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.

Congress ' Complicity in Mass Shootings

I have never lost one of my children much less lost one to the senseless carnage that erupted in Santa Barbara thanks to a mentally disturbed individual having three semi-automatic weapons.  Hence, I cannot fully know the anguish and sorrow felt by the parents of those who lost children in the carnage.  But I can agree with Richard Martinez who lost his son on one thing: Congress is complicit in the ongoing mass shooting sprees.  But for prostituting themselves to the NRA which is in reality nothing more than a front financed by the gun manufacturers, we'd have common sense gun control in America.  Thus, in some ways, every member of Congress who has refused to vote to pass gun control had their fingers on the trigger along with Elliot Rodgers. An editorial in the New York Times underscores this reality.  Here are highlights:

Richard Martinez has a message for the politicians who have been calling to express condolences on the death of his son, Christopher Michaels-Martinez, in the massacre of six people in Isla Vista, Calif., on Friday: “I don’t care about your sympathy,” he said. “Get to work and do something.”

Through his tears, he called lawmakers in Washington “a rudderless bunch of idiots” for bowing to the National Rifle Association and refusing to enact restrictions that might have kept three semiautomatic handguns away from the deranged shooter, Elliot Rodger. “These people are getting rich sitting in Congress,” he said. “And what do they do? They don’t take care of our kids.”

In being bullied by the gun industry into rejecting one of the most effective ways of limiting the proliferation of guns — universal background checks — members of Congress have become complicit in shootings by anyone who should not be allowed to own a gun because of a criminal or mental health record. It is not just the mass shootings like the one in California that the nation needs to focus on (victims in these horrific events make up less than 1 percent of all gun homicides), but also the more than 11,000 individual deaths from gun violence every year, most of which get no attention, or the more than 19,000 annual suicides by gun.

The background check bill failed in the Senate a year ago, mostly because of Republican opposition. The gun lobby, determined to prevent a single restriction from being approved, spread vicious misinformation about the creation of a gun registry that left lawmakers quaking and raised ludicrous fears of government confiscation.

Last year, a consortium of top mental health professionals said the government needed to go further and ban gun possession from those who have been involuntarily committed to outpatient treatment if they pose a danger to themselves or others. People should also be unable to buy guns, the group said, if they have been convicted of a violent misdemeanor, subject to a domestic violence restraining order, . . . 

[P]arents or other relatives should be allowed to petition a court for a restraining order prohibiting gun ownership by those who pose a credible risk of harm to themselves or others.

The greatest danger the N.R.A. poses is not just its lobbying might or its lies, but the hopelessness it induces in good people who have given up pressing for new restrictions. More than 280 Americans are shot each day, and every bullet should send the opposite message.