Progressive network of wonks to bring reality to campaign

Paul Ryan gets fact-checked, for real. It's very hard for most people who don't have the kind of time bloggers do to delve into what the candidates are actually saying and proposing. It's even harder to figure out what those proposals could actually mean, what they would result in, if they were implemented. Once upon a time, there was a traditional media that had people who actually could think and process outside of the pure horse-race, he-said-she-said method. Back then, you could watch the news and read a paper and get a fairly substantive idea of the issues in the campaign.

Since that doesn't happen anymore, a handful of new-media-savvy, progressive wonks are stepping in to fill the gap. The group calls themselves the Scholars Strategy Network, and intends to "spell out the democratic and policy implications of their research in ways that are broadly accessible."

One of their key focuses is demonstrating just how extreme the Ryan budget is.

Yale University Professor Jacob Hacker, who serves on the SSN's steering committee, described the current push in support of the Ryan budget as a 'big mobilization' that could be held up as an embodiment of conservative priorities. In this case, those priorities that the network of academics will highlight include across-the-board tax cuts, including steep ones for the wealthy, at the expense of investments in education, health care, job training, college loans and other domestic programs. [...]

'This time around, the Republicans are essentially using the deficit as the central organizing principle for their budget," Hacker said in an interview. "But what they are proposing are plans that every independent analyst says will increase the deficit." [...]

"What's at stake in this debate is whether or not Ryan can maintain that he's going to have a tax reform that's going to lower the rates on high-income people and won't cost the Federal Treasury hundreds of billions of dollars," Hacker said. "To the extent that that fiction is revealed to be a fiction, that changes the debates."

Of course, because these scholars identify themselves as progressives (and you know what a liberal bias the facts have) they'll likely be dismissed or marginalized by the traditional media, which has a notoriously hard time accepting the fact that Republicans just like to make shit up.

Nonetheless, SSN will provide a fantastic resource for us in our efforts to educate and inform the people around us. It should be the first stop for anyone wanting to delve deeper into the most important policy issues the country faces.