“Unlike the current president, who has cut Medicare funding by $700 billion, we will preserve and protect Medicare and Social Security,” Romney said Saturday while introducing Ryan.
The trouble with this argument — made frequently by Republicans, including Ryan himself — is that Ryan’s own budget sustains the Medicare cuts in “Obamacare.” Congressional Republicans have voted overwhelmingly — most recently this spring — for the blueprint containing those cuts, which don’t significantly alter the seniors’ safety net program.
Talking points circulated by the Romney campaign Saturday similarly instruct surrogates to make the “Obama cut Medicare” argument to blunt voters’ fears over Ryan’s Medicare plan.
“No. President Obama is the one who should be worried, because he has cut $700 BILLION from Medicare to pay for Obamacare, and put in place a panel of Washington bureaucrats to make decisions about what kind of care seniors will receive under Medicare,” the memo reads. “Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have a bipartisan plan to strengthen Medicare by giving future seniors the choice between traditional Medicare and a variety of private plans.”
You remember 2010, right? When the Tea party swept the congress?
I wonder if there has ever been a dumber political move than the Grand Bargain talks last summer in which the President and the Democrats put the safety net on the table (and bragged about it even as recently as this week) after those ads in 2010? I’m still gobsmacked by it.
Turning this on the Democrats is a perfect “I know you are but what am I” political gambit and it will be a miracle if the electorate just doesn’t assume they cancel each other out and go to other factors to make their choice. On the other hand, it allows the Democrats running down ticket to disavow any cuts to Medicare and Social Security, which could end up being a good thing.
Go out and get a supply of aspirin. This is going to make your head hurt for the next two months.
*Also, you can contribute to Rob Zerban, Ryan’s congressional opponent, here. Maybe we can get rid of him altogether.
Judging from the emails flooding my inbox from big Democrats and Obama campaign officials, Romney picking Ryan may end up very good news for the country. This is not because Ryan is going to help Romney win, needless to say. It’s because of this, from Jim Messina of the Obama campaign:
Congressman Paul Ryan is best known as the author of a budget so radical The New York Times called it “the most extreme budget plan passed by a House of Congress in modern times.” With Mitt Romney’s support, Ryan would end Medicare as we know it and slash the investments we need to keep our economy growing — all while cutting taxes for those at the very top.
And this from Senator Patty Murray:
Ryan is best known for the extreme budget that bears his name — one that would end Medicare as we know it while giving huge tax breaks to billionaires and corporations. A Romney-Ryan ticket is a frightening prospect for the middle class and anyone who might one day need Medicare or Social Security.
As anyone who reads this blog knows, for the past couple of months there has been an aggressive effort to create this “fiscal cliff” hysteria and push through large cuts to the safety net and other important programs in exchange for some millionaire tip money and a small reduction reduction in defense in the lame duck session. I’ve been sick watching what seemed to be a runaway train.
But this could change the dynamic. Up until now all this talk has been largely under the radar and away from the campaign trail as everyone tries to talk about jobs and the current economic woes. After all, that’s what the people of the country actually care about. But that’s over. With Ryan on the ticket his dystopian Randroid budget will be on the ballot. If we’re very lucky the Democrats will say things on the campaign trail that will make it much harder for them to agree to a Grand Bargain in the lame duck.
It’s possible that they will try to thread this needle and say they are the grown-ups etc, etc. The President has certainly been trying up until now, in discrete ways. This is from a major NY Times story just this week:
As president … he has come to believe the news media have had a role in frustrating his ambitions to change the terms of the country’s political discussion. He particularly believes that Democrats do not receive enough credit for their willingness to accept cuts in Medicare and Social Security, while Republicans oppose almost any tax increase to reduce the deficit.
I’m guessing that they’re all going to have to stop thinking like this with Ryan on the ticket. Changing the terms of the political discussion in this particular way is not a way for Democrats to win elections and the Obama campaign clearly knows this since they haven’t been talking about their desire to cut Medicare and Social Security on the trail. Running against the Ryan vision demands that they give up on any public support for Grand Bargains and giving a full-throated defense of the safety net that he wants to destroy.
