Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Former Speaker Of The House Paul Ryan was always a poster boy for a sick blend of Washington evil and Washington hypocrisy mixed with what can only be called a cancerous intellect. That's common in Washington and it goes on today but Paul Ryan had a perverse gift for it. He didn't invent it but he sure mastered it. While in office, he was a virulent one man crime wave of attacks on Americans. I remember when the scum at the top of both parties sung his praises as some sort of up and coming "man to watch." Bill Clinton comes to mind as one of them. Mittens Romney even chose him as his VP candidate. The corporate media joined right in in their praise. To me, all you had to do was look at Ryan's eyes to see the inner lunatic as he railed against the very concept of Social Security while smugly knowing that his own father's benefits supported him in his teen years and paid for his college education. Paul Ryan was the epitome of the typical "I got mine. Fuck you Jack" attitude of Washington's politicians.

Paul Ryan teamed up with Trump countless times, most notably in the republican battle against healthcare and Tax Scam 2017. A quick search will provide you with endless pictures of Ryan sitting or standing next to Trump with a broad, gleeful smile on his face as they planned or celebrated their next mayhem against average Americans, many of whom voted for both men. Now, Paul Ryan writes a book for money and says he always knew what most sentient people know about Trump; and David Corn's tweet sarcastically points out. So, ask yourself, what is more evil: Being a true believer in the devil or not believing and doing his bidding anyway. Obviously, Ryan was a more than a little of both.

Sadly, Paul Ryan is now able to operate under the radar. If he was still in the House, at least we could see some of what this deadly virus was up to. It's really too bad someone isn't following him around with a camera. Now he's up to who knows what off stage. In a better world, we could organize a Pay-Per-View event where 1000 lucky American citizens would each get the honor of taking 5 shots at Paul Ryan with a nail gun. The proceeds could pay for Social Security increases and the best healthcare program in the known universe for the next 1000 years. Fuck you, Paul Ryan. FUCK YOU.

I Can't Wait To Read American Carnage

On Saturday, Lloyd Green reviewed Tim Alberta's new book, American Carnage for The Guardian. He referred to it as "compelling, alarming and scoop-heavy history." Trump's obsessive attacks on Paul Ryan this week, guaranteed the book all the coverage it would need to put it into the top of the charts when it's released on Tuesday.

Like the deity on the sixth day of creation, Donald Trump has recast the Republican party in his own image. Aggrieved and belligerent is the new normal. The soul of the party has migrated from the sun belt to the Bible belt, from the suburbs to rural America, from a message suffused with upward arc to one brimming with resentment.

The 45th president has won the hearts and minds of the faithful while turning off the rest of America. According to a recent poll, Trump has garnered the approval of seven in eight Republicans even as he trails Megan Rapinoe, the star of the champion US women’s soccer team, 42%-41%. All this despite an economy that moves forward.

Tim Alberta, Politico’s chief political correspondent, has written a masterful must-read. Across 600-plus pages, he chronicles more than a decade of transformation and turmoil within what was once but is no longer the party of Abraham Lincoln.

Over the past half-century, the GOP has dramatically changed. New England and New York’s tony bedroom communities are now Democratic. The old Confederacy is a contiguous sea of Republican red. In the 2018 midterms, the GOP captured 9% of the black vote. In 1972, they got twice that.

Subtitled On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump, American Carnage delivers a lively tick-tock on how the party moved from George W Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” to the jagged contours of Maga. Trump emerges as the vehicle and voice of white evangelicals and white Americans without a four-year degree, the operative word being “white.”

Alberta is mindful that the winds of proto-Trumpism were present before Bush had left office. In his telling, Sarah Palin-- who once bragged of her husband and herself: “He’s got the rifle, I’ve got the rack”-- was a harbinger of a post-Bush world.

American Carnage records Karl Rove, Bush’s political brain, branding Palin “vacuous” and evidencing a Republican tropism toward “wanting people who would throw bombs and blow things up.” While Trump was the “ultimate expression” of that impulse, Rove says, Palin was an “early warning bell.”

As framed by Paul Ryan, the former House speaker and 2012 vice-presidential candidate: “The Reagan Republican wing beat the Rockefeller Republican wing. And now the Trump wing beat the Reagan wing.” Against the backdrop of failure in Iraq, the Great Recession, displacement and globalization, Trump delivered “hope” to voters Hillary Clinton discounted as deplorable.

Alberta’s storytelling is bolstered by his access to powers that be and were. Trump, Ryan and John Boehner, another ex-speaker, all go on the record. American Carnage is filled with scoop. It is an exercise in a pulling back the curtain, not breathlessness.

For example, Alberta lets us know the fix was in at Fox News for Trump during the Republican primaries, in a manner akin to the Democratic National Committee putting its thumb on the scales for Clinton. Ted Cruz, Texas’ grating junior senator, never had a real chance with the network built by the late Roger Ailes.

One Fox staffer told Cruz: “We’re not allowed to say anything positive about you on the air.” Or, as Cruz put it after Ailes’ death in 2017: “I think it was Roger’s dying wish to elect Donald Trump president.” Alberta lets us know that Ailes believed Barack Obama “really was a Muslim who really had been born outside the United States.”

American Carnage also crystalizes Trump’s own penchant for eavesdropping. In early 2012, as the primaries were heating up, Matt Rhoades, Mitt Romney’s campaign manager, met with Michael Cohen, Trump’s then consigliere who is now a resident of a federal correctional facility. They discussed the prospect of Trump meeting Romney. Alberta lays out what happened next: “Cohen was suddenly interrupted by a voice crackling over a speakerphone on the table. It was Trump. He had been listening the entire time …”

In describing the 2012 race, Alberta conveys the mistaken belief held by Romney’s team that that he would win based upon pre-election polling. American Carnage, however, makes no mention of a poll circulated on the Saturday night before the election by Alex Gage, which showed Obama with at least 300 electoral votes. Gage was a veteran of the Bush 2004 re-election effort and Romney’s 2008 campaign. His then wife, Katie Packer, was Romney’s deputy campaign manager.

Alberta sheds light on Trump’s thinly reported May 2016 meeting with Rove. Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s then campaign manager, called the get-together “good” without saying more. American Carnage brings color and detail.

Trump appears both ignorant of the realities of the electoral map and appreciative of the tutorial. The two men review Trump’s path to an electoral college majority, Rove correcting his eager but pride-filled pupil. Trump poses the possibility of winning California, New York and Oregon, only to be shot down. The last time any of those states went Republican was more than 30 years ago.

Rove explains that Iowa, Pennsylvania and West Virginia are winnable if the campaign husbands its time and energy. Trump turns to Steve Wynn, a casino magnate subsequently felled by allegations of sexual misconduct, and exclaims: “Why aren’t people in my campaign talking to me about this?”

Alberta makes clear that Trump was the only candidate capable of harnessing populist fury into something more than a collection of raw emotions. Clinton’s worship at the altars of identity politics and political correctness helped cost her the election, just as Trump’s lack of a filter endeared him to his base.

Although Clinton finished with nearly 3 million more votes, Trump sits in the Oval Office. As Alberta observes, authenticity remains in high demand, more so than reality.

Trump is embattled but far from despairing. “I fucking love this job,” he “howls” to no one in particular, backstage at a rally in Columbia, Missouri, in November 2018.

He knows he is transformative.

“Honestly,” Trump tells Alberta. “Can there even be a question?”

Yep, Foxconn Was A Con Job All Along-- You'd Expect Something Different From Trump, Walker And Ryan?

Wednesday morning, Reuters broke an explosive story about how Foxconn is reconsidering the bullshit deal they made with Scott Walker, Paul Ryan and Trump "to make advanced liquid crystal display panels at a $10 billion Wisconsin campus, and said it intends to hire mostly engineers and researchers rather than the manufacturing workforce the project originally promised."

Announced at a White House ceremony in 2017, the 20-million square foot campus marked the largest greenfield investment by a foreign-based company in U.S. history and was praised by President Donald Trump as proof of his ability to revive American manufacturing.

Foxconn, which received controversial state and local incentives for the project, initially planned to manufacture advanced large screen displays for TVs and other consumer and professional products at the facility, which is under construction. It later said it would build smaller LCD screens instead.

Now, those plans may be scaled back or even shelved, Louis Woo, special assistant to Foxconn Chief Executive Terry Gou, told Reuters. He said the company was still evaluating options for Wisconsin, but cited the steep cost of making advanced TV screens in the United States, where labor expenses are comparatively high.

...“In Wisconsin we’re not building a factory. You can’t use a factory to view our Wisconsin investment,” Woo said.

Earlier this month, Foxconn, a major supplier to Apple Inc., reiterated its intention to create 13,000 jobs in Wisconsin, but said it had slowed its pace of hiring. The company initially said it expected to employ about 5,200 people by the end of 2020; a company source said that figure now looks likely to be closer to 1,000 workers.

...Rather than manufacturing LCD panels in the United States, Woo said it would be more profitable to make them in greater China and Japan, ship them to Mexico for final assembly, and import the finished product to the United States.

During the 2018 congressional campaign, Foxconn became a hot topic between progressive Democrat Randy Bryce and Foxconn booster Paul Ryan. Most Republicans, though not all (see Justin Amash tweet above), bought into the corporate welfare plan Ryan, Walker and Trump were advancing. Bryce warned voters that this whole Foxconn deal was a con, a scam, and that it wouldn't work. I asked him about it when the news broke yesterday.

"When the Fox-conn deal was first announced," he told me, "it was not too long after we launched our campaign to take Paul Ryan out. Trump invited Ryan and Walker (who was also about to be taken out as well) to the White House where they all broke their arms frenetically patting themselves on each other’s backs. There was no doubt it was a politically motivated stunt to save their careers. The deal was practically agreed upon on the back of a napkin. Since then Walker promised over 4 BILLION dollars to the Taiwan-based company. This at a time when public education had been stripped of nearly 1 billion. Income inequality at it’s all-time worst. The Middle class leaving Wisconsin quicker than any other state in the country. Walker postponed infrastructure projects claiming we can’t afford to make our roads and bridges safe but at the same time vowed to widen lanes from Milwaukee’s airport to the Mt. Pleasant Foxconn location to be used for AUTOMATED trucks to deliver goods."

Bryce continued, "Now that we have a new governor-- Tony Evers-- the same old grifter network is at an end. It’s no surprise that we find out just how big of a scam it was. The sign welcoming people to Wisconsin used to read 'Open For Business.' Now that we’re 'open for everyone,' the corporate gravy train is over. It’s time to use taxpayer money to benefit the citizens-- not the corporations who see us as their servants."

Another Democrat who recognized the whole deal was bogus from the start was state Senator Chris Larson, who is eager to create good middle class jobs in the area he represents south of Milwaukee, but wasn't buying into the con-job the GOP was offering. "Wisconsin taxpayers shouldn't invest our future or our funds in a company that isn't invested in Wisconsin," he told me yesterday. "That will be the legacy of the failed FoxConn deal. In the meantime, we'll continue to have to put up with the tortured explanations as to why the jobs won't materialize, why they can't follow our environmental laws, why they choose to put all our money in a foreign corporation instead of in our kids' education, and today, why they don't actually want to build here anyway." And he was just getting started.

Beware Wisconsin Republican leaders promising job creation for handing out massive tax subsidies. As it so happens, taking an agreement written on a bar-room napkin as gospel is not the brightest idea former Governor Walker and legislative Republicans have had. Foxconn was never going to build a manufacturing plant, they were never going to invest $10,000,000,000 here, and they were never going to create 13,000 jobs. The Foxconn boondoggle was an election year fantasy designed to hide the fact that the extreme Republicans who have had a gerrymandered stranglehold on Wisconsin have never had a real economic development plan.

It is telling that despite having delivered a historic $1 billion cut to public education, having local roads and infrastructure in extreme disrepair, and being told that regional public transit is just “too expensive,” Republicans always find the tax dollars for their corporate buddies. Over the last eight years, Wisconsin had the opportunity to invest in ourselves but time and again Republicans chose to invest in millionaires and billionaires.

The sooner we ignore the snake oil salesman (and the politicians that ogle their cash) and instead start plotting our own way forward, the better off we'll be.

Yesterday, the Washington Post reminded Wisconsinites about a statement they got last November from Mark Maley, spokesman for Scott Walker's Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation. "The state of Wisconsin is investing in a once-in-a-lifetime economic development opportunity that will be transformational as the state will become home to the only LCD manufacturing facility outside of Asia." Maley (and the Walker administration-- since sent packing by the voters) lying? You bet they were, right along with Trump, Ryan, Ryan clone Bryan Steil and Sean Duffy. "Foxconn," reported the Post" has a history of walking back its hiring announcements. The company grabbed headlines in 2013 when it unveiled plans to invest $30 million and generate 300 jobs at a new high-tech factory in central Pennsylvania. The state’s governor applauded the news, and economists predicted Foxconn would lead a local manufacturing revival. But after the spotlight faded, Foxconn quietly dropped its plans in the state. Trump and Walker’s deal with the company also sparked criticism. Wisconsin’s nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau forecast the move wouldn’t bring profits to the state until 2042. Walker lost his race in November to Democrat Tony Evers, who has slammed the Foxconn deal a as a 'Hail Mary pass on the part of the governor.'...Wisconsin’s offer of economic sweeteners to Foxconn was unprecedented in scale, analysts say. The bundle of financial incentives was larger than what New York, Virginia and Tennessee collectively pledged to Amazon.com to win its new offices."

