“Inherit The Wind - This is ridiculous: for the drop
in the bucket that PP represents, there are hundreds
of billions, even trillions that have been lost to
AIG, Goldman, GE, JPMorgan et al, who pay their C-
levels insane salaries, while not only paying no
taxes, but getting using unimaginable amounts of
taxpayer dollars.  Just the CEO of JPMorgan alone is
being compensated for 2010 with $40,000,000 in cash
and prizes.

We’ve spent trillions on Bush’s wars (now Obama’s),
750 billion on bailing out banks (and taken on
trillions of risk in the process) yet you think
cutting PP will fix it.

I have an elderly parent with a fixed income and
limited resources we have to carefully meter out for
however long they last.  If she lives long enough,
they will run out and Medicare and Medicaid will take
over…but they will be gone by then, if Ryan gets his
way.

So the REAL “Death Panels” are being created by Paul
Ryan and his desire to cut Medicare, Medicaid, and
Social Security.  When all that runs out, what
happens to the most frail, the most vulnerable, the
most elderly?  Do we just send them out into the icy
wilderness to die the way the ancient Eskimo did?”

Ok lets get a few of your facts straight. Starting
with. I never said giving money to AIG or GE or any
of the others was acceptable either. I don’t like
hogs at the public trough period. Whether they are
eating tax money by the truck load or just your “drop
in the bucket” they are thieves as far as I’m
concerned.

As far as Bush’s wars - Iraq is winding down on
Bush’s schedule (although Oblameless is taking credit
for it) we will be out shortly. Afghanistan is the
war Obama campaigned FOR. It was the RIGHT war not
the WRONG war like Iraq. Remember? If you voted for
him you don’t have a bitch about Afghanistan. As for
Libya well he will go down in history for creating an Arab Korea. Not north and south but east and west
novel to say the least. But remember - you voted for
him.

As for your elderly parents on their fixed income. If
you can read you may want to reread what Ryan
proposed. Since you say your parents are elderly I
will assume they are over 55. If they are over 55
nothing changes for them. Thats right when their
resources run out and Medicaid and Medicare take over
they will still be covered under the same plan.

Now if your Elderly parents are under 55 as am I
(although I don’t think I qualify as elderly yet) yes
both plans change. They work exactly like the
Medicare prescription drug benefit program, it works,
people like it, and it has cost 40 percent less than
projected. This is due to competition among providers
for the business of millions of seniors. The fear
that few providers would join the program was
unfounded. Dozens have.

As for Social Security, I can’t receive full benefits
until I’m over 67 years of age as it is. The system
as set up makes Bernie Madoff look like an amateur.
There is a generational problem not foreseen when
social security was set up because it’s never
happened before. the generation coming behind the
baby boom isn’t larger as every generation has been,
it’s smaller. Allot smaller. It makes all of the
numbers unworkable. So lets fix it. I personally
think Daniel Patrick Moynihan was right. Social
Security is through personal ownership with the
ability to transfer wealth from generation to
generation the best way to lift people out of
poverty. Now no one has championed this fix since
Moynihan died. But Ryan didn’t touch Social security
in his budget either and he should have although we
have more time before it collapses.

http://www.socialsecurity.org/daily/05-31-00.html

i’m not against abortion at all - just against things
like PBS and Planned parent hood. private companies
existing on federal dollars that they turn around and
use to lobby to get more dollars with. After they pay
huge salaries to their executives and lawyers of
course.
**************

This is ridiculous: for the drop in the bucket that PP represents, there are hundreds of billions, even trillions that have been lost to AIG, Goldman, GE, JPMorgan et al, who pay their C-levels insane salaries, while not only paying no taxes, but getting using unimaginable amounts of taxpayer dollars.  Just the CEO of JPMorgan alone is being compensated for 2010 with $40,000,000 in cash and prizes. 

We’ve spent trillions on Bush’s wars (now Obama’s), 750 billion on bailing out banks (and taken on trillions of risk in the process) yet you think cutting PP will fix it.

I have an elderly parent with a fixed income and limited resources we have to carefully meter out for however long they last.  If she lives long enough, they will run out and Medicare and Medicaid will take over…but they will be gone by then, if Ryan gets his way.

So the REAL “Death Panels” are being created by Paul Ryan and his desire to cut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.  When all that runs out, what happens to the most frail, the most vulnerable, the most elderly?  Do we just send them out into the icy wilderness to die the way the ancient Eskimo did?

“John M:
Instead of reading the Washington Examiner you’d get
a more accurate view by reading the Washington
Spectator.

What you and ALL the opponents of Planned Parenthood
MISS, is that PP prevents more abortions than all you
religious crazies who are equally against birth
control, which PP has always provided.

The BEST way to prevent abortions is to prevent
pregnancies, but you like all your trolling kind, are
against that too.  We’ve seen how well “abstinence
only” works when the daughter of one the PREMIER
teaparty leaders had an out-of-wedlock child at 17.

The “Pro-Life” movement has always been a phony,
being nothing more than an anti-abortion movement led
by people who advocate getting rid of free birth
control and do NOT actively support adoption.

In fact, I argue that ANYONE who opposes abortion but
has not adopted, attempted to adopt, or encouraged
their children to adopt, is a phony and a hypocrite.

Have YOU adopted the child of an un-wanted pregnancy,
or are you a hypocrite too?”

Nope you missed

i’m not against abortion at all - just against things
like PBS and Planned parent hood. private companies
existing on federal dollars that they turn around and
use to lobby to get more dollars with. After they pay
huge salaries to their executives and lawyers of
course.

If the service needs provided by the government -
have the government provide it. Quit handing out
checks to private companies to provide services that
they have complete say over.

John M:
Instead of reading the Washington Examiner you’d get a more accurate view by reading the Washington Spectator.

What you and ALL the opponents of Planned Parenthood MISS, is that PP prevents more abortions than all you religious crazies who are equally against birth control, which PP has always provided.

The BEST way to prevent abortions is to prevent pregnancies, but you like all your trolling kind, are against that too.  We’ve seen how well “abstinence only” works when the daughter of one the PREMIER teaparty leaders had an out-of-wedlock child at 17.

The “Pro-Life” movement has always been a phony, being nothing more than an anti-abortion movement led by people who advocate getting rid of free birth control and do NOT actively support adoption.

In fact, I argue that ANYONE who opposes abortion but has not adopted, attempted to adopt, or encouraged their children to adopt, is a phony and a hypocrite.

Have YOU adopted the child of an un-wanted pregnancy, or are you a hypocrite too?

Thank you seek truth

We agree on where the real money goes. And its not for common man.

John M this is not a strike against your sincere beliefs, but you said nothing about the wars of choice.

Gosh we blew that $360 million a year you complained so much about to Planned Parenthood, in one day, attacking Libya.

Where is our money going?

There is too much deflection about the real treasury drainers.

Once again our Government wants the common man to pay the bill so they can keep giving the Elite all the profits they can hoard.

Planned Parenthood points out that most of its
services do not involve abortion, but this misses the
point. First, if Planned Parenthood didn’t provide
abortions, there would be very little energy to strip
its funding. Second, almost all of its services for
pregnant women are abortions, according to its own
fact sheet published last month: It performed 332,278
abortions in 2009, while serving 7,021 prenatal
clients and referring 977 parents to adoption
services.

Liberals argue that Planned Parenthood’s federal
funding—a bit more than a third of its billion-
dollar budget—does not fund its abortions, but
only pays for other worthy services. But that’s like
the notorious gambler who asks you for money to feed
his family. If you decline on the grounds that he’ll
just gamble the money away, he retorts, “No, man,
I’ve already got my gambling money—it’s the food
money I need.”

Planned Parenthood already has its aborting money,
it’s the HIV test money it needs from the taxpayers.

Don’t forget the politics. Democrats benefited from
more than a million dollars in political spending by
Planned Parenthood and its political action committee
in the 2010 election, with most of that being
independent expenditures. The group’s lobbying tab
was $700,000 in 2010, down from $1 million in 2008.

Federal subsidies allow Planned Parenthood to use the
money it raises not only for more abortions, but also
to support Democratic politicians and their agenda.
Democrats and Planned Parenthood fund one another.
It’s hard to get more cozy.

Conservatives, however, do their side a disservice by
claiming that taking away Planned Parenthood’s
funding is about fiscal restraint. The $360 million
could easily be cut from somewhere else. In fact, in
a purely fiscal sense, abortions for poor mothers are
probably an effective—if grisly—method of
controlling social welfare costs.

The real question is this: Should taxpayers be forced
to subsidize a partisan group that provides
abortions?

Taxpayer funding seems like the sort of question over
which even pro-choice politicians could compromise.
But abortion is the issue where Democrats do not
compromise.

Read more at the Washington Examiner:
http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/2011/04/democr
ats-will-yield-everything-abortion#ixzz1JEsAWXDY

This Democratic Senate and White House are clearly
willing to disappoint their base on many issues.
They’ve agreed to spending cuts and tax cuts for the
wealthy, scrapped a public option, and continued
warrantless wiretaps, indefinite detention of
terrorism suspects and unnecessary wars on Arab
dictators. But in last week’s budget debate we
glimpsed the party’s unshakable core: dedication to
the abortion lobby.
President Obama had promised to veto the House-passed
bill funding government through the end of the fiscal
year, and Majority Leader Harry Reid made it clear
the Senate would never pass it. But the final
agreement—with most of the cuts Republicans
wanted, plus funding for school vouchers in
Washington—proved that the Democratic opposition
was grounded not in Keynesian fears of spending cuts
or liberal concern over service cuts.

The deal breaker for Democrats had been the rider
cutting off federal funds for Planned Parenthood. As
a “senior Democratic source” told the Huffington Post
on Friday, “The cuts will be hard for us to swallow,
but we won’t bend on Title X”—that is, federal
funding of Planned Parenthood. “Reid doesn’t even
have to go back to the caucus to ask on that one.”

Reid said so himself Friday: “We are not—we are
not!—bending on women’s health.” When you consider
the flexibility of Reid on other issues, this shows
extraordinary devotion.

Republican rank and file were equally insistent on
not funding the abortion provider. But in the horse
trading over spending cuts Friday night, GOP leaders
agreed not to filibuster a Senate amendment next week
to reinsert Planned Parenthood funding. That was
enough for Democrats—the deal was done.

John Maynard Keynes would be horrified at the thought
of cutting government spending at a time of 9.2
percent unemployment, and many liberals expressed
anger at the agreement. But Planned Parenthood
celebrated: “American women made their voices heard,”
the group’s website trumpeted over the weekend.

On all the big fights during Obama’s presidency,
Planned Parenthood has gotten what it wants: abortion
subsidies in Obamacare, two Supreme Court justices
who will uphold Roe v. Wade, and staunchly pro-choice
Kathleen Sebelius at the Department of Health and
Human Services, among other things.

It’s no wonder. Planned Parenthood is no simple
health care clinic—it is a part of the Democratic
Party. And despite the talk about “women’s health,”
it is about abortion.

By Cliff Carson, April 11 at 1:49 am Link to this comment

I would like to repeat Cliff’s comment a thousand times!!

“Anybody notice that no Government leader is calling for stopping wars of choice?  Wonder why that is?  Could it be because it is profitable to the Elite as long as only the “common folk” are left to bleed and die in those wars and those common folk back home are sent the bill for the expected profits of the War Industry. 

During the Bush years the National Debt more than doubled.  But it wasn’t funded remember?  Now it has to be addressed and guess what those wars did to our National Debt.

So to cure the debt problem Republicans and Democrats are proposing to cut the largest Programs, Social Security and Medicare, that pay more into the Federal Treasury every year than is paid out from the Federal Treasury every year.  Now when the Republicans bluster about pay as you go they need to study these programs which actually do it.

So going to the core of the problem, it is this:

Republicans and Democrats want to give us common folk less at more cost and give the Elite more at less cost.

Do you see something wrong with our Government?”

Anybody notice that no Government leader is calling for stopping wars of choice?  Wonder why that is?  Could it be because it is profitable to the Elite as long as only the “common folk” are left to bleed and die in those wars and those common folk back home are sent the bill for the expected profits of the War Industry. 

During the Bush years the National Debt more than doubled.  But it wasn’t funded remember?  Now it has to be addressed and guess what those wars did to our National Debt.

So to cure the debt problem Republicans and Democrats are proposing to cut the largest Programs, Social Security and Medicare, that pay more into the Federal Treasury every year than is paid out from the Federal Treasury every year.  Now when the Republicans bluster about pay as you go they need to study these programs which actually do it.

So going to the core of the problem, it is this:

Republicans and Democrats want to give us common folk less at more cost and give the Elite more at less cost.

Do you see something wrong with our Government?

In a conference call with liberal
bloggers about Ryan’s budget last week, House
Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi warned against
proposing a Democratic counteroffer for entitlement
reform. “Once you put another proposal on the table
you’re conceding that there must be some big
problem,” she said.

