Paul Ryan's Woolen Underwear

"In any discussion of the problems in our world today, racism must rank high. Not because we are soft-minded liberals obsessed with countless crimes throughout history induced by colour, religion, tribalism or chauvinism of one kind or another. But because the poison which we hoped and believed had been eradicated in our own time by the knowledge of the ultimate evil- the gas-chamber murders committed by the Nazis--is in fact still present, not in any one area of discrimination or racism, or in a restricted number of specific rulers or governments, but in all humankind. I call it "Inner Racism."-

Gitta Sereny, "The Healing Wound"

Sunday, August 19, 2012

Paul Ryan's Woolen Underwear

Young and Foolish

August 19, 2012

Arithmetic was always easy up until my junior year anyway. It was what it was- adding and subtracting and dividing and multiplying- precise, logical, exact. Numbers abstractly represented by letters and postulates about many-sided shapes and angularities with discriminating laws all had a definite symmetry and even a beauty , if you will, and for most of my public school life it was a cinch. Until trigonometry class and Vicki L., but that's another post - maybe. So why do I have such a hard time understanding the Budget "proposals" as put forth by that presuming vice-president, Paul Ryan ? Granted putting together such a

Professor Ryan

"blueprint" for the entire country plus generations yet unborn (I mean he's got all these non-specific disbursements going out to the year 2050 or something before this thing even talks about being balanced!) is quite a daunting prospect and he is so seemingly self-assured and oh so arrogant in judging himself so highly for doing this wonderful thing in behalf of the Amercian people that his whole congressional reputation rests on this document and this after 14(?) years in Congress and now he can be vice-president because he's the guy who wrote THE budget for Amercia while drafting as many anti-choice and anti-women's legislation as he can between ab crunches and buttock pinches . Is it all just a matter of cash-in, cash-out? Of course not, but is it all because we happen to live in an Ayn Rand novel? von Ryan thinks so and therein lies - everything. What I really don't get at all - or maybe I'm just afraid of what I really think- at all, is how anyone can possibly consider this Paul Ryan and his equally facile buddy, Mitt, as serious contenders to anything. I mean its the easiest thing in the world nowadays to see just what these cabbageheads stand for-if anything- their words and deeds are there for anyone to see and hear and how anyone can listen to a Mitt not answer a public question without reacting with a "UH?" or a Ryan try to elide over his voting record for the past 14 years or come up with an intelligent answer to the details left out of his miraculous budget plan without wincing is either a fool or is so given over to the idiotic mantra of "taking our country back" that he or she is too incapacitated by racism to be a viable, thinking human being in the first place. Paul Ryan is described by the indiscriminate media as the Intellectual Leader of the Republican Party-if this was a court trial and I was a prosecutor I would simply turn to the judge now and say, "the people rest". Paul Ryan is yet another one of "our"

The Leadership

young guns (see previous post regarding that young Congresswoman from Alabama or the last one mentioning Eric Cantor) who came of age in the Time of Reagan and someday this epochal convulsion will generate thousands of doctoral dissertations hopefully anent what finally went wrong with Amercia.

"She has a great attraction for simple people who are puzzled by organized society, who object to paying taxes, who dislike the welfare state, who feel guilty at the thought of the suffering of others but who would like to harden their hearts," so wrote the late Gore Vidal in a review of Ayn Rand's philosophy back before the Mets had even started their unremarkable first half century, " For them, she has an enticing prescription: altruism is the root of all evil, self-interest is the only good.." Which I am sure has benefitted Mssrs Ryan and Mitt very nicely over the years especially if those stories about Ryan shorting Treasuries before the market meltdown in '08 are accurate or was that purchasing Goldman Sachs after that inside meeting with Paulson? Mitt of course has never done anything wrong as his income tax returns show (only the poor pay taxes as the Queen of Mean once said), although I would like to see the earlier paperwork on who he got to invest "seed" money in Bain . I heard something about right-wing death squad money from El Salvador or some such wacky tale like that. Say it ain't so, Mitt. If it does pan out its just one more Reagan connection which I guess all the young Republican heroes can enjoy. Paul Ryan was born in 1970 (I have socks older than he is, rimshot) so he's 10(?) when Reagan is elected and is starting college when Bush, Sr is elected. These are formative years for a young man and a young man enamored of Ayn Rand (she loved the young men herself as long as they didn't get her pregnant - for she was a great defender of a woman's right to abortion, or as long as they didn't ask her to marry him- She was a

: denigrator of the so-called family unit, or invite her to pray with them- she was an avowed atheist, someone only a Paul Ryan could idolize ) who stands on extremes himself, should be a constant wonder for the snoozing media . Children raised on the carefully coifed image of Ronald Reagan and the seductive greed of Ayn Rand are a clear and present danger to present day Amercia. There's an interesting "insight" into this bizarre woman at http://exiledonline.com/paul-ryans-guru-ayn-rand-worshipped-a-serial-killer-who-kidnapped-and-dismembered-little-girls/ .

His Budget is really not that hard to figure out when you consider that most of the agenda put forth by the republicans is an easy formula to memorize (easier than the multiplication table up to 12 anyway or easier than memorizing the first two decimals of Pi (after 3.); easier than remembering - for some of us at least- your home phone number), take from the have-nots and give it to the Haves; take from the Poor and give it to the rich. That pretty much covers it- all of it -now if they could just stop people from voting. This of course is the not so dirty little secret of Amercian democracy for what is happening today in states like Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, others(?) is the blatant dissembling of everything we had once held dear. Not to belabor this because such a topic deserves so much more than this Unread Blog can give it - more than NBC, CBS, and pick your favorite newspaper can also - yet it is connected to the candidacy of Mitt and Ryan and unless there is an extraordinary effort to get out the vote come election day everything people have lived and died for during the past 100 years will be scrapped. Thanks to the Young Guns like Ryan and Eric Cantor and their Inarticulate and Shameless leader, Mitt, Voting Rights in at least three (and maybe more) key states will be denied a large Minority bloc (read: Democrats);

rights that were inscribed in Law at least 5 years before Paul Ryan was born; rights that people died for before Ryan flexed his scrawny biceps; better people certainly than Ryan and Cantor and Mitt and all the Republicans and even some of the Democrats who are not standing up to this abomination, better than solitary bloggers who sit on their old worn out asses and never enter the fray they once were part of, complicit in their absence condemned by their silence. It's interesting to note that among the many Republican -led state legislatures there have been numerous attempts in the past two years, especially, to curtail the right to vote to many citizens under the ruse of combatting voter fraud and its only the Republicans who introduce such legislation; and with the recent moronic decision by a judge in Pennsylvania and with what is happening in Ohio and Florida (and what has happened) it is tantamount to a hate crime. Now some idiot who is running for U.S. Senate in Missouri wants to throw out the Voting Rights Law of 1965 which "prohibited states from imposing any voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the U.S. to vote on account of race or color". It prohibited, too, the dubious practice of having voters in certain regions of the country (guess) pass so-called literacy tests in order to vote. It established Federal Oversight of Election Administration in states that- at that time - had an extensive history of discriminatory voting practices - they could not implement any change affecting voting without First obtaining the approval of the Department of Justice. These "COVERED JURISDICTIONS" as they were called included most of the Southern States and several heavily populated minority counties in others, including Brooklyn, NY and about 5 counties in Florida. It is interesting to note that the covered jurisdictions did not cover the states of Ohio or Pennsylvania or Arizona(?) and I wonder what other currently-controlled Republican state? Wisconsin?

Paul Ryan is on Record stating that the reason he got involved in Public Service in the first place IS Ayn Rand. In 20 years in Washington, D.C. he has stayed within the purview of such stalwarts of public policy as Bill Kristol (another prodigal son) and George Will ( who if he's not talking baseball he's braying at the moon) and William Bennett ( the Education Poseur) or the Amercian Enterprise Institute which somehow gets millions to sit around and offer research papers on what corporate Amercia wants from Amercians and then offer live pundits to go on Fox and others to sing hymns to Ronald Reagan and our wonderful free-enterprise system. And no one within this limited but exclusive sphere ever pointed out to him the utter stupidity and absurdity of that statement? Then again, this is a man who is now able to stand in front of a large group of hand-picked Republican Seniors at some "retirement" reservation with his own Mother in tow and just LIE about what his medicare program is all about and what the President's is not. With his mom by his side. What I wouldn't give to be able to call out these politicos who for obvious, nay nefarious reasons determinedly lie about their true intentions by offering their potential voters, read: victims, words that belie the opposite. There "oughta be a law" as an old cartoonist wrote. There are precedents in the case histories of our jurisprudence of "companies" deliberately Misrepresenting to the Public and the Courts have ruled that the Practice Cease immediately. Well, if Companies or Corporations are People according to the Mitt and by extension his best-mate, Ryan, who hasn't denied it, why cannot we hold them to the decision as put forth by the Court in say the Federal Trade commission v. Winsted, 1922***. The Commission had complained that the Winsted Hosiery Company had deliberately mislabeled their underwear's wool content to undermine their competition while deceiving the buying public. It seems the Company used different names or brands for the "wool" they sold to retailers and none of the brands thus offered had as much as 10% of the stuff if anything. "By means of the labels and brands of the Winsted Company bearing such words, part of the public is misled into selling or into buying as all wool, underwear which in fact is in large part cotton. And these brands and labels tend to aid and encourage the representations of unscrupulous retailers and their salesmen who knowingly sell to their customers as all wool, underwear which is largely composed of cotton." It is even admitted in the decision that such a deceptive way of doing business was wide-spread within the industry itself, "the trade," it continues," is not deceived by them"; the representatives of Winsted argued that even if consumers are misled because they do not understand the trade signification of the label or because some retailers deliberately deceive them as to its meaning, the result is in no way legally connected with unfair competition. This was the cincher for the Court of Appeals, but the Supreme Court recognized the unsoundness of this argument and so stated in the words of Louis Brandeis,"

Brandeis

The labels in question are literally false... and are palpably so. All are calculated to deceive and do in fact deceive a substantial portion of the purchasing public. That deception is due primarily to the words of the labels..And they show also that the practice constitutes an unfair method of competition..For when misbranded goods attract customers by means of fraud which they perpetrate, trade is diverted from the producer of truthfully marked goods. That these honest manufacturers might protect their trade also by resorting to deceptive labels is no defense to this proceeding brought against the Company in the public interest." The Court found for the Commission while remarking that a substantial part of the public "was still misled by the use of the labels" and so the public had an interest in stopping the practice as wrongful. So Paul Ryan and his mom will probably go right along pulling the wool over the aging eyes of his prospective buyers, I mean voters because it is afterall business, I mean politics as usual in Amercia . His words are the Republican brand, the label they present to the voting consumer. Today there's more integrity in the knit underwear trade than in any Republican running for office.

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***http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/258/483 ---------------------------------------------------------

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/24/opinion/krugman-galt-gold-and-god.html?ref=todayspaper ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/31/opinion/Krugman.html?smi ___---------------------------------__________________-----------------