Category: Politics As Usual

Janna Ryan

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

So Paul Ryan married a lobbyist:

Ryan and her then-boyfriend’s work appear to have overlapped. In February 2000 while Janna Ryan still was working on behalf of UPS, Paul Ryan made one of only two corporate-funded trips he took that year, from Milwaukee to Atlanta, where UPS is headquartered. The trip was paid for by UPS, which also flew the congressman back to Washington, according to his financial disclosure reports.


The Romney campaign declined to comment on the UPS trip, nor did the campaign comment on her lobbying clients.

Empathy

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

HuffPost Hill:

Here is the latest in our ongoing series PASTED: The Emails of the Jobless. “I was let go from a position as a Compliance Paralegal in March of 2009,” writes a 55-year-old Pennsylvania woman who asked for anonymity to protect her job prospects. She said she’d previously earned a $55,000 salary. Now she’s earning half as much at a part-time gig as a legal assistant. “I have applied to hundreds of jobs, I have had my resume professionally created, I have networked, I have attended workshops….My spirit is broken. I have very good support from my family, but this ordeal has shaken me to my core. I have been unable to perform well on interviews. I am so nervous that I freeze up and cannot talk. This will not get me a job. But I can’t get past it. And I never used to have this problem. I used to be able to ace an interview. Now I can’t even talk!”

Honey, I know exactly what you mean. It’s awful. I can’t believe what this has done to my confidence.

Language intelligence

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

I was thinking about this yesterday as I took a long drive to someone’s house while listening to Randy Newman’s “Rednecks” album. I thought to myself what perfectly evocative, persuasive use of language. “More liberals should listen to this,” I said.

Because one of the things that drives me insane about progressive strategists is how poorly they use language. Man, do these people love to take a perfectly clear sentence and neuter the shit out of it! Perfectly nice people, but some of them have been educated into irrelevance – because real life is not a graduate seminar. So I hope this book is very, very popular and that they all read it:

I don’t normally do this. But right now, I am going to come out and gushingly endorse a book: Climate blogger Joe Romm’s Language Intelligence: Lessons on Persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga.


Everybody who cares about why science doesn’t get through to the public should read it.


Basically, it is a powerful treatise on the neglected art of rhetoric, the technique mastered by Shakespeare, Lincoln, and the writers of the King James Bible. As an English major, I particularly delighted in Romm’s discussion of figures of speech and how they make orators persuasive by allowing them to activate people’s emotions. Indeed, as Romm writes, modern neuroscience now confirms what the poets always knew about getting to people’s heads through their hearts (that’s a metaphor, by the way–one of the chief techniques that Romm discusses).


If you ever want to understand why scientists fare so poorly getting their message across–and why liberals lose policy debates and, often, presidential campaigns–this is also the book for you. In essence: too much higher education, too much wonk sophistication, destroys the common language simplicity of good rhetoric and makes you less persuasive.

Freedom!

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Way to go, Citizens United!

Two conservative nonprofits, Crossroads GPS and Americans for Prosperity, have poured almost $60 million into TV ads to influence the presidential race so far, outgunning all super PACs put together, new spending estimates show.


These nonprofits, also known as 501(c)(4)s or c4s for their section of the tax code, don’t have to disclose their donors to the public.


The two nonprofits had outspent all other types of outside spending groups in this election cycle, including political parties, unions, trade associations and political action committees, a ProPublica analysis of data provided by Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group, or CMAG, found.


Super PACs, which do have to report their donors, spent an estimated $55.7 million on TV ads mentioning a presidential candidate, CMAG data shows. Parties spent $22.5 million.


Crossroads GPS, or Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, is the brainchild of GOP strategist Karl Rove, and spent an estimated $41.7 million. Americans for Prosperity, credited with helping launch the Tea Party movement, is backed in part by billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch, and spent an estimated $18.2 million.

Again

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Charlie Pierce on the New York Times Ryan story:

How can you possibly write that passage and dismiss idly as a “contradiction” the ironic — not to mention hilariously hypocritical — fact that, after his father passed, and while working the fry station and toting canoes at a YMCA summer camp, Ryan was also the beneficiary of Social Security survivor’s benefits? These did precisely what they were designed to do, which was to help young Paul Ryan get the education that would help him become the adult Paul Ryan who’s been on one government payroll or another since he left college, and who goes around telling half-dim audiences that people on government assistance are mired in a “culture of dependency.”


But don’t you know he grooves to Rage Against The Machine? It is not possible for the Times to disgrace itself further.


Fk Ludwig von Mises. If it weren’t for FDR and LBJ, and for the munificence of the American taxpayer, Paul Ryan would still be in Janesville, looking for a job.

Like most conservative dimwits, Ryan thinks the revolutionary attitude of Rage Against the Machine means Rage Against The Safety Net.

I think Tom Morello just threw up in his mouth a little.

No one puts Mittens in the corner

~ susie

The Mittster rolls the dice, because businessmen rule! Once you make gobs of money, you have access to all the hidden knowledge of the universe and no one tells you what to do:

Mitt Romney appears to have picked Paul Ryan as his running mate over the objections of top political advisors, offering a glimpse at the leadership style of the Republican nominee in the most important decision of his campaign.


Romney’s aides have stressed publicly in the 24 hours since Romney electrified conservatives with his choice that the pick was the governor’s alone. They have been less forthcoming on the flip side: That much of his staff opposed the choice for the same reason that many pundits considered it unlikely — that Ryan’s appealingly wonky public image and a personality Romney finds copasetic will matter far less than two different budget plans whose details the campaign now effectively owns.


“Everybody was against [Ryan] to start with only Romney for,” said one top Republican, who is skeptical of the choice and griped that Romney’s top advisors have “been giving Mitt everything he wanted in this campaign.”

Good clean fun

~ susie

The media feeding frenzy begins, and of course it’s always nice when a Republican is the target for a change:

Let’s put this in the “the real scandal is what’s legal” file:

Ryan attended a closed meeting with congressional leaders, Bush’s Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on September 18, 2008. The purpose of the meeting was to disclose the coming economic meltdown and beg Congress to pass legislation to help collapsing banks. Instead of doing anything to help, Ryan left the meeting and on that very same day Paul Ryan sold shares of stock he owned in several troubled banks and reinvested the proceeds in Goldman Sachs, a bank that the meeting had disclosed was not in trouble.


This kind of trading might be illegal now but was definitely kosher back then when insider trading rules didn’t apply to Congress at all. My guess is that it’s probably fine even under today’s rules, since even though it fits the ordinary language meaning of “insider information,” it doesn’t actually make Ryan an insider to the companies in question in a legal sense. But it’s about as clear an example of a public official trying to use his office to obtain personal benefits as you’re likely to find.