Kentucky Should Sue Paul Ryan for These Blatant Lies

Come on down to to the Bluegrass and say that, motherfucker. There are 90-year-old grannies who are lined up for the chance to shatter your balls with one kick.

Charles Pierce:

Ryan ....during an upcoming interview with Al Hunt on the Bloomberg teevee channel.

The former GOP vice presidential nominee was asked on Bloomberg's "Political Capital with Al Hunt" about whether Republicans would keep provisions like requiring coverage for pre-existing conditions, keeping kids on their parents' insurance until they are 26 years old and barring insurance companies from having different rates for those whose jobs include physical labor. The first two provisions are among the most popular parts of Obamacare, which as a whole is not popular. But Ryan says such provisions would also drive up the cost of insurance too much. "If you look at these kinds of reforms, where they've been tried before - say the state of Kentucky, for example - you basically make it impossible to underwrite insurance," Ryan said, according to an advance transcript. "You dramatically crank up the cost. And you make it hard for people to get affordable health care."

He really doesn't know what he's talking about. He hasn't had to live in the real world away from the government trough for 10 minutes since he entered high school. Biggest fake in American politics.

The Affordable Care Act does more to improve the health, economic stability and job opportunities of hundreds of thousands of Kentuckians and millions of Americans every single fucking day than you have done in your entire miserable waste of a life, you repug piece of shit.

The Non-Racist Poverty Facts Ryan Got Wrong

Yes, of course, anybody who dog-whistles "urban men" and the rest of the culture of poverty bullshit is a racist, Paul Ryan included.

But there's a bigger failure in the inability of somebody with ambitions to national leadership to even begin to comprehend what being poor in America is like.

Martin Longman just nails it:

First, he went too far and argued that there are “generations of [black/Latino] men not even thinking about working.” This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how ghetto economics work. In 2004, I was a community organizer for ACORN/Project Vote working out of an office in predominantly black North Philadelphia. My job was to hire, train, and deploy (mainly) young adults from that blighted and crime-ridden community to do voter registration and Get Out the Vote drives in suburban Montgomery County. When I put an advertisement in the paper, I was completely deluged with people looking for work. My challenge was to try to find the people who would stick with it and succeed, but I had to turn most applicants away. The hunger for work was overwhelming.

I discovered over time that nearly everyone had a way of making money, despite the fact that they were officially unemployed. I learned about a shadow economy that encompassed more than a mere black market. There were the legitimate under-the-table jobs that aren’t accounted for in government statistics and are taken on day-to-day: unloading trucks, working as a construction laborer. There were the semi-legitimate jobs: using your car as an unlicensed taxi. There were the hustles: making DVD’s of movies with a camcorder, selling fake auto-tags for inspection and registration. There were other non-violent criminal enterprises, like selling stolen t-shirts and the like. Ironically, I found that the people who were the best at getting people to register to vote were the people who set their alarm clocks for early in the morning so that they could go out and work their hustle and make some money. They worked extremely hard, and when given something legitimate to do, they excelled. The reason these people came to me in droves for a low-paying job is because they craved the legitimacy of socially-approved work. Their community was absolutely starved for that kind of work.

That being said, a lot of these young adults were not prepared to enter a standard work place. I had tremendous difficulty getting them to provide all the documentation that you need to get a legitimate job. So many of them had no Social Security card, or driver’s license, or any clue where to find their birth certificate. They also spoke a dialect ill-suited for most workplaces, and they didn’t have the computer skills that are required for a lot of entry-level jobs. But they wanted those skills and I gave out a lot of advice about how to get them. Most of all, I came to love and respect these people and their culture, and not to look down on them as shiftless layabouts or violent criminals. Of course, there are plenty of those in our ghettos, too, but they aren’t the kind to answer my job postings.

Paul Ryan has a cartoonish view of the people who live in our inner cities, in part, because he doesn’t know them. Because he doesn’t know them, he doesn’t understand what they need. He’s right that they need jobs and would benefit from more mentors, but their work ethic is just fine. They work hard. What they need is legitimate work and access to the education and job-training that is required for legitimate work.

And that gets to the second thing wrong with Ryan’s remarks. His prescriptions won’t create jobs in our ghettos. If anything, by pulling a huge amount of capital out of our ghettos, he’ll increase the poverty rate and make it harder for people to pool enough money to take a step up.

This problem of persistent intergenerational poverty in our inner cities is vexing, but alleviating it isn’t rocket science. You need a combination of more jobs for low-skilled workers and big investments in job training. Because the manufacturing base in this country is no longer very low-skilled, the job training component is more important than ever.

