“I get nervous when I start feeling too certain about something, and I feel pretty certain that Paul Ryan’s budget is a massive devolution of government responsibility masquerading as fiscal prudence. So I called Alan Viard, a tax and entitlement scholar with the American Enterprise Institute…” [Atlantic]

In 1982, the year after we graduated college, 26,173 Americans died in drunk-driving accidents — 60 percent of all automobile deaths that year, in a population of some 231 million souls.

A generation later — in 2010 — the drunk-driver death toll was down to 10,228, or 31 percent of the total carnage. In a nation that had swelled to 308 million.

Also in 1982, 32,957 Americans died from firearms, the vast majority homicides and suicides. By 2009, that had plunged to — well, 31,347. Certainly a reduction if you grade on the population curve, but not a two-thirds reduction.

We chose the starting date for a few reasons.

Read more »

Half-baked, half-term Alaska Governor and reality TV show star Sarah Palin, who, with her intellectual co-equal, George W. Bush, is one of the two people most responsible for the election of Barack Obama in 2008, will not be speaking at this year’s Republican national Convention and has issued the following statement to Fox News personality and BFF, Grettan Ven Susteren:

Everything I said at the 2008 convention about then-candidate Obama still stands today, and in fact the predictions made about the very unqualified and inexperienced Community Organizer’s plans to “fundamentally transform” our country are unfortunately coming true. This year is a good opportunity for other voices to speak at the convention and I’m excited to hear them. As I’ve repeatedly said, I support Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan in their efforts to replace President Obama at the ballot box, and I intend to focus on grassroots efforts to rally Independents and the GOP base to elect Senate and House members so a wise Congress is ready to work with our new President to get our country back on the right path.

And with those words signalling her intention to exit the center spotlight of a political party that has been strugggling to extrictate itself from under the crushing weight of her out-sized ego and vapid, vulgar, intellectually incurious persona, Sarah Palin drops off the political map to spend more time with her dysfunctional family.

So long Sarah, I’d like to say we’re going to miss you, but all the Stockholm Syndrome fairy dust in the universe wouldn’t begint to make that statement true.

“The suspect in a shooting that killed a Brazos County constable and one civilian died from injuries during a shootout near the Texas A&M University campus Monday afternoon. Three other people were injured in the gunfire, including two College Station police officers and a civilian.” [WFAA]

Our guest columnist is Matthew Yglesias, exhibiting the first documented case of Paul Ryan Derangement Syndrome.

Let me apologize. I originally had a too-credulous item here linking to a piece at The Richmonder alleging that Paul Ryan has sold bank shares after a closed door meeting with Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke on the financial crisis in 2008. As Eric Platt explains he certainly seems to have sold the shares on the same day as the meeting, but the meeting happened in the evening by which time the markets would have been closed. One can perhaps construct a scenario by which the Richmonder’s theory of the case holds up, but they don’t have the goods and I shouldn’t have passed their analysis on with no qualification and so little scrutiny of my own.

As Brad DeLong writes, for one reason or another Ryan did quite a lot of trading of individual bank stocks in 2008 so the timing of this particularly transaction isn’t particularly noteworthy when put in that context. For posterity’s sake the original item is below now in strikethrough.

Paul Ryan’s Bank Stock Trading [Slate]

Paul Ryan Insider Trading Rumor Quickly Debunked [TPM]

We’re being told by starry-eyed political commentators that with the selection of Paul Ryan, the election has become a civics geek’s wet dream: a stark choice between Governing Philosophies.

To which we laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

It would be nice if that were the case. It would be nice if Americans were offered an Honest Choice, instead of one side doing its darned best to keep the other side from voting. It would be nice if one side had the courage of its loudly proclaimed convictions, instead of cravenly stacking the deck every chance it gets.

But that’s not why we laugh.

We laugh at the suggestion that Paul Ryan offers anything approximating a Governing Philosophy. We laugh at the insistence that Paul Ryan holds the real power among Republicans, and that Mitt Romney is just a figurehead.

We laugh, because Paul Ryan is a Toady.

Read more »

The Huffington Post Reports:

WASHINGTON — Presumptive vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan said on Sunday that while he turned over “several years” of tax returns to the Romney campaign during his vetting process, he would only make two years of tax returns public for voters.

The Wisconsin Republican, appearing alongside Romney on “60 Minutes” for their first joint media interview, seemed poised and assured throughout the 15-minute segment. When pressed with a question about tax returns — a topic that has dogged Romney — Ryan had a ready answer.

“It was a very exhaustive vetting process,” he told CBS’s Bob Schiefer. “It is a confidential vetting process. So there were several years. But I’m going to release the same amount of years that Governor Romney has. But I got to tell you Bob — two, I’m going to be releasing two, which is what he’s releasing -– what I hear from people around this country, they are not asking, ‘Where are the tax returns,’ they are asking where the jobs are? Where is the economic growth?”

So John McCain has seen a decade’s worth of Romney’s tax returns, because it was essential to vetting him for a potential VP slot, but We The People don’t get to, even though we’re supposedly vetting him for the presidency? And likewise, Romney demanded that Ryan provide him with “several years” (3, 5, 10?) of tax returns, because it was essential to vetting him for the VP slot, but We The People have to make do with two cherry picked years from each of them?

The only thing one can conclude from this is: there’s politically tone deaf, there’s just plain deaf, and then there’s Mitt Romney.