Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital | Politics News | Rolling Stone

And this is where we get to the hypocrisy at the heart of Mitt Romney. Everyone knows that he is fantastically rich, having scored great success, the legend goes, as a "turnaround specialist," a shrewd financial operator who revived moribund companies as a high-priced consultant for a storied Wall Street private equity firm. But what most voters don't know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: by borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America's top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth.


Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/greed-and-debt-the-true-story-of-mitt-romney-and-bain-capital-20120829#ixzz253O5I100

Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital | Politics News | Rolling Stone

Matt Miller: The real Medicare villain - The Washington Post

Republicans cry that President Obama is raiding Medicare to fund a socialist health-care nightmare. Democrats blast the GOP for sticking grandma with vouchers to wreck a program they’ve secretly loathed for decades. Far be it from me to put the kibosh on all this drama, but when it comes to the policy stakes, such breathless charges are beside the point.
The real Medicare villain is not Barack Obama, and it’s not even “evil” Paul Ryan. The real villain is America’s medical-industrial complex — and once you grasp this, everything changes.

Matt Miller: The real Medicare villain - The Washington Post

Fear of a Black President - The Atlantic

As a candidate, Barack Obama said we needed to reckon with race and with America’s original sin, slavery. But as our first black president, he has avoided mention of race almost entirely. In having to be “twice as good” and “half as black,” Obama reveals the false promise and double standard of integration.


Fear of a Black President - The Atlantic

Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.

Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult

Paul Ryan's budget: 4 ways it proves he's not a fiscal mastermind - The Week

Mitt Romney's running mate has a reputation as a serious policy intellectual, but critics say his budget is just fuzzy math and magical thinking

posted on August 20, 2012

Paul Ryan's budget: 4 ways it proves he's not a fiscal mastermind - The Week

PoliGraph: GOP claim on Obama Medicare cuts misleads | Capitol View | Minnesota Public Radio

The law doesn't cut Medicare benefits.
Rather, the law slows the future growth of the program by reducing payments to Medicare Advantage, a private insurance alternative to the traditional Medicare program, and ties reimbursement to performance. Additionally, the law slows future growth in payments to hospitals and other providers, according to a joint reporting project by the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation's Kaiser Health News.
The savings are used to help pay for other parts of the health law.
Up until recently, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimated the law would save about $500 billion over 10 years. But in July, the CBO increased its savings estimate to more than $700 billion over 10 years.
Finally, there's an important twist buried in all the rhetoric: Ryan's budget overturns Obama's health care law, but it preserves the Medicare savings.


PoliGraph: GOP claim on Obama Medicare cuts misleads | Capitol View | Minnesota Public Radio

Jonathan Cohn: If Somebody Is Raiding Medicare, It’s Not Obama. It’s Romney And Ryan. | The New Republic

Medicare Fix-Compare it to what Ryan and Romney have in mind. Ryan, again, has the same cuts in his budget. But he would rescind both the prescription drug assistance and the free preventative care. In other words, unlike Obama, Ryan would take benefits away from current retirees. And where would the money go? Ryan would it to offset other priorities in his budget, priorities that happen to include a very large tax cut for the rich.

So just to review: Obama takes money away from the health care industry and uses it to help people pay their medical bills. Some of those people include seniors already getting help with their drug bills and free preventative care. Ryan and, by implication, Romney takes the same money from the health care industry. But they also take away those new benefits for seniors, even as they find room in their tight budgets to cut taxes for the wealthy. ~ Jonathan Cohn




Jonathan Cohn: If Somebody Is Raiding Medicare, It’s Not Obama. It’s Romney And Ryan. | The New Republic

Kevin Hassett, world’s worst economist, works for Romney - Salon.com

Kevin Hassett, world’s worst economist, works for Romney - Salon.com

Hassett in the spin room is a familiar sight. He was an economic adviser to John McCain in 2000, George W. Bush in 2004, and then McCain again in 2008. One could well argue that his purpose in life is to manipulate reporters on the merits of the economic plans of Republican presidential candidates. After they are elected (or fail to be elected), he returns to his cushy think tank sinecure. He hasn’t actually been involved in making economic policy since the Clinton administration, when he served as a “policy consultant” to the Treasury Department.