The Bait, The Switch ... Oh but he's just being "honestly frank" with you and me and fondling his wallet.

Who was that smiling congenial man who gave the opposition party rebuttal to the State of the Union address by the president?

He's the ranking member, Committee on the Budget. He has published a plan that is his notion of what is best for America during this time of financial crisis. You can find it online at the following website.

As for his post-SOTU rebuttal speech, I also noted the following as written in the Washington Post Business section:

Ryan managed to get through the speech without mentioning, or even alluding to, his Roadmap. Nor did the words "Medicare" or "Social Security" pass his lips. It was like watching Colonel Sanders give a speech that never mentioned chicken.

Now we're not all Tea  Party types who think the slogan of cutting spending is enough rather than promoting actual items to be cut. We are not all Democrats nor Republicans whose partisanship leaves us in front of cable TV talk shows or faux news programs.

But we are angry, upset and feeling more and more disillusioned by all the smiling talk from presidents and congresspersons.

• We did not make the mess we are  in
• We didn't spend the country into record deficits. 
• We didn't start two wars with money we did not have.
• We didn't agree to give huge tax cuts to the rich. 
• We aren't the Wall Street business professionals whose greedy judgment caused the collapse of our economy. 

Mr. "Trust Me and My Smile" appeared after one long frustrating presidential litany of hope and promises but he could only come up with the usual partisan nonsense. 

Mr. Ryan essentially described the problem, then said it was all the Democrats' fault. 

He in so doing also implied that his own party 

• - the one that looked the other way while the mounting derivative and unjustified mortgage loan investment programs of the Bush years - careened over the cliff at maximum speed. 
• His party, the George Bush Republican majority Congress (House and Senate) rubber stamped the Wall Street lobby with reckless abandon.

He'd like you to believe that his own party was not to blame ... well, not as much to blame two years after the Bushco holocaust as the Democrats.

But he can't blame irresponsible spending, foreign policy decisions and catering to corporate interests at the expense of mom and pop on the Democratic Party alone.

So in truth was not Rep. Paul Ryan and his party - like reformed drunks who themselves only recently are pretending to have gotten on the wagon - making the faulty promises most addicts in recovery make?

... that they would fix everything, make it all right?

Ryan and his corporate welfare buddies have a  plan ... per Rep. Jan Schakowsky:

In it was his simple plan for health care reform: destroy Medicare as we know it by giving seniors a fixed dollar voucher and sending them off to find an insurance company that will cover them. That's after raising the age of Medicare eligibility. He also revives the discredited idea of privatizing Social Security and raising the retirement age. Good luck, Grandma!

Now this smiling good son does have some positives in his roadmap plan regarding what's best for ALL of us.

• Cut taxes for the wealthy, 
• Completely eliminate the corporate income tax
• Create a value added tax. 
• Raise taxes for the bottom 95 percent of American wage earners and cut taxes for the top five percent. 
• The top 0.1 percent would see an average tax cut of $1.7 million -- every year! 

Again from the Washington Post,

Ryan and the Republicans have an increasingly odd relationship: They need him as protection against the claim that they're a party of objections, not solutions. But his solution is much too radical for them, particularly now that they're in power. 

So they've embraced him and his reputation for tough choices and fiscal real talk, but not the plan that reputation is built on. And he's going along with it. But that's meant spending down a lot of the credibility the Roadmap gave him. 

As the Economist's Greg Ip lamented, it increasingly seems that as Ryan's "prominence in the party has risen, he has morphed from a principled fiscal hawk to an old-school ‘starve the beast’ Republican for whom lower taxes always trump deficit reduction."

And, like many politicians of both parties who are in place because of their ability to raise the necessary funds to run for re-election once in office, Mr. Ryan's bathwater is as cloudy as the next.

Here's a report of Ryan's top 20 political contributors as most recently reported:


1 Northwestern Mutual
2 AT&T Inc
3 Blue Cross/Blue Shield
4 PricewaterhouseCoopers
5 Investment Co Institute
6 Honeywell International
7 National Beer Wholesalers Assn
8 Indep Insurance Agents & Brokers/America
9 Koch Industries
10 Home Depot
11 Aetna Inc
12 Harris Assoc
13 Credit Suisse Group
14 New York Life Insurance
15 National Assn of Home Builders
16 National Electrical Contractors Assn
17 General Electric
18 Abbott Laboratories
19 Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
20 KPMG LLP
20 National Venture Capital Assn
20 Boeing Co

Total donated and accepted by Ryan from the above list= $ 1,427,820.


 At the site you can see a list of the Ryan's top 100 contributors

There ain't a Mr. or Mrs. mom and pop from Wisconsin on that top 100 list. But you'll find among the rest

• Fedex
• AFLAC
• Humana
• UPS
• National Assn of Realtors
• Lockheed Martin
• GlaxoSmithKline
• Morgan Stanley
• Bank of America
• Walmart
• Microsoft
• Ford 
• Goldman Sachs.

So how is it that Ryan's roadmap essentially involves the reduction, elimination, drastic change of spending programs directed toward you and me and mom and pop?

How is it that Ryan's plan creates massive opportunities for greater wealth and profit of those 100+ donors who don't need access to medical coverage, 

who don't need personal retirement stability 

and who don't have a political voice equal to the money-speaks-louder-than-common-sense of all those corporate non-human "persons?"

Schakowsky:

It's a two-way street between Ryan and his Wall Street pals -- but the shrinking middle class, the poor, and others who benefit from bedrock American support programs including seniors and those with disabilities just keep hitting road blocks.

The Republicans led by Ryan are determined to keep serving only their wealthy constituency and push the rest of America down a dangerous road that threatens what has long been a consensus vision of our country as the land of opportunity for all.