So, the really offensive thing about Paul Ryan’s comments isn’t so much that he said that black and Latino men in our cities don’t even think about working. The offensive thing is that he thinks that convincing them to think about working will actually get them a job.

They’re already working. Everybody’s got to eat.

 Also, Erik Loomis:

Paul Ryan, unfortunately the latest Irish-American politician to forget the roots of his people and become a right-winger, has had a very racist week. Blaming black people for inner-city conditions is another in a long history of rich people blaming the poor for their own poverty. Maybe like howthe English blamed the Irish during the potato famine as the English were forcing Ireland to grow crops for its neighbor to the east. Anyway, if you aren’t familiar with why inner-city conditions became so bad in the late 20th century, Jamelle Bouie provides an excellent run-down of America’s racist housing policy and the pernicious effects of residential segregation.

QOTD

The Rude Pundit on CPAC:

There's that old saw the Rude Pundit despises: "If you give a man a fish, he can eat for a day. But if you teach a man to fish, he can eat for a lifetime" or some such shit. As he's said before, that's great, but you better give that man a fishing rod, some tackle, fishing line, maybe a net, maybe some bait. Maybe you could stop poisoning the water where he needs to fish. If you're not prepared to do all that, then why not give him a fish? Because eating that fish hurts his soul?

Mostly, though, just fuck that Paul Ryan guy.

It's Not a Budget; It's a Blueprint for Feudalism

And thus is fit only for ridicule.

Charles Pierce:

(Paul Ryan) believes that there are certain things that the government should not do for its citizens, and he would believe that if the balance showed a 20-gozillion surplus. His goal is to stop the government from doing those things. Everything else he does — every "budget" he proposes — is in service to that philosophy. His whole career has been made within the confines of that philosophy. It has blinded him to the very real human effects of what would occur if his "budget" ever was adopted, it also has blinded him to his own staggering hypocrisy — a man seeking to demolish the very safety net that got him through high-school and college, a man talking about the perils of government who's never had a real job outside of it. He is engaged in an extended act of camouflage through which he concocts disguises for policy preferences that the country has told him, over and over again, it does not want, and which the country has told him, over and over again, do not reflect the country's idea of itself. When he laughed at Paul Ryan in that debate, Joe Biden laughed for America.

Zandar:

The austerity fetish is really simple, actually. We elected Obama, therefore we must learn our place. If the people are made to suffer, then they will be humble. More importantly, if the electorate comes to understand that prosperity for the 99% will never be allowed to happen under a Democrat, then all will be right.

SNIP

But Republicans have now finally admitted that austerity for austerity's sake was always the plan. Americans have to suffer now. You, your loved ones, your community, your friends, you will be made to suffer by rich white men who demand fealty. You must be punished for your defiance. It doesn't matter what is cut, as long as it's cut.

It's for your own good.

The Rude Pundit:

The proper way to think about Paul Ryan's latest iteration of his budget, a budget that helped the GOP to lose in 2012, a budget that was rejected by the majority of voters through the election, is that it's a proposal of punishment for a nation that rejected the Republican way of doing things. It's Ryan's and the GOP's way of saying to 99% of America, "Fuck you." Ryan may as well have put a picture of himself flipping us off on the cover.

The Fuck You Budget. That's what it is.

Quote of the Day 2

SEK at Lawyers, Guns and Money, on everything you need to know about Paul Ryan as a debater and as a person:

The one thing you don’t address — the one you know better than to pursue — the one that must be avoided at all costs — the one that must not even be mentioned in a debate with Joe Biden is a tragic car accident. The attempt to elicit sympathy for Romney by anecdotal proxy is a poor enough of a play. The decision to do so via an anecdote about a tragic car accident in a debate with Joe Biden means you’re either a sociopath or possessed of an idiocy of immeasurable power.

Eddie Munster Cockblocks the Tribble-Toupeed One

The Courier's piece on Kentucky-Indiana pols' reactions to the Ryan Pick has one glaring hole: no comment from AynRandPaul.

Mitch McConnell, of course. Congressman Awesome John Yarmuth, sure. Buncha no-name Hoosiers, OK whatever.

No Rand.

Not in the Courier, not in the Herald, and not anywhere in a superficial google search that replied to every request for "Rand Paul on Ryan Pick" with articles about Paul Ryan's necrophiliac passion for hypocrite Ayn Rand.

The Courier does have an opinion piece on Rand's chance for stardom at the Big Dance in Tampa, but that was written before Romney even hinted at the Ryan pick. It mentions AynRandPaul as a likely contender for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, but doesn't even hint that those hopes were dashed Friday night, when Eddie Munster became the instant 2016 front-runner.

My guess is AynRandPaul is throwing a temper tantrum somewhere, stamping his tiny feet and screeching "NOT FAIR! I'M supposed to be the VP - Daddy made Mitt promise! I'M supposed to be the leading candidate in 2016 after stupid Mitt loses to that ni**er in the White House. ME!

"MEMEMEMEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"

Wonder why Kentuckians will re-elect Mitch McConnell to the Senate in 2014? I mean, other than the utter failure of the Kentucky Democratic Party to present a remotely viable candidate?

The Tribble-Toupeed One is why. Compared to him, Mitchie-Poo is dignified bipartisanship personified.

Quote of the Day

Scott Lemiuex at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

... implying that Ryan cares about the deficit is conceding too much. He cares about upper-class tax cuts, he cares about funding stupid wars, he cares about slashing any federal program that might benefit a non-affluent person, but he doesn’t care at all about deficits.

The Ryan Anti-Veteran Budget

There aren't enough days left before the election to cover every way the Ryan budget flays the social compact, but let's start with how it  would devastate veterans.

John Stolz at VoteVets:

How bad is Mitt Romney’s VP Pick Paul Ryan for Veterans?  His budget slashes care for veterans, but doesn't even use the word "veteran" once.  Below is the piece I wrote, written in March at Huffington Post, about Paul Ryan’s hostile view of veterans. 

Do Republicans care about keeping our promise to veterans?

Looking at the recently released GOP budget, written by Rep. Paul Ryan, it's hard to see how they do. In fact, looking at the nearly 100 page document, the word "veteran" doesn't appear once. Not once.

Today is the 9th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. Last night, I spoke with someone who served with me in Iraq during my first tour. And for the first time in almost nine years, she wanted to talk to me about an incident where she drove through an IED and a soldier was killed. It was a profound moment that shows how war and sacrifice stay with us, always. For those of us who served, in many ways, yesterday is today. And today, we read that the GOP doesn't even talk about veterans in their budget.

But, without saying the word "veteran," the budget tells us a lot about what they think about veterans. The budget calls for across the board spending freezes and cuts. If enacted, the Ryan GOP budget would cut $11 billion from veterans spending, or 13 percent from what President Obama proposes in his own plan.
 
It's unconscionable that they'd do this at a time when so many Iraq veterans have just come home and rely on veterans care. Over 45,000 US troops were wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more will come who will rely on VA services, on top of veterans of other wars and eras who depend on the VA. But, this shortsightedness isn't new.

Back in 2005, President Bush underfunded the Department of Veterans Affairs by about a billion dollars, despite its need. The result? Secretary Jim Nicholson was forced to crawl before Congress and plead with it to pass emergency supplemental spending, just so it could keep the doors open. After that debacle, I have to admit, I never thought Republicans would do the same thing again, if for no other reason than that it just looks bad politically, leaving aside the horrible effect it would have on veterans in need.

Additionally, after the backlash against ending Medicare the last time Paul Ryan released a budget, they're at it again. That, too, affects veterans. I was speaking with one veteran in Missouri, who lost both of his legs in Iraq. His care now relies largely on Medicare, as it does for so many veteranswho were wounded. In fact, older veterans, even those not wounded, rely on Medicare like any other senior. So, no, I couldn't believe that Paul Ryan and the GOP would again propose ending Medicare.

Yet, here we are. A budget from the GOP that short changes veterans, horribly. And where does that money go? Not to reducing the debt. The debt as a share of GDP would actually increase under the Ryan plan. The money doesn't go towards anything, really. But it does go towards some people. As in $3 trillion in tax giveaways to the richest Americans and corporations. People like Mitt Romney, who already pays a tax rate lower than most of our troops.

That's the choice the Ryan plan presents to America -- do we want to fund the wealthiest Americans and corporations, or keep our promise to our veterans? Ryan and the GOP say the former. I can't believe that most Americans wouldn't say the latter.

Empty Carts

The symbiosis of freakazoid religion and reichwing politics has less to do with faux tradition and fake conservatism than it does with the fundamental emptiness of both ideologies.

