Turning Lyin' Ryan Into Cryin' Ryan

Maybe the Obama bounce-- even from right-wing polling-- is all about what a relatively flawless convention the Democrats staged in Charlotte, compared to the confused mess Romney presided over in Tampa. Or maybe not. Maybe it has more to do with the confused, incoherent mess the Romney/Ryan campaign has become. Nothing is going right, mostly because Romney is an egg shell-walking flip flopper with no core beyond a hodge-podge of crazy Mormon doctrine and because, as Krugman, so eloquently put it yesterday, Ryan is nothing but a shyster-- an obvious shyster. And anyone who is just becoming aware of this, obviously hasn't been paying attention for the last half dozen years as Wall Street picked out, succored, and pushed forward their freaky and empty-headed little Frankenstein monster from Janesville, Wisconsin.

Tom Edsall has a very good piece on one of the key evasions in the Ryan budget plan, the huge unspecified cuts in discretionary spending. Edsall goes into more detail than anyone else I’ve read about just how much is hidden in that “sinkhole” and how it calls everything else Ryan claims into question.

But can I point out that this basic piece of flimflam was obvious all along? From my original Ryan takedown, more than two years ago:

Finally, let’s talk about those spending cuts. In its first decade, most of the alleged savings in the Ryan plan come from assuming zero dollar growth in domestic discretionary spending, which includes everything from energy policy to education to the court system. This would amount to a 25 percent cut once you adjust for inflation and population growth. How would such a severe cut be achieved? What specific programs would be slashed? Mr. Ryan doesn’t say.

And yet until very recently the whole Beltway was united in praising Ryan as a Serious deficit hawk, with a detailed plan-- he even received a big award for fiscal responsibility.

So the Ryan story isn’t just about Ryan; it’s about how the establishment allowed itself to be taken in by such an obvious shyster, despite warnings from many of us that he was, well, an obvious shyster.

How lucky is Rob Zerban to have minds like Paul Krugman and Tom Edsall tuned in to Ryan's chicanery and doing his opposition research for him? It almost makes up for the sabotage to his congressional campaign from inveterate Ryan protectors Steve Israel and Debbie Wasserman Schultz. They're not only not helping Zerban beat Ryan in a very winnable Wisconsin district that Obama took in 2008, they're actually working behind the scenes to hurt his campaign. These are two of the most horrible people in the Democratic Party. Nancy Pelosi passed over one to be DCCC chair and gave the other one the job, who she describes as "reptillian." You can help Rob stop Paul Ryan from turning our country over to his Wall Street masters here-- because they're also Israel's masters and Wasserman Schultz's masters and those two will never help get rid of Ryan. What Ryan and Romney are hiding is that to implement their increase in military spending and their lowering of taxes on the rich, they will have to ease out the mortgage interest deduction on the middle class. No one could say that and hope to win an election. So they're not. Watch the video above where everyone dances around it. When releasing it, OFA put out, in part, this statement:

This unapologetic evasiveness by the Romney-Ryan ticket won’t be lost on voters because their lack of specifics carries a strong message of its own-- which President Obama and Vice President Biden translated for voters during campaign events in Florida and Ohio on Sunday afternoon. The Vice President put it plainly: “The money’s got to come from somewhere. Guess who? You.” And the President said, “They want your vote, but they don't have a plan. Or at least they don't want to tell you their plan. And that's because they've got the same plan they've had for 30 years.”

That’s all Americans need to know about the Romney-Ryan plan-– it’s the same one that got us into this mess in the first place. In other words, bad math.

President Obama is doing very well against Romney/Ryan. Thank God. Rob Zerban, however, doesn't have the resources available to make the case in WI-01. Israel and Wasserman Schultz have seen to that. In Edsall's Sunday column Krugman referred to, he makes the point that one of the "most striking aspect of the omissions in the Ryan budget is the failure of Obama and other Democrats to capitalize on it." He cites two factors Democratic leaders say limit their ability to mount a counter-attack.

