Heritage Unhinged!

Ohio Senator Rob Portman was a speaker at a "fix the debt" forum.   Unfortunately for Mr. Portman he had to actually hear how his constituents felt about privatizing Social Security!   

After pretending that he would actually meet with his constituents to try and get them to stop, he eventually just gives up when they do not.   Eventually, they get up and leave and senior "fellow"(term used loosely) Ed Haislmaier extreme right wing Heritage Foundation becomes unhinged! 

Ed's little crazy rant leaves us to wonder - Someone procreasted with you?    These are the people that are setting the debate and will not work with President Obama in solving our problems!  

Coming To A Billboard Near You!

Under The Romney/Ryan/Thompson Plan...

...we'll all feast like royalty! Or something like that.

Mitt Fires Up The Crowd!

It has been a tough week for Mitt Rmoney, first the word got out that he likes to hide is money(and he has lots of it) in the Cayman's to avoid paying taxes in the country that he wants to be president of. While he keeps trying to duck the issue, the only thing we know for certain is that he has no intention of releasing his tax returns so we can see just how extensive this problem is. Then he took his show on the road and addressed the national NAACP conference in Boston and he was definitely not a hit! Lucky for Mitt the audience did not have a gong!

Mitt Romney had an uphill climb in winning over the NAACP in an address their annual convention Wednesday. That was put on prominent display when Romney endured a loud, sustained round of booing after repeating his promise to repeal President Obama’s health care reform law.

“I will eliminate expensive non-essential programs like Obamacare, and I will work to reform and save Medicare and Social Security, in part by means-testing their benefits,” Romney said, according to prepared remarks.

No wonder the GOP does not want African Americans to vote!

Paul Ryan Is No Ageist!

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As the gentle reader knows, even though he himself had benefited greatly from Social Security, Paul Ryan wants to privatize it so that all the money goes to his supportive Wall Street friends.  Maybe he feels that this is the way to get them to buy the next rounds of $350 wine.

Likewise, he also wants to gut Medicaid and Medicare, again so that wealth that the tax payers have invested in can be redistributed among the fat cats of Wall Street and big business.

This is nothing new to anyone who's been paying the least bit of attention and doesn't get their information solely from Faux News or talk radio.

But what does make it even more outrageous is that he still wants to do so in the face of a new study which finds that more than 10% of people over the age of 65 is living in poverty and that this number is growing every year.  The study also found that minorities and single women are also more likely to be below the poverty level.

But it's not just the elderly that Ryan is targeting.

He toed the line for the Koch Brothers and voted against preventing student loans from doubling.  As his opponent for the fall election, Rob Zerban, points out, this is a really, really bad thing:

“Doubling the student loan interest rate and saddling our young people with an extra $1,000.00 in costs each year, at a time when families are already struggling to make sure their children have the opportunity for higher education, is a recipe for disaster.

“I personally know how important these programs are – they are the reason I was able to attend school and become a job creator that Paul Ryan and his Washington Republican buddies tout. I was able to live my version of the American Dream because our country made a modest investment in me through Pell Grants and Stafford Loans.

“We as a county can never compete in the global economy if we continually put up barriers for young people to thrive in whatever future they choose.  Paul Ryan’s budget does absolutely nothing to help Americans succeed – it is simply yet another giveaway for the oil & gas companies, Wall Street and corporations who fund his campaigns on the backs of our working families.”

So, as you can see, Paul Ryan is no ageist - he hates the old and the young equally.  In fact, he's no bigot at all either since he shows the same callous disregard for women, men, minorities, even his own constituents.

Or could it simply be that he is having emotional pangs about having to break up with his long-time fantasy girl?

Paul Ryan's BIG Lie

I thought I would start out my writing here at Cognitive Dissidence, the same way that I did at Bloggingblue. Pointing out one of Paul Ryan(R-Wall St.) lies. Since I joined the grandaddy of them all, I thought I would address Paul Ryan's lie that is the Grandaddy of them all!!! The lie that Social Security is going broke!

