Man MKE's blog

Paul Ryan is turning out to be about as conventional a GOP hack as you could find. Toned pecs and boyish charm notwithstanding, his stands on actual policy issues and his willingness to round the corners of sharply defined subjects is nothing at all new.

And he even dutifully reads out of the GOP blast-fax hymnal. Obama is raiding Medicare! he complains, even though Ryan would do the very same thing only worse. Obama bankrupted the country with stimulus monies Ryan would never accept -- except that he did. And so on. The latest Ryan genuflection to conservative conventional wisdom:

It's not often when Markos "kos" Moulitsas, founder and publisher of Daily Kos, comes out into public view to issue a personal comment, but he did so today and he had extremely unkind things to say about Rep. Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican who is Mitt Romney's running mate.

The concluding comments from Kos in his blog post:

Ryan did nothing to try and stop the closing of a major employer in his town, one that supposedly employed a bunch of his friends. That's called being a dick.

Charles Pierce in my view holds the honor of posting perhaps the most devastating and erudite take-down of Rep. Paul Ryan blogged so far, since Saturday when Mitt Romney choose the Wisconsin winger to share the GOP presidential ticket.

Pierce, a former Wisconsin journalist who now covers politics for Esquire magazine, lit into Ryan big time in a moderately lengthy post. Every sentence is delicious writing and full of disdain for Ryan, who was in the House of Representatives the architect of the GOP "dismantle Medicare and much of the rest of the social safety net while hiking the deficit by trillions" budget plan -- if, that is, you can call it a plan when Ryan says future congresses will have to specify unknown spending cuts over the next 28 years to make his factually lacking little package actually add up dollar-wise.

Sketchy early bulletins in Milwaukee news media this morning suggest Wisconsin residents can stop thinking about the murderous insanity in Aurora, Colorado and start thinking about gun mayhem closer to home.

GOP truthinessRepublican mendacity is now so casual that party regulars don't even attempt to bother disguising their lies. This curious development is analyzed quite thoroughly by a piece just published at Salon.com (see URL below). The article's examples include lies by Mitt Romney and Scott Walker.

Wisconsin progressives have watched with disgust as Republicans and their minions have turned last year's million-plus signatures on various recall petitions into a set of McCarthyesque black lists. Or maybe it's more like a set of Nixonian "enemies lists." In either case, any Wisconsin resident who signed a petition to recall any Republican from Scott Walker on down last year has since been put at risk of being singled out -- and called out -- by these scurrilous political opportunists.

Scott Walker's big health care gamble failed, so now he'll double-down on that bad bet, as is his usual custom.

When the US Supreme Court today affirmed the constitutional validity of the ACA or Affordable Care Act  ("Obamacare," to reactionary cretins), Walker's gambit of stalling on reform mandates while risking the health of tens of thousands of Wisconsin residents turned out to be the wrong choice.