of 2011 trying to negotiate a so-called Grand Bargain with Republicans, a bipartisan plan for deficit reduction over the long term. Those negotiations ended up breaking down, and a minor journalistic industry has emerged as reporters try to figure out how the breakdown occurred and who was responsible.

But what we learn from the latest Republican budget is that the whole pursuit of a Grand Bargain was a waste of time and political capital. For a lasting budget deal can only work if both parties can be counted on to be both responsible and honest-- and House Republicans have just demonstrated, as clearly as anyone could wish, that they are neither.

Last week Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) took to the floor of the House to blast Ryan and his Wall Street anti-family budget as flying in the face of centuries Judeo-Christian civilization-- which is exactly what Ryan's mentor, Ayn Rand, had in mind for her disciples. "Why does your budget resolution take away the Medicare guarantee?" and quoted Leviticus 19:32, "You shall give due honor and respect to the elderly." Going back to what Alan Grayson said earlier-- and what the DCCC doesn't seem to want to understand, if you're serious about getting rid of the Ryan budget, defeat Paul Ryan in November. And the way to do that is by electing Rob Zerban to represent Wisconsin's first congressional district. You can help accomplish that here.

May 25, 2011-- Bill Clinton, Paul Ryan And The Conservative Consensus

I can't find that old video of President Obama referring to Paul Ryan as "serious" and giving Village credibility to his corporate-written harebrained schemes to reverse the New Deal, destroy Medicare and privatize Social Security. It was one of the first indications I had after the 2008 election that Obama was in way over his head. Paul Krugman's 2010 columns on Ryan's ignorance and unseriousness helped put the lie to Obama's foolish-- and presumably now regretted-- assertion. Krugman's classic Flimflam Man OpEd:

One depressing aspect of American politics is the susceptibility of the political and media establishment to charlatans. You might have thought, given past experience, that D.C. insiders would be on their guard against conservatives with grandiose plans. But no: as long as someone on the right claims to have bold new proposals, he’s hailed as an innovative thinker. And nobody checks his arithmetic.

Which brings me to the innovative thinker du jour: Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.

Mr. Ryan has become the Republican Party’s poster child for new ideas thanks to his “Roadmap for America’s Future,” a plan for a major overhaul of federal spending and taxes. News media coverage has been overwhelmingly favorable; on Monday, the Washington Post put a glowing profile of Mr. Ryan on its front page, portraying him as the G.O.P.’s fiscal conscience. He’s often described with phrases like “intellectually audacious.”

But it’s the audacity of dopes. Mr. Ryan isn’t offering fresh food for thought; he’s serving up leftovers from the 1990s, drenched in flimflam sauce.

...So why have so many in Washington, especially in the news media, been taken in by this flimflam? It’s not just inability to do the math, although that’s part of it. There’s also the unwillingness of self-styled centrists to face up to the realities of the modern Republican Party; they want to pretend, in the teeth of overwhelming evidence, that there are still people in the G.O.P. making sense. And last but not least, there’s deference to power-- the G.O.P. is a resurgent political force, so one mustn’t point out that its intellectual heroes have no clothes.

But they don’t. The Ryan plan is a fraud that makes no useful contribution to the debate over America’s fiscal future.

Has Bill Clinton been taken in too? Or is he part of the scam? Last week we saw Clinton endorsing one of the most corrupt conservatives running for Congress anywhere, Maryland multimillionaire loan shark, John Delaney. Want to feel sick to your stomach? Just watch this video on Clinton offering to help Ryan with his plans to kill Medicare the day after Democrats won a Republican seat in upstate New York based almost entirely on opposing Ryan's Medicare plans:



It's less than a minute long, caught surreptitiously on someone's cell phone... but it speaks volumes about the corporate money-driven conservative consensus that rules Washington, a consensus that allowed Clinton and Rahm Emanuel to succeed in passing George H.W. Bush's tragic NAFTA legislation and that allowed Obama to continue George W. Bush's policy of bailing out criminal banksters-- instead of jailing them. That's why Blue America is a progressive PAC, not a Democratic Party PAC and it's why you'll see us fighting against corrupt conservatives regardless of political party. Aside from Ryan, our primary targets right now, are a Republican corporate whore in California, Buck McKeon, and a Democratic corporate whore in Pennsylvania, Blue Dog Tim Holden. Corrupt members of DC's conservative consensus are frantic to save both their necks. Their constituents are having second thoughts. And as for the Flimflam Man himself... he has his very own Blue America page, Stop Paul Ryan. Have you visited it lately?

You can read the rest of this post at DownWithTyranny but, let me warn you, there are no more goofy pictures of Ryan there.

"Ryan's mother was a hamster?'

"Criticism of policy proposals is not the same thing as an ad hominem attack.

"If I say that Paul Ryan’s mother was a hamster and his father smelt of elderberries, that’s ad hominem. If I say that his plan would hurt millions of people and that he’s not being honest about the numbers, that’s harsh, but not ad hominem." 

-- Paul Krugman has more on Truthout. 

And Ryan's mother wears combat boots.

Paul Ryan-- Not Just A Self Server, But An Ignorant Self Server

...Lining his own pockets-- dining at one of the sleaziest lobbyist joints in DC (Bistro Bis) and swilling some fancypants $350 bottles of Jayer-Gilles 2004 Echezeaux Grand Cru (the most expensive wine on the restaurant's rip-off menu). He claims the two unidentified lobbyists he was drinking the $700 worth of wine with are "economists" but he refuses to give their names and he quickly paid for one of the pricey bottles when he was confronted by someone who recognized him. Says he won't do it again... But, of course, this is the same Paul Ryan who told constituents subsidies for oil companies should be ended just a few days before voting against ending them. Is he a pathological liar? His voting record, going back over a decade certainly attests to that.

Perhaps what Ryan and the two lobbyists "economists" [one has now been identified as one of the most predatory and ruthless hedge fund managers anywhere] were toasting was the gargantuan haul his reelection campaign had just taken in from special interests eager to express their thanks for his willingness to toss middle class Wisconsin working families under the bus to benefit... well, his own wealthy campaign contributors, the kinds of people who drink a couple bottles of Echezeaux Grand Cru with dinner. Mike Tate, chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party isn't one of those people. And he wasn't celebrating Ryan's latest haul either.

"With Paul Ryan having already taken more health insurance money than any politician in Wisconsin history and already in the pocket of Wall Street bankers, we now see massive fundraising totals coming for the 7-term Washington insider. But all the money in the world can't and won't redeem his immoral plan to end Medicare. When 2012 comes around, the seniors and working families of southeastern Wisconsin will pour to the polls and vote not on the size of Ryan's bank roll-but on a rotten agenda that asks seniors to give up the historic guarantee of health care so that millionaires and billionaires can cravenly share less in the burdens that keep America strong."

I'd like to think he's right but Republicans in the southern Milwaukee suburbs and especially in southern Waukesha County have been electing outright fascists and reactionary bums like Joe McCarthy, Scott Walker, John Schafer, Ron Johnson and, of course, Ryan. Replacing Paul Ryan with Democrat Rob Zerban is something we should all think about contributing to-- except those of us who don't find it appalling that Ryan continues to support massive taxpayer subsidies for some of the world’s most profitable companies-- as well as the biggest polluters-- while so many middle-class American families are hurting in this down economy.

Paul Krugman doesn't suffer Ryan gladly and early on pointed out that he has absolutely nothing of any value to offer in any debates about the economy or about fiscal policy. In fact we're coming up on the one year anniversary of Krugman letting NY Times readers know that "the Ryan plan is a fraud that makes no useful contribution to the debate over America’s fiscal future." Yesterday he got down into the fiscal weeds on a topic Ryan's been doing a lot of spouting on-- ignorant, misleading spouting, as it turns out: interest rates.

The Very Serious position has been that government borrowing will drive up rates, crowd out private investment, and impede recovery. A Keynes-Hicks analysis, by contrast, says that when you’re in a liquidity trap, even large government borrowing won’t drive up rates — and hence won’t crowd out private investment. In fact, it will promote private investment by raising capacity utilization and giving firms more reason to expand.

What we usually get in response to this seemingly decisive data are a series of excuses-- most recently, that rates were low because the Fed was buying all the bonds. Well, that program has ended, and interest rates are still low.

But wait: the crowding out types have another answer, namely, to just ignore the facts.

Which, brings us, as it so often does, right to Janesville dunce, Paul Ryan. As usual, he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about and as usual, the House Budget Committee chairman's got it all ass backwards: "Stop corny crony capitalism in the regulatory state, get spending under control to show that we’re getting our borrowing under control so we take pressure off the interest rates, reform the taxes. And our budget says, through base boarding, getting rid of loopholes in exchange for lowering rates, have a top tax rate of 25 percent so we’re more globally competitive, a tutorial system on corporations and sound money, sound monetary policy so our dollar maintains its reliable store of value. Those four foundations, real sensible regulatory system, spending cuts and controls to get our debt under control, sound money and tax reform, those are the things I think we need to do, the foundations for economic growth. There’s no excuse to do something else or there’s no substitute for it. This Keynesian borrow, spend and tax isn’t working and it won’t work." Wrong, wrong, wrong... and you can use those three words to sum up most of what Ryan has had to say about the economy and about fiscal policy since the small town p.r. hack who never had an honest job in his entire life declared himself an economic expert.

Don't forget... laughing at Ryan-- or even hating him-- isn't going to defeat him and it isn't going to elect Rob Zerban. Can you help?

Vouchercare is not Medicare, and a pizza is not the Marines

Paul Krugman, who must be Paul Ryan's worst nightmare, writes about the Ryan Road to Ruin again, in a column headlined, "Vouchercare is not Medicare." Highlights:

For some reason, many commentators seem to believe that accurately describing what the G.O.P. is actually proposing amounts to demagoguery. But there’s nothing demagogic about telling the truth.

Start with the claim that the G.O.P. plan simply reforms Medicare rather than ending it. I’ll just quote the blogger Duncan Black, who summarizes this as saying that “when we replace the Marines with a pizza, we’ll call the pizza the Marines.” The point is that you can name the new program Medicare, but it’s an entirely different program — call it Vouchercare — that would offer nothing like the coverage that the elderly now receive. (Republicans get huffy when you call their plan a voucher scheme, but that’s exactly what it is.)

Read it here.

Paul Ryan And The Bible-- It Must Be A Different Bible Than The Rest of Us Read

Even though it's an extreme right-wing front group for the Republican Party, it's still odd that the Faith and Freedom Conference would invite Ayn Rand die-hard Paul Ryan to speak at their DC conclave. Odder still that he decided to talk-- with a straight face-- about his cause (as he calls his budget proposal). As TPM reported yesterday, Ryan "was chased by a protester waving a giant Bible and decrying libertarian author Ayn Rand" as he left the meeting.

"Why did you choose to model your budget on the extreme ideology of Ayn Rand rather than the faith of economic justice in the Bible?" the blond, 20-something male asked. He said he wanted to "present" Ryan with a Bible to teach him how to help the "most vulnerable."

I've been waiting for a Christian-right kind of guy to confront Ryan with his hypocrisy. It should happen everywhere he goes, since-- like Rand said explicitly (watch the video above)-- his budget says implicitly that Jesus had it all wrong and that the least among us and most downtrodden actually don't deserve any help, just a swift kick in the balls. And all that stuff about camels getting through eyes of needles... with the tax breaks Ryan is giving the rich, they can breed miniature flying camels.

This morning Think Progress reported on mainstream religious leaders worrying aloud about how Ryan's Randian budget unfairly targets those most beloved by Jesus.

Four members affiliated with the religious group Faith In Public Life held a brief press conference during FFC’s afternoon intermission to denounce the GOP’s adherence to the philosophies of anti-government, anti-religion author Ayn Rand. The leaders-- Rev. Jennifer Butler, Jim Wallis, Rev. Derrick Harkins, and Father Clete Kiley-- asserted that the GOP efforts to cut funding from many anti-poverty programs while balancing the budget on the backs of the poorest Americans were not in line with Christian values:

"...[P]oor and low income people are not the ones to make hurt more when you’re making tough decisions. … They don’t bear the brunt of our fiscal irresponsibility because they didn’t cause it. We did not get into fiscal trouble because of poor people. … The poor didn’t cause this. Let’s not make them pay for it."

What we’re saying in the faith community, across the spectrum, is that a nation is judged-- our Bible says-- by how we treat the poorest and most vulnerable. Period. That’s what God says to us. That’s God’s instruction to us. To be faithful to God, we have to protect poor people.

Wallis and Butler repeatedly asserted that political leaders could not adhere to the teachings of both Rand and the church. “This budget has more to do with the teaching of Ayn Rand than the etchings of Jesus Christ,” Butler said. “I read [Rand] in high school, and she said, ‘You have to choose me or Jesus,’” Wallis added. “And so I did. She lost.”

Religious leaders have recently spoken out to House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan (R-WI) and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH)-- both of whom are practicing Catholics-- telling them that the cuts in their budget disproportionately target poor Americans and are thus out of line with Christian and Catholic teaching. Early in May, a group of Catholic bishops sent Boehner a letter denouncing the budget cuts. Ryan, meanwhile, has attempted to persuade Catholic bishops that his budget is in line with religious teaching. Kiley was skeptical today, however, saying Ryan handpicked phrases from Catholic teaching in attempts to justify his budget cuts, largely ignoring the majority of Catholic teaching.

Of course Ryan and Boehner worked out a scheme to pacify seniors by promising them that the kill Medicare budget would only impact future generations and that they're safe. Seniors have overwhelming rejected that sociopathic attitude anyway but now, as Tim Fernholz at the National Journal revealed, even that's a lie! Ryan even threw the seniors he's expecting to reelect him under the bus! But why should the William Edward Hickman of politics honor the elderly?

Republicans are convinced that burnishing the public’s view of their unpopular proposal to overhaul Medicare depends on assuring today’s seniors that they won’t be affected.

“The retirees are going to be taken care of; there’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it,” House Speaker John Boehner vowed in an interview with CBS last month. The plan’s architect, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, has said time and again that the changes wouldn’t affect anybody getting close to retirement. “We propose to not change the benefits for people above the age of 55,” Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, insisted last week.

There’s only one problem with the strategy: It’s not true.

The policies in the House GOP budget, if enacted, would begin affecting millions of seniors almost immediately by increasing their costs for prescription drugs and probably long-term care. Further, Medicare costs could rise over time if healthier seniors choose to abandon the traditional benefit program.

Exploiting the fear of change is a constant in health care politics, so nearly every reformer tries to play down the dislocation inherent in plans to make the system fiscally sustainable. During his own reform push, President Obama promised citizens they could keep their existing health insurance plans if they liked them. That was not exactly true: Although the new law doesn’t eliminate the current insurance system, it does put in place new incentives that experts predict will significantly change individuals’ health care options.

Republicans capitalized on the fear of those potential changes, as well as of hundreds of billions in genuine cuts to Medicare spending that were part of last year’s law, and they won heavily in November’s midterm elections. The president’s party lost seniors by more than 20 percentage points after splitting their vote 50-50 with the GOP in the prior midterm election. This year, however, it is the Republicans’ turn to be nervous, as opinion polls and their surprising loss in a special election in upstate New York revealed voter anxiety about their plan.

