Paul Ryan (R-WI) Has The Values Of A Sleazy Conman - Tell Ryan To Tell The Truth About GM's Janesville Plant

Paul Ryan (R-WI) Has The Values Of A Sleazy Conman - Tell Ryan To Tell The Truth About GM's Janesville Plant

The list of falsehoods Paul Ryan told at the Republican National Convention last night isn't short, but there's one, in particular, that seems to be generating the most attention.

    "My home state voted for President Obama. When he talked about change, many people liked the sound of it, especially in Janesville, where we were about to lose a major factory.

    "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."

For regular readers, the anecdote may have sounded familiar -- Ryan has incorporated the anecdote into his speeches before, I took it apart two weeks ago.

To their credit, plenty of campaign reporters immediately recognized one of the major flaws in Ryan's attack -- the GM plant in Janesville was shut down before Obama took office. Take a look at that photo included above, and then notice the date on the banner. GM's press release announcing the closing of the plant was issued in June 2008. One of the local papers ran this headline in December 2008, the month before Obama's inauguration: "Hugs, tears as GM workers leave Janesville plant for last time."

Republicans are going to great lengths to argue that Ryan didn't actually mislead the country. They're wrong; Ryan's argument was obviously and deliberately deceptive. The truth matters, and Ryan's version of reality isn't it.

But the closer one looks at Ryan's attack, the more bizarre it appears.

At the surface, there's just no reason to suggest Obama is responsible for a plant closing initiated under Bush. But even beyond the surface-level lie, the ideological disconnect is almost as striking.

President Obama, as you may have heard, rescued the American auto industry in 2009, over Republican objections. In the process, Obama not only saved GM, he rescued plants, workers, and communities.

Ryan, unwilling to respect Americans enough to talk to us like adults, is trying to make a child-like appeal: the plant is closed, Obama is president, ergo blame Obama for the plant closing.

But that's ridiculous. If it weren't for the president's policy, the Janesville plant wouldn't have been the only one closed. Indeed, Ryan's running mate would have allowed all the GM plants to close as part of his "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt" policy.

Obama did visit the plant while running for president saying he supported the GM government sponsored bankruptcy so they could reorganize and stay in business. part of GM's decision was to close that plant. Ryan says that Obama uses too much big gov'mint power, so Ryan is being dishonest and hypocritical by saying that Obama should have intervened and micromanaged GM's business decisions. The Janesville plant was making SUV's whose sales had bottomed out during the 2007-2008 financial collapse. I guess Ryan wanted Obama to force people to buy a car model no one wanted as well.

The GOP’s tough-love approach, heavy on the tough. Funny how the GOP version of tough love always means working class Americans making more sacrifices and the wealthy getting yet another tax cut.

The 5 Weirdest Bits in the 2012 GOP Platform. Conservative Republicans may have a simple medical problem, their tin foil hats are on way too tight.

Dear Clint Eastwood and other reality challenged conservatives.

Dear Clint Eastwood and other reality challenged conservatives. Take responsibility for the havoc you reeked on the economy. You broke it, you own it.

About the July Jobs Report

Job growth picked up in July, but a strong labor market recovery remains elusive.

    Private and government payrolls combined rose by 163,000 jobs in July, a significantly faster pace than in the prior three months.  Private employers added 172,000 jobs, while government employment fell by 9,000.  Federal employment fell by 2,000 jobs, state government employment fell by 6,000, and local government employment fell by 1,000.
    This is the 29th straight month of private-sector job creation, with payrolls growing by 4.5 million jobs (a pace of 157,000 jobs a month) since February 2010; total nonfarm employment (private plus government jobs) has grown by 4.0 million jobs over the same period, or 138,000 a month.  The loss of 543,000 government jobs over this period was dominated by a loss of 392,000 local government jobs.
    Despite the 29 months of private-sector job growth, there were still 4.7 million fewer jobs on nonfarm payrolls in July than when the recession began in December 2007 and 4.3 million fewer jobs on private payrolls.  Payroll job growth has averaged 151,000 over the year, and July’s 163,000 jobs are still well below the average of 252,000 jobs a month that the economy created in December through February (although warmer-than-usual weather played a role there by, for instance, allowing for more outside construction jobs).

Conservatives in Congress have blocked all job creation legislation in order to increase their chances in the election. Rep Michele Bachmann famously hoped that unemployment would remain high. Senate conservative leader Mitch McConnell(R-KY) famously quipped that his only goal was to make sure Obama had a failed presidency. Why do Republicans love the goals of the conservative movement and hate the USA. Perhaps Clint could ask that empty chair. In 2008, before Obama was elected Republicans ruled over a loss of about $17 trillion dollars of the nation's wealth. Yea, great idea, let's return these dangerous zealots back to power.

Mitt Romney Has More in Common With Old World French Aristocracy Than Patriotic Americans

Mitt Romney Has More in Common With Old World French Aristocracy Than Patriotic Americans

And this is where we get to the hypocrisy at the heart of Mitt Romney. Everyone knows that he is fantastically rich, having scored great success, the legend goes, as a "turnaround specialist," a shrewd financial operator who revived moribund companies as a high-priced consultant for a storied Wall Street private equity firm. But what most voters don't know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: by borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America's top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth.

By making debt the centerpiece of his campaign, Romney was making a calculated bluff of historic dimensions – placing a massive all-in bet on the rank incompetence of the American press corps. The result has been a brilliant comedy: A man makes a $250 million fortune loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place. That same man then runs for president riding an image of children roasting on flames of debt, choosing as his running mate perhaps the only politician in America more pompous and self-righteous on the subject of the evils of borrowed money than the candidate himself. If Romney pulls off this whopper, you'll have to tip your hat to him: No one in history has ever successfully run for president riding this big of a lie. It's almost enough to make you think he really is qualified for the White House.

The unlikeliness of Romney's gambit isn't simply a reflection of his own artlessly unapologetic mindset – it stands as an emblem for the resiliency of the entire sociopathic Wall Street set he represents. Four years ago, the Mitt Romneys of the world nearly destroyed the global economy with their greed, shortsightedness and – most notably – wildly irresponsible use of debt in pursuit of personal profit. The sight was so disgusting that people everywhere were ready to drop an H-bomb on Lower Manhattan and bayonet the survivors. But today that same insane greed ethos, that same belief in the lunatic pursuit of instant borrowed millions – it's dusted itself off, it's had a shave and a shoeshine, and it's back out there running for president.

Mitt Romney, it turns out, is the perfect frontman for Wall Street's greed revolution. He's not a two-bit, shifty-eyed huckster like Lloyd Blankfein. He's not a sighing, eye-rolling, arrogant jerkwad like Jamie Dimon. But Mitt believes the same things those guys believe: He's been right with them on the front lines of the financialization revolution, a decades-long campaign in which the old, simple, let's-make-stuff-and-sell-it manufacturing economy was replaced with a new, highly complex, let's-take-stuff-and-trash-it financial economy. Instead of cars and airplanes, we built swaps, CDOs and other toxic financial products. Instead of building new companies from the ground up, we took out massive bank loans and used them to acquire existing firms, liquidating every asset in sight and leaving the target companies holding the note. The new borrow-and-conquer economy was morally sanctified by an almost religious faith in the grossly euphemistic concept of "creative destruction," and amounted to a total abdication of collective responsibility by America's rich, whose new thing was making assloads of money in ever-shorter campaigns of economic conquest, sending the proceeds offshore, and shrugging as the great towns and factories their parents and grandparents built were shuttered and boarded up, crushed by a true prairie fire of debt.

Mitt Romney – a man whose own father built cars and nurtured communities, and was one of the old-school industrial anachronisms pushed aside by the new generation's wealth grab – has emerged now to sell this make-nothing, take-everything, screw-everyone ethos to the world. He's Gordon Gekko, but a new and improved version, with better PR – and a bigger goal. A takeover artist all his life, Romney is now trying to take over America itself. And if his own history is any guide, we'll all end up paying for the acquisition.