2018 In Review: The Paul Ryan Obituary, Homicidal Maniac With A Pen. The Whole World Is Watching, Part 6.

by Noah

Speaker Paul "Crazy Eyes" Ryan, the pride of Janesville, Wisconsin, is almost Ex-Speaker Paul "Crazy Eyes" Ryan now. On the long list of Speakers of the House, Ryan's tainted name will forever linger towards the bottom of the Speaker quality list. The mystery should be how did such a profoundly unqualified person get as far as he did, but, then you look around him and it adds a perfect perspective. In a Washington World of Louie Gohmerts and other single digit IQ wonders, the man whose IQ breaks 70 is bound to be king, or at least Speaker.

Ryan was just smart enough to float to the top like the gasbag he has no doubt been since birth. From there, he set out to hurt as many Americans as he possibly could with his efforts to have them suffer or die simply due to a lack of affordable medical care, and fighting to fill their air and streams with as many carcinogens as possible, all while sadistically dangling even low-paying jobs forever just out of their reach. Then there's his infamous role in the Trump/Ryan Tax Scam where he promised a booming economy that would lift all up the economic ladder. The economy went boom alright.

To top it all off, Paul Ryan wanted to used the deficit disaster results of his tax plotting as an excuse to do away with Medicare and Social Security altogether. In his outgoing speech he arrogantly stated that he regretted not getting to do that. He, like all Republicans, called Social Security an "entitlement" even though we paid for it with our own money every week of our working lives, unless of course, we made more than about $118,000 per year, in which case we paid nothing and still got it.

Ryan is a man who lived on his father's government benefits and even went to school on them, but, for Ryan and those like him, it will always be a case of "I got mine Jack. Screw you!" To top it off, Ryan will have a lifetime pension paid for by the people he devoted his life to screwing. Swell guy. Can you imagine being the child of such a villainous cretin? If that was my father, I would see my options as changing my name and running away asap, or doing the universe a big favor by burying him behind a fake wall in the basement. And then, as a final twist, I'd live off his benefits and pay for a law school education with them. It's always best in this world to have a strong sense of irony.

Most guys like Paul Ryan would never have gotten out of Janesville. He would have remained a townie all his life, perhaps starting out with a porno video store or doing classic late night TV ads for his own Paul Ryan Used Cars. It wouldn't have been just any used car lot either. It would have failed after enough people bought enough cars that suffered brake failure or broken axels as soon as the new owners drove them off the lot. He would have sold cars that came with cracked engine blocks and, most appropriately, leaking oil lines. The brake failures would have caused deaths but who cares? As the naive and gullible customers happily drove away, he would have waved and smirked the classic smirk he's known for as he counted the cash. He probably would have even had a side business of used watches that he slyly removed from the wrists of customers as he shook their hands.

Are you worried about what will become of Paul Ryan? Well, ideally, he'll go down for being an accessory to Trump and McConnell's crimes. Remember, he was in charge of Devin Nunes and his fake House investigation of Trump, But, no. Get real.

Instead you can expect Paul Ryan to be come a highly paid K Street Bagman. Or, maybe, he'll follow his role model Trump's past and become a racist landlord with a fake mail order university, bilking money from the fools who fall for his cons. Failing that, Pat Robertson will be dead soon and Ryan can replace him as a hate-filled fake Christian flim-flam man who spends his days blaming the world's problems on "The Gays" and Obama. He's got practice at that sort of thing and people will still stuff his pockets with cash.

Fuck you, Paul Ryan. And the pig you rode in on. Your very fraudulence and your cons will plague us all for a very long time. Real Americans, hurt by your evil, have already fantasized a thousand ways for you to meet your karmic payback. Mine involves you walking too close to the accelerating engine of a brand new Boing 787. What a damn, stinking mess.

Is It Fair To Blame Trump? You Bet It Is!

The drawing above, by Nancy Ohanian, is entitled Spineless-- The GOP. There's no doubt Paul Ryan was foremost in her mind when she came up with and executed the concept. Yesterday, on Face The Nation, John Dickerson asked Ryan outright if he thinks Trump's rallies sow division in the country. Ryan replied: "Sometimes, yeah... not always but sometimes." Dickerson followed up by asking him if Trump practices a kind of politics that unifies the country. "Sometimes he does and sometimes he doesn't," answered Ryan with a smirk on his face like a child who had just been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. "Come on, honestly," prodded Dickerson, somewhat dismayed that Ryan had decided to portray himself as spinelessly as that. Ryan then listed ways in which Trump had unified the country-- like "tax reform," an issue Ryan cannot be unaware how most of the country understands what a scam Trump's (and his own) "tax reform" is.

Trump's only partisan goal is unifying the right for his own benefit. Anything trans-partisan or in the national interest is beyond his ken. Yesterday, after the Trump-inspired #MAGAbomber sent a pipe bomb to Democratic activist-- and billionaire-- Tom Steyer, Trump painted another target on his back, ridiculing him as a "stumbling lunatic" and calling him crazy and "Wacky Tom Steyer."

If Ryan can't give a straight answer to a simple question, Adam Serwer certainly can. He doesn't beat around the bush in connecting Trump and his rotten regime directly to right-wing terrorism. He pointed to bullying tweets about the "Caravan," they hoped to use to scare morons into going to the polls. Señor Trumpanzee: "The United States has strongly informed the President of Honduras that if the large Caravan of people heading to the U.S. is not stopped and brought back to Honduras, no more money or aid will be given to Honduras, effective immediately!" and "We have today informed the countries of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador that if they allow their citizens, or others, to journey through their borders and up to the United States, with the intention of entering our country illegally, all payments made to them will STOP (END)!," He forced Pence to do likewise.

"The apparent impetus for this outrage," wrote Serwer, "was a segment on Fox News that morning, which detailed a migrant caravan thousands of miles away in Honduras. That caravan began sometime in mid-October, made up of refugees fleeing violence in their home country. Over the next few weeks, Trump would do his best to turn the caravan into a national emergency. Trump falsely told his supporters that there were 'criminals and unknown middle easterners' in the caravan, a claim that had no basis in fact, which was meant to imply that terrorists were hiding in the caravan-- one falsehood placed upon another. Defense Secretary James Mattis ordered more troops to the border. A Fox News host took it upon herself to ask Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen whether there was 'any scenario under which if people force their way across the border they could be shot at,' to which Nielsen responded, 'we do not have any intention right now to shoot at people.'" A real liberal!

