Republicans: There's No Debt Crisis, We Just Want to Screw the Poor

Appearing on Sunday morning talk shows this weekend, Boehner and Ryan revealed that their push for spending cuts is all about ideology — not economic collapse.
March 18, 2013  |   By Alyssa Figueroa

Appearing on Sunday morning talk shows this weekend, both Republican House majority leader John Boehner and Republican Congressman Paul Ryan admitted that there is no imminent debt crisis.

On ABC’s “This Week,” Boehner said he agrees with President Obama that there is no immediate crisis concerning the country’s debt.

Boehner told ABC’s Martha Raddatz:

We do not have an immediate debt crisis. But we all know that we have one looming. And we have-- one looming-- because we have entitlement programs that are not sustainable in their current form. They're gonna go bankrupt. Washington has responsibility-- to our seniors and our near seniors-- that we firm up these programs so that they're there for the long term. Because if we don't do it, not only will they not get benefits, we will have a debt crisis right around the corner. We have time to solve our problems. But we need to do it now.

Later, on “Face the Nation,” Paul Ryan agreed, even boasting that the United States is handling debt better than European countries and has a “resilient economy.”

Then he admitted to CBS’s Bob Schieffer:

We do not have a debt crisis right now, but we see it coming. We know it’s irrefutably happening. And the point we’re trying to make with this budget is let’s get ahead of this problem.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party continues to push through a budget that emphasizes cuts to the so-called “entitlement” programs. Ryan’s proposed budget would cut more than $4 trillion from the federal budget — bringing government spending to the lowest levels since 1948. And it’s balanced mostly on the backs of the poor, as he proposed to slash Medicare, Medicaid and other social welfare programs like food stamps. His plan would also repeal Obamacare. Overall, 66 percent of his proposed budget cuts would be cuts to those with low and middle incomes.

Admitting that there’s no immediate crisis illustrates that the GOP’s proposed monstrous cuts to social welfare programs are more an attempt to push through their ideology than save the country from collapse. As the media continues to hyperbolize the deficit, the need for compromise and the instantaneous dangers that will occur if we don’t impose austerity cuts, Republicans are happily using the spin to quickly demand these absurd cuts. But now, especially with both parties acknowledging that there’s no immediate debt crisis, we must demand an honest, smart budget from Congress.

The Ryan Budget vs Women and Children - GOP Misogeny

Paul Ryan is a dick? Say it ain't so...

The Ryan budget won't ever pass the senate. It has to pass both houses to be put in place. Unless Obama sells out to the Republicans again.

The Daily Show: American Pickers

Wall St. Loses Faith in Their Man Romney

6 Really Bad New Signs for the GOP Candidate
Several recent developments that must cause the Romney campaign extreme consternation
September 27, 2012  |   AlterNet / By Lauren Kelley

Though the election is far from over, Team Romney has had some tough times recently. The now infamous “ 47 percent” video [3] may have been the worst of it, but it certainly wasn’t the last of it; the bad news just keeps on coming for the Romney campaign. Below are several recent developments that must contribute to Romney and his handlers shaking in their boots.

1. Wall Street is giving up hope for a Romney win.
Wall Street executives have obviously been rooting for a Romney victory. However, “now many masters of the universe concede they may not get their man,” Politico reports [4].

Across Wall Street and the broader landscape of corporate America, even strong supporters of Romney acknowledge that swing state polling numbers and the direction of economic data and markets suggest it’s time to brace for a second Obama term.

Though money from Wall Street donors doesn't appear to be drying up for the Romney campaign, "the business community tend to follow data and play percentages. And right now they favor the president." That does not inspire confidence.

2. He keeps alienating poor voters, a.k.a. “them.”
After the 47 percent debacle, you’d think Romney would step up his game in courting low- and middle-income voters. In his new campaign ad [5], he does try to woo those voters -- but he fails by reinforcing the notion that poor Americans are not like him. Garance Franke-Rute at The Atlantic [6] on Romney’s “them” problem:

In the 47 percent video, it was "those people."

"I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives," Romney said.

But presidential elections are always about the grand national us. They are about we, the people. And when it come to a candidate, they are about me and you.

Garance Franke-Rute [6] points out that instead of an "us" Romney makes poor and middle class voters a "them":

"President Obama and I both care about poor and middle-class families. The difference is my policies will make things better for them."

3. Romney’s backed himself into a corner by saying good things about RomneyCare.
Romney’s presidential campaign has relied in large part on Romney denying and/or ignoring the similiarities between ObamaCare and the Massachusetts health care plan he pushed through as Governor. Well, the Republican candidate is starting to slip up on that front. As Salon’s Steve Kornacki [7] reports, Romney has bragged about his RomneyCare legacy a few times of late, and it’s put him in a tight spot.

[W]hen Obama embraced RomneyCare and the GOP embraced reflexive opposition, it left Romney with nothing to say. The best he can do is occasionally invoke his main gubernatorial feat in interviews like he did with Allen and hope there’s not any immediate backlash from his base. And even if there isn’t, it just reinforces his plight, with the media covering not the content of his remarks but the oddity of it all.

4. He just keeps embarrassing himself.
Romney’s robot-like charisma can’t be winning him many votes. In this clip (hat-tip Raw Story [8]), Romney can’t get the whole name-chant thing down with the crowd at a recent campaign event. Even right-winger Joe Scarborough (MSNBC) had to cover his eyes and cry, “Oh, sweet Jesus.” Here’s the cringe-worthy moment:

 

5. He’s not backing down from some of his worst ideas.
As Sahil Kapur at TPM reports [12], Romney’s tax plan has few supporters, on the left or the right -- a Tax Policy Center study even said it was “not mathematically possible” – but that’s not stopping him from going full steam ahead. One of Romney’s spokespeople told TPM, “The governor’s plan calls for a 20% rate cut for all brackets, revenue neutrality, while ensuring that high-income earners continue to pay at least the same share of taxes. All of these goals are achievable, and the governor will work with Congress to enact tax reform that meets each of the goals he has proposed.”  


6. And finally, he doesn’t have the all-important Samuel L. Jackson endorsement.
Samuel L. Jackson has recorded a hilarious, F-word-packed pro-Obama ad [13] for the Jewish Council on Research and Education. If I were Romney, I wouldn’t want to be on Sam Jackson's bad side.

