She said that selfishness must be the central organizing precept of your life and that the most important thing was to take care of yourself, don’t worry about others. —- “Rand described altruism as ‘evil,’ condemned Christianity for advocating compassion for the poor, viewed the feminist movement as ‘phony,’ and called Arabs ‘almost totally primitive savages.’” —- But, you know, you’ve got to be careful what you ask for, because I think the glee that some people in the Democratic Party have about running against Romney-Ryan needs to be qualified, because it’s—it is possible that Ryan is going to help the ticket. And I think, as the ideologist of the Republican Party, this is a victory anyway for Wall Street. It’s a victory for the Republican Party’s right wing, because here you have a guy who’s out there, you know, peddling this stuff constantly about how great the free enterprise system is and how we need to cut government and how deficits are the worst thing in the world and we’ve got to focus on them as opposed to helping people. —— And what bothers me is that Obama has a tendency to want to play things toward the middle or meet people halfway. And, for instance, in the budget negotiations with Boehner a couple years ago or last year, he was open to a grand bargain. And even some of his staffers have said he’d be open to a grand bargain again. Well, yesterday, Ryan was talking on 60 Minutes about a compromise on issues like Medicare and Social Security. Is that really what we’re going to get to here? I should hope not. —- But the fact of the matter is, while he talks about really not liking government, really being opposed to government, the truth of the matter is, he voted for two unfunded wars—and put on a credit credit card, not paid for. He voted for the bank bailouts, for TARP, for the auto industry bailouts, for Medicare Part D, which was a very badly constructed initiative, very, very costly. So for all his talk about wanting to balance budgets, the fact of the matter is, what he seems to really want to do is empower Wall Street. He gets huge amounts of money from many of the same interests that we might talk about with the Fed and the banks and other folks. —- You know, the thing is, people look at Ryan’s budget plan, and they say, “Well, it attacks Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.” At least to some extent it does. It begins a deconstruction of them. But what it really does, fascinatingly enough, is return full-scale supply-side economics. Ryan’s plan doesn’t balance the budget for 28 years. Ryan’s plan really is all about massive tax cuts for very, very wealthy people, for multinational corporations, and the beginning of a redistribution of federal spending from funding programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security into Wall Street and the insurance companies. His notion of using vouchers to, you know, help people, quote-unquote, “buy their Medicare” or “buy their Medicaid,” what that’s going to do is make insurance companies a whole lot richer. So, the fact of the matter is, here’s a guy who gets immense amounts of money from Wall Street, the banks, the Koch brothers, who is proposing a budget under the guise— —- Paul Ryan has voted for free trade policies pretty much across the board and is, to my mind—and I say this as somebody who grew up just a few miles away from Janesville—really out of sync with what was best for that district. He is not a blue-collar Republican. He is not a Republican with deep roots in working-class communities. He’s a Republican who’s gotten a lot of money from Wall Street, used it to win a congressional seat, maintain that seat.