And What a difference a week makes

Presidential adviser David Plouffe said Obama has
long been committed to finding ways for the nation to
spend within its means. He confirmed that the
president would unveil more specifics for deficit
reduction with a speech Wednesday that would reveal
plans to reduce the government’s chief health
programs for seniors and the poor.

“You’re going to have to look at Medicare and
Medicaid and see what kind of savings you can get,”
Obama adviser David Plouffe said Sunday on NBC’s
“Meet the Press.”

“Things got heated,” Plouffe said on NBC’s “Meet the
Press” today. “The president’s approach was to try
and engage all the parties to come together. Going
forward this can be a model.”

President Barack Obama wants you to know that he is
not a golf addict.

He spends so much time unwinding on the links because
security restrictions mean he can’t go out for long
walks or go to the carwash or the grocery store.

“I just miss - I miss being anonymous,” he said at
the meeting in the White House. “I miss Saturday
morning, rolling out of bed, not shaving, getting
into my car with my girls, driving to the
supermarket, squeezing the fruit, getting my car
washed, taking walks. I can’t take a walk.”

He says he enjoys golf but is not the fanatic that
some have portrayed.

“It’s the only excuse I have to get outside for four
hours at a stretch,” he said.

His impossible dream: “I just want to go through
Central Park (in New York) and watch folks passing by
... spend the day watching people. I miss that.”

Cheering Ryan is like cheering a thug for stealing a poor woman’s purse. Ryan is proposing a robbery of the middle class and the poor and transferring the proceeds to the rich.

Ryan should be fired not cheered.

How come the house of representatives get to run the show now?

Remember the healthcare crap bill, when it was all up to the senate.

I bet Kucinich does.

We got the best press money can buy.

Who’s killing grandma now?

Damn this country sucks. I would go to Canada but scared to leave all these nukes to our religious fundamentalists.

Many, Many good comments on this cockamamie scheme of Ryan and the Republican faithful.

I noticed the other day that the amount authorized to fund the Defense Department thru September was $512 Billion.  Since the budget is for $1.4 Trillion and the funding of the Defense Department thru September is for nine months of 2011, that means the extrapolated Defense budget for a full year is around $600 Billion or about 40% of the budget.

Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid payouts come to about the same percentage.

But there is a mind boggling difference.

Where war expenses pay nothing into the Federal coffers, Social Security and Medicare have paid an excess amounting to about $200 Billion per year, above the payouts for SS, Medicare, and Medicaid - for years.  Where is all that money owed Americans that Ryan and the Republicans want to scam from you?  You gonna vote to allow it?  No you won’t get to, but you can go to the polls with wrath and payback on your mind.  Will you?

Folks that means that SS,Medicare,and Medicaid has not contributed one damn dime to the debt that has been amassed.  And a majority of American voters voted for these creeps.  Seems I’ve heard something like “Ye reap what you sow”.  Seems like the more we vote for those who proclaim vote for me and I’ll get rid of the crooks once they get in they start telling you to get ready for BOHICA (Bend over here it comes again).  Ever feel like you’ve been had?  Gonna vote for them again?  Seems like you always do.

Now look at what Ryan and his Republican Party would have you believe:

That those programs that are paying for themselves are what is putting us in debt.  And those wars of choice don’t cost a thing.  And if we would give more to the super rich, it might start raining manna from heaven.

Ever feel like you’ve been had?  Gonna vote for the same crooks again?  Most of you will.

But at least it will give you some thing to gripe about.

It was no accident that Ryan fared so well. His
budget, with its deep cuts and revolutionary reforms,
might have frightened many House Republicans. But
Ryan got critical help from House majority whip Kevin
McCarthy, who turned over his conference room in the
Capitol for a series of lectures to the entire
Republican caucus on the looming debt crisis and
Ryan’s answer in his budget. (Some members returned
to hear the lecture a second time.) When the budget
committee approved the Ryan document, all 22
Republicans voted for it.

Ryan and McCarthy also summoned business and
conservative advocacy groups to briefings. Among
them: the International Franchise Association, the
National Restaurant Association, the Chamber of
Commerce, and Heritage Action for America. Their
response was favorable.Ryan personally lobbied
conservative talkers, including Rush Limbaugh and
Sean Hannity, columnists such as David Brooks of the
New York Times, think tanks, reporters, policy
experts, and anyone else Ryan could get to sit down
with him. The House Republican Study Committee
produced its own budget with deeper cuts than Ryan’s,
but RSC members are overwhelmingly supporting Ryan
too.