---

Links: 
[3] http://www.alternet.org/election-2012/big-fat-lie-behind-romneys-absurd-47-argument 
[4] http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0912/81738.html?hp=t2_3 
[5] http://youtu.be/_HjDCHbtXHQ 
[6] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/09/mitt-romneys-them-problem/262890/ 
[7] http://www.salon.com/2012/09/27/what_mitt_was_supposed_to_be/ 
[8] http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/09/26/scarborough-cries-oh-sweet-jesus-as-romney-fails-to-lead-chant/ 
[9] http://www.nbcnews.com 
[10] http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032507 
[11] http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032072 
[12] http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/09/mitt-romney-not-backing-off-tax-plan.php 
[13] http://www.businessinsider.com/samuel-l-jackson-ad-obama-romney-wake-up-2012-9

Paul Ryan Booed while Giving a Speech to AARP Members

8 Bad Things That Happened to Romney...Just This Morning

by Alex Kane on Wed, 2012-09-19 - Alternet
 

Yesterday was a no good, very bad day for the Romney’s campaign, who had to mop up the mess their candidate created when he said that “47 percent” of Americans are “dependent on government” and “believe they are victims.” But the bad news hasn’t stopped today.

From poll numbers to Republican politicians throwing Romney under the bus, the campaign’s woes continue.

1. Ryan Says Romney Was ‘Inarticulate’

Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential candidate called the “47 percent” comments “inarticulate” in an interview [1] with a local news station in Nevada. “He was obviously inarticulate in making this point,” said Paul Ryan. Asked by a reporter if Romney regrets his comments, Ryan said, “I think he would have said it differently, that’s for sure.”

2. GOP New Mexico Governor Rejects Romney’s Comments

Governor Susana Martinez may be a Republican, but she’s running as fast as she can away from Romney’s comments writing off half the country. Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall picks up [2] on Martinez’s comments that add to the “pile on.”

“We have a lot of people that are at the poverty level in New Mexico, but they count just as much as anybody else,” Martinez said. “I think, certainly the fact that New Mexico provides that safety net is a good thing.”

3. Peggy Noonan’s Verdict on the Romney Campaign: ‘An Intervention is in Order’

It’s not just Martinez who is hitting Romney’s comments that were captured in video published by Mother Jones. Conservative columnist Peggy Noonan has joined in.

“This is not how big leaders talk, it’s how shallow campaign operatives talk: They slice and dice the electorate like that, they see everything as determined by this interest or that,” Noonan wrote in a blog post. [3] “You know what Romney sounded like? Like a kid new to politics who thinks he got the inside lowdown on how it works from some operative. But those old operatives, they never know how it works.”

4. GOP Candidate Linda McMahon: ‘I Disagree With Governor Romney’

Yet another Republican candidate wants nothing to do with Romney’s “47 percent” comments. Linda McMahon, the GOP candidate for Senate in Connecticut, wrote on her Facebook page: “I disagree with Governor Romney’s insinuation that 47% of Americans believe they are victims who must depend on the government for their care. I know that the vast majority of those who rely on government are not in that situation because they want to be.”

5. Polls Show Obama’s in Command

New polls show that President Obama has gained ground on Romney nationally and in swing states.

Obama is up by 5 points nationally, according to a NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll--and the survey was taken before Romney’s infamous comments. [4] NBC notes [5] that their data shows increased optimism among voters about the economy. “Forty-two percent of voters also believe the economy will improve in the next 12 months, which is a 6-point jump from August, and a 15-point rise from July.”

In swing states, the story’s the same. The Hill reports [6] on swing state polls:

President Obama leads Mitt Romney in three key swing states, according to a series of new polls.

Obama leads Romney by 51 to 45 percent in Wisconsin, 50 to 46 percent in Virginia and 47 to 46 percent in Colorado, according to polls conducted by Quinnipiac University for CBS and The New York Times.

The figures in Virginia are particularly notable, as this is the sixth poll in a row showing Romney slipping behind Obama in the critical state. Another from WeAskAmerica out Wednesday morning showed a similar 3-point Obama lead.

6. Obama Keeps Calm on David Letterman’s Show

The contrast between Mitt Romney’s floundering campaign and President Obama can’t be more striking. Obama appeared on the “Late Show With David Letterman” [7] last night, and he looked relaxed and calm. Obama also took the opportunity to criticize Romney’s comments.

“My expectation is that if you're president, you've got to work for everyone, not just some,” said Obama. [8]

7. Ann Romney Makes It Worse

AlterNet’s Adele Stan notes that Mitt Romney’s wife attempted some damage control last night in an interview with a local Fox affiliate. But she may have made things worse.

Stan writes: [9]

After assuring the anchor who conducted the interview that Mitt had no "disdain for the poor," in interview Eli Stokol's phrase, Ann Romney explained why women, especially, should vote for her husband. As a woman, Mrs. Romney said, "I want to know what motivates the person that I would be voting for, and I would say what motivates Mitt is that he cares. This is a guy that obviously doesn’t need to do this for a job."

Wow. I feel better already. So, apparently the reason that Barack Obama is running for the presidency is because of the big bucks that come from that government salary -- a job he won, according to Mitt Romney, because a bunch of moochers thinks Obama will fill their coffers with more of that government dough.

8. North Carolina Republican Disavows Romney in Debate

As you can see, a host of Republican candidates have disavowed Romney’s “47 percent” comments in an effort to distance themselves from what is fast becoming a toxic Romney brand. A North Carolina Republican running for a Congressional seat is running away from Romney as well.

Last night, during a televised debate, Mark Meadows criticized Romney’s comments.

“It might come as a surprise, but Mitt Romney didn’t call me before he made those comments and ask for my advice,” Meadows said, according to an Asheville-based paper. [10] The paper notes that “Meadows said voters in the 11th Congressional District are not as easy to define as Romney’s comments seemed to try to do.”

“I’m concerned about all 750,000 people,” said Meadows.

Links:
[1] http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/09/19/paul-ryan-says-romney-comments-obviously-inarticulate/
[2] http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2012/09/martinez_piles_on.php
[3] http://blogs.wsj.com/peggynoonan/2012/09/18/time-for-an-intervention/
[4] http://news.yahoo.com/obama-hits-leads-5-points-nbc-wsj-poll-235428444--politics.html
[5] http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/09/18/13944838-nbcwsj-poll-obama-leads-romney-nationally-by-5-points?lite
[6] http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/250305-polls-obama-leads-in-wisconsin-virginia-colorado
[7] http://entertainment.time.com/2012/09/19/obama-on-letterman-top-10-things-you-missed-if-you-didnt-watch-last-night/
[8] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/19/obama-rebukes-romney-letterman
[9] http://www.alternet.org/hot-news-views/watch-ann-romney-mitts-moocher-comments-hubby-doesnt-need-do-job
[10] http://www.citizen-times.com/article/20120919/NEWS/309190066/Meadows-forum-m-not-Romney?odyssey=mod%7Cnewswell%7Ctext%7CFrontpage%7Cp&gcheck=1&nclick_check=1

The Capital Gains Escapades of Paul Ryan

The Fiscal Pretender

by GERALD SCORSE

Aside from the sub-three hour marathon he never ran, the most fanciful notion to come from GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan is his proposal to eliminate capital gains taxes. The idea violates a central principle of tax equity, it mocks his tax reform and deficit-cutting pretensions, and it tends to confirm what the economist Paul Krugman has been saying for the longest time—Ryan is an over-hyped petty boy, heavy on ideology but light on fiscal chops.
 
The tax principle that Ryan would flout is called horizontal equity. Simply put, it holds that people who make similar incomes should pay similar taxes. Obviously, with no tax on capital gains, there’s no hope of horizontal equity.

Not that there’s any such equity now. Capital gains (and dividends) are hugely tax-advantaged, with the tax on long-term gains currently at an 80-year low of 15%. If the Bush tax cuts expire on schedule, the capital gains levy is set to rise to 20% in 2013—still less than the tax the middle class pays on wages.

Things might have been otherwise if Ryan had voted differently as a member of President Obama’s bi-partisan fiscal commission, a.k.a. Bowles-Simpson.

The commission, you’ll recall, was charged by the president with developing a plan to attack the federal deficit and put the nation on fiscal terra firma. Led by co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the commission delivered as charged. A key ingredient in their plan was horizontal equity: equal taxes on all income, including capital gains and dividends.

Ryan chairs the House Budget Committee, and was the acknowledged policy-wonk leader of the Republicans on the commission. He’s fond of talking the talk on deficit reduction. Put to the test, he declined to walk the walk. He voted against the plan; it was his vote, essentially, that turned the promise of Bowles-Simpson into one more instance of gridlock, one more disillusion.

Coincidentally, another deficit-reduction plan came in close on the heels of Bowles-Simpson. This one issued from the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Debt Reduction Task Force, and it was co-chaired by former Federal Reserve official Alice Rivlin and ex-senator Pete Domenici. Its recommendations differed in important respects from Bowles-Simpson, but the plans had this in common: each called for horizontal equity, for equal taxes on all income.

In his acceptance speech at the GOP convention, Ryan slipped in a marathon-like mention of the Bowles-Simpson commission: “He [Obama] created a bipartisan debt commission. They came back with an urgent report. He thanked them, sent them on their way, and then did exactly nothing.”

Of course it was Ryan himself who effectively doomed Bowles-Simpson, making sure the report went to the White House without the necessary support to force a Congressional vote.
While the fiscal pretender Ryan calls for an end to capital gains taxes, others continue to call for horizontal equity.  A recent New York Times editorial scolded private equity firms for converting management fees into capital gains in order to take advantage of the 15% rate. “The best way to end this problem,” The Times concluded, “is to get rid of the special rate for capital gains. As long as income from investments is taxed at a lower rate than income from work, there will be no stopping the search for ways, legal or otherwise, to pay the lower rate.”

There’s another believer in horizontal equity too, but he’s no longer with us. President Ronald Reagan’s signature Tax Reform Act of 1986 called for equal taxes on all income. In a signing ceremony on the White House lawn, Reagan called the bill “a sweeping victory for fairness….and the best job-creation program ever to come out of the Congress.”

There’s no better time for an encore than 2012.

Myths Both Parties Want to Maintain Through the Presidential Election

Ed Krayewski|Aug. 16, 2012 Reason.com

To those NOT enamored by Teams Blue and Red, the rhetorical gymnastics performed in the run-up to a presidential election can be daunting. Yet underneath the hyper-partisan back and forth is an uncomfortable truth: a lot of what both sides are saying on the campaign trail is complete bullshit. Previously I broke down four misperceptions about Barack Obama some of his supporters advance. Some political misperceptions, however, are beneficial to partisans on both sides of the aisle, albeit for different reasons. Here are four myths that both the Democrats and the Republicans want to keep in circulation until the November election.




Paul Ryan Is a Deficit Reducing Fiscal Hawk
In the selection of Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney’s running mate, we had the opportunity to witness the creation of a bipartisan myth in overdrive. In this case, the myth was that Paul Ryan was a fiscal hawk, a libertarian, even an extremist. Anyone who’s given the Paul Ryan budgets serious study knows that none of this true. Nick Gillespie noted earlier this year that Ryan’s latest budget runs a deficit of $1.2 trillion, while the president’s ran a deficit of $1.3 trillion. What’s $100 billion between friends? By 2022, the Ryan budget envisions the federal government spending 4.9 trillion dollars. As Gillespie points out, though the Ryan budget doesn’t deny the massive debt problem facing America, it’s “weak tea” considering it does nothing to shrink annual deficits, and in fact doesn’t even try to balance the budget at all in the next 10 years. Yet Romney selected Ryan to energize the small government and Tea Party base, and President Barack Obama has decided to pin his campaign’s hope on painting his opponents as extremists, so playing on the misperceptions of Paul Ryan as a fiscal hawk is politically beneficial to both sides.
NEXT: Did you hear about Obama's amnesty?




Barack Obama Is Pro-Amnesty
While the DREAM Act languished in both the Democrat- and the Republican-controlled House as well as the Democratic Senate, even when Democrats held a 60-vote filibuster proof majority in that chamber, the Obama Administration hit record-breaking deportations rates and resisted reform of detention practices. Yet since President Obama announced temporary relief for some young people threatened by deportation a few months ago, his disenchanted Latino base has largely been re-invigorated. The unilateral presidential action also made passing immigration reform in Congress that much harder. But you wouldn’t think the president’s record was so muddied based on the rhetoric surrounding it. House Judiciary Committee Chair Lamar Smith (R-Texas), called Obama’s limited waiver via executive order an “amnesty.” A simple Google search will reveal Smith's not alone in characterizing Obama’s move that way. At the other end of the spectrum, the Obama campaign’s “Truth Team”—normally quick to spin any dissenting political opinion as factually untrue—debunked the myth of the Obama amnesty just once, a full nine months before the president’s executive order. In the meantime, “Latinos for Obama” even created an infographic claiming Mitt Romney would “repeal the DREAM Act,” almost as if the president and Democrats had actually passed it, beefing up their pro-immigration bona fides.
NEXT: Dude, our president is a peacemaker, he even got a prize for it!

 


Mitt Romney Is More Pro-War than Barack Obama
President Obama was announced as the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize just 10 short months after taking office. Amazing, right? Why did the Norwegians award our president this prize? "[F]or his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." Specifically, the committee cited our newly-minted president’s efforts to reach out to the Muslim world. The president admitted he didn’t think he deserved the award, adding, “but I also know that this prize reflects the kind of world… all Americans want to build, a world that gives life to the promise of our founding documents.” What has Obama done since then? By the end of 2009, there had already been more drone strikes in Pakistan than under the last four years of the Bush administration. A New York Times expose of the president’s drone war revealed that the Obama administration considered conversations within the executive branch about the justification for ordering drone killings as sufficient to meet the constitutional due process standard. So much for the promise of our founding documents. Obama also sent U.S. military forces to help bombard Libya during its civil war, violating the constitutional limits on war making. The war in Afghanistan, of course, continues bloodily, and though many believe the war in Iraq has ended, that’s not completely true either. Not exactly a peacemaker. Reason has repeatedly explained how Obama’s foreign policy mirrors George W. Bush’s while various foreign policy analysts have noted that Obama and Romney’s foreign policy plans are pretty much the same. Even on the issue of Iran, the difference between Obama and Romney has been described as more a difference in style than substance. Yet both Obama apologists and Romney boosters will claim a substantive difference in foreign policy, one that paints Romney as the more warmongering candidate and Obama as “weak” on foreign policy.
NEXT: Only Romney can stop Obamacare, right?




Mitt Romney is Opposed to Government Intervention in Health Care, Like Obamacare!

When it comes to health care reform, the motto of the Tea Party has been “repeal Obamacare,” but for Mitt Romney it’s “repeal and replace.” But replace with what? Romney defended his own government intervention in health care in Massachusetts, Romneycare, in a similar way to Obama’s defense of Obamacare. An MIT professor who helped formulate Romneycare and advised Democrats on Obamacare noted many similarities between the two laws. The president himself identifies the Massachusetts law as a blueprint for his own program (though as Romney notes, he was never consulted for his expertise by the Obama administration). Recently, Romney was the target a vicious attack ad trying to connect him, through his work at Bain Capital, to a woman who lost her health insurance and died of cancer. Romney’s chief spokesperson, Andrea Saul, didn’t rebut the attack by pointing out the glaring inconsistencies of the narrative, but instead noted that had the woman lived in Massachusetts when Romneycare was in effect, she would’ve never lost her health insurance. Not exactly the kind of defense a candidate opposed to even more government intervention in an already heavily-regulated health care market would give. The comment drew calls for Saul’s resignation, but she remains on Team Mitt.

At the same time, the Obama campaign uses the threat of the repeal of Obamacare to marshal support for the president. Just this week, the first lady framed the debate over Obamacare as a question of health, asking an audience “Do we want these reforms to be repealed? …Or do we want the people we love to have the care they need? That’s the choice we face.” Although Romney may bank on the unpopularity of Obamacare, especially among the conservative grassroots, he’s never repudiated the idea of government intervention in the health care market. He even went so far as to tout the Israeli government's intervention in health care as an aspirational model. But what if Romney is actually sincere about repealing Obamacare, and the “replace” part of his mantra is just him trying to play both sides like politicians are wont to do? In June, The New Yorker laid out what it would take to repeal Obamacare and why a President Romney wouldn’t be able to do it. The most compelling point? Republicans are highly unlikely to get the 60 votes in the Senate needed to repeal the law.




Barack Obama’s foreign policy is not as destructive as George W. Bush's was (or Mitt Romney's would be).
During his 2008 campaign, Barack Obama leveraged his outspoken opposition to the Iraq War (while in the Illinois State Senate) to appeal to anti-war voters. To hear Mitt Romney tell it, Obama’s foreign policy hasn’t been sufficiently militaristic. This while a list of presidential accomplishments recently released by a Democratic group is riddled with the people killed while Obama has been commander in chief. Even as Joe Biden is calling Mitt Romney’s foreign policy weak, and mocking the sensible sounding idea of “subcontract[ing] our foreign policy to some expert at the State Department” (as opposed to the CIA or DoD, Joe?), the left continues to portray Romney as being more neo-conservative than Obama, the very president that neo-con leader Bill Kristol has claimed as one of his own. The truth is Romney would probably fit right in with Obama’s cabinet when it comes to making foreign policy decisions, and Obama’s foreign policy itself is a natural extension of President George W. Bush’s.


Barack Obama’s immigration policies are compassionate and humane.
 Obama's pro-immigration reform supporters were already growing disenchanted with Obama when he announced temporary relief for some young people threatened by deportation. While the move is expected to help thousands of people begin to normalize their legal status in the country, it comes as part of a broader approach from this president that has included record-breaking deportations rates and resistance to detention reform. Nevertheless, the “temporary stop gap measure” may have been enough to renew enthusiasm for Obama among Latinos and other pro-immigration voters, even while the unilateral action by the president makes efforts to pass immigration reform in Congress that much harder. Nor did Obama spend any political capital on immigration reform early in his presidency, even though Democrats held both chambers at the time, with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.


Obama’s support for gay marriage is groundbreaking.
When President Obama came out last month and staked a position on same-sex marriage that, as critics noted, Dick Cheney held back in 2004, it was nonetheless heralded as a grand moment in the gay rights struggle. Newsweek even dubbed Obama America’s “first gay president,” burying James Buchanan deeper into the nation's historical closet. What did Obama do to earn such accolades from supporters? Although he voiced support for same-sex marriage early in his political career, as president Obama waited until the day after North Carolina voters amended their Constitution to prohibit same-sex unions before telling ABC News about his personal support for gay marriage. While the president has instructed the Justice Department to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act in federal court, both the president and his aides have indicated that Obama sees gay marriage as an issue best left up to the states. Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson, on the other hand, supports the right to gay marriage on a federal level.




Barack Obama will end the war on drugs, eventually.
This is the most pervasive and consistent fantasy about former pot-smoker Barack Obama espoused by his supporters. MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell went so far as to say that Obama legalizing drugs after the election is the “204th reason to vote for President Obama.” While Mitt Romney might be the kind of neighbor to tell you to extinguish your joint on the beach, Barack Obama is the kind of president that doesn’t understand the economic benefit of marijuana legalization and, more important, who has ramped up federal raids on medical marijuana clinics operating legally under state law, whose government seeks life sentences for medical marijuana dispensary owners whose activities are too profitable, and who refuses to allow any discretion in the execution of a deadly and never ending drug war. Obama is a drug warrior, plain and simple.

Romney's Veep Choice: Paul Ryan, Koch Ally and 'Right-Wing Social Engineer'

And after Obama capitulates to his Wall St puppeteers, Romney's puppeteers--the Kochs--pick his VP running-mate for him...Paul Ryan. It can get plenty worse, though it doesn't seem possible.--jef

Gay or not gay?

In making the risky choice of picking Rep. Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney seals the deal on the Koch brothers' takeover of the Republican Party.
August 10, 2012

 |   By Adele M. Stan

It's official: The Republican Party is now officially a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Koch brothers. How else to explain Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's pick of Rep. Paul Ryan, Wis., as his running mate. Yes, that Paul Ryan -- chairman of the House Budget Committee and author of the infamous Ryan roadmap budget plan, which promises to turn Medicare into a privatized voucher system, and yank health care from millions of children whose parents happen to be poor. And that's just the beginning. In addition to a raft of cuts, the Ryan plan would end the Earned Income Tax Credit, which millions of parents count on.

It's a plan that even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich deemed too "radical." Asked by NBC's David Gregory to respond to Ryan's proposal, Gingrich famously said [3] (video):

"I don't think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering. I don't think imposing radical change from the right or the left is a very good way for a free society to operate."

(Of course that was before Gingrich walked back [4] those remarks, apparently reminded by some savvy operative that he might not want to anger the Kochs, to whom Ryan, 42, is something of a youthful ward, having been the beneficiary of years of support from the Koch-founded Americans For Prosperity.)

In case anyone should miss the point that Ryan is a very Kochy guy, Romney is doing his big reveal of Ryan this morning aboard the U.S.S. Wisconsin, a decommisioned ship docked in the all-important swing state of Virginia. However important Virginia is to the electoral math, Wisconsin is a symbolic icon for the Tea Party. It's not only Ryan's home state; it's the poster state of right-wing triumph, the place where Gov. Scott Walker successfully fended off a recall attempt by progressives in response to a bill he rammed through the state legislature that all but ended collective bargaining for the state's public employees. Much of the credit for Wisconsin's right turn goes to Americans For Prosperity, which boasts a particularly aggressive Wisconsin chapter, which began building a network of activists there in 2005.

Ryan's association with the group goes back almost that far. In 2008, he was granted [5] the Wisconsin AFP chapter's "Defending the American Dream" award, handed to him by a young county executive who served as emcee for those festivities -- a guy named Scott Walker. Since then, he has made countless appearances on the group's behalf, at anti-health-care reform rallies on Capitol Hill, on conference town halls across the country and at Americans For Prosperity and Americans For Prosperity Foundation events. (Just enter Ryan's name into the search engine on the Amerians For Prosperity Web site, and you'll come up with eight pages [6] of citations.) In fact, Ryan was due to speak at last week's conference sponsored by the AFP Foundation in Washington, D.C., forcing increased speculation about his running-mate prospects when he failed to show [7].

For Romney, the pluses in picking Ryan are these: the Tea Partiers, who are less than wild about Mittens, really love them some Paul Ryan -- as does David Koch, who will be seated as a Romney delegate at the Republican National Convention in Tampa. Koch and his brother, Charles, are major donors, not only to political candidates, but to a range of right-wing think tanks and groups [8]. In the post-Citizens United world, those donations add up to millions in political advertisements by all manner of non-profit groups. Already, Americans For Prosperity has made a $27 million air-time buy [9] for running anti-Obama ads.

Romney already owes some of his success in the primary season to Koch's favorite politicians in Wisconsin. Remember Rick Santorum? Right-wing base types -- Christian evangelicals and Tea Partiers -- just loved him. He was giving Romney a whole lotta agita during the primaries -- first stealing Romney's reported win in the Iowa caucuses back from the Mittster in a recount, and nearly besting Romney in Michigan, where Romney grew up.

In the weeks leading up to the Wisconsin primary, Santorum was running double-digits ahead of Romney. But then Paul Ryan endorsed Romney [10], and so did the Koch-bought U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson. When Ryan began campaigning with Romney in the final days of the campaign, the crowds at Romney events seemed to swell. While conventional wisdom holds that endorsements don't amount to a hill of beans, conventional wisdom had an epic #FAIL on Wisconsin's primary night, when 60 percent of those responding in exit polls [10] said that Romney's endorsers influenced their vote. (Romney also won the endorsements of a number of Americans For Prosperity-backed state legislators.)

But Romney's Ryan pick is not without its minuses, the largest one being running with a guy who has promised to end Medicare and replace it with something else entirely that could wind up costing seniors big-time. Don't be fooled by the fact that Ryan calls his voucher-health-care system for seniors "Medicare". That's just a trick -- like an employer who promises you dental coverage that amounts to a coupon for a discount on a visit to your favorite dentist.

Of course, photos of the children who would lose health-care under the Ryan plan would probably not play well for Romney, either. Democracy Corps, the polling outfit run by Stan Greenberg and James Carville, found the Ryan budget to be a drag on Romney's prospects for moving swing voters into his column. (Greenberg refers to the key Obama coalition of unmarried women, youth, and minority voters as the "Rising American Electorate.") From their latest memo [11], issued in July:

The Ryan budget’s impact on the most vulnerable is powerful among key swing voters, including unmarried women, who shifted a net 10 points toward Obama, the Rising American Electorate (net 3-point shift), and independents (net 9-point shift). Even conservatives were swayed, shifting a net 13 points toward Obama.
Among those who heard an even split of facts about the Ryan budget – including ones about cuts to programs aimed to help mostly lower and working class families – the shift is even more pronounced. With this group of voters, Obama leads Romney by 9 points, 52 to 43 percent, the largest margin of any of the groups in our experiment. It’s clear that focusing on what the Ryan budget does to the most vulnerable Americans can pay dividends for Obama.

Looks like the Koch brothers are going to have to throw a whole lot of money at this thing to make it work for them. But we know they've got plenty of that.