Willard "Mitt" Romney's background in many ways suggests a man who was born to be president – disgustingly rich from birth, raised in prep schools, no early exposure to minorities outside of maids, a powerful daddy to clean up his missteps, and timely exemptions from military service. In Romney's bio there are some eerie early-life similarities to other recent presidential figures. (Is America really ready for another Republican president who was a prep-school cheerleader?) And like other great presidential double-talkers such as Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Romney has shown particular aptitude in the area of telling multiple factual versions of his own life story.

"I longed in many respects to actually be in Vietnam and be representing our country there," he claimed years after the war. To a different audience, he said, "I was not planning on signing up for the military. It was not my desire to go off and serve in Vietnam."

Like John F. Kennedy and George W. Bush, men whose way into power was smoothed by celebrity fathers but who rebelled against their parental legacy as mature politicians, Mitt Romney's career has been both a tribute to and a repudiation of his famous father. George Romney in the 1950s became CEO of American Motors Corp., made a modest fortune betting on energy efficiency in an age of gas guzzlers and ended up serving as governor of the state of Michigan only two generations removed from the Romney clan's tradition of polygamy. For Mitt, who grew up worshipping his tall, craggily handsome, politically moderate father, life was less rocky: Cranbrook prep school in suburban Detroit, followed by Stanford in the Sixties, a missionary term in which he spent two and a half years trying (as he said) to persuade the French to "give up your wine," and Harvard Business School in the Seventies. Then, faced with making a career choice, Mitt chose an odd one: Already married and a father of two, he left Harvard and eschewed both politics and the law to enter the at-the-time unsexy world of financial consulting.

"When you get out of a place like Harvard, you can do anything – at least in the old days you could," says a prominent corporate lawyer on Wall Street who is familiar with Romney's career. "But he comes out, he not only has a Harvard Business School degree, he's got a national pedigree with his name. He could have done anything – but what does he do? He says, 'I'm going to spend my life loading up distressed companies with debt.'?"

Romney started off at the Boston Consulting Group, where he showed an aptitude for crunching numbers and glad-handing clients. Then, in 1977, he joined a young entrepreneur named Bill Bain at a firm called Bain & Company, where he worked for six years before being handed the reins of a new firm-within-a-firm called Bain Capital.

In Romney's version of the tale, Bain Capital – which evolved into what is today known as a private equity firm – specialized in turning around moribund companies (Romney even wrote a book called Turnaround that complements his other nauseatingly self-complimentary book, No Apology) and helped create the Staples office-supply chain. On the campaign trail, Romney relentlessly trades on his own self-perpetuated reputation as a kind of altruistic rescuer of failing enterprises, never missing an opportunity to use the word "help" or "helped" in his description of what he and Bain did for companies. He might, for instance, describe himself as having been "deeply involved in helping other businesses" or say he "helped create tens of thousands of jobs."

The reality is that toward the middle of his career at Bain, Romney made a fateful strategic decision: He moved away from creating companies like Staples through venture capital schemes, and toward a business model that involved borrowing huge sums of money to take over existing firms, then extracting value from them by force. He decided, as he later put it, that "there's a lot greater risk in a startup than there is in acquiring an existing company." In the Eighties, when Romney made this move, this form of financial piracy became known as a leveraged buyout, and it achieved iconic status thanks to Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. Gekko's business strategy was essentially identical to the Romney–Bain model, only Gekko called himself a "liberator" of companies instead of a "helper."

Here's how Romney would go about "liberating" a company: A private equity firm like Bain typically seeks out floundering businesses with good cash flows. It then puts down a relatively small amount of its own money and runs to a big bank like Goldman Sachs or Citigroup for the rest of the financing. (Most leveraged buyouts are financed with 60 to 90 percent borrowed cash.) The takeover firm then uses that borrowed money to buy a controlling stake in the target company, either with or without its consent. When an LBO is done without the consent of the target, it's called a hostile takeover; such thrilling acts of corporate piracy were made legend in the Eighties, most notably the 1988 attack by notorious corporate raiders Kohlberg Kravis Roberts against RJR Nabisco, a deal memorialized in the book Barbarians at the Gate.

Romney and Bain avoided the hostile approach, preferring to secure the cooperation of their takeover targets by buying off a company's management with lucrative bonuses. Once management is on board, the rest is just math. So if the target company is worth $500 million, Bain might put down $20 million of its own cash, then borrow $350 million from an investment bank to take over a controlling stake.

But here's the catch. When Bain borrows all of that money from the bank, it's the target company that ends up on the hook for all of the debt.

Now your troubled firm – let's say you make tricycles in Alabama – has been taken over by a bunch of slick Wall Street dudes who kicked in as little as five percent as a down payment. So in addition to whatever problems you had before, Tricycle Inc. now owes Goldman or Citigroup $350 million. With all that new debt service to pay, the company's bottom line is suddenly untenable: You almost have to start firing people immediately just to get your costs down to a manageable level.

"That interest," says Lynn Turner, former chief accountant of the Securities and Exchange Commission, "just sucks the profit out of the company."

Fortunately, the geniuses at Bain who now run the place are there to help tell you whom to fire. And for the service it performs cutting your company's costs to help you pay off the massive debt that it, Bain, saddled your company with in the first place, Bain naturally charges a management fee, typically millions of dollars a year. So Tricycle Inc. now has two gigantic new burdens it never had before Bain Capital stepped into the picture: tens of millions in annual debt service, and millions more in "management fees." Since the initial acquisition of Tricycle Inc. was probably greased by promising the company's upper management lucrative bonuses, all that pain inevitably comes out of just one place: the benefits and payroll of the hourly workforce.

Once all that debt is added, one of two things can happen. The company can fire workers and slash benefits to pay off all its new obligations to Goldman Sachs and Bain, leaving it ripe to be resold by Bain at a huge profit. Or it can go bankrupt – this happens after about seven percent of all private equity buyouts – leaving behind one or more shuttered factory towns. Either way, Bain wins. By power-sucking cash value from even the most rapidly dying firms, private equity raiders like Bain almost always get their cash out before a target goes belly up.

This business model wasn't really "helping," of course – and it wasn't new. Fans of mob movies will recognize what's known as the "bust-out," in which a gangster takes over a restaurant or sporting goods store and then monetizes his investment by running up giant debts on the company's credit line. (Think Paulie buying all those cases of Cutty Sark in Goodfellas.) When the note comes due, the mobster simply torches the restaurant and collects the insurance money. Reduced to their most basic level, the leveraged buyouts engineered by Romney followed exactly the same business model. "It's the bust-out," one Wall Street trader says with a laugh. "That's all it is."

Private equity firms aren't necessarily evil by definition. There are many stories of successful turnarounds fueled by private equity, often involving multiple floundering businesses that are rolled into a single entity, eliminating duplicative overhead. Experian, the giant credit-rating tyrant, was acquired by Bain in the Nineties and went on to become an industry leader.

But there's a key difference between private equity firms and the businesses that were America's original industrial cornerstones, like the elder Romney's AMC. Everyone had a stake in the success of those old businesses, which spread prosperity by putting people to work. But even private equity's most enthusiastic adherents have difficulty explaining its benefit to society. Marc Wolpow, a former Bain colleague of Romney's, told reporters during Mitt's first Senate run that Romney erred in trying to sell his business as good for everyone. "I believed he was making a mistake by framing himself as a job creator," said Wolpow. "That was not his or Bain's or the industry's primary objective. The objective of the LBO business is maximizing returns for investors." When it comes to private equity, American workers – not to mention their families and communities – simply don't enter into the equation.

