QOTD: Charles Pierce

The esteemed and renowned columnist Charles Pierce hits it right on the head with this paragraph:

They [the Republicans] aren’t going to pull back. They aren’t going to stop. They aren’t going to do their jobs. Their patriotism extends only as far as a donor’s wallet and their devotion to the Constitution can be measured with an eyedropper. Nobody truly can be said to be NeverTrump anymore who is not also NeverMcConnell, NeverRyan, and, frankly, NeverGOP, at least in its current manifestation. The prion disease has triumphed completely. The patient is brain-dead, but still deadly in its contagion.

And since I'm quoting Pierce, I feel obliged to gratuitously share this picture of the time I got to meet him:

And yes, that's Randy Bryce photobombing us.

Janesville Gazette Changes Name to the Paul Ryan Messenger

By Jeff Simpson

Lost in the Magic of the Christmas season, was an apocalyptic op-ed from the Janesville Gazette, which was a jumble of drool over the Boy Wonder child from Janesville - Paul Ryan.  

Politico recently broke a story about how Speaker Ryan was considering retiring at the end of 2018.  As Joel McNally pointed out, the "leaked" retirement story was just a front, to get the national political reporters to talk about what a great guy Paul Ryan (R- Wall St.) is.     

The Janesville Gazette, abandoning all pretense of objectivity, liberality and honesty, took the story - hook, line and sinker.  

Just in time to be buried the day before they reposted - Yes, Virginia There is a Santa Claus (showing us the best of what an editorial is meant to be), the Janesville Gazette posted - Please Don't Go Paul.  

Let's take a look:

Rumors about House Speaker Paul Ryan possibly leaving Congress next year dampened excitement over passage of the nation’s first tax overhaul since the Ronald Reagan era.
Some athletes try to retire at the top of their games, and maybe Ryan is having similar thoughts as he contemplates this major legislative victory.

The majority of people do not like the new tax overhaul bill, as they know it is a huge give-away to the rich and will increase the deficit approximately $1.5 trillion! 

Despite its depth, the report reveals little about Ryan—“friends say he feels like he’s running a daycare center”—that we don’t already know or suspect. The story highlights Ryan’s torn feelings over his job, zooming in on the dysfunction afflicting our nation’s capital.
Small wonder Ryan should want to leave. He’s endured withering, often unfair criticism from both the left and right not to mention a parade of protesters stalking his home in Janesville.
We can hardly blame Ryan for wanting to escape the spotlight and spend more time with his family. For many politicians, “spending more time with family” is code to cover up their real reason for leaving. But Ryan has been sincere in his dedication to his family, notably insisting on coming home during weekends as a condition of accepting the speaker job.

Can we please stop with the Paul Ryan family man myth?  Does he really come home every weekend to "spend time with his family"?  Or is he running around the country on weekends fundraising and trying to sell The Donalds border wall?   

$10,000 a plate is a hefty price for a kid's meal.  

Ryan exhibits a kind of humanity and decency too often missing in politics today. D.C. lost its way long ago, and much of the cynicism directed at Congress is justified, though Ryan pulled off a minor miracle by shepherding several bills through the House this year.

Like the Obamacare repeal bill, which Ryan passed through the House, but would have left millions of Americans without healthcare but was too extreme for the Senate to pass.   It would have also ended the pre-existing condition clause in the ACA, which means it would have killed me(literally).   

The GOP tax bill is by no means a perfect document, and we cannot claim the middle class emerges as a clear winner. But the bill is a genuine attempt to simplify the tax code, placing limits on, for example, deductions for mortgage interest and paid property taxes. The bill also seeks to make American companies more competitive by lowering the corporate tax rate.

"We cannot claim that the middle class is a winner"?  Yet you declare it a major victory?  What do you think Janesville is made up of?  Will the private jet deduction be a big hit in your circulation area? By the way any responsible journalism, would tell us that the US does NOT have the highest corporate tax rate and a corporate tax cut will not spark the economy. 

 Under a Republican-controlled Congress and presidency, the tax overhaul should signal greater legislative victories to come. But in this fractured Congress, many Republicans are greeting the tax bill’s passage with a sigh of relief, not so much the jubilation of conquerors.

You are really calling the GOP "conquerors?  I agree but it is hardly a compliment. 

As anyone familiar with Twitter knows, Congress is operating under unusual circumstances thanks largely to President Trump’s unpredictable leadership. Ryan has fortunately avoided getting into a tweet war with Trump, which might explain why Ryan has been spared from Trump’s infamous 140-character assaults. Nevertheless, working with Trump must be exhausting (in the daycare sense).

Paul Ryan(R-Trump's lackey), has not been attacked by The Donald lately because HE AGREES WITH EVERYTHING THE DONALD DOES.   Why would anyone attack a yes man?  

Through it all, Ryan has refused to debase himself by hurling insults at his critics. He reminds the Beltway of what life used to be like before Twitter, and he’s an example of how a leader should behave.

Let's just pretend incidents like this have never happened:

 Or this:

Or This:

“Right now about 60 percent of the American people get more benefits in dollar value from the federal government than they pay back in taxes,” Ryan said. “So we’re going to a majority of takers versus makers in America and that will be tough to come back from that. They’ll be dependent on the government for their livelihoods [rather] than themselves.”

Or this:

 But the reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand. And the fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.

• Speech at a 2005 Atlas Society event  

Brit Hume, FOX News: What is your view of Ayn Rand? Are you an Ayn Rand disciple? 
Rep. Paul Ryan: No. I really enjoyed her novels, Atlas Shrugged in particular. It triggered my interest in economics. That's where I got into studying economics. That's why I wanted to study the whole field of economics.
I later in life learned about what her philosophy was, it's called Objectivism. It's something that I completely disagree with. It's an atheistic philosophy. But I think what she's done is she's showed -- she came from communism. She showed how the pitfalls of socialism can hurt the economy, can hurt people, families and individuals and that to me was very compelling novels. Which says freedom, free enterprise, liberty is so much better than totalitarianism and socialism. Those novels, I thought were interesting. But her philosophy, which is different, is something I just don't agree with.

There is a reason why Charles Pierce calls Ryan a "zombie eyed granny starver" and the "Biggest. Fake. Ever." 

Charles Pierce describes perfectly, what the folks at the Janesville Gazette think a true leader is:

 As the deciding votes were cast—recorded in green on the black digital scoreboard suspended above the floor—the speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, threw his head back and slammed his hands together. Soon he was engulfed in a sea of dark suits, every Republican lawmaker wanting to slap him on the shoulder and be a part of his moment.

His moment. Thirteen million Americans lose their health care.
 Paul Ryan, threw his head back and slammed his hands together.
His moment. Eighty-percent of the benefits going to the top one-percent.
 Paul Ryan, threw his head back and slammed his hands together.
His moment. Millions of dollars shoved upwards to people who already have billions of dollars. A deficit entering the orbit of Mercury.
 Paul Ryan, threw his head back and slammed his hands together.
His moment.

 

William Rivers Pitt @truthout had a similar disgusted reaction: 

When the president of the United States of America signs this bill into law, he will, among many other things, be signing a check to himself and men like Bob Corker. That check has a great many zeroes to the left of the decimal. These are the people the Evangelicals embrace as "theirs," though their pockets will be picked and their futures plundered, once again.

They cheered. It would be bad enough if they did this with their heads hung low in shame, knowing as we all know that this is only happening because the big GOP donors demanded the key to the Treasury and refused to donate again until they got it. We're sorry, they could (but would never) say, but they made us do it. We had to, we're sorry.  

 Instead, they cheered.  They actually cheered.

But Wait there is more:

 It’s not fair to blame Ryan for the antics of a president with little self-control.Congress would lose a great deal—namely integrity—if Ryan were to leave. Paul, please don’t go.

Yes if you were to ignore the career politicians complete record and just be mesmerized the one day a year he graces the Gazette with an interview, then you would definitely think that Paul Ryan was a man of integrity.   

However if you look at his record, listen to his words and as the late great Maya Angelou told us - "When someone tells you who they are. Believe them.".   Then you would know that there is not now, nor has there ever been an ounce of integrity coursing through Paul Ryan's body. 

Please Please Please Paul Go AWAY...and do not let the door hit you on your way out!  

Biggest. Fake. Ever.   

Edit Note:  There are two people running to dethrone Paul Ryan and actually for the first time allow the people of the first CD to be represented in Washington.   

Cathy Myers and Randy Bryce! 

Let's make sure one of them does! 

 

Paul Ryan's Dishonorable Discharge

By Jeff Simpson

I have advocated that Democrats cross over in the 1st Congressional District of WI and vote against Paul Ryan.  That means voting for his opponent, Paul Nehlen in the primary.   This is our best chance to eliminate the  scourge on our country that Paul Ryan has brought us.

