GOP: The party of incoherent old white men. Eastwood’s not one to mock Biden.
Paul Ryan is a LIAR and Republicans love liars
The media coverage of Paul Ryan’s speech: 15 euphemisms for ‘lying’ – The Week
Republicans are delighted with Paul Ryan’s GOP convention speech, hailing it as an out-of-the-ballpark hit that demolished President Obama’s case for re-election. The nation’s fact-checkers, however, are not as pleased. Ryan suggested that Obama’s policies failed to save a GM plant in Ryan’s hometown of Janesville, Wis. (It closed before Obama was inaugurated.) He accused Obama of raiding Medicare of $716 billion "at the expense of the elderly." (Ryan’s own budget includes the same savings, achieved, as in Obama’s plan, by cutting reimbursement rates to health care providers, not seniors’ benefits.) And Ryan even chastised Obama for ignoring the recommendations of a presidential bipartisan debt commission. (Ryan sat on the commission and voted against its report.) Truly, Ryan was apparently trying to "set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech," says Sally Kohn at Fox News. However, since it’s impolitic to accuse a vice presidential candidate of being a liar, most news organizations have tip-toed around the L-word. Here, 15 euphemisms they’re employing instead (emphasis added in all cases):
The media coverage of Paul Ryan’s speech: 15 euphemisms for ‘lying’ – The Week
Paul Ryan’s speech included an incredible string of false or misleading statements. – Slate Magazine
Ryan plowed through one of the more impressive strings of whoppers we’ve seen at this level. Ryan’s been doling out chunks of this speech for weeks, which made the fibs sound even stranger.
In the spirit of the Internet, I will package them in listicle form.
Paul Ryan’s speech included an incredible string of false or misleading statements. – Slate Magazine
Like any bully, Republicans will trip you and call you clumsy
Condoleezza Rice outshines Paul Ryan – PostPartisan – The Washington Post by EJ Dionne
[Ryan] has clearly picked up the Romney campaign’s habit of playing fast and loose with facts. For example, he declared of President Obama, “He created a bipartisan debt commission. They came back with an urgent report. He thanked them, sent them on their way, and then did exactly nothing.”
Somehow, Ryan said not a word about the fact that he was himself a member of the commission and that he voted against its report, one reason it did not get the votes it needed to for adoption.
Condoleezza Rice outshines Paul Ryan – PostPartisan – The Washington Post
There’s more fact-checking (calling out Ryan’s lies) at the link.
Marking Time
Each of us marks time in our own way. Days can drag on and decades can fly by. As of today (8/29), we’ve been in our house 25 years! We were both in our early thirties when we moved in the day Merri’s mom turned 60, just a few years older than we are now. It’s one thing to look at someone who was the age I am now but is so much older: it reminds me that a lot can happen in the next 25 years, should I live so long. It’s another thing to see our friend, Maddy Mullany, head off to college. I think about what my heading off to college must have felt like for my parents and their friends – was it like this? Did they look at me and think of how much they had lived since they were the age I was then, the age Maddy is now. Do the young remind the old of their own youth or of the years since? I’m thinking about being 18, about being 39 (as I was when Maddy was born – she attended my 40th birthday in Chaco), about being 60, 85. I’m always thinking about being gone forever. That’s not morbid, although it saddens me. Everywhere I look sends me time traveling.
One theory of time is that all time happens / is happening at once. Perhaps we are all proof of that: the world is born and dying every second. Live now, while you can.
GOP stoops to Orwellian rewriting of history | Jay Bookman
GOP stoops to Orwellian rewriting of history | Jay Bookman
Taken in context, [Obama] meant that no person or business succeeds alone. For those who care about such things, here are his actual remarks:
“Look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something – there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that.”
In my mind, it says a lot that the Republicans are building their 2012 convention message, and much of their 2012 campaign, around what they know in their hearts to be a blatant lie. That lie is repeated and repeated and repeated, and it gets no more truthful with each iteration.
ThinkProgress Live Blogs The Republican National Convention | ThinkProgress
ThinkProgress Live Blogs The Republican National Convention | ThinkProgress
10:44: Christie bragged about the tax cuts he’s passed since coming into office. As the Newark Star-Ledger put it, “Here are the facts: The 16,000 families in New Jersey earning more than $1 millon will get an average tax break of $40,000 apiece under [Christie’s] budget. At the same time, a single mom working for minimum wage will pay $300 more in state taxes.”
10:40: CNN is confirming that a Republican attendee was removed after throwing nuts at black CNN camerawoman. The delegate reportedly said, “this is how we feed animals.”
10:38: Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) is touting the fact that his dad went to a publicly funded university, on the publicly funded GI bill, and that his mom traveled on publicly funded transportation. …
6:55: Tuesday’s convention theme is “We Built This,” a riff off of President Obama’s claim that the government can help businesses succeed. Republicans have criticized the argument all summer and will poke fun at the president from a convention center built with tax-payer dollars. Two of tonight’s speakers run businesses that benefited from government contracts and grants and one even offered a detailed presentation about how businesses can secure more government work.
ThinkProgress Live Blogs The Republican National Convention | ThinkProgress
‘Real Romney’ Authors Dissect His Latest Campaign : NPR
‘Real Romney’ Authors Dissect His Latest Campaign : NPR
The Mitt Romney who ran in 1994 started out as a political independent. He’s somebody who railed against the Contract with America, which of course was the big Newt Gingrich GOP revolution that year. He was a strong supporter of abortion rights. He was very outspoken in favor of gay rights, even writing this famous letter to the Log Cabin Republicans, a Republican gay rights group, talking about how he could be more effective than Ted Kennedy could be, his opponent, on gay rights.
So you go up and down the line and it’s a very, very different political profile. So I think the one thing ideologically almost that’s consistent from then to now is he’s a pragmatist. And at the time, he was running against a very liberal senator, with an impressive civil rights record and he was in very blue Massachusetts, so he had to be a certain type of candidate to be successful — and to a large extent that continued in his gubernatorial run in 2002. After that, when he starts to run for president, it’s a very different environment and he realizes he has to be someone completely different to succeed in a Republican primary." …
… I was particularly surprised is that it was Mitt’s father, George, who ran for president despite being born in Mexico and did not come to this country until he was 5 years old. At the time, his father’s campaign took some questions about that and it never really came to complete conclusion because George dropped out before the first primary.
But I looked back at newspaper stories of the time and there were serious questions being raised about whether George was qualified since he was born in Mexico and didn’t come here until he was five, whether he could fit the definition of being a native-born citizen and so forth. And their explanation was that George’s parents had lived in the U.S. at a certain time and that he was therefore qualified under that. But I think he’s been particularly sensitive because his father went through some of these same questions when his father ran for president."