Friday, June 24, 2011

Paul Ryan. Radioactive.

Separated at birth from Eddie Munster?
There's a lot to dislike about a lot of Badger State Republicans. One of the biggest tools in the Wisconsin GOP's Middle Class Destruction Box is Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman who's trying to kill Medicare.

Ryan's not too popular these days. Politico reports that Republicans running for election are distancing themselves from his plan to enrich insurance companies and take health care away from all but the wealthiest Americans. Doofus Former Sen. George Allen of Macacaville Virginia recently tied himself into knots dodging a question about how he would have voted on Ryan's plan. According to Politico,

Pressed further, Allen said, “I’m not a U.S. senator. If I were a U.S. senator, yes, I would vote yes or no on it.”
And here's Politico on Florida Senate president Mike Haridopolous:

Pushed repeatedly by an Orlando-based host — nine times in 4½ minutes — to say how he would have voted on the plan, the Florida state Senate president would only offer, “I’m not going to get into that today.”

The exasperated host finally lashed out, “Get him off my phone. I don’t want anything to do with this guy. Get rid of him,” before cutting the line.
Ken Blackwell, Ohio's former secretary of state, actually supports the plan. And he's running for office. The Gooznews blog has Blackwell figured:
(Blackwell) plans to take on Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown next year. “We need to elect conservatives who will have the courage to take the tough votes and stand with the conservatives already serving in the Senate,” he wrote in National Review. “A good place to start will be to support only those Republicans who had the courage to support the Ryan budget.”
I was there in 1979 when Blackwell, then a Democrat elected to the Cincinnati City Council as a member of the reform Charter Party, switched sides in a vote on giving a tax break to a luxury high-rise along that city’s riverfront. As the head of the local Ohio Public Interest Campaign, I had lobbied hard to prevent that tax break, which deprived local schools of much-needed revenue. His cave-in to the local real estate industry and eventual switch to the Republican Party marked the beginning of his long and lucrative career catering to the rich.