The biggest coup for Ryan was Democrat Erskine
Bowles, the Obama-appointed co-chairman of Obama’s
debt commission. Bowles and his co-chairman,
Republican Alan Simpson, lauded the Ryan budget as “a
serious, honest, straightforward approach.” Compare
this with their take on the Obama budget. “The
president’s budget doesn’t go nearly far enough in
addressing the nation’s fiscal challenges,” they
said. “In fact, it goes nowhere close.”

While that was a blow to Obama, he would still have
the commanding position in a debate with Ryan. He’s
president and commander in chief. Ryan is a House
committee chairman. There’s a difference. Obama has
the biggest megaphone and gets the most attention.
The media, while critical of Obama’s budget, are
largely on his side ideologically. Press attacks on
Ryan are inevitable. Indeed, they’ve begun. Obama can
change the subject and drag the media off with him.

But Ryan has significant advantages in a clash over
spending, the deficit, debt, health care, taxes,
economic growth, and America’s future. His biggest
asset is his vastly superior knowledge of most of
these subjects. I suspect he knows more about Obama’s
budget and health care plan than the president does.
He’s an expert. Obama isn’t.

Ryan has the credibility that comes from meeting
head-on the fiscal challenge to which Obama responds
with lip service. In one sense, Ryan is less
politically motivated than the president. He’s not
running for president and has said so repeatedly and
convincingly. He doesn’t have to answer to interest
groups. And he’s steering the country in the
direction it wants to go, though he’s probably doing
so faster and more aggressively than most Americans
expected. Ryan is a risk-taker with an instinct for
leadership. Obama is a leader with an instinct for
avoidance.

“If there’s anyone made for this moment,” says
McCarthy, “it’s Ryan.” If anyone has said that about
Obama, I missed it. Now he has an opportunity. He can
meet the challenge of Paul Ryan and the fiscal issues
he’s been inclined to dodge. He can debate Ryan. Or
leave it to others. The country is waiting.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly
Standard.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/great-
debate_557015.html?page=2

Paul Ryan’s dissection of Obama-—care at the White
House health care summit on February 25, 2010,
elevated him to a stature in Washington rare for a
House member. The summit dawdled along for seven
hours. Six riveting minutes of analysis delivered by
Ryan, as President Obama listened a few seats away,
broke the tedium.
Obama’s reply is largely forgotten. Rather than
responsive, he was evasive. He ignored Ryan’s
sweeping critique and said he wanted to “follow up on
a couple points.” He picked one that Ryan hadn’t
mentioned. He asked if Ryan thought Medicare
Advantage was “working well,” then didn’t give Ryan a
chance to answer.

Given this encounter, you can imagine Obama’s
wariness of debating Ryan on the 2012 budget and
everything that goes with it, from spending and debt
to tax reform and Medicaid. And there’s the larger
issue, the future of the country. Obama says he wants
to “win” it. Ryan believes we’re “on the brink of
national bankruptcy.”

Obama and Ryan haven’t talked since the summit,
except for the president’s brief call to Ryan after
Republicans captured the House in last November’s
election. Yet Obama and Ryan are the only worthy and
appropriate debaters. Both are leaders of their
party, Obama as the Democratic president, Ryan
because he’s been designated by Republicans as the
architect of their budget and its plan for
restraining the growth of government.

They are cool and likable rivals from the same
generation. Obama is 49, Ryan 41. Both have visions
of what constitutes a successful America. Obama wants
government to play a dominant role in American life,
redistributing wealth by heavily taxing the well-to-
do. Ryan would shrink government, cut taxes, and
incentivize individuals to create a more dynamic
country. Obama’s model is Western Europe. Ryan’s is
America over most of the 20th century.An Obama-Ryan
debate wouldn’t be a one-on-one, televised sit-down.
That’s inconceivable under current political
circumstances. Instead, they’d debate in speeches,
interviews, and press conferences over the spring and
summer, defending their ideas and criticizing their
opponent’s views. The media would cover them
lavishly.

Ryan will do this, regardless of what the president
does. Is it too much to ask of Obama that he engage
directly? It may be. He would be well outside his
comfort zone. He is a world-class delegator. He
turned over the drafting of his biggest initiatives—
economic stimulus, health care, and energy/-climate
change—to Democratic functionaries in Congress.

For Obama to debate Ryan, even from a distance, he
would have to defy conventional wisdom. Presidents
try to rise above squabbling in Congress, posturing
as adults confronted with unruly children. After
being overexposed in his first two years in the White
House, Obama may conclude this strategy makes sense.

But Obama is already 0-for-2 in 2011, a very bad
start in his struggle with Republicans and bid for
reelection.

He has talked often about coming to grips with the
soaring cost of entitlements. In February, he said
financing Medicare and Medicaid creates “huge
problems” that must be dealt with in “a serious way.”

His budget for 2012 failed the seriousness test. It
must have shocked the president and his advisers when
his budget and Obama himself were panned by the
media, including the liberal press. He’s not used to
this. That was loss number one for Obama this year.

The second was the successful rollout of the Ryan
budget. In contrast, the media praised Ryan while
goading Obama. “The Wisconsin Republican has produced
a plan to deal with the debt, which is more than his
Democratic colleagues or President Obama can say,”
the Washington Post editorialized. “Now it’s Obama’s
turn,” the Boston Globe said.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/great-
debate_557015.html?page=2

“...and the bombs bursting in air…” is fast
becoming ‘and rusted, crumbling pipes carrying water
in our cities bursting and flooding (hopefully the
streets and houses in the gated communities of the
rich and infamous,)’  The American Society of Civil
Engineers didn’t give the American infrastructure a
grade of’D’ for nothing.

If there is any ‘beauty’ in the Ryan plan, it’s that
its ramifications will not spare the rich.

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid told MSNBC last
month that we should not consider any changes to
Social Security until we actually confront a
catastrophic failure of the program in the 2030s,
saying “Two decades from now, I’m willing to take a
look at it. But I’m not willing to take a look at it
right now.” In a conference call with liberal
bloggers about Ryan’s budget last week, House
Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi warned against
proposing a Democratic counteroffer for entitlement
reform. “Once you put another proposal on the table
you’re conceding that there must be some big
problem,” she said.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/radical-
gradualism-paul-ryan_557012.html?page=1

@Shaw: I thought I made it clear that the Bush tax cuts are the #1 problem, since I alluded to the One Percent (the number of super rich folks).  It is absurd to require the Middle Class to pay for the lion’s share of not only entitlements but the gargantuan defense budget when that One Percent pays nothing.  The oil companies get paid extra for making profits in the billions.  Something is wrong here.

I would further add the ever growing poor and ever shrinking middle class have been sacrificing to subsidize billionaires for more than 35 years. Overturning the Bush tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans would solve most of our budget problems as would ending subsidies to big oil and other energy corporations, ending laws that allow corporations to offshore profits to avoid paying taxes and creating real oversight concerning wasteful and unnecessary Pentagon spending.

The government has been witholding Medicare and Social Security deductions from my paycheck for the fifteen some odd years I have been working. I resent these rabid right wing assholes trivializing them as ‘entitlements’.
You’re damned right I’m entitled - I paid into it. Medicaid is the only real ‘welfare’ medical care program that fortunately most of us won’t need, since only the destitute can qualify.
It certainly is not the case that US citizens will suffer from unemployment, or that the GDP will shrink, if we stop the stupid expensive wars we are currently engaged in.

I was watching Ryan this morning on Meet the Pests. His most profound statement was that the reason Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are in trouble is because today people are living longer then they were in 1960. Well damn those people for living so long and proving Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid work!

I think you are missing something here.  Ryan is a star.  Ryan has matinee idol good looks in the vein of any one of dozens of movie and TV actors, day-old beard and all, each hair neatly combed into place—the guy must spend hours in front of a mirror.  But good looks are skim deap and what I see is a hustler, a cheap hustler.  His ideas are nothing but a script he memorized, written by the One Percent for the most photogenic of the Repubs. They boil down to dismantling every beneficial social program since the New Deal and Draconian measures punishing women, queer people, and other minorities.  Paul Ryan is a shuck.

Ryan’s economic stupidity is only dangerous if the majority of Americans are stupid enough to accept it.
He is totally dependent on the disconnect between government spending and unemployment. The problem is not the deficit, but the availability of capital - due to the recent crash of the banking industry which—- yes—the government bailed out. Just as the Reps keep chanting no taxes-raised-during-a-recession the same applies to social services cuts. But since when is it necessary to be rational in American politics? The Reps will gouge the middle class for any reason whatsovever. It looks great to talk about ‘fiscal responsibility’ in the light of so much Wall Street crime that has at yet gone unpunished or unregulated.