The Department of Homeland Security’s Twitter account “confirmed” that within the caravan there were people who are “gang members or have significant criminal histories,” without offering evidence of any such ties. Trump sought to blame the opposition party for the caravan’s existence. “Every time you see a Caravan, or people illegally coming, or attempting to come, into our Country illegally, think of and blame the Democrats for not giving us the votes to change our pathetic Immigration Laws!” Trump tweeted on October 22. “Remember the Midterms! So unfair to those who come in legally.”

In the right-wing fever swamps, where the president’s every word is worshipped, commenters began amplifying Trump’s exhortations with new details. Representative Matt Gaetz wondered if George Soros-- the wealthy Jewish philanthropist whom Trump and several members of the U.S. Senate blamed for the protests against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and who was recently targeted with a bomb-- was behind the migrant caravan. NRATV, the propaganda organ of the National Rifle Association, linked two Republican obsessions, voter fraud and immigration. Chuck Holton told NRATV’s viewers that Soros was sending the caravan to the United States so the migrants could vote: “It’s telling that a bevy of left-wing groups are partnering with a Hungarian-born billionaire and the Venezuelan government to try to influence the 2018 midterms by sending Honduran migrants north in the thousands.” On CNN, the conservative commentator Matt Schlapp asked pointedly, “Who's paying for the caravan? Alisyn, who's paying for the caravan?,” before later answering his own question: “Because of the liberal judges and other people that intercede, including George Soros, we have too much chaos at our southern border.” On Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show, a guest said “these individuals are not immigrants. These are people that are invading our country,” as another guest asserted they were seeking “the destruction of American society and culture.”

In the meantime, much of the mainstream press abetted Trump’s effort to make the midterm election a referendum on the caravan. Popular news podcasts devoted entire episodes to the caravan. It remained on the front pages of major media websites. It was an overwhelming topic of conversation on cable news, where Trumpists freely spread disinformation about the threat the migrants posed, while news anchors displayed exasperation over their false claims, only to invite them back on the next day’s newscast to do it all over again.

In reality, the caravan was thousands of miles and weeks away from the U.S. border, shrinking in size, and unlikely to reach the U.S. before the election. If the migrants reach the U.S., they have the right under U.S. law to apply for asylum at a port of entry. If their claims are not accepted, they will be turned away. There is no national emergency, there is no ominous threat. There is only a group of desperate people looking for a better life, who have a right to request asylum in the United States, and have no right to stay if their claims are rejected. Trump is reportedly aware that his claims about the caravan are false. An administration official told the Daily Beast simply, “it doesn’t matter if it’s 100 percent accurate… this is the play.” The "play" was to demonize vulnerable people with falsehoods in order to frighten Trump's base to the polls.

Nevertheless, some took the claims of the president and his allies seriously. On Saturday morning, Shabbat morning, a gunman walked into  the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and killed 11 people. The massacre capped off a week of terrorism, in which one man mailed bombs to nearly a dozen Trump critics, and another killed two black people in a grocery store after failing to force his way into a black church.

Prior to committing the Tree of Life massacre, the shooter, who blamed Jews for the caravan of “invaders” and who raged about it on social media, made it clear that he was furious at HIAS, founded as the Hebew Immigrant Aid Society, a Jewish group that helps resettle refugees in the United States. He shared posts on Gab, a social-media site popular with the alt-right, expressing alarm at the sight of “massive human caravans of young men from Honduras and El Salvador invading America thru our unsecured southern border.” And then he wrote, “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

The people killed on Saturday were killed for trying to make the world a better place, as their faith exhorts them to do. The history of the Jewish people is one of displacement, statelessness, and persecution. What groups like HIAS do in helping refugees, they do with the knowledge that comes from a history of being the targets of demagogues who persecute minorities in pursuit of power.

Ordinarily, a politician cannot be held responsible for the actions of a deranged follower. But ordinarily, politicians don’t praise supporters who have mercilessly beaten a Latino man, as “very passionate.” Ordinarily, they don’t offer to pay supporters’ legal bills if they assault protesters on the other side. They don’t praise acts of violence against the media. They don’t defend Nazi rioters as “fine people.” They don’t justify sending bombs to their critics by blaming the media for airing criticism. Ordinarily, there is no historic surge in anti-Semitism, much of it targeted at Jewish critics, coinciding with a politician’s rise. And ordinarily, presidents do not blatantly exploit their authority in an effort to terrify white Americans into voting for their party. For the past few decades, most American politicians, Republican and Democrat alike, have taken care not to urge their supporters to take matters into their own hands. Trump did everything he could to fan the flames, and nothing to restrain those who might take him at his word.

Many of Trump’s defenders argue that his rhetoric is mere shtick. That his attacks, however cruel, aren’t taken 100 percent seriously by his supporters. But to make this argument is to concede that following Trump’s statements to their logical conclusion could lead to violence against his targets, and it is only because most do not take it that way, that the political violence committed on Trump’s behalf is as limited as it currently is.

The Tree of Life shooter criticized Trump for not being racist or anti-Semitic enough. But with respect to the caravan, the shooter merely followed the logic of the president and his allies: He was willing to do whatever was necessary to prevent an “invasion” of Latinos planned by perfidious Jews, a treasonous attempt to seek “the destruction of American society and culture.”

The apparent spark for the worst anti-Semitic massacre in American history was a racist hoax inflamed by a U.S. president seeking to help his party win a midterm election. There is no political gesture, no public statement, and no alteration in rhetoric or behavior that will change this fact. The shooter might have found a different reason to act on a different day. But he chose to act on Saturday, and he apparently chose to act in response to a political fiction that the president himself chose to spread, and that his followers chose to amplify.

