Paul Ryan Campaign Defends Much-Ridiculed GM Plant Closing Remarks

[Emit]

Did y'all see this?

Paul Ryan Campaign Defends Much-Ridiculed GM Plant Closing Remarks

The thrust of the Ryan argument is that whenever the plant may have closed, it has yet to re-open under Obama, and is therefore a symbol of a failed recovery.

"It’s President Obama who needs to explain his words," said Brendan Buck, a spokesman for Ryan, in an email to HuffPost. "The facts are clear: when the GM plant went on standby, the president told the people of Wisconsin he would ‘lead an effort to retool’ it and restart production. But when the bailout’s winners and losers were decided, Janesville ended up losing. The people of Wisconsin, like so many Americans, are still waiting for the president’s imaginary recovery.”

Buck was referring to an October 2008 Associated Press article, which quotes candidate Obama saying that if he's elected, he will "lead an effort to retool plants like the GM facility." That's different, of course, than saying he'd retool the plant itself, which made SUVs, but it adds context to Ryan's argument.

Ryan's speech has led conservative media outlets to clash with mainstream fact-checkers, who have debunked Ryan's claim by noting that the plant didn't fully wind down until Obama was president in April 2009, when the final 57 workers were laid off.

~snip~

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/30/paul-ryan-gm-plant_n_1844456.html?utm_hp_ref=elections-2012

And another, although I can't find the original source in this piece - it was sent to me by a right wing acquaintance:

Media Calls Paul Ryan A Liar. Real Facts Say Otherwise…

~snip~

Seems like fact checkers need to do some fact checking of their own assumptions. Paul Ryan’s speech last night included a reference to a GM plant in Janesville that closed, which Ryan used to criticize Barack Obama for failing to meet his campaign promises. A number of “fact” checkers jumped all over Ryan’s anecdote to claim that he lied about the circumstances of the plant’s closure.

…Actually, those “facts” aren’t quite accurate, either. As the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported in September of last year — long before Ryan got added to the ticket — the Janesville plant got shut down in 2009, after being notified of their pending closure in December 2008:

The Janesville plant stopped production of SUVs in 2008 and was idled in 2009 after it completed production of medium-duty trucks.

…Ryan acknowledged that the plant had already been slated for shutdown in 2008. That was his point. People voted for him because they thought Obama represented hope to get the plant back in operation. In fact, that had been known since at least February 2008, when Obama came to Janesville to speak, and specifically addressed the plant closure in his remarks, delivered at the plant itself — and promised to keep it and other plants like it open “for the next hundred years”

~snip~

http://theulstermanreport.com/2012/08/30/media-calls-paul-ryan-a-liar-real-facts-say-otherwise/

[IggleDoer]

1. Do they really want to go there?

How many plants did Bain close that never reopened? Bain owned them and had control over them. Did they want the government to use taxpayer's money to open them?

[muntrv]

2. Oh yes it's Obama's fault! GM ceo Rich Wagoner was the victim and was powerless

to keep it open.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

3. If Ryan had said Obama was a vampire who turned into a bat every night

and sucked the blood from white people because he liked its taste (which Ryan may yet do because facts no longer matter) Republicans would be trying to spin that and say anything before they would admit a lie.

[nanabugg]

4. What folks are missing are the other lies and midinformation. nt

[edhopper]

5. So they WANT

the government to interfere with the decisions of a private company?
Or they want the government to let businesses make their own decisions?
Which is it?