Paul Ryan Never Grew up, Never Appreciated What Others Gave Him

Madison, Wisconsin—There was a report months ago unknown persons shot out the windows of a SUV while a family slept at night on the southwest side.

Asked around about it, the verdict was: Kids.

Kids didn't understand the results of actions, what they did to the family, neighbors, community, how something like this violence could traumatize a family, inflicting a home, the sanctuary, the scared foundation of America.

Thought about this wanton act on reading reports House Speaker Paul Ryan will not seek reelection.

From the time Paul Ryan was a college student paid for in part by Social Security survivor benefits, he took, and took, and then lived on the public dole for decades with his tax-payer-financed salary with benefits most any Wisconsin family would envy.

Why Paul Ryan would mutate into a zealous ideologue to destroy Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is inexplicable.

Like a malignant child, Paul Ryan never understood the work generations of American families accomplished to create Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, so Ryan has no compunction about destroying social insurance.

Paul Ryan just took, born into privilege, growing "up in a big Colonial house on a wooded lot, and his extended clan includ(ing) investment managers, corporate executives and owners of major construction companies," (Los Angeles Times).

Paul Ryan is the Koch brothers representative, and Ryan needed a gerrymandered congressional seat to stave off Wisconsin voters.

Ryan's biggest accomplishment: Bequeathing future generations with a $ trillion deficit, purposely imperiling social insurance from which he took.

Lawrence O'Donnell gamed out Paul Ryan's scenarios in December 2017, and guessed a future presidential run is likely.

As Paul Ryan lives on his tax-payer-financed pension, a presidential run is not necessary.

A simple thank you to the Americans whom Paul Ryan betrays will do.

Everything about you is a fraud. Your fake earnestness, your pseudo policy chops, your smart-for-a-country-boy act, your hostility for the poor masquerading as patriotic. EVERYTHING. You are a coward, a liar, a stooge and a hack. That is all. Carry on… https://t.co/2JuUhRhEiT

— Charles M. Blow (@CharlesMBlow) February 4, 2018

BREAKING: WE JUST REPEALED PAUL RYAN

Now it's time to replace him. Chip in to help us build this campaign and give #WI01, for the first time in 20 years, some real representation.https://t.co/SgSfzooZOR

— Randy Bryce (@IronStache) April 11, 2018

Lying Paul Ryan in Dec 2017: 'Not quitting anytime soon'.

Nate Silver Forecast: Obama Will Win

Satellite loop from the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
showing Hurricane Sandy as it made landfall in New Jersey.

Nate Silver has become a phenomenon (and sometimes a tranquilizer of sorts) for Americans anxious over the prospect the White, Christian, authoritarian, Republican Party could be unleashed onto what remains a largely depoliticized America.

And for good reason, Silver is predicting Obama's re-election.

With few notable exceptions, moderate, intelligent Republicans—for reasons surpassing understanding—refuse to publicly criticize the Tea Party's direction led by underground, corporatist movements such as the Koch brothers and other rightwing billionaires who would literally alter the composition of the Earth's climate, because they perceive this to be convenient in the short term.

Global warming and extreme weather events, like Hurricane Sandy, who cares? We all should.

Other horrors await.

Women's choice—we have to get rid of that.

Voting Rights Act—that's why we have a corrupt U.S. Supreme Court to strike it down.

Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—Ayn Rand (were this loony alive) and the Koch brothers do not approve. Plenty of Scott Walkers and Paul Ryans to take their money and implement their plans of destruction.

In Wisconsin, the Walker regime takes aim at the Coalition of Wisconsin Aging Groups (see excellent article by Mike Ivey) and other institutions of increasing importance for seniors. [more on that in the coming weeks]

One can go on.

President Obama represents a bulwark against this neo-fascist movement, hence my mentioning Nate Silver's prognosis of an Obama victory. Silver is rigorous and fact-based.  His track record on forecasting national political wins is bolstered by his prediction of the GOP take-over of the House in 2010.

But one wonders what exactly the Tea Party-GOP would have to do before moderate, intelligent Republicans would voice objection.

History long presents a horror show of bystanders with results that ought to strike the conscience of widespread passive compliance (another powerful underground movement) today.

Vote for Obama, but do not for the sake of your children and your grandchildren, make that the end of your political activity.

Romney's Posturing Draws Raves from Political Pundits

Mitt Romney remains unwilling to explain
his $5 trillion tax cut favoring
today's economic royalists.

In Madison, Wisconsin today one commitment I want President Obama to make is: I will protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid from the people who would destroy our earned social insurance against the economic royalists. The vision of the Republican Party is hostile to the health of our families.

Mitt Romney lied well last night.

So, we must install Romney; gut Medicare and Medicaid; and trash working families who owe their very lives to the glorious 'wealth creators'—the protectors of traditional values against the dark forces endangering our land from within and without.

This is the Republican argument.

Paul Krugman aptly describes the GOP argument and Romney's lies last night as a "sick joke."