It doesn’t mean the Lame Duck monster has been put down. They can always go back on their word. But this makes it a little bit harder.
By the way, I’ve been writing about Ryan for a very long time and not because he’s so good-lookin’. He’s not a normal politician, he’s a dangerous Ayn Rand acolyte who should never be allowed to get near to real power.
UPDATE: And after you’ve enjoyed this rockin’ teenage tribute, read Charles Pierce on the man he calls the “zombie-eyed granny starver”.
UPDATE: Romney is trying to distance himself from the only quote substantive unquote reason he picked Ryan, namely his crackpot plan for a budget. This is a lame attempt to claim that attacks on the Ryan Plan are obsolete. No one doubts that any budget Romney releases will be filled with tax breaks for Romney and his pals and contain numerous stealth projects to gut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. (The repeal of Obamacare won’t be stealth). You can also expect massive giveaways to the military and to churches – a lot to the churches. In short it will be the Ryan budget – mittitfied.
I miss Fridays with Inkblot, so I’ll just post this wonderful story about the enduring power of kitties to make us all feel better, even those who have bigger problems than most of us:
Few medical treatments are as grueling as bone marrow transplantation, which can require months of isolation while patients have their own marrow destroyed to allow the transplanted cells to take over. The risk of infection during this period is so great that even an ordinary touch from a loved one could introduce deadly germs.
And so it’s no wonder that Maga Barzallo Sockemtickem, a 16-year-old cancer patient who spent seven months in isolation at Seattle Children’s Hospital in 2011 waiting for a bone marrow donor, before returning this year for another month, found herself missing her pet kitty, Merry. Maga wasn’t allowed to bring Merry into her sterile room safely, so the staff at Children’s went to Facebook for help. On the hospital’s Facebook page, they asked fans to post pictures of their cats for Maga to see: 3,000 cat photos later, the Cat Immersion Project was born.
Using sheets, projectors and the photos sent in by fans, the Children’s staff built a virtual cat cocoon around Maga’s bed, so she could be surrounded by images of playful kitties.
Maga’s response to the project was priceless.
Her thank you note:
You guys remind me that there is so much good in the world, and its just makes me feel so much better, and connected. I can’t tell you how it feels sometimes, feeling disconnected and cut off from the world, and then with something like cat pictures bringing me back. Thank you all for your kind words, and well wishing. Its means more then you can ever know. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The leader of Kansas’ moderate Republicans said three weeks of attack ads from conservative groups, including those with ties to the Koch brothers, are to blame for Kansas Senate moderates’ losses during Tuesday’s primary.
Senate President Steve Morris (R-Hugoton), who lost his own seat to state Rep. Larry Powell in the primary, confirmed that internal polls showed moderate Republicans in the lead until roughly three weeks ago when a series of conservative groups launched radio and television attack ads on moderates, tying them to President Barack Obama and claiming they supported Obamacare. Seventeen out of 22 moderate Republican Senate candidates were defeated Tuesday, a culmination of a bitter GOP war that has engulfed the state since 2011.
“They tried to tie our folks to President Obama even though we had nothing to do with him,” Morris told HuffPost. “They said we all supported Obamacare and that’s not true. It’s effective. The campaigns we did were positive and informational. The campaigns against us were very nasty. Evidently negative campaigning must work.”
Morris, the president of the National Conference of State Legislatures which is holding its annual summit meeting in Chicago this week, said conservative groups including Americans for Prosperity, the Club for Growth, the Kansas Chamber of Commerce and Kansas Right to Life spent between $3 and 8 million.
Morris noted that the Koch brothers also helped fund the campaign, using Kansas as a testing ground for their ideas. “They said it will be an ultraconservative utopia,” Morris said of the Kochs. “It depends on your definition of a utopia.”