 Links

[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsHw92j9P0Q
[4] http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/05/17/gingrich-apologizes-paul-ryan-right-wing-social-engineering-criticism/#ixzz23DfTabbG
[5] http://www.alternet.org/story/149965/wisconsin_is_a_battleground_against_the_billionaire_kochs%27_plan_to_break_labor%27s_back
[6] http://americansforprosperity.org/search/Paul+Ryan/
[7] http://www.politico.com/blogs/burns-haberman/2012/08/paul-ryans-weekend-131130.html
[8] http://www.alternet.org/story/150520/you_thought_the_koch_brothers_were_bad_turns_out_they%27re_even_worse_than_you_thought?paging=off
[9] http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2012/08/afp-to-announce-a-new-27-million-ad-buy-against-obama/1#.UCYW42NSREM
[10] http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/876280/did_the_koch_machine_put_romney_over_the_top_in_wisconsin
[11] http://www.democracycorps.com/National-Surveys/serious-attack-on-ryan-budget-takes-toll-on-mitt-romney/#ftn1

Overlooked GOP Budget Provision Would Fuel Offshoring With New Tax Incentives

Corporate shill, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) sucks. You people in his district need to vote that greedy fucker out after you vote Gov. Scott Walker out. Both are corporate-serving shills whose task is to destroy the collective bargaining process, offshore the good jobs, and turn all workers into wage slaves. The sooner they fail, the sooner we will have REAL progress.--jef



Wednesday, May 9, 2012 by In These Times
Ryan Shrugs: Overlooked GOP Budget Provision Would Fuel Offshoring With New Tax Incentives
by Roger Bybee

 

GOP House Budget Chair Paul Ryan reigns as the GOP’s resident economic genius, even as the productive base and health of his own southeastern Wisconsin district deteriorates under the impact of the very policies he has championed: deregulation, cuts to the social safety net, and “free trade”-fueled offshoring of jobs. 

In recent years, Ryan’s congressional district has been hollowed out by the loss of major employers like Delco in Oak Creek (3,800 jobs, mostly going to Mexico), Chrysler in Kenosha (850 jobs sent to Mexico with the help of auto industry “bailout” funds), and General Motors in Janesville (a plant closing wiped out 2,800 jobs directly and another 3,000 jobs in nearby supplier plants).

A devotee of hyper-capitalist author Ayn Rand, Ryan has seen the misery and, well, shrugged, just like Rand's Atlas. At least that's what his latest federal budget, which was passed by the House in late March, implies. In the face of suffering in his district and across the nation, Ryan's "Path to Prosperity" would deepen the economic polarization of America by heaping new riches on the 1%. A little-understood provision in it would make the exodus of jobs even worse by creating huge new tax incentives for corporations to relocate more jobs and assets overseas.

Although praised by Mitt Romney as “marvelous,” Ryan’s plan is so extreme it has gained criticism from even the conservative U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and other theologians for its sweeping cuts on programs serving the poor—which comprise about 62 percent of deficit-cutting measures in the budget—despite their tiny share of the overall federal budget. While cutting $3.3 trillion from safety-net programs such as Medicaid and food stamps, Ryan, a practicing Catholic, is all for creating $3 trillion in new tax breaks for corporations and the rich.

A PERNICIOUS PROVISION
Among the most pernicious provisions of Ryan’s tax breaks is a plan to halt the authority of the U.S. government to tax the foreign profits of U.S. corporations once they are brought back into the country, notes tax expert David Cay Johnston, author of Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense and Stick You With The Bill. Known in right-wing parlance as “extra-territoriality,” this proposal would be disastrous to both U.S. jobs and tax revenues.

“Ryan’s plan would insure that any profits created offshore by U.S. corporations would never be taxed by the U.S. government,” explains Johnston, who won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for his work as The New York Times' tax reporter. “This would create a tremendous incentive to move more and more U.S. jobs overseas to escape taxes on the profits that foreign workers produce for them,” Johnston says.

“Up until now, we’ve been losing good jobs because CEOs practice a kind of labor ‘arbitrage,’ seeking the most advantageous place to locate their plants based on low wages,” Johnston says. “It doesn’t take a genius to see that if your labor costs are about $40 an hour at a major unionized —$27 an hour plus benefits—you can save money if you relocate the work to China where the cost may be $4 an hour or under.”

Right now, foreign-generated profits of U.S. firms are not taxed until they are brought back into the United States. But a huge number of multinational corporations like Apple and GE and Nike use a variety of accounting tricks to essentially launder their profits before moving money home.

The key mechanism to this systematic tax avoidance is not the territory in which profits are generated, said Johnston. "Territoriality is a phony issue,” he stated “What's critical is the ability of corporations to form hundreds of corporations.”

These arrangements permit some subsidiaries to artificially charge other parts of the corporation high fees for the use of logos and brand names, and then to place the real profits in tax havens like the Cayman Islands.

As a result of Apple’s complex tax maneuvers, including such exotically-named tricks as “the Double Irish,” the corporation has been able to sharply drive down its U.S. tax burden. The impact has been immense, as a recent front-page New York Times investigation concluded:

Without such tactics, Apple’s federal tax bill in the United States most likely would have been $2.4 billion higher last year, according to a recent study by a former Treasury Department economist, Martin A. Sullivan. As it stands, the company paid cash taxes of $3.3 billion around the world on its reported profits of $34.2 billion last year, a tax rate of 9.8 percent. (Apple does not disclose what portion of those payments was in the United States, or what portion is assigned to previous or future years.)

Apple is far from exceptional in this respect. GE has been particularly fortunate, Citizens for Tax Justice reported:

Over the past decade, GE’s effective federal income tax rate on its $81.2 billion in pretax U.S. profits has been at most 1.8 percent…. GE is one of 30 major U.S. corporations that paid zero – or less – in federal income taxes in the last three years.

But this reality is rarely made visible in our commercial media, which instead uncritically transmit Republicans’ incessant claims of uncompetitive and excessive tax burdens. If the Obama campaign is smart, it will seize upon the Romney-endorsed House budget and condemn its favorable treatment of U.S. companies' foreign profits and new incentives for offshoring.

Comics Page

Rejected Romney Campaign Slogans
by Brian McFadden

Obama and Romney Are Politicians, Not Visionaries

Tuesday, April 10, 2012 by Common Dreams

by Dean Baker

 

There is a dangerously painful story line that is being propagated about a presidential race between President Obama and Mitt Romney. The line is that this will be a contest over competing visions for the country. In this story the alternative visions are outlined in the competing budgets put forward by President Obama and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, which Governor Romney has embraced.

The story of competing visions is a cute fairy tale for people who don't know anything about Washington and American politics. For adults who have not newly arrived from some foreign country, this line is just silly.

President Obama and Governor Romney are politicians, not philosophers. They have not made it to the top of the political ladder because of their grand visions of the future. They got their positions by appealing to powerful political actors who were able to give them the money and/or votes needed to get ahead.

The absurdity of the competing visions story is apparent to anyone who has looked at the Ryan budget. According to the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) analysis of Representative Ryan's budget, which was prepared under his direction, the budget would shrink all non-Social Security and non-health care spending to 3.75 percent of GDP by 2050.

To put this in perspective, the United States currently spends roughly 4 percent of GDP on the military, not including spending on the war in Afghanistan. Since the start of the Cold War it has never spent less than 3.0 percent of GDP on the military. Ryan does not want sharp cuts in defense; in fact he has already criticized the modest cuts President Obama's 2013 budget proposal.