Sure, I want President Obama to speak out, growl if that what it takes, and call out the lies of the bigots and economic royalists.

This desire is continual.

Consequently, the president's distaste for interrupting Mitt Romney on stage last night is less important than Mr. Obama making clear commitments to protect social insurance, the right of workers to organize and sell their labor product, the right to vote and a women's right to choose what to do with her own body.

In Madison, Wisconsin today one commitment I wish to hear from President Obama is: I will protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid from the people whom were they put into office would destroy our earned social insurance bulwarks against economic royalists and their predatory tools: Romney, Ryan, Thompson and Akin.

This action is 'winning' the debate.

United Front Against Radicalized GOP

Women for Obama

"More generally, the Republican assault on the very concept of collective bargaining and its treatment of wages and benefits (not to mention regulations and corporate taxes) as nothing more than cost-boosting burdens on 'wealth creators' harnesses the GOP to a concept of economic development that if it were effective would have long made Mississippi the nation's economic dynamo."
- Ed Kilgore, Washington Monthly

"I think they should spend five or ten minutes on [campaign 2012]. Seeing if there’s a point in taking part in the carefully orchestrated electoral extravaganza. And my own judgment, for what it’s worth, is, yes, there’s a point to taking a part," said Noam Chomsky.

Professor Chomsky said he will probably vote for Jill Stein for president in an effort to push a genuine electoral alternative, but that if he lived in a swing state he would vote "against Romney-Ryan, which means voting for Obama."
- From Matthew Filipowicz at AlterNet

Cillizza and Blake Speculate on Scott Walker's Hits on Romney

Scott Walker

Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake ask What’s Scott Walker up to?

And they speculate and speculate.

Who cares?

Walker is an extremist, anti-choice, Christian whack with his hand out to the plutocrats.

Maybe Cillizza and Blake are just fishing around for fodder for their column, but Walker won't get to spend $60-million this 2014 in his reelection bid, and his attacks on women and working families won't be forgotten.

Walker won't be a "major conservative hero" for years and years.

No matter how much Wisconsin media have buried the John Doe and the federal investigation of Walker's corruption and public misuse of office up to now, this won't last forever.

What's Walker up to? Squawking till he can't anymore.

In Washington Paul Ryan Is Considered a Serious Thinker

The Philosophy Prince: How Paul Ryan
convinced Washington of his genius
- by Alec MacGillis

"Let me not be alone in the back of the crowd," wrote Richard W. Rahn, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's chief economist, on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, "as I tip my hat to my longtime colleagues on the economic barricades: Thank you, Mr. Gilder, Mr. Kemp, Me Laffer, Mr, Mundell, Mr. Roberts, Mr. Ture, Mr. Wanniski and all the others who helped invent this economic miracle."

One week later the country in the great crash of 1987 "'came within an hour' of the disintegration of the stock market," as noted by Felix Rohatyn, a partner of Lazard Freres and Company. (Johnson. Sleepwalking Through History, America in the Reagan Years; W.W. Norton Company, 1991. p. 381)

The massive deregulation advocated by the likes of Jude Wanniski and George Gilder led directly to the crash of 1987.

Another round of deregulation begun a decade later and accelerated by George W. Bush led to the crash of 2008 and the worst recession since the Great Depression.

Today, Congressman Paul Ryan (who has spent his entire adult career insulated in Washington) and Mitt Romney (a leverage buy-out artist) advocate still more deregulation.

They appear not to have learned anything from recent history and the last 90 years of macroeconomics, or at least nothing can pierce their extremist ideology.

Early in his career as a congressional aide, "[Paul Ryan] nagged Cesar Conda, now Marco Rubio’s chief of staff and a Ryan admirer, so often with questions about supply-side economics that Conda lent him two books to keep him busy—Jude Wanniski’s The Way the World Works and George Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty, both foundational tracts for trickle-down Reaganomics," reports Alec MacGillis in the current issue of The New Republic.

Ryan of course is the same creature of Washington who called for ending Social Security in a speech to fans of Ayn Rand, another rightwing whack the coddled Ryan champions and whom Ryan has said is "the reason I got involved in public service."

Ryan and Romney are "preaching the same empty conservative sermon" that has brought us disaster before and will again if we elect these two phonies, as noted by David A. Stockman, who was the director of the Office of Management and Budget under Ronald Reagan from 1981 to 1985.   End Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, increase defense spending, attack Iran, lower taxes on the one percent and in the words of Richard W. Rahn, we can expect another "economic miracle."

This career Washington ideologue and leverage buy-out artist are the perfect front-men for today's GOP and Tea Party—deluded, dangerous and ahistorical.

The fact the Romney was caught on tape saying he doesn't care about working people is a lucky break.

As for Congressman Ryan, his insular background and hostility to social insurance will out to a wide audience as the campaign nears a 45-day sprint to election day as Congress maintains its 11 percent approval rating and the GOP ticket appears in free fall.

