Romney Picks... Sanpaku

Was it much of a giveaway when Romney announced last night he would be announcing his choice in Norfolk with the USS Wisconsin in the background? Did anyone think he might pick Scott Walker or Ron Johnson? As Fox warned when they confirmed the pick at 4AM this morning (minutes before that Romney VP app went off), "the announcement comes as some polls, including a recent Fox News survey, show the Republican presidential candidate losing some ground to President Obama." Will Ryan be able to deliver Wisconsin? Will Biden be able to handle him in a debate? What happens in the WI-01 congressional race? Will sales of Ayn Rand's adolescent dystopian books zoom into the stratosphere?

Dick Cheney says he worships the ground that Paul Ryan walks on-- his words (just watch the video below)-- and Paul Ryan says he feels the same way about Ayn Rand, a self-proclaimed anti-Christ (now watch the video way below). Ryan is Wall Street's dream candidate for a complete takeover of America. By forcing him down Romney's throat today-- even if it's going to turn out to be as failed a bid as it now looks-- Ryan will be set up as the GOP presidential nominee for 2016. The Big Business interests and Tea Party financiers who Ryan represents are getting exactly what they want... even if they have to sit through four more years of an ineffective neither-fish-nor-fowl Obama administration. Many GOP propagandists were beating the drum on Ryan all week-- especially since Romney's approval numbers are in the toilet nationally. But Republican columnist David Frum was swimming against the current in his own party-- even as Romney was hinting that Ryan was his man. Frum understands that the people who pushed Ryan on Romney don't like Romney, don't respect Romney and might not even care if he loses... as long as they're setting Ryan up as the next in line.

The clamor you are hearing for Paul Ryan for VP is not about helping the Romney candidacy. It's about controlling the Romney campaign-- and ultimately the Romney presidency. It's about forcing a platform on Romney, and then dictating the agenda for that presidency's first year. The platform happens to be suicidal, and the agenda impossible, but that does not matter to the Ryan advocates. They take the old Tammany Hall point of view: "Better to lose an agenda than lose control of the party."

In that sense, the Ryan proposal is a test of Romney's leadership. If he accedes, it's a big surrender of control-- and a surrender to many of those who most opposed (and who inwardly continue to dislike) his nomination.

John Nichols was, predictably, far more insightful into just what Paul Ryan is, than Frum. Like many in Wisconsin who have watched him most closely, Nichols understands that, at his core, Ryan is just a "hyper-ambitious political careerist-- who has spent his entire adult life as a Congressional aide, think-tank hanger-on and House member" who wants to keep on climbing until he's America's real life John Galt. He knows he could control a doddering fool of a puffed up CEO type like Romney as easily and thoroughly as Cheney controlled Bush. But there's a problem. As Nichols writes, "Vice presidential nominees are supposed to help tickets, not hurt them."

Romney clearly needs help. Just back from a disastrous trip to Europe and the Middle East, mired in controversies about the “vulture capitalism” he practiced at Bain Capital and his refusal to release tax returns that his dad-- former Michigan governor and 1968 Republican presidential contender George Romney-- said contenders for the Oval Office had a responsibility to share with the voters, Romney could use a boost.

But Ryan would be a burden, not a booster, for a Romney-led ticket.

Like Romney, Ryan is a son of privilege who has little real-world experience or understanding. He presents well on Sunday morning talk shows and in the rarified confines of Washington think tanks and dinners with his constituents—the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street-- but his record in Congress and the policies he now promotes are political albatrosses.

Some Republicans, perhaps even Romney, do not get this.

But the Obama campaign recognized, correctly, that Ryan’s positioning of himself as the point man on behalf of an austerity that would remake America as a dramatically weaker and more dysfunctional country makes him the most vulnerable of prominent Republicans.

Ryan scares people who live outside the “bubble” of a modern conservative movement that thinks the wealthiest country in the world is “broke” and that Ayn Rand is a literary and economic seer.

The House Budget Committee chairman imagines himself as a high priest speaking unfortunate truths about debts and deficits, the unforgiving foe of social spending who would gladly sacrifice Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid on the altar of debt reduction. Ryan has branded himself well within Republican circles, so well that he has parlayed himself into contention for the vice presidential nod. To get that nomination, however, Ryan must count on the prospect that the party that takes as its symbol the memory-rich elephant will suddenly suffer a spell of forgetfulness. That’s because the Republican congressman from Wisconsin, for all his bluster, is anything but a consistent advocate for fiscal responsibility and balanced budgets. He is, in fact, a hypocrite.

Or, to be more precise, a hypocritical big spender-- at least when Wall Street, the insurance industry and the military-industrial complex call.

Ryan has been a steady voter for unwise bailouts of big banks, unfunded mandates and unnecessary wars. Few members of Congress have run up such very big tabs while doing so little to figure out how to pay the piper. How has Ryan gotten away with his fool-most-of-the-people-most-of-the-time politics?

For the most part, he has until recently flown under the radar-- dazzling fellow Republicans with fiscal fancy footwork, while dancing around weak Democratic opposition in his home district.

Nichols, without slapping around the DCCC, also notes that Ryan has, until now, never had a legitimate reelection contest. What he's polite enough not to say is that the DCCC had no will to go after Paul Ryan. They-- or at least DCCC Chair "ex"-Blue Dog/ex-Center Aisle founder Steve Israel-- have told their big donors not to contribute to Ryan's progressive opponent, Rob Zerban. The DCCC has a long and shameful history of never opposing Paul Ryan and, in fact, of undermining Democrats in southeastern Wisconsin who wanted to defeat him in this swing district that Obama won neatly, 51-48%, and that sends plenty of local Democrats to Madison.

