Author of South Carolina’s voter ID law apologizes for writing “amen” in reply to email comparing blacks to “bees going after a watermelon.”
It took a couple weeks of false welfare ads, and a full day at the GOP convention premised on the idea that President Obama believes successful companies are doled out to lucky business owners like heavenly manna. But for all intents and purposes the political press has placed the Romney campaign at a crossroads.
Either it can proceed with these two lines of attack — which, let’s face it, are now the tentpoles holding up his entire campaign — or it can capitulate; not necessarily confess to having done anything out of bounds, but just drop the lines in order to avoid more and more stories about how mendacious they are.
As of yesterday, the campaign seemed pretty content to carry on as it has been. Maybe that’ll change — but whatever Boston decides to do will, I think, have genuinely significant consequences. Read More
Guy proposes to gal on stage at the GOP convention — and other images from today in Tampa.
So just we’re clear: Paul Ryan’s main signature policy is to change Medicare from a defined benefit to a defined contribution health care plan. Or to put it more simply, to turn it into a voucher program. Let’s see how much attention that fact gets tonight — either in his speech or in the press reaction.
Late Update: 9:09 PM — CNN reporter says Paul Ryan is interested in ‘reforming’ Medicare.
Rand Paul’s deadenderism on Obamacare: “The whole damn thing is still unconstitutional!”
Mike Huckabee: “The only hitch in an otherwise perfect week was the awful noise coming from the hotel room next door to mine. Turns out it was just Debbie Wasserman Schultz practicing her speech for the DNC in Charlotte next week. Bless her heart.”
10:27 PM — Ryan takes the stage.
10:29 PM — “Fear and division is all they’ve got left.”
10:34 PM — Ummm … about that auto plant Obama didn’t save? It closed under President Bush.
10:37 PM — So instead of making job creation his first priority, President Obama pushed the stimulus bill.
10:39 PM — Ryan pillories the $700 billion of cuts to Medicare dollars for insurance companies that Ryan himself endorsed. #hardchoices
10:40 PM — Ryan will protect Medicare by changing it into a voucher program.
10:42 — “Obamacare, as much as anything else, explains why a presidency that began with such anticipation now comes to such a disappointing close. It began with a financial crisis; it ends with a job crisis.” Ends with a jobs crisis? Didn’t that start at the end of 2008?
At the top of his speech Paul Ryan scorned President Obama for failing to save a GM plant in his home town. Only the plant closed under President Bush.
On optics and on motivating the audience, a good speech. The convention was pumped for Ryan considerably more than for Mitt. It was also a speech of astonishing intellectual dishonesty — on small things, like when plants closed; and much larger things like the entire economic trajectory of the last three and a half years.