This is going to be short, but it's not going to be sweet.
Mitt Romney's selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate is nothing less than an across the board endorsement of Ryan's radical budget proposal and, in my opinion, constitutes an outright declaration of war against the American people.
Paul Ryan's budget plan is an direct attack upon the American people, upon the indigent, the poor, the mentally ill, the out of work, the disenfranchised.
It's also a declaration of war against the working class, the middle class, and anyone who aspires to becomea member of the shrinking middle class.
Mitt Romney selected Ryan because he knows himself weak among hard right economic voters, the voters who have embraced Ryan's budget proposal in the belief that it will strangle "Washington" because it will.
But "Washingtoin" is a code word for the rest of us, the real majority, the people who have been disenfranchised by an obscene decision of the Supreme Court to all0w the very rich to buy elections for the candidates of their choosing.
If you haven't read Paul Ryan's budget plan, you had better start reading because it is a prescription for economic disaster that has no chance of succeeding at changing the geopolitical and socioeconomic forces that are crushing the American people.
I haven't read or heard any reports from any quarter about how the Ryan appointment is going to affect the election.
What I would like to believe is that this is the wake up call that the American people will finally pay attention to....a warning that the inmates are taking control of the asylum, as if anyone still needs that proven to them at this late date.
I've despised Paul Ryan since he first appeared. He's a cynical political operative posing as a committed conservative.
But, consider this: Paul Ryan steadfastly refused to enter the campaign for the presidency.
If he wasn't willing to throw his hat in the ring then, why is Romney giving him a free pass.
Romney fought for the nomination against a dozen opponents, and has spent years of his life working his way toward the presidency. And, with a single public statement, he has potentially elevated Ryan to the second most important job in the world as president in waiting.
Here's my question: Would you vote for Paul Ryan as president of the United States, because that's what you're going to be doing.
Mitt Romney has no intentions of serving two terms as president. He moves on every four years or so. If elected, he will serve one term and then he will retire in Ryan's favor.
So, tell me, would you really vote for Ryan to be president of the United States, because that's what you are going to be doing if you vote for Mitt Romney.
I am tempted to suggest that we are watching a coup in the making.
So am I paranoid? And, does that make me wrong?
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Lake Michigan, I've got your back.
The coup happened a long time ago. November is our last chance to stop it from becoming a permanent state of being.
This kind of timidity in our language and rhetoric is what always makes the moderates to leftist part of society useless to prevent takeovers by extreme rightists, fascists and dictators.
Let us stop pretending to be intellectuals or statesmen and women. We are the voice of the people in these forums. Each of us represents about 10,000 people. We cannot afford to minimize our conversation or to minimize our courage, just because someone might not like our style. This is word war and it's been going on for a while.
The entire election is a fraud - a sham. You know it, I know it, and if the American people aren't wearing rose coloured glasses, they know it too.
As Zuma said, "The coup happened a long time ago." But she's wrong about one thing; November won't stop it from becoming permanent. It is already permanent. Obama has proven just as obedient to his masters as any GOP candidate or President could possibly be. The NDAA add-on clause was the worst attack on your constitution that has ever occurred and it was there at the insistence of Obama, NOT over his objections.
You've hit the iceberg. Changing captains will serve no more purpose than keeping the one you have at this point. My advice?
Take a deep breath, bend waaaaay over, and kiss yer ass good-bye. And save a spot right beside ya. We Canucks will be right along in a minute or two.
.
First of all, President Obama did not cut $700 billion from Medicare. That's a complete fallacy. Presidents do not have the power to re-order the spending paradigms under which our federal government operates.
What did happen was that the Affordable Health Act came along with some new restrictions that, cumulatively result in $700 billion in COST SAVINGS over a 10 year period or, in other words, an average of $70 billion a year, which averages out to $70 billion a year, or 8.1% of the Medicare Budget, and the savings have been achieved through economy measures that have not reduced services for Medicare recipients, as the Ryan plan would.
The constant reiteration of one big lie after another has become the thematic background for this campaign. The fact is that the only reason that Medicare or Social Security - or the Postal Service - are in trouble is that Congress has refused to vote the rate increases required to keep these functions fully-funded.
When you sell produce, and your costs of goods goes up, you increase the price of potatoes. Well, medical care costs have increased tremendously since the last time we revisited the rate question.
The Republicans are trying to starve social progress into submission. They want everything to be on a cash basis and those who don't have the cash won't get serviced.
They are evil in both intent and effect.
In my darker moments, I think that the Republicans are in the process of establishing a dynasty, not just for this election cycle, but in perpetuity because, once they have control of the state legislatures and the Congress, it won't matter who the president is any more.
American democracy is going into eclipse.
It should be easy to scare the public when it comes to Ryan because that can be done without even bothering to exaggerate. He should already alienate the crap out of the AARP.
http://open.salon.com/blog/stlfilmaker/2012/08/11/welcoming_paul_ryan
Lezlie
I suppose fear, bigotry and blind hatred of Obama trumps everything else including common sense, self interest and rationality.