In response, the GOP is doubling down on the idea that today’s seniors won’t be affected. That’s partly true. Ryan’s plan to convert Medicare into a limited insurance subsidy, the most controversial aspect of the budget, wouldn’t take effect until 2022.

But the proposal would also repeal last year’s health care law, which means reopening a coverage gap in Medicare’s prescription-drug benefit that the statute closed. The gap, commonly called the “doughnut hole,” requires seniors to pay 100 percent of any prescription costs after the annual total reaches $2,840 and until it hits $4,550. Those who spend more or less have at least three-quarters of the costs covered. Under the 2010 health law, Medicare will pay 7 percent of the cost of generic drugs and 50 percent on name-brand pharmaceuticals; by 2020, the doughnut hole will be closed.

If Congress were to pass Ryan’s plan and repeal the law, as House Republicans want, the 3 million to 4 million seniors left in the doughnut hole each year would immediately face significant out-of-pocket costs. They and all other Medicare beneficiaries would also lose access to a host of preventative-care benefits in the health care law, including free wellness visits to physicians, mammograms, colonoscopies, and programs to help smokers quit.

Perhaps more jolting, the Republican budget would cut spending on Medicaid-- health care for the poor-- much of which goes to long-term care for the elderly. Some 9 million seniors qualify for both Medicare and Medicaid benefits, and about two-thirds of all nursing-home residents are covered by Medicaid. The GOP budget proposes cutting some $744 billion from Medicaid over 10 years by turning the system into block grants that limit federal contributions and give states more choice in structuring benefits. No one knows exactly which Medicaid services states would choose to cut back, but senior citizens account for a disproportionate share of Medicaid outlays and would almost certainly bear some of the burden.

“We know that two-thirds of the dollars in Medicaid go to people who are disabled or over 65, so this is the big funder of long-term care in this country,” said David Certner, AARP’s legislative-policy director. “We also know this could have an impact on home- and community-based care, which is the kind of care individuals prefer the most [and] often the ones that will be cut first.”

The plan to grandfather traditional Medicare for those older than 55 could also have negative consequences for current seniors: In 2022, when the limited-subsidy program would be introduced, seniors who qualified for traditional Medicare would be allowed to switch to the new program. If healthier or younger beneficiaries make the change to lower their out-of-pocket costs, those still participating in Medicare would be part of an insurance pool that is less healthy and more expensive. To cover those higher per-person costs, Medicare might well be forced to either raise premiums or limit reimbursements to health care providers-- which could prompt many to stop taking Medicare patients.

Republicans say that comparing their plan with the projected costs of unsustainable programs is an exercise in magical thinking. They have a point. But the idea of cutting benefits deeply without affecting anyone over 55 is almost as fantastic.

If Christians stop taking Ryan seriously-- serious Christians I mean, not right-wing fanatics making believe they're Christians-- at least he'll still have the punditocracy on his side, as Krugman opined yesterday. "[M]any of the pundits who gushed over the Ryan plan, after being rocked back a bit when the plan was exposed as the nonsense it is, have decided to double down. In particular, they are insisting that anyone who describes a plan to dismantle Medicare as a plan to dismantle Medicare is somehow engaged in disreputable scare tactics."

You can read the rest of the post here and you can donate to Rob Zerban's campaign to retire Ryan from Congress here

Do You Think Professor Krugman Would Give Paul Ryan An F?

Paul Krugman hasn't been a fan of Paul Ryan's breezy pseudo-intellectual laziness for just about a full year now. Last August he warned Beltway insiders that the Wall Street Frankenstein creature from Wisconsin was nothing but a flimflam man and his much-heralded "courageousness" was, in reality, merely "the audacity of dopes." Thursday, in light of Ryan telling reporters he doesn't care if he loses his own House seat next year, Krugman poked through the Republican wreckage in western New York state and found what happens when someone who doesn't know much about economics tries to put one over on the public. He found why Ryan is "upset" and "bitter" and added "sore loser" to the growing lexicon that describes the Republican Budget Chair, reminding us that Hochul's campaign had "focused squarely on Mr. Ryan’s plan to dismantle Medicare and replace it with a voucher system." Ryan blamed his stunning loss on "Democrats’ willingness to 'shamelessly distort and demagogue the issue, trying to scare seniors to win an election,' and he predicted that by November of next year 'the American people are going to know they’ve been lied to'.”

You can understand Mr. Ryan’s bitterness. He has, after all, experienced quite a comedown over the course of the past seven weeks. Until his Medicare plan was rolled out in early April he had spent months bathing in warm approbation from many pundits, who had decided to anoint him as an icon of fiscal responsibility. And the plan itself received rapturous praise in the first couple of days after its release.

Then people who actually know how to read a budget proposal started looking at the plan. And that’s when everything started to fall apart.

Mr. Ryan may claim-- and he may even believe-- that he’s facing a backlash because his opponents are lying about his proposals. But the reality is that the Ryan plan is turning into a political disaster for Republicans, not because the plan’s critics are lying about it, but because they’re describing it accurately.

Take, for example, the statement that the Ryan plan would end Medicare as we know it. This may have Republicans screaming “Mediscare!” but it’s the absolute truth: The plan would replace our current system, in which the government pays major health costs, with a voucher system, in which seniors would, in effect, be handed a coupon and told to go find private coverage.

The new program might still be called Medicare-- hey, we could replace government coverage of major expenses with an allowance of two free aspirins a day, and still call it “Medicare”-- but it wouldn’t be the same program. And if the cost estimates of the Congressional Budget Office are at all right, the inadequate size of the vouchers-- which by 2030 would cover only about a third of seniors’ health costs-- would leave many if not most older Americans unable to afford essential care.

If anyone is lying here, it’s Mr. Ryan himself, who has claimed that his plan would give seniors the same kind of coverage that members of Congress receive-- an assertion that is completely false.

And, by the way, the claim that the plan would keep Medicare as we know it intact for Americans currently 55 or older is highly dubious. True, that’s what the plan promises, but if you think about the political dynamics that would emerge once Americans born a year or two too late realize how much better a deal slightly older Americans are getting, you realize that this is a promise unlikely to be fulfilled.

Still, are Democrats doing a bad thing by telling the truth about the Ryan plan? “If you demagogue entitlement reform,” says Mr. Ryan, “you’re hastening a debt crisis; you’re bringing about Medicare’s collapse.” Maybe he should have a word with his colleagues who greeted the modest, realistic cost control efforts in the Affordable Care Act with cries of “death panels.”

Anyway, the underlying premise behind statements like that is the assumption that the Ryan plan represents a serious effort to come to grip with America’s long-run fiscal problems. But what became clear soon after that plan was unveiled was that it was no such thing. In fact, it wasn’t really a deficit-reduction plan. Once you remove the absurd assumptions-- discretionary spending, including defense, falling to Calvin Coolidge levels, and huge tax cuts for corporations and the rich, with no loss in revenue?-- it’s highly questionable whether it would reduce the deficit at all.

What the Ryan plan is, instead, is an attempt to snooker Americans into accepting a standard right-wing wish list under the guise of deficit reduction. And Americans, it seems, have seen through the deception.

So what happens now? The fight will shift from Medicare to Medicaid-- a program that has become an essential lifeline for many Americans, especially children, but which in the Ryan plan is slated for a 44 percent cut in federal aid over the next decade. At this point, however, I’m optimistic that this initiative will also run aground on popular disapproval.

What of Mr. Ryan’s hope that voters will realize that they’ve been lied to? Well, as I see it, that’s already happening. And it’s bad news for the G.O.P.

I wonder if anyone thinks it's just a coincidence that young Ryan has taken more money from Wall Street and Big Insurance interests than any other politician in the history of Wisconsin. Wall Street selected him long ago as someone to back and push all the way up the ladder. The audacity of dopes is exactly what they were looking for and, so far, the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate sector has showered Ryan's political career with legalist bribes to the tune of $2,349,822, the kind of money usually reserved for senators. Insurance companies chipped in $713,003 and the Medical Industrial Complex put forward another $1,063,242. Big Business is financing Ryan's career because he will always pick their interests over the interests of his constituents who he doesn't care about one whit. When he says he doesn't care if he loses his seat or not, he means it. He's convinced his friends in the plutocracy will take good care of him. Hopefully, we'll see if that's true or not.

Please consider helping Rob Zerban get his message out to southeast Wisconsin voters this cycle so they can do the country a favor and defeat Ryan not just in NY-26 but in WI-1, where it will count the most. (Although, I have to admit, I love to see other progressive candidates around the country campaign on an anti-Ryan platform.)

This week Washington Post editorial writer Dana Milbank jumped into the fray as well with Paul Ryan gets a taste of his own shameless demagoguery, an opinion few Inside the Beltway were willing to consider when the full court press of the corporate propaganda machine was churning out hourly praise for Ryan's brilliance and courageousness last month. The conservative voters in the suburbs and small towns between Buffalo and Rochester defeated that meme. But what Milbank focuses on is that though a petulant Paul Ryan is bitterly complaining that Democrats are being mean to him, it was Ryan himself who was one of the GOP kings of "shameless demagoguery and scare tactics" for the last two years.

Speaking on the House floor in 2009, he said the Democrats’ health-care legislation would “take coverage away from seniors,” “raise premiums for families” and “cost us nearly 5.5 million jobs.” Later, he said the health plan would bring about government “rationing” of health care.

He also labeled the plan “a government takeover of our healthcare system,” claimed America was at a “tipping point” toward a “European social welfare state,” and gave a wink to the “death panel” allegations. His suggestion that the legislation would result in the IRS getting “16,000 agents” to police the health-care law was knocked down as “wildly inaccurate” by Factcheck.org.

...Ryan might be worthy of more sympathy if he hadn’t been one of the people clubbing Democrats with slogans about trampled liberty as they labored to explain exchanges and cost curves. Now Ryan is the one trying to define the narrow difference between “premium support” and “vouchers” while Democrats accuse him of forcing seniors into destitution.

As Central Florida Democratic congressional candidate Nick Ruiz asked yesterday, "Why is America being forced to play Ryan Roulette? Where each vote for such a misguided plan as Paul Ryan’s (WI-1), that can only be seen as the Republicans’ siren song-- the medieval Path to ‘Austerity’-- is like a blow to the head of America."

'If anyone is lying, it's Paul Ryan himself' -- Krugman in NY Times

Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winning economist and NY Times columnist, minces no words is dismantling Paul Ryan's claims that Democrats are lying about his Medicare plan, but voters will figure out the truth:

If anyone is lying here, it’s Mr. Ryan himself, who has claimed that his plan would give seniors the same kind of coverage that members of Congress receive — an assertion that is completely false...

What the Ryan plan is, instead, is an attempt to snooker Americans into accepting a standard right-wing wish list under the guise of deficit reduction. And Americans, it seems, have seen through the deception.

So what happens now? The fight will shift from Medicare to Medicaid — a program that has become an essential lifeline for many Americans, especially children, but which in the Ryan plan is slated for a 44 percent cut in federal aid over the next decade. At this point, however, I’m optimistic that this initiative will also run aground on popular disapproval.

What of Mr. Ryan’s hope that voters will realize that they’ve been lied to? Well, as I see it, that’s already happening. And it’s bad news for the G.O.P.

Read it here.