You're So Wonderful, Not

UPDATE IV:  "Imagine a presidential candidate who spoke with blunt honesty about American problems, dwelling on measures by which the United States lags its economic peers. . .

[Talk of American exceptionalism] may inspire some people and politicians to perform heroically, rising to the level of our self-image. But during a presidential campaign, it can be deeply dysfunctional, ensuring that many major issues are barely discussed. Problems that cannot be candidly described and vigorously debated are unlikely to be addressed seriously. In a country where citizens think of themselves as practical problem-solvers and realists, this aversion to bad news is a surprising feature of the democratic process."

Read The New York Times, The Opiate of Exceptionalism. 

UPDATE III: "The Anthony Weiner story is really about narcissism." Read The New York Times, The Online Looking Glass.


UPDATE II: "America needs to adjust its message to college graduates." Read The New York Times, It’s Not About You.


UPDATE: American 'exceptionalism' "discourages compromise, for what God has made exceptional, man must not alter. And yet clearly America must change fundamentally or continue to decline. It could begin by junking a phase that reeks of arrogance and discourages compromise. American exceptionalism ought to be called American narcissism." Read the Washington Post, The myth of American exceptionalism.

"Americans’ tendency toward overconfidence is corroding our citizenship" and may be responsible for our unwillingness "to support the sacrifices that will be required to avert fiscal catastrophe." Read The New York Times, The Modesty Manifesto.

The Obamney Snow Job

The Obamney campaign was asked "to substantiate their claim that his policies will create 12 million jobs during his first term. The results were, as the kids say, LOL-worthy.

One study said a Romney-like tax plan could create 7 million jobs. The only problem? That was over 10 years, not four years. Worse, the study assumed that a Romney-like tax plan would be completely paid for and would happen in an economy at full employment. Neither is likely.

The next study was a Citigroup Global Markets effort that projected 3 million energy-related jobs. The only problems? It was over eight years, not four. Oh, and it wasn’t evaluating any of Romney’s policies at all. It was actually looking at current trends and policies — which is to say, Obama’s policies.

Then there’s the 2 million jobs that a 2011 International Trade Commission report estimated we could create if China stopped violating our intellectual property rights. This study wasn’t looking at either Obama or Romney’s policies, and no one thinks that any U.S. president could get Chinese businesses to respect American patents.

So Romney’s claim of 12 million jobs over four years breaks down to 7 million jobs over 10 years in an economy that’s already at full employment, 3 million jobs over eight years that have nothing to do with any of Romney’s policies, and 2 million jobs if China suddenly became very, very respectful of U.S. intellectual property laws."

Read the Washington Post, The Romney campaign’s job math is just as bad as its tax math.

"[T]he true Romney plan is to create an economic boom through the sheer power of Mr. Romney’s personal awesomeness. But the campaign doesn’t dare say that, for fear that voters would (rightly) consider it ridiculous. So what we’re getting instead is an attempt to brazen it out with nakedly false claims. There’s no jobs plan; just a plan for a snow job on the American people"

Read The New York Times, Snow Job on Jobs. 

More of Those Republi-CON and So-Call Christian Family Values

"Conservative pundit Dinesh D’Souza was forced to quit as president of an evangelical Christian college in Manhattan after it came to light that he became engaged to a young woman while he was still married.

D’Souza, 51, had brought his 29-year-old fiancée to a religious conference, and they shared a hotel room.

His resignation from The King’s College was announced Thursday by Andy Mills, chairman of the institution’s board of trustees.

A former Ronald Reagan aide, D’Souza is a best-selling conservative author and director of the controversial documentary “2016: Obama’s America” — which cast a critical eye at the President’s upbringing and early influences."


Read the New York Daily News, Conservative pundit Dinesh D'Souza steps down from Manhattan evangelical Christian college after unholy tryst. 

I guess his CONservative success went to his head (the little one that is).

Republi-CON CONcern for the Poor

Who stopped by a soup kitchen on his way to the airport for a 15 minutes photo op washing clean dishes?  Read the Washington Post, Charity president unhappy about Paul Ryan soup kitchen ‘photo op’, which includes this video showing the shameless political stunt:



A perfect metaphor of 'the GOP disrespect for the poor.'

The Republi-CON Budget Con

The Republi-cons can't even explain their budget proposal to their media cronies at Hedgehog News, "[i]t would take me too long to go through all the math."

But "the problem isn’t that the math on their plan takes too long to detail. It’s that the math on their plan can’t be done. Or, it can be done, but when you do it, you get answers the Romney campaign doesn’t like — for instance, that the tax plan will either raise taxes on the middle class or add to the deficit."
Read the Washington Post, This is how you quickly do the math on the Romney-Ryan tax plan. 

The Wizard of Republi-CONism Strikes Again!

UPDATE VII:  His job is not to worry about 'those people'.  From the Washington Post, Brutal new Obama ad features Mitt Romney and the 47 percenters:

"The Obama campaign has not sent this ad to national reporters, but I’m told it will air in the seven key swing states. It is a brutal shot at Mitt Romney’s videotaped remarks about the freeloading 47 percent — it features nothing but audio of Romney’s own words, accompanied by pictures of veterans, workers, families with children, and other 47 percenters:



The ad concludes on these words: 'My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.'"

And he needn't worry that it will be his job not to worry about 'those people'. 

UPDATE VI:  Willard "Mitt Romney stands by his secretly taped stance that half of Americans are mindless moochers who don't pay income tax"  Watch The Colbert Report, Mitt Romney's Secret Video, as he shows Obamney how to deliver his message to the freeloaders and moachers with a little more penache:

The Colbert Report
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UPDATE V:  The Republi-con Party "has been taken over by an Ayn Rand-type vision of society, in which a handful of heroic businessmen are responsible for all economic good, while the rest of us are just along for the ride."  Read The New York Times, Disdain for Workers.

UPDATE IV:  And just who are those '47 per-centers'?  More likely than not, Republi-cons.  Read the Washington Post, Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” problem — in 2 maps.  

UPDATE III:  "The candidate needs to stop talking.

Talking includes 'issuing statements' and 'approving this message.' Talking includes making faces that could be interpreted as expressing an opinion. This extends to talking at fundraisers and talking in private and reading books to your grandchildren. This includes making remarks that you thought were off the record. There is no longer any such thing as off the record. You are a candidate for public office. If it were possible, your thoughts and your eerie clown-dreams and the rare occasions when you lusted in your heart would be on the record. If you ever open your mouth, you must assume that everyone who disagrees with you is listening. So avoid the problem altogether. Don’t open your mouth.

This will create a few problems, sure, but it will solve more. Yes, the debates will be a little awkward, as President Obama speaks candidly and at length on a variety of subjects, and Mitt Romney just stands there silently looking presidential and occasionally making a hand gesture of polite disagreement. But it cannot possibly be worse than the present state of affairs."

Read the Washington Post, Mitt Romney needs to stop talking. 

UPDATE II:  "Mitt Romney’s comments on the 47 percent of Americans who make too little to pay income tax and 'will vote for this president no matter what' are causing him some political problems this morning. But could they cause him any electoral problems? Is he really insulting anyone who would already be willing to vote for him?

Actually, yes. The Tax Foundation put out this helpful map of the states with the highest and lowest percentage of people who don’t file income tax returns. The biggest non-filing states are — except Florida and New Mexico — solid red states:

 

Three of the states with the lowest number of non-filers are solidly conservative: Alaska, North Dakota and Wyoming. Two, New Hampshire and Virginia, are swing states. All the rest are solidly Democratic, including half of New England. All told, Obama gets 50 electoral votes from the 'maker' states to Romney’s 9 — 17 are tossups — while Romney gets 96 electoral votes from the 'taker' states to Obama’s 5, with 29 as tossups.

Read the Washington Post, Mitt Romney will probably get 95 electoral votes from ‘moocher’ states. Obama will probably get 5.

UPDATE:  "For what it’s worth, this division of “makers” and “takers” isn’t true. Among the Americans who paid no federal income taxes in 2011, 61 percent paid payroll taxes — which means they have jobs and, when you account for both sides of the payroll tax, they paid 15.3 percent of their income in taxes, which is higher than the 13.9 percent that Romney paid. Another 22 percent were elderly.

So 83 percent of those not paying federal income taxes are either working and paying payroll taxes or they’re elderly and Romney is promising to protect their benefits because they’ve earned them. The remainder, by and large, aren’t paying federal income or payroll taxes because they’re unemployed. But that’s a small fraction of the country."

Read the Washington Post, Romney’s theory of the “taker class,” and why it matters.

"Who are these [so-called Republi-con] freeloaders? Is it the Iraq war veteran who goes to the V.A.? Is it the student getting a loan to go to college? Is it the retiree on Social Security or Medicare?

It suggests that Romney doesn’t know much about the culture of America. Yes, the entitlement state has expanded, but America remains one of the hardest-working nations on earth. Americans work longer hours than just about anyone else. Americans believe in work more than almost any other people. Ninety-two percent say that hard work is the key to success, according to a 2009 Pew Research Survey.

It says that Romney doesn’t know much about the political culture. Americans haven’t become childlike worshipers of big government. On the contrary, trust in government has declined. The number of people who think government spending promotes social mobility has fallen.

The people who receive the disproportionate share of government spending are not big-government lovers. They are Republicans. They are senior citizens. They are white men with high school degrees. As Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution has noted, the people who have benefited from the entitlements explosion are middle-class workers, more so than the dependent poor.

Romney’s comments also reveal that he has lost any sense of the social compact."

Read The New York Times, Thurston Howell Romney.  

Anybody But Obamney

"There is no love for Mitt Romney in today’s papers. Both The Post and the New York Times have polls showing the Republican presidential nominee trailing President Obama in Florida and Ohio. And there appears to be no love for Romney out on the hustings.

As the clip from 'Morning Joe' shows, after Romney thanked his running mate Paul Ryan for a rousing introduction in Ohio, the crowd started chanting 'Ryan! Ryan!' And then the unfortunate happened. 'Wait a second,' Romney said turning to the crowd before directing them with his hands. 'Romney-Ryan! Romney-Ryan! Romney-Ryan! There we go. All right.' The scene was so painful, 'Morning Joe' host Joe Scarborough muttered, 'Sweet Jesus' through his face-covering hands."

Read the Washington Post, No love from polls or people for Mitt Romney.  

Or watch the clip,

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Save Us, Sarah, Save Us!

Obamney's Dilemma: Damned If He Doesn't Explain, Damned If He Does

"Mitt Romney might still win this election, but he’s now stuck in a trap that will be difficult to escape. Americans are rejecting his argument that they should view their choice mostly as a referendum on Obama’s economic performance, because they blame the sluggish recovery on the magnitude of the mess Obama inherited from George W. Bush, and believe things will get better in Obama’s second term. That is putting pressure on Romney to be more specific about why his alternative, such as it is, would spark a faster recovery than is occurring under Obama.

But Romney can’t be too much more specific about that alternative, because it risks reminding voters of the degree to which his policies resemble those of the aforementioned George W. Bush, under whom the meltdown happened in the first place."

Read the Washington Post, The trap that has ensnared Mitt Romney. 

Are You a Moocher?

"[A]ccording to 2008 data from the Cornell Survey Research Institute reported Monday in a Times opinion piece, that 96 percent of Americans have taken part in government benefit programs in one form or another."

Read The New York Times, How Many Government Programs Have You Benefited From?

The Obamney Welfare Hypocrisy

Obamney's father was an illegal Mexican immigrant who received public assistance.  Read NPR, Welfare Wasn't Always A Dirty Word In The Romney Family

How Do You Know When a Politician is Lying?

UPDATE:   Democrats "suffer from self-deception (such as a reluctance to credit improvements under a Republican president), but today’s Republicans seem disproportionately untethered to reality."

Read The New York Times, It Takes One to Know One.  

His lips are moving:

Who Will Win, Continued

Obamney is "behind in most election-forecasting models. Political scientist James Campbell rounded up 13 of the most credible efforts to predict the election outcome: Romney trails in eight of them. He’s also behind in Nate Silver’s election model, the Princeton Election Consortium’s meta-analysis, Drew Linzer’s Votamatic model and the Wonkblog election model.
 
But I didn’t realize quite how dire Romney’s situation was until I began reading 'The Timeline of Presidential Elections: How Campaigns Do and Don’t Matter,' a new book from political scientists Robert Erikson and Christopher Wlezien.

What Erikson and Wlezien did is rather remarkable: They collected pretty much every publicly available poll conducted during the last 200 days of the past 15 presidential elections and then ran test after test on the data to see what we could say about the trajectory of presidential elections. Their results make Romney’s situation look very dire."


Read the Washington Post, The Romney campaign is in trouble.

The So-Called Tea Party Has Been Co-Opted by the Republi-CON Establishment

"It’s a story as old as time: two opposing families are brought together when members of each are married.

The Capulets and the Montagues, Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, the Hatfields and the McCoys (oh, wait…).

Today, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has arranged one hell of a political marriage. And in the process, he has cemented his own status as one of the preeminent political survivors of our time.

McConnell announced Thursday that his 2014 Senate campaign will be run by Jesse Benton, who just happens to be a former top aide to Ron Paul — the libertarian congressman that has tangled with the Republican Party establishment for years — and his son, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who trounced a McConnell-endorsed candidate in a primary just two short years ago."

Read the Washington Post, Mitch McConnell + the Pauls = A political marriage made in heaven?

They have been assimilated by the Republi-con collective.  

Obama Calls the Republi-CON Bluff to Balance the Budget

UPDATE V:  The only thing holding Obama back is a lack of will to confront the Republi-cons.  Read the Washington Post, The Green Lantern theory of the fiscal cliff.  

UPDATE IV:  Did you know that the Ryan budget would cut $897 billion from the federal government budget?

Since Obamney "has committed himself to keeping the Pentagon budget (Function 050) at 4 percent of G.D.P. By 2050, that would leave zilch under the Ryan plan for such separately funded programs as Veterans Benefits (Function 700); the administration of justice, including the F.B.I. (Function 750); Education, Train and Social Services (Function 500), and pretty much anything else."

Read The New York Times, The Ryan Sinkhole.  

UPDATE III:  The Naive-ocrats have finally gotten the chance to call the Republi-con budget bluff, and they are all-in.

"[T]o paraphrase H.L. Mencken, is that the Obama administration knew the fight they wanted, and now they’re going to get it good and hard.

Putting the Ryan budget at the center of the 2012 election has the tactical benefit of forcing Republicans to defend an unpopular proposal; more important, it has the long-term strategic benefit of potentially discrediting the Ryan budget as a political document. Prior to Ryan joining the ticket, a Romney loss seemed likely to strengthen the Republican Party’s conservative wing, because the defeat would be blamed on Romney’s moderate past. Now, if the Romney-Ryan ticket loses, it will vindicate skeptics of the party’s rightward shift, potentially strengthening the party’s moderates. That could produce a more cooperative opposition for Obama to work with in a second term.

But if Obama loses, Republicans will have won the presidency with a mandate to enact a deeply conservative agenda. Left to his own devices, Romney might have been a relatively pragmatic and cautious president. Instead, the Obama administration’s three-year effort to enshrine the Ryan budget at the heart of the Republican Party would prove to have been a crucial push toward enacting that budget into law."

Read the Washington Post, The White House’s huge gamble on Paul Ryan.

Actually, I bet that even if the Republi-cons win they won't even try to balance the budget, proving my theory it is all a con job.

UPDATE II:  It is "impossible to overstate how central the unjustified label of 'fiscal conservative' is to the Ryan brand and the GOP’s strategy."  Read the Washington Post, Recognizing Paul Ryan’s ‘tell’ when he is trying to avoid something.  

UPDATE:  "[H]ow will a Romney administration make its budget math add up? . .

[Obamney made] outlandish budget promises in order to win a Republican primary, . . . [and now he] is disavowing Ryan’s Medicare cuts mere days after naming him to the ticket?

This is simply not a credible budget plan, and Romney’s fast retreat from Ryan’s most unpopular cuts makes it even less credible. And yet Romney, who has never released the specific cuts that would make his numbers add up, repeatedly touts it on the campaign trail, and the media dutifully reports his promises to cut federal spending by more than $500 billion in 2016, and in fact to balance the budget by the end of his second term, which would require far larger cuts than what I’ve outlined here, despite the fact that everyone basically knows these cuts aren’t credible and will never happen.

I’m not sure what alternative there is, exactly, except to say, as clearly as possible, Romney’s budget plan is a fantasy, and it will never happen."

Read the Washington Post, Romney’s budget plan is a fantasy.  

I've been challenging Naive-ocrats to call the Republi-con bluff and balance the budget with tax cuts, a delusional fantasy of made-up facts and figures. 

You may remember, in 2003 the "prescription drug bill, creating a new federal entitlement that eased the financial burden on seniors while securing drug industry profits at taxpayer expense, with the legislation’s cost – $62 billion in 2010 alone, 12 percent of the federal government's Medicare's costs – covered by the same device used in the Romney and Ryan tax plans: a magic asterisk promising that somehow the numbers would work out.

The vote was contentious, with many conservatives voting against it. Ryan voted in favor. In doing so, he announced that he was a player. . .

The appetite for fantasy – the will to believe the magic asterisks really work – will be enormous. Ryan, the conservative icon, is the ideal emissary to inform the party's true believers that not everyone in this large, pluralistic, complex nation wants to dismantle the federal government at this particular moment. When you wish upon a magic asterisk, not all your dreams come true."

Now we'll get to see if the public really wants to dismantle the federal government.

But if "the [Romney-Ryan] ticket loses, the loss will discredit the Ryan budget, and empower those in the Republican Party who want to pivot back to the center."  

Are You Better Off? You Betcha!

From Bloomberg, Are You Better Off? Take a Look at the Stock Market:

"Do you remember the news four years ago? Banks collapsed, markets cratered, companies struggled to make payroll and millions of people lost their jobs. Your retirement savings were decimated, the value of your house plunged, credit was unobtainable. Politicians dithered and economists argued. Only confusion prospered.

Against this background, it’s surprising to hear Republicans returning to Ronald Reagan’s classic debate question: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” To anyone whose memory extends a full electoral cycle, the answer is clearly yes. . .

When assessing our politicians, what matters isn’t just the here and now. It’s at least as important to consider how well we are set up for tomorrow, next year and the decades that follow.

This distinction is particularly important in assessing the aftermath of the last recession. The anxiety that gripped us in late 2008 wasn’t born out of a typical cyclical decline that hurts for a year or two before the economy returns to growth. Rather, it was a fear that something more fundamental had changed, altering our whole economic trajectory.

Only a forward-looking indicator can pick up both this fear and its ultimate resolution. Unfortunately, most economic statistics tell us only what happened last month, last quarter or last year.

The stock market, by contrast, is obsessively focused on the future. When investors decide whether to buy a company’s stock, they aren’t just thinking about its current earnings (if they were, a company like Twitter Inc. would be worthless). They are trying to figure out what its future earnings will be, and what that stream of income should be worth today. Their collective judgment, while far from perfect, tells a compelling story about how America’s prospects have changed over the past four years." 

Rosie Ruiz Republicans

UPDATE:  Lyin Ryan "has always resided in a counter-factual universe. He is a product of the hermetically sealed right-wing subculture. Many of the facts taken for granted by mainstream economists have never penetrated his brain. Ryan burst onto the national scene with a dense, fact-laden attack on the financing of Obama’s health-care bill that was essentially a series of hallucinations, pseudo-facts cooked up and recirculated by conservative apparatchiks who didn’t know what they were talking about or didn’t care. His big-think speeches reflect the influence of fact-free conservatives and collapse under scrutiny."  Read New York Magazine, Since When Did Paul Ryan Become a Liar?  

Another great op-ed from an economist and professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University, and the winner of the 2008 the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, Paul Krugman.  Read The New York Times, Rosie Ruiz Republicans, which states:

"Remember Rosie Ruiz? In 1980 she was the first woman to cross the finish line at the Boston Marathon — except it turned out that she hadn’t actually run most of the race, that she sneaked onto the course around a mile from the end. Ever since, she has symbolized a particular kind of fraud, in which people claim credit for achieving things they have not, in fact, achieved.

And these days Paul Ryan is the Rosie Ruiz of American politics.

This would have been an apt comparison even before the curious story of Mr. Ryan’s own marathon came to light. Still, that’s quite a story, so let’s talk about it first.

It started when Hugh Hewitt, a right-wing talk-radio host, interviewed Mr. Ryan. In that interview, the vice-presidential candidate boasted about his fitness, declaring that he had once run a marathon in less than three hours.

This claim piqued the interest of Runner’s World magazine, which noted that marathon times are recorded — and that it was unable to find any evidence of Mr. Ryan’s accomplishment. It eventually transpired that Mr. Ryan had indeed once run a marathon, but that his time was actually more than four hours.

In a statement issued by a spokesman, Mr. Ryan tried to laugh the whole thing off as a simple error. But serious runners find that implausible: the difference between sub-three and over-four is the difference between extraordinary and perfectly ordinary, and it’s not something a runner could get wrong, unless he’s a fabulist who imagines his own reality. And does suggesting that Mr. Ryan is delusional rather than dishonest actually make the situation any better?

Which brings us back to the real issues of this presidential campaign.

Obviously nobody cares how fast Mr. Ryan can run, and even his strange marathon misstatement wouldn’t be worth talking about in isolation. What makes this incident so striking is, instead, the way it resonates with the essential Rosie-Ruizness of Mr. Ryan’s whole political persona, which is built around big boasts about accomplishments he hasn’t accomplished.

For Mr. Ryan, as you may recall, has positioned himself as an icon of truth-telling and fiscal responsibility, while offering policy proposals that are neither honest nor responsible. . . "

That So-Called Republi-CON Leadership

If you listened closely, both Christie and Ryan used their campaign speeches to point out that Obamney is not the right man to elect because he lacks leadership and follows the polls.  Read the Washington Post, A very strange argument for Mitt Romney, which states:

"Chris Christie and Paul Ryan hit the same themes. We have hard choices facing us. We need leaders who won’t flinch before those choices. Leaders who won’t be deterred by the polls. Leaders who won’t compromise their principles. Leaders who won’t duck the tough issues. Leaders who won’t hide the hard truths.

That description arguably works for Christie and Ryan. That’s their brand, even if it’s selectively applied. But whether you love Romney or you hate him, do these lines really sound like a description of him? Is his political history really that of a bold, poll-defying, truth-talker?

Ryan was emphatic in his speech. 'So here is our pledge. We will not duck the tough issues,' he promised. 'We will lead.'

Christie was no less forceful. 'It’s easy for our leaders to say, ‘Not us, not now’, in taking on the really tough issues,' he said on Tuesday. 'And unfortunately we have stood silently by and let them get away with it.  But tonight, I say enough.'

Here is what Romney, so far in this campaign, has said. No changes to any entitlement programs for any seniors for the next 10 years. No specifics on how quickly his Medicare vouchers will grow for future seniors. No specifics on which tax breaks he’ll eliminate in order to offset the multi-trillion dollar cost of his tax cuts. No specific plan naming the cuts he’ll make to reach his $7 trillion target. No specifics on how he’ll equalize tax treatment of employer and individual health care. It is a campaign based on the principle of 'not us, not now.'

'Real leaders do not follow polls,' Christie continued. 'Real leaders change polls.'

And perhaps they do. But so far, the Romney campaign appears to have followed quite a number of polls.

In 2009, Romney wrote an op-ed for USA Today in which he advised President Obama to apply 'the lessons we learned in Massachusetts' to his health-care reform. Among those lessons was that 'using tax penalties, as we did, or tax credits, as others have proposed, encourages ‘free riders’ to take responsibility for themselves rather than pass their medical costs on to others.' That is to say, among those lessons was to include an individual mandate in the plan. Romney later said the mandate was 'unconstitutional.'

In February, Romney said, 'The president tells us that without his intervention things in Detroit would be worse. I believe that without his intervention things there would be better.' In April, under fire for opposing the auto bailout, Eric Fehrnstrom, Romney’s top communications adviser, said, Romney’s 'position on the bailout was exactly what President Obama followed. I know it infuriates them to hear that. The only economic success that President Obama has had is because he followed Mitt Romney’s advice.'

Tonight, Ryan said Obama didn’t do enough to 'correct' the housing crisis. Romney’s initial position on housing was, 'Don’t try to stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom.' Later, he said, 'The idea that somehow this is going to cure itself by itself is probably not real. There’s going to have to be a much more concerted effort to work with the lending institutions and help them take action, which is in their best interest and the best interest of the homeowners.' The campaign never released an actual housing policy.

During the debt ceiling debate, Romney remained silent for months on end. Critics — including on the right — joked that he’d joined 'the Mittness protection program.' Then, after the deal was struck and Congress was about to vote, he released a statement saying, 'while I appreciate the extraordinarily difficult situation President Obama’s lack of leadership has placed Republican members of Congress in, I personally cannot support this deal.' It is hard to see that episode as either a display of tough leadership or indifference to polls.

Indeed, it’s difficult to think of a single issue where Romney has defied the polls to tell his party something they didn’t want to hear. He raised his hand when Bret Baier asked the participants at a Fox News debate whether they’d oppose a deal that include $10 in spending cuts for every $1 in taxes. He backed off his once strongly stated belief that global warming was caused by humans. He moved from being pro-choice to pro-life, and from holding 'progressive' views to being 'severely conservative.' . .

[I]f you’re looking for a guy who doesn’t duck the tough issues, who never obscures the hard truths, who tells you the unpleasant facts you don’t want to hear, who isn’t deterred by the polls, Romney isn’t your guy."

No Surprise, A Republi-CON CONvention of Lies

UPDATE V:   Lyin Ryan delivered "a speech that is more about big ideas than it is about facts -- ideas like 'Lying is handy.'"  Watch the Colbert Report, Paul Ryan's Misleading GOP Convention Speech:

The Colbert Report
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UPDATE IV:  Obamney proved once again that there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.  Read the Washington Post, The trends behind Romney’s numbers, which notes that while he didn't lie, his claims were misleading. 

UPDATE III:  Don't take my work for it.  Read Fox News, Paul Ryan’s speech in 3 words, one of which was dishonest, noting that "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."

UPDATE II:  And a critique of the lies continues, after reading, watching and re-reading Ryan's speech, and using a 'definition of 'true'" that is loose, not "for arguments that were ironclad. It was just for arguments — for claims about Obama’s record — that were based on a reasonable reading of the facts, and that weren’t missing obviously key context. . .

Ryan’s claims weren’t even arguably true. You simply can’t say the president hasn’t released a deficit reduction plan. The plan is right here. You simply can’t say the president broke his promise to keep your GM plant open. The decision to close the plant was made before he entered office — and, by the way, the guy at the top of your ticket opposed the auto bailout. You simply can’t argue that the Affordable Care Act was a government takeover of the health-care system. My doctor still works for Kaiser Permanente, a private company that the government does not own. You simply can’t say that Obama, who was willing to follow historical precedent and sign a clean debt ceiling increase, caused the S&P downgrade, when S&P clearly said it was due to congressional gridlock and even wrote that it was partly due to the GOP’s dogmatic position on taxes.