As for those who aided the president in his propaganda campaign, who enabled him to prey on racist fears to fabricate a national emergency, those who said to themselves, “This is the play”? Every single one of them bears some responsibility for what followed. Their condemnations of antisemitism are meaningless. Their thoughts and prayers are worthless. Their condolences are irrelevant. They can never undo what they have done, and what they have done will never be forgotten.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Smug and corrupt from head to toe. On the days these sociopathic two parasites die, the world will truly be a better place because they are no longer in it. In the meantime, the damage they cause to every living, breathing thing in America, even their beloved .05%, is nearly incalculable. McConnell and Ryan: Yes, nearly all of Washington is on the take, but there are no better examples of maximum corruption than these two Trump toadies. They mooch and mooch off of us as we pay them with our hard-earned tax dollars. They suck up a lifetime of medical care as if they are lampreys attached to our necks. Even the office staffs and the meals they eat come out of our pockets, not to mention their pensions. They do it all while they moan about others getting "entitlements" handed to them. But, still, what they greedily guzzle at the public trough just isn't enough. They want more, more, more, and one of the places they get it is from Big Pharma and other healthcare related corporations that have an interest in keeping the status quo gravy death train going. Mitch and Paul know all about handouts. Does anyone get more free stuff?

What do we get from top of the list lowlifes like McConnell and Ryan in return? The human misery of health issues we can't afford to treat even though it is our money that goes to treat theirs. McConnell and Ryan hate the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. They hate the idea of Medicare for all. In fact, they hate the idea of Medicare, period. Human Misery, illness, death. They are it's merchants. They are mass murderers on a huge scale, from doing away with regulations that keep chemicals out of our water and the air that we breathe to doing away with our ability to pay for the aforementioned treatments that become needed for our survival; all because of their sadistic money-grubbing, and sociopathic legislating. Imagine if you were one of McConnell or Ryan's kids and you woke up one morning, truly woke up, and realized what a mass-murdering maggot brain your dad is.

Halloween is coming. Who needs Freddy Krueger when you have the reality of these two?

Gambling And Prostitution Czar Sheldon Adelson Is Underwriting The Republican Party's Overtly Racist Advertising

Macau/Vegas Mob-affiliated right-wing billionaire Sheldon Adelson continues to fund McConnell's Senate Leadership Fund and Ryan's Congressional Leadership Fund to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. He is, by far, the biggest contributor to right-wing politics in America, around $60 million so far this year... with plenty more coming. Among House races, the biggest Adelson cash dump has been in Wisconsin, against Randy Bryce, where hundreds of hours of vicious smear attacks have seriously changed the complexion of the race. An old friend of mine in Kenosha told me, "You can't escape the barrage of really ugly ads against Randy. Ryan is really doing a job on this guy. If there's a TV ad next week saying the Randy looked over someone's should in the 3rd grade to get a test answer, it wouldn't surprise me one bit. They don't want to talk about issues; they just want to attack, attack, attack on all this made-up personal crap... I hope it backfires on that little slimeball Ryan is pushing."

On Wednesday, one of the right-wing slime-buckets, Republican Nancy Douglass, who's been slanting the news on WLKG, her Lake Geneva radio station against Bryce for months, was forced to resign as chair of the Wisconsin Broadcasters Association. She appeared in an ad sponsored by Ryan's PAC, referring to Bryce as a deadbeat. Remember, Bryce is union iron worker who's been slaving away his whole life supporting a family. Brian Steil, a shady corporate attorney, has been busy working for a firm that specializes in sending Wisconsin jobs to low-wage hell-holes overseas.

Widely considered one of the most vicious broadcasters in the Midwest, Douglass is a frequent contributor to the Republican Party of Walworth County and has spent lavishly to support Paul Ryan and other right-wingers in southeast Wisconsin. An anti-union zealot and repulsive racist, Douglass represents everything that's wrong with the Trumpist party today. The Wisconsin Broadcasters Association is fortunate to be rid of her and her unAmerican propaganda.

Bryce may be getting the largest amount of Adelson sewer money thrown at him, but he's hardly the only one. Republican Party racism is on display big time as the party and its affiliated SuperPACS descend into a frenzy of white nationalism around the country. Jamiles Lartey has been watching for The Guardian as the GOP takes aim at non-white congressional candidates. Trumpism has given racism a seal of approval. He wrote that "as the 2018 midterm election campaign pulls into its homestretch, Republican attacks in two congressional races happening 3,000 miles apart have triggered alarm bells for targeting non-white candidates in an apparent effort to highlight their 'otherness.' The first comes from California’s 50th district, where Ammar Campa-Najjar is running as a Democrat for a seat currently occupied by the Republican Duncan Hunter. NBC’s Chuck Todd, a veteran political reporter and commentator called the spot 'maybe the most shocking and outrageous political ad I’ve ever seen,' in a Meet The Press Daily segment."

The ad zeroes in on Campa-Najjar’s heritage-- his mother is Mexican American and his father is Palestinian-- calling him a “Palestinian, Mexican, millennial Democrat” who is “working to infiltrate Congress” and a “security risk.”

“At best it’s desperate. That’s putting it mildly,” said Campa-Najjar, who also called the effort “blatantly ignorant” and “unhinged from reality.”

Last Wednesday a bipartisan group of dozens of national security veterans decried the spot as a “racist and bigoted” attack. “The baseless allegation that he is somehow a ‘security threat’ is an affront to our professionalism as national security experts, our American values, and our collective national dignity,” the group said in an open letter.

The ad accuses Campa-Najjar of being supported by the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood with no evidence, and despite the fact that Campa-Najjar is a Christian. “It’s just so interesting that we live in a world where Islamophobia even extends to non-Muslims,” Campa-Najjar told The Guardian.

...In a email statement to The Guardian, Hunter’s spokesman, Michael Harrison, declined to provide a source for the claims about the Muslim Brotherhood or the quote from Campa-Najjar’s father, but insisted that “the facts … raise national security concerns.”

Ironically, when Drunken Hunter was arrested and arraigned on a wide range of corruption, fraud and theft charges recently, Paul Ryan kicked him off the House Armed Services Committee since he really is a security threat. (And to make it worse, one of the groups he stole from was Wounded Warriors.) Hunter, a far right extrenmist, is a well-known philanderer and substance-abuser, who stole money to buy drugs and companionship from sex workers. First the San Diego area saw Duke Cunningham get thrown in prison-- a close "associate" of Duncan Hunter, Sr.-- and now it looks like Duncan Hunter will be the next San Diego member of Congress headed there.

“The fact is, there’s me, who was cleared by the FBI to work at White House, and there’s Hunter who was indicted by the FBI,” said Campa-Najjar. “So the law’s on my side and not his side as of late.”

David Schweidel, a professor of marketing at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University said ads like this may increasingly be more en vogue in the post-2016 election climate largely because Trump’s well-documented reliance on personal attacks proved effective enough to win the White House.

“We saw pundit after pundit kind of commenting on the fact that these personal attacks weren’t coming across as presidential and how ‘it’s the wrong temperament.’ Well, guess what, people responded to it,” Schweidel said.

