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Eric Fehrnstrom, Mitt Romney's senior campaign adviser, is denying that Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan suggested that President Barack Obama was to blame for a GM plant that was shut down while President George W. Bush was still in office.

Ryan's Wednesday night convention speech has been blasted by fact checkers at The Associated Press, USA Today and CNN (just to name a few) for what one Fox News contributor called "misrepresentations" and Salon's Joan Walsh said were just "nastiness and lies."

One of those misleading statements had to do with a Janesville plant that GM decided to close in June of 2008, but Ryan has repeatedly said that the president "broke his promise" by failing to keep it open after taking office in 2009.

"What Paul Ryan said there was clearly misleading," CNN host John Berman pointed out to Fehrnstrom on Thursday.

"Well, no," Fehrnstrom replied. "He didn't talk about Obama closing the plant. He said that candidate Obama went there in 2008, and what he said was with government assistance, we can keep this plant open for another 100 years."

The adviser continued: "Here we are four years into his administration. That plant is still closed. I think it's a symbol of a recovery that hasn't materialized for the people of Janesville, Wisconsin, just as it hasn't materialized for Americans everywhere."

"He left the impression that President Obama shut that plant down," Berman pressed.

"Well, I would encourage people to go back and look at what candidate Obama said in 2008," Fehrnstrom insisted. "What he said was with his recovery program, with government assistance, we can keep that plant open for 100 years. Four years later, it's still shuttered. I think it's a symbol of a broken economy under this president."

Earlier this year, Fehrnstrom was widely mocked after he said that Romney could shake up his campaign "like an Etch A Sketch" and "start over again" after spending the primary season pandering to conservative voters. As the general election campaign was underway in June, the adviser tried to deflect attention from the candidate's extreme positions on contraception and abortion rights by saying that women's issues were just "shiny objects" being used to distract voters.

(h/t: Talking Points Memo)

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Vice President Joe Biden was out on the campaign trail this week in Ohio, and on the attack over Mitt Romney's record as a so-called "job creator" and a businessman who "knows how to create jobs" and get our economy moving again. Fox's Neil Cavuto brought on his former fellow Fox contributor turned Ohio Governor John Kasich to respond.

Kasich of course tried to downplay the credit the Obama administration was attempting to take for Ohio's economy improving and their unemployment rate falling below the national average, and instead credited himself for making Ohio a more business friendly state and making the same points we've been hearing from Republicans ad nauseum on what Paul Krugman has rightfully called "the confidence fairy." Forget the fact that what drives businesses to make investments and grow their companies are consumers and whether the general public has enough disposable income to afford their products. Kasich wants you to believe, like all Republicans, that fear of over-regulation, rather than a lack of customers is what's stifling our economy.

The "confidence" businesses actually need is going to be driven up by a strong middle class and consumers who can afford their products; which as we've seen over the last few decades is what Republicans are determined to destroy.

The Ohio Democratic Party Chairman Chris Redfern pointed out earlier this year exactly why Kasich does not deserve credit for turning Ohio's economy around: REMARKS: Chairman Redfern Says Kasich Should Credit Obama, Brown, Dems for Ohio’s Improving Economy in State of the State Address:

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Fox is at it again, bashing unions. Of course the panel on Bulls & Bears thinks this is a fantastic idea other than their one out-gunned "Democratic strategist" -- GM may link vehicle quality, employee pay incentives. This might be a good time for a reminder of just what it took for American auto workers to get rid of things like piece work in the first place.

The historic 1936-37 Flint auto plant strikes:

The feisty young United Auto Workers launched the first of a series of sit-down strikes against General Motors at Fisher Body Plant No. 1 in Flint. The goals were to earn recognition for the UAW as the bargaining agent for GM workers, and to make the company stop shipping work to plants with nonunion workers. The strike lasted 44 days and became the first of many union victories. [...]

On Nov. 18, 1936, the UAW struck a Fisher Body plant in Altanta. On Dec. 16, they hit two GM plants in Kansas City, and on Dec. 28, a Fisher stamping plant in Cleveland. Two days later they struck Fisher Body No. 1 in Flint. Within two weeks, approximately 135,000 men from plants in 35 cities in 14 states were striking General Motors.

As the nation was emerging from the Great Depression, the striking workers enjoyed the sympathy of most of the people, including Michigan governor Frank Murphy and popular New Deal President Franklin Delano Roosvelt. Roosevelt had promised in his inaugural speech to drive out the "economic royalists," a pointed reference to the General Motors officials. [...]

The News gave this account: "The guardsmen forming a line around the No. 4 plant were part of a contingent of 1,200 who formed a bayoneted ring of steel around the 80-acre grounds which house all 12 plants of the Chevrolet Motor Car Co. at Flint. Machine guns emplacements were at strategic approaches and except for a small group of pickets outside the gates of the No. 4 plant, all visitors were barred unless they had special military passes.

"The guardsmen surrounded the grounds and 'enforced peace' on orders of Gov. Murphy, following the rioting."

The News also gave the union version: "Then company police and hundreds of thugs, armed with tear gas pistols, tear gas bombs, blackjacks and clubs manufactured in the Chevrolet woodshop, attacked all workers in the plant, using floods of tear gas. It was a clear case, apparently, of company thugs against the workers since all the injured workers were found in the plants and no one was injured on the outside of the company property. City police do not seem to have been involved."

The National Guard fixed bayonets and halted any delivery of food to the occupiers. But the governor never ordered the troops into action.

The strikers vowed a hunger strike until their families could bring them food, or their demands were met. The sit-downers appealed to the governor.

President Roosevelt asked GM to meet with the union once more. The tension subsided. General Motors signed an agreement with the UAW, giving the union bargaining rights in 17 GM plants shut by sit-downs.

Employees at the 17 plants involved got 5 percent pay hikes and were allowed to speak in the lunchroom. The company agreed not to discriminate against union members and agreed to begin negotiations on other matters.

A synopsis of the issues included in the union demands:

1. Recognition of UAW as sole bargaining agency.
2. Abolition of piece work in favor of straight hourly rates.
3. A 30 hour week and 6 hour day, with time and a half for overtime.
4. A "minimum rate of pay commensurate with an American standard of living."
5. Seniority rights based on length of service.
6. Reinstatement of all employes "unjustly discharged."
7. Mutual agreement on "speed of production."

The dramatic military style battles depict the times and the desperation of those involved. The outcome much later in time proved that both the union and the company could coexist and indeed prosper beyond anyone's expectations. Those who made the cars could finally afford to buy them, pouring profits back to the stockholders. Spreading the wealth caused more to be created. The pension and wages won by the workers raised the standard of living for the whole country.

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Via The White House blog:

In the fourth edition of White House White Board, Austan Goolsbee, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, discusses the President’s tough decisions on the American auto industry in light of the General Motors IPO.

Goolsbee is so good at these things that you wonder why the White House didn't do them sooner.

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On Fox’s The Journal Editorial Report, while discussing whether the panel believes that BP really had a choice as to whether to put up the $20 billion for the escrow fund to pay for the claims from the Deepwater Horizon disaster rather than the victims being tied up in the courts for years or waiting for BP to decide who to pay claims to, John Fund opines that BP being prodded by the Obama administration to put up that fund is going to turn the United States into a “banana republic” and repeats the Republican meme of the week that it was a “shakedown”.

It’s too bad Mr. Fund isn’t quite so concerned that years of conservative governance have turned us into a plutocracy or an oligarchy already, either of which would better describe what has happened to our government as our middle class in the United States continues to disappear and the gap between the rich and the poor grows even wider.

Expecting companies to clean up their mess does seem to suddenly get the right wingers worried about the expansion of government power; those same companies socializing the losses onto the taxpayers… not so much.

Fund: It’s almost as if we have different models of how you nationalize a company. There’s the original model with General Motors and Chrysler and now there’s a new model which is if you get into any kind of trouble, you know, the next Toyota for example, you’re going to basically face such liability that the Federal government is effectively going to own your future.

Gigot: Well does this mean that in any… is this setting a precedent that in any future large scale industrial accident that this kind of pubic trust fund where a company is obliged to put money into the fund and then the government will decide who gets paid and when; is that what we’re going to see from now on?

Fund: That’s a danger. Remember one of the reasons so many investors overseas have contributed to the American economy for so long is we have a rule of law here. It’s due process. Well this effectively says to foreign investors, forget the rule of law. Joe Barton basically, you know, came out against this $20 billion….

Gigot: He called it a shakedown.

Fund: …a shakedown, and…

Gigot: Is that what it is? Is this a shakedown?

Fund: You’d better believe it’s a shakedown. This completely goes around the legal process. The message this sends to foreign investors, be careful here because the United States can resemble a banana republic overnight with the wrong President in charge.

Of course all of them are very concerned about the rule of law being followed, as long as that rule of law makes sure that claims are slow walked through the courts and as long as we have the kind of justice where huge companies end up paying next to nothing once their friends on the Supreme Court finally take care of them decades later.

Fund's assertion that making BP fork out $20 billion is "nationalizing" them is completely ridiculous as well. As Think Progress noted, "in the first quarter of the year, the London-based oil giant’s profits averaged $93 million a day".

And for a little reminder of what these hacks are advocating for from the same post:

At $93 million a day in profits, BP makes $350 million in about 3.8 days. The Washington Post noted that Exxon, through a decision by the Supreme Court, was able to pay only $507.5 million of the original $5 billion in punitive damages that it had been assessed for the 1989 Valdez disaster.

There's the kind of "rule of law" that they would prefer.

h/t Media Matters

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If you're like me you're more than a little sick of GM's Ed Whitacre tv ad. So are more than a few U.S. Senators and lawmakers. From Fox:

General Motors has been running ads on all the major networks claiming the company repaid its $6.7 billion U.S. government loan "with interest five years ahead of the original schedule." General Motors Company CEO Ed Whitacre can be seen in the ad walking through an auto plant as he touts the company's progress.

But lawmakers, and even the inspector general for the bailout fund GM borrowed from, point out that General Motors only repaid the bailout money by dipping into a separate pot of bailout money. They say the company did not actually use its own earnings to make the early payment and are questioning why executives are making such a big deal out of it.

The workings of the bailout and what is actually being repaid and how are complex but simplified basically GM is repaying their "loan" with other money from the government, not from any actual earnings.

The $6.7 billion is also just a fraction of the $52 billion General Motors received in government aid. Grassley said lawmakers are being told government losses on GM are expected to exceed $30 billion.

The TARP inspector general, Neil Barofsky, bluntly told the Senate Finance Committee during a hearing last week that the repayment "is just other TARP money" and lawmakers should not "exaggerate" the feat.

"It sounds like they're kind of like taking money out of one pocket and putting it in the other to do that," Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., said at the hearing.

And of GM’s Vice Chairman Stephen Girsky:

General Motors admits that the company is repaying the loan with other government money, but says a year ago "nobody thought we'd be able to pay this back."

Gee, that's really reassuring.

Here's Ed Whitacre's complete ad, somewhat ironically titled "Trust":

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June 02, 2009 C-SPAN

Ted Poe is apparently undeterred by Nate Silver's reporting.