Mother Jones has the story 14 Wacky “Facts” Kids Will Learn in Louisiana’s Voucher Schools.

1. Dinosaurs and humans probably hung out: “Bible-believing Christians cannot accept any evolutionary interpretation. Dinosaurs and humans were definitely on the earth at the same time and may have even lived side by side within the past few thousand years.”—Life Science, 3rd ed., Bob Jones University Press, 2007

Certainly this cannot be one of the wacky facts.  Didn’t the movie Jurassic Park definitively prove that dinosaurs and humans hung out?

I guess the selection of Paul Ryan as the Vice Presidential candidate to run with Mitt Romney caught the Obama team by surprise. The announcement came at 9AM and I did not receive the email about this video until 6PM. 🙂

Here is the email I received about this video.

The Agenda Project Action Fund presents: Romney Girl.

The Nation of Change has republished the Robert Reich column Erasing W.

Republicans want to obliterate any trace of the administration that told America there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and led us into a devastating war; turned a $5 trillion projected budget surplus into a $6 trillion deficit; gave the largest tax cut in a generation to the richest Americans in history; handed out a mountain of corporate welfare to the oil and gas industry, pharmaceutical companies, and military contractors like Halliburton (uniquely benefiting the vice president); whose officials turned a blind eye to Wall Street shenanigans that led to the worst financial calamity since the Great Crash of 1929 and then persuaded Congress to bail out the Street with the largest taxpayer-funded giveaway of all time.

And when we try to remind people of recent history, the Republicans try the old saw, “Isn’t it time to stop blaming George Bush?”  Have we stopped blaming Herbert Hoover yet?   Perhaps when Republicans forget Jimmy Carter, we can forget George Bush.  Although the damage George Bush did far exceeds anything Jim Carter can be blamed for, so that might not be a fair trade.

The Washington Post has the story Biden: McConnell decided to withhold all cooperation even before we took office.

Grunwald has Joe Biden on the record making a striking charge. Biden says that during the transition, a number of Republican Senators privately confided to him that Mitch McConnell had given them the directive that there was to be no cooperation with the new administration — because he had decided that “we can’t let you succeed.”

Here’s the relevant passage, from page 207:

Biden says that during the transition, he was warned not to expect any cooperation on many votes. “I spoke to seven different Republican Senators, who said, `Joe, I’m not going to be able to help you on anything,’ he recalls. His informants said McConnell had demanded unified resistance. “The way it was characterized to me was: `For the next two years, we can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back,’” Biden says.

The vice president says he hasn’t even told Obama who his sources were, but Bob Bennett of Utah and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania both confirmed they had conversations with Biden along these lines.

Now is it clear enough that the lack of bipartisanship in Congress does not come equally from both parties?

Do you suppose that when Scott Brown went to the Senate that Mitch McConnell didn’t tell him about the plan?  Yet, Scott Brown tries to make out that he is the neutral voice in the war between two extremes.  He actually stands in the middle between one extreme and moderation.  That still puts him way toward the extreme.

Does this make you even angrier at Obama for bending over backwards to get Republican cooperation when his administration was told in no uncertain terms that there would be no cooperation?

boston.com has the story Romney names Paul Ryan his No. 2.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney tapped Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin as his vice presidential running mate on Saturday, turning to the architect of a conservative and intensely controversial long-term budget plan to remake Medicare and cut trillions in federal spending.

The Progressive Change Campaign Committee says “This is a major unforced error by Mitt Romney.”

As long as we are in a race to the bottom, there is no sense in one side quitting.

Is there anything untrue about this ad?

Reader RichardH sent me the link to The New York Times editorial, Mr. Romney Hits Bottom on Welfare, as a response to my previous post Romney’s welfare-to-work attack on Obama not quite accurate, experts say.

From The New York Times editorial:

Mitt Romney’s campaign has hit new depths of truth-twisting with its accusation that President Obama plans to “gut welfare reform” by ending federal work requirements. The claim is blatantly false, but it says a great deal about Mr. Romney’s increasingly desperate desire to define the president as something he is not.

My confirmation bias likes this editorial.

I do sometimes wonder how the media can say things are “not quite accurate”,  “depths of truth-twisting”, “claim is blatantly false”, and still not be able to simply say “it is a lie”.

The Boston Globe has the article Republicans assail Waltham battery maker’s deal with China.  The following are some quotes from the article:

A Chinese company’s preliminary agreement to invest in A123 Systems Inc. has ignited concerns that China could take control of the struggling Waltham battery maker’s advanced technology and spurred new criticisms by Republicans that the Obama administration squandered billions in stimulus money with investments in risky firms.
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“This is just another example of Barack Obama’s failure to follow through on his economic promises and the millions of taxpayer dollars he has wasted,” said Kirsten Kukowski, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee. “It’s unfortunate Obama borrowed from the Chinese to give taxpayer money to prop up green energy companies that the Chinese are now buying already.”
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A123’s agreement with Wanxiang comes as many US clean energy companies struggle to compete against Chinese rivals, which are bolstered by cheap labor and their government’s massive subsidies. US companies also complain that the Chinese government has done little to stop firms there from stealing their technology.
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US Representative Cliff Stearns, a Republican from Florida who serves on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said the A123 deal shows the Obama administration is not doing enough to protect US technology. Earlier this year, he said, a Russian citizen gained control of the assets of Ener1 of New York, another troubled battery maker supported by the US taxpayers.

Let me see if I have this straight.  The Chinese and the Russians see this battery technology as a strategic investment.  The Republicans see this technology as valuable enough to want to keep it out of the hands of the Chinese and Russians.

The Republicans think it was a mistake for Obama to see the technology as strategic enough to want to invest our money in it.  They also don’t propose that he invest any more in order to compete with the Chinese and Russian investments.  They do want to block the Chinese and Russians from getting the technology we paid for, but they don’t want to see us invest any more.  If we don’t invest more, the companies with the technology will go out of business and bury their knowledge with them.  Meanwhile the Russian has a company that will further the technology it has, and the Chinese will be forced to invest their money elsewhere to develop these technologies.

In a few years we will be buying these technological products from the Russians and the Chinese instead of selling products to the world that capitalized on our head start in developing them.

So a Democratic President can recognize a strategic opportunity when he sees it, but the Republicans want to block his every efforts.  The Republicans claim to be good business people.  They think they know more than President Obama, The Chinese, and the Russian.  If the Republicans  are so smart, why aren’t we the country that is getting ahead in the world?

As I remember it, a former boss at Digital Equipment Company, Duane Dickhut , used to say on hearing a too timid business proposal, “This isn’t a business plan, this is a going out of business plan.”  The Republicans seem to have a lot of “going out of business plans” these days.

WBUR aired this program Brown, Warren Offer Different Deficit-Reduction Approaches by Fred Thys.

This just goes to show you what happens when you let a reporter who knows nothing about economics report on economic matters.  I expect a public broadcasting station to educate me, not to dumb me down.

I won’t even put the audio on this blog,  You’ll have to click the link above to hear it.  However, I must warn you that your brain might rot if you listed to it.  If you aren’t careful, you will come away knowing less than you did before you listened.

My comment on their web site is as follows:

This has to be one of the silliest stories I have heard in a long time.  The commentator obviously knows nothing about economics.  He makes no comment about the fact that Brown’s prescriptions show a total lack of understanding of the economics of a national economy like the United States’ economy.  Brown goes on and on about how the first stimulus did not work, when it did.  Where is the money for the spending going to come from – the Fed of course.   We are sovereign in our own currency, so if the Fed says there is more money in the economy, they just make it so.  Private institutions that lend their depositors or investors money also create money.  The fact that these private entities are holding on to their money instead of investing it, takes money out of the economy.  That is what the idea of stimulus is all about.  The stimulus money puts money into the economy and also draws out the money being withheld by the private sector.

When the country lost trillions of dollars in stock value when the market crashed, do you think someone actually goes out and burns up a pile of money?  When the market recovers, as it has done quite well since 2009, do you think someone is actually putting the ashes back together?

Brown clearly understands nothing of this.  Or at least he pretends not to understand.  When other Republicans spout such nonsense, I can believe some of them are pretending.  In Brown’s case, I fear he may actually believe this stuff.

What this says about the WBUR commentator, I really have to wonder.

Please do not let your children listen to WBUR without your presence to offset anything they hear.

I should also point to some other sources for the money that I failed to mention in my comments on the WBUR web site.

The federal government can say to wealthy individuals, “If you aren’t going to put your money into the economy, then give it back to us, and we will put it into the economy.”

Getting the money back from the wealthy can take several forms. One form is to issue government bonds and notes, so that the wealthy lend us their idle cash, and we put it to good use in creating jobs and investing in the future of the economy.

The other way, is to raise the taxes on the wealthy, (or rescind tax cuts). If they aren’t investing that money in the economy, then giving them tax breaks to keep more money is obviously not helping. This method of raising money does not raise the government debt, and the new taxation rate will put us on a path to surpluses when the economy recovers.

Just think, a lot of the money that the wealthy are withholding from productive uses is going into non-productive financial derivatives. To put it another way, the wealthy have so much money, they don’t know what to do with it all. So they have taken to gambling in financial markets for fun and profits. If they lose a bet, they stop having fun, and we have to pay for it in the sick economy their losses bring on.