He added that spots like Hunter’s are generally not intended to sway undecided voters, but to inspire the base to show up at the polls. As US politics continues its long slog towards ever-increased partisanship, elections become more about turning out the base and less about converting undecideds: which could mean negative and personal attacks only become more prevalent.

On the other side of the country, attack ads on a black congressional candidate’s former career as a rapper have taken on racist undertones in a district that, like California’s 50th, is predominantly white. Antonio Delgado, a Harvard Law graduate and Rhodes Scholar is running as a Democrat for a seat in New York’s 19th district currently held by Republican John Faso.

As a young man, Delgado released a socially conscious and political hip-hop album under the name AD the Voice in 2006.

Since the album came to light, a number of Republican groups have seized on it to paint Delgado’s flirtation with hip-hop as out of step with the values of the district. The Congressional Leadership Fund released an advert spot referring to Delgado as a “New York City liberal” and “[Nancy] Pelosi’s candidate” before clipping a handful of Delgado’s song lyrics, overlaying dramatically loud “bleep” sounds over words like “fuck,” “sex” and “porno.”

The ad also accused Delgado of “lacing his raps with extremist attacks on American values”, playing a clip where Delgado states, factually, that more civilian lives were lost during the Iraq war than the 9/11 attacks.

Faso didn’t place the ads, but has not condemned them either, saying in a statement this summer that “Mr Delgado’s lyrics paint an ugly and false picture of America.”

The subtext of the ads was seemingly illuminated in a New York Times article from July when Gerald Benjamin, a friend of Faso’s and director of the Benjamin Center at State University of New York at New Paltz, posed the question: “Is a guy who makes a rap album the kind of guy who lives here in rural New York and reflects our lifestyle and values?”

He continued: “People like us, people in rural New York, we are not people who respond to this part of American culture,” eventually sparking protests from students at his home campus in New Paltz. Benjamin later apologized for his remarks.

Delgado has said the ads are an effort to “otherize” him in the eyes of the white voters he needs to win.

“It’s insulting to people in the district that Faso believes they will buy into this sort of deception and dishonesty,” said Delgado’s campaign manager, Allyson Marcus, noting that a similarly themed Super Pac radio ad was even pulled by the local radio station WDST, which called the ad “highly offensive” and “factually distorted” in a statement.

“The truth is Antonio grew up in a working-class family in Schenectady, right here in upstate New York, where he learned the values of hard work and accountability. The real question is, why won’t Faso condemn these divisive and deceptive ads,” Marcus asked.

Faso did not respond to a request for comment.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

There's Charlie Manson. There's Ted Bundy. There's Jim Jones. There's Jeffrey Dahmer. America has produced some spectacularly sick and twisted psychopaths. The men I've just mentioned killed a total of hundreds of innocent Americans. What Charlie Manson did is, perhaps, most widely known. The gruesome details of what Jeffrey Dahmer did are impossible to stomach. No one knows for sure how many women Ted Bundy killed. Jim Jones got his followers to knowingly drink cyanide-laced cups of grape Kool-Aid. It is Jones who provides the best comparison or metaphor for what Paul Ryan is. People repeatedly have drunk Ryan's Kool-Aid as he has rammed republican ideals and policies through congress that end up killing Americans. Whether it's his pro-pollution attacks on the environment, the removal of regulations on chemical corporations that fill our lives with carcinogens, the promotion of Earth threatening global warming, or the removal of healthcare and well-being of Americans, or fighting against the dignity that earned Social Security benefits provide, Ryan has pushed for things that will cause far more deaths of Americans than the four men I mentioned above. He has done all of this with an evil smirk. Men like Ryan even consider an increase in children born with birth defects a plus. He is a merchant of death and human misery on a medieval scale.

Here's the punchline: Don't be shocked if he ends up being President Of The United States in the very near future.

Whitewashing Paul Ryan-- Who Randy Bryce Scared Off The Field

Here at DWT our war against Paul Ryan started well over a decade ago. And we love that it has been so widely picked up across the country. There was a time that no one knew who the hell he was and why he was so dangerous. That was a long time ago. I remember when Paul Krugman took up the fight in his NY Times column. That was the beginning of the change, although it still took the DCCC many years-- far too many years-- and many wasted election cycles, before they finally woke up and smelled the coffee. Thanks to Randy Bryce, they finally did this year; he left them no choice. And so did Ryan himself; Bryce left him no choice either. Ryan isn't running again. Earlier this week, Mark Leibovich, whose name I never saw attached to anything to do with Ryan, wrote an exhaustive piece for the NY Times Magazine, This is the way Paul Ryan's Speakership Ends. He apparently harbors a tiny bit of semi-admiration-- mixed with the pity Ryan always tries electing from people-- for the fucking dickhead. He interviewed him in the speaker's "ornate" Capitol Hill office after Ryan's appearance on Fox & Friends and a meeting at the White House with Señor Trumpanzee.

"Ryan announced in April," wrote Leibovich, "that he would not be seeking re-election, ending a 20-year run in Congress that, for most of it, seemed to be on a straight-up trajectory. Ryan’s official reason for leaving was that his 'family clock was ticking' and he no longer wanted to be a 'weekend dad.' But it’s easy to suspect otherwise, and not just because that is a clichéd excuse: Ambitious 48-year-old politicians at the peak of their powers don’t suddenly just decide to quit because they’ve discovered that their teenage children are growing up fast back in Wisconsin. Ryan should, by rights, be riding out of town at the pinnacle of his starlit Washington career. Yet he remains a distinctly awkward match to a moment-- and president-- that seem certain to define much of his legacy."

As has been strenuously noted, Trump and Ryan are stylistic and philosophical opposites: Trump the blunt-force agitator vs. Ryan the think-tank conservative. Trump lashes out while Ryan treads carefully. Ryan still fashions himself a “policy guy” and a man of ideas: In high school, he read the conservative philosopher Ayn Rand and was captivated by her signature work, Atlas Shrugged. He bills himself as a guardian of the free-trading, debt-shrinking notions that Republican-led governments used to stand for before Trump crashed the tent. The speaker says he tries to encourage good behavior in the president. “He put out a tweet last night that was really good,” Ryan told me after he and the president hung up. (It was apparently an inoccuous tweet about trade.) The speaker’s words carried the vaguely patronizing tone of a parent affirming a potty-training milestone.

Trump used to call Ryan “Boy Scout.” “I thought it was a compliment,” said Ryan, a former altar boy and habitual people-pleaser. But after the Republican-controlled Congress passed a few bills Trump announced to Ryan that he would stop using the nickname. “So I guess he meant it as an insult all along,” the speaker said. “I didn’t realize.” Ryan shrugged.

