Month: January 2010

Nick Baumann writes:

…it’s been hard for Sullivan to find examples of the National Review or the Weekly Standard or the American Conservative or Commentary denouncing the Ugandan law. The writers at those magazines may disagree with Sullivan on a lot of things, but I suspect they think it’s pretty obvious to most Americans that executing gay people is wrong.

Most, but definitely not all:

God in His law requires the death penalty for homosexuals. [R.J. Rushdoony, Reconstructionist theologian, in a letter to Mel White]

The Bible is without reservation in its condemnation of homosexuality . . . „If a man also lie with mankind . . . they shall be put to death.‰ (Lev. 20:13) . . . This is certainly clear enough and there is not a single text in all of the New Testament to indicate that this penalty has been altered or removed. . . (pp 422-25). . . We find that St. Paul far from setting aside the law and its penalties appeals to the death penalty against homo-sexuals as an established and continuing fact. (Rom 1:32) (p735) [R.J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law]

Oh, and you might want to look further on that link to see what Rushdoony has to say about slavery.

“Yeah, yeah, so what?” you say. “The late Rushdoony never had any more influence or access to power than, say, Fred Phelps.” Think again. Rushdoony’s membership in The Council For National Policy, where he consorted numerous well-known christianists is just one indication of the considerable respect this lunatic had. A cursory scan of the list of CNP members includes the likes of Phyllis Schafly, Oliver North, Grover Norquist, Pat Robertson, Bob Jones, Tim LaHaye and other psychos who had frequent access to the president of the United States during the Bush administration and who are still heavily involved in today’s Republican party.

To be clear: I doubt – except when I’m in a particularly unforgiving mood – that any American evangelical directly told anyone in Uganda to sponsor a “kill the gays” law. But the concept is far more common among American christianists than Nick Baumann realizes, and I have no doubt that the language those evangelicals did, in fact, use in Uganda, made capital punishment for homosexual behavior sound like a reasonable idea. For example, here’s a reminder of the kind of foul garbage influential Republicans have felt no compunction spewing into our discourse.

In 2004, Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn rated the ‘gay agenda’ as a more pressing danger than any terrorist activity affecting Americans.

Naturally, the worthy Senator is not calling upon anyone to kill gays. He just thinks gay sex is a more pressing danger than terrorist activity. And since neither Coburn nor many Americans would have any problems executing terrorists…

There’s a larger point here: Christianists, and the modern GOP, are far more radical than many people, no matter how well-meaning and intelligent, realize. Buffoons they certainly are, but they are very, very powerful buffoons. The Ugandan law is a direct outgrowth of radical American christianism and its high-level reach within our national politics.

Telling

by digby

Poor Republican strategist Todd Harris couldn’t come up with one good thing the Republicans have done in the last 30 years:

I guess he figured that lowering taxes on the most wealthy people in the country and starting unnecessary wars wasn’t a good answer.

And it occurred to me that the teabaggers have ruined the Party’s most cherished claim — that Reagan defeated communism with his bare hands. After all, if we just elected a commie president of the United States, that doesn’t exactly hold up, does it?

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Where Are The Pitchforks?

by digby

David Corn asks polling experts about populist anger at Wall Street and finds that:

Politicians Don’t Care. “People don’t know what to do with the anger they do have,” says Marttila, because they feel blocked by “senators, representatives, and [Treasury Secretary] Timothy Geithner, who speaks gobbledygook.” Wall Street, in other words, is protected by the people’s representatives. “There is a layer between Americans and the villains of Wall Street, and that’s Congress,” Marttila contends. With Obama adopting mostly mainstream positions on economic issues, no national figure has stepped in to rally the resentment. Nobody has put popular anger to good use, because nobody really wants to.

Fear, Not Loathing. As a leading Democratic opponent of the banking bailouts, Rep. Brad Sherman of California has thought a fair amount about public sentiment and the economic crisis. “The public is very angry at Wall Street,” he says. “But they are constantly told by all the respected voices that if we don’t protect and preserve the institutions on Wall Street, we’ll be fighting for rat meat on the streets.” And this fearmongering works. Fear, Sherman says, is generally stronger than anger. The resentment that does exist is diffuse; it is not channeled toward specific solutions. The fear, however, is specific: What will happen to me and my family? With authorities in government and the media incessantly bleating that what’s good for Wall Street is good for the country, Sherman adds, “we’re angry at those people and we’re too fearful to do anything about it.”

