Remember When Paul Ryan Said He Was NOT Interested In Being Speaker?

Now he says he's not interested in running for president, not even to save his party-- not to mention his country-- from the monstrosity pictured just above. Thursday, with every bit of hype and brouhaha the Republican Party Establishment can still manage to muster, Ryan daddy-figure Mitt Romney kicked off a new phase in his reluctant candidate's sub-rosa campaign for the GOP nomination. This is worth watching if you haven't seen in already, perhaps even watching a second time if you already have:



By late last year, anyone who ignores the Beltway pundits knew the GOP establishment play was deadlocked/brokered convention ending in a Paul Ryan nomination. Our first DWT post predicting it came December 13 and it was met with incredulity from DC. Several people asked me for citations to "prove" the case. Citations? From the Washington Post, the NY Times, the Beltway pundits? I sit on the phone all day talking with Members of Congress and DC and campaign staffers but you want a citation from one of the sources that refused to believe Mark Foley was gay-- let alone molesting underage boys-- for several years after "everyone" knew except the citational sources. If you want a citation, DWT might be the wrong blog for you. We'd rather cover what's going to happen, not what already happened and has even been on TV already. We've expanded on the Ryan-will-be-the nominee 8 times since that first post about it 3 months ago. And now it's citational. Everyone is writing about it and TV pundits mention it routinely. Now that there's a (content-free) website with a dedicated SuperPAC, the Committee to Draft Speaker Ryan, even The Hill has caught on!!

Ryan's non-Shermanesque disavowal-- "He is flattered, but not interested"-- isn't quite as compelling as Romney's own. Yesterday on the Today Show, Romney told Matt Lauer that "There are no circumstances I can foresee where that would possibly happen" and when pressed further, he said flatly, "I’m not running for president, and I won’t run for president." Lauer didn't ask him how he felt about a coronation, which is really what Ryan is bucking for so that the doesn't look like another grubby little politician, which is what he is, of course, out hustling votes and cash and working to disguise a reactionary agenda the American people are repulsed by. When Herr Trumpf tried to pick a fight with Ryan during his Super Tuesday victory speech-- saying Ryan will either learn to get along with him or "pay a big price"-- Ryan claims he laughed it off.

When asked, several times, about military officers saying they would refuse to obey unlawful orders in line with the themes he's campaigning on, Trumpf put on his silly school yard bully persona and warned, operatically ominously that they will be brought to heal. Oh, wait that was Hillary talking about black youth. Same idea; Herr will force the military-- mold them to his will. I asked L.A. area congressman and decorated Reserve Officer, Ted Lieu, what he would do if Herr ordered him to do one of the grotesquely illegal things he has been beguiling his fans with. Ted (no citation; it was a personal conversation): "Having served on active duty, I know America's military is the best in the world. One of the reasons for our excellence is that we train every military member in the Law of War; we demand compliance; and we court-martial servicemembers who violate those laws. If Donald Trump somehow becomes Commander-in-Chief and he orders crazy actions, our military would not follow any orders that are unlawful orders. Donald Trump can say stupid things such as that he would kill civilians because they happen to be family members of terrorists, but thank goodness our military would refuse to carry out such unlawful orders." I wonder if some authoritarian who fancies himself a constitutionalist would conspire to shoot down Herr Force One!

And, speaking of ultra-violence, I hope you've been following the on-going drama around the July Republican Convention in Cleveland. If Romney and other Establishment Republicans actually do manage to steal the election from Trumpf, no one thinks his fan boys would take it lying down. So-- the party that claims the whole world is safer if everyone is armed with guns-- has banned guns from the Quicken Loans Arena, even though the GOP, to great fanfare in crazy town, pushed through an open-carry law in Ohio.

Parties expecting to be aggrieved-- the very parties who always expect to be aggrieved and are encouraged by the GOP and their Hate Talk Radio and TV hosts to always play the victim-- are now petitioning, although the order for the ban came directly from Paul Ryan-- who also bans all guns (but now bows and arrows) from his own public events. Andrew Tobias wrote yesterday in the Cleveland Plain Dealer that Cleveland law enforcement agencies are hitting up the stressed federal budget for significant purchases of riot gear in time to great the Republican conventioneers. They've asked for the money to equip 2,000 control officers, including 2,000 sets of state-of-the-art riot-control suits.

The convention, scheduled for the week of July 18, is expected to attract 50,000 visitors to Cleveland. As part of its security plan, Cleveland is organizing a police force of 5,000 officers-- the city is in the process of recruiting officers from surrounding suburbs and elsewhere to bolster its existing force of about 1,200. Previous conventions also have attracted political demonstrators, ranging from more than 100,000 for the 2004 RNC in New York City to less than 1,000 for the 2012 RNC in Tampa, Florida.

Because the RNC has been designated as a National Special Security Event, it is eligible to receive federal funding. Cleveland is planning convention security under the direction of the Secret Service.

City officials largely are not commenting on their convention-planning efforts.

However, Mayor Frank Jackson's administration told City Council last month that the city plans to spend roughly $30 million of the federal grant on personnel, and $20 million on equipment.

Don't worry about Little Marco or Lyin' Ted making it all the way to the nomination as the alternative to Herr Trumpf. They have as much a chance as Low Energy Jeb did... which goes a long way towards explaining why Ryan is laying low and making sure there is as small a target on his back as possible-- although the natives in the House are getting extremely restless already about what they see as Ryan's instant sell out to the forces that prefer to keep the government open rather than giving a green light to the safe-district extremists  who want to shut it down, the preferred action of a significant and loud faction of the Republican Party, especially in the House... and of their crackpot constituents.

UPDATE: Louisianans Vote Today

When I woke up this morning, I flipped on MSNBC to get some light in the room. I was still groggy and floating in and out of consciousness and thought I dreamed something truly horrible from a grandmother who supports Herr Trumpf and plans to vote for him today. But, later, when I was on Twitter, I realized it wasn't a horrible dream but something reported on MSNBC: