QED: Republican Voodoo Economic

"These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert, to fleece the people."
--Abraham Lincoln





This morning the Portsmouth Herald carried a letter from Patrick Abrami who is a delegate to the New Hampshire House of Delegates for Stratham, Exeter and North Hampton. Mr. Abrami argues to over ride a veto of a bill called "Right To Work," saying that the American People have voted with their feet, by leaving states which do not have a Right to Work law and resettling in states where such laws exist. He then spiffs up his otherwise lame argument with a Latin maxim: Quad erat demonstrandum, which means "We have proved the proposition we set ou to prove."

I am guessing he's a Republican.

How could I know he's a Republican?

Because he engages in that pathognomonic (from the Greek) behavior of Republicans to draw their conclusions not from whence their data leads them but from their own fantasy of how life should be and then to search out data, however bogus or irrelevant to "prove" they are right. (Pathognomonic in medicine is a sign or symptom of the disease so characteristic, it makes the diagnosis.)
This is the classic case of True/True/Unrelated.
But first, let me digress. One thing you have to admire about Republicans is their capacity for naming. The tax on the wealthy which claims back for the society a portion of wealth which society helped the individual create is not called "The Estate Tax, "but Republicans call it "The Death Tax," as in, "This tax is the death of the economy," or the "Death of the Republic tax."
Now to Mr. Abrami's argument: He sets out in detail which states lost population and thus Congressional seats in the last census, and because 11 states with a Right to Work law gained seats and only one state which had rejected this type law gained, while 10 states which reject the law lost seats.

Then, triumphantly, Mr. Abrami exults: QED, I have proved my point! People moved from Non Right to Work States to Right to Work states and voted with their feet.

Of course, he makes the classic mistake the uneducated man makes: He fails to look at other possible explanations for the migration. He so badly wants the reason each of those families migrated to be his reason, he is blind to all other explanations.
Let's look at those states: People moved away from Louisiana, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Illinois, Ohio.

Can you think of any other reason people might have left Louisiana? Can you spell Katrina?
Michigan, well there's this thing called the auto industry which, had the Republicans had their way, would have totally imploded, but for the action of the Democrats (which gave rise to the Republicans derisive name Government Motors--oh they are so good at names.)
Then there are those "rust belt" states, which have been ravaged by the shift of manufacturing from the USA to China, well before the economy tanked, a trend which dates back decades through good times and bad.

And, oh yes, there's Massachusetts, which, if anything should give Mr. Abrami pause, it's a state where the economy has been relatively untouched by the hard times, but people are still fleeing pockets of poverty.

Let's look at the states which are growing: Texas, ah yes, Texas. Rick Perry is currently claiming his shining state is drawing in workers like a giant job magnet. Of course, 25% of Texans have no health insurance and most of the jobs there are low wage jobs for the desperate, many of them the flooded out victims from New Orleans.

Then there are the rest of the states, all Sun Belt states in the South or Southwest, to which people have been streaming dating back to the Carter administration and beyond. The reasons for this migration have been the subject of academic theses and fodder for PhD's for decades. Explanations have ranged from the better weather to places with low cost of living and attractiveness to retired people, who are not likely to be much concerned about whether or not unions or Right to Work laws exist there.

Fact is, some people do follow jobs, but the reason jobs went to the Sun Belt is the factories in the North and Midwest closed down as America lost manufacturing to Asia, not because unionized workers made companies uncompetitive but because nobody could compete with the slave wages paid in China, India and Indonesia.

What Mr. Abrami does not touch upon is what exactly the Right to Work law means: I cannot claim to know its details. I have to confess to judging it mainly by knowing Republicans like it so it's probably bad for the common man. I suspect it's an attempt to eviscerate the unions, probably by saying to prospective employees, well you don't have to join the union, we have both types of workers in this factory. But, of course, you know which type of worker we want to hire.

What really strikes me is the nature of Mr. Abrami's mind, as revealed by his argument. New Hampshire is a state of roughly 1.3 million people. For this small state, there are 460 members of the House of Delegates, who represent roughly 3,000 citizens each. One would think those 3,000 citizens of Exeter, Stratham and North Hampton could have come up with someone better educated than Mr. Abrami. Someone who has some clearer understanding of cause and effect.

Then again, I live in Hampton and our House of Delegate representative once explained at a meeting of citizens his plan to solve the budget crisis in New Hampshire: He would lower the cigarette tax. See, what this would do is it would lower the cost of a pack of cigarettes, so people would buy more cigarettes and the state would make more money. Why, he exclaimed, people from Massachusetts and Vermont would flood across the border to buy our cheap cigarettes and we could solve our fiscal crisis quickly.

Then someone asked: So you want to solve our money problems by exporting cancer to Vermont and Massachusetts? And what about New Hampshire smokers? Don't we have to pay for their lung cancer? Well, no he explained, only in Massachusetts does the state have to worry about paying for its citizen's healthcare. But, he responded brightly, what's the problem? Cigarettes are legal. We might as well profit from the trade.

Talk about having lost a moral compass. But then again, in the world of commerce, where the Republicans live, maybe a moral compass is not something they much need.
In the end, this Republican said, "Look the voters have spoken. They sent us to the legislature to cut taxes, pure and simple and we are going to do that."

There you have it: cause and effect. He knew what those votes meant. Everyone else is still trying to figure out what that vote meant, but he knew what he wanted that vote to mean and that's his story and he's sticking to it.

Pathognomonic.

Bill O'Reilly And the Big Bad $16 Muffin

Bill O'Reilly and some of his friends at Fox News jumped all over the latest example of government wasting money: He claimed a conference for Justice Department "Nitwits" spent $16 for each muffin eaten by the conference attendees.

This was based on an government audit done by the office of the Inspector General.

Actually, it turns out, the 5 day conference, like most conferences I go to, provided coffee, fruit and soft drinks during breaks between lectures and the cost per person for all this was $14.72, which is 2 cents over the allowable Justice Department limit.

But O'Reilly didn't bother to wait for the response from the hotel's accountant; this was just too good a story, a Heaven sent example of how government "nitwits" live it up on his dime and your dime and mine. Oh, we are just supporting these welfare Queens with $16 muffins, while we slave away at our TV stations. This story is "About a federal government that doesn't give a hoot about how much money it spends," and "President Obama wants more tax money to buy more muffins."

Now, you might expect O'Reilly would be a little abashed, learning the truth, but no.

This is a classic event--and Rush Limbaugh is the king of this sort of disinformation. You get the headline, erupt in righteous indignation, proclaim this just "proves" you have been right all along about that big bad federal government and that evil, foreign born President Obama, and move on to the next story without a shred of shame.

Fact is, Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Hannity, Beck--none of them has ever really put himself on the line for his fellow citizens. They are the yell leaders. They are wimps, every last one, without even enough mental rigor to check out a story. They so want the story to be true, they cannot bear the thought that more investigation might undermine it.

That's how they do.

The Dangers of Warm and Fuzzy

We had an edifying session among Hampton Democrats the other night. One of us played a Bill O'Reilly, Newt Gingrich, you name it, the generic Republican, spewing forth the Republican Party babble: "Democrat Big Federal Government Regulations are discouraging the Job Creators from creating new jobs, and wasteful government spending is killing the economy and driving up the deficit which our grandchildren will be paying for," and so forth, and various members of the Democrat club tried to respond to this tripe.

At one point, someone said, "You know, when I hear this sort of stuff, I know it's just no use. That person has made up his mind."

Another said, "It is just so demoralizing, I feel badly just having to reply to this."

But that is when I thought, "Qui Tacit, Consentit." He who remains silent, consents. Or, silence implies consent.

Someone pointed out, when Clinton was President, he had George Stephanopolis on TV refuting every one of these insipid Republican talking points, point by point, and firing back with aggressive assertions of his own, and eventually, the accepted truth was not simply the Republican truth, but people began to question all of this Rush Limbaugh braying.

It's exhausting, but it's necessary. It requires persistence, but it's essential.

And it requires a taste for confrontation, which some people simply cannot stomach. But that's what war is.

I heard Newt Gingrich tonight and I listened to Bill O'Reilly and if I closed my eyes, I could not tell one from another, the Republicans have read so long from the same prayer book.

One of them, maybe Bill O'Reilly, was talking to Jon Stewart about $16 doughnuts ordered for a meeting of government "nitwits." (It turned out this dunce had it wrong, the $16 per person covered breakfast, the rental of the room etc., but when has reality ever mattered to demagogues?) And he went on about how he wouldn't mind paying higher taxes, a 40% tax rate but he knew the government would waste his money on $16 doughnuts.

And Jon Stewart pointed out that even if that $16 a person was wasted the total cost came out to about $800 and how much did those Wall Street wild men, those champions of the private sector, who the Republicans so admire cost us?

O'Reilly pointed out he employs dozens of people and if he stopped working, all those people would be unemployed.

Stewart, patient, methodical, confrontational demolished each absurd thrust. Are you really saying you would simply stop working because you would take home not $3.5 million but only $3 million?

That reminded me of an interview I heard with a professor from the Wharton School of Business who was talking about the Republican line you hear constantly that small businesses are the main drivers of employment. Most jobs are created by small businesses (who, the Republicans say are afraid to hire because of federal government regulations.) But, asked the professor, how do you define small business? Below 500 employees. Well, that's a pretty big factory, he said. And then he observed the real small business is a doctor who has maybe five employees, and he cannot hire more, not because of regulations, but because the size of his income stream cannot sustain more employees.

And real innovators, a business start up with ten employees, fail with great regularity, so they are not job creators but job destroyers. They create briefly, then destroy. So that image of the small businessman swamped by government regulations is a false image.

Who exactly are these small harried businessmen? They are always a single person Michele Bachmann met while campaigning in New Hampshire who told her a story, right after the lady who told her the story about her daughter being struck with mental retardation after a government mandated vaccine.

They are the imaginary friends of each of these Republican dupes.

We have to confront the monster.

We have to man up.

One of the Democrats at the meeting told of her brother, who does not read the newspaper, but goes to the bar or turns on the radio and listens to Rush Limbaugh, and he repeats what he hears there and she has to confront each assertion with reality, and it's draining.

But, as unpleasant and draining as it is, it is work that has to be done.

And we can't be too nice about it.

Obama tried that, until he discovered the people he is opposing don't play nice. They see nice as a sign of weakness.

And we should be aware of this. When I hear a story about reforming the prison system, and I hear an advocate start talking about moving prisoners from state penitentiaries to local jails so they can be closer to their families and to rehabilitation facilities, I just shake my head.

That woman's brother who listens to Rush is thinking, there ain't no way to rehabilitate these low lifes. He has no sympathy for them and as soon as you show you're sympathetic you are a bleeding heart.

What you can say is we cannot afford to keep non violent offenders who were locked up for drug possession in state penitentiaries.

Let's stop advocating for the needy, who Joe Sixpack thinks are undeserving. Let's just attack and attack and attack again. We cannot afford being seen as being too sympathetic. The Republicans base their appeal on their own lack of sympathy. We have to show we are just as hard hearted, but we are smarter. We know government is necessary and can be a positive force to rescue us from economic disaster.

We hav e to show it is the Republicans are the wimps because they are paralyzed, unable to do anything. They keep waiting for the phantom small business Job Creator heroes to magically appear and rescue us all. Democrats are the active champions who say, move ahead or move aside. But if you can't lend a hand then get out of the way.

Or, as the bard once said:
Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled.

Portsmouth Herald Showcases the Republican Song and Dance: Susan Collins Style

Yesterday, the Portsmouth Herald published a 20 paragraph, two columns letter from Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) with some surprising news: Over-regulation by Washington is the reason we are having economic problems.

I wonder where she got that novel insight?

This does sound familiar, as you hear it ad nauseum from virtually every Republican, as if they are reciting Hail Marys.

Why did she feel compelled to repeat these flabby canards?

I was under the apparently mistaken impression our economic woes had something to do which a more complex morass of what was happening in the world wide economy. (Perhaps Senator Collins has not heard of a certain little brouhaha in a place called Europe, and Greece in particular. ) And mixed in that brew are two wars (led by her own party) and a financial meltdown visited upon us by a lack of regulation.

And I seem to recall there a little problem with greedy bankers and stock brokers who sold rotten mortgage backed securities which caused both the housing market and world markets to crash?

If this is true, perhaps the Senator is confusing the disease (greed, and its fellow traveler, unscrupulous behavior) with the therapy (vigorously enforced regulation.)

But now we have a United States Senator, who people have been fond of describing as a "Moderates Republican" screaming about regulations holding down the economy. (Maybe this is like one of those fraternity stunts you have to do to be taken into the club. You know, like running around the quad in your underwear in the snow, shouting, "Beware the Sky is Falling!)

