Paul Ryan Admits He Was a Fraud All Along

I have never liked former House Speaker Paul Ryan who I always saw as a liar and a fraud. While in office, Ryan cared about only two things - actually three, the third being staying in office - cutting taxes for the wealthy and slashing the social safety net for the less fortunate, all the while pretending to be a good Catholic despite all his actions contrary to the Church's social gospel. Before retiring, Ryan accomplished one thing: passage of the Trump/GOP tax cuts which have exploded the federal deficit - something Ryan supposedly cared about, but like all else with Ryan that story line was a lie.  A piece in Vanity Fair looks at Ryan's new and disingenuous book which tries to rewrite history and rehabilitate Ryan's abysmal record.  Here are article highlights:

After the release of the Access Hollywood tape, which featured the future president bragging to Billy Bush about how his celebrity entitled him to sexually assault women, Paul Ryan canceled a scheduled appearance with Donald Trump and announced he would not campaign on behalf of the Republican nominee. “I am not going to defend Donald Trump,” then-House Speaker Ryan reportedly told his party at the time. “Not now, not in the future.” Ryan probably assumed he wouldn’t need to defend Trump in the “future,” as the prevailing wisdom was that Hillary Clinton would send him back to the bowels of reality TV from whence he came. But it was still a notable disavowal even if, in true Ryan form, it made no move to rescind his tortured Trump endorsement.

Of course, Ryan would break his promise after Trump’s shock victory. The self-styled wonk would, again and again and again, defend the president, enable him, and respond to his daily outrages with feeble handwringing. But the Wisconsin Republican is now trying to rehabilitate his doormat reputation. . . . Ryan tees off on the president, depicting him as a narcissistic, divisive loon and “uneducated about the government”—revelations that only further highlight how Ryan was knowingly complicit in Trump’s nightmare government.

“We’ve gotten so numbed by it all,” Ryan tells Tim Alberta in American Carnage, which examines how Republicans came to embrace Trump after an acrimonious 2016 race. “Not in government, but where we live our lives, we have a responsibility to try and rebuild. Don’t call a woman a ‘horse face.’ Don’t cheat on your wife. Don’t cheat on anything. Be a good person. Set a good example.”

Ryan, who tells Alberta that he viewed his retirement as an “escape hatch” to get away from Trump, plays up the “adults in the room” myth, suggesting his deference allowed him to steer Trump on a better course.

It’s a line Ryan has echoed before. . . . And of course, it’s intended to paint Ryan in the best possible light, similar to John Kelly, Rex Tillerson, and others who suggested they only stood by Trump out of some high-minded sense of duty to the country. Of course, none actually succeeded in serving as a real moderating influence. They may be better than the sycophants he’s surrounded himself with now, but Kelly, Tillerson, and Ryan consistently failed to keep the president’s impulses in check. Worse, they lent a veneer of normalcy to a president who was decidedly not.

That Ryan is now back to bashing Trump is, perhaps, a step above some of his former colleagues, who have turned into rabid, mindless supporters of the president. But it’s hardly courageous to point out Trump’s plainly obvious defects after the fact. So far, just one Republican—Justin Amash, who left the party earlier this month—has openly criticized the president. “These guys have all convinced themselves that to be successful and keep their jobs, they need to stand by Trump,” Amash tells Alberta in the book. “But Trump won’t stand with them as soon as he doesn’t need them. He’s not loyal. They’re very loyal to Trump, but the second he thinks it’s to his advantage to throw someone under the bus, he’ll be happy to do it.”

Hopefully, history will be very harsh to Paul Ryan.

Trump/GOP Seek to Cut Veterans Health Care

One of the great political myths is that Republicans are more supportive of America's military and veterans than Democrats.   In reality, its the opposite with the GOP and Trump Hell bent to slash funding for everything ranging from Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security to veterans health care benefits - calls all the more urgent give the Trump/GOP $1.5 trillion tax cut give away to the very wealthy and large corporations.  Average working Americans and veterans simply do not count in today's GOP.  Yes, one hears Republicans bloviating about "supporting our troops" and waiving the flag and bashing "unpatriotic" NFL players, but where the rubber hits the road, their actions do not reflect the talking points they toss out.  As the saying goes, talk is cheap.  Actions are what count.  As a piece in New York Magazine notes, a Trump/GOP effort is underway to cut veterans health care benefits under the guise of addressing the ballooning budget deficit - the deficit that is ballooning in no small part due to the Trump/GOP tax cuts - cuts that have not trickled down in any significant way to working Americans or small businesses. Sadly, rather than "do their homework" and discover the truth, many Republican "friends" simply allow themselves to be taken in by GOP ruses and fail to ferret out the facts.  Here are highlights on the threat to veterans benefits:  

Last year, the Trump administration insisted that its regressive tax cuts were so important, it was worth adding $1.5 trillion to the national debt to ensure their passage. Now, the White House is warning Congress that the United States cannot afford to add $1.6 billion to the deficit to expand health-care options for veterans.

In a letter Monday, the Trump administration demanded that lawmakers fund a popular veterans’ health-care program — which allows former troops to spend public funds on private doctors and hospitals — with cuts to other parts of the budget. Democrats, and some top Senate Republicans, prefer to raise the current caps on discretionary spending instead.

The case for the latter option is straightforward. Congressional spending falls into two categories: mandatory (funding for programs like Social Security, which increases automatically as more Americans qualify for benefits) and discretionary (spending that Congress must actively renew). When Congress passed its omnibus budget bill back in March, the private veterans’ health-care program was on the mandatory side of the ledger. Thus, although lawmakers knew that federal spending on the program was going to increase, they didn’t have to account for its cost when setting a discretionary budget.

But last month, president Trump signed a law that reorganized veterans’ health care, and shifted funding for the private program into the discretionary column. This did not significantly increase the overall cost of domestic spending — but it did lift the price tag on the discretionary budget above previously set caps. Which is to say: It produced a budget shortfall that wasn’t a product of changes in fiscal reality, so much as in accounting practices.

Relitigating funding levels for various domestic programs — which Congress had found consensus on just months ago — is not a fight that most lawmakers want to have.

And it’s hard to see why the White House does. The administration’s desire to repent for its sins against fiscal responsibility is understandable enough (even if their gesture is roughly akin to a serial arsonist buying a single brownie from a local fire department’s bake sale). But why they would want to center their performance of deficit hawkery on the issue of veterans’ health care is baffling.

Yes, their official position is that the program must be funded with reductions in other appropriations. But the administration has already established that it believes corporate tax cuts are so important, they’re worth enacting at any fiscal cost. Given that context, it shouldn’t be difficult for Democrats to paint the White House’s current hard line on deficits as a tacit admission that it sees caring for America’s retired troops as less important than increasing corporate America’s allowance.

With a family member still dealing with the consequences of injuries suffered in Afghanistan, I know that these veterans' benefits are crucial.  Sadly, flag waving Republicans and the foul individual in the White House do not - or perhaps they simply do not care about "little people" - people like veterans. 

House GOP Seeks to Cut Medicare, Social Security to Balance Budget After Massive Tax Cuts for Wealthy

While much of the American public is focused on the horrors and deliberate cruelty taking place on America's southwest border, House Republicans are conspiring to unleash cruelty on those who rely on Medicare and Social Security to survive.  The pretense for harming countless lives?  The need to cut the federal budget deficit which is hemorrhaging red ink in the wake of the $1.5 trillion (yes, trillion with a "T") tax cuts for the very wealthy and large, rapacious corporations.  It has been Paul Ryan's sick and morally bankrupt dream to destroy the social safety net for years, and now the massive give away voted in by Republicans is being grotesquely used to harm the poor and the elderly.  While Catholic bishops are condemning the Trump/Pence family separation policy, they might also want to bar Ryan from the sacraments given his utter disregard for the poor, the hungry and the sick. Trump cruel border policy did not arise out of thin air.  The GOP has been pushing a cruel agenda for many years.   A piece in the Washington Post looks ate the GOP's manufactured crisis and those whom they seek to harm.  Here are excerpts:

House Republicans released a proposal Tuesday that would balance the budget in nine years — but only by making large cuts to entitlement programs, including Medicare and Social Security, . . . .

The House Budget Committee is aiming to pass the blueprint this week, but that may be as far as it goes this midterm election year. It is not clear that GOP leaders will put the document on the House floor for a vote, and even if it were to pass the House, the budget would have little impact on actual spending levels.

Nonetheless the budget serves as an expression of Republicans’ priorities at a time of rapidly rising deficits and debt. Although the nation’s growing indebtedness has been exacerbated by the GOP’s own policy decisions — including the new tax law, which most analyses say will add at least $1 trillion to the debt — Republicans on the Budget Committee said they felt a responsibility to put the nation on a sounder fiscal trajectory.

Democrats have little interest in addressing it except as part of a larger deal including tax increases — the sort of “Grand Bargain” that eluded President Barack Obama.

The House Republican budget, titled “A Brighter American Future,” would remake Medicare by giving seniors the option of enrolling in private plans that compete with traditional Medicare, a system of competition designed to keep costs down but dismissed by critics as an effort to privatize the program. Along with other changes, the budget proposes to squeeze $537 billion out of Medicare over the next decade.

The budget would transform Medicaid, the federal-state health-care program for the poor, by limiting per capita payments or allowing states to turn it into a block-grant program — the same approach House Republicans took in their legislation that passed last year to repeal the Affordable Care Act (the repeal effort died in the Senate, but the GOP budget assumes that the repeal takes place).  It also proposes adding work requirements for certain adults enrolled in Medicaid. Changes to Medicaid and other health programs would account for $1.5 trillion in savings.

Social Security comes in for more modest cuts of $4 billion over the decade, which the budget projects could be reached by eliminating concurrent receipt of unemployment benefits and Social Security disability insurance. . . . And the budget proposes $230 billion in cuts from education and training programs, including consolidating student loan programs and reducing Pell Grant awards.

The budget also relies on rosy economic-growth projections . . .

Democrats were quick to criticize the GOP proposal while contending that Republicans were opening themselves up to election-year attacks by releasing it at all.

“The 2019 Republican budget scraps any sense of responsibility to the American people and any obligation to being honest,” said Rep. John Yarmuth (Ky.), the top Democrat on the Budget Committee. “Its repeal of the Affordable Care Act and extreme cuts to health care, retirement security, anti-poverty programs, education, infrastructure, and other critical investments are real and will inflict serious harm on American families.”

The farce is that the GOP pretends to be the party of "family values" and "Christian values" yet other than slavishly prostituting itself to hate-filled anti-abortion, anti-gay Christofascists, NOTHING in the GOP agenda is family friendly or remotely in keeping with the Gospel's social message.