As we've been explaining for at least the last 5 years, there is no politician anywhere in the country more dangerous to American working families than Paul Ryan. If the DCCC had cared anything about protecting America-- or could even discern the nature of the existential danger Ryan poses-- defeating him would have been Priority #1 for them. Instead, Israel was committed to giving him yet another free pass. Blue America is a small independent PAC. Until today there were very few who wanted to work to defeat Paul Ryan. Will he run for reelection to Congress and for Vice President simultaneously, the way Lieberman did in 2000? I'm guessing we'll know pretty fast. We've been working to help Rob Zerban since he took the courageous step to go up against Goliath-- and we're doing our own independent work to elect him as well. You can help either or both efforts at the StopPaulRyan ActBlue page. Please do it now, before it's too late. (I know it sounds dramatic... but I'm speaking from my heart. This is the guy we need to defeat... for VP, for Congress, for 2016...

Paul Ryan's Budget Proposal 3 Times Worse Than Automatic Cuts He Called Crippling

Remember the Simpson-Bowles Debt Commission? It was a special congressional panel established by President Obama as part of a debt ceiling deal with Congress to write a bi-partisan policy on fiscal responsibility and debt reform. It consisted of 18 members including six congressional republicans and six democrats.

We already know there's been plenty of criticism from both sides of the aisle about the commission's final report and we also know all six republicans chosen for the panel were Norquist pledge signers. The "Norquisters" guaranteed the commission would fail because it needed a super majority - 14 votes - to pass, and there was no way those six republicans would allow any balanced debt solutions to include revenue increases. Among the Norquister six on the debt commission was our own failed Congressman Paul Ryan.

More importantly, now that the debt commission failed, was the default mechanism called a sequester Congress agreed to with the President as part of the debt ceiling deal. The sequester was meant to be a fail safe policy of across-the-board automatic cuts that panel members were supposed to fear enough, that they would be forced to reach some sort of a bi-partisan balanced solution to cut and control future deficits. Paul Ryan knew of all this well in advance.

Failing to reach the minimum 14 votes needed to pass - the sequester kicked in. Again, Congress agreed to this. But a few months ago, Ryan issued a complaint of sorts, claiming that the automatic cuts that he allowed to kick in, would have a crippling effect on our military. He wrote ...

Paul Ryan House Excerpt:
...we established a Joint Select Committee in Congress tasked with producing at least $1.2 trillion in additional deficit reduction. This "supercommittee" was backstopped by an automatic, across-the-board spending cut known as a sequester. This sequester was never intended to be policy. It was meant to be something both parties wished to avoid, in order to motivate members of the supercommittee to work together. Despite a good-faith effort to avoid the sequester, the supercommittee's negotiations broke down over fundamental differences in visions for our nation's future.

Again, most of the Democrats on the committee voted to approve the final draft. For good or bad, they feared the cold cuts the sequester would bring. Ryan however did not.

The sequester was never meant to be an empty gesture or something that would be pulled away if they merely negotiated in good faith but still failed, as Ryan now implies. That would mean it would have no bite, no power and that scenario was not part of the debt deal agreement and Ryan knows it. When Paul Ryan voted "no" on the debt commission, he not only agreed to honor the $1.2 trillion automatic reductions in defense and domestic programs, but he also implied that the automatic cuts he now suddenly calls "crippling" were not enough incentive to coerce him to find common ground with others on the panel. He failed miserably not only in leadership, but in a teamwork environment as well.

To deny responsibility when the panel failed to reach consensus or blame it on Obama is completely ludicrous. Congressman Ryan gave up on being part of the solution and gambled away thousands of American jobs when he folded on the debt commission.

But now there's a new report from the Wisconsin Budget Project that looks into the effects Ryan's own budget would have on the state of Wisconsin if passed into law.

Wisconsin Budget Project Excerpt:
The funding cuts to states, counties, and cities under the Ryan budget proposal would far exceed the automatic cuts scheduled to begin in January, often referred to by the term “sequestration.” In 2014, the Ryan budget cuts would be three times as deep as those inflicted by sequestration. In later years, the difference would be even larger, as the sequestration cuts diminish but the Ryan cuts remain just as deep.

It's true. The automatic cuts Ryan settled for in opposition of the debt commission, but now calls "crippling," are nowhere near as devastating to the state or country as his own budget proposal is, particularly in the long-term.

We know Paul Ryan has a serious pre-existing ideological condition making him unfit to be in Congress, let alone on any committee or panel that requires the maturity and knowledge to reach common ground. He proved this on the debt commission and proves it again with his toxic politicking to cover his tracks.

There is no substitute for facts.

ADDITIONAL: CBPP - How the Potential Automatic Cuts in the Debt Limit Deal Would Occur

New Yorker buys Ryan's bull

Howie Klein of Down With Tyranny blog is unimpressed -- to say the least -- with Ryan Lizza's "billion word" profile of Paul Ryan in the New Yorker :

Lizza's ponderous Ryan feature starts off badly, with an assurance that Ryan's "mastery" of the budget is almost legendary. Only for Inside-the-Beltway dolts... like Ryan himself, a third rate flim flam man who has managed to take in some 4th rate pundits-- and who don't know much about economics. He does know a lot of greed, selfishness, Madison Avenue marketing techniques and how to persuade gullible journalists and dumber politicians he's a serious figure.

Read Klein's million word analysis here.

Desperate Ryan jumps on Phony "You Didn't Build It" bandwagon...genius or fool?

Rep. Paul Ryan has tried everything, from backhanding his own policy of crony capitalism, saving social safety nets by dismantling them, to foolishly joining the ranks of the loony right who purposefully misinterpreted Pres. Obama's comment that businesses didn't invest in building roads and bridges. In many cases, taxpayers supply the access roads.