What is the difference between the way Romney and the European aristocracy of the 17th century and earlier. Romney and his followers do not believe in honest rewards for honest goods and services rendered they believe that all the GDP produced by American workers is due them because they are the entitled elite. Sure they'll throw the peasants a a few crumbs, they have to make it look like the system is kind of working and if its not, its your fault. Yet no pain caused to working class Americans is Romney and the elites fault. Funny how that works. 12 Tax-Dodging Corporations Spent $1 Billion To Influence Washington Over The Last Decade

Why Mitt Romney Is a Threat to Women’s Health

6 Big Lies By Republican National Convention Speakers, Day One

Mitt Doesn’t Care About Your ‘Facts’

Clueless Elitist Mitt Romney Cites Businesswoman Who Presided Over Huge Losses And Job Cuts As Model For His Cabinet

Clueless Elitist Mitt Romney Cites Businesswoman Who Presided Over Huge Losses And Job Cuts As Model For His Cabinet

During an interview published on Monday by Politico, Mitt Romney praised one of his favorite business leaders, Hewlett Packard CEO Meg Whitman. According to Politico, Romney said that his cabinet “would be dominated by people from the private sector, citing Meg Whitman of Hewlett-Packard as a model for female leaders he would like to surround himself with.”

This isn’t the first time that Romney has pointed to Whitman — who is also the former CEO of Ebay and a former California gubernatorial candidate — as a leader to emulate. But at the moment, Whitman is presiding over a company in free-fall. HP just suffered its largest quarterly loss ever and is shedding tens of thousands of jobs:

    Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) posted a record (HPQ) quarterly loss and reported slumping sales for personal computers and services aimed at businesses, underscoring the turnaround challenge facing Chief Executive Officer Meg Whitman.

    The fiscal third-quarter loss of $8.86 billion includes a writedown for the enterprise-services unit and reflects a 10 percent decline in PC revenue…Whitman is cutting 27,000 jobs over two years.

During her unsuccessful 2010 run for California’s governorship, Whitman released a slew of half-baked economic plans. These included a proposal to balance the Golden State’s budget that, according to a ThinkProgress analysis, wouldn’t come anywhere close to actually balancing the budget.

While at Ebay, Whitman succeeded in boosting net income, but eventually left the company crippled due to disastrous acquisitions: “A year after Whitman bailed on eBay, the stock had sunk so low that employees were left holding onto stock options that would actually cost more than than eBay’s market stock price, making them worse than worthless.” Before moving to Ebay, Whitman was CEO of FTD.com, where she oversaw a fifty percent drop in business during her two-year tenure. And evidently this is the sort of experience Romney would like to bring to the federal government.

There has always been a crazy element to American politics and elections. One of the most bizarre things about this election cycle is that a guy who has never done an honest day's work in his life, had a disastrous record of creating jobs as governor, pioneered the offshoring of American jobs to Asia, has multiple foreign bank accounts, has a budget plan that spells disaster for the middle-class is being seriously considered by the same people who would return a pair of socks for being poor quality. How is it that some Americans will not tolerate a poor quality sock, but will make a person of such poor character, with a delusional world view, president.

Add It Up: Taxes Avoided by the Rich Could Pay Off the Deficit

Remember Romney said he had no active role in Bain, Romney asserted active role in Bain to claim half-million dollar tax deduction in 2010

If Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan had values They Would Stop Their Medicare Lies

If Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan had values They Would Stop Their Medicare Lies

When formulating public policy, evidence should be accorded more weight than ideology, and facts should matter more than shibboleths. The Romney-Ryan plan for Medicare reform depends on assertions that are ideologically consistent. But the Republicans plan is not supported by the evidence and does not survive serious scrutiny.

Perhaps that's why the Romney campaign has been deliberately misrepresenting President Obama's Medicare record.

Mitt Romney characterizes the $716 billion of Medicare savings over the next 10 years, contained in the Affordable Care Act, as President Obama's "raid" on the Medicare program to pay for his health care program. This fear-mongering is simply untrue. These savings result from reforms to slow the growth of Medicare spending per enrollee - there are no cuts in Medicare benefits.

The reforms include both voluntary and mandatory changes in how providers deliver health care to promote better care coordination at lower cost, reward the quality and outcomes of services rather than their volume and reduce fraud and abuse.

For example, the law fosters the creation of accountable-care organizations, i.e., groups of providers willing to accept a flat fee for the integrated care provided to their Medicare patients. Accountable-care organizations represent a major step away from the unsustainable fee-for-service model that rewards the number of procedures rather than the quality of care.

Health experts believe that these organizations will significantly improve care and lower costs not just in Medicare but throughout the health care system. This belief is based on evidence, not ideology.

Medicare beneficiaries will also benefit from reforms that penalize hospitals for preventable re-admissions reflecting complications from previous procedures and that require hospitals to post their rates of medical errors, with penalties for those with the highest rates.

Both Governor Romney and Representative Paul D. Ryan have promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act and with it the reforms behind the $716 billion in Medicare savings (although Mr. Ryan duplicitously counts the savings from these reforms in his deficit-reduction plan). Medicare beneficiaries would be the losers. They would lose the benefits of better care at lower cost. They would lose the plan's expanded Medicare coverage for prevention benefits and prescription drugs, and they would be forced to pay higher premiums and co-pays as a result of faster growth in Medicare costs.

Same on Romney and Ryan for being yet more examples of the moral corruption and anti-Americanism of the Republican party.

Anti-American Fanatic Dinesh D'Souza's "The Roots of Obama's Rage" rooted in lies

Anti-American Fanatic Dinesh  D'Souza's "The Roots of Obama's Rage" rooted in lies

In his new book The Roots of Obama's Rage, Dinesh D'Souza theorizes that President Obama is motivated by an "anti-colonial" ideology inherited from his father, and boasts that this theory explains Obama's actions in a way "that no rival theory can even begin to do." In reality, D'Souza's absurd "anti-colonial" theory is premised upon a series of false and misleading claims.

1. CLAIM: Obama "hadn't lifted a finger to help a destitute close relative," half-brother George

From pages 3-4 of The Roots of Obama's Rage:

    I'm a conservative, and I didn't vote for Obama. During the 2008 presidential campaign, I read an interesting article in the London Telegraph titled "Barack Obama's Lost Brother Found in Kenya." The article featured a picture of a 26-year-old man standing inside a ramshackle hut on the outskirts of Nairobi. CNN confirmed the story, reporting, "We found Barack Obama's half-brother living in a Nairobi slum." He was George Hussein Obama, the product of a liaison between Barack Obama Sr. and an African woman. "I live here on less than a dollar a month," George said. Humiliated by his poverty, he confessed he never mentioned his famous half-brother. "I say we are not related. I am ashamed." In 2006, George briefly met Barack Obama, who was then a United States senator from Illinois, but felt as though he was talking to a "total stranger." I found it remarkable that Barack Obama, who had a net worth of several million dollars and who was within striking distance of the world's highest office, hadn't lifted a finger to help a destitute close relative.

    Seeing from the article that George Obama aspired to be a mechanic, I started the "George Obama Compassion Fund." On a daily blog I wrote for AOL at the time, I invited people to make small contributions to help George move out of his hut and get some training to realize his dreams. We raised a couple of thousand dollars, and a Christian missionary promised he would deliver the money in person to George. Then I was contacted by a reporter for a large newspaper in Kenya who told me that the Obama family had refused the money. Evidently they had consulted with the Obama campaign and been told to go into hiding. My attempts to locate George proved unavailing. So I tore up the checks, figuring that perhaps I had jostled Obama into doing something for George, if only to save himself from political embarrassment.