As John Nichols recently pointed out, Mr. Ryan has been completely shamed.  His short tenure as speaker has absolutely exposed his many weaknesses and shown him to be a coward in every sense of the word.

As Charley Pierce from Esquire Magazine says of Paul Ryan - "Biggest. Fake. Ever."

Unfortunately the mainstream media keeps painting Pink Slip Paulie as a centrist, intelligent savior.  He has been dubbed the "GOP Ideas guy" too many time to count.

However, what they fail to ever tell you(how many times have the MSM done stories on Paul Ryan and had no counter balance?) is that he has actually done nothing in his time in Congress.

 Can Mr. Ryan himself compromise in the interest of getting legislation signed into law? Many in both parties have come to doubt it after 17 years in which the 46-year-old congressman from Wisconsin has held increasingly influential positions in the House, with Republicans holding a majority for all but four of those years.
This is, after all, someone whose self-described bold ideas have never gained liftoff; he has rarely taken the really bold step of writing them into legislation, with specifics. “He has actually proposed three — total, three — bills that have become law in his entire career dating back to 1999,” said David T. Canon, chairman of the political science department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. One named a post office in Wisconsin, a second changed taxes on arrows used by deer hunters, and the third, this year, established a $3 million presidential commission on “evidence-based policy making.”

A quick recap, of his 17 years, he has been in the majority 13 of them and has passed a whopping THREE bills.  In a huge bit of irony, the last bill that the ideas guy passed, was a $3 Million dollar STUDY on how to use evidence to actually make policy.  

Let that sink in for a minute!

It is absolutely time to evict Mr. Ryan from his lofty perch where he makes over $150,000/yr plus Cadillac benefits to name a Post Office every twenty years!  

Please join me in supporting and voting for Paul Nehlen on August 9th*!!

edit note:*  Once we eliminate the threat to the nation that Paul Ryan is, then we can go back to actually deciding on the issues between the Democrat and Mr. Nehlen.   There is NO law that says who you vote for in the primary you have to also vote for in the general!

Lets look forward to bringing Paul Ryan home so he can be buying his $350 bottles of wine in Janesville and stimulating his hometown economy that desperately needs it!!!

Here is Paul Ryan helping drive General Motors out of Janesville!

Quote of the Day (And Bragging Rights)

I'm honored and excited that Charles Pierce of Esquire picked up my story about the deadbeat Orville Seymer, which I had posted on Crooks and Liars (as well as on here).

Pierce's take on Scott Walker, who keeps getting tied up with lowlifes like Seymer, was not only dead on but absolutely priceless:

Both capper and Daniel Bice point out that this deadbeat's organization was central to the political rise of Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed thrice-elected manager of said midwest subsidiary, and also that it has been central to Walker's defense against the stubborn charges that he regularly uses one office to help him get elected to the next one. I swear, I have never seen anyone whose rise to national prominence has been so thickly festooned with small-time, penny-ante grift. It's like nominating a squeegee-man to be Secretary of the Interior.

I would point out that the squeegee-man would have one distinct advantage over Walker - the squeegee-man would know which end of the squeegee is the business end.

Today's MUST Read

By Jeff Simpson

If there is a better writer right now in America than Charles Pierce, I have not seen them. 

Today he addresses Wisconsin(again) and it is a MUST read. 


Here is an excerpt....I highly recommend the whole thing!

This has nothing to do with public safety. I've been in that rotunda. It's huge. You could bring in Up With People, and there'd still be room for the daily business of selling Wisconsin off wholesale to get done around them. This is about inconveniencing a guy who wants to run for president based on his record of selling Wisconsin off wholesale. This is about video he doesn't like and people who harsh his mellow. Which happens to be what the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and Article I of the constitution of what once was the state of Wisconsin, are all about, too

Compare/Contrast - Staffer Edition

1. Compare:   Mitt Rmoney cut his staff off the minute he knew he lost!

From the moment Mitt Romney stepped off stage Tuesday night, having just delivered a brief concession speech he wrote only that evening, the massive infrastructure surrounding his campaign quickly began to disassemble itself.
Aides taking cabs home late that night got rude awakenings when they found the credit cards linked to the campaign no longer worked.

Thanks to Charles Pierce for his outstanding reporting during the whole campaign.

Sorry guys, this is a business and you no longer supply anything of value to Mitt so all bets are off.  Loyalty and appreciation do not exist in Mitt's world, just the bottom line.  Mitt needs every dollar he has for the next run for president!  Besides, the staffers should be lucky Mitt didn't ship their job to China! 

2. Contrast:  President Obama showed his appreciation to his staff - "I'm really proud of all you guys."

"I'm just looking around the room and I'm thinking wherever you guys end up ... you're just gonna do great things," Obama told his mostly young campaign staff in a video released by the campaign on Thursday night.
"And that's why even before last night's results, I felt that the work that I had done in running for office had come full circle," he said, his voice breaking up. "Because what you guys have done means that the work that I am doing is important."

"And I'm really proud of that. I'm really proud of all of you," he said, a tear rolling down his right cheek. As he wiped it away, the crowd of hundreds broke into applause. Obama also choked up on Monday night as he spoke at his final campaign rally in Iowa.

Obama recalled his time as a 20-something working as a community organizer in Chicago and "didn't know at all what I was doing." His staff, he said, is "so much better than I was."

"The most important thing you need to know is that your journey is just beginning, you're just starting," he said. "And whatever good we do over the next four years will pale in comparison to what you guys end up accomplishing for years and years to come. And that's been my source of hope."

"That's why, over the last four years, when people ask me about, 'how do you put up with this or that or the frustrations of Washington?' I just think about you," he continued. "And that's the source of my hope, that's the source of my strength and my insipration. And I know that you guys won't disappoint me because I've already seen who you guys are. And you all are just remarkable people and you've lifted me up each and every step of the way."

President Obama realizes that "they built this", and he owes them gratitude and loyalty and he would not be where he is today without them.    He also realizes they are human beings who will continue to go on and make a difference in their and our lives! 

America does not always get it right, but we sure did in this election!

Sunday Reading

1.  The first comes from a recent speechfest that the right wing rock stars gave in front of the Reagan library.  Governor Crisco and Marco Rubio both spoke, Charles Pierce from Esquire took the time to break down our very own Paul Ryan (R- Wall St.) speech: 

Ryan also leaned on an old historical trope of his that I've always found to be the last refuge of a true bunco artist:

"We wonder if we will be the first generation in American history to leave our children with fewer opportunities and a less prosperous nation than the one we inherited."

You know when people began to feel that they could leave their children with more opportunities than they had? When government got involved, that's when, and when common people began to feel that the government was on their side, and not the wholly owned subsidiary of the wealthy and the privileged. The farmers started to feel it when the Morrill Act established land grant colleges. The miners began to feel it when unionization fought to make their jobs slightly less hellish and when government got behind that effort. The farmers began to feel it when the Progressives began to force change at the beginning of the last century. Everybody felt it with the election of Franklin Roosevelt and the defeat of Hooverian economics, for which Paul Ryan seems overly nostalgic. And that feeling really took off in the 1950's, when government passed the GI Bill and built the interstate highways, and made college affordable generally to the children and grandchildren of the people who won World War II like, say, me. And when we recognized that the death of a parent need not blight the hopes and dreams of his children, who would be allowed the opportunity of an education through the survivor benefits provided by Social Security, like, say, Paul Ryan was. The notion that we will leave a brighter day for our kids is a relatively recent phenomenon, and it is one that was not possible without the intervention of the government, and it is one from which Paul Ryan profited so handsomely that he is now in a position to claim a "moral obligation" to deny it to everyone else. What a country.

2.  You know how all of the right wingers defend cutting taxes on corporations, because "all they will do is pass those costs on to the consumer"?  Well the consumer better get ready to bend over, since JP Morgan Chase recently had a bad trade that cost the company $20 BILLION dollars.   Poor Poor over regulated banksters.  As a matter of fact, Bill Maher recently had CNBC ancher Michelle Caruso-Cabrera as one of his guests and she pointed out that none of the regulations we have gotten rid of would have stopped JP Morgan Chase from losing this money.  Silly corporate mouthpiece that she is, she was also wrong.  Dodd Frank would have saved JP Morgan $2 Billion +.

 

 

Here are the very specific things that could have kept that $2 billion in JPMorgan's pocket.
The Volcker Rule: Everybody hates the Volcker Rule. Jamie Dimon, even after watching his firm burn up $2 billion, still hates the Volcker Rule. This is the rule that attempts to turn the clock back to the days when investment banks and commercial banks were kept miles apart by a Depression-era law called Glass-Steagall, a law that was dismantled by those flying-monkey lobbyists, Alan Greenspan and the Clinton administration in the late 1990s.
The Volcker Rule attempts to remedy this by prohibiting banks with federally insured customer deposits from blowing all their money speculating on Slovakian government bonds. So you can see why banks hate it! Gambling in the market is like the Lotto: You've got to be in it to win it. But not being in it might have prevented JPMorgan's chief investment office from having those big bets on credit derivatives that cost it $2 billion.

JPMorgan has argued, and will continue to argue, that its bets were a desperately necessary strategy to balance out the risks it takes when it helps the economy and creates jobs by lending money to puppy farms, firemen and schoolteachers. It just goofed up on this one. Sorry, guys, won't happen again. But even if you take the banks' word for this and give them a pass on trading credit derivatives -- which is probably going to happen -- there are two other aspects of Dodd-Frank that could have prevented JPMorgan's big loss:
Lincoln Rule: This is way less well-known than the Volcker Rule, but probably just as hated, and just as much under assault, according to Greenberger. This rule, also known as the "Swaps Pushout" rule, denies Fed assistance to dealers in derivatives called "swaps," as in "credit default swaps," as in "what helped blow the economy up four years ago." Just like with the Volcker Rule, banks get an exemption from the Lincoln Rule if their swaps bets are purely to hedge their risks. But! They only get to take that exemption if their credit default swaps are traded through a central clearing house. Which brings us to the third aspect of Dodd-Frank that would have stopped JPMorgan before it killed its own money again:
Derivatives Clearing: Title 7 of the Dodd-Frank act is a tangled word-nest that will take regulators a while to sort through, but it gives them the right, at least, to demand that derivatives be traded out in the open, where everybody can see them, with a central clearing house directing traffic and keeping banks from being a danger to themselves or others.
This is a huge point for the JPMorgan situation, notes Greenberger. A central clearing house would not have let the bank's derivative bets drift so deeply into stupid territory. It would have seen the bank taking losses on a weekly basis and asked it to post more money for security. Maybe more importantly, the Fed would have caught on more quickly and encouraged JPMorgan to put the ix-nay on the erivatives-day.
But none of that stuff happened, because none of these reforms are in place, four years after the last crisis. Maybe this blowup will help convince banks -- and the politicians they purchase -- of the need for these regulations. Frankly, I'm not optimistic. The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression didn't convince them. A couple of billion dollars into thin air at JPMorgan probably won't, either.

 Just ask Economist and Professor Simon Johnson.  I wonder why free market captain Paul Ryan has not weighed in on this yet?   

3.  Want more on Wall St. and Regulations?  The full length documentary Inside Job can be seen here!

'Inside Job' provides a comprehensive analysis of the global financial crisis of 2008, which at a cost over $20 trillion, caused millions of people to lose their jobs and homes in the worst recession since the Great Depression, and nearly resulted in a global financial collapse. Through exhaustive research and extensive interviews with key financial insiders, politicians, journalists, and academics, the film traces the rise of a rogue industry which has corrupted politics, regulation, and academia. It was made on location in the United States, Iceland, England, France, Singapore, and China.

4.  Interesting Column by Eugene Kane on the Wisconsin jobs debate:

Frankly, it would be a lot easier for people to accept some of the jobs numbers being tossed around by Gov. Scott Walker if they knew someone who had actually gotten a job since he took office.
A quick survey of social-media friends in Milwaukee asking whether they - or anyone they knew - could credit Walker for their job brought these responses:
"I don't know anybody that has gotten a job."
"I don't know anyone that has secured permanent employment or temporary employment that was tied to anything Walker did as county executive or governor."
"I know people who have lost jobs under Walker. My husband was a city worker, and a lot of their jobs are now being done by private contractors."
"My son and several hundred co-workers lost their (jobs) when Frontier Airlines decided to pull up stakes and go back to their Denver roots."

5.    Dr. Glen Barry, went to Marquette with Scott Walker and does not have much good to say about him.  

Walker’s debut in Marquette student politics as a freshman began by stirring up the campus with a McCarthyite investigation into misspending by the Homecoming committee. Despite the President and Vice-President of student government having already resigned over personal expenditures by a larger group of student leaders from student funds – including myself and others unknowingly – no criminal charges of any kind, and no hard evidence of wrong-doing by anyone, Walker grandstands and leads a student government trial of myself and others, that could have been avoided if he so chose.

Walker lost on all counts, but not before destroying a few people’s reputations, and amassing personal power. Sound familiar? Thus began an over 25 year record of bullying to get what he wants, of being insincere and narcissistic, and political grandstanding at the expense of others¸ all for personal self-aggrandizement, and without an ounce of either personal or political virtue.