SSDD

When I was a pup, I had intuitions that sometimes fell into left-wing territory and sometimes right-wing territory, though I didn't know enough politics to understand that this was the case. As I began emerging from the Cave, I began to realize that the GOP always said it was a good time for tax cuts. Slow economy? Tax cuts. Fast economy? Tax cuts. Budget deficit? Tax cuts. Budget surplus? Tax cuts. Each time they offered it as a solution to a problem and not simply a principled commitment to lower taxes in all cases. Though I was a neophyte, this made me suspicious. I grew wiser. I realized the GOP, in recent years anyway, doesn't offer solutions to problems; they simply have an agenda.

Piece Of Shit

Vito Lopez.

Roy Attempts Rebuttals

As he notes, Avik Roy is one of Romney's advisers on health care. His rebuttals are not too convincing. The worst, unsurprisingly, is his remarks on Bowles-Simpson. He tries to finesse Ryan's comments into something other than what they actually were. Ryan made it seem as if Obama didn't act on a proposal on his desk. But Ryan (not 'them', 'we'!) and others voted not to put it on Obama's desk. Then Ryan actually says Obama did nothing to try to work on the deficit, but Obama tried many things. It's not his fault if the most dysfunctional Congress in a long time, perhaps ever, didn't create legislation. Roy ignores or downplays these stark facts.

Chait on Ryan

Jonathan Chait says he doesn't have the willpower to cover all Ryan's inconsistencies but goes on to cover many. Very persuasive.

"Ryan began by castigating Obama for borrowing money to fund a stimulus. He then castigated Obama for making his “first order of business” the passage of health-care reform rather than economic rescue, when Ryan himself had just told the audience that the first thing Obama had done was actually to pass a plan intended to rescue the economy. Having argued that Obama erred by distracting himself with health care rather than devote all his energies to the recovery, Ryan immediately promised he and Romney would repeal Obamacare — wouldn’t that also possibly distract from their own economic focus?

In the same vein, Ryan told unemployed Americans, “if you're feeling passed by, you have not failed, your leaders have failed you” — and then, moments later, sneered that Obama saw economically struggling Americans as “victims of circumstances beyond our control.” Ryan believes fervently that Obama’s failures are the sole exception to the general rule that individuals are the masters of their own economic fate."

Cohn On Ryan

Cohn gives the rundown on what people think are the big whoppers in Ryan's speech. In my view, the thing about the plant in Janesville isn't a lie, just a stupid gotcha. Ryan didn't say Obama closed it. He said Obama said it would be open with government help. That can be read as re-opened. So he's blaming Obama for it not being open even if Obama didn't close it. It's not a lie, just silly. If Obama had said "plants like this one" instead of "this plant" there would be nothing for Ryan to complain about. Also, Cohn points out that Bush policies are to blame for much of the running deficits, and that's true to some extent. But Obama continued many of those policies, including the "surge" in Afghanistan and the Bush tax cuts. Perhaps his arm was twisted to some extent, but I don't see how we can exclude that fact. The worst two are the B-S b.s. and the last about helping those in need. It is very underreported how drastically Ryan's budget - which the House passed, remember, thought it died in the Senate - cuts programs that benefit the poor, both in the short and long run.

People Die All The Time When They Don't Have To...

Especially in the U.S., the richest, most powerful country in the world!

Ryanpalooza

There's been a lot of clamor for more stuff on Paul Ryan. He gave a speech last night at the Republican convention. More blogging on this to follow, but start with some good stuff from Yglesias. In general, I'd bet low information voters (and plenty of high information ones) use heuristics and rules which do not readily allow for matters of degree to make a difference. Things like: Debt bad! Taxes bad! Spending cuts bad! This sort of thinking is very bad for politics, since circumstances are complicated to begin with and change all the time AND it's not like we ever got anything exactly right in the first place. It's important to keep things in perspective.

Good Ideas In The GOP Platform

According to Matthew Yglesias. I agree about many of them, but look out for coded words.  "[R]eform of the 42-year old National Environmental Policy Act to create regulatory certainty for infrastructure projects" can mean different things depending on which party you're talking to.