First, the complexity of the issue makes it difficult for reporters to understand and write about the subject. After wading my way through all of this, I know what they mean. Second, the Ryan tactic of obscuring the cuts successfully plays to a fundamental ambivalence that amounts to an internal contradiction in public opinion: strong support for spending cuts in the abstract, but opposition to many specific cuts in programs that have popular support.

...In an interview, Christopher Van Hollen Jr. of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, told me that the Ryan budget “is a shell game designed to hide the damage to the country.” Van Hollen is frustrated that the damage to which he alludes has not become a campaign issue: “The magnitude of this budget gimmick takes your breath away.”

Instead of sabotaging his campaign and telling institutional donors not to give him any money, Israel and Wasserman Schultz should be helping to finance Zerban in a way to significantly threaten Ryan's political career. They never will. We should do it instead.

You Think Obama Just Won The Presidency?

Earlier I mentioned how s pack of bloodthirsty Cossacks chased my grandfather out of his small village when he was eleven years old. He hid in a forest and then he left Russia and came to America. Watching Barack Obama take the stage tonight brought tears to my eyes and all I could think of was "can this man save us from a national nightmare that has brought our country closer to authoritarianism and absolutism that my grandfather fled from when he arrived in NYC penniless and alone at the age of twelve.

I want so much for him to rise to the challenge of the catastrophic mess we're being left. I want him so much to be Franklin Roosevelt. And what I heard tonight allows me to believe that that's more than just a hopeless dream.

I'll append the YouTube to this as soon as it's ready. Meanwhile, here are some of the lines that made everyone I talked to so far-- and apparently the MSNBC anchors-- that Obama just added 10 points to his bounce. It won't surprise me if the GOP decides to put its convention off so they can run a week of negative campaign ads smearing Obama before they dare face the American people.

1- This country is more generous than one where a man in Indiana has to pack up the equipment he's worked on for twenty years and watch it shipped off to China, and then chokes up as he explains how he felt like a failure when he went home to tell his family the news. 

We are more compassionate than a government that lets veterans sleep on our streets and families slide into poverty; that sits on its hands while a major American city drowns before our eyes. 
 
Tonight, I say to the American people, to Democrats and Republicans and Independents across this great land-- enough!  This moment-- this election – is our chance to keep, in the 21st century, the American promise alive. Because next week, in Minnesota, the same party that brought you two terms of George Bush and Dick Cheney will ask this country for a third. And we are here because we love this country too much to let the next four years look like the last eight. On November 4th, we must stand up and say: "Eight is enough." 

2- ...the record's clear: John McCain has voted with George Bush ninety percent of the time.  Senator McCain likes to talk about judgment, but really, what does it say about your judgment when you think George Bush has been right more than ninety percent of the time?  I don't know about you, but I'm not ready to take a ten percent chance on change. 

3-The truth is, on issue after issue that would make a difference in your lives-- on health care and education and the economy-- Senator McCain has been anything but independent. He said that our economy has made "great progress" under this President. He said that the fundamentals of the economy are strong. And when one of his chief advisors-- the man who wrote his economic plan-- was talking about the anxiety Americans are feeling, he said that we were just suffering from a "mental recession," and that we've become, and I quote, "a nation of whiners."
 
A nation of whiners? Tell that to the proud auto workers at a Michigan plant who, after they found out it was closing, kept showing up every day and working as hard as ever, because they knew there were people who counted on the brakes that they made. Tell that to the military families who shoulder their burdens silently as they watch their loved ones leave for their third or fourth or fifth tour of duty. These are not whiners. They work hard and give back and keep going without complaint. These are the Americans that I know.

4- Now, I don't believe that Senator McCain doesn't care what's going on in the lives of Americans. I just think he doesn't know. Why else would he define middle-class as someone making under five million dollars a year? How else could he propose hundreds of billions in tax breaks for big corporations and oil companies but not one penny of tax relief to more than one hundred million Americans? How else could he offer a health care plan that would actually tax people's benefits, or an education plan that would do nothing to help families pay for college, or a plan that would privatize Social Security and gamble your retirement? 

