Paul Ryan Update

Paul Ryan (R-Wall St.), Has been in the news so much its hard to keep up but I will try.

First off, h/t to Lou kaye of rocknetroots who does a very good job of keeping an eye on ryan’s misdeeds(which are many). Unfortunately since the Janesville Gazette has shirked their media duties and became a wing of the Ryan campaign, his work is needed more than ever. Lou points out that yet another manufacturer is fleeing Ryan’s district(and hometown).

Norwood promotional products , has a long history in Janesville as a consolidation of several other companies such as Jaffa, Crystal Etch and The Janesville Group. It is a leading supplier of imprinted promotional products that are now branded as Jaffa.

The company was founded in 1989 and has operations in the U.S., Canada and China. Norwood markets more than 5,000 promotional products.

Norwood’s Janesville history is no more, despite Ryan winning awards for legislating manufacturing excellence from an outfit called the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). Heck he has even voted their way over 90% of the time. This leads me to two conclusions. 1. NAM is actually a moving company and loves Paul Ryan giving them business by driving jobs out of his district and, 2. Could Ryan have caused more damage to his district even if he tried?

Then in one of the funniest lines of the year, Slate\'s John Dickerson asked Paul Ryan to answer a question honestly. After the laughter died down we got this:

Debates about the past are tiresome, but as with budgets, it’s instructive to measure each side’s baseline view in order to measure future behavior. If they show a little give, they might have it in them to give in the big way Ryan and others say they’ll have to in order to get anything done.

Obama had said he could have done more to work with Republicans. Did the GOP share any of the blame?

“No, it’s all the Democrats’ fault,” Ryan said. “We’re great. We have halos over our heads,” he added sarcastically. “How do you want me to answer that?” he asked. I told him that truthfully would be fine.

He seemed boxed-in. Even if he believed Republicans shared some blame, he couldn’t admit it. “They had to make a decision,” he said, referring to the president and Democratic leaders. “Do we work with these Republicans and do we meet in the middle? But we don’t have to because we have all the votes. They made a choice to go it on their own, and that’s when we had to protect ourselves.”

Dickerson not believing his ears(and expecting that Ryan had some sense of dignity and honesty) asked again.

So Republicans didn’t share at all in the blame? I asked, just to be clear. Ryan repeated his answer.

Steve Benen @ Washington Monthly had this observation:

My third response is to note that when the GOP did express a willingness to present actual policy proposals, they tended to be stark raving mad. Seriously. Their response to the economic crisis was a truly insane five-year spending freeze. They came up with a health care reform plan that didn’t bother to cover the uninsured, or extend protections to those with pre-existing conditions. On Wall Street reform, national security, student loans, and other high-profile issues, it became practically impossible to “meet in the middle,” as Ryan put it, because Republicans weren’t operating in the realm of mainstream reality.

Even Ryan sycophant David Brooks pointed out the danger that the republican obstructionism has caused the country.

conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks slammed the GOP’s reflexive obstructionism and demand for ideological purity, saying their “rigidity” harms “governance” and is based on a false world view that progressives are a “bunch of socialists”:

BROOKS: And my problem with the Republican Party right now, including Paul, is that if you offered them 80-20, they say no. If you offered them 90-10, they’d say no. If you offered them 99-1 they’d say no. And that’s because we’ve substituted governance for brokerism, for rigidity that Ronald Regan didn’t have.

And to me, this rigidity comes from this polarizing world view that they’re a bunch of socialists over there. You know, again, I’ve spent a lot of time with the president. I’ve spent a lot of time with the people around him. They’re liberals! … But they’re not idiots. And they’re not Europeans, and they don’t want to be a European welfare state. … It’s American liberalism, and it’s not inflexible.

PS: one last thing to keep an eye on. In the next session congress is going to have raise the debt level. The \"tea party\" is adamant that not happen! Paul Ryan, local “tea party” favorite shows what he thinks of the people who got him elected:

He(Ryan) also chuckled at the idea of refusing to increase the debt ceiling

Again an opportunity to see if the “tea party” is as independent as they like to pretend they are!

Buckle up its going to be an interesting year!

Share:

Related Articles