REALITY: George Obama is a community organizer, chooses to live among poor

The Associated Press reported on June 14, 2009, that George Obama had signed a deal with Simon & Schuster to write a book detailing his "fall into crime and poverty as a teenager and his eventual embrace of community organizing -- a passion shared by the president -- and of advocacy for the poor, an identification so strong that he chooses to live among them." As Media Matters documented, after conservatives (like D'Souza) used the initial reports of George Obama's living conditions to attack President Obama, George called the reports "exaggerated" in an interview with CNN, saying: "I was brought up well. I live well even now." George added: "I think I kind of like it here. I'm Kenyan, so definitely I'd really love to live in Kenya."

2. CLAIM: Obama initiated financial, auto industry bailouts

D'Souza twice indicates that Obama initiated the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and the federal bailout of the automobile industry. From page 5 (emphasis added):

    As Obama launched his spending spree -- a bailout plan followed by a stimulus plan followed by an automobile industry rescue plan followed by a national health care plan and then new environmental and financial regulations -- I became alarmed.

From pages 17-18 (emphasis added):

    At the same time, Obama has transformed the relationship between American citizens and their government. He has passed the most significant raft of laws since the Great Society: the bank rescue plan, the auto industry bailout, the stimulus package, sweeping regulation of Wall Street, a complete remaking of the health care system.

REALITY: Both programs were begun under Bush

The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (commonly known as the bank bailout) was signed into law -- as its name indicates -- on October 3, 2008, by then-president George W. Bush. In December 2008, Bush announced that $13.4 billion of the funds allocated by Congress for the bank bailout would be loaned to General Motors and Chrysler to prevent the companies from collapsing. Bush said at the time: "In the midst of a financial crisis and a recession, allowing the U.S. auto industry to collapse is not a responsible course of action. The question is how we can best give it a chance to succeed."

3. CLAIM: Obama started going by "Barack" to adopt his father's "African identity"

On pages 26-27, D'Souza writes that Obama "is his father's son, and his dreams are derived from his father's aspirations and failures." Expanding on this claim, he writes:

    Obama even took his father's name in order to cement his explicit identification with him, and they way he did so is even more revealing. Young Obama's parents named him Barack, after his father. But from birth until his young adult years, he was known as Barry. Actually, Obama's dad was also called Barry; Barry was the name he adopted when he came as a student from Kenya to America. While the father went from Barack to Barry, however, the son went in the opposite direction. As a young man, Obama asked people to stop calling him Barry and instead to call him Barack. For Obama's father, the switch from Barack to Barry was no big deal; he was just doing what many immigrants do in order to fit in. For the son, by contrast, the move from Barry to Barack was a very big deal. He didn't just take his father's identity; he self-consciously rejected his father's American name in favor of the senior Obama's African identity.

REALITY: Obama on name switch: "It was not some assertion of my African roots"

D'Souza sourced his claim to a March 22, 2008, Newsweek article titled "When Barry Became Barack." According to that article:

    Obama wanted a clean slate. "Going to New York was really a significant break. It's when I left a lot of stuff behind," he says. "I think there was a lot of stuff going on in me. By the end of that year at Occidental, I think I was starting to work it through, and I think part of the attraction of transferring was, it's hard to remake yourself around people who have known you for a long time." It was when he got to New York that, as he recalls it, he began to ask people to call him Barack: "It was not some assertion of my African roots ... not a racial assertion. It was much more of an assertion that I was coming of age. An assertion of being comfortable with the fact that I was different and that I didn't need to try to fit in in a certain way."

4. CLAIM: Obama's push for a "nuclear-free world" is evidence of his "anti-colonialism"

D'Souza claims on page 38 that Obama "must constantly translate his ideology into terms that are accessible and palatable to the American people," adding:

    He cannot say that he hates the rich, so he has to talk about fairness and equality. He cannot say America is a nuclear menace to the world, so he has to say that he wants a nuclear-free world. He cannot say he thinks Wall Street is evil, so he must accuse the investment firms of not looking out for the interests of Main Street. Obama sometimes blows it; he doesn't always succeed with his anti-colonial marketing. Even his attempt, however, is impressive; this is a skill he has been honing for many years.

REALITY: If this is true, then Ronald Reagan was also "anti-colonial"

Obama, in his April 5, 2009, speech in Prague, called for a world free of nuclear weapons:

    OBAMA: So today, I state clearly and with conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons. I'm not naive. This goal will not be reached quickly -- perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence. But now we, too, must ignore the voices who tell us that the world cannot change.

In his second inaugural address, Ronald Reagan also called for a world without nuclear weapons:

    REAGAN: There is only one way safely and legitimately to reduce the cost of national security, and that is to reduce the need for it. And this we are trying to do in negotiations with the Soviet Union. We are not just discussing limits on a further increase of nuclear weapons. We seek, instead, to reduce their number. We seek the total elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth.

Many delusional anti-American conservatives are eating this up like crack addicts given a fix of all the loony unsubstantiated urban myths they believe. hey its is a book it must be true and since they want all these falsehoods to be true, of course they do not perform any fact checking. Fact checking requires energy and integrity, something sorely lacking in the radical anti-American conservative movement. 

Urban Myths: How Conservative Neo-Nazi Dinesh D'Souza's Lies in "About 2016: Obama's America"

Urban Myths: How Conservative Neo-Nazi Dinesh D'Souza's Lies in "About 2016: Obama's America"

The marketing materials for the upcoming film 2016: Obama's America claim that it "takes audiences on a gripping visual journey into the heart of the world's most powerful office to reveal the struggle of whether one man's past will redefine America over the next four years." If the movie is anything like its source material, we can expect it will be a mostly fraudulent journey.

The movie is based on Dinesh D'Souza's book The Roots Of Obama's Rage, which received high praise from people like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, neither of whom have shown any qualms about promoting outright lies, distortions, and outlandish claims in the past.

The New York Times reports that the film is partially financed by billionaire investor Joe Ricketts, who previously considered financing a multimillion dollar political ad campaign linking the racially charged rhetoric of Rev. Jeremiah Wright to President Obama.

The central thesis of the book is that Obama has some sort of anti-colonial world view, handed down to him by his ancestors, that acts as the motivation behind his actions and policies as president. It is just another form of birtherism, albeit a more highbrow variety of the ongoing conservative conspiracy theory. Appearing on Beck's Fox show, D'Souza explained:

    Obama is not anti-American in that he wishes ill on America. He wants what's best for America. He thinks it's really bad for us to be a colonial power. And therefore, in his view, he is doing right for America by pulling us out, by knocking us off our pedestal, by in a sense taking us from being the world's arrogant superpower. He wants us to share the wealth. He thinks he's gonna get a better America. The problem is, he's stuck in this theory, he's frozen in this time machine. In a sense, he's a captive of the ideology of a Luo tribesman from the 1950s. It's an incredible idea.

D'Souza boosts this ludicrous premise (Obama ran for the presidency because he hates colonialism ... just like America's founders!) using several claims that are simply not rooted in reality. A few examples:

    D'Souza claims that TARP and the federal bailout were programs that "Obama launched." Both programs began under the Bush administration.

    D'Souza claims Obama went by the name Barack to adopt his father's "African identity," but Obama has explicitly said his name change "was not some assertion of my African roots."

    D'Souza insists that references in Obama speeches to a "nuclear-free world" are evidence of "anti-colonialism," but Ronald Reagan made multiple references to the same concept.

    D'Souza claimed that Obama supported the release of the Lockerbie bomber because he sometimes "supports the release of terrorists who claim to be fighting wars of liberation against American aggression." But the Obama administration formally opposed the release in an official letter from the State Department.

    D'Souza claimed that Obama referred to BP as "British Petroleum" in a May 2010 speech. He never did.

And D'Souza just goes on and on, inventing incidents that never happened, making historical claims that don't match up to the facts, shoehorning these made-up stories into a false narrative of racial resentment.

It doesn't appear that D'Souza has corrected or amended his flawed premise. 2016: Obama's America is just repeating the same falsehoods with moving pictures.

Conservative Republicans are literally organizing bus tours to go see this movie, because conservatives think if you repeat lies on film that magically makes them true.

 As head of the investment company Bain Capital, Mitt Romney laid off thousands of workers.

 Mitt Romney's advice on the foreclosure crisis: "Don't try and stop the foreclosure process."

 The former Bain Capital managing director said of Mitt Romney's tenure: "We had a scheme where the rich got richer." [Los Angeles Times,  12/16/2007]

 Mitt Romney set up shell companies in the Cayman Islands and Bermuda to avoid U.S. taxes.[Los Angeles Times,  12/19/2007]

 Mitt Romney calls Obama's payroll tax cut that would save middle class/lower income families $1,500 a year "temporary little band aids."

 Mitt Romney's first budget as governor included $240 million in fee increases.

Mitt Romney has proposed tax cuts for the rich and corporations that would cost $7.8 trillion over 10 years.

Mitt Romney's top economic adviser Greg Mankiw said the "offshoring" of American jobs was a good thing.

Mitt Romney, who lambasts the "failures" of government-backed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, profits from investments in the firms.

Mitt Romney said that catching bin Laden would be "insignificant" and it's "not worth moving heaven and earth."

Mitt Romney pledged to expand a Bush-Era policy of permitting doctors to deny women access to contraceptives.

Mitt Romney said he supported the Ryan Republican budget plan that would effectively end Medicare.

Paul Ryan embraces the extreme philosophy of sex cultist Ayn Rand.

Paul Ryan wants to raises taxes on the middle class, cut them for millionaires

Paul Ryan thinks Social Security is a “ponzi scheme.”

Paul Ryan supports $40 billion in corporate welfare subsides for big oil.

The Romney-Ryan Economic Plan

The Romney-Ryan Economic Plan

Congratulations To Scott Brown (R-MS) For His Great Job of Deceiving Voters While Pretending To Be a "Nice guy"

Congratulations To Scott Brown (R-MS) For His Great Job of Deceiving Voters While Pretending To Be a "Nice guy"

Scott Brown has donated thousands of dollars to fellow Republican candidates after they sponsored legislation to redefine rape as “forcible rape”

As Rep. Todd Akin’s despicable comments on “legitimate rape” rightfully provoke outrage, the Massachusetts Democratic Party reminds voters that Republican U.S. Senator Scott Brown has given thousands of dollars to other Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate who would redefine rape as “forcible rape” and threaten women’s rights if, with Brown, they gain control of the U.S. Senate.
 
Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan also supports the bill.
 
Brown’s PAC, SCOTTPAC, has made campaign contributions to four House members, including three U.S. Senate candidates, after they cosponsored the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act.
 
Scott Brown is supporting a Vice Presidential nominee and three of his fellow senate candidates who want to redefine rape, excluding protections to victims of violent sexual assaults. Brown donated to current Senate candidates Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-MT), and Rep. Rick Berg (R-ND), as well as Rep. Jeff Denham (R-CA). The Republican nominee for Vice President, Paul Ryan, also cosponsored the bill.
 
“Scott Brown is supporting Republicans with a dangerous agenda for women throughout the Commonwealth and across the country,” said Massachusetts Democratic Party Executive Director Clare Kelly. “Brown is doling out his campaign cash to aid extreme conservatives who want to redefine ‘rape’ and roll back critical protections for women – and they will, if they gain control of the Senate and the White House.”
 
Scott Brown has made campaign contributions to the following supporters of the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act that would redefine rape:
 
Scott Brown's PAC contributed $5,000 to Jeff Flake for US Senate Inc[OpenSecrets.org, Accessed 8/20/12]
 
Scott Brown's PAC contributed $10,000 to Montanans for Rehberg [OpenSecrets.org, Accessed 8/20/12]
 
Scott Brown's PAC contributed $5,000 to Berg for Senate [OpenSecrets.org, Accessed 8/20/12]
 
Scott Brown's PAC contributed $10,000 to Denham for Congress [OpenSecrets.org, Accessed 8/20/12]

Many voters are just trusting people who take crafty con-men like brown for what they appear to be on the surface  - "nice". Most of histories scoundrels, thieves and con-men have had a pleasant persona, that is in fact part of what allowed them to get away with hurting so many people. Brown seems to have studied and mastered their techniques. Good for him, not so great for normal decent Americans.

Radical Republican Medicare Voucher Plan Remains Unpopular - Plurality Views Ryan VP Choice Negatively

Paul Ryan (R-WI) is not getting high marks for running an honorable campaign

Shades of Todd Akin(R-MO) 2012 Romney - Ryan Republican Platform To Advocate Abortion Ban Without Rape Exception

Shades of Todd Akin(R-MO) 2012 Romney - Ryan Republican Platform To Advocate Abortion Ban Without Rape Exception

Republican politicians have been falling over themselves to condemn from Rep. Todd Akin, the Republican Senate candidate in Missouri, who said Sunday that women who have experienced “legitimate rape” don’t get pregnant because “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” The Romney-Ryan campaign called Akin’s comments “insulting, inexcusable and frankly wrong,” in spite of Ryan’s close working relationship with Akin on a number of radical anti-abortion and contraception bills. A Romney spokesperson added that the “Romney-Ryan administration would not oppose abortion in instances of rape.”

But embracing a rape exception for abortion rights would put the campaign at odds with the Republican Party’s longstanding platform, the newest iteration of which will be officially unveiled at the Republican National Convention in Tampa. In spite of the massive public outcry from the right over Akin’s comments, the official GOP platform committee drafted a provision Monday supporting a “human life amendment” that would outlaw abortion without specifying exemptions for rape or incest. The platform reads:

    Faithful to the ‘self-evident’ truths enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, we assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed. We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children.

Heading the committee is Gov. Bob McDonnell (R-VA), best known for his “mandatory ultrasound” law requiring any woman getting an abortion to undergo an unnecessary ultrasound. McDonnell also revealed his regressive position on women’s rights in his college thesis, which slandered working women, contraception, and “fornicators.” It’s no surprise, then, that under his guidance, the Republican Party will reaffirm its support for a constitutional amendment that would outlaw abortion and likely many forms of contraception.

In saying they would not oppose a rape exception, Romney and Ryan are both changing their tune. Romney said in 2007 he would be “delighted” to sign a bill banning all abortions, and Ryan has been staunchly anti-abortion in all cases, even attempting to restrict abortion access to victims of “forcible rape” only.

The human life amendment has been a tenet of the Republican Party platform since the dawn of the Reagan era in 1980. It has survived for 32 years and nine presidential elections, even after former presidential candidate Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) pushed hard in 2000 for an explicit exception for rape and incest. McCain ceded the language to party officials during his own run in 2008.

One of the most backwards and Orwellian terms of our times is the conservative claim to being "pro-life". Is that supposed to be some kind of joke. They say they care about a bunch of cells in a woman's uterus, but once born they'll do more to see a golf course gets watered than to see that child has a good education, a job and medical care.

The Creators of the Financial Crisis Are Trying To Rewrite History

The record here is crystal clear: AIG and Hank Greenberg were charged by the New York Attorney General's Office—while I was attorney general—with fraud and deceptive accounting practices. The company settled for $1.64 billion, at the time the largest payment in history. Let me quote from the New York Times’ reporting of the settlement: "Under the settlement reached with the Justice Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the New York Attorney General's office, and the New York State Insurance Department, AIG acknowledged it had deceived the investing public and regulators." Further from the New York Times: "Mr. Greenberg, who was removed by AIG's board last march, remains under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice department and faces a lawsuit by the New York Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer."

After invoking his Fifth Amendment right to avoid testifying, Greenberg settled with the SEC for $15 million. And a federal judge, in a written opinion, found evidence that the conspiracy to deceive investors originated with Greenberg. Even CNBC covered Greenberg's settlement by saying "Ex-AIG CEO Greenberg settles fraud charges with SEC."

