Mark Thoma goes ballistic: I don’t understand why someone with such a clownish views is lauded as a policy wonk: What did Ayn Rand teach Paul Ryan about monetary policy?, by Brad Plumer: In 2005, Paul Ryan explained that he often looks to Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged” as inspiration for his views on monetary […]

Paul Ryan Says He’ll Only Release 2 Years Of Tax Returns In ’60 Minutes’ Interview. What else?

by Linda Beale The fallacy of privatization: anti-government screeds and the Romney agenda As a prominent tax professor points out, Mitt Romney accumulated most of his additional wealth in a business that generally doesn’t do anything to increase national wealth. Mitt Romney accumulated his wealth as managing director of Bain Capital, a leveraged buyout fund […]

Hi folks…coming back on line from experiences in hospital services (not mine) and found this Guardian article on something we haven’t followed closely in posts.   From the Guardian comes this note on the preliminary data of the new Cryo-Sat-2 probe on Arctic ice volumes: Sea ice in the Arctic is disappearing at a far […]

Via The Dailey Beast comes this tidbit from Grover Norquist at the Defending the American Dream Summit in Washington, sponsored by Americans for Prosperity: The most quoted speech at CPAC this year was Mitt Romney’s, but my vote for the most significant goes to Grover Norquist’s. In his charmingly blunt way, Norquist articulated out loud […]

Ed Kilgore’s thought develops as he finally faces facts. He wrote It is entirely unsurprising that Paul Ryan and his many supporters have been advertising the [skip]in his budget proposal as the greatest thing since the Clinton-era welfare reform legislation. What is surprising is that some progressives seem to be going along with the characterization […]

One interesting Romneycampaign tic is to use “numerous” to mean two. Examples of this abuse of “numerous” follow. 1. “After extensive hearings the bipartisan [Massachusetts] Ballot Law Commission came to the same conclusion as numerous independent fact checkers in finding that Mitt Romney ended his active employment with Bain Capital in 1999.” The numerous fact […]

by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care Thoughts: Re-admissions, Resident Rights and Pie  A follow up to a post on evidence based medicine….  PPACA is putting extreme pressure on hospitals to reduce Medicare re-admissions. Hospitals are putting increasing pressure on nursing home to reduce re-admissions, particularly due to diabetes.  Nursing homes are under constant pressure to […]

At this point, the question mark is needed just in case the Romney campaign is deliberately trying to trick the rest of us. This seems to me to be politically insane. Ryan is the guy who wanted to end Medicare and replace it with a fundamentally different program based on vouchers whose value would not […]