It’s Complicated. There’s no doubt Americans are upset about paying for the failures of banks and corporations, says Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. But the financial issues involved appear “incredibly arcane and difficult to penetrate. How do you regulate derivatives when 99 percent of the public don’t understand it?” Marttila agrees: “The public policy implications are beyond the reach, vocabulary, and discussion of many. So the bad guys escape.”

Big Business vs. Big Government. For many decades, Americans have held negative attitudes toward the titans of industry. “It’s a constant,” says Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of the Gallup Poll. “You never go wrong vilifying big business.” But Americans also don’t fancy the counterbalance to corporate power: government. Since 1965, Gallup has asked survey respondents to choose the biggest future threat to the country: big business, big labor, or big government. Big government always wins—by a lot. In December 2006, 61 percent said they fretted about the government, compared with 25 percent who feared corporate power. Last spring, when Wall Street was in deep disrepute, the numbers changed only slightly: 55 percent still fingered big government as the greatest threat. “People always have concern about the government doing too much,” says Newport, “even when [it’s] regulating financial institutions they don’t like.” In fact, as recently as September, Gallup found that 45 percent of Americans believed there was too much government regulation of business. Only 24 percent said there was too little. “The lucky thing for business is that its foil is government,” concludes Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center.

None of that surprised me in the least. It’s not like the Democrats have tried in the least to make a political argument about this that made any sense. But the Republicans have, and it’s a doozy. If things don’t improve quickly, a lot more people are going to be listening to it.

When you have a man-made crisis (or even a natural disaster) people will always look for someone to blame. It’s human nature. The out of power Republicans have a ready made boogeyman in the government, of course, to which they conveniently misdirect all the fear and anger since they are the ones who both led the charge to deregulate and profited from the excesses. The Democrats, either out of a severe case of regulatory capture or a quixotic political desire to “change the tone” and “look forward not backward” have left themselves holding the bag as the defenders of the one institution everybody now holds responsible for the mess.

What a weird place Democrats have in our political culture these days. They’re like the official sin-eaters. They do all the dirty work to clean up after Republican excess and take the blame for making the mess in the first place. What kind of people want a job like that?

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Ann Stone’s Psychic Friends Network

by digby

The Center for Public Integrity has discovered that pro-choice Republicans are just like the rest of them:

Wharton Professor Yoram “Jerry” Wind calls himself a liberal Republican. Unhappy with what he considers far-right positions taken by his party, he searched for a way to change the GOP. Unsolicited, in July of 2000, Wind donated $250 to an Alexandria, Virginia-based political action committee: Republicans for Choice. Over the next nine years, he and his wife sent 10 more contributions to the same PAC, totaling $4,000. Like many of the more than 300 donors to the PAC since 2006, Wind expected that his contributions were going to help elect Republican candidates who support abortion rights — and “to fight against those who want to legislate against abortion.”

Since the PAC’s formation in 1990, documents show that Republicans for Choice has raised and spent more than $5.5 million. But a Center for Public Integrity analysis of the PAC’s more recent filings — along with data from CQ MoneyLine, which tracks political giving — reveals that over the past decade less than five percent of the committee’s spending has gone to political candidates, other political committees, or independent expenditures. Since 2005, just about one-half of one percent of the PAC’s nearly $1 million in spending has gone to federal or state campaigns, according to a review of records. By comparison, Federal Election Commission data show the average federal PAC in the recent 2007-2008 cycle dedicated about 35 percent of spending to contributions aiding federal candidates. A comparison to other PACs on both sides of the abortion debate shows that similar groups spend a much greater portion of their funds on candidates and campaigns.

Where did RFC’s money go? Much of the group’s spending has been for consulting companies owned by the PAC’s chairwoman, Ann E. W. Stone. Those firms — along with payments to reimburse Stone’s expenses for travel, entertainment, and automobile repairs — comprise more than two-thirds of RFC PAC’s expenditures since 2006. And hundreds of dollars more went to pay for Stone’s parking tickets.

Stone says that her group’s overhead is high because, unlike most political action committees, it does not have affiliated interest groups to share administrative expenses. And she notes that much of the organization’s activity goes beyond the election of political candidates.

Yes, and there’s no doubt that she’s been extremely effective.  After all,the Republican Party has become so much more pro-choice since 1990.

