Romney And The Priebus Monkey Are In Love With Paul Ryan's Mystery Meat

Will the Kochs give Scott Walker a job running one of their toilet paper factories after the recall?

Some clown named George just responded to one of my posts on the Republican War Against Women by claiming that not every Republican wants to beat up women. Glad to hear it, George. On Thursday, conservative Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) took on boneheaded Republican men who are trying to claim that there is no Republican Party war against women. Addressing not just strangely misogynistic RNC Chair Reince Priebus and his war against caterpillars, but right-wing males in general, she told a local Chamber of Commerce lunch:

“If you don’t feel this is an attack, you need to go home and talk to your wife and your daughters.”

Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) have also called on conservative men to come to their senses and stop attacking women (i.e., 53% of the voters).

But leave it to deranged Republican radicals in Wisconsin to make it worse. They opened a new front in this crackpot war against women. It's like they have a suicide impulse. Whenever President Obama talks about his accomplishments, he always talks about the Lilly Ledbetter law he signed that mandates equal pay for equal work regardless of gender. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, with the backing of Wisconsin's whole crazy ALEC-infected GOP, signed a law yesterday, in effect, reversing Ledbetter.

The Dem charge of a “GOP war on women” is getting a boost this morning, with the news that Scott Walker has quietly overturned Wisconsin’s equal pay law. As HuffPo reports, Walker has signed a measure repealing the 2009 Equal Pay Enforcement Act, which is designed to deter employers from discriminating against workers by giving them an easier way to challenge discrimination in the courts.

...Romney has fully embraced Walker and his agenda in recent days, proclaiming him a “hero” and vowing to campaign for him in his recall election. That alone ensures that Walker’s agenda will figure in the presidential race, since Romney’s support for it could be a factor in the battle over Wisconsin, a state that Republicans may need to take back from Obama to get to 270.

Today’s news add another twist-- one involving women’s issues. The Romney campaign has rolled out Ann Romney to argue in multiple forums that the battle over contraception and cultural issues won’t hurt Mitt, because women mostly care about jobs and kitchen table concerns. But here is a gender issue that’s an economic issue, and if Romney takes the wrong side of it, Ann Romney’s argument won’t work in this case.

And Paul Ryan, the likely Republican vice presidential nominee, is finding himself in hot water of this as well. He's voted for every single anti-woman agenda item the Republicans have brought up and now his Democratic opponent, Rob Zerban, is calling him to task for backing Walker. "Scott Walker and Paul Ryan are waging war on women by defunding programs and stripping away legal rights," he told us yesterday. "They want to take women back to the 1950s, and back out of  the court room and the board room."
And this kind of Republican attempt to roll back the calendar on progress is something Zerban takes personally. And it pisses him off. 

"My wife Cornelia is a teacher at the technical schools here in Wisconsin. She got socked with a huge pay cut and more classes added to her work load. We learned that to the GOP, we are suckers living the high life who need to be taught a lesson with their big cuts. Of course, they deserve all the tax breaks. The GOP attack has been especially focused on women.
 
Just last week, Paul Ryan voted against the Violence Against Women Act. This Act received broad bipartisan support and provides funding and services, such as transitional housing and legal assistance to victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking. This bill has been reauthorized twice since its introduction in 1994, and expired on September 30, 2011.
 
Ryan's vote is just part of a pattern of attacking women's rights. Ryan and the House GOP grandstanded to the public about their uninformed cuts to Planned Parenthood and threatened women's access to safe and affordable health care. They even joked about using aspirin instead. 
 
I think Scott Walker and Paul Ryan will pay a heavy price at the polls for alienating women.

May I take a moment out here to suggest you consider helping Zerban defeat Ryan in November? You can do that right here at the Blue America StopPaulRyan page. And Zerban, of course, isn't the only Wisconsin progressive horrified by Walker's and Ryan's jihad against women. Our friend state Sen. Chris Larson, who shares constituents with Ryan in the southern Milwaukee suburbs, told men and women in the area that this is a dangerous step in the wrong direction.

“All signs point to us living in a 21st Century world. Our school children can watch space expeditions to Mars from their classrooms, we can control our cars with simple voice commands, and worldwide communication is instant. Yet if you look at the most recent legislative session you might be tricked into believing that we are still living in the 1800s.
 
“Today, by signing Senate Bill 202 into law, Governor Walker again confirmed his opposition to creating high-paying jobs and a fair work environment for all Wisconsinites. With a stroke of his pen, the governor rolled back equal protection laws for Wisconsin’s women and limited their ability to seek justice for discrimination.
 
