Ryan Seals The Case Against Voter ID

Over at The Political Environment blog, I noted that Ryan in his acceptance speech absolutely nailed the case against Voter ID:

If rights, as he tells the convention, come from nature and God, then government cannot abridge the right to vote with voter ID laws.

Birth Of A Nickname

Lyin' Ryan.

From PolitiFact, right after Ryan's acceptance speech:

Says President Barack Obama broke his promise to keep a Wisconsin GM plant from closing.

Paul Ryan on Wednesday, August 29th, 2012 in a speech at the Republican National Convention in Tampa

Did Barack Obama break a promise to keep GM plant open?

Why is Paul Ryan hot?

According to Milwaukee political cartoonist Stuart Carlson, here's the reason:

A terrible day for Paul Ryan in the NY Times

A one-two punch for Paul Ryan in today's New York Times.

Front page headline: Paul Ryan's speech contained a litany of falsehoods

Then, on the op ed page, Ryan nemesis Paul Krugman, leads his column with:

Paul Ryan’s speech Wednesday night may have accomplished one good thing: It finally may have dispelled the myth that he is a Serious, Honest Conservative. Indeed, Mr. Ryan’s brazen dishonesty left even his critics breathless.

It gets worse from there:

But Mr. Ryan’s big lie — and, yes, it deserves that designation — was his claim that “a Romney-Ryan administration will protect and strengthen Medicare.” Actually, it would kill the program.

Read it all here.

Wisconsin media getting wise to Paul Ryan lies

After weeks of near-coronation of home-state-pol-gone-bigtime Paul Ryan, criticisms are finally creeping into Wisconsin media's coverage in the wake of his widely panned, lie-filled speech to the RNC on Wednesday.

Shortly after the speech, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel PolitiFact reviewed three statements from Ryan's RNC talk and a fourth Ryan assertion, giving the bunch two "false" ratings, one "mostly false" and one "half true."

The paper's editorial this morning, while focused more on Mitt Romney's speech ("Romney's shifting record remains a problem for him"), noted in euphemisms for "lying" also cropping up in other media, that:

"...his (Ryan's) speech was littered with loose talk..it was marred by how often he shaded the truth."

Is the bloom starting to come off the Ryan Rose at the state's biggest paper? Nice to see some fact checking and critical thinking of homie Ryan finally.

Over in Madison, in the Wisconsin State Journal, a conservative daily, a story carried the headline, "Fact flub in speech calls Ryan's credibility into question," noting:

""The risk for Rep. Ryan is he's a new face, to be sort of caught in those misstatements, it will raise questions about his character, and whether he's ready to play at this level,' said Joel Goldstein, a law professor at St. Louis University and an expert on the U.S. vice presidency."

And the reliably liberal (and mostly online, not print, these days) Cap Times, found that Romney trumped Ryan in his speech -- in the number of lies he told:

"But anyone who thought that Paul Ryan was going to win the liar's contest at the convention wasn't counting on Mitt Romney."

Clearly the Romney/Ryan machine, with its Wisconsin Walker allies, will work the media, try to spin Ryan back into their good graces. As will the smooth-talking Ryan himself.

But with the avalanche of national criticisms of Ryan's speech-a-lyin', and non-partisan fact checks ripping his speech, perhaps Wisconsin media will put aside its milk-colored glasses and keep reporting the truth of what Ryan is saying.

Merry Christmas 2008!

FU Paul Ryan and your band of blind followers!

Cap Times Editorial Slams Paul Ryan For GM "Lie," Using "Hometown as a Prop"

Blistering stuff this morning from the Cap Times on wonky "hard-truth"-teller Paul Ryan's cavalcade of lies in front of the Tea Party faithful in Tampa last night:

Ryan’s clear suggestion that Obama — or his policies — had something to do with the plant closure was a lie.

The government that was not there to support the Janesville workers was the administration of George W. Bush. GM announced and implemented the closure of the plant during Bush’s presidency.

When a newly elected President Obama rushed to save the domestic auto industry, and perhaps to renew the prospects of shuttered plants like the one in Janesville, the man whose campaign Ryan is now propping up wrote an op-ed titled: “Let Detroit (and, presumably Janesville) Go Bankrupt.”

And since we’re on the subject of government failing the workers in Paul Ryan’s hometown, surely it is relevant to bring up the congressman’s repeated votes for free-trade agreements that members of Janesville’s United Auto Workers Local 95 warned would undermine and ultimately shutter their workplace.

A man who would use his hometown as a prop and then try to deceive the country about the causes of its circumstance has a certain appeal to Republican delegates who cut their political teeth making the case for trickle-down economics and weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

But Wisconsinites, at least those who can remember 2008, will not believe him.

Nor should discerning voters in the rest of the republic.

Press seems to be turning on Ryan nationally. Full editorial here.

Fact-check time for Lyin' Paul Ryan's big speech

Lots of fact checking about to be done of Lyin' Paul Ryan's big speech tonight at the RNC -- we hope. We caught a ton of outright whoppers -- see our @paulryanwatch livetweets -- and the smart folks on MSNBC identified many others tonight.

We are especially impressed to see this analysis of lies written in real time during Ryan's speech and posted already by Think Progress.

With Wisconsin suddenly a swing state thanks to Ryan's Janesville ties, it's especially important that Wisconsin newspapers start covering the lies. The big question: Will they? Will the state's talented political reporters, including the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Craig Gilbert, Dan Bice, Patrick Marley and others across Wisconsin be unleashed by their editors to truly check and report the facts? Or will the papers just print more Paul Pablum and keep their customers and state residents in the dark?

Fact checkers and media in general have an unusual problem with Romney/Ryan, according to this great Washington Post piece: How to report the "the epic dishonesty of Romney’s campaign." The piece, entitled, "Call out the lies right in your headlines,"starts with this:

This doesn’t happen every day, but good for the Los Angeles Times for calling out the ubiquitous falsehood about Obama supposedly waiving welfare reform’s work requirement right in its headline: 

"Rick Santorum repeats inaccurate welfare attack on Obama"  

As Kevin Drum says: “it’s about time reporters and copy editors started putting this stuff front and center.” And, indeed, the LA Times does this, in its headline and with this highly placed sentence: “In fact, Obama did not waive the work requirement.

Here's hoping for some tough Wisconsin reporting -- despite the challenge of an unprecedented blizzard of lies and the natural tendency to boost the local guy. Let's get beyond the fact that Ryan is from Wisconsin. Let's get the facts about what he says and has done, and let the facts fall where they may. Let voters know what's true and what's not -- and let them decide who Wisconsin will choose in November. 

Watergate thug is Paul Ryan's longtime friend and campaign chairman

Steve King, a thug who manhandled Martha Mitchell to keep her from talking to the press about Watergate,  took the stage at the Republican National Convention to nominate his buddy Paul Ryan.

It was just another moment in the spotlight for Wisconsin, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which spends full-time promoting Paul Ryan these days.  This is just one of two stories about King's role, both by longtime political reporter Craig Gilbert, who's been around long enough to know King's story.

Paul Ryan’s name will be placed in nomination for vice president Tuesday by Wisconsin’s Steve King, a longtime friend and a member of the Republican National Committee.  [That's him pictured in an old photo.  He seems to stay away from photographers.]

“Essentially, we’re trying to introduce Paul to the world,” said King. “It’s my three and half minutes … I’m going to try to personalize it.” 

King, 71, and Ryan go back to before Ryan’s time in Congress. Paul Ryan volunteered on King’s unsuccessful campaign for U.S. Senate in 1988.

“He was an envelope stuffer,” says King.

And King has chaired all of Ryan’s House races (Ryan was elected to Congress in 1998). King is a former state chairman of the Wisconsin GOP, and a former business associate of Ryan’s brother, Tobin.

And now, the rest of the story (apologies to Paul Harvey, wherever he is):

King was deeply involved in helping Richard Nixon cover up the Watergate scandal during the 1972 presidential campaign, Martha  Mitchell's biography says. King, a former Wisconsin Republican Party chair, ran for the US Senate in 1988.

King, an ex-FBI agent, was working as a security man for the Committee to Reelect the President, known as CREEP, in 1972. He was assigned as personal security escort for former Atty. Gen. John Mitchell, the head of CREEP, and his outspoken wife, Martha, when the Watergate burglary became public. King later became head of security for CREEP, replacing his boss, John McCord, who was one of the Watergate burglars who broke into the Democratic Party's national headquarters.

The Mitchells were in California when the break-in occurred, but John Mitchell soon left for Washington to deal with the crisis, leaving Martha and King in California. When Martha was unable to reach him by telephone the next two days, the biography says:

Periodically, she'd go tell Steve King and Lea Jablonsky (John Mitchell's secretary) about the dirty tricks she knew had been instigated by the Nixon Administration and the Committee (CREEP), hoping to learn more from them.

She wanted her husband to quit CREEP and get out of politics and left that message with a Mitchell aide in DC. She also told the aide she was going to call the press and tell them about her ultimatum to John. She called Helen Thomas of UPI and was telling her about her disgust with politics when, she said:

Steve King rushed into her bedroom, threw her back across the bed, and ripped the telephone out of the wall.

She tried to call from another room:

Again, she said, she was thrown aside while the phone was disconnected. Steve then shoved her into her room and slammed the door.

She tried to climb from the balcony in her villa to the one next door, but

Steve King ran out and pulled her back inside. She claimed he threw her down and kicked her.

King stood guard outside her door. The Nixon and CREEP people began to spread stories that Martha was crazy, an out-of-control alcoholic, or had had a breakdown. The next day

...King was no longer guarding her door. She slipped downstairs, planning to escape, but King spotted her just as she reached a glass door. In the ensuing scuffle, Martha's left hand was cut, so badly that six stitches were required in two fingers.

When a doctor came to treat her hand, she was highly agitated and, with the help of two or three security people, he injected her with a sedative as she resisted. Before it took effect, she tried to get away, but

According to Martha, King saw her dashing toward the door and ran over and slapped her across the room.

Martha left the next day, agreeing to stay with friends in New York state, but instead checked into the Westchester NY Country Club and called UPI to say she had been held a political prisoner in California. When the story moved on the wire, reporters swarmed the country club, but only a NY Daily News crime reporter, Marcia Kramer, got into to see Martha.

As a crime reporter, Marcia says it was her opinion that Martha was a "beaten woman" and that the "incredible" black and blue marks on Martha's arms looked like they were a "totally professional job."

Martha eventually agreed to rejoin John in Washington, on condition that he resign from CREEP and that King and Jablonsky be fired. Mitchell resigned, but Martha found out later that rather than firing King, one of the last things Mitchell did at CREEP was to promote King to head of security -- presumably for a job well done. A few months later, in a letter to Parade magazine, a national Sunday newspaper supplement, Martha told columnist Walter Scott that:

Steve King ... "not only dealt me the most horrible experience I have ever had, but inflicted bodily harm upon me."

King, no doubt, will dismiss all of Martha's claims as untrue, the ravings of a drunken lunatic. But Winzola McClendon, who authored the biography, tells of a conversation she had later with John Mitchell, in April 1973:

We discussed the California incident. I asked if Martha really had been held down and sedated, and he said everything she told me was "essentially true." Why did Steve King and Lea Jablonsky -- a young woman Martha considered her friend -- let this happen? "These kids were scared to death ...They thought they were protecting me," he answered.

After Nixon won the election, King was rewarded with a job as special assistant to the Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz. That, of course, was before it all came tumbling down and Nixon was forced out of office on Aug. 8, 1974.

Quotes and excerpts are from Martha: the Life of Martha Mitchell, by Winzola McLendon, published in 1979 by Random House. Ms. McLendon, a journalist and White House correspondent, met Martha Mitchell while interviewing her in 1970 and became a friend and confidant while continuing to work as a reporter.

 

Paul Ryan, Social Security and Survivor's Benefits

My father died when I was five years old. He was about 36, younger than I am now. When he was still healthy enough to work, he worked at a local lumber mill and before that, as a surveyor for the county. There's frankly no way he had personally earned enough in his adult life to cover survivor's benefits for me and my sisters, aged three and 16, from then until each of us turned 18.

But that's what my family received, and it meant that my religiously inclined stay-at-home mom with almost no adult history of paid employment (or paying into Social Security, obviously) didn't lose the house. When she remarried, she was able to continue staying home with us.

Consider it a stark illustration of the difference between defined benefit vs. defined contribution programs.

In other words, Social Security allowed my working class family to live the kind of traditional nuclear family lifestyle that you practically have to be a Romney, a Ryan, a Palin, or a Santorum to afford anymore in a two-parent household. In traditional conservative circles, they'll still make working class men feel like failures because their stagnant wages don't cover a multi-person household anymore, and make working class women feel like failures as wives and mothers for not being true to their 'proper' roles, but that only goes so far. Guilt pays no one's rent. Even very conservative denominations like my parents' church have had to increasingly tolerate the fact that most married women have to seek paid employment at some point.

Ryan knows something about this sort of situation himself, since Paul Ryan also received survivor benefits when his father died, and was able to use them to finance his public university education. I feel bad for him losing a parent at a young age, but I also feel especially qualified to despise that he would turn around and pull the ladder up behind him for all the other families whose incomes don't cover private life insurance plans if they should die young.

Because Paul Ryan wants to cut Social Security to the bone and replace it with individual investment accounts, turning it into a 401(k)-style defined contribution program that would enrich Wall Street, with even smaller defined benefits going to the mostly working class recipients.

Just as Ryan's hero, Ayn Rand, used Social Security and Medicare, just as Mitt Romney can hardly seem to find a business community spokesperson who hasn't been a government contractor or gotten government support, Republicans are always stating their certainty that government help will surely destroy the moral character of any recipients they don't personally know.

Which is why, no doubt, Romney has embraced Ryan's budget plan. Romney's said doesn't think it would really hurt anyone to cut the social safety net, and maybe he really doesn't know better. Paul Ryan could tell him differently, but won't, because ... well, why does it matter?

It's purely vile to take help when you're in need and then turn around and ruin that help for others facing similar hardships. The motivation doesn't really enter into it as a mitigating factor, in my opinion, presuming that the truth of that motivation were even possible to determine.

Social Security takes care of people who are too old or sick to work anymore. It takes care of the widows and orphans of people who didn't live long enough to reach that state. In short, quietly and efficiently, without requiring membership in a church or big charity banquets where the donors are lavishly praised and celebrated, this country has been living the theoretically Christian ideal of taking care of the least of those among us at a level that no society in history had ever done before through private charity, with credit owing to even the lowest paid workers in the country.

Ostentatious Bible-thumpers like those running the Republican Party right now should appreciate that, because I know from my youthful readings that those ideals were pretty high on the list of things Jesus was said to care about. Unlike abortion or gays, which he didn't discuss, the Jesus of the Bible could barely stop talking about taking care of the poor and sick and disadvantaged. Dude could not shut up about it. Paul Ryan, who belongs to a church whose clergy have often been targeted for assassination in developing nations for helping the poor, should appreciate that. Paul Ryan, who was an orphan himself, should be able to bring some small fraction of the compassion he lauds for a 10-cell zygote to his public policy work if he's going to try and trade on a 'pro-life' aura derived from the faith he trades on.

The Republican Party has done well for themselves taking on the mantle of a lay ministry tending to the souls of change-averse whites. They've gotten all kinds of undeserved moral authority by playing semi-spiritual figures hawking God for secular political leverage. Though when you're also a transparent shill for aristocrats like Mitt Romney who simply want all the money to themselves and their VIP friends, there's only so far that a political performance art homage to the Carpenter of Galilee should really be able to take you before you can't open your mouth anymore without being laughed at.

Paul Ryan - Career Politician!

According to his brother who always thought one day that Paul would get a real job.




Why work for a living when you have figured out a way to become rich on the taxpayers dime? Let them do your work for you!

Paul Ryan - Bringing Back The Good Old Days of the 1920's

More Here!

Does it really cost $100,000,000 for Paul Ryan?

Cross Posted @ Cog Dis!

According to an embedded republican insider, David Koch bough the Vice Presidency for Paul Ryan (R - Ayn Rand).

 H/T Cenk Uygur and Current TV


Paul Ryan(R - Wall St.) is master of the oldest profession in the world....

It also goes to show how completely incapable Paul ryan is, that it takes $100 Million to get him on the ticket and nothing to get Sarah Palin on the ticket!

 I wonder who Mitt really wanted??

Ryan As Omen

It was just fifteen days ago that Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan for the campaign co-pilot seat, and they've been in rough skies ever since.

Ryan spent the first few days saying he wasn't really trying to kill Medicare as we know it, then burned up part of a week by denying, then admitting that, yes, he had solicited funds from the very federal stimulus program he'd repeatedly condemned.

And just as that fire was put out, sort of, Ryan's legislative far-right pally Todd Akin burst on to the scene with his now-infamous screwy suggestion that raped women could magically prevent their pregnancies and thus were not entitled to abortions - - misogynist cruelty on par with the proposal Akin and Ryan had endorsed in the House of Representatives to limit federally-funded abortions to only women who had been raped "forcibly."

Ryan had become the Dick Tracy comic strip character with a personal rain cloud over his head - - and just as Ryan was to jet off for the Tampa Convention a bigger, legitimate storm - - Hurricane Isaac - - took aim at the Florida Gulf Coast and has already cut at least one day off four days of GOP hoopla there.

They say national party nominating conventions are intentionally superficial and scripted, but this one won't escape some discussion of changing climate extremes - - Ryan voted against measures to stem greenhouse gas emissions (see a report on Ryan's record, p. 136) - - even if the Tampa event puts more climate change deniers under one roof than attended the last ALEC reunion.

And as Florida first responders are pressed into action with the approaching hurricane, Romney may wish he hadn't said the lesson of Scott Walker's recall election win was that we didn't need more firefighters and police officers. 

Tampa had already heavily borrowed police from across Florida to help with convention security, and that was before Isaac began to bear down on the convention city.

Nothing has gone right for the the GOP since Ryan loped into an oddly-choreographed early Saturday morning news conference/photo op on the dock off the USS Wisconsin, now a museum ship permanently tied up in Virginia.

It's still a long way to November 6th - - but shorter by two weeks, and counting, then when Ryan joined Team Romney.

Rocky takeoff for sure, in part because Ryan didn't use those two lost weeks to show us he's ready to sit in the Captain's seat.

In fact, he hasn't looked much different than Dan Quayle, 2.0.

Cross-posted at The Political Environment.

Convention Preview: Ryan A Tool In GOP Election Buyout

A guide to the Tampa Convention and subsequent campaign:


The Convention outcome:

Mitt Romney is nominated because the GOP (Greedy Old Party) has found and embraced the wealthiest person ever to run for President on its ticket - - though former rival New Gingrich's anti-Romney ads during the primaries documented that much of that wealth had been made at the expense of other people.

Paul Ryan is nominated because he is the architect of a budget plan that keeps the tax code working to protect and enhance the Romney niche wealth - - again at the expense of other people.

The Campaign strategy:

After the nominations, with the help of Super PAC's and the Citizens United decision, Republicans will spend about a half-billion dollars convincing all the other people that Romney and Ryan are working for them.

Romney-Ryan will count on the power of wealth already disproportionately showered by the tax code on the 1% to achieve the unabashed commercial flim-flamming of the electorate  - - greased by swing-state voter suppression laws - - in the most cynical and corrupt political act in American history.

Cross-posted at The Political Environment.

Paul Ryan-- Brown Noser Extraordinaire

Paul Ryan's high school class voted him biggest brown-noser in school. A former classmate from Joseph A. Craig High School in Janesville told us he was "always kissing up and kicking down. He was very popular in a superficial-- prom king and jock and student council president-- way but not really someone anyone trusted."

Most people who have followed Ryan's career in Washington have noticed the same patterns-- always kissing up and endearing himself to the rich and powerful. One of his Wisconsin colleagues told us that he "sold himself out to K Street and Wall Street faster than any Member had ever done in the history of Congress." Even when David Obey-- who was in Congress when Ryan was still brown-nosing in high school-- was Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Ryan had sailed past him in terms of contributions from Wall Street. The Financial/Insurance/Real Estate sector has given more in legalistic bribes to Ryan than to any other politician-- including senators-- in the history of Wisconsin. And that happened even before Boehner appointed him Budget Chairman! This morning, Politico took a deep look into how Ryan clawed his way to the top of the House foodchain, vaulting over a whole generation of ambitious Republican politicians. Ever wonder how Ryan got the word "serious" attached to his name? It sure made serious economists like Paul Krugman scratch their heads in absolute wonder. Politico hones right in on Ryan's ability to blow smoke up the asses of the media.

190 times. That’s how often the Wisconsin lawmaker’s name appeared in the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal between Election Day 2008-- when a Republican rout at the polls left the conservative intelligentsia urgently looking for a new star-- and the day this month when Mitt Romney tapped Ryan his running mate.

Another revealing number: Ryan and his plans for overhauling the federal budget drew at least 72 mentions in the conservative Weekly Standard magazine, according to a Politico count. There were at least as many references in the equally influential National Review.

These billings, in turn, helped Ryan drive an even bigger number: 1,050 is how many times Ryan and the Ryan budget were talked up on Fox News.

There are legions of smart and ambitious politicians who could never dream of this kind of publicity who can testify that numbers like this do not just happen by accident.

In Ryan’s case, say people who have worked closely with him, they are the result of a years-long effort to cultivate relationships with a small but influential corps of commentators, policy intellectuals, and impresarios of the conservative movement.

Ryan invites these people to off-the-record dinner briefings to talk about ideas and his policy proposals. He calls them to say how much he liked their articles. He attends their going-away parties and hires young people from their staffs. Above all, he has made clear that he takes these people seriously and wants to be taken seriously by them.

And these Washington and New York influentials-- including writers Bill Kristol and Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard, and Rich Lowry of National Review, and policy provocateurs like Bill Bennett and Pete Wehner-- have repaid the favor. In the process they have helped Ryan illuminate a path to power much different than the traditional strategy of bill-passing, logrolling, and above all loyal time-serving that historically was the way to win influence on Capitol Hill.

“Ryan developed a fan base outside of Congress,” explained conservative editor Yuval Levin. “He seems to be taken seriously by people who other members take seriously.”

“Public policy and intellectual types are susceptible to flattery and the bar is not particularly high,” quipped Ramesh Ponnuru, a National Review writer who knows and admires Ryan.

The GOP, long a royalist party that rewards those who wait their turn, has been upended in recent years by powerful ideological and technological forces, and nobody better symbolizes the new ways in which power is obtained than Ryan.