Ryan’s plan is classic tax reform — which even Obama
says the country needs: It broadens the tax base by
eliminating loopholes that, in turn, provide the
revenue for reducing rates. Tax reform is one of
those rare public policies that produce social
fairness and economic efficiency at the same time.
For both corporate and individual taxes, Ryan’s plan
performs the desperately needed task of cleaning out
the myriad of accumulated cutouts and loopholes that
have choked the tax code since 1986.

Ryan’s overall plan tilts at every windmill
imaginable, including corporate welfare and
agricultural subsidies. The only thing left out is
Social Security. Which proves only that Ryan is not
completely suicidal.

But the blueprint is brave and profoundly forward-
looking. It seeks nothing less than to adapt the
currently unsustainable welfare state to the
demographic realities of the 21st century. Will it
survive the inevitable barrage of mindless, election-
driven, 30-second attack ads (see above)? Alternate
question: Does Obama have half of Ryan’s courage?

I think not (on both counts). But let’s hope so.

By Charles Krauthammer, Thursday, April 7,

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/after_ryans_le
ap_a_rush_of_deficit_demagoguery/2011/04/07/AFUfOXxC_
story.html?nav=emailpage

By Charles Krauthammer, Thursday, April 7, 7:34 PM

In 1983, the British Labor Party under the hard-left
Michael Foot issued a 700-page manifesto so radical
that one colleague called it “the longest suicide
note in history.” House Budget Committee Chairman
Paul Ryan has just released a recklessly bold, 73-
page, 10-year budget plan. At 37 footnotes, it might
be the most annotated suicide note in history.

That depends on whether (a) President Obama counters
with a deficit-
reduction plan of equal seriousness, rather than just
demagoguing the Ryan plan till next Election Day, (b)
there are any Republicans beyond the measured, super-
wonky Ryan who can explain and defend a plan of such
daunting scope and complexity, and (c) Americans are
serious people.

My guesses: No. Not really. And I hope so (we will
find out definitively in November 2012).

The conventional line of attack on Ryan’s plan is
already taking shape: It cuts poverty programs and
“privatizes” Medicare in order to cut taxes for the
rich.

Major demagoguery on all three counts.

(1) The reforms of the poverty programs are meant to
change an incentive structure that today perversely
encourages states to inflate the number of dependents
(because the states then get more “free” federal
matching money) and also encourages individuals to
stay on the dole. The 1996 welfare reform was
similarly designed to reverse that entitlement’s
powerful incentives to dependency. Ryan’s idea is to
extend the same logic of rewarding work to the non-
cash parts of the poverty program — from food stamps
to public housing.

When you hear this being denounced as throwing the
poor in the snow, remember that these same charges
were hurled with equal fury in 1996. President
Clinton’s own assistant health and human services
secretary, Peter Edelman, resigned in protest,
predicting that abolishing welfare would throw a
million children into poverty. On the contrary.
Within five years child poverty had declined by more
than 2.5 million — one of the reasons the 1996
welfare reform is considered one of the social policy
successes of our time.

(2) Critics are describing Ryan’s Medicare reform as
privatization, a deliberately loaded term designed to
instantly discredit the idea. Yet the idea is
essentially to apply to all of Medicare the system
under which Medicare Part D has been such a success:
a guaranteed insurance subsidy. Thus instead of
paying the health provider directly (fee-for-
service), Medicare would give seniors about $15,000
of “premium support,” letting the recipient choose
among a menu of approved health insurance plans.

Call this privatization if you like, but then would
you call the Part D prescription benefit
“privatized”? If so, there’s a lot to be said for it.
Part D is both popular and successful. It actually
beat its cost projections — a near miraculous
exception to just about every health-care program
known to man.

Under Ryan’s plan, everyone 55 and over is
unaffected. Younger workers get the insurance subsidy
starting in 2022. By eventually ending the current
fee-for-service system that drives up demand and
therefore prices, this reform is far more likely to
ensure the survival of Medicare than the current
near-insolvent system.

(3) The final charge — cutting taxes for the rich —
is the most scurrilous. That would be the same as
calling the Ronald Reagan-Bill Bradley 1986 tax
reform “cutting taxes for the rich.” In fact, it was
designed for revenue neutrality. It cut rates — and
for everyone — by eliminating loopholes, including
corrupt exemptions and economically counterproductive
tax expenditures, to yield what is generally
considered by left and right an extraordinarily
successful piece of economic legislation.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/after_ryans_leap_a_rush_of_deficit_demagoguery/2011/04/07/AFUfOXxC_story.html?nav=emailpage

Wendell Potter, former executive with Cigna Health Insurance Company, cautions
us not to underestimate Paul Ryan’s proposal.  He says that Ryan is not revealing
his scheme without the backing of the big money health insurance companies. 
They have been wanting to get access to the profits that Medicare could provide
them and they have the money to hire national public relations firms that have a
proven track record of convincing us, everyday people, to vote against our own
best interest.  It is definitely worth their while to do it again.  Hiring PR firms and
contributing to politicians who vote on these things is an investment that can
bring big returns to them.  They have no humanity despite there status as persons.

