Last updated on February 8th, 2013 at 12:08 pm
Oops, he did it again!
The Romney Ryan ticket will make you dizzy. Back and forth, for it against it and then deny it. Deny, deny, deny, and they will believe. Paul Ryan’s been running all around telling everyone that the stimulus was an utter failure and he, rugged individualist, didn’t take no stinkin’ stimulus.
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Ryan is a another cardboard cut out of a rugged individualist. All dreams, no substance.
There are pdfs with Ryan’s signature asking for the stimulus money, over and over and over again. In them, he writes to support the request for “grant application for the Recovery Act”. Ryan says he didn’t lie, he just didn’t remember because his staff handled the requests as “constituent services”. Sorta like how he forgot about that million dollar trust fund he left off of his disclosure.
And much like his professed love for Ayn Rand that he has now revoked (only a truly disturbed grown up would base monetary policy on a fictional character or confuse fiction with philosophy), Ryan was against the stimulus and then he was for it and then he lied to you and told you he was against it and never took any of that dirty stinking socialist help the Commonwealth money.
ABC reports on the denials (emphasis mine):
Ryan had denied doing so as recently as Wednesday, when he spoke to ABC’s Cincinnati affiliate, WCPO, in Ohio. “I never asked for stimulus,” Ryan said. “I don’t recall… so I really can’t comment on it. I opposed the stimulus because it doesn’t work, it didn’t work.”
Two years ago, during an interview on WBZ’s NewsRadio he was asked by a caller if he “accepted any money” into his district. Ryan said he did not.
“I’m not one people who votes for something then writes to the government to ask them to send us money. I did not request any stimulus money,” the congressman answered.
Paul Ryan wrote letters begging for stimulus money- the stimulus he said didn’t work – and then he lied about it. Ryan told voters two years ago that he isn’t one of those people to vote one way and then get the money anyway, and he claimed, “I did not request any stimulus money.”
That is not true. Ryan wrote to the U.S. Department of Energy and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis multiple times asking for stimulus grant money. He wrote once in December of 2009, and three times in October of 2009. In the letters are the words “grant application for the Recovery Act”.
Now Ryan is blaming his staff, saying they filed these requests under constituent services and it should have been handled differently. CNN reported tonight:
“After having these letters called to my attention I checked into them, and they were treated as constituent service requests in the same way matters involving Social Security or Veterans Affairs are handled.
“This is why I didn’t recall the letters earlier, he continued. “But they should have been handled differently, and I take responsibility for that. Regardless, it’s clear that the Obama stimulus did nothing to stimulate the economy, and now the President is asking to do it all over again.”
But back in 2010, Ryan’s staff justified the requests for the stimulus money as “constituent services” so he knew what it was back then, and he knew how they handled it.
The Wall Street Journal reported in February of 2010:
Rep. Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican who called the stimulus a “wasteful spending spree” that “misses the mark on all counts,” wrote to Labor Secretary Hilda Solis in October in support of a grant application from a group in his district which, he said, “intends to place 1,000 workers in green jobs.” A spokeswoman for Mr. Ryan said the congressman felt it was his job to provide “the basic constituent service of lending his assistance for federal grant requests.”
Ryan’s trying to pass this off as helping constituents write letters, but he asked for the stimulus grant funding and he supported the corporations requesting it. And by the way, by constituents, he means corporations (e.g., Wisconsin Energy Conservation Corporation).
You can’t blame Ryan. He’s out there telling you he knows how to create jobs, but that is not evident in his home town, where unemployment drags. He has no private sector business experience to speak of, save the Weinermobile, which I actually applaud him for. You won’t ever see Mitt Romney lowering himself to labor of that sort, and I say, good for Paul Ryan. He was industrious and willing to do what he had to do, though Ryan did take Social Security that he doesn’t think the rest of America should have now. At any rate, it’s not exactly as if Ryan has created jobs anywhere.
In These Times writer Robert Bybee described Janesville, Wisconsin as a town suffering with no help from its representative, Paul Ryan, who continues to vote against policies that would help his district:
In Ryan’s hometown of Janesville, hollowed out by the pre-Christmas 2008 shutdown of its giant GM plant, the average wage has fallen from $23.27 in 2007 to $18.82 last year.
Up until now, the tensions have largely and tragically been contained within families and working-class neighborhoods as victims of declining incomes and disappearing dreams turn on each other. Janesville has been afflicted by rising abuse against women and a major increase in child abuse and neglect. Child poverty has nearly doubled to 47.1 percent since 2000, and the town has also experienced a near-doubling in suicides over the past two years.
The stimulus money is just one more issue Republicans campaigned on, made a HUGE stink about when it was going down. Then when the lights and cameras were off, they went skulking back to their hometowns and sat down to write obtusely cheerful letters about how their district, these companies, deserved stimulus money and could they pretty please have some stimulus, daddy?
Heck, Paul Ryan was allegedly for green building according to these letters. But Mitt Romney is on the trail making “jokes” about how wind power is silly because you can’t put a windmill on your car (actually, you can but that is hardly the point).
You don’t really know what you’re getting with this ticket, but one thing Paul Ryan is doing highlighting for a larger audience just how rabidly hypocritical the Congressional Republicans have been since Obama took office.
All of that talk about fiscal responsibility sounded like it made sense, until you looked under the hood. Under the hood, we have two pretty little liars who don’t give a hoot about fiscal responsibility.
Paul Ryan begged for stimulus money and then told voters that he did not take any of the money. Now he says he wasn’t clear that it was stimulus money, even though his staff coded the requests for stimulus funding as “constituent services” back in 2010. Ryan is just making things worse with this King of Lame excuse.
Yeah, Ryan wrote to request federal grant money from the stimulus but he and his staff called it something else, so he didn’t remember. Sorta like how we wasn’t clear that his trust fund was not an excepted or blind trust.
The R & R boys are stretching “believe!” a bit too far.
Additional Source: PDF of Ryan’s requests
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