So Mr. Langone, despite your effort to talk about everything other than the facts of these cases, facts matter. These cases were absolutely correct, important, and went to the heart of the type of corporate fraud and defalcation that very nearly destroyed our economy.

Conservatives learned nothing from the financial collapse of 2007/2008. We need better regulation and fair enforcement. No exaggeration - check out most of the conservative web sites - they all claim it was caused by some vast conspiracy between Fannie May, Barney Frank and working class Americans. Because of course everyone on Wall Street is an angel who never does wrong.

The Depravity of Rep. Todd Akin(R-MO) Is Shared By Paul Ryan (R-WI) And Other Conservatives

It Isn’t Just Medicare: Don’t Forget Paul Ryan’s Vision for Medicaid

Someone needs to put Romney in a time machine and have his parents teach me what real values are. He just keeps lying about Obama and welfare reform. If he can only become president based on a blatant falsehood what does that say about his character, New Romney Welfare Ad Cites Newspaper That Says Its Welfare Reform Claims Have ‘Been Debunked’

Romney and Ryan Owe America An Apology For Their Immoral Medicare Lies

Romney and Ryan Owe America An Apology For Their Immoral Medicare Lies

Republican attacks on President Obama’s plans for Medicare are growing more heated and inaccurate by the day. Both Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan made statements last week implying that the Affordable Care Act would eviscerate Medicare when in fact the law should shore up the program’s finances.

Both men have also twisted themselves into knots to distance themselves from previous positions, so that voters can no longer believe anything they say. Last week, both insisted that they would save Medicare by pumping a huge amount of money into the program, a bizarre turnaround for supposed fiscal conservatives out to rein in federal spending.

The likelihood that they would stand by that irresponsible pledge after the election is close to zero. And the likelihood that they would be better able than Democrats to preserve Medicare for the future (through a risky voucher system that may not work well for many beneficiaries) is not much better. THE ALLEGED “RAID ON MEDICARE” A Republican attack ad says that the reform law has “cut” $716 billion from Medicare, with the money used to expand coverage to low-
income people who are currently uninsured. “So now the money you paid for your guaranteed health care is going to a massive new government program that’s not for you,” the ad warns.

What the Republicans fail to say is that the budget resolutions crafted by Paul Ryan and approved by the Republican-controlled House retained virtually the same cut in Medicare.

In reality, the $716 billion is not a “cut” in benefits but rather the savings in costs that the Congressional Budget Office projects over the next decade from wholly reasonable provisions in the reform law.

One big chunk of money will be saved by reducing unjustifiably high subsidies to private Medicare Advantage plans that enroll many beneficiaries at a higher average cost than traditional Medicare. Another will come from reducing the annual increases in federal reimbursements to health care providers — like hospitals, nursing homes and home health agencies — to force the notoriously inefficient system to find ways to improve productivity.

And a further chunk will come from fees or taxes imposed on drug makers, device makers and insurers — fees that they can surely afford since expanded coverage for the uninsured will increase their markets and their revenues.

NO HARM TO SENIORS The Republicans imply that the $716 billion in cuts will harm older Americans, but almost none of the savings come from reducing the benefits available for people already on Medicare. But if Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan were able to repeal the reform law, as they have pledged to do, that would drive up costs for many seniors — namely those with high prescription drug costs, who are already receiving subsidies under the reform law, and those who are receiving preventive services, like colonoscopies, mammograms and immunizations, with no cost sharing.

Mr. Romney argued on Friday that the $716 billion in cuts will harm beneficiaries because those who get discounts or extra benefits in the heavily subsidized Medicare Advantage plans will lose them and because reduced payments to hospitals and other providers could cause some providers to stop accepting Medicare patients.

If he thinks that will be a major problem, Mr. Romney should leave the reform law in place: it has many provisions designed to make the delivery of health care more efficient and cheaper, so that hospitals and others will be better able to survive on smaller payments.

NO BANKRUPTCY LOOMING The Republicans also argue that the reform law will weaken Medicare and that by preventing the cuts and ultimately turning to vouchers they will enhance the program’s solvency. But Medicare is not in danger of going “bankrupt”; the issue is whether the trust fund that pays hospital bills will run out of money in 2024, as now projected, and require the program to live on the annual payroll tax revenues it receives.

The Affordable Care Act helped push back the insolvency date by eight years, so repealing the act would actually bring the trust fund closer to insolvency, perhaps in 2016.

DEFICIT REDUCTION Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan said last week that they would restore the entire $716 billion in cuts by repealing the law. The Congressional Budget Office concluded that repealing the law would raise the deficit by $109 billion over 10 years.

The Republicans gave no clue about how they would pay for restoring the Medicare cuts without increasing the deficit. It is hard to believe that, if faced with the necessity of fashioning a realistic budget, keeping Medicare spending high would be a top priority with a Romney-Ryan administration that also wants to spend very large sums on the military and on tax cuts for wealthy Americans.

Regardless of who wins the election, Medicare spending has to be reined in lest it squeeze out other priorities, like education. It is utterly irresponsible for the Republicans to promise not to trim Medicare spending in their desperate bid for votes.

THE DANGER IN MEDICARE VOUCHERS The reform law would help working-age people on modest incomes buy private policies with government subsidies on new insurance exchanges, starting in 2014. Federal oversight will ensure a reasonably comprehensive benefit package, and competition among the insurers could help keep costs down.

But it is one thing to provide these “premium support” subsidies for uninsured people who cannot get affordable coverage in the costly, dysfunctional markets that serve individuals and their families. It is quite another thing to use a similar strategy for older Americans who have generous coverage through Medicare and who might well end up worse off if their vouchers failed to keep pace with the cost of decent coverage.

Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan would allow beneficiaries to use vouchers to buy a version of traditional Medicare instead of a private plan, but it seems likely that the Medicare plan would attract the sickest patients, driving up Medicare premiums so that they would be unaffordable for many who wanted traditional coverage. Before disrupting the current Medicare program, it would be wise to see how well premium support worked in the new exchanges.

THE CHOICE This will be an election about big problems, and it will provide a clear choice between contrasting approaches to solve them. In the Medicare arena, the choice is between a Democratic approach that wants to retain Medicare as a guaranteed set of benefits with the government paying its share of the costs even if costs rise, and a Republican approach that wants to limit the government’s spending to a defined level, relying on untested market forces to drive down insurance costs.

The reform law is starting pilot programs to test ways to reduce Medicare costs without cutting benefits. Many health care experts have identified additional ways to shave hundreds of billions of dollars from projected spending over the next decade without harming beneficiaries.

It is much less likely that the Republicans, who have long wanted to privatize Medicare, can achieve these goals.

Romney and Ryan Lack The Courage and Morals To Honestly State Their Plans To Detroy Medicare

The Venal, Morally Corrupt Serial Liar and Corporate Socialist Mitt Romney Tries To Explain His Medicare Magic Trick

Mitt Romney offered a white board presentation during a news briefing in South Carolina on Thursday morning that sought to untangle the campaign’s contradictory message about Medicare. Over the last week, Romney and Ryan have twisted themselves into a pretzel to attack President Obama for “stealing” $716 billion from Medicare, while trying to explain why Paul Ryan included the savings in his FY 2013 budget. Romney had previously pledged to sign the document into law.

During the presentation, Romney tried to lay out the differences. Obama takes the money out of seniors’ Medicare Advantage plans and cuts payments to providers, causing some to lose his coverage, he argued. The program’s trust fund would go bankrupt by 2024, under Obama, and seniors would lose access to the care they need. His plan, alternatively, would preserve the program for current retirees and keep it solvent indefinitely.

