"Joy and pleasure are as real as pain and sorrow and one must learn what they have to teach. . . ." -- Sean Russell, from Gatherer of Clouds

"If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right." -- Helyn D. Goldenberg

"I love you and I'm not afraid." -- Evanescence, "My Last Breath"

“If I hear ‘not allowed’ much oftener,” said Sam, “I’m going to get angry.” -- J.R.R. Tolkien, from Lord of the Rings

Monday, April 16, 2018

Today in Disgusting People

A perennial front-runner for this category who's decided to step down -- uh, "spend more time with his family" now that he's done what the Kochs, et al., put him in office for. At least, most of it. Anne Laurie has a good summation at Balloon Juice. She draws in part on this article by Paul Waldman, but I have one caveat, where Waldman refers to Paul Krugman's analysis:

But as Paul Krugman observed, Ryan failed at both his pretend goal and his real goal. He will leave office after setting the deficit on a path to exceed $1 trillion in 2020, and yet, he failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act and didn’t even bother to wage an assault on Medicare, almost certainly because he knew how disastrous it would be for his party.

I wouldn't call the books closed on that yet -- he's got eight months left, a little more, before he steps down, and he has a tactic that worked on the "tax reform" bill -- introduce a massive bill, call for a vote within a day or two, no hearings, no debate. And he has his majority until January. I would guess he'll try to gut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the AFA in December. He hasn't give up:



And just to point up what a piece of shit Ryan -- and the whole "libertarian" wing of the GOP -- is, there's this:

[I]t’s worth revisiting now, as Ryan prepares his exit from politics, the thrust of the argument that the tale advanced—that, in general, the 20 million children in this country who receive free lunches have parents who clearly don’t care about them and that in providing food to those children, the government enables bad parenting. That sweeping judgment is impossible unless one considers poverty and economic hardship themselves personal failings. For about a decade now, Ryan has demonstrated that he believes precisely this—that those who have trouble making their way in the world are personally defective, that those immiserated by circumstance have willingly surrendered their lives to dysfunction, and that the best remedy society can offer to those who lack is to deprive them, in cuts to already meager social programs, of even more.

Never a reference to the fact that the GOP's backers, our corporate overlords, have shipped those parents' jobs to China and Vietnam.

There's more, and none of it is complimentary. But then, to be honest, I don't see how it could be.

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