Tim Ryan says, "Fuck them grandkids!"
Tim Ryan says, "Fuck them grandkids!"
Ohio's Great White Centrist Hope cashes out on Congressional career to peddle methane in a climate crisis.
Ohio is a dark place full of very comprehendible horrors. There are no massive victories, moral or otherwise, in this state for anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan’s moldering corpse.
It’s about taking tiny hits of dopamine when the narcissistic perverts that run this state reveal themselves to be even more awful than I told my readers they were in my trademarked, typo-ridden screeds.
There was nobody easier to peg, and not in the good way, either, than former Democratic Congressman Tim Ryan, who you might remember ran an ostensible “workers-first” Senate campaign against that San Franciscan charlatan J.D. Vance.
Here’s how I saw the race on July 22nd, 2022:
I am not Ryan’s target audience for this campaign. I in no way represent the Ohio electorate as a whole.
But Ryan’s campaign crunched the numbers and decided that in Ohio it’d be wiser to court Republicans than those crazy activists who care about “woke” issues like transgender civil rights or Black Lives Matter in attempt to lure Obama-Trump voters back in the fold.
Ryan will probably drag the discourse further right, lose by seven points, and then pull the ripcord on a golden parachute into the lobbyist industry.
In the end, that turned out to be a bit unfair to Ryan, who lost by 6.2 percent as opposed to the seven percent I predicted.
I was correct about everything else.
Ryan becoming the latest scumbag to hit the eternal revolving door between Congress and Big Business lobbying was easy to predict considering the insane personal financial situation he disclosed as a non-millionaire running for Senate.
From Andrew J. Tobias of cleveland.com in August 2021:
Ryan, who has served in Congress since 2003, representing the Youngstown area, reported a precarious financial situation in a disclosure filed with the U.S. House earlier this month. He said owned financial assets worth $85,009 to $276,000 -- mostly his wife’s state pension, and his personal investments in mutual funds -- compared to between $380,000 and $800,000 in debt.
Ryan’s reported assets also include royalties from two books he wrote, “A Mindful Nation” and “The Real Food Revolution,” which he said each were worth $15,000 and $50,000, although he didn’t report any annual income from either. Members of Congress make a base salary of $174,000 annually.
Meanwhile, Ryan said he owed from $250,000 to $500,000 on his mortgage, plus from $50,000 to $100,000 on a home-equity line of credit. He also reported taking out two unsecured personal loans, one ranging from $50,000 to $100,000 and the other of $15,000 to $50,000.
His debts also include student loans from his wife, Andrea, who is a schoolteacher.
Very cool how Ryan’s wife was paying off student loan debt as a teacher at age 45(!), yet Ryan still did his duty as a wise centrist to tsk-tsk Joe Biden for offering a modicum of relief to Americans in similar circumstances.
What was Ryan going to do? It ain’t like he was ever going to work off that ridiculous debt by getting a real job after working in Congress for 20 years.
As he showed in his campaign, he will always take the laziest route possible in shameless self-promotion.
That’s why, out of all the industries for which Ryan could have schlepped as a lobbyist, he chose the methane industry that treated eastern Ohio as a piggybank and poisoned generations of area children as an added treat.
Ryan will be deployed against other centrist Democrats (Republicans don’t need convincing) to lure them away from such woke concepts like clean air and water.
It would have been more ethical to work for the payday loan industry. But, as brutal as that industry is, at least it does improve the material conditions of poor people in its twisted way.
Ryan will peddle methane in the middle of a climate crisis that will profoundly affect his grandchildren, if not his children.
From Sabrina Eaton of cleveland.com:
WASHINGTON, D. C. - Former U.S. Congressman Tim Ryan announced Thursday that he’s joining the leadership council of a political nonprofit that promotes the natural gas industry, where he pledges to boost the role of natural gas in meeting climate goals “securely, reliably and affordably.”
Notice that none of that is true. But look how much methane propaganda is packed into that tiny little paragraph, which is about as far as most readers get if they get past the headline at all.
It’s impossible to “meet climate goals” with methane unless your goal is to keep selling methane, a leading cause of the crisis, during the crisis itself.
From the Environmental Defense Fund:
Methane has more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide over the first 20 years after it reaches the atmosphere. Even though CO2 has a longer-lasting effect, methane sets the pace for warming in the near term.
At least 25% of today’s global warming is driven by methane from human actions.
Ryan’s new career is lobbying for climate arson. No other way to cut it.
Suddenly, Ryan’s opposition to the mythical “New Green Deal” during his Senate run makes much more sense. He was campaigning for the fossil fuel companies the entire time—his final test to prove to them he’s not “that kind of Democrat.”
Ryan is the kind of Democrat that is only in the fight for as long as it advances his personal cause. It’s a type we know well in Ohio. Unfortunately, Ryan is the kind of Democrat that leads every one of our major cities and trickles down to their city councils, too.
“The science is in; climate change is real,” Ryan said at a presidential campaign (lol) stop in 2019.
“The threat is not distant; it is here now. I am tired of just hearing about how we need to reduce climate change; it is time to start talking about how we are going to reverse it.”
Climate change is here now. But Ryan no longer cares as he no longer needs your vote and won’t be alive when we reap the consequences of his selfish actions.
If only his children and future grandchildren were lucky enough to have a golden parachute of their own. Given Ryan’s ludicrous spending habits, there probably won’t be much to inherit.
THOSE WMDs. Your therapist shouldn’t be on TikTok… We’re doing rest stops all wrong in America… A selection of Virginia Woolf’s most savage insults… How to negotiate over anything… How to encrypt any file, folder or drive on your computer.
On $174k a year (plus all his committee appointment bonuses) I could afford to buy a 3-4 bed house in Youngstown outright the first year alone IN CASH... AND pay for an apt in DC and all my expenses. What has this dude been spending all his money on? Even coke is cheap in Ytown.