Scot Ross, top banana at the liberal activist group One Wisconsin Now, was a guest of Joy Reid's show on Sunday morning and spelled out another failure of the Republicans and the corporate media in giving the Cowardly Lyin' Ryan a free pass on his horrendous track record:
Joy Reid: Wisconsin is Koch brothers deep, Bradley Foundation deep, It's full of big money that want no taxes on themselves. Scott Walker, the governor there, they're all cut from the same cloth, It's where Reince Priebus came from, the whole crew in the White House and that are gone. I'm wondering if Wisconsin politics has changed over the years and whether that kind of Ayn Randian idealism is still electable in the State of Wisconsin.
Scot Ross: Oh, I mean we have definitely -- we've definitely become a laboratory for the worst right wing, Friedman, Ayn Rand policy that exists. Everything from when Walker got into office one of the first things he did was attack the rights of 170,000 working men and women and at the same time restricting the right to vote for people. We've seen not just -- not just, you know, our infrastructure just completely and totally be decimated, We've now gotten into the top ten percent of our graduates with student loan debt. Top to bottom, this has been a disaster. They've been writing checks that we're going to be forced to pay for down the road. Again, in Wisconsin, we have this massive snowstorm and thank God, you know, there are still folks from AFSCME out there plowing our streets but underneath those streets are torn up roads. Because Scott Walker cannot balance a budget because all he's about is giving tax breaks to rich people.
Top to bottom, Paul Ryan's the same thing. And I would add one point. Paul Ryan became the speaker at 45. When he became the speaker he had passed three bills the entire, you know, 15 years at that point he had been in congress. One of them was to rename a post office. One of them was to give a tax break to bow and arrow hunters or manufacturers. Can you imagine if an African-American woman who was 45, who had been in congress for 15 years, was suddenly pushed out there with that record as being the next speaker. The media would have torn that person to pieces and torn the party that had that person pushed out there torn to pieces. But with Paul Ryan he got complete and total free pass. It's just so disturbing how little he's been held accountable for here in Wisconsin and outside of the State of Wisconsin. It's nice to see that he at least does enough polling to know that there is a Blue Wave coming and that his future as the speaker was in real jeopardy.
Joy: Well, it's not just him. One of the people who is slated to potentially replace them did not deny having attended a white nationalist meeting. And the media just completely glosses over it and never mentions it again.
Ross is spot on with his take on the corporate media, especially in Wisconsin. Their biased reporting - either minimizing the damage done by the Republicans or just ignoring it out right completely - is truly appalling. It is the main driving force that caused me to end my subscription to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel years ago and to get into blogging in the first place. I couldn't stand by silently while this injustice was happening and no one reporting it. I could give any number of examples where either a blogger such as myself has scooped them or how they totally misrepresented the facts of a story, choosing instead to just regurgitate a press release from this Republican or that without questioning it even the most simplest of ways.
