The Republican Convention

Ryan didn't consult me on his speech, but if he had I would have advised him to stick with undeniable facts, whether or not they had a Wisconsin connection. When the US taxpayers bailed out GM and the Obama Government took over it's management, thousands of people working for GM dealers lost their jobs. (Chances are pretty good that some lived in Wisconsin

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) claimed during his convention speech Wednesday that President Obama is responsible for the closure of a GM plant in Janesville, Wisconsin. However, as many media outlets have noted, GM announced plans to close the plant in June ’08 — long before Obama was even elected — and it ceased major operations in December of that year.

For proof, just ask one of the more prominent supporters of the Janesville plant shutdown — the George W. Bush Administration. After all, the closure was part of a broader GM restructuring initiative that the then-President supported. White House Press Secretary Dana Perino even praised it as evidence of GM “adapting well:”


The White House called the announcement a sign that the auto giant was “adapting well” to market shifts.

“It’s a sign that Detroit continues to adapt and evolve and address the change in consumer tastes and attitudes. And I think that they’re adapting well,” spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

“And they’ll make these changes, and hopefully be able to pull themselves up out of what has been a rough several years,”

she said. …

GM plans to shutter production at its Toluca, Mexico, pickup truck at the end of the year and its Oshawa, Canada plant will be closed in 2009. Plants in Moraine, Ohio and Janesville, Wisconsin, are slated for closure in 2010 “or sooner if market demand dictates,” GM said.

In keeping with the rest of the night’s theme of ignoring and whitewashing the Bush Administration’s disastrous record, Ryan failed to mention this inconvenient history.

Condy didn't use one.

Your double standard is blatant and laughable.

What he should have focused on and very specifically, is the fact that Obama, more than once, voted against legislation that would compel doctors to provide life saving action to babies (not fetuses...not lumps of parasitic flesh) that surrvived an abortion procedure.

It all goes back to a woman named Jill Stanek, an anti-choice fanatic who uses her popular blog to do things like help anti-choice activists figure out which doctors they want to stalk and promulgate every lurid story that percolates within the anti-choice community, including claims that Chinese people eat fetuses. Stanek rose to prominence after claiming that the Illinois hospital she worked at as a nurse was performing botched abortions, accidentally delivering babies alive and then tossing them in a utility closet to die. (A state investigation demonstrated that her claims could not be substantiated.) Stanek brought this story to the Illinois legislature in support of a bill called the "Born Alive Act," even though the behavior Stanek claimed to have seen would have, if it had actually happened, already been illegal under Illinois law. What was clear to Obama when he opposed this bill in his time as a state legislator, was that it had nothing to do with actual babies that had been born alive. As FactCheck.org explains:


What Obama voted against was legislation that would have extended the law's protection to any aborted fetus that shows any sign of life, even if doctors are certain that it cannot survive.

Snood's classic sound & fury.

What the hell is this supposed to mean?

Not that I mind defending Romney but where in this thread have I done so?

Do you even think for 30 seconds before you post, or do you have duffle bag filled with idiotic insults that you reach for whenever you see a post from me?

Such an intellectual is our snood.

No creature of raw and irrational emotional, he can always be counted upon to eviscerate an opponent's argument with concise, yet profound prose:

"A sack' o **** like Romney" deserves a place of honor amongst sublime American rhetoric.

(Brilliant use of the apostrophe there snoodly)

A tip-o-the-hat to you Leftist Warrior!

I notice you're not saying that Cycloptichorn is mistaken, or that Ryan did not lie through his teeth in that speech....

To anyone watching Ryan’s speech who hasn’t been paying much attention to the ins and outs and accusations of the campaign, I suspect Ryan came across as a smart, passionate and all-around nice guy — the sort of guy you can imagine having a friendly chat with while watching your kids play soccer together. And for a lot of voters, what matters isn’t what candidates have done or what they promise to do —it’s personality. On this measure, Mitt Romney has been catastrophically struggling and with his speech, Ryan humanized himself and presumably by extension, the top of the ticket.

Barry Secrest: Romney has been catastrophically struggling?

Last time I checked, Romney was leaving Obama in the dust when it comes to campaign contributions. Obama's campaign is, in fact, in the red.

If that's 'catastrophic' to Romney, we'll take more of it.

2. Deceiving

On the other hand, 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.

Barry Secrest: Which is more jobs than Obama has created; however, when rebutting the words of politicians, Kohn's argument is devoid of any specific facts.

Even garden variety bloggers can at least make a salient point or two. Not so with these so-called journalists.

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.

Barry Secrest: Simply not true.

Professional credit rating agencies do not base their decisions on subjective political perceptions, otherwise, they would be less than worthless and bound only by their respective ideologies.

These agencies do base their findings on cold, hard data, and we already know what the US financial data looks like.

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.

Barry Secrest: Um, excuse us, but GM declared bankrutpcy under Obama, not Bush.

While you're at it Sally, why don't you explain where one 'closed GM plant' ended up under Obama's tutelage?

If you guessed Mexico, you get the gold star. Wonder how much Obama made from that deal?

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.

Barry Secrest: "If you started a business, you didn't build that, somebody else made that happen."

Sounds pretty clear to me....

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.

Barry Secrest: Uh...say what? OMG How ridiculous!

$ 716 billion was cut from Medicare, period. You can try to spin that anyway you want, Sally, but trying to put lipstick on it is not going to change the simple fact.

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.

3. Distracting

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.

Barry Secrest: Sorry, but 75% of all Americans don't want killing babies to be institutionalized by the central state.

Ryan didn’t mention his previous plan to hand over Social Security to Wall Street.

Barry Secrest: It's a choice, people get to choose, and as it stands, there is no money left in the trust fund. A fact that the Left never seems to want to bring up.


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.

Barry Secrest: Not true, the tax cuts are across the board. The best way to help the poor is to provide them with economic opportunity, not redistribute other people's money to them.

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.

At the end of his speech, Ryan quoted his dad, who used to say to him, “"Son. You have a choice: You can be part of the problem, or you can be part of the solution."

Ryan may have helped solve some of the likeability problems facing Romney, but ultimately by trying to deceive voters about basic facts and trying to distract voters from his own record, Ryan’s speech caused a much larger problem for himself and his running mate.

Barry Secrest: That a Progessive Obama supporter can even talk to us about distractions is a joke unto itself.

What about Romney the "felon," "tax cheat," "enslaver," "murderer"; are those not over-the-top distractions proffered by Obama, which are then gobbled up by media mavens like yourself, Sally?

Pathetic.....