Oh, and here’s one we missed: 'You would think that any president, whatever his party, would make job creation, and nothing else, his first order of economic business. But this president didn’t do that. Instead, we got a long, divisive, all-or-nothing attempt to put the federal government in charge of health care.' The stimulus — which was the administration’s major job creation package — came before health care. It was their first priority. That’s simply inarguable. . .

This has been a central challenge during this election. The Republican ticket, when it comes to talking about matters of policy and substance, has some real problems – problems that have nothing to do with whether you like their ideas. Romney admits that his tax plan “can’t be scored” and then he rejects independent analyses showing that his numbers don’t add up. He says — and Ryan echoes — that he’ll bring federal spending down to 20 percent of GDP but refuses to outline a path for how well get there. He mounts a massive ad assault based on a completely discredited lie about the Obama administration’s welfare policy. He releases white papers quoting economists who don’t agree with the Romney campaign’s interpretations of their research.

All this is true irrespective of your beliefs as to what is good and bad policy, or which ticket you prefer. Quite simply, the Romney campaign isn’t adhering to the minimum standards required for a real policy conversation. Even if you bend over backward to be generous to them — as the Tax Policy Center did when they granted the Romney campaign a slew of essentially impossible premises in order to evaluate their tax plan — you often find yourself forced into the same conclusion: This doesn’t add up, this doesn’t have enough details to be evaluated, or this isn’t true.

I don’t like that conclusion. It doesn’t look “fair” when you say that. We’ve been conditioned to want to give both sides relatively equal praise and blame, and the fact of the matter is, I would like to give both sides relatively equal praise and blame. I’d personally feel better if our coverage didn’t look so lopsided. But first the campaigns have to be relatively equal. So far in this campaign, you can look fair, or you can be fair, but you can’t be both."

Read the Washington Post, A not-very-truthful speech in a not-very-truthful campaign.  

 

UPDATE:  The consensus is that the Ryan speech "was a stunning display of dishonesty. In the twelve hours since Ryan gave his address, Slate, Bloomberg, New York Magazine, the Boston Globe, the New Republic, the New Yorker and the Associated Press have run scatching critiques.

The leading fact checkers — Politifact, Factcheck.org and the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler — have followed suit."

Read the Washington Post, Will Paul Ryan's dishonesty matter to voters?

Of course, what did you expect, even the Obamney campaign declared that it was "not going to let [their] campaign be dictated by fact-checkers."

The article states that "Ryan started this race with a reputation for honesty. He’s on his way to losing it."

But I think he was a  Republi-con all along, his reputation only proved how good he was at conning people.

Read The New Yorker, The Paul Ryan Speech: Five Hypocrisies. 

Obamney Picks a Person He Doesn't Think Is Qualified to Be President

UPDATE:  Don't take my word for it.  Even Ryan's brother calls him a "career politician. . . [who has never had] a real job."

Read the Washington Post, Barack Obama spent a lot more time in the private sector than Paul Ryan.

"Three years ago, Mitt Romney proposed a constitutional amendment that would say 'the president has to spend three years working in business before he becomes president of the United States. Then he or she would understand that the policies they are putting into place have to encourage small business to grow.'"

By this standard, Ryan isn't qulified to be president.

Read the Washington Post, Mitt Romney’s constitutional amendment would bar Paul Ryan from the presidency.

The Republi-CON 'We Are Self-Sufficient' Myth

Did you know that federal "[t]axpayers directly contributed $18,248,300 million to the Republican and Democratic national committees, or a total of $36.5 million, to hold their presidential nominating conventions in Election 2012"?

And that Republican National Convention is being "held in a stadium that was financed with $86 million in public funds"?

In the meantime, Republi-con wonder boy, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal won't be participating in the government subsidized fun because he's too busy begging for federal government money.