Rep. Paul Ryan is not telling the truth. Again. (Kevin Lamarque, with enhancements/Reuters)
Yeah, it's a dog bites man story, but it's a good one because it's the
Washington Post's fact checker
checking Rep. Paul Ryan's facts and finding them just a tad bogus.
"You have 219 new regulations coming out, costing over $100 million each."
—Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), Oct. 27, 2011
[...] Imagine our surprise on Thursday when we saw that Rep. Paul Ryan made the statement above concerning federal regulations on CNBC's "Squawk Box." We thought we had driven a stake through this myth when we gave three Pinocchiosto House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) in early September for making virtually the same statement. [...]
[A]fter our column appeared, the source of the figure—Susan E. Dudley, director of the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center—decided to do a deeper examination of the data. She found that the number of pending regulations that met the $100 million threshold in the database she examined was actually 158. [...]
It is also worth noting that Bloomberg News this week reported that "Obama's White House has approved fewer regulations than his predecessor George W. Bush at this same point in their tenures, and the estimated costs of those rules haven’t reached the annual peak set in fiscal 1992 under Bush's father."
It's kind of cute that WaPo's Kessler thinks that when he points out a Republican lie, they'll stop using it. That's seriously underestimating Boehner, Ryan, et al.