Open Thread: Sunday Night Funnies

Posted: September 9, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, open thread, U.S. Politics, War on Women | Tags: , , , , , | 28 Comments

Obama Gets a Lift in Florida:

In this key swing state, Obama stopped at Big Apple Pizza & Pasta Italian Restaurant, where he was greeted by owner Scott Van Duzer, a muscular man dressed in a gray T-shirt and matching athletic shorts.

Van Duzer was so smitten by the president that he embraced him in a bear hug, leaned backward and lifted the 6-foot-2 president a foot off the ground. Photos of the moment show Obama with his arms spread wide and palms turned upward, as if to say he’s at the mercy of the pizzaman….

Afterward, a reporter at the scene reported that Van Duzer, 46, from Port St. Lucie, stands 6-foot-3 and weights 260 pounds, and he can bench-press 350.

“Everybody look at these guns,” Obama said, pointing to Van Duzer’s chest. “If I eat your pizza, will I look like that?”

“Look at that!” Obama exclaimed after Van Duzer put him down. “Man, are you a powerlifter or what?”

Joe Biden had a big day too.

SEAMAN, Ohio — Vice President Joe Biden was looking to cozy up with voters as he toured Ohio this weekend, but he did not imagine that an Ohio woman would nearly end up in his lap.
Biden was chatting up customers in the Cruisers Diner in southern Ohio Sunday when he met a group of motorcycle riders in black leather vests and bandanas.

A female group member was watching, and Biden waved her over, telling her, “I know who runs the show.”
The woman had no place to sit, so Biden pulled a chair in front of himself and pulled her nearly into his lap. He put his hands on her shoulders and leaned in for a conversation as photographers snapped away.

Economics lessons aren’t usually all that funny, but the one Paul Krugman gave Rand Paul on ABC’s This Week was hilarious.  Cokie Roberts interrupted with some Villager nonsense–she seems as unteachable as Rand Paul.

Krugman was so amazed by the ignorance that he wrote two blog posts about it.  The first one is mostly a chart showing the steep drop in government employment under President Obama.

Krugman’s second post: The Zombie That Ate Rand Paul’s Brain

After watching the video, Krugman noticed the shocked expression on Rand Paul’s face. How could he be so stunned by a fact that is out there for anyone to read about?

Almost surely it’s a case of a zombie lie that has gone unchallenged in the hermetic world of movement conservatism, so that people like Paul know, just know, something that ain’t so. I wrote about this way back: the usual suspects seized on the Census bulge in employment as evidence of a big-government surge; and because nobody in that business ever admits having been wrong, this became a “fact” that people like Rand Paul believe. He wouldn’t have made this mistake if he ever read or listened to an analysis from nonpartisan sources, but he evidently doesn’t.

I’ve got a few editorial cartoons for you too. The first two are about Bill Clinton’s speech to the DNC.

Two on the “We built it” theme.

And one more on Romney’s ridiculous “Are you better off” question.

What next?  I’m looking forward to more craziness next week.

Friday Morning Reads

Posted: September 7, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , , , , | 58 Comments

Good Morning!

Sandra Fluke gave a wonderful speech to the DNC on Wednesday. The young woman rose to prominence after being denied an opportunity to be the only women speaking to a Issa congressional panel on the coverage of birth control in all insurance programs.  She was savagely attacked by the right wing press then and now.  Here are some horrible tweets that show exactly how awful women in the spotlight are treated by the right.

Let’s get one thing straight first: Contrary to what Limbaugh said, just because a woman wants to have easier access to contraceptives does not make her a slut or a prostitute.

But in order to promote a radical agenda that would deny women access to something so basic as birth control, conservatives took to Twitter after Fluke’s speech to, once again, repeat the disgusting falsehood that she wants the government to “pay” for her social life and to bash her for “whining” about it on a national stage.

Here’s a sampling of tweets that Think Progress spotted:

Sandra Fluke: I am woman, hear me whine.

— Todd Kincannon (@ToddKincannon) September 6, 2012

Shorter @sandrafluke #DNC speech: Me me me me me me. Free free free free B(irth) C(ontrol).Eeeeevil GOP.

— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) September 6, 2012

Don’t lecture conservative women about empowerment while demanding that we pay for what goes on in your bedroom #DNC2012

— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) September 6, 2012

I wonder if she has “Birth Control Martyr” business cards.

— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahNRO) September 6, 2012

I hope someone was passing out free condoms tonight, otherwise Sandra Fluke might be in trouble tomorrow.

— Michael Berry (@MichaelBerrySho) September 5, 2012

Sandra wants taxpayers to pay for her tanning appointments.

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) September 6, 2012

So, there’s a new “fish” story from Paul Ryan out and about the web.  First, we heard that Ryan lied about his marathon running feats.  Now, we’re hearing a story about Mountain Climbing.  Lies seem to come easy to Romney and Ryan, as BB pointed out.  This one is really interesting.  How many fourteeners has Ryan really climbed?

Craig Gilbert, of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, wrote the original story, back in 2009, about Ryan’s mountain-climbing record. He has now written an update and amplification of exactly what Ryan told him then. Here are relevant parts from the original interview:

Ryan: “My mom was very outdoorsy …  We spent our summers doing backpacking trips in the (Colorado) back-country, you know, Snowmass Lake, Capital Peak, spent all our summers doing that …  went all over White River National Forest, just the whole Elk range. I mean I’ve climbed every fourteener in that range and the three around there … So I got into climbing fourteeners when I was 12, with my brother, Stan. My mom got us into that.”
Question: “How many fourteeners have you climbed? Or how many times?”

Ryan: “38. I think that’s my last count.”

Question: “Those are just climbing peaks that are 14,000 feet?”

Ryan: “I’ve done it 38 times. … I’ve done 38, but I think the number of unique peaks is something like twenty… no, no it’s like thirty or something like that. I counted it up a year or two ago.”

Question: “Most of those in Colorado?”

Ryan: “All of them are in Colorado. So I think I’ve climbed like 28 (peaks), and I’ve done it 38 times, because I’ve done a number of them a few times. So I was, you know, kind of into that stuff.”

So, now folks that are real fourteeners are weighing in on the possibility of that actually being true. According to folks that know what they are doing, it’s likely another Ryan Whopper. So, is Ryan a serial peddler of fish stories or has all that reading of Ayn Rand prevented him from processing reality?

I loved Jared Bernstein’s post on yoyo economics and politics.  It’s a theme that both Barack Obama and Bill Clinton spoke about at the DNC.  The idea of YOYO (your’re on your own) vs. We’re in This all Together is a good way to put the election this year.

Protecting the rights of individuals has always been a core American value. Yet in recent years the emphasis on individualism has been pushed to the point where, like the diners in hell, we’re starving. This political and social philosophy is hurting our nation, endangering our future and that of our children, and, paradoxically, making it harder for individuals to get a fair shot at the American dream.

This extreme individualism dominates the way we talk about the most important aspects of our economic lives, those that reside in the intersection of our living standards, our government, and the future opportunities for ourselves and our children. The message, sometimes implicit but often explicit, is, You’re on your own. Its acronym, YOYO, provides a useful shorthand to summarize this destructive approach to governing.

The concept of YOYO, as used in this book, isn’t all that complicated. It’s the prevailing vision of how our country should be governed. As such, it embodies a set of values, and at the core of the YOYO value system is hyper-individualism: the notion that whatever the challenges we face as a nation, the best way to solve them is for people to fend for themselves. Over the past few decades, this harmful vision has generated a set of policies with that hyper-individualistic gene throughout their DNA.

The YOYO crowd—the politicians, lobbyists, and economists actively promoting this vision—has stepped up its efforts to advance its policies in recent years, but hyper-individualism is not a new phenomenon. Chapter 1 documents archaeological evidence of YOYO thinking and policies from the early 1900s, along with their fingerprint: a sharp increase in the inequality of income, wealth, and opportunity. The most recent incarnation can be found in the ideas generated by the administration of George W. Bush, but the YOYO infrastructure—the personnel with a vested interest in the continued dominance of these policies—will not leave the building with Bush. Unless, that is, we recognize the damage being done and make some major changes.

One central goal of the YOYO movement is to continue and even accelerate the trend toward shifting economic risks from the government and the nation’s corporations onto individuals and their families. You can see this intention beneath the surface of almost every recent conservative initiative: Social Security privatization, personal accounts for health care (the so-called Health Savings Accounts), attacks on labor market regulations, and the perpetual crusade to slash the government’s revenue through regressive tax cuts—a strategy explicitly tagged as “starving the beast”—and block the government from playing a useful role in our economic lives. You can even see this go-it-alone principle in our stance toward our supposed international allies.

While this fast-moving reassignment of economic risk would be bad news in any period, it’s particularly harmful today. As the new century unfolds, we face prodigious economic challenges, many of which have helped to generate both greater inequalities and a higher degree of economic insecurity in our lives. But the dominant vision has failed to develop a hopeful, positive narrative about how these challenges can be met in such a way as to uplift the majority.

If you’d like to read the full text of President Obama’s acceptance speech last night it is reprinted here in full.

If you reject the notion that this nation’s promise is reserved for the few, your voice must be heard in this election.

If you reject the notion that our government is forever beholden to the highest bidder, you need to stand up in this election.

If you believe that new plants and factories can dot our landscape; that new energy can power our future; that new schools can provide ladders of opportunity to this nation of dreamers; if you believe in a country where everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same rules, then I need you to vote this November.

America, I never said this journey would be easy, and I won’t promise that now.  Yes, our path is harder – but it leads to a better place.  Yes our road is longer – but we travel it together.  We don’t turn back.  We leave no one behind.  We pull each other up.  We draw strength from our victories, and we learn from our mistakes, but we keep our eyes fixed on that distant horizon, knowing that Providence is with us, and that we are surely blessed to be citizens of the greatest nation on Earth.

The election theme music is Bruce Springstein’s “We Take Care of Our Own”.  Quite a contrast to the Throw yo Momma from the Trian, isn’t it?  I love this song because it was written partially about Hurricane Katrina.

“From the shotgun shack to the Super Dome …”

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

DNC Live Blog: Day 3

Posted: September 6, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, Live Blog, Mitt Romney, Reproductive Rights, The DNC, the GOP, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, War on Women, Women's Healthcare | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 46 Comments

Here we go . . . This is the last night of the 2012 Democratic National Convention. We can only hope the speeches will be as thrilling as the ones we heard last night.

Tonight Vice President Joe Biden and President Barack Obama will accept their nominations to run for reelection. In addition, there will be a who slew of celebrity appearances, including Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, The Foo Fighters, Eva Longoria, Mary J. Blige, James Taylor, Earth Wind & Fire, Marc Anthony, and Kerry Washington. Former Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords will lead the pledge of allegiance.

At 8:00, former Florida Governor Charlie Crist will speak. At 10:00, we’ll hear from Eva Longoria, Joe Biden, and President Obama. The rest of the night’s schedule has not been released.

Just a few headlines to get you going:

Amanda Marcotte: Sandra Fluke’s Speech Made Republicans Crazy. Which Is Just What the Democrats Want.

For a short period yesterday evening, a moment of panicked confusion broke out among those of us obsessively watching and tweeting the Democratic National Convention, when Sandra Fluke did not go on stage as scheduled. It turns out that we needn’t have worried; convention organizers made an apparently last minute decision to move Fluke’s speech to later in the night, giving her a prime-time audience. It’s a move that indicates Democrats have finally stopped freaking out at the first sign of reactionary histrionics, and instead have embraced the strategy of taking the fight to conservatives.

After decades of playing along with conservatives who dress up their hostility to female sexuality as nothing more than an interest in “life,” Democrats have finally realized that baiting the anti-choice right into showing its misogynist, sex-phobic side may just be a winning strategy.

Marcotte posts some of the rageful Republican tweets at the link.

HuffPo: Unions Hope Democratic National Convention Draws Attention To Plight Of North Carolina Workers

North Carolina passed right-to-work legislation in 1947, barring contracts that require all workers at unionized companies to pay union dues. North Carolina is now the least-unionized state in the country, with about 3 percent of workers belonging to one, according to the Labor Department. The state also bans collective bargaining for public-sector workers. Feeling snubbed, some activists skipped the convention in favor of what was billed as a “shadow convention” for organized labor in Philadelphia.

“This entire saga, from the beginning to today ­– the site selection, the state selection — the way it’s been handled is just nothing more than confirmation to me that the standing of organized labor in the eyes of the Democratic Party is lower than it’s ever been in my time,” said Chris Townsend, political director of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America union, who has been in the labor movement for more than three decades.

CNN Money: Is Wall Street Being Bamboozled by Romney?

FORTUNE — Wall Street is taking quite a pounding at the Democratic National Convention this week as speakers, like Massachusetts Senate hopeful Elizabeth Warren, fire populist missives so inflammatory it would cause even the most liberal banker to cringe. While the speeches are meant to fire up the Democratic base, they are also likely to induce some financiers to double their contributions to Republicans, namely, Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney.

But is that a safe bet? Much of Wall Street’s concerns derive from the passage of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, even though some of the most controversial aspects of the bill seem permanently lost in regulatory limbo. Going forward, there remain questions as to what, if anything, a Romney Presidency could truly deliver in the next four years that would be so different from a second term Obama presidency. Given that uncertainty, Wall Street could possibly be better off sticking with the devil they already know.

New York Observer: We Can All Breathe a Sigh of Relief: Mitt Romney Has a Plan to End the Housing Crisis

Is Mitt Romney really the man to solve the housing crisis? Well, consider this: Mr. Romney may not have ever struggled “to put food on the table” as folksy politicians are so fond of saying, but he has four houses. Four. So he knows a thing or two about home ownership. And, unlike some homeowners who took out mortgages and couldn’t pay them back, Mr. Romney is wealthy enough not to have to take out mortgages (although there’s a possibility that he did—the man does have the common touch, at times).

In any event, the Republican candidate has revealed his four-point plan while taking a few swings at Obama, like: “the dream of home ownership is out of reach for many Americans as a result of President Obama’s failed policies and stalled economy.”

Because Americans were doing so well with home ownership before Mr. Obama took the helm. Ha! Good one! As though the “stalled economy” and, well, the “economic crisis” weren’t a result of the fact that many Americans were actually really horrible when it came to assessing risk and making responsible choices about home ownership.

The consensus is that it’s not much of a “plan.”

ABC News: Paul Ryan Anticipates and Counters Obama’s Convention Speech Tonight

COLORADO SPRINGS–Just hours before the president takes the stage at the Democratic National Convention, Paul Ryan attempted to counter Obama’s speech by reminding voters in this battleground state of then candidate Obama’s promises in his 2008 speech in Denver.

“Right here in Colorado, four years ago with the Styrofoam Greek columns, the big stadium, the president gave this long speech with lots of big promises,” Ryan said. “He said … that Democrats have a very different measure of what constitutes progress. By those very measurements, his leadership has fallen woefully short.”

Yawn. . . Lots more of Lyin’ Ryan’s psychic predictions at the link. Frankly, after the spanking he got from Bill Clinton last night, the little twerp would do better to just STFU; but I’m hoping he continues making a fool of himself. I guess he doesn’t know that he has lost all credibility with everyone but obsessive Fox watchers.

Detroit News: Conservatives Pull Ads from Michigan

Mitt Romney’s conservative allies are bypassing Michigan with their advertising while stepping up efforts in other battleground states — suggesting campaign strategists don’t believe his road to the White House leads through his native state.

The pro-Romney groups American Crossroads and Americans for Prosperity are pouring nearly $13 million into advertising in key states, indicating they remain eager to lend considerable financial muscle to Romney in states viewed as truly competitive.

There are no presidential campaign ads of any kind airing in Pennsylvania and Michigan, according to information provided by media trackers to the Associated Press.

Nate Silver: The Simple Case for Why Obama Is the Favorite

…our forecast has moved toward President Obama over the past several days. It now gives him about a three-in-four chance of winning the Electoral College on Nov. 6.

I’ll explain a little bit more about how the model comes to that conclusion in a moment, but the intuition behind it is pretty simple:

1. Polls usually overrate the standing of the candidate who just held his convention.
2. Mitt Romney just held his convention. But he seems to have gotten a below-average bounce out of it. The national polls that have come out since the Republican National Convention have shown an almost exact tie in the race.
3. If the polls overrate Mr. Romney, and they show only a tie for him now, then he will eventually lose.
The first point is the simplest of all, but perhaps the most important. There is a lot of focus on the bounce that a candidate gets after his convention — that is, how the polls conducted just after the convention compare with the ones taken immediately beforehand.

Silver predicted the 2008 election results almost perfectly.

I’m looking forward to reading your comments tonight, so bring it!

Mitt Romney Just Doesn’t Get It

Posted: September 6, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, Civil Rights, Mitt Romney, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , | 57 Comments

Bob Garon and Mitt Romney

This morning on Twitter, I clicked on a link to a video posted by Mansur Gidfar. It’s a recording of a spontaneous conversation between Mitt Romney and a Vietnam veteran named Bob Garon that took place in a Manchester, New Hampshire restaurant on a December morning in 2011.

To me the episode depicted in the video is emblematic of who Mitt Romney is–a stodgy, selfish, self-centered man who sadly is unable to empathize with anyone who doesn’t share his own experiences as a privileged, wealthy, straight white male Mormon.

Romney sat down with Mr. Garon uninvited and began talking to him about Vietnam. He had no idea that Garon was a gay man who was having breakfast with his husband.

On January 1, 2010, New Hampshire legalized same sex marriage and ordered that all civil unions in the state would automatically become legal marriages. There was an effort to repeal the statute that legalized same sex marriage that Mitt Romney supported. That effort failed in March 2012. In New Hampshire’s Democratic governor John Lynch would have vetoed the repeal even if it had passed.

I discovered that this meeting between Romney and Garon was pretty well covered at the time, but somehow I missed it. The NYT Caucus blog covered the interaction on December 12, 2011. After the exchange, Garon summed up his reaction to Romney:

Afterward, Mr. Garon, who legally married another man in June, said Mr. Romney was not getting his vote.

“He told me that I’m not entitled to Constitutional rights,” he said. “I think a man and a woman and a man and a man should be treated equal.”

Adding that while he had been undecided until he chatted with Mr. Romney, Mr. Garon said, “I’m totally convinced today that he’s not going to be my president — at least in my book.”

“This man is ‘No way, Jose,’” he said. “Well, take that ‘No way, Jose’ back to Massachusetts.”

Though Mr. Garon conceded that Mr. Romney had handled his question fairly, giving him the yes or no answer he’d requested, he nonetheless offered an unfavorable prediction for the Republican primary outcome.

“He is not going to make it,” he said. “Because you can’t trust him. I just saw it in his eyes. I judge a man by his eyes.”

Times change. People change.

Romney doesn’t understand that times have changed since he was a prep school bully judging his classmate’s “manliness” back in the 1960s. He and his Gen-X running mate are still living in the past, when straight white males ruled the roost and the rest of us were also-rans. But no more. America is changing, and I don’t think reactionaries like Romney and Ryan are going to be able to stop it.

Just comparing the crowds of delegates at the two parties’ conventions shows how time has flowed onward despite the Republican Party’s reactionary efforts to stop it.

At the Republican Convention, we saw a sea of mostly older white faces, with a few token people of color on the stage and fewer in the audience. We heard mostly negative, messages that excluded those of us who don’t fit the Republican view of what a “real American” should be–including our President.  Even though there was a parade of people on stage talking about Romney’s kindness and generosity, we never heard of his helping people who weren’t like him–those he helped were mostly fellow Mormons as far as I could tell.  We never heard episodes in which he reached out to those outside his own circle.

At the Democratic Convention, we have been seeing a rainbow of faces–people wearing different kinds of clothing, belonging to many cultures, but united in wanting this to be a country in which people care about and for each other–because we’re all in this together. We’ve heard an inclusive, forward-looking message of hope for the future rather than a futile wishes to go back in time to a pristine America that never really existed.

I know which group I want to be part of, and I hope we send Romney and Ryan packing in November. Let them live in their fantasy world if they want to, but we must stop them from forcing their reactionary values on the rest of us.

This is an open thread. I’ll post a live blog later this evening for the third and last night of the Democratic National Convention.

Thursday Morning Reads: About Last Night

Posted: September 6, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney, morning reads, The DNC, the GOP, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 60 Comments

Good Morning!!

Thanks to everyone who helped with the live blogs last night. You guys are the greatest! I’m still fired up from Warren’s and Clinton’s speeches last night. The comparison between those two and Lyin’ Ryan and Etch-a-Sketch Willard could not be any greater. Tonight we’ll see both Joe Biden and Barack Obama. It should be another fun night, so please join us tonight if you can.

Here are some of the early reactions to Wednesday night’s speeches.

TPM: Bill Clinton to Mitt Romney: Barack Obama is My True Heir.

Bill Clinton offered an impassioned defense of President Obama as a leader in the mold of his own image Wednesday night, praising him for rescuing an ailing economy even as Republicans sought to thwart him at every turn.

Mitt Romney has tried to position himself as Clinton’s heir in recent months, employing a false claim that Obama gutted Clinton’s signature welfare reform bill, comparing the two presidents on jobs and claiming he’d follow Clinton’s lead in working with the other party.

Clinton made clear that there was only one candidate in the race who embodied his values.

“If you want a future of shared prosperity, where the middle class is growing and poverty is declining, where the American dream is alive and well and where the United States maintains its leadership as a force for peace, and justice, and prosperity, in this highly competitive world, you have to vote for Barack Obama,” he said.

NYT: Transcript of Bill Clinton’s speech.

ABC News: Elizabeth Warren: The System is Rigged.

Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, speaking ahead of Bill Clinton tonight at the Democratic National Convention, delivered an acid rebuke of Mitt Romney and Republican economic policy.

Their vision is clear, she said: “I’ve got mine, and the rest of you are on your own.”

Warren, who founded the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2010, is the Harvard professor who became a YouTube hero among Democrats when she asked a small gathering of Bay State supporters, “You built a factory out there? Good for you — but I want to be clear: You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.”

LA Times: Sandra Fluke: GOP positions ‘offensive, obsolete relic’ of past

Sandra Fluke on Wednesday offered a dire vision of the future if Mitt Romney is elected president, one where rape would be redefined, women would be forced to have ultrasounds against their wishes, and access to birth control would be controlled by men.

Calling GOP positions “an offensive, obsolete relic of our past,” Fluke told delegates at the Democratic National Convention that “we know what this America would look like and in few shorts months that’s the American we could be, but that’s not the America that we should be, and it’s not who we are.”

Fluke was referring to a host of Republican moves, including measures to narrow the definition of rape to include only those that are “forcible,” as well as attempts by Republicans in some states to force women seeking abortions to undergo a vaginal ultrasound and efforts to curb funding for Planned Parenthood, a leading source of contraception for poor and younger women.

HuffPo: Randy Johnson Speech Attacks Bain: Mitt Romney Lacks A ‘Moral Compass.’

Bain Capital became front and center at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., Wednesday, with three speakers knocking the private equity firm that GOP nominee Mitt Romney founded for costing them their jobs.

First up was Randy Johnson, who has needled Romney has far back as 1994 when he ran for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, the same year Johnson was laid off.

“I want to tell you about Mitt Romney’s record of cutting jobs. Mitt Romney once said — quote — ‘I like being able to fire people,'” Johnson said, quoting a remark Romney made in January about keeping the competitiveness of the health care industry, rather than workers.

“I don’t think Mitt Romney is a bad man. I don’t fault him for the fact that some companies win and some companies lose. That’s a fact of life,” he said. “What I fault him for is making money without a moral compass.”

Connie’s friend Cindy Hewitt also spoke.

Cindy Hewitt, interviewed by The Huffington Post about layoffs at the plant where she worked, echoed Johnson’s sentiment about Romney Wednesday, along with David Foster, another employee laid-off by a Bain-controlled company. All three speakers acknowledged that business had “winners and losers” or some variation — perhaps to stave off sounding too “anti-business” — but proceeded to attack Bain’s model of capitalism.

A couple more general links:

Here’s an interesting piece comparing Michelle Obama’s convention speech with Ann Romney’s: Study: First Lady’s convention speech seven grade levels higher than Ann Romney’s

The speech First Lady Michelle Obama delivered at Tuesday night’s Democratic convention read at a twelfth grade level, according to an analysis by a University of Minnesota political scientist, making it, by that measure, the most complex speech delivered by a presidential candidate’s spouse at a nominating convention.

By contrast, the speech delivered by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s wife, Ann, checked in at a fifth grade reading level. Romney’s speech marked the lowest reading level for a spouse’s convention speech since the practice first began in 1992, according to Eeic Ostermeier, the Minnesota political scientists.

Ostermeier reached his findings using the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, a metric that rates sentence structure and difficulty of word use, and then computes numbers corresponding to grade levels to indicate how verbally advanced a given text is. For example, longer sentences and words score more points, while monosyllabic words score fewer points.

Hmmm…5th grade level vs. 12th grade. Interesting. I wonder what grade level this Lyin’ Ryan Speech would test at?

Ryan praises Bill Clinton, compares Obama unfavorably to the former Democratic president.

Void of a single reference to Clinton-era scandals, Ryan’s praise was a way to paint Obama as a failure on the GOP ticket’s terms.

“Under President Clinton we got welfare reform,” Ryan told an audience outside a small-town courthouse west of Des Moines. “President Obama is rolling back welfare reform. President Clinton worked with Republicans in Congress to have a budget agreement to cut spending. President Obama, a gusher of new spending.”

I’m guessing that one is about 3rd grade level.

I’ll end with this video of Lewis Black talking about how long-winded Bill Clinton’s just how white Mitt Romney is and lots more.

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