Let's assume that Representative Ryan wants to keep defense spending somewhere between its 3.0 percent of GDP low and the 4.0 percent current level. That leaves somewhere between zero and 0.75 percent of GDP for everything else the federal government does other than Social Security, health care and defense.

This spending must cover all of the federal government's spending on road and bridges, airports and every other form of transportation. It covers its spending on aid to education, from running day care and Head Start to Pell grants and other college aid. It covers research and development including funding for the National Institutes of Health. It includes the money needed to run the State Department, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the federal prison system. It includes the money to pay for the border patrol and immigration enforcement, the patent office, and Food and Drug Administration.

In short, if the Romney-Ryan budget is taken seriously, then the vision essentially involves shutting down the federal government. All the federal government will do is literally run a military and pay out money for health care and Social Security. We will have no federal courts, federal law, patents, copyrights or borders since their budget has no money to pay for the institutions needed for enforcement.

So what exactly is the Romney-Ryan vision in this scenario? How do they envision that Pfizer and Merck will make money when there is no patent agency to register their drug patents or courts to enforce them? The same applies to copyrights for Microsoft, Time-Warner and all the other firms that depend on copyright protection.

What will be U.S. immigration policy when we have no one to enforce borders or even issue passports? Is the Romney-Ryan vision an open country with no borders? How about the airwaves, what will broadcast and telecommunications giants like Comcast and Verizon do to secure their access to the airwaves when there is no Federal Communications Commission to parcel out bandwidth?

Will there no longer be an interstate highway system, since there will be no federal funds to maintain it? Will airports and air traffic control be left to states, since there is no money for the Federal Aviation Commission?

These are the questions that reporters should be asking about the Romney-Ryan vision. The arithmetic in the Romney-Ryan budget says that they want to shut down the federal government outside of Social Security, health care and defense. Maybe the reporters who are singing about competing visions can try to tell the rest of us what the Romney-Ryan vision means, since the information on the table does not give a clue as to what the Romney-Ryan world looks like.

Since the Romney-Ryan vision makes zero sense (challenge to pundits: try to show otherwise), let's try an alternative story. Suppose that there is no Romney-Ryan vision.

Suppose that Romney and Ryan are politicians trying to appeal to rich people by promising them big tax cuts. After all, big tax cuts for the rich is the item is that is most clearly defined in the Romney-Ryan budget.

So why don't "neutral" reporters just tell us what the budget does -- it gives tax cuts to the rich and guts programs that benefit the middle class and the poor. The stuff about "vision" is just nonsense to tell children and Washington pundits.

What Veterans? The Republican Budget Proposes to Cut $11 Billion in Veterans Programs

03.21.12 - Common Dreams
by Abby Zimet

This week, which marks the 9th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War, let us note one of many crimes committed by the recently released GOP budget written by Rep. Paul Ryan: In the nearly 100-page document, the word "veteran" does not appear. But veterans are there: They face $11 billion in cuts.
"For those of us who served, in many ways, yesterday is today. And today, we read that the GOP doesn't even talk about veterans in their budget."

The Real Agenda Behind Paul Ryan’s Deficit-Slashing Mania

Tax Cuts for Corporations and the Super-Rich; Budget Cuts for Medicare and Medicaid

by DEAN BAKER

If you want to see House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan sanctimoniously excuse himself and his friends for missing the most predictable economic crisis in the history of the world, you now have the opportunity: In a YouTube video produced by his staff, Ryan tells viewers that the crisis called by the collapse of the housing bubble caught “us” by surprise.

Well, it didn’t actually catch us by surprise. Some of us had been warning about the potential damage caused by the collapse of the bubble since 2002. We repeatedly tried to warn of the dangers of the housing bubble in whatever forum we had.

It was easy to see that the housing market was hugely over-valued and that at some point it would collapse, just as the stock bubble had collapsed in 2000-2002. It was also easy to see that its collapse would have a devastating impact on the economy.
The bubble was driving the economy both directly by propelling a construction boom and indirectly through the impact of housing bubble wealth on consumption. When the bubble burst, there would be nothing to replace this bubble driven-demand. It would be necessary to run the sort of large government budget deficits that we have seen the last four years in order to sustain the economy and keep unemployment rate out of the double digits.

All of this was 100 percent predictable and predicted. However Representative Ryan wants to give himself the blanket “who could have known” amnesty because he and his Wall Street friends chose to ignore the people who were giving the warnings.

Ryan should apply a variation on the sanctimonious lines in his video to himself:

“Imagine being warned about an economic crisis that would throw more than 10 million people out or work and cause millions to lose their home and doing nothing. Imagine that our politicians in Congress and the White House chose to do nothing while there was still time because it would have been bad politics to upset the Wall Street banks who were making so much money. They instead chose to ignore the warnings. That is immoral.”

While some of us were putting in overtime and missing sleep to try to warn about the dangers of the housing bubble, Representative Ryan and his cronies were whining about a budget deficit that was almost non-existent. The budget deficits that the government was running in the years just before the collapse of the housing bubble were less than 2.0 percent of GDP. The debt-to-GDP ratio was actually falling. We could have run deficits of this magnitude forever.

After contributing through his negligence to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, Representative Ryan has the gall to imply that the people who don’t like his plan are immoral. While we don’t yet know the specifics of his new plan this year, we do know what he put on the table last year.

According to projections from the Congressional Budget Office, that plan would have raised the cost to the country of buying Medicare-equivalent insurance policies by $34 trillion over Medicare’s 75-year planning period. It also would have led to huge cuts in Medicaid, denying health care to children as well as other budget cuts that would have worsened the situation of low and moderate-income children.

And to offset these cuts Representative Ryan promised big tax breaks to corporations and the richest people in the country. His budget lowered the tax rate on both to just 25 percent.
If we can skip the sanctimony let’s just say what every budget wonk knows to be true. We don’t have a budget problem; we have a health care cost problem. If per person health care costs in the United States were in line with those in any other wealthy country we would be looking at huge budget surpluses, not deficits.

The answer lies not in cutting back and/or eliminating Medicaid and Medicare, but in fixing the health care system. That’s the simple truth and to try to contend otherwise is immoral, Representative Ryan.

Ryan Budget: Medicare Privatization, Big Spending and Tax Cuts

Tuesday, March 20, 2012 by FireDogLake
by David Dayen


Paul Ryan’s new budget was released this morning. He kicked it off with another pretentious video preview and a somewhat less pretentious and more standard op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Ryan’s budget resolution is similar to last year’s version, which passed the House and went nowhere in the Senate.