Questions about Donald Trump have been an inescapable companion to Ryan’s final months in office. They have trailed Ryan since the billionaire showman first incinerated the Republican Party as he knew it and reduced the boyish speaker to his most puzzled-over foil. “It was shocking to me,” Ryan told me of Trump’s rise. “I didn’t see it coming. It threw me off.” What would the supposedly principled conservative speaker tolerate? What would he fight for? Would he fight at all?

1- everything and anything
2- nothing, ever
3- not for anyone. If Trump raped his wife or daughter, Ryan would smile bitterly, like a martyr (or perhaps, at most, weep silently)

I'm imagining Leibovich decided not to try to directly answer those three rhetorical questions he posed.

Ryan is clearly sick of the “What about Trump?” questions and of having the dilemma imposed upon him. He has been held up as a figure of disdain across the spectrum: Trump-lovers have remained suspicious of him as a tool of the establishment and are quick to raise Ryan’s sacrileges against their hero during the campaign; Democrats, “never Trump” conservatives and-- quietly-- some elected Republicans wish Ryan would provide a stronger counterbalance to a battering-ram president. Ryan, the rap goes, has deserted his post as a potential conscience of the party and voice for decency, and he has allowed Trump’s most fervent acolytes in the House-- Devin Nunes, for instance-- to run wild in his defense. The speaker knows better and yet goes along anyway. “Ryan traded his political soul,” the conservative columnist George F. Will has written, “for... a tax cut.”

Ryan’s defiance to Trump, such as it is, can carry an almost pro forma quality. He will avoid or claim ignorance if possible (“I didn’t see the tweet”), chastise the president if he must (rarely by name), wait for the latest outrage to pass, rinse and repeat. “Frankly, I haven’t paid that close attention to it,” said Ryan at a June news conference in which he was asked about the job status of Scott Pruitt, the scandal-drenched E.P.A. administrator who was finally run out of office in July and whose mounting offenses over several months would have been impossible for even the most casual news consumer to miss.

“I can understand all of the rationalities,” says Charlie Sykes, a longtime conservative radio host in Wisconsin who spent years trying to persuade Ryan to run for president before turning sharply against him over Trump. “In a Faustian bargain, you get a lot of things. You get the wealth, you get the beautiful women and you get all this good stuff.” In Ryan’s case, this would include tax and regulatory overhauls. “It just turns out the price is higher than you thought.”

Ryan hears such assessments all the time. “I’m very comfortable with the decisions I’ve made,” he told me. “I would make them again, do it again the same way.” He is quick to present his counterfactual. What if he were to pick a fight with Trump every time he said something that offended? “I think some people would like me to start a civil war in our party and achieve nothing.” Why should Ryan, despite his own misgivings, make himself the vehicle for anti-Trump wish-fulfillment?

The counter-counterfactual is this: Are Republican leaders so unwilling to condemn Trump because their voters support him so vigorously, or do these voters support Trump so vigorously because so few Republican leaders have dared condemn his actions? Chicken, meet egg.

“I would say the unwillingness of Ryan and others to offer an alternative vision to Trump would be the reason” that Trump’s approval number is so high, Sykes told me. “When your best and brightest basically run up the white flag, it’s going to have an effect.”

The last few months have been a particularly checkered stretch of Paul Ryan’s finale. He agreed to a series of exit interviews during a tumultuous summer, over which Trump would blowtorch his way through a tour of Europe, call the European Union a top foe of the United States, feud with NATO, embrace Vladimir Putin and absolve the Russians for election meddling-- and then came home to insinuate himself into Republican primary campaigns, escalate his attacks on Robert Mueller and threaten to shut down the government if he didn’t get his border wall.

...Far from any unified governing philosophy, the animating objective for much of today’s Republican Party has been reduced to whatever Trump does or wants. The main goal of many elected Republicans is to curry the approval of the president, avoid provoking him (or, worse, a tweet) and thus not inflame the “base.” Being deemed an infidel inside the Church of the Base can be lethal for even the most ensconced incumbent (Mark Sanford, a South Carolina representative and a persistent Trump critic, was primaried out of his misery in June).

...It was only after Trump stunned Hillary Clinton in November that Ryan forged a détente with Trump born of a powerful convenience: The new president knew (or cared) little about policy, and Ryan was happy to fill the void in exchange for Trump’s signature. (The anti-tax activist Grover Norquist once identified the most important characteristic of any Republican president as “enough working digits to handle a pen.”)

Trump’s signature across the Republican tax-reform bill gave both men their chief legislative accomplishments. In Ryan’s case, the bill supersized the deficit and made a mockery of the “debt crisis” that Ryan used to talk endlessly about during the Barack Obama years. The bill has also failed to attract the widespread approval in polls that tax cuts typically do, and has become only less popular over time.

Does Ryan want to be president? You bet he does. Leibovich didn't mention it. Nor did Leibovich mention Wisconsin ironworker Randy Bryce, who was on track to beat Ryan in November. Suddenly Ryan surrendered and scurried away. Leibovich isn't the only elite member of the media blindly accepting Ryan's narrative about how he couldn't stand Trump any more. That will look good on his political resume-- a lot better than "he was beaten by a union construction worker in 2018."

IronStache by Nancy Ohanian

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

C'mon, you know you'd love to put your fist through this thieving jackass's face! I know I would, and that would be just the start of it. After all, true justice can come in many forms. If only we didn't have those stupid, burdensome regulations that get in the way of me being the instrument of karma! Besides, Eddie Munster should sue the hell out of Paul Ryan for stealing his face and ruining his reputation.

While the horror of what Señor Trumpanzee is doing to thousands of children, their parents, and our nation's reputation gets the lion's share of our attention, we must not forget that other Washington evil-doers are working to screw as many Americas as possible for fun and profit. Speaker Ryan is a case in point. As a child, he lived off his father's Social Security survivor benefits. They even helped him pay his way through school. Too bad they can't buy you a soul.

