Being our semi-regular weekly survey of the state of Our National Dialogue which, as you know, is what the late David Bowie would have come up with had he composed, "Ziggy Starderp."

Before moving to the action on The Sunday Showz, I suppose we have to deal with this whole Sean Penn/El Chapo/Rolling Stone hootenanny. First of all, this was a helluva get, and Sean Penn's involvement is entirely beside the point. There are very few editors I know who wouldn't have sent a St. Bernard to get this interview, if that's what it took. Second, yes, Penn's piece should have been edited with a band saw. My favorite passage?

Dick in hand, I do consider it among my body parts vulnerable to the knives of irrational narco types, and take a fond last look, before tucking it back into my pants.

If I may say, for the record, ick.

But some of the reaction to the whole goofy escapade has verged on the seriously comical, and it has a direct bearing on the usual topic of this semi-regular weekly feature. Take this Tweet from Very Serious Villager Timothy Noah:

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The ethical chin-pullers ignore Rolling Stone's greatest (& least remarkable) offense: allowing actors who can't write to play journalist. — Timothy Noah (@TimothyNoah1) January 11, 2016

Amid gales of ironic laughter, and great gusts of sarcastic guffaws, let us ask Timothy Noah whether he is fcking kidding us here. Has he ever watched The Sunday Showz? They are nothing but entertainers and celebrities pretending to be journalists. Is Peggy Noonan really a journalist? Is Hugh Hewitt? Is it worse to allow actors who can't write to "play journalist" than it is to allow political hacks like Michael Gerson, or torture-porn artists like Mark Thiessen, neither of whom writes much better than Penn does, to "play journalist?" If we held to Noah's rules, the Washington Post op-ed section would be a full-page ad for DraftKings and Fred Hiatt would be trying to sell me an apple from atop a steam grate on Constitution Avenue.

Anyway, let's move onto our primary duty here. I am going to ignore He, Trump's visit to the Overlook Hotel, where my man Chuck Todd always has been the caretaker, because it's just pointless now, and it has been dealt with more than sufficiently elsewhere. Instead, let's award the House Cup this week to Face The Nation on CBS, where zombie-eyed granny starver Paul Ryan sat down to explain (once again) how dear to his heart the poor people are. First, though, there were guns to talk about with John Dickerson, who has settled nicely into the chair once occupied by onetime Maurya imperial scribe Bob Schieffer.

DICKERSON: Mr. Speaker, when President Obama announced that he was expanding background checks, he said, "I respect the Second Amendment and gun ownership." But then you said—quote—"He had never respected that right." So do you think he's not telling the truth?



RYAN: Well, I think he'd like to go a whole lot farther than he is going right now. That's point number one. Point number two, there really isn't a loophole. If you are in the business of buying and selling guns, you have to have federal firearms license. And if you have a federal firearms license, you have to do background checks. So, I think this is basically the president looking for an issue to exploit in some ways, because these so-called solutions that he's talking about, they would not have stopped any of these shootings.



DICKERSON: But do you think he respects the Second Amendment?



RYAN: No, I actually don't. I don't think—I think he would like to go much, much further than what the Second Amendment allows.













So Paul Ryan is essentially on the same side as the most paranoid gun-fondlers on Wayne LaPierre's Christmas card list. The usual disclaimer: Paul Ryan is the biggest fake in American politics. They moved on to poverty, which is another one of Ryan's areas of phantom expertise.

DICKERSON: Let me ask you a philosophical question. Hubert Humphrey, a Democrat of course, used to say, the strength of the American economy is best judged by the weakness of any section or any person or any part." Do you agree with that?



RYAN: Yes, I think there's something to that. I'm not a big Hubert Humphrey fan, but I do. I think—look, I—let me give you another Democrat, Jack Kennedy. "A rising tide lifts all boats." (ED NOTE: I have often pronounced myself more than willing to have the top federal tax rate go back to where it was after JFK's tax cut—to wit, 65 percent.) I think that's true. But with poverty, we are finding deep and persistent chronic poverty. We have—we're over 50 years in the war on poverty. We've had 80 new programs—80 programs created since then at the federal level, spending trillions of dollars, yet we basically have a stalemate on our hands. We have a safety net that tries to catch people from falling into poverty, but we don't have one that helps get people out of poverty. We're actually treating the symptoms of poverty and perpetuating poverty, so we need to break that cycle and we need to go at the root causes of poverty and measure success not based on input and efforts and money and programs, but on outcomes and results. Are we getting people out of poverty?





And what is Paul Ryan's genius idea to "break the cycle." You'll never guess.

"Block grants and banalities?"

One of the central components to addressing poverty were versions of Ryan's proposal to block grant safety net programs, including food stamps, officially called SNAP (Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program) and welfare, or TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.) In 2014, Ryan, who was head of the House Budget Committee at the time, proposed "Opportunity Grants" that take federal funding for federal safety net programs, repackage it and grant the money to the states for each state to administer the program and set the program's parameters.

Damn, you guessed.

RYAN: I don't want to keep people in dead-end jobs. I don't want to keep people in jobs that keep them in poverty. I want people to be able to get the skills they need to get better jobs. I want people to have the ability to get on the escalator of upward mobility, which is slowing down in America. So we've got to get them the skills they need. And that's not just a job. That might be many different kinds ever problems that people are experiencing. But if we think all the wisdoms in Washington, you know, this—if we—if we're telling our fellow citizens, pay your taxes, the government is going to fix poverty, Washington's got a bureaucracy that will take care of this, that's not going to work. That's what we've been doing for 50 years. But if we say, you, each and every one of us in—in America needs to get involved so that we can, in our communities, help a person, and if we can remove those barriers that are making it harder for people to rise and get an economic growth that is growing the economy everywhere, then we can reignite the enthusiasm for the American idea, the American dream, reconnect people it to. Instead of treating the symptoms of poverty so people can tolerate it more, let's get them out of poverty. And so I think what the left ends up doing is they speak to people as if they're stuck in their current station in life and government's here to help them cope with it. We should reject that. We want to help people get out of the fix they're in and get on to a better life so that they can meet the potential and flourish. There will be differences in people's lives, but that's OK. That's what—that's what a free society has.

It takes a considerable fake to propose block-granting the federal poverty programs back to the states while Rick Snyder 's administration is poisoning kids in Flint, while Greg Abbott is one step away from secession in Texas, while Louisiana is climbing out from under the rubble of the Bobby Jindal Era, and while Scott Walker is continuing his attempt to make over Wisconsin as a banana republic with snowmobiles. A considerable fake, indeed.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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