The uncritical coverage of Paul Ryan's budget plan continues.In the new issue of Time magazine,Michael Crowley and Jay Newton-Smalltell us that Ryan is "the new face of federal frugality":
Just 41 years old, with jet black hair and a touch of Eagle Scout to him, the House Budget Committee chairman unveiled an ambitious package of huge budget cuts designed to dig the country out of its crippling debt crisis. For Ryan, reining in spending is nothing less than an act of patriotic valor.
Valor. Eagle Scout. Great hair!
Ryan'scritics have notedthat his plan actually does very little about the "crippling debt crisis." Brian Beutler at Talking Points Memo reports that the Congressional Budget Office's score of the plan"finds that by the end of the 10-year budget window, public debt will actually be higher than it would be if the GOP just did nothing."
The Time reportersadd:
He may be a modern political star, but there's still something a little old-fashioned about Ryan, right down to his crow's-beak nose. Maybe it's the premature seriousness that comes from finding your father dead of a heart attack when you were 16 and then helping to care for a grandmother with Alzheimer's disease.
Now a married father of three, Ryan is a PowerPoint fanatic with an almost unsettling fluency in the fine print of massive budget documents. "I love the field of economics," Ryan says. "I have a knack for numbers. And I've just delved into this issue for my adult life, basically."
Deep into the piece, after these tributes to Ryan's wonkery, comes this parenthetical:
(He's also been criticized for peddling fuzzy math and rosy projections. A Washington Post factcheck deemed his budget full of "dubious assertions, questionable assumptions and fishy figures.")
Huh. I thought he had "an almost unsettling fluency in the fine print of massive budget documents"?
By placing the factcheck sodeep into the piece,and in parentheses, Time isall but saying that it doesn'tmatter what the facts are about Paul Ryan's plan. What's more important is that he's a patriotic number-cruncher.
With great hair!
About Peter Hart
IN A PIGS EYE!!!!!(Except for the bit on our debt.—–Just putting off the day)
Did you see the VP sound asleep last night as Obama spoke.And the woman behind Biden was snoozing the night away as well?Tax n spend….tax n spend….. tax n……I think im gonna take a nappy too……………………………WAKE UP!!!!!Oh my God im sorry.Forgot im a tea party member.Almost fell asleep at my post.Helen it does not fly,and it won't fly.
Another part of the banking collapse Fannie and Freddie had no part in [which also preceded their takeover by the government.]
(Reuters) – Moody's Corp and Standard and Poor's triggered the worst financial crisis in decades when they were forced to downgrade the inflated ratings they slapped on complex mortgage-backed securities, a U.S. congressional report concluded on Wednesday.
In one of the most stark condemnations of the credit rating agencies, a Senate investigations panel said the agencies continued to give top ratings to mortgage-backed securities months after the housing market started to collapse.
The agencies then unleashed on the financial system a flood of downgrades in July 2007, the panel said.
"Perhaps more than any other single event, the sudden mass downgrades of (residential mortgage-backed securities) and (collateralized debt obligation) ratings were the immediate trigger for the financial crisis," the staff for Senators Carl Levin and Tom Coburn wrote in their report.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/13/us-financial-regulation-report-ratingage-idUSTRE73C8GX20110413?WT.tsrc=Social%20Media&WT.z_smid=twtr-reuters_%20com&WT.z_smid_dest=Twitter
The reagan miracle continued:
Since 1980, when Reagan won the presidency promising prosperity through tax cuts, the average income of the vast majorityâ┚¬”Âthe bottom 90 percent of Americansâ┚¬”Âhas increased a meager $303, or 1 percent. Put another way, for each dollar people in the vast majority made in 1980, in 2008 their income was up to $1.01.
Those at the top did better. The top 1 percent\'s average income more than doubled to $1.1 million, according to an analysis of tax data by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. The really rich, the top one-tenth of 1 percent, each enjoyed almost $4 in 2008 for each dollar in 1980.
The top 300,000 Americans now enjoy almost as much income as the bottom 150 million, the data show.
http://www.wweek.com/portland/print-article-17350-print.html
The talks I gave to so many audiences dealt with the inevitable collapse of Fanny and Freddy and the results to such a calamity. Dodd,Schuman,Franks all lied to my face and called it solvent.I was specific.I was right.My audiences were often liberal, and that means they were screaming banshees of derision.I always ended by pointing to the deniability factor "built in" to the system that would allow Dems to blame it on the Banks,ratings systems,wall street and so on. Again I was specific and correct.( The Senate panel you quoted were almost all left as I recall.) Fanny and Freddy today have a bottomless loan ,actually gift- from the taxpayers. Some of the same people who ran this titanic are now running the reorganization of our financial woes.Insanity.But hard heads can change.One man…A mr ward I believe is his name ,recently met me on the street and apologized.He had been at a symposium and was one who screamed loudest.He called me a liar.That I had no care for the poor and so on.I gently told him…"someday you will see i was right,i hope you will then extend the olive branch".He did that day on the street.