Excellent clarion call, Sage.
For more on this, please see my latest post.
however, this is going to be an interesting election because it will probably have more highly paid/slick rovian propaganda esp by the right than ever before in history ... most of it will be on tv [because thats where the ripples go out to the low info voters] but some of it will probably show up on the internet too.
"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they are not coming (for you)."
They've landed. They landed when they began directing our feelings, and how we ought to... "What the Iraq (American) people don't understand...
He has a smirk like Cheney, who should be in prison.
too bad the feature story on good morning america refutes your thesis. they lead with an analysis about why romney ISNT endorsing ryan's economic plans.
well, you can't win them all.
More to the point, now that Romney has embraced Ryan, he faces a dire dilemma....and so does Ryan....because Romney's half-asssed budget proposal is at odds with the Ryan Plan.
Romney's nomination of Ryan for Vice President - and that's what it is, a nomination by a man who isn't even the nominee yet himself - is a tacit acceptance of the Ryan plan, which has already been endorsed by the House of Representatives and every major political pundit.
This puts Romney in the position of having to reject key elements of the Ryan Plan in order to avoid cognitive dissonance with older voters who actually care about their entitlements - which puts him in the position of having to disagree with his vice presidential pick on Ryan's flagship bill - one of the two or three he has managed to get passed in 10 years as a member of the House.
Either that, or Ryan has to waffle on his own Budget Plan which, considering Romney's propensity for waffling on and sidestepping his own record, would be par for the course for this tag team slate.
Romney and Ryan. It's alliterative but no such alliterations have won a presidential election in my lifetime, if ever.
They sound more like a vaudeville act than presidential material.
If the economy is still in the tank come November...and the economy WILL still be in the tank...Obama is toast.
I will vote for Barack Obama with enthusiasm. Much of his base will jump ship...and then pretend they did not help bring on the debacle soon to come.
Ryan is, quite simply, the male version of Palin.
If you want the type of ruthless leadership which enjoins 1% from the remaining 99% of us, vote for Romney.
Given all the real so-called "nightmares" that go with "living the American dream" --or perhaps what should more inclusively and compassionately be called "living the Americas' daymares"-- my single repetitive daymare while asleep is of me walking around alone with empty pockets --fortunately most always with no member of my immediate family-- in treeless, lifeless (but for others walking in all direction apparently more confident about arriving at their destinations than my nightmares allow me) jungles of concrete, metal, glass, and doors to anywhere but more facelessly mute crowded sidewalks, nameless streets and buildings never finding a way home, most frequently not even feeling a sense of home. Most likely, such a sense of homelessness accounts for the few times in my life when indeed, for span of real-time reality, I was alone with more debris in my pockets than something that would get me a couple twenty-five cent macs; coupled with childhood experiences of such spans of time when either parent was near when not overcome --afterall, each at such a time had me and my similarly income-challenged young siblings to care for-- by/with/in another encounter with destitution in The American Dream. Anyway...given all the real so-called "nightmares" that go with "living the American dream" mine have been relatively tame so far. As my time on the treadmill of Life is significantly more near the end than the beginning, my childrens' times are becoming set in stone and I fear for them in my daymares, anxious that my nightmarish senses of helplessness not be revised to a higher tempo in my sleep time, which time is also sometimes my sole refuge from The American Dream, the daymare of the vast majority of Americans in the Americas.
But back to Paul ...ironically, my daddy's name too... and Paul's obvious sense of unquestionable, purposeful self-made destiny: one Randied Christian flavored variety with a Greenspan twist; an atheistic Judeo-Christian militant zionUSt$ surprise filled fantansia of cerebral orgasms of imagining his even better and surely more purpose-filled re-birth and afterlife. When his kids are teens he's probably going to be discovering some yet to be explored caverns in his soul wherein his pathetically self-assured air bag of "I'm above it all." will begin to deflate.
Seriously though. Stay out of my head. My dreams are copyrighted.
Maybe each of us in this vulture culture is one of those faceless walkers in cityscape replicas of soundless canyons popping in and out of others dreams like inconsequential, unfelt breezes in a water-free sauna. i can't help but wonder what vultures' dreams are like other than that they are certainly copyrighted and plenty of other vultures' livelihood depends on ensuring that their copyrights are not infringed upon...the tax returns of Ryan's Romney being such an example.
It's been said that Ryan saved his SS monies to pay for his college, but apparently he did not save enough or else it would seem he might not have chosen to be a fast food grill boss before finally sleezing his way into Washington's Republican backrooms.
And, just to cover myself- Obama may win, but the margin will be very slim and Congress will block his every move. So, he'll seem ineffective, again to half of the nation. But, everytime I read or listen to both sides I see the right as more dominant.