That’s something isn’t it? And keep in mind this came from fellow Republicans.Meanwhile in bizarroworld:
President Obama spent his formative years in academia, so he’s no doubt familiar with postmodernism, the literary theory that rejects objective reality and insists instead that everything is a matter of interpretation and relative “truth.” At any rate he’s running the first postmodern Presidential campaign, now organized almost exclusively around allegations about his opponent that bear no relation to the observable universe…
The point is that more than any President we can recall, Mr. Obama isn’t trying to persuade voters that he deserves to stay in office because of his philosophy, record or positive vision for the country. Rather, his case is that he deserves re-election because Mr. Romney is worse, and he is so very much worse because of things that were invented in the West Wing but are detached from reality.
The entire theory of the Obama campaign seems to be that the more outrageous the claim the better, because the more you repeat it the more the media will talk about it, and the lie will achieve a kind legendary truth.
I’m sorry, it’s their PoMo Political world. We just live in it.
The ongoing assault on voting rights continues apace
by digby
It is very hard to see how this is constitutional, but they’re going ahead with it anyway:
Starting October 1st, voters in Democrat-leaning urban centers including Cleveland, Columbus, Akron and Toledo will now only be allowed to vote between 8 am and 5 pm on weekdays, when the majority of people are at work. The board of elections in these counties, which are split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, was gridlocked over a Democratic effort to expand hours. The Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted stepped in to deny expanded hours in these counties. But Republican-heavy counties have actually expanded early voting hours on nights and weekends, when most people have time to go to the polls. The Nation reports:
According to the Board of Elections, 82% of early voters in Franklin County voted early on nights or weekends, which Republicans have curtailed. The number who voted on nights or weekends was nearly 50% in Cuyahoga County.
“I cannot create unequal access from one county board to another, and I must also keep in mind resources available to each county,” Husted said in explaining his decision to deny expanded early voting hours in heavily Democratic counties. Yet in solidly Republican counties like Warren and Butler, GOP election commissioners have approved expanded early voting hours on nights and weekends.
Besides historically favoring Democrats, these urban centers comprise Ohio’s most populous and diverse counties. 28 percent of Cuyahoga County is African American, as is 20 percent of Franklin County. President Obama won the African American vote by 95 points in Ohio.
This takes some real gall, but there’s no shortage of that in the Republican party these days.
It reminds me of this passage from a famous Supreme Court ruling:
The right to vote is protected in more than the initial allocation of the franchise. Equal protection applies as well to the manner of its exercise. Having once granted the right to vote on equal terms, the State may not, by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value one person’s vote over that of another. See, e.g., Harper v. Virginia Bd. of Elections, 383 U.S. 663, 665 (1966) (“[O]nce the franchise is granted to the electorate, lines may not be drawn which are inconsistent with the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment”).
That ruling was Bush vs Gore, of course, when the Court decreed that the votes of one side could diluted by re-counting all the votes and so the counting had to stop altogether. Considering that twisted logic, one would think that allowing some people more time and opportunity to vote would also be considered a violation.
Unfortunately, that case is no guide:
“Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities.”
I’m reminded of that hideous result whenever I read about these GOP vote suppression efforts. Like so many of our problems, this voting rights crisis can be traced to America’s “don’t look in the rear view mirror” policy about everything these days. If the election of 2000 didn’t make Democrats wake up to the long term goals of the Republican Party then nothing would. But aside from a few activists on the margins talking about computer voting machines, the political world went silent upon the instructions of the political establishment to “get over it.”
CNN’s Erick Erickson wants people to know that he pays taxes, and he thinks that the Occupy Wall Street protesters should stop whining.
The CNN contributor, who also founded the conservative blog RedState, helped launch “We Are The 53%” to counter the “We Are The 99 Percent” Tumblr. The site says that it features messages from “the 53% of income-earners who pay taxes” and “refuse to b-tch about it.”
Erickson posted a picture of himself holding a scribbled message that read, “I work 3 jobs. I have a house I can’t sell. My family insurance costs are outrageous. But I don’t blame Wall Street. Suck it up you whiners. I am the 53% subsidizing you so you can hang out on Wall Street and complain.”