PZ Myers, discussing superstition vs. science:

I think science is primarily a pragmatic approach that takes whatever tools work to build a better (as evaluated by testing against real-world observations) understanding of how the universe works. My major objection to creationism isn't that it violates a set of dogmatic rules established by scientists playing a formal game, but that it provides no working alternative that I can use. The creationists mistake a series of assertions about history for a bank of operational methods for creating and answering new questions about the world. 

Exclusion isn't quite the right word for what we're doing. Science's job is to fill up the silos of the world with the grain of useful information, and we've found that applying the principles of the scientific method and operating under the guidelines of methodological naturalism means we're productive: we can keep trundling up with wagonloads of corn and wheat and rice. The creationists are showing up with broken-down, essentially empty carts, containing nothing but chaff, a few dirt clods, and some fragrant manure, and they're being turned away because they have nothing to contribute. You're not being excluded if you have nothing to offer.

I imagine that Belfast creationist went back to his clique of ignorant pissants with a sense of triumph, and proudly announced that I had dogmaticly refused to include his offering of hot air and dust as nutritious and fit for a feast, and therefore was yet another tool of the establishment who unfairly discriminated against their way of knowing. Sorry, guy; a wealth of ignorance is no substitute for even a grain of knowledge.

Fascinating, although not surprising, how creationist methods of "debate" - lying, denying facts, misrepresenting the other side's case, etc - resembles so closely how repugs pretend to debate national policy: lying, denying facts, misrepresenting the other side's case, etc.

 

That's probably because the creationists and the repugs - besides having heavily overlapping memberships - have similarly anti-reality goals.  

 

The creationists want everyone to share their superstition and are willing - nay, eager - to eliminate any and all facts in the way.  

 

The repugs want everyone to willingly work as serfs to enrich the privileged few, and are willing - nay, eager - to eliminate any and all obstacles - like our constitutional democracy - in the way.

Your 3 a.m. Ryan Wake-Up Call

Here's just a taste of how Charles Pierce won the weekend:  (h/t  TBogg)

Paul Ryan is an authentically dangerous zealot. He does not want to reform entitlements. He wants to eliminate them. He wants to eliminate them because he doesn't believe they are a legitimate function of government. He is a smiling, aw-shucks murderer of opportunity, a creator of dystopias in which he never will have to live. This now is an argument not over what kind of political commonwealth we will have, but rather whether or not we will have one at all, because Paul Ryan does not believe in the most primary institution of that commonwealth: our government. The first three words of the Preamble to the Constitution make a lie out of every speech he's ever given. He looks at the country and sees its government as something alien that is holding down the individual entrepreneurial genius of 200 million people, and not as their creation, and the vehicle through which that genius can be channelled for the general welfare.

SNIP

But the quote illustrates something else about Paul Ryan: get him out of his comfort zone of being thought an intellectual by the likes of Louie Gohmert, and of being thought of as a bold thinker by half the buffet-grazers in the Beltway media, and he really is quite the political coward. (In this way, he is a perfect match for the man who picked him.) He does not have the raw balls to explain to the country that, no, he does not believe in government — not the federal government, anyway, and not as it was originally conceived, as the fundamental expression of a political commonwealth. 

Read the whole thing.

Then read Tristero on why Democrats should stop celebrating.

Bootstraps versus Silver Spoons

In honor of the republican presidential ticket: two rich white guys who never worked a day in their parasitical lives:

David Atkins nails why I say that all rich people today got that way only by cheating all the people who are poor today. So jail everyone who has more than a billion dollars, confiscate all - 100 percent - income above $1,000,000 per year and distribute it equally among everybody else.

No, I am not fucking kidding.

Anyone who can stand to watch that smug, self-assured pompous jerk [Bill O'Reilly, but Mitt and Paul are just as bad if not worse] tell the single mothers who work 50 hours a week and struggle to get by, or workers who take low-wage barista jobs after grad school because there are no decent thinking jobs left, or the unfortunate middle-aged Americans who get laid off at 55 years old after 30 years in the same field and can't get hired again due to age discrimination and inability to completely retrain, or people who grew up in delapidated, unpoliced virtual war zones where joining a gang often seems like the best of way of protecting oneself, to simply pull themselves up by their bootstraps despite decades of wage stagnation even as all the productivity gains go to the top--well, much can be said of them but none of it good.

There is a good reason that fewer Americans were on welfare in the 1960s: a single income could support an entire family (which in turn led to fewer child care costs at the expense of women's freedom), good jobs were available right out of high school, companies tended to provide lifetime careers with job security for workers, the pace of life and work was slower and carried fewer cost expectations (just about any decent job these days expects you to have Internet and a cell phone), etc. Oh, and minorities were treated as less than human and often lived in appalling conditions, too.

