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Voters in upstate New York hand a safe Republican seat to a long-shot Democrat who beat her opponent with a blunt instrument: Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan’s politically-tone-deaf ‘plan’ to trash Medicare and hand billions, trillions in public-dollar Medicare voucher payments to private insurers.

And that bit of calculated cleverness – - exempting people over 55, but sticking it to younger people – - badly backfired: who would support a plan that will cut the standard of living and quality of medical care for the under-55 generation, and perhaps also impoverish their parents who might have to burn through their savings to take care of younger relatives whose vouchers ran out?

All while enriching insurance companies.

People are not as stupid as Ryan and the GOP assumed.  These Republicans yammer in their ideological, bumper-sticker dialectic about “personal choices vs. Government,” when, in fact, people like Medicare and told the GOP in the upstate NY congressional election they “choose” it over insurance company profits and a voucher scheme they know will come up short with their first medical crisis.

At 55, they could face decades of shortfall and heartbreak – - and they understand that the Ryan plan would make it all worse.

Next to feel the Ryan sting: Senate Republicans who are going to be forced to vote up or down on the Ryan plan because the bumbling Majority Leader John Boehner rammed it through the House and sent it on to the Senate where it never had a chance of approval, given the Democrats majority.

This is what the politics of overreach, ideological blindness and extreme Ryan Worship are bringing on to the GOP.

It will be interesting to watch Republicans in the Senate run from what is becoming Ryan’s Distress; GOP leaders and talk show hosts from Rush Limbaugh to Charlie Sykes in Milwaukee were so heavily-invested in Ryan’s now-fading persona as The Smartest Gun In Congress that they will have to spin their way around the NY results and also from Ryan – - though throwing him under the bus would be too much an admission of their own failure to see the fallacies and risk in Ryan’s scheme.

But they will pull the bus to the side of the road, let him off far from his destination – - the speaking circuit, maybe the road to The White House in 2016 – - and suggest that on his walk home alone that he find an out-of-the-way dumpster to drop that plan of his, and fast, because everyday it’s out there it’s a serious drag on the Party of Overreach.

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