I’ve seen Stone numerous times at the Republican convention and on TV and they always trot her out to show what a Big Tent the Republicans are (as opposed to the allegedly Bob Casey Sr hating Dems.) She’s their professional token “pro-choice” Republican. And it appears to be a very lucrative career.

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Comebacker

by digby

Hey, here’s some good news for a change:

In the daily briefing on Tuesday, Gibbs said he did not “know what decisions have been made about nominees that have, as a result of being — having passed a year, need to be re-nominated.”

According to sources, however, the names of those people whose nominations were held up during the past year and are likely to be re-nominated include:

Dawn Johnsen, Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel
Christopher Schroeder, Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Policy
Mary Smith, Assistant Attorney General for the Tax Division
Craig Becker, National Labor Relations Board
Louis Butler, U.S. District Judge for the Western District of Wisconsin
Edward Chen, U.S. Magistrate Judge for the Northern District of California
David Teeples, Army brigadier general

The speculation was that the administration would just drop her nomination, which has been dogged by infighting among the Democrats as much as blocked by Republicans. I’m not sure why they don’t just give her a recess appointment and put her on the job but perhaps they have some information that leads them to believe she’ll be more easily confirmed in the next session. (Or maybe they just don’t care if the job is filled.)

In any case, it’s good news if they do renominate her, even if it’s only to maintain the presidential prerogative to have his administration nominees confirmed except in cases of bad qualifications or severe, radical douchebaggery. Standing up for her because she is an outspoken critic of the torture policies of the Bush administration would be nice too.

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Why Were They There?

by digby

Hmmm:

Two of the seven CIA personnel killed in last week’s suicide bombing in Afghanistan worked as contractors for the company formerly known as Blackwater, but what role Dane Paresi and Jeremy Wise played at the CIA’s forward base in Khost remains unknown. The base collected intelligence used in the CIA’s drone attacks across the border in Pakistan, but CIA director Leon Panetta has said that the former Blackwater, now known as Xe Services, is no longer involved in the drone program.

Spokesman for both the CIA and Xe/Blackwater declined to comment whether Paresi and Wise were employed through Xe, but two private intelligence sources and one current government official familiar with CIA operations at the Afghanistan base confirmed to ABCNEWS.com that the two were there as Xe employees. A source familiar with Xe’s contracts said that their role was not to provide security for the base, but provided no further details.

[…]

Last month, CIA director Leon Panetta announced that his agency had terminated its contract with Xe to load and arm Predator and Reaper drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan that are used to strike suspected militants and al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan’s Tribal Areas. According to two former intelligence sources, Forward Operating Base Chapman was used to gather intelligence for drone strikes across the border.

In response to an ABC News report last month that the CIA had expanded the role of contractors to operation positions, CIA spokesman George Little said, “CIA does not use Blackwater to perform our core missions of collecting intelligence, performing analysis or conducting covert operations,” said Little.

A U.S. government official told ABC News the private contractors “don’t kick down doors” but only fulfill a “security role” on certain CIA missions.

I’m not sure which way they would want this story to go.  If they were there to provide security, they seem to have seriously fallen down on the job and sadly sacrificed their own lives in the process.  If they weren’t there to provide security, what were they doing there, since the official line clearly says that was their only current mission?

I guess what’s happened is that the highly trained super spook/ special forces guys are all leaving government service to work for contractors and make better money.  I think it would probably be better to just pay them better money directly, don’t you? Hiring a private army to do youir dirty work is a very bad idea.  You end up having all the responsibility and accountability but without any of the control. That never works very well.

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Talking The Talk

by digby

Somerby had a good piece about two different subjects of interest. The most important is the second part in which he talks about how deficient the Democratic arguments have been about health care over the years, and therefore, how ineffectual they are when trying to pass something important to the Democratic agenda. This really can’t be emphasized enough — it’s not enough to gain a majority or even to strong-arm your allies into voting the way you want them to. (The last only being realistic if you have real power.)

If progressives want to change politics in this country they are going to have to do it not just in institutional terms, but in rhetorical and ideological terms as well. It’s not like we haven’t talked about this before. Until the 2008 presidential campaign, it was one of the primary issues we talked about — changing the terms of the debate, educating the people, giving voters something to believe in and care about. But for some reason, on the progressive side all we seem to care about these days is poll numbers and institutional reform.