 The 2012 Social Security Trustees Report, will be released soon.   The findings are simple: 

The most important take-away points from the 2012 Trustees Report will be that Social Security has a large and growing surplus; that without any Congressional action, Social Security will continue to pay benefits to America’s eligible working families for decades; and that with modest legislated increases in revenue, it will continue to pay those benefits for the next century and beyond.

There is even a simple fix, to the modest deficit that will arrive in 2033(it is not an immediate problem):

 Social Security’s projected long-range funding gap could be eliminated without cutting benefits, which are modest in size, yet crucial. Congress could eliminate Social Security’s entire projected shortfall, which amounts to around 0.8 percent of Gross Domestic Product (about the size of the Bush tax cuts going to the top two percent of the population), by raising the Social Security tax cap so that the 6 percent of workers who make more than $110,100 a year pay taxes on all of their wages, just like everyone else who makes less than that amount. This would guarantee full payment of Social Security benefits for the next 75 years and beyond. There are many other ways to address the projected shortfall without cutting benefits which are already very modest, averaging just $14,781 a year for retirees – less than is paid in a year of minimum wage work, yet vitally important. Two-thirds of seniors rely on Social Security for half or more of their incomes. The benefits are also vitally important to children and spouses of deceased workers, to workers who have sustained permanent and serious disabilities and to their families.

Another couple of take - aways from this report;

1. When Paul Ryan tells you that Social Security is going broke: HE IS LYING!

2. To make sure Social Security remains solvent, GIVE TO ROB ZERBAN!

Did Ron Johnson And The Tea Party Agenda Do In Paul Ryan's Budget Scheme?

With all the hubbub the last couple of days, I've been preoccupied, like the rest of the state with the recall elections.

It wasn't until today that I realized that we haven't heard a heckuva lot today from Paul Ryan.  Even radio squawker Charlie Sykes, who had a parade of Republicans on his show today to try to spin their loss of two seats as a good thing, seemed to have missed him.

Then it dawned on me that the other big news of the week might have been keeping him quiet.

You will remember that Ryan, the Republicans' shining star, has, as a key part of his budget from hell, privatizing Social Security and allowing people to invest it in the stock market themselves (Or in other words, he proposes to do a work around so that Wall Street can have even more of our money, because the bail outs just wasn't enough for those greedy pigs.

However, now that Ron Johnson and John Boehner having first held the nation hostage in regards to raising the debt ceiling and then forcing their short-sighted, narrow-minded and spiteful Tea Party agenda into the fray, the stock market has been plummeting, dropping 2,000 points over the last couple of weeks.

Even the bullheaded Ryan has to realize that only the extreme lunatic fringe would want to invest their retirement into the market right now.

I do admit that I am enjoying a certain schadenfreude in seeing Ryan's rising star being brought crashing down by his own friends, supporters and malicious agenda.

ADDENDUM:  Lou Kaye at The Paul Ryan Watch noticed my post and expands upon it. A worthy read.

Unintended Consequences; or Poetic Injustice

This is a case of "be careful what you wish for, you just may get it."

Everyone has heard of the TEA Parties, the astroturf groups funded by the likes of the Koch brothers, who protest everything under the sun from taxes to spending to President Obama's skin color.

A good number of these people are older, 40% of them are over 55 years old. It spawned some derision and helped point out some of the hypocrisy of the Tea Partiers with the line about "Keep your hands off my Medicare."

As it turns out, the TEA-sponsored move of the nation's politics closer to fascism is already coming back to bite them in the wallet:

House and Senate Republicans on Wednesday thwarted Democratic efforts to award $250 checks to Social Security recipients facing a second consecutive year without a cost-of-living increase.

President Barack Obama and Democrats have urged approval of the one-time payment, saying seniors barely getting by on their Social Security checks face undue hardships without the COLA increase.

But most Republicans contended that the nation couldn't afford the estimated $14 billion cost of the payment, and that the COLA freezes in 2010 and 2011 come after seniors received a significant boost in 2009.

As the very people that they supported in the elections throw them under the bus, expect their hypocritical cries of outrage on this in 3...2...1...