ThinkProgress explains why this is wrong:



The Obamacare savings slow the growth of Medicare over the next decade by, in part: eliminating overpayments to private insurers in Medicare Advantage, reforming provider payments to encourage greater efficiency, tying reimbursements to improvements in economic productivity, and reducing fraud and abuse. The law does not impact patient benefits.

As a result of these savings, “growth in spending will be restrained” and the life of the Medicare trust fund is expanded by eight years, the government estimates. Sixteen million seniors are also benefiting from the savings by receiving preventive benefits without deductibles or co-pays and saving more than $3.9 billion on prescription drugs.

Should Romney restore the $716 billion — and unless he institutes other yet to be specified reforms — we would move back to the old system of overpaying private insurers and providers. He’d be re-inserting inefficiency back into the system, jeopardizing the benefits that seniors are currently enjoying, and shrinking the solvency of the Medicare trust fund from 2024 under current law to 2016.

 Romney vs. Ryan On Medicare’s Solvency

Via Twitter, David Phillippe pointed out today that Paul Ryan has directly contradicted Mitt Romney on how to extend the solvency of Medicare. At issue are cuts to Medicare included in both Obamacare and the House GOP budget engineered by Ryan, which now total $716 billion over the current budget window. Mitt Romney told CBS on Wednesday he would undo those cuts and restore Medicare’s payments to their prior level, and claimed this move would extend the program’s solvency:

    ROMNEY: The president’s cuts of $716 billion to Medicare, those cuts are going to be restored if I become president and Paul Ryan becomes vice president… My commitment is, if I become president, I’m going to restore that $716 billion to the Medicare trust fund so that current seniors can know that trust fund is not being raided and we’re going to make sure – and get Medicare on track to be solvent long-term on a permanent basis.

Meanwhile, Ezra Klein notes that back in July, Paul Ryan told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that the exact opposite approach would extend solvency:

    STEPHANOPOULOS: Your own budget, which Governor Romney has endorsed, would also have [$716 billion] in Medicare cuts.

    RYAN: Well our budget keeps that money for Medicare to extend its solvency. What Obamacare does is it takes that money from Medicare to spend on Obamacare.

Paul Ryan has the right of it — maintaining these cuts will extend the solvency of Medicare’s trust fund, while undoing the cuts as Romney insists will shorten its solvency. That’s because the cuts do not target seniors’ benefits, but rather the payment rates to health care providers. Overpayments to private insurers in Medicare Advantage are trimmed, overall provider payments are reformed to encourage efficiency, and reimbursements are tied to improved economic performance.

Since the securities flowing into the trust fund come from the payroll tax, which is not cut, the funding remains the same while the services-per-dollar those funds can purchase goes up. As a result, the solvency of Medicare’s trust fund is extended, and the gap over the next 75 years between Medicare’s funding and its expected payments shrinks.

Of course, Ryan’s implication that Obamacare uses the money from the cuts to pay for its own spending instead of extending Medicare’s solvency is also wrong. Trust fund accounting, which deals with Medicare’s solvency, is a conceptually separate framework from the unified budget accounting under which Obamacare’s spending falls. It’s perfectly feasible for the same cut to make room for new spending under the latter, while simultaneously improving Medicare’s solvency under the former. As Paul N. Van de Water put it, “That’s no different than when a baseball player hits a home run: it adds to his team’s score and also improves his batting average.”

So Romney contradicts Ryan on whether these cuts extend Medicare’s solvency, and both incorrectly claim Obamacare fails to do so. Welcome to politics.

Romney, Paul Ryan and sate level Republicans are in an absolute panic trying to get seniors to believe they are not going to cut Medicare. At the same time these gutless conservatives are lying about how Democrats and Obama strengthened the Medicare program.  No, “ObamaCare” Doesn't Cut Medicare

I’m sorry, but do Republican politicians have no shame? They’ve been running with the bold faced lie that “ObamaCare”, aka the Affordable Care Act, “cuts Medicare” since the day it was signed into law. Jesse Kelly pasted signs that “Gabby voted to cut $500 Billion Medicare” on his campaign signs in 2010. What do you do when a lie doesn’t stick? Tell a bigger lie. Now that Mitt Romney has selected Paul Ryan as his running mate Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” Budget Plan that converts Medicare into a voucher system that will result in much high medical cost for future retires has become a campaign issue. So Romney figures the best defense is a good offense and has dusted off the old “Obamacare cuts Medicare” lie and upped the ante – now he claims the Affordable Care Act “cuts Medicare” by an absurd $700 Billion.

Whatever amount you want to use, the Affordable Care Act doesn’t “cut Medicare” – it saves Medicare by reducing expenses. Let SeniorCorps.org explain:

    Despite the doom and gloom tactics of some members of congress and talking heads, the cuts will come from two prime sources; (1) eliminating Medicare fraud, and (2) a reduction in the amount of payments that are paid into Medicare Advantage programs that are offered by private insurance companies.

Medicare fraud cost the program an estimated $60 Billion every year. By beefing up the enforcement of fraud detection, the Affordable Care Act enables the Medicare Administration to significantly reduce this waste. As for Medicare Advantage program, that was a program passed by a Republican Congress under the theory that private business can always do something better than government. Enron anyone? Medicare Advantage benefits typically cost much more than benefits directly from Medicare. As my blogging colleague Denise in her Medicare and More blog explains so well in her Paul Ryan’s Medicare Plan article today, Medicare administrative costs average 3-4%, while private insurance companies’ administrative costs average around 15%. One reason is that the Medicare Administration doesn’t pay hundreds of millions in salaries & benefits to CEOs like the big insurance companies do. And private insurance companies don’t like to lose money, so they got the Republicans to include a “risk adjustment” factor into the Medicare Advantage program that guarantees the insurance companies will always get paid more than their actual cost. It doesn’t matter if their higher costs are from bloated administrative costs or actual benefits paid out to enrollees, they always get paid more. The Affordable Care Act remedies that by reducing and capping payments to insurance companies offering Medicare Advantage policies. The leaner, more efficient companies will do just fine and continue to offer policies, while the companies with bloated costs will abandon the market. Capitalism at its finest. And seniors don’t lose a single benefit – if they don’t fine find a Medicare Advantage policy that meets their needs they simply re-enroll to get those benefits directly from Medicare.

Neo-Nazi Site The Daily Caller Lies About Biden and $20M federal loan

Neo-Nazi Site The Daily Caller Lies About Biden and $20M federal loan

Fox & Friends, the Daily Caller, and the Drudge Report are falsely charging that a businessman that has supported President Obama and Vice President Biden is receiving a taxpayer-financed loan to expand his business overseas. In fact, the loan comes from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, which does not use taxpayer funds, and exists for the purpose of helping "U.S. businesses gain footholds in emerging markets" overseas.

The Daily Caller charged:

    In late July, John Hynansky -- a longtime friend of Vice President Joe Biden, and a major donor to Biden's campaigns as well as President Barack Obama's -- was awarded a $20 million taxpayer loan to build a foreign-car dealership in Ukraine.

Drudge highlighted this false claim with the headline, "Biden's 'good friend' receives $20M federal loan to open luxury car dealership -- in Ukraine." And Fox News also hyped this claim with co-host Gretchen Carlson saying: "Talk about friends in high places. A major donor to President Obama's campaign getting $20 million in taxpayer money to build a luxury car dealership in the Ukraine."

However, the claim that this loan uses taxpayer money is false. The Overseas Private Investment Corporation states that it is "the U.S. Government's development finance institution" and "helps U.S. businesses gain footholds in emerging markets." While it receives administrative funding from Congress, OPIC "operates on a self-sustaining basis at no net cost to American taxpayers" and has actually reduced the federal budget deficit for 34 consecutive years:

    Are OPIC services U.S. taxpayer-funded?

    OPIC operates on a self-sustaining basis at no net cost to American taxpayers. In fact, it generated net income of $269 million in Fiscal Year 2011, helping to reduce the federal budget deficit for the 34th consecutive year.

Indeed, during the early 1980s, OPIC returned the taxpayer money used to start up the agency to President Reagan. At the time, Reagan praised OPIC for helping advance the cause of economic freedom in the world.

The Daily Caller, Fox, and Drudge also highlight Hynansky's political contributions and relationship to Biden, but at no point do they present evidence that these donations or his friendship with Biden had any effect on his loan application.

Lies and disinformation continue to be one of the major tolls used by the far Right fanatics. Many of them call themselves conservatives or Republicans. That is misleading at best. While there are a few good Republicans left in America, most conservative Republicans - such as sites like The Daily Caller, The Drudge Report and Fox & Friends are ramming smiley-faced Neo-Nazism down the public's throat. They literally cannot bring themselves to post a fact based political story.

Mitt Romney's Double Backflip Medicare Lie

Mitt Immoral Elitist Romney's Double Backflip Medicare Lie. Romney Lies About His Medicare Plans Than Lies About Obama. Where Is Your Honor Mr. Romney?

Fact checkers call Mitt Romney's claim that the duo will preserve Medicare 'eye-popping' considering that Ryan calls for reworking it from the ground up.

    Romney vowed the duo would "preserve" Medicare, an eye-popping claim considering Ryan wants to transform the program from the ground up.

As to the predictable charge that President Obama will take $700 billion out of Medicare, they not only dispute this but say that "you could fill an arena with the facts this statement leaves out". It is shocking to see someone finally calling them out for what they are.

    ROMNEY: "Unlike the current president, who has cut Medicare funding by $700 billion, we will preserve and protect Medicare and Social Security and keep them there for future generations."

    THE FACTS: You could fill an arena with all the details left out in this statement. Ryan's reputation as a fiscal conservative is built on a budget plan that would overhaul the Medicare program and introduce a voucher-like plan that future retirees could use to buy private health insurance. Whether that results in a better or worse situation for Medicare recipients is a matter of debate. But under Ryan's plan, traditional Medicare would no longer be the health insurance mainstay, just one of many competing options.

They go on to give a hypothetical example of a senior under President Obama's plan and conclude that slowing the growth of spending is tantamount to a spending cut in Washington. They add the detail about the 'cuts' coming from Medicare Advantage. (How The Romney/Ryan Medicare Plan Would Affect Today’s Seniors)
They next criticize Romney's statement that he will 'preserve' Social Security leaves out the fact that he proposes changes such as increasing the retirement age and means testing the wealthy.

On Romney's bipartisan record as Governor of MA:

    THE FACTS: For a Massachusetts governor, balancing a budget is a requirement of state law.

    Ryan's claim that Romney didn't raise taxes to comply with Massachusetts' yearly balanced budget requirement is also misleading.

    And while Romney himself didn't raise income taxes, he benefited from a huge $1.1 billion tax hike passed by Democrats the year before he took office. It was responsible for roughly half of the deficit Romney helped cut in his first year in office.

They add that Romney, working with the Democratic Legislature,  raised hundreds of millions of dollars through new fees, but doesn't call that 'tax increases'.

On Romney/Ryan claims that they have provided specific, 'bold' solutions that don't duck the truth:

    THE FACTS: So far, vital specifics are missing from Romney as he pledges broad cuts in federal spending, but more money for the armed forces, and significant tax cuts. He proposes to cap federal spending at 20 percent of gross domestic product by the end of a first term, an ambitious goal that is not fleshed out with the painful choices that will be necessary for that to happen.

On Ryan's claims of President Obama's failures in his first 3 1/2 years in office:

    THE FACTS: Obama succeeded in achieving a stimulus plan, the automakers' bailout, his health care law, new rules in the financial services sector and more. But he had failures, too, a promised immigration overhaul and climate change legislation among them. Ryan's assertion that the Obama agenda "didn't make things better" is primarily a political judgment call. But no one seriously argues that the stimulus plan or the auto bailout made no difference at all. The question is whether such spending was worth the gains that were made.

    Obama's $800 billion-plus stimulus, enacted in February 2009, created both public-sector and private-sector jobs, even if not as many as its sponsors had hoped. The director of the Congressional Budget Office, Douglas Elmendorf, estimated that the stimulus saved or created more than 3 million jobs. Princeton University economist Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, estimated that the stimulus, together with the bank bailout started by President George W. Bush and continued by Obama, saved or created more than 10 million jobs. An earlier CBO analysis estimated that stimulus trimmed the unemployment rate by 0.7 to 1.8 percentage points.

On Romney's claim that Ryan has shown an ability to work with members of both parties: Not exactly.

On the 'You Didn't Build That' meme:

    THE FACTS: Ryan, like Romney and scores of Republicans in recent weeks, has used comments Obama made at July 13 campaign appearance in Virginia against him. But the rhetorical jab takes Obama out of context. Republicans have seized on only part of Obama's quote — "If you've got a business, you didn't build that" — but the full quote makes clear Obama is talking about the conditions that help businesses and individuals succeed, such as teachers and infrastructure.

There is a lot more detail that fair use prevents me from repeating. The media rarely does such a thorough job of debunking falsehoods promoted by those running for office.  I urge everyone to go to the link, recopy in its entirety and paste it into an email to every rightwinger you know making these arguments, every on the fence family member and coworker,  retweet, and share as widely as possible. 

Drive-by Bigot Mitt Romney Calls Kettle Black

So it's come to this. Less 24 hours after airing his latest demonstrably false, racially-driven ad about welfare, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney accused President Obama of waging a "campaign of division and anger and hate." By any measure, Romney's is an amazing--and cynically conscious--case of projection. After all, with a wink and nod Romney has coddled, aided and abetted his Republican Party's birthers and bigots, its union-busters and gay-bashers, its Muslim-haters and misogynists and more. He's insulted people his backers proudly hate as well as many whose support they claim to seek.

Speaking at a rally in Chillicothe, Ohio, Governor Romney informed his audience that it is in fact Barack Obama who is "dividing us all in groups":

    "He demonizes some. He panders to others. His campaign strategy is to smash America apart and then cobble together 51 percent of the pieces. If an American president wins that way, we all lose," Romney said. "So, Mr. President, take your campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago, and let us get about rebuilding and reuniting America."

That was an unfortunate choice of words. After all, Mitt Romney didn't just refuse to repudiate his Obama birth certificate fabulist Donald Trump. Cobbling together a majority, Romney announced, was what his candidacy was all about:

    "You know, I don't agree with all the people who support me and my guess is they don't all agree with everything I believe in," Romney said. "But I need to get 50.1% or more and I'm appreciative to have the help of a lot of good people."

No doubt, many of the people Trump claims "are screaming, 'Please don't give that up'" attended Romney's "Dine with the Donald" fundraiser. And if they missed that shindig, they might have joined Trump and Romney at the New York City birthday bash for Mitt's wife, Ann.

It is Ann Romney, by the way, who her husband says "regularly reports to me" about what American women care about. But when one of those women, Sandra Fluke, testified in March to Congress about contraception policy, right-wing storm-trooper Rush Limbaugh called her a "slut." But with a Republican nomination to win, Romney was too cowardly to cross his party's kingmaker:

    "I'll just say this, which is, it's not the language I would have used. I'm focusing on the issues I think are significant in the country today, and that's why I'm here talking about jobs and Ohio."

Five months later, Romney used the same dodge to avoid risking the ire of the Tea Party Islamophobes who dominate today's Republican Party.

 If Mitt Romney has values than so does every other scumbag on the face of the earth. Shame on Romney, Ryan and the radical anti-American conservative Republican movement for defining values as something base and repulsive to normal Americans.

Washington Post Columnist Charles Lane Thinks the Elderly Are Wealthy Because They Can Afford to Pay Off Their Mortgage. Conservatives suck at math as well.