Paul Ryan is the commencement speaker today at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. Given Ryan’s approach to budgeting, it’s hard to come up with a more un-Benedictine choice for speaker.

Maybe the college president is trying to show how radical the Benedictine approach to hospitality is.

Now that Republicans have failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act in the short term many are still working to make the implementation even more problematic. One of the latest efforts is Paul Ryan (R-WI) “warning governors” that they shouldn’t count on generous matching funds for Medicaid expansion. From Chicago Tribune:

Each time the stage mothers of the Republican Party push another child star out into the footlights, we find, yet again, that the children of Lake GOP are quite uniformly, below average.  Although this goes back to Reagan; the idea of casting affable meat puppets for the role of “President” to cynically sell the evergreen policies of the plutocracy to the unsuspecting rabble, the talent pool has gotten pretty laughably shallow.  And not for nothing.

Currently the top four choices by Republicans to carry the party banner in 2016 are Sen. Marco Rubio, Rep. Paul Ryan, Sen. Rand Paul, Gov. Chris Christie, and Former Gov. Jeb Bush. The following are findings from a new national Quinnipiac poll:

All four of these budget projections, if implemented could only correspond to a bleak, stagnating economic future for the United States, with the House Budget producing the worst result by far. I’m sure this analysis would be strongly objected to by the authors of all four budgets. But of the four, the most credible claims against what I’ve written would probably come from CPC neo-keynesian budget proponents.

In 2011, before he was the Republican nominee for vice-president, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) proposed a federal budget. He called it, “The Path to Prosperity: Restoring America’s Promise.”

Two years later, now in his second year as chair of the House budget committee, he dusted off and polished his old proposal. He calls this one: “The Path to Prosperity: A Responsible Balanced Budget.”

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan wrote an Op-Ed for the Wall Street Journal extolling the virtues of austerity while claiming anyone who disagreed with his plan to destroy Medicare was, ironically, going to destroy Medicare. While blaming Senate Democrats for the Sequester because they did not pass a budget Rep. Ryan offered a Greece style austerity budget while claiming to oppose austerity.

I’ve often wondered what on earth it is that drives people to become Republicans.  Is it personal wealth and privilege?  Sometimes, undoubtedly.  Deep-seated bigotry?  That tends to play a role as well.  Stupidity?  Yes, but that only applies to voters, not the politicians themselves.

The likeliest answer, however, isn’t grounded in such subjective, and ultimately unknowable, value systems. 

In the governor’s mansion in Brownbackistan, there is wailing and gnashing of teeth this morning. In the offices of many school districts across the state, there is much rejoicing. The reason? A state district court ruled that the schools of Kansas have been shortchanged by the ultraconservatives in the state legislature of the constitutionally-required money to provide a decent education to the children of the state.

The way the district court made its point was to point repeatedly to those pesky things that Stephen Colbert rightly noted have a liberal bias: facts. And they pointed them out with great style and elan, taking deliberate aim at the Governor and his minions.

John Boehner delivered a letter to the White House today about the fiscal slope, and I just find it to be weird. He starts off by calling the events of November 6 a “status quo election” where the American people expect a “fair middle ground” on fiscal issues (the fact that House Democrats got more votes than House Republicans, and could have taken the chamber but for factors like gerrymandering, didn’t enter into this). He then says that Republicans “presented (the White House) with a balanced framework of spending cuts and new tax revenue. Nobody has seen this and the White House has repeatedly said that Republicans have not presented them with anything specific.

Then, Boehner laments the terrible partisanship of the Geithner proposal, which he frames in ways favorable to the Republican position.

Then there’s this curious line: “If we were to take your Administration’s proposal at face value, then we would counter with the House-passed Budget resolution.”