The truth behind the fiction of the Republican National Convention

What they want to say is I Built It. By saying “we” they just make Obama’s point. these people can do nothing right.

My dad just sent me a long email suggesting that Obama’s college education was paid for by a Chicago crime syndicate. I don’t quite follow the logic, but I guess they had somehow taken a liking to the young Barry Obama when he was attending Occidental as an undergraduate, and determined that he could one day be molded into a powerful weapon and brought to Chicago to do their bidding. So, they decided to put him through Harvard. There’s no other way, you see, that a young black man of modest means could do something like that on his own. Two minutes with Google brought up all kinds of information on Obama’s student loans, which are well documented. (He was still paying them off when he was in the Senate. Ultimately, he paid them off with the royalties from his autobiography.) I made this clear to my father, and the next day I received an email about Obama’s birth certificate and how easy it is to have documents forged when you control NASA and the Pentagon. There is absolutely nothing that you can say to these people. But, I keep trying. The debunking fatigue is setting in, though.

Michael Moore weighed in on Eastwood’s bizarre performance.

Speaking to Invisible Obama last night, in a performance that seemed to have been written by Timothy Leary and performed by Cheech & Chong, Clint Eastwood was able to drive home to tens of millions of viewers the central message of this year’s Republican National Convention: “We Are Delusional and Detached from Reality. Vote for Us!”

The footage of Eastwood rambling and mumbling to his “Harvey” – President Obama – will be played to audiences a hundred years from now as the Most Bizarre Convention Moment Ever. The people of the future will know nothing about Dirty Harry or Josey Wales or a Million Dollar Baby. They WILL know about the night a crazy old man hijacked a national party’s most important gathering so he could tell the President to literally go do something to himself (i.e. fuck himself). In those few moments (and these days, it only takes a few moments—see Anthony Weiner), he completely upended and redefined how he’ll be remembered by younger and future generations.

A few years ago, at the annual National Board of Review film awards held at Tavern on the Green in New York, I was there to hand out one of the honors. When it came time for Eastwood to accept his, he went up to the microphone and growled to me in front of the audience, “If you ever show up at my house with that camera, I’ll shoot you on sight.” The audience laughed, I laughed, but the person who issued the threat wasn’t laughing. That creeped me out a bit. I made sure never to go stand on Clint Eastwood’s lawn.

But as I said, the best outcome from the incident last night was that it showed just how out of touch Republicans are these days. It’s as if they want a divorce from us, the American mainstream, so they can go live in the land of legitimate rapes and ice caps that don’t melt. Most Americans don’t live there on Planet Koo-koo, and I don’t suspect many will be visiting there any time soon.

Thanks, Clint: you made our day!

I was in a park yesterday and noticed a car with a bumper sticker “I don’t believe the LIBERAL media.”

I spent the next hour trying to tease it out.

Like:

1. What exacty IS the liberal media? Is he referring to specific media providers? Or does he mean to imply that ALL media is liberal?

2. What is there to “believe” or not believe. Are weather reports on how much rain fell yesterday to be left to scrutiny? Are we being misled by reports on football scores on the New York Times?

I don’t know, I probably spent way too much time with the bumper sticker, but I couldn’t help but interpret it as to say “I only believe whatever suits me, don’t confuse me with the evidence”

I will return to my coffee now that Mark has turned down my lunch offer, that bastard.

Given media consolidation, almost all of our current alternatives are owned by the same few individuals and corporations, almost all of whom are conservative. When people rant about the “liberal media” what they’re really ranting about are facts. They’re objecting to having to be confronted by facts. It’s that simple.

Correction, the Economist is not American,. I apologize for the oversight.

Nate Silver is giving Obama a 71% chance of winning. I don’t think having a delusional Clint Eastwood yelling at a chair helped.

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/author/nate-silver/

Chris Rock said it best.

https://twitter.com/chrisrockoz/status/241373614572724224

They had considered having a hologram of Reagan at the convention.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0812/80532.html?hp=l3

Ryan doubles down on his lies:

Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan declined on Tuesday to back away from statements in his party convention speech that nonpartisan fact checkers have branded as false or misleading.

In a round of television interviews, the Wisconsin congressman was challenged by network anchors to defend statements on Medicare, the federal deficit and the 2008 closing of a GM plant in his hometown, Janesville.

Asked by NBC “Today” show anchor Matt Lauer whether he would concede that some of his statements “were not completely accurate,” Ryan responded: “No. Not in the least, actually.”

Factcheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, found that Ryan’s nomination acceptance speech last week in Tampa, Fla., “contained several false claims and misleading statements.” Politifact, a project of the Tampa Bay Times and other news organizations, faulted the speech for falsehoods as well.

In the speech, Ryan said many people liked the sound of President Obama’s talk about change during the 2008 campaign — “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.”

But GM had closed the Janesville plant a month before Obama took office as president. Ten months before the shutdown, Obama had visited the plant and told workers there, “I believe that if our government is there to support you, and give you the assistance you need to retool and make this transition, that this plant will be here for another hundred years.”

“After our plant was shut down,” Ryan told Lauer on Tuesday, “[Obama] said that he would lead an effort to retool plants like the Janesville plant to get people back to work. It’s still idle. People are still not working there. Lots of people I grew up with who lost their jobs there still don’t have those jobs there. So my point was not to lay blame on a plant shutdown. It was, this is yet another example of the president’s broken promises.”

Lauer also questioned Ryan on his remarks at the convention on Obama’s creation of “a new bipartisan debt commission.”

“They came back with an urgent report,” Ryan said in his speech. “He thanked them, sent them on their way and then did exactly nothing. Republicans stepped up with good faith reforms and solutions equal to the problems. How did the president respond? By doing nothing — nothing except to dodge and demagogue the issue.”

Lauer asked Ryan whether he owed it to the public to mention that as a member of the panel — the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform — Ryan had voted against sending its deficit reduction plan to Congress for a vote, in effect blocking action on its recommendations.

“But if you read the next paragraph, I said Republicans offered alternatives,” Ryan told Lauer.

Ryan said the Republican-controlled House addressed some of the plan’s shortcomings and adopted its own version. “That’s my point,” he said. “The president didn’t do that.”

But Obama did release a plan to cut the deficit by $3.6 trillion over 10 years through spending cuts and tax hikes.

On ABC’s “Good Morning America,” anchor George Stephanopoulos asked Ryan to respond to charges by Democrats that it was dishonest for him to criticize Obama for $716 billion in Medicare cuts that Ryan included in his own federal budget proposal.

Ryan said his budget, which the House passed, included the Medicare cuts because it was “based upon current law,” which included assumed the reductions as part of Obama’s healthcare overhaul. He told Stephanopoulos that he voted to undo those cuts when he backed repeal of the healthcare law.

“The point is, and this has been pretty well verified and established, if you’re taking $716 billion from Medicare to finance Obamacare, that really is a raid of Medicare for Obamacare,” Ryan told ABC. “We think that’s wrong. Our plan to save Medicare does not affect or change the benefits for anybody who is in or near retirement.”

The $716 billion in Obama’s Medicare cuts also do not affect anyone’s benefits; they come mainly from reductions in government reimbursement rates for hospitals and other care providers.

Obama’s reelection campaign released a statement hammering Ryan for his remarks on the GM plant in Janesville.

“On all three network morning shows today, Congressman Ryan repeated the falsehood he told about the Janesville GM plant in his convention speech,” the statement said. “The truth is that the GM plant closed before President Obama took office and, as the Detroit News reported, he ‘made no such promise’ to keep it open.”

After his morning show interviews from North Carolina, where he campaigned on Labor Day, Ryan planned to head to Ohio for an afternoon rally near Cleveland, then to Iowa for another in Cedar Rapids.

Taken from the LA Times:
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-paul-ryan-fact-check-20120904,0,3872415.story