Lyin' Ryan suckers voters with Financial CHOICE Act, exploiting "rural resentment" to the max.

Paul Ryan is exploiting “rural resentment” with conscience free panache pushing this gift to the Wall Street Banks, the Financial CHOICE Act. So now “choice” is good? I’ve highlighted Ryan’s shameless bullshit (keep in mind Ryan voted to bailout the banks):

“This is a jobs bill for Main Street. It will rein in the overreach of Dodd-Frank that has allowed the big banks to get bigger while small businesses have been unable to get the loans they need to succeed. With the Financial CHOICE Act, the era of taxpayer-funded bailouts and too big to fail is over. Instead, we will put Main Street first to create more opportunities for people who work hard and do the right thing.

"People who work hard and do the right thing" probably isn't mention anywhere in the Act:

Ryan’s co-opting of the “too big to fail” tagline was rich, considering that Dodd-Frank was specifically designed to ensure financial institutions so entwined with the economy that their failure might tank the entire market could be dismantled safely. It’s right there on the first page of the legislation:

Here's Ryan pushing passage of the Wall Street bailout. Ya think he'll make the same speech and "hard" choice again when the time comes...sure:

So what's making Ryan drool in the Financial CHOICE Act? Well, it has nothing to do with helping you. In fact, you're on your own...which is CHOICE and freedom after all:

The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau — which seeks to improve transparency in auto loans, student loans, and mortgages, i.e. the things most directly affecting the average Joe — would be hobbled. Right now the CFPB can sue financial institutions on your behalf when they cheat you out of money, and track and resolve customer disputes with their banks and credit card companies. It acts largely independently because its director cannot be fired by the president and it does not have to answer to Congress. In other words, the only person the CFPB works for is you, and the GOP doesn’t like that, so they want to replace its director with a board of appointees and eliminate its current funding.

Another provision the GOP hopes to do away with, which was not a part of Dodd-Frank but an Obama-era executive order, is the fiduciary rule. We’ve addressed it in greater depth in other articles, but put simply, the rule required financial planners to act with your best interests in mind, instead of acting in their wallet’s best interests. (Kind of wild they were ever allowed to do that in the first place, isn’t it? But hey, this is America.)

And I thought these were two nightmarish but interesting additions:

The bill would remove the power through which the federal government can label a bank “too big to fail,” and disassemble it before it collapses and triggers another crisis. The bill would also replace Dodd-Frank’s Orderly Liquidation Authority with a special bankruptcy process that aims to insulate the financial markets from a failing bank’s fallout.

Ryan uses poll numbers to make Obama's Growing Economy look like we're on the Wrong Path.

Republicans have been relentless trashing the U.S. economy, trying in every way to delegitimize Obama. If you believed the GOP presidential front runners, the country was on the verge of collapse.

This was all by design:

Secret meetings led by House GOP whip Eric Cantor (in December 2008) and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (in early January 2009) in which they laid out their daring (though cynical and political) no-honeymoon strategy of all-out resistance to a popular President-elect during an economic emergency. “If he was for it,” former Ohio Senator George Voinovich explained, “we had to be against it.”

Republicans have made it their business to obstruct everything he does. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said it best in 2012: “Our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term.”

This PolitiFact finding makes it seem like the country is headed in the wrong direction too, based on the GOP's campaign of deception to the American public for the last 7 years:

How could the public feel otherwise, hearing lie after lie on conservative talk media and countless fact free Republican presidential debates. Heck, they even said in public how they planned to delegitimize Obama. Except for "cut to lobbyist," the cliche ridden list of fear based fiction below has been successfully sold to the public, according to the poll Ryan is referencing:

Reality looks completely different. PolitiFact had a responsibility of making note of was how wrong public perception is, and that Ryan's use of the poll number obscures the truth. Many of the numbers have gotten better since I screen captured these. 

Even with all the obstruction, does this look like American is on the wrong path?

  

Correcting Lyin' Paul Ryan...again.

The only good that came out of Paul Ryan's run for vice president is that we now know he's a lying phony. Is that just liberal name calling? Not if it's the truth.

Ryan's opponent Democratic candidate Rob Zerban would wise to incorporate a few of the important reality base points below about Ryan's mischaracterization of poverty and Medicaid. From Bill Moyers:

Ryan: “It’s time for an adult conversation,” he told The Washington Post: The problem is that a prerequisite for any adult conversation is telling the truth and it is there the congressman falls monumentally short.

In addition to Rep. Ryan’s recent, racially-coded comments about “our inner cities” where “generations of men [are] not even thinking about working,” his rhetoric around policy should raise red flags for anyone — including the media — assessing his credibility.

Here are the facts that simply scream common sense:

A report from Emily Oshima Lee, policy analyst at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, examines the hatchet job Rep. Ryan did on Medicaid ... The Washington Post generously described as a “critique.” Indeed, Ryan’s report ... misrepresenting and cherry-picking data — is a dangerous disservice ... assessing antipoverty programs.

Lee notes that Ryan misuses research to imply that Medicaid coverage leads to poorer health. “The privately insured comparison is patently unfair because these people tend to be higher income and that comes with a whole host of health privileges.” She notes that Medicaid enrollees tend to struggle a lot more with chronic conditions and illnesses than other populations writes Lee, in my opinion admirably resisting the temptation to add, “duh.”

Ryan also argues that Medicaid coverage has little positive effect on enrollees’ health. But as Lee points out, Ryan conveniently overlooks studies showing lower mortality rates; reduced low-weight births and infant and child mortality; and lower mortality for HIV-positive patients. “…such as increased use of preventive care and greater financial security.”

Despite Ryan’s shabby work when it comes to antipoverty policy, the media repeatedly seems willing to overlook it. That’s another strike against the prospects of a truly adult conversation about poverty — in addition to honesty, it requires accountability.

Rep. Ryan also plays on fears of low-income people abusing the welfare system when he asserts that Medicaid coverage improperly increases enrollees’ use of health care services, including preventive care and emergency department services ... by comparing Medicaid enrollees to uninsured people ... “Presenting data that Medicaid enrollees use more health services than the uninsured affirms that insurance coverage allows people who need care to seek it out,” writes Lee, “and that being uninsured is a major barrier to receiving important medical care.”

Further, one of the two studies Ryan references explicitly states that “neither theory nor existing evidence provides a definitive answer to… whether we should expect increases or decreases in emergency-department use when Medicaid expands.”

Softening Reputation as Lyin' Ryan, he desperately constructs funny "getting Weinermobiled again" story.

'This Town' (Blue Rider Press), Mark Leibovich's new book, contained this folksy aside about regular guy Ryan:

 "In early August, when Romney tapped him, Ryan's life got predictably insane: he coined a new phrase, 'to get Weinermobiled.' It referred to a summer he once spent working for Oscar Mayer in northern Minnesota. A reporter asked him if he ever drove the Weinermobile. 'I did actually, as a promotion for turkey bacon at a grocery store,' he said. 'Then Wikipedia or something wrote that I was the guy who drove the Weinermobile.' That was its own job. Ryan only drove it once. But the story spread and he gets accused of lying. 'So now, whenever something like that happens, we say, "Oh, I'm getting Weinermobiled again." ' "

Yeah, that's makes everything good again?