Even Scott Walker is running from it.

Whites Lose Electoral Power, Ron Paul Still Is Retrograde

Ron Paul

Terry Nelson, a campaign adviser to George W. Bush, John McCain and, this year, the former candidate Tim Pawlenty, said ... :

'The country is changing. In every election cycle, every year, every day, this country becomes more ethnically diverse. And that has an impact on the kind of coalition that you need to put together to win. ... The truth is, Obama needs fewer white voters in 2012 than he did in 2008.'

- Calmes, Landler, NYT

In January 2008. James Kirchick in The New Republic knocked down Rep. Ron Paul as a bigoted nutbag running on white resentment.

The Ron Paul people went ballistic, but nine months after Kirchick's piece, it was reported [Walters in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel] that Paul would keynote the 50th anniversary of the Appleton-based John Birch Society.

The John Birch Society, dating back to the 1950s, is infamous for its conspiracy-minded, anti-Semitic, and Joe McCarthy-supporting whacks.

Even as Ron Paul dances around the single digits in the Republican Party primary this year, he is still proving Kirchick correct.

Ron Paul remains a "member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics," Kirchik wrote in '08.

In 2012, Paul recentally embarassed himself more than usual by advoacting that those hit by Hurricane Irene should have to face the consequences without FEMA or any help from the federal governement:

[A]ssuming the vanguard of Tea Party reactionaries, [Paul] deemed a FEMA response unnecessary, remarking, 'We should be like 1900… I live on the Gulf Coast; we deal with hurricanes all the time. Galveston is in my district.'

That's the bottom line for Paul; bring back 1900 and the good ole days.

GOP Pres Candidates Breaking Bad

Pols for GOP nomination are lame, or not sufficiently crazy

Update: See also Sarah Posner's Christian Zionists, Bibi, Obama, and Armageddon at Religious Dispatches.

The weakness of the field at this point is comparable to December 2007 when many on the right were trashing Mike Huckabee in the twisted objections then twirling in leading Republican minds.

Sarah Palin is the recipient of similar derision today, though from different players.

As Chris Cillizza wrote then of the GOP field: "Someone Has to Win the GOP Nomination."

McCain won and lost, the target of McCaincon—a plot by authortarian (ostensibly religious) Movement officers to sabotage the GOP nominee for not being sufficientally crazy, though McCain tried mightily and got a bum rap by the right in this respect.

The parallels between the '08 and '12 nomination race are striking.

The most striking analogue is Mitt Romney.

The Ken Silverstein cover story of the November 2007 issue of Harper's seems like it could be rerun today without anyone noticing.

November 2007

Writes Silverstein: “(Romney) says all the right things, his speeches run through the litmus test on conservative issues, but there’s no conviction behind it. …,” said Cyndi Mosteller, a social rightwinger and GOP politico in South Carolina.

Add to this lack of conviction a dose of Christian religious bigotry against Mormons and you have a political Loser, now leading the current pack of crazies. [Palin, Paul, Gingrich, Cain, Pawlenty, and Bachmann]

Let's say Romney wins the nomination. Will he then pull a McCain and court the endorsement of John Hagee, another whack who says the Holocaust was part of God's plan, among other charming nonsense?

ADL in 1994 Hits Crazies

Being Christain Zionist and anti-Tolerance, anti-Pluralistic and just plain nuts, as Hagee is, sits fine with elements of the Lobby now-a-days—now making noise to align with the GOP nominee [certain to be anti-pluralistic] as long as the Christian right-endorsed candidate advocates war against Islam or at least employs the term "Islamofascism" with some frequency.

The ideologues—who may fall together into a motley coalition looking for an endless war against terror, Satan, Muslims, [maybe even South America]—look to conjure some GOP chimera.

But they may find that the vast majority of Americans are not apocalyptic, war-mongering nuts who, as Noam Chomsky wrote in 2002, do not accept the "increasingly desperate claim that everyone is following them in their depraved subordination to power" and more war.

One aspect of the American political culture persisting is the hope that people can compete with power; that the remnants of our democracy are sufficient to knock down a religious zealot like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, a Medicare-destroying ideologue like Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin), rightwing billionares like the Koch brothers, and the eventual Republican nominee for president.

Sarah Palin in '12

Update: Welcome to the Republican National Committee's winter meeting -- and the GOP's alternate reality, where happy days are nearly here again. (Madden, Salon)

From Charlie Cook:

" ... From a list of 10 possible GOP contenders, respondents [in a Gallup Poll conducted post-election November 5 to 16] were asked which ones they would like to see run for president in 2012."

Running first was the party's 2008 vice presidential nominee, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, with 67 percent wanting her to run."

I say go, Sarah, go. 2012, is not 2004, nor even 1980.

More Americans than ever are disinclined to vote for ignoramuses with no idea what public policy is or why it's important. The reality-based community is thriving.