President RMoney-Ryan = Chaos

Oh, do I ever have the perfect Monday morning post for you. Before reading it, please remove all weapons, sharp objects, open flames, prescription narcotics, belts and shoe laces from your immediate vicinity.

Eric Alterman at The Nation:

A Romney victory would likely bring with it a large majority in the House and quite possibly a Republican Senate as well, and hence a tsunami of regressive legislation. As the longtime nonpartisan analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein argue, a Republican victory in November will likely prove a key turning point in modern American history. It will offer Republicans the opportunity, in Mann’s words, to put “in place a radical view of policy that goes well beyond anything Republicans have proposed in the past,” one that has moved so far rightward that “no Republican president in the modern era would have felt comfortable being a part of [it].” What’s more, they will likely succeed owing not only to Romney’s eagerness to blow with whatever winds may be buffeting him, but also, as Mann and Ornstein put it, to his party’s “demonstrated willingness to bend, break, or change legislative rules and customs that have stood in the way of radical change in the past.”

If you think the Tea Party has gone away, think again. Its members are not holding demonstrations so much anymore because they are staffing campaigns, winning Republican primaries (often against veteran incumbents and well-funded establishment favorites), or replacing the staffers of those they have scared into submission. As Dave Weigel writes in the Washington Monthly, “After 2010, the movement evolved. Activists got jobs with newly elected Republicans. Political organizations like the [corporate and conservative billionaire-funded and -controlled] Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks grew their staffs and budgets. Elected Republicans continued to draw on them for strength, support, and warm bodies at campaign events.” Under a Romney administration, many of these ignorant fanatics will be called upon to staff a significant number of the more than 3,000 federal appointments that a president makes, and his hundreds of potential judicial appointments as well.
The result, should Romney become president, will be a mixture of policies that favor the superwealthy, punish the poor and middle class, restrict the rights of average Americans, and—I say this without hyperbole—cause a degree of almost unimaginable and unprecedented chaos in virtually every area of American public life.

Read the details, if you dare.

Robert Reich has the short version.

And Susie Madrak at Crooks and Liars has the best real-world-consequences post I've seen yet:

This is a blog post written by a long-time Wisconsin reader of my own site who, against daunting odds, pulled herself out of a crappy minimum wage job, chronic poverty, a bad relationship, and an assortment of major health issues (both hers and her daughter's) and put herself in college, where she's doing quite well and has, I hope, much more of a future before her - at least, if Wisconsin doesn't cut the programs on which she and her daughter depend. I thought this was important to share:

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See that low-income-program-cuts graph?

Daughter is on SSI – Supplemental Security Income. My tuition is covered by Pell Grants, with secured loans and grants making up the rest. We both are on Medicare-Medicaid. We live in low-income housing. We get Food Share.

We got into all of these programs WHILE I WAS WORKING FULL-TIME, just so you don’t think I’m some low-life slacker.

So. If Paul Ryan has his way (poor people are not suffering enough) I will be homeless. Maybe my daughter will be too, I don’t know. I’ll have to quit school, but all that – homeless, out of school – will be moot, because without health insurance I’ll be dead. My prescriptions run well over $500 a month. I get one of them, the $350/month one, through low-income support programs that the pharmaceutical companies run, so their drugs will be covered on some federal insurance programs. Do you think that will continue when Medicaid gets cut? I don’t.

But rich people will pay less in taxes.

I’m taking it pretty personally. You would be too, if somebody thought you didn’t deserve to be alive.

Now send this to every Republican voter you know. You never know, one might accidentally learn something.

No, DON'T send it to any repugs. Send it to every DEMOCRATIC voter you know - especially the ones who are not counting the days to Nov. 6 and champing at the bit to vote for President Obama and against RMoney-Ryan.

Send this to all the disappointed democrats, all those Obama supporters who don't plan to vote, every dem leaner who can't be bothered to haul her fat ass out of the barcalounger to cast a vote to prevent the fucking apocalypse.

As Alterman concludes:

Despite the many disappointments of his presidency, Barack Obama remains a vehicle for progressive change in America, one whose weaknesses reflect the weaknesses of the left in a system dominated by money, democratic dysfunction and a myopic media. Those are our real problems—not the attitude of the individual in the White House. And not one of them will improve once the power of the presidency is bestowed upon those who have created those problems and continue to profit by them. Indeed, nearly all of them will reach (and some may exceed) crisis proportions. And what that will lead to, no one—certainly not your author—can predict, save for one thing: chaos.