It's not because John McCain doesn't care. It's because John McCain doesn't get it.

5- For over two decades, he's subscribed to that old, discredited Republican philosophy-- give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else. In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society, but what it really means is– you're on your own. Out of work?  Tough luck. No health care? The market will fix it. Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps-- even if you don't have boots. You're on your own. 
 
Well it's time for them to own their failure. It's time for us to change America.

6- Change means a tax code that doesn't reward the lobbyists who wrote it, but the American workers and small businesses who deserve it.

Unlike John McCain, I will stop giving tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas, and I will start giving them to companies that create good jobs right here in America.

7- America, now is not the time for small plans.
 
Now is the time to finally meet our moral obligation to provide every child a world-class education, because it will take nothing less to compete in the global economy. Michelle and I are only here tonight because we were given a chance at an education. And I will not settle for an America where some kids don't have that chance. I'll invest in early childhood education. I'll recruit an army of new teachers, and pay them higher salaries and give them more support. And in exchange, I'll ask for higher standards and more accountability. And we will keep our promise to every young American-- if you commit to serving your community or your country, we will make sure you can afford a college education.
 
Now is the time to finally keep the promise of affordable, accessible health care for every single American. If you have health care, my plan will lower your premiums. If you don't, you'll be able to get the same kind of coverage that members of Congress give themselves. And as someone who watched my mother argue with insurance companies while she lay in bed dying of cancer, I will make certain those companies stop discriminating against those who are sick and need care the most.

8- And just as we keep our keep our promise to the next generation here at home, so must we keep America's promise abroad. If John McCain wants to have a debate about who has the temperament, and judgment, to serve as the next Commander-in-Chief, that's a debate I'm ready to have.

9- We are the party of Roosevelt. We are the party of Kennedy. So don't tell me that Democrats won't defend this country. Don't tell me that Democrats won't keep us safe. The Bush-McCain foreign policy has squandered the legacy that generations of Americans-- Democrats and Republicans-- have built, and we are here to restore that legacy.

Meanwhile, Associated Press has decided to create its own "news" in the service of electing John McCain. They should be ashamed.

If you missed it, here's 45 minutes of history:

Will Obama Get A Bounce Out Of This Convention?

John Amato told me there's a huge TV viewership. I notice it sounds great on radio when I'm driving around. A few days ago the National Journal polled a bunch of bloggers with the question "How big of a bounce-- if any-- will his convention give Obama?" This was before the really excellent speeches by Michelle Obama, Brian Schweitzer, Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton-- let alone tomorrow's Obama speech. A plurality of bloggers-- me included-- picked 4-6 points. Now I'm thinking it could be even more, although sometimes I get in a darker mood and I agree with Chris Bowers that something's wrong-- I chalk it up to racism-- and there may be no bounce at all...

Here's how the normal bloggers pegged it:



And this is what the extreme right wing shills and GOP plants thought:



My friend Mike just watched Melissa Etheridge play at the Pepsi Center and he says she was incredible. But as for a bounce... he's worried. He-- like a lot of people I know-- says he'd "like to see the Democrats hit McCain harder. It seems they give him a pass on a lot cause he has white hair and was in prison."

I have a feeling that's because they want to appeal to independents, not the hard core activists. We'll see-- and in any case, next week's Republican HateFest in St. Paul should make the Democratic Convention sparkle in retrospect. The Republicans are seriously divided and their coalition is falling apart. A couple dozen members of Congress-- including big names like Senators Susan Collins, Gordon Smith, John Sununu, Pat Roberts, Ted Stevens, Chuck Hagel, Elizabeth Dole-- won't even show up and are praying their constituents don't remember that they're Republicans. Half the Michigan GOP members of Congress are "too busy" to come.