Nation wakes up to Paul Ryan's record of Inhumane acts against Women, the Poor, and Jobless!

Being the speaker of the House is bound to bring out critics, but Paul Ryan has accomplished something more than that, and it has been one thing after the next.  The latest:

“What this is not is an indictment of our institutions, of our justice system,” House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said Thursday about the now infamous “Nunes memo.” “It does not impugn the Mueller investigation or the deputy attorney general,” the speaker insisted. Is this cynicism or naivete? Discrediting law enforcement is the memo’s transparent purpose and why it has been embraced by President Trump.

Mr. Ryan’s staff says the speaker supports releasing the Democratic memo after giving it more scrutiny.

Another way of putting Ryan’s statement; give the Republican memo mileage and media spin. Oh, and Ryan quickly contradicts his previous claims it does nothing to impugn the investigation:

Mr. Ryan bears full responsibility for the deterioration of congressional oversight of intelligence operations ... Ryan’s aid and comfort is helping Mr. Trump impede an investigation into these very issues. It is sad to see the speaker allow the House to be tarnished in this way.

 

Ryan even contradicted Trump:

This memo will actually prove political bias in all of those places, Trump suggested:

The top Leadership and Investigators of the FBI and the Justice Department have politicized the sacred investigative process in favor of Democrats and against Republicans - something which would have been unthinkable just a short time ago. Rank & File are great people!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 2, 2018

Ryan Pushes Job Training for Food Stamps...and to cut Budgets: Imagine suggesting that every Kimberly-Clark worker who is losing their job was lazy, needed drug testing and had better get in line for job training if they want to see any benefits. That's 600 newly unemployed Americans. Never mind their current skill levels were just tossed away like trash, leaving families struggling to find a way to stay in their homes and pay their bills during a time of record low unemployment. Note: Ryan rolls out the "skills gap" myth again:

[T]he Wisconsin Republican is back at it again, repackaging his proposals … urged congressional Republicans to tackle “workforce development,” … a matter of “helping people”— not a budget-cutting excursive. What Ryan is deploying is a massive bait and switch: Get people talking about beefing up job-training resources for the able-bodied unemployed or underemployed poor. Phase one … would be work requirements. More generally pushing people out of entitlement benefits and into jobs that may or may not exist requires more cover.

He pointed out that there are 6.6 million people on unemployment and more than 5.8 million open jobs. That skills gap, he said, could be filled by the unemployed population if the government provided the facilities to link the two.

Ryan Ignores History. The Past is Littered with Failed Job Training Programs: The simple truth? Unpredictable jobs losses due to technology, automation, markets, outdated products or services...etc. will always outpace any "job training" programs. Sorry Paul, too wonky?

Lawmakers from both parties and at every level of government have struggled for decades to come up with a successful system for job training. The Manpower Training and Development Act of 1962, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act of 1973, the Job Training Partnership Act of 1982, and the Workforce Investment Act of 1998, have all, according to nearly every assessment, largely failed to address the enormous problems for workers caused by automation and globalization.

If Ryan has some brilliant ideas for overhauling this system, we’d all like to hear them. But if talk about job training is just a pretext for cutting benefits, then it’s just the same old same old from the inveterate enemy of the welfare state.

 Ryan Stands for the Trump Disaster: Ryan's Democratic challenger Randy Bryce tweeted this:

 Who could forget the 13,000 retweets of this:

Ryan passes Junk Science Legislation attacking vulnerable Women...because he can:

In October 2017, members of the House of Representatives passed a bill that would prohibit abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy … you might not hear much about this draconian measure or the junk science used to justify the harmful and medically unnecessary restriction. Unfortunately, right-wing media are taking full advantage of the silence since last October.

Twenty-week abortion bans are built on the inaccurate claim that fetuses can feel pain by 20 weeks in pregnancy, despite the wealth of scientific evidence to the contrary that such claims do not track with the majority of scientific consensus. As The Daily Beast explained in a May 2016 article, one researcher “told The New York Times that his frequently-cited research ‘did not deal with pain specifically’” and was being misrepresented by anti-abortion advocates.

A ban on abortion at 20 weeks would disproportionately impact low-income people. As the Guttmacher Institute explained, these patients may have to delay an abortion to later in pregnancy “because they had difficulty raising funds for the procedure and travel costs, or because they had difficulty securing insurance coverage.” But anti-choice politicians and right-wing media frequently vilify people who have later abortions and largely ignore the reality that people who seek these procedures do so for a variety of personal and medical reasons.

It's not hard to see Ryan's stark disconnect from the hard realities every American has to deal with outside the bubble in our nations capitol. Ryan isn't really a guy from Janesville, he's a paper thin two dimensional character ripped from an Ayn Rand novel:

Trump's Infrastructure plan sticks States with bill requiring tax increases!!!

Let me get this right; before Republicans tried to figure out how much it would cost to fix up our crumbling national infrastructure, they decided instead to first cut federal tax revenue by $1.5 trillion?