Senator Collins certainly sounds as if she knows: “Crushing new regulations,” are on their way: More than 4,200 new rules 845 affect small business with economic impact of $100 million each costing 90,000 American jobs. Wow! And Senator Collins has been talking to “businessmen” and “Job Creators” who tell her “Uncertainty generated by Washington is a big wet blanket on our economy.”

Perhaps, if she had listened more closely, she’d have realized the kind of uncertainty they are talking about is the kind created when her own party, the Republican party, initially refused to allow FEMA relief payments for flood victims in Vermont and elsewhere. When the Republicans try to control and regulate—no FEMA payments until we cut something from government programs —well that’s just responsible government action. And talk about uncertainty: Let’s spend the summer closing down the government by dreaming up a problem (as if we don’t have enough already) called the “Deficit.”

I keep looking for the specific regulations which are dragging down our economy and Senator Collins offers only two examples: Walnuts and boiler emissions.

Let’s take the case of walnuts; it’s something I actually know about. Senator Collins says, “Washington claimed the walnuts were being marketed as a drug, so the government ordered the company to stop telling consumers about the benefits of nuts.”

Oh, bad government! Down boy! Good walnut sellers. Good boy.

The problem with the Senator’s argument is there are no persuasive, double blind, controlled prospective trials to confirm any of the claims made for walnuts (avoid heart disease, improve blood sugar control in diabetes.) There are lots of claims made for a variety of foods, but these are studies which leave a lot to be desired, scientifically. How many walnuts do you have to eat a day to raise your HDL cholesterol? Is the effect transitory or sustained? Does this actually result in an outcome we care about, like reduced heart attacks? Or do people simply gain weight and start smelling like walnuts?

But the lack of evidence never stopped the walnut purveyors from making those claims. This is part of the culture of commerce, which in this country trumps the culture of science every time. If you have a "scientific claim" which can be turned into cash, the Republican Party and the folks in the money chain are rooting for you, whether or not the claim is phony. Every day I see on TV advertisements for FRUIT LOOPS as being good for your child’s health because of their fiber content! Imagine if the government tried to stomp all over those Job Creators at the Fruit Loop Company for deceptive advertising.

But deceptive advertising is nothing that bothers Ms. Collins or her party. They do it all the time.

Just consider the case of her partner, across the river, Kelly Ayotte who voted to kill Medicare and then claimed the Republican party was not trying to kill Medicare, it was just “Improving” it. Improving it, by converting it into a coupon care program. So you would get, say $8000 a year to spend on whatever your little heart desires for medical care, and you’d save the government a bundle of money and help keep the big bad Deficit away. Of course, if you needed a coronary bypass that year, the bill would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $200,000. But, hey, $8,000 is a start. Your children can chip in. And you could sell your house.

I don’t know much about boilers, but the Senator from Maine tells me the regulations had something to do with the Environmental Protection Agency, which her party believes to be a Democratic anti business machine and the EPA is at it again, regulating “emissions” from these boilers which will cost 90,000 jobs. I don’t know, maybe she’s right. Whenever she trots out big numbers, you know she must know what she’s talking about.

But then again, think about those walnuts.

Republicans: The Anatomy of Hate

My wife remarked I would have lasted about thirty seconds as a psychiatrist. Coming from her, this was a compliment. During her nursing training she had to do a rotation on psychiatry, in a very famous psychiatric hospital, Payne Whitney, in New York City and she said it was all she could do to stop herself from just slapping some of her depressed patients. "Man up," she wanted to say. "Just stop whining and pull yourself together."

So ours is not a household given to a lot of psychobabble.

On the other hand, when I look at the Republicans who are most prominent, from Rush Limbaugh, to Rick Perry, I cannot help but notice a few shared characteristics which one might describe as a syndrome of the hater.

Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, all very poor students. All, presumably, told at some tender age they were not the sharpest blades in the drawer, and you can just see them trying to prove all those doubters wrong. You see them struggling to change that past of humiliation.

And Rush, one has to admit, is a man with some pretty obvious reasons for self loathing. He is, after all, grotesque, physically. This is not a kind or socially correct thing to point out, but it's sort of the 800 pound gorilla when it comes to Rush, and for that matter Glenn. Pretty obvious insecurity and inferiority complexes just lighting up like neon.

