The most dishonest convention speech ever?

Well, to be a fact-checker the day after Ryan's much anticipated, and highly dishonest and disingenuous, convention speech! Where does one begin? The GOP--and Ryan in particular--lives in an "up is down" sort of world. 

How else does one explain Ryan's assertion that the President ignored the recommendations made by the Simpson-Bowles debt commission?  The very commission that Ryan himself was on, and voted against the commission's own recommendations and convinced the other Republicans on the commission to follow suit. More here: 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/paul-ryan-fails----the-truth/2012/08/29/bbfe1eac-f254-11e1-b74c-84ed55e0300b_blog.html#pagebreak

Or the assertion that Obamacare diverts funding from Medicare---the very same reductions that were included in Ryan's own plan?

Or the assertion that the President has resided over the most deficit spending in history, ignoring the fact that he--Ryan--voted for all the tax cuts and spending increases of the GW Bush era?

And there were more. See, for instance, here: http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/106730/ryan-most-dishonest-convention-speech-five-lies-gm-medicare-deficit-medicaid

Add to these other Romney-Ryan blatantly dishonest assertions (Obama gutting welfare reform; the "you didn't build it" attack; the claim that Romney-Ryan will balance the budget) and it's no wonder journalists, fact-checkers, and citizens have a tough time cutting through the bull. It's dizzying...

The Romney-Ryan campaign may just be the most dishonest major campaign in modern American history, where up is down, black is white, and fact-checkers be damned.. Hopefully--and I am skeptical--the American people will see through the lies and dishonesty and misdirection and mendacity come November.

Oh, and by the way, the economy is the major issue for this campaign, right? Just curious, what exactly is the Romney-Ryan plan for recovery? I, for one, haven't seen one, yet we are told that a vote for R-R is a vote for economic recovery? Just want to make sure I've got that straight.... 

The Weekend Link

Ezra Klein writes about the "Do-Lot" 111th Congress:

The votes are (mostly) counted. The Republicans have clearly and decisively won. But did the Democrats actually lose?

They lost the election, certainly. And many of them lost their jobs. But the point of legislating isn’t job security. It’s legislation. And on that count the members of the 111th Congress succeeded wildly, even historically.

Timothy Egan writes that Obama saved capitalism, and lost the mid-terms because of it:

For no matter your view of President Obama, he effectively saved capitalism. And for that, he paid a terrible political price.

Suppose you had $100,000 to invest on the day Barack Obama was inaugurated. Why bet on a liberal Democrat? Here’s why: the presidency of George W. Bush produced the worst stock market decline of any president in history. The net worth of American households collapsed as Bush slipped away. And if you needed a loan to buy a house or stay in business, private sector borrowing was dead when he handed over power.

The Achievements of Governance

With the electorate ostensibly sending a message to President Obama and the Democratic Party in the 2010 mid-term elections, there is no shortage of punditry as to the reasons why voters turned their backs on the Democrats. Whether implicit or explicit, these pundits point to Democratic failures—failure to reduce unemployment more rapidly, failure to frame their agenda within a grand narrative that resonates, etc.

What has largely gone unnoticed—or at least underappreciated—is just how much this president and the Democratic congress achieved legislatively over the past two years. Healthcare reform, the stimulus, and financial regulatory reform, of course, have received all the headlines—and rightfully so—but there have been a myriad of progressive legislative achievements that have gone relatively unnoticed, without the fanfare, anger, faux outrage, and demagoguery of the healthcare debate.

Among others, these include:

-The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, making it easier for workers to sue for pay discrimination based on gender.

-Tripling the size of the AmeriCorps public service program

-Hate Crimes legislation, making it federal crime to commit an assault based on sexual orientation.

-Student Loan reform, discontinuing a forty-five year program that provided federal subsides and guarantees to private student loan lenders, with the Department of Education now handling such loans directly without profit.

-New rules on credit card companies, banning sudden arbitrary interest rate hikes

-A stimulus package that provided investments in education, health care, a national electronic health records system, infrastructure, green energy, and more.

-Healthcare reform that will extend health insurance to over 95 percent of Americans and does much to begin the process of bending the cost curve

-Financial regulatory reform, which modernizes the regulatory apparatus and rules for the 21^st century, while also creating an independent Financial Consumer Protection Agency

These are what Rachel Maddow calls “the underpinnings of the most legislatively productive 21 months in decades”…characterized as “policy, not politics”. It’s safe to say that the Democrats used their majorities to get stuff done, to govern, rather than politicking in anticipation of the next election. For that reason, it has been a two-year super majority well spent.

Mid-Term Post Mortem

I’m a little late to this but, hey; it’s been a busy week.

As expected, Republicans have won a sizeable majority in the House of Representatives and failed to win the Senate, despite making some gains there as well, resulting in divided government for at least the next two years.

Republicans were the big winners, but why? As I’ve pointed out several times in the past (here, here, and here), it’s sickening to think that the same folks that (a) were largely responsible for the structural weakening of the American economy and the germination of the financial crisis over the past decade; and (b) did everything in their power to block the Democrats’ economic recovery agenda over the past two years, have now been rewarded with large electoral gains. Now, obviously, the economy is still in rough shape, what with unemployment still hovering between 9 and 10 percent. But does anyone truly believe that the recovery would have been stronger and quicker under Republican governance?

Which brings us to those pundits who maintain, “if only Obama and the Democrats had spent more time ‘focusing’ on the economy, growth would be higher, unemployment lower, and Democrats would still have a Congressional majority”. Of course, as Paul Krugman points out, these people fail to specify what a greater “focus” on the economy would have consisted of. Would greater “focus” consist of a larger, more robust stimulus package? Or simply the president touring the country, repeating over and over, “We’re totally focused on the economy”? Of course, as it turns out, those who assert that the president hasn’t focused enough on jobs and the economy generally wanted a smaller stimulus package (or none at all) and have attempted to block (oftentimes successfully) all subsequent economic recovery legislation in the Senate, from extension of unemployment insurance to tax cuts for small businesses to aid for states and municipalities.

As Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have noted, we are essentially “giving the keys back to the folks who crashed the car.” Very disheartening, indeed.

The Economic and Political Consequences of an inadequate stimulus

Krugman:

What we do know is that the inadequacy of the stimulus has been a political catastrophe. Yes, things are better than they would have been without the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: the unemployment rate would probably be close to 12 percent right now if the administration hadn’t passed its plan. But voters respond to facts, not counterfactuals, and the perception is that the administration’s policies have failed.

The tragedy here is that if voters do turn on Democrats, they will in effect be voting to make things even worse.

The resurgent Republicans have learned nothing from the economic crisis, except that doing everything they can to undermine Mr. Obama is a winning political strategy. Tax cuts and deregulation are still the alpha and omega of their economic vision.

What the Democrats are up against, part 2:

More here.

What the Democrats are up against: