Democrats don't know how to do much, but what they do know is how to run a national campaign against Republicans by warning voters about Republican intentions to decimate social security and medicare. Why did the Republicans voluntarily walk right into that hall of spinning daggers?

so assuming that john cole is correct - and i certainly do - what does it say about obama that he continues to talk the talk of bipartisanship?

The core of the Randian worldview, as absorbed by the modern GOP, is a belief that the natural market distribution of income is inherently moral,

Ain't nothing natural about it.

When they have a "natural" market, freed from the influence of Gov't created corporations, gov't protected securities, gov't enforced contracts, etc, etc, then we can talk about what's "natural" in the "free" market.

Steve - There is nothing new about this. Ryan is what the GOP has been about since Raygun. And, while I completely agree with your analysis, could you cut the hyperbole. Its exhausting and reminds me what Republican's do.

Indeed, just today the GOP leadership picked Ryan to serve on President Obama's 18-member deficit-reduction panel, despite his extremist agenda.

And the president picked Andy Stern to serve on the deficit commission, despite his extremist agenda. What's your point?

whoopsie...think there's a misstatement near the end:
"...Republicans and the conservative mainstream aren't reading Ryan's plan and quietly nodding their heads."

I think you meant they ARE reading Ryan's nutty plan and quietly nodding. :O)

Republicans and the conservative mainstream aren't reading Ryan's plan and dismissing it as a bizarre Randian fantasy, at odds with American traditions, morality, and common sense; Republicans and the conservative mainstream aren't reading Ryan's plan and quietly nodding their heads.

Huh? If they aren't doing either of those, what are they doing? It seems like you're trying to say that Republicans and the conservative mainstream are in agreement with Ryan, so shouldn't you write that they "ARE reading Ryan's plan and quietly nodding their heads"?

the sociopathology of american "rugged individualism" has metastasized and will destroy this country, particularly as it is the ploy the corporatist puppets use to snooker the gullible peeps...

Anyone want to take a guess what would've happened if Democrats had released a budget proposal that raised taxes on 90% of Americans, but cut the tax rate in half for the top 5% of wage earners?

Anyone think we'd ever head the end of it from the chattering classes and the media?

It's also good to know that to clinically stupid wingnuts (such as x the troll) wanting workers to have more rights, universal health care, and to not rape the environment is now considered "extremist" ... despite the fact a vast majority of Americans support all of those.

It's almost as if they embrace being selfish, cold-hearted, and willfully ignorant.

This is what Repiglicans have always been about. Just remember the actual reality of President McKinnley and the absolute control of the Corporations of that time. This is what Teddy Roosevelt had to try to undo when he became the President. And let's remember our own history that has been happily expunged by the historians in our history books: the plan of Bush, Hurst, and all the other corporate pigs in the mid 1930's to remove Theordore Rosevelt from power: a coup. And the fact that they actually had 500,000 ex vets lined up to help them. And that they controlled all the media of that time and knew that they could convince the citizens of their plan being right via the propaganda that they would spread. And what did they want to replace Rosevelt with ? Their model of that time, what they wanted to do, is exactly what Mussolini had done: to make the Corporations and the Government ONE AND THE SAME. And then to recreate the economic reality of McKinnely which is exactly what the Repiglican want now.

Could someone PLEASE explain how you can base economic, tax, and fiscal policies on a shitty novelist's ecoerotic-racist nonsensical rantings? As a write, Ayn Rand sucked.

If I never read the word "touted" again I will be so happy.

I hate to be a nitpicker, but the thesaurus has a lot of words. Can we try using another one?

i just love nitwit remarks like that of x at 4:37. on the one hand, we have paul ryan, whose dishonest approach to a balanced budget is to eviscerate all social insurance and social welfare programs and shift the tax burden to the middle class without actually getting to a balanced budget.

on the other hand, we have andy stern, who believes working people need to stand together as a countervailing force to corporate power.

and then we have the witless x, who thinks these are comparably radical positions.

even worse, x is allowed to vote.

NEWS FLASH (not): REPUBLICANS WAGE CLASS WARFARE AGAINST MIDDLE, WORKING CLASS!!!!!!

Hello people, let's call this what it is, class warfare and right now the middle class is getting its ass KICKED.

And the very people who support the party waging the war against us are the people being defeated... isn't that fucking American or what???

In any sane political environment, or any functional democratic country, this would not be happening. What is it about America that allows this?

I talked to my partners about Paul Ryan's plan at lunch today. They looked at me as if I had suffered a mental lapse of some sort. They couldn't believe that any responsible person would advocate the nonsense in Ryan's roadmap.