Liberals today have learned to obfuscate factuality to fit the template of their beliefs.They practice the art of personal attack against anyone who hinders their ideology. Politics of personality is another liberal four star game. Pseudo intellectual elitists who use class warfare as an election tool.
The wealthy, the Teabaggers they dupe and the Republicans denounce any facts that show that the last 30 years have been very very good to the rich and pretty crappy for eveyone else as "provoking class warfare" in order to obscure the class war by Government policy that they have successfully conducted, [and continue to as I type], that has laid waste to the middle class and poor. Their assault on unions being the last act.
Anyone continuing to try and act as if it wasn't the mortgage lenders, the banks, the appraisers, the speculators, the securitizers and/or the rating agencies for the housing collapse is simply practicing an astonishing level of intellectual dishonesty.
"Liberals today have learned to obfuscate factuality to fit the template of their beliefs." Actually, reality has a liberal bias. Conservatives have a dozen think-tanks whose only purpose is "to obfuscate factuality to fit the template of their beliefs."
"Politics of personality is another liberal four star game." …..What a joke! Palin! Ryan! Commander Codpiece! The ghost of Reagen! Heck, they've been trying to rehabilitate Hoover and Joe McCarthy……The GOP is the ultimate cult of personality.
"They practice the art of personal attack against anyone who hinders their ideology."
Shouldn't talk about conservatives that way.
No reason to mention "Terrorists! Elitists! Baby Killers! Parasites! Anti-Semites! Enviroment Extremists! "Unpatriotic! Dirty Hippies! Feminazis! Etc, etc
[...] "bold," "serious," budget proposals (even though his numbers don't add up). Indeed, Ryan has become a genuine media [...]
I am an Eagle Scout, and i can assure you that Paul Ryan is NOT at Eagle Scout. He was a scout as a youth, but simply didn't have it within himself to reach Eagle.
It's a fact– https://beascout.scouting.org/filestore/pdf/210-571.pdf
Let's e clear, Ryun COULD HAVE BEEN an Eagle scout but he COULD NOT HANG.
Those of us who really are Eagles resent those who would pretend to be Eagles. It wasn't easy to get the rank,as evidenced by the fact that Ryan didn't qualify.
RYAN'S DAD IS NOT AN OLYMPIC CHAMPION AND HE IS NOT AN EAGLE SCOUT.
please make a note of it, and thank you for listening.
[...] Michael Crowley deserves some credit for saying this about the Tea Party movement, in his piece about how they [...]
To be fair, only 3% of all boys who enter the Boy Scouts achieve the rank of Eagle Scout. To suggest that someone did not achieve the rank because he "…didn't have it within him…" or "…could not hang…" misses the point, not only of the award, but of Scouting. Advancement is one of several METHODS Scouting uses to achieve its AIMS of building citizenship, character, and personal fitness. A boy who grows up to become a good citizen, of good character and personal fitness achieves the aims of Scouting far more than someone who completes the requirements for the Eagle medal, but who grows up to be unkind, arrogant, and discourteous.
I do not know what Mr. Ryan had or didn't have within him, but I have observed in almost 50 years with the Boy Scouts that the quality of a person's character has practically nothing to do with rank advancement. Some of the finest Scouts I have ever known were NOT Eagle Scouts. They were just boys who loved Scouting. I do my best to live up to the high ideals of Scouting, not because I am an Eagle Scout (which I am, by the way), but because I was taught the value of the Scout Oath and Law by men of great character, none of whom, incidentally, were Eagle Scouts themselves.
It is an honor to achieve the rank of Eagle Scout, but it is no dishonor to participate in Scouting and not achieve that rank. And, it has been my experience that wearing the Eagle Scout medal is far more of a burden than an honor. As an Eagle Scout, I would think long and hard before I spoke in denigratory terms of a fellow Scout who had not achieved that rank.
[...] Crowley, this is actually toning down the Ryan praise. Just last year, he co-wrote a piece for Time that went like this: Just 41 years old, with jet black hair and a [...]