The big story behind Trump's $1.5 trillion road building plan is how little the federal government is going to kick in over 10 years. Ready for it? Just $200 billion. With both the tax cut and infrastructure bill, we're now spending/or in the hole $3 trillion.

Behold the next disaster:

SCHAPER: President Trump's plan to invest billions into fixing the nation's crumbling infrastructure may burden state and local governments and lead to a greater reliance on tolls White House officials say of that $1.5 trillion the president wants to spend, only $200 billion would come from the federal government, spread out over 10 years. Local governments would have to come up with much of the rest. And Wright says cities and states already shoulder a significant share of the transportation funding burden.

BUD WRIGHT of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials: "About 80 percent of the investment that's being made on highways today comes from state and local governments. And the number is somewhere around 75 percent for public transportation."

SCHAPER: Wright says more than 30 states have raised gasoline or other taxes in recent years to make up for a lack of federal funding. So few may be able to stomach raising taxes even more to come up with what the president's plan would require them to put up. Another concern is how the money would be distributed.

SCHAPER: President Trump is also calling for greater private sector investments in infrastructure. Sarah Badawi of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee calls that a scam.

SARAH BADAWI: And the result - families will pay tolls to Wall Street just to drive home from work.

MARYSUE BENNETT, president of Chicago's Metropolitan Planning Council, a regional planning nonprofit: “We have to decide about the economic value. We have to decide about the equity impacts, who's being left behind in our changing economy and making sure that we don't invest just in the places that are already successful.”

The New Republican Party and Cadidates are here...Trump appeasers Ryan and Walker must be proud..

It was hard to imagine...once. Now it's a reality, and that eye watering stench is coming from the Republican Party.

Paul Ryan's primary challenger Paul Nehlen simply reflects the natural "regression" of  Republicans  in general, the exciting next generation of resent driven hate and paranoia. And thanks to Trump's unfiltered boldness, candidates and party leaders are telling us the festering rot we're seeing in America isn't coming from them, it's coming from Jews and drug induced killer immigrants:

(Nehlen) tweeted a list of 81 Twitter users who have criticized him on the social media platform. In the post, Paul Nehlen asserted 74 of the listed critics were Jewish. 

An hour after posting the list of critics, Nehlen tweeted out a link to a page on his campaign website where the names, emails and phone numbers of those who have contacted his campaign to criticize him are posted along with portions of their emails or transcripts of voicemails.

The Terrorist Left: I've been waving this red flag for years. Republicans have vilified the word liberal and portrayed them as terrorists and nation ending socialists for years. What did you think would happen? Note: Nehlen oddly wasn't "silenced...on major social media" was he, when he post his trash on Twitter?

He also posted text of legislation he said he would propose to "end the radical left's silencing of conservative voices on major social media platforms."

 Republicans Mainstream Messaging:

Ann Jacobs chairs the Jewish Community Relations Council of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation and said she has never seen rhetoric like this in Wisconsin politics. 

"The idea that this is someone who is running for public office and who thinks that his anti-Semitic opinions are mainstream, worthwhile, going to get him votes. It's just horrifying."

In response, the person whose message above is shown on the right, explained:

The phone number for a woman who asked Wisconsin Public Radio to identify her as M to preserve her privacy (said), "I contacted someone who wants to be a public official using a public number and because he disagreed with my statement, he posted my private information online. What upsets me the most is that there are people who want to become part of our government who want to end civic discourse, and civil discourse."

 Nehlen: "It means not backing down to people like this:" In the lives of these new conservative messengers, this kind of stuff has been normalized, as demonstrated by Nehlen's frightening response. In his world, this makes perfect sense:

Responding to questions from WPR by email, Nehlen's campiagn said "pointing out factual information is not anti-Semitic," and that people's criticisms of the campaign were posted to the site "to provide the public full transparency of what they can expect if they run for office" and that Nehlen is "no more concerned (about those critics receiving threatening or harassing messages) than they were by making threatening/harassing calls or messaging of this campaign."

Not to be outdone: While liberals are vilified for pushing health care for all (the horror), there are right wing groups influencing Republicans right now that have a much deeper and darker agenda:

The group, Abolish Abortion Wisconsin, is affiliated with the radical activist Matt Trewhella and plans to host an event in the State Capitol on February 7, according to the message to legislators from Rep. Chuck Wichgers. Abolish Abortion Wisconsin: “… public officials in Wisconsin are bound by solemn oath and moral duty to oppose the Supreme Court’s perversion of the Constitution … When we are asked what the punishment should be for women who have illegal abortions, we should unashamedly respond – whatever the penalty is for murder in the state where it takes place.”

One Wisconsin Now: “Rep. Wichgers is not advertising a meeting to have a rational discussion of public policy. Instead he is promoting a repugnant hate group that advocates for lawlessness and violence against women.”