Remember, Medicare is a system that is good for seniors and should be extended
to everyone regardless of age.  That would be the most efficient system.

Reference comment by fdmgkmkl/April 4,138AM-This
appears to be a sales offer.Is it supposed to be herein
presented?

Ryan’s father died when Ryan was young.  Ryan saved the Social Security Insurance
survivor benefits he received from his father’s SSI account to pay his way through
collage.  So now it is time for Ryan to screw U.S. citizens on SSI benefits.  How
sinking decent!  Don’t hold your breath for the main slime media to ask him about
this.

Ryan’s Express purpose is to hurry the middle class out of solvency into a listless hopelessness where plutocrats are kings and we are serfs. If we continue to act like lifeless serfs, it will be so.

“If a serious budget is a budget that eventually curtails deficits and reduces the national debt within the foreseeable future, the Ryan plan is a joke—...”

A much better joke was made last year: spending money without taking any responsibility for it, ie not having a budget at all even though they had control of House, Senate and Presidency.

Thank you Nancy, Harry, and Barry. The Three Stooges of American politics!

Ryan is a financial terrorist.  He seeks to destroy people’s confidence so they will turn toward his fascist teaparty and give up their rights and property so his feudal bosses can live even higher on the hog.  The compensation for the CEO of JP Morgan for 2010 was just announced: With cash and prizes he was payed over $40 million.  Clearly it’s not enough and Ryan will terrorize the poorest to get them more.

One of the most disgusting aspects of this buffoonery was the reaction by the million dollar pundits who could not wait to ejaculate on themselves in praise of this buffoon called Ryan. These are the same ‘media elite’ who have been made into millionaires by the Corporations that hire them to do their bidding. They are in fact employees of those corporations and like any employee they are expected to do what they are hired to do. In their cases that means to do the bidding of those corporations. So of course they sell their Souls, make their Faustian Deals, in order to be among the ‘media elite’. Being made into millionaires they then find themselves in the tax bracket that now only benefits millionaires and billionaires. So whose interests to you think they have in mind ? The common person who is 98 percent of our population, or the 2 percent that control almost all the wealth in our country ? This utterly repulsive demonstration of their ejaculations over buffoon Ryan perfectly illustrates how the catapult the corporate propaganda that they have been hired to do.

Ryan’s actions answer the question..“Why does a dog lick his balls? Because he can!” Ryan can say or propose anything he wants so long at it follows along with the divise and greed driven agenda of his corporate masters. It also doesn’t hurt that the ignorant rubes out there who voted for him or one of his reactionary clones in ‘10 have no idea what is in their best interests. No, they’ve been bamboozled into believing that screwing those less fortunate or influential than they rather than confronting the real culprits behind the curtain is the most assured way of achieving trickle-down nirvana! I devoted 35+ years to a career working with the mentally ill and disabled of all ages and continue to marvel at the horrible lack of functional intelligence and pycho-social awareness and empathy of what we would consider “normal” people in this nation! Too many people in this nation have no idea what reality is but, to paraphrase a former justice of the SCOTUS, they seem to believe that they’ll recognize it WHEN(?) they see it!

As a life-long (76-years) resident of Wisconsin, I can sincerely say I am ashamed of what has become our present political leadership.

In the past, we have had Lafollette’s, Proxmire, and Fiengold, who all truly represented the values Wisconsin and all Americans should want.

Unfortunately, Wisconsin’s gullible residents tend to be easilly taken-in by the Carnival barker-types such as the late Joe McCarthy and the present Governor Walker, Senator Johnson, and Representative Paul Ryan. They do not represent what the majority of Wisconsin voter’s thought they were voting for. Those voter’s will soon find out that those promises of fiscal responsibility were actually aimed directly at them. They are now awakening to the real world of Republican politics in it’s most vicious form, which is cut from the poor and weak, and give to the rich and strong.

Thank you Mr Conason for the low-down. I’m livid.