Rick Perry, ditto. Not because he is physically grotesque. Not because he knows he is not going to walk out of the bar with a woman and he's over compensating for physical unattractiveness, but he was, as he freely admits, a dimwit in school. He tries to get past this by joking about it, as if to say, having been a dunce, well that doesn't mean your not smart, because, obviously, I've written this book which displays just how smart I am. I can see Social Security is a Ponzi scheme and ought to be executed, Texas style.

Rush Limbaugh hates the undeserving poor, the welfare queens who want to rape the system and free load off the hard working American Taxpayer. Mitch McConnell shares that hate and so does Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann. All the Republicans do. They hate the poor who are poor because they are undeserving and trying to live like parasites on the American taxpayer.

They are not simply derisive, they actively hate these fellow citizens. They hate criminals who commit heinous crimes and they want to kill them. Rick Perry has never lost sleep over killing prisoners on death row. And he is dead certain (excuse the pun) he has never executed an innocent man, that's how sure he is of the Texas courts.

In his certainty, Rick Perry shares this characteristic with all the big time Republicans, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Paul Ryan, Glenn, Rush, Sean, Michele. In fact, it is a source of some fascination and wonder to Democrats about just how sure these Republicans are of everything.

But there is nothing new in this.

Just after World War II, Jean Paul Sartre looked at the anti Semite. "Anti Semitism is a way of feeling good, proud even," Sartre observed. "It is not unusual for people to elect to live a life of passion rather than reason." The hater does this out of a "Longing for impenetrability. The rational man groans as he gropes for the truth; he knows that reasoning is no more than tentative, that other considerations may intervene to cast doubt on it...The Anti Semite has chosen hate because hate is a faith."

Democrats over the past three years, have agonized over the inability of Democrats, of the President in particular, to come up with a coherent, cogent and simple response, a catchy little catechism like the Republicans have: "Regulations, tax and spend, driving up the deficits for our grandchildren to pay. Government is not the solution; it is the problem."

Why don't we have a catchy little riff like that?

It's Bertrand Russel's plaintiff question: Why is it the stupid are cocksure, and the intelligent full of doubts?

Well, I guess the answer is, because the Right is always sure it's right. And the Left, well, they are pondering.

But Democrats have got to get beyond all this.

We may not have all the answers, but we do know this: The Republicans, for all their surety are wrong. They stamp their feet and throw tantrums, but what they are really saying is, "We cannot and will not do anything! No!" They are saying government cannot help. No. We will not allow it!

And Democrats, from the time of Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression know that government will fail, but it will try again, and it has to try and keep trying until something works. And eventually, something will work. And we call the successes Social Security and Medicare and The Interstate Highway System and the Internet and the Atom bomb (heaven help us) and a dead guy called Osama Bin Laden.

If you keep trying, eventually, something works.

Democrats Build Bridges; Republicans Build Riches (For Themselves)

We really need some marketing in the Democratic Party.
The Republicans are so good at this: They turn Estate Taxes into Death Taxes.
They turn a recession into an Obama Recession.
They turn Affordable Healthcare Act into Obamacare.

Well, you get the drift.

And then, in the best tradition of advertising and Mad Men, they all pick up the chant and keep hammering it home so whatever they say becomes received wisdom.

They could decide the earth is flat, and the world was created in 7 days and sell that.
But wait, they already did that.

And evolution is just a theory like creationism and everyone deserves to carry a concealed weapon and if it weren't for government regulation and taxes on the rich, the Job Creators would make a new world in six days and rest on the seventh and create all the jobs in the universe and all the creatures and Sarah Palin would be President and Michele Bachmann the Secretary of the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services and State; but wait, there would be no Department of Education and no EPA either. And Rick Perry would be Secretary of Defense because he looks so good with that six shooter.


And Mitch McConnell would be Senate Leader and John Boehner would be Speaker of the House and President of Congressional Country Club.

What a world we would have then.

It just makes me so excited and rapturous to think on it.

So there's a bridge between Kentucky and Ohio which carries 3% of all the nation's GNP, and it connects all the truck traffic from Michigan to New Orleans and it backs up for miles every day and we just cannot fix it because, Doncha Know? The Deficit! We cannot spend money to do this because we have to live within our means, and we cannot and will not raise taxes and it's all these government regulations which keep us from doing anything at all.

We are just paralyzed.

And we are just helpless, helpless, helpless because we are under control of the Republicans.

Rapacious Republicans. Selfish Republicans. Tea Party Republicans. Tax anyone but the rich Republicans. Medicare killers. Social Security killers. The party of hate and fear.

And just when you began to think, well, they're not all so bad--Susan Collins and Olympia Snow, after all. But look at them. Those two women vote just as John Boehner and Mitch McConnell tell them to vote and they will campaign for Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann.

And nary a one of them is loyal to the United States of America. They are only loyal to the Republican Party.

Congressman Paul Ryan Instructs

Some times you got to love National Public Radio. Today Michele Norris asked Congressman Paul Ryan why he so opposed increasing taxes on the rich and he said, as Republicans now all say whenever they get the chance, the rich people are not rich people, they are "Job creators," and if we annoy them with taxes and hamstring them with "Regulations" they will simply stamp their feet and refuse to hire any of the poor people who need jobs and who the government should definitely not hire to do any sort of work (because that would drive up the dreaded deficit.)

And here's where it got good: Ms. Norris asked him, very politely, well, if keeping taxes low on the rich "Job Creators" is the secret to getting the Job Creators to hire, why had they not been hiring after years of some of the lowest tax rates we have ever set for the rich--currently at 32% for the top incomes. We have had eras when tax rates were much higher and unemployment was much lower, so why were those rich Job Creators willing to hire when they were paying higher taxes then, but not now?

Representative Ryan responded that actually the tax rates for the richest Job Creators once reached a low of 28%, a non sequitur about which, sadly, Ms. Norris did not press him.

He went on to recite the usual cant about how those magical, unspecified "Government Regulations" were keeping rich Job Creators from feeling secure about the future, and how the deficit, (which Republicans created with low taxes and high war expenditures) was making the JC's unwilling to risk hiring. It was all the fault of misguided Democratic Party policies.

He described himself as a policy man.

We all remember his most famous policy: Replace Medicare with a coupon system. You get an $8,000 coupon every year to put toward your medical expenses. That ought to just about cover the anesthesiologist's bill for your by pass. So they can put you to sleep but not fix your heart, because the surgeon has a bill and the hospital, too. But that coupon system sure would save the government a lot of money.

So now this is the best the Republican party's best policy man, their chairman of the House committee on budgets, monetary policy and all things financial, can come up with.

I couldn't help thinking, as I was listening, who exactly are these Job Creators? I mean, is there a directory of Job Creators? Do they have a convention? Do they all belong to the same country club? Do they have a Face Book page? Does Paul Ryan have them over for a prayer breakfast every Monday?

And what, specifically, are those frightening, stultifying "Regulations" which have so paralyzed these Job Creators they have simply refused to hire their fellow citizens?

I had some very good friends in Washington, DC who ran a real estate development company with about thirty employees. They bought up parcels of land in Silver Spring, Maryland, intending to develop it but then a huge corporation made them an offer for this land they simply could not refused. Every one of the three partners became a multi milloinaire overnight. One of them cashed in and moved to horse country, Virginia, retiring at the age of 45. But two others kept the company going. And when I asked one of them why he hadn't simply bought himself a country estate and started traveling and riding horses in hunt club events, he looked at me, a little surprised. "Well," he said. "We've got thirty people depending on this company for their jobs. And they like developing projects, building homes and offices and shaping the future. This is a company, well, I'm not running it for me. I'm running it for them, for the people who work in it and for the people they are going to put in homes and in communities."

This guy, remember is very rich. Doesn't have to work. And he's a freaking Communist! Warren Buffet if not the only rich dude out there with a conscience and a sense of doing socially responsible work.

I would venture to say, this guy is the real patriot in the house.

You may be wondering who those kids in the picture are. They are kids from a middle school in 1927, and most of them lived in tiny apartments with their parents and didn't know they were living in poverty because everyone around them lived about the same way. And some of them, probably most, grew up to own big houses and cars and send their kids to college because a rising tide raised their boats, as the country went through the Depression and the World War and they were part of that community which hung on together and got the country through it all and built a future for themselves and their cohort. They paid their taxes and never complained.

Michele Norris asked Mr. Ryan about his claim hat President Obama was engaging in Class Warfare by suggesting we increase taxes on the rich. She said, actually aren't you the one who is engaging in class warfare by asking the question, by making the issue of spreading the tax burden more evenly into a class question?

He just laughed and said he didn't see that at all.

Check out Congressman Ryan's hairline. That simian look may tell you something about him, and about those who travel with him in that right wing party on Capitol Hill.