If over half of this country is suffering from such Stockholm Syndrome combined with racist animosity that they're not repulsed by the arguments from this gasbag and those like him, then they deserve the grinding impoverishment they receive at the hands of the moneyed elite.

Read the whole thing.

The Conservative Economic Vision

That's it in table form, direct from the official repug budget plan: Taking money from the middle-class to further enrich the already obscenely wealthy.

Kevin Drum summarizes:

I'd just like to quickly sum up what we now know about conservative Rep. Paul Ryan's "Roadmap for America’s Future":

• It raises taxes on 90% of Americans.
• It doesn't explain what spending it would cut.
• It doesn't eliminate the deficit.
  

And remember, this comes from the guy who's pretty much the best the GOP has to offer. Pretty impressive, no?

In more detail:

Rep. Paul Ryan's tax and spending "roadmap" is a fascinating critter: conservatives all praise it to the skies but none of them want to actually commit to supporting it. The reason for their hesitation is obvious: Ryan's plan would cut spending dramatically, and supporting it would mean having to explain what, exactly, they'd cut. That would be electoral suicide and they know it. They much prefer their usual game of loudly denouncing "spending" without ever having to say what spending they're actually opposed to.

However, their reason for supporting Ryan's plan is also obvious: it would cut taxes on the rich dramatically, and there's nothing conservatives like better than cutting the tax bills of America's wealthy. But how much would it cut taxes on the rich?

Citizens for Tax Justice has run the numbers and the answer is: a lot. The very richest of the rich would see their tax bills go down by an average of over $200,000, a whopping 15% of the income. Ka-ching! To make up for that, everyone with an income under $100,000 would have their taxes increased by about $2,000 per year.

It's a sweet deal for the rich. But even with all the tax increases on the middle class, Ryan's plan still raises less revenue than today's tax code. "It’s difficult to design a tax plan that will lose $2 trillion over a decade even while requiring 90 percent of taxpayers to pay more," says CTJ acerbically. "But Congressman Ryan has met that daunting challenge."

But the real horror is in the vision behind the plan, as Ted Frier expands on Jon Chait's terrifying analysis:

In place of those liberal public policies that for more than a century have tried to domesticate and humanize the untamed forces of a free market that accounts for both our economy's dynamism but also its destructiveness, Ryan and the Republicans would simply un-cage these forces to roam free about the countryside.

In doing so, the GOP's roadmap essentially codifies what Chait says is the coherent view of society sketched by Ayn Rand which glorifies selfishness, denies any basis for using public democratic power to reduce economic inequality, holds people completely responsible for their own destiny and fate, and concludes that whenever government tries to help all it really does is punish virtue and reward vice.

The core of the Randian worldview that Ryan and Republicans embrace, says Chait, is that only bad things happen when people (meaning the government) interfere with the "natural market distribution of income" that capitalism creates, meaning that the "central struggle of politics is to free the successful from having the fruits of their superiority redistributed by looters and moochers."

SNIP

What Ayn Rand and the Republicans who follow here want us to believe is that there is a class of super-achievers - the John Galts of the world -- who are responsible for everything that is good. And then there is us - we parasites, who live off of their beneficance and should be grateful every day for whatever jobs these super-achievers have created for us.

"Rand tapped into a latent elitism that had fallen into political disrepute but never disappeared from the economic right," said Chait, citing as evidence the prominent conservative Ludwig von Mises, who once confided to Rand: "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."

The hilarious thing about the whole John Galt myth is that these supposed essential beings on whose Herculean shoulders the entire economy rests wouldn't last five seconds without trillions in government subsidies (agriculture, oil, gas, coal, Etc.), contracts (defense (Blackwater and Halliburton), homeland security, corrections, etc. ) and myriad other forms of corporate welfare. There's not a CEO on Wall Street who could support himself for a day in the minimum-wage, forced-labor ghetto the vast majority of Americans work through every day.

Nor do any of the corporate rich have an iota of personal responsibility that is not forced on them by government bureaucrats.

Anybody really think chemical companies would keep paying millions to prevent their shit from poisoning local water supplies if they were "freed" from those onerous regulations? That Walmart would test those Chinese toys for lead and refuse to sell them? That the helicopter-owning owner of your factory would pay taxes to keep the highways maintained? That public schools would teach anything other than blind obedience to our corporate masters?

Understand clearly the world conservatives want, and why they're lying to you about it.

Read both Frier's and Chait's pieces in full.