Here is the question, what would happen to Republican plans if any "serious" journalist examined and publicized Ryan's roadmap with any degree of intellectual honesty? Would the vast majority of Americans jump up and down in favor of massive tax breaks for corporations and the rich, shifting the federal tax burden heavily onto the middle class, eliminating Social Security, privatizing Medicare, and creating a health care system that punishes the sick? Sadly we will never know, because the MSM will never repeat Ryan's roadmap in detail and with any kind of honesty. After all his roadmap is policy not process. Americans don't care about policy. All they care about is process. I know, Chris Matthews told me so.

Just as it's a longterm Democratic/Progressive/Liberal goal to provide univerals healthcare (notice I don't say universal health insurance), it is a longterm Republican/Conservative goal to privatize social security, medicare, medicaid, and the VA so that coporations can tap those markets and make profits on the backs of working class Americans.

Rand was literally a psychopath, and now it figures that Ryan would go for such a crappy plutocratic tax plan. BTW, Ayn Rand's admiration for a psychotic serial killer is little known but very revealing:

AlterNet

She admired him for having "no regard for the other." Note of course, the complete incompatibility (not just about ethics, but literal materialism and atheism) with Christianity - completely irrelevant to today's Christianist frauds who might as well be in the Church of Randianity.

Howard - you're witless if you truly believe policies like EFCA will have any result other than to increase unemployment among the middle class, or that someone like Andy Stern really cares about anyone who doesn't pay dues to his union.

I've read some of Rand's works. She claims to base her "philosophy" on pure reason. That's what allows her ideas to seduce some normally intelligent people. The problem is she is ignorant of the principles of reason. She has no clue what the difference between an axiom and a hypothesis is. She is ignorant of economics. One of her primary economic principles is that resources are, by definition, unlimited.
She was a writer of fiction. She worked for Cecil B. DeMille. She simply didn't know what she was talking about.

And that's why the very idea of Democrats and Republicans finding common ground isn't just unrealistic, it's become increasingly ridiculous. There's no basis for talks, no shared sense of values, no common commitments.

As I have said for a very long time, ideologically speaking, getting 50-55 Democratic votes today is the same as getting 40-45 Democratic and 10-15 Republican votes twenty years ago. There are no longer any center-right Republicans left in Washington (not when it comes to votes anyway). They are all Democrats now (Nelson and his crew).

The policy debates happening within the Democratic party today are the debates that use to happen between Democrats and Republicans in the 80s.

I always love to point something out to fans of Rand. The world of Atlas Shrugged only worked because of the 'Motor', free-energy' device created by John Galt. Take away the magical McGuffin and Galt's vision falls apart in minutes. It's only with unlimited free energy that Galt and his followers can separate themselves from society at large and be independent.

Oh please, god, not Ayn Rand again.

As a "philosopher" she was a pretentious, pompous, fatuous ass.

As an "author" she was one of the worst writers to ever crank out mass-market pot-boiler romance novels in the English language.

thorin-1 wrote: "It's only with unlimited free energy that Galt and his followers can separate themselves from society at large and be independent."

And thus it is extremely ironic that Rand's Republican Party devotees are obstructing the rapid proliferation of today's real-world technologies for harvesting an unlimited supply of free energy from the sun and wind.

"Libertarians" should be the biggest fans of solar and wind energy technology. The fact that they are, instead, for the most part shills for the fossil fuel corporations, reveals that their so-called "libertarianism" is phony to the bone.

If a modern day John Galt created a "free energy motor" like the one in Atlas Shrugged, ExxonMobil would have him killed.

republicans have been successful for 30 years because of their embrace of right extremism and ideological purity.

democrats have been mostly unsuccessful for 30 years because of their embrace of the ever rightward moving center.

Democrats have mastered the art of the self-compromise before capitulation followed by defeatism and abandonment.

I find Rand to be one of those intellectual tricksters as what comes from her ideology is not the opposite of communism, as she claims to despise, but a copy of it. You allow greed to run amok and all the wealth will be centered in a few hands call it a monarchy, a dictatorship, a tyranny..whatever and you will have something much like what our founding fathers fought to free us from...powerless and propertyless masses of an enon order.

x, give up when you're already behind, my good initial.

if a pro-union perspective were all it took to harm the middle class, then the american middle class as we know it (which is really since world war ii) would never have come into existence, since the american middle class's best years (1945-73) coincided with a very robust period of unionization and union power.

but that's all right, don't let the facts get in the way of your embrace of a moronic notion that a lying gasbag like paul ryan is just like andy stern....

I rather think I know how Ryan's ideas will play out with committed Democrats (horror) and Republicans (post-orgasmic bliss); but has anyone polled the "independents"? Might be interesting, as their votes are the ones that tip the balance one way or another...

If these policies are developed then the economy will just totally fail, eventually for the entire planet. These ideas do not coexist with a viable economy in today's world. Business will fail when the middle class cannot afford to buy anything then the corporate structure that they are favoring will fail without the product sales. It would seem like some of these braniacs could fiqure all this out.