Ryan is going to say and do whatever to give R and R a chance to win. Democrats were given no favors. This will be one of the closest races since 2000 and Gore lost by a smidgen. It'll be ugly.
Thanks for sharing.
I am not afraid.
I am clean, sober, and angrier than an abused polar bear.
I am disappointed that Kid Rock apparently has endorsed Governor candidate Romney....You?
Serious in Seattle,
Jim
JD, of course there was abnormal trading in long put options in companies affected by the fallout from 9/211, including the airlines involved, United and American, along with Travelers Insurance and Morgan Stanley.
No question about it. Huge sums of money were made by people who obviously had insider knowledge about the impending attack....but the flaw in your thinking is related the IDENTITY of the people or institutions who made those bets.
Neither you, nor anyone else, knows who those parties were because the trades were conducted through third parties. The records exist, but no one has bothered to dig into them. (I used to be a bond analyst on Wall Street - no, really, back in the 1960s - so I know something about these things, however dated my information may be; there are always records.)
But here's the fact that has escaped the attention of conspiracy theorists: the group that was uniquely positioned to profit from 9/11 were the perpetrators of the attack was Al Qaeda itself!
The Al Qaedans had access to plenty of money with which to back those bets, and they had access to third party players - straw men buyers - through whom they could place those puts and calls. The straw men, invariably as straw men will, placed their own bets behind their clients' bets and, ipso facto, you have identified the beneficiaries who profited from 9/11 and the source of their information.
I have no documentary evidence to support my thesis, but it passes Occam's test. The least outrageous solution is usually the right one.
What the conspiracists don't have is any evidence tying anyone in the political establishment to those puts and calls. I know this because if they had such evidence, we would have seen it ages ago....and we haven't because there isn't any.
Even if elected or appointed officials did have prior knowledge, they would have held that knowledge circumspect, creating the circumstance in which several people at the highest echelons of our government knew about the impending attack, were positioned to profit from it using their own straw men to place their bets, and said nothing to each other because insider knowledge becomes worthless when you spread it around too much.
So, here we are, with the specter of a meeting of the Bush cabinet a few days before the attack where some - if not all - of those present had foreknowledge of the impending attack, said nothing, and never knew that the other people at the table also knew what they knew, creating a background of guilty knowledge those men will take to their graves, still not knowing to what degree their colleagues were complicit in their crimes.
As someone who has been diagnosed as clinically paranoid, I must constantly guard against stupid conspiracy theories exciting my inborn paranoia.
Case closed.
You my friend are way less paranoid then I.
the proof:
http://open.salon.com/blog/ptaray/2012/08/15/what_romney_-ryan_ticket_really_could_mean
Yes, it's important to reduce the debt. It's also important to recognize that the only efficacious way to reduce the debt is to increase revenues.
You're not paranoid; you're right. As far as I see it though, Obama is going to crush Romney because (drumroll) that's exactly what the aristocrats of this country wanted. Romney's a puppet. Don't take his jibber-jabber seriously. The real devil is the one whispering in both their ears.
Anyone want to start a commune with me? Veterans? We could do it. I know how. I just don't have the wherewithall.
Perhaps the Republican ticket, insofar as election is concerned, is not so dumb a move as it may seem.
Jan,
In that Counterpunch "What Ryan and Obama Share" analysis by Paul Passavant, Paul wrote: "I think Romney made the smartest choice he could have made." We all know that like Bush2 was before and during his presidency, Romney is a fascUSt$ puppet, albeit exponentially less entertaining and innately reluctant to exhibit candidness that is inseparable from insecurities associated with just being a human being. In that a 2D cardboard cut-out of Romney is inspirationally identical to the man himself it's hard to imagine how Romnbo is going to be able to sufficiently pump up the killer-instinct of militarUSt$' legions to fight United States' corporatUSt$ wars, to effect zionUSt$-approved regime changes and subterfuges globally.
Paul wrote: "Ryan also excites the conservative base, but isn’t a moron like Sarah Palin." It's illusory that Ryan personally excites the conservative base. Examining the range of definitions for "base" one comes upon "devoid of high values or ethics". What better describes the conservative base than that and especially describes those most suited, most electable, to represent that base? At the risk of offending all morons, which is certainly not my intent, is it moronic to be devoid of high values or ethics? or is it evil? I have a fairly high opinion of morons like Palin and Bush2, believing she and those like her are not evil. Paul Ryan, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Bush1 and the cesspool of US neocons on the other hand are not morons.
my partner got it earlier today as Paul Ryan and Todd Palin.
Besides looks, there's that predator aura...and of course a love for Sarah... and wieners, guns, capitalust gains, snowjobobiles, snowwhite lies, USland's justUS, zionazis, USrael and Jesus blues.
On the heels of his convention speech Wednesday, Ryan criticized the way President Obama initiated and handled the commission, but the Wisconsin congressman failed to mention his own role on it.