Musicmystery
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A whole bunch of them, actually.
Try disputing the arguments, instead of pretending they don't exist.
Even FOX agrees is was a pack of "blatant lies." And you know, they're fair and balanced!
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/08/paul-ryan-and-the-post-truth-convention-speech/261775/
"I am impressed, in a bad way, that Ryan thought he could just brazen it through. But it is also impressive that, at least in the short run, parts of the press are responding as they must in an era when politicians don't care. That is, they're not simply quoting "critics" about things Ryan made up. They are outright saying that he is telling lies. For instance:
*The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler, with the headline, "Ryan misleads on GM plant closing in hometown."
*A more omnibus fact-check item also by Kessler, with half a dozen similar exaggerations, distortions, etc.
*A very tough item by Jonathan Bernstein, on the WaPo's Plum Line blog, with the headline "Paul Ryan fails -- the truth."
*And another on the Post's site by Ezra Klein. Sample: "Quite simply, the Romney campaign isn't adhering to the minimum standards required for a real policy conversation."
*And even a WaPo editorial on the misleading nature of the speech.
*An excoriation by Jonathan Cohn, in The New Republic, under the headline, "The Most Dishonest Convention Speech ... Ever?" As Cohn adds: "I'd like to talk... about what Ryan actually said--not because I find Ryan's ideas objectionable, although I do, but because I thought he was so brazenly willing to twist the truth.
"At least five times, Ryan misrepresented the facts. And while none of the statements were new, the context was. It's one thing to hear them on a thirty-second television spot or even in a stump speech before a small crowd. It's something else entirely to hear them in prime time address, as a vice presidential nominee is accepting his party's nomination and speaking to the entire country."
*I know that TNR is not "mainstream" in the sense that the NYT, WaPo, AP, etc., are. Still this is a very powerful item. And it leads to:
*An AP item headlined, "FACT CHECK: Ryan takes factual shortcuts in speech."
*An item from NPR with a mildly "he said, she said" headline ("Fact Checkers Say Some of Ryan's Claims Don't Add Up") but that gets the main points across.
*One just now from the NYT, with the headline "In Ryan Critique of Obama, Omissions Help Make the Case." It begins this way: "In his speech accepting the Republican nomination for vice president at the Republican National Convention, Representative Paul D. Ryan criticized President Obama for seeking Medicare cuts that he once sought as well, and for failing to act on a deficit-reduction plan that he too opposed."
*Another excoriation by Michael Tomasky, in the Daily Beast, that is headlined "Paul Ryan's Convention Speech and his Web of Lies" and which begins, "It just boggles the mind to imagine how Paul Ryan can stand up there and lash Barack Obama for abandoning Bowles-Simpson when he did exactly that himself."
*An item on the Fox News site for which there must be an interesting backstory, in which contributor Sally Kohn says that "Ryan's speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech."
*On TPM, a catalogue with the headline "Top 5 Fibs in Paul Ryan's Convention Speech."
*Update An excellent item I had somehow missed before, by Jonathan Chait in NY Mag, about "Paul Ryan's Large Lies and One Big Truth." Worth reading in general, and to see what that "truth" is.
*And Dave Weigel in Slate, plus Zack Beauchamp in Think Progress, about the euphemisms some reporters still use in order to avoid saying that Ryan "lied."
To restate the larger points for the moment: The bad one is that a major party's nominee for national office apparently just doesn't care that he is standing in front of millions and telling easily catchable lies. The less-bad one is that the media are noticing"
Links to all of these pieces are in the article link above.
From FOX News:
To anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to facts, Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech. On this measure, while it was Romney who ran the Olympics, Ryan earned the gold.
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.
Fact: While Ryan blamed President Obama for the shut down of a GM plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, the plant was actually closed under President George W. Bush. Ryan actually asked for federal spending to save the plant, while Romney has criticized the auto industry bailout that President Obama ultimately enacted to prevent other plants from closing.
Fact: Though Ryan insisted that President Obama wants to give all the credit for private sector success to government, that isn't what the president said. Period.
Fact: Though Paul Ryan accused President Obama of taking $716 billion out of Medicare, the fact is that that amount was savings in Medicare reimbursement rates (which, incidentally, save Medicare recipients out-of-pocket costs, too) and Ryan himself embraced these savings in his budget plan.
Elections should be about competing based on your record in the past and your vision for the future, not competing to see who can get away with the most lies and distortions without voters noticing or bother to care. Both parties should hold themselves to that standard. Republicans should be ashamed that there was even one misrepresentation in Ryan’s speech but sadly, there were many.
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 his numerous votes to raise spending and balloon the deficit when George W. Bush was president.
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.
These aspects of Ryan’s resume and ideology are sticky to say the least. He would have been wise to tackle them head on and try and explain them away in his first real introduction to voters. But instead of Ryan airing his own dirty laundry, Democrats will get the chance.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/08/30/paul-ryans-speech-in-three-words/#ixzz254JV95nG
Then there are these:
Let’s start with the chronologically impossible. Ryan spoke about the GM plant in his hometown of Janesville:
A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant. Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: “I believe that if our government is there to support you … this plant will be here for another hundred years.” That’s what he said in 2008.
Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day. And that’s how it is in so many towns today, where the recovery that was promised is nowhere in sight.
Set aside the fact that Paul Ryan, in a fit of anti-Randianism, asked for government funds to save the plant. Set aside that he voted for the big-government auto bailout. Ryan also conveniently forgot to mention that GM announced the closure of the plant in early June 2008. In fact, Ryan and then-Wisconsin Sens. Russ Feingold (D) and Herb Kohl (D) sent a letter that month to GM CEO Rick Wagoner asking him to reconsider. This was not just before Barack Obama was inaugurated or even elected; it was the same day he won his own party’s nomination. There was no way Obama could have saved that auto plant without also discovering time travel.
Despite his problems with calendars, how did Ryan fare when it came to his own record? Well, he also inveighed against Obama on the national debt:
[Obama] created a bipartisan debt commission [, the Simpson-Bowles commission]. They came back with an urgent report. He thanked them, sent them on their way, and then did exactly nothing.
But Ryan was on that commission, and he voted against that “urgent report.” Also, the president did not do “exactly nothing”: The White House released a debt plan last September, despite Republicans’ best attempts to pretend it doesn’t exist. Finally, if the crisis is so urgent, why does Ryan’s own budget proposal not balance the budget until the 2030s?
One more example — a line from his attack on Obama’s stimulus:
The stimulus was a case of political patronage, corporate welfare, and cronyism at their worst.
As Time’s Michael Grunwald, who has just published a new book about the stimulus, points out, “Experts had warned that 5 percent of the stimulus could be lost to fraud, but investigators have documented less than $10 million in losses — about 0.001 percent.” Solyndra has been the exception, not the rule.
These are just three examples, and there are many others: attacking the president for “raiding” Medicare when his own budget calls for cutting the same amount of money from the program; claiming fiscal rectitude after voting for the two wars, Medicare expansion and tax cuts that remain key drivers of our federal deficit; and so on.
With tonight’s speech, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have doubled down on their twin bets of 2012 — that journalists will sit back and name winners and losers without regard to who is telling the truth, and that voters are too ignorant to care about the truth. Do not let them be right.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/post/paul-ryans-dishonest-speech/2012/08/30/16bb62d8-f24f-11e1-adc6-87dfa8eff430_blog.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/08/30/paul-ryans-speech-in-three-words/
< Message edited by Musicmystery -- 9/2/2012 9:10:48 AM >
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RE: FOX News: Ryan "blatant lies" - 
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