Reintroducing the real Paul Ryan

Meet Paul Ryan, sociopath. Paul Ryan is having his big night tonight, his reintroduction to America in which he'll have to overcome his zombie-eyed-granny-starver essence. So this is what we'll get:

The engaging, budget wonk from Wisconsin is expected to talk about shrinking the deficit, boosting employment and ousting President Obama, who Ryan has cast as the source of the country's economic woes. But even more than policy, Ryan is poised to talk in detail about his personal story, his family, and his small-town values during a half-hour speech he's been tweaking with Romney and top aides for days.

Here's just some of what you need to know about the real Paul Ryan.

• On Medicare: We already know that his plan would effectively end Medicare, turning it into a privatized voucher system. The vouchers given to seniors to purchase health insurance would decrease in value relative to the cost increase of health care, sicker and older people would stay in traditional Medicare, costing it more and more, and retirees would be forced to spend much more out of pocket to get less care. And yes, the cuts proposed by Ryan and Mitt Romney will hit current seniors, not just the under 55 crowd.
• On Social Security: Ryan calls Social Security a Ponzi scheme, and he's not just a Social Security privatizer, he had a plan that was so extreme, George W. Bush, the only president who's ever tried to privatize Social Security, rejected it.
• On the War on Women: Ryan's a true warrior, as anti-choice as Todd Akin. He says that the talk of "forcible" rape didn't mean anything, it was just "stock language" and that rape is basically just a "method of conception."

  And that's not even going into the extent to which is budget punishes women at every stage of their life. Because the budget is so skewed against lower-income families, it's women who get the biggest hits.

• On immigration: Two phrases say it all: "anchor babies," and "catch and release."
  
• On "shrinking the deficit": Ryan voted with Republicans during the Bush-era spending spree 90 percent of the time, voting for "65 different pieces of legislation to expand the debt."

  His budget will actually increase the deficit by around $2.5 trillion, yes, trillion in the next decade, by Paul Krugman's calculation.

• On jobs: The Ryan budget would cost five million jobs in the next two years. That's not five million jobs created. That's five million jobs lost in the extreme austerity his budget would create.
• On taxes: Ryan would set the top tax rate to the lowest level since the Hoover administration. Which is, of course, very good news for Mitt Romney, whose new tax rate would be 0.82 percent.
• On education: Ryan would take Pell grants away from one million students in the next decade. That's just part of the $291 billion in cuts that also hit Head Start, child care, K-12 education, and job training.
• On the safety net: Ryan would cut Medicaid and other health programs for low-income Americans, including the elderly and children, by $2.4 trillion, not billion, trillion.
• On food assistance: He would cut food stamps by 17 percent over the next decade, $134 billion. That's $134 billion that's not helping the millions of people newly unemployed by his cuts.
• On government: Ryan's plan is so unbalanced, so extreme, that if it were actually enacted, by 2050 there would essentially be no federal government other than a Pentagon.

And finally, because it can't be ignored as Louisiana is being deluged once again, Ryan tried to cut the fund that is providing federal assistance right now to Louisiana.

That's the real Paul Ryan, the one who took his governing philosophy from a crack-pot fantasy author and whose serious wonk credibility is as based in reality as an Ayn Rand novel. In other words, the real Paul Ryan is a fraud, and a dangerous one.