The charges are similar, too. He claims that Democratic-led Senate hasn’t passed a budget in three years, though the Budget Control Act sets out spending targets for the next ten and, in the mind of Senate Democrats, obviates the need for an annual resolution. He produces a chart that creates a “current path” for the budget and deficits by merely drawing a sharply rising line with no basis in actual numbers. And he asserts that the GOP budget “strengthens the safety net by returning power to the states, which are in the best position to tailor assistance to their specific populations.”

This means block grants for Medicaid, which just caps funding for a program that’s growing along with health care costs. “Returning power to the states” means that they have to fend for themselves on any additional funding for the program. It’s a massive cut-off of state funds to the most vulnerable population in the country.

But the three big aspects of the GOP budget are this: First, Ryan ends the Medicare guarantee by instituting his “premium support” plan with Ron Wyden. This will fragment the large population in traditional Medicare today and raise costs significantly throughout the system. It also shifts those costs onto seniors by providing inefficient vouchers for adequate health coverage,while expecting the beneficiaries to make up the difference.

It also doesn’t save the government any money, as the GDP +1 growth rate of Medicare, which is how fast the vouchers will increase under Ryan’s plan, is also the target rate under the Affordable Care Act to which the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) will seek to hold costs. House Republicans will try to repeal the IPAB this week.

Second, the Ryan budget drives non-defense discretionary spending well under the cap set by the Budget Control Act in the debt limit deal, about $20 billion to $1.028 trillion, the same amount it was for FY2013 in his budget last year. It also cancels out the first year of the trigger on defense cuts with more non-defense discretionary cuts, this time with cuts to the federal workforce. Senior Senate Democrats Dan Inouye (chair of Appropriations) and Kent Conrad (chair of the Budget Committee) made their position known on this yesterday in a letter to John Boehner and Eric Cantor.

“We believe that ignoring the BCA represents a breach of faith that will make it more difficult to negotiate future agreements,” they wrote in the letter addressed to House Speaker John A. Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.). 

“Rather than trying to tear down the BCA, we should be holding it up as an example of what can be accomplished if we are willing to set aside our differences and work hard to find bipartisan solutions to our nation’s challenges,” they continue.

Boehner responded by whining that Democrats should write a budget instead of a letter. Democrats say the Budget Control Act is their budget resolution. And on and on.

Finally, the big surprise in the new Ryan budget is the introduction of a compressed tax code with only two tax brackets, at 10% and 25%.


The proposal would replace the current tax structure’s six brackets with just two tax levels, a 10-percent marginal tax rate for lower income earners and 25-percent for upper income earners.

That would be a reduction from a top marginal rate of 35 percent under the current structure. The plan would also lower the top corporate income tax rate to 25 percent and virtually eliminate taxes on corporate profits brought back from overseas. And it would do away with the Alternative Minimum Tax, which was designed to hit the wealthiest taxpayers but increasingly also affects upper-middle-income earners.

The only way to do all this – while keeping the military relatively whole – and somehow move the budget on a path to balance is to virtually eliminate all spending on the safety net. When we see the numbers, we will realize that much of the budget is smoke and mirrors, where “dynamic scoring” assumes economic growth will increase tax revenue when you cut it to almost nothing. But understand one thing – the GOP House voted for a balanced budget amendment last year. This budget from Ryan doesn’t meet that test. In fact, you can say of it exactly what was said of President Obama’s budget by the CBO – it lards on trillions of dollars of debt over the 10-year budget window.

Democrats aren’t planning on helping Republicans pass their budget, and they may need the help. For all the radicalism of the Ryan budget, hardline conservatives will probably voteagainst it, because it doesn’t cut spending deep enough. The Medicare piece served Democrats well last year in the spin war, and they plan to use that to full effect again.

But I’m glad that Ryan released this budget. Unlike some Republicans of prior years (and some Democrats, to be honest), he has not hidden the true face of his policies. We know exactly where Republicans want to take the country.

Rep. Paul Ryan warns anti-piracy bill may lead to Internet ‘censorship’

By Stephen C. Webster - RAW Story
Monday, January 9, 2012

One of the most conservative members of Congress signaled on Monday what may be the beginning of the end for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA): Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI), chairman of the House Budget Committee and one of the GOP’s frontmen against so-called “job killing regulations,” has officially come out against it.

Taking issue with its potential for abuse, Ryan said that SOPA could actually be a new kind of onerous regulation — the one thing Republicans hate most.

“The Internet is one of the most magnificent expressions of freedom and free enterprise in history,” Ryan explained in a prepared statement. “It should stay that way. While H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act, attempts to address a legitimate problem, I believe it creates the precedent and possibility for undue regulation, censorship and legal abuse. I do not support H.R. 3261 in its current form and will oppose the legislation should it come before the full House.”

Ryan’s statement comes days after a group of activists with the social media forum Reddit.com launched a campaign called “Pull Ryan,” in reaction to rumors that he was in favor of SOPA. Ryan later disavowed those rumors and insisted he hadn’t made up his mind.

Ryan is not the only prominent conservative to come out against SOPA. Although the bill was sponsored by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) and supported by many of his fellow Republicans, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is also opposed.

“As a former tech entrepreneur and patent holder, I know that innovation depends on strong intellectual property rights and robust enforcement tools,” Issa explained to Raw Story in December. “SOPA, however, goes far beyond what is necessary to protect the rights of intellectual property owners from foreign rogue sites. It would put tremendous new regulatory and monitoring burdens on legitimate commerce in the digital space, leave the internet less secure and ultimately handicaps the policies that have allowed digital job creators to flourish.”

He also changed the profile photo on his personal Facebook page to a black box with the word “CENSORED” in the middle, in protest of the bill. Issa has a history working with technology products for automobiles. He is also part of a bipartisan group of lawmakers in the House and Senate who’ve proposed an alternative to SOPA, called the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade (OPEN) Act.

Instead of using the courts to force search engines and ISPs to block websites accused of copyright infringement, as SOPA and Protect IP would, the alternative suggests simply cutting them off from all sources of funding, just like the banks did to WikiLeaks.

The lawmakers would accomplish this by regulating illegal downloads as a matter of international commerce. Doing so, the group of lawmakers hope to see the International Trade Commission (ITC) take charge of combating piracy, instead of judges. The ITC would be tasked with reviewing claims of online infringement against foreign website owners, and ordering them cut off from funding sources if the claims prove true.

It would also set up a rapid-response mechanism for temporary disconnections from funding if an imminent harm can be demonstrated by a copyright holder, such as broadcasters who air live events that are being illegally streamed online.

The House has delayed further hearings on SOPA until later in January, when it’s expected to come up for a vote before the House at-large.

A spokesman for Rep. Ryan did not return a request for comment.