How dumb does he think we are? That's what Paul Ryan is counting on, and I hope he's disappointed. The Right Scoop:

Ryan is only Wisconsin House member to vote against freeze in Pentagon spending

An amendment to cut $1.1 billion from the 2013 Pentagon budget, effectively freezing the military budget at this year’s levels, passed the House on a bipartisan 247-167 vote last week.

Remarkably, all but one of the Wisconsin members of the House, Republicans and Democrats, voted for the cuts.  Even arch-conservative Jim Sensenbrenner voted yes.

Who didn't? Self-styled fiscal hawk and budget-cutter Paul Ryan. 


It was a somewhat small but nonetheless important step, and other amendments for more Pentagon cuts and ending the war in Afghanistan unfortunately didn't pass in the Republican-controlled House


 Here's the vote breakdown.

Ryan Conservatives Surprised by Questioning Press; Belittle it for Demanding Honesty.

CBS’s Nora O’Donnell has apparently decided enough is enough.

A pioneer of right wing lunacy, Michelle Malkin, featured on her blog this moment of conservative outrage by Doug Powers, who wrote: “Paul Ryan won’t refer to extending over ten-year-old code as ‘cutting taxes,’ CBS host scoffs.”

And well she should. Nora O’Donnell is doing what most reporters should be doing, treating Republican talking points like the ridiculous statements they usually are. Paul Ryan is a master at reframing and rewording simple truths into wonkish mumbo jumbo that the press interprets and genius. Far from it.  

Powers: Rep. Paul Ryan tried to explain to CBS News Chief White House Correspondent Norah O’Donnell why he doesn’t refer to extending the same tax rates that have been in place for over a decade as “tax cuts,” but with the election and Dem talking points in the balance, O’Donnell was having none of that:

Amazing isn't it. Temporary tax cuts that add to the deficit and should be allowed to expire, have now been extended so long now, that they're no longer tax cuts? Spin, con or just more Ryan condescension?

Ryan rolling in dough; Where'd he get it? One guess

RYAN'S WAR CHEST [$5.4M] LEADS HOUSE CANDIDATES NATIONWIDE. 

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports Paul Ryan's among the top five U.S. House candidates nationally in money raised with $4.2 million during the current two-year election cycle.


He's never had a close race since winning the seat in 1998 and has been amassing the money for years.  Is $5-million enough to buy the vice-presidential nomination?


Ryan also raised $4.3 million in 2011-'12 for his political action committee, Prosperity PAC and  helped the Republican National Committee raise $21 million as head of a party fundraising
effort known as the Presidential Trust .


Ryan credited “grassroots …It’s the budget. … It's all because of our message. The country is so
ready to be talked to like adults. … When they see you getting shot at, they like you even more. Each quarter it grows."

When you look at Open Secrets and see where Ryan's money comes from, it ain't exactly the grassroots. Check this "profile of his fundraising.

You'll find the top sources of his money are people and PACs from the insurance industry, securities and investment firms, health care professionals, and manufacturers. Grassroots indeed. Six million dollars -- 36 per cent of every dollar he's raised in his career -- comes from special interest political action committees.

Here's the Journal Sentinel story.

Paul Ryan - Urban Legend

There is a story that has been flying around the internet, that Paul Ryan was lured into politics by his love of Ayn Rand. Ryan is even known to buy all of his staffers Atlas Shrugged the Book. In fairness to Paul Ryan (R-Wall St.), he did not make his staff watch Atlas Shrugged the movie, since no one could be expected to sit through that! It turns out that Paul Ryan had more in common with Ayn Rand, than just using Social Security to get ahead while working to end it. They also shared a philosophy(at least the Paul Ryan before being challenged by Rob Zerban did): From the New Republic:

"Almost every fight we are involved in here on Capitol Hill ... is a fight that usually comes down to one conflict--individualism versus collectivism."

And let us not forget this gem he told the Atlas Society(I think that might be a clue)on February 2nd, 2005:

“I grew up reading Ayn Rand and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are and what my beliefs are. It’s inspired me so much that it’s required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff… 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.” - Representative Paul Ryan, February 2, 2005

Now Stephen Colbert wants to name him Vice Pope:

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Then the Catholic Church said Hey Paul Slow Your Roll:

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Paul Ryan, who has very expensive tastes, will not take criticism from the Catholic church lying down. paul ryan starts out by asking Who is Ayn rand? and like Peter denied his deity Rand three times before the cock crow:

“I, like millions of young people in America, read Rand’s novels when I was young. I enjoyed them,” Ryan says. “They spurred an interest in economics, in the Chicago School and Milton Friedman,” a subject he eventually studied as an undergraduate at Miami University in Ohio. “But it’s a big stretch to suggest that a person is therefore an Objectivist.”

“I reject her philosophy,” Ryan says firmly. “It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview.

“Don’t give me Ayn Rand,” he says.

Cock A Doodle Doo.............................. Mr. ryan was not done, then he set his sights on the Catholic church, pointing out how wrong they were to dare question him.

"I suppose that there are some Catholics who for a long time thought they had a monopoly of sorts ... on the social teaching of our church," Ryan said during a speech that attracted a full audience and a number of of protesters. "Of course there can be differences among faithful Catholics on this. The work I do as a Catholic holding office conforms to the social doctrine as best I can make of it."

Paul knew that the way Jesus really cleansed the Temple was kick all of the poor out so the moneychangers could party on in peace! Paul taking on the Catholic church was not enough for the man with this big of an ego, ryan then took on the military!

"We don't think the generals are giving us their true advice," Ryan had said, according to Politico. "We don't think the generals believe their budget is really the right budget."

