I received an email from The Daily Kos saying “Click here to see 25 journalists and pundits call out Paul Ryan for lying, and please share the list with friends over Facebook, Twitter or other social networks you belong to.”

I figured it was easier to pass this link on to you than it would have been to make 25 separate blog posts.

I haven’t followed any of the links in The Daily Kos article yet.  I figure I can pretend to be Faux Noise for a day and report first and verify later.  If I  find any of the links to be misleading in themselves, then I will be sure not to bother to report back here.

I have mixed feeling about clicking on the following link from the article:

Fox News contributor, Sally Kohn:
“Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech.”
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/…

I have barely begun to read the Faux Noise article and it already beats the part quoted by The Daily Kos. To all your friends that insist that Faux Noise never lies, I beg of you to send them a link to this Faux Noise item. However, stand back, because the cognitive dissonance may explode from their heads.

On the other hand, to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to facts, Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech. On this measure, while it was Romney who ran the Olympics, Ryan earned the gold.

The good news is that the Romney-Ryan campaign has likely created dozens of new jobs among the legions of additional fact checkers that media outlets are rushing to hire to sift through the mountain of cow dung that flowed from Ryan’s mouth. Said fact checkers have already condemned certain arguments that Ryan still irresponsibly repeated.

TruthOut.org has the Democracy Now interview Matt Taibbi: The Secret to Mitt Romney’s Fortune? Greed, Debt and Forcing Others to Foot the Bill.

A new article by reporter Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone sheds new light on the origin of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s fortune, revealing how Romney’s former firm, Bain Capital, used private equity to raise money to conduct corporate raids. Taibbi writes: “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.”

Matt Taibi talks about a number of concrete examples of the hypothetical situation I used in the previous post Vulture Capitalism Explained. If you have trouble getting a grasp on what Taibi is talking about, reading my previous post may help. Also, if my previous post was too hypothetical, then Taibi adds the real examples to what I was explaining.

Mitt Romney is up in arms about the federal government’s long term debt which is less than our gross national product. In Romney’s business life in one example in the above video, he invested $18 million to get hold of a company that then borrowed over $300 million to pay him huge profits. After creating this fictitious wealth, he walked off with the cash, put the company in bankruptcy, and left the lenders with close to nothing for their $300 Million in loans.

No wonder Bain has been able to have an 88% annual return for its investors for twenty years. You use the money to invest in what is essentially a heist. The difference with this and other criminal types is that you get the government to write loopholes into law so that what you are doing is technically legal.

But as we liberals, progressives, and Democrats have been saying since Reagan came to office ,”There oughta be a law.” And there could be a law if we got the government out of the hands of the corporate Republicans (and some corporate Democrats.)

The Real News Network has the video interview Romney and the European Authoritarian Right with John Weeks.

John Weeks: European right-wing governments prefer Obama for pragmatic reasons, but are closer to Romney in ideology
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The U.S. Federal Reserve has put a lot of money into the various bailout funds for the euro. Okay. I think that the European governments believe that—the right-wing governments believe that Romney would be less likely to do that. So even though they may prefer Romney in terms of his social and economic policies, they’re interested in continued support from the Federal Reserve system. And after all, the sad part of it is Obama has not been that progressive. So he’s not that far from some of these governments. I mean, that is the—that’s what’s fundamentally under attack by the right wing in the United States and Europe, the idea that people can come together to solve a problem.

This interview explains to me why it is that Europe is turning rightward. I was fooled by the post World War II history into thinking that the United States was leading Europe away from Europe’s social democratic tendency.

Rolling Stone magazine has the article The Federal Bailout That Saved Mitt Romney. Thanks to ToddS for recommending this article.

In fact, government documents on the bailout obtained by Rolling Stone show that the legend crafted by Romney is basically a lie. The federal records, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal that Romney’s initial rescue attempt at Bain & Company was actually a disaster – leaving the firm so financially strapped that it had “no value as a going concern.” Even worse, the federal bailout ultimately engineered by Romney screwed the FDIC – the bank insurance system backed by taxpayers – out of at least $10 million. And in an added insult, Romney rewarded top executives at Bain with hefty bonuses at the very moment that he was demanding his handout from the feds.

Sort of calls to mind the book by Bill Black – The Best Way To Rob a Bank is to Own One.  Mitt seems to have come up with a way to rob a bank that Bill Black didn’t even think about.

The Rolling Stone article concludes with

Even as consumers took a loss, however, a small group of investors wound up getting a good deal in the bailout. Bain Capital – the very firm that had triggered the crisis in the first place – walked away with $4 million. That was the fee it charged Bain & Company for loaning the consulting firm the services of its chief executive – one Willard Mitt Romney.

I guess the title of another book could be, “The Best Way To Get Rich Is To Steal Money.”  Maybe “Mitt, you didn’t build it, you stole it” would be a better title.

Rachel Maddow has blogged about Court rejects Florida GOP voter-registration restrictions.

Republican efforts to restrict voting rights come in a variety of forms. Some of the most notable efforts involve onerous voter-ID laws and closing early-voting windows.

But in Florida, GOP officials have also placed sweeping restrictions on voter-registration drives. As Laura explained overnight, new Republican-imposed rules have made it almost impossible for progressive groups to register new Democratic voters. This isn’t an accident.

I hate to think that this election is already moot because the Republicans have already suppressed enough Democratic voters to cause President Obama to lose this election.

Here is a completely unbiased look at the Romney-Ryan economic plan 🙂

According to MoveOn.org, “Everyone Around You Needs To See This Video Robert Reich Dropped Everything To Make”

There has been a controversy on Roger Goun’s Facebook page about whether or not the Romney ads about the welfare work rules changes are truthful or not.  Coincidentally that dependable commie, pinko, left-wing mouth piece, The Boston Globe has an editorial on the subject. (I thought I would put in the adjectives before some right-wing nut job did 🙂

The 1996 reform was intended to guide welfare recipients into the workforce. But Ron Haskins, the Newt Gingrich policy aide who worked on the legislation , has said the program was always meant to adapt during a downturn, when needs rise and the number of jobs available shrinks. Unfortunately, it hasn’t. Over the past four years, temporary assistance enrollment has barely increased, even as unemployment grew. People who need help aren’t getting it.

Part of the problem is the program’s rigid work rules, which might make sense when the economy is humming but are counterproductive now. Currently, a state must have a sufficient percentage of its welfare recipients working in order to qualify for federal funds. When jobs are few, as in the current economic climate, that means states have a perverse incentive to cut otherwise deserving recipients off assistance in order to reach the work-participation threshold. In Ohio, officials have slashed temporary-assistance rolls by a third since last year in order to avoid losing aid. That’s a sign of inflexible rules, not a sudden increase in employment.

Tweaking the rules to account for the lack of jobs in the private market is consistent with the aims of welfare reform. It would allow states to use different approaches, for instance by extending a private-sector jobs programs subsidized by President Obama’s 2009 stimulus. In the program, HHS provided stimulus dollars to states that subsidized the hiring of temporary assistance recipients by private companies. The program was a wild success; for less than 1 percent of the cost of the $787 billion stimulus, it created 260,000 jobs in 39 states. Even states with very conservative Republican governors, including Haley Barbour of Mississippi and Rick Perry of Texas, took part in the program before it ran out two years ago.

When this legislation passed in the 1990’s, I thought, “Fine for putting in these rules when the economy is booming, but what is going to happen in the next recession?”  I didn’t know that there was adaptability written into the law to cover the situation I worried about.

Of course, now that we are at the stage were we believe nothing we read, or hear, or see, I suppose it is almost pointless for me to read anything or write anything on the matter.

The Real News Network has the article Wilkerson on GOP Convention.

Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired United States Army soldier and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. Wilkerson is an adjunct professor at the College of William & Mary where he teaches courses on US national security. He also instructs a senior seminar in the Honors Department at the George Washington University entitled “National Security Decision Making.”

JAY: And I don’t think you could find it in most undeveloped countries.

WILKERSON: No way. This is part of the American mystique, it is part of our heritage, to from time to time become, essentially, speared on our own devices. We use religion, we use finance and economics. You ask about the division in the Republican Party. If I were the Koch brothers, if I were some guy making billions of dollars off a hedge fund and paying absolutely no taxes or very little taxes, I’d go after Romney, too; I wouldn’t vote for Obama. Obama at least looks like he might be slightly interested about the vast majority of poor people in this country. He looks as if he might slightly be interested in revenues through taxes. He might slightly be interested in things that impact the majority of people in America. Romney’s interested in the richest people in the country. And so if I were they, I would be out there like Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers and others; I’d be funneling that money out there for Romney; I want an idiot in there who believes in predatory capitalism the way I do, so that I can continue to rape the world.

It is interesting how the word “rape” comes up in so many different contexts when talking about Republicans. Maybe this is why Republicans have such a fixation on sex. They think about and dream about it, but don’t have much scientific or practical knowledge about its affects on society.

This is another of the articles recommended to me by RichardH. The Last Bipartisan by Bill Keller about Senator Ron Wyden from Oregon.

I once asked a Wyden aide whether the senator ever showed signs of despair at the increasingly toxic climate. “You know,” the aide replied, “I’ve been trying to figure the guy out for about six years now and I honestly think that while the stuff that goes on here makes the rest of us tired, angry and cynical, it just makes him that much more determined to find a way to fix it. Seriously, after taking a three-year beating trying to push bipartisan health reform, he walks into my office and says, ‘Great, now we’re going to do bipartisan tax reform.’ I admire the hell out of him for it, but sometimes I want to throw things at him.”

As a resident of Oregon from 1994 to 2006, I voted for Ron Wyden a number of times.  So I have been trying to figure him out for more than just 6 years.  As his aide says, “but sometimes I want to throw things at him.”

Ron Wyden wants to win some minor battles while slowly giving up enough territory to lose the war.  It didn’t take President Obama quite as long to figure out (I think he might have figured it out), that giving an inch to the opposition is a losing strategy.  It is not even a winning tactic anymore.

For Ron Wyden to come up with a bill that he and Paul Ryan could agree on required Wyden to accept the false Ryan premise that the problem is in the level of social benefits and not in the tax and regulation give-aways to the wealthy.  If you start with the wrong premise, you will inevitably lose the war.

RichardH has been sending me links to articles from The New York Times.  Here is the first one The Comeback Skid by Paul Krugman.

But as I said, Mr. Christie talks a good (and very loud) game about his willingness to make tough choices, making big claims about spending cuts — claims, by the way, that PolitiFact has unequivocally declared false. And for the past year he has been touting what he claims is the result of those tough choices: the “Jersey comeback,” the supposed recovery of his state’s economy.

Strange to say, however, Mr. Christie has told reporters that he won’t use the term “Jersey comeback” in his keynote address. And it’s not hard to see why: the comeback, such as it was, has hit the skids. Indeed, the latest figures show his state with the fourth-highest unemployment rate in the nation. Strikingly, New Jersey’s 9.8 percent unemployment rate is now significantly higher than the unemployment rate in long-suffering Michigan, which has had a true comeback thanks to the G.O.P.-opposed auto bailout.

Why does reality seem to have a liberal bias?