He even managed to ingratiate himself to fellow Wall Street-oriented Democrats to so powerful an extent that he has never to this day been seriously challenged for reelection by the DCCC despite representing a swing district filled with Democratic legislative leaders, a district that Obama won in 2008. Even now, when Ryan has a formidable grassroots challenge from Rob Zerban, Steve Israel and Debbie Wasserman Schultz have sent out the word that Ryan is not to be touched. One of the DCCC's biggest donors and fundraisers told me she would throw an event for Zerban in her home and the next day she told me "Steve told me not to waste my time or money. He said Zerban won't even win the nomination." That seemed odd to me since the DCCC hadn't even put up an opponent and no other Democratic opponent had come forward. But it was just Steve Israel doing what Wall Street whores like him-- and it is a requirement of the DCCC chairmanship that you be a Wall Street whore (think Rahm Emanuel and Chris Van Hollen)-- had always done: protect Paul Ryan.

But being president-- the position Wall Street wants him in-- is very different from being president of a fraternity or a junior high school class. We'll soon see if the American public is as gullible and susceptible to his charms as Rich Lowry, Bill Kristol and Stephen Hayes.

And, by the way, please visit the Stop Paul Ryan page if you'd like to do something about saving America from this venal brown-noser.

Paul Ryan & Women - Top 5 Facts

The Ryan Bounce

From http://www.firedupmissouri.com/content/ryan-bounce

Paul Ryan may have finally gone too far for Wisconsin voters

Check this out, Packer Nation. Paul Ryan is no friend of Wisconsin. Forget Medicare and abortion for a moment. He's abandoned us for the the Steelers!

He's a typical politician: Says whatever he thinks will help him get a vote.

Paul Ryan Learns National Media Doesn't Play Fox/Talk Radio Patty-Cake

Wherein Dana Milbank of The Washington Post gets the last word and re-directs Paul Ryan's clumsy spin.

But let's not get ahead of the story...

Ryan has been in The Todd Akin Avoidance Bunker this week ever since Ryan's reliable Missouri anti-abortion clone commandeered the national conversation with a weird lecture about rape and female physiology that threw science, base-line respect for 51% of the population and the entire Romney-Ryan campaign game plan under the bus.

So Ryan, who strongly opposes abortion even in cases of incest and rape, and supports the total abortion ban implicit in the so-called Personhood legislation he and Akin have backed, eventually had to face the media traveling with him and explain the contradiction he'd come to represent without looking like a fool or a hypocrite:

Walk that far-right line to keep the Tea Party and Right-to-Life movement satisfied - - the reason he is on the ticket - - while at least appearing to defer to Papa Bear Romney, who has said he supports abortion exceptions in rape and incest cases.

So he abandoned the fatally-toxic Akin, but muffed the scene because he couldn't tell the complete truth about just how Akin-like he really is.

So reporters pressed Ryan - - unlike the obsequious talk show hosts who let Ryan and his ilk prattle on without a challenge - - about the qualitative difference between Akin's signature, offensive stance on "legitimate rape" and the "forcible" rape language Ryan and Akin wanted added to federally-permitted abortion funding to narrow the exception.

The Washington Post's Dana Mil;bank nicely-framed Ryan's failed effort to mislead the media; the episode will be remembered when Ryan wanders off script or the Fox 'News' set where real reporters might be able to interview him:

“Look, I’m proud of my record,” he told reporters on his plane, but “Mitt Romney is going to be president, and the president sets policy. His policy is exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother. I’m comfortable with it because it’s a good step in the right direction.”

Does he now regret his sponsorship of legislation that made a distinction between “forcible rape” and other kinds — a position eerily similar to Akin’s “legitimate rape”?

“That bill passed, I think, by 251 votes,” Ryan replied. “It was bipartisan.” He neglected to mention that it passed after removal of the “forcible” language.

Cross-posted at The Political Environment.