In some ways, the most horrible thing about teatardism is that it makes people like Paul Ryan look like intellectual giants by comparison.
Bobo and Andrew Sullivan and Ross Douthat and the other economic illiterates who populate the *serious intellectual* conservative pundit class are so happy to see a Republican whose calculator goes into the billions that they don’t bother to ask how the fuck raising interest rates would increase lending or what the fuck “vouchering Social Security” could possibly mean.
You can bet that they’ll portray John Thune as a serious policy wonk if he gets the nomination in 2012, too. And the evidence that will be provided is that he’s not as ignorant as Sarah Palin.
Update. Sorry for the lack of links. I did this with the iPad and doing links isn’t so easy with it for me, at least not yet. BTW, this site is barely usable on the iPad — about 45 seconds to load.
Kryptik
Not to mention that his grand plan pretty much sums up to ‘Cut the rich’s taxes by half, make everyone else pay a VAT to offset so its paid for’. In other words, a total, naked, radical shift of the tax burden.
I wouldn’t even technically mind a VAT if it went to something like…say…health care. But simply so the highest 3% of earners can get hundreds of thousands in tax breaks? Fuck that shit.
Bill E Pilgrim
So you’re saying that the whole George W Bush as President thing was just a tactic to lower expectations to zero.
Makes sense.
Morbo
Slashing taxes on the wealthiest 3% while gutting Medicare and Social Security and adding an additional regressive tax is not class warfare; calling such a practice class warfare is class warfare.
JGabriel
@Bill E Pilgrim: No, any cynic can have zero expectations – Bush lowered expectations to hell.
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r€nato
‘vouchering Social Security’ means another opportunity for Wall Street to raid the middle class… to raid their last remaining piggy bank.
Senior citizens are too tired to carry pitchforks and torches around very much, after all… and that’s the point at which all the people who got away with our money hide out in gated communities with armed guards, while the rest of us fight for scraps of meat in the streets.
That’s the ownership society, baby. That’s privatization carried out to its logical conclusion.
Bulworth
Shorter Ryan Plan: Despite the Bush Tax Cuts and our two wars and despite eight years of de-regulation, our economy still sucks only it sucks worser now, which means the geezers and other low income losers have to pay the price.
Violet
The timidity of our media class is pathetic. They won’t ask the hard questions but instead faff about rugged, sun-kissed good looks or some crap and decide that’s the intellectual barometer we should all be using.
TomG
So Gary Johnson still isn’t on anyone’s radar yet. Not sure if that’s good news or bad news.
Cat Lady
Racists, demagogues, hypocrites, grifters, idiots, liars, warmongers and perverts, and the pundits who fellate them. Heckuva job fourth estate!
Bill E Pilgrim
@JGabriel: Oh I just meant in the ignorance/intelligence sense, following on the post.
It never occurred to me that there could be a lower value than zero intelligence, but… why not!
David Hunt
A hermit raised from birth in a cave, totally isolated from the outside world their entire life is less ignorant than Sarah Palin. The hermit would at least have the advantage of knowing nothing as opposed to Palin whose total wrongness on so many things I quantify as knowing less than nothing.
Steeplejack
@DougJ:
Your last sentence:
mai naem
I was watching Morning Ho this morning and they had Andrew Ross Sorkin on, who is probably in his twenties. Howard Dean was on and Sorkin in his standard smarmy gliberatarian way asked Dean about means testing SS. Dean ofcourse said that SS wasn’t the real problem, that medicare was the real issue. and furthermore once you start means testing, it turns into a program for the poor which makes it easier to cut. Deam also mentioned means testing wasn’t going to solve the problem anyway etc. etc. Sorkin pulls this “what?what?Warren Buffett doesn’t care about a measly $28 grand.” Sorkin much later on the program, mentions this again and how Dean’s position didn’t make sense.
Just remember Andrew Ross Sorkin writes a column for the leasing newspaper in this country in no less the business section. Granted he’s not writing on economics but this dud seriously had no clue.
bozack
More on Ryan: “it wouldn’t balance the budget, even after two generations. What it would do is massively redistribute income upward, raising taxes and slashing benefits for most Americans, while providing huge tax breaks for the top 0.1 percent of the population.”
No one benefits more from the soft bigotry of low expectation than conservative politicians.
LittlePig
Let’s see – raid Social Security, give to private investors, private investors create bubble since actual wealth-building gives too small a return, bubble bursts, end up in same spot only this time without Social Security.
Sounds like a plan both parties, Republican and Republican-Lite, can get behind.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
I’ve been bored today here in the office and had already visited every site I normally read when I decided to lift my self imposed ban and go see what Sullivan was up to. I got about two sentences into the post on Ryan before I felt that nausea one feels when reading conservative dipshits.
ornery curmudgeon
“And the evidence we’ll be that he’s not as ignorant as Sarah Palin.”
Really good point, DougJ.
Sadly, yes.
slag
Ding ding ding! The fact that anyone’s been taking this guy seriously has been making me crazy.
Is there a wingnut relativity theory we can apply to this?
me
And yet, people around here say how nice it is to have an influential congressman. Hopefully his opponent will be able to get though to voters how useless he is, although I’m not holding my breath.
RSA
Shades of C. P. Snow.
shecky
Ryan gets credit for simply having ideas. Any ideas.
This constitutes raising the bar among the teapublicans.
jacy
But Paul Ryan is a bold contrarian, and really, isn’t that what’s important? Grasping at straws, they are.
They want so badly to have their mythical “serious conservative” that it doesn’t matter if said conservative’s ideas are a pile of crap. In the end, they’re just a bunch of magpies looking for something shiny to distract them from the fact that they’re actually unprincipaled idiots.
freelancer
@slag:
You don’t have to be wingnuttier than the Mama Grizzly, you only have to be wingnuttier than the other guy ?
Morbo
@bozack: And the amazing thing about Sullivan’s latest Ryan fluffery is that he acknowledges that very article and still proceeds to call Ryan the best serious hope for conservatism.
Cat Lady
Apple’s flying monkeys are headed your way as we speak.
Tom Hilton
This site is sometimes barely usable on a desktop PC using IE8. Yesterday morning it was consistently crashing my browser.
skippy
dougj, friends don’t let friends blog on an ipad.
LGRooney
iPad problem? Sounds like your connection. I tried the iPad in the Apple store by loading this site and it zoomed right in. As well, at home, my iPod Touch picks it right up.
Brachiator
I’ll gladly take that iPad off your hands.
I played around with an iPad at an Apple Store a couple of weeks ago, and reading and navigating around Balloon Juice was a snap. Of course, I don’t know if they did stuff to optimize the experience when testing out these demo models.
Good one. Sullivan is not only weak on economics, he is also blind to his lack of understanding. I don’t know, maybe this makes it easier for conservative mischief makers to slip crazy ass ideas like voucherizing Social Security pasthim.
Comrade Mary
The site is pretty fast on Canadian iPads, too — if you’re on WiFi in a store. I have no idea how long it takes to load on a 3G network.
RSA
I sometimes read BJ on my iPhone. The front page is fast enough, but the comment pages… slow.
mattt
FWIW B-J loads quickly on my (original Motorola) Droid. I often read it off the Droid, though I haven’t tried commenting from that platform (yet).
Comrade Mary
@RSA: You don’t know slow until you try to read this site on a Blackberry. Slow like maple syrup, man.
Bill Murray
@David Hunt: Thune is far closer to Pali than he is to the metaphoric hermit. He may actually be as ignorant as Palin, it is a very close battle. Thune did make his money the easy way — getting paid $5 million for lobbying between his stint in the House and his current Senate stint.
Airmon
As an iPhone 3GS user as well as a Nexus one user, my experience with the site has varied.
The 3GS worked poorly on IOS3.x ( borderline unusable), but improved with IOS4 to the level of acceptable.
My Nexus One ( Android 2.1 ) was marginally faster than any iPhone version I tested, but with 2.2 it took another step forward in speed.
burnspbesq
Posting links is easy once you figure out the workflow. The key is to have multiple windows going, and use the superimposed-squares icon in the Safari toolbar to navigate back and forth between what you want to link to and where you want to put the link.
Belvoir
This particular page with comments took 60 seconds to load on my iMac.. don’t know if it’s the iPad there.
And Sullivan really is a fool.
Texas Dem
I don’t like Ryan’s medicare and budget plan, but at least he has one, and that’s more than I can say for the rest of the GOP. But this is all smoke and mirrors because we have about as much chance of seeing Ryan’s plan enacted as I have of getting a date with Ali Larter, which is to say, no chance at all. If the GOP seriously proposed repealing medicare and replacing it with a voucher program, we’d have blood in the streets, if not civil war. The social disruptions would make last summer’s tea parties and town hall meetings look like pre-K.
Ranjit Suresh
I disagree with the premise of this post.
I would take tea party hypocrites who support prescription drug benefits, Medicare, and social security under Republican presidents to a die-hard reactionary ideologue who would systematically dismantle the rudiments of the American welfare state. And never mind about Andrew Sullivan – what’s depressing is that ostensible liberals like Ezra Klein are pumping up the credibility of this lout.
13th Generation
You’re my favorite poster here, DougJ, but an iPad? Really?
droog
Nice dig at McMegan, DougJ. Your karate grows fast like the grass in summer.
JC
How do you like the Ipad? I keep thinking of getting it, but I”m not sure.
DougJ
@JC:
I like it a lot, though more for work than for anything else. It’s great for reading papers.