I think those things are important, but they aren’t the whole story. If the Republicans make a comeback — a big “if,” in the short term — they will do it because they have spent the last thirty years indoctrinating the American people into a certain way of thinking. It doesn’t give them a permanent hold on power,obviously, because at some point their bad ideas have consequences. But unless somebody explains why those bad ideas were the reason for the bad consequences, they can manipulate the electorate into believing that the problem wasn’t the ideas but the implementation. Since the people are comfortable with those ideas — and nobody’s offering a real alternative — when a crisis hits they naturally gravitate to the ideology they have internalized without even knowing it.

I’m not sure why we lost that thread on the progressive side. Part of it was that Obama ran a very clever campaign that sort of sounded like it was a new way forward, but it was more about symbolism and process  than new ideas. And symbolism won’t help you when the shit is raining down. But it’s time we activists started thinking about it again. It’s a long term project that needs to be undertaken once and for all and I would guess that unless we do it, the Republicans will always be able to recover smartly from their defeats and the reform agenda will never get off the ground.

Anyway …

I also have to mention the other story Somerby flags, which is the lugubrious Sally Quinn monstrosity. He points out an appalling vignette that I actually missed in the Taylor Branch Clinton bio:

Read Quinn’s full column, and you’ll learn a sad fact: These people think they get a large say in how the White House operates. They start to get mad when their wishes aren’t met—when their firmly-held views about various procedures aren’t honored by the silly shlub who stooped to getting elected. In Quinn’s piece, we hear unmistakable echoes of the way these people turned on the Clintons when they somehow weren’t respectful enough. But then, Clinton and Clinton “were not of Washington” either!

This is a deeply foolish “elite.” They’ve done this damage before.

Don’t get mad, get stupid: Is the following claim about Sally Quinn true? We have no way of knowing. But Taylor Branch, a sober fellow, decided to include it in his book, The Clinton Tapes. David Corn told the tale in real time:

CORN (9/21/09): In 1996, when Washington author Sally Quinn was telling people that Hillary had not written her book, It Takes a Village, Branch suggested to the First Lady that she invite Quinn and her husband Ben Bradlee to the White House. “You know,” Hillary shot back, “she has been hostile since the moment we got here. Why would we invite somebody like that into our home. How could she expect us to.” Branch writes, Hillary “said Quinn and her friends simply invented gossip for their dinner circuit. They had launched one juicy affair between Hillary and a female veterinarian attending Socks, the Clinton family cat, with tales about how somebody discovered them in flagrante on a bedroom floor in the White House.”

Wow.  Those are some mean, mean socialites if that’s true. But it sounds right …

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Making Their Day

by digby

This story from the Wingnut Examiner is just lethal:

White House visitor logs dumped late in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve show that Billy Tauzin, the top lobbyist for the prescription drug industry and once a favorite target of Barack Obama, visited the White House at least 11 times in Obama’s first six months in office.

The White House’s open door for Tauzin, whom candidate Obama attacked as the embodiment of the revolving door and the corrupt collusion between politicians and industry, further dismantles the myth of Obama as the scourge of special interests. It also bolsters the conclusion that health care “reform” has become a boondoggle for the health industry, especially pharmaceutical companies.

During the presidential primary, in the spring of 2008, Obama ran a campaign ad aimed directly at Tauzin, chief executive officer of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. In the ad, titled “Billy,” Obama tells a small gathering of seniors:

“The pharmaceutical industry wrote into the prescription drug plan that Medicare could not negotiate with drug companies. And you know what, the chairman of the committee who pushed the law through went to work for the pharmaceutical industry making $2 million a year. Imagine that. That’s an example of the same old game-playing in Washington. I don’t want to learn how to play the game better. I want to put an end to the game-playing.”

But Obama has played the game, and Tauzin was one of the first players he picked for his team. White House visitor logs show that between Feb. 4 and July 22, Tauzin visited his office an average of once every 15 days — about as frequently as Tauzin probably collects that generous paycheck candidate Obama derided. We don’t know how often Tauzin visited after July, because of the ad hoc nature of White House visitor log releases.

They made a campaign ad called “Billy” against lobbyist power and then they immediately invited “Billy” to practically move into the White House? What in the hell were they thinking?

The Republicans are going to have a field day with this and I’m hard pressed to argue with them. It’s true that they are total hypocrites on this issue — but then, so are the Democrats. In more ways than one. Perhaps you recall this odd decision last June:

The Obama administration is fighting to block access to names of visitors to the White House, taking up the Bush administration argument that a president doesn’t have to reveal who comes calling to influence policy decisions.

Despite President Barack Obama’s pledge to introduce a new era of transparency to Washington, and despite two rulings by a federal judge that the records are public, the Secret Service has denied msnbc.com’s request for the names of all White House visitors from Jan. 20 to the present. It also denied a narrower request by the nonpartisan watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which sought logs of visits by executives of coal companies.

Obviously, they relented and agreed to release the logs — sort of. But I think we can now see the real reason they might not have wanted to do it.

Aside from the policy implications, which we already had to swallow, the political problem the Democrats have bought for themselves with this are huge. It would be different if Obama hadn’t explicitly run on a clean government platform and if the Republicans weren’t blatantly hypocritical opportunists. But he did and they are and this is powerful mojo that plays into the hands of the tea partiers and Republicans.

I can’t get over the administration’s sheer political malpractice in handling this populist mood in the country. I don’t know if they all convinced themselves that they were political magicians and therefore the rules don’t apply to them or what, but Democrats should have known that after having turned the phrase “culture of corruption” into their mantra, they would be particularly vulnerable to appearances of impropriety (not to mention actual impropriety.) Bad, bad move.

Here’s the ad, FYI:

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Trade-Offs

by digby

Chris Bowers wrote a provocative post yesterday observing that if people really want to kill the health care bill they would work for the election of Republican Scott Brown in the Massachusetts special election. (If he wins, the Republicans could successfully filibuster the final bill.) It’s a very interesting strategic argument and one that has implications for the future.

Reader Sleon wrote to me yesterday to tell me that Brown’s allies are making that pitch explicit:

I arrived home this evening to a blinking light on my answering machine. It was a women named Ann Fox of the Massachusetts Citizens For Life Political Action Committee. She wanted me to know that the new Health Care Bill would, “mandate abortion, rationing, denial of care and slash choices of conscience for doctors and patients.” Fortunately, she continued, we here in Massachusetts can, “save the whole country from this awful healthcare.” How…by electing the Republican candidate for Senate, Rob Brown, who has pledged to vote against the conference bill if elected. Plus, he’ll be a “pro-life” vote in the Senate.

There was a recent poll showing Brown closing in on Democrat Martha Coakley, but I don’t think anyone’s taking it all that seriously. But if he won, he would derail the bill — and vote anti-choice among other things. It illustrates the price of such strategic alliances.

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Teabag Truthiness

by digby
 
After watching that marvelously confusing video yesterday, you might wonder if the Republican Party, as opposed to “grassroots” teabaggers, might actually have the chutzpah to run as populists. Never underestimate the chutzpah of Republicans.

Today in the Wall Street Journal Thomas Frank echoes my harangues of the past year — that the Republicans would run as populist heroes by conflating their tried and true anti-Government rhetoric with the bailouts (while raking in the big bucks from the very people who were bailed out.)

According to the demented logic of American politics, the world began anew with the Obama presidency, and so it is the Democrats who will have to go before the public this fall and defend the bailout of Wall Street. Similarly, it might be the Republicans who seize the opportunity to capture public outrage this time around, denouncing concentrated economic power, insisting on holding big business accountable, and promising to settle scores with the nation’s erstwhile financial rulers.

Given the GOP’s doings over the past 30 years, such a reversal may strike you as implausible, if not downright ridiculous. But it can be done. The first step in what could become a movement in that direction is the essay by Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) that appeared in Forbes magazine in December. Its title: “Down With Big Business.”

Paul Ryan is one of the GOPs fastest rising stars. He’s a corporate stooge who’s being groomed for very big things.

Now, Mr. Ryan seems at first like no more of a radical than do the editors of Forbes. The “philosophy of governing” spelled out on his campaign Web site rails against the New Deal, “class envy economics,” and a federal “regulatory leviathan.”

Mr. Ryan’s fund raising also follows an unremarkable conservative pattern. According to the Web site maintained by the Center for Responsive Politics, many of his donations come from people or Political Action Committees associated with insurance, banking and a certain private equity firm that invests in banks and insurance companies.

But the tone Mr. Ryan takes in his Forbes article makes him sound like the Jacobin of Janesville.

He savages “crony capitalism,” pausing to note the “resentment” it is inspiring. He depicts the Troubled Asset Relief Program, better known as TARP, as a well-intentioned measure that has become “an ad hoc, opaque slush fund for large institutions that are able to influence the Treasury Department’s investment decisions behind-the-scenes.” He complains about lobbying, offers the obligatory denunciation of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, and bemoans the economic disasters befalling small companies while the rescued banks enjoy “record profits.”

Had he stopped there, Mr. Ryan might have become my favorite Republican since William Allen White.

It’s amazing what you can say when you have completely retired the concept of hypocrisy, isn’t it?

But the problem seems not to be that government made poor decisions over the past year; it’s that government made any decisions at all. Government, in Mr. Ryan’s view, is alternately the tool and the terror of big business, doing one firm’s bidding as it crushes another one. The solution is to get government out of the game altogether, and Mr. Ryan fondly recalls the great deregulatory campaigns of the past (leaving out the embarrassing story of how he and his colleagues overturned Glass-Steagall and then watched the banking industry explode in a fireball of freedom).

He goes on to explain that this is actually an old argument about how free markets keep business from gaming government and forming cartels. Indeed, according to this concept deregulation is the only way to control corporations. Isn’t that convenient? 

As Frank points out, that cracked notion is “twisted and counterintuitive” and you’d think that after three decades of a mass experiment in government deregulation, privatization and “free” market ideology people would realize how cracked it really is. But Frank rightly understands that to the Republican base, it will all ring true: the problem with big business is big government.

He goes on to say that for the disaffected Independent voters (the new electoral Holy Grail) the logic is less important than the sincerity of the emotion. I actually don’t think sincerity is necessary at all and that the reason it will have salience is because all these DIVs will hear the comforting old saws about Big Gummint being the enemy and will breathe a great big sigh of relief that “somebody is finally talking some sense.”

Frank predicts the future and I agree:

That’s why we may be heading for the greatest burst of fake populism since those TV commercials 10 years ago that showed a mob breaking down the doors of a stock exchange—not because the revolution was on but because they wanted to trade like the pros, which the sponsor promised to let them do.

Democrats, for their part, will find it difficult to respond in kind, especially after having spent their first year delivering regal gifts to the insurance industry and dithering over the urgent matter of new financial regulation. Their friends in the labor movement, meanwhile, got a lump of coal.

No kidding.  And it wasn’t difficult at all to predict the political landscape and see how their actions would play.  The only reason the Democrats didn’t properly anticipate it is because they are obviously more afraid of alienating their Big Money allies than they are of alienating voters.  Either that or they are just stupid. Take your pick.

The Republicans have not yet recovered from their disastrous eight years and as long as they have jokes like Palin at the top of the pyramid they’re going to have problems nationally.  But Ryan’s incoherent message has, as Frank writes, “the ring of truth” because they’ve successfully indoctrinated much of the public in their nonsensical, Orwellian “up is downism” for decades.  But this time, it doesn’t have to make logical sense, it just has to “feel right.” If things keep going the eway they are going, they could surprise us.

Update:  if you want to know more about Paul Ryan, just click here to find Howie’s entire series on him at Down With Tyranny.  In case you have any doubts about what he’s all about, here’s a little excerpt from one of the posts:

When the Republican Party’s designated spokesperson is Joe the Plumber (watch the video below), even a shallow, blow-dried phony-baloney hack like Paul Ryan (R-WI) looks almost intellectual in his approach to slavish, even naive, adherence to right-wing dogma and, above all, serving the vested interests of the rich and powerful against those of ordinary American working families. So while a GOP front group paid the make believe plumber to go rile up celebrity-starved Pennsylvanians against their own rights, the Party Establishment arranged for the Republican ranking member on the House Budget Committee to write an essay in the party newspaper and on their MSNBC morning show. Poor, pathetic Ryan had to try to make excuses for his hapless party leader… he gave up and resorted to the same right-wing rhetoric that caused the Great Depression and the Bush Recession. If you hit that link you’ll probably notice that Ryan sounds like a college freshman who was just partying with the Young Americans For Freedom and forgot to do his homework. Chris Matthews, when asked if Ryan makes any sense, said “No; he sounds very much like Hoover. This was a doctrine that was tried in 1932 and failed.” Right afterwards, also on MSNBC, Austan Goolsby suggests Ryan’s “plan”– more tax cuts for the richest Americans and gutting Medicare– is nothing but an April Fools’ joke.

But it sure was truthy.

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