So for those of you keeping score at home, lets do a quick rundown. In the last couple of months, paul ryan has called the right wing media, the ayn rand society, all ayn rand supporters, the paul ryan circa 2005, the bishops from the Catholic church, the religious leaders of Georgetown University and the all the Generals in the US Military Liars. very impressive list. It is still better than being one of his constituents because all he has for the people of Wisconsin's First district is contempt! Who is this guy anyway? 




Cross Posted @ CogDis!  

Paul Ryan: Fiscal Hypocrite!

H/t John Nichols and the Capital Times!

Ryan has branded himself well, so well that he has parlayed himself into contention for his party's vice presidential nomination.

To get that nomination, however, Ryan must count on the prospect that the party that takes as its symbol the memory-rich elephant will suddenly suffer a spell of forgetfulness.

That's because the Republican congressman from Janesville, for all his bluster, is anything but a consistent advocate for fiscal responsibility and balanced budgets.

He is, in fact, a consistent big spender — at least when Wall Street, the insurance industry and the military-industrial complex call.

A steady vote for unwise bailouts of big banks, unfunded mandates and unnecessary wars, few members of Congress have run up such very big tabs while doing so little to figure out how to pay the piper.

 

The Nichols correctly points out that, this year paul ryan has a serious challenger who is not letting up in pointing out the failures of mr. ryan.  

This year, Ryan is being called out by an able challenger with actual experience in the private sector, as well as local government.

Rob Zerban, the congressman's Democratic challenger, is not fooled by Ryan's budgetary blathering.
Zerban is familiar with Ryan's record.

And he is calling the budget committee chairman out on his "faux fiscal credentials."

"Congressman Paul Ryan can grandstand about the debt all he wants, but at the end of the day, Ryan is a root cause of many of the financial issues our country faces today," says Zerban.

"From supporting two unfunded wars, to dumping millions of senior citizens into the Medicare Part D 'donut hole' while tying the hands of the government to negotiate prescription drug prices, and from fighting for subsidies for Big Oil that his family personally benefits from, to supporting the unfunded Bush tax cuts for his wealthiest campaign contributors, Paul Ryan's hypocrisy is astounding."

 

Paul Ryan Budgeting Himself Millions!

H/T Badger Democracy! Go here and read the whole story, but here is a highlight! 

Statements of Economic Interest (SEI) recently released by Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Janesville), when compared to previous years’ SEI show a clear pattern – the more influence he has on the Congressional Budget process, the more stake he (through his wife Janna (nee Little)) has gained in Oklahoma mining interests. This family interest is led by Ryan’s father-in-law, Dan Little; and is currently making millions leasing rights to energy giants engaging in extensive natural gas shale fracking.

The financial conflicts at work here are direct. Ryan’s budget gives $43 Billion in tax breaks to the companies and processes the Little family (and Ryan) profit from. The policy conflict is the expansion of fracking, which the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is promoting through powerful Legislators like Ryan.

You might ask yourself how could someone who is making a very decent wage of $174/k yr, turn that into becoming a millionaire in a matter of ten years!  The answer is simple, control the budget of the United States!

 Ryan is getting away with clear financial conflicts of interest. The worse crime is complete rejection of potential social, safety and environmental impact to pursue profit at any cost. Ryan is using his powerful position to forward a fiscal and regulatory agenda from which he personally has, and will continue to reap enormous profit. In 1998, none of this interest was reported by Ryan – now, the value is nearly $1 Million and growing…thanks to Ryan’s inside operations.

Give Scott @ BD credit for reaching out and getting a response from Ryan's office(I have tried on numerous occassions and have never received even a response).   By the way, Ryan's response when asked about this:

He would rather not talk about it:

Our office doesn’t comment on the financial disclosures any further than what is available publicly. Appreciate your reaching out.
Smythe Anderson

 Maybe a REPORTER who has access to Ryan on a regular basis could get this explained and maybe while they were at it, they could get an explanation on WHY this is even legal!  

One last thing to remember, Ryan (from economically devastated Janesville, WI) is the one who wanted to end unemployment benefits! 

Yes what a stand-up Catholic paul ryan is!  

Paul Ryan Misinterprets Everything!

Paul ryan recently went public with his opposition to Obamacare, he even went so far as to argue it with Ted Kennedy's widow - Victoria on ABC's This Week. 

During an interview on ABC, former Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy’s widow, Victoria Kennedy, told host George Stephanopoulos that the Supreme Court had made the right decision by upholding the Affordable Care Act.

“This health care reform was the cause of my husband’s life,” she explained. “He believed that it was a moral issue, that it defined the character of who we were as a society, who we were as a country, and that decent quality, affordable health care should be fundamental right and not a privilege.”

But Ryan rejected Kennedy’s assertion and promised to completely undo the law.

“We’re going to repeal the entire law and then we’re going to advance patient-centered reforms that address these kinds of issues,” the Wisconsin Republican said.

“I think this at the end of the day is a big philosophy difference,” he continued. “What Ms. Kennedy and others were saying is that this is a new government-granted right. We disagree with the notion that our rights come from government, that the government can now grant us and define our rights. Those are ours, they come from nature and God, according to the Declaration of Independence — a huge difference in philosophy.”

To paraphrase Jesus - Forgive him Father for he knows not how dumb he is. Lets take a quick look at paul ryan's premise. The Treaty of Tripoli was signed on June 10th, 1797 by our first conservative President John Adams.

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen [Muslims],—and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan [Muslim] nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

Sorry Paulie, the United States is not in any sense a Christian nation! You obviously have never had a grasp on the Constitution, now it looks like you have even less of a sense of religion.

Well digging into what Paul Ryan (R- Wall St.), actually does and says, we know that he really is not the person to be interpreting what God tells us either. Ryan, the ayn rand disciple and worshiper, now pretends to interpret what God tells us.

Paul Is definitely NOT one of the Apostles!

Just ask the Nuns on the Bus!

