Romney's campaign announced today that he will be coming out with a concrete five point plan to fix the economy. With early voting starting in Iowa next week, he's cutting it kind of thin. Since he was supposed to be the expert, the 'smart guy in the room', the whiz kid of Bain Capital, why didn't he share any of this wisdom with voters before? Why was the plan secret?

The 'intellectual' leader of the Republicans, Paul Ryan, says tax reform policies need to be vague in order to get them passed in Congress. This guy should lose his House seat once they hear him back in Wisconsin. The math simply doesn't work. Even if you closed all the 'loopholes' on the poor who 'don't pay taxes,' you know: child credits, home mortgage interest, credits for the blind, that sort of thing; the money simply isn't there.

'Look it up', this is something you'll never, ever hear from the right. They love their talking points that they treat as facts, as they do with any opinion that pops into their heads. Even when they quote an actual real number, they never put it into context.

The big headline today on the rightwing 'news' sites is that the workforce non-participation total is now 89 million. They are implying and hoping you will accept this to mean that there are 89 million unemployed people (all on welfare of course). This is simply nonsense. The number represents everybody over 16 who isn't institutionalized or in the military. Even if you are a 100, you are counted as a potential worker if you have stayed out of the nursing home.

Incredibly, the Republicans think they can pull a Ronald Reagan stunt and work the 'Morning in America' scam on the voters again. Carter lost a big chunk of the union vote who blamed him for the bad economy caused largely by Nixon, they foolishly believed Reagan to be on their side. Mitt Romney doesn't pass the smell test for most voters, even with many of those who will vote for him anyway.

But are you better off than four years ago? Well, the banks are no longer dropping like leaves from the trees after an early frost. At 4.5 million, more jobs have been created than Bush lost, in fact more than he created in 8 years. In total Bush's new job creation was a net zero. The first decade of zero growth ever.

One plank of the Republican platform to be presented in Tampa is a demand for a return to the gold standard. This little bit of crazy is apparently intended to placate the Libertarian delegates that support Ron Paul. I've heard that they actually have enough votes to keep Romney from being nominated. This would explain them moving the official nomination from the traditional Wednesday session to Monday.

You know something is up because the habitual liars didn't use the excuse of the Wrath of God bearing down on Tampa for the sudden change, but claim it was always the schedule. (it has always been done this way, and we've always been at war with East Vagina)

The geniuses of the Republican National Convention have installed a huge banner across the front of the Tampa Convention Center proclaiming "We Built That".

They unconsciously summarized the Obama speech that they are trying to mis-characterize. Even though the convention center sports a corporate sponsor's name, it really was built by government with union labor. The "branding" of public buildings with corporate names is really a subtle propaganda ploy to make people think that everything good is provided to them by their benevolent corporate overlords. Americans have been conditioned to believe things that come from corporations are free, and that government is expensive. This is the opposite of reality of course.

Mitt Romney stood in front of the battleship USS Wisconsin to announce his VP choice. It really was fitting that he stood in front of a ship that was obsolete and useless when it was built, just like the Ryan budget. Also fitting was that he stood in front of a ship that Ronald Reagan dragged out of mothballs and fooled away billions of dollars on. Reagan did this in order to mask the collapsing economy he was creating with his trickle down voodoo economics.

Reagan added 400 ships to the Navy built around the four Iowa class floating money drains to "confront the Soviets". He did this because the Evil Empire had secret nuclear submarines, according to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. The CIA said no they didn't, but that only meant the Russians were keeping them secret.