“According to the Wisconsin Alliance for Women’s Health, women earn 77 cents for every dollar men make nationally. In Wisconsin, however, women earn even less as they take home only 75 cents for every dollar their male counterparts receive.
 
“This is not the only time Republicans put extreme ideology ahead of job creation and economic prosperity. Governor Walker and his rubber-stamp legislators also rammed through other attacks on women’s rights this session including ending comprehensive sex education, interfering with doctor-patient relationships, obstructing access to contraception, and eliminating funding for comprehensive women’s health centers that provide life-saving services, such as pap smears and mammograms.
 
“The governor’s misplaced priorities threaten the rights of our mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters. We owe it to them to stand up for what is right and halt these Dark Age practices so that we can get our state moving forward again.”

All that said, Romney is still veering towards a worse pick than even John McCain made! Hard to imagine but Ryan could lose Romney more votes than Palin did McCain. Noam Scheiber has pointed out that Romney is viewed as too squishy and too wishy-washy and too mainstream and moderate by the radicalized Republican masses who have been turned into absolute freaks by Hate Talk Radio and Fox TV. To Republican zombies Romney smells a lot like Bob Dole and John McCain-- and to them that odor is putrid.

Romney, if anything, suffers even more acutely from this problem. McCain and Dole were war heroes, at least, which counts for something in conservative circles. They also hailed from conservative states. In the eyes of right-wingers, Romney’s résumé offers nothing remotely as redeeming. No surprise, then, that having effectively bagged the nomination, a time when you’d expect him to lunge for the middle, Romney is moving rightward. 

How else to explain his strange embrace of Paul Ryan and Ryan’s Medicare-gutting, upper-income-tax-refunding budget in recent days? Given that the country is pretty down on Republicans, Romney's only hope of winning the presidency is to distance himself from the party. And yet, over the last week, he’s done nothing but tie himself to the GOP's most polarizing elements. He spent five days as Ryan’s wingman in Wisconsin and then explicitly defended the Ryan plan in Washington on Wednesday. 

Were Romney remotely confident of his right-wing résumé, he wouldn’t be auditioning Ryan for vice president, as he appears to be, but dismissing him as a cold-hearted pipsqueak. One can imagine a more secure conservative complaining about Ryan’s “right wing social engineering” and slagging his budget for “imposing radical change from the right.” In fact, a more secure conservative has said that. He’s just not on the ballot. He’s at home muttering to himself-- accurately, it turns out-- about how moderates make terrible nominees.

Yesterday Paul Krugman. who keeps flying in the face of Conservative Consensus conventional wisdom by reminding everyone that Ryan's budget is nothing but "a piece of mean-spirited junk." He asked his readers to understand two numbers: $4.6 trillion and 14 million.

$4.6 trillion is the size of the mystery meat in the budget. Ryan proposes tax cuts that would cost $4.6 trillion over the next decade relative to current policy-- that is, relative even to making the Bush tax cuts permanent-- but claims that his plan is revenue neutral, because he would make up the revenue loss by closing loopholes. For example, he would … well, actually, he refuses to name a single example of a loophole he wants to close.

So the budget is a fraud. No, it’s not “imperfect,” it’s not a bit shaky on the numbers; it’s completely based on almost $5 trillion dollars of alleged revenue that are pure fabrication.

On the other side, 14 million is the minimum number of people who would lose health insurance due to Medicaid cuts-- the Urban Institute, working off the very similar plan Ryan unveiled last year, puts it at between 14 and 27 million people losing Medicaid.

That’s a lot of people-- and a lot of suffering. And again, bear in mind that none of this would be done to reduce the deficit-- it would be done to make room for those $4.6 trillion in tax cuts, and in particular a tax cut of $240,000 a year to the average member of the one percent.

While the Jesus-hating tag-team of Romney and Ryan split up tasks-- Romney professing his undying devotion to women (which sounds creepy from someone whose grandfather had 4 wives) and Ryan whining that the president is being mean to him by exposing his budget as a fraud-- White House press secretary Jay Carney blogged away-- in great detail-- about why Ryan is such a fraud-- and how his budget would essentially end not just Medicare and Medicaid but the middle class itself, a theme that Robert Reich also took up this week. "Imagine a country in which the very richest people get all the economic gains. They eventually accumulate so much of the nation’s total income and wealth that the middle class no longer has the purchasing power to keep the economy going full speed. Most of the middle class’s wages keep falling and their major asset-- their home-- keeps shrinking in value. Imagine that the richest people in this country use some of their vast wealth to routinely bribe politicians. They get the politicians to cut their taxes so low there’s no money to finance important public investments that the middle class depends on – such as schools and roads, or safety nets such as health care for the elderly and poor." You get the picture, I'm sure.