He was talking about the real scofflaws, the ones Michele Bachmann insisted needed to ante up at least the price of a couple of Happy Meals to be considered Americans.
Fox & Friends: “Is that fair?” On the April 9 edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends, after co-host Gretchen Carlson stated that “yesterday we were reporting a story that 47 percent of all Americans don’t pay any taxes,” Fox Business host Stuart Varney stated: “Yes, 47 percent of households pay not a single dime in taxes. And some of those households actually make a profit from the Treasury.” Co-host Steve Doocy asked, “Is that fair?”
Greta Van Susteren: “Is it fair for half the country to be paying all the federal income tax?” On the April 7 edition of Fox News’ On the Record, host Greta Van Susteren noted the report and said, “Is it fair for half the country to be paying all the federal income tax?” Her guest, former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), said: “You’re talking about people who are, you know, earning $50,000 a year who have kids, four kids. And they — because of deductions and other things, they don’t pay any income tax, and they may be eligible for a refundable tax credit above the fact that they don’t pay any income taxes. … [W]hen you reach the point where people feel like they don’t have to pay anything and they’re getting money out of the Treasury for nothing, then there’s no end to the amount of government that people want.”
Sean Hannity: ‘[I]t seems like, at this point, what incentive is there going to be for the people that are paying taxes?” On the April 8 edition of his Fox News show, Sean Hannity said: “But there was a big report today. It came up on the AP. It was the Drudge headline last night before I went to bed. And I got here in Grand Rapids, and I’m reading the Internet, and 50 percent of Americans no longer pay taxes. They don’t pay income taxes. So we — and it seems like, at this point, what incentive is there going to be for the people that are paying taxes?”
Las Vegas Review Journal: “[W]hen people get something for nothing, they have every incentive to continue voting to forward the bills for their goodies to someone else.”
Indeed. Someone ought to ask these folks whether it’s just the senior citizens and the working poor families who need to chip in or whether these fine folks ought to be part of that 53% too:
It so happens that this summer the Internal Revenue Service released data from the 400 individual income tax returns reporting the highest adjusted gross income. This elite ultrarich group earned on average $202 million in 2009, the latest year available. And buried in the data is the startling disclosure that six of the 400 paid no federal income tax.
The I.R.S. has never before disclosed that last fact.
Not even Mr. Romney, with reported 2010 income of $21.7 million, qualifies for membership in this select group of 400. But the data provides a window into the financial lives and tax rates of the superrich. Since the I.R.S. doesn’t release data for the tiny percentage of Americans at Mr. Romney’s income level, the 400 are the closest proxy.
And that data demonstrates that the ultrarich can and do reduce their tax liability to very low levels, even zero. Besides the six who paid no federal income tax, the I.R.S. reported that 27 paid from zero to 10 percent of their adjusted gross incomes and another 89 paid between 10 and 15 percent, which is close to the 13.9 percent rate that Mr. Romney disclosed that he paid in 2010. That means that more than a quarter of the people earning an average of over $200 million in 2009 paid less than 15 percent of their adjusted gross income in taxes.
When Erickson said “Suck it up you whiners. I am the 53% subsidizing you so you can hang out on Wall Street and complain,” I’m fairly sure he sure didn’t know he was talking about Mitt Romney. But he was.
Mitt Romney has been determined to resist releasing his tax returns at least since his bid for Massachusetts governor in 2002 and has been confident that he will never be forced to do so, several current and former Bain executives tell The Huffington Post. Had he thought otherwise, say the sources based on their longtime understanding of Romney, he never would have gone forward with his run for president.
Mitt has known since at least 2006 that he wanted to be the leader of most powerful nation on earth and probably much longer than that. But apparently he’s never wanted it so much that he would willingly pay his taxes in such a way that they would be above reproach.
Or to put it another way, if he thought he would be forced to choose between giving up a fair share of his vast quarter billion dollar fortune or leading the United States of America, he would have chosen his money.
And it’s not as if paying a fair share of taxes would have left him broke. He would still have been worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He just cares more about keeping every red cent than he cares about the country. Which makes him a GOP hero.
Update: It sure makes this seem like a load of fetid baloney:
“I truly want Mitt to fulfill his destiny, and for that to happen, he’s got to do politics,” Ann told the Los Angeles Times on the eve of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics. In his book “Turnaround,” Mitt says he initially resisted the offer to take over the games until Ann changed his mind. “There’s no one else who can do it,” he remembers her saying. Last year, when Mitt entered the presidential race, Ann told Parade, “I felt the country needed him … This is now Mitt’s time.” In a March radio interview, Ann declared, “He’s the only one who can save America.
Well, unless he has to be above reproach when paying his taxes. Then, not so much.
The Kansas State Board of Healing Arts, the governing body that regulates the practice of medicine in the state, stripped the medical license of a woman who refused to force a mentally-ill 10 year old to give birth.
As Robin Marty reports, Dr. Ann Neuhaus became the target of domestic terror group Operation Rescue after her colleague, Dr. George Tiller, was murdered. Neuhaus assisted Tiller by providing second opinions for mental health exceptions for late-term abortions.
Operation Rescue filed a negligence complaint against Neuhaus alleging that her exams were not thorough enough to support her medical conclusions and her follow-up care was inadequate because she did not recommend counseling or hospitalization after each procedure.
Neuhaus offered a rebuttal of her own. “To even claim that isn’t medically necessary qualifies as gross incompetence,” said Neuhaus. “Someone’s 10 years old, and they were raped by their uncle and they understand that they’ve got a baby growing in their stomach and they don’t want that. You’re going to send this girl for a brain scan and some blood work and put her in a hospital?”
Like other states, Kansas has made recent attempts to stack their medical review board with anti-choice advocates like former Operation Rescue attorney Richard Macias. When hearing the case against Dr. Neuhaus, the board offered up their own expert to determine if any breach of the standard of care occurred. Not surprisingly, the witnessed insisted that in no cases is abortion a treatment that could be seen as beneficial to a patient’s mental health, further clouding the waters as to the kind of care girls and women can expect in the state of Kansas.
Forcing a 10 year old rape victim to go through childbirth is sadism, pure and simple. And any medical practitioner who testifies under oath that abortion would not be beneficial to a pregnant 10 year old rape victim’s mental health should have their license revoked immediately.
It’s quite clear that they would rather that little girl go through devastating, painful, life threatening childbirth, which she cannot fully understand, than allow an abortion. Clearly, they value potential life far, far more than they value the living.
I haven’t eaten at a chain pizzeria in decades, but in another life I worked on some commercials for Papa John’s pizza. As I recall it was pretty good but the crust, as is so often the case with chain restaurants, was so sweet it was like eating a donut with pizza sauce and cheese on it. The owner, John Schnatter, was a very friendly guy, very involved in the ad campaign and quite generous with the crew. But I’m not surprised he’s a big Republican out there talking down Obamacare. After all, why should he want to pay for his employees to have health care when he can just fire them if they get sick?
Still, his crocodile tears about having to add an extra 15 cents per pizza are a little over the top. The Obama years have been good to Papa John’s:
I frankly don’t think that paying an extra 15 cents for a pizza so that the employees can have health care is too big a price to pay. (After all, they’re probably all eating them too and getting the same diseases as the rest of us that result from living on transfats and sugar .) But let’s not pretend that Papa John’s has to do it. It’s not like they’re struggling on the margins.
I’m not sure why these CEOs feel it’s in their best interest these days to shoot their mouths off about politics, especially when they can buy all the real influence they want. In this polarized country it risks alienating half their customers. But hey, it’s free country and they have every right to say anything they want. (According to the Supreme Court they have every right to spend every last dollar ensuring that their voices are heard above everyone elses.) But it strikes me as being more to do with ego than business.
I wouldn’t have eaten at Papa John’s anyway, for the reasons I mentioned. But he’s probably lost a few customers and I can’t see what he got for it.