 If you want to the end the reign of incompetence that Paul ryan brings to Wisconsin, throw some support to his opponent - Rob Zerban!!

Cross Posted at CogDis.

Bad news from Drs. Ryan and Romney

Ryan's Hometown Health Care Providers Say SCOTUS Ruling Is Good News

JG Excerpt:
Setting political arguments aside, Gruber (Mercy) and Craig Samitt, president and chief executive officer of Dean Health System, said the Affordable Care Act is a step in the right direction.

Throughout the article, leaders working within the area's health care sector repeatedly confirm and describe how the Afford Care Act "moves the nation in the right direction," "improves access to health care" and is "vitally important that that care is managed and coordinated."

As has been the case for more than a decade, there's a tremendous chasm between what the folks on the ground have to say and what party-line statist and reality-disconnected Paul Ryan has to say. Ryan says the ruling is nothing but bad news. More here>>>.

When will people start voting for their own best interests?

Ryan budget would cost Wisconsin $3.3-billion, 26,000 jobs

If Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan’s approach to budgeting became U.S. law, Wisconsin would lose about $3.3 billion in federal spending in the next two years, with a resulting loss of about 26,000 full-time jobs.

Medical assistance programs would suffer most under the Ryan budget, with $1.7 billion cut in 2013 and 2014 compared with current law. That’s enough to keep more than 400,000 adults off Wisconsin’s BadgerCare program.

Income security programs—including food stamps, child nutrition and housing assistance—would lose more than half-a-billion dollars in 2013-14. Over 70,000 households would lose food benefits next year.

Those are conclusions from a new Institute for Wisconsin's Future analysis of Ryan’s budget: Which path leads to prosperity? The report details both the statewide impact and the effects on each of Wisconsin’s 72 counties.

Can Rob Zerban Turn Walworth County Blue... Or Even Purple?

Yesterday Paul Ryan got his head handed to him by a busload of nuns in his hometown, Janesville. Rob Zerban was there to greet the nuns, who are so incensed by Ryan's shockingly anti-Christian Ayn Rand budget that spits in the face of working families. Rob was glad that the sisters were making the point:

I support the Catholic nuns and many other people of faith protesting Paul Ryan's immoral budget. The right wing has hijacked the idea of faith to say it is not about being honest and helping others but being greedy and selfish. Paul Ryan is arguing his faith is leading him to throw the poor, the sick, and the elderly under the bus to try to get rich quick. That's the Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan way. This tea party approach, as advanced by Paul Ryan, is immoral and should not be allowed to hide in plain sight from the condemnation it deserves. I encourage the press to stop being biased for Republicans and examine how dangerous Paul Ryan's proposals truly are. I look forward to joining the nuns today and others who are raising awareness that it is time to defeat the agenda of Paul Ryan.

Janesville tends to be a Democratic stronghold in WI-1. Walworth County, just east of there, is another matter. It's a beautiful part of the state, but one that Ryan and most other politicians have pretty much ignored. Zerban thinks he can turn the people there around and he's been spending more time and energy in Walworth than anyone remembers any candidate ever doing before. The first congressional district is a classic swing district. Bush won it narrowly in 2000 and 2004 (with 51 and 54%, respectively) and President Obama won in 2008 with 51%. But that doesn't make the whole district a swing district. Leaving out Milwaukee County (only small part of which is in the boundaries of WI-1, and in which Obama won 67% of the vote against McCain) and Waukesha County, where a notoriously partisan county clerk has been stealing elections for many years, making their election statistics useless-- Obama only took 37% in the county, a ridiculous figure Kathy Nickolaus pulled out of her fat ass-- let's look at the most legitimately Republican part of the district, Walworth County. In 2008, Obama lost the county to McCain 48- 51% and Ryan pulled 70% of the vote for his reelection. There are just over 100,000 people there and the biggest city is Whitewater, (population 14,390) but most of the people live in Jefferson County, which shares the city, and are students at the University of Wisconsin (as was John Belushi). It was the home of noted GOP plagiarist Stephen Ambrose. The county seat and actual biggest city is Elkhorn, population 7,500. 95% of the folks are white. 2010 was a Republican wave year and Walworth County came through big time for Ryan-- 75% of the vote-- while giving Ron Johnson a big win over Russ Feingold, 64-35%.

Blue America's correspondent in the area, reported that the local Sunday paper ran two big stories on Rob Zerban this week. He was in shock because the paper has been part of the Ryan propaganda machine for years and there were no gratuitous attacks against Zerban. "This is the bloody red heart of WI-1," he told us. "It is definitely winnable if Zerban can get the money and get on the national news, to make this a referendum on the Ryan budget. There are an awful lot of old white people on SS and Medicare that won't like what he's selling if they knew."

The columnist who took on the task, associate editor Dan Plutchak, seems almost surprised that such a fine, upstanding businessman like Rob Zerban is a... Democrat. "At first glance," he begins, "you might think Rob Zerban is a conservative. His family struggled to get by as he was growing up, but he went on to start two successful businesses, then sold them by the age of 40 with enough money to retire. What makes Zerban different is that he's a Democrat." What can I say... except that even someone trying to be fair-minded in these small towns in rural Wisconsin have a twisted way of looking at what makes a Democrat and what makes, in his words, "a conservative."

He posits that Zerban's shot at victory will be whether or not he can hone in on "voters' concerns over changes to Medicare in the Republican budget authored by Ryan." And there's the rub. Although Zerban has raised over a million dollars, almost entirely from grassroots small donors, Ryan has $5,081,310 in his campaign chest, much of it from Wall Street banksters and Big Insurance. And he can get his hands on literally unlimited amounts of money from big Republican and corporate donors who see him as the future of the Republican Party and their best hope for ending democracy and instituting the kind of dystopian Ayn Rand society demonstrated by Ryan's heartless, even sociopathic, budget proposal. The DCCC has thus far not even put Rob Zerban on their shoddy Red-to-Blue program and are absolutely refusing-- as they always do-- to go up against Paul Ryan, who shares so many big contributors with DCCC chairman Steve Israel.

...Zerban supports eliminating the income cap and allowing the government to negotiate prices with drug companies... He is also an unapologetic supporter of the Affordable Health Care Act, often called Obamacare, and is among the camp that believes it didn't go far enough. He promotes what he calls Medicare for All, basically a single-payer plan built on the Medicare model.

Plutchak ends his column by letting his readers know that Zerban "may become the rare underdog to defeat an incumbent." The interview that ran the same day was conducted by Margaret Plevak and it isn't easily accessible online. Here's a screenshot:


But they certainly give Rob the opportunity to make a straight forward case for why he'd be a better representative for ordinary working families than Ryan has been. It doesn't present him as some kind of "other" but as a reasonable alternative to Ryan.

Rob Zerban says some refer to the social safety net as a hammock, but he counters his own experience proves it was a lifeline... In Republican parlance, Zerban was a job creator, a small businessman who successfully built up and sold two businesses.

...Zerban’s mother never took food stamps to help feed her family, but she did accept cheese from a government food surplus program, he said. As a child, he participated in the free lunch programs at school, and later, in part through a federal Pell Grants program, graduated from the Culinary Institute of America at Hyde Park in New York.

“Paul Ryan is trying to end these programs,” Zerban said. “If it weren’t for them, somebody like me would not have lived the American dream.”

Working in the food service field in the northern suburbs of Chicago, Zerban made certain his 45 employees got decent health insurance coverage and paid time off. The expense of employee benefits was high, but he realized its worth.

“I found if I take care of my employees, they’ll take care of me,” Zerban said.

At a time when job growth is encouraged, Zerban knows the difficulties entrepreneurs face.

“The cost of health insurance alone is one of the biggest deterrents to starting a business,” he said.

He agrees that the country has fiscal problems, but he would rather the government root out fraud and waste than slash much-needed social programs. And he’d like to see in place a structure like Medicare for All, that promotes a national single-payer health care system based on the Medicare model. Companies like Wal-Mart have supported single-payer plans because they recognize the cost savings and efficiencies, he said.

“Single payer isn’t a bad word, though Republicans demonize it,” he said. “I’m not returning back to this idea to dwell on the past-- this is simply a common sense proposition.”

...Under Ryan’s watch, Zerban estimated 12,500 jobs were lost between Kenosha’s Chrysler assembly plant and the General Motors assembly plant in Janesville-- earning the congressman the nickname “Pink Slip Paul” from Zerban.

When Zerban heard car maker Audi planned to open a plant in Mexico--but didn’t, he met with United Auto Workers union president Bob Kind about keeping Audi in America. Zerban is now planning to fly to Germany to meet with Audi executives about opening a plant in Wisconsin.

He’s not sure what will come of the meeting, but he said at least he’s trying to get autoworkers back to work in Wisconsin, unlike his opponent.

Zerban noted that Ryan’s proposed budget has been ripped by American economist Paul Krugman and even former John McCain economic advisor Mark Zandi.

Zerban called Ryan out of touch and wondered how he’d earned the reputation of economic whiz kid.

“He’s predicting a dire economic crisis within two years,” Zerban said. “Yet he couldn’t predict our last economic crisis.”

Those who are concerned about the country’s deficit should confront Ryan, he said. “You don’t cut a deficit by funding two wars. You don’t cut a deficit by cutting taxes for millionaires.”

During a campaign stop in Janesville recently, a 74-year-old man told Zerban he’d been a lifelong resident of the city, and had voted for Ryan in the past. But not this time around.

“He told me, ‘I just can’t bring myself to vote for Paul Ryan.’” Zerban said.

More voters, Zerban believes, are feeling the same way.

If Rob can keep getting that out there-- and penetrate the prejudices and partisan propaganda barrage-- he'll win this race. If he doesn't, it will be to the eternal shame of "ex"-Blue Dog Steve Israel who has, thus far, prohibited the DCCC from helping Zerban, although most of the people who work there are champing at the bit to take on Ryan. If that's a bit you're champing at... may I suggest you visit the StopPaulRyan page and take action yourself. Waiting for the DCCC will only guarantee Ryan is reelected.

Bus Tour: Catholic Sisters Will Visit Paul Ryan's Office In Janesville

Catholic Sisters across the country work every day with people struggling at the economic margins. Meanwhile, the House of Representative has approved the “Ryan Budget” – which will harm millions of the people they serve.

NETWORK has announced an exciting new venture: a bus tour through nine states to highlight the work of Catholic Sisters, meet the people they serve, and learn about the harm that would be caused by these federal budget cuts.

“Nuns on the Bus: Nuns Drive for Faith, Family and Fairness” will make stops in Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia during the two-week tour beginning June 18. We’ll visit social service agencies and offices of members of Congress, highlighting our opposition, as well as the U.S. Catholic bishops' opposition, to the Ryan budget that passed the House.

THEY WILL BE IN JANESVILLE, TUESDAY MORNING, JUNE 19TH FOR A PRESS CONFERENCE AND A STOP AT PAUL RYAN’S OFFICE, 20 S. MAIN STREET – 3 PM!!!!!

COME ON DOWN AND STAND WITH THEM!

You can find more information about this event by visiting "Nuns on the Bus" website here.

Find out how the Ryan Budget will hurt your state here.

Paul Ryan, Courageously fake

According to Republicans, spending in of itself creates debt, that's why repubs like Rep. Paul Ryan constantly twist the truth with, "we don't have a revenue problem, the country has a spending problem." That is the construct to which the empty-suited Ryan and the Republican Party has hitched our futures on. Most Americans know better of course, that spending in of itself does not cause debt - only borrowing causes debt. But I'll give him that, Ryan's got people second-guessing their own better intuition and values.

So how responsible is a political party that refused to pay the country's bills when it could afford? Obviously they were completely irresponsible, but they are now playing off the popular appeal of the taxed enough already crowd and locked into the Norquist "borrow only" for revenue pledge - there's no turning back. Repubs also think it's courageous to stand up and tell people lies. That's why Paul Ryan is at the top of the heap. That's why he's their star.

In the video below, Martin Bashir shoves facts in the face of Paul Ryan's comical but emotional breakdown for Ronald Reagan's "spirit" and bogus tax reform. You'll see first-hand how Paul Ryan panders and poses with Goober Pyle-like sincerity. You know the kind. Fakes.

NY Times Excerpt: (Krugman)
And the evidence for their fakery isn’t just their bad arithmetic; it’s the fact that for all their alleged deep concern over budget gaps, that concern isn’t sufficient to induce them to give up anything — anything at all — that they and their financial backers want.

Ryan tells out-in-out fairy tales with a dumb face and everyone knows it, but his backers laugh and applause anyway. Perhaps that's his appeal.

You'll also see Ryan doing what he does best as he recasts his perceived enemies with his own budget and tax policy failings. We're all familiar with the constructs of what Ryan is saying, except the names have been changed to condemn the innocent.

Another fine catch from the Democurmudgeon library. Watch it:



ADDITIONAL:
Rock Netroots - Faces of Debt

Paul Ryan-- Much Stupider Than You Probably Imagined

Most politicians are too cagey to submit to the kind of standardized testing they've forced on students and are trying to force on teachers. So is there any objective way to measure a politician's intelligence (beyond just his or her record of accomplishment)? Probably not. BUT the Sunlight Foundation just conducted an interesting experiment that is somewhat helpful in measuring politicians' intelligence-- at least as much as intelligence can be correlated to the ability to communicate in formal speech. It may not be definitive in helping explain, for example, why Paul Ryan is as fixated as an adolescent fan boy on tawdry, low-grade novelist Ayn Rand, or why he keeps coming up with deranged proposals, couched in "serious" Madison Avenue-speak, to wreck America's social fabric, but the test shows him at a 9th grade level, which... well, make a lot of sense to anyone who has followed Paul Ryan's politics. He's been able to hoodwink the Beltway media-- much of which is at a 6th grade level-- but Ryan is a clown and has always been a clown. He sounds "intelligent" to the same kind of people who buy into the hype that Newt Gingrich and Rich Nixon are legitimate intellectuals. They're not and neither is Ryan.

Congress now speaks at almost a full grade level lower than it did just seven years ago, with the most conservative members of Congress speaking on average at the lowest grade level, according to a new Sunlight Foundation analysis of the Congressional Record using Capitol Words.

Of course, what some might interpret as a dumbing down of Congress, others will see as more effective communications. And lawmakers of both parties still speak above the heads of the average American, who reads at between an 8th and 9th grade level.

Today’s Congress speaks at about a 10.6 grade level, down from 11.5 in 2005. By comparison, the U.S. Constitution is written at a 17.8 grade level, the Federalist Papers at a 17.1 grade level, and the Declaration of Independence at a 15.1 grade level. The Gettysburg Address comes in at an 11.2 grade level and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is at a 9.4 grade level. Most major newspapers are written at between an 11th and 14th grade level.

All these analyses use the Flesch-Kincaid test, which produces the 'reads at a n-th grade level' terminology that is likely familiar to many readers. At its core, Flesch-Kincaid equates higher grade levels with longer words and longer sentences. It is important to understand the limitations of this metric: it tells us nothing about the clarity or correctness of a passage of text. But although an admittedly crude tool, Flesch-Kincaid can nonetheless provide insights into how different legislators speak, and how Congressional speech has been changing. ...Overall, the complexity of speech in the Congressional Record has declined steadily since 2005, with the drop among Republicans slightly outpacing that for Democrats.

You can look at the entire chart here but here are the 10 worst performing Members of Congress.


As you can see, all of them are Republicans and most of them are teabaggers and freshmen. The only senior congressmember in the lot is Todd Akin of Missouri who has a well-earned reputation as one of Congress' dimmest bulbs. The GOP is running him for Senate this year. Ryan performed at a 9.66 level, the 55th worst of the entire 530 people analyzed in Congress. He was fractionally better than Ted Poe, a lunatic fringe Texas backbencher and birther who has been asked to keep quiet and not embarrass the party with any more rambling quotations from his idol, KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest, and to stop trying to force Christian prayers on all military casualties regardless of their own religion or their families' preferences. So, Ryan's a tiny fraction smarter than that.

Amanda Terkel wrote up the study for HuffPo Monday and concludes that members of Congress are now talking, on average, at the level of high school sophomores, a precipitous decline due almost entirely to the GOP teabagger freshman class. The lowest score, of course, went to South Carolina teabagger Mick Mulvaney, considered a joke even among Republican staffers, who is the only Member of Congress who speaks on a level below an average 8th grader. Mulvaney is more of a doofus than Michele Bachmann (9.52), Aaron Schock's boyfriend Adam Kinzinger (8.99), John Bircher Paul Broun (9.30), Lynn "Mr. 10 Commandments" Westmoreland (9.54), dog-lover Steve King (10.14) or Congress' dumbest closet case, Patrick McHenry (10.21). Even raging homophobic imbecile Virginia Foxx beat him with a 10.68!

Anyway, back to Amanda at HuffPo. After examining the data, she came to the same conclusion I did-- and anyone would have to: "The members speaking at the lowest grade levels tend to be freshmen Republicans."

Before 2005, Republicans spoke, on average, at a slightly higher grade level than Democrats. Since then, Democrats have been slightly higher.

Sunlight did not reach a definitive conclusion on why lawmakers' speech patterns have become simpler over time, although Drutman wrote in a blog post, "Perhaps it reflects lawmakers speaking more in talking points, and increasingly packaging their floor speeches for YouTube. Gone, perhaps, are the golden days when legislators spoke to persuade each other, thoughtfully wrestled with complex policy trade-offs, and regularly quoted Shakespeare."

So now we get a freak show like Ted Poe quoting the founder of the KKK instead. Wouldn't you rather hear Paul Ryan coming out with something this based on his understanding of Hamlet:

Neither a borrower nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend, and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry... As my mentor Ayn has explained This above all: to thine own self be true.

In op ed column, Ryan hides the truth about student loan rate increase

Think Progress reports:

Unless Congress acts, interest rates on federal student loans will double from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent in July. House Republicans have been blocking efforts to prevent the increase, saying they will only agree to do so if Democrats gut a preventive health care fund.

The House Republican budget — authored by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) — called for allowing the increase to occur. The House Republican budget also calls for cutting nearly one million students off of Pell Grants. But in an op-ed Ryan wrote over the weekend for the Wisconsin State Journal, he claimed that Republicans are just attempting to tackle “tuition inflation” with their plan for student loans.

Ryan managed to write the entire op ed column without ever mentioning the coming increase in the interest rate.

Ryan's budget still bedevils GOP Congressional candidates

The budget proposal issued by Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is still a hazard for Republican candidates, more than a year after the proposal’s initial release.

Republican candidates continue to find themselves on the defensive about what the plan will actually do, especially to Medicare, and Democrats continue to make claims about the dire consequences if it were to become law.

The Washington Post's Ed O'Keefe reports from central New York about Ann Marie Buerkle getting questions on her vote for Ryan's budget. The scene he sets at a town hall has her on the defensive, with liberal activists handing out flyers accusing her of cutting funding to entitlements to give tax breaks to the rich.

Read O'Keefe's story here.

Ryan’s morality “play,” and his cart before the horse solutions.

Republicans blame government for their failures, Democrats blame themselves. Who's more responsible?

Cart before the horse? That's the standard working model of the Republican Party, and explains their overzealous quest toward tort reform, the attack on unemployment benefits, and now cuts to food stamps (can't list them all here).

In each case, Republicans like Paul Ryan want to cut back on the penalty for medical errors, cut back on unemployment benefits and cut back on food stamps, as if they were actual problem...the cart before the horse.

Instead of the hard work that goes in to solving the problems listed above, freeloading politicians like Ryan take the easy way out; cut malpractice awards and those costly social safety nets. We're throwing our hard earned taxpayer money to a bunch of politicians that not only offer us simpleton solutions, but have the balls to penalize us in the end? I guess I'm not masochistic enough to be a conservative.

Arrogance Overload? Ryan isn't afraid to force his "moral authority" down our throats.

Ryan: "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, it is the morality of what is occurring right now, and how it offends the morality of individuals working for their own free will to produce, to achieve, to succeed that is under attack." 

Funny thing about that? It never occurred to me to blame the government for my own failings or successes in business. Ever!

The clip below offers up both examples; the Randian morality lesson we all must adopt, and the cart before the horse philosophy that permeates the Republican authority:

Ryan: Government that helps women is "creepy"

In Paul Ryan's oddly organized mind, public programs that seek to address women's inequality are "big government" Obama-centric efforts at overreach and control. And that's "demeaning," says Ryan, because it implies women can't run their own lives without help.

Well of course they can't, not when creeps like Ryan vote to take away their control over their own bodies, allow pay inequities to continue, and more. Of course, in the Ryan-o-verse, when it comes to giving rich people like himeelf big tax cuts, or giving huge public subsidies to profitable corporations, well, that's not big government nor is it intrusive or demeaning -- much less creepy. It's wholly justifiable, because it creates profits that trickle down to the nation's disadvantage, including many women.

Hasn't this uber-social darwinist ever taken a minute to read newspapers or watch an episode of "Law and Order: SVU"? In Ryan's mind, women (and probably black Americans and others) don't need any special consideration or assistance, because they should be allowed to remain "free." His kind of policies fathered the problem, but he's against paternalism. DailyKos blog post lays it all out:

http://dailykos.com/story/2012/05/07/1089466/-Paul-Ryan-Government-programs-that-help-women-are-creepy-and-demeaning-

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.

Ryan 'would have been great televangelist or Hall of Fame funeral director'

Columnist Gene Lyons savages our boy Paul Ryan in the Arkansas Times:

To understand the secret of current Republican matinee idol Rep. Paul Ryan's success, it's necessary to grasp three essential elements of his popularity:

 First, he's a handsome, telegenic fellow very good at faking sincerity. Maybe the best since disgraced Democrat John Edwards. If he weren't a Catholic, Ryan would have made a brilliant televangelist. As an Irish-American funeral director, he'd have been a first-ballot Hall of Famer.

Second, Ryan knew the exact moment to reposition himself to take advantage of the GOP's hysterical freakout over U.S. budget deficits. See, as recently as January 19, 2009, George W. Bush was still president, the projected FY2009 deficit was a record $1.3 trillion, but relatively few Republicans had anything to say about it. And certainly not Rep. Ryan, who'd championed every one of the Bush administration's budget-busting innovations, from the ill-advised tax cuts to the deficit-financed 2003 Medicare prescription-drug benefits.

Third, and perhaps most important, the budgetary manifesto Ryan calls "The Path to Prosperity," exists in the realm of pure theory, if not downright fantasy.

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.