There's Working Class Solidarity-- And There's Also Betrayal

Working class candidates often point to their roots when they talk about why they can be trusted to represent the interests of working families. The best examples this cycle have been Randy Bryce (D-WI), Kaniela Ing (D-HI), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Jared Golden (D-ME), Tom Guild (D-OK) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). Class has been integral to all of their campaigns-- both as  motivationally and in terms of goals. People in Queens and the Bronx are hearing her inspiring message which is bring hope to communities that have been largely ignored by an incumbent congressman who has nothing to do with the people he's supposed to be representing. Today Alexandria told me

"I was born to a working class family. At a very early age, I learned the injustice of a zip code determining your destiny. When I was four years old, my parents realized that the public school options in my area were severely lacking and we of course had no money for private schools. So my entire family-- my parents, my aunts, my uncles, my family in Puerto Rico-- chipped in to let my parents put a down payment on a small home 40 minutes north of the Bronx. This 40 minute drive shaped my world view at a very young age. I saw how just 40 minutes changed the opportunities I had versus what my cousins had in the Bronx. Those 40 minutes gave me the opportunity to go to college, get a job at Ted Kennedy's office, and have some economic opportunity. But in 2008, I also learned just how fragile economic opportunities are for working families like mine. At the same time the stock market crashed, my father passed away. I saw how even though my family had spent 20 years trying to build up some wealth, it could get wiped away in an instant because we didn't have a wealthy community or family to fall back on. We had no safety net. For the next few years, my mother had to go back to driving buses and cleaning and I started taking double shifts at night waitressing and bartending-- it was a fight to keep our home. We hear about an America where if you work hard and do everything right, you can make it, but the reality now is that unless you are born to the right family in the right zip code, the chances of making it with hard work are becoming slim to none. We need to change that."

But this isn't always the case. Paul Ryan wasn't exactly working class. His family was somewhat well-to do. His father was an attorney but at 16 years old Ryan found his 55 year old father dead in their home of a heart attack. From the time of his father's death until his 18th birthday, Ryan received Social Security survivors benefits, which were saved for his college education. In that period he worked at McDonald's operating a grill. He has spent his entire political career trying to pull up the ladder behind him that allowed him to prosper after his father's death. A devotee of Ayn Rand, Ryan doesn't believe in the kind of government help that allowed him to go to college. In that way, he differs fundamentally with Bryce, Ing, Tlaib, Golden, Guild and Ocasio-Cortez.

Below is a TV ad for Tom Guild. who has a primary a week from tomorrow and who has a very different approach from Paul Ryan's. He told me this morning that "As a small child our family survived mainly on government commodities, a precursor of the food stamp or SNAP program. My brother Robert and I would surely have starved and perished were it not for this godsend to our family that was existing well below the poverty level. Since this government program literally sustained our lives, I will fight for today’s poor children (and adults) and make sure that they are not nutritionally deprived, and don’t needlessly perish from this earth."



Over the weekend, Politico reported the GOP has given up-- at least for now-- on their goal of destroying Medicare. "Republicans on Capitol Hill," they reported, "are giving up on what might be their last best chance to overhaul Medicare, just as they’re losing their leading champion on the issue, House Speaker Paul Ryan. The quiet surrender on a subject that’s energized GOP fiscal hawks for the better part of a decade comes as new projections show Medicare’s trust fund in its worst shape since the recession, partly because of Republicans’ other chief obsession: their sweeping tax cuts."

That’s left conservatives unsure how to agitate for a politically unpopular Medicare overhaul-- one that President Donald Trump detests-- and raises new questions about who will take up the entitlement reform mantle as Ryan heads for the exits.

“It takes two houses of Congress and a president to want to do that,” said Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO), lamenting the party’s apathy over Medicare. “No matter who’s been in the House or who’s been speaker, we have not been able to get entitlement reform done.”

"Reform" might be lowering the age of Medicare to 55 or including treatment of eyes, ears and teeth, for example... extending it to all Americans is the goal for progressives. But when Republicans talk about "entitlement reform," it doesn't mean improving it; it means abolishing it, iultimately through privatization. That's what Blunt wants and what Ryan wants. The public doesn't.

[T]he GOP’s sweeping tax cuts will add $1.5 trillion to the deficit, slowing the flow of money into Medicare and putting the health care program on increasingly unstable financial ground, the report from Medicare’s trustees predicts. The decision to also repeal Obamacare’s deeply unpopular Medicare cost-containment panel, the Independent Payment Advisory Board, will put additional strain on Medicare’s finances, the trustees said. Medicare’s hospital trust fund is now projected to go broke by 2026, three years earlier than projected.

...The trustees' report, which was overseen by Cabinet officials, projected the GOP tax cuts would reduce the income taxes people pay on Social Security benefits, part of which are funneled toward Medicare. The tax law’s repeal of the Obamacare penalty for not having insurance will drive up the uninsured rate, increasing Medicare payments for uncompensated care, the report said.

Medicare’s chief actuary, Paul Spitalnic, said lower-than-expected tax returns explained the “vast majority” of this year’s funding shortfall. The trustees found that payroll and income taxes simply aren’t enough to cover Medicare’s large budget gap, partly as a result of the GOP’s tax law. The results, Spitalnic said, are “largely a revenue story.”

The report also delivered grim news for Social Security: For the first time since 1982, the program is expected to spend more than it raises in revenue and collects in interest.

...Republican leaders have shown little appetite for tackling Medicare since taking full control of Washington last year. Though Ryan himself said a Medicare overhaul would be a priority for 2018, Republican leaders have abandoned the idea ahead of a midterm election that could determine control of Congress.

Neither chamber has firm plans to pass a budget blueprint this year, and some conservatives now fear GOP leaders may skip it entirely, leaving a big question mark about the GOP’s fiscal agenda.

...During the Obama administration, House Republicans approved belt-tightening budgets that would transform Medicare into a so-called premium support model giving beneficiaries a set amount to spend either on traditional Medicare coverage or private insurance plans. Critics contend the plan, dubbed Medicare privatization, would leave enrollees with higher costs and worse coverage. Other Republicans have supported raising Medicare’s eligibility age.

Democrats, who in the past have eagerly campaigned against the GOP‘s Medicare plans, claim Republicans have shed their concerns about fiscal restraint in pursuit of tax cuts.

“When Republicans want to cut taxes but don’t want to contain health care spending, they are yanking Medicare three years closer to insolvency,” said Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the Finance Committee.

GOP leaders, though, insist they haven’t taken their eye off entitlements. They just need a bit more time at the drawing board.

“It’s still a huge thing,” House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady (R-TX) said. “The question is, how do we address this thing?”

Alan Grayson grew up in a tenement in the Bronx and worked his way through college by cleaning bathrooms. He gave up his Orlando congressional seat to run for the Senate. He's seeking to win back his House seat now, currently in the hands of a do-nothing conservative New Dem. While Grayson was in the House he did the opposite of Ryan, working hard to perfect and try to persuade his colleagues to expand Medicare and Social Security, cut or eliminate taxes on working people and retirees, raise the minimum wage, provide paid sick leave and vacations to everyone, stop foreign military intervention, protect our privacy, block corporate "free trade" giveaways and make public college free-- among other things. This is the TV ad he's running in Orlando right now: