The good news is that the Romney-Ryan campaign has likely created dozens of new jobs among the legions of additional fact checkers that media outlets are rushing to hire to sift through the mountain of cow dung that flowed from Ryan’s mouth. Said fact checkers have already condemned certain arguments that Ryan still irresponsibly repeated.
Fact: While Ryan tried to pin the downgrade of the United States’ credit rating on spending under President Obama, the credit rating was actually downgraded because Republicans threatened not to raise the debt ceiling. … [follow the link for more]
And then there’s what Ryan didn’t talk about.
Ryan didn’t mention his extremist stance on banning all abortions with no exception for rape or incest, a stance that is out of touch with 75% of American voters.
Ryan didn’t mention his previous plan to hand over Social Security to Wall Street.
Ryan didn’t mention how his budget would eviscerate programs that help the poor and raise taxes on 95% of Americans in order to cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires even further and increase — yes, increase —the deficit.
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):
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.
[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.
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.
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.
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.
. … [follow the link for more]