Paul Ryan is trying to actually say he and the GOP have ideas. Soon, the media will pick up on this and also say that the GOP and Ryan have really cool ideas to take care of that nasty federal deficit and curb health care costs by 2080. Yes, I'm not kidding. 2080 I guess it is an idea even if it's batshit crazy.

The Economist lays it out for you.

Barack Obama's visit with the Republicans last week, some members of the opposition were deeply upset. They bristled at the idea that they have not proposed any serious ideas and are simply the "Party of No". In fact, the accusation is not true: Republicans have proposed some serious ideas recently. I'm going to post on two of them. The first, put forward by Paul Ryan, the ranking Republican member of the budget committee, is the "Roadmap for America's Future" budget proposal and it credibly claims to put America's federal budget in surplus by 2080. The CBO agrees. How does it do that?Simple, it slashes Medicare...top_paying_them">read on

He's shilling for Wall Street yet again as he usually does. He wants to privatize medicare and social security although he uses words like "vouchers" to mask what he's saying.

Crying John Boehner is running from it as fast as he can.

House Republicans are at pains to point out that a far-reaching budget roadmap unveiled by their top budget guy, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), isn't their budget, but when asked today at a press conference what about Ryan's budget he disagreed with, Minority Leader John Boehner couldn't name anything.

"Off the top of my head, I couldn't tell you," Boehner said.

And as Howie Klein points out, he reminds teabaggers why they aren't going to like him.

And Paul Ryan's is one of Wall Street's most devoted partisans on Capitol Hill, a veritable lobbyist inside Congress for all of their interests. Teabaggers don't like politicians who voted for the irresponsible Bush bank bailouts? Ryan didn't only vote for it-- twice-- as a high ranking member of Ways and Means and Banking Committee, the he persuaded dozens of reluctant GOP colleagues to vote for it and after it failed the first time, is said to have been the key figure in passing it the second time a week later!

Blue America just set up a page called Stop Paul Ryan. While he's a spectacular conservative hack, he's still very dangerous. If you can throw a few bucks our way. We plan to target him. Remember, he is a conservative and Wall Street golden boy.

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For the second day in a row (Monday's show being so chockful o'wingnuttery that we didn't have time to post on it) Glenn Beck devoted two whole segments to the subject of net neutrality.

And for the second night in a row, the discussion featured a guy named Phil Kerpen from Americans For Prosperity, which has a long history of shilling for whatever right-wing corporate agenda it can suck out money for: tobacco interests, health-insurance companies, corporate polluters have all pitched in money so that AFP can variously promote tobacco, lobby against health-care reform (it was one of the original promoters of the Tea Parties) and push the idea that global warming isn't really happening.

And now he's out pushing the notion that somehow, regulating Internet providers so that they cannot determine or limit public access is the same thing as communism. Or something like that. When you have Glenn Beck as your No. 1 cheerleader, logic doesn't actually have to enter into it.

Especially not facts. Because Beck appears to have no idea at all what Net Neutrality is actually all about.

As Timothy Karr explained on Democracy Now last month:

And net neutrality is really the fundamental openness principle of the internet. Whenever you connect to the internet, net neutrality makes sure that you can connect to everyone else who’s on the internet. And this has been a tremendous engine for free speech, for economic innovation, for equal opportunity. And we are now fighting with some very prominent internet service providers, very powerful companies, to try to preserve that fundamental openness, so that whenever we go online we can choose, as users, where we go and what we do via the internet.

Somehow, Beck is able to transform this into an attack on "freedom of speech" -- when it obviously is precisely the opposite.

To guys like Beck, you see, the only threat to our liberties is from the government. Giant corporations that control our means of information, not so much.

Indeed, his argument boils down to a simple proposition: "Freedom" means letting powerful business interests control the public's access to the internet.

Hm. That's some kinda freedom.

ThinkProgress has more:

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On Hard Ball Friday, Woodward turned into anapologist and defended Novak in the Valeri Plame case while discussingJudith Miller. He says the case is a sham and Novak didn't know she wasan "operative," a code word to shield Novak and anyone else from anywrong doing. He specifically said that Novak ALWAYS uses the word"operative" to refer to anybody and everybody.

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Woodard also uses the word "intent" as a defense ofNovak which will expand to any government official that leaked theinformation. (We all know Robert's intent except Woodard apparently)

Talking Points Memo talks about Novak's role as the leaker:" A close look at the wording Novak used in his column and a careful reviewof previous Novak columns over the years shows he only ever uses theword 'operative' to refer to covert agents. And that's the word he usedto refer to Plame. So Novak knew she was covert. And that prettyclearly means his sources knew too. How else would he have found out?"

At TPMCafe,Josh uncovers the bogus claim about Robert Novak's use of the term"operative" and asks the question "why is Woodward shilling for him?"